The Wall (5 page)

“It was more than that. The dance was just a cover. She was their window on the world. They adored her, and vice versa. She taught them things. They taught her things. Henna patterns. How to pluck her eyebrows with a loop of thread, one hair at a time. How to belly dance. And make coffee from scratch. Green coffee.”

“She was surviving, Hugh. It was just a way to keep her sanity.”

“Her sanity?”

“Yes, while you were gone looking for oil and climbing mountains. Did you know I told her to leave you? To come home? I told her you would follow.”

“Yes, we talked,” said Hugh. “But there was nothing for me here. My job was there. And this will sound old-fashioned, but she was my wife.”

“Don’t put it that way,” Rachel chided him. “Marriage wouldn’t have stopped her from coming home. Love, yes. The wifey thing, not a chance. Not the Annie I knew.”

“The Annie you knew was only the Annie she let you know,” Hugh said.

“We had no secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets, Rachel.”

“Not us.”

Hugh could have let it die there. But he was tired of hiding the truth. He was tired of the pity and the whispers. “Did she ever say anything to you about her Swiss cheese?”

“ ‘Swiss cheese’?”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “It was our little code for the holes in her memory. The little lapses that started turning into big ones. Her spells.”

The slightest storm appeared on Rachel’s taut forehead.

“She did her best to hide it,” Hugh continued. “For a while we thought it was just the summer heat or maybe a bacteria in the air-conditioning. Or menopause. That was the great hope, that it would get better. She quit drinking alcohol, then coffee and her Diet Cokes, thinking, you know, it might be the artificial sweeteners or the caffeine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I came home one day and she was sitting in front of the TV. But it was off. I touched the set and it wasn’t even warm. She’d been there all day. Watching nothing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either, not for the longest time. She was too young. It crept up on both of us, and then it was too late.”

“What, Hugh?”

“Alzheimer’s.”

“Annie?” said Rachel.

“We stopped going to parties because there would be these lapses. She would fumble little shared moments, or get a friend’s name wrong. It got worse. She did everything to keep up appearances, even in front of me, but we both saw what was happening. The pounds just fell off of her. She’d forget to eat during the day. The expat wives all wore gold bangles from the medina, just like the Arab women. But Annie’s wrists got so thin the bangles dropped like rain. I’d find them on the floor. One day I stepped on her wedding ring, by the front door.”

“I had no idea.” Rachel was in shock.

“While it still mattered to her, she didn’t want anyone to know. By the last year, she didn’t know herself.”

“This is so…I thought she shared everything with me.”

“She felt like a leper. She dropped from sight.”

“How long did this go on?”

“In retrospect, years. Like I said, at first it seemed just a lapse here and there.”

“How did you manage?”

“You mean the doctors? We tried them all. I took her to Switzerland. They all said the same thing. A losing battle. They didn’t use those words, but that’s what they meant. It was just a matter of waiting for the end.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m talking about you. How did
you
manage?”

“I didn’t want it to be true either. I was in denial just as much as she was. But then one afternoon, there was a knock on my door. It was the
mutawaeen,
the religious police. Holier than holy. They roam the streets with camel switches, looking for vice, stuff like a woman’s hair poking from her head scarf, or nail polish on their toes.”

“She wrote about them. Vicious fanatics.”

“Some are good men, some are very bad,” Hugh said. “But Annie was right. She was a bird in a cage. There are so many rules to follow over there, especially for the women. There’s the dress code and the head scarf. And every guest worker has to carry an ID card. Married women have to carry a copy of their husband’s identification or they’ll arrest you. This can get very serious. The
mutawaeen
take Sudanese or Ethiopian women, black women, into the desert and rape them, and leave them to die.”

Rachel looked stunned. “And they came to your house?”

“That day I answered the door, and there were two
mutawaeen.
They had Annie with them. That was bad enough. She had wandered out of the compound in shorts, and with no head scarf, and no I.D. She didn’t know her own name. They could have disappeared her. Instead they made inquiries and were returning her to me. It was the most terrifying moment in my life.”

“Because she had wandered away?”

“Because they were so kind about it. Because they could see what I had been refusing to see. They have a word for the insane,
majnoona.”

