The Wall (13 page)

The fire dragged on.
The world tightened around them. Hugh couldn’t hear the flames anymore. The gloom thickened and the sun shrank to the size of a piece of buckshot. The insects quit moving, smoked to death. Birds toppled over with their little stick claws balled.

Hugh lay on his side, flipping idly through his book of maps and approach notes. Then he began sculpting the sand into little dunes. With his eyes right next to the ground, the Rub’ could take him away from this place.

People thought deserts were all the same, just big wide-open sandboxes. In fact, they came in all shapes and sizes and substances. There were ice deserts in the Antarctic, and relic deserts in Nebraska, where the grass had locked the shifting sands in place. While hunting for hydrocarbon reservoirs near Yemen, Hugh had come across so-called radar rivers, the remnants of river systems that dated back twenty million years before the Nile and other great rivers were born, buried so deep only radar could find them. Deserts beneath deserts.

The Rub’ al-Khali—the Empty Quarter—held the greatest sand sea on earth. The only one larger that anyone knew existed was on Mars, near the northern polar cap. Besides their immense size, the two planets’ sand seas shared the same kind of dune formation, and even the same shade of red.

“Is she in there?”

Hugh lifted his head. Lewis had crept up on him. He was guessing at Hugh’s tracings in the sand. Annie, he meant. Hugh didn’t answer. The smoke was making him vaguely sick.

“Come on, man. Talk to me.”

Hugh was wary. He didn’t like going there with people, not even friends. Friends? He’d become a wanderer. Lewis was his last link.

“Somewhere,” Hugh answered.

“Let me in, Hugh. Let somebody in. Rachel said you told her Annie had Alzheimer’s. We never knew that.”

“What more is there to know?”

“You’ve got to clear your head, man. Control, Alt, Delete. Reboot. Before she kills you.” Tit for tat, Annie for Rachel, Lewis was giving him back his own words.

Hugh lifted his finger from the sand. He didn’t like the rebuke. But then he thought that Lewis probably hadn’t liked it either. “Fair enough,” he said.

There were a thousand and one ways to tell that day. He had become like Scheherazade that way, forever weaving a single incident into complicated escape hatches. His storytelling had begun with the goatherd who found him, and continued with the soldiers, then the police, then the expats in the compound, and always with himself. Stories to survive by. Which would he tell Lewis? He turned onto his side, putting the patch of sand between them.

“There are five types of dunes,” he started. “Each depends on the wind for its shape.”

Lewis sat opposite, holding his gauze mask in place. With one taped palm, Hugh smoothed the sand, and with his finger he began cutting lines in the sand, building a dome, shaping a starfish, then a parabola, describing each. Finally he scooped an arc.

“This is the crescent dune, the most common kind of dune in the Rub’,” he said. “Here are the horns, here is the body. Like an ocean wave, very slow, almost frozen, but alive. Because there is always the wind, and so there is always motion. The grains of sand are driven upslope in little skips and hops. They call it saltating. When one grain lands, it dislodges another, and that skips higher, and so on.

“The crest builds until the mass of grains go tumbling down the lee slope, the slipface. The dune moves. There’s a formula for how quickly a dune will creep, sometimes as fast as a hundred yards per year, but usually much slower. The wind determines everything. From year to year, in different places, I could recognize individual dunes almost like they were mountains.”

“Did you give them names?” Lewis asked.

“They weren’t real mountains.”

“It’s all relative,” said Lewis. “If they can be seas in slow motion, why not mountains in fast motion? I would have named them.”

“See? You should have visited,” said Hugh. “There’s a use for poets, after all.”

Lewis grimaced. “Have passport, won’t travel.”

“We can still change that. Remember all our talk about Nepal or Chamonix? It’s not too late.”

“Quit changing the subject. We were talking about dunes.”

Hugh returned to the desert. “On holidays, especially during Ramadan when everything shuts down, Annie and I and friends would drive south from Dhahran loaded with fuel and water and tents and food. At different points along the way, we’d stop and deflate our tires for traction and angle off into the sands and go for days. At the petrol stations, they’d ask you, twelve or thirteen? Twelve or thirteen pounds of air per inch. Thirteen was for road driving. Twelve for off the track.

“At first, the desert was just a playground. We’d drive up the dunes, then surf our Land Cruisers down the slipfaces, and pitch camp and break out the barbecue grills and home brew. Then we began discovering relic lakes. They’re just natural desert pavement now, stripped down to the hardpan. But during the Ice Age, lakes existed all through the region and supported whole tribes. We discovered this by finding their projectile points.”

