Imagine subzero temperatures atop the tallest peak in the world — the wind kicking up bits of ice that dig in to any exposed skin… Imagine air so cold and thin it burns your insides every time you take a breath… Imagine the weight of your pack… your muscles exhausted, weak from days and days of climbing to mount the final summit… Imagine yourself standing there, breathing in a deep, painful breath, knowing this is the last time you will ever see it… because even if you were to climb Everest again, this is the last-ever-first-time it was climbed.
Now, imagine: a glint of light flashes across the corner of your eye ––
You turn, and there it is: what you’ve been waiting for this whole time, the time you’ve been trying not to wait — the thing you came to the top of the world to find — the thing you came to the top of the world to feel you earned…
A phone booth.
A big, red one like the ones they have in London. It stands proud, vertical, undaunted by the reality of its own imagined largesse against the panorama — a matter of perspective, certainly — but then again, perspective is perhaps everything.
Its little windows are too thick with frost to see the inside, but you know what waits in there.
Behind you, Tenzing flings an arm over the edge, then a leg. He pulls himself up. You were there by yourself no more than a moment, but time has slowed in the thin air…Now, Tenzing, with seemingly endless endurance, comes up behind you, and he’s laughing.
He pauses to admire the view; then, turns, nodding his head.
You can’t see his expression under his scarf and goggles, but you know him well enough to know he’s grinning.
Dude, he says. You know what this means, right?
You can’t bring yourself to answer.
You’ve got to call her, dude, he says.
Nodding, you look at the phone booth, then at Tenzing, then back at the booth.
What’s the worst that’s going to happen? he asks. She says no. Then, what?
Then what? you repeat.
She’s not going to say no, he said. I mean, c’mon man… you’re Ed Hilary, you just climbed Everest!
You realize he’s right. You’re Edmund Hillary – you just climbed the tallest peak on the planet for the first time in history. The last-ever-first-time.
That’s you.
So you turn, reach for the latch on the booth. It’s crusted with ice, so you have to work around it with the pic of your axe to get it open.Tenzing comes behind you to help, but you put up a hand. Before long, you’ve got it open. You step inside, loose your scarf, pull back your ear muffs and goggles … You pick up the phone. Pause. Feeling the coldness of the receiver next to your ear.
Tenzing, you say. Loan me a quarter.
He doesn’t say anything, but you know he’s right there. He has been the whole way. And sure enough, a hand appears over your shoulder with a shiny new quarter. You load the money in the slot, dial the number. It rings.You hang up. The money drops back into the return slot.
I can’t do it, you tell him, voice breaking.
It’s okay, man, he says, his hand on your shoulder. It’s okay.
Call her for me, Tenzing…
He nods: I got you, man.
And you step out of the booth, let Tenzing in. He pulls the money out of the return chute, takes the receiver in hand. He puts the money in the slot and dials. So nonchalant, so confident. Outside the booth, it’s muffled, but you still hear it when it starts to ring in the earpiece.
It rings three times, four, then you hear her voice coming through, even obstructed in its transmission by being pressed to your friend’s ear.
Hey, Louise, Tenzing says. Yeah, hey. Yeah, it’s Tenzing. No, no, he’s fine. He’s right here…
And you listen as he makes small talk. Asks what’s new. He pauses as she says something on the other end. Laughs shortly. Then: Listen, he says. I called for a reason. Yeah, we made it, we’re here. But that’s not why I’m calling. Yeah, Ed wanted me to ask you something…
He looks back at you, nods confidently; then back at the dial pad on the phone.
Louise, he says. Ed wants you to marry him…
And the wind stops. It’s quiet on Everest…
But at this point of the evening, this point of the story, the eyes of the dark-haired woman with red lipstick — the one who says like too much — are glassy. She’s looking in her purse, checking the time on her phone. Yawns. And she is young enough she likely doesn’t even remember a time when there were phone booths.
And so we’re sitting in a sorry American excuse for an English pub, having a nightcap. There’s a model of a red phone booth like they have in London as you walk in. It’s empty, the phone booth – no phone in it.
It’s just for decoration.
I’ve never been a nostalgic person, but it makes me a little sad for some reason that there are no more phone booths in the world.
It’s, like, getting late, she says, the girl with red lipstick who says like too much. Yawns a second time.
