Alex Morel - Survive

“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.”

Bounty isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what we found rummaging through the luggage (me) and bodies (Paul) left on the plane. We found four candy bars, a pack of gum (the old-fashioned sugary kind), cough syrup, sleeping pills (Paul pocketed those), Tylenol, a lighter, some plastic garbage bags from the snack service (for keeping stuff dry), two empty plastic soda bottles (Paul says we’ll fill them with snow and our bodies will melt them into water over time), a first aid kit, lots of non-working cell phones, one Sawtooth Mountain coffee mug, a camping lantern, a pair of sunglasses for me. And a second sleeping bag, which I immediately recognize as the end of my very short-lived physical experience with the opposite sex.

I follow him back to the tail of the plane, the wind at our backs now, so we make good time. We stop outside. For the first time, the sky is clear enough to see the outside of our shelter. The tail of the plane remains intact. The little wing on the right side of the tail is jammed into the snow, and the left wing sticks out at a forty-five-degree angle. The rudder streaks toward the sky and looms tall over the ledge, like the top of a broken cross marking a wintry grave.

I look at the bathroom door-it’s tilted sideways in the middle of the exposed circle that once seamlessly attached to the main cabin. The metal surrounding it is distressed; I imagine it having a voice and screaming from the pain of being ruthlessly torn from its body. Crooked and slightly indented at the middle, the door represents the flimsy line of protection between the wilderness and us.

Paul pushes open the bathroom door and starts arranging all the stuff we found inside. I walk behind the tail of the plane and am hit by a toxic wall of spilled jet fuel. The snow is saturated with a bluish-green hue that streaks back from behind the plane. The winds, I think, must have pushed the fumes away from our cabin. I quickly cover my mouth and nose, but the stench is strong, and the combination of hunger and dehydration and the fumes overwhelms me. I begin to wobble, and Paul’s hand suddenly grabs my forearm.

“Whoa-you can’t inhale that stuff at all. It’ll kill you.”

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“That’s one of the reasons we can’t stay here. If the winds shift, we’ll be inhaling jet fuel all day and night.”

I nod, but I’m too weak to process the phrase “can’t stay here.” It rings in my mind, but I can’t quite bring myself to confront it or Paul.

Paul walks me back and opens the door.

“You first,” he says.

I step in, and Paul has organized things like a little nest for us. It makes my heart warm. He climbs in behind me, and it is snugger than before. He’s so big and the tail so tilted and cramped that all we can do is lean against the wall together, in a semi-lying-standing position.

We get settled in our bag and then Paul hands me the coffee mug filled with snow. We look at the rest of our loot, which I’ve laid out on the floor: basically candy bars, which I could eat by myself for one lunch, but that’s all we have and we’ll have to make it last.

“Hold up the mug,” he says.

He takes his tiny lantern, breaks the glass around the flame and lights it. It provides almost no heat, but Paul places the cup directly onto the flame and melts the snow.

“Why don’t we just eat the snow?”

“Like I said before, you’ll die. We’re already at risk for hypothermia. Eating snow will drop your body temperature even more. Eventually, we will use our bodies to melt the snow in these soda bottles, but we need water now. That’s more important than food by a long shot.”