The Wall (16 page)

On the next pitch,
a thin flake, the soot was like dry grease. The toes of his shoes simply would not smear upon the outer rock. All his weight went onto his tired arms. Once again, he was forced to run the rope out its full length before finding a place to anchor to the wall.

While Augustine jugged up and retrieved the protection, Hugh hauled the bag. He took out his notepad and added a line to his map. He wrote, “160’, 5.10-ish, no bolts, cams only (1–2"), HB.” The line of ink hovered on his page, attached below to dots and a cartoon explosion of false cracks and other lines and hieroglyphics. “Many blades and arrows, two rurps, beaks,” a note read, and elsewhere, “Rope drag!” and “mantle off beak.”

Every detail held meaning to a climber, and Hugh was meticulous with his record. At the same time, he knew the map was gibberish. It had no beginning and would have no end, because they had inserted themselves onto Trojan Women at an indefinite midpoint, and their climbing would halt when they reached the women. Disconnected from the ground and the summit, it was a map of nowhere.

He felt dangerously lost. Navigation came as second nature to him, a habit from his doodlebugging days in the Louisiana bayou. He always plotted his location, the more remote, the more precisely. Deep in the desert or among nameless mountains, he kept track of his progress as if it were an autobiography. But Trojan Women erased all his reference points. It made a sham of his fragment of a map. His head ached.

Augustine appeared in the smoke.

“One more pitch,” Hugh told him. “Then we park for the night.”

“It can’t be more than one pitch,” Augustine assured him.

But at the top of the next pitch, with the tan smog turning coffee, the Eye still eluded them. “One more,” said Augustine.

“No. We’re tired. This is it for the night.”

“But it’s right there.”

“You’re pointing at smoke.”

Augustine tapped at Hugh’s open notebook. It left a smudge of blood on his map. “Look how far we’ve come.”

The question is how far we’ve got to go, and what shape we’ll be in when we get there.”

“We’re on route. They came this way. Those are their chalk marks.”

“I’m not climbing in the dark for something I can’t see in the day.”

“You just said you can’t see anything anyway.”

Hugh looked at his red eyes. “You’re pushing too hard.”

Augustine sagged. He whispered. “I’m afraid.”

“I know.” Hugh placed one hand on Augustine’s arm. It was not all that intimate. They were shoulder to shoulder as it was, crowded together by the ropes. When one coughed, it shook the other.

“You think I’m a fool.”

“I think you’re tired.”

“I’m out of bounds.”

“That makes two of us, wherever we are.”

“I mean out of bounds with you,” Augustine said. “I know how this looks to you, like a dumb infatuation. You lost a woman who was your wife. And Andie was just a dream anymore.”

Augustine seemed to be preparing himself for the worst. That would mean more for Hugh to haul, more of other men’s guilt. “That’s what life’s all about though, right? The dream.”

“There’s a difference,” Augustine said. “I know it was worse for you.”

Hugh looked to see if Augustine was trying to beguile him. But the man seemed earnest, and miserable, with his bracelet made of hair. “Not necessarily,” Hugh said. “My wife and I got to live our years. And yours were all ahead of you.”

“Maybe once,” said Augustine.

They slung the two hammocks, one below the other, and burrowed in. They rigged slings to pass a jug of water up and down. Hugh had to restrain himself from drinking the whole gallon. They weren’t out of the woods yet. The darkness gathered.

“Is it true you never found her?” Augustine asked from underneath him.

Hugh grunted. Couldn’t they just let the desert lie? His head was pounding. The hammock was squashing him. It was going to be a long night. But Augustine needed to talk.

“Your friend told me,” Augustine said. “It was on the ledges last night. He woke me up. He threatened me. He said to take my claws out of you. You’re grieving. I’m exploiting you. He said quit for the good of everybody.”

“Lewis, my archangel,” Hugh said.

“I almost did what he said.”

“Quit?”

Augustine’s voice grew softer. “What if you’re right? What if she’s gone?”

They were supposed to be flying on Augustine’s hopes. Instead Hugh was carrying them on his wings, leading the way, decoding the wall, keeping them sound.

