People were like red ants at a picnic on the igneous rock where I thought I would die. I spit on mountains everywhere now and wish that they would all be moved out of the way. The bulldozing must start near the school at which I’ve been contracted to work for a year in Japan and of whose Mountain Climbing Club I’d recently become a member because I thought I liked nature.
The nature of this uprising of rock-stone was such that, in the darkness of a night hike organised for new staff, you have the impression that the next station (a place to stop and rest) is at the top, until you reach and can see past it to the one that follows. After the twelfth time, I decided that I would live there, on the volcano, if that small oasis hadn’t turned out to be the last on the eternal trek.
Some of the other teachers’ bodies, mutinous because, instead of being taken to bed at the earlier time to which they’d become accustomed, they were carried on a surprise six-hour military tour of duty, attempted to turn inside out. The afflicted suffered with fits of vomiting and a desire so violent to relieve themselves, some believed it was from things yet uneaten—spoilt food they would unintentionally eat in the future. Many concluded that this had happened to serve as a warning to never climb anything ever again—not even a flight of stairs, especially if resembling the one at the bottom of Mount Fuji, at its beginning.
The pilgrimage commenced with a thought that followed a steups, I do a six-hour hike before in de sun from Barclay’s Park to North Point. These people is bare jokers! I was wrong to assume it would be a walk in the park and was sure of this when I first thought, I am going to lose my life. I had slapped my side against a rock face and was then supporting my upper body, bent over like a Demerara window, trying not to succumb to the sting of the air in my lungs, when I saw them—luminescent blue butterflies. They were each the size of two open hands put together to form beating wings and I turned to show someone but remembered that I’d rushed ahead, thinking I’d been left behind by the ones to whom I compared myself in physicality, and had been alone for most of the journey.
They hovered for a moment and my attention was drawn behind them by the lanterns centipeding down the mountain, disappearing and reappearing in the mist. Then, as if I’d blinked them away, they were gone. My brain probably wasn’t getting enough oxygen and I hoped that as I pressed on I wouldn’t, without warning, suffer some euphoric episode that might lead me to fling myself off a cliff to try to fly back to Barbados.
My heart was fluttering around, but not inwards like when I have deliberately moved faster than was normally required; it was throwing itself against its cage. I put both hands on my chest and pushed down. After three more steps, gritted teeth as something corrosive was pumped into my thighs. Two more steps and I was gasping like a fish breathing air. People were inhaling deeply from canisters that looked like small fire extinguishers, but I knew that only a brain starved of nutrient would direct anyone to climb into the sky, despite how things turned out for Jack.
I trudged on trying not to look up but at my feet instead. I willed myself to put one foot in front of the other whispering lies like, “You can do this,” and “It’ll soon be over”. I was grateful to eventually be marking time behind a long line of children who’d sprung up and withered into senior citizens along the way, because I would tell everyone how upsetting it was and that they slowed me down. Then…magically…after what seemed at least forty consecutive nights unpunctuated by days, I was at the place where you run out of mountain to climb. Unfortunately, it was also where the grey gale-force was made from ice machetes.
As I started to be peeled alive, almost immediately, out of someone’s throat, “I’m dying! Come lie down and keep me warm!” I did not hesitate and soon, under what may have been a sleeping bag or debris snatched from the wicked wind, my back was the only part of my body not experiencing the mountain’s obvious rage at being climbed. I laid there laughing through chattering teeth, delirious as the woman clasping me caught someone else’s ear and he joined us behind her. We were too busy clinging to life to care about what this might look like to the people speaking in tongues around us.
In English, something was said about kerosene oil lamps in shops that were about to open, Yes, but is this what my first winter is going to be like?, I wondered, Will I have to set myself on fire to get warm? I imagined myself in flames (and finally warm) as I drooped over on a bench, too exhausted to tighten my muscles and break the ice around my spine. In this locker-room-like place, women with their heads tied, wearing aprons, distributed what looked like noodles in boiling water to their patients.
Predictably, someone decided we should suffer some more in order to see the sunrise. I just wanted to go to sleep and wake up at home. How was seeing a sunrise going to help me accomplish this? We started our descent and found a place with fewer clouds. I was about to spit on sunrises everywhere when the mist gave up for a moment to reveal clouds below me like an endless field of tightly packed, ripe cotton, on the horizon of which the nestling sun ruffled its rays. I wanted to cup it in my hands, pull out its wings and keep it in a jar to punish it for having cooled into a pale picture of itself.
