At the table again, he sat and stared at the screen and reeled in his mind when it started to wander. Finally, to break something loose, he sipped coffee that had grown cold sitting next to the computer, took a deep breath, and tried a jump-starting trick a writer friend had once showed him:
Dear Hallie,
What I really want to say here is
Stopped. Waited for more. Waited longer. Rubbed his forehead. Leaned back, closed his eyes, grunted. Stood, cursed, and went to make dinner.
He rose the next morning before sunrise, had coffee, and set out on snowshoes. Twenty minutes of easy cross-hill climbing brought him to the base of the biggest frozen waterfall. As far as he knew, he was the first to climb it, so he’d had the privilege of naming the falclass="underline" Revelation.
It rose vertically for almost 150 feet. The exit on top was barred by a rounded, bulging cornice that required very careful climbing. Unusual to have the crux of a route so near its end, but the velocity of flow in this stream caused water to shoot out beyond the cliff face, forming the cornice as layer after layer froze. At some point the cornice would break off of its own weight.
It was about ten degrees and still, perfect weather for climbing here. Everything — rock, ice, snow — was blue in the predawn, though the sun would appear soon, in an hour at most. Above him, the ice looked like giant drips of melted white and blue wax. His passage had silenced the woodpeckers and chickadees, ermine and hares, the wraith deer. The only sounds were his breathing and small, sharp cracks as the ice shifted, compressed, expanded. Every part of it that he could see was frozen solid, but deep inside there was always something happening.
He stamped a firm circle and stepped out of his snowshoes, clipped into his Grivel crampons, took two leashless Black Diamond Cobra ice tools from their holsters on either side of his climbing harness. Accustomed to solo climbing, he carried just a few carabiners and ice screws. The only other tool was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX pistol in .44 magnum caliber, black stainless steel with internal laser sight, carried under his left arm in a custom Bianchi shoulder holster, which also held two extra eight-round magazines. Bowman never went anywhere unarmed.
He stepped to the ice, found secure placements for both tools above his head, set one pair of front points, then the other at the same level. He hung straight-armed from the ice tools for a few seconds, knees bent and legs relaxed. He stood up straight, removed and replaced his left tool higher, stepped up with his right foot, moving diagonally to center his body on the tool, set the left front points, set the right tool, and stood again.
The ice was perfect, solid enough to be secure, with features and porosity for good penetration of the tools’ picks. Then he really began the climb, not stop-go, stop-go, but in a continuous flow, arms and legs always moving, body constantly, smoothly rising, as if he were being hoisted by an invisible cable.
When he had climbed sixty feet, the sun rose over the treetops and he saw it strike the ice twenty feet below him. He was tempted to hang and let it catch him, because it would feel good to be there like that, sandwiched between the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice.
He started up again, moving in that easy rhythm, and stopped at 130 feet. The cornice overhang loomed above him. Beneath that, a massive fracture had left a band of clean rock ten feet high and cutting completely through the ice column. He was surprised not to have seen the debris down at the bottom, but then he reasoned that it must have shattered upon impact with the ice column’s solid base. There had been less than full light, too, when he began. He understood that the ice section’s cracking and fall was what he had heard the night before.
He could try to climb past the smooth swath of granite. It wasn’t the rock he was worried about, though it looked dauntingly clean. Worse, all the ice above that section was now unstable, held in place only by adhesion to the face. It might carry ten climbers his weight or come off with one strike of an ice tool. The sun was moving. Warmth touched his calves like slowly rising water. In ten minutes, maybe less, it would reach that ice hanging above him.
He leaned back, surveyed the rock band, looking for a line. Saw two ledges the width of a guitar pick that could hold his front points and, above them, a crack that would take the pick of one tool. He could get that far, but the ice above would still be a foot beyond his longest reach. It would require a dynamic move, launching himself off those ledges and swinging the free tool all at once, to reach that ice above, with no guarantee that it would take his weight long enough for him to place the other pick.
Two hours later, climbing gear stowed and coffee poured, Bowman added maple logs to the Defiant and sat at the oak table. Like Hallie, he came to decisions quickly and did not look back. He put the mug down and started typing.
Dear Hallie,
I have been at this for some time without producing anything worth sending to you. So I’m going to let words come as they will. I said there were things you don’t know about me. I wasn’t referring to the work. Not directly.
I was married before, and we had a child. My wife’s name was Arden. Our daughter was named Sarah. One time some people came to where we lived then and killed them both. I was not there to save them.
It was never my intention to deceive you. Only guilt and shame kept this locked down. It cuts every day.
You doubtless would have thought me a paltry excuse for fatherhood before. I cannot imagine that this will improve your estimation much.
Wil
He sent the email, wondering which would disturb Hallie more: that he had had a family, or that they had been killed, or that he had taken a year to tell her about it.
His cellphone chimed while he was in the kitchen breakfasting on raw lemons and blood-red otoro.
“How’s BARDA today, Don?”
“All good. Are you planning to be in D.C. anytime soon?”
“Why?”
“Something I’d like to discuss with you.”
“About our mutual friend?” Bowman put his chopsticks down. He could not think of another reason Hallie’s boss would be calling him. And if Barnard had been on the phone with good news, he would not have hesitated to speak about it immediately.
“That’s right.”
“I’ll see you in two hours.”
13
Sitting at the tiny desk, Hallie watched a fly hanging upside down from one of the white ceiling tiles. She wondered briefly how a fly might come to the South Pole, much less survive there. Then she wondered if she was seeing things. And then — she was learning the Pole’s way of deranging thought — she recalled Charles Lindbergh. He had become legend for flying solo across the Atlantic, but it wasn’t true. Not strictly, anyway. Hallie’s father had known one of Lindbergh’s children, who told him something about the flight few people knew.
After twenty-two hours without sleep, still flying in the dark over the ocean, Lindbergh began to hallucinate. He saw, or thought he did, a fly in the cockpit. He had opened the Spirit’s windows several times during the flight, hoping the cold air would keep him awake, but apparently the fly — or at least his vision of it — hadn’t been blown out. To keep himself awake and help ward off thoughts of death, Lindbergh began talking to the fly. He realized that it was an aviator of sorts itself, and he considered that the hazards his tiny companion had to deal with outnumbered his own many times over. He began to feel something like affection for the fly and conversed with it as he might have with a copilot.
Now Hallie tried to work up some feeling for the fly on her ceiling, just to see what would happen. Lindbergh had his copilot. She could do with a little confidant. Try as she might, the thing remained an insect that vomited before it ate and thought shit was earth’s greatest treasure.