A housefly, by the sound of it, has just whizzed overhead. That’s strange.
“I’m okay,” she says.
He grips and pulls her more firmly and her legs lag, numb and clumsy, as if the tendons are severed. Again she yanks her arm free. As if in refusing his help she might conjure away the situation that has caused her to need it. In air this thin the brain slows, so when things happen quickly, your thoughts straggle — the climbers tell her it’s a prime danger up here, and far worse higher up.
“Here,” he says. “Stay.”
He tries to push her down behind the nearest boulder, whose grey face in the last of the sun radiates dry heat like a sauna stove.
“Dr. Book!” he yells toward base camp.
“Don’t call him yet! I need to think. We need to think what to do.”
“Please, down.”
Jigme and Lobsang are strolling toward them. They hiked down here from Camp One this morning. Jigme is in cargo shorts and a parka and wearing earbuds, wires running down to the MP3 player in his hand. Kaljang flaps his raised palm at them: go back! Jigme shrugs and they keep dawdling over. Kaljang plucks his two-way radio from its holster with a flourish of manly competence — courting her, even now — and crouches down beside her. She’s unaware that she has crouched down. A sweet juniper whiff of sweat, tobacco. “Hi there?” he says into the radio. “It’s Kaljang.”
“Oh my God,” she says, “how did he get here?” Wade Lawson stomping through base camp with what looks like a machine gun slung on a strap over his shoulder.
“Get the Dr. Book now,” Kaljang says into the radio. “We need him.”
ne time when she was ten, her father charged out the front door as if on an emergency call. She’d called him, shouting from the front window to the kitchen where he was making spaghetti and meat sauce, drinking a glass of beer, humming off-key. She’d never seen him on an urgent call but she guessed that on his foreign postings — the long stretches when he was away — he must race around like this all the time.Across the street, two high school thugs were performing the ritual preliminaries to an assault. Their victim was the street’s most conspicuous target, a timid, chunky clarinet prodigy who always carried his instrument around. Matters had just reached the shoving stage — one attacker shoving from the front, the other from behind, the kid’s head bobbling. Her father moved with an oddly stiff, lunging gait, slippers slapping the icy pavement, and she in the doorway, watching him go, hugging herself to contain the trembling. He wasn’t a big man (now, at seventeen, she’s as tall as he is, and even then he didn’t seem paternally huge), though he was fit and gristly and had a focused gaze of the kind she associated with predators who could render prey catatonic with a glance. He was a karate expert, too, she told herself then, on the freezing porch, as he rushed toward the bullies. Had she told herself that? Anyway, it was something she believed back then, later discovering it wasn’t true — he had one of the lesser belts, had only taken a couple of courses, years back, before medical school.
The bullies turned toward him and took a step back each. Her father, seen from behind, standing in the gutter, looked small, while they, big guys in inflated parkas, were elevated on the sidewalk above the curb.
