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through the stem of Daniel's good ice screw. His right forearm hurt, but the
pain was ritual, bearable. He held the hurt with his left hand.
From a great distance, he watched the blood running through the sleeve and
between fingers that were his.
In that dazed state, Abe sat on his ledge. Head back against the ice, he
stared into the blankness of Tibet. He might have dozed.
At some point Daniel appeared. The black-haired ghost rose up along the newest
of the ropes, seeming no worse for the wear. Abe knew that couldn't be so, not
after such a fall. On second glance, he saw that this figure was moving slower
than the old Daniel.
But that was to be expected from a dead man.
'Abe?'
Abe didn't answer. He knew the mountain was playing a trick on him. Starved
for oxygen, the human brain freely invented its own fictions, populating the
world with angels and demons and other imaginary beings. High altitude
climbers often reported a third man on a rope for two. They would talk aloud
to their guest. They would cook food for him.
'Are you okay? Look at your arm.'
Abe ignored the hallucination.
'It hit you too?'
'No,' Abe said. 'That was you.'
The apparition sat down beside Abe on the little ledge.
'Man. What a ride.'
'Now what,' Abe said aloud. He didn't mind the company, but he wasn't speaking
to it. He was talking to himself, company enough.
'How about one more go?' Daniel asked. 'We were so close. And I saw something.
Up in the cave. It might be good.'
'Sure,' said Abe.
'Or we can go down.'
'No,' Abe decided. 'Up. It might be good.'
'Can you belay?'
'Of course.'
For the next space of time, Abe belayed the ghost. He fed rope out with his
good arm.
Gus appeared. She was quite ugly now, but beautiful too.
'Hi, Gus,' Abe said.
'What's this shit?' Gus gasped. Abe followed her gaze. She was staring
dismayed at the anchor. It was in near ruins  a lone, bent screw  and she
had just trusted her life to it. Abe tried to see it from her perspective. He
could have repaired the anchor. At least he could have warned her. He felt a
little bad about that. On the other hand he couldn't say if she was any more
real than Daniel. How odd, he thought. Even in death, Daniel was somehow their
higher standard.
Then Gus noticed the blood heating in a small pool on the glassy ledge. She
knelt beside Abe and peered inside his ripped sleeve.
'We have to get you down.'
'No. Up,' said Abe.
'Where's Daniel at?' she said. 'Does he know you're like this?'
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'He fell.'
'No,' Gus determined. 'He's okay. Up there. He's in the cave.'
From above, Abe heard Daniel's voice. 'Abe. You can come on now.' Showtime
again.
'What happened here?' Gus said.
'It doesn't matter,' Abe said.
Daniel's voice moved between them. 'Gus. Can he climb?'
'Are you kidding?' Abe could tell she was mystified and angry. He wondered
idly how it would be to kiss those torn lips smeared white with zinc oxide.
She was his angel. 'He has to go down,' Gus reiterated.
'It's a thousand feet down,' Daniel argued. 'Only one pitch up.'
'But he's hurt. He's in shock.'
Not so bad, Abe thought. In most respects, it was pleasant sitting
here at Gus's knees with the planet curving on the north horizon.
'There's a camp here,' Daniel said. 'It will be dark soon. We're best here.'
'I thought I belonged,' Abe confided to Gus. 'I'm sorry.'
'That's all right,' Gus said. 'Can you stand?' Abe stood.
'Let me check your jumars. And your harness. And fix this helmet.' She was
trying to take charge here. Abe could tell she was thinking of many
things. 'Daniel,' she shouted up the wall. 'Abe's pack. Can you pull it up
on a rope?'
'I don't think so,' Daniel answered.
'No problem,' Abe said. He reached for his pack, his pack of wonderful
heaviness. He had hauled so much so high and there was only this eighty feet
more to go.
'Leave that,' Gus said. 'I'll bring it up. Can you climb?'
Abe made his way up. It was much, much easier without the weight on his back.
His wings were freed. He could fly.
Daniel met him at the mouth of the cave. The cave was almost
supernaturally perfect for human occupation. The floor was flat, the ceiling
was seven feet high, and the walls were spaced wide enough to admit the two
tents that were standing side by side. One was a faded peach color, the other
was still orange. The cave wasn't very
deep, maybe fifteen feet, and it looked like some equipment had been parked in
the very rear.
'Maybe you should lie down,' Daniel said.
'I'm fine.' Abe was enchanted. He had entered another dimension in here.
Outside there had been no respite. But here there was an inside to the
mountain. There was a sanctuary not only from the rockfall and the
crucifying sunlight, but also from the relentless verticality. He took a
few prickly steps forward atop his two-inch crampon teeth. The floor was flat.
He couldn't get over that. He had forgotten what it was like to stand on a
horizontal surface.
'We lucked out,' Daniel said. 'Look at all this stuff. The Kiwis just left it
all.'
Both tents were zipped shut, both were intact. Neither had so much as a tear
in the fabric or a split in the seams. In contrast to the Ultimate Summit's
fancy dome tents, these were old-style triangular structures with guy lines
and center poles, the kind that required daily attention or else they
collapsed. But years had passed and these tents were standing whole. Their
spines were tight, not an inch of sagging, and their walls drummed to Abe's
finger tap. They could have been pitched yesterday.
Yellow urine stains to the side of each tent looked fresh. Empty food cans and
paper wrappers lay loose in nooks and crannies of the cave, unperturbed by so
much as a breeze. Ropes lay piled in limp butterfly coils, ready for use.
Behind the tents, in the deepest recesses, heavy oxygen bottles were
stacked like firewood, and red stuff sacks contained windpants and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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