The Snow Queen

  On the ceiling directly over Barrett’s head, a Y-shaped crack has begun, every now and then, to shed a pinch of plaster dust, a sporadic drift of artificial snow, which means of course an argument with the landlord, but means as well that the building is dissolving (there are other signs—beams going powdery, an increasing aspect of ineradicable dankness), a view held only by Barrett, who’s convinced that the building is losing faith in itself; that it can just barely manage the effort required of load-bearing walls and uncompromised ceilings; that one day it will simply emit a low creak of a sigh, and collapse entirely.

  Beth, however, has been healed, her own crumbling reversed, and Barrett has yet to permit himself to imagine that the celestial manifestation, which occurred a full year and a half ago, could possibly be connected.

  He can’t bear the oddness of it. He can’t bear the grandiosity. It’s good to lie alone on his bed in his quiet room, with the party sounds and the street sounds drifting in, all those worlds going on without him. He floats on his bed like Ophelia, blissfully drowned (or so he likes to picture her): lost to life, yes, but lost as well to accusation and betrayal, more beautiful in death, afloat with her calm pale face and her white, empty hands turned to the sky, surrounded by the current-borne flowers she’d bent too far to pick; a once-troubled woman gone tranquilly to the natural world, given over to the bright movement of water, at one with the earth, as only the dead can be.

  “Hey.”

  Barrett lifts his head, turns to face his open doorway.

  It’s Andrew. It can’t be Andrew. Why would Andrew come and stand in Barrett’s doorway?

  But here he is. Here’s his shape, the vee of his torso, the compact, shaven helmet of his head, the casual grace with which he stands, as if standing were part of a dance for which most of the population has somehow failed to learn the steps.

  “Hey, there,” Barrett replies.

  “Are you holding?” Andrew asks.

  Holding what? Oh, of course.

  “No. Sorry.”

  Andrew shifts his weight against the doorframe, agile and authoritative as Gene Kelly. Of whom, of course, Andrew has surely never heard.

  Part of it: the piratical uncaringness, that marvelous youthful conviction that if it were important, Andrew would know about it.

  “Oh,” Andrew says. “I thought you were sneaking off to get high.”

  Barrett forces himself through a dazzled moment—Andrew registered his leave-taking. But no. Don’t linger there. Keep talking.

  Barrett says, “You know, there’s a remote possibility. Come with me.”

  He rises off his bed, takes the steps toward Andrew. Barrett has no dancer’s walk to command. He puts one foot in front of the other. He hopes the word “hulking” does not apply.

  Barrett enters Andrew’s penumbra of scent—bottled, it could only be called Boy. There’s the strangely unsour emanation of sweat (Andrew exudes nothing fetid, his sweat has no correlate or comparison, it is simply clean, and carnal, with perhaps the faintest hint of oceanic salt). No cologne of course, no deodorant, but a citrus something, a hint of juice and tartness; soap or lotion, maybe just lip balm, a lurking fragrance that’s been purchased and applied.

  Barrett exhorts himself, silently, to calm down, and experiences a brief, irrational fear that he has somehow said it out loud—that he has walked up to Andrew and said, out of nowhere, Calm down.

  Is it a general quality of the besotted to believe that their thoughts can be read? Probably. How, after all, can such a turmoil of hope and fear and lust be inaudible? How do our skulls hold it in?

  Andrew says, “I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “No,” Barrett answers. “I was just … I was taking a little break. Before midnight.”

  Andrew nods. He doesn’t understand the need to take a break before midnight, but he acknowledges, he honors, the minor peculiarities of others. This, too, is part of his allure—his butch version of Alice’s schoolgirl calm as she moved through a Wonderland in which nothing at all was familiar and everything was curious but only curious, never frightening or appalling.

  “Come with me,” Barrett says.

  He leads Andrew down the hall, to Tyler and Beth’s room.

  The room is dark and empty. Without Beth lying in state, the room has transformed itself from treasure trove—filled with offerings to the sleeping princess—to junk haven. The objects have increased, but not substantially changed. There are more books, precariously stacked. The hula-girl lamp, still awaiting its rewiring, has acquired a sister, with a base shaped like a lighthouse and a shade emblazoned with sailboats. The skeletal duchesses of the twin chairs have been joined by a modest bamboo end table—a small, abashed-looking object, cheaply made, servant to the chairs.

