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Bifurcation Point

Don Stockard

    Foster sat on the edge of his desk and stared at the blackboard where a mathematical mélange of numbers and symbols flowed in a stream. Incomprehensible to most, Foster reveled in the elegance of the mathematics and the subtle nuances. He was deep in the intricacies when he heard the door open. Foster didn’t bother to glance toward the door. He presumed it was another grad student – several shared the office.
    “Foster.”
    Foster spun toward the door. Although his physical response was rapid, it lagged behind his mental reaction. Instantaneously Foster recognized the voice as belonging not to one of his officemates, but rather to Thurman, one of his climbing partners, and there was something unusual, even foreboding, in his friend’s tone. By the time Foster’s eyes fastened on Thurman, he was tense. The grim look on Thurman’s face did nothing to ease Foster’s concern. He stared silently at Thurman, his mind frozen in anticipation.
    “News report from Nepal. Avalanche. Got eight of ‘em.” Thurman waved a paper. “You know someone on that expedition, don’t you?”
    “Gimme the paper.”
    Thurman handed it to Foster, who stared at it, frowning. “Where’s the article?”
    Thurman pointed to it.
    Foster scanned the article. “Oh, shit. Carson got it.”
    “I thought that was him.”
    Foster slammed the paper on the desk and cradled his head in his hands. Images careered wildly through his mind — Carson’s form barely visible at the end of the rope in a whiteout; Carson hunched over in the back of the tent writing in his journal; Carson grinning on a godforsaken cold, windy summit; the snap of the rope as it caught Carson at the end of wild glissade. Images piled up in an achronological heap. Emotions tumbled over one another in an equally chaotic collage. Anger, grief, despair, dismay, anguish, bitterness, outrage. None registered. The whole ebbed leaving a pit of emptiness.
    “It’s for sure?” He looked up at Thurman.
    “There’s a survivor. He says there’s no doubt. They searched for two days. Found nothing.”
    Foster took a deep breath. He could feel the shock-tension draining.
    Thurman dropped onto a chair facing him. He averted his eyes from Foster. Thurman was new to climbing. He had never met Carson, having only heard Foster’s stories. He felt awkward and had no idea what to say. He contemplated leaving but that seemed even more awkward. As a result, he did nothing.
    For a full minute they sat mutely staring, Foster’s eyes unfocused and Thurman studying the floor. Foster tried to sort out his emotions but soon abandoned the project. It took a mental agility that he did not posses at the moment. He returned his focus to the room. He had never noticed how close the walls were. He almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought. Of course the walls were close. He was in a small room. That was the problem. He was inside. He wanted a release. Somewhere. Anywhere but in a room. He caught himself. Not anywhere. He wanted to be in the mountains. He glanced at the blackboard. The string of symbols and numbers evoked no emotion or interest. They were meaningless, tied to the stifling claustrophobia of the room.
    “How long would it take me to get to San Jac, Thur?” Foster fixed his gaze on Thurman.
    “San Jac? I don’t know. I suppose about three hours at this time of the day. Why?”
    “I’ve got to get to the mountains. That’s the only way I can handle this. San Jac’s the closest thing. It’s not much of a mountain, but it’ll have to do.”
    “I don’t know.” Thurman glanced at his watch. “You’d be climbing in the dark.”
    “So what? It’s a walkup. I’ve got a headlamp.”
    Thurman rubbed his jaw. Foster was right. The climb was little more than a hike and Foster would have no problem. But he had never seen Foster upset like this. He was known among those who climbed with him for his nerves of steel. Thurman didn’t think Foster needed to be alone. “Mind if I go with you?”
    Foster shrugged. “No. But I thought you had a paper to give next week.”
    “Yeah.” Thurman paused. “I’m pretty well set for it.”
    “Okay! Let’s go.”
    The two exited the room. As they were leaving another grad student was entering. “Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asked Foster.
    “Hell, with any sort of luck.”
    The student looked surprised as Foster and Thurman hurried down the hall.
    “I’ll pick you in half an hour,” Thurman said.
    Foster nodded as he started his motorcycle.
    Half an hour later Foster threw his pack in the backseat of Thurman’s ancient Ford.
    They fought the rush hour traffic for over an hour before reaching the highway that led to the mountains. They spoke little during the drive. Foster watched the familiar scenery slide by. It had no more meaning than the mathematics hanging on the blackboard in his office. At least the mathematics were elegant. Nothing he saw as they drove by — unimaginative strip malls, sleepy small towns, insipid brown expanse of water-starved grass — could be construed as elegant. None of it, the mathematics or the scenery, was associated with Carson. As far as Foster knew, Carson had never been in this part of the country. And mathematics was completely alien to him.
    They arrived at the base of the mountain at dusk. The parking lot was empty. A popular climb, or more properly a hike, it was crowded on a summer weekend. But late in the day on an early spring day in the middle of the week, there was no one around.
    They took out their packs, locked the car and started up the trail.
    “I assume this wouldn’t be much of a climb for someone of Carson’s caliber,” Thurman said.
    “It’s the best we can do. Besides, Carson loved the mountains and it didn’t have to be a major peak. He’d be fine with something like this. It’s a few thousand feet to climb and the summits over ten thousand. Not too shabby.”
    “Yeah, I guess not.”
