Everest

by Mark Brazaitis

It’s midnight at Camp Four. Our guide is leaving for the summit. The woman he impregnated—my wife—is too weak to go on. Her water broke thirty minutes ago. Our guide hoped she would be the first person to give birth at the peak of the world’s tallest mountain.

“You’re leaving us?” I shout at him as he heads off toward the Balcony. “You aren’t going to help with the birth?”

He turns to me. “I’m a guide, not a doctor.”

“You would’ve been happy to help if she was giving birth on the summit.” 

“No one gives a damn about someone who came up short.”

“Giving birth at 26,000 feet won’t be miracle enough?”

“At best, it’ll be mildly interesting. Send out a press release. See if anyone cares.”

As he strides into the darkness, I see a ghost marching in step beside him. The ghost and our guide are the same height and are dressed in what appears to be identical snowsuits. But whereas our guide wears a headlamp, the ghost has no such equipment. It doesn’t need to; it radiates a moon-colored light.

Am I hallucinating? The wind kicks up, and I think my eyes might freeze shut. Between the icicles on my eyelashes, which are like the frozen bars of a prison, I see guide and ghost begin their ascent. “Fuck you!” I shout after them. “I hope you die of HAPE! I hope you fall into the deepest crevasse on the mountain! I hope the helicopter sent to rescue you slices off your head!” The wind is as loud as a furnace. I know they can’t hear me because I can’t hear myself.

My wife and I have been high-altitude mountain climbers since we were in high school. We’ve summited the highest mountains on six continents. The world’s tallest mountain was to be our lucky seventh.

Our guide—or, as he is known in the business, The Guide—visited us one Sunday morning to volunteer to lead us to the top. Because we couldn’t afford his usual fee—even in the world of high-altitude mountain climbing (or especially in the world of high-altitude mountain climbing), it pays to be rich—he offered us a discount. But he placed a condition on his marked-down services: In the runup to our climb, I would have to be celibate. “Think of yourself as a boxer before a title bout,” he said, appraising my slender frame and my tent-pole arms and legs. “Save up your strength.” To ensure my fidelity to his command, I was required to sleep in a separate hotel room in Kathmandu, Nepal—and, thereafter, in a separate tent—from my wife.

He made no demands of my wife. I assumed my celibacy would ensure hers.

We were at Camp Two on an acclimatization run—the first of three we would make before our final push to the summit—when she told me she was seven months pregnant. She’d hidden her condition beneath her snowsuit. I did the math and realized I couldn’t be the baby’s father. She didn’t want to acknowledge who’d impregnated her—she mumbled about an immaculate conception—but I knew.

When I told our guide that my wife and I intended to abort our climb because of his perfidy, he laughed. “And miss the chance to make millions with a summit birth?” he said. “Babies aren’t cheap.” He reminded us of what we’d sacrificed to make the climb: we’d given up our jobs; we’d maxed out our credit cards to buy equipment, plane tickets, and climbing permits; we’d paid—in advance—his fee, whose discount didn’t warrant the word “generous.” We were broke, and unless we hit the jackpot with a summit birth, we would be broke for years.

When I criticized our guide in front of my wife, she said I shouldn’t jinx him with my righteousness. I might doom us all, she warned. Thereafter, I only imagined calling him demonic names and damning him with curses. I seethed in silence.

I know nothing about assisting in childbirth. When, from her tent, my wife screams, I panic. I try to catch my breath, but I find it impossible. I soon know why. My supply of supplemental oxygen is gone. My lungs have been abandoned to the thin air. I stumble into my wife’s tent. She’s cocooned in her sleeping bag. Her oxygen tank is beside her, empty. I think of our guide. You have forsaken us. It’s the gentlest accusation I would shout up the mountain if I had the breath to shout.

I unzip my wife’s sleeping bag. Aside from her hat and gloves, she’s naked. She screams again. I manage a single word: “Push.” She does. In the illumination from my headlamp, I see the baby’s head between her legs. I want to tell the baby to retreat. The world is a cold and inhospitable place. The mountain we are on is only a metaphor. The baby doesn’t listen to what I haven’t said.

“Push.” It’s the only word I can manage. My wife screams and pushes and screams. The baby’s head is in the world. Its eyelids are red from my wife’s blood. In my delirium, I wonder if my wife is birthing a devil. A second later, the baby opens its eyes. They see me. They look past me, as they will forever after.

My wife screams and pushes and screams. I don’t know how any woman, at any altitude, can survive such an ordeal. I’m powerless to ease her pain. I don’t know why I didn’t leave the mountain as soon as I learned of her betrayal. If I’d left, would our guide have abandoned her or would his craven conscience have convinced him to remain by her side? The world is replete with enablers of egoists. How many of us are happy to kowtow? How many of us despise our slavishness even as we practice it?

“Push.” The baby continues to move into the world.

My wife screams and pushes and screams and screams and screams. At last, she makes a sound other than a scream. It’s a sound of release, of relief, of wonder. I pull a Swiss Army knife from my pocket. With shivering hands, I cut the umbilical cord. The baby is in my palms. The afterbirth comes soon thereafter. My wife sits up and extends her arms. I hand her the baby, and she brings him to her breast.

The baby’s nursing is as loud as our breathing. I am again choking on nothing more than air. Even in the close confines of the tent, I feel I’m a mile from where my wife and the baby are. I have become—and so soon—the third wheel, the odd man out, the extra who makes three a crowd.