  When Beth recovered, when she left her life in the bedroom and rejoined the larger world, she took with her the room’s languid, Edwardian enchantment. It is now just a bedroom, cluttered with books and castoffs, the den of hoarders, charming in its way but a little nutty, too. Beth’s dying, the idea that she might do so in this room, cast a spell, and now the room’s silent denizens, its chairs and lamps and scaling leather suitcases, are objects, only that, finished with their brief period of transfiguration, returned to the realm of the extraneous, waiting patiently for the world to end.

  The bed, however, behind its barricade of bric-a-brac, is blank and white, almost luminous. The bed is Sleeping Beauty, the junk a thicket of brambles and thorns grown up to protect her.

  Barrett wends his way among the accumulations. The room may be an object-purgatory, but it is not subject to the junk-store odors of dust and old varnish mixed with that mournful not-quite-clean essence that seems to attach itself to anything that has gone too long unwanted. Beth burns lavender-scented candles now, in every room, the way an aging woman uses perfume, to banish any detectable essence of degeneration.

  Barrett opens the drawer of the nightstand on Tyler’s side of the bed. The drawer is full of Tylerish stuff: condoms and lube of course (Magnums, really?); a tube of some Japanese ointment; a small pad of Rhodia paper and a Sharpie; an old photograph of their mother (Barrett is still surprised, sometimes, by the reminder that she was buxom and heavy-browed, with the skeptical, close-set eyes of a woman who’s never been overcharged by the village butcher; a handsome woman, as they say, formidable, but not a great beauty, as Barrett insists on remembering her); a few loose Contac capsules; a scattering of guitar picks; and …

  The vial, protruding halfway from under one of the guitar picks. It occupies no position of honor. It is simply one more object in Tyler’s drawer.

  Barrett had hoped to find Tyler’s cocaine stash. And hoped not to.

  Of course Tyler hasn’t quit. Barrett must have known. Right? Or not. He’s been so long wedded to the habit of believing Tyler.

  A strange phenomenon: there seems (though it’s not possible—is it?) to be a confluence of secrets, suddenly revealed: a twinning. If Barrett is keeping the story of the light from Tyler, Tyler would naturally be keeping something from Barrett, as well. Balance must be maintained.

  Which is insane. And which strikes Barrett as possible.

  Another strange phenomenon: Barrett is pinned between his sense of betrayal (he performs a quick memory scan—how many times did Tyler actually say he’d stopped using drugs?—which matters because there is, it seems, a difference, for Barrett, between actual lies and acts that merely go unmentioned); his worry (coke isn’t good for Tyler, it is not of course good for anyone, but Tyler, in particular, goes too edgily ecstatic on it, believes too utterly in his own hallucinated version of himself); and Barrett’s own relief (of which he’s suitably ashamed) at finding something that will delight Andrew—the pleasure Barrett derives from this minor criminal ability to provide; to be, for Andrew, someone other than a man without resources who’s merely been lying alone on his bed.

  Barrett takes out the vial. It’s a small clear plastic jar with a black plastic lid. He raises it fo
r Andrew to see. Andrew nods sagely, as if agreeing with a widely accepted wisdom that’s been repeated, with no diminishment of its fundamental truth, for centuries. Barrett gives him the vial.

  Barrett has done coke twice, at parties, years ago, and harbors no affection for it. It struck him, on both occasions, as little more than a self-imposed headache, accompanied by a greater-than-usual sense of anxiety and unease, both of which he possesses already, in abundance.

  Andrew unscrews the top of the vial. He takes a ring of keys from his pocket (why would he have so many keys, there are at least a dozen of them), dips one into the vial, and extends the key to Barrett. On the key’s tip, a neat little white mound.

  Oh. Barrett had meant it as a New Year’s Eve gift for Andrew. He hadn’t imagined doing any himself.

  What, though, was he thinking? From what train did he recently emerge, all gawk and polyester, into the glare of the city? Of course, Andrew assumed they’d do bumps together. That’s what people do.

