Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page A

continent as there is on mine. I hold up three tampons, fanning them out like cards. Or scissors. Scissors for hands . Edgardo squints at them, momentarily confounded by the foreign packaging. Recognition sets in.
    “Okay, okay,” he says.
    “Okay?” I snap, tampons up.
    Great, now I’ve completely blown my chances at molestation. A Frenchman on the top bunk next to me starts snickering and Edgardo glares at him. The Frenchman rolls over in his sleeping bag, where he whispers to his partner on the other side. At one point in the night I shake so uncontrollably, I climb down to the ground and move the whole bunk a few inches away so as not to put his bed on “vibrate.”

    •••

    The following cannot be overstated: Had I known what I was getting into, the thing I would have left home with — my emotional EpiPen — is a friend. Someone I trusted. Someone I had slept with. Someone to whom I owed money and thus had a vested interest in seeing me make it off Cotopaxi in one piece. All the mountain climbing accounts I have read post-Cotopaxi seem to say the same thing: You’d be an idiot to climb a major mountain alone. More than experiencing dehydration as your crampons punch through the very substance that might otherwise hydrate you, loneliness is one of the elements. Not one of these accounts suggests the more fundamental problem. That traversing a volcano in the middle of the night might be just a little bit unwise.
    There is a rip in Victor’s sleeping bag. As the night ticks on and grows colder, I want to spread the extra fleece jacket lent to me by the Seattle guide over my already layered body, maybe stick my gloved hands in the sleeve ends. But every time I move to retrieve the fleece, the sleeping bag rips a little more. The rip is cunning. It will not be tricked by me slowly lifting my knees or gradually extending an arm down from the side. Frustrated, dizzy and desperate to put my boots on and go to the bathroom, finally I just sit up. The rip shows no mercy and now runs the full length of the sleeping bag. When I return, I have to clamp it shut between my knees. I experiment with comfort, using my forearm as a pillow. But the skin exposed by being forced out of the sleeping bag gets too cold too quickly. It’s unacceptable for my hands to be anywhere but my armpits or between my legs. I think of the expression “chilled to the bone” and for the first time in my life wonder what comes after that. Chilled to the marrow? Then what? If you hit the center of the center of the center, do you just start blowing icicles out your nose and die? I think again of my apartment in July. Then I think bigger, trying to recall all the times I have stopped in front of air-conditioned stores to get a break from the thick New York heat. My goal is to convince myself that it’s too hot for sleep, that I have just kicked the comforter to the ground and a simple sheet is oppressive to my skin. I strain to hear the sound of that summer rain falling on metal.
    If a beetle could survive up here, I could see its breath.
    I have felt this alone before but it has always been on purpose, in a field under the New England night sky or on the one miraculously unpopulated subway car. Never have I felt alone like this, surrounded by about 10 souls also trying to make a go at unconsciousness. I sit up in a panic, clutching my own throat. I had started drifting off. This would be a good thing if I weren’t also coming down with what would later be deemed acute altitude sickness. Anyone who has ever been awake and then gone to sleep is familiar with the concept of slowed breathing. But if you’re already struggling to breathe, slipping into slumber feels like an invisible force is trying to choke the life out of you. I look around me at the occupied mattresses and sigh in a pitiable fashion. I promise that I will run six miles a day for the rest of my life if given the chance to breathe normally now. I’m dehydrated and losing iron