The Snow Queen

  “I’m going to scatter some,” he says. “And then I’d like each of you to, too.”

  Tentatively, as if he might make a wrong move (he has a momentary vision of ashes strewn across the iron-plate flooring), he lifts the canister shoulder-high, and tips it.

  Nothing happens. Are they compacted? Do they need to be stirred around?

  He gives the canister a small, gentle shake.

  And then, a spiral of pallid brown ash flies out. It is, momentarily, a palpable stream, but it quickly catches the wind, and disperses. There are quick dull gleams of bone chips. It’s a stream, then it’s a modest wispy scrap of cloud, and then, an instant later, it’s gone.

  Tyler gives the canister to Barrett. Barrett disperses a fleeting ash-cloud of his own, hands the canister to Liz, who does the same, until nothing more emerges.

  The vanishing was more complete than Tyler had expected it to be. The vastness and churn of the harbor is more intimidating than what he’d pictured, more arctic in its black and sparkling way. He hadn’t been thinking of a windblown, restlessly glittering tundra, or of all these ships. He’d imagined being able to see the ashes dissolve into the water. They are, however, gone, utterly gone, dissolved in the turbulent air. The night continues. The three of them stand at the railing in silence, with yet another freighter, this one the size of a football field, passing close by, and the low moan of what Tyler can only think of as boat sound, an exhalation like that of a titanic French horn.

  They’ll disembark at Staten Island, then re-board the same boat back to Manhattan. The others are waiting at home. Ping and Nina and Foster and another ten or so. They’ve made dinner, as people do. They’ve agreed that no one will utter the words “celebration of life.”

  It seems that Tyler, Barrett, and Liz should embrace, or at least put their arms over one another’s shoulders. That is not, however, what they find themselves doing. They stand close, but at slightly discreet distances. It seems, to each of them, that one of the others is about to say something unbearable, though none of them can tell whether the dreaded outpouring would be grief, or accusation, or … something else, something all three can imagine, but for which none of them has a name. There are, clearly, words to be said, or shouted, or hurled out over the water, but Tyler, Barrett, and Liz all believe those words to be forthcoming from one of the others. They are possessed, all of them, by an inexplicable feeling of reserve; a sense that if they aren’t careful, true annihilation will descend. None of them will ever mention this to the others. Anxiously waiting, hoping for catharsis and hoping, with equal force, that they’ll simply remain quiet, docile passengers, they watch the lights of Manhattan, the ice-white glow of the ferry terminal, the small bright finger of Miss Liberty, recede.

  And what, exactly, are they supposed to do, now, with the empty can? None of them had thought about that.

  NOVEMBER 2008

  People are already hauling things away, before Tyler and Barrett have brought the last of it out to the sidewalk. An elderly couple—shabbily natty, he’s got licorice-black hair and has a silk scarf knotted around his neck; she’s primly white-haired, in an ancient Pierre Cardin jacket, once apricot, now the color of a Band-Aid—are carrying off the two spindly chairs, one apiece. They carry the chairs seat-forward, as if prepared to offer a ride to anyone who might need one. Tyler, hefting a carton full of old DVDs, locks eyes with them as they depart, but they eschew recognition. They are deposed royalty. These chairs have been restored to them, but you can’t imagine, young man, all that’s been lost.

  As the chair-bearing couple make their way toward Thames Street, a trio of skinny skateboard kids, each showing three inches of underwear above his jeans, zips up to examine the lighthouse-based lamp.

  “It needs to be rewired,” Tyler tells them, as he sets the carton full of DVDs down on the pavement.

  One of the boys says, “Thanks, dude,” and they’re off again, as if Tyler had warned them against some hidden danger.

  Barrett emerges, barely managing to carry the green Naugahyde armchair. Tyler hurries to help. When they’ve gotten the chair onto the sidewalk, Barrett sits down in it.

  “Goodbye, old girl,” he says to the chair.

