Every Lost Country Page 8

  “Okay, look—I am sorry your husband crossed that border, but it was a border.”

  “From what I understand, he had to.”

  “But you don’t understand. It wasn’t his business.”

  Delay. “I know Lewis. When people are in trouble, there isn’t a border.”

  “This climb and the people on it are his business—he gave his word. He signed a contract! What if people die on this expedition because he’s not here to help? I mean, look, now even your…he’s not even here now for your daughter.”

  “Your expedition,” he caught (they were cutting across each other’s delayed sentences now), “and you’ll need to hold off until Lewis and Ms. McRae return!”

  “At this point, putting it off is cancelling it.”

  “For a day? What difference could that make? You did say they’d be back today.”

  And Lawson saw the truth of it: he was far from sure. It could be two days, hell, it could be five days, by which time Amaris would be in no shape to climb and film anything. And a part of him had known this truth since the moment of her capture and had factored it into his panicked planning.

  “I mean, it’s hard to say how far the Chinese base is. It could take a bit longer.”

  “So you were lying to me.”

  “Look, I’m not down in the big city, like you! Things are never clear-cut above 20,000 feet and you people down there with your cellphones and Blackberries don’t get it.”

  Delay. “Sophana and Pavlos and I…we want Lewis back safe. That’s all.”

  A plaque of bitterness narrowed Lawson’s throat. He couldn’t swallow for a moment. What kind of divorce was this, anyway? As if his own ex would ever say something like that about him.

  “This is a climbing expedition, ma’am, not a rescue mission. If men like your ex-husband go around violating international laws and crossing lines, they’ve got to accept the outcome, just like I do every time I rope up to climb.” He rapped his disposable razor on the table like a tiny gavel. “If I end up alone up there and dying, you think I expect anyone to dice away their lives coming up to save me?”

  “Yes, your past actions show how you feel about mountain rescues.”

  “So the media’s starting to rehash its lies?”

  “I’ll be calling back in two hours to speak to my daughter.”

  He has noticed before that when you piss people off they suddenly wheel out possessives like my daughter, my son, my husband, as if refusing to acknowledge your first-name connection with their loved ones. Closing ranks against you—what people always do to you, especially in an establishment like the climbing world if you’re from the rougher side of Main and you keep doing things your own way, and succeeding.

  He’ll summit Kyatruk for himself—to hell with the media and the climbing world and everybody else.

  Now he and Shiva slog on upward as Zeph descends. Lawson thinks of radioing up to Tash or Jake to ask them what the fuck’s going on, give them hell for letting Zeph go, but they’re going to collide with the kid soon enough. Despite the big pack Zeph seems to be lugging, he has found a loping rhythm, quick on the hairpins, zippering down.

  “Hey, Uncle Wade! Hi, Shiv!” he calls in a raw, excited voice when he’s still minutes above them. Lawson plants himself across the path in a relatively flat spot, Shiva behind him. He breathes from the belly, regains his wind. At last Zeph rounds the hook in the trail. He’s rangy, six foot two, and standing upslope with his high pack he seems to tower above Lawson, the sun just to his left like a gleaming buckler. Blinding. Lawson thinks of ploughing a shortcut up the steep snowface and reaching the trail just above the hook, behind and above Zeph, but decides that blocking the route down is the stronger position. Not that strength is needed here. Delicacy is needed here and Lawson knows himself to be clumsy in kid gloves. Zeph, though physically impressive, is weirdly sensitive, once almost crying after making a gaffe and getting corrected while learning to belay, because Jake, he said, might have gotten hurt. Lawson’s brother, Clyde, went too easy on the kid, folded too often to the hippie whims of the older woman he met and married, to the whole town’s surprise, when Zeph was ten. Zeph is short for Zephyr. His blood father had become a guru or a druid in some kind of solar cult and disappeared when Zeph was five. His mother, Coriander, was the most stunning woman Lawson had ever seen, even with her armpits unshaved on her wedding day. Still is the most beautiful now, as a forty-six-year-old widow. Lawson can almost grasp how Clyde, of all men, could have turned vegetarian for her—though Lawson could never stand how the marriage bevelled his brother’s edges, ate away at his drive, his will, especially for climbing. That lack was what killed him in the end. So Lawson maintains. Nevertheless, he feels a duty to his brother’s family, and for four years has employed Zeph at his climbing gym and coached him as well.

