Chapter 26

     “Jesus Christ, Max, of course I know what a missing person is.  I can’t believe this.  You were…”

     “I don’t give a good God Damn for what you believe or not, Jerry.  You’re my partner out there in La La Land and I want to feel like a partner to you, God Damn it!  Now…  now…”  Max’s voice trailed off for a moment, then recovering, “It’s been three days and this inspector of an ‘inept-God-Damn-carry-over-of-a-Storm Trooper-wannabe’ is getting nowhere.  Pull Toro and the rest of them together, put them on a plane and get them here.”

      Jerry’s voice was calm and understanding as he replied, “Max, they’re just stunt men.  You think they can…”

     “’Just stuntmen, Jerry?’  Are you forgetting how long they’ve been with us, or how when the rescue teams turned back on Mt. Hood and left us for dead, these ‘just stuntmen’ figured out the route and guided the our whole damn crew and equipment down that mountain.  We’d both be dead along with everyone else if it hadn’t been for some kind of tenacity and guts these ‘just stuntmen’ threw our way.  So, don’t you ask if I think they can.  They don’t know the word ‘can’t’.  They’d go anywhere, do anything for us and this is ‘anything.’  I want her found.”

     “Max, you made your point and yes they love you, but you know how they are about traveling…”

     “First Class?”  interrupted Max.  “Yes, and they deserve it.  I’ve already chartered Virgin.  Tomorrow morning, LAX, 8am.”

***

 Ice can be something more than beautiful thought Samantha as her still warm breath passed across the ice cave’s sculptures of blue ice, one of Zermatt’s primary tourist attractions.  Her eyes moved to Ari sitting beside one of the Ice Palace’s stellar creations.  Ari’s head hung loose to his chest.  His fingers were red with cold as he made one last cross of the digital pen, rendering one last diagonal slash across the laptop screen.  His head slowly lifted to meet the gaze of Samantha’s eyes… eyes that now squinted at the screen’s rendering of small facial fragments behind the many lines that severed her digitized image, as if covered in shattering ice.  He too looked once again upon this obsessive challenge, this elusive meaning of beauty he’d pursued for… he had lost count, but it had been many years. 

“Tomorrow,” sighed Ari.  “Tomorrow, perhaps.”  He closed the screen and stood.  Samantha’s eyes remained fixed where a moment ago she had seen an expression of herself that made the chill of the air seem tepid compared to the cold reality that now rippled beneath her down jacket.  Ari stepped up to her and gently took her hand, assuring her that all was right.  She couldn’t explain her embracing of his body and nestling her cheek against his ear.  Is it appreciation?  Was it guilt?  Or was it just the shock of seeing herself as she might actually be… this foreign understanding that wasn’t any competition to Max, but felt so intimate.  It felt so natural that she didn’t know how to utter the words to express the moment or explain it to Max.  “I don’t understand this feeling.” 

“I’ve found my own revelatory moments perplexing also.  To understand it might be to lose it,” whispered Ari.

The simple yet troubling thought lingered as they impulsively traveled to Italy and… 

Later that night, as asked of her, Samantha stood naked before him, a strange willingness to be like his model, his...what?  The suggestion of never understanding the feeling suddenly became clear and real. 

“Your face is troubled,” said Ari. 

“To be so defenseless before you now is unlike me.  You were but an intruder just hours ago and now look at me.  It is unlike me, Ari.”

“Is unlike Sam or Samantha?” he asked.

“You are in your robe, I am without clothes.  You are not with camera.  I am without audience.  We are playing with explosives we’ve never known, don’t you think?”

“What do you think?” whispered Ari as she stepped over the tub’s edge of sculpted marble and into the steaming water.  Tears could no longer be contained, and Samantha wept. 

“Shhhh.”  he uttered and stepped back to light the balance of candles surrounding the deep tub.  Suddenly, he too found a trickle of tearful reality working its way down his cheek.

“Will you at least explain to me what these two days are suppose to mean?” asked Samantha. 

He turned from the candles and blew out the match.  As the smoke rose, his eyes followed the last undulating element of translucent life, up, up, and gone.  “I’m not sure.  It is happening like the pen… like the palette of colors that has changed the images so many times.  It just knows no end, only beginnings over and over.”

Samantha’s head arched back into the carved marble that formed the edge of the tub.  The clear water of the bath surrounded all but her naked face.  “I can’t believe I am here… this hotel… this distance from my husband… this closeness to… “

Ari knelt.  “Yes?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.  “Haven’t you ever felt so close to something so real, yet so foreign that you thought you were going…”  her voice quivered, “… insane?”

“Close as in what?”

