How It All Goes Down
The People Have Spoken
- Mortenson returns home to San Francisco, where Dr. Marina breaks up with him. "I've started seeing Mario again" (9.12), she says. (Mortenson: Always the Luigi, never the Mario…)
- She's sad that even though Mortenson wrote to her from Pakistan, all he talked about was his work, never her.
- To make matters worse, Mortenson gets fired from his job at the medical center.
- And the final straw: He gets mugged once on the way home. He feels "Broke. Broke down. Broken." (Quick, someone call Louie Zamperini.)
- Mortenson rents a room from a guy named Witold Dudzinski and spends his time moping; to distract himself, he thinks about the bridge dilemma in Korphe.
- One day, Mortenson gets a call from Dr. Louis Reichardt, one of the first Americans to scale K2.
- Reichardt tells Mortenson to call Hoerni, saying, "Ask him to pay for the bridge. Believe me, he can afford it" (9.65). Well if you say so…
- Mortenson dials the phone.