Running Stairs
Mark Jenkins
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster."
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
I have not bathed in 73 days.
I know this will disgust you, Coach. I can see your veiny blue face bulging, spitting obscenities. But we’re sweating so hard from Day One, sweating like horses sweat, so everyone smells the same. After two weeks you reach a state of equilibrium: body oiled and content in its own animal smell, heat rash where the pack straps go over your shoulders, hair malleably greasy.
I believe I’ve lost 20 pounds. I trained hard before all this, going over to the stadium every day, so I didn’t have that much to lose. Feeling my corporeal self inside my sleeping bag, beneath my foul long underwear, I find things missing. For example I no longer have triceps. They have vanished leaving my shrunken biceps the only muscle fastening elbow to shoulder. And my lats, the wings of the back, they too are gone. And my pecs, once shallow plaques of masculinity, gone.
Of course any fat was dispatched long ago. The little slip of suet below one’s chin, the invisible pads between the legs, the pleasing wrap around one’s waist, all the physical manifestations of affluence and boredom, dished up and devoured. Strange sort of metaphor, consuming oneself outside in.
I see now that arms and chest were inconsequential. All I really needed was legs and lungs. Big lungs and ceaseless legs. Legs that keep kicking even when it’s all over.
I grope down inside my bag and squeeze the muscles above my feet. (I won’t touch my feet. I’m afraid to touch my feet.) Quads, glutes, calves. Each is sculpted hard as marble, proud of itself for surviving. Coach, you would be impressed.
I take a deep breath. Even up here, where we gulp at the air as if we are drowning. I can still do that. My skin is stretched taut around my chest. Every bone protrudes. I feel the curve of each rib, the small lumps and dents from injuries I acquired decades ago, perhaps the year you knew me. When I lie flat on my back I can feel the nodes of every vertebrae. My hip bones poke up ridiculously into the goose down of my sleeping bag.
Ah, I hear you. Snorting phlegm up your throat, popping you knuckles like walnuts. Self-indulgence offends you.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mention all this, but today is unusual: I have taken a rest day. Not by choice. This is my 17th consecutive day above 21,000 feet. Everyone said I should go down and rest, that I was tempting fate, but I kept on until I couldn’t. So now I’m tent bound. Perhaps if…
I’m back. I don’t know. I just fell asleep.
I should tell you, I’m living on the edge of a terminal drop. I’m living on a ledge, like a hermit, my hair curling into my beard, my skin peeling off in strips. The ledge is far up in the sky. It took us a month to get this high.
I’m inside a tiny red tent on this tiny ledge. I imagine the tent as a kite, a kite that cut loose and soared so high it disappeared above the clouds, then crashed into the side of the Himalaya like a plane. Sometimes I dream that it is just hanging her by strings frozen into the ice.
I have taken a rest day because of last night. Because of last night I can go nowhere. I am not sure I can walk.
I know I should not even think it, let alone speak it, but Coach, I am weak. I realize that is blasphemous. Even the word itself is anathema to you, the sound of it in some poor body’s throat would make you vomit like a sick bull. I know.
This morning it took all I had to piss out the tent zipper. I got up on my knees, still in my sleeping bag. The slice of light that came through the tent flap stabbed my eyes. I got dizzy for a moment.
Dizziness is death up here. Vertigo is death. If I had fallen forward I would have fallen off the edge. A flight of 2000 feet.
But I didn’t have vertigo. I never do on a mountain. If I’ve been living the horizontal life for several months and happen to get to the top of a building, and look over, I get vertigo. I think it’s due to the suddenness of a mortal perspective. The horizontal life provides primarily oblique panoramas. Too many things in the way for you to see whatever it is you’re really looking for. From above, things look fairly clear. But going up mountains, especially a mountain this size, is slow business. Believe it or not, you get used to living on little bird ledges and hanging in midair. You get used to looking down and having to search the glacier for a speck you know is a tent. It’s almost like being in a plane. Who gets vertigo in a plane?
After pissing I felt better. I collapsed back inside and must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes my cheek was frozen to the tent floor. I got myself deep in my sleeping bag and decided to read, then decided not to.
I have already read my section of Moby Dick, page 263, "Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes," to page 429, "Measurements of the Whale’s Skeleton." Read it twice. Like all the books, we ripped it into four pieces and distributed them amongst us. We swap with each other once we’ve finished our sections, which of course means I can’t read the book in order, which you might think would be disagreeable. Actually, I enjoy it. Makes me see how nicely things fit together; how the present is no more than a small extension of the past; how the future is but an interesting turn on the present; everything already right there from very early on, we just don’t usually see it.
