The Snow Queen

  “We left the window open last night. Our bedroom is full of snow.”

  He taps the pack, violently, before extracting a cigarette. He’s not entirely sure why people do that (to concentrate the tobacco?), but he likes doing it, he likes that one sure and punishing whack as part of the lighting-up ritual.

  Barrett says, “Dreams?”

  Tyler lights his cigarette. He goes to the window, cracks it open, blows the smokestream out into the air shaft. His exhalation is answered by a tickle of frigid air, seeping in.

  “Some windy joy,” he answers. “No specifics. Weather as happiness, but gritty, happiness blowing in unwanted, maybe in a town in Latin America. You?”

  “A statue with a hard-on,” Barrett says. “A skulking dog. I’m afraid that’s it.”

  They pause as if they were scientists, taking notes.

  Barrett asks, “Have you listened to the news yet?”

  “No. I’m a little bit afraid to.”

  “He was still ahead in the polls at six.”

  “He’s not going to win,” Tyler says. “I mean, there were no fucking weapons of mass destruction. Zero. Zip.”

  Barrett’s attention is briefly diverted by a search, among the shampoo bottles, for one that still contains shampoo. Which is just as well. Tyler knows he can get crazy on the subject, monomaniacal; he can be tiresome about his conviction that if others only saw, if they only understood …

  There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.

  And, by the way, he’s destroyed the economy. He’s squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.

  It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane. And now that he’s no longer looking out onto his private snow kingdom, now that he’s coked himself up from that languid, awake-too-early state, he’s not only alert as a rabbit, he’s also available, once again, to the forces of fretfulness and dread.

  He blows another plume out into the inrushing cold, watches his furls of smoke evaporate in the falling snow.

  Barrett says, “What I’m really worried about is Kerry’s haircut.”

  Tyler shuts his eyes, wincingly, as he would at the onset of a headache. He does not want to be, will not be, the one who won’t tolerate a joke, the uncle who has to be invited at the holidays even though we all know how he’s going to carry on about … whatever injustice or betrayal or historical malfeasance he wears like a suit of iron, soldered to his body.

  “What I’m worried about,” Tyler says, “is Ohio.”

  “I think it’ll be all right,” Barrett answers. “I have a feeling. Or, well, I have hope.”

  He has hope. Hope is an old jester’s cap by now. Faded motley, with that little tin bell at the tip. Who has the energy to wear it anymore? But who’s courageous enough to doff it, leave it crumpled in the lane? Not Tyler.

  “I do too,” he says. “I have hope and belief and even a particle or two of actual faith.”

  “How are you doing with Beth’s song?”

  “I’m a little stuck,” Tyler says. “But I think I made some progress last night.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “Giving her a song seems kind of … small, don’t you think?”

  “Of course not. I mean, what kind of wedding gift do you think would mean more to her? A BlackBerry?”

  “It’s so impossible.”

  “Writing songs is hard. Well, pretty much everything is hard, right?”

  “I guess,” Tyler says.

  Barrett nods. They pass through a moment of silence as old as either of them can remember, the quietude of growing up together, of sleeping in the same room; the shared quiet that has always been their true element, interrupted of course by talks and fights and farts and laughter over the farts but essential, the atmosphere to which they’ve always returned, a field of soundless oxygen made up of their combined molecules.

  Tyler says, “Mom got struck by lightning on a golf course.”

  “Uh, you know, I know that.”

  “Betty Ferguson said at the memorial that she’d been three under par that day.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Big Boy got hit by the same car, twice. Two years in a row. And it didn’t kill him either time. Then he choked to death on a Snickers bar at Halloween.”

  “Tyler, really.”

  “Then we got another beagle and named him Big Boy Two, and he got squashed by the son of the woman who’d hit Big Boy One, twice. It was the first time the woman’s son had driven by himself, it was his sixteenth birthday.”

  “Why are you saying all this?”

