by Jacob Lister
Tyler had been preparing for tonight for some six months. He
drank some coffee, with cream and sugar, to help calm his nerves, while pacing beneath the
lighting. He leaned his head back and looked straight up, measuring all the ropes and cables
and wires above him, scanning the top of the curtain as if its folds were billowy clouds on a
lazy day. Here was his peace, on the stage, right now, though the crew often asked him to
move while pushing carts or carrying scenery past him. But he was still fighting, a
cease-fire wouldn't come until the curtain lifted. Even though he had played Willy Loman in
a dozen full dress rehearsals, in front of a live audience, opening night always made him
nervous.
This was a major production, in San Francisco also, and that
certainly didn't ease his tension. He had a connection with his part, though, and that
helped. He had grown up without a father, his mother worked to support his brother and him.
It would have been what it was like for the boys in the play, after the end of the play, and
if they weren't nearly as old. Now that he thought about it, the link wasn't as good as he
thought, and a slight frown crossed his face.
Jack, too, had been preparing for about the same amount of
time. One thousand miles away, he drank some black coffee, to help warm him, huddled beneath
a cliff of ice. He was on the leeward side, but the wind still blew snow over the top of the
cliff, down onto him. He drew in the snow on the ground, tracing a house with his glove,
but clumps of snow were falling down from the cliff, burying his picture like a coffin. It
would have been a nice house, he thought, with a chimney, and a tree nearby.
He stopped drawing, and looked at his base camp. All his
fellows were in their tents, they told him he was crazy to stay out in the wind, but he
preferred it to the cramped nylon crannies they slept in. The wind was a full gale, blowing
at least 50 knots, but he was sheltered beneath the face of the cliff. Even so, the air
pressure at 19,000 feet bit at his lungs, left him fighting for breath. He had been at base
camp for five days because the weather prevented further ascent, but it was clearing and he
was hoping to reach the peak around midnight. Being summer, the top of Mt. McKinley wouldn't
be dark, not dark enough to keep him down.
Tyler bit his nails, as he always did when under pressure. He
had fought to kick that habit, but five failed performances later and superstition had him
nibbling again. He would be glad when the curtain fell for the final time, just before
midnight, and the cast would celebrate the way they always did, with champagne and soda
crackers backstage. When he thought about it, it seemed strange, but it was superstition
also, so he wasn't going to argue.
But now, he strained to hear the audience, already beginning
to fill the seats of the theater. The gentle whistle of the flautist warming up kept him
focused on the impending performance. But his thoughts strayed, and he habitually waved on
the assistant who told him there were only five minutes til curtain. He couldn't help but
think about the papers tomorrow, when he would be featured in a large article in the San
Francisco Chronicle. The reporters had already interviewed him, and taken several pictures.
He hated the way they misquoted him, or put words in brackets, bowdlerizing his ideas, but
it would still be he in the paper.
Jack had been told that the weather was not going to lighten
up, a storm would blow over in another eight or ten hours, but he was determined not to let
it stop him. If he climbed the final thousand feet, he could be back down before it hit.
But the soft whistle of the wind was deceptive, concealing gusts that could blow him twenty
feet easily if he wasn't careful. He knew he could make it to the top, hopefully, but he
was worried about the journalists with him. National Geographic had good people, who knew
the ropes and carabiners, but they weren't he.
He was getting a lot of publicity on this climb, and he felt
he deserved it. National Geographic would put him in front of people, people across America,
and around the world. It was somewhere that his brother couldn't get, not to millions of
homes. But still, he couldn't let it end there, and he was already thinking of the next
trek. He might do Kilimanjaro, or possibly one of the Andes, but he certainly wasn't going
to stop climbing now.
Tyler watched with snowy eyes as the curtain rose, and suddenly
he remembered he had to be on stage. He gathered the empty cases that he was supposed to be
carrying, and walked out from behind the side curtains, out among the plywood facades. He
hadn't been paying attention to the curtain calls, and now the cases slipped in his damp
palms, even though they weighed almost nothing. He relieved himself of the cases, swallowed
a large rock while moistening his mouth, and began to speak. He hardly payed any attention
to his lines, but he knew that he was saying them correctly. They slid off his tongue like
ice, and he shivered with the slight chill.
He stared out in the crowd, scanning like a cat waiting for a
bird. He was looking for anybody he knew, but nobody in particular. He used to look for his
mother, but she had passed away three years back. She had rarely been to any of his
performances, even when he sent her a ticket, she usually was working to support herself.
He never had enough money to support her, acting has its drawbacks, but he could occasionally
get a free ticket. He jumped back to the play, back to reciting his lines, but he left his
eyes in the audience.
Jack weighed the thoughts in his mind, concerned with each ounce
as when he had weighed his equipment at the beginning of the climb. He was responsible for
each member of the team, responsible for their safety, and even their lives. There wasn't
enough food left to wait out the storm, which could last several days, and none could be
flown in either. If he pushed on, and was delayed somewhere, the storm would hit them in
the open. If he didn't climb now, they would have to leave and descend a couple of miles
before the storm hit. His mind was as blank as the vast fields of snow he surveyed, both
pitted with crevasses.
