In the months after they found me, it was mostly questions. People want to know, I guess. They did, after all, discover me unconscious and buried beneath layers of jackets and sleeping bags. They found me with ice in my beard, blood-soaked clothes, and blood-stained cheeks. They found what was left of a shitty little plane buried in the snow that had been drifting for a hundred-and-twenty-four fucking days. They found the faces of my friends.
So they had a lot of questions. Of course they did.
And this wasn’t even the shrinks. Not yet. This was the orderlies. This was the nurses, nurses’ aides, nursing students asking me all these questions. They’d be feeding me – it was months of well-rounded meals of chicken and peas and rice and tall glasses of juice and milk – when one of them would say, “What was it like? I mean, eating your friends? How did you do it? It’s amazing.”
Or they’d be bathing me. It was months of sponges and averted eyes; of young and beautiful women in scrubs who made you think maybe you were in a porn, only no one told you. Or it was some middle-aged guy who tried to talk about sports or the news or something, anything to keep his mind off the fact that he was giving a sponge bath to another man. They’d be bathing me, and they’d ask, “How did you get through that? I mean, over four months? Where did you find the strength? I’d have just died. It’s totally amazing.”
They had a lot of questions, but I wouldn’t answer them. I was tired. I was emaciated and tired. I was broken. They’d even had to re-break and reset some of me – the parts of me that had already begun to heal without proper medical treatment. In a lot of places, I was broken. Both legs (in different places), a few ribs, one wrist and forearm. They told me I was lucky to have sustained only these injuries. Apparently, people know nothing of luck.
Still, again and again they asked, and again and again I avoided giving an answer. I just couldn’t.
Even if I could have, what would I have said? It was amazing that I was still alive. Any idiot could have told you that. Plus, I knew there would be plenty to talk about with the shrinks.
“How did it make you feel, seeing everyone dead? Realizing you were lost? Realizing you had no food? Deciding that it would be better to eat your friends than to die there, alone on that mountainside? How did you feel when you finally cut into the rear end of the pilot? Chewed his fat, his muscle, his skin? Swallowed it? And the rest of him? Was he easiest because you didn’t know him? And your friends; was it more difficult for you to eat them? Or did it just not matter anymore? How do you feel about it now that it’s all over?”
These, of course, were only a few of the questions. People want to know. Those doctors, they want to know everything.
But these were my answers: Shocked. Lost. Hungry. Traitorous. Sick to the pit of my soul’s stomach. Sick to the pit of my own stomach. A little numb. Full. Of course the pilot was the easiest. Harder for the friends. Of course it mattered. I feel like I got shafted by some invisible force that either forgot about me entirely or wanted to see what would happen if I were forced to decide between cannibalism and death, and that I must have put on a goddam good show, seeing as you assholes want to know so much about it now.
By the end of it, they said they were glad I stopped talking to the stars, lest I developed some sort of split- or multiple-personality disorder. That didn’t really make much sense to me, but then, I’m no professional. They also said that I seemed to be a reasonably emotionally stable young man, and that I seemed to be dealing with the unfortunate circumstances leading to the cannibalization of my friends about as well as could have been hoped for. By the end of it, they said I was well enough to go home. They said they thought it would be best for me to continue talking to someone, because you never know what sort of residual affects an event such as mine might have on one’s psyche. They said that, soon enough, my memories of the accident would settle down into the muck that is the rest of my brain. It would sink in, and I’d have to get my hands dirty if I ever wanted to really get a good look at it again.
After an unfairly long six months, they said I could go home.
I said thank fucking god and good riddance.
And I went home.