  “I’m just listing the impossibilities that happened anyway,” Tyler says.

  “So, like, Bush won’t be reelected.”

  Tyler doesn’t say, And Beth will live. He doesn’t say, The chemo is working.

  He says, “I just want this fucking song to be good.”

  “It will be.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  Barrett says, “I am like Mom. And you know, really, it won’t matter if the song isn’t great. Not to Beth.”

  “It’ll matter to me.”

  Barrett’s sympathy blooms in his eyes, which darken for Tyler the way their father’s do. Although their father is not an especially gifted father, this is one of his talents. He has the ability, when needed, to perform this little eye-shift, a deepening and dilating that says to his sons, You don’t have to matter any more than you do right now.

  They should call him, it’s been, what, more than a week now. Maybe two.

  Why did he marry Marva so soon after Mom died? Why did they move to Atlanta, what do they do down there?

  Who is this guy, where did the plaid come from, how can he love Marva—Marva’s okay, she’s fun in her crude, shock-the-boys way, you learn not to stare at the scar, but how can their dad cease to be Mom’s solicitous penitent? The deal was always so clear. She was the cherished and endangered one (lightning found her), it was right there on her face (the milk-blue Slavic fineness of it, her hand-carved quality, her porcelain glaze). Their father was the designated driver, the guy who enforced naps, the one who got panicky when she was half an hour late; the middle-aged boy who’d sit under her window in the rain until he caught his death.

  And now, this person. This man who wears Tommy Bahama shorts, and Tevas. This guy who rockets around Atlanta with Marva in a Chrysler Imperial convertible, blowing cigarillo smoke up at whatever constellations appear over Georgia.

  It’s probably easier on him, being this guy. Tyler doesn’t, won’t, begrudge it.

  And, really, their father was released from paternal duty years and years ago, wasn’t he? It may have occurred as early as those drinking sessions with Barrett, during the days after their mother’s service.

  They were seventeen and twenty-two. They just hung around the house like stray dogs for a few days, in briefs and socks, drinking down the supply (the scotch and vodka led to the gin, which led to the off-brand tequila, which led eventually to a quarter-full bottle of Tia Maria, and an inch of Drambuie that had probably been there twenty years or more).

  They languished for days in the suddenly famous living room, surrounded by all the ordinary things that had so abruptly become her things. Tyler and Barrett, sloppy and scared and shocked, getting hammered in their briefs and socks; it was (maybe it was) the night they turned a particular corner …

  Do you ever think?

  What?

  They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare junk to holy artifact.

  You know.

  What if I don’t know?

  You fucking do.

  Okay, yeah. Yes. I, too, wonder if Dad worried so much about every single little goddamned thing …

  That he summoned it.

  Thanks. I couldn’t say it.

  That some god or goddess heard
him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether she’d been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer …

  That they delivered the thing even he couldn’t imagine worrying about.

  It’s not true.

  I know.

  But we’re both thinking about it.

  That may have been their betrothal. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. We no longer need, or want, a father.

  Still, they really have to call him. It’s been way too long.

  “I know,” Barrett says. “I know it’ll matter to you. But I think you should remember that it won’t, to her. Not in the same way.”

  Barrett, bluff-chested, naked in graying water, is in particular possession of his pink-white, grandly mortified glow.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” Tyler says.

  Barrett stands up in the tub, streaming bathwater, a hybrid of stocky robust manliness and plump little boy.

  This peculiarity: Tyler is untroubled by the sight of Barrett emerging from his bathwater. It is, for mysterious reasons, only Barrett’s immersion that’s difficult for Tyler to witness.

  Might that have to do with endangerment, and rescue? Duh.

  Another peculiarity: Knowledge of one’s deeper motives, the sources of one’s peccadilloes and paranoias, doesn’t necessarily make much difference.

  “I’m going to go to the shop,” Barrett says.

  “Now?”

  “I feel like being alone there.”

