#biasfuzzball

He was asked--he remembered what he was asked, though the sound of the voice or who’s voice it was he would never remember--to choose a mountain from his memory. He’d climb this mountain forever... or what would feel like forever, anyway. Purgatory was the eternity of toil to work up to an eternity of bliss in Paradise. 

He would starve and thirst and sweat... the mountain paths were an allegorical maze of the worst sins of his life. At the end of the journey, The Angel would come down from the clouds and collect you. Some people chose the tallest mountain to be closer to the heavens at the end. Some tried to be clever and chose the shortest they could think of. Some penitent souls let the voice choose for them. But everyone got one mountain, forever. How could he not choose Illiniza? 

He knew mountains, he loved hiking, he had never had a better climb than Illiniza. If there was a mountain he had to climb forever, it could be Illiniza. There was a certain defiance to the action, too, which he considered as he stood atop one of Illiniza’s two peaks.  The landscape before him was an unfathomable expanse of mountains: every hue and size and shape imaginable, stretching out to a horizon that did not bow. He had seen a peak here and there as he climbed, but the way the paths twisted and trapped you against a snowpack had kept his eyes on his feet. Hunger and fatigue of listless millennia had made him stumble along. And there was the loneliness.

He reached the summit what must have been weeks ago, and the view still left him gobsmacked. Mountains of absurdly conflicting ecologies with roots twined together beneath shadowed, impenetrable valleys of fog. Off to his right, the red and jagged peaks of some Rocky Mountain transplant, so sharp it seemed to crumble before his eyes as it split the the clouds that wandered overhead. 

Further in the distance was a snow-capped summit--a cartoon of a mountain, practically--deep vein-purple and sloped with a slope that was practically concave. At this distance, the sides seemed impossible smooth. The treeline girded the foot of the mountain: the faintest hint of green fading to solid rock.

And all around him at lower elevations there were the low weathered humps of ancient mountains, no more than hills at his present height. Naked trees--cold and early fall or hot winter dried branches--enveloped the mountain from foot to peak like a shadow.

Once in a while he saw The Angel come for someone, lifting them to Paradise in a shaft of pure gold. Each time, it was so distant that it seemed a single blonde hair snaked down from the clouds and blew away on the winter wind. Then the mountain would submerge itself beneath the fog.

It was Dante who had conceived of Purgatory as a single giant mountain. He had always liked that Comedy. But expeditions with crowds were awful, and if it were possible, he was happy at first to find Purgatory so lonely. But, perhaps it was only his Purgatory that was a mountainous waste. Maybe someone else on one of those other peaks saw all this as... a forest... or a highway... or as a single mountain of Dante-esque torments. Perhaps they saw him waiting in some ironic trap. In someone else’s view, he might not be alone, but simply ignorant.

He knew that often the angel often made it’s supplicant’s wait (patience, too, was a lesson Purgatory taught), and so he had waited when he reached the ‘summit’ of his chosen mountain.

But, in his gut, he knew no one was coming for him. He had requested a single mountain that was two mountains--hoping to spend eternity smug with a technicality exploited. He had ascended the taller of the two peaks, even, as if to assure there were no hard feelings. But now, standing atop Illiniza Norte, he knew that salvation was on the shorter peak. But Illiniza Sur was a travesty of a climb... and the thought of wandering back through the winding trails then back up a more difficult peak destroyed him. It would all have been better if he could determine for himself why he had chosen Illiniza in the first place: was it because of his fond memories, or his desire to get the better of the afterlife?