Jeff Long The Ascent

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Daniel had once pioneered a new line in the
Karakoram range of Pakistan, and two separate parties had suffered casualties
trying to repeat it. Abe had heard of Gus, though always in terms
of her machinelike strength and endurance. No one gossiped about her being a
girl climber or a husband hunter or a black widow. She was a climber a
climber's climber, and she belonged to
Daniel, or Daniel belonged to her, Abe couldn't quite tell how it was, not
until their first
night of the full moon.
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It was after dinner. The afternoon winds had died early, giving them a respite
from the cold. Their garden thermometer, tied to a ski pole beside
the mess tent, was registering a relatively balmy 10 degrees
Fahrenheit. In the distance, Everest hovered like the ghost of an Egyptian
pyramid, triangular and alabaster and remote.
No need for his headlamp. When he entered his tent it was in darkness.
It took a moment to see that someone was already there.
Stripped to the waist and bent over in the semidarkness, the climber was
busily scrubbing his face with one of the hundreds of surgical wipes Abe had
made available.
The moon was cutting the tent's interior into black and silver tatters, and
that made it impossible to tell who the person was. He studied the bare
glittering back, sorting through the possibilities, and decided it was
probably Robby.
Zebra-striped with moonlight, he had one of those precision-built climber's
bodies, 95 per cent fat-free. Flaring latissimus dorsi joined at the
spine in tightly knit striations. An ugly lightning-shaped scar scuttered
off one trapezoid and across the big rib cage. And a tattoo of some kind
peeked insolently above the elastic waistband of his surfer pants. His
physicality was branded sharply. He belonged to the wilderness.
'It's a warm night,' Abe greeted the climber.
'Doc?' the climber answered, straightening up and turning around.
It wasn't Robby. It wasn't even a man. It was Gus.
Abe didn't know what startled him more, her quicksilver nipples or the
corrugation on her stomach or her indifference to his shock. Indeed her
attitude seemed to dare him.
Gus made no attempt to hide her nakedness. She just stood there, her white
eyes locked on Abe's. He felt paralyzed by Gus's metamorphosis from man to
woman. Her red hair was bunched up beneath a baseball cap. Abe saw that now.
And her skin was gleaming.
'I was just washing up,' she said. Warshing hoop.
'I didn't know you were here,' Abe said. 'I'll step out.'
'Why? It's your tent,' Gus dryly observed.
So it was. She was telling him to stay.
Abe passed his eyes down her body. He did it quickly, trying to disguise it
as an afterthought. She had a bodybuilder's pectoral ridgeline, and to the
sides stood her breasts, almost supernaturally round.
Gus was watching his eyes. She was letting him look. For a moment, a vain
instant, Abe thought she was trying to seduce him. In a way she was.
'I know about you,' she said, then started to towel herself off. 'Daniel told
me.' Still facing him, she took her sweet time with the towel, but the
eroticism was gone. If it was his attention or confusion Gus had wanted,
she had it.
'What did Daniel say?'
'No big secrets. I've known about his dead Diana ever since I met him.
And I've known as much about you as Daniel has, which is next to
nothing. You did the death-watch with his girlfriend. Your name is Abe.
That's all we knew.'
All? Abe wondered. He wanted that to be all they knew. He wanted the past to
be done.
'So you buried her,' Gus said. She reached for an undershirt and pulled it
over her head. For all her seriousness, she could not help but luxuriate in
her cleanness. The shirt slid across her bare skin.
'You could say that.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'Anyway, I have a favor to ask.'
Abe felt oddly exposed. This stranger had just washed her body in front of him
as if his desire were irrelevant. Something close to contempt laced her
attitude, and that threw Abe because he'd done nothing to deserve it. Not if
she knew nothing.
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'What do you want?' Abe asked.
'Between you and me, okay?'
'Fine.' Was that her reason for presenting her nakedness then, to create a
precedent of secrecy between the two of them?
'Good,' she said. 'I know this is the very beginning of the climb. But I want
you to stay away from Daniel. And I'll keep him away from you.'
Abe gawked at her with a mute farmboy look. First Thomas had warned him away
from Kelly. Now Gus was taking her turn. Maybe they were freezing him out.
'Nothing personal, Abe. But you have no right to him, no more right than you
had to her. Okay? So I'm asking you, just stay away.'
Abe took half a step backward, speechless. 'Gus...' he finally said, but
nothing more came to mind. It was she who had no right here, not he. She had
to be kidding.
'I know Daniel,' Gus explained. 'He's not like the rest of us. He
can't afford memories, not that one anyway.'
Abe recovered enough to be stung and then angry. 'But that's between him and
me,'
he said. Gus had nothing to do with that long past matter. It was he who had
lived all these years with the voice in the crevasse, and it was
Daniel whose girlfriend had furnished the voice. Together they had sealed
the dead girl in ice. Then it occurred to him that Gus might be jealous. She
could be jealous of Abe's connection across time with Daniel, he considered.
Or jealous of a dead girl. But he didn't say so. It was too juvenile.
'I don't understand,' he said.
'You could kill him with all that shit.' Gus's white eyes flared in the
darkness. 'I mean it. There's something about this wall. And you. Of all
people, he gets you invited. I
don't know what he's thinking. But I do know this. If he can just make it past
the Kore
Wall, everything's going to smooth out for him.'
Abe saw the sense she'd made out of the same coincidences he'd already
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