MOUNTAIN HIGH
By jack buckeridge
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I took breathing for granted, until one day I couldn’t.
Breathe, that is.
The same could have happened to walking or thinking or talking. But it didn’t. It just happened to breathing. And after that first attack I never looked at it quite the same way again.
I was eleven at the time—young enough to be fearless. But I made a shaky teen after that and carried an atomizer with me wherever I went.
Just in case.
And, just in case had a lot to do with me not being the same as I was before. Each day started with an edge. And my euphoria was constantly measured by what I carried in my pocket.
But constant vigilance wears off and at six-thirty in the evening, the first day in the mountains, I remembered what I should have brought with me the night before. But by then it was too late.
Of course it was years later than when the world had first taken its turn for the worse and the attacks were less frequent. There were days when I forgot about them; forgot about the edge. Felt normal.
Forgetting, I’d pay a price. But most of the time I had things covered. Help was never too far away.
That was the other problem. I felt like I couldn’t do it alone. The atomizer was part of me, and slotted into the indent that had formed in my hand. It had to be there when the demon of asthma came.
There’s a world full of dust out there. I got to know that soon enough. And sense when there was more. Or I was less. It came down to how I felt and where I was and there were all sorts of weird parameters that I honed into with an antenna that got longer and more sensitive as the years passed by.
I should’ve remembered that before I drove up the mountain at five yesterday afternoon. But there’d been other things to think about. Big things that took all the thought I had. Stuff that made me forget, for a time, what a measured existence I live.
I’d been distracted before, but had always managed to keep a red light on when in thinker mode. But this time was different.
It’s a world full of sharp turns and exceptions after all; a world full of pain.
The hotel was four stars. I’d done well in the last few years, worked my way up from two. One more and I’d made it. It was just a question of time.
Through the windows there was a glistening mountain wall and traces of snow filled the crevices higher up. It was summer after all.
A stream gurgled across the valley floor.
I was tired after the drive and as soon as I entered my room I pulled the sheets on the king-sized bed back, tossed my shoes across the thick pile carpet, and stretched out.
I looked at the beige carpet again before I closed my eyes.
Ten minutes later I was dreaming colors: red shirts in the distance, with chests in them, heaving their way across a white field; an off-white Persian rug tossed in the snow; the dreamer circling it trying to work out why the rug was there, kicking it hard.
I’d got to know carpets very well. Knew what they held in their pile. But I’d never dreamt of floor coverings before, as far as I could remember. Still, there’s a first time for everything. I’d never been this high up a mountain before either. And it made sense to check what was under me first. At least, that was what the dream was telling me.
The carpet was a threat. And the dreamer was standing on it, jumping up and down; quarks of dust lifting off, whirling into the dream sky like little planets of their own.
The jumper stepped off the rug onto what had seemed like snow seconds before, his heavy boots scuffing white dust up now. And airborne and seeking the dreamer’s nose, the mountain dust moved faster than the snowflakes had before.
Only wet rocks in the distance offered any refuge, as I ran (it was me now), pursued by a billion specs of dust. I could feel the sweat on my real body, as the snow dust posse came after me.
I was glad when the dream came to an abrupt end and I opened my eyes at six in the evening. Happy to be awake, to know it was over.
But everything was moving too quickly, even now that I was awake.
I turned on my side, gasping, suddenly aware of a dearth of air. My head hanging over the side of the bed at a strange angle as if some other part of me had already determined that I had a better chance that way.
I slid off the bed and crawled towards my unpacked suitcase beside the wardrobe. I still hadn’t realized that there was no atomizer inside.
Everything would be all right; all was not lost. The remedy was only the pull of a zipper away.
Or was it, I asked myself as I rummaged breathlessly through the contents.
It’s hard to think when you can’t breathe, but I was desperate, racking my brain for where the atomizer might be, sucking in a few molecules of oxygen in the general cellular scramble my body was engaged in.
But a cold light was coming on in my head as desperate fingers groped for my salvation.
I was still drained from the dream and unprepared for the grim reality of a bag packed only with clothes and a toothbrush.
"No!" I thought. "No!”
The fear that had been building in me but until now had remained uncoiled in the dark reaches of my brain suddenly sprang free as the next gasp found no air at all.
I was deep in the attack now and crawling towards the bathroom, my memory trawled through the file of past attacks, looking for an angle that could help.
