The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Anna and Eleanor,

  who traveled great distances

  Prologue, you barrel-crouching rodeo clown, you sleight of hand, you basket viper, you abortion of a knock-knock joke. Foul whisperer, gossipmonger, ear poison enthusiast. Begone! Let me speak clearly in my own voice: something terrible is about to happen.

  —from the prologue to The Blizzard Party by E. Saltwater

  Blah, blah, blah.

  —H. Saltwater

  Part I

  1.

  I am Hazel Saltwater, daughter of Erwin and Sarah Saltwater, a citizen of the borough of Manhattan, proprietor, researcher, part-time recluse, widow, fury, known to the waiters at Wavy Grain Bistro (formerly the Cosmic Diner) as Ms. Patel, known to the co-op board at the Apelles as a compliant and reliable neighbor, among resident children of same known to be a Halloween enthusiast, known to my dry cleaner Tio as a generous December tipper, to my acquaintances a person of pleasant demeanor, to my lenders an exemplary credit risk, to my friends a mystic, a crazy woman, an apopheniac, a rationalist, an open wound.

  It is a gray morning. The men working on the building across the street have arrived with their coffee in paper cups and egg sandwiches wrapped in foil. They’ve staked out the stoop, draping themselves variously over the railing, across the steps, boots on balustrades, shooting the shit, their voices pinwheeling like kids in a schoolyard. The contractor’s big Ford pickup, outfitted with racks and rails, drooping lengths of PVC pipe, assorted proofs of masculinity and patriotism affixed to the window, idles at the curb. They’re in and out. The doors squeak open, slam shut. It is 31.7 degrees Fahrenheit according to the website upon which I rely for semi-accurate readings, a hub formerly owned and operated by the University of Michigan and in accordance with the rules of academio-subversive nomenclature dubbed the Weather Underground back in the dork days of Telnet. The site was later purchased by the Weather Channel, an acquisition that precipitated the degradation of the Underground’s predictive qualities. These days storms blow in without warning, prophesied rain never falls, it’s hot when it’s supposed to be cold, snowing when it’s supposed to be hailing, tsunamis never show, hurricanes lose focus and drift out to sea. My handheld device, which came preset to display the Edenic atmospheric conditions over the city-state of Cupertino, the Holy See of our sparkling new aluminum universe, is equally worthless at making predictions. However, though it’s as useless as a crystal ball, the Underground is invaluable for historical readings.

  I am alone, and the first to admit that I have not handled well the loss of my husband. I haunt the internet, as do we all, though perhaps I leave behind, pixelated, more of myself than most. Occasionally I chat with strangers on sites where I expose my body to the blue light of the screen, the empty cyclopean eye that so coolly observes whatever I can throw at it. The chats take a familiar, comforting route, along the lines of, Hey bb. Hey bb. Show tits? And I do. I am aware of government and extra-governmental surveillance, the great electronic blanket that shields and suffocates, and I do like to imagine an NSA agent on his or her break scrolling over to my feed and, while popping peanuts somewhere deep within the recesses of that shiny black rectangle in Maryland, possibly flipping through NBA trade rumors on a handheld, one eye on the monitor, one on Kevin Durant’s latest tweet, lingering just for a moment, just to see how far I’ll go. The thought strikes me like a depth charge. Here’s how far I’ll go. How about this? And this? Do you see this?

  In the years after my husband’s disappearance, I froze up a little. I wouldn’t say I’ve ossified. I don’t leave the building much, though I’m not, strictly speaking, afraid of anything outside, not the way my father was. This is the same apartment where I grew up, which might be a signal that even before Vikram disappeared I was a creature of habit. New York, so fanatically public, is the world’s best place to hide. If I so choose, I may live unseen. But that’s not what twists my lemon. I want to be seen, to be observed, but without the knowledge that I am being observed. Like the lady said, I want to be alone. By which I’m pretty sure she meant, Think of Me Always.

  Anonymous friend, please watch and see how far I’ll go.

