The travel carrier—Nick had said that all I hadda do was think about it and I’d make it real. And that’s why I can’t say how real this all was. The sled, the blanket, even that friendly ol’ thermos, maybe I’d thought them into existence and could just as easily think them out again, like when you flick a switch and kill the flames of a gas fireplace, instantly reducing it to a pile of phony stone logs in a hotel lobby.
And admit it, it wasn’t such a leap to imagine that the weight of the blanket was actually your grandma’s arms embracing you. That it was her sobbing that you heard, not the luring call of the echoes in the wind. If you created your own reality, then it wasn’t such a leap to think that the big, dark shape pulling you ahead, hunched in intense physical exertion, wasn’t Nick, wasn’t Grandpa, but was the Hermit. The mythical, faceless figure you had feared your entire life, his skull and shoulders still smoking because he’d stepped right out of the flames. All these things were as real as the cold. Yes, it had been extremely cold that night, Auntie Bernstein had said. When you got older, once the cold had settled into your bones, she’d said, it never really went away anymore.
Louetta Molignon had also said something about that particular night fifteen years ago in the Catskills. Cécile’s mamie, according to her, there most definitely had been birds. Really big ones, with long beaks, looking for prey.
And yes, they were there. Every time your consciousness drifted over the line between sleeping and waking, you could catch glimpses of them. Death birds. The carrion consumers of the mountains. They circled high above the slopes, never too far from the sled, like vultures above a dying animal in the desert. Sometimes they would chatter or loop and roll, but they never attacked. Not yet.
I think it was then that I realized where I really was.
We once started on a descent here, but it had never come to an end.
What I’d see if I were to follow the Panther Mile all the way back up to the top had always filled me with utter terror. Now, that fear had faded into a vague, throbbing unease. I felt it pulling, felt it waiting for me up there at the end of the valley. The charred hole where Huckleberry Wall once stood. A possessed mountain. It stared, with holes for eyes, in which it was freezing and thawing. Holes like scars in a face, breathing out the eternal cycle of time.
Thus we climbed on and left the valley behind us. Mountain passes slipping into stone under a thick layer of snow. Alternately floating through real and unreal things and being rooted in the steep funnel that was the doorway to the Maudit. My ticket to redemption was one-way only, but I accepted that.
That’s to say, until everything tilted forward so far that you could no longer hold on.
If gravity took hold, we would all fall.
7
It’s difficult for me to write about what happened next. To tell the ending to my story.
It’s not the ending I’d wished for. If you’re rooting for me even just a little bit, you’d hope for something melodramatic, our own Thelma and Louise, but that was not to be. Such an ending, an ending of enduring love, of love beyond death, it would have given us both more consolation, because deep inside, you wanted something like that to be true. But here we are, on the last leg of a journey we started a long time ago, and if I start bullshitting now, everything up to this point will no longer have any meaning.
What I’m giving to you is the inevitable ending. The naked ending. As true as you and me. They say there’s no point getting mad about the inevitable, but sometimes it crushes you with such incredible force that you just can’t help it, right?
Nick and me, we reached the col at the dawn of a new day. Again, beats me how exactly we got there, but I do remember that I swung out of sleep mode and into the waking world and thought, We got there. This is Nick’s sanctuary.
In front of me lay only this floating landscape of deep, subdued colors that was living up to its hyped-up reputation. The storm had died down in the course of the night. Layered, dispersing shreds of cloud were still trembling in the air, fading into vague puffs of breath from the mouths of the highest summits. The valley before us, I recognized it from the description in Nick’s manuscript, except that everything wasn’t gray but purple. Everything was violet. Magenta. Azure and turquoise. It was ice sparkling in an alpenglow you’d call corny on Instagram, cuz there was no way it could be real. But it was, here. The anticipation of sunlight before there was sunlight, reflected on ice crystals in a charged atmosphere as polished as a Cartier diamond.
And at the center of this arena I finally saw, for the first time, the Maudit.
You knew it was the Maudit the minute you saw it. Even I knew it. I had to lean my head all the way back and still had to look even higher in order to absorb its full magnitude. The Maudit, it loomed up out of the mist on the glacier like the iceberg that doomed the Titanic must have loomed up out of the mist—grand, sudden, unavoidable.
This was, as they say, a mountain.
Even I could get why Nick had fallen for it. He was right. There was mystery concealed here. Something timeless and dreamlike that was calling to you. In the devastating beauty of this mountain, in both its all-encompassing wilderness and its peace, I saw precisely the part of Nick I had totally fallen for from the get-go. The part that had been so far away from me. Whispering, it floated over to me and seduced me with the promise of absent things, and following it up in the sky seemed as tempting as being lifted up by a dream . . .
Just so we’re clear, that was the hypothermia talking.
When the cold penetrates deeper into your body, you get woozy. Lethargic and distracted. You yawn, you stretch your jaw, you relax. Freezing to death is number 1 on Tripadvisor’s Top 10 Best Transports to the Hereafter. Because it’s so peaceful. Everything seems agreeable as you glide closer and closer toward your hibernatory coma. Everything feels nice. Everything feels good. Then your heart stops.
By definition, I wasn’t worried about it.
The rustling of my coat’s seam sounded strangely subdued in the silence. Turns out I was wearing Nick’s spare Gore-Tex. What a surprise. I’d even thought this ultimate fashion faux pas into existence for the sake of pragmatic comfort. All sounds here were strangely subdued. Nick was right about that, too. For a place the folks down there called the Valley of Echoes, it was suspiciously devoid of echoes.
A dark shadow sailed over me. In the sky, a rather ominous but strangely melodious call. A few yards away, one of those black birds touched down in the snow. It hopped a coupla curious steps my way. Looked at me with cool, lidless eyes. A look without even a trace of depth, just hunger. The penetrating smell of organ meat. Thymus or something. Liver.
“Shoo!” I called out, and absently threw a handful of snow at the critter. It flew up and disappeared.
When I looked up I saw Nick.