I know you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, I know you don’t give a damn, either.
Anyway, I’ve done everything I must do, everything I can do, so I decided to write you. I see that my handwriting started out erect and smooth but has already degenerated. Cold does that. It’s like cancer.
I know you don’t know anything about mountain climbing – it’s not much like football – most people don’t. Most people think that it’s just cold that makes you cold. But at 23,000 feet the real problem is dehydration. Melting snow is so time consuming you get tired and don’t boil up as much water as you need. So you get dehydrated and your blood turns to syrup and can’t get into the capillaries. That’s how you lose fingers and toes.
About half this team had something amputated. Joe, the leader of this expedition, he lost his big toes when he was about my age. They were snipped off irregularly in some hinterland hospital, leaving rough gnarls of skin that catch when he tries to pull on his wool socks. He says it has never bothered him, but I watch him, slowly picking his way down through the glacier using his ski poles for balance. He goes slow. Like a dog with three legs. He could go faster but without big toes you lose forever…
Sorry, fell asleep again.
You know you feel safe inside sleep. I dreamed of green again. We’re all dreaming of green, have been for weeks. We live in a world of unbearable, blinding, burning white – so we dream of green. We dream of it like we once dreamed of sex. Carnal green. Voluptuous green. Velvety wet warm green. We wake up and tell each other of dreaming of sleeping naked with green. Of green cottonwoods growing straight up out of the glacier.
Of course that’s not all we talk about. At dinner, when we’re not too tired, lying on our sides in our bags with our noses in cups of steaming hot chocolate, we talk about sports that make sense. Snorkeling, in warm green Caribbean water. Or lawn tennis in England. Funny no one has mentioned golf yet, all that endless soft flowing green trimmed short as a woman’s pubic hair.
Does it sound like I’m with somebody right now? I’m not. Of course you can sometimes think you’re with somebody even when you’re not. Just like when you’re in an old house at night and the floors start to creak as if someone is walking around and you get up to have a look, maybe grabbing a butcher knife from the kitchen on the way. You do that sort of thing here, too. Listen too closely and you start to hear life outside the snapping tent, voices and sometimes yells and footsteps crunching in the snow coming close and the n going away and then coming back again, so you dress slowly and yank on your headlamp and step outside onto the tiny platform and look around and the beam of your headlamp barely pierces all the horrid black white wiping clean the face of the earth – and nothing. Of course, nothing. Just like at home because after you’ve been here long enough it is home.
But none of this is really what I wanted to talk to you about. I seem to be getting off on tangents, which as you probably don’t know is likely due to hypoxia.
I’ll explain briefly. Hypoxia is a lack of oxygen to the brain. At this altitude you get about half the oxygen you would at sea level. Affects everybody differently. Some climbers get nauseous and vomit regularly; there’s a frozen yellow glob just outside the tent. Some get searing headaches. Some get loose concentration and float a little. You have to be careful with this one. Just because your mind is floating you can sometimes start to thinking your body can too and forget about gravity. If mountain climbing is anything at all, it is dancing with gravity. Dark and beautiful and deductive she is. She has eyes that take your clothes off. She wants to lie down with you. She slowly slips from her dress and you see here and her flesh and she smiles and reaches up and takes you arm and her grip is suddenly not soft and delicate but heavy, so unimaginably heavy, and she won’t let go and you have to be willing to kick her because she’s a sorceress, a widowmaker, an executioner.
You learn this quick or you don’t live long climbing mountains. Like I said, this ain’t football.
Anyway, what I wanted to tell you about was what happened yesterday.
It started out as just another day. I was alone, kicking the points of my crampons into the blue ice, slowly jugging the lines up the ice wall. I don’t suppose you can imagine it but it’s not that different from climbing the ropes in gym, except we have spikes on our feet and wear big gloves.
Yesterday was the sixth day in a row I’d gone up on the face carrying loads. Every day the same: up at 3 a.m., boil something, down it, walk up the glacier in the dark under the stars brilliant as fireworks which is magic every single time, then start up the wall. On a good day, even with a heavy load, I would be up to this camp by noon.
But yesterday I felt different almost from the beginning. Uneasy. Like how you feel when you think something bad is going to happen to someone you’re close to, but you don’t know who, or how, and you can’t do anything about it and it makes you feel raw and upset but since you can’t do anything you just do what you would normally.