  “It’s not like you don’t have your own room. I mean, am I crowding you?”

  “Shut up. Okay?”

  Tyler tosses Barrett a towel from the rack.

  “It seems right, that the song is about snow,” Barrett says.

  “It seemed right when I started it.”

  “I know. I mean, it all seems right when you start it, it seems infinitely promising and inspired and great … I’m not trying to be profound, or anything.”

  Tyler lingers for a final moment, to fully feel the charge. They do the eye thing, once more, for each other. It’s simple, it’s undramatic, there’s nothing moist or abashed, nothing actually ardent, going on, but they pass something back and forth. Call it recognition, though it’s more than that. It’s recognition, and it’s the mutual conjuring of their ghost brother, the third one who didn’t quite manage to be born, and so, being spectral—less than spectral, being never—is their medium, their twinship, their daemon; the boy (he’ll never grow past the pink-faced, holy gravitas of the cherubim) who is the two of them, combined.

  Barrett dries off. The bathwater, now that he’s out of the tub, has turned from its initial, steaming clarity to a tepid murk, as it always does. Why does that happen? Is it soap residue, or Barrett residue—the sloughed-off outermost layer of city grime and deceased epidermis and (he can’t help thinking this) some measure of his essence, his little greeds and vanities, his self-admiration, his habit of sorrow, washed away, for now, with soap, left behind, to spiral down the drain.

  He stares for a moment longer at his bathwater. It’s the usual water. It’s no different the morning after the night he’s seen something he can’t really have seen.

  Why, exactly, would Tyler believe this was a good morning to return them to the story of their mother?

  A time-snap: Their mother reclines on the sofa (which is here now, right here in their Bushwick living room), smoking, cheerfully bleary on a few old-fashioneds (Barrett likes her best when she drinks—it emphasizes her aspect of extravagant and knowing defeat; the wry, amused carelessness she lacks when sober, when she’s forced by too much clarity to remember that a life of regal disappointment, while painful, is also Chekhovian; grave, and rather grand). Barrett is nine. His mother looks at him with drink-sparked eyes, smiles knowingly, as if she’s got a pet leopard lying at her feet, and says, “You’re going to have to watch out for your older brother, you know.”

  Barrett waits, mutely, sitting on the sofa’s edge, at the curve of his mother’s knees, for meaning to arrive. His mother takes a drag, a sip, a drag.

  “Because, sweetheart,” she says, “let’s face it. Let’s be candid, can we be candid?”

  Barrett acknowledges that they can. Wouldn’t anything other than total candor between a mother and her nine-year-old son be an aberration?

  She says, “Your brother is a lovely boy. A lovely, lovely boy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you” (drag, sip) “are something else.”

  Barrett blinks, damp-eyed with incipient dread. He is about to be told that he’s subservient to Tyler; that he’s the portly little quipster, the comic relief, while his older brother can slay a boar with a single arrow, split a tree with one caress of an axe.

  She says, “Some magic has been granted to you. I’m damned if I know where it came from. But I knew it. I knew it right away. When you were born.”

  Barrett keeps blinking back the tears he’s determined not to shed in front of her, though he wonders, with increasing urgency, what, exactly, she’s talking about.

  “Tyler is popular,” she says. “Tyler is good-looking. Tyler can throw a football … well, he can throw it pretty far, and in the direction footballs are supposed to go.”

  “I know,” Barrett says.

  What strange impatience rises now to his mother’s face? Why does she look at him as if he were sycophantically eager, desperate to please some doddering aunt by pretending surprise over every twist in a story he’s known by heart, for years?

  “Those whom the gods would destroy …” his mother says, blowing smoke up into the crystals of the modest dome-shaped chandelier that clings like an upside-down tiara to the living room ceiling. Barrett isn’t sure whether she can’t, or won’t, finish the line.

  “Tyler is a good guy,” Barrett says, for no reason he can name, beyond the fact that it seems he has to say something.

