And he realized at the deepest level of his consciousness how thin the margin was between extreme, awesome, energizing terror-and death. For the first time in his life, he understood thrill seekers, extreme skiers and mountain climbers. Hang gliders and skydivers and tightrope walkers. He finally understood the intoxicating sensation of defying death, of facing down our hardwired instinct for self-preservation.
And then, just as quickly as this realization had come over him, another kind of understanding seized him. That he might actually meet his death on the rocks below.
And the instinct for self-preservation reasserted itself.
This might have taken as much as two seconds. Certainly no more. He bent his knees, squatted, braced himself-
– and landed hard on the ground, absorbing the impact, a blow to his entire body all at once. He catapulted forward. He’d lost control.
The tip of his right ski caught on something. He flipped over and landed, hard, on his back, and for a moment everything was absolutely quiet. He’d come to an abrupt stop.
He tasted blood.
He twisted, felt pain shoot through his limbs, then throughout his entire body, jagged, like the crackle of lightning.
Icy snow bit his ears, his eyelids, the back of his neck. He tried again to move, wriggled, and found he could move his legs, his arms. He felt bruised all over, but nothing seemed to be broken. Then he remembered how to get up with skis on. He tucked his feet in toward his butt and leaned his knees to the left side. He realized he’d lost both skis. Slowly, carefully, he rolled over. Felt something twang in his lower back, a pizzicato pluck of nerve endings. A tendon? A pulled muscle? He hoped it was nothing more serious than that. For a moment he needed to rest, so he sank down, his face buried in the snow, which felt strangely warm, and then icy cold.
Then, bracing himself on his elbows he pushed up, the exertion sending more daggers of pain through his arms and shoulders. He pushed through the pain and got to his knees. He tasted more blood, probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, realized he’d bitten his lower lip during the fall.
Unsteady on his feet now, he saw something maybe two or three hundred feet away. An old shack, it appeared, built from logs. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet by ten feet. Squat and sturdy and old, with a shingled roof. It looked like an old mining hut, left over from the mining boom at the end of the nineteenth century. He knew that Aspen had once been a silver mining camp, the largest in the country, until the day Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, demonetizing silver; in a matter of months, Aspen was a ghost town. But many of the old buildings remained, dotting the mountainside.
Through a small window on the side facing him, Danny could see a flickering amber light within. And silhouettes moving inside. Instinctively, he sank to the ground, sat in snow. He rooted around in his pockets until he located the nylon pouch that held the camera.
He yanked it open, the ripping sound of the Velcro closure loud in the muffled silence.
He trained the strong lens on the window, dialing the focus in and out until a face came into focus.
Galvin’s.
Even this far away he could smell one of Galvin’s cigars.
Galvin seemed to be rocking back and forth. No, he was pacing. Behind him was a man, or maybe two men, both of them wearing dark coats. One of the other men was bald. Danny refocused on the bald man. A plump, cue-ball round face with a goatee festooning a double chin. A heavy brow, unshaven-looking. He heard the crack of a tree branch, and he turned to look.
A man in a black parka and ski mask was lunging toward him. Before Danny could scramble to his feet, something crashed into the side of his head, an almost inconceivable explosion of pain, and the white light had bloomed to blot out his entire field of vision, the blood bitter and metallic, like copper pennies in his mouth, and then everything was absolutely quiet.
47
Later, the paramedics told Danny that he’d probably lost consciousness for no more than twenty or thirty seconds. But whatever happened in the hour that followed, he had no recollection of it. Later he was told he kept asking, over and over, “Where am I?” and “What happened?” He had nothing more than fleeting strands of memory, swirling like the streamers of yolk in a partly scrambled egg.
One minute he’d been staring through the camera lens at an old log cabin. The next minute, he was lying flat on his back in some sort of large barnlike room with plywood paneling. He had no idea where. Faces swam in and out of his field of vision. One face loomed directly above his, upside down, the funny-looking harp of a mouth forming nonsense words.
The cadence made the gobbledygook sound like a question, but the words meant nothing.
He tried to look around, but he could barely move his head. The room was overheated. Stifling hot, actually. He felt drenched with sweat.
Again he tried to look around, to figure out where he might be and how he’d ended up there, but his head wouldn’t move, his neck wouldn’t swivel. With a flutter of panic, he tried to lift his entire torso, but he was totally immobilized. His legs, his arms, his hands, and feet-all were frozen in place. Nothing would move.
He was struck with a terrible realization: I’m paralyzed. I’m a quadriplegic.
“… the United States,” said a voice.
“What?” Danny said. I can’t move my limbs, can’t even move my head. I’m frozen in place, locked in. I’m paralyzed.
“Who’s the president of the United States?” The upside-down face, the harp mouth. A raspy baritone.
Danny stared up at him in disbelief. I’m a quadriplegic, and you’re wasting my time with ridiculous questions like that?
“Calvin Coolidge,” he said.
The upside-down face swam out of his field of vision. Someone chuckled and said, “Wiseass.”
“At least his sense of humor is intact.”
Galvin.
An image came back to him. Galvin and someone else in the window of a small log cabin. The other person in the cabin was someone he’d never seen before. Cue-ball head. Spherical. A goatee floating in the middle of a double chin. Heavy brow.
How long ago had that been? Hours, maybe? Galvin meeting with some unidentified person in an old slopeside hut. But now he and Galvin were here.
“Where am I?” Danny said.
“America in 1925 or whatever, I’m guessing.” Galvin again.
“I can’t move,” Danny said.
“Hey, baby.” Lucy’s face was close, her eyes wide. She looked scared.
“Hey, you. Will you tell me where I am?” He smiled with relief, with gratitude, with love.
“Ski patrol hut at the base of the mountain. Sweetie, do you remember falling and hitting your head?”
“No… not really.”
“You remember going off to ski the uncleared side of the mountain?”
“That was sort of an accident. I didn’t mean to.”
“How’s your head? Do you have a headache, or are you dizzy, or…?”
“I can’t move.”
“Guys, there’s no reason for him to be strapped down like that,” Lucy said. “Come on. This is silly.”
“I’m strapped down? That’s the best news I’ve gotten in years.”
Now the same voice that had just asked him about the president of the United States said, in a hoarse baritone, “I’m going to insist he go to Aspen Valley Hospital to have a CAT scan.”
Danny could hear noises, snaps and buckles and something rubbing against something. The sharp pain of something squeezing against his wrists. Then he could feel his hands, tingling and heavy. He could move them.
Then the same thing with his ankles and his feet, which also tingled from a loss of circulation. He wriggled his fingers and found they worked just fine. His toes as well. A strap came off his chest, and a pair of hands helped him to sit up.