I didn’t get how this was “luck.” That close the other way and he would have come home in one piece. That close and we’d now be in a sunny hotel bed having hot and steamy sex to drown out the memory. I was already trying to come up with the French for “hot and steamy” but checked myself, remembering il dottore was probably still treating Nick.
Harald asked if the place where the accident happened was dangerous, and I was gonna say, Yeah, mountains, hello. If you’re at the bottom of the slope, you’re not technically dead yet, but let’s just say the clock is ticking.
Genet said he didn’t know the exact location. “In the Val d’Anniviers, in the Pennine Alps. But the Air-Glaciers report only mentioned that it was a remote and inaccessible area. Precarious terrain, seldom climbed.” He mumbled something unintelligible to his deaf-mute subjects, then turned back to us: “We’ll inquire for you on which mountain the accident happened.”
I thought, What’s the diff? A mountain is a mountain is a mountain. A pile of frozen rocks, sans coffee corners, club sodas, or mojito bars, you shouldn’t touch with a ten-mile pole. I didn’t give a hoot what a chunk of land ignored by evolution for millions of years was called. Drill a hole in it, fill it up with nukes, and boom, you’re recycling.
There were police photos, shot before they sewed up Nick’s face, but Genet held on to them so we couldn’t see. Turned them upside down, frowning, turned them right side up. “It will be difficult enough once the bandages come off.”
Louise covered her mouth with her hands.
“Your son’s lucky he was preserved well. He lay unconscious in the ice for hours before coming to, which stanched the bleeding and prevented swelling. The frostbite caused loss of soft tissue, which we had to suture with grafts.”
Grafts?
“From his arm.” He spread his thumb and finger again, closer this time.
I saw Nick’s face before me: a bloody, gaping hole.
I saw Nick’s face before me: necrotic and black, growing an arm.
Harald asked the million-dollar question: “Is there any permanent damage?”
Genet looked pensively at the photos of my boyfriend’s perfect, mutilated face and said, “Plastic surgeons call it a permanent smile, and not without reason. At a later stage, we can perform corrective surgery to reduce scarring, and it may be possible to make everything suppler with silicone dressings. But thinking we can make these kinds of nasty wounds completely invisible is an illusion. No one tells you, but after a face-lift people are covered in scars. It’s just that we apply the scalpel wisely. An incision above the eyelid. An incision around the nostril. An incision behind the ear. The difference is that with your son’s rectification, it’s not up to us.”
Yeah, that’s the word he used.
Nick didn’t even get a report in the newspaper, no “Mountain Bites Happy Horror Grin in Dutchman’s Face,” because the next day the press headlined pics proving actress and Miss Swiss Heidi L?tschentaler’s nose job and there was no space for trivial items.
“It will take about six months before the jawbone heals and we can insert dental implants. In the meantime, he’ll have to wear dentures. But that’s just the start of it. It’s uncertain whether he will fully recover facial expressivity. You have to be prepared for problems of functionality such as impaired opening of the mouth, irreparable damage to motor nerves resulting in a drooping mouth or partial facial paralysis . . .”
My head started to spin. Somewhere in the distance I heard Louise cry. I tried to focus on the zigzagging vein on Genet’s balding temple, a bead of sweat trailing down it.
“. . . loss of chewing functions, limited nasal inhalation, reduced sense of smell and taste, impaired speech . . .”
The vein, his baldness, they were scars, too: old age.
“. . . PTSS, partial memory loss, anxiety disorder . . . Is your son insured?”
And my brain on overload: Please end me now.
Of course, at that point I still hadn’t noticed something was wrong. I was in shock. And I still refused to notice it when I left the hotel that evening and, after rambling through a tangle of narrow, annoyingly steep alleys, eventually ended up at the hospital, where the night nurse, Cécile Métrailler, nervously handed me the folded note.
Don’t believe them. It wasn’t an accident.
Sure I shoulda believed him. Who wouldn’t believe his boyfriend when he says something like that? But Nick was suffering from the aftereffects of severe trauma, and Dr. Genet had said that he didn’t remember the accident. So I thought Nick was hallucinating.
And I also thought that it would be my biggest worry. But that surfaced only the next evening, after something had so scared the shit out of poor Cécile that she hightailed it out of the hospital in the middle of her shift and didn’t dare to come back.
That something was Nick.
3
He was sort of conscious when we finally got to visit him that afternoon, and they’d given him a pen and pad to communicate with. But he wasn’t exactly writing epic poetry, just basic info—No, no pain and Water, please and Black magic—so the Police Cantonale dicks had to bide their time, hanging further up the hall like a coupla monitors on mute.
Truth is, opening that door made me shit bricks. Louise sensed it and squeezed my hand, but then went ahead into the room to see her son. It was all I could do to keep myself from turning around and beating it. I was scared of what was waiting in there, but I was also pissed off, cuz I’d begged him so many times to cut it out with that dumbass hobby of his, and I also felt sorry for myself because, dammit, the best we could look forward to now was looking back at how it used to be. Unfair? Maybe. But true.
Then I straightened my back, walked in, and saw what was left of the pretty Dutch boy I fell for three years ago. I wish I could say it wasn’t that bad. But if I start fibbing now, the rest I have to tell won’t be worth diddly-squat.
I recognized him cuz the light blue sheet was pulled back to his waist and he had no shirt on. Biceps: check. Pecs: check. Mutilated mummy mug: check. His face was wrapped in miles of tightly stretched gauze holding compresses in place. Fastened hit-or-miss to keep the whole shebang from falling apart and treating us to the hideous sight of what was squished underneath with a lick of pappy and putrid antibiotic salve. The only gaps were the holes for his eyes, his left ear, and his nostrils—one for breathing and one housing a plastic tube. Give him glacier glasses and he’s the Invisible Man on a glucose drip.
His eyes were dulled by the morphine but were still his, and, passing over his mom and dad, they searched mine.
“Hail, Tutankhamen,” I said.
This made Harald, Louise, and the nurse who was taking his blood pressure burst out laughing. Even Dr. Genet chuckled a little. I was secretly relieved, cuz it gave me the chance to look away from his glance. Woulda been too much to bear. Didn’t wanna start crying with everyone there.
4