“She wasn’t insane, Hugh. Alzheimer’s is a disease.”

“It’s just a matter of which century you live in.
Majnoona
. It means possessed. Possessed by jinns.”

“Genies?” Rachel scoffed. “Like in a lamp?”

“That’s the American version, sanitized. Among the Arabs, they’re beings from a parallel universe, created before Adam. Some are like devils, but some can be like archangels who watch over you. The Arabs believe they live in deserts and the ruins of cities and graveyards and empty wells, even in toilets. Scholars debate why Allah made them. The Koran talks about them in ‘Surah Al-A’raf,’ the Heights. They have powers. They can inhabit people, or animals, even trees.”

“You’re serious,” she said.

“I’m just telling you what they believe. It’s a different world over there. And however you want to explain, after the
mutawaeen
came, I couldn’t deny we had a problem. Annie was not Annie anymore. They might have returned her to me, but she wasn’t ever coming back again.”

“Hugh, this is awful.”

“I resigned myself. It was like the end of my life. But it was going to be a very long ending, possibly decades. I thought about putting her in an institution. But she would have hated that, so I kept her at home. I hired help. We took a few trips into the desert. She used to love that open sky. Then I screwed up. Our last trip, I lost her.”

“I thought she wandered away.”

“I don’t know how it happened. I left her in camp, and when I returned, she was gone. Vanished. It was almost like the jinns really had kidnapped her.”

“So she
did
wander away.”

“I should never have taken her into the desert. But I did, and now I have to live with that.”

He waited to see what Rachel said. She touched away a tear that threatened her mascara. “Poor Annie, my God.”

They had gone deep enough. He backed off. “I didn’t mean to surprise you with this. All I’m saying is that it wasn’t all peaches and cream. But it was our life together,
hayati
and me.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rachel said. “It
was
your life together. And I’m one to talk. Look at the mess Lewis and I have made of ours.”

“He’s a good man,” Hugh said.

She didn’t contradict him. Her mind was made up. Lewis was history. Hugh understood. There comes a time.

She turned Hugh’s hand in hers, palm up, then down. She touched the lines and callouses and knuckles and hairs and pale scars. Long, long ago she used to read their palms.

“What’s it like now, Hugh? What kind of life do you go back to?”

“Without kids, less and less, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve got a Hobie out in the bay. I swim and take my vacations in the mountains wherever, Nepal, Africa, Europe, South America. Other than that, security’s so tight these days, we rarely leave the compound. The walls keep getting higher, literally. Big concrete walls. They won’t keep the madness out. It’s only a matter of time before someone breaches the fortress and kills more of us.”

“You could leave,” she said.

“I think about that. They’d love to retire me. But then where would I go?”

She turned his hand again.

“I remember this,” she said. “How you go up whole and come back skinned and raw and starving. It made sense back then. Both of you needed to see the emptiness for yourselves. You’ve been there, though. You’ve seen what there is to see. Why go tilting at windmills when you know they’re just windmills?”

Hugh started to say that Lewis was out to show his women—his wife and daughters—that he was still their knight in shining armor. But she had basically just said as much.

“It’s not going to work,” she said. “He wants to win me back. El Cap figured so large in our romance, and in yours. Bless him, he thinks we can still be saved, even Annie, somehow. But my mind is made up.”

“I know,” Hugh said.

She glanced at him. “It’s that obvious?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“I know that, too. I can tell.”

She took a sip of wine. “At first I blamed Lewis. Then I blamed myself. I thought it might be the big M, or boredom. All I can say is, we reached a fork in the road. I want to see the world, Hugh. I waited until the girls went off. Now it’s my turn. Do you understand? El Cap is useless.”

“Then why bother coming to Yosemite at all?” he asked.

“Because, Hugh. I’m tired of missed opportunities.”

Hugh was stunned. She had come for him?

He looked at her face, and this time he saw the desperation. She was holding his hand for dear life. She wanted to be rescued from her decision.

He was tempted. She was beautiful. He was lonely. He could catch her hand and pull her to firm ground. They could be perfect together. It might even last.

But there was El Cap.