  “Hey, Zeph, what’s going on? The peak is thataway.”

  Zeph lifts his sunglasses onto his slacker toque as he always does when talking to you, even when the sun off the snow is dangerously bright, like now. Lawson readies for expressive eye contact. “Uncle Wade, I…just couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “You and me both, Zeph. The altitude’s a bitch. You’re in good shape, though. You look ready to go.”

  “I was thinking stuff over …”

  “At night? Thinking stuff over at night’s a bad idea!” Lawson shows his front teeth while pulverizing a lump of gum with his molars. “Night changes everything, Zeph. Makes everything worse. But it’s a great day for climbing—look around! Why would you be heading down?”

  “Yeah, it’s awesome. But I was like…thinking maybe I should help them?” Brown eyes soft as a fawn’s, pink cheeks, blond beard and platinum curls coiling out the edges of his toque. “The, uh, refugees.”

  “The Tibetans are fine, Zeph! They have plenty of help. And they’ll be leaving any minute.”

  “Yeah, I can see them down there, but, you know. I can catch up to them, and …”

  “Is it partly about the film?”

  “The…what?”

  “Because I still think Amaris is going to make it back and join us for the climb.”

  “Film? No, no, it’s not the film, I mean…God! I don’t care if I’m in a film or not! We don’t even, like, own a TV.”

  “We won’t wait for you, Zeph—you understand that? We can’t. You go down to Tarap with them and your climb is over.”

  “I know, Uncle Wade.”

  “The Tibetans will be fine, I promise you!” As he says the words he believes them with all his heart. “They don’t need you. We need you! You’re part of the team.”

  “That’s what Jake said.”

  “Jake’s right.”

  “But I’m still, like—”

  “Damn it, Zeph, I need you!” The truth of the words, this sickening admission, almost doubles him over, ripping its way up and out of him, an urgent peristalsis. If he summits alone again, who will ever believe him? And it’s not just that. Zeph’s eyes wander slightly as if trying to peek past the wraparound shades that Lawson calls, half in jest, his re-entry shields. With his instinct for gestures of power, Lawson sweeps them off his face, squints against the sun.

  “Just turn around, Zeph, and we’ll go back up together now.”

  “Uncle Wade…I’m sorry, I just can’t. I have to go down there and help. I know Ming and Jigme could use the help. I talked to Ming on the two-way, and I just—”

  “Ming asked you to come down?”

  “No, no way, man, nothing like that! It was, like, my decision?”

  Since when do you make decisions? thinks Lawson. Zeph has dithered and shirked and hedged for as long as Lawson has known him. Still lives at home. It kills Lawson that this towering twenty-six-year-old child is defying him.

  “Couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t help,” Zeph says.

  “But you’ll have to live with giving up this mountain!”

  “I sort of feel like, you know…their mountain is realer?” />
  Lawson works his soles deeper into the trail. “Your own life is the realest thing you’ll ever have, Zeph, and this is your chance to do something with it! Goddamn it, I feel like I’ve been trying to drag you uphill into your real life for years now while you smoke up with your snowboard pals and philosophize and write reggae songs.”

  “I won’t be asking for my money back or anything. I know I’m, like—”

  “Good. Because you won’t see a dime of it. I covered most of your costs anyway.”

  “Uncle Wade—”

  “And you’re finished at the gym, you understand?” The gym is finished.

  “I’m really sorry, Uncle Wade…this is, like, the hardest choice I ever made in my life.”

  “And you can find another coach.”

  “Okay, like—fuck, I’m sorry!” He looks down at his boots—Finnmarks, a recent gift from Lawson. “But I better go now,” he says.

  How are they going to manage this? This trail is not made for two-way traffic, and Lawson is no mood to make room. But Zeph has sensed the impasse. In a halting, self-effacing way, he draws his ice axe and sidesteps down off the trail, shortcutting down the snowface to meet the next switchback. He keeps his axe in cane position, as Lawson taught him on Mount Gimli a few months ago, to dig in if he slips.

  “Let’s go,” Lawson tells Shiva with a glance back, half surprised to find the porter still with him.