Clouds below me
I put away my camera and remembered that coming up the mountain hadn’t killed me and so going down would be given its chance. The gravel loosened by the migrating multitude rolled under our feet, but at least now we could see the brightly coloured winter wear around us collapsing out of sight and knew what to expect. The terrain of the route down, although more visible than the one up, was still that of an uninhabitable planet with its zigzagging pathways.
I’d managed to, in my crapaud-trance, get separated from the ones with whom I’d trembled at the top of the crater but had caught up with Nat, also a born-again hater of heights, so we hit it off. She’d lived in France for some time because her mother was a successful designer there, but I never once wished for a crevice to suddenly open up and for her to be lost in it forever.
Our decision not to slide on our bottoms in a straight line across the Z’s was a good one. Lewis, a Scottish man who, when he drank, always talked about his mission to conquer the English, we would later discover, was beaten on his feet with a stick and spoken to in loud guttural noises for having done this. We were only afraid it might start an avalanche or that we might be unable to stop and fall over a precipice (where I might try to fly back to Barbados).
Then, suddenly, there was enough oxygen in the air for my revived brain to properly examine what I’d been doing and my knee caps fell off. We stopped to rest and fill our eyes with the dust kicked up by the ones overtaking us more frequently after this, as we imagined what it might be like at the bottom where people walked on flat ground or stood in the shade of a tree perhaps.
After about four hours of almost landing on our rear ends, landing on our rear ends and grazing our palms, wishing for flat ground, bathing in and lining our lungs with red ash, we had another two hours of the same. Then, at what looked like the level bottom where I still had to use my legs to walk, I was asked to complete a questionnaire about my climbing experience. Nat pulled a ninja assassin move and disappeared before my eyes when the man said, “Free bottle of water,” which made me consider that she was probably never there. I suggested they put in escalators.
The water became hot as the sun remembered how to rise and ripple the air, but I didn’t stop sipping it. There were wild flowers the colour of bruised skin in the shade of a tree whose trunk looked like a stack of chilled watermelons. I’d been walking behind the only black man with dreadlocks I’d seen since my arrival in the country. When he saw me, he released an Asian woman’s hand to speak as if we were good friends. Then he said they’d been to the mountain top…. Why didn’t they look as if they’d been spat from the earth like an irreverent offering? I did not believe in them—their existence—and asked if they knew a girl named Nat.
Running away was followed by running around to find the vehicle that had brought me there to perish. After resisting the urge to let the blood of my mother’s great aunt Enid “rise up in me” to call down curses on the four blondes from the bus sitting in the square who’d been silently watching my headless chicken dance, I put my knee caps in my pocket and laughed at how I couldn’t bend my legs to get down the stairs without them. I was sure I looked like my American friend Tyronne, ‘wukking up’ for the first time on Kadooment Day “down Spring Garden” and hoped I would not break in half.
The survivors exchanged war stories at the bus. Some had turned back (bless them); others had been held in a chokehold by their stomachs; a few, after running out of water, had considered drinking their own fluids. At the back of the bus some hugged their knees as they slept and there was Miss Serendipity who took the right turn when everyone else took the left. She was in an unreasonably expensive taxi that was bringing her from the other side of the place I renamed Morgoth (meaning ‘Black Foe to the World’ in Tolkien’s invented Sindarin language). Yes. There were taxis on the other side, in the Promised Land.
Happy to be alive, although not entirely convinced that that was the state in which I found myself, I used the backs of the bus seats as crutches to swing what was left of my hanging parts to the place I had occupied on my way to the challenge of a lifetime, before I could truly understand that that would mean a lesson in perseverance. I lowered myself into the seat. Someone outside commented that Mount Everest was almost 9000 meters high and that this Goliath was a molehill in comparison, at just under 4000 meters. Consequently, I estimated a meter to be about a barefoot walk in the midday sun around the periphery of fires that never burn dim.
This was the last thing I thought before I fell asleep, stepping weightlessly
into a capsule that entered a long dark tunnel, speeding me away from my aching
body. I would awaken on my back, disoriented, to find myself about halfway up a
suspiciously high Mount Hillaby, the object of the attention of members of an
eyelidless race of aliens.
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