My head throbs a little from the noise and smog, and it’s hard to see where I’m going while I film, but I keep at it, narrating the sights for Mami in the brightest voice I can muster. I’ll have to edit before I send it to them. They don’t need to hear me swearing when I realize I’ve stepped in a giant pile of cow manure.
We’re stopped again, this time while Paul looks at a patchwork skirt for his niece. I pull Tate forward, trying to get him to stop staring at the wall of a sketchy little pharmacy. He appears to be reading an ad about male enhancement.
“Seriously? You know girls don’t care about that stuff nearly as much as you think,” I say, dragging him along to where Paul is finishing his transaction. “We always say, ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the—’ ”
“Oh, shut up. I was…you know what? Never mind.” He moves as though to give me a wet willy, but I duck, keeping my ears far away.
It’s a comfortable seventy degrees or so, and I’m too warm in my long pants and boots. But I hadn’t thought to pack any sandals, which was dumb. Kathmandu’s at the same latitude as Florida—the cold only comes when we get up into the mountains. Still, I fit in here. Pretty much everyone in this part of town is decked out in climbing clothes. Tate snorts at a particularly geared-up blond guy who looks ready to start scaling a peak.
“What the hell? What’s he going to do? Boulder up that two-story building?” he asks.
“He’s just excited,” I say. “Like us.” But my voice makes it a question. I want to be excited, but I’m still so tired it’s hard to think of anything other than sleep.
Tate doesn’t answer.
“Hey,” I press. “We are excited, right?” I knock lightly on the side of his head. “Right? You home in there?”
Tate swats my hand away. “Sto-ooop!” he fake whines. “You’re messing up my hair!”
I laugh but keep staring at him. “Yeah? All good? You’ve been super quiet all day. And yesterday.”
He nods. “All good. Still a little zonked.”
I nod but keep looking at him. Tate notices and shoves me.
“I promise. Things are fine. I’m deliriously excited. Orgasmically excited. Radioactively—” He starts to spin around, Sound of Music–style, and almost knocks over a table of brass singing bowls.
“Fine!” I laugh, relieved. He is back. Endless-energy-constant-optimism Tate. The tiny knot of unease I hadn’t really noticed dissolves. Normally Tate’s bad moods are epic, more tantrums than moods, and they never last long. This quiet “just tired” attitude since we arrived in Nepal weirded me out a little and made me realize how much I count on him to keep our energy up.
We move slowly up the street.
“Did you see the poster?” he asks, after a minute.
“About male enhancement? Dude, I am not the person to talk to about this,” I say.
“Dumbass. Next to it, for the missing climber.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t notice. What did it say?”
He shrugs, shouldering through the crowd. At six feet, three inches, Tate looms even higher than I do. I follow along easily.
“Tate?” I ask, trying to slow him down.
“Nothing. It was nothing. A Dutch dude last seen two weeks ago, heading toward Annapurna 1. I don’t know why they bother putting up signs. If he hasn’t been found by now, he’s not going to be,” he says, catching up to Jordan and Paul, who are standing outside a restaurant that Finjo has deemed acceptable for lunch.
I don’t know what to say. Of course it’s dangerous, climbing mountains. We know this.
“Tate…” I start, but I trail off.
“It’s fine. It’s too bad, that’s all.” He turns to me, his grin bright and real in his stubble-covered cheeks. “Hey, did I tell you? It was on CNN in the lobby this morning: a dog summited Everest!”
I blink at the change of subject, then scowl.
“That’s bull. You totally made that up! Who’s going to bring a dog twenty-nine thousand feet up a mountain! Humans can barely survive it, and most of them are wearing oxygen masks.”
Tate takes his hand, puts it over his heart. “Scout’s honor. It was a rescue dog. With its own tiny O2 canister hookup specially designed for him by a group of NASA technicians.”
I look at him, skeptical. His brown eyes open wide, looking innocent. He shrugs.
“Okay, I made up the part about NASA, but the rest of it is true. Seriously, I saw it on the news. Ask Finjo.” He turns and taps Finjo on the shoulder. “Didn’t a dog summit Everest this week?”
Finjo snorts. “No summit. It was just to Base Camp. It was a Sherpa dog.”
“That makes more sense,” I say, comforted that I haven’t been beaten to the summit by a canine.
“But the headline read ‘First Dog to Summit Mount Everest!’—How is EBC a summit? It’s not even eighteen thousand feet! Middle-aged tourists go there all the time.” Tate snorts. “False advertising.”
“Well, eighteen thousand feet is still something,” I say. “Especially for a dog, I guess. After all, most mountains stop at that height. It’s just that Everest starts there.”
I glance over at Tate. We joke about the climb a lot, but we haven’t talked about what it’s really going to be like. Probably because—even with all the books and documentaries and live, in-real-time blogs—we don’t really know. We don’t know what it will take, only that it will challenge us in ways we’ve never been challenged before. That’s the part of climbing I love best, solving a puzzle that’s unfolding in front of me. The part I like least is the amount of time it takes, time that was increasingly hard to find as high school got harder and harder. Time that Mami had to remind me I owed to climbing, to our grand Everest plan. Time that I often gave all too grudgingly.
But everything is different now. Everest is unlike anything we’ve ever done, and Mami can’t be here, but I can. I itch to start climbing, to push away the Dread and concentrate on the work ahead. I can’t worry about Mami, or about anything, when I’m climbing. And right now that’s exactly what I want.
All around us, Kathmandu roils and bustles, but I barely notice. Instead I’m seeing a route up through snow and ice, Tate beside me, roped in. We’ve climbed so many mountains together; maybe Everest will be just another peak. Maybe. But I can see it so clearly in my mind: me and Tate, arms around each other for the expected photo at the summit, sending it across the world to Mami in real time. Need like fire burns in me to do this, to be this.