BEN BRIAR

The hood of my jacket blew off my head as the strong winds tousled my full hair into the same mess it had been in the morning. Full hair at my age was an achievement to develop. I was old and no one could say that I looked young anymore. The revealing white in my hair instead of a dull gray could be attributable to the ice and snow that I live for, that I breathe to gain an inner understanding of oneself on this Earth.

    But there is no one to say I'm looking old, except for the mirror back at the camp. An expedition does require at least two souls to accompany each other into the icy wasteland that is the Antarctic, so I brought along an old knave to preheat the camp and carry my bag when I wasn't feeling like it. And that was almost always because I hated the fellow, and I hated the branch of government that funded my research to give me this ever-lying half of a man. Sure, he's renowned for his own university thesis, but all he wants is to steal this project from my hands. I can see it in his eyes and I can see it in his heart. He has no intentions of sharing and no concept of fairness. His name is Val Cobuge and I can say for a fact, he is old.

    There is someone who teases my elderliness. She is the only bubbly fun that exists this far south of a mainland that is green or concrete. I am training her to be my successor. To know the ice like the back of her hand. She is very young, and a source of sunshine that continues to warm the snow. She should be at home in Los Angeles on summer break, but she would rather spend it with her two bickering expeditionists in the worst conditions. Maybe I should have been at home in LA as well. In my warm condo. But if my protege is persistent, I am too. Her name is Jennifer and I love her like a granddaughter and she loves me to death.

    My research in the South Pole heavily relies on unexplained and unsolved disappearances. What drove me to this job was my father's career and posthumous legacy as an expeditionist himself. He went missing in the snow when I was just a boy, which profoundly affects my emotions when digging into my work. I am not exploring the unknown, but I am perceiving the known as an underworld. I am the detective with a dim-witted partner and a little girl, connecting disappearances through theories and collected field evidence, to find the killer. In this case, it might be the snow that buries them so far underneath our noses, we can only sniff their whiff and not relocate their graves to a more urban landscape.

    The predicament we find ourselves in is the fault of Prof. Cobuge. I was busy breathing in the snow in the morning and so I absent-mindedly left the task of checking the weather to Val. Jennifer was busy making my coffee and her coffee, and I can't even remember if I even touched that coffee or if Jennifer should be drinking coffee. All you have to do to check the weather is to walkie-talkie it in, ask for the weather and with the ministration of the person on the other end, you will receive accurate predictions of the weather. It is usually my job, I have to admit, but I wanted to nag the professor for the enjoyment of nagging.

    He disobeyed orders and forgot about it, and I forgot about asking him again. We got to a site of the disappearance of a young couple, waving our metal detectors around until the sun got real low. Then the blizzard kicked in. Of all the days we forgot to check the weather, a snow blizzard occurred. Our camp was almost two kilometres away. We had no buggies, only a set of sled dogs that tramped into the thickening snow. We didn't know if there were any camps closer or if the blizzard would die out soon.

    Our sled dogs carried us about halfway to the camp, but I could tell they were tired and freezing just as we were. We emptied our equipment, but the lighter weight would not align with our survival. The ropes that held the sled dogs in place tore into strands from the bitter frost and the animals roamed free, but they would be lost to the blizzard without us reining them back to camp. Val cursed at me and I arrived to the conclusion that he was the most hated person in the Antarctic. This thought was enough to ignite a heated exchange of pointless remarks and criticisms that would be underlying if I ever spoke to him and underlying if he spoke to me, but it was brought to middle ground by the blizzard that blew snowflakes in our goggles.

    Now I'm here with my hoodie blown off my head, my hair flapping and freezing as we head back and I resent our argument and having Jennifer take the backseat. The bile in my stomach is burning in contrast to the relentless ice tornado that perforates my gloved fingers. It gnaws until it cuts me off with the hand completely and I can no longer feel the blood circulating. I see Jennifer ahead at a peak. I ramble up the snow that slides off my foot curves and blows so strongly back into my face, I think about fainting against it. I just hope it sprays into Val's face, who is crawling behind me like the underclassmen he is.

    "Jennifer," I shouted with my hand outreached to her, "pull me up!" She didn't answer me or turn around to help me because she had a look of doom on her face as she stared out over the peak. And as I pulled my own damn self up with my one hand, not frozen, I too had that look of doom. Beyond the peak was a rift, a crack in the ice, stretching far enough to not be capable of jumping across and too deep to even see the cold water that I knew would moat the bottom. A gamut of far-fetched ideas of how to get across scrolled through my head, but none would have us live.