Quickly, before Rachel could speak to his desires or build more secrets between them, before she pulled him into her, he rejected her. He let go of her hands. He didn’t draw away, nor did she. But she let go, too.

“Maybe I’m still shaking off the sand,” he murmured.

Rachel didn’t even blink. Probably she had expected nothing from him. “This should be easy then,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“While you’re up there, slaying your dragons together, will you do me a favor?”

Hugh knew what she was going to ask.

“Make him understand,” she said.

Lewis had made Hugh his messenger. Now she was making him hers, using Lewis’s very words. Hugh started to protest. “Rachel…”

“You know what it’s like to lose a wife,” she said. “You’ll have the right words for him.”

Abruptly, she released him. There was one more sip in her wineglass. “I should warn you,” she said, too cheerful, “it’s been a long day, and four is early. I’m going to look like holy crap in the morning.”

Hugh started to stand to guide her to her husband’s room.

She pressed his shoulder, making him sit. “Oh, Hugh,” she said, as if his chivalry was the silliest thing.

Hugh stood outside
the front lobby in the darkness. It was colder than he’d expected, near freezing. He could tell by the fog off the Merced River. It could seem like whole parishes of souls when that mist smoked up and marched across the meadows. Sometimes people got lost just getting back to their tents.

He bent and hefted his rucksack, which contained next to nothing. The little pack was a vintage Mammut made of indestructible canvas and leather. He’d had it since high school, when he and Lewis had first started daring each other up the crags.

He looked for the sky, and there were no stars, no moon, no sign of any rim. The night felt deep. He faced the bully line of trees crowded up against the asphalt. Behind him, the lobby was well lit and warm, with a Mr. Coffee machine in one corner. But that would be the end of him, Hugh knew. If he took one step away from this cold post, he’d be gone.

Somewhere beyond the park’s boundaries there was bound to be a breakfast shop with a booth by a window. He could watch the sun come up. It had been decades since his last visit to SanFrancisco. Drive down the coast and he could lose himself in a thousand coves. Head north and he wouldn’t have to stop until the Arctic Sea. Why repeat himself on El Cap? He could take Rachel and go off into the world, armed with a Visa card and a map.

He kept his back to the lobby. He passed his hand through the mist, opening and closing his fingers. By turns it was a young hand, then an old one.

The parking lots were largely empty. It was another California October full of Armageddon. There’d been an earthquake along the coast, more fires, more floods. And terrorism weighed heavily on everyone he’d met since returning. They had been a traveling people, Americans, but now he found them bunkered in their homes and neighborhoods, with their cities under siege. Airlines were going bankrupt. The tourist industry was in near collapse.

Just beyond the reach of the light, night animals were scavenging the joint, rustling about, hunting down every human remnant. He could conjure up their feast: the crumbs from trail snacks, the cigarette butts, chewed gum and Band-Aids with XMen and Disney creatures, the backing peeled off new bumper stickers declaring “Yosemite—The Best of the West” and “Go Climb a Rock,” and dropped yen notes, and even the salt off discarded hiking sticks. That reminded him of Joshua.

Where are Lewis and Rachel?

He crossed his arms. The sleeves of his fancy new all-weather shell crackled and whisked. He uncrossed his arms, self-conscious, and saw the Nike trail hikers with their royal purple ankle sleeves. Should have stuck with the old gear, he thought. Things that showed pedigree and the violence of high places, like his rucksack. Instead he’d gone shopping.

An animal squealed suddenly, a tiny, piping shrill. Hugh held his breath and listened. The piping rose and fell, then ebbed to silence. He imagined fur being ripped open.

He felt impaled.

Dawn would break the spell, of course. The crystal forest always thawed. The mist burned off. The birds sang again.

A pair of headlights materialized. Hugh picked up his rucksack. He half-expected Lewis to be hanging from the passenger window like a bird dog, but the window was shut. When Hugh opened the back door, the signal went
ding-ding-ding.

Rachel was driving. She didn’t greet him. Lewis twisted to give him a smile, but by the green dash light he looked weary and awful, as if he had not slept for nights.

They left behind the few lights of civilization. The fog opened in rags. Hugh peered through the window and found stars blinking like sniper fire.

