As her heart blinks rapidly, Rita promises herself that the next day will be less punishing, less severe. The morning will be clear and dry and when the fog burns off, it will be so warm, maybe even hot, with the sun coming all over and drying their wet things. They will walk upward in the morning wearing shorts and sunglasses, upward toward the sun.
The morning is wet and foggy and there is no sun and everything that was wet the night before is now wetter. Rita’s mood is a slashing despair; she does not want to leave her sleeping bag or her tent, she wants all these filthy people gone, and wants her things dry and clean. She wants to be alone, for a few minutes at least. She knows she can’t, because outside the tent are the other hikers, and there are twenty porters, and now, a small group of German hikers, and at the far side of the camp, three Canadians and a crew of twelve—they must have arrived after dark. Everyone is waking up. She hears the pouring of water, the rattle of pots, the thrufting of tents. Rita is so tired and so awake and she comes close to crying. She wants to be in this sleeping bag, not awake but still sleeping, for two and a half hours more. In two and a half hours she could regather her strength, all of it. She would have a running start at this day, and could then leap past anyone.
There is conversation from the next tent. The voices are not whispering, not even attempting to whisper.
“You’re kidding me,” one voice says. “You know how much we paid for these tickets? How long did we plan to come here, how long did I save?”
It’s Jerry.
“You know you didn’t have to save, Dad.”
“But Michael. We planned this for years. I talked to you about this when you were ten. Remember? When Uncle Mark came back? Christ!”
“Dad, I just—”
“And here you’re going down after one freaking day!”
“Listen. I have never felt so weak, Dad. It’s just so much harder than—”
“Michael. Yesterday was the hardest day—the rest will be nothing. You heard what’s-his-face . . . Frank. This was the hard one. I can see why you’re a little concerned, but you gotta buck up now, son. Yesterday was bad but—”
“Shhh.”
“No one can hear us, Michael. For heaven’s sake. Everyone’s asleep.”
“Shh!”
“I will not have you shushing me! And I won’t have you—”
There is the sound of a sleeping bag being adjusted, and then the voices become lower and softer.
“I will not have you leaving this—”
And the voice dips below audibility.
Shelly is awake now, too. She has been listening, and gives Rita a raised eyebrow. Rita reciprocates, and begins searching through her duffel bag for what to wear today. She has brought three pairs of pants, two shorts, five shirts, two fleece sweatshirts, and her parka. Putting on her socks, wool and shaped like her foot, the ankle area reinforced and double-lined, she wonders if Mike will actually be going down so soon. There is a spare garbage bag into which she shoves her dirty socks, yesterday’s shirt, and her jogging bra, which she can smell—rain and trees and her.
“You’d have to break my leg,” Shelly whispers. She is still in her sleeping bag, only her face visible. Rita suddenly thinks she looks like someone. An actress. Jill Clayburgh. Jane Curtin? Kathleen Turner.
“Break my leg and cut my tendons. You’d have to. I’m doing this climb.”
Rita nods and heads toward the tent’s door flap.
“If you’re going outside,” Shelly says, “give me a weather report.”
Rita pokes her head through the flaps and is facing fifteen porters. They are all standing in the fog, just across the campsite, under the drizzle, some holding cups, all in the clothes they were wearing yesterday. They are outside the cooking tent, and they are all staring at her face through the flap. She quickly pulls it back into the tent.
“What’s it like?” Shelly asks.
“Same,” Rita says.
Breakfast is porridge and tea and orange slices that have been left in the open air too long and are now dry, almost brown. There is toast, cold and hard and with hard butter needing to be applied with great force. Again the five paying hikers are hunched over the small card table, and they eat everything they can. They pass the brown sugar and dump it into their porridge, and they pass the milk for their coffee, and they worry that the caffeine will give them the runs and they’ll have to make excessive trips to the toilet tent, which now everyone dreads. Rita had wondered if the trip might be too soft, too easy, but now, so soon after getting here, she knows that she is somewhere else. It’s something very different.
