Utopic/fairy-tale-ic/make you jealous till you’re sick, that’s how they told their stories online. Josh Fonesca, who bought his girlfriend, Sarah Hilt, a diamond-studded ring when she was lying in the ICU. Sarah Hilt, pumping music into her ears from her iPod while speed cycling the second leg of a triathlon; she didn’t notice till it was too late that she’d ridden smack-bang into a wildfire. Her face and sixty percent of her body burned. Three CPRs, two hundred operations, and a proposal in Bora Bora later, she was on the cover of People. Like a melted human candle, saying, “Beauty Is Self-Confidence.”
Or Gordon Duvall, who’d had a little accident with a buzz saw. A little accident that splattered one of his eyes and most of his nose away. A year later he hooked Billie Hamilton—blond bimbo, lingerie model—on a dating site. Bilbo, who announced on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, “I don’t even see it when I look at him.” And Gollum, sitting next to her on the couch, his one eye glancing askew from the remains of what was once a face, Ellen clearly wondering where Bilbo’s seeing-eye dog was. The dating site where they met was Plenty of Fish, not exactly your hunting ground for credit card pervs. Or for the blind.
What no one ever told you is that reality is way different. All those lifestyle magazines, all those human-interest websites, they never published the stories no one wanted to know about: “I Dumped My Partner After the Fire” or “My Affairs After the Pit Bull Worked Her Over.” All those message boards, all those discussion sites, all those hypocrites who declare, strictly hypothetically, “Sure I wouldn’t leave him; it wasn’t his looks I fell for.”
All those PCs who forgot what it’s like to be twenty-four. They pounce on you like a pack of wolves when you say mutilation sucks all the sex out of a person.
That New York retro club jam-packed with walking Tinder portraits—Mr. Flawless Face 4, 5, or 6 infiltrating my personal space, throwing one of my chakras out of whack, thinking he’ll wake up next to me the following morning, probably never experienced disappointment his whole life, Nietzsche-ing me: “Your future. Tell me about your future. Today is only tomorrow’s story.”
And I was digging into my Good Evening Spitfire: Ancho Reyes/mezcal/coconut milk/cold coffee. God knows where Julia’d disappeared to, but at this stage nothing could faze me, not my walking/talking cover boy/Descartes’s menthol mouth fumes, not even that Julia had gone AWOL on me to get speed-dated by semi-bi Lenox Hill. The booze buzz started to do its thing: spin my head, hot flash me. Buddha-Bar Breakbeat or whatever trance bass they were playing shoved into the background and my future, in all its conceivable contingencies, into the limelight.
I couldn’t deal with it.
I tried to, I really did. Confronting myself with the grotesque, the tragic, in all its deformities. I googled it all. Facial disfigurement. Orogeny. Scars. Crevasses. Burns. Eroded rocks. Trypophobia skin conditions. Pit craters. Elephantiasis. Mountain streams.
I couldn’t, just couldn’t bear to look. Seeing those pics pop up made my flesh creep. I had to get up and pace, cover the screen with my hands. Know what I mean?
All those deformed faces.
All those deformed landscapes.
Zap: Nick’s mutilated face the exact wrong-time split-second I go into the room. The mountains across the lake from the hospital window.
Mountains had bitten Nick’s face off.
And then you thought it was over, that life wouldn’t kick you when you were down, but then came the reaction to your reaction, and then the reaction to that: an avalanche of emotions that swept away everything in its path. Was I really that superficial? Such a degenerate dick? Why wasn’t I more Josh Fonesca-ish? Why couldn’t I be more like Billie Hamilton? Fonesca bought a Tiffany ring while the love of his life was fighting for hers like a smoldering ember, and what do I do? Flee to New York. My crib, my crowd, my crew. My urban watering hole for the dry spells. I came here to wallow in my comfort zone but, instead, was engaged in a futile attempt to escape my discomfort zone. The avalanche thundering behind me, hurtling off the mountain at me, dogging me even here in the streets of Manhattan. Even here, even here, even here.
As Mr. Flawless Face 7, 8, or 9 oozed his sweat on me, I chugged my Sunset Spice: rum/curacao/pomelo/tarragon/orange chili pepper. My own sweat dripping from my forehead into my eyebrows, from my neck hairs down the collar of my T-shirt, coloring the cotton with hot, damp stains.
Julia emerged from the crowd and said, “Easy on the cocktails, baby brother. You don’t look so good.”
I said, “I’m okay.”
And Mr. Flawless Face number whatever, Harry or Niall or Liam, who cares: “Tell me about the most crucial moment in your life. The one defining moment that sparked all others.”
So here’s Julia eyeing me, secretly relishing the possibility of me spilling my guts. Knowing the most crucial moment in my life was also the most crucial moment in hers.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said, when she realized that if I opened my mouth it would only spew bad stuff. The kind of bad stuff you get from too many cocktails, head spins, and stomach cramps. Not even Zayn’s or Louis’s snazzy L’Envin sweatshirt deserved that. “Jack off on someone else,” Julia said to the flabbergasted stud as she tugged me to the door. “This one’s mine.”
Score. Next to my sis, I’m a total bush leaguer.
This is why I came to New York. Even if I fuck everything up, when the smoke clears, there’ll be Julia Avery. My sister, my panacea.
You know what they never tell you about New York? That the city borders on an enormous wasteland. The Big Apple’s skin is an illusion, a thin layer of cultivated civilization, right behind which rises the wilderness of the Highlands, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks. Few New Yorkers are aware that, at this exact spot, two completely different worlds converge. The eternal north wind whistling down Fifth Avenue? Updraft caused by the skyscrapers, was what you always thought. Till you realized that the city is an island in the estuary of a primeval glacial valley. From Ellis & Avery, my dad’s office on the sixty-seventh floor, I now saw for the first time that the mountain range of bricked architecture flows seamlessly into rocky precipices that tower above the Hudson, just beyond the George Washington Bridge. That the rocky mantle inching closer and closer underground had suddenly torn through the soft upper layer, forming outcrops here in Central Park. Eons-old geology smuggling the wilderness back into the city. Like it was growing. Infiltrating the city. Taking it over.
And behind that? Endless woods of rotting scrub you could stray through and lose your way in, endless hills where who knows what could happen. Okay, not exactly virgin territory, not exactly Manifest Destiny, but what they never tell you is that a coupla years ago, just two hours out into the wilderness, three people were killed by a mountain lion. What they never tell you is that a coupla years ago, just two hours into the wilderness, a complete village had disappeared—Black Rock or Black Hill or Black Spring or whatever it was called. And then you in turn never told anyone that the most crucial moment in your and Julia’s lives had happened up there, in those hills, in that wilderness. You never told anyone that the last time you were in the Catskills was the last time you’d ever wanted to be in the Catskills.
You could cross an ocean, you could be fifteen years older, but the wilderness always catches up with you, because it’s inside you.