by Calvin Baker
“Only if you want to. I can also go by myself, before I have to take my next job.”
“No,” I said. “It’s me who doesn’t want to keep traveling alone.”
We were late to meet the others for dinner, and rushed to join them in town for a meal of buffalo burgers and old-school California wine from Mount Eden. Dinner was perfect, and our lovemaking too that night.
Before bed we soaked in the hot tub, luxuriating in our last hours before going back east. We were surrounded by the ancient forest behind the cabin, simple and unspoiled. I felt like a perfect Philistine.
29
We dropped off the rental car in the predawn light and boarded a regional flight to Salt Lake, where our landing was delayed. When we finally reached the next gate, the agent told us our connection had been canceled, due to a storm back east that had closed down most of the coast.
The terminal was filling up with stranded passengers, and fearing we might be stuck there the rest of the day, I asked whether they could fly us into Philadelphia instead. The flights were all full. We put our names on the standby list, then went for breakfast, before going to the next gate to see if we were called. Our hopes were dashed when we saw they were asking for volunteers to skip the flight. By then the airport was jam-packed, the agents beaten down, and people were setting up camp for the long haul. We went back to the information desk, where there was an infinite line and only two agents on duty, one of whom told us there was nothing else east that day.
“What about ATL?” I asked, dreading the prospect of being stranded.
“Traffic is backed up there for hours, and if you get in, you will not make it back out.”
“What do you think?” I asked Sylvie.
“I think we should stay here another night.”
“There are no hotels. We’ll have to sleep in the airport.”
Sylvie scanned the desk to see where business was done, and approached another agent. “We need your help,” she said, the gentle certainty of her charm cutting through the chaos with quiet command. “I know you have all these other people to deal with, but we need to get home.”
“Detroit is open, but there is only one eastward flight from there.”
“Do you have room?”
“No, but you would be first on the list. If you land before the storm moves in.”
She booked it, and printed out the tickets. “Can I have your ID?”
I handed her my passport.
“No, your crew ID.”
“We are not crew.”
“I thought you were.”
“No, I just always like to have a way home.”
We went to the gate for the flight, and, as the plane began boarding, exhaled with relief when our names flashed green.
We landed in Detroit half an hour late, and the onward flight was already boarding, but when we reached the gate there was an old couple there in wheelchairs, the husband breathing from a respirator. Sylvie and I looked at each other, her face twisted in a wry smile and her eyes brimmed with I-told-you-so as we gave up our seats.
“Let’s find a hotel,” she said, sitting down at the empty gate, despairing of what to do. When we called around, they were all booked, so we were forced to camp out in the airport after all.
The only places open, other than the lounges, were a record shop, with old Motown drifting into the corridors, and a soul food restaurant called Brother Leon’s, where a line of people out the door waited to be fed. The sign in the window announced worldwide delivery, with a cartoon picture of the couple behind the counter leaning out of an airplane, riding in a speedboat, sitting in the jump seat of an old Ford.
Life taking you places? Don’t even know where you are? This is Motown. We understand people move. We deliver. Coming from nowhere? Don’t know how long you’ll be staying? We will feed you. Feeling out of sorts? Headache? Heartbreak? Midlife crisis? Menopause? Double-consciousness? Plain ole vanilla angst? Let me put it to you this way, who’s going to bury you where? Here, have some pie.
Ready to order? You do know what you want, right? Maybe something to take along for the kids? Their kids? Come on now, what are you going to feed them? Big, corn-fed American babies? Or smug little brats, in need of being separated from their sushi money? A man has to know what’s worth holding on to, or else it will surely slip away, my daddy used to say. Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m only asking because time is passing. What do you want with the world?
Cornbread with that? ’Course you do. Why you at it, might as well figure out how are you going to bridge your past, which you barely understand, and your future, which you have no way of knowing. Don’t mean to burden you. Just fiddling time in a snowstorm. But do you hear me? Define yourself on your own terms. What happens when you are only the content of your own character in the dark heart of the great American story? Sweet potatoes or plantains? What’s the secret to the oxtail stew? I’ll tell you the secret, youngblood. It all hangs on what you feed your ox.
What binds you to the spirit that flowed through your ancestors? To the others who are not connected to the same ancestors, and sometimes maybe ain’t connected to nothing at all? How do you carry on, and keep yourself open to the spirit that sustained them as your life melts into the wide-open world? Leon’s Soul Food. We deliver, baby. Soda? Just another current in the river, feeding the open sea, a tributary to draw on when times require. Maybe not even in your own lifetime but your children’s and their children’s. What place for them in the corny American song? To the spirit? Do you still hear it? Or have you gone over? Don’t tell me. Ain’t really none of my business. This is a question for deep in the darkness when you are in that place where the world does not matter, and even the one you love does not matter, but when you focus your prayer, and all that matters is who you are in eternity.
“Stay or to go?”