To my surprise, I started dragging about halfway up the wall. At first I tried to ignore it – which I’ve had more practice at since you knew me – but when it’s really bad, I don’t care what you used to say, Coach, it’s bad. In disbelief, I was suddenly barely moving. Each step was shrinking, rising only a few inches above the last. It seemed to require extraordinary energy to move at all. I felt like I was diminishing, as if I were being absorbed by something too vast and perhaps even too kind to fight. I had to stop for every breath. I kept craning my neck around like a baby bird, looking up, looking for this little red nest on a ledge. Then I was stopping more than going. Just standing there a thousand fee in the air, straight up above the glacier, hanging onto a rope balancing on four tiny metal teeth shoved into the ice. I kept looking up. Then I just stopped. I don’t know for how long. Just stopped. The air was getting colder. I could feel it freezing the snot on my face. I thought I saw some sparrows flitting above me, darting, diving, swooping playfully in the dusk. Then it was getting dark. I couldn’t believe it. Quire calmly it occurred to me that I might not make it. I couldn’t see the ledge and I couldn’t lift my legs anymore and I couldn’t feel my toes. Everything was starting to move in slow motion (like this) and my thought were coming slower and slower like when you are given anesthetic and you can’t seem to control …
I said something to myself out lout. It took a while to sink in. "Fuck," I whispered, my mouth barely capable of forming around the word. My lips felt unattached. I started consciously breathing the word over and over very slowly, forcing myself to speak loudly. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."
Then something snapped or I don’t know what and I was lucid fro a moment. I thought: how dumb, I’m going to die. I’m going to freeze stiff as a strip of jerky hanging on a wall between two camps on a big mountain in the middle of the sky in the middle of the night in the middle of Asia.
Then you know what I thought of? You won’t believe it: running stairs. I couldn’t believe it myself. Here I was, couldn’t event feel my damned feet and I’m thinking of running stairs. It was a visceral thought. My body thought of it, not me.
Right after that I thought of you and I started to move again. Hat has a lot of energy.
I’m sorry, I can barely hold the pen. I have to sleep now.
Back again.
You won’t remember but it was because of you I learned how to run stairs.
I was a skinny kid, sinewy. I set the junior-high record (it might still be up on the gymnasium wall) for doing 1589 situps in a half hour. You made us do all the physical fitness tests on the bare hardwood floor. Setting that record left me with a three-inch bleeding gash in the middle of my back, but anything was worth it for a piece of pride when we were 12. You knew that.
Actually, Coach, you can’t take all the credit. I learned how to run stairs partly because of a boy named Weichman.
It was during a game of Murder Ball.
This was back when boys and girls did not have gym class together. There was a boys gym and girls gym, both enormous three-story mausoleums with dusty yellow light coming through a thousand panes of old warped glass and bleachers running all the way to the ceiling.
Now that I think about it, once a month, only once a month, by some stroke of erotic temptation, we’d have a "co-ed day," which meant boys and girls would get to bounce on trampolines in the same gym. Coach, I recall you would stand along the edge of the girl’s tramp and look up their skirts. We knew you were sick. Every other day, in the scary, sacred gigantic boys gym, Murder Ball was enacted.
Murder Ball was an elementary game that I don’t think you thought up, although it’s precisely the kind of game you would have if you could have. Perhaps theatrically named, I think now it had some very adult, real-world veracity. Take a class of 30 gangly, all-sized, ruddy-cheeked boys – some shy to the point of fainting at VD health movies, some already so abused they could take a punch from a full-grown man, and a large bunch of us just trying to be normal and stay out of the way – randomly divide it in half, divide the gymnasium in half, put a team on either side, slowly roll five or 10 hard rubber balls down the half-court line.
Rules were simple; you barked them: "Don’t git hit; if you do, yer ass is out. Don’t ever go too far and step over the line."
The beginning was always tense. I remember this was the part you relished. Your eyes would roll in your head and you’d clench your jaw so much we could see the muscles in you blue cheeks. The balls would be gliding silently down the line following one after another and several brave boys from both sides would have to race to the line serving and ducking, snatch up a ball and throw it as hard as they could at somebody doing the same thing three feet away. Some kid always got it good.
Thereafter both teams commenced to pummel each other. The fat kids or slow kids or dumb kids always went out first, often getting hit with two or three balls at once, which would send them to the floor screaming.
Although I was reasonably quick and strong, I hated this game. I think every boy hated this game except maybe the large, vicious kids who could really throw a ball and the few kids whose dads wanted them to be World Series pitchers and had taught them how to throw hard and accurate.