“You went hunting for arrowheads?”

“And spear points, and hand axes. We found knives, flakes, and fossils. The early people made their camps along the lake beds. We started pushing deeper and deeper into the desert. Once we crossed into Yemen without knowing it, and the soldiers fired their rifles to scare us away. Anymore, you’d be crazy to go so deep.”

“After what happened to Annie?”

“Because it’s a migration route for Al Qaeda and others. They come up from the south. There are crosshairs everywhere out there.” Maybe he could get them off on to politics.

Lewis refused to give up, though. “Annie, Hugh. What happened?”

“Have you seen
The English Patient
?”

“And read the book.”

“Everyone thinks it must have been like that scene with the sandstorm, that we got buried, or she was injured and I went off for help. But it was nothing like that.”

“Then, what happened?”

“Nothing. No drama. No storm. No injuries. The sky was clear. The sun was out. Everything was ordinary.”

“She just disappeared?”

“Some friends were going to join us, but at the last minute they canceled. I decided to go out alone with her, a change of scenery. Get her out of the compound. We drove, and I set up an awning. She stayed in the shade while I went looking for flints. I was gone for an hour, less, that’s all. When I returned, she was missing.”

Lewis got up on one elbow. “Just like that?”

“I had made her an iced tea. It was there beside her chair. Ice cubes were still floating in the glass. My first thought was, she’s gone off to pee.”

“She must have left footprints.”

“Yes, and I followed them through the dunes. I went for miles, calling her name. Night fell. I knew better, but I kept walking, sure she’d be around the next ridge. When the sun came up, I realized my mistake and tried backtracking to find her footprints again. Then I lost my own prints.”

“How’s that possible?”

Hugh glanced at him. Lewis wasn’t challenging him, just openly baffled.

“A breeze came up, not much of one, but enough. The wind was no more than ten miles per hour, I learned later. I didn’t recognize any of the dunes. I couldn’t find the car. I climbed to the crests and looked out, and there were just soft, rounded waves. You said they’re like real mountains, but if they’d been mountains, I could have gotten my bearings. I was lost.”

“You? The mapmaker?”

“Yes.”

“That just makes it stranger.”

Hugh dabbled at the sand. “Why is that?”

“Because you’re never lost. Since we were kids, you always knew what you wanted, and where you were going, and how you were going to get there. It was me who wandered and got tardy slips and never got papers in on time.”

“This time it was me,” said Hugh.

“What did you do?”

“Kept walking. It wasn’t a situation where you stayed put and waited for rescue. No one was going to come looking for us. I called for her. I let the breeze push me along. I held up a thread from my shirt and went where it pointed. I thought if only I could find her, at least we could die together.”

“But someone found you.”

“They say it was another night and a day later. I don’t remember much. He was an old man, a goatherder, very poor. Somehow he got me to a petrol station along the highway.”

“You must have been a wreck.”

“They wanted to take me to a hospital, but I refused. If I was still alive, then Annie might be, too. An army patrol came by. They had a Bedouin tracker. These guys are good. We went back out and found the Land Cruiser, but Annie was gone.”

Lewis was quiet.

Hugh smoothed over the sand. “Every now and then, satellites spot ancient caravan sites under the sand, and forgotten cities. She’ll show up one day, like that iceman in the Alps. People will wonder about her. Maybe they’ll invent a name for her.”

Lewis was silent a minute. Then he said, “Rachel told me you had some Arab word for sweetheart.”

“Hayati.”

Lewis repeated it to himself, and quit talking. He offered no sympathy or condolences, which was fine. People usually tried to put closure to it. Lewis taped the gauze over his mouth again. He retreated to his hood of a shirt.

The afternoon passed.

The smoke grew muddier.

At some point, Hugh heard echoes in the abyss. He lifted the rag from his head. Lewis had heard the voices, too. He went to the rim. “They must be coming for us,” he said.

Hugh joined him slowly, padding barefoot across the dried insect husks. Lewis started helloing into the depths. The cottony smoke flattened his voice. He sounded feeble.

Hugh glanced over the edge, and there were no depths to see. Visibility stopped at their feet. Unless you knew the edge was right here, you might keep walking and fall through the smoke without really knowing you were falling. Hugh stepped back.