  “Good luck in all future endeavors.”

  Barrett strokes one of the chair’s slick, bile-green arms. “You can get attached to just about anything, can’t you?” he says.

  “Some people are more sentimental than others.”

  “I’m not sentimental. I’m … compassionate.”

  Tyler lights a cigarette (rehab promoted him from occasional to pack-a-day smoker). They look around. The entire apartment has been arrayed on the sidewalk. Barrett has insisted on dioramas: the living room furniture is grouped together, as are the Formica-topped kitchen table and its mismatched, rickety chairs. He’s done his best to reproduce the familiar disorder of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom, as a curator would, with all the shabby treasures that had been gathered around the bed in more or less their former places.

  Tyler is surprised by how peculiar it all looks; not only because it’s out on the sidewalk but because he has, it seems, been blind to the ragtag, junky nature of their possessions. In situ, their furnishings struck him as cool, jokey, satisfyingly outré. Out here, in public, they’ve acquired a pathos they did not seem to possess when they were private, everyday objects. Strangers pass, browse, take something or don’t. The gray sky shines down on it all, silvers the pots and pans, inspires the kitchen chairs to throw modest, formless shadows onto the sidewalk. A titanic, pewter-colored cloud rolls slowly in from the west, bringing the portent of rain to a sky that had been, until a moment ago, merely overcast. The pots and pans lose their luster, the chairs their shadows, and are rendered that much more commonplace. Just so, one might be brought before the thousand-eyed, mirror-winged god, and try warming him up with a few jokes before judgment is passed.

  Barrett says, “We really don’t want to keep anything? I mean, this is our last chance.”

  “We’re keeping the TV.”

  “I voted to get rid of the TV.”

  “Then we wouldn’t be able to watch the election returns.”

  “I think it’s Obama,” Barrett says. “I mean, I really think so.”

  Tyler shakes his tired head. “This country is so not ready for a black president. Prepare yourself for McCain. Get ready for Vice President Palin.”

  Barrett says, “I think this country is ready for someone who’ll fix the economy and maybe, oh, stop killing about a third of the world’s population.”

  “You’re a dreamer. That’s a good thing about you. If also ever so slightly annoying.”

  Barrett says, “I’m actually feeling a little panicky.”

  “You have good reason. I mean, Sarah Palin?”

  “Actually, I meant I feel a little panicky about us getting rid of all our furniture.”

  “The sofa. We’re keeping the sofa,” Tyler says.

  “That’s like saying we’re keeping Aunt Gertrude.”

  “I’m going to breathe my last breath on that sofa. Do you promise to get me onto the sofa, when the time comes?”

  “If I outlive you.”

  “I have a feeling you will.”

  Barrett glances nervously around. “Don’t say that. Do you have any idea how much you’ve just increased the likelihood that a cab driver is about to lose control and run me over, right here in this chair?”

  “You may not be more sentimental, but you are without question more superstitious.”

  “I’m more amenable to the possibility of magic. How’s that?”

  They pause to watch a homeless man in soot-colored sweater and blackened wool pants, looking as if he’s just escaped a fire, pick up the Dante vase (Korean-deli tulips, still fresh, sprout from Dante’s severe and frowning head), examine it, and put it down again.

  Barrett says, “Even he doesn’t want that thing.”

  “What would he do with a vase?”

  “Liz gave t
hat to me.”

  “How’s Liz doing?”

  “Relieved, mostly. I think she was pretty much over it already.”

  “She hangs out sometimes. With Andrew and the new one. She’s taken them to dinner.”

  “As Liz would.”

  “It that it? Does she do things because Liz would do them?”

  “Sometimes. Don’t you do things because of that?”

  Tyler hesitates. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, come on. Aren’t there times when you don’t know what to do, and you ask yourself, What would I do in a situation like this?”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  Tyler exhales a feather of smoke. He says, “Why didn’t you didn’t tell me about that goddamned light?”