He got up and dusted off the snow and ice, revealing the neon
blues and greens of his parka. He strode over to the tents, shaking each one to let the
occupants know they would be moving, and had to be ready. The snow slid down the face and
catapulted off the tents, tumbling through the air. It must have been what he looked like,
flying through the air, when he broke two ribs off a slide in a snowy playground. He was
only seven then, he thought, and now twenty-five years later he was still playing in the
snow.
Tyler had set down the empty cases and now looked back at them
between glances at the audience. Those cases were painted a gloss black, so bright from his
viewpoint on stage that they ate away at the darkness they were left in. He was in another
room now, in the play, but he didn't consider them separate, as they only had different
lighting. He was always annoyed that the stage hands didn't quite communicate with the prop
builders, and this was the result. But still he let his lines slip out, escaping somewhere
into that darkness on stage.
Finally, he was starting to feel at home, aside from being in
the bedroom partition of the stage house. He had felt a little odd early in the production,
before dress rehearsals even, playing a character that was thirty years older than he. With
a little powder in his hair, he could pass for his age to the audience. He could never see
himself on stage, so it always worried him that he didn't look the part. Still, he had tamed
his self-consciousness, telling himself that it was the actor, not the look that made a play.
Jack already had his backpack ready and crampons attached, and
was roaming among the other three mountaineers who would join him in climbing to the top,
helping them with their gear. He ran his now bare and chilled hands along the guide line,
carefully checking for frays or chinks in the rope. If anyone slipped and fell, that guide
line would keep them from sliding all the way back down to base camp, and he certainly didn't
want a bad rope to cause problems.
He stared up at the almost black sky of the early evening,
dark not because of the hour, but because of the elevation. He grabbed his map and stared
down at the bright red lines, pointing out the trail to the other climbers. He had shown
them the trail before, but he would continue to finger the line that went up to and ended at
the little triangle that said McKinley. They would use the same path back down, so any
pitons they put in the ice could be used twice. Everybody was finally ready, he thought,
but he double-checked their gear anyway.
Tyler was lost on stage, not physically, but in his thoughts.
This play required him to stand for several hours, and his legs were always sore toward the
end. A good night's sleep would cure that, of course, and he could wake up tomorrow and
leisurely read the paper, the article. He was on the way up, already he had new ideas, he
was hoping to play Shakespeare in London. Certainly that would be a triumph, a grand step
into the heights of society.
He sighed as he focused on the performance, returning to him
passively, as passively as he strolled through his lines. But every time one of the
supporting cast pitched a bad line, it hit him like a wild fastball. He winced, and took a
step, leaning toward his right, at the last mangled line. It was funny, he thought, that
he payed so much attention to every line but his own, and now, he was worried that he might
be throwing bad lines himself.
Jack firmly planted the two-inch-long steel spikes on his feet
into the ice, and felt the satisfying grip they held. Waving his ice-pick in the air, he
rallied his followers for the ascent that was starting. He gazed for a minute, back at the
camp, where a sullen cheer went up from the few people who would stay. He waved to them,
and thought about how nice it would be to get back down to camp after the climb, and cozy up
to a warm meal of something dehydrated that tasted like ambrosia at the end of a hike.
With a quick step, they were off, the four who would climb to
the top. He led them, staring down the peak like a matador or perhaps a reckless driver.
The base camp was protected, hidden from the force of the penetrating wind, and now, when
they climbed out of the bowl, it blasted him. He felt the wind, stinging his face, past a
hood and a face mask, and sunglasses which he had taken up wearing since the day when he
went snowblind for 18 hours in the high Sierras. It was then that he had planned this trip,
waiting in a tent while someone else climbed in his place.
Tyler looked out the stage window while the curtain lowered for
the intermission. After everyone else had left the stage, he turned to the velvet folds,
sighed and walked off stage to find a chair. It was nice to sit down, he thought, after
standing for the entire first act. The second act went by quicker during rehearsals, and he
also had several exits when he could rest offstage. The director said something to him, but
he was protected from the comment through a loose detachment.
He sipped some water from a styrofoam cup, and leaned back,
thinking about the play, some of his previous plays. His start in acting was in musicals,
parts like Captain Corcoran of the H.M.S. Pinafore, but his voice didn't fill the part. His
ship came in an adaptation of Tom Sawyer, when the young lead was sick, and he took over for
a night, despite being in his twenties. The first play he could remember was his fourth
grade Christmas pageant. Even then his mother couldn't attend, she was waiting in the
hospital with his brother, who had broken some ribs. It was silly, he thought, there were
plenty of doctors there to mend the bones, she should have been at the play.
