The mountains had bitten Nick’s face off.
I couldn’t figure what the guy on the line meant when he kept trying to explain about Nick’s face. The Police Cantonale rep, I mean. Said something was wrong with his face. The face I knew inside out. Sharp angles, but gentle features, a primitive symmetry that made him look like a creature straight out of nature. What I adored most about it was the total lack of shame. My mind jury was still out on whether Nick’s cool collectedness was because he simply didn’t notice other people’s gazes and jaw drops or because he was so used to them that he just didn’t give a shit.
And there it was, the phone going off and me still thinking it was him: the same face smirking at me from the screen. The pic I took ten days earlier, the evening before he set off. I wanted to see that pic every time he called. #bebacksoon I captioned it on Instagram. In the ensuing days, Nick had put up a few of his own; polarized glasses and ice axes and death drops that would give any sane person the heebie-jeebies. #livingthelife was how he’d captioned them.
The reason I saw that pic was because the Police Cantonale had used Nick’s phone to call me.
The drive to the CHUV, the university hospital in Lausanne, took ages due to the rain, and Harald and Louise Grevers, neither of them liked driving abroad.
Meanwhile, my mind was running in circles. Would you stay with me if I became paralyzed? If some gas tank blunder burnt my face off? Would you stay with me if my legs were gone? If I had to eat liquids through a tube? Would you stay with me if I became brain damaged and could no longer love you as I love you now? Will you stay with me when I’m old and invisible?
I thought, Accident or gravity—we all end up mutilated. That was from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, if I remembered correctly. But this accident was gravity. Not the kind that sags your once-fit body, but the kind that splatters you in one fell swoop.
Will you stay with me when my face is gone?
In the backseat of Nick’s folks’ Hertz rental, the mountains took me prisoner. Lake Geneva is the gateway to the Alps. This landscape was giving me the evil eye, I could feel it all over. A palpable malevolence hung over the water like a force field. As if a door had opened to something intangible but extremely menacing, something that was going to trail me for a long time to come.
The thing was, I was twenty-four and he was twenty-seven.
The thing was, we didn’t wanna be invisible yet.
Or compensate. We were too young to lower the bar. Rejoice that he was still alive. Thinking thoughts like that with Nick in a coma, did that make me a scumbag? Shallow? But it was my world. So please, I’ll take shallowness.
We met curling EZ bars at the gym, no less. Biceps: check. Pecs: check. Abs: check. The gym is the crème de la crème of the human casing, the antithesis of the bowels of the internet, where credit card pervs and butcher fetishists go to drool over mutilation and stumps.
Will I stay with you, if I can’t handle this?
The mountains loomed on both sides, higher and higher. A tangle of nausea settled in my stomach. I flashbacked to that first time in the gym: Nick lying on the bench, glistening with sweat, pumping iron, shirt soaked. But this time he had no face. Where it should have been was now a deep, dark cave, the agglomeration of gravity and bad dreams.
2
His life wasn’t in danger, but he wasn’t out of the woods.
Before they let us see him, two Police Cantonale detectives took us over to the dental surgeon’s office. He did all the talking, bookended by the bored cops. Who knows what protocol stipulated their presence, but for spicing up the party, they got an F. After a while, it made me feel so awkward I started thinking maybe some social reintegration initiative now has the Swiss police employing deaf-mutes.
The long-winded powwow was the kind of quintessential linguistic extravaganza any one of my professors would cream their pants for: Nick’s folks talked Dutch to each other and English to the oral surgeon, the oral surgeon talked English to Nick’s mom and dad and French to the cops, the cops talked zilchese—all four of which I have mastered. I know that scene from Inglourious Basterds totally cracks Europeans up—you know, the one where Diane Kruger asks Brad Pitt, “I know this is a silly question before I ask it, but can you Americans speak any other language besides English?” Well, I do. I also speak Spanish, passable German, took a specialized course on Creole languages, and I read (or used to) Latin. I’m doing my master’s in linguistics at the UvA, and thanks to Nick, after three years, I’m fluent in Dutch (although I’d like to think my accent is less thick than he says it is, and to that, I say I can’t help that your language sounds like you all have a gerbil stuck in your throat and are trying to spit it out while you speak).
The dentist’s name was Olivier Genet, and when he spoke, it wasn’t to me. Maybe cuz I’m an American or maybe cuz he was a Jesus lover. He had one of those comb-overs gone wrong, with the last strands of hair swept from the sides of his skull over his bald pate like a diaphanous mesh. Alopecia androgenetica, I thought. When he addressed only Nick’s parents for the umpteenth time, I revised my diagnosis: mofo MPB. There was an imprint on his coat that said Propriété de Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, and I wondered whether that applied to the coat or to the man.
Jerks like him are always something’s or someone’s property.
Genet said Nick was lucky. He got hit by falling rocks but he was still alive. Until he was able to spill the beans, it would be impossible to determine exactly what had happened, but enough could be deduced by the circumstances in which the mountain rescue team had found him. Had found Nick, cuz all they found of his climbing buddy, Augustin, was an ice axe.
Augustin must have gone for help in bad weather and fallen into a crevasse on the way down. Whatever was left of him was now frozen solid in the ice; “He Died in a Crack While Pursuing His Passion” would be his epitaph. His family had been brought up to speed.
“Oh, how awful,” Louise kept saying. “Awful, for his parents. Thank God our Nick is still alive.”
Yeah, thank God. Cuz Nick, as Genet said, Nick was lucky.
Only half of Nick’s face had been smashed off. The rock had split open his jaw, knocked two teeth out, and ripped off most of his cheeks. #livingthelife.
“He was lucky,” Genet said for the third time, and spread his thumb and index finger. “That closer and the rock would have got his eyes. That closer, he could have died.”