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It's the ice, the ice, the ICE. It's cold and it's everywhere and he can't feel his toes and he can't feel his fingers and he can't feel himself and he's dying. Dying because another man is dead. And it's the ice again, all consuming, covering him and his heart and his head and the man who lies in the snow, gone, gone forever.
There's no fault, no blame, nothing to tell himself, nothing that will save him from the water freezing in feathery layers inch by inch over his heart and his stomach and his eyes, clouding everything he sees. There's nothing in front of him but a white cloud, a dark mass, and a steadily spreading stain of the darkest red. It grows darker and darker until it turns grey, and it is no longer blood, but an extention of the dark blob that was once his partner.
His partner, his translator, everything he had. He forces himself to move, to leave, to step away from the shadow that is slowly being consumed by the vast white that the blizzard lays down. As the body is covered and removed from sight it is also removed from his mind. He has to move, to go back, back to where they started. To where he started his brain corrects. For the sake of the job and for his own sanity he must accept that there is no they.
It's cold and it's everywhere and he can't feel his calves and he can't feel his arms and he can't feel himself and he's dying. In his mind the frozen parts shatter, they shatter and they fall off and with every step he takes into the blinding whiteness he feels as though a trail is being left behind, a breadcrumb trail of his own frozen dust that will never be followed. There is nothing but silence now, pure torturing silence in a world full of white and it feels like a dream.
A dream.
His frozen heart stops, and when it starts again it's beating hard. A dream, a dream, a dream it says. Finally, fault, blame, an out and he seizes it, oh does he sieze it, as if there was nothing else in the world.
It was dream. Only a dream. There was no shape in the snow, slowly spreading its grey shadow outward, there was never anything. No man. No hours in the car. No kisses no fighting no smell of gel no grime smudged smiles no anything. In the frozen white world he leaves it all behind with the frozen pieces still falling behind him. He sheds his frozen skin. He forgets.
They find him hours later, when the blizzard has begun to pass, collapsed a few miles down the road. He's huddled in on himself, unaware, fingers tinged with the dark beginnings of frostbite. Eventually he is talked to. Where are you from? they ask him. He doesn't know. Can you understand me? He doesn't know this either. He doesn't know anything but eventually his hands, wrapped heavily in bandages, find there way up and he signs. He's no help to them. They show him pictures. A man, a man with eyes that laugh and laugh and laugh and he doesn't know the man but he hates him. They show him another man. He doesn't know this one either but he comments that he looks weak, hands still slow and unsure of themselves. And they show him another man, and he knows this one, but he doesn't know why, and he doesn't understand why he feels so blank. Like there's a hole, like a piece of ice had melted and the water had dripped out leaving nothing but a giant gaping wound.
That man is dead he signs to the people, Why is he dead? What happened to him?
They come for him a few weeks later. He's no better. In some ways he's worse. After an hour with him they know. They know what's happened but they know they have a job to so.
In the end they decide it's a kindness.