I woke up in a panic, not screaming, just a groan from deep in my throat. I’d dozed off in the hard plastic chair by the window. The clock above the door showed 11:30 and the ICU was dead silent. Adrenaline supply not yet depleted, I staggered to my feet.
Nick was still asleep. Still hadn’t moved, but the motionless mound on the bed defined the hospital room. Hate saying it, but I could barely dare to look. All the getting used to the situation wiped out in one blow by what I saw when I entered the room at the wrong time. The dream was a horror show, okay, but this was real.
He was right; he’s a monster.
At the outdoor cafe in Ouchy, I had confided Nick’s harrowing words to Cécile. I couldn’t imagine what could have brought her to echo them like this. Maybe she’d come to the same conclusions as I did and was burdened with moral qualms greater than mine, but that was no explanation for abandoning her patient to his fate, just like that. What could scare an experienced nurse so much that it made her run away screaming in the middle of changing the bandages?
Nick slept. Sheet motionless. Lightning in the distance.
On the TV, the flawless faces and perfect six-packs had been replaced by experts analyzing Heidi L?tschentaler’s nose job, but I barely registered any of it. I walked to the window and looked out on Lausanne’s quarters, terraced on the various slopes, a cascade of yellow and orange light. Our hotel was more to the right, in the old city center, but my gaze wandered deeper down, to that mirror, the endless black lake that reflected the lights of villages pasted high up on the opposing mountains.
What drove people to live up there? And what had possessed Nick to make him so want to tempt gravity, to chase the clouds that ventured the highest ridges with such deceptive ease? Was life down below so pointless that he had to reduce his world to a spot from which the only way forward was downhill?
Something had happened up there, and from then on, things had gone solely downhill for Nick. Definitively for Augustin.
I realized that I was scared, irrationally scared, like a gust of wind on a cold winter night can scare a kid. Sounds became muffled, my thumping heart louder. I looked at my arm, felt the hairs creeping, as if the hospital room’s canned air was charged.
Jesus, what’s wrong with me?
When the lightning flashed again, revealing the contours of the mountains on the other side of the lake, I realized what had unsettled me: there was something conscious about them, something that deliberately made you stray from our trail of happiness. And once you lose your way in the mountains, gravity’s going to come and get you.
“There are holes in the ice,” Nick said.
I spun around to the bed.
A soft rustling sound accompanied the words that I thought I’d heard. Nick hadn’t budged, except that his head had slid sideways, as if he’d turned toward the window in his sleep.
It was a figment of your imagination; save that to your hard drive.
I’m sure I coulda convinced myself of that, but then I saw that Nick’s eyes were open, dark and drifting between the bandages. Awake. Despite the morphine, awake.
“Nick, you all right?” I asked. I walked over to the bed and took hold of his hand. It felt chilly. Unnaturally chilly. He didn’t seem to know I was there, stared right through me to the window, his eyes searching the mountains beyond it. I’d have expected them to be dulled by the morphine, but they were unusually fierce, exhibiting uncanny concentration and reflecting the distant lightning’s every spark.
Night terror, I thought. A sort of waking dream. He’s asleep, but with open eyes. It happens. He can’t talk; the muscles in his cheek were all slashed. Besides, he’d tear out all the stitches.
But then he looked right at me and spoke. “They look just like eyes. The water inside freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws.”
His voice was subdued by the gauzes, but the words were articulated and clear, and I will never forget them.
A broad, horrific smile broke through from behind the mummy mask. “And you will also find out what it’s like to fall. To fall . . . and to fall . . . and to fall . . . and to fall.”
My blood froze in my veins. That smile, I could see it in his eyes, like a stranger was staring at me, as if deep inside him, a door had opened and something else was looking out of it. And now I could see that grin on his face, too. It stretched the bandage seams tight, patches of blood blossoming on them like hideous flowers, so dark you’d swear they were black.
“Nick! Dammit, Nick, you’re freaking me out!”
I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. His body shook like a rag doll, head rolling on his neck. “Nick! Come on, dude, say something! Talk to me, please . . .”
Stop! What are you doing? You could cause irreparable damage.
I stared at the bed in bewilderment.
Nick was asleep, as peacefully as before.
But the blotches of blood on the mask were real; the bandages were soaked with it.
The door flew open and the nurse, the one who wasn’t Cécile, stormed in, aghast. She stared at the bed. I stared at her.
She stared at me.
Déjà vu.
Then I ran past her out of the room.
11
Next morning, I bought a ticket to New York at the Swiss desk in Geneva. This Airbus was bigger and disengaged itself from the surrounding ridges PDQ, but it was long after the last snowcapped summits were lost to view behind us and we were cruising westward in the sun-splashed sheer-clear stratosphere that I could detach my claws from the armrests.
Even then I didn’t feel free of the mountains’ clutches. That would take an entire ocean.
Landed at JFK at three EST. Phone on: sixteen missed calls, five texts, all from Louise Grevers. Didn’t read them, didn’t listen to my voicemail, whipped the SIM card out of my iPhone, bought an AT&T prepaid to use instead, then took an Uber into the city, where I stayed for the next three weeks.
No matter how far you’ve gone, or how long you’ve been away, home is where the door is always open, even when you’re on the lam.
It was America out there, but Europe was never far away.
Just had to close my eyes and I’d see that swaddled mask.
Then I’d see those dark bloodstains appear and hear him say, There are holes in the ice. They look just like eyes.
Misery
Messages from Nick Grevers The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.
—Stephen King
1
WhatsApp message, August 18, 8:13 a.m.
Yes, I’m OK. No need to worry. AMC in total chaos. They think it’s a terrorist attack. Spooky shit!
2
Subject: More spooky shit
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 8-18-2018 2:10 p.m.