020 USHUAIA, ARGENTINA, MARCH, 2003. You are a young idiot, like most youngsters. You checked in the homestay last night and you were distraught. Your host name is Alejandra. She is double your age and she had a son born on the same day as you. To sleep under the same roof as Alejandra makes you feel like the description of Ireland’s Beds and breakfast’ uttered by your former Gaelic associate, “The Clown”: “It is like having a sleepover in the house of your best mate’s parents— except for the fact that your best friend is dead.” MIJITO You wake up sweating after having the recurrent dream where your mother is a stripper asking you to fill her cleavage with a dollar note. After trying to dissuade her for an agonizing while, you relent and give her a one-cent coin. She looks at you with maddening eyes, flips it and says: “There’s a lump in my head.” Before you can react she turns the coin into an AK-47, points it at her nose and fires it, hence you would only realise in hindsight that your dead mother could see the future: there’s a bloody lump where her head was. As you are fleeing Alejandra’s house you get your dead twin room door mixed up with the front door, and walk into his dimly lit chamber. There are dozens of devices and a big screen shining in the dark. You get close to it. There’s an image with a label underneath: HARPER-GOD PROAI-XS. You rub your eyes many times to no avail: it is your damned face and it has the same name as the protagonist of your first novel: Harper God! What the heck? NOWHERE: ALL THE BLOODY BATTLEGROUNDS OF EUROPE, 1916. Before the vertiginous glaciers and the heavenly summits, the horror of mankind had reached NOW HERE: GANDAKI, NEPAL, AUGUST 2025. Your only relief is that the executioner, who turned Khaled’s head into a strawberry daiquiri, is the same cop who has been failing to pin you down for the last lustrum, the notorious bloke with a scar like a crooked question mark running from his cheekbone to his earlobe. As many therapists will tell you, his surname is greatly to blame—for real! Your surname means “large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls.” Therefore, right now, you just want to honour your only purpose: to live and die by your sword, and lure the Murder(er) into hitting your Medieval wall — therefore terminating your vengeance against those responsible for the obliteration of your loved ones. Then you may check out. unparalleled heights. In 1916, some of the future Everest climbers were losing limbs, watches, touch, rings, vision, boots and everything else (including their mental health and further sanity) while fighting the greatest massacre of young souls ever recorded: The Great War. The only thing the survivors would never lose was the first they would have traded for a kidney or an eye: their memory. Instead of forgetting, they kept gathering the dismembered slides of the gruesome extermination of the brightest minds of their generation. THE NORTH COL, JUNE 6TH, 1924. Fast forward eight years and two of the survivors of the carnage, Howard Somervell and George Mallory, the man who had turned all heads with his effortless gait — including the Queen’s head, the Alpine Society heads, the heads of all Tibetan Sherpa, shamans, porters and even the Dalai Lama’s and Virginia Woolf’s head— are leading the last attempt to crown Everest. The monsoon is a tickling bomb above their heads, and the blizzards are insane. Sandy Irvine, the youngest member and oxygen master of the party, has woken up to a pounding migraine and has remained on the lowest base camp. Mallory misses him while ascending along Somervell and Norton. The winds are bitter, the ice ledge is trembling, and the vertical, frozen walls are reflecting the broken sunshine in murderous fractals. Upon reaching the highest point, 900 metres away from the summit, Norton foolishly removes his goggles, and the piercing fractals burn both his corneas. Somervell has to escort his blind companion back to base camp, and during the treacherous, slippery descent, a gush of wind and ice enters his mouth and slices his throat. He spits the lining of his larynges before collapsing. Mallory has no choice but to cancel the ascent. He is corroded but not defeated.
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