B.I.V. - UNDER ARCTIC ICE (THIS IS HOW YOU DROWN)

B.I.V. was born and raised in California City, CA and resides in Queens, NY. When not writing, they are landscaping, specializing in dangerous plants. They enjoy predicting the future and the art of staring contests. They are currently working on a short story collection The Other Lives I've Kept, a novel about Lenore, OR, and an epic poem. 

Under Arctic Ice (This is How you Drown)
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​          “How the fuck did we end up here?”
          “We are on vacation. Adventure right? Cause we go where the fuck we want?”
          I love her reasoning - ‘Why the fuck not.’ Not even a question. Just another dissident comment on top of the viewing platform overlooking the Arctic playground, where the only color comes from the three different flags on the five different ships in our view. The UK’s X and + slowly down the strait within a few feet of the cracked jagged frozen teeth riven by the earliest icebreakers, China’s rectangular red covering about half of the metallic steel already anchored in the “bay” which is in actuality a lake, and the Maple Leaf flying from the back of the last three small ice runners, returning in circles before they dart back east into the number glaciation - the paralyzed Hyperborean.        
           “No, they are on vacation.”         
           “Do you really want to be on a ship like those people? On a big ole American ship red white and blue dripping down the sides? Because, you know, you can work for like, a bank or something. Maybe take some oil tycoons and tax evaders here on a bizness trip.”
           “The US doesn’t have routes up here.”
        “You can bring some underage girls too in fine fur coats. Really anything you could fucking want.”  
           “Oh please fucking stop.”
           “Skull-fuck polar bear carcasses.”
           Her sarcasm allows me to retreat inward, settling in the pockets of my skull where nothing ever happens. She’s a Pragmatic Idealist. Alternatively I am self-conscious and nervous about my diffident choices. I settle on; she believes. I sometimes think I fell in love with her because I wanted to be her.
           I pluck her earrings a few times with my index finger, and she turns closer to me with a scrunched up frozen raw face. I was worried about frostbite, but Airea insists your blood is enough keep you warm - just don’t let it stop.
           That’s why I think I will die first. I would choose to not have frostbite, and counter it by putting on a coat or hat, or realistically just going inside. Airea will just believe she won’t get frostbite, and would be naked in a snow pile avalanche attack and be as warm as if she was in a bathtub. Maybe it was an advanced form of meditation, but I was almost sure that she was not human, which makes the love so much stronger.
 
           “Holy Hell! Look at the puffins!”
           Airea follows my outreached hand to the puffins popping up in the middle of the lake. I’ve never seen one in real life, but I know what they look like, but I do not know their habitat, or really anything about them.
           “Wow, they are way bigger than I thought!”
           Airea looks back towards my dumb excited face and I wish that her piercings in her ears, nose, and mouth shined more spectacularly than her eyes. No matter what was said, they always had a shimmer of empathetic sadness, or just some decent understanding, that was surrendering. Through the irony and derision, I always understood that at a fundamental human level, she was ‘saintly.’ And I hate reducing my lexicon to the word ‘saintly,’ but nothing comes close to describing her accurately. I once told her she was ‘saintly,’ and she took a knife to my throat. This is while she and I were still just dating. She told me, ‘Never call me saintly again. The path of God is saintly, the path of god is genuine, heartfelt, and authentic.’ I still haven’t found a better way to say it yet.
           “Those are not puffins.”
           I watch some more breach the surface directly next to the boat and see their breath rise along the starboard side of our vessel.
           “What'd ya mean? Those are puffins.”
           “My god dude, they are huge. Puffins are like, bird-sized.”
           “Well do you really know? Have you seen one?”
           One solo puffin emerges from the water and immediately takes a wing and unzips itself from the head. I watch the limp puffin skin skim along the water behind definitely a human swimming toward the English ship.
           “You could not have predicted that.”
           “What? Oh! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that puffins are like duck-sized and don’t live in Canada!”
           Yea I sometimes - well I was going to say she makes me look like an idiot but really, it's basic information I should have known. I am an idiot. But that is not to say that I am not smart. I just have no foreboding actions. I can figure out puzzles and riddles and I fucking hate myself for this reason. Airea is not only a Pragmatic Idealist as I said before, but also an Informant if she wanted to work for the FBI, a Rejecter if she was entrapment, and a Sociopath that can understand anything, and yet still willingly observes the chaos and “entropy” because she is an expert at erasing. I call her The Eraser and she smiles and we fuck afterward, and then I call her The Destroya.