  Barrett hesitates. No thanks is the simple and obvious response. And yet—eager little lapdog—he can’t bring himself to refuse. He can’t permit himself to be so … not-Andrew.

  Barrett leans over, allows Andrew to push the key partway into his right nostril. He inhales.

  “Harder,” Andrew says. Barrett inhales harder. The coke is harsh and slightly numbing; medical.

  “Now the other,” Andrew says. He dips the key back into the vial, inserts it gently into Barrett’s left nostril. Barrett inhales, harder.

  Andrew scoops out two little mounds of coke for himself, one and then the other. He breathes deeply. “Nice,” he says.

  He sits down on the edge of Tyler and Beth’s bed, like a swimmer who’s made his way to a raft. Barrett sits beside him, careful not to brush Andrew’s knee with his own.

  Andrew says, “I needed that.”

  “Me, too,” Barrett answers. Will he tell any lie, impersonate anyone, for the sake of mindless desire?

  “Look out, it’s gonna be 2006,” Andrew says.

  “Look out.”

  It takes Barrett a moment to understand that he’s feeling the coke. There’s a buzz in his head, a convocation of … not bees, exactly, nothing so alive; it’s as if the buzz emanates from a flotilla of microscopic steel balls covered with bristles, whirling around in his brain, scouring away his thoughts and leaving only a stark, throbbing cleanliness behind. It is distinctly medical. This won’t be pleasant, but it’s going to make you feel better.

  Maybe, this time, it will make Barrett feel better.

  Andrew says, “Let’s do one more. I mean, hey, it’s New Year’s.”

  He scoops out another small mound. Barrett lifts his head to receive it. He’s worried that he’ll miss, scatter it down his chin, but Andrew is as precise as a surgeon, he guides the end of the key directly into Barrett’s right nostril, and then his left. Andrew does the same for himself.

  “Nice,” Andrew says.

  “Very nice,” Barrett answers, though it begins to be apparent that it is not nice at all. The steel bristles scour away. He can feel, he believes he can feel, the inner surface of his skull, ravaged, a white emptiness where his brain had been.

  Barrett hears himself say, “Two-thousand six is off to a pretty amazing start, isn’t it?”

  It’s only his voice speaking. He himself resides in a skull sepulcher, an ancient emptiness where some strange machinery emits its burr, metal teeth on metal teeth.

  “Beth,” Andrew says. “You mean Beth.”

  “No. I mean Michael Jackson getting off on those trumped-up child molestation charges.”

  Andrew turns his head, looks uncomprehendingly at Barrett. As, of course, he would. Andrew doesn’t get it. Andrew doesn’t speak sarcasm. To Barrett’s astonishment, though, he doesn’t seem to mind. He feels too twitchy, too nervously discouraged, to mind. Andrew, this is who I am. I’m prone to irony and wit. I’m not a great, accidental beauty like you are but I, too, cut a shape in the world.

  The steel bristles have, it seems, abraded away his self-concern, his desire to be desired; he has only this voice, which speaks like some cranky oracle from the vault that was his mind.

  “Joke,” Barrett says. “I mean, yes, of course, Beth.”

  “I know, man. The body can pull off some crazy shit.”

  “It can.”

  “And, you know, doctors have no idea.”

  “Doctors have some idea. But they’re not always right. No one is.”

  Barrett hears himself, wonders at his ability to speak in sentences. The mechanism is doing it, the small forgotten cleaning-machine that resides in his skull, doing the work its progenitors programmed it to do.

  “If I got sick,” Andrew says, “I’d go to a shaman.”

  A change occurs.

  Barrett is surprised, but helpless. Some physical process, some assertion of the blood, seems to be announcing itself. Barrett’s attraction to Andrew is beginning to fade.

  The change has to do, it seems, with the word “shaman.” It has to do with Andrew’s insistence on it, despite the fact that Beth has recovered without having remotely considered seeing a shaman or a psychic or a layer-on of hands; it has to do with Barrett’s own singular, visionary experience, which occurred in spite of his skepticism; and with hearing that particular word, “shaman,” delivered in Andrew’s New Jersey accent; it has to do with the very real possibility that Andrew isn’t entirely sure what a shaman actually is.

