The next morning, along with hundreds of others, maybe a thousand college students, aged crunchies, office workers, protest veterans, and plain people trying, as was he, to not look confused or self-conscious—as though hiking up a glacier to strip naked with a thousand other people was something they did every day—he walked the towrope the organizers had set up, Heini ahead of him, in tight rock-climbing shorts, calling back to her sister Heljä in the Finnish he couldn’t understand, the two of them giggling as they all went up the access crevasse. “Heini, CAN YOU SEE THE PEAK YET?” Heljä called in English to her sister, who turned, gave him a quick up and down then burst into a hissing laugh she couldn’t stifle.

But as they reached the top of the crevasse, and saw the ice field below, a silence fell over the group. He had expected it to look like the old illustration he’d once seen: a mighty river of ice. From the peak where Fred and the sisters stood, the line of protesters snaked down the white slope and into the valley like avatars being born into W.2. They kept moving, the serpentine pattern they formed across the glacier lengthening. The sight of the melting glacier, the mountain peaks—black and stony instead of snowcapped as they used to be—silenced everyone with the gravity of what had brought them there. Though this was Fred’s first time to Switzerland, even he could see the glacier was ill, its ice permeable instead of solid. More snowcone than rock crystal.

Then came the order to strip. All around Fred, hundreds of men and women began shedding Birkenstocks, fleece vests, striped knits, Recycle What’s Left tees, and Lapland thermals. He unbuttoned his pants, and began pulling them down. When Fred stole a glance at the sisters, they were already down to panties and hiking boots. But to his surprise, even as they stepped out of them there was nothing sexual in it, and together they placed their clothes as bundles on the grid laid out with string so they could find them afterwards.

Throughout the morning, he, the sisters, and the others got into position like pallbearers being told where to stand at a funeral. No one spoke other than the organizers who directed them through bullhorns. “Nicht in die Kamera blickt,” the bullhorns would call from time to time, Heini translating for Fred, “Don’t look at the camera.”

And when the order came over the bullhorns for them all to lie down, he did so naked with the girls on the ice, Heini’s unshaved bare legs warm against his unshaved cheek, his own bare legs against Heljä warm face, the sun also warm, the ice cold as a hard sponge, and he closed his eyes imagining how they looked through the cameras trained on them from the top of a ladder, he and the sisters just flesh-colored dots among other dots, a chain of nude people, a necklace looping up and down the glacier as they all lie down with their mother to say goodbye.