Lewis went on listening, cocking his head from side to side like a man in total darkness, sifting for noises. He leaned out, one big hand clutching an anchor rope, squinting down.

With no warning, a shape—an apparition—swept across their heads in a long arc. It almost struck them.

Hugh ducked. Lewis fell to the sand. Whatever it was slapped at the rock. Just as quickly, the thing disappeared back into the smoke from where it had come, leaving only a drag mark of blood on the stone.

Lewis scrambled back from the edge. Hugh peered into the smoke. He looked at the blood streak, the finger marks. He stood up.

“Stay down,” he told Lewis.

“What the hell was it?”

Hugh braced his feet. He got a good wrap of the anchor sling around one arm, and waited.

A minute later, the figure reappeared. It broke from the gloom and smoke with crimson eyes, and this time Hugh was ready for him. With one arm, he hooked the wingless intruder and brought him to earth.

It was the boy, Joe. His fingers were scraped raw. He clutched Hugh’s arm. “Keep him away from me,” he said.

Before Hugh could ask what he meant, Augustine sloped in from the smoke. Lewis tackled him before the arc carried him away, and they landed in a heap in the sand.

Hugh looked at the two of them, reading their ordeal in the details. What it came down to was this, the two searchers had returned to the ledges, empty-handed. They had strayed into the care of their fellow nomads.

“Water,” said Augustine, but not before carefully tying the end of his rope to the anchor. Hugh knew what that meant. He was not finished yet.

The smoke
had blued their faces almost black. Their eyes were so red they seemed to be bleeding. They drank everything Hugh and Lewis gave them without apology or shame or even thanks.

As night gathered, neither of the younger climbers could speak above a cracked whisper. They had not drunk all day, and the reason for that was simple. Augustine had left, deliberately left, their several gallons of water—plus all their food and the med pack and their climbing gear, everything—hanging from pitons on Trojan Women. In doing so, he had taken a huge gamble, betting that Hugh and Lewis would still be on the Ark with water and food that they would share. It was calculating and presumptuous and totally reckless.

“What if we’d already taken off? What if we’d started for the top?” Lewis demanded. “We could have decided to climb away from the fire.”

“But you didn’t,” Augustine said.

“We almost did,” Lewis lied. He couldn’t get over the audacity. “No water. No food. In this heat. Breathing this smoke. Are you going for an epic?”

In the universe of climbers, there was nothing more hallowed—or freighted—than the epic. Whymper’s descent from the Matterhorn, Herzog on Annapurna, Doug Scott crawling down the Ogre, Joe Simpson touching the void, Krakauer in thin air, the list ran long. An epic was the closest of close calls, often involving the death of partners, the loss of toes and fingers, madness, terrible privations, the whole nine yards. Summits come, summits go, and those were matters of record. An epic, though, that went into the hall of fame.

The irony was that, for all the shock and awe an epic inspired, no seasoned climber ever wanted to be part of one.
No epics:
that was the wise man’s mantra. An epic was a freak of nature, like a two-headed snake. Every epic involved two accidents, the accident itself, and the accident of one’s survival. Every survivor was meant to have died, but for some reason had not, and whatever that reason was it was necessarily out of one’s control, because if it were in your control it wouldn’t have been an epic. God—the mountain—ruled. Only a fool, or Rambo, thought skill or strength or readiness let him off the hook.

And so Lewis was not praising Augustine. His denunciation was clear. Augustine had invited disaster. He’d cowboyed their descent, and put a kid at risk, and that was not okay. Worse, he was a rescue man. He was supposed to stay in charge.

Augustine did not react. Hugh was struck by that. Sitting among the dead birds and insects on the sand in this psychedelic night with the smoke lit orange and pink now that the sun had fallen, Augustine looked like the lord of his land, calm and in command despite the chaos.

“It was farther than I thought, five pendulums, not three,” he said. “That dropped us lower on the wall than I wanted. By the time we connected with their route, it was going dark. But we managed to get a good pitch higher. A few more and we would have reached her. She was there.”

“Not anymore, she’s not,” Joe said.

“We should have kept going.”

“The fire started,” Joe declared. “I was tired.”

Augustine shot a hard glance at him, and opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. Obviously they had argued last night. Obviously Joe had forced their halt, like any sane climber. Obviously Augustine meant to return.

“You said it yourself,” Hugh said to Augustine. “It was past dark. You were deep into the night.”

“We had lights. That’s what lights are for.”

