September 22, 2005

They said, “write a story about action.” And because I’m a guy, whenever I hear the word action I think of getting it on. After a few seconds, I also think of Conflict! Strife! Struggle! Consequently, I wrote a story that tries (and fails) to combine all these elements. But I think it can be made better — conflict is so patriarchal. How would you change the story? I want to steal your ideas.

The first thing I remember about Brant were his hips, the way they swung towards us that summer day as though they were made of electricity and sensuality, not flesh and bone. He was a tiny man with a sardonic smile, but I swear that the way he moved down that rocky path made him look as tall as the trees.

He approached us slowly, with bizarre self-assurance.

“15,000 dollars,” he said. He knew we needed a guide to take us across the mountains with our fake press credentials and passports. He also knew he was the only one of the sheepherders in the village willing to do it.

“Please try to be reasonable,” Chela pleaded, widening her eyes. She never told me her real name so in the few days we were together we never spoke to each other but to the identities we elaborately constructed.

“That’s our budget for the whole goddamn trip,” I added, slowly packing heavy camera gear that hadn’t worked in years but looked shiny and impressive from a distance.

“Tough,” he said.

“Who needs you?” I said, spitting on the ground.

“What do you know about mountains anyways?” he asked, and immediately turned around and disappeared up the rugged path to reclaim his sheep.

We knew nothing about the terrain; we didn’t even have a map, just a faint trace leading up those impossible cliffs towards the war raging on the other side. The trace was left by Gerald, my boss at the agency, who vanished in the early spring. His last, hurried and unintelligible communication came from somewhere near the peak of the mountain.

The agency scrambled to offer us a contract to find Gerald’s remains, Gerald who turned out not to be the Gerald I knew all those years, but Frank who left behind a pretty wife I never met and two boys he pretended were his nephews. That’s why, four months after he disappeared, Chela and I stood in the same place he once camped, eager to follow him up the mountain to recover the information he collected and his body. The reward was fantastic — Gerald’s mission was not only to map the region, but also to find a base from which our agents could slip undetected into the war zone.

This time around, we were much better prepared that Gerald: we procured press credentials from non-existing newspapers, props to add credibility, and Canadian passports. We were there with two bagsful of props to search for a dead man. The only thing we were lacking was a guide to help us trudge up the mountain.

For two days we went through the village door to door, looking for someone willing to guide us. The old shepherds who knew about the war across the mountains were either too wise to get involved, and the young ones were not foolish enough to leave behind their sheep and sweethearts to search for death on treacherous terrain. They refused whatever we offered them, and instead stared at us with suspicion and fear.

Each night, Chela and I came back to our tent dejected, enraged, willing to blow up the entire village.

“What do we do now, stuck on this goddamn slope with no way to climb? If I find Brant again I’ll break one of his fingers for every dollar he charges us.”

“Let me talk to him,” she said. “I’ll get him drop the price.”

She went to see him later that night, and when she came back to our tent just before daybreak she told me he agreed to lower his price. “Five thousand,” she said. I pretended I didn’t know what she had to do to get him to agree. “Not my problem,” I thought, reminding myself that I knew only her fake name, but deep inside I still contemplated harming him in some profound way.

“You were just doing your job, that’s all,” I said aloud.

“Help me pick up the gear,” she said, laughing. Her eyes were still sleepy but not at all unhappy. “It’s my business who I fuck on this goddamn mountain.”

We hardly spoke until he came down the rough path towards our camp an hour later with his climbing boots and a stick. The sun was softly rising over the village and small boys were chasing sheep towards the pastures.

“When winter comes, they’ll drive the sheep down towards the valleys, thousands of them. It’s like an avalanche of wool rolling down the hills,” he said, his eyes glazed with something like nostalgia.

Ignoring his bout of romanticism, I picked up my knapsack and climbed the path ahead of them, eager to find my corpse. We walked in silence for a while, him light on his feet and jumping over boulders with ease, and us trying to keep up with him with our heavy burden of largely useless equipment. We sweated profusely as the sun climbed higher. Brant, sensing our anguish, stopped now and again to offer us water or to give Chela berries that grew along the way. They would then exchange slow, languorous glances, sharing some secret memories from the night before. Each time I would wipe sweat from my brow and prod them on with my hiking stick.

“No need to rush,” he said one time when I interposed my body between theirs. “There’s a plateau up ahead we should reach soon. We’ll camp there overnight and move out again early in the morning.”

And then his eyes got all misty again as they did whenever he talked about sheep or trees.

“You should see the lake up there by moonlight, when the water becomes a gleaming sheet of silver in the darkness. And when you step into that liquid light, even late in the summer, you can feel a million cool icicles pinch your skin.”

I didn’t stop to listen but climbed higher, urged upward by the incantations of a dead man. By sunset, we found our way to the plateau and the mountain lake, like Brant promised. Down beneath us he pointed out the village we left that morning, now covered in evening shadows with smoke gently rising from the chimneys.

