by Jack Livings
Vik didn’t leap into action immediately, fearing at first that he’d been backtracked by the poet-terror from Cinema West, but after a moment observing the man, he decided that this was another classification of nut entirely, one who intended to commit an act of self-harm, as Albert was by then attempting to straddle the railing, with minimal success. Vik was only about twenty feet away, a distance that somehow made him responsible for Albert’s well-being, and he called out to the potential fence-hopper: Excuse me!
Albert: Who’s there?
Vik: Over here! Do you need help?
Albert squinted into the storm. It seemed to him that the trees themselves were speaking. He drew back his leg from the railing and replied in code. He said: There are a lot of people who don’t know how to read a newspaper!
Vik moved closer, toward unknown dangers, driven by an empathetic impulse, a genetic flaw that drove Bonny to drink over his son’s chances for survival in the wolvish arena of, well, everything: school, import/export, love. Wrong paternal instinct, Bonny. You should have deprogrammed his unyielding punctuality. Vik said: Sorry?
Albert, now apprehending the non-tree before him: I say, a lot of people who don’t even know how to read a newspaper!
Vik, desperately trying to understand: Illiterates?
Albert: No idea that it’s all fibs. They get so exercised.
Vik, clueing in: Oh yes, I understand.
Albert: Other than newspapers, however, where would one get one’s information?
Vik: The television?
Albert: Fool! The television hasn’t even been invented!
Vik: Sir, do you need a cop? (And none of that New York smart-ass on the sir, either.)
Albert: Certainly not. They are the last to know. If they knew anything about how to do their jobs, they’d arrive before the crime, wouldn’t they?
Vik: Do you live nearby, sir?
Albert: Why would I go home?
Vik: Because it’s cold out here.
Albert: Why would I go home?
Vik: To see your family.
Albert: At the Apelles?
Vik: The big place on 78th?
Albert: The Apelles, yes.
Vik: That’s where you live?
Albert: I suppose so. I suppose I should go home? Is that it?
Vik: I think so?
See? Easy, simple, nothing sinister in their exchange, just a decent kid helping a senile old man on the worst night of the year. Their little story might have rounded out a blizzard box deep inside the Times, nestled in there among the rowdy Queens runts chucking snowballs at the police cruisers (say hey, whaddya want, city kids, amirite?) and Stella Kilgore age ninety-seven’s first-person account of the great blow job of 1888 (ma’am, you have to stop saying that, no, what, never mind, go ahead, I’ll just put down…), a bridge club from Hartford on their way to Key West for a tournament, stuck at JFK for the night but guess what they did? Played bridge! Enterprising bartender invents the Manhattan Whiteout to delight of trapped guests at the Plaza! Etc.
Nothing pulls the city together like a natural disaster. Metro section, B5:
Apology Accepted: Blizzard Thaws Hearts
By A. L. KNAPP
John Caldwell, 31, involved in an altercation at the Cosmic Diner on the Upper West Side Monday afternoon, later sought out his adversary at Roosevelt Hospital to apologize. Caldwell attributed his decision to a change of heart, and made a peace offering of a cup of coffee.
“I thought it was decent of him,” said the employee of the Cosmic, who asked that his name be withheld, having been released after treatment for a mild concussion. “I don’t know I would have done the same thing.”
When asked why he and the Cosmic employee had tangled, Caldwell had no comment. One witness to the reconciliation noted that it was “a sort of good will to man kind of night.”
“Drugs,” said a nurse who spoke anonymously, as she was not authorized to speak to the press. “They’re all on drugs.”
32.
We reach the hot, molten center of my discord. Vik, age thirteen, had deposited Albert Caldwell, age seventy-four, a man on a mission of self-erasure, alone in a bedroom with me, age six. It was the innocent mistake of a boy to whom an old man was an authority, trustworthy by virtue of age alone. He said later he thought my presence in the room might have been a solace to Albert.
