Snowblind (13 page)

The road curved between the rocks. The Joshua trees pressed close. Chase pointed to a dirt road that split off toward Queen Mountain, and Jay nosed the Subaru along the twin ruts.

“Want to stay and climb a few days?” Chase asked.

“Nope,” Jay said. “Carrie. School. Work.”

“Want to boulder just this morning?”

“No. But we get out here a few times a month. Though I don't know how we'll find you. Particularly without Big Yellow.”

“I'll be around. Look for me.”

Chase told Jay to stop at a bend where the road swung near Queen Mountain's farthest outlying cliffs. They got out and swung the duffel off the road into the sand. They shook hands. Jay got back behind the wheel and turned the car around. When he had himself
pointed west, Chase waved once. The car rolled back toward the ocean and the city, and Jay watched in the mirror as Chase left the road and disappeared into the Joshuas and stones.

THE SKIN OF THE WORLD

I

D
ARKNESS AND COLD come early in December. It was not much past five o'clock, but David and Ian had already cocooned themselves in their sleeping bags. They sat upright, side by side, on a ledge a few feet wide and a dozen feet long. Between and above them, the ropes and hardware were stacked, racked, and tidied for the night—though the result looked more Gorgon-ish than tidy, with coils of rope and cruel-looking metal geegaws dangling from slings. They had their backs against the stone, their legs in the bags hung over the edge. A thousand feet down, the green-black pines rocked back and forth in the wind like waves on dark water, shadows in the blackness above the snow that buried their trunks and lowest branches.

“I think I've found a mountain for us,” David said.

“Is it beautiful?” Ian asked.

That was just like Ian. Not “how high?” or “how hard?” He would never admit to wanting to know the gross measurements of a mountain. David rubbed his hands together, trying to rub out the cold from inside his bag. “Like nothing I've seen before,” he said. “Honestly.” He studied his mental image of the mountain, which was never far from the surface these days. “It has cheekbones. Like Sophia Loren.”

“And where does Lady Loren live?” Ian asked.

“In China. Near the old border with Tibet. It's called Yunshan.”

“Yunshan,” Ian repeated. “I've never heard of her. What does the name mean?”

“Yunshan?” David said. “I don't know.”

The moon lifted itself up out of Tenaya Canyon, flooding the valley with light, turning the snow to glass and the granite to silver. It was the Yosemite Valley below their ledge, which meant there were signs of the other world down there: headlights, even tacked Christmas lights, on cars being driven to the little outposts of commercial cheer within the park. Seeing those lights, imagining the heavy windows of the lodges shielding fires and compressed voices—the merry bunching of humanity against the cold—only increased the distance David felt between himself and the ground. He felt pressed up against the rim of the world.

“It looks hard,” David said.

“Sure it does,” Ian said. “You wouldn't be taking us to China otherwise.”

That was the risk of climbing with Ian. He didn't say no. Which didn't mean he was fearless. He'd whimper and shake his way up a
scary lead just like anyone else. But he would agree to a big climb without even bothering to say yes, and that worried David sometimes. By the time he made a suggestion, it was a reality, with no chance to step back and laugh it off. Already, sitting there in the cold on their ledge on another climb, he could feel them inching toward the Kunlun Range. He didn't even know how to get there, really, or where the money would come from, or what lengths of red tape the Chinese would wrap around their mountain. Still, he felt the first stirrings of gravity pulling them toward Yunshan. So there was the risk, and the payoff, too. David would dream big, and Ian would shrug as if it were the most natural suggestion in the world. The wheels would turn, carrying them to the Alps or Peru or Alaska, and then David would climb outside of himself, beyond the limits he imagined, pushed on by Ian's refusal to confess any notion of the lunacy of their project. But Yunshan was the biggest dream yet, and David had half hoped he would get some kind of new reaction from his partner.

The cold was looking for him through his layers. David could feel it brush his skin and then retreat, waiting for his blood to slow. He was wrapped up in every scrap of clothing he'd brought, plus his harness and the rope, which ran up out the neck of his bag to their anchor so that he wouldn't roll off their ledge. As far as he could tell, he would not be taking off his harness or even a single layer for another three days—and that assumed no blizzard was tracking down from the north to ambush them first. The cold dug deep, even for December. They had waited until a river of arctic air swung down off the Bering Sea, icing the entire West. This had
been another of David's ideas, to try to make a Yosemite winter feel like a Himalayan summer. They were evaluating their fitness to handle hard climbing in the cold. Ian said they were prospecting their souls.

David had left his tether too tight. He slipped one hand out to loosen the clove hitch tying him to the anchor. To get to the anchor, he had to reach through the snakes of rope and also through the charms and juju beads Ian had hung there when they set up for the night: a string of feathers, a chain of amber teardrops, two old coins with center-holes, and John, Ian's shrunken head. David had never quite gotten over his revulsion of the head—the wrinkled skin-leather, the grotesque features, the history it represented. Ian had explained that he was misdirecting death, which made little sense to David, since the thing looked very much like death. Anyway, it hardly mattered. They were hauling six gallons of water—enough for the two of them for five cold days—so Ian's talismans weren't exactly holding them back. The feathers were something new. David finished fiddling with his rope and snatched his hand back into his bag and retightened its hood. “Ian,” David said. “What's with all the feathers?”

“I'll tell you,” Ian said. “A month ago—a Thursday—I walked out to my car, and there were two white birds on the hood, staring back at me. Not pigeons, not gulls, I don't know what they were. But they stared at me till I put the key in the door, and then they were gone. I drove up 140 and slept by the river. The next morning, I walked up to Arch Rock, and when I got there, two climbers decked right in front of me. Two white birds. Two dead climbers.”

