The mountain had not been there yesterday. Yesterday there had been her brother, twelve years old, laughing at something she had said, stepping from the kerb without looking, and yesterday there had been the sound of metal and bone and the wet, conclusive ruin of a body undone by velocity and mass. He had been wearing the green jacket he always wore, the one with the broken zip he refused to replace because he claimed the gap gave it character. Today there was a mountain. It had erupted from the very asphalt whereupon he fell, thrusting upward with such violence that windows shattered three blocks distant. The earth had shrieked as it rose. Now it stood against the sky, black stone and serrated edges, its summit vanished into cloud cover that had not, she was tolerably certain, existed the day before. Her brother’s mountain eclipsed the sun.
She stood at its base with already-bloodied hands, having begun climbing before she had consciously decided to climb, and having torn the skin from her palms on the first jagged holds. She climbed because the mountain was there, and because she could not see beyond it, and because declining the climb was spending the remainder of her life in its shadow, whereof she judged the cold would be insupportable. The stone was sharp; obsidian, or something of that family. Her fingers bled as she pulled herself up the first ten feet, leaving dark red upon black rock, and thereafter she stopped counting feet and simply climbed, bleeding into the stone that her grief had made.
Dark thoughts of her brother pressed against the backs of her eyes until her vision swam at the edges. They were not, those thoughts, precisely lies. They occupied the grey between culpability and circumstance: between what she might, with one word or one hand, have prevented, and what was merely the terrible, impersonal determinism of the universe going about its business. The thoughts circled her, patient as carrion birds, waiting for the moment whereupon her grip might fail.
She climbed higher. Her palms were shredded now, loose flaps of skin hanging where there had been skin entire, blood running freely to her wrists and thereinafter dripping from her fingers onto the stone below. The mountain steepened.
Halfway up, or what she judged, in her diminished condition, to be halfway, she found the first part of him. A shard of bone, protruding from the black rock like a fossil. She touched it with one bleeding finger and felt a shock that nearly unseated her from the face of the mountain altogether. His radius, the bone of his forearm. She knew it as she knew the sound of his laugh; she knew it because she had held his uninjured hand whilst the doctor reset that same bone when he was eight years old and had fallen from a tree with the magnificent overconfidence of a typical boy.
The bone belonged to the mountain now. It was all that remained of the hand. She vomited once, into the wind, which received it without comment. Then she continued climbing. The thoughts came no longer in single file but in a stampede, no longer coherent enough to be argued with. She screamed into the wind, and the wind screamed back, or perhaps that was merely the wind.
Near the summit the stone changed in its character. It grew less solid and more porous, almost organic in its texture. Her fingers sank into it when she gripped it, leaving impressions behind. It was warm, and it pulsed.
Blood loss had rendered her lightheaded. But stopping was remaining suspended between ascent and descent, and between motion and surrender, at an altitude whereof neither was possible. So she climbed.
The summit was a platform of black glass. She pulled herself onto it with the last creditable reserves of her strength and lay there a long while, simply breathing. There was nothing at the top. Only wind, and stone, the vertiginous drop on all sides, and the grey sky pressing down.
She had climbed the mountain of her grief and found thereupon precisely what she ought to have expected: more mountain. The summit was not a reward; it was just an altitude. And yet, something changed.
The wind came for her then, not against her, but through her, as though the summit had been waiting for this specific configuration: her body emptied by the climb, her hands ruined, her chest scraped hollow of everything wherewith she had begun the ascent. Something loosened beneath her sternum. For a moment, one moment only, she felt the air move beneath her shoulder blades as though something had opened there, and as though the mountain had accepted his weight from her and undertaken to bear it itself. She did not know if she was grateful. She did not know, in all honesty, whether gratitude was a thing she was permitted to have.
She sat on the black glass for a long time. The wind was very clean at this height. She thought that it would be possible to simply remain here. To let the mountain keep her the way it had kept the bone. She examined her hands instead, and the ruin of them. She thought: these are hands that climbed this. These are hands that can descend it. She sat up slowly, and looked down.
The city spread below, small and distant and orderly. She could see other mountains, dozens, perhaps hundreds, each one a private catastrophe made visible to those in its immediate vicinity and invisible to everyone else. Some were being climbed by figures so small as to resemble insects on a wall. Some had weathered over time into gentler hills, rounded and habitable. Some were so newly formed they still smoked at the base, and the asphalt around them not yet cooled.
Her mountain blocked the sun for those below. But from here she could see it rising, feel its warmth upon her ruined face, watch it paint the other peaks in rose and gold.
The mountain had not granted her closure; it had not healed anything, nor had it promised to. But it had altered her relation to itself, which was perhaps the only alteration on offer and therefore the one that mattered. She would have to descend. That would be harder, she expected. Descent always is, wherein the body must resist the very force that ascent requires it to overcome. And when she reached the bottom, the mountain would remain. It would remain each morning when she opened her curtains. It would remain each evening when the light left it and it became merely a great black shape in the dark.
But perhaps that was not the worst fate available. Perhaps climbing it was the only honest response to catastrophe that she had at her disposal. She examined her hands.
The descent was slow. She found purchase in the same cuts and crevices that had torn her on the way up, her body having learned, in the manner wherein bodies reluctantly acquire knowledge through suffering, precisely where to place itself. Halfway down she rested on a ledge and looked out at the city. She could see her house from there, and the small figures of her parents emerging from a car and standing in the street and looking up at the mountain.
They would have to decide, those two small figures, whether to climb it themselves or to make what life they could within its shadow. Their grief was not identical to hers; it was the same catastrophe seen from a different angle, whereof the mountain had taken a different shape, a smaller one perhaps.
When she reached the base at last, her parents were waiting. They looked at her hands, the ruin of them, and at the blood dried dark on her forearms, and at the exhaustion wherein her eyes. Her mother reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, a thing she had done since childhood, an arbitrary thing that meant nothing and everything, and then let her hand rest against her daughter’s cheek for a moment. That was all. There was nothing to say. They understood this collectively, without discussion, as families sometimes beautifully do.
She had not conquered it. She would never conquer it, nor did that prospect present itself as a serious ambiguity. Mountains are not conquered; they are ascended and descended, thereinafter ascended and descended again, across the years, with varying degrees of preparation and varying quantities of blood. The mountain endures; the climber adapts.
But she had climbed it. She had climbed the thing that should by rights have crushed her, and she had discovered thereupon that she could breathe at that altitude. Not without pain, but breathing nonetheless. For now, that sufficed.