The revel was thumping away just outside the door. I was facedown, the razor-sharp creases of my uniform skirt’s box pleats bowed suggestively open or snapped suggestively shut, my shirt untucked, a sliver of glowing skin exposed at my waistband, the line of skin at the bottom of my leggings, the buttons of my elbows, the radii of my wrists as delicate as tulip stems, every inch of it an enticement. The dried blood on my scalp some sort of symbol. Albert, whose eyes no longer functioned as traps for light, didn’t see me, but he sensed me. He removed his clothing.
Albert was practiced in the art of occupation. He was receptive to the thoughts and feelings of the child in the room with him, postmaster to my mental correspondence. Chief among these communications was my dream, the dream of Slade, again pawing along the high beam in the barn. Already Albert had entered the dream, a silent observer, and I was aware of him but there was no cause for alarm, no more than I’d express over the sudden appearance of a tree or an old cow. He stood behind me on the dusty floor of the barn, in the hazy gray light, and while I watched Slade, he watched me. There was no water in my dream, which is perhaps what had attracted him most, some need to equalize by his presence the absence of that essential element, to soak the brittle straw and corn husk, to give weight to the dust, to tamp down the atmosphere’s lightness. He was sodden, his cell walls shredding as water broke through mesothelium to drown his organs, swell his muscle fibers to exploding, insinuate his bones, turning them to mealy pulp, filling his fingers, his palms, his arms, a spring cracking the stone within him and flooding his every thought, straining away color and texture, rendering him featureless, smooth as an eyeball.
I was dry, dry, dry, and he was overwhelmed by my scent. I was earth and altitude, the smell of cold astringency and absence, of life itself, unstained. His urge to fill the dryness with himself was overwhelming, an army marshaled to slaughter reasoned thought; compared to this, the urge to procreate was a pebble in his shoe. I was drawing him like a source of gravity, capillary action absorbing him into the dream, and the barn filled with water, I filled with water …
* * *
And I was kicking to the surface, which was thick with a skin of dust and straw. I punctured it, reached for the beam, and Slade was there, his tail twitching, the water still rising, and what did Slade do? He flew. I held tight to his small soft body and we soared through the loft doors, above the water, and as we escaped the roaring ocean consuming the topography below, dialing up the sides of houses and sinking the peaks of roofs, swallowing trees, telephone poles, flattening and darkening the world, I turned my head to the side and I saw a lone jag of rock jutting out of the dark sea. We flew closer and I saw that atop the angle of stone there was a birdbath, and sparrows were perched there, dipping their small bodies and flipping diamonds of water off their wings, oblivious to the flood.
Slade and I zoomed away from the water but not in fear, for we could fly forever, we could live in the sky, but it was troubling me, the water’s gelid menace. It was alive. It could send up a silvery palm and slap us out of the sky, and I urged Slade higher, until we were so high I was sure we were unreachable, as high as the tallest buildings I knew of, the World Trade towers. Good Slade!
I knew that Albert, like a dog that had treed a raccoon, snarling jaws white with foam, would starve, freeze, burn, waste away waiting for me to descend. I knew it was him, the old man who lived downstairs, trying to tempt me down, cooing liquid sibilance, Devonian soundings that rose and fell like wind, mere Hertzian insinuations because, after all, he was already in my head. That is to say, even in the dream, I knew that he already inhabited me, and the clear ey
es I once used to view the world clouded and I was awash in metaphor. Yes, I understood the water was not water but Albert, and also that his voice was not a voice but a song in my memory, that I was dreaming, that nothing in the world was only itself, but a twin, that everything, even my own self, had divided into the real and the imagined, and that the two were interchangeable and that it was impossible to tell which was which.
33.
