mountain

mountain
Stage 0
Denial

1
	Death. The element of life that binds us all. There is no isolation that comes close to those final moments on the deathbed. Even though you are surrounded by family, friends, nurses, general compassion, you might as well be in a lifeless ocean, alone. Drifting slowly to the seabed. Life having the form of the light that pushes through the thick, salted water. Eventually, no light reaches you, and darkness overcomes all your perception. Darkness, in each direction. Death.
	The two brothers stood over their father. He was only kept alive by machinery, whirring, beeping, forcing the poor old man to use the last of his energy, until none is left. Like a cow, the machines almost seem like the ones that milks out all the energy. Even if this may seem true, the brothers did not understand what the man in the lab-coat had told them. They did not understand the reasoning, in their selfish, undeveloped mind. Why would they kill daddy, they thought. He’s still alive, breathing, even if through this infernal technology.
	They had no say in the decision. Their mother, sitting in a chair behind them, head in her hands, took the liberty of choosing what would be best for them. “For all of us,” she had said. Yet still she is sad, and still she sits there, too afraid to see the final breaths over her husband, or perhaps too ashamed of showing her face to her murder victim.
	They stood there, watching as his chest went up and down, rhythmically, timed with the whirring of the surrounding apparatuses. It was like an orchestra. It certainly had the same effect on them as an orchestra would have. They have the same feeling in their gut that they would get from the bassline, and the same goosebumps they would get from the main melody. It was almost too rhythmic to seem believable. Then again, the entire room, with its blinding lights, squeaky-clean appearance and blinded windows had a very tense atmosphere, that would only be describable if you had actually been there.
	Then, the breathing slowed. Still keeping its rhythm. A decrescendo. Perhaps, one of the two boys thought, there would be a crescendo soon, ending this moment in a thunderous finale, and afterwards, an equally thunderous applause. Anything to release the pressure from the room. He could only hope. Suddenly, a sob sounded from behind him. Mother began to cry.
	In the end, there was no crescendo. There was no finale. There wasn’t even a farewell bow, with thunderous applause to boot. There was only the sobbing, the whirring, and the slowing breathing. Until, almost too soon, the breathing ceased. Even though there was nothing to be perceived, everyone in the room knew a soul had left it. The pressure lifted. Tears streamed down the boy’s eyes. This was the first time he had experienced Death.


2
	The cabin was quiet. Only a single gas-fueled lamp was lit, standing on a wooden desk. From the sky, had it not been overcast, it was the only thing that signified the cabin exists. A single stain of luminescent orange, spilled on the black canvas of the mons.
	The lamp made a faint hissing sound as it sat on the desk. It flickered slightly, making shadows projected on the surrounding walls dance along with it. It, combined with the deafening quiet of the cottage, almost had a hypnotizing effect, surreal and uncanny as it was. After seeing it for a long period of time, you would probably get vertigo, and later, perhaps you would reach insanity. The thin red line everyone knows exists, yet no one dares to consider. It’s easy to point out a psychopath going on a murder-spree. It’s harder to realize that psychopath is as human as anyone else.
	Especially the quiet is the main force to push you over the border into no-man’s land. It has a way of getting into your mind, lockpicking its way into the ears, and then strolling inside like it owns the place.
	All the critters and crawlers had fled back to the tree-line a season ago. Such a period of time could be perceived in these parts of the world as eternity, unending, at least until the cold and the absence of food would knock on your door. There was nothing alive in the cabin, or its rocky surroundings. Nothing, but the man who was sleeping beneath three layers of covers, and another three of clothing, lying on the bed beside the ghastly lit desk.
	No one in their right mind would have stayed in the cabin during the coldest months, had they perceived true desolation before, and had they a single say in it whatsoever. These days were meant to be spent in a packed household, with central heating, and occasionally a fireplace. A household filled with laughter and cheer as friends and family would reunite, perhaps the only time of the year. No one in their right mind would choose the dank, decrepit, possibly long-forgotten cabin deep within the bosom of the Alps, and a long way above the line of Life.
	At this time of the year, the only way on and off the mountain would often be barred. It was a single wide descent that would be re-plowed at the dawn of spring, used in those meagre months as recreation. In fact, it was one of the most popular areas for skiing, at least for those who even heard of it, and had the resources to reach it. It would be used and covered until the beginning of autumn, when each year, without change, avalanches and rockslides would again bar the steep entrance to the top of the mons. The only way to climb in those months would be by a sort of modified armored vehicle, comparable to a tank. It would be sturdy enough against the deathly wind, and heavy enough not to slip into one of the many cliffs and valleys, some measuring up to 500 feet. The locals from the town overcast by the shadow of the mountain called it the ‘Hedgehog’, due to the spiked appearance of the peculiar ground vehicle. Spikes that would, in theory, increase grip if the vehicle would flip over.
	To spend the winter there would be to risk death, with no way of getting supplies but by some alien vehicle, nor any possibility for electrical power. No communication with the outside world. Even point Nemo would be incomparable with the peak of the mountain, for it has at least the company of the stars above. The Mons has never seen an open sky. For all periods of the year, dense clouds would cover the sky. Dense enough to halt any starlight trying to find its way to the surface of the Earth.
	All of this is why it comes as no surprise that the man now sleeping on this ancient bed, within these ancient walls, did only come here through circumstances beyond his control.