How long does it take you standing there, recalling your grandfather, before you understand what the old folks, all old folks, really meant every time they asked you anything—why don’t you come here and let me get a good look at you? Do they take you to church? What grade are you in now? What are you running so fast for? What did you just say?—is: How is your soul fixed? Are you strong enough to keep it right no matter what happens to you out in the world? Strong enough yet to tend it yourself long after we are gone?
30
We wrangled a flight home late the next afternoon, and cabbed back to my apartment over the treacherous snowpacked roads from the airport. The driver caromed down the highway faster than was advisable, sending us skidding, slip-sliding the entire way. I hectored him to slow down, but the roads were unsafe at any speed and there was nothing we could do but clench our teeth, lock hands, and try not to think about it.
When we finally pulled over the bridge onto Canal Street it was one in the morning. The eerie white streets were completely snowed in, and the only thing moving were the traffic lights, flashing red against the banked whiteness as the blizzard continued to lash the city. My apartment was not far away, but the snowdrifts were as high as the roof of the car and the taxi could go no further. We exited near Broadway, and were immediately whipped by the arctic air catching the oversized gear bags like sails, pushing us back with each violent gust of wind.
“Look,” Sylvie said, turning to face Broadway. “Have you ever seen the city so empty?” All that was visible were our tracks in the snow behind us, the flashing red streetlights, and nothing else astir.
“Only once,” I said.
All day we had tried to make the best of it, but as the buildings on lower Broadway focused the wind into a tunnel, and the snow pelted our faces, I told her how sorry I was for my lack of patience in insisting we return.
“I forgive you,” she said. “But we could have done it my way too, you know, and stayed put.”
My building was in sight by then, and we pressed into the warm sanctum of the lobby, and were home.
We left our luggage in the living room, found food in the refri
gerator, and drank hot tea, before falling into a bone-deep sleep.
That night I dreamed I was climbing a great set of stone stairs carved from a cliff. At the summit was a lake, which I dove down until I nearly drowned, before emerging on the outskirts of a majestic, red-golden city. When I emerged in its castle I ascended into a vaulted room, and walked around until I came to a kitchen, where I saw my mother cooking. She was young in my dream and happy. I approached and she told me sit down and tell her what I had learned, as though I had just come home from school. The dream dissolved, and I awoke in the middle of the blue night as the tempest continued to rage outside.
I could not go back to sleep, and went to the kitchen for water. When I returned to bed Sylvie was awake. “You were right,” she said, the tempest outside beating against the glass. “It’s good we made it home.”
“No, you were right. We should have stayed where we were. The risk was not worth it.”
“But now we are safe and snug.” She nestled against me in the predawn and fell back asleep. I remained awake the rest of the night, but stayed in bed watching her sleep. When she woke we rose to make breakfast, then returned to bed where we spent the rest of the morning. By late afternoon the snow began easing up, and we went out to explore. The plows were out on the avenues, but the smaller streets were pristine with snow, and we made our way over to the Battery, and we followed the bike path along the Hudson before taking the subway up to Hell’s Kitchen, and then made our way across to Central Park. The edges of the park were full of people sledding, and making snow angels, but the interior was silent, and the tops of the buildings scarcely visible, so it felt like an otherworldly forest, as we crossed east and headed back downtown.
We walked down the middle of Fifth, quiet and still as a blanket of new wool. The lions outside the Met were frozen over in a clear sheet of ice, and the doormen guarded their posts in the cold, draped in greatcoats.
By the time we reached the southern edge of the park, we were shivering with cold, and decided to have drinks before heading home. There was life out front of one of the hotels, and we made our way toward it.
There was no one inside except a handful of young guests and their chaperones, all dressed up for a birthday party, looking worried no one would make it out in the weather.
We were seated in a window bay, looking out from our perch over the emptiness of the streets.
“Aren’t they just the best waiters in the world?” Sylvie asked, when our drinks arrived. “They are not playing at waiting. They are real, first-class waiters from a different time, when people knew to wait for things.”
“Which era was that?” I asked, and we played the game of choosing which epoch we would best like to live in, and drank our toddies, and decided it was the perfect time to be alive.
There were no cabs when we left, and it had begun to snow again, so we took the subway to Canal, which was barricaded, due to a blaze that had broken out in the apartment blocks along East Broadway, forcing us to walk through the snow-blanketed streets, which had turned to a wet, sooty slush.
As we trundled home the needles of swirling snow began to blind us, and everyone else around was coated in the falling flakes, which looked gentle where there was no wind but were ferociously sharp to the skin, reminding me of things that used to be.
Everyone’s eyes were asquint, with scarves pulled around their noses and mouths for protection, as we maneuvered the confusion of the barricades, wondering which way to go. We clasped hands in commiseration, then shoved them in our pockets for warmth, nodding sympathetically at passersby who did the same, everyone afraid and confused and anxious to get home.
A water main had burst on Chambers, sheeting the street in ice, and snapping over the few spindly trees, forcing us to double back again with the crowd, willy-nilly out toward the river, as the ghostly snow fell over us.
Sylvie tucked against my shoulder and we leaned into the howling onslaught, miserable and frozen to the core, and it felt we would never be warm.