“When was the last time you slept?” Hugh asked him.

Augustine rejected the excuse. “Not last night, that’s for sure. There were no ledges anywhere. We hung in our slings and harnesses. Not a wink. We could have been climbing the whole time.”

“You need rest,” Hugh said.

He offered a second gallon of their water, and Augustine took it. Gallon by gallon, Hugh was giving away their climb. But really, he wasn’t giving away anything. Lewis had terminated Anasazi. They were going down. Hugh accepted that. Now Augustine could have what was left of them.

Augustine locked eyes with Hugh. “She’s alive, goddamnit.”

“You saw her?”

“Yeah, we saw her,” said Joe. “She’s all fucked up. Dead. It’s seriously heinous.”

Seriously heinous? All fucked up wasn’t bad enough? For that matter, wasn’t dead? “Then you did see her,” Hugh said.

“Before she disappeared.”

Hugh glanced at Lewis, who took up the question. “Disappeared,” said Lewis. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Augustine shot a look at the kid. “We caught sight of her on the fourth pendulum, just before dark, a good six hundred feet up, hanging on the rope. But when we looked again this morning, she was gone.”

“You could see through the smoke?”

“We were higher than you are. The smoke was still rising this morning. Yeah, we could see.”

“And the rope was empty?”

“The rope was gone.”

Lewis said, “Then it’s over, brother.”

“Not by a mile,” said Augustine.

“The rope broke,” Lewis told him.

“You’re wrong.”

“You did your best,” Hugh said.

“She doesn’t belong to you, anyway,” Joe muttered.

Hugh grew still. Joshua had said something very much like that to him. “Say that again,” said Hugh. “She doesn’t belong to who?”

Something was out of whack. Hell, everything was out of whack. But there was an undercurrent here, Hugh could sense it.
Keep him away from me.
This was something more than a climbers’ quarrel over retreating. It was more than the kid surviving Augustine’s single-minded quest. It preceded the climb.

The boy carried horror in him. Freaked by the fire, freaked by Augustine, afraid even to sit next to him. He stayed on the other side of Hugh and Lewis, beyond Augustine’s reach.

“Nothing,” Joe mumbled.

Augustine spoke. “I’ll tell you where the rope went. She took it with her. Once Joshua lit the place up, she climbed back to their camp in the Eye, and pulled the rope up after her. Andie’s there. She’s waiting for us.”

“Joshua?” Lewis said.

Augustine held up his radio as if it were proof of all his truths. “The Neanderthal erased himself. They were closing in on him, and he knew it, so he took the forest and Cass with him. You didn’t hear him cooking off down there?”

The screams, Hugh realized.

Lewis looked sheepish. He’d slept through all but the aftermath.

Hugh replayed the animal cries in his mind, stunned to have missed the obvious. Joshua, of course, armed with a torch, racing through the dry woods. And then the wind had come.

“What’s the news?” asked Hugh. “How bad is it down there?”

“We got the worst of it right below us,” Augustine said. “They caught the burn at Manure Pile Buttress, and killed it down the valley with a fire line. They’re still working a few hot spots, but the fire’s pretty much run its course. Parts of the road melted. The park’s closed. Otherwise, nothing’s changed.”

“No, everything’s changed,” Lewis said. Because if nothing was changed, they continued on, climbing.

“Down there, maybe. Not here. Not us,” said Augustine.

“We’ve got a massacre on the wall. A body thief. A forest fire. We’re cut off from the world.”

Augustine brushed it all aside. The fall, the fire, their isolation…a million miles away. “We’re still fully operational. The summit crew is in position. The litter’s assembled, the anchor’s set. All I have to do is give the word and they’ll lower the litter to us. By tomorrow morning, we can have her off.”

We. Us.
Hugh heard him. Lewis hadn’t yet. He didn’t get it. It was beyond his comprehension. “Go back up? Tonight?”

“What do you think I’m here for?” Augustine practically whispered it.

Lewis gaped at him, finally realizing that Augustine had not returned from Trojan Women to shepherd a frightened boy to safety. He’d come to trade him for a man. Lewis’s chin drew into his bull neck. “No.” He shook his head. “There’s a limit. Absolutely. Limits.”

Augustine released him without a word. He had already released the boy. He turned to Hugh.

“There are ropes running all the way across and up to our high point.” No invitation. No pleading. No demands. Just the necessary facts.

