Caitlin and I arrived at the park the next morning. She drove me in early, a punishment for having to sleep on her couch. It was still dark, and we could only see the snow drifting across the headlights as I fought the urge to fall back to sleep.
I was cold, hungover, waiting around our break room just to watch the sunrise come through the window. The lights buzzed quietly. The cheap coffee I drank out of a styrofoam cup tasted like chemicals. As I took the final sip, I felt an urge to sink my teeth into the cup and tear it apart.
I was laying my head on the table and moving a loose piece of coffee bean across my gums when Caitlin got a call. “Hey Buck,” she said through a yawn. Each part of her face looked like it was sinking out of exhaustion, but her brow furrowed.
“Why would you call me if you’re right outside?”
I chuckled until Caitlin tapped my shoulder.
“Kid, you didn’t see any cars, did… Buck, it was pitch dark when we got here. We didn’t see anything. Are you saying that girl’s car is still there?”
She grabbed her jacket and braced herself. She opened the door to Buck standing in the parking lot silhouetted against the sunrise, next to the only car that wasn’t ours. It was empty. The doors were unlocked, and her bags were inside.
“Call David,” Buck said, “we need the helicopter.”
Caitlin took the call while Buck and I walked around the parking lot, once again looking for footprints.
“I shouldn’t have left,” he said, “It was wrong to leave when she was struggling like that.”
“It’s alright, Buck, we’ll find her.”
Buck’s eyes glossed over the bumps in the snow but he never stopped to look. Everything around the parking lot looked undisturbed. Waiting for a rustle to help us find her felt strange, almost as if the stillness was now mocking us. Buck heard the futility in it, but he was used to it. I trusted him and followed quietly until the air started to convulse with the helicopter blades cutting over the mountain.
The snow in the parking lot turned into a pulsing tidal wave as the helicopter landed. The pounding of the engine split across my head and turned my hangover into an awful migraine. After grabbing binoculars, we boarded and ascended.
I didn’t bother to ask where we were going, and nobody bothered to tell me. Everyone quickly took to looking over the landscape. After a few minutes, David gestured at the glacier field in front of us and began to descend. My stomach sank. Once everyone saw the spot he was pointing at, the rest of the ride was just preparation. Controlling your breath, keeping the mind from slipping away, and thinking of what the right thing to say is once it’s time for explanations.
“Hypothermia, frostbite,” Buck said, standing next to the body, “and what appears to be a case of paradoxical undressing.”
Looking at her, my eyesight crashed between clear and distorted. Even though everything was still, I only saw glimpses of her through what my mind would allow.
She was keeling next to the Eye, almost in the same spot as Hal, and her jacket was open, exposing her bare chest. Her body had been eaten by the cold. Her face was cracked and pale except for her nose, which was so black and shriveled it looked almost as if it had been scorched.
In a fit of undressing brought by the cold, she had unzipped her jacket, but she had also done something I hadn’t seen in cases of hypothermia before. She had not only torn through her cotton shirt, but through her spandex sports bra. Caitlin removed one of her gloves and an investigation of her hands revealed large fractures and tears in her fingers, indicating the immense strain she put on herself to rip everything open. Next to her body was a speck of red in the snow. I scooped it up and realized a fingernail fell out of her glove, and it was painted in her blood.
Caitlin zipped up her jacket to cover her naked body, although from bowing into the snow, her chest had been stripped of identifiable features. Everything had turned black from frostbite, leaving her skin looking ancient and long past the rot it had to endure. She was brittle, and moving her body produced sickening scapes and cracks. When I heard a snap from her hip as her body was put onto a stretcher, I ran back to the helicopter and cowered from my migraine.
The return was muted. The words out of Caitlin and Buck were only wisps of things I could catch. Comfort. Contacting the family. Another break from rescue work. It was practically forced upon me, and this time I didn’t complain. I knew I would get through it, but I didn’t know how long it would take.
That night I went to Anchorage and drank until I disappeared into the smoke of the club floor. The music made the migraine feel like it was pulse away from cracking my skull, but for a few hours, I had a new rhythm other than my heart.
In the early morning, I dreamed of men lost on the mountain. They were frozen beneath trees breaking beneath the snow and I couldn’t see if they were going up the mountain or down. I went up to one of the men and as I pushed a branch to the side, I woke up grasping my chest, praying that it wasn’t frozen.
The agreement was with Caitlin that when the nightmares stop, I can return. Buck showed up randomly one night to have a cigarette with me. Neither of us smoke, and we didn’t say much of anything during it, but after he left I slept a little better. At one point I even tried to call my mother, but she didn’t pick up.
When I return to work, I’ll have to take the wild of the mountain that I don’t want with the kind that I do. I’m continuing to write this thinking that something will come together for me. Of all the bodies I helped recover, I can’t understand what it was about this one that revealed to me that I never had a choice in the matter. Maybe it was just seeing the decay at the wrong time, or that the Eye, for some reason, keeps being the wrong place. All I want is to choose hope. Someone has to.
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