Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney

      Author’s Note

      There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people like Miles who are unable to speak for themselves and give or withhold consent for inclusion in a book such as this. To protect the identity of those few I have included, their names have been changed and some details of their story altered.

      Some other names have also been changed, for reasons of discretion.

      Finally, there are people who were closely involved in Miles and Ron’s situation but whom I have not included in detail, both to protect their privacy and because they were not, in the end, part of my story.

      March 19, 2006—St. Anton

      Imagine a young man in his prime. He is quite tall, has clear, deep green eyes, brown hair thick and so dark it can gleam almost to black, and a longish face balanced by strongly defined cheekbones and jawline. His look is humorous, challenging, engaged; there is a vivid charge of energy to be felt in his presence. He has just turned twenty-nine and after a week’s hard snowboarding he is fitter than ever; that is the reason he will be known by the doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit as the Athlete.

      It is early morning on the last day of his skiing holiday and the sun is just beginning to glint and sparkle on the night-hardened snow. Inside his room it is still dark and he will have had to set an alarm to wake this early, for early rising is not his forte. There is that particular hush in the air that comes after a night of heavy snow, broken now only by the distant sound of the piste machines with their wide corrugated tires already busy preparing the empty ski slopes. Turning off the alarm, the young man lies back luxuriously in his bed to contemplate the day. Tomorrow he will be back in London and back to work, and he realizes with surprise that it’s not an unpleasant thought. In fact, there is nothing right now that he doesn’t feel positive about, a state of mind he used to associate only with childhood. His school years were not straightforward and in his early twenties his bent for introspection descended into a suffocating depression, during which he came to recognize the hard-eyed gremlin sitting on his shoulder overseeing his every move, judging, criticizing, never drawing breath. “The rabid prattle in my skull,” he once wrote. But over these last few years the prattle has subsided and now it is gone; his mind feels as sharp as a new razor, his sight is clear. If you asked him, he would admit he feels capable of achieving great things. Indeed, he is anticipating it; in an attempt to clarify his aims he has written in his journal:

      Step back. What are the principles?

      Don’t want to abstract. Want to create.

      Want to create things of great beauty and power.

      Want to change the world.

      He sees his future brightly lit and gleaming ahead of him. Having reached that point where ambition and self-awareness happily coincide, he now acknowledges his weaknesses and knows his strengths. With exhilaration he feels that anything and everything is possible.

      He gets up and draws back the curtains, letting sunshine cascade into the room against a backdrop of snowy mountains and blinding blue sky. With a prickle of adrenaline he remembers the day’s plan—last night he and his friends had decided they couldn’t leave without attempting the notoriously high jump in the snowboard park that they hadn’t yet tried. For the first time in all his years of chasing the thrills of skiing and snowboarding he is going to get himself a crash helmet. That is why he has to get up early today, to give himself time to go to the ski shop where he will buy the best one available; he likes the best of things and now he can afford to be extravagant.

      He packs his small bag, throwing in his clothes without a thought, no careful folding or smoothing. Then he takes a quick shower, long enough to enjoy the sting of hot water washing off the suds as he feels the tension in his muscles; keeping fit is one of his hobbies, which is why he has taken up amateur boxing back in London. This reminds him of a former girlfriend, Annabel, and he thinks now with pleasure about her body, as lean and supple as a ballerina’s even though exercise was as alien to her as ballet is to him. Together with his mother and sisters, it was she who nagged him to give up boxing when he came home one evening from his weekly bout with his T-shirt covered in blood. You have such a magnificent brain, Annabel had said, it’s one of the things I love about you! He considered giving in to them, for in a rueful sort of way he enjoyed the fuss they made.

      Breakfast is served downstairs in the small dining room of this old Alpine hotel with its checked gingham curtains and cozy decor, everything so strangely diminutive compared to the view through the mullioned windows. When I have a chalet in the mountains, he thinks, I’ll have one built to amplify the light and the vastness, to feel on the edge of such awesome beauty and to see and know it is dropping away beneath me. Soon he is joined for breakfast by his friends, Ben and Charlie, both fellow snowboarders as well as colleagues back in London, and after some laughter recalling last night’s exploits they confirm the day’s plans. The snowboard park, the jump and then the dash to the airport to get the flight to London. They discuss the jump, how long the descent for it should be, where to start; it is difficult to judge at what point and at what speed it should be taken to remain on balance, which is where the thrill comes in. The longer the approach down to it, the faster you go, the higher you jump. He is the only one not to own a helmet, so he leaves them finishing breakfast and makes his way to the ski shop.

      This is St. Anton and the shop is appropriately stocked. The clientele of the elegant resort is a mix of ambitious snowboarders and well-heeled classical skiers and there is every fashionable accoutrement for sale. He is distracted on entering by a striking girl assessing herself in