The Ascent(18)

Just seeing Andrew’s name with the return address was enough to cause something small and wet to roll over in my stomach.

I carried the mail over to the Filibuster, where I ordered a glass of scotch and occupied the same booth Andrew and I had sat in eight months earlier. I drank the scotch, getting up to go to the bathroom three times before the drink was finished, my hands shaking, my face flush with fever. My reflection in the spotty bathroom mirror was gaunt and terminal, and I thought about a book I’d once read about a man waking up on a city bus with no memory. Suddenly I prayed for no memory, but I couldn’t stop picturing that old motorcar driving off the cliff, David behind the wheel, Hannah in the passenger seat …

I had two more drinks before I opened Andrew’s letter. It was written in the same childlike handwriting he had used in the note that had accompanied the hunk of granite months earlier.

Stop fighting old ghosts, Tim. Please come.

—-A. T.





“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

Included with the letter was an airplane ticket to Kathmandu.





PART TWO





THE GHOSTS WE LEAVE BEHIND





Chapter 5


1



THE AIRPLANE TOUCHED DOWN AT TRIBHUVAN

International Airport in Kathmandu after a connecting flight in London followed by several hours of nauseating turbulence. I tried to sleep, but it was useless. I’d only accomplished the type of half-sleep that recalled my days of falling asleep at my desk in high school, where every sound around me was incorporated into my dreams and boiled down to nonsense.

After the plane had landed and I gathered my bags, I hopped on a tram that climbed through brown villages. From every direction, I could see the mountains, enormous and capped in bluish snow. It was early November, and the villages were celebrating the Hindu versions of Christmas—Dashain and Tihar, according to the magazine article I read on the plane. We passed through Kathmandu, and I was slightly disappointed to learn it was a small city just like most small cities around the world, corrupted by industry and modernization. There didn’t appear to be anything magical or spiritual about it.

I hadn’t spoken with Andrew since our chance meeting at the Filibuster. However, approximately one month after I’d received the airline ticket, another letter bearing Andrew’s name appeared in the mail.

This time the return address was from Miami, and the letter itself was more detailed. Andrew outlined the items I was to bring and included a few hand-drawn maps of the surrounding villages and the name of the lodge where I’d be staying. He had already booked my room.

At first, his presumption provoked in me a childish stubbornness, and I quickly became resolute—I would not go on the damn trip. I couldn’t just pick up and leave everything behind on a whim, could I? Yet despite this determination, I never threw away the airline ticket or the follow-up letter.

By midsummer, the apartment was suffocating me. I couldn’t finish the sculpture, and Hannah’s ghost had become unrelenting. The first week in August, I couldn’t get the smell of Hannah’s perfume out of the place. I even had it fumigated, which seemed to do the trick for two days … until that aromatic lilac smell crept through the walls and soaked into the furniture. By that time, Marta was long gone; her refusal to set foot in my apartment was steadfast, although I would meet her occasionally for lunch at the City Dock Café. I told her about the smells and how it was becoming hard to breathe in the apartment. I told her, too, about Andrew Trumbauer and the airline ticket to Nepal.

“Is there any doubt what you should do?” she told me one afternoon. We were at the café, eating club sandwiches and knocking back mimosa after mimosa. “You once lived for this sort of thing.”

“My leg,” I offered.

“Is healed. It’s been over a year. And you’re out running five, six miles a day. Physically you’re in good shape. Mentally, though …” She rolled her shoulders, and her small, pink tongue darted out to nab the teardrop of mayonnaise at the corner of her mouth.

She was right, of course. That hollowness continued to spread through me. At the end of each visit with Marta, I found myself fearful to return to my apartment. And I hated myself all over again for being such a coward.

As the tram bumped along, I leaned over to the man next to me—an Indian fellow with streamers of white hair sprouting from his large, brown ears—and asked him if he had ever heard of the Canyon of Souls.

He responded, but in his language it meant nothing to me.

2



FORTY MINUTES LATER. THE TRAM LET ME OFF AT

the lodge. It was cool, not cold, and I slid the zipper of my jacket down. The air smelled smoky. The sky was dense and gray to the east, but the west was a vibrant blue, uncorrupted by clouds, and the sunlight glittered like fire on the frozen peaks of the distant mountains. Down the valley stood the monsoon forests, heavily green and like a canopy over the land.

My room was small but adequate, furnished in alpine furniture and with a full wall of windows that faced a stand of evergreens and a dilapidated shed. Two young men helped carry my bags to the room, and I paid them in rupee I’d exchanged at the airport. I proceeded to unpack with the lethargy of someone submerged in water. Exhaustion weakened my muscles and brought my eyelids lower and lower. Finally I succumbed and climbed onto the bed where I napped for a few hours.