3
	He tested the flaps. Small components on each of the small wings moved up and down. Working. He went further down on his checklist of his small Cessna. Fuel, filled to the brim. The old engine had to be oiled, but he did not care to do so yet. He stepped outside, and checked the blades. A little rough around the edges, but it will do just fine. He had full trust in the small vehicle.
	It was inherited from his uncle, back in the early nineties. He remembered going on a trip over the Rockies with the piece of scrap-metal. It was breathtaking, seeing those infinite ranges from above. His uncle thought so too. Sadly, its charm became average the next time he himself flew over it. Next he had tried flying over the Appalachian mountains, which again had the same effect. Breathtaking first time around, but he just got used to it all the other times. It was a part of human wiring. As soon as you have seen something for the first time, you can never experience it again.
	Inspired by his uncle, he had gotten himself a recreational pilot license, and training on the Cessna. He adored airplanes from when he was young, and was terribly sad to see the Concorde go before he could have a ride on it. He flew over all the mountain ranges and natural reservoirs he could. Maybe because it has always been part of his life, from when he was small. Maybe, it was to see the most distance between himself and it, high above in the sky. He never really knew why, nor did he care. It’s a hobby. Others have models, sports, arts. He had mountains.
	After he had seen all the American ranges from above, having become fully bored of the American kind, he decided to take a trip to Europe. He had never been to the Alps before, and he thought it could be as breathtaking as his first trip across the rocky mountains. He hoped so. He needed time off, aside from that, and this was the perfect escape.
	He skipped most of the list, having full confidence the thing would fly, as it had for the last twenty years. He started the engine, and closed the door to the cabin. The familiar smell of kerosene filled his nose to the brim. He had always loved the smell of fuel, whether it be for airplanes or automobiles. He did not feel interested in engineering, but he still liked the smell.
	After he had received permission from the small tower standing on this small airfield in southern France, manned by no more than three people, he positioned himself at the end of the runway. Suddenly, a bad feeling rushed over him. An Omen. He had felt it before, today. When he landed in Paris, and went to get a rental car, there was this same paranoid feeling that made his flesh tighten around his body. As he went to the front desk of the rental company, he saw a glimpse of a look the woman sitting there gave him. He still remembered it as if it had just happened a second ago, as if he was still standing in the kerosene-smelling hall with a cheap carpet and fake smiles all over. She had looked at him with a glance that brought him back to his memories, much earlier still. It wasn’t a normal look for a helpdesk worker, it wasn’t a disappointed look, a ‘Oh dear, here comes the next one’ look, it wasn’t even a tired look. For that split second that he remembers so well, her look was almost malicious, in a way that instilled a strange feeling in his core. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
	-“Sir?”
	He had only just now noticed he had stood there, lost in thought, in front of the desk, with his mouth agape for at least a few seconds. Embarrassed, he shut his mouth, and started to reserve a car. Still, the feeling kept gnawing at his flesh, pulling it tightly.
	It was only after he had received the keys, and turned around to the garage, that he realized what the feeling was. It was the customer-friendly, artificial smile of the lady that really nailed the word to it, though he did not know why. Nostalgia. It was Nostalgia. However, instead of longing for the past, it was rather a feeling of wanting to run away from the past, or maybe forget about it. Maybe, he wanted to go back to the past not because of a sort of homesickness or anything of the sort, but because of another reason entirely.
	Sitting in the airplane, he finally realized what that reason was, though he wished that he could forget all about it. Regret.
	He wept as he started on the runway. Not wanting to be embarrassed, he shut off all communication.

