frigid

He’s sitting in the passenger seat, wearing his winter coat, covered in a blanket, and he still has chemical warmers in his shoes. I’m using my warmers inside my gloves as a buffer between my palms and the steering wheel. The cold is creeping up my legs from the bottoms of my shoes and through my jeans. It’s like I’m resting in an unattended bath that’s slowly losing its residual heat to a cold room. My toes throb with dull numbness.

About three hours ago, the sun went down and with it, warmth. We tolerated the cold until it was pitch dark. I started the drive, when the sun was still beating against the windows, as the passenger. We stopped some time ago to pick up our warmers and we swapped responsibilities. I wanted to pull my weight on the road trip and we were finally on a road I knew. Glancing over at him, with the blanket wrapped around him like a man-sized cocoon, I regret that decision.

It will be another couple hours, maybe more, before I can crawl into a thick wad of blanket and warm my extremities. I signal left, turn the wheel slightly, and ease into the left lane. There isn’t another car for seven or eight blocks to the front or back, but the movement provides a reason for fresh blood circulation and the slight warmth that comes with it.

The cold is unrelenting. It is there, still and calm. It is absorbing any heat we generate like a dry sponge on a humid day. I pass a dark-blue Toyota Camry and fist my right hand, then release, then clench it again to try and push heat to my fingertips. I laugh after he makes a remark about picturing myself on the beach, soaking up the sun. There’s a goofiness about him that, after seven years, still catches me off guard.

This trip, in the dead of winter, just after the new year, we went out to his school and are on our way back. We are on the last two hundred miles of the seven hundred mile trek. I can’t stand being around many people in a confined space for very long, but with him it’s constant entertainment. He’s foolish and exaggerated, making people laugh with nutty stories or ridiculous ideas. I’m sarcastic and more subdued, making people laugh with commentary and analogies. We don’t come off as an odd pairing, though. We have similar tastes in music, movies, clothes, and other such interests.

A chill runs down my left leg. I curl my toes and shift my foot inside of its shoe. The cold is just a reminder of our combined idiocy. The car hasn’t had running heat since spring. He warned me, but our plan was to leave early in the morning and be midway home before the sun waned and fell below the horizon behind us. That was before I drank a half-liter of brandy and he had quite a few of his own drinks. We woke late, rushed through his errands, and finally started off for home after four.

Now we are trapped in a glass and metal chilling chamber, the only heat coming from ourselves. The warmth of the engine is blocked off to us by faulted valves, fans, or tubes. The vents themselves open freely, but let in the colder air that screamed past us outside our shell. Despite breathing into my coat, and him into his blanket, the windows are fogging. The movement of wiping them clean relieves the cold slightly, but is wasted effort.

The only solution, one I very much wanted to avoid, is to open the vents and let some air in to equalize the temperature enough to slow the condensation. Eventually, I have no choice. I tell him to brace himself, open the vents, and try to spirit myself away. The windows clear quickly as the dew point dropped.

I start laughing, not at something said or done, but at the realization of how ridiculous we must look. If an S.U.V. or pick-up came past us—which wasn’t likely, considering my speed—and the driver happened to look over, I wondered what he’d think. The faint glow of the headlights and the almost-full moon would show us in quite a state.

He is curled up tightly, with only his eyes above the blanket. The rest of his head is covered in his knit cap. I'm shivering involuntarily and alternating my hands into fists while stomping my feet onto the floor of the car. We're singing along with whatever happened upon the radio. This would have looked all the more ridiculous considering our exaggerated gestures. His movements look like the bending of fingers inside a mitten, I can’t quite tell what he's doing.

We discuss exiting, to warm ourselves under the brightly lit interior of the first gas station we came to, but decide against it. We want to get back to our respective homes as soon as possible. There we can warm ourselves without the glaring prospect of this refrigerated vehicle waiting for us in a parking lot. At home we will stay warm and comfortable without jumping back into this torturous chamber. The car keeps getting colder as we drove closer to home.

I enter the house in what seems like three long strides. The running brings slight warmth, but I haven’t felt my toes in forty miles. I toss my bag onto the couch in the front room and am wrapped in a thick blanket on the couch, with my knees up to my chin, rubbing my hands together before my parents can get out the first words of a welcome.

The feeling returns to my fingertips by the time the television show reached its credits. By the time the next is on it’s second commercial break, my toes are no longer numb. I walk downstairs, change for bed, and lay there while my bed warms to my presence. Within moments I'm drifting. The three hours of discontinuous sleep the night before hit me like a professional wrestler off the ropes. Sleep crashes over me like waves on a sun-soaked beach.