vacation, and an extra seventy-five cents every hour he
worked once his unpaid overtime was accounted for.
That job had been slavery, strangling the life from him
one pay period at a time.
But this! This was freedom!
Reid let out a smoking sigh of wonder as he looked
down across the fey greens and troll greys of the valley
below, where the town was little more than a few twists
of bulging color in the mountains’ roots. Then he
turned his head up to admire the coronation of sharp
white peaks that sliced the heavens in crystalline arcs
above. The flutings and cornices seemed almost to
support the vault of the sky. He felt so small here,
surrounded by nature, and caught in this middling
place, he took a moment to gaze upon the beauty of all
that waited both above and below.
High up like this, he could really feel the bite of
winter temperatures and the thinness of the air, cutting
daggers in his throat with every inhalation and freezing
a kiss upon his lips as he exhaled. Already, the sun was
descending. He couldn’t climb much more that day.
He made camp in the shadow of a sheer ice-slicked
wall while the light scintillated on the rockface above.
He’d packed enough food, but hydration was always a
greater priority and he boiled ice into drinking water
with his small gas stove before retiring into his tent for
the night.
The next morning he woke to the ululating wind,
keening an eerie dirge as it shrieked down the frozen
slopes. He opened his tent flap onto a blinding white
abyss of snow. He couldn’t see the valley anymore, and
he certainly couldn’t see the peaks above through the
jotunn’s breath that blasted down the mountain at
him. This windy haze had devoured yesterday’s autumn
hues.
He breakfasted on MRE’s and snowmelt, boiling
enough extra drinking water to fill his canteen for the
day. Then he began his ascent up the wall of ice.
Driving his ice axes and crampons into the rime, he
fumbled to twist ice screws into the cliff face. He
advanced slowly, the wind tearing at him as he hung
exposed on the heights. But after the first sixty or
eighty feet, the wind eased up and his muscles began to
remember how to work after years of neglect.
It took him several hours to get to the top of the
wall, and when he reached the summit he pinioned
himself in place and just lay there, panting. His whole
body ached. He sucked deep breaths of the thin air.
Finally, Reid got up the strength to peer over the edge.
There was no bottom. There was just pale haze in
the void, a chasm that stretched into infinity.
In times of old, Norse warriors who died in battle
might expect to be greeted by beautiful and furious
Valkyries who’d whisk them off to Valhalla, but the
shameful dead went to Helheim’s misty halls below the
roots of the world. It seemed even at this height, those
mists climbed up to claim him.
So he climbed even higher, not giving himself as
much rest as perhaps was wise, but not willing to quit
either. He was determined to reach the top, and if it
killed him, then all the better.
A much gentler slope awaited him atop the ice
wall, and he figured if he took it along the bend to the
east he could reach the eastern peaks ahead of him by
early the next morning. However, less than an hour
into the trek, his headaches returned, and gravity
began to pull sideways as vertigo took hold. He sat
down, opened his sack, and began to fumble with his
medicine.
It wasn’t the good stuff. He couldn’t afford the
good stuff. The little blue pills numbed his pain and
helped suppress his vertigo, but when things got really
bad and he had difficulty with memory or spatial
relations or—God help him—visual hallucinations
from the tumor pressing against his optic nerve, well,
then he wouldn’t even be able to see his final moment
as he blundered into it.
He ate another MRE, downed half his canteen,
and reminisced about his last climb in the Rockies
with Cassie. They told stories to each other around a
small campfire alongside the trail, and when they
reached the summit, made love on the mountaintops
under the open sky. But that had been in the height of
summer and at lower elevations. Not like these heights
where scathing white winds blasted across the mountainside. He’d always wanted to climb in Norway, but
it wasn’t even winter, and still the cold clawed under
his coat and gloves to burrow inside the hollows of his
bones. He picked icicles of frozen snot from his nose,
and stared up at the white ridges bending ever higher.
This really was the perfect place to die.
He climbed another couple hours that day before
stopping on a snowy ledge to set up camp for the
night. Nightmares plagued him, or perhaps they were
memories, as delusion and recollection bled together
inside him.
He awoke the next morning not from the wind,
but the cold.
The sun still stalked the nightlands beyond the
horizon, its orange glow not yet come to drive back the
dark, and an altogether different light filled the sky
above. He stared in open-mouthed wonder a 2F