“No!” The response was instant, emphatic. He surprised himself.
“As I say. You are a man using to being in control. Or believing that he is. Or it could be denial. Do you know?”
He was silent, thinking. So much was foggy, even without drugs. Drunk. The accusation repelled him. Why was this his strongest reaction yet? Why was he so sure?
“If you have to ask, you don’t know,” he said.
Chagrin flickered over her annoyingly serene features.
“They’d have taken blood tests right after the accident, yes?” he asked.
She nodded. “No alcohol or recreational drugs in your system. At that point. But you were flown in from another continent.”
He nodded, in turn, to the window and the panorama of what he now knew were the Alps. But which Alps? French, Italian, Swiss? The Alps snaked across Europe like the rim of a massive crater.
He said, “Any climber, especially a control freak, would be crazy to drink anything but water up there.”
“ ‘Control freak.’ I do love American expressions. They always cut to the . . . pursuit.”
“Chase. Cut to the chase. The expression is based on early filmmaking. Directors of cheap thriller movies would skip the exposition, the dialogue, and cut to the action scene: bad guys chasing good guys.”
“And which guy are you?”
He smiled at how formal the word guy sounded in her overprecise English. “We don’t know yet, do we? So why’d you ask if I was drunk, when you knew the tests proved me sober?”
“I wanted your spontaneous answer.”
“Just to be mean? Taunt the invalid?” He almost added, “Get a rise out of him?” but decided that was too close to reality.
Actually, he was enjoying this in more ways than one. He’d heard only solicitous murmurs in the far back of his mind for a long time, maybe even weeks. It was good to exercise his brain on something, someone not treating him like a helpless child.
She pursed her lips while examining the chart he suspected was a meaningless prop for her inquisition. Psychiatrists always thought they could outthink their patients, and she was exactly what he’d suspected she was. But what kind of psychiatrist?
“Actually, Mr. Randolph,” she said at last, “being drunk is the only rational explanation for why you weren’t more seriously injured. The surgeons said your fall had the impact of a car crash at sixty miles an hour. You should be dead, or in a cast up to your cerebellum. Instead, you have a couple of broken legs. Not fun, but not as lethal as it should be.”
“You’d prefer me dead?”
“Of course not. But the surgeons said that the only way you could have come off so lightly, the only way anyone did from an impact like that, was as a drunk driver. The kind that walks away from a crash that kills his victims because he was so inebriated his body was utterly limp during the crash. Senselessness saves the sinner.”
He didn’t like hearing how bad it could have been. Or being compared to a drunk driver. He knew he hadn’t brought this on himself. Why was she trying to make him feel guilty? Some shrink! She was doing everything she could to rile him. Weren’t there laws against this kind of patient abuse?
He gazed out the window. From this distance the majestic peaks seemed only postcard pretty, not lethal. And he couldn’t picture himself attacking those sharp icy teeth with pitons and a pickax. Not his thing. But it must be.
He glanced back. Her eyes had never left his face.
“Maybe,” he said, “I’m just a relaxed kind of guy.”
“That doesn’t go with the control freak.”
“Maybe I’m more complex than you think.”
“Oh, I think you’re very complex, Mr. Randolph. Too much so. I don’t want to keep you. À bientôt.”
Until later.
He watched her leave, relishing a future tete-à-tete. His legs were broken, maybe not badly, thank God, but she was right about his need for control. He hated this wheelchair.
He propelled it into the adjoining bathroom, through a bland blond door wide enough to accommodate it. Brushed steel assistance bars were everywhere, but he was interested in the shower rod above the—nice, if his casts were off!—Jacuzzi bathtub.
Pushing himself upright against the white-tiled wall, he studied the rod and its attachments to the tile. Solid. Everything here was for security and safety. German-built. Like Revienne Schneider.
He grasped the pole underhanded and then hauled up against his imprisoned legs. If he was such a gung ho mountain climber, he didn’t want to lose any upper body strength. He guessed he’d been doing this during every conscious, unchaperoned moment. The first pull-up was still agony. The second worse. He did ten. Twelve, twenty, then stopped and lowered himself on trembling arms into the wheelchair.
He’d forgotten to check himself out in the mirror over the sink while he’d been upright, but it was probably just as well. He had a feeling he wouldn’t recognize his face. He knew “things,” could think, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself or how he’d got here. What really bothered him was the name “Randolph.” It had a vague familiarity, but it wasn’t his. It didn’t feel like his name.
Nothing did. Surnames tumbled through his brain—O’Donnell . . . Kinkaid . . . Bar . . . Bartle. Moline. But that was a town in Illinois. His brain had salvaged lots of general information, but no specifics. No faces and places. He’d have to analyze himself before that tight-lipped shrink pried out more than he wanted her to.
He knew a lot about mountains and foreign languages and attractive interrogators, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself except what he could weasel out of his shrink.
Nothing.
Not even his name.
Matt, maybe. The name just came to him! Matt?
Matt Randolph. Didn’t feel right.
From Here
to Urbanity
Even long, lean Fontana brothers, Las Vegas’s own Magnificent Ten, have to disembark from the Rolls onto the desert sand when we arrive at the party destination in the dark of evening.
Wait a minute. Desert sand?
I am not the only one befuddled, although I am the only one who is licking sand grains from between my unshod toes.
“Hey,” says one plaintive voice. “This isn’t the strip club, is it?”
By now three rounds of champagne have sloshed in the gathered glasses, except for Mr. Matt’s and mine.
That extra-dark tint on the Rolls’s windows may have been disorienting.
“Naw, that must be the place,” Emilio announces, gesturing with his still-full champagne glass.
Indeed, amidst the Stygian darkness that surrounds the party we can see the illuminated glitter of a large entrance canopy.
(This Stygian darkness is like super-dark shades and refers to some ancient place underground, like a cave. Or a wine cellar. Or a tomb. Even now I do not quite grasp our situation. And I am the only one in the party fit to grasp anything, except for Mr. Matt, who is starting to frown just before the Rolls headlights go out and we are all truly in the dark.)
The sound of leather soles grinding on sand guides me forward. Mr. Matt and I have been abandoned to trek along behind the brothers ten and Uncle Mario.
By now I have been noticed, and, in fact, had about six toasts made to my unexpected presence en route to the bachelor party. That is why I and Mr. Matt are sober and surefooted, and all the Fontanas are lurching along like hail-fellows-well-met.
I am starting to feel the hairs on my spine stiffening and standing upright.
It could be the cooler night air.
It could be the off-key chorus of “O Sole Mio,” that is drifting back on the desert air.
It could be the fact that the convivial singing comes to a sudden halt on the warm, lamp-lit threshold before us all.