  Lawson may be livid at Zeph, but as the steepening slope cuts into his rage and siphons it away as manic fuel, he feels a touch sick about his words. Over the summer he and Zeph worked hard to get ready for this climb. Zeph the neph, as the kid calls himself around his step-uncle, is the nearest thing Lawson has to family now. At first when Zeph said he wanted to come on this expedition, Lawson balked, afraid the kid lacked the necessary fibre and focus, and also leery of a mishap—of losing Coriander’s son as well as her husband. But then he sniffed out a narrative rightness—a deeper note of redemption—in getting his brother’s stepson up an unclimbed mountain and down safe. And think what that would mean to Zeph himself! Clyde had been sixteen when he led Lawson up Mount Gimli and thirty-nine when he died in Lawson’s arms on Mount Logan, four years back. Come on, Cly. Keep going. You can do it. By that time, anyone who didn’t know the brothers would have assumed Wade was the elder. He’d certainly become the better climber—a famous climber, a leader of climbs—so in the end he was held responsible for the death.

  Lawson’s baby son, too, died in his arms. Lawson opts to believe that. The boy spent all of three, four minutes in the world. The obstetrician was a dashing, pompous young city type on a locum in Nelson who’d never troubled to conceal his unhappiness about the placement and kept calling Lawson “Dwayne” and Jennifer “you,” and when he said, at the critical moment, You will need to leave immediately, Dwayne, so we can handle this, Lawson looked him in the middle of the brow, as his father had taught him, and said, slowly, My place is right here. It had worked. It always did. But remaining with Jenn for the birth had not made it a birth. Poor little climber, tangled in his own ropes. The feeble life signs had tapered, fought back for a moment, then faded forever. The cyan face and purple lips of hypoxia, a condition Lawson knew well from high-altitude climbing. A tiny, toy oxygen mask. By the time Jenn, and then Lawson, held the boy, he was gone, officially, though he was not yet cold, not yet fully (so Lawson maintained) dead.

  Media types like to refer to Jenn “leaving Lawson” in terms of his “disgrace”—after his brother’s death on Mount Logan, after his disputed solo climb of Makalu, where he’d also “failed to save” a dying man, a Swiss soloist he had passed on his descent (advanced pulmonary edema at 26,000 feet: what was he to do, a fireman’s carry down ice cliffs?)—because that made a neater story and it thrilled the public to see a man slip and tumble all the way to the bottom, shattering every bone, every dream, just as it had thrilled them before to see him struggle and grit his way to the top, stand there in photogenic glamour and wave the flag, their flag, for them…. But Lawson opts to believe it was the stillbirth (as the hospital insisted on calling it) of Wade Lawson Jr. that killed the marriage. How for eighteen months the ashes remained in a silly turtle-shaped urn that Jenn had selected, waiting to be buried or scattered in an alpine meadow, but he and Jenn kept deferring the moment, just as, having tried to start over by moving into a bigger house he had planned and built for them—two-storey, vertical pine log, on a south-facing slope above Nelson—most of their stuff had remained packed in boxes. So for the final months until Jenn left, those rooms had never stopped echoing. She wouldn’t admit it was about the baby. She denied it was about his public disgrace. She said it was him, damn it, just him.

  At that point he’d started planning this climb.

  Shiva lags far behind by the time Lawson, an hour later, pounds into Camp One. Jake rolls toward him, lanky, loose-jointed, like a bit player in a western. He has a wedgelike face: sloped, balding forehead, long sharp nose, bushy moustache over an overbite that keeps his mouth pried open in an apparent smile.

  “Apologies, dude,” he says with that beaverish smile that isn’t one. “I tried to keep him up here.”

  “Yeah. Well. This might work better in the end.”

  Lawson does feel better roped to Jake Kravchuk than to Zeph. He gets Jake. Jake’s a guy’s guy—a beer drinker, not a pothead. He has guts and doesn’t complain. True, he lacks Zeph’s rock climbing finesse and power, but Lawson feels, now, that up on the Lawson Wall Jake will be a sounder bet.

  Kaljang’s voice scratches out of Lawson’s handset radio. Lawson has been expecting this for a while—for Kal to patch through a call from someone who insists on speaking to the expedition leader, even though it’s around nine p.m. Vancouver time.

  “Come in?”

  “It’s that climbing website,” Kaljang says. “They want to speak to you. And your corporate sponsors, they want you to call back to them. Over.”

  “You’re not coming in too clear, Kal.” This is the truth. “Over.”

