And I think of them all sitting around that stone altar, laughing and eating. Smearing grey sampa flour on their faces; the promise that they would live to see each other become old and grey. Mountain says no.
Because the view from the other side of the mirror can so often look the same. Even when you know exactly what it feels like to fall, to be alone. Even when you know—as you look up out of silent blue dark into howling white light and life; as the air prickles against your skin like blunted pins—that it’s already too late. Like a slow-suffocating nightmare inside thick, heavy curtains. A leaving that never feels like going anywhere at all. To be gone, but not gone.
They can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both.
And they didn’t.
The shocking agony of plunging into that silent blue dark, Felix’s weight pulling me down faster, harder, the snapped rope showering snow. To feel it coming, to know. A breath, barely long enough to scream, but stretching out into infinity.
Deniaclass="underline" a mountain climber’s best and worst friend. Better to believe. Except we never do—those of us already on the other side of that coin, that mirror. Because then there really is no going back at all.
Nick still howls even as the wind picks up again and the night gets colder. But he’ll come back. He’ll always come back. Because this is where Nick lives. Not in our shitty Catford maisonette. Not even in base camps or trekking lodges. Only up here, in the clouds and violent snowstorms and hurricane-force winds; on the rock faces and ice fields and stony summits; in the gullies and crevasses, the ridges and jet winds and dancing tails of white snow. Up here, where people can’t survive; where we start dying faster the moment we start to climb. This is Nick’s home.
And mine. Because what I told Pasang will always be true. I think of Acke shouting stay with me to the stone, the snow, the sky. I am here because Nick needs me to be here. And so I stay. I will always walk beside him. It’s the only reason I’ve ever climbed any mountain at all.
LIQUID AIR
INNA EFFRESS
In the pickup, Kris pulled down the visor, tousled her sandy hair, and reapplied the Carmex. Sharkey had instructed her to stop off at the sign shop to collect a repair—a giant flashing arrow—to be placed high on a post visible from the road. It would be her second time meeting the sign-maker. Why was she so concerned with her looks? Just habit, she thought.
At Wild River Paper Mill, she turned, and tires crunched against gravel. The Mill was a sprawling brick building. Its stink hung like rotten cabbage over the Neches River, the unmistakable odor of sulfur from the chemical pulping of wood chips, what locals termed “the smell of money.” On the top floor, the dark windows seemed liquid, in each of them a rising moon reflected a coin floating in melted mercury.
The parking lot was empty besides a hauling truck, and on the far side, in shadows, the sign-maker’s van. His bumper sticker read, “The beginning is in small things.”
On the stroke of eight, a fizzing sputtered from up high. Lights flickered, then strobed. Up on top of the industrial building beamed Vegas Vic, the sign-maker’s most famous restoration job, forty feet of cowboy looming over the roof’s lip. His ten-gallon hat grazed the sky, blazing red. Eyebrows, thick and fiery, a comic strip version of wisdom, the red-embered tip of his cigarette dangling from his lips for a touch of mystery. Years ago, the mill owner had unearthed Vic at a neon boneyard in Nevada, but to Kris, the sign was a misfit, an alien, condemned for life to flash its loneliness and deformity, like an immigrant imprisoned in his crumbling memory—his mind’s snapshots of a dacha paneled with driftwood along the Volga River, of mushroom-picking in rubber boots in the darkness before a fleeting dawn, the river lapping at the bank, where the only inkling of a road was two tracks of dirt through long, grasping grass.
With a timid knock, Kris let herself in the shop where the van was parked.
“Hello?” she said, and a muffled voice responded, “Be right with you.”
The shop had been one of those old shotgun houses, the kind inhabited by logging camp gypsies who vanished with the final thud of the last tree standing.
It was dark. On the far side, orange flames flared. She pivoted and blinked. Parts and valves, machinery and cables crowded every shelf and surface, along with giant sketches of reverse lettering like looking at one’s tattoo in a reflection, as long as the tattoo said Bar, Espresso or Pawn.
“Hi, it’s Kris Church?” She couldn’t recall the man’s name. It was something exotic. “I was here last week. The order for the Roadhouse?”
Her sight adjusted. He sat on a stool behind a metal table littered with four-foot glass tubes. Some of them were already bent, so the pile looked like a den of glass snakes. A live hand-torch like a wishbone roared ice blue in his one hand, while he manipulated a melting glass tube with the fingertips of the other. No protective gloves.
One end of a skinny yellow hose dangled from his mouth, as from a hookah. It slung around the back of his neck, coiled down and attached to glass he was warping. For a moment he stopped blowing, the hose still drooping from his lip, so his consonants were distorted when he spoke.
“Have a seat.”
A scowl formed behind his goggles, probably directed at her.
“Okay, um, will you be a while?”
No answer. Whatever it was she’d felt coming here was snuffed out, though not quenched, by his obvious indifference.
When he looked up, the glass in his grip began to buckle and he quickly resumed blowing, his thumb alarmingly close to the torch. At his elbow, a burner labeled “crossfire” stood ignited, a series of brass nozzles streaming blue flames, all of them aimed at the same point from two sides, like six lasers meeting at an optical center and refracting.
Kris pushed aside some clutter on a dusty loveseat, and settled into a clearing by a copy of Signs of the Times magazine, addressed to Tertullio Ramone. No wonder she couldn’t remember.
What was she doing here again, in this backwards place of her childhood? Sometimes it didn’t feel anything like civilization. She pictured her husband, with his glazed expression, his enigmatic condition, holed up in the barn, confiding in his dolls, dressing them, grooming them and giving each one a story of her own. I wish I’d never seen what was out there, she thought. At least then this life would be more bearable.
“Your sign’s not ready yet. Electrode problem. You can wait here or come back tomorrow evening.”
With the hose out of his mouth, his speech had a trace of an accent, sharp and unexpected, like hail on a sunny day.
“It’s not for me. It’s for my boss—Sharkey.”
“Like I said—it’s your call.”
He placed his goggles on his hair, so black it looked blue. The lines on his wide forehead deepened and for the first time, he directed an unflinching gaze at her. Kris swallowed. His eyes were the consistency of tar, dissecting and remaking her, the eyes of any cannibal or Picasso, himself. Her mouth was dry. It was as though she were ensnared in quicksand, trying to avoid any frantic movements that might suction her further and swallow her whole.
“Listen, Tertullio? Did I say that right? I’ll be back tomorrow.”
He shrugged and replaced the protective glasses. As she pushed the screen door, he said, “Come earlier. I’ll show you how it’s done.”