 
           “HEY! OI! OI!”  
           She knows how to raise her voice, and everyone knows to answer to it.
           “Yes! Hello!”
           “Where did ya get those puffin suits eh? How do you get one of those, those puffin suits?”
Jeez she is so insulting as she is curious.
“They just gave them to us, just for fun.”
Motherfucking bloke just swam away.
“What do you think he meant just for fun?”
“I think that means hunny that they wittingly adorn those suits as some sort of amusement. It’s a choice that they make to look like that as their reinforced impressive totally human decision.”
“Those costumes are to make me want to mate with them?”
“All clothes are. All of life is one mating dance in infinite parts.”
“Are you telling me we should not be wearing clothes right now? So as not to be playing into the mating dance of life?”
“Baby you don’t need the progression and rebellion against logic to get me naked.”
           “Jeez you’re romantic.”
           “Hey you two! We are anchoring here! Go grab your shit!”
 
           Industrial cruises became trendy a few years back and were now considered straight up fashionable. Due to the inherently dangerous routes, and its rarity, the exorbitant costs never dropped substantially, and thus allowed only the rich, who have seen enough of the Already World to tour these polar waters. Except for us.
          Kinda. Airea and I hitched a ride on an old half oil tanker half cargo ship out of Anchorage, then slept and fucked most of our way through the Bering Strait and then we sorta woke up somewhere on top of Canada. This is the last thing I could remember, of course, if it happened. I realized, while scanning the unvarying Open Ocean and mechanical glaciers in repeat, that if I think it, I can remember it too. Like the breaching whale, and the pod of dolphins that glittered in the purple sundog.
           Back in the day anyone could board a commercial ship – if you cooked and cleaned. Now you need to be in a union. Something about being unsafe and the corporation overlords wanting people to be unhappy. Airea and I unionized years back. You are still supposed to be part of the Oil Tankers Union or Cargo Haulers, but they make exceptions for other people who support the cause, if they trust ‘em. I actually met Airea at our local Communist meeting in Burlington, and then we encountered each other again at a meeting in Tucson. Unless she was a fucking nark, and I already made the list, there was a beautiful reason for it. On our first “date” (we went to the carnival and got stoned; she hoped I would join her monkey wrench some dam) we both decided to quit our jobs (I had been working at a Make-Your-Own t-shirt shop; she was working as a dishwasher,) and work at the factory in the heart of the city our other comrades had said was always hiring. We coveted the humanity, we needed the surroundings, and they wanted us there – so we signed up for the Industrial Players Union, paying the first dues with the money we would have spent on smokes. Quit smoking that day too.
 
           We crunch the ice as we climb down the frozen ladder. Airea jumps from ten feet up and lands. I wait until I’m my height up and jump. The ice with a fine dusting of loose snow catches my feet, like falling with magnets. It welcomes me into its landscape as an itinerant monument, but I worry it does this to maybe imprison me and kill me.
           Airea pulls her hair into a ponytail, except for a small amount she never ties up, and has colored purple and blue using paint, sometimes lead free.
           “You two have my sympathy,” An Able seaman yells from above, “You sure you wanna be dropped off here?”
           “Yes. Definitely.”
           “Best of luck.”
           “Yea fuck off.”
  
           I had already asked Airea if we wanted to get dropped off here, or rather, why the fuck we were getting off here. I had thought we would travel back to Anchorage, or maybe further south to Victoria or Seattle. I had grown in attachment to Anchorage, and really only agreed to the trip with the stipulation we would in fact return. I might have even called it my Favorite City. I had never felt so alone and responsible for my own isolation in my life. The extraterrestrial charm of going to the store, or even getting into the bed was maddeningly mesmerizing, because nothing is comparable. Taking off a hat and brushing out the cold flecks of honesty that melt into the carpet will always be a cinema, of some overwhelming heartache until the next icing. It reminded me of Burlington, but VT still just felt a little too close, too well known. Going to Alaska is as close to disappearing as you can without completely exhausting yourself into the oblivion.
           I even saw a moose behind our house. In Tucson I sat on our deck and watched rodents run from their reptilian assailants.
