The Snow Queen (2 page)

If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you’d better learn to praise the small felicities.

And, living as Tyler does in this place, in this placidly impoverished neighborhood of elderly aluminum siding, of warehouses and parking lots, all utilitarian, all built on the cheap, with its just-barely-managing little businesses and its daunted denizens (Dominicans, mostly, people who went to considerable effort to get here—who had, must have had, higher hopes than those that Bushwick has granted them) trudging dutifully along to or from minimum-wage jobs—as if defeat could no longer be defeated, as if one were lucky to have anything at all. It isn’t even particularly dangerous anymore; there is of course the occasional robbery but it seems, for the most part, that even the criminals have lost their ambition. In a place like this, praise is elusive. It’s difficult to stand at a window, watching snow feather onto the overflowing garbage cans (the garbage trucks seem to remember, sporadically, unpredictably, that there’s garbage to collect here, too) and the cracked cobblestones, without thinking ahead to its devolution into dun-colored sludge, the brown tarns of ankle-deep street-corner puddles upon which cigarette butts and balls of foil gum wrappers (fool’s silver) will float.

Tyler should go back to bed. Another interlude of sleep and who knows, he might wake into a world of more advanced, resolute cleanliness, a world wearing a still-heavier white blanket over its bedrock of drudgery and ash.

He’s reluctant, however, to leave the window in this condition of sludgy wistfulness. Going back to bed now would be too much like seeing a delicately emotional stage play that comes to neither a tragic nor happy ending, that begins to sputter out until there are no more actors onstage, until the audience realizes that the play must be over, that it’s time to get up and leave the theater.

Tyler has promised he’ll cut down. He’s been good about it, for the past couple of days. But now, right now, it’s a minor metaphysical emergency. Beth isn’t worse, but she isn’t better, either. Knickerbocker Avenue is waiting patiently through its brief interlude of accidental beauty until it can return to the slush and puddle that is its natural state.

All right. This morning, he’ll give himself a break. He can re-summon his rigor easily enough. This is only a boost, at a time when a boost is needed.

He goes to the nightstand, takes his vial from the drawer, and sucks up a couple of quick ones.

And here it is. Here’s the sting of livingness. He’s back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he’s renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

He returns to the window. If that windblown ice crystal meant to weld itself to his eye, the transformation is already complete; he can see more clearly now with the aid of this minuscule magnifying mirror …

Here’s Knickerbocker Avenue again, and, yes, it will soon return to its ongoing condition of anywhereness, it’s not as if Tyler has forgotten that, but the grimy impending future doesn’t matter, in very much the way Beth says that morphine doesn’t eradicate the pain but puts it aside, renders it unimportant, a sideshow curiosity, mortifying (See the Snake Boy! See the Bearded Lady!) but remote and, of course, a hoax, just spirit gum and latex.

Tyler’s own, lesser pain, the dampness of his inner workings, all those wires that hiss and spark in his brain, has been snapped dry by the coke. A moment ago, he was fuzzed out and mordant, but now—quick suck of harsh magic—he’s all acuity and verve. He’s shed his own costume, and the true suit of himself fits him perfectly. Tyler is a one-man audience, standing naked at a window at the start of the twenty-first century, with hope clattering in his rib cage. It seems possible that all the surprises (he didn’t exactly plan on being an unknown musician at forty-three, living in eroticized chastity with his dying girlfriend and his younger brother, who has turned, by slow degrees, from a young wizard into a tired middle-aged magician, summoning doves out of a hat for the ten thousandth time) have been part of an inscrutable effort, too immense to see; some accumulation of lost chances and canceled plans and girls who were almost but not quite, all of which seemed random at the time but have brought him here, to this window, to his difficult but interesting life, his bulldoggish loves, his still-taut belly (the drugs help) and jut of dick (his own) as the Republicans are about to go down and a new world, cold and clean, is set to begin.

