Annapurna

I used to have a photo sitting on the desk in my home office.

To anyone else, I doubt that it would have meant much. It was one of probably two or three hundred that I'd taken of myself and Katy, back when we were still in college, and it wasn't even particularly good. We'd decided to do a study-abroad, spending a semester together in Milan, and wanted to commemorate our last full day in the city with a night on the town. At some point that evening, we'd stopped on a bridge over the river Navigli, and I whipped out my cell phone for a set of half-drunk selfies.

A few years later, just before graduation, I picked that photo from a whole roll of others and had two copies printed out. One was for me, and one for her, a little something to help remember the years we'd spent as best friends before life took us to opposite ends of the country.

We were so young, so happy, and so stupid. Both of us were smiling, but she had this huge, infectious grin, the kind that went from ear to ear and somehow got her eyebrows involved. You could see the kind of person she was then, painted on her face, wrapped in a wreathe of bleached-blonde hair.

When I got back home, I stuck my photo in a clear plastic frame, and it followed me everytime I moved into a new apartment. I'm not sure what she did with hers.

We'd planned to stay in touch, and we did over the summer. I would call every evening, if my phone hadn't already rang by dinner time. By September, though, the long-distance conversations had become less frequent. We'd talk every few days, then maybe once a week, and finally only when something major happened that we either wanted to celebrate or vent.

There were a few times when we planned to meet up, but it never worked out. Especially after landing the job I'd always wanted, as the editor for a major magazine based out of New York, my schedule was constantly full. Katy never really settled down in one place, but she might have been even busier than I was. Whenever we'd talk, after gaps that sometimes ran months at a stretch, she told me about her work as a travel photographer. She sent me pictures she'd taken of high, snow-capped mountains in Patagonia, of firefly trails in the forests of Japan, of the Milky Way's river flowing up from the dark desert floor in Arizona...

Katy was always the adventurous one. She never turned down an opportunity to try something new, or to see how far she could push herself. Those months in Italy had been her idea. So had plenty of hiking trips through the Rockies, near our school. Where I just ended up cold, tired, and sore, she was positively giddy with excitement. She'd show me all the flowers that she could identify, take shortcuts through undergrowth that smelled of pine needles and moist clay, and lead us out onto heights that gave me vertigo.

I don't think there was ever a time when I saw her afraid of anything in nature. There, she was in her element.

That's the Katy I always wanted to remember. The one who I lived with my freshman year, who was inseparable from me all through college. That same person who called me up one hot summer night two years ago, filled with excitement, to let me know that she was making an attempt on Annapurna I.

Her words that night didn't mean much to me, at least at the time. She'd reached the summits of Mt. Everest and K2 before then, and they were thousands of feet higher than this peak. There had even been a little bit of frustration in her voice when she told me how commercialized and crowded the world's highest mountain was in the main climbing season. I figured this was just one more ascent, but without nearly as many people packing the trails.

Since then, of course, I've found out why the ending of that phone call felt so off, for her. It wasn't like her to finish up the description of one of her exploits by dipping into nostalgia, or reminding me that she still cared.

Annapurna I is part of a massif that includes several points over 20,000 feet high. It's named for a local harvest goddess. The first team on its rocky promontory struggled to get back down, and endured severe frost bite as a result. Its main claim to fame, though, isn't geographic or historical. Annapurna is best known among mountaineers for killing almost 1 out of every 3 people who attempt to scale its heights. In less than a month, Katy would be a part of that awful statistic.

Just a few hundred feet below the summit, on her team's return trip, they'd been struck by a sudden and severe blizzard. She was missing for four hours before someone finally found her body. There was no way to safely reach her, lying among the regolith below a steep, bare rock face, so they had to leave her there for the elements and scavengers to tear apart.

It was too much for me to process at first. The Katy I'd known had been so young, so vibrant, so alive. She couldn't be a corpse lying in state on the windblown, gravel-strewn shoulder of some godforsaken peak in Nepal. But, of course, she was. I would always have that picture of her, on my desk and in my memory, but that was all. We always thought we had more time, but suddenly our time was up. We'd never see each other again. We'd never even speak together on the phone.

Except, it turned out, that last part wasn't quite true.

The first message from Katy's old number reached my voice-mail just a few days after she died. I didn't actually hear it for over a year, though, and by that time it was one of nearly a dozen. My inbox was full.

I chose to listen to that first one out of morbid curiosity. It was such a short time that her number couldn't have been reassigned yet, after all. I assumed that it was probably just a spoofed call, so there was something chilling about what I heard.

There was no automated voice trying to sell an extended warranty, or reassuring me that there was nothing wrong with my credit card. No one spoke at all. The recording wasn't entirely silent, though. I could hear something. Maybe wind blowing past the microphone, or fabric rustling. It was like an accidental call from inside someone's pocket.

After that recording ended, I moved on to the next.

Maybe she still had her phone with her, when she died? I didn't know how it could have a signal, up there in the rarefied atmosphere so far above the world of the living, but maybe it'd been switched on, and my name had just been at the top of her contacts?

