I couldn’t care less when I reached the summit, I just wanted to explode at her. All the pain in my legs and feet, all the misery of my tired lungs, and I wanted to scream, What the fuck are you thinking? Do you not realize I’m behind you? Do you not care? As I staggered up to the small hut at the summit with a sign warning of the danger from lightning, I felt such a dense ball of hatred for her and her everlasting arrogance, her selfishness, her unchecked prerogative to never think about anyone or anything that wasn’t Kate Morris. Meanwhile, she lazed on a slab of white granite, drinking a beer, surrounded by three young guys. They were all chatting loudly, their voices braying over the eerie quiet that came when the wind died down at 14,505 feet.
“Hey, there you are!” she called out when she saw me. I swallowed all my rage. “You didn’t die!”
One of the kids, sporting a huge blond beard that reached his navel, handed me a beer.
“These guys carried up a twelve-pack,” she told me. “My heroes.”
The kid smiled through the beard and raised his can high. “Fuck it, let’s go.”
“Fuck it, let’s go!” Kate cried, and we all toasted, looking out over the sheer granite summit, eye level with the heavens. Patches of snow still held on in this incinerator of late spring, the majesty of the Sierras in repose. Something Kate had said long ago came back to me. We’d been staring at the geology of Idaho while coming down the backside of the Teton Range. Mountains are the planet’s best violence. Mountains are chaos disguised as stillness. The earth somehow felt bigger than ever, its possibilities so vast, and its individual beer drinkers so utterly puny. “See, I told ya, Tar Heel,” said Kate, slapping my bare leg, squinting into the slashes of golden sunlight piercing distant white clouds. “Little twelve-year-old girls hike this shit. It’s basically a Disney ride.”
The way back down was a death march. With each step, I prayed for her to feel the altitude, to suggest we rest. I’d never wanted to be done with anything so badly in my life. My quads were on fire, and thunking each hiking pole ahead of the other felt like deadlifting a car. I fought dizziness with every step. I’d blink and see gray splotches, nuggets of infinity passing before my eyes. I wondered what would happen if I died up there, who would protect her from herself, who would keep her from leaping off the absolute craziest cliffs.
Kate slowed down, though, probably because I’d barely said a word at the summit. No longer oblivious to my mood, she understood that I was pissed, though maybe she didn’t get why.
“Wanna break for a snack?” she suggested.
“No argument here.”
We sat for a while eating Kate’s trademark cucumber and vegan cream cheese sandwiches. She pulled out a cold cooked potato and ate it like an apple. I stuck with an actual apple.
“I just needed to sweat out my hangover,” she said. “Then I felt like a trillion bucks. You did great, kid.”
“I think I came just a few breaths short of dying actually.”
“I’ll drive you to an early grave yet.” And with her teeth bared like a wolf, she darted her head to snatch a bite of my apple.
We sat snacking for a while in silence, watching the east side of the mountain grow shady as the sun descended at our backs. Looking out over the cordillera of the Inyo Mountains catching the winnowing sunlight, it occurred to me then that maybe I was the selfish one. After the failure of PRIRA, after the embarrassment of her scandal, after the awful stay with her dad, this hike had been the first time I’d seen Kate truly joyful in months. Two miles down from Whitney’s peak, I finally felt guilty about denying her this moment of vitality and grace, a brief respite to just taste her own sweat and the punch of adrenaline.
“You ever think…” I stopped. She looked over at me.
“Yeah?”
“You ever think about how you’ll be remembered?” I searched for what I wanted to say, what I’d been mulling this whole trip and trying to articulate for a few years now. “You know. No matter what happens, you’ve already locked in a place for yourself in history.”
She wasn’t impressed with this. “I would’ve thought I’d told you often enough, Matt, history’s just a cheap story written by the powerful. Who the fuck cares what history thinks?”
“You don’t think about how people will remember you?”
She looked genuinely baffled by the question. “Why would I? Nah, kid. We come, we drink our drink, we sing our song, and that’s more than good enough.”
I had to half laugh and half scoff at this. “Bullshit. You expect me to buy that? When you’re out doing what you do? Kate, I’ve never seen someone think more about her legacy than you.”
She shook her head vigorously in disagreement. “What? No way, man. Humans are just moss. Nothing beyond nature, no more important than bugs. That’s obvious.” She nodded her head back and forth as if conceding a point to herself. “But then you get to thinking about humanity, and it’s like, fuck! We’ve got all this stuff! This knowledge, this curiosity, and we’ve got Patti Smith! When I heard her for the first time as a kid, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this bitch is the Truth. She is art, science, philosophy, and faith all wrapped up in one gorgeous package.’ And that’s just one of us! We are so insanely singular and significant, and even our cruelty, our psychopathy—even that seems like a motherfucking miracle.”
“I feel like we’re having separate conversations.”
She grimaced, as if revealing a dirty secret. “So I want us to keep doing all our weird shit. I don’t want to watch all this crumble.” She stretched a hand to the distant mountains, phantasms silhouetted by dust and sun. “It’s not about legacy at all. I’m engaged in long-term memetic warfare, dude. This is not just about our planet’s fate right now, it’s about the next battle and the battle after that. It’s about our destiny as a species. We’re holding on to something unthinkable, something holy. And we may lose it before we even fully realize it’s in our hands.”
I’d never heard her voice any of this so bluntly before. There on the rocks, it felt like the right time to ask another question I’d always wondered about.
“Are you ever scared, though?”
She sipped from her CamelBak and then released a small burp. “Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake just for proposing that the universe might be infinite, Tar Heel. Everyone’s a critic.”
“No, not that. I mean if you had to say, in your heart of hearts, will we do this? And I don’t just mean can you get Randall to try again if she wins another term. You know—will we do this?”
Her mouth curled into a tight smile, and she looked like herself in the picture I’d taken in Wyoming. She blew a few strands of hair from her face and turned her gaze back to the mountains.