Airea though needed to keep moving. Anchorage was never home, neither was Burlington nor Tucson and especially not Hoboken. Whatever she wanted though...I assumed I would be happy with it. Airea sometimes seems independent, in a good word, or selfish, in a bad. But during the five years together, my assurance that I was to be protected and tended to steadied into fact. The contradictory cooperative psychopath - my love.
“Where to now?”
“I told you, we’re on vacation right? Let’s go check out the lake.”
I stare across the constant ripple of the water. It’s autumn now, but it feels more like spring. The air is tonic, and the sun screams in the sky, but it is not blinding. The ice absorbs the light deep below the surface - there is no reflection.
“Come along now dear.”
We walk side by side around the lake for maybe a mile, not saying a word. I occasionally look up and watch her old green rucksack bump up and down, left to right, loose on her shoulders, and watch her hair sway the opposite way as if she is one wavelength unto herself. The Laws of Physics.
“Hey, The Laws of Physics would be a cool band name.”
She laughs a titter, but it is sincere.
“I hope it isn’t science themed.”
“Maybe anti-science themed.”
“Decon-Post-Anti-Futural-Hardcore? I love it. Learn the guitar.”
“Maybe I’ll play the organ.”
“Actually, I think some apocalyptic instrument made out of rocks, melted metal, and rubber that produces the sound of radiation might be more suitable.”
“Sung in a new guttural language.”
“Purely for art’s sake. Since you won’t be playing to many people.”
“Sometimes I think we are anarchists…”
We stop and look at each other. Airea frowns at me and I try to keep a straight face. Within three seconds we are laughing ourselves into curls and then wrestling into the ice. I get a face full of some still fresh snow and sit up squinting the sting away from my tender red face that Airea kisses until it returns to a healthy pulse.
“I think we are close. I saw some puffins go this way.”
So they ARE puffins.
“I know what you are thinking...the humans in puffin costumes. I should have been more clear.”
We continue on and I ignore the ice melting in my boots until I realize the melted pool in my sole is startlingly warm.
“I think this is the spot.”
How she determined one singular spot existed is inexplicable and straight strange. This entire landscape looks identical. The only difference is some land is ice and some land is not ice and is water.
I follow her finger down to the water’s blurred surface. I bend my knees and put my face right next to the water. I breathe on the icy strands in the lake and they begin to disappear, allowing for a clear view of a small trail, leading down towards the bottom of the lake. Maybe ten feet further I can make out the faint alternating glow of light, emanating from the sides of the underwater gully.
“What the fuck is that?” I turn around, almost concerned, but concerned enough to spin too quickly and let the weight of my bag bring me to my back.
“I think it’s the tour.”
Without hesitation, Airea takes two steps forward and places her boots into the water. She brings me a giant smile. Her teeth reflect the sunlight. Her whole face does. She has been given go and down she goes, with poise, descending underneath the water.
For the next five minutes I think she is dead. The first two minutes is spent still lying on the ice, waiting for her to resurface. The next minute, I actually start to believe she is dead, and I wait for her morbid bubbles to reach the air and pop. The next minute, I contemplate how I can dive down into arctic waters and rescue her. My non-existent swimming capabilities frighten me though, and I start to panic. The water will always scare me. The last minute that I thought she was dead was spent stripping off my clothes. I read somewhere if you have to go under, you don't want your clothes dragging you down, and you are going to want something warm. I’m down only to my underwear and way-too-thin socks when Airea’s head sticks up.
“Are you coming in?”
Stunned to silence, with my hands still on my socks, my voice box crackles with static.
“Eraauuuh...What?”
“Why did you take off all your clothes? I mean, I’m not complaining at all but…”
“I thought you fucking drowned! I was going to save you! How...what?”
“Put your clothes on. We’ll be down here for a bit.”
“Are you not hypothermic?!”
Airea looks confused, and angles her neck to stare at the water.
“Uh, no. The water’s just like any other water. Wet is its distinguishable feature. But only when you get out ya know? Now come along. Put those clothes on.”
It takes me a few seconds before I start to move and gather my frost stricken clothes.
“Backpack too?”
Airea nods her head, and then dips back under.  
When I first began swimming lessons my mother forced me into during a particularly hot summer in Omaha, I was too frightened to breathe through the snorkel while I was in the water. I would stand on the edge of the pool, and take ten huge breaths in and out, and on the eleventh, hold in a maximum lung-capacity’s worth of oxygen.