A scrap of air filtered into my lungs and I devoured it desperately, hoping that another would follow, but all that did was an image of a mountain in my head.
The air that I needed was at the top of that mountain and the bathroom tiles had been transformed into rocks.
I had to get to the summit anyway I could, to breathe.
There were banners of death flapping around me on that bathroom floor, but pushed on by what seemed like a chant of angels I focused only on the summit air way above me.
I wasn’t sure why, but I knew just the same that if I could make it to the top I’d be all right. Of course there was no top, no mountain at all, but I didn’t see it that way right then.
I continued urging myself up to breath, to the world above mine, where under different rules there was no threat.
It was a vast struggle but once there my lungs took the offering in. Greedily soaking oxygen deep within.
But I’d no sooner done that than I found myself thrown into the abyss on the other side, where there was no air, crawling again, deprived of what kept me alive.
An asthmatic knows better than most that life is a question of minutes. All the bulk of existence is meaningless alongside that. One attack can end it all. Everything is reduced to precious seconds. That is why my mind does great loops in the thick of battle. Why I started up the second mountain to the pure air above.
I could feel the rasp of the rocks as I dragged myself up, the terror of dying like this, forcing me on through this nightmare made real.
In more or less the same arduous way I made the second summit, breathed my fill of the imagined pure air, suspicious of a new descent.
There was no time to analyze what was happening or to laugh at the absurdity of my predicament. The rules had been thrown out the window and I had to do whatever I could to survive.
Survive? Even that seems absurd in an attack. What is there to live for, if it’s that hard to buy a single breath?
I kept scrambling anyway, the hard nut center of my being determined not to renege. For twenty-eight years I’ve been on the roller coaster, and the ride, as hard as it’s been, is all I know.
I’ve never really thought how living like this has molded my personality. I suppose I’m more intense than most. I grab moments, like I’m grabbing scraps of air now, like others embrace years.
The third mountain stretched above me. I started up.
Three is harder than two and two was harder than one. I guess the cynic in me is gaining power, the scramble over rocks harder. I lifted myself up to the sink. There was a mirror there but I didn’t want to look in it. Didn’t want to see what I was going through; didn’t want to face the fact that I was alone in a bathroom, minutes, perhaps seconds away from death; didn’t want to think of loved ones, as I dangled over the edge.
There has always been beauty in the word summit, in what it implies, in seeing a flag planted on the crest of Everest, the world beaten by one of its tenacious creatures. Where I was right then was spiritual, survival was all about how I thought, not where I was. I needed to believe in something, to focus on a purpose that was transcendental. I couldn’t look life straight in the eye. I had to slant my way back home.
I breathed my fill on the third summit, knowing that the fourth abyss was seconds away. My brain had snapped in two and staying alive meant going up and down instead of breathing in and out. I’d taken a lateral nightmare and made it into a vertical purification. Of course, I didn’t see it quite that way right then.
I was getting tired of going up, of hanging in. It was starting to feel like a bridge too far. And the still reaches of my everyday life seemed so far away. I wanted to scream for mercy, to scamper back desperately to the secure atomized world. But there was another me getting stronger in this death frontal state. And that me was ready to give it all away.
From that very first day of the first attack life has been a two-sided coin: light and shade, comedy and tragedy, positive and negative. And scrambling desperately up the fourth mountain, flung now over the toilet seat, one side of the coin had been smoothed away and as my imagined physical body was going up, my mind was facing its own demise. Near the fourth summit it was clear that life had sucked all there was out of me; the peace of death now a lure.
I breathed what I could when I got to the top, and exhausted, decided I didn’t care anymore; going through this just to hang on for a few more years made no sense at all. I wanted to climb no more. And abandoning the struggle I slid onto the tile floor and every living cell in my body readied for the trip to wherever.
Nothing; how good did that seem right then?
Abandoning the struggle, no longer prepared for the climb, the tension flowed out of my body as I readied for the void. And even as deprived of oxygen and as desperate as I was, the world of surrender felt infinitely better.
But life is a riddle and an hour later sipping mineral water in the hotel restaurant, looking at the happy breathing four star human beings around me, I wondered why it was that in the very moment of me giving up, the mountains receded and air flowed back into my lungs.
It was an inversion that made no sense, a twist of the absurd and left me asking why surrender had meant victory on the precipice of that tiled bathroom floor.
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