The tent is buffeting as furiously as white water rapids. The sky is clear but to the south the clouds form a wall rolling slowly toward us. When all of that air and moisture hits the base of the mountain it will have nowhere to go but up. And as it does so it will accelerate.
Back in the tent we take final stock of the situation. We’ve now been on this mountain for twenty-eight days and have endured winter storms for twenty-two of them. Water vapor has begun to freeze solid even among the down feathers of the sleeping bags. At some point we lost the will to keep clearing the entrance, and snow has been slowly pouring in like sand through an hourglass. Every so often one of us takes a gloveful and eats it. A filling in one of my molars has cracked. But a needling pain in my fingertips suggests that my capillaries are still functioning.
Jacek loads his batteries back into the radio and calls the other camps. There’s no answer from Camp 2, and from Camp 1 Kolesniak sings out “I’m so lonely without my zucchini!” and then goes silent. The batteries are already coated with frost. The moisture’s probably done the thing in.
Bieniek has not moved since we awoke and we decide to consult with him later. Our thinking has slowed down. At altitude you imagine you’re thinking clearly, but you’re not. Urgency disappears. Sometimes you mistake the intention of acting for the act itself. Climbers have had the notion of hooking on to a belaying rope and then have stepped free-fall out into space.
Above us we can hear the white noise of the gigantic air masses splitting around the peak. Crystals continue to spatter on the nylon over our heads. We try to work it out: the tendency when this close to the summit is to expend your last bits of energy to get there. But once on the summit you still have to climb back down, with only the shortest of pauses in which to recover.
“I can do it,” Jacek says. And it’s as if he’s speaking for me. The plan becomes to go up and get back to the tent by nightfall. We’ll leave at three the next morning to get as far as possible before daybreak. We immediately set about trimming gear weight, so desperate to lose ounces that we tear labels from our clothing. We even leave the foil space blanket, which hardly weighs a thing. This activity exhausts us and after two or three actions we have to stop for a count of ten to draw some breath.
We need to wake at one to get out of the tent by three. The wind is gone but we’re still shocked by the cold. Night and winter this high are like outer space. The other mountains below look like whitecaps on the ocean.
After so much time in the tent, it’s like learning to walk again. Jacek takes the lead on ice so hard our picks ring off it as if it were a bell. We pant in the insubstantial air. For eight hours we traverse pinnacles and chop through cornices. On the ice walls we get our feet secure with the front points of the crampons and then move the ice axes and reverse the process. Every few minutes we rest, leaning into the slope, heads on arms.
Then Jacek gives out a cry up ahead and I see that there’s nothing above him; he’s swung a leg over a summit crest so narrow that he has to straddle it like a horse. I climb up behind him and we pull ourselves forward with our hands, right legs dangling down the mountain’s north face and left legs the south. My boot punches through a cornice to provide a porthole view six thousand meters down. Jacek’s babbling something but I can’t make out what. I’m just relieved the wind is manageable.
Even at this time of day — is it noon? — the sky above is indigo, fading into a pink upper atmosphere.
We have to descend nearly immediately if we’re going to reach the tent before sunset. It takes some minutes to communicate that to Jacek by shaking his shoulder and shouting into his ear. We dismount the crest and belay one another downward as if negotiating a ladder, taking turns as anchors with our ice axes. If we start sliding in the shape we’re in, we won’t be able to stop. At some points the slope is so steep that we can’t see the wall below us from above. Spindrift burns our faces. A cloud mist leaves us in a half-light, like a waking dream. But an hour after darkness we manage to grope back into the tent and fall asleep instantly, one atop the other.
We wake to Bieniek’s alarm. His little boy is muffled under all of the layers. The boy repeats his good morning until we dig out his father’s wrist and turn him off.
We shake Bieniek and ask how he’s doing but he doesn’t answer. There are ice crystals in his hair. His nose and cheeks are brown. We ask more questions and he follows our movement with his eyes, though otherwise no longer seems present.
Once we’re sufficiently revived we make some tea with the last of the gas in the stove. There’s so little air in the tent that the flame is a small blue halo above the burner.
We shouldn’t start this late in the day, but we have to leave nonetheless. We assemble what bivouac gear we can for the likelihood that we’ll spend the night out in the snow. Jacek climbs from the tent as I put a farewell hand to Bieniek’s shoulder. His half of the tent is caved in. I touch a glove to his face and he doesn’t stir, but when I remove it he asks for water. While I pour him a cup, he says, “It’s quiet out. You could go down.” I ask if he can stand and he doesn’t answer. He no longer seems to be breathing. I lean in close, and listen, then set the cup on his chest and climb out myself.
Jacek leads on the way down. During a rest break in an ice gully he tells me to keep an eye on him, because he’s starting to hallucinate again.
The storm blows in while we descend. Every few feet I’m surprised to find I’m still moving. It’s impossible to belay each other in these conditions but the alternative is to sit down and die. On less steep stretches I’m frightened by momentary blackouts from which I emerge after apparently having proceeded five or six paces.
During another rest break Jacek informs me he can’t breathe properly and asks if his lips are blue. Our boots hang out into space off the ledge on which we’re sitting. The wind is such that it looks like we’re kicking with them.
I tell him not so blue. The process begun in the tents is accelerating with the strain of all this agonized work: his lungs are filling with fluid, drowning the alveoli that absorb the oxygen.
We keep plodding downward. Finally in the starlight I can feel how close we’ve come to the edge of a giant balcony and I force us to stop. We dig a shallow snow cave in a languid stupor and then spoon inside it, taking turns on the warmer side. Even only this much lower, the air feels richer and full of oxygen, a pleasure to breathe.
The storm gets worse. A dull thundering rolls down from the summit pyramid. One of Wanda’s gestures sticks in my memory and I worry it like a puzzle. As my way of rejecting the notion that no more messages will get through, and that home has become an imaginary thing, I compose what I’m going to say to Agnieszka by way of apology.
The morning after our first night together, she told me that her brother had died climbing. When she went through his things, his assets turned out to be his equipment, most of which was left on the mountain. He’d always told her not to worry about the trip they were discussing; the next trip was the one that was going to prove dangerous. She told me this on the living room floor, her legs still wrapped around me. She was weeping and I was inside her. I analogized the intimacy in electrical terms, thinking we formed a complete circuit. After she pulled away from our kiss she said she still didn’t accept that he was gone. That she’d told herself, toward the end of his memorial service, he still had five minutes to turn up.
We should have been talking about all of this. But there’d only ever been time to discuss what had happened since I was gone, and where I was going next.