Echo Thomas Olde [ENGLISH]

THE INVINSIBLE MAN

"Notes by Sam Avery
'You don't understand,' he said, 'who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you."
– H.G. wells"

1.

When the Airbus started its descent to Geneva, Nick, or what was left of him, was still artificially kept in a coma. And up in the mountains there was a thunderstorm. Above, one big turbulence nightmare in unstable air. The Airbus circled endlessly and blindly in the cloud mass and suddenly dove through a hole, revealing that we had been lower than the surrounding ridges for quite some time. The horror vacui at the total lack of orientation immediately exchanged for an unvarnished claustrophobia. Outside of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, this was the first time in sixteen years that I was confronted with mountains. It left no room for illusions: I hated the mountains. I still hated them.
I hated how they locked us in. How they seemed to bend over the plane. How they rose right through the storm. Whimsical like a predator's teeth. The mountains had bitten off Nick's face. All this time I'd wondered what the guy on the phone had meant when he kept talking about Nick's face. That guy who was the representative of the Police Cantonale. He said there was something wrong with his face. That face, I knew it through and through. Masculine lines but soft features, a primal symmetry that gave him the appearance of a being straight from nature. What I adored most about it was the complete absence of shame. I still wasn't sure whether Nick's calm self-assurance came from the fact that he simply didn't notice other people's eyes, or whether he was just so used to them leaving him cold.

And I still think it was him, when the phone rang: that same face grinned at me from the screen. The photo I had taken ten days earlier, the night before he left. I would have liked to see that picture on screen every time he would call. #bebacksoon I captioned him on Instagram. In the days that followed, Nick had posted photos of his own, with glacier goggles and ice axes and depths that would send shivers to any sane person. #livingthelife he had captioned them. That photo, I saw it because the Police Cantonale used Nick's own number when they called. The ride to the CHUV in Lausanne was slow because it was raining and neither Harm nor Louise Grevers liked to drive abroad. Meanwhile I thought: Will you stay with me if I become paralyzed? Will you stay with me when my face is horribly burned? I thought: Will you stay with me when I have no legs? If I have to swallow liquid food through a tube? Will you stay with me when I become mentally retarded, and I can no longer love you as I love you now? I thought, Will you stay with me when I'm old and invisible?"
I thought: Some things go fast and some go slow, accident or gravity, but in the end we all get maimed. Now the accident was gravity. Not the kind that hangs your body and makes you invisible bit by bit, but the kind that makes you smash with one blow. I thought, Will you stay with me when I don't have a face anymore? In the backseat of Nick's parents' Hertz rental, the mountains captured me. Lake Geneva was the gateway to the Alps. This environment was hostile to me, I felt it in everything. A palpable malice hung over the water, like an electric charge. As if a door opened here, behind which was something elusive but very menacing that would keep me company for a long time. The point was: I was twenty-four, he twenty-seven. The point was: we didn't want to be invisible yet. Compensate. Be glad he was still alive. We were too young for that. Did it make me a bad person to have such thoughts while Nick was in a coma? Shallow? It was the world I knew. Just give me that superficiality. We had actually met each other in the gym. Biceps: check. Pecs: check. Abs: check. The gym is the crème de la crème of the human exterior, the counterpart of the internet's caverns where credit card pervs and stump fetishists go to indulge in mutilation and amputation. I thought: Am I staying with you, if I can't handle this? The mountains rose on either side, higher and higher. A sick feeling gathered in my stomach. I pictured him lying there that first time on that exercise bench, sweating gleaming with weights, his shirt soaked. Only now he had no face. Where his face should have been was a deep black hole, a culmination of gravity and bad dreams.