  Vik’s specialty was the assessment of undervalued companies. They called him Old Mother Hubbard, the lax bros and big swinging dicks who staffed his firm. He was the worrier, the detail-sweater, a man of the people who could be trusted to come back from the factory break room with the real story. He traveled a lot. He traveled so that he could sit in a sawdust-floor bar with the drill press operator, or the warehouse associate, or the Logistics Tech II who, after a few drinks, after Vik had listened more patiently to their catalogue of complaints than anyone had listened in their life, might begin to feel that maybe Vik wasn’t just some asshole vampire from New York who’d come to suck the life out of the factory that put food on his family’s table, but that this guy might actually be sympathetic to the plight of the workingman. Maybe he’d flown all that way because he wanted to do right by them.

  They weren’t wrong for thinking such a thing. Vik had a soul. He was an avid conversationalist. And if he determined, after a period of information collection, that a distressed company might be made more profitable, his firm would purchase it and set to restructuring. Big deal, so management took a haircut. No one needed to worry about those guys. They parachuted into new Aeron chairs in new offices at new companies without putting so much as a single wrinkle in their khakis. My husband’s firm was not a buy-and-burn operation. And they did fine, just fine. They did fine, I should say, until the day they were obliterated, every last one of them.

  Thus, by the grace of my husband’s good worry, I was allowed to remain on the island of my birth, in the only home I’ve ever known. I was two months out of Amherst, living in my childhood bedroom, when Vikram hired me as an analyst. He was seven years older than I. We were connected by a long history, though we didn’t know each other very well. At first our ages served as a natural barrier. We were formal, respectfully awkward. I told myself he was no different than his colleagues. Nice suits, tall collars, Breitlings, wallets fat as hamburgers parked on their desks lest their spines go crooked from twelve-hour days on misaligned hips. Strange men. Men of practiced masculinity, no subtlety, all of them silently yearning for a lost boyhood. I told myself I had no interest in a man who’d chosen such a life for himself. I told myself I was disappointed in how he’d turned out. We were married three years later.

  Vik looked good in a convertible. He looked good in shorts and sunglasses, no shirt, hair blown back. He looked good at the console of Bo Vornado’s old Boston Whaler, which he’d scored at a sweet discount. Bo had tried to recruit him when he was twenty-five. The boat had been part of the mating dance. Bo had an eye for talent, but it never would have worked, which Vik recognized long before Bo did. Bo liked to hit the jugular with his fangs out. My husband was a gentleman. He met your eye and listened. He might touch your shoulder on parting. A spy, not a hairy forearm-to-the-face type. On a flight to Tulsa he could talk crop rotation with the Aggie on his right, then turn and talk shoelace production with the Sooner on his left. Mostly he listened, and for his patience he’d been rewarded with a mind that was a warehouse of the arcane. What good does a working knowledge of the lacing patterns attractive to the suburban Caucasian male Amer
ican 13–17 demo do you? None until you need to assess the financial viability of Oklahoma’s last shoelace factory. That kind face, which was absent the menace that men manufacture to scare away the other dogs—it put people at ease. He had brown eyes, elegant bovine eyelashes.

  When he traveled for work, I often wished his plane would go down. This was after we were married. I was still in my twenties and hadn’t yet developed the competencies that I assume would have allowed me to navigate a long marriage. I didn’t know why I wanted him to die. I only knew that I wanted a blank slate. I was getting a bead on it all when he disappeared. He could do a great French accent. He could roll bastard around in his mouth and I’d be in agony. I loved him and I wished he would vanish and he did.

  After he disappeared, I told the counselor that I’d often wished he would die in a plane crash. She said I’d felt abandoned. She said I was angry at him for traveling. I said that a plane crash was cheaper than a divorce. Ha. You’re essentially a solitary person, she said, and I said, Yes, that’s true. She said, Do you feel guilty now for wishing that he would die in that manner? No, I said. It was just a fantasy, I said, an escape fantasy, and I knew that much even then. Okay, the counselor said. That’s probably what I would have told you. It’s a normal fantasy. You know, parents sometimes wish their children would be abducted. Well-adjusted, normal, decent people. Fleeting thoughts, the counselor said, but worth examining. I can imagine, I said. Sometimes, she said, as a reaction to overwhelming life events—the unpredictable nature of love, for instance—our psyches create scenarios that allow us to relieve the pressure. Sometimes that’s all we need, a stress valve. If you sometimes feel relief that he’s gone, that’s normal. It’s fine to feel that way. As valid as any other emotion. Do you ever feel that way?