  Barrett has never spent much time imagining a future for Andrew. There was no possible future that might include Barrett, and so it was better, it was sexier, to dream only of Andrew in the present.

  Abruptly, though, change is occurring. Barrett can for the moment see nothing but Andrew’s future: Andrew an aging devotee of the improbable, living cheaply, doing some doltish job, turning by slow degrees from a perpetually attentive wizard’s assistant into one of those men who consider themselves wizards in their own right; who get their “facts” from who knows where; who are well informed about the ongoing government cover-up of the alien landings at Roswell but can’t name their state senators …

  Andrew is an illusion.

  Barrett has known that all along, known it since Liz first turned up with Andrew (she’d brought him along to a movie, was it Star Wars III?) and Barrett had gone hollow-bellied at the first sight of Andrew’s frank and uncaring beauty, the nonchalance with which he wore it, as if he were the embodiment of some lost American ideal—built for labor, newly minted, his face pure and clear; Andrew the descendant of generations of men who rode bold-hearted off into unknown territory, into the mountains and forests, while the others—the cautious, the unsure, those who were grateful for what little they had already—conducted their various businesses on the sooty cobblestones of the East, careful about puddles and piles of manure.

  Andrew is an ideal, an invention, a golden cup. Billions of dollars are expended annually, by countless members of the population, on the basis of how much or how little they resemble Andrew, the son of a New Jersey shoe repairman; Andrew who got it all free of charge.

  Barrett can feel his interest waning. A balance has shifted. At one moment, Andrew’s naïveté was the perfect, satyrly complement to his heedlessly perfect body. At the next, he’s a foolish boy who will remain foolish long after time has done its work on the other parts.

  Barrett says, “If you had stage four liver and colon cancer, a shaman could do exactly shit for you.”

  Andrew leans forward, looks avidly at Barrett.

  “You don’t believe in shamans,” he says, in a tone of eager (flirtatious?) argumentativeness.

  Is it true, is it possible, that Andrew has suddenly taken an interest in this new Barrett, the one who’s losing interest in him?

  It is. Any other response would be the surprise.

  “No, I believe in, I don’t know, almost everything. In the right place at the right time. Magic is great, magic is underestimated. But magic is not going to
suck the cancer out of your body.”

  “Don’t you think that’s what happened to Beth?”

  How exactly should Barrett answer that?

  Barrett closes his eyes for a moment, letting his brain go electric, letting it continue cleaning itself out.

  Then he says, “I saw a light in the sky once.”

  He’s never told anyone. How could he possibly be telling Andrew?

  Who else would he tell, though? Who else wouldn’t question it, or joke about it?

  And this new, dishonored Andrew, this Andrew who sits here, foolish and mortal as countless beautiful young men, over countless centuries …

  “I see lights in the sky all the time,” Andrew answers. “Meteors, planets, shooting stars. Probably a flying saucer or two.”

  Barrett says, “It was a big greenish light. Kind of like a spiral. I saw it over Central Park more than a year ago.”

  “Cool.”

  “Well, yeah, it was cool, but it was very strange, too.”

  “There’s all kinds of strange shit up there. You think we know everything that’s up there? You think we got it mapped?”

  “It felt … alive. In some way.”

  “Stars are alive.”

  “It wasn’t a star.”

  “Was it beautiful?”

  “Yes. It was beautiful. And kind of terrible.”

  “Huh?”

  “Powerful. Enormous. And then it went out again.”

  “That sounds very cool.”

  Barrett should stop talking now. He should stop talking.

  He says, “I’ve been going to church.”

  “Really.” By the tone of his voice, Andrew apparently finds this neither strange nor ordinary. In Wonderland, the customs are unfamiliar, but not repellent. Alice simply wanders through it, polite and well behaved.

  Barrett says, “I don’t pray. I don’t stand up or kneel. I don’t sing. I just sit there, a few times a week, in a back pew.”

  “Churches are beautiful. I mean, organized religion is bullshit, but churches have holiness in them.”