  “But first,” Kal says, “I have to inform you with some news. Over.”

  “Bad news, right?”

  “I am not sure. But I think, probably, terrible.”

  Over. It’s over.

  “Sophie’s not present,” Kal says, “in the base camp.”

  “What?”

  “________gone. Her mother called again and I couldn’t find her. Over.”

  “Kal, wait a minute, she wanders off all the time, she could be anywhere.”

  “Pardon? Come in?”

  Lawson repeats himself.

  “No,” Kaljang says, “I know her places. Zeph and me now just looked everywhere. And she has taken her things. I think that she has chased her dad down the glacier trail. Over.”

  “Jesus,” Lawson whispers.

  “Come in? Maybe I should go in hot pursuit?”

  “No! Absolutely not! Look. Tell the Himalaya dot net people I’ve got to get organized up here—we’ll call them in an hour. And don’t mention anything about Sophie yet. Not till we’re sure she’s crossed the border.”

  “________late. Her mother knows. She is so upset. She’ll call back, too, and she calls back the embassy, quite soon. They’ve just informed the Beijing authorities, too. Oh…and Zeph has already been answering some questions of the climbing website. Over.”

  Glancing down the glacier Lawson spits his gum into the snow, where it disappears, a dimple of shadow left on the surface.

  They’ve been in the truck for some time, accelerating over straight reaches of the gravel road, slowing to thump and smash over rutted stretches. The dusty air is warmer than at base camp and this enclosure smells of cigarettes and gasoline and the barny odours of wet sheepskin, urine and blood. Whenever the ride roughens, Book stoops low over the wounded man, digging his hands under the limp shoulders to cradle him over the corrugated steel floor, trying to absorb the road with his arms and keep the wound from reopening. The man’s face is tallowy an
d his eyes are closed. He’s balding, the hair closely shorn. Every few minutes a bad bump jolts a groan out of him. Book is being helped by the kid in the parka and baseball cap, who has introduced himself by saying “Norbu” while pointing at his own face, the bony cheeks a relief map in acne, downy hair on the chin and above his lip. RED BULL, his cap reads. He points at Book’s patient now and says, “Lhundup Boshay.”

  Book gives his own name—straining his voice over the engine, the crunching of the tires, the Talking Heads throbbing from up front in the cab, “Take Me to the River”—then adds, “Can you speak any English…Chinese?”

  Norbu spits out something that sounds like “Motherfucker.”

  “What…pardon?”

  The kid shrugs politely. Book looks around, then clears his throat and calls out, “My patient needs water—please.” At the end of each facing bench, by the open back of the truck, their guards sit: the young guy with the low hairline and virile, almost muscular face, and the emaciated giant, his head stooped under the sloping roof-canvas in a way that looks as much apologetic as practical. Both men grip their assault rifles tightly. A gap on the bench separates each guard from a row of captives, crowded up to where the truckbed meets the cab. There, a small window allows a glimpse of Palden Jangbu driving, Lieutenant Zhao apparently dozing beside him.

  “Water,” Book repeats to the guards, pointing at the patient, and he mimes taking a drink. In fact his patient needs blood, pints of it. A few moments later the sheepish giant leans and, with a superhuman reach, proffers a tin flask. The other guard scowls out the back, smoking murderously. When Book says shei shei—one of the few bits of Mandarin he recalls from a posting in a flooded part of Jiangsu, in 1994—the giant nods slightly and turns away.

  Book braces Lhundup Boshay’s head with one hand. With the other, he holds the flask and drips water between the seamed, swollen lips, which suckle at the rim. “Come on. Come on.” The ride is rougher now, Palden accelerating as he turns up his music again. Book glances out the back of the truck: the second, empty truck falling behind in a smog of dust, and above the dust, a disembodied mirage of white peaks. The adventurer that Lawson loves to talk about must have caught his first glimpse of Kyatruk from around here—that high pyramid, titanium white, thrusting above the glacier and the lesser peaks, with a long cirrus of snow blowing east off its summit like a phantom windsock. The night after they all reached base camp, Lawson gave a lecture in the control tent: “Murloe and the Mountain.” He turned out to be an engaging speaker, his ego taking a step back behind his boyish enthusiasm for the story. (Book was only distracted by the name “Murloe,” which kept reminding him of good red wine.)