Hugh didn’t shy away from the blood-red eyes. Augustine was measuring him. In turn, he measured Augustine. He measured himself. “It’s night. You’re talking about a traverse. The smoke would eat our headlamps. We’d be blind.”

“We were blind coming across,” Augustine said. “That’s why it took us all day to get here. It didn’t stop us, though. And now the ropes are in place.”

“You don’t really think she’s alive?” Hugh needed to state his uncertainty outright. If Augustine blew up at the challenge, or fell to pieces, Hugh’s choice would be made for him.

“I know what I hope,” Augustine said. He didn’t begrudge Hugh’s bluntness. He didn’t fake the cold facts to try and win consent. “Maybe she’s not. But there’s only one way to find out.”

The two men stared at each other.

“Leave him alone,” Lewis said to Augustine.

Augustine ignored him. He was fixed on Hugh. They were driving a deal. It had nothing to do with Lewis. “Morning,” he bargained. “We rest tonight. Let the smoke thin out. Then jump on it, first light. Get it done.”

“Screw this, Hugh. You can’t bring Annie back.”

“Andie,” Augustine corrected him.

“I’m talking to my friend,” Lewis snapped, “about his wife.”

Augustine’s face clouded, then suddenly clarified. “Annie,” he said.

“I’m not trying to bring her back,” Hugh said to Lewis.

“Then rein it in, partner. This was a mistake. We’re off the wall.”

Hugh liked that, nearly a half mile off the deck, off the wall. He smiled.

“I’m not fooling. It keeps mutating on us. It started out one thing, then changed to another, and another,” Lewis said. “Face it. We were doomed before we left the ground.”

Hugh studied Augustine. He’d emerged from the desert with eyes as red as his, and lips as cracked, and a voice like rusted metal. But he wasn’t Augustine, and Annie—the idea of her—was not remotely present among these girls killed by El Cap. What Lewis could probably never understand was how unnecessary memory was in the end.

Something tugged at Hugh. Trojan Women whispered to him. Whatever it was saying, he couldn’t quite hear. The more he listened, the less he understood. But he felt drawn to go over. The mystery itself pulled him. It pulled him out of himself, out of his cocoon of solitariness.

He’d grown smaller since Annie’s disappearance, and that’s not how it was supposed to have gone. Where was the sense of liberation? Where was the fresh love, the unshuttered world, the second life? As it was, he did his job, went home to frozen dinners, watched CNN, and prepared for his next escape into the mountains. The drabness had become a relief of sorts, because it seemed to be the only punishment he would suffer for losing her in the desert. At the same time, it bound him so tightly that at times he could barely think. There had to be more. That’s what he wanted to hear in the whispering of Trojan Women.

Something, or nothing, was waiting for him over there. He’d reached enough summits to know the emptiness he would find, but it was better than the emptiness waiting below.

It came down to that. He was not finished with the abyss. Or the abyss was not finished with him. He shrugged. “All right,” he said to Augustine.

Augustine gave a single nod. Lewis screwed up his face.

There was nothing more to say. Each of them had made his decision, and all that remained was to wait out the night. Augustine called on his radio, and a ranger reported that the fire beneath El Cap had spent itself and that the floor was cooling. Also, they had located two charred bodies in a cave, presumably Joshua and Cass.

Augustine asked about a third body. Hugh respected him for that because he asked it outright, in front of them all. The third body would have belonged to his missing Andie, which would have eliminated this vertical dash for Cyclops Eye. Negative, said the ranger. But they would send a team to the base to search again in the morning.

Augustine explained the new plan. The radio crackled with static. Roger that, the ranger answered. Lewis and Joe could safely descend and walk out tomorrow. They could catch a ride at the road. There would be crews driving back and forth all day.

The climbers divvied up the gear. There was no haggling. Lewis and the boy needed three ropes, one haul bag, some hardware, and a quart of water for their descent. The fifteen or twenty rappels back to earth would require close attention—too many deaths happened on rappel—and time. But they would be down by midafternoon at the latest.

Hugh packed the remaining four gallons, some food, and bivvy gear for his journey to Trojan Women. Augustine said the extra weight would only slow them. Hugh didn’t argue, he just went on packing the haul bag. Augustine said, “We’ll do it your way, then.”

The climbers settled on different islands to sleep. The heat dissipated slowly. No more fever heat, it felt like a summer night now. There were no stars, of course. No summit. No nothing. Limbo.