“How was that tent of yours?” Frank asks, directing his chin toward Grant. “Not too warm, eh?”
“It was a little cool, you’re right, Frank.” Grant is pouring himself a third cup of tea.
“Grant thinks his dad’s old canvas army tent was the way to go,” Frank says. “But he didn’t count on this rain, didja, Grant? Your dad could dry his out next to the fire, but that ain’t happening up here, friend.”
Grant’s hands are clasped in front of him, as if arm-wrestling with himself. He is listening and looking at Frank without any sort of emotion.
“That thing ain’t dry tonight, you’re gonna be bunking with me or someone else, Grant.” Frank is scratching his beard in a way that looks painful. “Otherwise the rain and wind will make an icebox of that tent. You’ll freeze in your sleep, and you won’t even know it. You’ll wake up dead.”
The trail winds like a narrow river up through an hour of rain forest, drier today, and then cuts through a hillside cleared by fire. Everyone is walking together now, the ground is bare and black. There are twisted remnants of trees straining from the soil, their extremities gone but their roots almost intact.
“There’s your forest fire,” Frank says.
The fog is finally clearing. Though the pace is slow, around a field of round rocks knee-high, it is not as slow as the day before, and because Rita is tired and her legs are sore in every place, from ankle to upper thigh, she accepts the reduced speed. Grant is behind her and also seems resigned.
But Mike is far more ill today. The five paying hikers know this because it has become the habit of all to monitor the health of everyone else. The words “How are you?” on this mountain do not form an innocuous or rhetorical question. The words in each case, from each hiker, give way to a distinct and complicated answer, involving the appearance or avoidance of blisters, of burgeoning headaches, of sore ankles and quads, shoulders that still, even with the straps adjusted, feel pinched. Mike’s stomach feels, he is telling everyone, like there is actually a large tapeworm inside him. Its movements are trackable, relentless, he claims, and he’s given it a name: Ashley, after an ex-girlfriend. He looks desperate for a moment of contentment; he looks like a sick child, lying on the bathroom floor, bent around the toilet, exhausted and defeated, who only wants the vomiting to stop.
Today the porters are passing the paying hikers. Every few minutes another goes by, or a group of them. The porters walk alone or in packs of three. When they come through they do one of two things: If there is room around the hikers, when the path is wide or there is space to walk through the dirt or rocks beside them, they will jog around them; when the path is narrow they will wait for the hikers to step aside.
Rita and Grant are stepping aside.
“Jambo,” Grant says.
“Jambo,” the first porter says. He is about twenty, wearing a CBS News T-shirt, khaki pants, and cream-colored Timberland hiking shoes, almost new. He is carrying two duffel bags on his head. One of them is Rita’s. She almost tells him this but then catches herself.
“Habari,” Grant says.
“Imara,” the porter says.
And he and the two others walk past. Rita asks Grant what he’s just said. “Habari,” Grant explains, means “How are you,” and “Imara” means “strong.”
“Blue!” Jerry yells, pointing to a small spot of sky that the fog has left uncove
red. It’s the first swatch of blue the sky has allowed since the trip began, and it elicits an unnatural spasm of joy in Rita. She wants to climb through the gap and spread herself out above the cloud line, as you would a ladder leading to a tree fort. Soon the blue hole grows and the sun, still obscured but now directly above, gives heat through a thin layer of cloud cover. The air around them warms almost immediately and Rita, along with the other paying hikers, stops to remove layers and put on sunglasses. Frank takes a pair of wet pants from his bag and ties them to a carabiner; they hang to his heels, filthy.
Mike now has the perpetual look of someone disarming a bomb. His forehead is never without sweat beaded along the ridges of the three distinct lines on his forehead. He is sucking on a silver tube, like a ketchup container but larger.
“It’s a kind of energy food,” he explains.
They are all eating the snacks they’ve brought. Every day Steven gives the paying hikers a sack lunch of eggs and crackers, which none of them eat. Rita is eating peanuts and raisins and chocolate. Jerry is gnawing on his beef jerky. They are all sharing food and needed articles of clothing and medical aid. Shelly loans Mike her Ace bandage, to wrap around his ankle, which he thinks is swollen. Jerry loans Rita a pair of Thinsulate gloves.
