my throat and a sickening warmth through my limbs. When I tried to sit up, everything fell away. I drank a good half bottle of the stuff and descended into a strange, surreal darkness that I have not experienced before or since.
I don’t remember much of the operation itself, but Greta told me later that I lost a lot of blood. From the look of the scar on my thigh—oblong and uneven, shiny and pink as pulled taffy—I know that Bernadette, with all her expertise with knives, didn’t perform the most elegant of surgeries. She removed the bullet the way one might have done during the Napoleonic wars—with a sharp blade and lots of liquor.
While my body lay in a state of profound trauma—opened and bleeding under Bernadette’s knife—my mind sank to a deep, fortified place of protection, a faraway bunker where it carried on untouched by pain. I was, suddenly, transported to the trophy room, where I stood before animal heads mounted across the wall. The bear, the mouflon, the deer, the thousands of ibex horns—everything twisted around me like branches in a forest. All was as it existed in real life. But it was the Iceman that I saw most clearly. In the workings of my hallucination, the man in the photograph lived. It stood upright before me, its eyes gleaming with vitality, its long hair cascading over its shoulders, no longer just a trophy in a cabinet but a living being. It spoke to me in a language I couldn’t understand, and yet, somehow, every word made sense: A long, long sleep. A famous sleep. I backed away from the creature, terrified, screaming.
I woke, startled, gasping. I had never felt anything like it, that pain mixed with the disorientation of my hallucination. I cried out as the knife dug into muscle, prying the bullet from my tissues. Leaning over the side of the mattress, I threw up.
Greta poured a shot and brought it to my lips. I drank it down and lay back again. My mind was bombarded with strange images, so vivid, so real, that I couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Where had I been? Where was I now? The pain paralyzed me, but so did the genepy. The whole world seemed twisted and unreal. Bernadette, standing over me with her bloody knife. Greta, holding a blood-soaked cloth. I fought to sit up, struggling to get off the mattress, but Sal pressed his forearm against my windpipe, pushing me back down onto the table. “Stay still, madame,” he said, as my consciousness slipped away again.
Back in the trophy room of my hallucination, the Iceman was gone. Instead, I found another creature, a female, her face an echo of the Iceman’s face, a pallid, pitiful thing, her skin tight against her cheekbones, her nose flat, the jawline hard and exposed. A single blue blood vessel, thick as a garden snake, pulsed across her forehead, throbbing and twitching over her scarred cheek and cleft chin. The image seemed to waver, the edges bend away, as if melting. I tried to touch her, but my hand hit a hard, reflective surface. It was my own image, reflected in a gilded mirror, my own pallid face, myself asking: What are you?
I screamed and felt a hard whack across my back. I had vomited in my sleep. Once, then again, a hand slapped me. Suddenly, a shot of air rushed into my lungs. The jarring experience of coming back to reality left me dizzy. I gasped for breath, inhaling with all the force I could muster, shivering with sweat and agony.
“Breathe,” Greta said as she helped me sit up. I felt nauseated, beaten. “That’s right. Breathe. You are fine, madame.”
As I woke, the world seemed to swirl and buckle. I heard the dogs barking in their pen, and above, in the rafters of the mews, a row of crows sat watching, silent witnesses to my suffering.
My wound sutured, Bernadette said something I couldn’t understand—I later learned she spoke Franco-Proven?al—and jumped off a chair onto the floor, like a child escaping from the dinner table. I blinked, trying to see clearly through the thick miasma of my stupor. Bernadette was half the size of Sal but wearing the same burlap trousers and boots. I watched her walk across the room, sure that I was hallucinating. But it was no hallucination. Bernadette the cook was a cretin.
When I woke—treacherously hungover, everything throbbing with pain—I lay behind the curtains of my four-poster bed.