They took a bend in the road. A vast darkness blocked the lower two-thirds of the night sky. That would be El Cap’s shoulder. More trees swooped in, blotting it out. But Hugh could feel it, like a magnetic force, a great northern presence hanging above them.

There are objects so large and forbidding they become benchmarks, giving scale to the world. El Cap was like that. The closest thing to it that was man-made, that wasn’t a force of nature, was war. But when all was said and done, war seemed to Hugh mostly a matter of failed imagination, and El Cap was just the opposite.

Abruptly, a big meadow opened to their left. The meadow lay stark and frigid, like a bad Polaroid shot. Autumn grass poked up, white and reedy. There was a cluster of people and vehicles up ahead. From a distance, they looked like another team preparing to embark.

“So much for solitude,” Lewis muttered.

“It’s a big rock,” Hugh said. There were dozens of routes spread across the face of El Cap, and the odds were slim these others were heading for Anasazi. But it would be a mess if they were. Even the idea of competing for his own route soured Hugh. He hadn’t come from around the planet to dodge dropped gear and share ledges with strangers.

Then Hugh recognized the green park trucks and some of the faces. “It’s the SAR crew,” he said. Rachel slowed to a halt along the gravel shoulder.

“They’re still looking?” she said.

They got out and walked ahead. There were a couple of National Guard troops among the rangers. Hugh could tell which ones were the eighties hires this morning. They weren’t wearing guns and Sam Brown belts.

“Glass?” said a short, sturdy man, one of yesterday’s rangers. He had a pair of binoculars, which Hugh thought curious. It was pitch-black out there.

“Morning,” said Hugh. They shook hands. “Still nothing?” He smelled fuel. They were tinkering with an engine back there.

“Bastard hid her body good,” the ranger said. “But some tourist called in a sighting.”

Rachel edged closer. Lewis tried to block her.

“So you’ve found her,” Hugh said.

The ranger shook his head no. “This would be another one of them, on a rope. A couple from Florida spotted it last night leaving the park. They thought it was normal, just another climber up there. Then they heard about the accident on the late news. We got their call about midnight. It took until now for the guard to bring up one of their big guns.”

“Try now,” someone said. A generator roared to life.

The soldiers tugged at a canvas shell, unveiling a trailer-mounted spotlight. They flipped a switch, and it was as if a false sun had suddenly landed among them. Hugh’s night vision blew to pieces.

They swiveled the machinery around. White light hosed the meadow and trees like a Flash Gordon death ray. In the really old days, rangers would push flaming logs off Yosemite Falls to entertain the tourists. Lewis had toyed with the idea of using the walls for a giant drive-in movie screen. He wanted to show climbing movies, what else. That was in the pre–
Eiger Sanction
era, when the pickings were slim: Walt Disney’s
Third Man on the Mountain,
and the Spencer Tracy movie
The Mountain,
and a sci-fi flick about the yeti. On slack nights, he said they could do slide shows about El Cap on El Cap.

The beam made a round circle on the stone above. It made the hulk of rock seem even more enormous. Hugh heard several eighties hires trying to direct the soldiers’ aim. The soldiers told them to keep their hands off. The circle of light wandered aimlessly for a minute, crisscrossing features famous to climbers, but meaningless to the layman. At last they got oriented, and the beam crept higher, a few feet at a time.

The ranger lifted his binoculars. All eyes focused on the circle. It was like looking through a giant, ungainly microscope.

As best he could, Hugh followed the women’s line of cracks and dihedrals. But without binoculars, and probably even with them, the route kept disintegrating into great blank patches devoid of cracks. Twice the rescuers lost their bearings in the blankness and had to scour the rock for cracks to restore the logic of the women’s ascent.

There was no missing her, once she appeared.

She was dangling upside down at the tip of a rope. The SAR team called back and forth to one another, compiling their individual observations. She looked too still to be alive. They followed the thin thread of rope higher to where it sank into Cyclops Eye. They splashed light into the depression, but saw no sign of the third woman. Maybe she was lying in the woods somewhere.

The ranger lowered his binoculars.

“You mind?” asked Hugh.

Through the binoculars, he saw the woman entangled with rope. A slight breeze rocked her gently back and forth. Her body was less distinct than her shadow, stark black against the brilliant white stone.

