The Color of Everything

The Color of Everything

1

The past, she is haunted, the future is laced. —­Gregory Alan Isakov


It’s December 28, 2010. I wake up in a blue room and panic for a moment because I’ve forgotten where I am. Curtains with delicate floral patterns and tattered hems bend the shadows of iron bars. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, moans though the windows. I brush the curtains aside and the damp air and words of the salāt al-­fajr, the dawn prayer, spill in. Islamabad spreads out below me as clumps of dark shapes, interrupted by dots of orange and green. A streetlight. A kitchen window. A barking dog. The soft, sticky sound of tires on wet pavement. Several blocks away, the minaret of a mosque pierces the sky, illuminated against the darkness, and the muezzin calls out from the too-­loud, tinny speakers. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate how they compel a quarter of the world to fall to their knees in prayer five times a day.

Six weeks later, on the side of the thirteenth-­highest mountain in the world, I’m praying to anyone who might listen and I remember the salāt al-­fajr, the first morning in Pakistan, and every morning before it. I’m not religious but this morning I’m being buried alive. I will slowly run out of air and suffocate under the snow. It seems as good a time as any to pray.

They’ll find my body in the spring when my orange down suit emerges from the melting snow and feathers float from the tears. After months of uncertainty, Mom and Dad will finally have closure, and all the fights and fuss and anger we endured together will seem silly compared to my death. I wonder if my eyes will be open or closed and if they will still be blue.

These are my thoughts while dying.

Like my childhood, the avalanche becomes sharp fragments of memory as bits of life’s strata overlap and blur. A cold blast of snow shoved into my open mouth as I gasp for breath. Snow up my nostrils and down my collar. I’m wet and annoyed that I can’t scream because I’m choking. Colorful splinters appear amidst violent flashes of black and white as the weight of my body is sucked deeper into the debris. Down is up. Up is down. Up and down become concepts and concepts are useless in this moment. My joints feel loose and limp in their sockets as fear is replaced by instinct, instinct is replaced by anger, and finally, anger is replaced by resignation. Time dilates and my brain thrashes to make sense of everything. Of anything. One second. One year. A birthday. A date. A bowl of Cheerios. Parking tickets. Song lyrics and books and movies. Faces and things unsaid and words I wish I could unspeak and actions I wish to undo and things I never did, and I remember that I have taxes to pay. I hear Dad say, “Nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes.” Life does flash before my eyes but there is no poetry to it. It’s just Polaroids of a collection of things, emotions, and questions.

My senses expand and blend into a single, encompassing sensation. This is dying. I hear the snow in my mouth and taste blue and smell frozen as everything becomes something different altogether before crashing back into a life unfinished. The fragments get sucked from my brain into a black hole, a singularity. I’m not ready to die. But I am dying and no amount of swimming, no god, and no prayer can save me. I summon all the force I have left and thrust my hand and head and life toward what I hope is the sky. In sha’Allah . . . if God wills . . . 

I stop fifteen seconds and lifetimes later. I’m entirely buried aside from one arm extended and shoved under my chin, cocking my head up toward a gray sky. I’m tangled in purple rope as the snow in my mouth melts and tastes like metal and drips down my throat and I drool. My breath comes in jerking, frenzied gasps that move too quickly to fill my lungs. I free my arm and dig around my head and neck and chest, working frantically to free myself from the snow before another avalanche comes. Simone and Denis are dead and buried and I will leave their bodies under the snow and crawl down the valley alone and I will scream.

I thrash and dig and whimper. Another minute passes before I hear Simone, which doesn’t make sense because he’s dead and it’s too soon for a ghost to be talking to me. Ghosts take time to gestate and find their immaterial voice in the material world. Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts—­I’m an atheist again. But now the ghost is on top of me and I feel his hands. He’s not a panicked hallucination and says, “Cory, everything is okay.” I’m alive and everything is okay, yet nothing is okay. I hear another voice step back into the world as Denis says, “Simone! I too am okay!” No one is dead.

I untangle my camera and turn it toward my face as I begin to cry. It’s a reflex now. It’s all I know how to do to stop my brain when life is going too fast, when it all becomes too big to understand. I am the snow collapsing on itself and I feel myself breaking into a thousand pieces. Maybe a picture can hold them together. The world is small around me as I kneel in the snow on the edge of my own death and cry tears of shock, pain, and relief.

Forty-­seven minutes pass. Frozen sweat and tears hang from my beard in salty globs of ice. My expression is full of confusion and exhaustion and terror. The reflex comes again. I turn the camera on myself and press the shutter five times as I stumble down through the icefall. My legs feel soft. This moment is a single grain of sand and will be suspended forever in the neck of the hourglass of my life. I am at once the same and different as overlapping versions of myself—­my life bisected by a great swath of snow.

For those of you who are here for adventure and climbing and pictures, that’s all in here, but this is not a book about that. It is a story of me, and a story about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the brain and the heart: mine and maybe yours. It’s a story of the binaries that draw us to the middle. It is black and white and right and wrong and joy and despair. It is success and failure and madness. It is the before and the after and everything in between.