I repeat the process. The eleventh breath brings me into a jump and I fall through the water. My feet immediately slide on the ice underneath, and I glide down through the gully until Airea stops my easy slide and picks me up. She looks like an ice goddess within the reflective nimbic spaceship of alternating and blending greens, purples, and blues.
“Pretty cool right?”
“It’s stunning.” I mumble not letting in any of the water into my mouth.  
“You can talk sweetheart.”
“It’s-” The water fills the spaces between teeth. Some is swallowed in the anti-gravity.
I feel myself drowning. The laughing eyes of Airea force mine closed as I kick frantically up towards the surface. My damn bag and clothes weigh me down, and only permit me a few feet towards safety with a spastic leap. The worst part is that I was sure Airea would never lead me to harm, and here I am drowning in front of her, while she manages to stay serene, and self-possessed.
I find traction on the icy hill and accomplish a few steps before I feel my hood pulled back by Airea.
“What are you doing!” Bubbles spray toward to her face.
She brings her hand under my nose.
“Look.”
There are bubbles escaping from my nose, and being pulled back in. I am still breathing. Like the anxiety of my youth, when I couldn’t breathe for an hour sometimes, and then realized a moment later that I am not dead, I understood the stressor to be only the disbelief that everything is fine.
The displaced air had shattered the light in incredible 360 and I lose all sight of what is around me. Then Airea grabs my hands, and my hyperventilating slows to an even pace.
“You wanna keep going?”
I am starting to understand that I have no substantial opinion or consequential selection today. Obviously, if I said I want to go back, I could, but since I am already totally thoroughly past my initial expectations, my opinions now seem, at least to me, obsolete. How am I supposed to really analyze my desires and wants when what I at least “enjoy,” was thought to be impossible?
Airea turns around and keeps my hand tightly in hers, leading us down through the expansive crevice. She brushes her fingertips on the crystals as if they were an instrument that produced an orotund, resonant symphonic melt, rather than a dampened echoless thump. I don’t touch them, though I marvel at their complexity. Every single one on my right side for the next ten minutes gets at least half a second of attention, until my neck starts to hurt, so I look up. The lights either bounce back from the surface of the water, or they actually seem to block the sunlight. If I were able to move with slightly less difficulty, I would believe I was still on land. A few small spheres of brown, held together, float above me as Airea grasps her index and middle finger in her right palm.
          “Whoa. Are you alright?”
           “Oh yes.” She turns to show me. “Just a small cut.”
As she squeezes, another drop of blood leaks out her finger, cut off by a lack of supply, and then floats perfectly round up toward the surface like gasoline. She reaches up to grab it between her fingers and holds up the tiny orb. Up this close, you can tell it is red. She inverts her hand and squeezes its center so it can continue to float up like a ring around her finger.
“Pretty eh? Blood Rings! All organic materials, no carbon footprint. no animal testing…if you don’t count me as an animal.”
“I don’t.”
She gently rolls it off her index finger and throws it towards the surface.
“Well you should,” she says, poking me in the chest as if she could disparage me truly.
           I turned to look behind me if there was anything besides phosphorescent glow, but there wasn’t. As bright as it was, the radiance behaved more like a shadow or aurora, than actual illumination. The cool haze literally lit our path though as we descended deeper into the arctic sea. To both sides of us, there were now two incredibly high walls. Either our descent quickened, or the creviced sides were growing out of the icy earth with immense force.
           Soon there was nowhere else for the glow to escape - the walls curled inward to form a cave. While there were fewer crystals emitting the flush light, the tunnel completely confined the rosy, the verdant, and the ideal sea, though the area was no more or less bright.
           The cave changed its trajectory toward the left as we continued on. I wondered if at any moment a reverse-flashflood would sweep us deeper into the cave. A bubble might break, a current might slip, and suck us down deeper into the arctic. A faint but sonorous bass of a mumble crawled up from further down the cave. Airea stopped and jutted her neck out to see. I worried the same thoughts troubled her.