  His mother speaks upward, toward the chandelier. She says, “My point exactly.”

  This will all start making sense. It will, soon. The square crystals of the chandelier, worried by the electric fan, each crystal the size of a sugar cube, put out their modest, prismed spasms of light.

  His mother says, “You may need to help him out, a little. Later. Not now. He’s fine, now. He’s cock o’ the walk.”

  Cock o’ the walk. A virtue?

  She says, “I just want you to, well … remember this conversation we’re having. Years from now. Remember that your brother may need help from you. He may need a kind of help you can’t possibly imagine, at the age of ten.”

  “I’m nine,” Barrett reminds her.

  Almost thirty years later, having arrived at the future to which his mother was referring, Barrett pulls the plug on the bathtub. There’s the familiar sound of water being sucked away. It’s a morning like any other, except …

  The vision is the first event of any consequence, in how many years, about which Barrett hasn’t told Tyler; which he continues not mentioning to Tyler. Barrett has never, since he was a kid, been alone with a secret.

  He has, of course, never kept a secret quite like this.

  He’ll tell Tyler, he will, but not now, not yet. Barrett isn’t ready for Tyler’s skepticism, or his valiant efforts at belief. He’s really and truly not ready for Tyler to be worried about him. He can’t bring himself to be another cause for concern, not with Beth getting neither better nor worse.

  A terrible thing: Barrett finds sometimes that he wants Beth either to recover or die.

  The endless waiting, the uncertainty (higher white-cell count last week, that’s good, but the tumors on her liver are neither growing nor shrinking, that’s not so good), may be worse than grieving.

  A surprise: There’s no one driving the bus. There are five different doctors now, none of them actually in charge, and sometimes their stories don’t match up.
They make efforts, they’re not bad doctors (except for Scary Steve, the chemo guy), they’re not negligent, they try this and they try that, but Barrett (and Tyler, and probably Beth, though she’s never talked about it) had imagined a warrior, someone kind and august, someone who’d be sure. Barrett had not expected this disorganized squadron—all upsettingly young, except for Big Betty—who know the language of healing, who reel off seven-syllable terms (tending to forget, or to disregard, the fact that the words are incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a doctor), who can operate the machinery, but who, purely and simply, don’t know what’s going to work, or what’s going to happen.

  Barrett can keep this one about the celestial light private, for a while. It’s not an announcement Tyler needs to receive.

  Barrett has, naturally enough, Googled every possible malady (torn retina, brain tumor, epilepsy, psychotic break) that’s presaged by a vision of light. Nothing quite fits.

  Although he’s seen something extraordinary, and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a mortal ailment he failed to find on the Internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, he is exactly who he was last night.

  However. The question arises: Who was he last night? Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his own ongoing condition? It’s a hard one to answer.

  An answer might account for how and why Barrett and Tyler have lived so randomly (they, the National Merit boys—well, Barrett; Tyler was a runner-up—club presidents, Tyler crowned king of the fucking prom); why they happened to meet Liz when he and Tyler went, as each other’s date, to what has lived on as the Worst Party in History; why the three of them escaped the party and passed midnight together in some divey Irish pub; why Liz would eventually introduce Beth, newly arrived from Chicago; Beth who in no way resembles any of Tyler’s previous girlfriends, and with whom he’d fallen so immediately in love that he resembled some captive animal, fed for years on what its keepers believed to be its natural diet and then suddenly, one day, by accident, given what it actually ate, in the wild.

  None of it has ever felt predetermined. It’s sequential, but not exactly orderly. It’s all been going to this party instead of that one, happening to meet someone who knew someone who by the evening’s end had fucked you in a doorway on Tenth Avenue or given you K for the first time or said something shockingly kind, out of nowhere, and then gone away forever, promising to call; or, with an equally haphazard aspect, happening to meet someone who’ll change everything, forever.