Anyway. One day I hit this kid Weichman in the face. I almost always threw with the fury of fear amidst a pell-mell dash, absolutely no aim, my eyes mostly closed. The ball flew out wildly hooking to the far left just when Weichman was stumbling forward narrowly avoiding another hissing peril. He happened to be looking up. I saw his eyes in his fat face, and when it hit I could tell it hurt bad and for a split second I wanted to yell out, "Sorry. Hey, I’m sorry," or something foolish like that before I realized I was close to the line and about to be hurt and threw myself backwards zigzagging like a shell-shocked rabbit.
When the bell rang I innocently thought Weichman had forgotten all about it although even from across the gym I could see his face was still red and welted. He jumped me in the locker room. He was much bigger but I was much quicker so all in all we punched and scraped and banged each other up against the metal lockers until Weichman’s face was bleeding and crowd gathered. Then you broke through and dragged us off to your office.
We knew what could happen. The bruises and blood were nothing now. We’d seen the perfect pattern of blisters in a rectangle of black on several of the tough boys who said it didn’t hurt but didn’t sit down even putting on their shoes for a month.
I was scared but inside I was feeling good too because fat Weichman twice my size hadn’t killed me and when I started to think about it I must have just somehow smiled again because you got purple in the face like you did yelling at your football team that I’d quit after the second week.
"Why you goddamn little smartass!" you said. You shoved Weichman out of your office bellowing: "Better quit yer fuckin cryin! Shower that fuckin blood of yer fat face." You slammed your office door and the pin-up girl tacked to the inside waved.
You cornered me. "Paddlins somethin pretty funny to smart farts like you aint it. Well get th’fuck out. Tomorroll be somethin for you." And you slapped me in the face and kicked me right in the anus and opened the door and shoved me out of your office.
So I was scared all the rest of the day and through that night when things can get real bad for a boy. The next day during roll call you roared at me to step forward.
"Saw you step yer ass cross the line yesterday, boy!" you said.
A strange sound went through the kids in the class. It was like a breeze that changes its shape as it moves. At first is sounded like a snicker but then it sickened and turned into a faint groan and ended in an inaudible gasp like what happens when someone is punched in the stomach. I knew what was about to happen and began to tremble and immediately forced myself to stop it and put on a blank look. I was biting my tongue.
"Asshole! Go stand yer ass gainst that wall."
Coach, you were smiling. I know that you lived for this kind of thing. I know now you aren’t the only vicious person on earth.
I walked rigidly across the gym floor trying to think about making my knees work, stopped at the wall, and turned around.
You cursed and all the boys lined up on the half court line. You voice was kind of high-pitched, like an over-excited dog. The boys were feverish and elbowing each other and sniggering nervously. You dumped over the box of red balls. The boys charged and scuffled and cuffed and of course the balls ended up in the hands of the meanest, most accurate throwers in class. One of them gave Weichman a ball.
I decided one thing. I decided to just make sure Weichman’s ball didn’t hit me.
Then you blew your whistle and all the itchy kids with strong arms and frenzied faces hurled at once but I was concentrating hard watching Weichman and I was fast and dodged and a firestorm descended and I dodged and suffocated and dove and got away from a few and a few just missed but then I was falling and one caught me hard in the ear and one caught me in the nuts and I dropped fast and felt hot and swallowed hot vomit and heard off in the distance that blurry snikersickgroan and saw what I thought were sparrows flitting above me, darting and diving and swooping playfully but couldn’t figure out how they got inside the gymnasium when your black leather shows shoved up under my face.
"Well, smartfart, git up."
I looked up.
"Don’t you! Don’t you give me that fuckin…" and I saw your leather feet twitch and shuffle as if you were going to kick me in the face.
Then everything was quiet for a minute.
"You got stairs for one whole fuckin month. Startin today. Now git on it." Coach, you dragged me to my feet by my ears because my hair was too short and shoved me off and kicked me in the anus.
That’s when I knew you liked me and all the kids knew I was lucky enough to get stairs because I’d managed not to get killed by Weichman and had even given him a bloody nose and managed somehow not to get the paddle either by not crying.
I’ve been running stairs ever since. Three months before every expedition I start visiting the stadium. It is a mile away and I run there every day. It is a ritual. I stand in the middle of the football field and stare up and listen to all the crowds whistling and hooting at football games I never go to. Then I take off. I run them until I can’t. Until I puke.