The next message, from three weeks later, was just more of the same. I was beginning to wonder, though, how her phone could have possibly held a charge for that long. How could it have even survived? Nights on Annapurna had to dip down below freezing, even in the summer. There had probably been more storms, too, burying it in snow.

It was ten seconds into the third voicemail, sent three and a half months after Katy's fall, that my heart fell down into a pit. It started out with the sort of quiet rustling I'd gotten on the first two, but then, something else cut in. A distant, quiet noise that I couldn't make out at first. It became closer and more distinct, though, until its source was obvious.

That sound was someone sobbing. It was Katy sobbing. Her choked cries turned, every so often, into screaming. Just before the end, words broke through, muffled but intelligible, "Please let me...please let me ou-"

With my fingers trembling, I started the fourth message.

This one was unlike the others. There was no sound of wind. No rustling. No sobbing. Only silence for almost half a minute, then Katy's voice. She sounded like she could barely speak, raspy and quiet as she said, "Anne? Anne, is that you? Can you call me back? Please, try to call me. Please. I don't know where I am, but I think...I think, oh God, I think I'm dead."

That was it. The sixth message was just more pleading, but less coherent. The seventh, wordless screaming. I couldn't force myself to listen to the last few, after that. No, I had a choice to make. Option one, I could go to the police, see if Katy had been abducted, and if they could find her. Option two, the only other realistic option, was to hit redial.

When I thought about doing that, it filled me with dread. I needed to go and get help, obviously. Not to waste time calling someone who was in danger. But, then, I'd already wasted more time than that would take, and I'd seen the photos, as much as I wished that I hadn't. That had been Katy, at the bottom of that cliff. She couldn't have survived the fall, and even if she had, then the time she'd been there in the cold without oxygen would have taken her life on its own. The possibility was terrifying, but if this was real, if this was her, I knew what I had to do.

So, I did it.

At first, I didn't really believe that anyone would answer. If someone did, I didn't think it would be her. Over the course of a year, someone else would have gotten her number, and they'd be just as confused as I was.

The phone picked up on the first ring, "Anne? Anne is that you? Oh God, Anne, please say something. Please..."

We spoke for hours on that first call. I kept trying to figure out how this could all be a misunderstanding. How she might have been kidnapped, even though she insisted that no one else was there, or ever had been. That there was nothing there. No light, no air, no matter and no movement. She begged me to help her, not to leave her alone.

I think the reality set in after the call dropped, when my phone's battery went dead. Katy had been speaking to me from somewhere far beyond New York, far beyond Annapurna. Somewhere that wasn't really somewhere at all, a place where I could never reach her.

Several choices presented themselves. I could have gone to the authorities, and tried to have them figure out the source of her call. I could have contacted her family, and let them know. I could have done a lot of things, but I didn't. For the next week, I went through life under a crushing weight of dread, wondering if my own grief and loss had hit harder than I expected. In the end, though, I knew what I was going to do.

Eventually, I called her again.

It only works if I hit redial, from my recent calls. Otherwise, I really do reach a new person who's been given Katy's old number. I've gotten a new phone since then, and had the SIM card switched out, but I can still reach her on the old one.

I do that every night now. I feel like I have to.

Sometimes, she's happy to hear from me. Sometimes, she's angry that I ever let her go back to that void. Time doesn't pass the same way there as it does here, without anything to mark the days and hours. It might feel like a few minutes, or like a thousand years. Sometimes, she can barely even recognize me.

There's nothing really to talk about on her end, so all of our conversations are one-sided. I tell her what I've been up to, and we talk about our memories together. Playing in the snow in Colorado, wandering through the speckled light under a canopy of evergreen trees, laughing and holding each other on that bridge over the Navigli. It seems like her memories of it all are fading now, but she at least pretends to understand when I talk about the sounds of the city as day fades into night.

She's told me that it's painful, not existing. Like every part of you is constantly being pulled away from every other part. Having something real to focus on makes it stop, even if it's only for a few minutes. She'll apologize for yelling at me, then start again after I've had to hang up and call back. I can't begin to imagine what that's like. I try not to, but it comes up all the time, in my dreams and in moments where there's nothing to occupy my thoughts.

There are things she isn't telling me, too. Sometimes, as terrified as she is to be alone, she acts like she's heard something and hangs up on me. I don't know if she's really the only one there, even if there are no other people in the blackness where she's trapped. Maybe it's just paranoia, the result of an eternity spent in an endless void. Maybe there's something awful, and she's trying to spare me at least that knowledge. I think she might answer honestly, if I asked, so I never do.

I don't know if that place is all that waits for anyone after death. Most people don't ever place a phone call from the Afterlife, after all. She doesn't know, either, or at least that's what she says.

It didn't take long for me to put that photo away. I don't want to be reminded of the time we spent together anymore. I don't want to think about who she used to be.

There's something cruel about all this. Even though we talk every night now, I miss Katy more than I ever did before.