At the Edge of Waking by Holly Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

the ice structures for figments of the whiteout at first, but then we were in among them and the wind died into fitful gusts. The line of flags ended, irredeemably scattered, unless this was its proper end and the former crevasse was utterly transformed. It was beautiful. Even exhausted and afraid I could see that, and while Andy shouted for Miguel and Del hunkered over our packs digging out the camp stove and food, I pulled out my camera.
    [Digital clarity is blurred by swirling fog. Yet the images are unmistakable, real.]
    Crystalline structures defy any sense of scale. This could be a close-up of the ice-spray caught at the edge of a frozen stream, strands and whorls of ice delicate as sugar tracery, until the videographer turns and gets a human figure into the frame. The man in red bends prosaically over a steaming pot, apparently oblivious to the white fantasia rising up all around him. The mic picks up the sound of a woman’s voice hoarsely shouting, and the camera turns to her, a tall green figure holding an orange flag, garish among all the white and blue and glass. Andy, says the videographer. Hush a minute, listen for an answer. The human sounds die, there’s nothing but the many voices of the wind singing through the spires. A long slow pan then: pillars, walls, streets—it’s impossible not to think of them that way. A city in the ice. An inhuman city in the ice.
    Movement.
    The camera jerks, holds still. There’s a long, slow zoom, as though it’s the videographer rather than the lens that glides down the tilt-floored icy avenue. [The static fog drifting, obscuring the distant view.] Maybe that’s all the movement is, sea-fog and wind swirled about by the sharp, strange lines of the ice-structures. [The wind singing in the mic, glass-toned, dissonant.] But no. No. It’s clarity that swirls like a current of air—like a many-limbed being with a watery skin—gliding gravity-less between the walls, in and out of view. [Pause. Go back. Yes. A shape of air. Zoom. A translucent eye. Zoom. A vast staring eye.]
    The camera lurches. The image dives to the snowshoe-printed ground. The videographer’s clothing rustles against the mic, almost drowning her hoarse whisper. We have to get out of here. Guys! We need to—
    We roped Miguel between Del and me, with Andy again bringing up the rear. It was an endless hike, the footing lousy, the visibility bad, all of us hungry and aching for a rest. Del tried to insist that we eat the instant stew he’d heated before we left, but I was seeing transparent squids down every street, and when Miguel stumbled out of the ice, crooning wordlessly to the wind even as he clutched at Andy’s hands, Del let himself be outvoted. “This is how climbers die,” he said to me, but I said to him, “If you’re on an avalanche slope you move as fast and as quietly as you can, no matter how hungry or tired you are.” Death is here: I wanted to say it, and didn’t, and while I hesitated the silence filled with the glass-harmonica singing of the wind—with Miguel’s high crooning, which was the same, the very same. So I didn’t need to say it. We followed the broken line of scattered flags back to camp.
    And now I sit here typing while the others sleep (Miguel knocked out by pills), and I look up and see what I should have seen the instant we staggered in the door. All of our gear, so meticulously sorted by Miguel, is disarranged. Not badly—we surely would have noticed if shelves were cleared and boxes emptied on the floor—but neat stacks and rows have become clusters and piles, chairs pushed into the table are pulled askew, my still camera and its cables are out of its bag my hands are shaking as I type this there’s a draft the door is closed the windows weatherproofed I’m pretending I don’t notice but there’s a draft moving behind me through the room.
    November 25:
    I took my ax to the tent where we still kept the ice-shape Del and I brought up from the bottom of the