Coach, I have to sleep now.
I know this will disgust you, Coach. I can see your veiny blue face bulging, spitting obscenities. But we’re sweating so hard from Day One, sweating like horses sweat, so everyone smells the same. After two weeks you reach a state of equilibrium: body oiled and content in its own animal smell, heat rash where the pack straps go over your shoulders, hair malleably greasy.
I believe I’ve lost 20 pounds. I trained hard before all this, going over to the stadium every day, so I didn’t have that much to lose. Feeling my corporeal self inside my sleeping bag, beneath my foul long underwear, I find things missing. For example I no longer have triceps. They have vanished leaving my shrunken biceps the only muscle fastening elbow to shoulder. And my lats, the wings of the back, they too are gone. And my pecs, once shallow plaques of masculinity, gone.
Of course any fat was dispatched long ago. The little slip of suet below one’s chin, the invisible pads between the legs, the pleasing wrap around one’s waist, all the physical manifestations of affluence and boredom, dished up and devoured. Strange sort of metaphor, consuming oneself outside in.
I see now that arms and chest were inconsequential. All I really needed was legs and lungs. Big lungs and ceaseless legs. Legs that keep kicking even when it’s all over.
I grope down inside my bag and squeeze the muscles above my feet. (I won’t touch my feet. I’m afraid to touch my feet.) Quads, glutes, calves. Each is sculpted hard as marble, proud of itself for surviving. Coach, you would be impressed.
I take a deep breath. Even up here, where we gulp at the air as if we are drowning. I can still do that. My skin is stretched taut around my chest. Every bone protrudes. I feel the curve of each rib, the small lumps and dents from injuries I acquired decades ago, perhaps the year you knew me. When I lie flat on my back I can feel the nodes of every vertebrae. My hip bones poke up ridiculously into the goose down of my sleeping bag.
Ah, I hear you. Snorting phlegm up your throat, popping you knuckles like walnuts. Self-indulgence offends you.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mention all this, but today is unusual: I have taken a rest day. Not by choice. This is my 17th consecutive day above 21,000 feet. Everyone said I should go down and rest, that I was tempting fate, but I kept on until I couldn’t. So now I’m tent bound. Perhaps if…
I’m back. I don’t know. I just fell asleep.
I should tell you, I’m living on the edge of a terminal drop. I’m living on a ledge, like a hermit, my hair curling into my beard, my skin peeling off in strips. The ledge is far up in the sky. It took us a month to get this high.
I’m inside a tiny red tent on this tiny ledge. I imagine the tent as a kite, a kite that cut loose and soared so high it disappeared above the clouds, then crashed into the side of the Himalaya like a plane. Sometimes I dream that it is just hanging her by strings frozen into the ice.
I have taken a rest day because of last night. Because of last night I can go nowhere. I am not sure I can walk.
I know I should not even think it, let alone speak it, but Coach, I am weak. I realize that is blasphemous. Even the word itself is anathema to you, the sound of it in some poor body’s throat would make you vomit like a sick bull. I know.
This morning it took all I had to piss out the tent zipper. I got up on my knees, still in my sleeping bag. The slice of light that came through the tent flap stabbed my eyes. I got dizzy for a moment.
Dizziness is death up here. Vertigo is death. If I had fallen forward I would have fallen off the edge. A flight of 2000 feet.
But I didn’t have vertigo. I never do on a mountain. If I’ve been living the horizontal life for several months and happen to get to the top of a building, and look over, I get vertigo. I think it’s due to the suddenness of a mortal perspective. The horizontal life provides primarily oblique panoramas. Too many things in the way for you to see whatever it is you’re really looking for. From above, things look fairly clear. But going up mountains, especially a mountain this size, is slow business. Believe it or not, you get used to living on little bird ledges and hanging in midair. You get used to looking down and having to search the glacier for a speck you know is a tent. It’s almost like being in a plane. Who gets vertigo in a plane?
After pissing I felt better. I collapsed back inside and must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes my cheek was frozen to the tent floor. I got myself deep in my sleeping bag and decided to read, then decided not to.
I have already read my section of Moby Dick, page 263, "Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes," to page 429, "Measurements of the Whale’s Skeleton." Read it twice. Like all the books, we ripped it into four pieces and distributed them amongst us. We swap with each other once we’ve finished our sections, which of course means I can’t read the book in order, which you might think would be disagreeable. Actually, I enjoy it. Makes me see how nicely things fit together; how the present is no more than a small extension of the past; how the future is but an interesting turn on the present; everything already right there from very early on, we just don’t usually see it.