           There were times down in the American Southwest when we heard about some hiker or hikers caught in some ravine. There were rarely survivors. The ones who did never hiked again. One man, a Tucson native straight up moved to New York City the next day after being released from the hospital. A few years ago I heard from an old friend who said ten people ‘wrapped themselves in a watery death.’ Two families at the same time. Two fucking lineages removed in approximately 46 seconds. Some people don’t know, including my friend, that the water doesn’t kill you. The rocks kill you.
           A slight push of pressured current forces our step backwards. Since we had been in the cave, the water seemed transfixed as air on a windless day, and only now did we realize it was before, overtly motionless. The rumble erupted again, louder this time but no clearer.
           “Should we get out of here?”
           “Hold on.” Airea said. “Just wait a minute.”
           Her curiosity is going to get us killed.
           But before I could desert back up the hill and out of the cave, the rumble distinctly became muffled voices. A group of puffins waddled into our view from around the bend in the cave. Seven of these people came up in a straight line and all waved at us simultaneously.
           “Where are your suits?” They all wondered.
           “Too cheap to pay for them?”
           I wave back at them and Airea kind of tries to smile.
        “You two can turn around we think. There’s not too much more down there,” The lead puffin said.  
           “Absolutely nothing interesting down there,” the puffin in the back called up.
           “How far down does it go?”
           “Oh we just went down another 200 meters or so. I mean, how many underwater arctic crystals can one see in a day before they all start to look the same?”
           “Well what do you wanna do Airea? Just turn back?”
           Airea looks back at me and scoffs.
           “We can see uninteresting for ourselves.”
           “Well alright,” says the second puffin. “Mind if we squeeze by ya then?”
           Airea and I squeeze our bodies flush against the wall, fitting our heads and limbs in between the crystals to allow those fat puffin suits enough room to waddle. The lead puffin drags its wing across Airea’s face accidently and she rigs up her face. The second puffin shuffles through, but as it steps past me, it trips on my foot and adjusts too far to the left, puncturing a hole underneath the wing. The pressurized suit releases its reserve of air, hurtling the second puffin directly into the leader. The lead puffin screams as it is shoved directly into the crystals. Both suits now are spraying wildly not only air, but also blood. The rest of the crew abandons the Single File Rule to help and discover the “advice” really is a command. I close my eyes and flash through dire stupidity and try to find comfort in Airea’s stoic utterances.
           “Ooh. Oof. Urg.”
           They sound nothing like the gurgled screams of the puffins. Airea clutches my arm and hauls me further down the cave. After the screams’ ringing vanishes, I open up my eyes to see seven dead real people in sagging lifeless suits, and a wall of blood, blocking out the light from the crystals they were impaled upon. The blood hung there like a peaceful undulating mobile, slowly dispersing and creeping through the tunnel. I could not speak from the terror, only shudder. Nothing I had ever seen remotely could compare to this. Another whole bloodline gone. I can see Grandfather Grandmother Father Mother Son Daughter and I think an Aunt. I have the sudden urge to contact my Uncle. Luckily, Airea is undisturbable, and is unnerved only at the sight of twins.
           “Well it looks like we are going this way,” she says.
           Fucking kidding me?
She starts walking further into the cave, and I have no choice but to follow her. I wait for a few seconds first, to see if a hand reaches out for help through the blood, but it does not. It is always the rocks. Well crystals specifically this time I guess. I think for a second they might be idiots, testing the Grim, the Grave, and the Wretched itself, and then remember that I do not know really anything without doubt, and probably would have suffocated myself if Airea didn’t tell me I couldn’t. That’s the not the first time Airea doubted my own mortality.
Can you drown if you don’t breathe in the water and it’s only a pure lack of oxygen? Would that just be suffocation? Not that it mattered. A coroner would say it was the wounds, nothing oxygen-less even mentioned. The coroner would say it’s always the rocks. We’ll tell someone when we get back to the surface.
           I rush after Airea who had gotten farther down the trail than I thought. No possibility to get lost here though, on one path. I catch up with her and hold her hand. She still leads, dangling her hand behind her legs. The cave now has contorted itself into tighter and tighter turns and I begin to get dizzy, not from the spinning, but from the complete lack of due north, something I can, without a doubt, always locate.
           I notice the cave ceiling pulling upward, and the floor downward, like a large trumpet. Airea and I step out through the flare to what could only be described as a unbounded courtyard of underwater evergreen trees, illuminated by the soft glow of blue and yellow fog containing tiny bright white spots like stars. Upon looking up, we can see the caves’ spiral, corkscrewing towards the top until out of sight.
