Chapter Thirteen
At sunrise, we all gathered at the northern edge of Global City, around the chorten, which was a tower of glacier rock the Sherpas had built. The purpose of the puja ceremony was to ask Mother Chomolungma—Mount Everest—for safe passage this season and to apologize for the pricks of our ice axes, crampons, and ice screws upon her as we climbed.
Among the Sherpas, guides, clients, and support staff, we numbered nearly eighty, with each of us laying an ice ax next to the chorten to be blessed during the ceremony. I was superstitious and, like the Sherpas, had also added my crampons, climbing harness, mountaineering boots, and helmet to the piles of gear.
The Sherpas sat on air mattresses in concentric half circles around the chorten, with the clients in rows behind them, followed by the Western guides and support staff in the last rows. I hung back, trying to get a spot next to Luke, but he somehow ended up on the opposite side of the group from me.
The Walkabout film crew was already in place with shoulder-borne cameras as Lama Rinpoche from the Tengboche Monastery started the thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist songs, prayers, and rituals.
I’m not sure how much Norbu had explained to the clients about the puja, but from my limited observation of him, it might not have been much. The Jim-Norbu dynamic was opposite of the Dad-Tshering dynamic; Norbu was a quiet, behind-the-scenes leader, whereas Jim was the gregarious, blunt one. Some of Global’s clients had been to Everest before and would know what to expect, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the ones who hadn’t. It was very cold this morning, and these ceremonies could sometimes last more than two hours.
I closed my eyes and listened to the low, syncopated chanting. The sound was comforting and familiar, but it was also disconcerting because I was surrounded by strangers instead of people I knew well.
A pair of hands briefly squeezed my shoulders. I turned, hopeful Luke had decided to be friendly on the occasion of this important ceremony, but it was just Dad. Silently he took a seat behind me. It was considerate of him to come to Global’s puja. My loneliness lessened. I was proud to have him see me here, sitting in the guides’ row.
I closed my eyes again, feeling the cold wind on my face and hearing the caws of the crows floating above. As Dad had taught me long ago, I visualized our safe passage on the mountain. I envisioned an early start on summit day under a crisp and cloudless sky, stars lighting our way through the dark. Our clients would be out of their tents on time, ready to go. All would have found a way to drift to sleep for two or three hours beforehand. No one would be plagued by coughs or other symptoms of altitude sickness. There wouldn’t be any traffic jams on the fixed line, and in the invigorating cold, we’d make steady progress upward.
On this day, Luke would be ahead of my A-Team with his UW climbers. Our teams would pass each other on the UW team’s way down. His clients would be exhausted but on a high from their minutes at the top of the world. The sun would have just risen. It would be Luke’s third summit, and I’d be about to break through to my seventh.
Between his glacier sunglasses and oxygen mask, I wouldn’t be able to see much of his face, but I’d know from his raised cheeks that he was smiling. I’d be smiling, too—beaming—because he’d done it and my clients were so close and all of them were going to make it free and clear.
He’d hold up his hand for a high five, and I’d grab it and pull him in for a squishy hug across our marshmallow suits. Another hug that would last longer than it should and be oh so delirious because of the lack of oxygen.
I popped my eyes open.
Puja was for meditating, praying, and visualizing. Not…fantasizing.
I refocused my thoughts, but now only bad things were coming into my head.
I saw those four mountaineering boots, two of them green, at the cave below the summit on the Tibet side. I saw swatches of fabric in the middle of a snowy plain—swatches so small, the clients might miss them, but I’d know from previous trips which corpse lay below. I saw grotesque frostbite injuries. I heard the scream and thud of that poor Portuguese climber who slipped off the rope on Lhotse Face last year. I heard the crash of the avalanche in the icefall three years ago that instantly claimed the lives of sixteen Sherpas.
In an attempt to distract myself from the images, I watched the people in front of me. April, Walkabout’s short, blond camerawoman, was filming Lama Rinpoche. Hulk told me yesterday that she was a pilot and was the one who operated the drone. Doc sat near the front with Claudia, the only other female client with Global this year. In the first row, Phurba was fiddling with his NASCAR bandana, and Glissading Glen and some of the other A-Team clients behind him were having a hard time sitting still, too. My eyes naturally tracked over to the other side of the group, where Luke sat with his eyes closed as he listened to Lama Rinpoche. Despite his closed eyes, he was not relaxed. His jaw was too hard, his back too straight.
As the puja progressed, the tone took a turn for the festive. I felt anything but. The music picked up, and Lama Rinpoche gave the signal to unfurl the eight spokes of prayer flags that flew from the top of the chorten to anchor points on the ground behind us. Jim and Norbu passed around bowls, and we all scooped handfuls of dry rice from them. Lama Rinpoche sprinkled oil over our equipment, with April and her camera scrambling to keep up with him. The music grew louder. Some of the Sherpas cheered.
On Lama Rinpoche’s cue, everyone threw rice into the air, and for a split second it was like time was suspended before the rice hailed back down on us. Then the chang came out, along with cans of Nepal’s national beer, Everest. It didn’t matter that it was still early in the morning, everyone was in full party mode.
