The Snow Queen

  “Not this one. It’s pretty plain. And it’s just me and about a dozen old ladies, who always sit up front.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody talks to me. I thought for a while that after a service, one of the priests would come over and say something like, ‘What brings you here, my son?’ But these guys are old, really old, they’re just going through the motions and, I don’t know, thinking about getting under the altar boys’ robes once everybody else is gone.”

  Andrew laughs lewdly. He asks, “Why do you go, then?”

  “It’s quiet. It has an atmosphere, even this crummy old church. I just sort of sit there wondering if something will … arrive.”

  “Has it?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Here you are.”

  Barrett opens his eyes. It’s Liz, standing in the doorway, a reenactment of Andrew coming to Barrett’s room twenty minutes ago. At the end of his life, will Barrett remember people standing in doorways, having found him in his various refuges?

  Andrew says, “Hey, there.”

  “It’s about eleven minutes to midnight,” she says. She walks into the room.

  “There is so much shit in here,” she says.

  “Tyler and Beth are collectors,” Barrett tells her.

  “Tyler and Beth are out of their minds.”

  She makes her way to the bed, settles in beside Andrew, who moves over to make room for her. Here, now, nudging against Barrett’s side, are Andrew’s right shoulder and the rise of his right hip.

  It’s sexy. Of course it is. But now that Barrett’s devotion is fading, Andrew is turning from deity to porn. Barrett is relieved, and sorry. A ship is sailing off. Barrett glances at the lampshade, with its painted-on sailboats, the paint chipped away in spots.

  Andrew says to Liz, “Want a bump?”

  “And whose coke would that be?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s Tyler’s,” Barrett says.

  “I’ve been under the impression that Tyler’s stopped doing coke.”

  “Wrong impression, it seems.”

  “Whatever. Did Tyler say to you, please go into my room and help yourself to my private stash?”

  “Hey, Lizzie,” Andrew says, “it’s a party, it’s New Year’s Eve …”

  “Put it back.”

  Barrett says, “Everything here is jointly owned, by Tyler, Beth, and me.”

  “Not drugs. You never ever take somebody’s drugs without having been invited. Put it back where you found it, right now.”

  Andrew passes the vial to Barrett, who opens the nightstand drawer and tosses it back inside.

  To Barrett, Liz says, “You don’t do this shit.”

  “Uh, it’s a party. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  Andrew says, “Barrett was telling me about this light he saw in the sky once. Over Central Park.”

  Of course Andrew would have no sense of secrecy. What could Andrew possibly imagine that ought to be kept secret?

  “A light?” Liz asks.

  Careful. Liz asks questions, Liz is not disposed to the miraculous or the inexplicable.

  “Don’t listen to me, not right now,” Barrett says. “I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  Andrew says, “It was this big sphere. It was beautiful and powerful.”

  “Barrett told you he saw a light in the sky,” Liz says to Andrew.

  “And Bigfoot,” Barrett says. “I saw Bigfoot, over on Third Avenue. He was going into a Taco Bell.”

  Liz tucks her lips together, looks briefly at the ceiling, looks at Barrett.

  “What was it like?” she asks.

  Barrett takes a breath, as if he were about to duck his head under water.

  “It was this sort of pale aqua color.”

  Liz continues looking at Barrett. Her face takes on a scrutinizing aspect, as if she were a detective who suspected Barrett of lying about his whereabouts on the night of a crime.

  “I saw a light once,” she says. “Up in the sky.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It was years ago.”

  “Where? Uh, I mean, in the sky, right …”

  “I was up on my roof. It was early summer, I was living on the Lower East Side then, working in Joshua’s store. I was going to bed, and I went up to the roof to smoke a joint first. Actually, come to think of it, I think it was opiated hash.”

  “What was the light like?” Barrett asks.

  “Well, I guess I’d say a disk. Or a sphere.”

  “This kind of pale aqua?”

  Liz emits a laugh with a strangely sour undertone.

  “I’d say more like teal. I’m in retail, I don’t see aqua.”

  “Tell me more about what it looked like.”

  She levels her eyes at him, a woman of patience, a woman sufficiently weary of overly ardent men that she’s come to choose irony over irritation.

  “It was this funny floating ball of light,” she says. “There was something sweet about it.”

  “Sweet?”

  “Yeah. I guess. Sort of like a satellite from the fifties. Like this little luminous has-been of a thing that had wandered in from some other time, when it used to be a marvel.”

  “That’s not like the light I saw.”

  “Well, then, it seems we saw different lights.”

  “Did you feel anything? I mean, what did you think when you saw it?”

  “I thought, This is really good hash, I’ve got to remember who I got it from.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What happened after?”

  “I finished the hash, went back downstairs, read a book for a while, and went to sleep. The next morning, I went to work again. Do you remember what an asshole Joshua could be?”

  “You didn’t wonder what it was? The light, I mean.”

  “I thought some kind of gas or something. Isn’t the universe full of gaseous elements?”

  Andrew says, “Yeah, there are gasses and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.”

  “And you just went on about your business?” Barrett says to Liz.