Tyler will get a rag and wipe the melted snow off the floorboards. He will take care of it. He will adore Beth and Barrett with more purity. He will gather and procure, take on an extra shift at the bar, praise the snow and all it touches. He will get them out of this grim apartment, sing ferociously into the heart of the world, find an agent, stitch it all together, remember to soak the beans for cassoulet, get Beth to chemo on time, do less coke and cut out Dilaudid entirely, finally finish reading
The Scarlet and the Black
. He will hold Beth and Barrett, console them, remind them of how little there is to worry about, feed them, tell them the stories that render them that much more visible to themselves.

Outside, the snow shifts with a shift in the wind, and it seems as if some benign force, some vast invisible watcher, has known what Tyler wanted, the moment before he knew it himself—a sudden animation, a change, the gentle steady snowfall taken up and turned into fluttering sheets, an airy map of the wind currents; and yes—are you ready, Tyler?—it’s time to release the pigeons, five of them, from the liquor store roof, time to set them aflight and then (are you watching?) turn them, silvered by early light, counter to the windblown flakes, sail them effortlessly west into the agitated air that’s blowing the snow toward the East River (where barges will be plowing, whitened like ships of ice, through the choppy water); and yes, right, a moment later it’s time to turn the streetlights off and, simultaneously, bring a truck around the corner of Rock Street, its headlights still on and its flat silver top blinking little warning lights, garnet and ruby, that’s perfect, that’s amazing, thank you.

B
arrett runs shirtless through the snow flurries. His chest is scarlet; his breath explodes in steam-puffs. He’s slept for a few agitated hours. Now he’s going for his morning run. He finds that he’s comforted by this utterly usual act, sprinting along Knickerbocker, leaving behind a small, quickly evaporating trail of his own exhalations, like a locomotive rumbling through some still-slumbering, snow-decked town, though Bushwick feels like an actual town, subject to a town’s structural logic (as opposed to its true condition of random buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots, possessed of neither center nor outskirts), only at daybreak, only in its gelid hush, which is soon to end. Soon the delis and shops will open on Flushing, car horns will bleat, the deranged man—filthy and oracular, glowing with insanity like some of the more livid and mortified saints—will take up his station, with a sentry’s diligence, on the corner of Knickerbocker and Rock. But at the moment, for the moment, it’s actually quiet. Knickerbocker is muffled and nascent and dreamless, empty except for a few cars crawling cautiously along, cutting their headlights into the falling snow.

It’s been coming down since midnight. Snow eddies and tumbles as the point of equinox passes, and the sky starts all but imperceptibly turning from its nocturnal blackish brown to the lucid velvety gray of first morning, New York’s only innocent sky.

Last night the sky awakened, opened an eye, and saw neither more nor less than Barrett Meeks, homeward bound in a Cossack-style overcoat, standing on the icy platter of Central Park. The sky regarded him, noted him, closed its eye again, and returned to what were, as Barrett can only imagine, more revelatory, incandescent, galaxy-wheeling dreams.

A fear: last night was nothing, a blip, an accidental glimpse behind a celestial curtain, just one of those things. Barrett was no more “chosen” than an upstairs maid would be destined to marry into the family because she happened to see the eldest son naked, on his way to his bath, when he’d assumed the hall to be empty.

Another fear: last night was something, but it’s impossible to know, or even guess at, what. Barrett, a perverse, wrong-headed Catholic even in his grade school days (the gray-veined marble Christ at the entrance to the Transfiguration School was
hot
, he had a six-pack and biceps and that mournful, maidenly face), can’t remember being told, not even by the most despairing of the nuns, of a vision delivered so arbitrarily, so absent of context. Visions are answers. Answers imply questions.

It’s not as if Barrett lacks questions. Who does? But nothing much that begs response from prophet or oracle. Even if the chance were offered, would he want a disciple to run sock-footed down a dim and flickering corridor to interrupt the seer for the purpose of asking, Why do Barrett Meeks’s boyfriends all turn out to be sadistic dweebs? Or, What occupation will finally hold Barrett’s interest for longer than six months?

What, then—if intention was expressed last night, if that celestial eye opened specifically for Barrett—was the annunciation? What exactly did the light want him to go forth and
do
?