“The smoke should settle tonight,” Hugh told him. “Maybe by morning, we can see what’s what. We’ll reach the Eye tomorrow. Then we’ll deal with it.”

“That’s what scares me.” Augustine was quiet a moment. “How
do
you deal with it?”

Hugh nested his head against the hammock. First Lewis, now this man, each wanted a guide to lead them through their damage. It was as if Augustine needed him, not to rescue a living woman, but to help bury her. Hugh was a rope gun for his mourning.

“You walk on,” Hugh said.

“That’s it?”

“Leave her behind. The past. Put it away from you.” Hugh was firm.

“But you came back.”

“Call it a high school reunion.”

“This is where you met your wife,” Augustine said. “I heard you in the bar.”

“And we lived a life,” Hugh said, “and then she vanished. You think people didn’t talk? I took a woman with no mind into the desert, and came home alone. People talked. No different than when you came back from Patagonia.”

“Except you didn’t choose to leave her out there.”

“Look,” said Hugh. “There are no rules in the wilderness. Not in the mountains, not out in the desert.” Nor on El Cap, he almost added. Because with Trojan Women, Augustine was carrying double the load of ghosts. He’d failed Andie’s brother and now it seemed he’d failed her, too. “There’s no good. There’s no bad. Forget the chattering class. When we’re this far from the world, there are no eyes to see into our hearts. There’s no one to judge us.”

“That’s the worst part,” Augustine said, “getting left to judge yourself.”

Hugh shoved at the wall with his shoulder. The hammock and the smoke and this burden of desire were smothering him. “That gets you nowhere. Think of it this way. We’re left alone by those who couldn’t keep up with us. You survive. You shed your skin. You grow a new one. You heal. It just happens.”

“Then we might as well give up,” Augustine said. He coughed.

Hugh didn’t like his tone. Attitude counted. It added up in all the myriad tiny details that stood between them and the summit. As much as Augustine needed him, Hugh needed Augustine. What he needed was for the man to stay glued together until they reached land, whether that was all the way up or all the way down.

“I said to shed your skin, not your spirit. We came to take care of her,” Hugh said. “Andie still needs you.”

Augustine didn’t speak again. Hugh tinkered with a piece of plastic pipe, trying to prop the hammock open, but it wasn’t much use. Finally he fell asleep.

He wasn’t surprised to be woken late in the night. By this time, he’d resigned himself to a steady diet of nightmares until El Cap was behind him.

He waited in his hammock, mashed against the wall, hurting, and miserable with thirst. He waited for the evening clue. What was it this time? Underneath him, Augustine was murmuring in his sleep and coughing softly.

After another minute, the noise repeated. A chorus of unearthly shrieks and howls rose up from the remains of the forest. It was the coyotes and other predators. They were ripping each other to shreds as they fed on burnt animals in the ashes of the forest.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. They were hanging two thousand feet above the savagery. But the blood drummed in his head, and he felt vulnerable and hunted in his little sack of nylon. He wrapped a length of slack rope around his hands and forearms, and held it hard against his pounding heart, and prayed for them to stop, even knowing it was the way of things.

On one venture
deep into the Rub’, Hugh and Annie had come upon a perfect reef of coral, preserved in all its details by dunes that had fanned open for a brief span of time. The ancient sea barrier rose like a dolphin’s back and dipped back into the sands. It predated their paleo lakes by millions of years. They found delicate fans and sticklike trees of limestone and a wall of mineral polyps like a thousand open mouths shouting at them, the skeletons of silence.

As they continued into the smoke the next morning, he was reminded of that day. The crack had petered away again, and he was climbing on the edges of dirty coins—of nickels and dimes, flakes that thin—when he came upon a vein of olivine. Like his lost reef in the desert, the vein suddenly surfaced from the white-and-tan granite without explanation or fanfare, a relic of deeper movements within El Cap. It curved upward like dark green vertebrae.

As he picked up speed on the spine of olivine with its glowing, bony burls, Hugh took heart. Perhaps this morning they might break through to the blue sky and a bright yellow sun and at least a peek of the summit.