  “What did you expect me to do, call the National Enquirer? I was high, I saw a light, and it went away again.”

  Barrett leans toward her, his head close enough to Andrew’s that he can feel Andrew’s breath on his cheek.

  He asks, “Did anything happen afterward?”

  “No, I told you. Nothing did.”

  “Maybe not right after.”

  “This was years ago, things happen all the time.”

  “Think.”

  “You’re scaring me a little.”

  “Come on. Think. Humor me.”

  “Hm. Okay. I found a pair of Jimmy Choos at T. J. Maxx, that’s kind of a miracle, right?”

  “Come on.”

  “You’re very high, aren’t you, honey?”

  “A little.”

  “You never get high.”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll play. Let’s see … it was at least ten years ago.”

  She pauses.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “What is it?”

  “It was, I guess it was, the year my sister came back.”

  The seldom-spoken-of younger sister. Barrett knows only sketchy details, after a decadelong friendship with Liz.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “This is silly.”

  “Go on.”

  She pauses.

  “She went off her medication. And one day she just … disappeared. For almost a year.”

  “You’ve told me that. I think.”

  “I don’t talk about her much.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “I’m not sure why, really. Well, okay, I guess it’s because it obviously runs in the family, and I’m afraid it could happen to me. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? Like the Greeks r
efusing to name the god of the underworld, in case he overheard them.”

  “What is it that runs in the family?” Barrett asks.

  “Well. Schizophrenia. It didn’t happen until she was twenty-three. She’d been the smartest, loveliest girl in the world. She was fine, she was just fine. She was in law school, she’d gotten an internship with the ACLU, which as you may or may not know is a very hard job to get. And then she had this break. And she was someone else. She was paranoid and anxious about almost everything and she had these crazy ideas about corporate plots, and assassination squads and, oh, well, she … changed. She was just … another person. She had to quit school. She moved back in with our parents.”

  Andrew says, “Her name was Sarah.”

  “That was in fact her name,” Liz says. “Anyway, she went on medication, and it helped, but only sort of. It made her a better imitation of who she’d been. But it was as if Sarah had died, and been replaced by some sort of pod person.”

  “I see pod people every day,” Andrew says. “All over the place.”

  “She hated the medication, everybody hates the medication, it makes you fat and drowsy and it just kills sex entirely. And, one day, without telling us, it seems she stopped taking it. And left. One day. When our mother and father happened to be out of the house for a while.”

  “She left,” Barrett says.

  “She walked away. We couldn’t find her. We tried everything. At first we looked around the city, and then we started calling the police and putting posters up all over the place. She was completely out of her mind, she was a pretty twenty-three-year-old, who knew what someone might do to her?”

  “Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.

  “She had some money with her, we knew that. She liked having money, she’d just take it from our mother’s purse, our mother never minded. We didn’t even know how much, but probably enough for a bus ticket someplace. And after a month or so, I thought our mother was going to die. I mean, literally. Sarah left in December. If she hadn’t been raped and murdered, she could have been frozen somewhere, she could have been starving to death.”

  A silence passes. The room crowds around them, all shadow and spike.

  “I’d go over to my parents’ place,” Liz says, “and my mother would just be sitting there. In a chair in the living room. Just sitting there. Like she was, I don’t know. In a waiting room, waiting to see a doctor or something.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He was devastated too. But he was himself. He kept doing things around the house. Fixing things. Like, if the house was in better shape, Sarah would come back. I knew, I thought I knew, that if Sarah … never came back, our father would be okay. Fucked up of course, but he’d survive. I wasn’t sure our mother would.”

  “Did you think she’d kill herself?”

  “No, I thought she’d … vanish. Bit by bit. That sooner or later she’d develop some illness, something the doctors couldn’t diagnose.”

  Andrew says, “People do that. People get sick from their lives.”

  Liz, her patience finally exhausted, gives him a stern, teacherly look. If you don’t know the answers, perhaps it would be best if you just listened.

  Barrett says, “What happened?”

  “What happened was. Like, five months later, there was a knock on the door, and it was her. She looked awful. She weighed about ninety pounds and she had bugs in her hair and was dressed in things people had thrown out. But she was there. One night. Out of nowhere.”

  “Really.”

  “It seemed so impossible. We’d been hoping, of course we had, but we’d been practicing for the idea that she … wasn’t alive anymore. And then one night, there she was.”

  “Where had she gone?”

  “We don’t know, really. She said something about Minneapolis, she said something about South Beach. But she’d turned down a law school in Minneapolis, before she had the break, and she’d gone to South Beach the year before, on vacation. We never really got the story. It was hard to tell whether she remembered where she’d been.”

  “She was home, though.”

  Liz nods gravely. She might be agreeing to some harsh but inevitable verdict.

  “Yes. She was home.”

  “Which was kind of a miracle.”

  “I don’t pray,” she says. “I don’t believe in God.”

  “I know that.”

  “But for a few weeks after Sarah came back, I did keep saying these silent thanks to every person who’d given her a dollar, every person who let her sleep in their vestibule, anyone who’d ever given her anything. After that, I always give a dollar to anybody who asks.”

