The Pulse

The Pulse
The man on the rope below him had been about to die for the better part of the last forty seconds, and Alexander had been deciding whether to let him.
Not seriously. Not in any sense that would have stood up to a direct question from the federation that paid the careful insurance on this particular expedition. There was simply, as there always was when a man underneath him on a rope did the precise wrong thing in the precise wrong sequence at the precise wrong altitude, the small unbothered second in which his body considered the question of whether the universe would, in the long view, miss the man currently wasting his time.

The man was named Chad. Chad had paid one hundred and forty thousand American dollars to be on this expedition. Chad had, in the four weeks Alexander had known him, told him three separate times that he was a self-made man, which was, in Alexander’s long observational practice, the small precise giveaway of a man who had been made, in fact, by the careful application of his father’s money to the lower-middle floors of his confidence.
Alexander pulled him up on the rope without comment.
The pull cost him nothing. Chad was a hundred and ninety pounds. Alexander had been carrying men heavier than Chad up the side of harder rocks than the Karakoram for as long as he had been wearing the soft black wool gloves he was currently wearing, and the small precise ease with which the pull happened was the kind of physical fact that the men further up the rope had stopped commenting on because commenting on it had begun, somewhere around the fourth climb, to make them look small.

Chad arrived on the ledge red-faced and apologising.
He did not look at him. He reset Chad’s harness, reset his own protection, reset the rope, and turned back to the southern face of a peak that had not been summited in thirty-one years without speaking, and the silence he gave the man was, in Alexander’s small careful repertoire of professional discipline, the worst thing he ever did to a paying client. The young Sherpa above him on the rope, watching, did the small specific thing the Sherpa did when Alexander dispensed silence as punishment, which was incline his head a single degree in approval.
Chad would tell his friends about it, later, in a bar in another country.
He would describe the silence. He would describe the way Alexander had not raised his voice. He would describe, because he had been close enough to register them, the specific silver-grey of the man’s eyes in the cold thin air, and the way they had landed on him for one second and moved on, and the way the soft black wool of the gloves had not so much as stretched on the pull. The friends in the bar in another country would, on hearing the story, get quiet. The friends in the bar in another country would go home that night, every single one of them, and dream about the man.
He turned back to the rock.
The pulse came up through the soles of his boots at three minutes past two in the afternoon, local time.

It arrived first as a low warm presence in the long line of his calves and second as a small soft tightening behind his sternum and third, after the small soft tightening had registered, as the unmistakable hot specific weight of an erection coming up under climbing trousers at sixteen thousand feet on the southern face of a goddamn mountain. He went very still. The hand he had been about to put on the next handhold flattened against the rock instead. The breath he had been about to take through his teeth came through his teeth a degree slower. The erection was not, by any honest accounting of his current physical situation, his. The body he was experiencing it from was not, by any honest accounting of the small careful distance between him and the woman generating it, in this country.

She was finding him.

In the daylight. For the first time. Without permission. Without warning. Without, as far as he could read the texture of the pulse, the slightest concern for whether he was, at the precise moment of her arrival, hanging off the side of a mountain.
He knew her. He had known her for weeks. He had been finding her in his sleep since the small careful crack in his own architecture had let her in, and the woman in his sleep had been, until this afternoon, a woman in his sleep. The woman in his sleep was now a woman on the other side of the world with her hand inside her own clothes, and the body she was working was telling his body, through every nerve he had spent nearly a decade carefully not feeling, that the small careful arrangement by which he had survived his mother’s death was finished.
His mother had died at a sink, in a kitchen, in another country. The polite reasonable men who had handled the small careful paperwork had called it a stroke. The women in his family had not, in his hearing, contradicted them. He had buried her on a Tuesday. He had, on the Wednesday, decided in the kitchen of his own apartment that the bloodline was going to take no more women from him by the simple expedient of his refusing, for the rest of his life, to be near another woman the bloodline cared about, and he had not, since that Wednesday, set foot in any room with a woman in it long enough for any frequency to start.

The frequency had started anyway.
The frequency was, at this exact moment, working her hand harder, and he stood on the ledge with his palm flat against the rock and his cock hard against the inside of his trousers and the breath coming through his teeth in the small private rhythm of a man whose careful architecture had, in the soft warm hand of a stranger he had been making love to in his sleep, gone down.

The wind shifted.
A small piece of ice, the size of a man’s fist, came loose from the lip above him without warning, fell past his right ear with the soft careful sound a piece of ice that size made when it had decided to take a man’s life with it, and missed the line of his temple by, by his quick estimate, the width of two of his own fingers.
He did not flinch.
He turned his head, slowly, and watched the piece of ice spin out into the long unbothered air below the ledge and become, after the small private second the eye took to lose it, gone.
The pulse behind his sternum did not, this time, go quiet.
The pulse behind his sternum, friends, came up another half-note.
She had felt the ice. She had felt the ice through him. The body in another country had registered the small precise second in which he had nearly died on this rock and had responded, in the soft warm specific way her body was responding, with the small unmistakable tightening of a woman’s hand around a man whose continued existence had, somewhere in the last weeks, become a thing she was not, in any country, prepared to let go of.
He pulled himself off the rock without explaining himself to Chad.
The descent took forty minutes. The young Sherpa on the rope above him, when he reached the saddle, said the small careful word in a language Alexander did not technically speak that meant, by everything Alexander knew of the man, go. He went.
Base camp was quiet. The walk to his own tent was unbroken. The cold thin air of the threshold gave way to the cold thin air of the interior. The satellite phone came out of the inner pocket of his parka. The folded paper that had been moving with him from parka to parka for nine years came out of the pocket behind it.

He stood at the entrance of his tent in the cold thin air, on the southern face of a peak in the Karakoram that had not been summited in thirty-one years, with the satellite phone pressed against his ear and the wind moving past him in the same long unbothered passes it had been moving past him in all afternoon, and he listened to the soft warm voice of a Scottish woman he had not heard speak in nearly a decade tell him she was not in at the moment.
The beep happened.
The first word he managed to put through the line was the soft Scottish syllable a small boy had used at her kitchen table when he was four. He did not say her name twice. He did not say his own. He told her, in the small low register a man uses when he has finally run out of reasons to lie, that something had happened to him on a ledge an hour ago that he did not have the language for. He told her he was sorry.
He told her he was coming home.
He hung up.
The wind kept moving.
The pulse behind his sternum, in the long quiet second after the receiver clicked, said three things to him in the order they had been waiting in.
You are not going to outrun her.
You are not going to want to.
She is yours.
He turned, slowly, back into the tent.
He began to pack.