The smoke was not so thick at this elevation. Soot still dulled El Cap’s colors, but no longer overwhelmed them. The gray world was giving way to life. They were escaping the inferno, or its aftermath.

The vein of olivine snaked up and to the right like the arch of a bridge. As he went, he found white chalk marks left by whichever woman had been leading. It was not unlikely that she was his same dance partner from yesterday. This high on the wall—this near the summit—the team would have sorted out its various specialties and assigned the free climbing to their fastest, most confident member.

He was growing fond of this woman, or the combination of women who made her up. Out here on the sharp edge, the two of them shared the same exact dangers and suffered the same questions and renewed their same faith in a pinch of stone. The only thing separating them was time. With the blood chemistry highballing his senses, and her sequence of moves affirming his moves, his contact with her verged on the sensual. His dancer seemed to be waiting for him at crucial moments. And the way he clutched and pulled and grunted and opened himself up on the rock came very close to embracing her.

In a sense, she was seducing him. Part of it lay in their climbing, part in their desire for El Cap, and part in the morbid attraction between the undertaker and his dead. However you put it, she was pursuing him even as he was pursuing her.

Hugh tried to remember the last time he’d felt chased this way, and it was by Annie back in the very beginning, on a rainy afternoon decades ago. He put away her image. This was a different woman. This was now. He gave in to the ferocious, nearly silent game. The only sound was of his breathing and heartbeat and the sigh of rope across stone.

The abyss dragged at his bowels and the saddle of his pelvis and the root of his spine. It pulled at his organs, and hung on his fingers. It filled him with loneliness and mass and fear. But she didn’t give up on him. She offered her ghostly prints, and urged his grace. She beckoned.

Every motion was deliberate, right down to his choosing how much to bend his knuckles when he crimped a hold, and where to place which part of his toe and how much to cant it and when to let go. From one instant to the next, he exerted maximum control, and yet he felt completely out of control. It was so easy. He had only to give in to her.

He tried to imagine which of the three women she had been. He’d met one in the forest with silver along her ear, and turquoise in her hair. Was it her, or one of the others? Probably he’d never know. For some reason, in his mind that made her more beautiful.

The rich green stone felt like chunks of treasure in his hands. It didn’t belong. Olivine was an orphan rock. It had floated out from some deep, plasmic interior, defying all the chemical and physical processes around it. Yet here it was, a passport through the territory.

After eighty or ninety feet, the olivine receded. The green chunks melted back into the speckled granite. Hugh clung to the last of the holds, a polished jug, searching for her next move.

There were no cracks in sight, no flakes to hook. Her chalk marks vanished. That gave him a start. He’d been so sure this was the way. Had the olivine been a false lead, then? Had she tricked him and backtracked, and now left him stranded? One thing he knew, his strength was running out. He took turns shaking his hands below his waist, pumping fresh blood into each forearm for whatever came next.

His knee wagged. Tetanus.
Lock it off.
He set his foot again, changed hands, craned back his head, scouring the rock for holds. It seemed impossible that she’d brought him so high on such promising holds only to abandon him at the tip of nowhere. He searched for the slightest detail, a fingerprint, anything. What he finally came to see was so immense it eluded him at first.

Ever so faintly, lurking in the smoke, a dark, nebulous crescent loomed above and to his right. It yawned like the mouth of a whale. It was a roof, he comprehended, a gigantic, arcing brow. Without knowing it, he’d reached Cyclops Eye, or nearly reached it.
So close, so faraway.
Clutching at his final hold, he could see no way to enter the monstrous feature.

He leaned out, trying to see around a squared, blind corner to his side. In the distance, there was nothing but smog. The wall had ceased to exist beyond his reach. While he was busy flirting with his dancer, the abyss had closed in all around him, above, below, on every side. For a fleeting moment, dizzied by the smoke, there was no up or down.

He gripped the olivine for dear life, squandering his arm strength. The greatest lesson a climber learns is when enough is enough. On a grand scale, you judge the rock or ice and weigh the outer mountain against your vision of it. You learn when to push and when to back away, and the limits of your body, how far your legs will spread, how much your arms will hold, how hard your heart can pump. You learn not to overdrive the piton with your hammer, nor shove the cam too deep, nor overpower your holds.