Jack had charged half the distance to the peak, but he was
starting to outdistance his team. He forced himself to slow down, trying to pace himself
with the rest of the group. They had stopped several times for photos, and it slowed them
down. But now there would be no more snapshots until the peak, and the distance would go
by much quicker. After all, pictures taken just below the peak weren't as nice as a good
distance shot of the peak, or those from the summit itself. So with cameras stowed, he
enacted a faster march upwards.
They were walking across a saddle, and he could look out, see
the approaching storm on the horizon, like a sand castle looks to a crashing wave. He had
only been to the beach twice before, and that was quite strange for someone from California,
he thought. He didn't have much interest in the water now though, only when he was young.
Even then, he had wanted to climb mountains and explore caves and sail oceans, and that was
what he was doing now.
Tyler gave his styrofoam cup to a stage hand while sitting down
at a table on stage. The curtain was just lifting, and he watched it climb, revealing the
audience, most of whom had returned from the lobby. Once again he let slip his lines with a
casual acquaintance, confident in himself. There had been a fair amount of applause after
the first half, and now things seemed to be going as smoothly as the finely sanded wooden
chair on which he sat.
It felt good to sit on that chair, he thought, and only slowly
did he relinquish it when he had to stand. It was getting late in the evening, and standing
the whole first act had taken its toll. He was used to it, but even so, his legs weren't as
stable as the chair. He couldn't stop the play on account of his weak knee, which he had
dislocated quite a few years ago, and he felt the extra thought only detracted from his
performance. Focusing on the play with a certain sincerity, he forced each line to sound
good, be good.
Jack focused on the peak as it loomed only a couple-hundred
feet above him. This would be the longest part of the day, of the entire climb even, dragged
out with anticipation. Luck was with him, though, and it appeared as though they wouldn't
have to circle the peak looking for a good, safe path. He looked up, past the peak, at the
sky, the moon and the sun both sharing a position on the horizon. He could have basked all
day in that moment, its beauty, and he still wasn't at the peak.
With a sigh, he brought his eyes down to the snow and ice ahead
of him, and forced himself onward. It was a pity that he wouldn't get much time at the peak,
only enough time for a short rest and to take those ever-important photographs. He
ineffectually brushed his hand over his glasses, trying to wipe off the condensation which
had gathered around the edges of the lenses. He was breathing hard, harder than ever before,
and each breath let off another full cloud that fogged his glasses more.
Tyler was anticipating the end of the play, constantly
searching for a clock that wasn't there. He was through two short breaks and the third was
going by too quickly, and he couldn't find that clock before he was back out on the stage,
shooting off his last few lines of the night. All his nervousness early in the evening had
made him run through parts of the play, and now he was trying to slow down, give the full
time that each word deserved. Now he felt he would make everyone else look bad, his lines
might come badly, or be too untimely and thus ineffective.
He glanced up, eyeing the curtain, half-expecting it to fall at
that moment, though he knew better. His mouth was parched, and his forehead was clammy,
because the play was almost over. He felt good about it, that it was a good show, but bad
that it was ending soon. Still, there were three more performances, and another two could be
added. He was torn between wanting more performances, and wanting to try a new part. This
wasn't the time to contemplate the stage, though, and he went back to watching the curtain.
Jack paused for a moment, clawing packed snow from his feet
with his ice pick. This climb had gone exceedingly well, there were no accidents, no
searching for a good trail, and the weather delay had been tolerated with simple eagerness.
His muscles were already getting sore from exertion, the air being less than half that of sea
level. He had never been quite this high, and the air was thinner even a thousand feet up
from base camp.
He checked his team, and failing to find any problems,
continued the march. They kept him going, not by encouragement, but by their presence. He
couldn't stop this short now, his goal was just the top of the hill, to get there and stand,
triumphant. Looking back at his team, he gained a final determination, and stormed up the
ice.
Tyler bowed humbly at the end of the play, as a servant who
knows how well he's pleased his master. The audience could have been standing, but his
senses were dulled, from weariness, and relief. He was heading backstage when the director
reminded him to take a second bow, and he obliged with blank eyes. Then with a quick
determination, he headed backstage for the obligatory champagne, before a short drive to his
darkened home.
For him, the play was already a success, but he really only
wanted a successful stepping stone. More acting would await him, and with that would follow
more of the feature articles which he enjoyed so vigorously. It was always the next play,
the next moment that was important to him. It wouldn't be long, he thought, as he crashed
through his unlit house, ready for a long, peaceful slumber.
Jack took the last few steps slowly, savoring the moment, as
he was quite literally at the top. He stood strong into the wind, facing its challenge.
The photographers caught a couple quick photos, but sat down soon for shelter. He stood off
a bit, in the bitter gale, icily detached from most of his surroundings. A slight smile
crossed his chapped lips, but brushing up against his mask hurt it away.
It was a feeling with nature that brought him up there, but it
was his detached aloneness that kept him standing. He surveyed his surroundings, the other
mountains, the sky, the approaching storm, and shook his head. It was a shame he had to go
down soon, he thought, but you can't spend all your time at the top. Too bad, it was
peaceful up there.