    It was a crisp, clear night. The mountain hid the setting sun. A few wisps of sunset red showed on each side of the mountain’s bulk. As they climbed, stars began to appear. Although a sharp wind dropped the temperature to an uncomfortable level, windbreakers and the exertion of the climb kept the two warm. They continued without stopping. There were no technical difficulties. Remnants of the winter snowcap crunched under their boots as they neared the top. On the summit the wind had strengthened and the temperature had dropped significantly.
    “Let’s get the tent up fast,” Thurman said, “before we freeze our collective ass off.”
    “Welcome to the arctic.” Foster pulled the tent out of his pack.
    The summit was broad enough to easily hold the two-man tent. They worked quickly at the familiar task; nevertheless, handling the aluminum poles in the freezing weather was not pleasant. A thin crescent moon hung near the horizon as they ducked inside the tent.
    “Man,” Thurman said. “We’re a couple of hours from a major metropolitan area and we could die of hyperthermia.”
    “No kidding.”
    “Got the stove?’
    “Yep.” Foster set it up and soon had a pot of water heating. A few minutes later a mixture of instant rice and dried soup was bubbling contentedly. The gluttonous mass that resulted and the later cup of tea constituted dinner. As soon as they had finished, they crawled into their sleeping bags.
    “This where I need to be,” Foster said. “I couldn’t have put up with staying down there.”
    Thurman grunted and they fell silent, listening to the howling wind and the flapping nylon of the tent.
    “Bifurcation,” Foster said finally.
    “Bifurcation?”
    “Yeah. The decision point. We come across them all the time. What school you go to. What girl you date. Whether you join the service or not. Sometimes the consequences are negligible. Sometimes it can make a big difference. Like the time Carson, another guy and I were fighting our way through an icefall on some glacier or other in Alaska. It was a jumble of ice towers and crevasses. It was completely unstable. The ice was groaning. You could almost feel it move. We came to a point where the route we were following, sort of a slot canyon between two walls of ice, divided into two canyons. A bifurcation point, if you will. We could go left or right. They looked the same and either one would probably get us out of the icefall. Carson was leading. He started into the left-hand slot. After about fifty feet, he stopped and came back out. ‘Take the other one,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t feel right.’ Damned good thing. We had just started into the right-hand slot when the left-handed one collapsed.”
    Thurman snorted. “That was a piece of luck.”
    “I suppose. But that’s not the point.”
    “Which is?”
    “The bifurcation point. One way was sudden death. The other was life. That’s where I am right now. I can go left or right — academia or the mountains.”
    “Academia or the mountains isn’t exactly a life or death choice, at least not in the sense it was on the glacier. Besides, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. You could pull off both. Get your degree, land a job at some university or other, and take the summers off for climbing.”
    “It’d never work. Look at the profs here. They’re lucky to get a two-week vacation. All they do is research.”
    “You don’t have to stay in the high pressure world. Go someplace obscure.”
    Foster shook his head. “They’ll rope you in. You get the degree and then it’s a postdoc in some research pressure cooker. From there it’s a university where you have to crank out papers.”
    A violent gust hit the tent, which almost flattened from the force of the wind.
    “That was a good one!” Thurman said once the gust had passed. “Many more like that and we’ll be rolling down the mountain!”
    Foster laughed. “It’s taken worse.”
    “Look at things long-term.” Thurman returned to the earlier conversation. “How are things going to look in forty years, when you’re too old to climb. No savings or good insurance to take care of a major illness.”
    “I doubt that Carson ever worried about that sort of thing. He never wasted his time sitting in classes, reading journals, and trying to come up with research projects. He never did any of that nonsense.”
    “And look what it got him. Death in an avalanche.”
    “And he doesn’t have to worry about retirement, major illnesses and that sort of thing. Besides, he bought it doing something he wanted to do. Something he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. I look down the road at what I’m doing and what do I see? A comfortable life teaching somewhere, writing papers, going to conferences, and dying old. Carson had it figured out.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “At least he would have been able to look back on having done something.”
    “So would you if wrote some papers, maybe a textbook. Made a contribution. You’re smart. You wouldn’t be where you are if you weren’t. You have a duty to use your intelligence.”
    “I have a duty to live.”
    “What does Caroline think about it?” Thurman referred to Foster’s girlfriend.
    “She hasn’t the foggiest idea why I climb.”
    “She would love to spend the rest of her life with you and have your kids. She’s a good woman. You could do worse.”
    Foster shook his head. “I’d be living a lie. Sooner or later it’d catch up with me. That’s when people go nuts, after living a lie for twenty years.”
    Thurman yawned. “You’re all worked up over Carson’s death. Give it a few months. You’ll look at things differently then.’
    Foster did not respond and soon he heard the regular breathing of sleep coming from Thurman. Foster remained awake, staring at the darkness of the tent and listening to the racket of the wind. He visualized the icefall and the bifurcation point. Down one slot he saw strings of equations. He recognized them, a potpourri of advanced mathematics. Down the other was a sharp fang of a peak, enameled with ice and snow. Without hesitation he started toward the peak. He took a deep breath, smiled, and was soon asleep.

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