She always could be a little condescending. And that helped me remember my anger. I broke our embrace. “What the hell makes you think I want to talk to you? You left me, Dolores. I thought we were going to get married. You left without a trace.”
I could see she was about to remind me again that I had burned her note. But instead she metronomed her head to the other shoulder, smiling ruefully. “Do you hate me?”
“I think I do.”
“I can tell you don’t.”
I sighed. “Maybe not yet. I’m still in shock. But I almost certainly will hate you. So let’s talk before the hatred sets in and I refuse to ever speak to you again.”
She came close again and hugged me to her and stood on her toes, allowing our breath to mix between our noses like a storm front. “Later, love,” she said. “First, let’s make up a little.”
Lazaro’s most recent film, The Aphotic Ghost, was nominated for an Oscar in short documentary a year ago. It chronicled a new species of jellyfish over 150cm in diameter, a superpredator by bathepelagaic standards. As it fluttered about the lightless ocean depths, its took on a vaguely pentangular shape, but with its five points rounded off. It looked almost like an undulating chalk outline, and its blue-white bioluminescence made it positively spectraclass="underline" thus the name.
Lazaro’s footage was gorgeous, unbelievably intimate. Jellyfish usually squirt away from lights and cameras as fast as they can, but the aphotic ghost—enormous, tremulous, poisonous, ethereal—let Lazaro swim along with it and gather images that were not only scientifically priceless but commercially lucrative.
It was me he took to the Academy Awards show. When he won the Oscar, the shot cut to me for three seconds. The caption read “Montenegro’s Father.” Not Thomaston, but Montenegro. By this point he’d taken my surname.
“Why do you want to climb Everest?” I asked Lazaro.
“I’m always in the water,” he said. He went over to the fish tank he’d convince me to get. It was a saltwater tank two meters in diameter specially made for jellyfish: a Kreisel model with a constant flow of water whisking the jellies around like a slow-moving washing machine. That’s exactly what it looked like: a futuristic upright jellyfish washer.
I looked up from my book. “So now you want to go to the highest point on Earth because… it’s the farthest place from sea level?”
He smiled ruefully. “Something like that.”
“Seems to me like the ocean’s been good to you.”
He turned back to the tank and watched the jellies spin. Sometimes the tank looked to me like a bird’s-eye model of the galaxies. Other times it made me sad, these small, nearly mindless creatures being infinitely jetted around a tiny glass container for my viewing pleasure. They had no comprehension of the forces that governed them. They had no idea their lives were in my hands. And who was I to have dominion over anything?
“It has,” he said finally. “The ocean has been my whole life. But it’s also defined me.” And then, a little softer, he added, “Limited me.”
“Still, Lazaro, Everest is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. You’re an expert when it comes to deep-sea diving. But on a mountain you’ll be—”
“—like a fish out of water?” he finished.
No mistaking his tone; he was dead-set. So I smiled and turned back to my book and simply said, “Something like that.”
Dolores stayed the night. We made love. Because I couldn’t keep up with her, she kindly slowed for me.
After, she asked me to be patient. She said Lazaro was alive, but when she told me how she knew, I wouldn’t believe her. But she’d find a way to explain so I would believe, and then I would save Lazaro. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but my mind was aswim, awash, adrift. I let myself be overwhelmed by her. We entangled ourselves in each other and fell asleep.
When I woke I found she had disentangled herself. A note on the pillow said, “Read before burning.” When I opened it, however, there was just a single word. “Bathroom.”
One of Lazaro’s video cameras was pointed at the bathtub. Taped to it was a note that read, “View before burning. Full explanation!”
The tub was full. Next to it was the freezer’s icemaker bucket, emptied, and a box of Instant Ocean, which I what I used to salinate the jellytank water. It was empty too.
In the tub, its blue-white glow refracting through the ice, filling and emptying like a lung, was a fully mature aphotic ghost.
I climbed Everest. More honest: Roger and the Sherpas climbed Everest and hoisted me behind them. They might as well have carried me up on a palanquin for all the effort I expended.
The search began the day after we arrived at the South Col. The weather was cooperating for now, and forecasts were good. If we were lucky we might get two days.
The cold had sunk an inch down into my body, anesthetizing me, preventing both hope and despair. It was the only reason I could function, this close to knowing. If I failed to find Lazaro, I could try again someday. But if I succeeded, he would be alive or dead. The wave would collapse. I would either eject him from his superposition and bring him back to life, or reify his death.
We searched half a day. I saw many bodies, none of them Lazaro. I wondered briefly if I shouldn’t make it the work of the rest of my life to bring the dead down and present them back to their families. But let’s see if I could succeed on my own mission first.
Roger, with a Rumpelstilskin-like prescience, knew not to pry, but the Sherpas couldn’t comprehend that I couldn’t care less about the stark and ominous wonders Everest offered. So, thinking I was like every other tourist, they kept trying to show me the sights. Two of them were dying to show me the most curious ice formation they’d ever seen.
I perked up. Ice formation? I followed.
It had appeared out of the ground last season, they said. They exhumed it out of the recent snow for me to see. It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus, and strange, ciliated phalanges circuited throughout its interior. Climbing gear radiated from it like an explosion.
“Roger!” I yelled.
Roger came. “We need the cooler,” I said.
He spoke to the Sherpas and they brought the coffin-sized cooler I had had specially made. It borrowed from ice-cream maker technology, had a nitrogen core lining the metal interior. After I delicately placed the ice formation inside of it, I found I could just close the lid. “Tell them to help me pack it with snow,” I said. Soon every Sherpa who could fit around the cooler was dumping snow and ice into it. When it was full I padlocked the lid.
I was weeping, but no one could tell because everyone’s eyes cry this high up, and anyway tears freeze before they fall. I took several hits from my oxygen tank, then said, “Roger, this is futile. I’ll have to reconcile myself to the fact that Everest will be my son’s final resting place. We’ll have to abandon the search. Gather the men.”
I could see he knew there was more to the story. But all he said to me was “Right.” Then he told the Sherpas what I said. A few of them looked at me incredulously—the search had hardly begun, and now I was content to leave with just an ice-souvenir?—but the more experienced among them simply started packing up. Americans were generally regarded as the best tippers in the world, even when an Everest ascent failed. Tolerating their strange ways was a small price to pay.