  “This was after you saw the light.”

  “It was at least three months later.”

  “But still.”

  “Okay, yes, you fucker, in strict chronological order, it was after I got very high on some very good hashish, and thought I saw some kind light. Do you honestly think there’s a connection?”

  “I’m not sure. I keep wondering about that.”

  “Well. It’s good, it’s very very good, that she’s home, that she’s safe. But she’s not better. She’s back on her medication. She’s fat and slow and she lives in her old bedroom. She plays video games.”

  “It’s better than dead in Minneapolis.”

  “Still. It’s kind of a shitty miracle, don’t you think?”

  Andrew says, “Hey, three minutes to midnight.”

  “I’m not really thinking miracles. I’m thinking, I don’t know, portents.”

  “Two minutes and fifty seconds,” Andrew says.

  Liz tells him, “Go into the living room and make sure everybody knows. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “You’ll be there for the countdown?”

  “Absolutely. Go, now.”

  Andrew rises obediently from the bed, leaves the room. It’s Liz and Barrett, side by side on the bed.

  “Does it matter?” Liz asks.

  “Does what matter?”

  “A portent. Something like that.”

  “You’d have to say it’s interesting.”

  “Sweetheart. I’m thinking more like, I’d have to say it’s wishful bullshit.”

  •

  Tyler and Beth have ducked into the kitchen, for a bit of alone time. They hold each other, leaning against the countertop.

  Beth says, “We’re almost in another year.”

  “We are.” Tyler buries his nose in the crook of her neck. He inhales her as deeply as he does cocaine.

  There’s a speck of grit in his eye. He tries blinking it out—he can’t loosen his hold on Beth, not now, to rub at it.

  “And the world hasn’t ended,” she says.

  “Not for some of us.”

  She presses him more tightly against herself. “Don’t start,” she whispers. “Not tonight.”

  Tyler nods. He won’t start. Not tonight. There will be no screeds about secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania, warrantless wiretapping, or the fact that Bush himself has now admitted to thirty thousand Iraqi civilians dead since the war began. That would be the war against a country that didn’t attack the United States in the first place.

  Tyler says, softly, close to Beth’s ear, “They found mammoth DNA in England.”

  “So, they can make a mammoth again?”

  “That’s probably a little premature. Let’s just say they were never going to make a mammoth again without mammoth DNA.”

  “That would be so great. Imagine!”

  “It would be extremely great.”

  “They’d keep him in a zoo, though, wouldn’t they?”

  “No. They’d want to study him in his natural habitat. They’d build a whole mammoth preserve for him. Probably in … Norway.”

  “That’s nice,” she says.

  “You know what else?”

  “What?”

  “Fiji overturned its sodomy laws. You can be gay in Fiji now.”

&nb
sp; “That’s good.”

  “And …”

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Princess Nori of Japan married a commoner, and relinquished the throne.”

  “Is he handsome?”

  “Not really. But he has a true heart, and he loves her more than anything.”

  “That’s even better.”

  “Of course it is.”

  From the living room, Ping’s voice. “One minute to midnight!”

  Beth says, “Let’s stay in here, okay?”

  “Somebody will come and find us.”

  “Then we’ll tell them to go away.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Unexpectedly, Tyler starts weeping. It’s a dry, quiet weeping, more like gagging on tears than shedding them.

  Beth says, “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

  Tyler lets her hold him. He can’t speak. He’s surprised by this sudden assault. He’s afraid, of course he’s afraid, on Beth’s behalf—a remission so unanticipated, so inexplicable, could vanish as mysteriously as it arrived. They both know that. They discussed it once, and agreed to discuss it no further.

  He weeps, too, over the wedding song he sang for Beth, more than a year ago. Why can’t he seem to forget (never mind forgive) the fact that it wasn’t a good song, despite the assurances, from everyone, that it was the best thing he’d ever done? Yeah, right. It was heartfelt, it naturally enough elicited tears, but Tyler knew, he knew, that it was more sentimental than searing. He’d been defeated by his own lacks. He winces, now, to remember: sliver in my heart had remained, but without any mention of ice; there may have been (he’s willed himself to forget the particulars) our double-handed, solemn approach, rhymed with the invisible driver of the ancient rose-decked coach. He knew he’d run out of time, he’d run out of talent, and delivered a ballad, a nice little ballad, appropriate to the occasion, satisfying to all present, but not a creation hammered out of bronze; not a song that mingled love and death, that could be sung after the lovers themselves were dust. It was local. It was of course ecstatically received, but even as he sang it, as Beth stood trembling (frail then, her skin the same watered white as her silk dress), transported, aflame with love for him; he knew even then that he was a minstrel, his forehead encircled not by gold band or laurel wreath but plumed hat; adept at singing of love because he did so for hire, all over the county; convincing because well practiced, so accustomed to feigning romance for strangers that he could at this point do nothing but feign, even when the feelings were his own. The musical language of convincing fakery had become the only language in which he sang.