And with that, I even surprised myself. Ever since that fuckup in Amsterdam, we hadn’t been intimate anymore. Not really. Couldn’t get it up. The nerve, I mean. Maybe some things that seemed fucked up beyond repair could still be fixed.
Anyway, Nick suggested going up the trail behind the house. So he could finally show me his beloved mountains. And his talking . . . well, he wasn’t exactly rattling on, sounded more like an amateur ventriloquist having a bad day, but hey, who needs articulation when you got willpower?
“Okay, forget the handicap. If you can learn to control your superpowers, I see a golden future in the film biz.”
“I don’t have superpowers, Sam.”
“Don’t be so conservative. What you did with me in the bedroom, that was telekinesis. Imagine. Every FX studio in Hollywood rendered obsolete. No action or horror movie without your name in the credits. You could be the first real-life Carrie White. And I’ll be your manager. Even if we only demand fifty percent of what the studios save on CGI, we’ll be raking it in. You just need a bit of practice. Here. Lift me off the ground.”
“Say what?”
“Lift me off the ground.”
“I can’t.”
“Willpower, Nick. Believe in it. You don’t want it enough.”
“That’s not how it works.”
I took out my iPhone and said, “Want me to film it? It’ll get a hundred million views on YouTube.”
Those explosions in his eyes—I couldn’t get enough.
We took it easy and rested whenever Nick’s body said so. One step, ten steps, a hundred steps. In front of us a huge brown cow was chewing on alpine grass. A gray cow was trying to scratch her rump with her horns, sound-tracked by the jingles of a massive bell. A third cow was blocking the trail, squinting against the sun. Chewing their cud, the cows didn’t budge, only their tails swatting their ass flies.
And me, I stood still, cuz those cows, those horns, not what you want shish kebabbing your painstakingly built abs.
“Relax,” Nick said, hands raised. “Alpine cows are gentle as lambs. They wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“I dunno, Nick. A wise man once said, ‘Never trust anything that lives on a mountain.’ ”
“Which wise man?”
“Me. Don’t you know some kinda spell to get that critter to move outta the way?”
Nick approached calmly. Deferentially. Like he was some kinda swami. And the cow, it just gazed unfazed. Couldn’t tell by her look whether she was super smart or incredibly dumb.
“If she freaks out, CinemaSins will troll the hell out of us,” I said. “Animals-sense-supernatural-presence-before-humans-do cliché.”
Nick giggled. “Come on. She’s harmless.”
“You mean she’ll harm me less?” I said, but I swerved behind Nick, keeping a wide loop, as far from the trail as possible without falling into the creek. Expecting a stampede any minute. Or the cows to crowd in a procession around Nick.
But none of the above. Clarabelle didn’t give us a second glance. It was almost a letdown.
About a mile past our house, the trail climbed through a narrow valley to above the tree line, and not much later we reached the top. In front of us, right in the middle of the upper valley, rose the massive gray wall of the Moiry dam. Above it, the shimmery reflection of the sun on a mirage. A jagged line of shark teeth. The mountains’ ivories. Glaciers, snowcaps, the works.
My stomach was on tumble-dry, a feeling that, geometrically speaking, was a hundred and eighty degrees diametrically opposed to the wild sparks in Nick’s eyes.
“Wow,” he said.
I didn’t say a thing.
A solitary curl of cloud brushed one of the highest peaks. Those mountains, they had something hypnotizing about them, but not in any dreamy or salutary way. I couldn’t help feeling that the dam formed a barrier. It emanated unseen menace. I wasn’t prepared for it, and it freaked me out. Also cuz of what I saw in Nick.
“See that ice face right above the dam? Pointes du Mourti. I climbed it.”
“Motherfucker,” I said.
“With Pieter. Our first north face. And that high one there in the distance, too. That’s the Dent Blanche.”
He musta seen something in my face, cuz he touched my hand and said, “Aww.”
I looked away, wished I had my shades with me. Said, “And now you’re gonna quit climbing, right?”
“Um . . . I haven’t really given it much thought yet.”
“You need to think about it?”
Nick shrugged. “The Kazakhstani climber Anatoli Boukreev survived a blizzard on Everest that killed eight others, and six days later he soloed Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world.”
“Eighth, sixth, fourth, who cares?”
“Joe Simpson started climbing again after he broke his leg high up in the Andes and almost died.”
“Cuz he’s a fool.”
“Your fools are my heroes. Maybe they went back to the mountains to come to terms with something.”
But that wasn’t the main reason and we both knew it. I thought of Nick’s manuscript, what he had written in it: If you, the climber, hear the mountain’s call, it will bewitch you, it will intoxicate you, and you will realize that you could fathom her only if you succumb to it—if you go up.
And Nick, again that intense look when he sniffed the cool air. He tousled my hair, which totally pisses me off most days, but I let him now, cuz I suddenly felt really shaky.
“Why don’t you like it here, Sammy?” he asked. “The mountains always make me feel so peaceful.”
Why didn’t I like it here? The mountains bit your face off. They almost killed you. They always make me wait at home, frozen with fear, every time your yogi yearning comes calling and you need to observe the whole karmic cycle of life from some elevated spiritual perspective. A jaw operation and two scar corrections coming up, and even so, your face will still be marked for life. How’s that for peaceful?
But I didn’t say that. And I couldn’t tell him about the Catskills, either. About Huckleberry Wall.
“Something about the way they block the horizon just gives me the jitters.” I made a wide gesture. “They make the world too small. Like everything behind them is a secret. And with every step you take, one disappears behind the other and then another one appears. One sidestep and your whole world looks different. How creepy is that?”
“Know what’s creepy?”
“What?”
“That hospital. They’re all so terribly unanimously positive, with their good intentions and carefree smiles and blah blah about how everything will be all right, but all around me people were dying. All those fathers and mothers and sons and daughters that couldn’t take their loved ones home, and I was ashamed because I was feeling miserable about my face, about how everything would be different when I got out.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“That’s not what I meant; you know that.”
“I’m still sorry. It feels like I let you down by not being there for you. Even here. Even on this fucking mountain. I shoulda been there for you.”
“That’s stupid.”
“But it’s true.”
We walked in silence for a while, unspoken words between us. A treasure of raw, white Tiffany pearls strung on the horizon.
“I’m not sure I can take you climbing again, Nick.”