In the cold bright dawn, he covered his bare hands with chalk, and then checked the friends, wire nuts and curlers, and chalk bag that were hanging off the bandolier on his sit harness. The only karabiners he was carrying were the ones he would use to hook on when he needed to take a rest.
Reaching high above his head, he found a handhold and drew himself a metre up onto the wall with one arm. Like an ape. In an hour or two, the winter sun would have warmed the rock, making it easier for the Boreal rock boots he was wearing — Jack didn’t much care for the White Fang stickers he was paid to wear by his sponsor — to get a grip. It would be the early part of the climb, on cold and sometimes icy rock, that would be more difficult and dangerous. Nine hundred and eleven metres to go.
After his trip to Washington he had been eager for this moment. Quickly he tried to find his rhythm.
The fall on Machhapuchhare had no real bearing on his climbing ability. He had not made a mistake. Surely he was the same crag rat who had climbed El Cap in record-breaking time. But as he progressed up the first pitch he sensed that this particular ascent would be more than just a climb, more than an exercise in self-discovery. He would have to reach deeper into himself than ever before. Where once he had climbed for fun, now he was climbing with an extra piece of luggage. It hung on him like a heavy haul bag. The fall. The death of Didier. His own thoughts and emotions, the smallest hesitation, the least hint of fear, all of them would fascinate him, scare him, intimidate him as never before. And all leading up to the great question set by his own personal Torquemada: Was he climbing El Cap with the abandon, the total self-confidence that had marked each of his four earlier ascents?
For two hours he climbed as efficiently as he had ever done, moving quickly up the steep rock in the early morning sunshine and relishing the silence and his sense of insignificance on the hard grey face. Sometimes he was hanging by only three fingers, or lifting a leg to the height of his own shoulder to find a foothold. This wasn’t fun. This was a lot of work. Already his fingertips were feeling as if he’d used them to sand a wooden floor.
He’d seen himself climb on video many times, and from a distance he was surprised how much like a scorpion or a lizard he had looked scrambling up a wall. Something not human anyway. Swift might have liked to believe that he went climbing because of the ape in him, but he would have liked to have seen the chimpanzee that had the patience to do a speed solo on a wall like the Salathé. It felt like a marathon. Hundreds of moves over hundreds of metres. Like running a marathon in a day. Except that it was rather more hazardous.
There was very little to recommend the Salathé Wall beyond its sheer difficulty. He’d been just twenty years old when he’d first succeeded in climbing it, with the dumb luck of youth. Certainly it was not a particularly aesthetic climb. It wasn’t much of a view behind him. Or below him. Just thin air, pulling at him with the nagging force of gravity. Like Galileo’s famous experiment. The law of uniform acceleration for falling bodies. And in front of him just rock, and more rock, monotonously, implacably, forever in his face.
Wind teased his hair. He never wore a helmet. If any object falling from something this high managed to hit you, you tended to stay hit, helmet or no helmet. Once, jumaring up the rope on another El Cap route known as the Dawn Wall, Jack had dislodged a flake of rock that narrowly missed hitting him. The flake had been as big as a set of radiator pipes. Another time the rope on a haul bag had broken and the bag — heavy with pitons, karabiners, nuts, and hammers — had come whistling past his ear. Another reason why he preferred a free climb. Weirdest of all, while Jack had been climbing the exterior of the Transamerica building in San Francisco for a TV commercial, one of the cameramen had accidentally smashed a window and a two-metre sword of glass had come within a few centimetres of his head. No helmet would have protected him from that.
The rock was getting warmer.
Maybe he just got bored with looking at it, but one hundred an fifty metres up on the wall. Jack did something that he had never done before on a free solo ascent.
Something you never did.
He looked down.
Suddenly his whole mind was in travail. Memory flung up in him the exact recollection of how it had felt to fall off Machhapuchhare’s north face. This time there was not even a rope to break. And certainly no snowdrift-filled bergschrund to cushion his fall.
Jack’s heart leaped in his chest, and for a moment all he could think of was himself in bed with Swift, her own mind on something else, the fossil, as he pumped in and out of her body like a mad thing.
Then memory played its ace trump card.
He remembered that it was not nineteen years since his brother had been killed. It was twenty. Twenty years. He tried to put it out of his mind, but already he felt his guts collapsing inside him, as if he was about to experience a diarrhoeic cramp.
Killed in this valley. Almost twenty years, to the month. It was just a coincidence, but courage slips on such small coincidences and, winded, lies helpless on the ground. By the time Jack had helped it onto its feet again and supported it long enough to get its breath back, he had already started to doubt that he could make it all the way to the top.
Gloved in white chalk, his own hand — the fingers raw and red with blood — appeared from underneath him, jammed a quad-camming friend into a crack, and then hooked him onto the sit harness.
‘Take a rest. You’ll be okay in a couple of minutes.’
Held firmly to the one spot like the Ponderosa tree growing on the cliff face high above his head. Jack shook his head, paralyzed with fear.
‘What the hell am I doing here?’ he said, pressing his face into the wall. ‘I can’t do this. Goddammit, this is crazy.’
He sat there in the harness, checking the view, waiting for his legs and stomach to steady a Little before he could try to go on. He closed his eyes and tried to persuade himself that he had freaked out before. The king of the big walls was not forced to abdicate so easily. The idea of a ranger rescue never entered his head. Not that he really had any choice in the matter. It was unlikely that any rangers would be looking out for climbers at this time of year.
He could climb up. Or he could climb down. Or he could jump. End of story.
‘Come on, you chickenshit arsehole,’ he yelled. ‘You’ve got to move.’
Minutes passed but still he stayed put, and Jack began to think that for the first time in his life he had come up against a very different kind of wall. Perhaps the highest barrier of them all. Himself.
Six
‘All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.’
The University of California Medical Center occupied a half-mile-square site on the thickly wooded slopes of Mount Sutro, midway between the red roofs of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. It was a pleasant neighbourhood, and Swift seldom visited the medical centre without also browsing in a few of the Haight’s famously radical bookstores. But on this occasion she went straight to the hospital’s radiology department, where she had arranged to meet an old friend.
Joanna Giardino was a diminutive Italian American beauty with abundant dark hair and the kind of come-hither look that made men fall for her like dumb animals. Swift knew her from a time when, as members of the university women’s ski team, they had briefly been rivals for the affections of one particular guy on the men’s team, a handsome hunk who was later killed in a motorcycle accident. Somehow the two women had subsequently become firm friends, and from time to time they would meet at the Edinburgh Castle, an English pub on Geary Street (Swift’s choice), or Capp’s Corner, an Italian restaurant (Joanna’s choice) in North Beach.