All you hadda do to get here was wake up in his arms and in a tightly wound roll of steel wire, listening to freak talk about Mount Doom and say Whoa, say Stop right there. You only hadda take charge and say This is what we’re gonna do, say This, but then it was late September and he still hadn’t shown his face. Get fed up with it all and you’d see him as nothing more than one big scar. Your trauma, your grandpa, the eagle that came to rip open your old wounds every night—it all culminated in Nick, and if you didn’t accept him now, you never would.
So it was time for a face-to-face. Midnight, masks off.
Nick was sleeping, and fuck almighty was I scared. Felt like Jack and the giant. Bilbo and Smaug. David and Goliath.
There was a clip. Behind his neck, near his hairline, in the pillow. I fumbled with it and unclasped it. The bandages loosened immediately. Nick didn’t stir. Only the rise and fall of his chest, the subterranean rumble.
I pulled the wrappings and exposed some of his right cheek. I was told that even if the corners of your mouth are ripped halfway to your ears, the flaps of skin will meld in a week, if properly stitched. Inside it takes much longer, inside a cleft orbicularis oris, and a torn-off pterygoideus lateralis, mumbo jumbo for enough muscle and tendon trauma to make it take months before he can articulate a decent a or i or e. Not to mention the scar. A month and half had now gone by, and I was prepped for peeling scabs. I was prepped for a black-and-blue, bloated cheek, a stiff, leathery balloon the color of sweaty Cracker Barrel country ham.
But I wasn’t prepped for what I saw.
Nick’s skin underneath the mask was gray and hard. Cracked. Crumbly edges. Almost like rock. Around the loose strips of gauze was a dark residue. I rubbed it between my thumb and finger, and it squirted onto the mattress.
Granite shards.
And I’m suddenly not so sure I wanna take a look under those bandages.
Nick moved. My hand shot back and froze. Ramses’s back twitched and he scampered away, a black flash of edgy energy. On my side of the bed, I’m mute, adrenaline speeding through my veins.
Nick’s head rolled slowly on the pillow. Loosened another strip. More gray, more grooves. Hard to see in the dark.
I counted. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Approached warily. My hand trembling with the urge to pull the rest of the bandages right off and expose his true face.
Too late I realized that the dull thump I’d heard when I peeled off the last wrapping wasn’t in my head. I’d heard it in his head. A profound, dark sound. As if deep inside him, the earth’s crust had caved in.
Dizziness back, more intense than ever. My growing feeling the past weeks that it was somehow issuing out of Nick, that Nick was a kind of walking Ménière’s disease, cuz come close or even look at him and you got all wobbly. Like the sight of him yanked the ground away from under you. I didn’t dare think about the implications. But now everything was reeling too much, and there was no turning back.
I pulled off the last wrapping and didn’t even get the time to recoil.
My Romeo’s flawless Gillette face, Nick’s smiling, infomercial Adonis face, it lay before me like a scarped, eroded landscape. Under his cheekbones a wasteland of dead skin and fissured rock, ravaged by the elements. A vast canyon, deeper and more jagged than the rest, cleaving it in half. Stretched all the way to the abyss of the corner of his mouth. I’m saying “canyon,” I’m saying “all the way,” I’m saying “abyss,” cuz even if I can still see myself sitting on the bed, the strip of gauze in my hands and everything whirling around me, I was in that landscape too, like I’d tumbled into it and was clinging on to a giant’s jawline.
Incredible! He was humongous! And me so tiny! Under my hands, the rock shook with his breath’s constant rumble. Echoing like a distant avalanche. The world strained and released, and I felt I was going to throw up, but then I got it: I was facing Nick like he’d faced the mountain, and I was experiencing vertigo.
But still, that canyon before me, that canyon where the ice axe smashed right through Nick’s face, I hadda go there. Hadda look inside. Like I had a choice?
As I crawled to the edge, a blast of icy wind punched me in the face. Total-body shiver session.
Under my fingers, rock turned into ice.
It cracked, blue and hard and hostile. The cold took my breath away. My eyes bulged, the corneas seemed to freeze. The moonlight fell through the bedroom window, illuminating the vertical walls of ice as I peered over the edge of Nick’s face into the crevasse.
The depth! Oh, god, that chasm! The most dizzying my eyes had ever seen.
The abyss was full of shadows, full of darkness from a pitch-black place so deep no light could reach it, full of dancing echoes.
And it was alive. The echoes were alive.
Something was climbing up out of the crevasse.
I saw it. A horror, darker than all others. Like a spider, clinging to the wall. Straight beneath me.
It was staring upwards. Staring at me.
And me, total panic. Outta here. Away from this insanity. Behind me, the spinning bedroom; behind me, the loose wrappings of gauze on the pillow; but wherever my hands groped, they found only air. Grasping in a vacuum. Nick’s abyss sucking me in. I wanted to scream, but it was like the air had frozen my lungs.
The thing in the crevasse was nearer. It was human-shaped but its movements weren’t human at all. The limbs were all wrong. When I looked, it stopped moving. Like I could confine it with my gaze. But if I blinked . . .
Oh Jesus fuck, the arm, the arm, it shot up! Fingers riveted into precipitous blue ice. Right under me. Cracks forming where they’d slammed in. The face, it was shrouded in shadows, but I saw red, outdoor-sports-jacket-type red, and shaggy hair.
Fuck Nietzsche and his abyss. The thing climbing out of Nick’s face was Augustin.
This time, I did scream. With all my might, I biffed myself back into reality and pushed myself away from the edge. I was suddenly thrown back onto my side of the bed. Next to me, the dark, silent figure that was Nick, only not quiet now. His body shuddering, twirling, a fluttering sound, a shriek, it filled the bedroom and bounced off the walls, which seemed more distant than I thought possible.
In a flash, something shot past me. It spread its wings. I flailed around, screaming. Three coal-black birds were circling the bedroom. One hit the ceiling light, tumbled down, then flew on, screeching.
There were birds coming out of Nick’s face.
And there was more. An arm protruded from the exposed scar. Five frozen zombie fingers stretching, seeking heat. Seeking me. Around it, the sleeve of a red Gore-Tex jacket.
Augustin.
You wouldn’t believe it if it came out of your own mother’s mouth.
Nick jerked upright. Literally roaring. The shock wave blew the window out and threw me off the bed. I mean, there I was, literally flying through the room and thudding against the wall. It walloped the air out of me. I rolled onto the floor, coughing and doubled up with pain.
I didn’t know what had just happened. Nick was thrashing his arms about and seemed to be struggling with something under the covers. For a minute I thought I saw something under the covers—a twisting shape, the illusion of something horrifying. But then it was gone. Nick ceased his eerie, inarticulate shrieking and stared wide-eyed at the circling birds. Feathers fluttered through the bedroom. They found the burst window and disappeared one by one into the night.