What did scare me were the words Nick had typed on his iPad, the morning I woke up wearing orthodontic headgear made of steel wire. Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” in my ears and Nick’s words still fresh in my mind: I didn’t mean to hurt you. But that person on the other side of the window did. And I couldn’t stop him. . . . If it can let me do things like that, if it can let me do such terrible things, where does this end?
Truth is, I’d never really believed that.
What was driving him was a force of nature, not a rational consciousness. Forces of nature have no will.
Whatever cruel things Nick had done, they had originated from within him.
Nick. My Nick. My perfect smile, emerald-eye boyfriend, who’d once slammed me against the UvA gym’s lockers and put his tongue in my mouth and then asked shyly if I wanted to go out to dinner with him. A mass murderer.
Your boyfriend is a mass murderer.
No.
I was letting myself get carried away. Fact is, in the early days of his rehabilitation he hadn’t even been physically capable of getting to his own hospital room’s crapper. Tethered by transparent tubes to the rattling IV and tripping on joy juice, he’d been in no condition to go on a killing spree throughout the AMC.
Plus, it was Nick we’re talking about here, dammit. I knew Nick.
But did I?
You bet your ass I did. So shut up.
He never got violent.
Nobody died.
And what about Dr. Genet? The doc that power-dived off the roof to find out if the falling would ever stop?
But Nick had been in a coma. Dr. Genet’s suicide was said to have happened more than a month after the operation. And who was your Deep Throat? Exactly—Cécile Métrailler. I never checked out her story. If she’d been crazy from the get-go, she coulda added this chapter to her tale too.
But why would she do something like that? Nurse Cécile, maybe she flipped out in the end, but before, she’d been on our side. I’d liked her. What had driven her to go to the mountains on the most dangerous night of the year, to try to mainline Nick with a lethal cocktail?
Necessity.
Once again, I felt my guts twist. Suddenly Cécile’s voice again, real close: Once he’s touched you, once he’s cursed you, he gets into your head and never leaves. Cécile’s voice, itself a curse: He makes you fall.
I started out of my reverie and stopped. Tore off my Beats. The storm was raging, but the echoes now sounded further away. Or was I being fooled? Looking around, I could see nothing, no trace of where I came from. No valley, no mountains. Nothing but the desolate night tide on the densely wooded slope. Nothing but the frozen air that made your throat sizzle. Only now did I realize how exhausted I was, how much energy it had cost me to plod through the deep snow. The storm was lashing me and making my hands numb. My thoughts liquid.
Cécile’s trail was gone.
I looked around. It just wasn’t there.
“Cécile!” I shouted again, but without conviction. The night had swallowed her up. Whether the trail had been snowed over or I’d lost it, it was the same outcome. She was gone. And, at the same time, I realized with my hollowed-out mind that the reason I was out here was never to find Cécile. This was my own escape. Getting lost gave me power. Control.
The opposite of what Cécile had meant by “falling.”
Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” I de-snowmanned myself and went on. Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long,” George Michael’s “Faith,” the cold and the ongoing tumult of the storm bashed time into liquidity. Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde and Paul Simon, the storm and my reason for being here meant nothing anymore, the music meant nothing anymore, it was but a mix of sounds spinning in and out of my awareness. The dude who kept tugging on the strings of my hood with numb hands, I didn’t recognize him. The rime of his frozen breath on my scarf wasn’t mine. I must have been wandering onward like this for hours. The batteries of both the Beats and Nick’s iPhone had given up the ghost sometime during the night, but all I can remember is the hypnotizing wind. Maybe the Morose had died down, or I had strayed too far from the valley’s mouth to still hear its echoes. All I knew was power, the power of moving forward. You would have literally needed a wall to hold me back.
It came. I literally bumped into it.
I noticed it only at the last moment. A lee in the storm. The wind lessening a bit. Then it loomed up out of the dark, right in front of me. High beyond measure. Wide beyond measure. A gray, concrete colossus. If I’d kicked it and was standing at the pearly gates, God’s idea of paradise was pretty Stalinist.
This was where my quest ended. Here, I would either die or be reborn. I took off my frozen fleece gloves. The palms of my hands red and waxy, I laid them on the concrete. Felt it vibrating. A deep, dark vibration, whizzing through my whole body, as if deep within this wall a gigantic, demonic generator were chugging.
I imagined that the vibrations were the mountains’ breathing.
After a while, I pressed my cheek against the wall too, so it could fully absorb me.
15
Run-of-the-mill moment, nothing special, the next morning. You wake up, or something of the sort. You don’t recognize the moment itself as such. Only that you suddenly realize that you’re staring at a still, snowy mountainscape. You have a vague perception of the life of the atmospheric tides in the sky above you. Endless ebbs and floods on the horizon of the universe. But when you’re awake, there’s daylight. The night has segued into day unnoticed. The storm has died down.
The dimensions are boundless. The still sky, boundless. The mountains, enormous. The wall you’re sitting against, which you recognize as the Moiry dam, immense. You’re in a land of giants.
In all their silent splendor, you finally see the beauty of the mountains.
It takes a long time before you feel able to set out on the long descent. Before you’ve hit and rubbed enough sensation back into your limbs to make the blood flow and make it possible for you to get up. You don’t feel any pain. Or your lips, for that matter. Or your ears. Your nose. Only a general, heavy-as-hell fatigue. Your head is strangely empty.
It stays that way as you progress through that strange, quiet valley. The sky is a smooth white and holding its breath. Sometimes the mountains shake off occasional avalanches, but they don’t touch you.
Only once you’ve almost returned to the civilized world, once you’ve rounded the valley’s curve and under the wooded slope you see the chalet and the road of polished ice that winds toward the village, do you see that someone in the distance is coming toward you. At first you think it’s Nick, then you see the delicate posture and think Cécile. The figure runs through the snow, stumbles from time to time, then falls to its knees.
Only at the last moment do you see that it isn’t Cécile. She’s approaching you, crying.
And I say, “Julia?”
And I fall into her arms.
The Great God Pan
Passages from Nick Grevers’s digital diary
I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it.
—Arthur Machen
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