“I don’t understand,” Hugh said. “How could I have missed her yesterday? Right underneath them and I didn’t see a thing.”

“None of us did,” the ranger said. “Maybe they tried to evacuate themselves after dark. Maybe they had a second accident.”

Someone flipped on a megaphone and began throwing names at the wall. “Cass. Andie. Cuba.” Three names, not two.

Then it struck Hugh that they still didn’t know whose body he had found yesterday. The megaphone repeated the litany over and over, each monosyllable distinct.

“The meadow’s going to be jammed today,” the ranger said. “One corpse missing, another on a string. A thing like this beats the hell out of reality TV.”

Hugh looked and Rachel’s face was metallic with anger.

“How soon can you get to her?” Hugh asked.

He knew the park service would be swift about it, as much for image as humanity. In one notorious incident on the Eiger, a German alpinist had dangled out of reach on the Eiger for almost a year. But it had been notorious only because it was so public. High peaks, particularly Everest, could be like open graveyards, with bodies and snapped-off parts scattered on both sides of the mountain. On one expedition, Hugh had watched climbers from a half dozen countries pass a dead Frenchman sitting in a perfect throne of ice beside the trail. He’d been there so long he’d become a landmark. At those altitudes, it cost too much time and effort to bury any but the ones that blew down to the flats, usually many years later.

“We’ve got a team on the way to the summit,” the ranger said. “They’ve been going all night. Once day breaks, Augustine will lower down to her.”

“The man we met last night?” Rachel said.

Hugh studied the situation. The shadows were useful, a way to gauge how far the body hung from the wall. Ten feet, he guessed. But above the hollow of the Eye, a brow of stone jutted out still farther. Even if Augustine could line up his descent just right and hit the dime, he’d still be facing a gap of twenty or thirty feet to the body. “It’s going to be tricky,” he said.

“Augustine’s the best we’ve got,” the ranger said. “Meanwhile we’ll keep searching the floor. It’s going to be slow going. There are niches and crannies all over, and we’re shorthanded. After nine-eleven, half the rangers got pulled from Yosemite to help guard dams and bridges.”

It was an invitation to join them. But Hugh saw the Kirk Douglas dimple in Lewis’s chin tighten. His vote was no. Hugh handed back the binoculars. “We’ll keep our eyes peeled from above,” he told the ranger.

The ranger didn’t beg. “Good enough.”

“The season’s getting late,” Lewis explained. “Every day counts.”

“There’s always next season,” the ranger said.

“No there’s not,” Lewis said.

“Oh, they’ll quit,” Rachel told the ranger. “But first they have to go through the motions for the sake of pride. They’ll come down. They’ll sneak out from the forest when no one’s looking.”

The ranger smiled at her little joke, then realized it was no joke. No one spoke for a moment. The generator roared, pouring light into the darkness.

“You’ll be close to the rescue team’s fall line,” the ranger finally said. “Watch your heads.”

They walked back to Rachel’s rental car. She was in a quiet fury. “You’re not going to help? You’re obsessed.” She was close to crying. “They could be your daughters.”

“Rachel,” said Hugh. “If there was a chance anyone might be alive, we’d join them in a heartbeat. But you saw for yourself. It’s over for them.”

She glared at him. He was the traitor, not Lewis. She’d given him a chance at her last night. He could have chosen romance. Instead he was going off toward death. She was trembling. “This is so ugly, I can’t tell you.”

Hugh had wanted things to be all right between them, to get her blessing, or a simple good-bye. That wasn’t going to happen. He felt momentary panic, an old nightmare, the lizard king rearing up from the desert.
You’ll lose her forever.
Did he dare?

He forced himself to breathe. You go forward. That’s why he’d come, not like Lewis, who wanted to go back. Searching for the dead…he couldn’t do that anymore.

Lewis started to change his mind. He saw an opening with her, or thought he did. “I could stay, if it means so much to you,” he said.

Rachel pointed at El Cap. “Go,” she said, “just go.”

Hugh slugged his rucksack onto one shoulder and stepped back to let Lewis say his good-bye. Without another word, she climbed into the car and closed the door and left them standing by the road.