Completely (New York 3)

“Why do they call you that?”

Kal sighed. “I grew up around climbers, because of my parents, right? And I was really into comics. I had some comics with me at Base Camp, X-Men, Fantastic Four, classic stuff like that.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

He’d been sixteen.

He didn’t want to lie to Rosemary.

After a moment, he tried again. “I was sixteen, actually. My dad asked me in front of a whole bunch of other climbers and Sherpa guides if I wanted to be an ice doctor someday.”

There he was, the son of Merlin and Yangchen Beckett. There he was, having survived his childhood, helped his mom get a divorce and encouraged her when she said she wanted to climb Everest herself, standing at Base Camp in front of his own fucking father who asked him if maybe he thought he could be an ice doctor someday, like that was some pinnacle of aspiration for a Sherpa kid like Kal.

Not, did he want to summit Everest himself?

Not, did he want to change the world?

Did he want to be an ice doctor?

“What did you say?” Rosemary asked.

“I told him I looked forward to the day when there wouldn’t be any such thing as ice doctors. Everest wouldn’t need them when I’d convinced Nepal to shut it down permanently to climbing.”

Kal remembered how full of himself he’d been, emboldened by his parents’ divorce and the fact that his dad couldn’t hurt him anymore. How good it had felt to brag in front of his father, puffed up with his own importance.

“I told him when it happened, no one would care about Merlin Beckett anymore. He’d have to learn how to do real work.”

It was one step too far, considering his audience. Merlin’s face had paled, his neck turned red and blotchy with his desire to lash out. He’d clawed at the neck of his jacket like he wanted to claw at Kal’s face. But there had been too many people around for him to do anything but storm off and find another outlet for his anger. Merlin’s usual outlet. Kal’s mom.

It was the last time Kal saw his father alive.

“I still don’t see where Doctor Doom comes in.”

“This Sherpa I knew, who I’d been showing comics to, joked I would put him out of business. He called me Doctor Doom. Diffused the tension a little.”

“And the name stuck?”

“Sherpa people don’t forget stuff like that. Years later, when I started working with the ice doctors, setting up the ropes and ladders in the icefall, they would send me to talk to the climbers—supposedly because I had the most English, although those guys all speak English just fine and understand more than they’ll show. It was because I was the youngest, and nobody liked giving those reports. Every day, it’s some asshole haranguing you in a different accent about how his clients need that route done yesterday. I got a reputation as Mr. Bad News. One of them heard me called Doctor Doom, and that was that.”

He still had his arm around her shoulder. She’d gone still, her eyes on her hands in her lap.

He liked how his arm fit around her. How they fit together.

Maybe in some other life, she was the kind of woman he’d have ended up with. If he believed in karma. Not this life, though.

“One of the women in my group said it was because you were always telling people to turn around,” Rosemary said. “As if you didn’t want anyone to get to the summit.”

He’d forgotten for a minute that Rosemary was a climber. She’d come to Everest with that British team, taken her acclimatization as seriously as any of them, all geared up and kitted out to check the mountain off her bucket list so she could move on to the next one.

She’d go back to Everest sooner or later. Drop another forty or sixty or eighty thousand dollars into the bucket as soon as Nepal reopened for permits.

Rosemary and him—they had next to nothing in common.

He could tell her he’d spent months on the mountain and off it trying to get the Sherpa guides to organize and convince the government to protect their interests. He’d pushed to make it mandatory for the expedition companies to buy life insurance policies for Sherpa workers, to pay them fairly, to take them seriously as experts instead of expendable labor available at the lowest market price.

He could tell her it had fallen apart, just like the project with Brian had. That the avalanche killed it, or that he had, because he hadn’t been smart enough or good enough to make it work.