I know you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, I know you don’t give a damn, either.
Anyway, I’ve done everything I must do, everything I can do, so I decided to write you. I see that my handwriting started out erect and smooth but has already degenerated. Cold does that. It’s like cancer.
I know you don’t know anything about mountain climbing – it’s not much like football – most people don’t. Most people think that it’s just cold that makes you cold. But at 23,000 feet the real problem is dehydration. Melting snow is so time consuming you get tired and don’t boil up as much water as you need. So you get dehydrated and your blood turns to syrup and can’t get into the capillaries. That’s how you lose fingers and toes.
About half this team had something amputated. Joe, the leader of this expedition, he lost his big toes when he was about my age. They were snipped off irregularly in some hinterland hospital, leaving rough gnarls of skin that catch when he tries to pull on his wool socks. He says it has never bothered him, but I watch him, slowly picking his way down through the glacier using his ski poles for balance. He goes slow. Like a dog with three legs. He could go faster but without big toes you lose forever…
Sorry, fell asleep again.
You know you feel safe inside sleep. I dreamed of green again. We’re all dreaming of green, have been for weeks. We live in a world of unbearable, blinding, burning white – so we dream of green. We dream of it like we once dreamed of sex. Carnal green. Voluptuous green. Velvety wet warm green. We wake up and tell each other of dreaming of sleeping naked with green. Of green cottonwoods growing straight up out of the glacier.
Of course that’s not all we talk about. At dinner, when we’re not too tired, lying on our sides in our bags with our noses in cups of steaming hot chocolate, we talk about sports that make sense. Snorkeling, in warm green Caribbean water. Or lawn tennis in England. Funny no one has mentioned golf yet, all that endless soft flowing green trimmed short as a woman’s pubic hair.
Does it sound like I’m with somebody right now? I’m not. Of course you can sometimes think you’re with somebody even when you’re not. Just like when you’re in an old house at night and the floors start to creak as if someone is walking around and you get up to have a look, maybe grabbing a butcher knife from the kitchen on the way. You do that sort of thing here, too. Listen too closely and you start to hear life outside the snapping tent, voices and sometimes yells and footsteps crunching in the snow coming close and the n going away and then coming back again, so you dress slowly and yank on your headlamp and step outside onto the tiny platform and look around and the beam of your headlamp barely pierces all the horrid black white wiping clean the face of the earth – and nothing. Of course, nothing. Just like at home because after you’ve been here long enough it is home.
But none of this is really what I wanted to talk to you about. I seem to be getting off on tangents, which as you probably don’t know is likely due to hypoxia.
I’ll explain briefly. Hypoxia is a lack of oxygen to the brain. At this altitude you get about half the oxygen you would at sea level. Affects everybody differently. Some climbers get nauseous and vomit regularly; there’s a frozen yellow glob just outside the tent. Some get searing headaches. Some get loose concentration and float a little. You have to be careful with this one. Just because your mind is floating you can sometimes start to thinking your body can too and forget about gravity. If mountain climbing is anything at all, it is dancing with gravity. Dark and beautiful and deductive she is. She has eyes that take your clothes off. She wants to lie down with you. She slowly slips from her dress and you see here and her flesh and she smiles and reaches up and takes you arm and her grip is suddenly not soft and delicate but heavy, so unimaginably heavy, and she won’t let go and you have to be willing to kick her because she’s a sorceress, a widowmaker, an executioner.
You learn this quick or you don’t live long climbing mountains. Like I said, this ain’t football.
Anyway, what I wanted to tell you about was what happened yesterday.
It started out as just another day. I was alone, kicking the points of my crampons into the blue ice, slowly jugging the lines up the ice wall. I don’t suppose you can imagine it but it’s not that different from climbing the ropes in gym, except we have spikes on our feet and wear big gloves.
Yesterday was the sixth day in a row I’d gone up on the face carrying loads. Every day the same: up at 3 a.m., boil something, down it, walk up the glacier in the dark under the stars brilliant as fireworks which is magic every single time, then start up the wall. On a good day, even with a heavy load, I would be up to this camp by noon.
But yesterday I felt different almost from the beginning. Uneasy. Like how you feel when you think something bad is going to happen to someone you’re close to, but you don’t know who, or how, and you can’t do anything about it and it makes you feel raw and upset but since you can’t do anything you just do what you would normally.