When he got home, he asked Tyler if he’d seen it (Beth was in bed, held in orbit by the increasing gravitational pull of her twilight zone). When Tyler said, “Seen what?” Barrett found, to his surprise, that he was reluctant to say anything about the light. There was of course the obvious explanation—who wants his older brother to suspect he’s delusional?—but there was as well a more peculiar sense, for Barrett, of a need for discretion, as if he’d been silently instructed to tell no one. So he made up something quick, about a hit-and-run on the corner of Thames Street.

And then he checked the news.

Nothing. The election, of course. And the fact that Arafat is dying; that the torture at Guantánamo has been confirmed; that a much-anticipated space capsule containing samples taken from the sun has crashed, because its parachute failed to open.

But no lantern-jawed newscaster locked eyes with the camera and said,
This evening the eye of God looked down upon the earth …

Barrett made dinner (Tyler can’t be counted on these days to remember that people need to eat periodically, and Beth is too ill). He allowed himself to return to wondering about this last, lost love. Maybe it was that late-night phone conversation, when Barrett knew he was going on too long about the deranged customer who’d insisted that, before he bought a particular jacket, he’d need proof that it had been made under cruelty-free conditions—Barrett can be a bore sometimes, right?—or maybe it was the night he hit the cue ball right off the table, and the lesbian made that remark to her girlfriend (he can be an embarrassment sometimes, too).

He could not, however, contemplate his mysterious misdeeds for long. He’d seen something impossible. Something that, apparently, no one else saw.

He made dinner. He tried to continue compiling his list of reasons for having been dumped.

Now, the following morning, he’s going for his run. Why wouldn’t he?

As he leaps over a frozen puddle at the corner of Knickerbocker and Thames, the streetlights turn themselves off. Now that a very different light has shown itself to him, he finds himself imagining some connection between the leap and the extinguishment, as if he, Barrett, had ordered the streetlights dimmed, by jumping. As if a lone man, out for his regular three miles, could be the instigator of the new day.

There’s that difference, between yesterday and today.

T
yler battles an urge to step up onto the bedroom windowsill. He’s not thinking of suicide. Fuck no. And, all right, if he were thinking of suicide, this is only the second floor. The best he might do is break a leg, and maybe—maybe—his skull might kiss the pavement with enough force to produce a concussion. But it would be a pathetic gesture—the loser version of that wearily defiant, ineluctably suave decision to say
That’s enough
, and waltz offstage. He has no desire to end up lying on the sidewalk, merely sprained and bruised, akimbo, after a leap into a void that can’t have been more than twenty feet.

He’s not thinking suicide, he’s thinking merely of going into the storm; of being more stingingly assaulted by wind and snow. The trouble (one of the troubles) with this apartment is one can only be inside it, looking out a window, or outside, on the street, looking up at the window. It would be so fine, so brilliant, to be naked in the weather; to be that available to it.

He contents himself, as he must, by leaning out as far as he can, which produces little more than a frosty wind-smack across his face, and snow pelting his hair.

B
ack from his run, Barrett enters the apartment, its warmth and its smell: the damp-wood sauna steam exhaled by its ancient radiators; the powdery scent of Beth’s medicines; the varnish-and-paint undertones that refuse to dissipate, as if something in this old dump can’t fully absorb any attempt at improvement; as if the ghost that is the building itself cannot and will not believe that its walls aren’t still bare, smoke-stained plaster, its rooms no longer inhabited by long-skirted women sweating over stoves as their factory-worker husbands sit cursing at kitchen tables. These recently enforced home-improvement smells, this mix of paint and doctor’s office, can’t do much more than float over a deep ur-smell of ham fat and sweat and spunk, of armpit and whiskey and wet dark rot.

The apartment’s warmth brings a tingling numbness to Barrett’s skin. On his morning runs he joins the cold, inhabits it the way a long-distance swimmer must inhabit water, and only when he’s back inside does he understand that he is in fact half frozen. He’s not a comet after all, but a man, hopelessly so, and, being human, must be pulled back in—to the apartment, the boat, the space shuttle—before he perishes of the annihilating beauties, the frigid airless silent places, the helixed and spiraled blackness he’d love to claim as his true home.