The Memory Thief Read Free Page A

am reminded of a bumper sticker—
Be Here Now
—but instead of serenity, I am filled with dread. The mountain’s staggering beauty seems sinister, a vindictive mistress. Apprehension washes over me, threaded through my muscles, coiling in the pit of my belly.
    I need to keep moving, to put this misplaced unease behind me. Sinking my ice axe, I step up, onto a glacial expanse. I brace myself to slip, but that doesn’t happen. Instead my boots hold steady and grip, metal squeaking in protest as it bites into the ice.
    Looking for a place to anchor in, I take a few steps onto the glacier’s surface. I am high enough that I can look down on the clouds. In the distance, I can see huge plumes of snow blow off the peak above in the growing light of the sun—a sight that gives me pause, no matter how many times I’ve taken it in. I breathe to center myself, though it’s a futile effort up here, where the air is so thin. Still, alone on the uneven, snow-laden crust of the glacier, the ice wall looming jagged below me, I am filled with an incredible sense of connection and fulfillment. I feel like giving the finger to whatever caused my earlier sense of foreboding:
I am here,
so there.
    â€œSlack,” I yell down the mountain. It’s been windy for most of the trip and we’ve had to communicate with rope signals, but today it’s clear and my voice carries just fine. A couple of seconds later the rope loosens, and I pull on it once, then again.
    That’s when I hear it, an earth-rending roar that can only mean one thing. For an interminable second I look up, turning my face into the warmth of the sun—but it, too, is gone. In its place is a wall of white, hurtling down the mountain.
    Avalanche. When you look death in the face, your life is supposed to unspool before your eyes, but I see none of mine. If only I had, perhaps everything would have been different—a thin chalk tracing between here and there, connecting
before
to
after.
Instead I see flashes: a small, blond boy in the middle of a playground, tracing the dirt with a stick; a brown-haired woman with her head thrown back, laughing, her throat a sleek marble line; a dark-eyed, smiling man sitting cross-legged by a campfire, guitar in his lap and tattoos on his upper arms, leaning forward like he’s listening to someone.
    I have an instant to wonder if I am seeing a future that might have been.
    The avalanche hits me, like nothing I have ever known. It takes me down, and I am flying. Somehow I still have my axe, and I twist, trying desperately to jam it into something, anything, even though I can’t tell which way is up. For a moment there is air, and I take my chance: a deep breath, the most I have in me. Then everything stops. I slam into something, then again. Pain splinters through my legs, encircles my ribs like an overzealous lover. I cup my hands around my face, carving out an air pocket, just before the snow settles around me, immovable as concrete. Normally this gesture connotes surprise, horror, fear—but for me, in this instant, it represents something else, something I thought I left behind a long time ago. In my cupped hands, I hold the last of my hope.
    In the minutes before the pain swallows me, before the lack of oxygen drags me under, my mind is strangely blank—like staring at a movie screen before the projector is turned on. Then I hear a buzzing sound, an echo. And on the blank screen a loop of images begin to appear: A small boy kneeling in the dust. A woman laughing. A man, cross-legged and attentive. I will the boy to raise his head and look at me, but he never does. His shoulder blades push against the thin cotton of his T-shirt, insistent. He is so young.
    The echo is gone now. It is just me, trapped and trembling. And though the silence around me is absolute—I might as well be floating in the airless, high-pressure vacuum of outer space—I hear a fragment of poetry, as