by Jack Livings
Out in the blowing snow, Albert looked for a cab, but the arcing drive down to the street was empty. Albert thought: Satan’s fiery red hell. And with that, his memory recovered enough ground for him to orient himself. Southward, south to the water.
The coat was heavy but the wind cut right into it, and he huddled behind a concrete pillar. What was he supposed to do, walk from here? If so, which direction? All he saw were dim outlines and snow.
Remarkably, his grandson, the impetus for this entire escapade, had been absent from his thoughts since he’d placed the phone call that set in motion his creaky machine, as if a final settlement had been agreed upon and his accounts, so long out of balance, had been paid in full. As he cowered from the wind, a strange thought bloomed, perhaps unfolding to fill the space vacated by the boy. Strange, because it was the first time he’d considered the question of who would maintain the memory of the boy’s death once he was gone. He’d written down none of his thoughts on the matter. He couldn’t remember having told anyone about what had happened. Shouldn’t he have? Shouldn’t he have ensured that his own memorial would be one of unabashed hatred, that someone would daily think of him with scorn? He was, after all, responsible for the boy’s death. Architect and contractor for the gallows, knotter of the noose.
Did he think these things or did I? Perhaps none of these thoughts crossed the transom of Albert’s conscious mind—they existed, I promise, within him, I’m sure of it, but as to the question of when I became aware of them, that’s a little like attempting to mark the moment one’s eyes become adjusted to darkness. Outlines, gradations. How long have the objects slowly coming into focus been there? A second? A minute? Decades?
So I’ve poured some of my own ink into the waters of his mind. But I only want to be fair. It’s true that I long for an impartial ear, and can only ask as much of you as Albert did of me.
He was about to start walking when a Checker cab crept around the curve. Albert waited motionless in the lee of the pillar while the driver got out, shoulders up around his ears, and danced over the icy concrete to the back door, where he helped out an old woman in slippers. Her terry-cloth housecoat hung below the hem of her black overcoat, whipping around her shins as she shuffled into the hospital on the driver’s arm.
Albert’s first step sent him slipping and pinwheeling across an icy patch but he caught his balance on the other side and shuffled around the front end toward the driver’s door. The wind pushed at him as he made his way around the big chrome bumper, the coat filling like a spinnaker, and he held on as well as he could to the car’s cold wet hood, working his way back until his fingers found the seam of the door. He pulled it open, got in, struggled it closed. A cigarette was smoking in the ashtray, and Albert opened a crease in the window and pushed it out, where it stuck against the wet glass.
Albert had not driven a car in a decade. Like all New Yorkers, he prided himself on his poor driving skills and the rarity with which he needed to employ them. Even when he’d driven the Coupe de Ville every weekend on Long Island, he’d never felt at one with the machine, not in the way of a man who’d come of age with his elbow out the window, wrist on the wheel, who’d learned to smoke sitting on the hood, had his first misaligned sexual experiences in a backseat. He’d come along too early and too poor. As if bringing himself physically closer to the machine might correct for his lack of experience, he’d always driven with the seat dumped forward, body hugging the wheel. He accelerated in pulses, the car surging forward like a rowboat, the children in the back lurching in time, while in the passenger seat Sydney perpetually kept her hand on his knee in an attempt to smooth their progress. He yelled when he drove. From the moment he slid the key into the ignition, he was locked in battle with the goddamn idiots populating the roadways, the unpredictable decelerators, the nervous Nellies, those with liberal signaling habits. Old men in hats were dependable targets. It’s not a wagon train! he’d growl if anyone rode his bumper. As soon as he parked and got out, he settled. The farther he was from the detestable Cadillac, the better. When he kicked the tires, and he often did, he did so with the intention of inflicting pain. Nothing in the world quite so brazenly represented his inability to master the subtleties of mechanical control. His partners zapped around the island in Alfa Romeos and MGs, in the manner of exiled Russian counts, behavior he found wholly inappropriate for men of their fiduciary responsibilities. The legal profession was a service industry, not a beauty pageant. He hated those cars.