I headed for the nearby trees to collect branches in the twilight. I also wanted to see if I could glimpse any sign of Gerald. For me he became the mountain, and I had a feverish conviction he would reveal himself like some sort of mystery, maybe a shoe washed down by the spring torrents or a scarf caught in a branch somewhere. The mountain gave no sign.

I came back to the campsite with a bundle of twigs under my arms to find Brant casually looking through my bag.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

“You’re not journalists, are you? Your cameras are museum pieces without film that probably haven’t worked in years.”

From the darkness I heard Chela’s laughter, crisp and clear in the cool mountain air.

“You let him rummage through our bags?”

“He was helping unpack. Unlike you, chasing dead men in the forests. Besides, I nearly broke my back lifting that goddamn useless bag of junk all the way up the mountain.”

“That’s our cover — it’s what keeps us alive. I didn’t bust my ass dragging it up here just to blow it away at the first opportunity,” I said

“With cover like that we’ll be dead before we reach the top.” Her laughter became mocking, mechanical.

“Just remember why we’re here,” I shouted.

“To find your dead man,” she responded, no longer laughing.

“Gerald,” our guide said, and for a moment we stared in the darkness. Of course he would have known about Gerald — he was probably the one who took him up the mountain the same way he was guiding us now.

“What do you know about him?” I said, turning towards him.

“I know his name wasn’t Gerald,” he replied. “I’ll tell you about him tomorrow.”

And though I cursed him and threatened to crack his bones, the little man stolidly refused to say another word. I retired to the tent, leaving the two of them alone by the fire, where they stood like statues and whispered all night. I no longer cared if she fucked mountain goats on the way up the mountain.

“His name was Frank, not Gerald,” he began as we crossed into the clouds. There was no earth, just rock now, and we climbed like cats from one crag to the next, barely able to see a foot ahead of us. I was secretly thankful to have left our bags of useless gear behind. Brant kept talking as we climbed, his voice coming towards us from the clouds.

“So Frank arrived in the winter when the village was still sleepy and covered with snow. He threw money in my face to guide him around the mountain. The climb was hard and dangerous because of the melting snow, and we spent days zigzagging through the forests, going into every precipice. He wanted to build a map, he said, he wanted to see everything.

“Then one day we stopped on the edge of a cliff. The mountain has a way of making men open up and unburden themselves of their secrets. He told me about the war across the mountains, about us, and them, about the weight of human sacrifices. And then he pointed to the village. He wanted to turn it into an operation base from which to dispatch agents and military equipment across the mountains. He was lofty and visionary.

“I asked about the villagers, the boys and their sheep, the old men who have seen much and suffered much. ‘We’re at war here,’ he said. ‘They can go … elsewhere. We can construct a wonderful cover for our operations and in the village and blast our way to the other side of the mountain to quickly deploy men and equipment.’ His world was full of strife. And my people, humble people, would have been scattered across the mountains, killed.”

Brant sat down on a pile of stones soon after we passed the cloud barrier. His eyes were fixed on the clouds beneath our feet.

“He didn’t see beauty anywhere. It was early spring, and beneath the melting snow the earth smelled like ripe fruits, but he didn’t see any of it. He just pushed on. He was as cold and hard as you are. But he pushed too hard. Just behind that crag over there, he stumbled in his rush and fell into one of the crevices in the rock. His feet were broken. I tried lifting him up, but I couldn’t, so I turned around and went down the mountain to summon help. The spring storms came, and by the time we made it back up here a week later he was dead. We buried him back in the village.”

“He killed him,” I spluttered. “He killed Gerald.” I pulled out the pistol strapped to my belt.

“No, I didn’t kill him. But I didn’t feel any pity for him either.”

“If you kill him, I’m going to kill you,” Chela said, pulling out her own gun.

“Are you crazy? He’s going to kill us both. Like Gerald. We’re the people he hates, the people who are going to take over his village… “

“We’re not going to take over his village,” she said. “Like Gerald you’re blind to everything. You don’t even care whose side you’re on as long as they pay you enough for your dirty work.”

She spoke very slowly now, as though she was lost in a dream. “You will give me your gun. We climb up and see what we can find. And when we go home we’ll write a report highlighting the difficulty of the terrain, the risks it presents, and recommend establishing a base elsewhere, behind the mountains.”

I hated her for loving him more than her job, for failing to understand the carnage on the other side of the mountain. But I gave her my gun. Near the peek, in a crevice of stone, we found Gerald’s notebook, filled with page after page of cartographical drawing, but not a single word to the wife he pretended never existed or the kids he claimed weren’t his.

We descended again, the air around us rich with summer smells. The vegetation slowly reappeared, and Brant and Chela walked behind me, brazenly holding hands. He was swinging his hips and pointing out birds in the sunset. Going down the mountain I felt free, my legs lighter than air. Somehow, that evening felt real and certain, something you could reach out and grab and hold forever. Mountains are staggering in the summer.

We flew home in a few days, and I let her peddle her lies in official reports. A month later she vanished. Nobody knew where. But I suspected she disappeared in a little village we pretended didn’t exist to tend sheep.

Posted by Tudor at 09:08 PM in Writing & the Media