  Relieved? I said.

  Yes, relieved, she said.

  My counselor was named Lana and she was terrible.

  * * *

  Surely he’s easier to love retrospectively. Would we have stayed married if he hadn’t disappeared? Doesn’t matter. Do I still love him only because he’s gone? Doesn’t matter. Is his existence within me a form of love? Doesn’t matter. I’m well trained in the analysis of markets, art, literature, and I’m capable of accurately extracting motivations, intentions, and presuppositions from a wide range of people, and none of that matters, either. It’s all mechanics, gears and grease; the only thing that matters is the feeling itself. The how of feelings—even the why of them—is a distraction, a game for college kids reading Descartes, something for a neuroscientist to build a career on.

  The ability to experience an emotion without labeling it—that’s what I’m talking about. I know it’s not cool to say this, but Vik is a living, breathing thing within my every feeling and my every action, and while I recognize that (as I have been told by a number of counselors) I do not have to allow loss to define me, I believe the righteous path is one of memorialization. Of course, I have some experience serving as a vessel for memories of the dead, and perhaps that has influenced my feelings on the matter. Perhaps I’ve chosen the comfort of the familiar.

  How did it all start? Me, six years old, at a party, asleep on the Vornados’ guest bed, the coverlet imprinting my cheek and arm with arpeggios of pointillist nonsense, the TV accompanying my heavy, magnetic sleep, my brain dreamlessly emitting spindle waves, delta waves, my consciousness a receptive void. Vik deposited the old lawyer Albert Caldwell into that same room. After Vik left, Albert lay down next to me. He took my hand and he bestowed on me the archive of his life. I had within me a new landscape, both unusual and instantly familiar, as though I’d been on a dark trail all along, following his bootheels. I had become a file cabinet for Albert’s history.

  So it would seem that Albert carved himself a snug little slot in my head. I have his memories, but the fog blurring his final year obscures his intentions. I can only speculate. Maybe he meant only to hold my hand, to establish a human connection as his final act on earth. Albert was a difficult man, short-tempered, intolerant, made wicked by the erosion of his reason. Yet it’s possible he meant me no harm. Albert, being Albert, would point out that intentionality is the only means of judging his actions.

  For as long as I can remember, Albert has been with me. I know things about his family that even his children do not know. His life with Sydney. His life before Sydney. The smell of Langdell Hall, the sound of law students’ fingers on the pages of those old books. The terrible power his father held over him. The pervasive calm of standing among horses on the farm where he grew up. The infant faces of his children. I have questioned his surviving children, and I have known the answers before they’ve spoken.

  We absorb our parents’ grief whether that grief is spoken or not.

  The workmen across the street have finished their breakfasts and gone inside the building. They begin work at 8:00 a.m. Soon they will be on the roof, where they’ve been banging on the HVAC units all week. They will have the best view in the city, but there will be no gifs of the incident passed around social. No conspiracy theories will coalesce around mismatched metadata from one of their phones, somehow calibrated incorrectly, out of sync with central internet time, an outlier, a time traveler, a visitor from another dimension. They will deliver no eyewitness accounts to brisk reporters with sharply parted hair. No helicopters will arrive to provide the bird’s-eye view. No wailing fire engines at the curb. No one will claim to have seen black-suited men fleeing the building. But there will be reverberations. One of the workmen might inexplicably return to the religion of his childhood. One might begin a study of geology. Another might quit the trades and move to Jamaica. They will not know it, but they will bear witness to my act of genesis.

  2.