He was especially unqualified, then, to handle two tons of Checker Marathon in a snowstorm. Not all that quick off the line in normal conditions, on the snowpack the cab’s handling was decidedly slicker and it sluiced around the curving hospital driveway like a pinball out of the shooter lane, crashed into the street, the front bumper gouging into the snow, tagging the pavement with a shriek. To avoid plowing into the cars on the opposite curb Albert cranked the wheel like a helmsman in a gale, narrowly avoided that disaster, and bounded off pulsingly up powdery Columbus.
The cabbie came out of the hospital’s revolving door just in time to see his car disappearing up the avenue, rooster tails spraying from the back tires. Typical. You try to do a nice thing. You take somebody’s grammy to the hospital in the middle of the storm of the decade, and some punk boosts your ride. Thanks a fucking lot, New York.
16.
By then the snow had erased the city. On West End, just outside the Apelles, the wind was whipping a NO PARKING sign like it was a fighter getting worked in the corner of the ring. Snow covered the streets, and the streets covered the pipes, the tunnels, the conduits, the corridors, the ancient veins of the city ferrying transmissions telephonic and electric, the steam, the words and water and waste, ever excavated and re-entombed by Con Ed hardhats. Traffic lights jounced around on their guy wires. Streetlights burned like quasars, tinting the white surface of the roadway tangerine, painting the flakes as they shot by. This snow did not twinkle or float. It crashed down. This storm meant to do harm to the earth, to obscure the land and all who walked upon it. It had silenced the mechanical thrum of the city, the grating metal and the horns and the incessant wail of sirens that proscribed its functional limits more than any boundary on a map. No cars out except for the ones crash-landed and abandoned at drunken angles to the glacial curbs. Even that ambient hum, the background noise audible on the quietest corners of residential streets in the dead of a summer night, beneath the air conditioners, beneath the distant hum of traffic on the FDR, the machinery inside the island that kept it inflated and breathing, a sound like air rushing through a canyon, even that noise was gone. People? Only a few. The city had been swept clean.
One of those people was my father. At shortly after midnight (twenty-one degrees, sustained winds from the northwest at around twenty-eight knots, gusting to fifty) he emerged from the Apelles. He had picked up a leather jacket from the apartment to wear over his enormous wool sweater, gray, with red and blue snowflakes encircling the midsection. The sweater was itself as thick as a coat, a Scottish invention capable of warding off anything gale force on up, and was such a tight fit inside the leather jacket that the two created a sort of vacuum seal against the elements. The furry edge hung below the bottom of the jacket, and the rolled neck extended so high that it made a scarf superfluous. He was also wearing wool pants, his writing pants, the seat nearly obliterated, and he was holding in his right hand the plastic bag containing the stinking, charred remains of the bluefish fillets.
The bag was snapping around like a ferocious little dog straining at its leash. The round yellow face on one side was a familiar hieroglyph commanding the user to Have a Nice Day!, hardly despotic but offering little choice in the matter, and fell into a common category of menacing American commands, along with Enjoy! and Smile! and Have Fun!, all of which rankled my father acutely with their insistence that he attain a lighter state of being, pronto. Having performed upon the bag the same inquiry he would have leveled at any other communication (being t
he sort of person whose mental filter trapped everything, everything, from legal disclaimers to the hierarchy of movie credits to the endless stream of advertising tag lines pounding on him every time he left the apartment, which he subjected to analysis normally reserved for exegeses of poems), he’d determined that in this case he was being commanded (by whom? God? Mother? McCann Erickson?) to experience a sublime joy, something like a hundred simultaneous orgasms—no, even more, the endorphin flood that soaks the brainpan at the moment of death. This required him to feel not just orgasmic joy but Death Joy. The happiness that surpasses all happiness. Not bad for a slogan bashed out by a speedballed copywriter at a Madison Avenue shop, picking through embers of his own dying life force for some flickering memory of joy, riffling through images from those months camping in Big Sur after graduation, where he’d dropped acid with his friends and achieved a state of ecstasy that manifested, like really manifested, projecting him upward on a beam of light, up above the trees, above the clouds, into space so that he could observe the complete blue marble herself, whence he inhaled all of America, the clouds and sun, viewed the top of every citizen’s beautiful unique head, from sea to shining sea, each one as perfect as a pin, before coming down, experiencing a hunger as wide as the plains, hopping in the VW, driving out of the forest to buy supplies and experiencing the aura of that girl behind the counter, the one whose eyes blew right through him, and who ten years later still haunted his memory, who had said to him when he pushed open the screen door to leave, Have a nice day, baby.