Where is our guide? I stumble out of my wife’s tent, hoping to see a sign of his return. But save a brilliant star in the sky, I see no light. I shout, but on the immense mountain, my voice is no more than a whisper. As I turn back to my wife’s tent, a ferocious wind slams me. I fall backwards. I don’t know if it’s the unceasing wind or my exhaustion, but I’m unable to stand. I fear I’ll become only another discarded body left untended on the mountain, an unheeded warning to climbers who follow in my plodding footsteps.

I think I’m hallucinating when I see three faces above me. In the starlight, snow crystals glitter on their hats, which look like bejeweled crowns. I see they’re sherpas. Later, I’ll learn their names: Norbu, Pemba, and Tenzing. Their hands reach for my hands; they lift me to my feet. They’ve brought gifts: three oxygen tanks. They strap an oxygen mask to my mouth, and I breathe again without feeling I’m about to suffocate. With my breath restored, I say, “Wife.” I say, “Child.” I point to the tent. Seconds later, my wife and her—our?—baby are breathing easily, or at least without gasping.

At dawn, we begin our descent. For the first time, I’m conscious of all the debris on the mountain—shredded tents, discarded gloves, spent oxygen tanks, human feces. The occasional sunburned corpse pimples the snow. The sacred mountain has become a chaotic landfill. The person who cleans it all up deserves sainthood but would never be celebrated. And no saint wants to be anonymous.

Norbu, Pemba, and Tenzing, climbing without supplemental oxygen, take turns carrying the baby down the mountain. My wife and I follow slowly, methodically, as in a dream. Somewhere above Camp Two, we’re passed by our guide, who pretends he doesn’t know me but gives my wife a wink. I’m too fatigued to express my outrage. I want him to die. But I want a warm bed and a long, deep sleep more.

At Base Camp, reporters from all over the world have gathered. They’re interviewing our guide. He has summited the mountain a record fifty times. “To stand at the top of this immense hill,” he says, bravado in his voice, “is to be at one with the universe.” My wife and I and our baby stand at the back of the crowd. A reporter turns to us. She notices our baby. “He was born on the mountain,” my wife says.

“At the summit?” the reporter asks.

“No,” my wife says, “in the Death Zone.”

The reporter shrugs and turns back to listen to whatever our guide is saying. He plays a recording of what he shouted in his booming bass at the summit. It’s his Ten Commandments of Mountain Climbing. One of his commandments is never to forsake anyone in one’s climbing group. Another is to leave “sauce-making”—the sherpas’ euphemism for sex—for sea-level.

I’m too tired to protest his hypocrisy.

Our guide will publish his commandments as part of a combination memoir, self-help manual, and cookbook. (He’s an expert on lamb.) Naturally, it will become a bestseller.

My wife, our baby against her breast, and I turn from the group of reporters. We hope to find Norbu, Pemba, and Tenzing. We don’t remember if we thanked them. But they’re gone, doubtless to sign on with another expedition or to catch up with the expedition they abandoned to rescue us. They’re paid pennies compared with the gold our guide commands in compensation. They have families to support. They can’t afford to waste time soaking up whatever minor acclaim they might receive for saving us.

My wife and I try to sell our story to People magazine, to literary agents, even to minor podcasters. If they even believe our story, they have one question about our son’s birth: “Did it happen at the summit?” Our story goes untold except in our local paper. It isn’t even on the front page, and the reporter misspells my last name.

Our guide contributes nothing to the boy’s upbringing. Even if we were inclined to sue him—I want to; my wife doesn’t—we couldn’t because it’s unclear where he resides. I think about denouncing him in posts on social media. But I think of what my wife and, when he learns to read, our son would make of what they would doubtless deem my pettiness. Besides, my voice would resound in a virtual void. My friends and followers number far fewer than the dead on the mountain we failed to summit.

I find work as a handyman. I spend my days in my customers’ basements and under their sinks and in the dust and debris of their crawl spaces. My wife spends her days moving from one window to the next in our trailer, placing herself in angelic light. Even after our son learns to walk, she keeps him close to her. She’s worried she’ll lose him to cruelty, misfortune, or betrayal. She sleeps with him in our bed. I sleep on the sofa. Some days I want to tell her she’s neglecting me. But I’m worried she’ll scrutinize me with genuine confusion and ask, “Who are you?” Is it possible to be forgotten in one’s own home? Sometimes I believe it is.

I don’t tell my wife about my dreams, which occur every night, like a song on repeat. We are back at Camp Four. She has just given birth. Norbu, Pemba, and Tenzing have yet to arrive with their life-saving oxygen. But it doesn’t matter. Our son, with preternatural strength and immune to the elements, crawls naked from my wife’s tent and toward the peak. I follow, gasping. He ascends, and I struggle after him until I see him at the summit. He stands, all of twenty inches long, and greets the waking sun.

It’s every father’s prerogative to imagine the greatness that awaits his child. But I know with a prophet’s certainty that our son will climb higher than the mere summit of the world’s tallest mountain, where, in the retelling of his origin story, he’ll have been born. I know, too, that I will not live to see his apotheosis. Before he becomes a teenager, I’ll die in a common, undistinguished way—in a car accident or of a heart attack in the bleachers of a Little League game—and if the world knows me at all, it will be as a curious, if minor, figure, celebrated, if ever, as an unprotesting cuckhold, someone whose claim to magnificence resides entirely in his meekness.

I could remedy this. I could leave behind this account, this bitter howl of protest, this righteous exposé of my trampled manhood. But I’ll renounce the truth in favor of securing my impotent place in the second greatest story ever told. Better to be thought of as an obedient caretaker of the extraordinary than one more insecure, ungrateful, grievance-filled bastard.

I’m putting a match to this manuscript. I’ll hold my words until they burn to immemorable ash in my palm. My name is Joe. The world will never know me.

 

 

Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.