  “Uh, beg your pardon?”

  “You told everybody else. You told Liz. You told Andrew.”

  “This is coming up now, because …”

  “Because it is. Because you saw the holy fucking Virgin Mother tap-dancing in the sky, and didn’t say a word to me about it.”

  Barrett gathers himself, runs a high-speed search for reason and logic, fails to locate a vestige of either.

  “That’s not true. I did tell you.”

  “After Beth died. Which would have been, what, almost five months after you’d told every-goddamned-body else. I mean, why did you wait? No, why did you tell me at all? Why didn’t you just go on forever with everybody but me knowing that this … miracle happened?”

  Barrett struggles to bring himself around. Maybe it’s only possible for them to have this fight in public; maybe it would feel too dangerous if strangers couldn’t see and hear them. It helps, of course (does it?), that, on the sidewalk, they’re surrounded by all their familiar, private things, which are for the moment neither theirs nor not theirs; that they briefly inhabit a halfway zone, between location and dispersal.

  Barrett answers, “How long have you been back on drugs?”

  Tyler’s expression is not the one Barrett was expecting. There’s nothing of the apprehended child about it. Tyler drags deeply on his cigarette, looks at Barrett in a way Barrett can only think of as provoked, as if Barrett had waited until some catastrophic interlude to accuse Tyler of neglecting a minor domestic chore.

  Tyler says, “Did you think the bit about the light was going to console me?”

  “I was afraid …”

  Tyler waits, sucking so hard on his cigarette that the ash goes from its regular orange to fiery tangerine.

  “I was afraid,” Barrett continues, “it would seem like I was trying to horn in.”

  “English. Earth-speak.”

  “Like I was trying to … I don’t know. Take over Beth’s illness. Claim some sort of extra importance for myself.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Well. I suppose I supposed … it would seem like, Yeah, Tyler’s writing a love song for her, Tyler’s marrying her, that’s all well and good, but guess what? I, Barrett, the gay little brother, have seen a light. In the sky.”

  “So you didn’t want to tell me about the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to you because you were afraid you might make the wrong impression.”

  “I started to wonder …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I started to wonder if I really had seen anything, or if I’d just … made it up.”

  “And why would you make something like that up?” Tyler flings his cigarette away, lights another.

  “Uh, like, maybe to feel like somebody? I wasn’t doing anything to help Beth get better …”

  “Nobody was, nobody could …”

  “I couldn’t write a song for her, I couldn’t marry her.”

  “So you cooked yourself up a hallucination.”

  Barrett says, “I didn’t know. It seemed so undeniable, at first. But over time, I started wondering. I kept waiting for, I don’t know. Vision number two.”

  “You think they come in pairs?”

  “I think I’ve been trying too hard for too long.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’ve given up the need to be important. Trying to matter. In that mover-and-shaker kind of way.”

  “I can’t say I’ve observed a lot of moving,” Tyler says. “Or shaking, come to think of it.”

  “But there’s a difference between not pursuing worldly ambitions and no longer feeling like a failure for not pursuing them. I’ve been wondering if that’s what the light meant. Like, you’re watched, you’re accounted for, you don’t have to be important, you don’t have to have your picture in a magazine.”

  “Didn’t we just decide the light was some kind of mirage?”

  “That’s the thing,” Barrett says. “It doesn’t matter if it was real, or if I just imagined it. It adds up, either way.”

  Tyler’s face changes in a way it never has before. His face resembles their mother’s. Has he known, all these years, how to summon her joke’s-on-you smile, her cynical arch of brow? Has he been saving this trick for a crucial moment?

  Tyler says, “You want something of your own, don’t you?”

  Barrett can’t seem to answer that.

  “You want something that has nothing to do with me,” Tyler says. “Am I right?”

  Barrett says, “I want to make sure about something. You think we’re going to kind of barrel-jump over you doing coke in secret. Right?”