No, I want to say: It is late.
The extinction of the phone booth: evidence somehow that the world is changed, changing… already leaving us behind. Me behind. But she wears the same perfume as you used to, this woman who wears red lipstick and says like too much, and for that reason, I suppose I keep sitting here.
Then, the bartender walks by: Last call, guys.
One more? I ask her, half heartedly.
The bartender looks at her, waiting for an answer.
I don’t know, she says to the bartender. I have to work tomorrow… like pretty early. I nod, mostly to myself, and give the bartender my credit card.
What is it you do again? she says.
After all, it’s the end of the night, and no one likes to be caught in the seat next to the jobless guy when the music stops. And I give her the short version because there’s not much money in it and it’s not sexy even if it is a burden I feel called to bear. Besides — you warned me to be careful next time. Not to put that burden of my callings on the next person.
Oh, she laughs. I thought you were, like, some kind of professor or something. About mountain climbing…
She laughs, accidentally snorts, excuses herself. And I remember: Oh how you liked to rail on girls who snort when they laugh!
Then again, I remember one time I said something you found so funny, you accidentally snorted. I felt like the funniest man alive. And I want to tell the bartender, the girl with red lipstick who says like too much, tell G*d and the world as if here in this one memory, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have irrefutable evidence: See? We were happy together.
Sure, over time, we fought more and fucked less, but that’s part of it, right? As long as you fuck more than you fight, I guess. But no, it’s the everyday stuff – the ordinary mountains – the things you never realize how much you don’t mind doing them until there’s no one to do it for: making breakfast on the weekends, doing the laundry. At home in my little lonely house, a small house, but still too big when it’s just me: the dishes are piled in the sink — mostly highball and pint glasses that won’t attract bugs, but still; the mail is stacked high on the counter; and the laundry slowly turns to the semblance of Tibetan foothills on the floor of the walk-in closet. And instead of going home and straightening up, I sit here in this bar, telling this woman with red lipstick who says like too much – but who wears that perfume you used to wear — back when you wore perfume – about a man with the courage to climb the tallest mountain in the world, yet he couldn’t ask the woman he loved to marry him.
Because it’s like that sometimes: the big mountains are occasional; the small are every day and you take them for granted, until one day, you seek a familiar footing and it slides out ftom under you; you go to grip a hold in the rockface, but there’s nothing there — and — well… I couldn’t call you now if I was even sure I wanted to: not on the cell phone in my pocket. Late as it is, the cellphone on your nightstand wouldn’t ring. Maybe if there were still landlines and payphones. Maybe if there were still phone booths like they have (had?) in London, and maybe if there was one at the top of Mt Everest.
Maybe.
In the men’s room, I relieve myself staring into the tile on the wall, getting lost in the pattern. Remember when they had newspapers mounted on the wall behind urinals? Remember newspapers? We used to take the Sunday paper out on the porch sometimes with our coffee, and I still remember reading about it in the paper — when Sir Edmund Hilary died. It was around the same time we got back together — for what was supposed to the final time — the final summit, so to speak, if you’ll forgive the easy metaphor.
I’m trying to remember if I ever told you about him, Sir Edmund Hilary? Did I? Well, anyone with 120 grand can be guided up Everest now… I read this in National Geographic. There’s a two hour wait in line to get to the top. What’s more, so the article said, Hilary’s Step is littered with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and there are pyramids of human excrement polluting the highest base camps. Whereas it took Hilary sixteen days of climbing through snow and ice before he finally made it to the top. I can’t believe I never told you about it… That part about him being too nervous to ask his wife to marry him is true! He really did have to get someone else to do it — he was so in awe of her magnitude…
I thought about him a lot around the time we were getting back together, wondering if we could ever make it work. I bought his autobiography even — though now I’m embarrassed to say I never finished it — and not because it wasn’t good. And we did make it work. For a while. Still, I remember most clearly reading the feature about him in the paper around the time we were getting serious again. And of course I remember little fights we had about the dishes left in the sink; about the mail left unopened in columns on the kitchen counter; about money and debt; about work; about laundry… After all, it wasn’t Everest that killed him — the cause of death was something decidedly unglamorous, something really very ordinary, if I remember right.
Heart failure, I think it was.