           “Nothing else to see here. Bullshit puffin fuckers.”
           “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
           “They must hate trees.”
           There is no trail here - the path fans out to encompass the whole forest floor.
           “So do you think we are, like, at the bottom of the ocean?”
           “Hmm,” Ariea thinks, “I think we must be. I can’t tell how long we have been walking, but I bet so.”
           “Well which way? Straight ahead?”
           “Sure. Sounds good. I don’t think it really matters. I bet it all goes to the same place.”
           “Then why don’t we find out if that’s true or not?”
           “Yea?”
           “A zigzag?” I say, tracing the path with my finger.
           “I’m proud of you kid.”
           The evergreen forest floor did seem to occupy an infinite space in all directions. But in all of its beauty it did appear to be sameness, much like the crystals. Individually beautiful, but when viewed together, a mass-produced image made for humbling the hollow humanity. The fog’s flow even seemed to be on a timer, or a set wavelength. But at this point, I was getting very tired, and my feet were starting to hurt, so my judgments might be a bit harsh and unfounded, as Airea still maintained an incredible wonder for the forested oceanic floor.
           “I am a little confused how we are going to get out of here though love.”
           “I told you already; it will all lead to the same place.”
           “This isn’t a ride. This is still natural as strange as it is.”
           Airea did not stop walking; instead she took a sharp left turn behind a tree.
           “This way!”
           “I thought they were all the right way!”
           Airea was correct either way. The trees began to disperse slowly, and the fog became brighter and thicker. She quickened her pace until soon she was at almost a jog. The fog obscured everything from view, and had lost its colors to develop a mantling grey sliced with beams of refractive white light. Airea was now long out of sight and I began to shout.
           “Hey! Airea! HEY! Where are you?!”
           Just when I almost began to panic, the fog broke. The trees fell into order. The light narrowed. The fog suppressed into a wispy smoke, hours after a fire, hovering just over the ground. The trees rose in straight lines of view, equidistant to one another. And in the middle of my view, a huge morning sun directly down the center of the road we were now on.
           “DUDE? You see this?”
           “Where are we Airea?”
           She didn’t have an answer for me.
           “There’s no way we like, transported or something,” I say.
           “No no I think we are still underwater. Look.”
           A small particle floated by - too slow and stable for pure air.
           “Feel.”
           My body vaguely swayed, and I felt lighter than I would on the surface. I exhaled to see. Bubbles rushed out of my mouth and ascended skyward.
           “Told you.”
           “How can this be? I mean Airea. There are fucking houses here.”
           The small one-story bungalows perfectly placed and compulsively colored in pastel pinks and blues flanked the sides of the road as far as the horizon line. Each one built exactly the same, and each one comforting in its surreal and strange behavior.
           “We’ve been before right?” I ask.
           “I can’t really place it, but yes, it certainly feels that way.”
           “It reminds of Hoboken. Out in the burbs where we had the funeral.”
           “Hm. It does appear to be similar…to that place.”
           Something so familiar came from that suburban block in the early hours of the day. As we walked down the underwater road, I needed to tell Airea something she would hate. I never believed in God. I much preferred Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy because I wanted to believe in something very few people did anymore. And not many people thought the way I did, so it felt like a rebellion, without the blood, the pictures, and the oath. I don’t believe in God because I could never imagine someone with that power, that oversight. Moreover, I could never accept anything would want to do this on purpose. I am not an atheist though, because I judge my ruling based on insight, and ignorance is no way to fund your beliefs. Nor am I agnostic as the beliefs I do have are well regarded, passionate, and poised - I could never consider myself a Religion of Shrugs. The rest have at least one deity, so how could I truly choose one or another. No, I am somewhere underneath them all, and far enough removed that they all can occupy the same erroneous space called Wrongness in my head.
           Regardless, I say:
           “Hey. I mean. This must be what heaven feels like. For like the first few minutes. Or what it looks like. If it existed. Like, what it would feel or look or be like if it was true and real and we were dead. I am so convinced we are nowhere near Earth right now even though we are so far…into it.
           She stops walking and swivels on her heel – looks me right in the eye. And then punches me right in the arm.
           “If heaven existed. No dude, this is all just camouflage.”
          We stood motionless for a moment, wondering which door to knock on first.