Real or imagined: I was the only credible witness to the murder of John Caldwell. Yes, John, who had turned back to the hospital to make peace with the counterman, driven by a strange attraction to difficulty, or by a sense of guilt, or a need to be forgiven, or by that flaw universal among those who are drawn to the stage: a desperate desire to be loved by strangers. And then propelled again to his father’s building by the same impulse. John, whose impeccable and atrocious timing, whose every second at the hospital making amends to the counterman from the Cosmic, whose every snowbound step over to West End and then north to pick up his dining table from the package room at the Apelles, or to check to see if his father had returned, or some other mix of bad fate and benevolence (conjecture, as he’s unavailable for interview, long gone), whose every hitch, every lurch, every scarf adjustment, whose every pause to clear his nostrils became, on the timeline of his existence, overweighted with import as he approached the Apelles, accreting dread suspense, as his path drew him ever closer to the spot in the snow where his father, traveling at a high rate of speed on the x-axis, would intersect finally with his own plot on the y-axis, an empty set fixed at an exact point on the night’s grid.
When John reached the Apelles, he saw the Vornados’ terrace-tossed furniture sticking out of the snow. He stopped to pull a teak chair out of a drift. He found the little French café table. Another chair. His apartment had only a fire escape landing, certainly no outdoor space for patio furniture. For whatever reason, he was arranging the chairs in a row when his father came down out of the sky and crushed him.
Egon Larder and his wife, Saska, acquaintances of Bo’s, had just skied up, and were only about twenty feet away. Under his parka Egon was dressed in a suit and tie, and had skied down from 89th wearing a plastic Tricky Dick mask, its protuberances hyperbolized with snow, the eyeholes and tic-tac slot breathing hole having suffered from accretion and clogging issues, and at the moment of impact he was conducting a vigorous boring-out of same with his gloved fingers. Saska (thrown together Dolly Parton/Elly May Clampett) was yanking on her left binding, drunkenly fumbling with the hinky clasp that never seemed to open except when she was downhilling, and then, usually, catastrophically. They had come from another party just up the block. Even over the wind, the sound of Albert hitting John made an audible thud, like a dictionary closing. A mattress, Egon thought. Neither of them having witnessed the actual event, they moved in for closer inspection and at that point discerned that the object in question was a body. They counted the legs and arms—two bodies. This all came out later—their inability to state unequivocally that they’d seen Albert fall from the top of the building was the heart and soul of Sid Feeney’s defense.
The prosecutor—tall, thin, dangerous-looking Adam’s apple—had a witness list as long as his chimpanzee-proportioned arm. One by one, party guests ascended the stand, recounted to their best recollection the events of that evening, climaxing at Sid Feeney’s ejection of Albert Caldwell, and one by one, they were dismantled on cross by Feeney’s lawyer, who reminded them of their oath before asking them if they’d ingested any foreign substances on the night of the party. One by one, they descended from the stand with their eyewitness accounts broken in two. And, if it please the court, if not one soul who claimed to have seen the alleged murder was a reliable witness, then how could anyone say with assurance how the two bodies had materialized there in the snow, dead as doornails? Perhaps the crowd on the terrace had experienced a collective hallucination that coincided with the suicide of a senile old man who unfortunately—terrible tragedy—ended the life of his own son in the process. Perhaps, for all a reasonable person could deduce from the evidence, they had been arranged there just so by a sidewalk-level assassin who meant to thwart an investigation. Perhaps it had been a suicide pact, a deal sealed in blood between a father and son who, let’s face it, had all the reason in the world to share a bleak state of mind. Perhaps— Give it a rest, counselor. We get the picture.
A bunch of rich, amoral assholes saw a guy get thrown off a balcony and they kept right on partying? The papers went bananas. “BLIZZARD PARTY BUGOUT!” “SNOWBLIND MURDER!” “SKI NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL!” (the last accompanying a photo of Monteller Lavange, louche inheritor of a minor fortune, who’d skied over to the party and famously tried to plead the Fifth from the witness box).
It was all going Feeney’s way until the prosecutor put me on the stand and I told the court what I’d seen, and when Sid Feeney’s lawyer ambled over, introduced himself, and gently asked me if I’d had anything to drink or if I’d taken any drugs that night—did I know what drugs were? Yes, they’re pills, I said—and I responded that I had, indeed, had a drink and some drugs, his dim old eyes relit and he pressed on for details, so I told him orange juice and two Children’s Tylenol for the cut on my head. There was some laughter, and the judge gaveled, and the lawyer thanked me and went back to his table. On close, he argued that Feeney had meant to be my savior, that he’d acted valiantly in my interests, and that his own molestation as a child predisposed him to overreact in stressful situations, but no one on the jury thought any of it made it okay that he’d thrown Albert Caldwell off the roof of a building and killed John Caldwell in the process.