“What?” David said. “What happened? Why didn't you tell me?”

“Leader had just started the last pitch of Lesser Evil. He fell and ripped the anchor. Gone just like that. Bloody mess. You were doing that concrete job, and I didn't see you for a couple weeks. Besides, I hate telling you stuff like this. You're such a skeptic.”

David tried to clear his mind of sarcasm lest anything about albino sparrows wriggle off his tongue. He knew he could be a bastard, and Ian had watched people die, so it didn't seem to be the time. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Not much to do,” Ian said. “I poked around at the bodies a few minutes.” (David was always caught by Ian's frankness. He, too, would have stayed to poke at the bodies—he had never seen what granite teeth would do to human flesh, though he had imagined it often enough. But would he have admitted to it so casually? He wasn't sure.) “Then I walked back down and called search and rescue. I spent the rest of the weekend soloing, looking for nests.”

Of course. Only Ian would watch two climbers land in front of him like that then go on a soloing, feather-collecting, spree. And then wait a month to mention it.

“You all right?” David asked.

“Yeah, all right,” Ian said. “It wasn't me that fell—though it felt like it at first watching them come down.”

“Did you ever find out who they were?”

“I asked around,” Ian said. “A couple of guys from Georgia no one had ever seen before. Makes me wonder how word will get back home for them. Who's going to track down their wives, girlfriends, moms, or whatever?”

“You could make that your work. Saint Ian of the fallen climber. It'd suit you.”

“No way. I'd creep them out. Can you imagine me showing up at your door? Better leave that to guys with crew cuts and uniforms.”

David waited for Ian to say something more. In truth, he wanted Ian to say something about the mountain in China. Dead climbers and feathers were surprisingly uncomfortable subjects once the basic facts had been covered. What could David say? What a tragedy? What do you suppose those birds were up to? Did you see their livers? And here, David had proposed that they climb a mostly unknown mountain on the other side of the planet, and all his partner wanted to know was what the name of the mountain meant! David had things to say on that subject: this many thousand feet of rock, so many pitches of ice, stacked overhangs at half height, the choice between twin ropes or a ten-millimeter lead line. He knew, in part, his reason for wanting to talk through these details. He was afraid of Yunshan, maybe even terrified of it. The mountain dwelt on a plane they hadn't touched before. Talking about the tools they would use and the sections they would climb would help still his mind. But Ian wasn't biting. Apparently he wasn't ready for that sort of business yet.

“How did Yunshan find you?” Ian asked, at last.

“Who says
I
didn't find
it
?” David said.

“Don't be vain,” Ian said. “The mountain comes for you when you need it. I guess Yunshan wants to show you something.”

“Have you been going to church again? You sound like a priest.”

Ian laughed, a braying sound that came out in short, wheezy barks. “Not often enough,” he said. “You should try it. I'll take you
sometime. All those old Semites had their revelations on mountaintops. It's inspiring stuff. So, where did Yunshan find you?”

“UC library.”

“Ah—secular church.”

The hood of David's sleeping bag, cinched around his face, kept him from looking over to Ian when they spoke. Anyway, what would he see if he could? A nylon mummy draped over the stone, hardly a person. So he spoke out into the silvery night, and Ian's voice, his hoarse rasp, came to him from out of the air. “In pictures in an old copy of the
Alpine Journal
,” David continued. They were from a photo reconnaissance from the 1920s, after the World War and before Chiang Kai-shek shut down south China, a time when there were still blank spaces on maps even as airplanes filled in the sky. The author—an Englishman with a fitting name, Mosshole, something like that—had wandered through the Kunlun, goggling and taking pictures and being imperious and British. He got tossed out by the new guard, and visitors were no longer welcome. And then Mao shut the borders, and that part of the world went dark for decades. “The pictures of Yunshan are incredible,” David said. “The mountain comes right up out of its glacier—a thousand feet of rock, then mixed climbing and a band of ice, another thousand feet of rock, and then the overhangs, more ice dripping down, snow, spires on top. Solid-looking granite.” David paused a moment to see if any response would return to him out of the night. “Ian? Mountains are made of rock, you know.”

Ian's fetishism of the mountains did not sit easily in David's mind. He didn't care for stories of the hidden world when the surface of the real world was so intricate and alive.

Up and down the valley, the granite glowed, and David felt himself becoming mesmerized by the moon. He closed his eyes, popped them back open again. It was much too early to drift off. He flexed his hands, which were raw from tussling with the granite. Already they were cracked, bleeding, coated black with aluminum oxide. His fingertips felt plastic in the cold. He wondered if he would be able to feel the difference between fingers punished numb and fingers losing feeling from frostbite. He imagined the grief he would get from other climbers if he frostbit himself in California.

The moon floated higher. David tried to stay awake. Going to sleep now would mean waking up at three in the morning with nothing to do but lie there and wait for dawn. Ian told a story, set in the desert. David lost track of whether it was in Australia after the year Ian had worked on a sheep farm or in New Mexico where he had been looking for mushrooms after a big spring rain. The land was all red and orange and flat except for the cliffs, which came up at perfect right angles. Distances were impossible to guess. A lean, hard, brown-skinned man with long black hair had wandered by and asked Ian whether he had seen his dog. They had ended up spending two days together driving dirt roads looking for a mutt the same color as the desert. The man had known just where to go at the hottest part of the day to see a mirage that looked like a tidal wave rolling off an inland sea. And then it was three in the morning, and David was awake and cold through and begging the dawn to hurry west.