Eric Dimbleby: White Out

Annie was starting to forget what reality even looked like. This icy white winter had overtaken all of her memories as well. Life before the big storm didn’t even exist.

“Can I talk to my Paulie? Please?” Annie asked, unwilling to engage in an argument that Christian couldn’t win. No point in shoving it in his face. She’d made up her mind about venturing out into the wild storm.

“Dammit, Annie, don’t change the subject.” She could hear a hint of rage creeping into his voice. He never felt rage towards anybody, only towards the situation, but it came off as nasty when he spoke in such a manner. He was a gentle man by nature. A caring man. And she hated what had become of them, shitty weather aside. They were poison in each other’s presence. It wasn’t a new thing, but it was in a full on fester nowadays.

Annie could see the frost of her breath. The oil had run out two days earlier, and the remnant heat only survived due to the well-insulated offices in her building. Tony and she huddled for warmth the night before—only once—but it was a sufficient enough sign to Annie that it was time to make their way home, to their respective families.

“It’s unbearable now. I don’t think we’ll last much longer in this building. We’ve been burning old file folders in a pit out by the backdoor, but it burns up quick. Business parks don’t keep stocks of firewood available, unfortunately. Food neither. If I eat one more damn bag of corn chips from the vending machine, I’m going to vomit.” She hated that she sounded like a prissy sorority girl.

“You need to stay put. This’ll all blow over any day now.”

Annie chuckled quietly, and the sensation warmed her for a moment. Body motion kept the blood circulating. Sexual intercourse, she had once read in one of her bored-house-wife magazines, was the best thing a near icicle of a human being could do for themselves. She tried not to think of Tony. They had cuddled once, and she was sure that he got the wrong idea. It was about survival, and nothing more.

She parted her chapped lips, speaking into the receiver with a resolute pace and tone, “You’re not seeing this for what it is, Christian. This isn’t going to end. It’s been four weeks , and I haven’t seen Paulie. I can’t even see out of the first or second floor windows. It’s at least 20 foot drifts pushing up against the side of the building, and we’re only a few days away from freezing or starving to death. Don’t you get it? Can’t you understand the situation I’m in?”

Annie heard him pull away from the phone, trying to mask a disdain that had, as of late, become unbearable to them all. “We’re all in this situation. This hasn’t been a cake walk for me, either. Paulie is fucking terrified,” he said, with an unspoken amendment of I’ll Have You Know . On top of that, Christian never swore. If he dropped a curse, then that meant he was losing his usually well-rounded marbles. The last thing she wanted him to do around their petrified son was to lose his shit.

“You need to let me do this and be okay with it. It’s the only way I’m coming home. It’s only eight miles.”

“Nine miles,” he corrected.

“Eight and a half, actually,” Annie shot back, trying to retain her composure. Compassionate as he was, Christian was also as stubborn as a mule, and in equal proportions.

“You need to think about your son. He told me he’d cry forever if you didn’t come home soon, and I think he meant it. You should have seen his face when he said it. Nearly killed me.” And there it is, thought Annie, the sweet man with the big heart that always made everybody else feel inferior and unworthy of his love. He was so damn perceptive, so damn heartwarming, but he only did it to make everybody else batty.

“My son is the only thing I’m thinking about.”

She could feel the hurt in his extended silence, transporting through the crackly phone lines, weeping through the receiver in utter silence. It was cold of her to imply that she wasn’t thinking of him, but maybe there was some truth to it. Even without the purported end of times, she rarely thought of him. Never did she step away from her computer, draw in a deep breath, and wonder what he was doing. Maybe most couples were that way, when they were so engaged in day-to-day parenting and economic survival. Maybe this unwarranted hatred wasn’t so strange after all.

Hate. Yes. From a certain perspective, she hated his fucking guts.

It came and went; hate then love then love then hate times three.

Two days of hate, one day of love, one day of hate, four days of love. Though she flipped and flopped on an emotional rollercoaster, she couldn’t quite get a handle on what she was really thinking or feeling. The night before, she’d dreamt of pushing Christian into an oncoming train, awaking to feel a painful guilt all through her being, wishing she could take back those subconscious thoughts that plagued her.

He didn’t deserve it. The shithead. The saint.

When the hell had she become such a horrible person? This wasn’t the little girl that kissed her mother on the cheek every morning. This wasn’t the same girl who won the spelling bee in third grade. That girl was dead as a doornail.

“Listen…,” she trailed off, still a bit fazed by how nasty she sounded, though she had no conscious control over that side of herself. “Tony has a really solid plan, so he says. It’s not fool proof, but it’s the best chance I’ve got if I don’t want to die out here.”

“Tony.”

“Yes, Tony.”

“Of course. Is Winnie still there?”

“She left last night, in the middle of the night. We couldn’t stop her. She was losing it, Christian. I doubt she made it far.”

A fabricated image of Winnie paused inside of her mind for a moment, of the chubby woman with the ruddy pink cheeks, trudging along the top layer of soft snow, sinking deep, up to her waistline, moving no more than a few feet per minute. In this mental recreation, the secretary disappeared into a copse of trees, blubbering hysterically. Within the first four hours of her doomed escape, she probably got hungry.

She won’t last long , Tony said, upon discovering the mottled tracks from the third floor window. He crudely guessed out loud that, she’d either die of a heart attack or drive herself mad , whichever came first . Either that, or she’d try to eat her arm , he barbed. Annie hadn’t found that very funny. He was a cold-hearted bastard like that.

They would have tried the best they could to talk her out of it, but she’d left in the middle of the night, inching away. Frosty little lemming , he called her. Tony had called out the window for her, hoping that she was within earshot. Annie wanted to trek out into the blasting snow to find her. It is better to conserve our warmth and survive another day , Tony replied. She was a depressed old spinster, said Tony, staring out the window at the footprints of their former coworker, adding, She was probably two years shy of a heart attack, anyhow.

“Poor Winnie,” mumbled Annie, biting back tears. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry because Winnie had most likely died, or because of the terrible things Tony said about the woman behind her back, both pre and post mortem.

“I see,” replied Christian.

Silence.

“So it’s just you and Tony?”

Annie nodded, staring at a patch of carpet on the floor, noting that it was frayed from years of wear and tear. Everything broke down on a long enough time line, carpets and marriages alike. She suppressed the urge to sigh, whispering into the phone, and said, “That’s right. Tony and I.”

He’d never liked Tony. And why would he? The guy was a slithering creep. Christian had once observed the way Tony looked at Annie during an office Christmas party. Ever since then, the mere mention of Tony’s name on Annie’s tongue would turn Christian’s usually pleasant face sour.