A noteworthy detail, the reason Feeney wasn’t my savior: Albert was dead before he went over the edge. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, from a legal standpoint, this might work in Feeney’s favor because, after all, you can’t kill a dead man. Albert wasn’t naked for the reason Feeney suspected, not at all. The chief medical examiner for the city of New York, whose office I would years later have occasion to visit no fewer than fifteen times, testified that his forensic work showed the elder Caldwell to have expired not from the shock of impact but from hypothermia. His limbs showed evidence of discoloration and his lungs the presence of pulmonary edema. He was naked because of a late-stage symptom called paradoxical undressing, not because he had sexual designs on me. Well known among alpinists, paradoxical undressing is the last stop before death, though it is sometimes accompanied by a symptom known as terminal burrowing, wherein a person will attempt to squeeze into a very small area—an opening in a tree trunk or a rock face, for instance—just as an animal finds a tight spot for hibernation. The chief medical examiner testified that Albert was dead before he reached that stage. But had anyone asked, I could have told them that Albert did, in fact, find an impossibly small space to squeeze himself into, and that he lives there to this day.
Albert’s reasons for being out in the blizzard that night barely even came up in court, and my father, who never even showed up at the Vornados’ place, never had to divulge his role in Albert’s suicide plans. As far as anyone knew, his motivations for walking to the hospital with John were entirely altruistic, and his book did nothing to disabuse anyone of that notion.
By the time Albert went over the parapet, my father had already settled into his chair, cleared his desk, dropped his novel about the Buddha’s life, seven years of work, into a drawer from which it would never emerge, and started typing what would become The Blizzard Party. Thus, he was no use as a witness.
My mother and the Jahanbanis, who were among the few people at the party capable of stating with any authority that they were not blasted on pills, had retreated to Bo’s office to talk art. So when it came to telling the cops what they knew about the incident in question, they could only frown and shake their heads. All the same, the court didn’t take kindly to the idea that I’d been left to fend for myself, and when I finished my testimony, the judge ordered my mother and father to stand up so that
he could take a look at the loving parents who’d abandoned their daughter in the court of Caligula.
And Vik? Vik had met Bo, who was rummaging in the kitchen pantry for a package of Nilla Wafers, while searching for the elusive someone—anyone—who could give him a straight answer about where Mr. Caldwell lived. Bo, stoned but far from mentally incapacitated, inquired as to how this Indian kid, still wearing his overcoat, pockets bulging, came to be the minder of the old crank, and Vik, being Vik, explained what he’d been doing out in the snow, where he’d come across Mr. Caldwell, and why he’d felt motivated to help: Because it seemed like the right thing to do. Vik actually said that. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Okay, Bo said. We’ll take him downstairs together. But first I want to know is, is that a gun sticking out of your pocket?
Oh no! Vik said, shocked at the suggestion.
Later, when a guest drifted into the kitchen and casually mentioned to Bo that people were tossing his patio furniture onto West End, Bo indicated only that they were to stay the hell away from his Finnish smoker.
He and Vik were busy scooping snow off the windowsill and ferrying it to the refrigerator, which they’d disemboweled, racks and all, in the name of science, and where Vik had arranged the Tami and the black velvet on the vegetable crisper. And that’s where they were, peering at snowflakes, when Albert went over the railing.
34.
One last stroll through the apartment, the sharp cedar/pine of floor polish, the aura of wool in the living room, of heating oil by the vents, mildew on the kitchen sponge, the curry and cumin in the cabinet, the vegetal aroma beneath the sink, ozone and tea in my father’s old office, the rank humanity of the laundry bag, the scent of impending snow in the bedroom I shared with Vik.
