The Snow Queen
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.
Tyler 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.
Back 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.
A light appeared to him. And vanished again, like some unwelcome memory of his churchly childhood. Barrett has, since the age of fifteen, been adamantly secular, as only an ex-Catholic can be. He released himself, decades ago, from folly and prejudice, from the holy blood that arrived in cardboard cartons by way of UPS; from the stodgy, defeated cheerfulness of priests.
He saw a light, though. The light saw him.
What should he do about that?
For now, it’s time for his morning bath.
In the hall, on his way to the bathroom, Barrett passes Tyler and Beth’s door, which has yawned open during the night, as do all the doors and drawers and cabinets in this slanty apartment. Barrett pauses, doesn’t speak. Tyler is leaning out the window, naked, with his back to the open door, getting snowed upon.
Barrett has always been fascinated by his brother’s body. He and Tyler are not particularly similar, as brothers go. Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with avid yellow eyes, love’s first kiss. Tyler is lithe and stringy, tensely muscled. He can look, even in repose, like an aerialist about to jump from a platform. Tyler’s is, somehow, a lean but decorative body, a performer’s body; for some reason the word “jaunty” comes to mind. Tyler is irreverent in his body. He exudes the minor devilishness of a circus performer.
He and Barrett are rarely recognized as brothers. And yet, some inscrutable genetic intention is apparent in them. Barrett knows it with certainty, though he couldn’t explain. They are similar in ways known only to them. They possess a certain feral knowledge of each other, excrescence and scat. They are never mysterious, one to another, even when they’re mysterious to everybody else. It’s not that they don’t argue or challenge; it’s just that nothing one of them does or says ever seems to actually baffle the other. They seem to have agreed, long ago, without ever speaking about it, to keep their affinities secret when they’re in company; to bicker at dinner parties, to vie for attention, to carelessly insult and dismiss; to act, in public, like ordinary brothers, and keep their chaste, ardent romance to themselves, as if they were a two-member sect, passing as regular citizens, waiting for their moment to act.
Tyler turns from the window. He could swear he felt eyes on the back of his head, and although there’s no one there he feels an essence, a dissolved form that the air in the doorway has not yet entirely forgotten.
And then, the sound of water running in the bathtub. Barrett is back from his run.
How is it that Barrett’s presence, whenever he returns from anywhere, still feels like an event to Tyler? The prodigal returned, every single time. It is, after all, just Barrett, the little brother, fat kid clutching a Brady Bunch lunch box, weeping as the bus pulled away; adolescent clown who somehow escaped the fate that was all but automatically doled out to the freckled and rotund; Barrett who held court in the high school cafeteria, the bard of Harrisburg, PA; Barrett with whom Tyler has done uncountable childhood battles over turf and tattlings, has vied for their mother’s fickle and queenly attentions; Barrett whose sheer creatureliness is more familiar than anyone’s, even Beth’s; Barrett whose capacious and quirky mind sailed him into Yale, and who, since then, has patiently explained to Tyler, and Tyler alone, the irrefutable logic of his various plans: the post-graduation years of driving around the country (he crossed twenty-seven state lines), picking up jobs (fry cook, motel receptionist, apprentice construction worker) because his mind had grown too full as his hands remained unskilled; then the hustling (because he was too much caught up in romance, too determined to be a latter-day Bryon, it was time for a crash course in the baseness and beastliness of love); the entering of the Ph.D. program (It’s been good for me, it has been, to know for myself that going out into the Mad American Night tends to involve sitting in a Burger King in Seattle because it’s the only place open after midnight) and the leaving of same (Just because I was wrong about life on the road doesn’t mean I wasn’t right about not wanting to spend my life arguing about the use of the parenthetical in late James); the failed Internet venture with his computer-geek boyfriend; the still-thriving café in Fort Green that Barrett abandoned along with his subsequent boyfriend, after the guy came at him with a boning knife; et cetera …
All of them seemed, at their times, either like good ideas or (Tyler’s preference) fabulously strange ideas, the sort of off-kilter illogic that a smattering of inspired citizens follow to greatness.
None of them, however, seems to have led anywhere in particular.
And now Barrett, the family’s tortured Candide, Barrett who seemed so clearly destined for vertiginous heights or true disaster, has committed the most prosaic of human acts—he’s lost his apartment and, having nothing like the money required to rent a new one, moved in with his older brother. Barrett has done what was least expected of him—he’s become another of New York’s just-barelies, a guy whose modest Hobbitty setup on Horatio Street worked fine as long as the building didn’t go co-op.
Still. It’s Barrett, and Tyler has not ceased marveling at him in some low-grade but ongoing way.
The current Barrett, the one running bathwater down the hall, is the same Barrett who’d seemed for so long to be the magical child, until it began to look as if that boy would have been the third, unborn son. The Meeks of Harrisburg appear to have stopped one son too soon. They produced Tyler, with his fierce concentration and his athletic ease and his singular gift for music (who knew, at the beginning, just how gifted you’ve got to be?), and then Barrett, who arrived with his array of languid capabilities (he can recite more than a hundred poems; he knows enough about Western philosophy to do a lecture series, should anyone ask him to; he picked up nearly fluent French after two months in Paris), but without the ability to choose, and persist.
Barrett, now, is about to take a bath.
Tyler will wait until he hears the water stop running. Even with Barrett, there are formalities. Tyler can hang around with his brother once he’s in the tub, but can’t, for some real but inexplicable reason, watch him enter the water.
Tyler pulls the vial back out of the nightstand drawer, draws himself two lines, perches on the edge of the mattress to Hoover them up. There’s nothing, really nothing, like the morning ones (though this morning is the last, it’s his farewell morning); the ones that slap you into beauty, that scour sloth away, that vaporize the vagaries, the residue of dreams; that blast you out of slumberland, the shadow realm in which you wonder, and ask yourself why, and think about going back to sleep, about how lovely and sweet it would be to just go on sleeping.
The water stops. Barrett must be immersed.
Tyler puts yesterday’s boxer shorts back on (black, emblazoned with tiny white skulls), treads down the hall, opens the bathroom door. The bathroom is in its way the least upsetting room in the apartment, being the only room that has not been changed and changed and changed over the last century-plus. The other rooms are haunted by innumerable attempts to erase some past or other with paint or fake wood paneling, with an acoustic ceiling (the apartment’s most horrific aspect: pockmarked, dingily white squares made of god-knows-what, Tyler thinks of them as blocks of freeze-dried sorrow), with carpet that covers linoleum that covers splintery pine-plank floors. Only the bathroom is essentially as it was, dingy white hexagonal tiles and a pedestal sink and a toilet that actually still dangles a pull-chain flush from its tank. The bathroom is a chamber of unmolested oldness, the only place in which to escape the on-the-cheap improvements wrought by renters who’d hoped to brighten things up a bit, who’d imagined that the hibiscus-patterned contact paper affixed to the kitchen counters, or the word “Suerte” inexpertly carved into the lintel, would help make them feel more at home, in this apartment and in the larger world; and who, all of them, have either moved on by now, or died.
Barrett is in the tub. There’s no denying his capacity for a certain comic grandeur; a pride of being he carries with him everywhere; something royal, something that can in all likelihood only be inherited, never constructed or feigned. Barrett doesn’t lie in the tub. He sits straight-backed, blank-faced, like a commuter going home on a train.
He asks Tyler, “What are you doing up?”
Tyler takes a cigarette from the pack he keeps in the medicine cabinet. He doesn’t smoke anywhere but in the bathroom, for Beth’s sake.
“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.