Normally my father wouldn’t have been caught dead carrying such a bag. He usually tried to sidestep the transubstantiation that rendered human beings billboards for all manner of capitalist sub-philosophies, philosophies of consumption he couldn’t even understand, ideas that made people meaningless except as ambulant advertising, but he’d been distracted by the smoke and the fire and the fish, and the distraction had almost turned him into a normal person who could simply grope around under the sink, grab a bag, and go.
So, while he hadn’t quite been able to ignore the yellow face, he hadn’t balled it up and whipped it into the trash in favor of a plain brown paper bag, which was, he’d always thought, his personal analogue in the world of bags: plain, square, liable to fall apart in the rain. He’d dropped the fish into the plastic bag as though he were not a man who could be thrown into a spiral of rage by an insipid piece of graphic art commanding him to alter his behavior.
Waist-deep drifts had blown in against the foundations of buildings on the east side of the street, the snow packing in alleys, on the cross streets turning brownstone stoops into ramps, but where my father was standing, just outside the arched west entrance to the Apelles, maintenance—on this lonesome night a crew of one, long-suffering Sandor—had been working his way nonstop around the building, the footprint of which filled an entire city block, salting and shoveling, resalting, reshoveling, a task my father quickly classified as the philosophical equal of suspension bridge painting, those crews who spent their entire working lives yo-yoing back and forth across the same ironwork span. He supposed that for any given worker, which side was considered the starting point was a personal matter, one that depended entirely on which direction the crew was moving on that particular guy’s first day on the job, so that painting crews all over the world must be divided into two factions, those who considered this side the start and that side the finish and those who considered that side the start and this side the finish, and surely they spent their professional lives in joking competition with the opposing faction while feeling just a touch more fraternal toward those in their own faction, heightened no doubt by the natural ease with which weekend bowling or pétanque or calcio squads were divided up according to faction, and perhaps it even came to influence which side of the bridge a worker chose to live on (a preference for this side because, between you and me, who wants to live on that side? I mean, sure, they’re regular slobs like the rest of us, but come on), which undoubtedly could lead to dissimilar political views, conscription into opposing militia factions when civil skirmishes broke out, and so on. And he wondered, of course, with all those internal pressures how the crews could be trusted to do even a halfway decent job of scraping the bird guano and applying the anti-corrosive paint to the exposed structure of the bridge. The answer, of course, was that they couldn’t, and there you had it.
Sandor, normally a retiring, thoughtful fellow himself, might have been driven to violence had he known that while he was aggravating his angina and adding to his collection of slipped disks, my father was watching him as if he were a zoo animal. Already he was going to rain hellfire down on the rest of the night crew for this. They all lived in the Bronx and had fled for home when the mayor’s office announced that nonessential government services were closing down. All except Sandor. Double overtime wasn’t going to buy him a new spine.
Sandor turned the corner onto 78th, and though my father had intended to pitch the bag of burned fish onto the four-foot wedge of ice and snow at the curb and hightail it back inside, it was hard not to notice that the street had become an alien thing, and he wondered at the silence, as out of place as a panther in this Upper West Side neighborhood. Before him the air was a curtain of undulating white and within the folds he saw a dark movement—another person. The figure was about three blocks away, advancing slowly, steadily forging north.
The figure passed into an orange cone of light, out of it, into another one, as if fixed on a strip of celluloid advancing a single frame at a time.
