I buried my face in his chest: my alcove, my breathing earth.
After a pause, I said, “Do you promise me everything?”
“Everything.”
“Good, cuz I already ordered that bag.”
“Seriously?”
“With your card.”
8
Late the next evening, CNN reported a possible terrorist attack on the AMC. Ten-sec paralysis while watching the livestream; deep inhale, deep exhale to steady my heartbeat. Then I texted him.
Jesus fuck Nick u ok???
Sometimes you need thirty-two killed to break the ice.
But we got talking, and a coupla days later, the evening before they removed the bandages, Nick emailed me over a hundred pages of manuscript.
He’d been productive. Anything better to do while lying there waiting for your face to regenerate and whitewashing your guilt about a death you caused?
I read it and put it down.
A haunted mountain, a descent routed by birds. We all tell stories when we can’t face the truth.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Notes by Sam Avery
It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
1
The front door wouldn’t budge. Fucking door. Abnormally chilly draft from the house cramping its style, and me, whaddya think, flesh creeping shivers. My backpack’s KLM label flapping around, and I’m thinking, It’s a sign. I’m thinking, The door, it’s giving you a hint. Take it. Go back before it’s too late.
Last twenty-four hours major rewind: head wonky, I step out of an uncomfortable night flight, six time zones earlier I get in fresh and frisky, gulp down the lump in my throat as I wriggle out of Julia’s arms, the overlong clinch at the security checkpoint after she could say, “Take care of yourself, okay? I’ll come to you if you need help,” embrace her, get out and into an Uber, open Ma’s case on the bed, take my clothes out, hang up, say I’ll think about it, pick up, hear my phone ring—a +31 number.
Why did I have to pick up? In every Hollywood movie, every Netflix series, every fucking Greek myth, bad news travels via long-distance calls. Black sails or smartphones, only diff is the medium.
Don’t pick up and you never come back. Don’t pick up and it’s your ticket to a life behind the counter in some fast-food joint somewhere in the Midwest, your date a bitchin’ hot Tinder Romeo who maybe’s still in the closet but ain’t never been in the vicinity of a mountain either.
Can’t argue with that.
Louise Grevers, waiting patiently on the line, four thousand miles away, probably still picking up my doubts, right through all the Apple electronics and Vodafone frequencies. Probably even sympathized, too.
No judging, no reproach for leaving Nick in the lurch. Zilch. Just asking if it was okay at my parents’, and if I’ve had time to collect my thoughts. They miss me in Holland, she said, asked if I considered going back home.
“On the other hand, maybe New York feels more like home to you now.”
Major throat lump again. Knockout sweetness, this woman.
So twenty-four hours later I’m in Amsterdam, struggling with that damn door. Shouldered it full-force, stumbling over the doorstep. You know you made the wrong choice when even your house doesn’t like you anymore.
Flung my backpack in the dusky hall, held back the urge to shout “Honey, I’m home!”
It was an uncanny moment, sun already crouching behind the houses, tomblike silence everywhere. Life invisible. Like I was the only human living and breathing for miles around. Our house also seemed unfamiliar after all this time. Had a foreign smell, like hospitals and cream. Not talking Dior here, I mean that antiseptic wound cream. Not for softness of skin, but for supple scar tissue. At the stairs, I listened to the silence upstairs that somehow seemed unusually deep, as if while I was away all sorts of rooms had been moved around or added.
It was obvious the house had to get used to me. And vice versa.
And Louise, twenty-four hours ago, long-distance: “I think Harald and I are losing our grip on him. Things haven’t been the same since they removed the bandages.”
That’s why she called: Nick.
What even my Catskills epiphany couldn’t supply, what even—get this—an ice axe through his face and thirty-two bodies in the AMC couldn’t supply, was the catharsis I so needed. Even surrounded by Times Square’s cultivated pixel-built reality, Starbucks mug in my hand, seeking serenity among as much nonwilderness as I could absorb, I was scared that some nonexistent birds would dive at me from the video walls and skyscrapers and rip me apart with their pointed beaks.
Death birds in Nick’s story.
Ethon in my grandfather’s story.
My taloned and feathered guilt complex.
You weren’t there when your boyfriend got to see the ruins of the face that was to be his future. Consequence: you edited yourself out of said future.
Even after all the running, after all those planes and cars and never looking back, where you ended up was the epicenter of your own wilderness.
Now, twenty-four hours later, silence upstairs. The house was holding its breath. Get Well Soon cards on the kitchen table. Dishwasher full but off. Typical Nick. Blender in the wrong place on the counter. Next to it, a pack of Quaker Instant Oats. A can of Mott’s applesauce. Trash can full of empty soup tins, semolina pudding, Nutridrink, Beech-Nut. And straws. Sure, straws. That’s Nick too.
Next date night criteria: Is there a juicer?
I kicked off my shoes, went upstairs, and twenty-four hours ago, Louise had said, “I knew nothing would ever be the same, because he immediately put the bandages back on.” She said, “Because he didn’t want anyone to see his scars, not even us. And I knew because of that picture. The one where Augustin has no eyes.”
Nick had stayed with his folks for a few days after he’d left the hospital. Louise had found the picture when she was putting the laundry into the closet in his room. “It was taken in the bivouac,” she said. She described the photo but didn’t need to. I knew exactly what it showed, cuz Nick had talked about it in his manuscript. It was the last pic he took of Augustin.
“Nick had them printed. He’s really sinking his teeth into it. I think it’s his way of processing it. Anyway, I didn’t think looking at the photos could do any harm, because Nick had already shown them to us on his iPad in the hospital. And I thought this would be more of the same. But it wasn’t. That particular one. Augustin was smiling in that photo, Sam. Only, Nick had scratched up his eyes with a ballpoint. He scratched them so hard they looked like black tunnels.”