To my surprise, I started dragging about halfway up the wall. At first I tried to ignore it – which I’ve had more practice at since you knew me – but when it’s really bad, I don’t care what you used to say, Coach, it’s bad. In disbelief, I was suddenly barely moving. Each step was shrinking, rising only a few inches above the last. It seemed to require extraordinary energy to move at all. I felt like I was diminishing, as if I were being absorbed by something too vast and perhaps even too kind to fight. I had to stop for every breath. I kept craning my neck around like a baby bird, looking up, looking for this little red nest on a ledge. Then I was stopping more than going. Just standing there a thousand fee in the air, straight up above the glacier, hanging onto a rope balancing on four tiny metal teeth shoved into the ice. I kept looking up. Then I just stopped. I don’t know for how long. Just stopped. The air was getting colder. I could feel it freezing the snot on my face. I thought I saw some sparrows flitting above me, darting, diving, swooping playfully in the dusk. Then it was getting dark. I couldn’t believe it. Quire calmly it occurred to me that I might not make it. I couldn’t see the ledge and I couldn’t lift my legs anymore and I couldn’t feel my toes. Everything was starting to move in slow motion (like this) and my thought were coming slower and slower like when you are given anesthetic and you can’t seem to control …
I said something to myself out lout. It took a while to sink in. "Fuck," I whispered, my mouth barely capable of forming around the word. My lips felt unattached. I started consciously breathing the word over and over very slowly, forcing myself to speak loudly. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."
Then something snapped or I don’t know what and I was lucid fro a moment. I thought: how dumb, I’m going to die. I’m going to freeze stiff as a strip of jerky hanging on a wall between two camps on a big mountain in the middle of the sky in the middle of the night in the middle of Asia.
Then you know what I thought of? You won’t believe it: running stairs. I couldn’t believe it myself. Here I was, couldn’t event feel my damned feet and I’m thinking of running stairs. It was a visceral thought. My body thought of it, not me.
Right after that I thought of you and I started to move again. Hat has a lot of energy.
I’m sorry, I can barely hold the pen. I have to sleep now.
Back again.
You won’t remember but it was because of you I learned how to run stairs.
I was a skinny kid, sinewy. I set the junior-high record (it might still be up on the gymnasium wall) for doing 1589 situps in a half hour. You made us do all the physical fitness tests on the bare hardwood floor. Setting that record left me with a three-inch bleeding gash in the middle of my back, but anything was worth it for a piece of pride when we were 12. You knew that.
Actually, Coach, you can’t take all the credit. I learned how to run stairs partly because of a boy named Weichman.
It was during a game of Murder Ball.
This was back when boys and girls did not have gym class together. There was a boys gym and girls gym, both enormous three-story mausoleums with dusty yellow light coming through a thousand panes of old warped glass and bleachers running all the way to the ceiling.
Now that I think about it, once a month, only once a month, by some stroke of erotic temptation, we’d have a "co-ed day," which meant boys and girls would get to bounce on trampolines in the same gym. Coach, I recall you would stand along the edge of the girl’s tramp and look up their skirts. We knew you were sick. Every other day, in the scary, sacred gigantic boys gym, Murder Ball was enacted.
Murder Ball was an elementary game that I don’t think you thought up, although it’s precisely the kind of game you would have if you could have. Perhaps theatrically named, I think now it had some very adult, real-world veracity. Take a class of 30 gangly, all-sized, ruddy-cheeked boys – some shy to the point of fainting at VD health movies, some already so abused they could take a punch from a full-grown man, and a large bunch of us just trying to be normal and stay out of the way – randomly divide it in half, divide the gymnasium in half, put a team on either side, slowly roll five or 10 hard rubber balls down the half-court line.
Rules were simple; you barked them: "Don’t git hit; if you do, yer ass is out. Don’t ever go too far and step over the line."
The beginning was always tense. I remember this was the part you relished. Your eyes would roll in your head and you’d clench your jaw so much we could see the muscles in you blue cheeks. The balls would be gliding silently down the line following one after another and several brave boys from both sides would have to race to the line serving and ducking, snatch up a ball and throw it as hard as they could at somebody doing the same thing three feet away. Some kid always got it good.
Thereafter both teams commenced to pummel each other. The fat kids or slow kids or dumb kids always went out first, often getting hit with two or three balls at once, which would send them to the floor screaming.
Although I was reasonably quick and strong, I hated this game. I think every boy hated this game except maybe the large, vicious kids who could really throw a ball and the few kids whose dads wanted them to be World Series pitchers and had taught them how to throw hard and accurate.