4
-	‘You have to open up more.’
	The modern room was dimly lit. A single lamp was positioned on a small table in the corner of the room. Another shone from overhead. Out of sight from both of the people sitting in the two chairs, opposite of each other. ‘It can’t go on like this,’ she said, looking with worried, tired eyes. It were the same eyes one would use to look at a dog, having wet the bed for the tenth time that week.
-	‘We can’t go on like this,’ she reaffirmed.
	The atmosphere was heavy, as if a pump was sucking all the outside air, and pumping it all into this small room. Even the opened glass-screen door, and the many open windows, gateways to the summer evening’s air, was not enough to lift the air from the room. There was no avoiding this. The inevitability scared him out of his mind. She could read this, clearly, on his face. He always was easy to read. To let him show his deck, now that was a different ball-park altogether. Unreachable, as he liked it.
-	‘Please, we could go to the shrink again, maybe he can-‘
-	‘To hell with the shrink! These five years, all of them could have done nothing. It would have been better to not have visited them,’ he interrupted, louder than he expected.
	This did nothing to pump out the air, and he knew it. Perhaps he could pump it as full as possible, so that she could finally leave. It is unimaginable that their marriage had turned this sour in such a short period of time, but she was forced to believe so. She did not understand his actions otherwise.
-	‘Then what should we do? Please, for the love of God, tell me. I am at my whit’s end, and you are not helping any bit,’ she pleaded, with an almost spiteful tone.
	There came no answer. No consolation. Nothing she would have hoped for. They had both fallen off the cliff, and now it was only a matter of when. Their downfall was unstoppable. As unstoppable as the birds, cheering their song outside, unending, even through the coldest winters.
	She no longer loved him. She would have. She would have given all she could, and she did. He did not co-operate. He did not want to co-operate. She was right about one thing. She was at her whit’s end. She no longer knew what she was supposed to do. There were no guidelines. The only line was the one between them, now almost visible to the naked eye, growing ever longer. She admitted, in her mind, that he was right. The shrinks, cheap as candy or expensive as their house, were no help at all. Damn them. Damn them to hell.
	At one point she had loved him. There was no denying that. He had meant the world to her. The world, and all the planets of the solar system to boot. Everything has to come to an end, however. Even the planets, and even the millions of billions of stars in the sky. All of them come to an end, inevitably.
	This moment, too, had to come to an end. He stood up, grabbed his coat. She didn’t say a word. He kissed her. To her, a moment of automatism, without emotion or meaning. To him, a goodbye, like a wave through the window, across the entire town. Or, perhaps, a distant, subconscious, cry for help.
	He left for the airport. The closing of the front door made the line infinite in both directions, in her eyes. She wept. She wept as he took the first flight to anywhere in Europe. It was his last chance.




