Told Dr. Claire Stein, my psychiatrist at the AMC, everything this morning. Big mistake. Worried I did something terrible.
For a month now, I’ve been talking to Claire every Monday and Thursday between ten and ten to eleven. The Medical Psychology department has referred me to her. Suits me well. Psychiatry is in another building, a much more modern building across the street, connected to the hospital only by a footbridge. Glad I didn’t have to wander through those endless corridors anymore. The AMC has in no way recovered yet from the blow. The employees are constantly on edge, walking around the hallways with their gazes fixed to the floor, only looking up briefly when you walk by, but the looks on their faces are like they’re always in a hurry to be somewhere else. The atmosphere there is eerie, dead. I notice I don’t want to be reminded about it, maybe because I was so close to death myself.
Anyway—Claire. At first it was the standard song and dance about trauma therapy, PTSD, EMDR, but before my sessions with Sam last week, I let her—at his urging—read my manuscript. She naturally doesn’t believe much of it, but she’s polite enough to not make me feel like I’m crazy, while not acknowledging what she calls my delusions, either. Early in today’s session, she looked at me from under a framed quote by Sigmund Freud—“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”—wearing her typical psychiatrist’s poker face, as friendly and inscrutable as you can get.
“It’s quite a claim, Nick, saying you’re possessed.”
I reached for my iPad, but Claire put her hand on it and said, “Try saying it out loud.”
I felt uneasy. Vocalizing something like that out loud is even harder than writing about it. “Listening to me isn’t that much fun, you know?” I mumbled. Wissennee a-mee i-in eahma fu, yano?
“I can understand you fine.”
“Fine, if you insist.” (Not going to write it phonetically to prove how horrible I sound.) “I can’t expect you to believe me. I don’t believe that kind of crap myself.”
“You don’t come across like you do, either. You told me you’re not religious. But the term possession is religious by definition.”
“True, but religion has nothing to do with it. There’s no devil or demon. No evil spirit or anything that can impose its will on me in a mythical sense. There’s only the mountain.”
“The mountain you’re so obsessed with,” Claire said.
Something tightened under my bandages. “I know what you’re getting at.”
“In psychiatry, we also use the term possession, but only in the context of obsession. We talk about being possessed by an idea. It isn’t unusual for obsessive thoughts to arise after a traumatic experience. You can’t get them out of your head, and you become incapable of seeing anything outside the context of the obsession. Then you behave accordingly.”
“So it’s me. My behavior is triggered by my obsession.”
“Don’t you think that’s a more feasible explanation, at the very least?”
“I discussed it with Sam. But the birds change the equation. They were real. Sam saw them too.”
“Are you really sure?”
I was about to say something but promptly fell silent. That came like a kick in the guts. In our three sessions together, Claire had got a pretty good picture of Sam. Now she thought I was pulling him into my delusions in order to make them seem more plausible. Or worse, that Sam wanted me to believe he’d seen the birds too, to keep the chasm between us from getting even bigger.
The death of my sanity. Christ, I can’t go any lower than this.
“Let’s assume for a minute that it all really happened,” Claire said. “Your flashbacks, the possession. How does that work, exactly?”
“Sam said it like this: ‘Possession is obsession with capital penetration. That mountain fucked you up pretty good.’ ”
Claire smiled but didn’t digress. “In your manuscript, you say you believe that mountains have souls.” Stressing the word with air quotes. “A conviction like that doesn’t pop up out of nowhere. And I have difficulty imagining someone whose convictions are firmly anchored in science and rationality thinking like that. How did you come up with that idea?”
3
(Italy, 2006)
Claire was right about one thing: my obsession with the mountains had already existed long before I set foot on the Maudit. It was born on the day of my coming of age. That’s not what I literally told her, but as I’m writing this, I know that it’s not only true but also that it’s more relevant than I’d dared admit before.
I’m convinced that in every life the passage from childhood to adulthood isn’t gradual, but that instead there’s a single, distinguishing moment that marks the transition, like a stoneman, a pile of stacked rocks on the col between two valleys. Often you don’t see it while it happens—maybe you become aware of it only years later—but good mothers do.
I’ll never forget the look in my own mother’s eyes when I came back to the campground in Gran Paradiso that midafternoon in August 2006 and plunked my sweaty backpack in front of the tent. I was fifteen years old, and my rite of passage had been to climb the Punta Rossa. When I came down, she must have seen something in my face, some kind of toughening, an aloof expression she didn’t recognize. But what she actually saw was that her son had grown up. He was older than the boy who’d left that morning and who, in the weeks before, had scoured the fields and built dams in the creek. It broke my mother’s heart, but that didn’t bother me. Every son breaks his mother’s heart sooner or later.
The previous day, during a trek with my parents through the Parco Nazionale, the mountain spoke to me. It wasn’t a particularly high mountain, and at first glance, not so attractive either, but it was attractive to me. More importantly, with my limited experience, I thought it was within my reach. Even when the path looped in the other direction, I could still feel its presence in my back, as if it were magnetic. At that moment, I couldn’t have put into words what I already knew instinctively, that the mountain possessed a primeval form of life and was speaking to me: Come up, Nick. I’m waiting for you.
Harald and Louise Grevers were hikers, not climbers. They felt drawn to the alpine pastures, the highland grasses and the panoramas of the slopes and the valleys. Dad wore his Borsalino panama to fend off the blazing sun, and Mom picked flowers. In the mountains, they were just like an Italian couple from a Fellini movie. The peaks didn’t interest them in the slightest; no reward awaited you at the top.