I stared at the distressed animal, not knowing what to do. She had been left behind by her herd after apparently breaking her hind leg from a fall off an outcrop. I could see the bone protruding and I smelled the sickly, gaseous stench of inflammation. Happened days ago, by the looks of it.
A shrill cry. High in the thin air, a golden eagle was circling, or maybe it was a bearded vulture. I immediately understood what that meant. She had been marked.
I knelt next to her. Her mild, almost human eyes looked back at me, and she bleated again. “Easy, girl,” I shushed. “I know it hurts. Easy.”
I shuffled closer, heart thumping. The wounded ibex tried to get up on her front legs, but she had lost all her strength and slid sideways over a rocky slab, falling with her sinewy posterior on top of the wounded leg. She cried.
“Shh,” I whispered again. “Relax. I won’t harm you. Poor girl.”
Without breathing, my eyes open wide, I reached out my hand and laid it on her back. I was fifteen, from downtown Amsterdam, and until then had never touched a wild animal. When I did, the reality of the situation hit me, and I wished I’d never gone up the mountain that day. It would have been better if I’d gone and built a dam in the creek. The ibex doe would have died a lonesome death up here, maybe tonight, maybe sooner if the birds dared to set upon her. It was cruel, but the mountains were cruel. Now things were different. I was here, even though I wasn’t completely convinced I had gotten up here of my own free will. This made her my responsibility. She was the toll I had to pay for the panorama of myself that the mountain had offered to me.
A flash in my head: I wanted to pay the toll.
The doe stopped trying to crawl away from me. Apparently she no longer regarded me as a danger, or had decided it didn’t matter anymore. I touched her small, sturdy horns. In a gesture of submission, she laid her head on my thigh and closed her eyes. I kept caressing her and whispering to her softly, as if it could delay what I had to do.
The sun was blazing on my shoulders and my body was sticky with sweat, but the heat burning behind my face was coming from within.
I must have already been holding the boulder in my other hand. I don’t remember picking it up. What I do remember is standing up and lifting the rock above my head with trembling hands. My windpipe was closed, breathing no longer an option.
The doe tried to stand up again. Later, I tried to convince myself that that’s why things unfolded the way they did. The animal had moved and her head was no longer lying on the ground. But it was me. Her horns were blocking the way, and I was afraid that her skull was too thick at the stem. That a single blow wouldn’t kill her. When I swung down the rock with all my strength, it was too much to the front.
Horrified, I looked at what I had done. The blow had crushed her snout. It was awful. The animal bellowed and rolled her eyes. Hair, foaming blood, and bone splinters stained the rocks when she scrambled to her feet, and now, with the strength of the dying, she managed to hobble away. Her ravaged snout dangled from her head on a strip of flesh and she was twitching with her horns. For a second I stood rooted to the spot, not knowing what to do. Then I ran after the trail of blood, looking in a panic for another rock.
Seven yards ahead, her legs gave out. Without hesitating, I started bashing in her head with the boulder. After the second blow she stopped bellowing. After the third she only quivered. After the fifth she was dead. But I kept on hitting her. I raised the rock and swung it down. Raised the rock and swung it down. I thought of relentlessly turning cogwheels, thought of tubes spouting smoke, thought of heavy machinery that, once in motion, couldn’t be stopped. My hands, my arms, my upper body were covered in blood. I felt it spattering on my cheeks and in my hair. The blood was a hot, red haze in front of my eyes.
Later, I covered the carcass with boulders. The following day I could barely lift my arms up to my shoulders, but during the descent there was only heat flowing through my body. I found a steel-blue pond in the combe above the tree line and dove into it. The water was so freezing that my heart skipped a beat or two and the blood in my veins seemed to clot, but I stayed underwater as long as I could hold my breath. It was the only thing that could extinguish the fire in my body.
I reached the campground in the late afternoon. I threw down my backpack and was about to crawl into my tent without a word, but my mom, who was cleaning carrots, called my name. Our eyes met for an odd, charged moment, and when she spoke, I heard something ill at ease in her voice.
“Hey. Did you find anything?”
“No,” I said. “There was nothing up there.”
6
(In the psychiatrist’s office)
“Why are you afraid to show your face?” Claire Stein asked.
The pressure. Oh, Christ, the pressure behind the mask.
“Because that’s the heart of the matter. You were mutilated up there in a terrible accident. And let’s be honest, till now you were always the kind of guy that could turn heads. On the street, in the bar, at the gym. You have many more followers on Instagram than the number of people you know, and that isn’t because of the articles you write for Lonely Planet.”
“I wouldn’t want to say . . .”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. Anyone blessed with good looks is to a certain extent aware of the advantages it offers in life. But eventually you start taking it for granted. Not out of arrogance, but simply because that’s how things are. You get used to your perceived self-image, and mutilation doesn’t fit in with how you pictured your life at twenty-seven. So you tell yourself stories that distract you from that reality. That, Nick, is the actual mask you’re hiding behind.”
There was something wrong with her voice. What was it? I still couldn’t read her look, and the uneasiness, the feeling that everything had been unsettled, was growing.
Okay, she was right. My mutilation did play a role in how miserable I’d been feeling the past few weeks. But the true reason was different. I felt it pressing from behind my face against the tightened bandages.
I heard Sam in my head. Kinda dizzy. Don’t know what’s up, been feeling woozy all day. Tipsy. Topsy-turvy. Whatever.
It was the voice that spoke those words—the voice of a frightened little boy—that finally turned memory into realization. Suddenly it made sense.
Claire was afraid of me. She had known something was off, and she had every reason to. Because it was back. That’s what the pressure building up behind the mask meant . . . a pressure that had now risen beyond a critical level.
My throat tightened, and although I tried to resist it, it was like my face was being pulled apart by two invisible ice-cold hands.
“Take off your mask, Nick,” Claire said, voice hoarse. “It’s time for you to confront yourself.”
“Can we please stop for today?” I heard myself say, starting to get up. “I know it’s early, but I’m really, really tired . . .”
“Stay in your seat! Sit down and take that mask off.”
“It would really be better if—”