Fifteen porters pass while the paying hikers are eating and changing. One porter, more muscular than the others, who are uniformly thin, is carrying a radio playing American country music. The porter is affecting a nonchalant pride in this music, a certain casual ownership of it. To each porter Grant says “Jambo” and most say “Jambo” in return, eliciting more greetings from Jerry—who now likes to say the word, loudly.
“Jahm-BO!” he roars, in a way that seems intended to frighten.
Shelly steps over to Frank.
“What do the porters eat?” she asks.
“Eat? The porters? Well, they eat what you eat, pretty much,” Frank says, then reaches for Shelly’s hips and pats one. “Maybe without the snacking,” he says, and winks.
There is a boom like a jet plane backfiring. Or artillery fire. Everyone looks up, then down the mountain. No one knows where to look. The porters, farther up the trail but still within view, stop briefly. Rita sees one mime the shooting of a rifle. Then they continue.
Now Rita is walking alone. She has talked to most of the paying hikers and feels caught up. She knows about Shelly’s marriages, her Ph.D. in philosophy, her son living in a group home in Indiana after going off his medication and using a pizza cutter to threaten the life of a coworker. She knows Jerry, knows that Jerry feels his restaurants bring their communities together, knows that he fashioned them after Greek meeting places more than any contemporary dining model—he wants great ideas to be born over his food—and when he was expanding on the subject, gesturing with a stick he carried for three hours, she feared he would use the word peripatetic, and soon enough he did. She knew she would wince and she did. And she knows that Mike is unwell and is getting sicker and has begun to make jokes about how funny it would be for a designer of ambulances to lie dying on a mountain without any real way of getting to one.
The terrain is varied and Rita is happy; the route seems as if planned by hikers with short attention spans. There has been rain forest, then savannah, then more forest, then forest charred, and now the path cuts through a rocky hillside covered in ice-green ground cover, an ocean floor drained, the boulders everywhere huge and dripping with lichen of a seemingly synthetic orange.
The porters are passing her regularly now, not just the porters from her group but about a hundred more, from the Canadian camp, the German camp, other camps. She passes a tiny Japanese woman sitting on a round rock, flanked by a guide and a porter, waiting.
The porters are laboring more now. On the first day, they seemed almost cavalier, and walked so quickly, that now she is surprised to see them straining, plodding and unamused. A small porter, older, approaches her back and she stops to allow him through.
“Jambo,” she says.
“Jambo,” he says.
He is carrying a large duffel with Jerry’s name on it, atop his head, held there with the bag’s thick strap, with cuts across his forehead. Below the strap, perspiration flows down the bridge of his nose.
“Habari?” she says.
“Imara,” he says.
“Water?” she asks. He stops.
She removes her bottle from her backpack holster and holds it out to him. He stops and takes it, smiling. He takes a long drink from the wide mouth of the clear plastic container, and then continues walking.
“Wait!” she says, laughing. He is walking off with the water bottle. “Just a sip,” she says, gesturing to him that she would like the container back. He stops and takes another drink, then hands it to her, bowing his head slightly while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Thank you,” he says. He continues up the trail.
They have made camp. It’s three in the afternoon and the fog has returned. It hangs lightly over the land, which is brown and wide and bare. The campground looks, with the fog, like a medieval battleground, desolate and ready to host the deaths of men.
Rita sits with Jerry on rocks the size and shape of beanbags while their tents are assembled. Mike is lying on the ground, on his backpack, and he looks to Rita much like what a dead person would look like. Mike is almost blue, and is breathing in a hollow way that she hasn’t heard before. His walking stick extends from his armpit in a way that looks like he’s been lanced from behind.
“Oh Ashley!” he says to his tapeworm, or whatever it is. “Why’re you doing this to me, Ashley?”
