Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

SHE HAS READsomewhere that this situation usually ends with people taking their clothes off. You get it wrong that final, fatal time and then, there you lie in your underwear, your bluish-white skin stretched tight and your eyeballs frozen solid, time passes and you become covered by a shroud of new snow that has to be gently brushed away by those who find you.

All she can see through the mist is a huge boulder just an arm’s length away, and if she leans her head a little to the left, the brightly colored tent looking like a moldy orange under its crust of frost.

She shouldn’t have lain down. But when she tries to raise her head, she realizes that her hair has got stuck in one of the countless Velcro pads on that state-of-the-art anorak, hugely expensive but still as cold as the heather beneath her, and she cannot find the energy to do anything about it.

Now, while she is still conscious, she must lock her fingers in a dramatic pose.

Oh my God, it looks as if she tried to grab at something at the moment of death!

And the rescuers will avert their heads in distaste. Someone in the team will break the arm so that the theatrical gesture won’t be in the way when the corpse is fitted into the bag tied to some kind of stretcher or sled so that it can be hauled down the hill.

What should she reach for, how should she make it look?

SHE HAD BEENgiven so much alcohol and legroom in the plane she felt like a rag doll left by a child in a massive armchair. They must be upgrading people to business class whenever there’s some hassle about the ticket. The guy next to her had presumably also drawn a winning number; both of them looked out of place among all the white shirts. She wore jeans and a college sweatshirt and he, a red-checked flannel shirt and hiking boots. So, here we are, she thought. And then felt uncertain if she’d actually said it out loud, because he quickly turned to her and smiled.

“It wasn’t anything.”

“What?”

She focused on the handbag she still had on her lap, disappeared into it like an animal digging for something. She had noticed him in the departure lounge. Thick blond hair, even though he was nearer fifty than forty. Neatly trimmed beard. Eyes so blue they might have been for decorative effect. He could easily have been the unknown fifth member of ABBA. Not her type. Though she wasn’t convinced she had a type.

She emerged from the handbag with a blister pack, twisted round to face the window, and swallowed ten milligrams of Valium without water. Three baggage handlers were heaving suitcases into the hold through some hatch she couldn’t see.

“Not keen on flying?” he asked.

She didn’t reply and the expectation of her saying something contracted like the field of vision before a fit, growing smaller and smaller until it became as uninteresting as the noises in the cabin. Suddenly, there were clouds outside just where the men had been moving about on the rain-soaked tarmac. Dr. Rice would have called it a hypnagogic state. A microsleep. A stewardess stopped at their row of seats. She asked for a whiskey and a Coke.

As she leaned across him to take the glass, the can of Coke, and the small bottle of alcohol, she noticed him glancing down at her breasts and, in these few seconds, enjoyed the sensation of remembering something so remote she had forgotten to miss it.

“My name is Ulf, if you want to know,” the man in the next seat said.

“Is that a real name?” she asked.

She finished her drink while he told her that he was on his way home from Nunavut in Canada after completing a two-year-long research project on the herding behavior of the musk ox. Once upon a time this would definitely have interested her; life had provided ideas for new short stories or novels, and people she met became models for fictional characters. Asking follow-up questions had become a habit. Her subjects usually grew fascinated by her eagerness to learn. Her questioning made her seem intelligent. Did you fly from Iqaluit? That part of her brain was still active and functioned independently, like clockwork without hands to move.

“What about you?” he asked. When he spoke, with what she assumed was a Scandinavian accent, the words came out loud and clear between his strong, white teeth.

She raised her eyes over the top of the seats, with their little white cloth squares placed there to catch businessmen’s dandruff, and looked for the stewardess with the beverage cart. Then, she said that she wanted to connect with her roots.

“I’ve spent some time on investigating my family origins.”

The phrase spent some time on sounded better than been totally fucking obsessed by . Just like clearing out the house, or like that online lecture she got so deep into.

After she had let him know she came from Wisconsin, he said, “I assume you’ve heard about the Wisconsin glaciation?”

She shook her head. It was too difficult to work out whether he was irritating or charming. He had commandeered the armrest between their seats.

“The Wisconsin Glacial Episode? Some 70,000 years ago?” he went on.

“It doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid. But it was a long time ago.”

He clearly didn’t find that amusing, and simply said, “Anyway, back in those days, there were musk oxen around in your home state.”

The stewardess with the drinks went off in the wrong direction.

“And now you’re planning to visit your relatives?”

She tipped the last of the half-moon-shaped bits of ice from the bottom of her plastic cup into her mouth and, with her mouth full to sound more casual, said, “I needed to get away for a while.”

She bent forward, her head between her knees, placed the now empty cup on the carpet, and pulled the neck of a bottle of Southern Comfort out of her bag. And drank, straight from the bag, as if it had been one of these old-style hiking bottles.

“The Inuit have this expression…” Ulf stared straight ahead when he said this, chortled, and drew his lips back, letting his row of large, white teeth light up his surroundings, “If you’re afraid, walk in a new direction.”

“Here’s another one” she said. “When the snow melts, you’ll see the dog shit.”

Halfway across the Atlantic, when the stewardess would no longer respond when she pressed the button, she slumped in her seat, wishing the man next to her was not asleep. She could hear his breathing. For a while, his eyelids trembled. Once they were still again, a narrow, white slit was still showing between his eyelashes, almost as if he were awake.

“As a biologist…” she began to address him in her thoughts. Naturally, he corrected her: “Zoologist.” She rolled her eyes at that and carried on with her imaginary account of the lecture she had watched online. With his training and experience, could Ulf please make sense of these ideas?

“You see, this famous physicist was speaking about how, among scientists, there is a growing acceptance of the notion that there’s something more than this life, than our world. Well, it’s not as simple…”

“But a greater consciousness?” he said, meaning to be helpful. “Something that is external to us, or is greater than any one individual? A dimension we don’t know about?”

“Exactly. And might there be something in it?”

“Yes, absolutely. It cannot be denied. By the way, you’re amazingly attractive. You still look great.”