Something bad is happening to me. I can’t stop it.
He leaned over to the headboard and switched off the reading lamp. It got dark again. Only a faint light shone through the heavy curtains, turning everything and Nick into outlines. But Nick was much more than an outline. He was an expectation, a fear, a memory, and his presence in that dark room filled my lungs and weighed on my shoulders and made me dizzy again.
“Does the light bother you?”
I could only just make out a nod.
“Okay.”
Silence. So long I barely got up the nerve to ask the question.
“Can I see it?”
This time I couldn’t tell if he nodded or shook. Just sat there, the shadow at the end of the bed. My heart was in my mouth.
“Nick. Can I see it? Without the bandages?”
He started writing again and ripped out the sheet. My eyes were adjusting slowly to the dark and I had to strain them all the way.
I love you too. I just can’t show my face yet.
Alarm bells ringing. But Nick beckoned to me, so what was I supposed to do but to go to him? And fuck almighty, there’s the room reeling again. Or was it Ramses purring? Couldn’t see straight. The bed bobbing and heaving like I’d downed the umpteenth Sunset Spice in NY and I’m thinking, Compensate, hotshot. Compensate, if you don’t want to give yourself away, and then I was plopping down on the edge of the mattress.
I grabbed something to stop the reeling and, shit, it was his leg. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. Did he notice me flinch? Or that my body was whirling so much I’d go kablooey if he got any closer? But that’s exactly what he did. Pulled me to him, pressed me against that big, feverish body of his. The antiseptic odor so overwhelmingly near, so penetrating, I had to hold my breath. But under it I smelled blood and sweat, and under that, I smelled Nick.
And something else. I honestly don’t know what that smell was. Something old. Something that sure as hell wasn’t Nick.
I tried not to moan when I surrendered to the embrace. We dropped sideways onto the bed and I was forced to raise my legs onto the mattress and lay them against his. I shut my eyes in an attempt to escape the dizziness, but even behind my eyelids the darkness kept twirling. Thank fuckness Nick couldn’t see my face in the dark—my unconcealable expression of hollow disgust—and thanks, too, that I couldn’t see his when I felt those rough bandages scraping my neck, and that gooey, unfamiliar topography rubbing my skin. His breath on my cheek wasn’t hot like the rest of him but ice-cold.
3
Didn’t think I’d ever be able to fall asleep, but looks like I did. When I woke up, the curtains were open and the bedroom was awash in warm sunlight. No Nick. The clock radio said 3:30 p.m. Jesus. Jet lag versus Sam Avery, 1–0.
I didn’t have my T-shirt on. Couldn’t remember taking it off, and that tangled up my insides. Did Nick do it when I was sleeping? Without waking me? I suddenly had an image of him kissing me in my sleep, those damaged lips hidden under the stiff bandages, and I went cold all over.
When I sat up, a folded note slid off my chest. I read:
It was nice to hold you. I looked at you all morning while you slept. You seemed so small in my arms! So small I felt I could have squashed you like a bug, I only had to close my arms and all your bones would break. Little, fragile Sam!
It doesn’t matter that you went away. All that matters is that you’re here now. Don’t be afraid of me, we’ll get through this.
xXx Nick
4
When did the idea first pop into my head that Nick’s trauma in the mountains had awakened some dangerous thing in him? Some thing that was actually some one, not him, or—way creepier—some thing that had always been there inside him? Well, right then. One of those first days in Amsterdam.
Maybe it was that evening, after all that went down when I found Nick on all fours in the cellar.
Or maybe it was later that night, when Julia said the word schizophrenia on FaceTime, which hit me like a bucket of ice-cold water in the face. She also went on about split personalities and Freud’s Doppelg?nger, after which I said “Please,” after which I said “Stop it,” after which I said “I get the point.” My Nick, Jekyll and Hyde. Whatever—in your face that the birth of the someone else came right around the showdown between him and Augustin on the edge of the crevasse. I finally had to bite the bullet: Nick was responsible for Augustin’s death. And it looked like his mind had not only got fucked up but also dualized, like, ding-a-ling! Good versus Evil, let the battle begin.
And that, that was the exact last thing I could use during my first night in Amsterdam. Wide-awake and straight up in bed, losing a hopeless fight with my jet lag, me in bed with my MacBook and shitloads of psychomedical terms, as far away from the cellar and the thing prowling down there as geographically possible without going through the roof or running outta da house: the exact last thing I could use.
What I could use was Vicodin and glitch-free Wi-Fi.
“I’m so glad you called, bro,” Julia said, her face stuck in a choppy blur—her digital complexion, cyberspace skin damage. “Mom and Dad said you would.”
“How the fuck do they know? They’re top of the list of people I’ve kept in the dark all these weeks.”
“That’s why.” Her face frozen in a zombified 2.0 of her ideal Snapchat selfie. “They said give him two days after he gets home. I thought their estimation was generous.”
I pictured my parents and threw in a locust plague and tornado for good measure. Don’t wanna sound like a jerk, but the last thing you need is to fill your parents in on all the details of how your life went south. Last coupla weeks in New York, I was about as transparent to them as reinforced concrete. Not that I’m ungrateful. As the apple of their eye, I had the right to unannounced visits in times of crisis, but that ocean suits me fine most of the time.
Julia, that night on FaceTime: “Talk a bit louder, okay? Why are you whispering?”
Can’t, I said. Cuzza Nick. Where he was? In the cellar. But what did I mean when I said I was scared of him? Did he threaten me? I said, I dunno if he threatened me, that’s the thing. I said, the cellar, that’s his sanctuary now. “The cellar,” Julia said. I said, he likes to be in the dark. At least, that’s what he said. Julia echoed the sentence and, gotta admit, it made my first day back in Amsterdam sound hell-hectic, and now the image froze on big eyes and curled lips that didn’t exactly look like they were expressing understanding.