I was too cold to talk, but when we reached John Street I thought to get some groceries, so that we would not be forced to leave the house the next day.
The shelves were empty, and the cashiers stared at the flashing television screen for information, wondering how they would get home at the end of their shift. They looked like they had not slept at all, scanning the screens anxiously for information. The announcers in their hyperbole kept calling it the Storm of the Century, but had no more information than that, except that there was no longer train service, and no more taxis, and nothing moving into or out of or through the city at all.
“Look, you’re all covered,” Mr. Lee said when we entered, handing us towels. We thanked him and asked how they were faring. “We all slept at the store last night,” he answered. “We may be here again. But we have food at least.”
We got what we could from the shelves, and stepped back out into the whipping gusts, until we finally reached the heat of the lobby, where we felt safe. The power in the building was out, so we climbed the stairs to the apartment. There was gas, so we made hot chocolate and lit candles and camped around the kitchen table.
It was still snowing the next morning, leaving the city frozen as the final ice age, and even the hum of white noise had disappeared into true silence, with nothing but winter all around.
“Look how easily even New York is made fragile,” Sylvie commented, looking down on the frozen city. “Just imagine what happens when a storm lands, or a drone strikes, in some place still half-made or half-defeated from being taken over.”
We stayed the next day in bed, under the comforter, reading to each other out loud, and only left the warm covers in the evening to cook.
“I will make dinner,” I said, going off to the kitchen. “Is there anything in particular you want?”
“Whatever you’re in the mood for.”
“There is the roast we bought last night, and some parsnips.”
“It sounds like a fine winter meal, but a vegetable is also sometimes green. Why don’t we make a salad of the fennel?”
Outside the power had not been fully restored, but the yellow sodium lamps glowed on the frozen snow, and beyond there were little flickers of light coming from the windows of the buildings with generators; but mostly there was darkness, the world reduced to the size of my apartment and everything beyond distant and meaningless.
“You know what this reminds me of?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Were you here?”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
She did not say anything else for a long time after that, but simply stared out over Lower Manhattan into the storm. “You know, there are kids in grade school now who were not even alive then.”
“Time moves so fast.”
“And if we have children they will never know what it felt like here then. They won’t know what it was like before, at all.”
“Before the murders.”
“I did not know you could be like that.”
“Like what?”
“So narrow with hate. Look at your face.”
“Neither did I.”
“But our children would not know any of it. Nothing except what they read in history. They’d never have to nurse from that shapeless fear and rage, neither ours nor theirs, or the knowledge of what we forged from our sadness and fear and tarnished with shame. They wouldn’t know any of it. Wouldn’t that be glorious?”
“Yes,” I said. “Except they will know, if only from the effects, or else they will know something from the same root. They cannot escape that.”
“No,” she shook her head. “I mean if they did not know anything like that at all.”
“Yes,” I said. “That would be glorious, but it’s not possible.”
“I did not ask you to weigh it, just to think if we could make the world again. They would be brand new, and the world would be new for them. We could make the world again for them, and the
y would not have to know anything like that at all. Wouldn’t that be divine?”
“Yes,” I said.
From bed we could no longer see the lights of the buildings in the distance, but watched whiteness cover the invisible city, and the people below, with all their burdens, and it just kept falling over us, like ash.
31
I accepted the assignment from Bea and we flew from winter back toward warmth, taking the PATH train from World Financial Center to Newark in the early evening rush. Our plane lifted and tacked out over the bay, then up the Hudson in harmony with the boats and the evening traffic along the West Side Highway and Midtown skyline. The entire city was aglow with activity, and the silhouettes of the buildings were a calming sight, and we fell asleep peacefully.
We woke the next morning with the Atlantic sun over the Netherlands, and changed flights in Amsterdam, where we stopped to buy buttery Dutch pastries, and the European papers. It was always refreshing to see the news from a perspective beyond the information firewall of America, and shocking every time to realize how thick that firewall was. Sylvie said much the same, as we scanned the papers from around the world in the free Dutch port.
“Which do you want?” I asked.
“Let’s take them all.” She gathered up a stack. “We can compare them and sort out for ourselves how much truth is in each and what’s really going on.”
As we fastened ourselves in for the next leg of the journey I told her how much I was looking forward to the trip.
“That’s nice of you to say, sweetheart,” she said, turning from the window. “I know you’re only going to make me happy, and it does make me happy.”
“I have my own reasons, too. Did you ever wonder why us, though?”
“No. I know why.” She pulled her pashmina around her neck and leaned against me.
“Tell me what you think,” I said.
“A lot of it is stuff you don’t believe.”
“Try me.”
“A shrink might say our neuroses match. A believer would say when we are open on the deep level the universe sends to us what we need, always. A pragmatist would shrug and say it is the causal outcome of a chain of factors we can never know completely, and probably shouldn’t worry too much about. A traditionalist might say people like us belong together. A mystic, that it is only mutual submission to what is happening to us. The Greeks would say it is éros. But ask, is it also philia? Pragma? Agápe? My mother just wants to know if you are good to me. If I am good to you.”
