Salary Man

Naomi Uemura’s body was never recovered. He radioed down from the Denali summit on February 13, 1984, and then the mountain kept him. What follows is one of the days that might have been.

The camp stove takes longer to light than normal. He holds the match too long and burns his fingers. Not badly, but enough to feel it.

Wind whips the walls of the tent around him. He is grateful for the shelter but allows himself to think briefly of a warm bed. For now, he waits for the water to boil, the sleeping bag wrapped tightly around his legs.

The mountain breathes around him. Or maybe it is only the weather moving through the ridges.

He glances at his watch. Still running. That pleases him.

There was a time he woke before dawn to catch the train. Thousands of men in dark coats huddled together. Tired before the day had even begun. At lunch they talked about promotions, golf, and the price of televisions. He remembered nodding a lot, his mind elsewhere.

There had been many jobs, but for a time he worked in an office where the section chief clipped his fingernails at his desk and dropped the clippings into an ashtray.

The water finally boils. He drops a handful of bouillon into the cup and stirs it slowly. Steam rises into his face. His hand is stiff from the cold. He eats slowly. There is no reason not to.

Outside, the wind strengthens. The tent snaps sharply. He listens. Then takes another sip.

Back in his university days, on a climb near Mount Shirouma, one of the older men in the alpine club asked him why he was always in such a hurry. He never answered. The truth was he did not know. Not then. Maybe he still didn’t.

By midmorning the weather has worsened. Snow hisses across the tent walls. The mountain has disappeared. Not that there was much of it left anyway. Only white. Only wind.

He checks the radio. Static. A voice appears for a moment and then vanishes again. He sets it down. The battery is nearly gone.

He thinks of his wife. He wonders if she slept well. He wonders if she remembered to pay a bill sitting on the table before he left.

The watch says 10:07.

Much of his life had belonged to clocks. The train. The desk. The years arranged by someone else.

But not this. Not here.

The wind strikes the tent hard enough to bend the poles. Fear had visited him many times before. On Everest. On the North Pole. In storms worse than this one.

What he feels now is something closer to recognition. As though he has finally arrived someplace he has been traveling toward for a very long time.

He thinks again of the men on the train. The dark coats. The briefcases. The tired faces reflected in the windows. Many of them probably lived good lives. Some surely loved their wives, their children, their work.

There was nothing wrong with that. It simply had not been his life.

Outside, the storm continues. Inside, the stove has gone cold. He pulls the sleeping bag higher around his shoulders.

After a while he thinks of the first mountain he ever climbed. He can no longer remember every detail. Only the feeling afterward. The certainty that something inside him had shifted. As though he had discovered a room he hadn’t known existed.

He spent the rest of his life trying to find it again.

The tent shudders. The wind rises. Then rises again. He listens to it for a long time.

At some point he stops checking the watch. At some point he stops thinking about the weather.

The mountain breathes around him. Or perhaps it is only the wind. He slips on his gloves. The day must begin.