I wake. Light splinters in from under the door. Paul’s arms are draped around me: his right arm snakes around my body, and his left circles above and around, cupping my waist, his hand gripping my side just above the hip bone.
I’ve read about the wilderness and I know that you can experience hallucinations in extreme cold. Because there’s a twenty-ish guy spooning me, I question whether this is indeed a hallucination. Am I losing my mind? I consider the possibility that I am actually dead and that this is the beginning of an unexpected afterlife. Could I have conjured up a more conventional scenario than to wake up in the arms of a beautiful boy?
I don’t want to move, for fear of waking him. I listen to his breathing, which is full and deep. His breath is warm on my neck. Maybe somebody will come today and find us and it will all be over. I wish I had a close friend I could tell. There’s nobody at the institution but the Old Doctor. He’d love it. I can imagine him saying, “Jane, don’t you see now? You were alive up there, face-to-face with death. Things happen when you’re alive in the world.”
“Are you awake?” Paul’s voice is deep and rusty.
“Yes, why?”
“You were talking to yourself. I thought maybe you were dreaming.” He shifts around a bit, moving his right arm up to stretch it.
“What was I saying?” I ask.
“You don’t want to know.”
Oh my God.
“Tell me, please,” I say.
“I’m kidding.”
Thank you, God.
“My hands feel better,” he remarks as he flexes his bruised left fingers. “But my head is killing me.
“Mine hurts too,” I say.
“We’re dehydrated. A headache is the first sign from the body. We need to find water.”
That’s true, no doubt, but what I’m thinking is I really have to pee badly. The bizarre nature of this situation dawns on me. I’m sharing a bathroom, literally, with a guy I met, in real time, maybe three hundred words ago. Sure, we survived an airplane crash together and I saved his life and I guess we have slept together, which may have created a bond so profound it will transcend time, but the thought of peeing in front of him still feels way out of the question.
“I hate to break this up,” he whispers.
“Why are you whispering?”
“What do you mean?” he says.
“You’re whispering and we’re alone in the middle of nowhere, in a bathroom.”
“Right,” he agrees, and then shouts loudly: “Nobody can hear us, can they?”
Not a hallucination: he’s just as annoying now as he was when I first met him. But I can’t help finding some of his antics charming.
He reaches over and pulls the zipper down on the sleeping bag.
“We need to do some investigating. And I actually need to use the toilet,” he confides.
“Me too. The bathroom.”
We both stand, he hunched over and me leaning against the sink, and look at each other for a minute.
“I’m not peeing in front of you,” I say.
“Right.”
He steps into his boots and laces them up. He pulls the door open and looks back out at me. “Don’t take too long; it’s freezing out here.”
He steps out into the light and pulls the door shut. I know he can still hear me and hearing is almost worse than seeing. Either way I have stage fright, so to speak.
“Start singing,” I shout.
“What?”
“I said start singing so you can’t hear me pee.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Start singing or I won’t pee.” I start kicking the door with my foot. “And I won’t let you in.”
He clears his throat and then breaks into song. “Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, ends up making love to a sofa or girl… Death or glory, just another story.”
I immediately let go, which is the most glorious sense of relief I’ve ever felt in my life. When I’m done, I move my foot and stand up and adjust. Then I pull the door slightly in to indicate I’m finished. Paul quickly jumps in and pushes the door shut. We are standing face-to-face. The top of my head only reaches his chin, which is black and stubbly.
I look up into his blue eyes.
“It’s very cold,” he says.
“I wasn’t aware.”
“Sarcastic, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it isn’t just cold. It’s bitter cold. It’s negative cold.”
“That means exactly nothing to me,” I say.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well,” he mumbled. “My pee-it froze as it hit the snow. It has to be very, you know, cold. It must have dropped forty or fifty degrees last night.” He paused. “And the wind is kicking powder and ice around; feels like flying needles on your face.”
“Someone will find us soon, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“But they always find people when they crash. They must know we’ve crashed.”
“Not in a blizzard and on a mountain in the Bob Marshall Wilderness,” he says. “Even if they knew where we were, it could take days or weeks to get climbers up here… With this amount of snow, we might not be found for weeks, maybe months.”
“Bob what?”
“Bob Marshall Wilderness. There are no roads. It’s two hundred and fifty miles of roadless mountains, and I think we’ve landed somewhere in it.”
“How will we get out?”
“I’m not sure, but down here they’ll never find us,” he says gravely.
“If you’re trying to scare me, you’ll have to do better than that,” I say, remembering all the cuts and blood and pain that landed me at Life House in the first place. Slowly watching yourself die and being unable to respond sounds wildly familiar to me. In fact, I think freezing to death sounds pretty straightforward.
“Do you know what happens when you die of dehydration?”
“I think so.” Now he’s starting to scare me because I am so thirsty, my saliva is sticking to my tongue and cheeks like paste.
“Well, here’s the thing: you can eat the snow and freeze to death, or we can stay here and die of dehydration.”
“Is there a third option?”
“The plane. We have to skin it clean of every drop of water and every morsel of food and every piece of equipment we can find in it.”
“And after that?”
“We’ll decide when the time comes.”