Like a robot, I went forward for my dip of tsampa barley flour. Doc smeared flour across my jaw to symbolize a white beard of old age. I faked a smile and did the same for her. I plopped some on Dad’s face, then ducked out of the way as he pretended to dump a handful on top of my braided pigtails.
Then, we were all smearing tsampa on each other: Sherpas to clients, guides to Sherpas, Sherpas to everyone. Now, it was abundantly clear who the veteran Everest clients were. They were the ones escalating the tsampa tradition into an all-out food fight. The first-timers caught on quickly and joined in. Today, I didn’t want any part of it.
I scanned the crowd for Luke, but he’d managed to slip away already. Damn it.
I drifted toward the edge of the melee so I could sneak back to my tent. Without warning, Luke stepped in front of me. I was taken aback, but I also knew this was my chance to put things right. I swallowed, getting ready to speak.
“Don’t tell me Greg arranged this job for you,” he said.
He was mad because he thought I’d gotten a handout? Never mind about putting things right. I turned on my heel and walked away, burning with an anger I wasn’t accustomed to. You mean, arranged this job for me like he arranged your fancy Kathmandu boarding school? Like he helped get your full-ride scholarship to University of Washington?
“Sorry, Emily, wait. I shouldn’t have said that,” he said, practically yelling to be heard above the blaring music.
“If you must know, no, my dad did not arrange this for me. In fact, he didn’t want me to do it.”
“Please, let me take those words back,” Luke begged. I bet he was worried about his karma. And he should be. I’d been about to apologize, and he’d attacked me.
“I was hurt you didn’t tell me,” he said.
“Like how you didn’t tell me you were coming to Everest this year until I was at your house.”
His shoulders slumped in defeat, which was satisfying. I crossed my arms on my chest and waited for a response.
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said.
“We’ve covered that already. It was a surprise, all right.”
“As was hearing Jim say you were guiding with us. Completely out of the blue. We were together the entire evening before that, and you never said anything. You let me go on and on about the pitfalls of guiding, and the whole time you knew you were going to be working for Global.”
Oh god. He wasn’t mad that I didn’t tell him before Jim announced it; he thought I’d been lying to him.
“No, no, no. I didn’t know that night. It wasn’t until the next morning that I got the job.”
Luke frowned, like he didn’t quite believe me.
“You were actually the one who made me think of asking Jim in the first place,” I said in a rush. “Because of what you said during checkers about the permit snafu. I guessed that you guys might need an extra guide to keep your guide-to-client ratios, and I needed a job right away. So I came up here and asked about it.”
“Oh,” he said, still a little taken aback. “I’m surprised you did that.”
“Me, too. But I told you, I’m not in a very good place right now. Necessity makes things easier.”
“True.” He shifted his weight.
“I’m sorry, Luke. I should have found a way to tell you before Jim announced it. If I had, you would have known how it all went down.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. And I’m really sorry about what I said about Greg. You know I think the world of him.”
“I know.”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. And what about you? Are you going to stop with the vicious looks and avoiding me?”
He winced, but then his mischievous left dimple appeared. “No one would guess this, but you can be pretty feisty when you put your mind to it.”
“Sorry,” I said, returning his smile.
We looked at each other. Behind him, the juniper smoke from the chorten curled up in a helix. He might not still be angry, but he was still something. Despite having known him forever, I couldn’t decipher what that something was. I bit my lip.
“Stay right here, okay?” he said.
He walked into the heart of the celebration and came back with a small mound of tsampa in his hand.
“Oh no you don’t,” I cried, blocking his hands so he couldn’t throw it on me.
“I would never.”
I relaxed and squared myself in front of him.
He dipped his fingertips in the flour and stepped closer. At five ten, he was only two inches taller than me, which put our faces quite near.
Slowly, he drew a line with the flour from my ear to my chin. My blood rushed at his touch. “For safety, summit success, and long life,” he said in Sherpa as he spread the cool, silken flour along the other side of my jaw.
I scooped flour from his palm, repeating the benediction before tracing careful lines down each side of his jaw. His skin was warm and smooth, coated in the flour that others had layered there before me. Flecks of golden amber shone in his eyes. I took it one step further. I dipped my fingers back in the tsampa and drew a line across his forehead. A line that I traced as slowly as I could so it would make the contact last longer.
I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. Allowing myself to dream. Or maybe it was just that I was still searching for closure from two years ago. But in this moment, this gravity-like connection between us was in control, and it felt right to be touching him.
I ran out of forehead, so I lowered my hand. We were just a foot apart.
What if I’d gone to Townsend College last year like I was supposed to? We would have been in Washington together after being apart only one year instead of two. Would that have changed things, made us keep closer in touch, like the distance was temporary, not permanent?
But, then, that had been our exact scenario at the point we’d said good-bye after the earthquake, and Luke had never used the email address I’d given him.
“Why did you never email?” I asked.
His eyes searched my face, as if what he found on it would determine how he answered.
“I did email,” he said finally. “But you never wrote back.”
My heartbeats thudded in my eardrums.
The sounds of the puja party returned, along with my awareness of the people around us. Which included the men of the A-Team descending on Luke and me, holding handfuls of tsampa like snowballs they were about to launch at us. I squealed and made a break for it.