Anyway. One day I hit this kid Weichman in the face. I almost always threw with the fury of fear amidst a pell-mell dash, absolutely no aim, my eyes mostly closed. The ball flew out wildly hooking to the far left just when Weichman was stumbling forward narrowly avoiding another hissing peril. He happened to be looking up. I saw his eyes in his fat face, and when it hit I could tell it hurt bad and for a split second I wanted to yell out, "Sorry. Hey, I’m sorry," or something foolish like that before I realized I was close to the line and about to be hurt and threw myself backwards zigzagging like a shell-shocked rabbit.
When the bell rang I innocently thought Weichman had forgotten all about it although even from across the gym I could see his face was still red and welted. He jumped me in the locker room. He was much bigger but I was much quicker so all in all we punched and scraped and banged each other up against the metal lockers until Weichman’s face was bleeding and crowd gathered. Then you broke through and dragged us off to your office.
We knew what could happen. The bruises and blood were nothing now. We’d seen the perfect pattern of blisters in a rectangle of black on several of the tough boys who said it didn’t hurt but didn’t sit down even putting on their shoes for a month.
I was scared but inside I was feeling good too because fat Weichman twice my size hadn’t killed me and when I started to think about it I must have just somehow smiled again because you got purple in the face like you did yelling at your football team that I’d quit after the second week.
"Why you goddamn little smartass!" you said. You shoved Weichman out of your office bellowing: "Better quit yer fuckin cryin! Shower that fuckin blood of yer fat face." You slammed your office door and the pin-up girl tacked to the inside waved.
You cornered me. "Paddlins somethin pretty funny to smart farts like you aint it. Well get th’fuck out. Tomorroll be somethin for you." And you slapped me in the face and kicked me right in the anus and opened the door and shoved me out of your office.
So I was scared all the rest of the day and through that night when things can get real bad for a boy. The next day during roll call you roared at me to step forward.
"Saw you step yer ass cross the line yesterday, boy!" you said.
A strange sound went through the kids in the class. It was like a breeze that changes its shape as it moves. At first is sounded like a snicker but then it sickened and turned into a faint groan and ended in an inaudible gasp like what happens when someone is punched in the stomach. I knew what was about to happen and began to tremble and immediately forced myself to stop it and put on a blank look. I was biting my tongue.
"Asshole! Go stand yer ass gainst that wall."
Coach, you were smiling. I know that you lived for this kind of thing. I know now you aren’t the only vicious person on earth.
I walked rigidly across the gym floor trying to think about making my knees work, stopped at the wall, and turned around.
You cursed and all the boys lined up on the half court line. You voice was kind of high-pitched, like an over-excited dog. The boys were feverish and elbowing each other and sniggering nervously. You dumped over the box of red balls. The boys charged and scuffled and cuffed and of course the balls ended up in the hands of the meanest, most accurate throwers in class. One of them gave Weichman a ball.
I decided one thing. I decided to just make sure Weichman’s ball didn’t hit me.
Then you blew your whistle and all the itchy kids with strong arms and frenzied faces hurled at once but I was concentrating hard watching Weichman and I was fast and dodged and a firestorm descended and I dodged and suffocated and dove and got away from a few and a few just missed but then I was falling and one caught me hard in the ear and one caught me in the nuts and I dropped fast and felt hot and swallowed hot vomit and heard off in the distance that blurry snikersickgroan and saw what I thought were sparrows flitting above me, darting and diving and swooping playfully but couldn’t figure out how they got inside the gymnasium when your black leather shows shoved up under my face.
"Well, smartfart, git up."
I looked up.
"Don’t you! Don’t you give me that fuckin…" and I saw your leather feet twitch and shuffle as if you were going to kick me in the face.
Then everything was quiet for a minute.
"You got stairs for one whole fuckin month. Startin today. Now git on it." Coach, you dragged me to my feet by my ears because my hair was too short and shoved me off and kicked me in the anus.
That’s when I knew you liked me and all the kids knew I was lucky enough to get stairs because I’d managed not to get killed by Weichman and had even given him a bloody nose and managed somehow not to get the paddle either by not crying.
I’ve been running stairs ever since. Three months before every expedition I start visiting the stadium. It is a mile away and I run there every day. It is a ritual. I stand in the middle of the football field and stare up and listen to all the crowds whistling and hooting at football games I never go to. Then I take off. I run them until I can’t. Until I puke.
Coach, I have to sleep now.
Climbing 187