Heavy wet flakes clung to my father’s face and eyelashes, and he pawed at them with his free hand, but there was no way to see clearly. The wind had parted his hair in a neat line down the back of his head, snow packing into the seam like caulk. He squinted. He curled the fingers of his hand into a tube and brought it to his eye. He still couldn’t see.
No music, no delivery truck loading decks slamming against the concrete. No buses heaving into gear. Wind. Rattling street signs. Somewhere to the east, a snowplow clattering over the pavement. God, was it quiet. When was it, my father wondered, that we became frightened of silence? When he was a boy, his father had come home after work and had sat in a rocking chair by the window, pondering, sometimes smoking, the chair creaking back and forth while his children fanned out across the room to read. No one spoke. No one turned on the radio. It was quiet enough to hear the contraction of the timbers releasing the day’s heat into the cool dusk. Quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackle in his father’s pipe. When he was a child, the ability to hold his tongue, not to blurt out the answer, to keep thoughts to himself—these were pact and signal of adulthood, of a thoughtful nature, ideals to which he aspired and from which he sometimes wondered if he’d ever escaped.
There was the stillness that would fall across the crowd at a Yankees game, a fog, a lull born not from anticipation for the next pitch, but of shared contentment, it seemed, a silence that had once been as natural as a cloud drifting in front of the sun but that was now obviously a source of anxiety for management, who viewed the absence of overt displays of happiness a sign that at any moment the crowd might descend into a state of mass reflection from which they would never recover. Steinbrenner had marshaled his troops to attack silence with the dipsy plonking of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the electric organ, or canned chants over the PA, as though quiet were a pernicious creature who’d wandered onto the field and had to be exterminated with great prejudice.
Oh hell. What bullshit. Baseball, last stop on the double-decker tour of great American propagandas, right after Life magazine and gap-toothed soda jerks and Bobby Kennedy’s jaw. He wasn’t in that line of work anymore. Great American somethings were behind him. Of course, there was no greater American something than always-charming, ruby-lipped, plump-assed mass appeal, whose wretched acquaintance he’d made all too well with Slingshot. Nope, nope, hold the watery beer and false hope, thanks anyway. Interiority? Self-examination? Even that had become a noise-maki
ng enterprise, primal screamers yelling into their own vertiginous hollows. Theater, all of it. You want to be left alone? It’s a downright guarantee if you slip back down the mineshaft of your own navel again, Salty.
Over his own brain’s dissonance, my father heard an engine revving, rising, too, over the wind and the distant sound of the plow, and he turned in time to see a Checker cab drifting around the corner of 79th, tires ripping up the graupel. The driver had the nose pointed more or less in the right direction, that is, south, but the cab was sliding intently eastward across the width of West End, toward the shoulder-high snowbank behind which my father was standing. He caught a glimpse of white hair, hands cranking at the wheel. Engine gunning, the cab continued to drift to port until the whitewalls caught for a moment and the car lurched forward, but alas, they only held to the next slick patch, where the slide recommenced, and it was then that my father’s adrenal glands awoke to the insistent banging at their door, and they basically flipped over the bed, chair, and everything else in the room scrambling to see what the hell was going on, which shot some voltage into his sympathetic nervous system, as it had been lazing around just downstairs but now everyone was up and they were throwing open the windows and sticking out their heads, and all at once he had become a black hole, sucking in snow, air, car, howl of wind, cast of streetlight, the sort of distracted wonder with which he’d been watching the night suddenly frozen in place, as was he, his legs having turned to concrete, braced for impact, his muscles taut, sphincter locked down, his jaw a sprung bear trap. The cab kept coming, sliding elegantly, like a dancer emitting a spiritual code, its frictionless progress penetrating into my father, the buildings, the falling snow, the light posts, projecting inevitability in the way that only the elephantine in motion can. In a category headlined by tidal waves and mushroom clouds a taxi is only a footnote, but it nonetheless shares the same operational principles of irreversibility and the blind, objective destruction of anything lying in its path.