  “I’m not,” Tyler answers.

  “I found a coke vial in your nightstand drawer.”

  “Old one. I’d forgotten about it. How many times have we talked about this?”

  “But, really?”

  “This is like some kind of Asian justice system, isn’t it? Like, once you’ve been proven guilty, you can never be not guilty again.”

  “You think that’s how Asian justice systems work?”

  “I have no idea. I guess it’s racist, huh?”

  Tyler sits down on the chair beside Barrett’s, the innocent-looking but fiendishly uncomfortable wing-back chair, upholstered in faded red silk, which Barrett has placed, in relation to the green Naugahyde, exactly where it stood in the apartment.

  Barrett says, “I’ve started going to church again.”

  “Have you?”

  “Having a crisis about God after Beth died seemed too … lame, I guess.”

  “How’s that working for you? Church, I mean.”

  “I couldn’t say, exactly. I just go.”

  “But nothing happens?” Tyler says.

  “I wouldn’t say nothing.”

  “You don’t pray. You don’t sing the hymns.”

  “No. I sit in a pew at the back.”

  “You must feel something.”

  “Peaceful. Semi-peaceful. That’s about it.”

  This is not, Tyler decides, the time or place for a detailed metaphysical discussion. He says, “I’m going to go over and check out the new place.”

  “I’ll come by after work. Okay if I bring Sam along?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really sure?”

  “What exactly is this thing of yours about me not liking Sam?” Tyler pulls another cigarette from his pack, fumbles in his jeans pocket for his lighter.

  “Uh, because he’s coming between us?”

  “Beth didn’t come between us.”

  Barrett says, “I was married to Beth too.”

  Tyler tries to light his cigarette with a pack of Life Savers, puts the Life Savers back into his pocket, finds the actual lighter.

  “Then I can be married to Sam, along with you, right?” he says. He lights his cigarette, takes a deep drag. Here, once again, is that delicious, slightly noxious flow into his lungs, the sour-sweetness of it. As he exhales, he watches the smoke disappear.

  “I don’t think so. I can’t see it. I’m sorry.”

  Tyler takes another drag, watches the smokestream.

  Barrett says, “I’m kind of excited about getting all new furniture.”

  “I am too.”

  “You’re sur
e about this? We can still reclaim some of it. Oh, look, there goes the kitchen table.”

  A young couple, tattooed and spike-haired, is carrying off the kitchen table. The boy cries, over his shoulder, “Thanks, guys.”

  Tyler offers a jaunty wave of acknowledgment. He says to Barrett, “I’m exactly haunted enough, without the furniture.”

  Both watch the kitchen table make its way west. Barrett sings the opening phrase of the theme song from The Jeffersons. “We’re movin’ on up …”

  “That’s all I can remember,” he adds.

  Tyler says, “From a total shithole to a semi-shithole.”

  The kitchen table, borne by its new owners, turns the corner and is gone.

  “I’ve been thinking about an old French farm table,” Barrett says. “You know the kind I mean? They’re about a hundred years old. They’re really long, and they have these great nicks and scars on them.”

  “Remember, we’re still on a budget.”

  “I know. But, hey, we’ve got a hit album …”

  “We’ve got a not-quite-finished album that’ll probably sell about three dozen copies.”

  Barrett says, “You know, if you’re hopeful, if you’re even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn’t affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart. This, coming from the superstitious one.”

  Tyler doesn’t reply. He tosses his half-smoked cigarette to the pavement, crushes it out with his boot-heel. He gets up, for the last time, from the world’s least user-friendly chair.

  “I guess that’s all of it,” he says.

  “I think so,” Barrett answers. “I’ll go back upstairs in a minute, and check.”

  “So. I’ll see you later. At our new home.”

  “See you later.”

  Tyler does not, however, leave; not right away. A sense of what could only be called awkwardness sets in.

  “This is strange,” Tyler says.

  “Moving is always strange, right?”