“As in engulfed, no, as in centered.  Centered somewhere under my sense of touch.  Somewhere deep inside me.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“What is it?”

Ari paused.  “Your truth.  That which you have played with all your life… peering from around the corner.  Perhaps you are coming to face it finally.”

She stared up at the ceiling.  The sculpted artifacts of the 17^th century design made her sense of un-worldliness all the more intense.  “I don’t know why I came here with you.  I don’t know what compelled me to leave… but… you said we were going to just journey for a short time and that I might experience something different, something new, something that you would help me understand about myself.  I believed you.  I don’t know the why of that either.  We just walked through that station and boarded a train to Italy.  My…”

“Yes,” said Ari gently.

“My husband must be beside himself.  I’ve taken unanticipated leaves of absence before, and he knows I’m crazy, but not this crazy.”

“Yes.”  Ari paused and gazed deeply into her eyes.  “We are so inept at definitions sometimes.  Do you think you’re crazy?”

“I honestly don’t know what I am at this moment.”

“Nor, I,” he said as his hand gently created small ripples in the bath water.  He snapped several pictures, settled himself on the floor, his head resting on the tubs edge, his eyes focused upward like hers, and allowed silence to comfort them the two of them.  Both wanted the restrictions of the ceiling to disappear, just as all barriers seemed to have evaporated for them in the last forty-eight hours. 

As the steam rose toward the carved baroque figures above them, Ari’s eyes closed.  Samantha’s hand had finally touched him, if but only his hair.  And yet with that gentle, voluntary physical effort to understand him, she had completed the impression of the obsession that had consumed him for so long.  Beneath his eyelids, a sparkling darkness housed the answer… like stars in the distance, he saw the completeness of Samantha, a completion for all to know… if only he could translate the moment through the digital screen that lay closed across the room… waiting to be challenged… waiting to once again replicate the effort of a man possessed by truth as only he knew it.   

He wasn’t sure if it was the dripping water as she moved from the bath into the hotel’s complimentary white robe, but the strange sensations suddenly caused his eyes to close in modest respect.  Beneath his eyelids, he found his focus upon skin the texture of orchid petals, visualized the rippled water effect sliding gracefully from her legs toward her feet, its tempered scent of tropical flowers rising to his nostrils and invading his soul like a slow moving hurricane in search of a grounding… that something, anything that might absorb its power.  Has she any idea of her power, her ability to resonate a force within me that no one, no other influence has ever been capable of?”

 Suddenly, he was no longer just this enigmatic instrument for communication, but something out of character.  He was suddenly a simple man with a wondrous appreciation of his own power, his own gifted soul, his own passion.

Drifting ever deeper, his imagination, his vision replaced all he thought was her with a new gentleness.  He found himself a newborn child.  It was peace.  It was unlike any experience he had ever had, and it was all in his imagination as he opened his eyes, gazed at Sam sitting across the suite in a lounge chair staring at him as he rose and prepared to translate his mind’s reality to the computer.

Such began the night where blizzard snows forced the closing of railroad and all other forms of transport from the tiny Italian mountain village.  As snows sealed the windows from the outside world, bedside candles flickered their last breath as if wanting to never leave the sleeping woman in the dark again.  Ari sat at his computer and tried to regain some kind of control of the frightening images he’d taken of Sam as she slept.  These were not the images of the diva he’d followed for years, photographed for years and imagined for years.  No, he thought, these photos taken as she struggled to sleep through whatever was raging inside her were the reflections of personages never before seen by him, personas he felt were also new to Samantha and Sam. 

He placed the pen down and stared at the screen.  Here he sat, this man that had once found it easy to focus his lens on the mutilated and dying in a fox hole in Afghanistan; to manage a series of perfect shots while free-falling 15,000 ft. over Rio; this man that had spent years perfecting his concentration and technical finesse to create images on his computer unlike any other, was a man for the first time in his memory, locked up, frozen.  At that precise moment of realization, he felt that his fingers, his eyes, his mind, the tools of his sanity, were all but gone, if not withered to a point of no return.  Burnout.  And like the candles that now gave way… there was the darkness of burnout.

***

     The cargo bay door was pulled open by the Virgin Air baggage man.  The whirl of the conveyer belt merged with the sounds of jet engines being retired and fuel trucks rushing to keep on schedule.  The sound of the flight-landing announcement for the benefit of those waiting inside for the arrival reached clearly to one anxious party... Max Quinlan.  He waited patiently as the gangway was suddenly filled with the men he believed would find his wife… now missing for 4 days.  Hugs and sympathetic comments faded quickly as the group of 8 stuntmen and Max merged with the crowds filling the Geneva Switzerland airport.