  Poor, sweet Vikram Patel. A boy of thirteen, all wrists and ears, a good son, studious, generous with friends, helpful around his father’s office, solicitous of strangers in need, respectful of his elders, just the wrong package entirely. A calamity, when you come right down to it. It was on Vik’s arm that Albert Caldwell entered the stately lobby of the Apelles, whereupon the two found themselves on the rump of a mob, a steaming mass of humanity, everyone dripping with melting snow, their cross-country skis, poles, snowshoes, toboggans, sleds clattering and barking against the marble floor with each forward surge.

  Everyone but Vik and Albert had assembled for a party. Everyone but Vik and Albert was wearing party-conducive vestment, genre choices informed by a murky matrix of personal politics, pharmaceutical proclivity, alma mater, what was on the closet floor from the not-so-distant New Year’s: gorilla suits, tuxedos, deerskins, accessories, and headgear straining the walls of plastic Fairway bags and waxed canvas backpacks—Viking horns, Coneheads, habits, the inevitable Afros, stovepipe hats, Iron Eyes Cody headdresses. Many had traversed great distances, their sufferings a sign of their devotion. Those from the east had braved the tundra of Central Park, those from the south, deep drifts, a persistent headwind. And those hearty souls who had descended from points north had embarked on a passage that would have ensured their murders on any other night of the year. They had come on foot across the frozen wastes of the city, and every last one of them was now jockeying for position at the elevator doors, each car of which could accommodate, in a configuration that would have pleased an orgy efficiency officer, twenty adults, give or take.

  Albert was shivering with such violence that he appeared to be vibrating. Vik had only just met the old man. Had the two been better acquainted, he would have been suspicious of Albert’s acquiescent behavior. Oh, waters, said Albert. Oh, stars! These were the last words he ever spoke aloud. He had gone down through a trapdoor, vacated the premises, mentally speaking, while Vik pogoed in hopes of putting eyeballs on a doorman or porter, someone who could help. No surprise to him, a watchful kid, that the inside of so grand an apartment building was a complete nuthouse, but didn’t he expect a zookeeper or two, a uniform who might acknowledge him, even if only to ask what the hell he thought he was doi
ng there? There had to be someone in charge.

  A howl of snow poured through the lobby door behind them, more bodies squeezing Vik and Albert against the wall of people in front of them, the sudden weather on the assembled mass inciting screams, hoots, cheers. And, Ding! the elevator thunk-rumbled open, inhaled a nostril full of partygoers. Whining expletives, more hoots, dramatic screams of Rape! and soprano trills as fingers goosed and rumble-thunk Get those fucking skis in! as the doors did their rattling chomping thing and heavenward groaned another muzzleful to the Vornados’ penthouse.

  Vik, who’d sacrificed his queen and along with everyone else was playing with nothing but pawns, stopped looking around and shoved his hands in his pockets to protect his cargo, his precious Tami microscope in one, and in the other the leather pouch containing checks and deposit slips from his father’s import concern, scientific inquiry and capital of equal value in his Stuyvesant-bound mind, while Albert, whose last bright bulb had sizzled, flickered, and died, slipped into a comatose state, quietly shuffled forward, his arm draped over Vik’s, as each new fraction of the crowd disappeared into the wall, speechless, his face a heavy, wet cloth that threatened to slip right off his skull and land with a slap on the slick floor. The firm surface of the present had finally split and he’d fallen into the dark ravine of the past, never to be heard from again.

  Their turn came. They were absorbed by the vacuum. Hustle, crush, the doors closed, a hush fell as everyone divided into tribes, those marble pillars who trained their eyes downward, those saintly souls who peered slightly upward at their ethereal destination, those dead-ahead bastions of cool whose refusal to acknowledge the alien nature of vertical transport signaled that they had achieved a divine state of pure, exquisite boredom. Everyone observed the protocol of silence. The wet chinchilla coat in front of Vik tickled his nose. Albert stood as if on review, eyes closed, swimming in his history, at least what he could recall of it, a fourth tribe unto himself. His teeth were chattering like a speed freak’s.