Far off into the mist, there is a song being sung. The words sound German, and soon they break apart into laughter. Closer to where she’s sitting, Rita can hear an erratic and small sound, a tocking sound, punctuated periodically by low cheers.
The mist soon lifts and Rita sees Grant, who has already assembled his tent, surrounded by porters. He and a very young man, the youngest and thinnest she’s seen, are playing a tennis-like game, using thin wooden paddles to keep a small blue ball in the air. Grant is barefoot and is grinning.
“There he is,” says Jerry. “Saint Grant of the porters!”
At dinner the food is the same—cold noodles, white rice, potatoes, but tonight, instead of orange slices there is watermelon, sliced into neat thin triangles, small green boats with red sails on a silver round lake.
“Someone carried a watermelon up,” Mike notes.
No one comments.
“Well, it didn’t fly up,” Frank says.
No one eats the watermelon, because the paying hikers have been instructed to avoid fruit, for fear of malaria in the water. Steven, the porter who serves the meals and whose smile precedes him always, soon returns and takes the watermelon back to the mess tent. He doesn’t say a word.
“What happens to the guy who carried up the watermelon?” Jerry asks, grinning.
“Probably goes down,” Frank says. “A lot of them are going down already—the guys who were carrying food that we’ve eaten. A lot of these guys you’ll see one day and they’re gone.”
“Back to the banana fields,” Jerry says.
Rita has been guessing at why Jerry looks familiar to her, and now she knows. He looks like a man she saw at Target, a portly man trying on robes who liked one so much he wore it around the store for almost an hour—she passed him twice. As with Jerry, she’s both appalled by and in awe of their obliviousness to context, to taste.
The paying hikers talk about their dreams. They are all taking Maladrone, an antimalarial drug that for most fosters disturbing and hallucinogenic dreams. Rita’s attention wanes, because she’s never interested in people’s dreams and has had none of her own this trip.
Frank tells a story of a trip he took up Puncak Jaya, tallest peak in Indonesia, a mountain of 16,500 feet and very cold. They were looking for a climber who had died there in 1934, a British explorer named Frankon whom a dozen groups had tried to locate in th
e decades since. Frank’s group, though, had the benefit of a journal of the climber’s partner, recently found a few thousand feet below. Knowing the approximate route Frankon had taken, Frank’s group, once at the elevation believed to be where Frankon expired, found the man within fifteen minutes. “There he is,” one of the climbers had said, without a trace of doubt, because the body was so well preserved that he looked precisely as he did in the last photograph of him. He’d fallen at least two hundred feet; his legs were broken but he had somehow survived, was trying to crawl when he’d frozen.
“And did you bury him?” Shelly asks.
“Bury him?” Frank says, with theatrical confusion. “How the heck we gonna bury the guy? It’s eleven feet of snow there, and rock beneath that—”
“So you what—left him there?”
“Course we left him there! He’s still there today, I bet in the same damned spot.”
“So that’s the way—”
“Yep, that’s the way things are on the mountain.”
Somewhere past midnight Rita’s bladder makes demands. She tries to quietly extricate herself from the tent, though the sound of the inner zipper, and then the outer, is too loud. Rita knows Shelly is awake by the time her head makes its way outside of the tent.
Her breath is visible in compact gusts and in the air everything is blue. The moon is alive now and it has cast everything in blue. Everything is underwater but with impossible black shadows. Every rock has under it a black hole. Every tree has under it a black hole. She steps out of the tent and into the cold cold air. She jumps. There is a figure next to her, standing still.
“Rita,” the figure says. “Sorry.”
It’s Grant. He is standing, arms crossed over his chest, facing the moon and also—now she sees it—the entire crest of Kilimanjaro. She gasps.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he whispers.
“I had no idea—”
It’s enormous. It’s white-blue and huge and flat-topped. The clarity is startling. It is indeed blindingly white, even now, at 1 A.M. The moon gives its white top the look of china under candlelight. And it seems so close! It’s a mountain but they’re going to the top. Already they are almost halfway up its elevation and this fills Rita with a sense of clear unmitigated accomplishment. This cannot be taken away.