Stage 1
Ascent

1
	He awoke from his slumber, because of the wind that had picked up, rushing along the mountaintop, and, most importantly, his stomach was completely empty. He had not eaten anything since he arrived at the small airfield, lying among the Alpine mountains in a small, picturesque valley.
	He counted the hours between then and now. Thankfully, his wristwatch was still functioning. It showed him he had slept for 7-and-a-half hours. Counting with it the three or four hours of flight, and the two hours before he fell asleep, and he had not eaten in over half a day. The arithmetic did nothing to help the rising hunger, and so he stopped thinking about it, hoping it would go away.
	Instead, he started thinking about possibilities. The cabin was completely ransacked, beyond maybe a few pencils in the desk and the small power-supply. There was no food to be found inside. Outside wasn’t much better. There was no foraging. All the bushes, as few as they are at this height, had shed their leaves months ago. The few trees that were currently trying to best the wind, those that found a way to grow between the rocks that made up the sharpened ground, were all pine. At this time of year, no animal in their right mind would be at this height. No luck.
	He would have had better chances of survival had he been dropped on a deserted island. At least there he could find fish in the sea. Up here, there was more resemblance to the surface of Mars than of any other area on the planet, apart from other mountaintops.
	At least he had a way of getting water. He could scoop up some snow, get some firewood, light it (although he had never lit a fire in the wild), and melt the ice. Desperate, he calculated how long he could survive without food, with ample supply of water. He wondered whether starvation truly was the conclusion of his life. He concluded that he could live no longer than a week.
	An optimist would suggest that by now, his plane had already been reported as missing. There would be no difficulty in reading the last-recorded flightpath from nearby radio towers, and from there, a triangulated area in which the plane could have crashed. However, he was no optimist. If you would ask him, he would call himself a ‘realist’. Of course, this was only a way to not be called a debby-downer by his social circle. He was, by all means, a pessimist.
	These four walls would be the last he would see. He was certain of it. He damned himself. He damned himself for completely shutting off communication. He damned himself for being so stupid. Had he left it on, he could have sent out an SOS during his tumble down the Alpine valley. Perhaps it would have quickened the Search & Rescue. He rented the Cessna for a week, expecting to book a hotel in wherever he was going to land. It would take a week, then, before the owner would grow weary. Only then would he think about asking for info.
	These damned walls. He had only been awake in the cabin for little over three hours now and already he hated every single bit of it. He did not care that it gave him shelter, that small room built on top of the mountain. He did not care that it would prolong his life just a bit. It would have been better had there not been a cabin here. He would have simply frozen to death. It only helped to prolong his suffering. Not that he didn’t deserve it. He deserved every single second of it.
	Who in the hell would build a cabin up here anyway? A madman, is who. Someone who could handle this distance away from people, all alone, in this one-bed room. No, a man who enjoys it. A man who hates humanity so much, he would rather find himself on Jupiter than he would a room that has more than two people occupying it. It was true madness. The cornerstone of the hut.
	Trying to conserve his energy, and thereby conserve what little was left in his stomach, he grabbed an extra sheet that he saw on top of an ottoman, in the opposite corner of the room, and lay back down.
	That’s odd, he thought. I thought I grabbed every sheet I could find when I went to sleep.

