Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

difficult mountain, but they are dummies now compared to you because they do not know this juicy tidbit I just shared. The bastard is taller than Everest! I hope you will act on this information some day, and when you do, I hope you will take me along.”

Yours,

Chhiri Tendi

Sherpa

Hoyt was taken aback. The man writing the letter seemed legitimate. The other facts and opinions in the letter were all reasonable. Why should he doubt the Fumu information? Sure, this Tendi fellow had latched on to English curses a little too tightly, but he otherwise seemed well-grounded. Hoyt’s urge to find out about Fumu for himself was overwhelming. Minutes after reading the letter, he almost started to pack. How could this information not be acted upon? How could an opium addict not react when learning of the existence of a thing called an “opium den?” But Hoyt did not write back to Chhiri Tendi. He saw Wizzy needle-pointing in the living room, looking as domestic as a pioneer woman on the Great Plains. For Wizzy’s sake, he did not act on his urges. But he also thought to himself: “Tell no one.” Maybe some day he would climb again, and when he did, he wanted to be the first to conquer the tallest mountain in the world.

Underneath all of these other thoughts that William Hoyt likely had that night driving to see his mother, there was another thought Hoyt was probably intentionally not having. Thoughts of Aaron Junk and the disaster at the top of Everest were off-limits to Hoyt’s consciousness. They brought him too much discomfort. The amount of shame he felt regarding his behaviour that day was too great, and the residual anger for losing the summit was too vexing. In a letter of apology to fellow Everest climber Gilford Taylor one year after the accident (an apology Taylor never dignified with a response) Hoyt wrote “Memories of the summit – visible but unattained - make my eyes close tightly and my jaw clench.” He was haunted. Indeed, with the Manhattan State Hospital sign in his headlights, rain coming down, William Hoyt was likely not thinking about Aaron Junk…with every fiber of his being.

“I am going to grab Hoyt by the berries and twist until he swallows his own tongue” Aaron Junk wrote to Patrick McGee while on brief holiday in the town of Truro on Cape Cod. “I am going to show him the meaning of a ‘forearm shiver’ but he’ll only know its meaning for the fraction of a second before the bridge of his nose lodges in his God damned brain.” Junk had been in this state for a year. McGee was frightened. Aaron had been capable of anger and brutality before, but it had never lasted very long, and certainly never long enough to escalate to a point where Junk considered murder a viable option. In the past, the moment his anger set in, Junk would simply hurt the offending individual, or he would whisper in McGee’s ear and then McGee would hurt the offending individual. But his anger toward Hoyt was another story. After the Everest debacle, Junk had spent the remainder of 1939 in a hospital in Bombay and then in another hospital in Boston, recovering from a laceration on his chest, two broken ribs, and a punctured lung. There was no chance for him to get back at the monster who had simply walked away from a dying man at the top of the world. Then, after leaving the hospital, there was too much publicity around the rivalry for Junk to exact revenge. Comedians in the Catskills were telling Hoyt/Junk jokes. Life Magazine ran a twenty-page article on “Infamous Rivalries Throughout History,” culminating in the story of Hoyt and Junk. The English populace was able to distract itself from the war at least enough to be enraged by the inclusion of Junk on the 1939 British expedition to Everest (The consensus was the American was the cause of the failure). If the world was caught up in their story, if every eye was trained on the two of them, Junk felt there was no way to get back at his rival with physical brutality.

Junk’s letters to McGee from Cape Cod kept arriving:

Dearest McGee, my oldest friend,

Now that I am out of the hospital, I must begin hatching a plan. I am not yet sure what it will be, but rest assured it will be the biggest shock to Protestantism since The Gunpowder Plot of 1605. I will offend every sensibility that man has. He will be so arrested by my actions he will simply stop getting out of bed in the morning. But what should it be?

Perhaps I need to get back at him through that Jezebel Spirit he calls a wife. The one who slapped me and drenched me with her cocktail. I could flirt with her on afternoons in Washington Square Park and win her over. Perhaps that’s the ticket? Or maybe his boys? I could befriend his boys at Princeton, invite them to a friendly game of poker and take them for their trust funds? No. Monetary damage is not enough. I need to ruin him spiritually, and there is no easier way to do that than through Family.

Marriage. Family. What a laugh. Why Marriage and Family? Why do it? Why do people feel their life is meaningless unless their death devastates at least one other person? I will feel more than content if I die with only you by my side, old friend.

Bah! This Hoyt thing tortures me. The young filly who I brought on this vacation wants nothing more to do with me. She wants to go home. I do not blame her. I sit around in my undergarments, food in my beard, wearing only one black sock. To be sure, not a good look on any man, but especially not on one who wanders around mumbling things about wrath and