A View from the Alps
A Flash Fiction piece
He stood there on the roof of his apartment, then sat on the ledge beyond the railings and watched the cars drive by beneath his feet. They were tiny. Buildings looked like termite mounds, and people could be seen on red district roads, addicts of many sorts. He decided he would leave this world behind.
The following morning he put on some coffee and replied to old letters. Some of them were written in college years ago. Some of them were from professors, and some others were from family. He didn’t respond to the ones written by lovers.
The coffee was blacker than the night he lost himself to, and it went well with the crêpes. Admittedly, he was indulgent with the powdered sugar on his crêpe, but what was life without a few reckless give-ins? Some things were better off a little too sweet.
After the usual cold shower, he dressed himself in silk and put on beige pantalons. He followed it with a maroon corduroy jacket and a felt hat. He spent the rest of the morning on a train headed towards the Alps. When the white mountain ranges came into view, he remembered snowboarding with his friends in true polaroid fashion, the edges blurred out, the surface glossy and two dimensional.
Once he got off the train station, a small, red gondola took him the rest of the way up into the sky. He tried to call his mother, but the phone was static.
A few minutes passed, and he arrived close to the highest summit. From there, his two feet took him on a path to a cabin. The harsh climate had him breathless, but he also never felt so alive. The cold was ruder than any ice bath he’d taken. It was refreshing. The cabin he came to was made of dark wood, and a man twice his height took his reservation from the front desk. This cabin had a front desk.
By midafternoon, he rented a pair of skis and tried out a few diamond-level slopes. The sun was incarnated, an angry reflection in the snow. It was so bright that he saw a tint of prune wherever he looked afterwards. It was careless to ride without ski goggles or a hat, or gloves for that matter, but he had no regrets.
He had no regrets in general.
The rest of the day he spent reading Bachmann and Novalis. Those two were the only things he had packed on the trip aside from his passport. He finished reading Bachmann’s collection of poems at one in the morning. By then he was reading by hearth’s flickering fire light. He saw a picture of the author in the inner cover, staring back at him in black and white, a disapproving look. He never knew Bachmann was a woman.
He closed the book tentatively and lay it on the arm of his armchair. He realized his hands were cold, so he fell on his knees before the fire and warmed them, at first like Merlin casting a spell, then like a fly begging for a good meal. He felt small, but it was a good kind of small and a good kind of feeling. He had felt nothing when he had jumped.
He lay in that cabin bed like he lay on the concrete sidewalk the night before, scattered and broken — but his face serene. He thought about Novalis. He thought about going home. He remembered his mother’s face. “I am a dead man who wanders registered nowhere.” Those were Bachmann’s words. The dead speak, and he found that he could now listen with newfound certainty. Everything was different. The alps. The friends. The hours in between.