2
	Unlike a real race, this contestant did not anticipate the finish line. The main goal. What he and everyone has been working for. Everything finally coming to fruition. This was because for him, there would be no shower of champagne. No medal, or gold cup with his name engraved. No hugs, kisses. There were no other contenders, nor was there a cheering crowd surrounding him as he set those final steps. Only a thick mist, menacing, brooding. Like a wild animal, waiting to pounce him the second he miss-stepped. At some points, it would even take the form, slowly creeping toward him, then suddenly lunging at him while he is most distracted-
	“Honey, what are you doing?”
	He closed all the windows on his desktop, nearly breaking his F4 key in the process. It was more reflexes than anything else, and he cursed himself for destroying all the progress he had just made.
	“Nothing, just finishing the last of my work.”
That was a lie. For a few weeks now, the two of them had been living off of his savings, without knowledge of hers. It was a necessity. She mustn’t know that the end is near. Of course, he never was a good liar, and she saw right through it. She gave a worrying look.
	“Okay, well, there’s someone at the phone for you.”
	He knew she trusted him. She believed that whatever he was doing simply must have been for the benefit of them both. He knew he breached this trust. He cursed himself again, subconsciously. His mind wandered on. Who could have been on the phone for him? Telemarketers? Scam artists? The IRS? He wandered, similarly, to the phone set on the kitchen table, after thanking his wife and treating her with a kiss. He picked up the receiver, lying on its side.
	“Hello? Who is this?”
	Before the man on the other line could finish his sentence, he realized it was his psychiatrist. He asked whether he was taking his meds, if all was fine, the whole schtick they probably learned from college. He could see right through the dishonesty, but still replied with a light tone. He told him what he wanted to hear. He always told them. Every single person saying those same things through this same telephone line. He would always tell them what they liked most to hear. The meds are working fine, yes fine! Oh I’m doing very good myself, thanks. Yes, the therapeutic plant watering is helping very nicely! Yes, I am working out more. Just recently I went out with some colleagues to the ballgame, I very much enjoyed it. And so on and so forth. Everything to keep them from saying those cursed words, one that haunts him still. Well, I do believe it is time for another appointment, isn’t it?
Those words would almost make him puke. His façade would almost instantly crash and burn. Stammering Why’s and No’s would follow, but he knew he had no choice. For his façade to not completely burn, never to come back again, he had to follow the doctor’s orders. Doubt was its worst enemy.
	Thankfully, those words never came out of the phone that day. His farce intact. For now, his strategy worked. This shrink was too new to see through it. Delighted, he gave his wife a second kiss as he returned to work. Re-opening the browsers, and checking through his history (which he would always remember to delete after his work was done), he found the plane ticket sites and plane rental spots around the Alps. His planning was almost finished. He was back in the lonesome race, the mist slightly more distant than before.
	That evening, he slept with his wife. Distraction. Bread and Games. She mustn’t know, for the diabolical consequences that could follow. He went on until she was satisfied, pretending to be satisfied himself. It has been a long while since he knew true satisfaction. Very long. He only knew the reactions of people upon receiving it. All the rest, he had long forgotten. Quickly after, he fell asleep, confident her mind was eased.
	He woke up to an empty spot to the right of him. He looked at the window, and saw the moon shining through a few branches. Immediately he jumped out of bed. She never got up this early. He looked in the bathroom. She was not there. He looked in the television room, no luck there either. He looked in the kitchen, nowhere to be found. Finally, he reached his office. A sudden feeling of gut-wrenching dread overcoming him. Did he delete his history? Could he have forgotten? That damn telephone call, it threw a wrench in his concentration, and let his mind wander. It’s a possibility he couldn’t exclude. He reached for the door, and swiftly opened it.
	There, his wife was sitting in his chair. The room was only illuminated by the monitor in front of her. It reflected incredibly off her eyes. They were damp. He forgot. His façade was crumbling around him. He could damn near feel the rumbling of the debris in his stomach. The ear-deafening sounds accompanying it. Nothing was left, when she spoke.

	She made sure not to wake him up as he slept. She knew something was up, and she was going to find out what. The constant lying, the overexaggerated affection he showed her. The embarrassing attempt at faking. It was almost as if he wanted to be discovered.
	She crept along, tiptoeing. She would make pauses every now and then, after she could have sworn that sound would have woken him up. Finally, she reached his office. She made sure to close the door behind her, so that the light of the monitor wouldn’t flood into the hallway. The computer was locked, of course, but the password was easy to guess. He would be so entranced with his ‘work’ that she could easily peek over his keyboard from the doorway while he would type his password into various websites. It had to be one of those, and sure enough, it was. What she found however, was heartbreaking. It wasn’t unsolicited, but the emotions fell over her anyway as she started to cry.
	Bank credit information, showing no source of income. The tickets. The plane rental. Nothing added up. She knew he would never dare commit adultery. But if not that, then what the hell is all of this? Why would he have resigned from his work, and why wouldn’t he have told him when he did, months ago? He is planning to leave, that’s for sure. Nowhere has he selected two seats for the tickets. A goodbye letter, still sitting unfinished in the private document editor. As she was clicking through all of this, the door to the office opened. She slowly panned her head, and quietly croaked a question to her husband, a look of fear and sadness in his eyes, a look she had not seen on him for a long time.
	“What… is all of this?”