“Only a point from which you can’t go any further,” my dad would say to me. “It’s much nicer to end up at a lake or at a rifugio. Up there, everything seems small.”
I didn’t get how he could call that scintillating landscape of ice castles in the distance “small.” Maybe he couldn’t bear feeling small and insignificant himself, beneath such grandeur. Me? Call it nihilistic, call it teenage anxiety, but I wanted to disappear in the immensity of it all. Up until then, my life had been a succession of bland events from which I couldn’t distill any noteworthy meaning. Higher up, life seemed more rugged, more pure, unpolished by time. The mountains were a world devoid of the varnish of civilization, and I felt the irresistible urge to lay them bare.
But my father was unyielding. “Absolutely not,” was his answer, when I begged him to take me up to the Punta Rossa, or at least allow me to go alone. “Much too dangerous. If you’re so intent on climbing mountains, you can take a course with the mountaineering association next summer. Now you’re coming back down with us.”
And so I did. I took that course a year later. But the Punta Rossa had come first, and that’s where it all began. The mountain had opened a door, and now, after all these years, I’m afraid much more has slipped through the crack than I’d like.
The next morning, I set out before dawn. I left a note on the tent: Went to look for ibex horns and build a dam further up the valley. Back before dinner. I told Claire that, looking back on it now, the whole undertaking seems pretty rash to me. Fifteen years old, all alone in the mountains, and no one knew where I was. But at the time I didn’t see the dangers involved. The mountain was all that mattered. Maybe it’s an integral part of growing up that you constantly walk a tightrope over death. The test is to make it to the other side alive.
The valley was still dark and damp with dew. The morning chill gave me goose bumps on my bare legs. Wisps of mist covered the slopes, giving the landscape an eerie character. The forest above the campground seemed riddled with secrets. If you solely regarded it as the gateway to the upper world, then the only respectful way to pass through it would be to do it quickly and quietly, with your eyes lowered to the ground.
I started running, had the feeling I was being chased by something. But that changed the minute I found a rhythm that I felt I could endlessly keep up. The air between the larches seemed strangely charged, electromagnetic energy that made my teeth and fingertips tingle and the slopes buzz with life. No matter how steep the trail got, I didn’t stop. Not to catch my breath, not to drink, not to look around. Running with my eyes to the ground, my heart in my mouth, and focused on my breathing, I seemed to be getting lighter. I felt like I was flying. Maybe I was.
It was only far beyond the tree line that I became aware of my surroundings again. The sky crept from deep purple to a pearlescent glow that faded the last stars. The day before, it took my parents and me three hours to reach the point from which you could see the Punta Rossa. Today it had cost me merely an hour. Dramatically, it rose into thin air before me, a mighty pyramid of rock, interwoven with a web of ribs and gullies that glowed bright red in the first sunlight. Somehow the mountain seemed bigger than the day before. I was in a hollowed-out combe of grasslands where yesterday we had seen a herd of ibex grazing, but they weren’t there now. It was as if the mountain wanted to reveal itself exclusively to me.
Come to me, Nick. Up here there are no limits to who you can be.
I ran on, past the point where my parents had turned back. The mountain had chosen me, and I had answered its call.
I’m coming. Here I am, and I’m here for you only.
Everything that happened after that has the tangled consistency of a delirium, in which I strayed further and further from the path and pushed on through the wilderness with increasing recklessness. I remember that, at the base of the rib, warmed by the sun and craving things I had no understanding of, I threw off my backpack and attacked it head-on. Without a plan, straight up, guided by a primitive, animal instinct. What I didn’t tell Claire is that something self-destructive had been awakened in me. And I loved it. It was overwhelming. Ecstatic. I was consciously severing the bonds that tied me to the lower world and trading them in for a detached existence in stone. Up here, the only thing alive was the mountain.
It was staring at me. Right into my soul.
It wouldn’t take its eyes off me.
I can still see myself standing on the summit: head thrown back, eyes shut, arms outspread, one knee raised. My body engaged in a perilous balancing act with the wind, my spirit wavering in a thrilling deadlock between life and death.
One step to the left. One step to the right. I can be eternal too.
Now, twelve years later, that thought still gives me shivers.
4
(In the psychiatrist’s office)
“How dangerous can I become? I need to know before it’s too late.”
I stared at Dr. Claire Stein with hollow eyes. I was painfully aware of how she was likely perceiving me, my drooping shoulders, face in hands, and the eyes between my fingers undoubtedly bloodshot. I was the epitome of the psychiatric patient. A disturbed patient. But I was also aware of the skin under the bandages, and it was dry and hot and throbbing.
Something was brewing in there.
“Have you ever felt the urge to hurt Sam?”
“No. Are you kidding? No way!”
“No impulse to?”
“No.”
“Not even when you lie awake at night, and bad thoughts about your mutilation sneak up on you?”
“I love Sam. I want to protect him.”
“And you still threw him across the room. You wrapped steel wire around his face.”
I started to stammer. “I . . . I already told you. It was beyond my control.”
“Because you believe it wasn’t you, but that the mountain operating through you made you do it. What about Augustin?”
I didn’t know what she was getting at. “Augustin is dead.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t hold him responsible for what happened to you. Last week, Sam told us about the photo he found, the one where you scratched Augustin’s eyes out and tore open his cheeks. You said you couldn’t remember doing that. Is it too far-fetched to conclude that you acted in a fit of resentment?”
My pulse went up and I felt sweat break out in my neck. “I’m not a violent person. I wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“He maimed you for life.”
“That wasn’t him. Because . . .”
“Because the mountain operated through him, too,” Claire finished my sentence. She laid her Parker pen down on my pile of notes. “Okay, I can follow your reasoning till here. But what I don’t understand is why it causes such extreme outbursts of violence. Why did it get Augustin into such a rage that he attacked you with the ice axe?”