Hugh forced himself to slacken his grasp. He prized one hand loose and shook it out. He traded hands. There had to be a next hold. But like the best of magicians, his anonymous sprite had left not a clue to her trick.

Hugh edged to the right. Holding the olivine lump with one hand, he hooked the heel of his opposite foot along the corner, and peered around.

There was another world in there.

Cupped within a great, empty cavity, the brown smoke looked almost blue. It wasn’t the blue of sky, but of deeper places. A slight breeze exhaled against his face. It felt even cooler than the stone he clung to.
New territory.
His excitement built.

He returned to the olivine hold and rested, and then tried again. Hooking his heel, he ran his hands up and down the corner, feeling for any folds or flakes. But the stone was blank.

It baffled him. His ape index had to be a full foot wider than hers, giving him far more range, and still he kept coming up empty. What was he missing? How had she done it? He retreated to his olivine jug and rested. His knee trembled. He switched feet. The other knee quivered. He willed it to stop. It trembled again.

He was running out of gas. There was only so long he could swap hands and feet before the law of diminishing returns axed him from the holds. He would have called down to Augustine, but there was nothing to ask for. Augustine couldn’t help him. The rope hung from his waist, a lifeless thing, useless for a fall, no comfort at all. He was alone up here.

Hugh stared at the corner. She had mastered it somehow. He looked for pockets of soot that might indicate the tops of flakes, but the rock was smooth.

Again he tried, hooking his heel on the edge and finding nothing. There was nothing there.

His heel hook started to slip, and Hugh grappled his foot higher. Unexpectedly, at shin level, where he would never have thought to look, the butt end of his heel caught on something. He carefully turned his foot, trading his heel for the top of his toe, feeling for the target.

Climbers are used to seeing with their fingers. Shorter, but more agile, his ballerina had gone one better, fishing with her toes. There it lay, hidden away, a slight shelf carved on the far side. Shaking, he retreated to his olivine jug.

The sequence was clear to him now. He knew what had to be done. As a guy, he was naturally inclined to muscling moves. But there was no move to muscle here. Everything depended on finesse. He eyed the edge of the corner, and it was dead vertical. His forearms were practically shot. His nerves were next to fried. She was giving him one last chance. Testing his commitment. Or mocking him.

He went for it, delicately.

He reached across with his right foot. One hand squeezing the olivine, the other gripping the bare right angle of the edge, he spread-eagled flat against the face.

Now.
In one fluid motion, he released the olivine, pulled at the corner, and came upright against the edge. His foot rolled flat. The toe seated on the hold.

There he balanced, embracing the intersection of two planes, taking a sip of air, just enough. Breathe too deeply, and his rib cage would topple him backward. A cough would send him flying. He couldn’t even lift the side of his face from the rock to look around the corner.

Perched on one toe, staring back at the chain of olivine holds he could not possibly return to, Hugh stroked the far wall. There had to be something in here. Up, nothing. Down, nothing.

His left hand was slipping. His knee chattered against the rock. Deeper. He reached deeper. He emptied his lungs. The hold was waiting for him.

But gravity, its slender thread, was towing him backward. There was nothing forceful about it. Very simply, he was going to fall.

Two choices flashed through his mind. He could keep hugging this corner until he fell. Or he could fall, but on his terms.

He fell.

He let go with his hands and fingers and the edge of his one shoe on that little shelf…all in that order. Toe last. That was crucial. It gave him the suggestion of a trajectory. Eyes wide, he tipped sideways.

The handhold flashed before him, almost an afterthought. Quick as a pickpocket, he snatched at it. His legs swung out. There was a crack farther on. With the last of his strength, he jammed every piece of shoe and tape and human meat into the breach.

Maybe a little part of him died by casting loose. All the fear he’d kept at bay came rushing at him now. Shouting and cursing, he grubbed deeper at the crack, not gaining an inch. If he could have clawed his way inside the rock, he would have, anything to hide from the monstrous suck against his back.

At last his terror ebbed. He was safe. And now he saw, he had reached their destination. He was inside the fabled Eye.