The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  Doesn’t appear so, does it? I need you to go out and get me something to eat, Albert said.

  Albert, she said.

  I’m hungry for sesame noodles.

  You haven’t eaten anything? It’s late.

  Is it? he said, though he was already looking at the clock. I was waiting for you, he said.

  She laughed. Waiting for me to get your dinner, you mean. Albert, the snow. There’s a blizzard. Nothing’s open, not even Golden Palace.

  You’ve confirmed this?

  Albert, nothing’s open.

  You’ve confirmed it? he said.

  Their secret: Albert survived on General Tso’s chicken and cold sesame noodles. Four, sometimes five nights a week, she called in the order. Albert refused to let her tip more than fifty cents, but if the weather was bad, she added a quarter of her own.

  I’m sure they’re open. But they won’t deliver. Not tonight, he said.

  You’re just making things up now. Stop it.

  Prove me wrong, he said.

  Fine. Let’s call and see if anyone picks up.

  I don’t want to call them! Albert was gripping the armrests like a man undergoing a particularly hairy dental procedure.

  Fine, Albert. Do you want to look at the photo album? Erica said.

  Now? Albert said.

  One last time before you go, she said.

  Fine, fine, Albert said. What had she meant by that? he wondered. Did she know what he meant to do?

  Erica perched on the arm of his leather chair while he turned the cardboard pages, tapping his finger here and here, breezily reeling off locations and dates. His identifications were inventions, words spoken with an authority intended to convince himself that he could go on. He recognized only himself and Sydney. Even their children, though they were obviously the children, were unfamiliar to him, and he said, Here are the children, and from a background or a dirt road or a farmhouse in the photo he would construct a location in terms vague enough to sound correct. If there were mountains, he called them the Adirondacks; if he saw a boat or a fishing rod, the Finger Lakes; if a beach, Florida.

  He’d gone on as long as he could, covering the lapses, but it was exhausting, an exercise as painful as push-ups on broken arms, and he began to lose heart. Confronted with a photo of his grandchildren, he’d say, Now, there’s a fine boy. He reminds me of my schoolmate Irving Teller. Died in the war, Irving … And who could say otherwise? He knew Erica didn’t care, and as with most deceptions, the bulk of his efforts went into convincing himself of the lie, though after a while it hardly worked on him, either.

  His mind: a slow sinking, an insignificant tear in the hull that takes on only a gallon or two a day, but eventually the gunwales are even with the surface of the water, and eventually the boat disappears, descending through the depths, leaving Albert to scissor his legs and carve the water with his emaciated arms. He’ll go down soon enough, he knows it. He’s finished, he welcomes death.

  Erica! Albert yelled. Where had she gone? He yelled again. This went on for a while until he looked at the clock, and suddenly she reappeared, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.

  What’s my dog’s name? she said.

  What dog? Albert said.

  My dog. The only dog I ever had.

  You’ve never mentioned it.

  Only every day. What’s his name?

  Don’t play this game with me. I’m starving.

  What’s his name, Albert?

  I don’t care what your dead dog’s name is, Albert yelled. Go get me something to eat.

  Erica nodded. Good, that’s right, he’s dead. What was his name?

  Albert gripped his chair. You’re taunting me. You’re always asking meaningless questions. These doors you insist on making me unlock just to get a drink of water or a morsel of food—if my daughters knew the tortures you put me through, they’d have your hide. I refuse to comply. I refuse.

  You don’t complain to them, though, do you?

  My conversations with my family are none of your business.

  Albert, you know it’s good for you. It’s good for your mind. It keeps you sharp.

  I’m a dead man. Who cares how sharp I am?

  I do, and the sharper the better.

  I’m pleased to be able to do you a service, then. Pleased.

  Don’t be such a little old lady, Albert. What was my dog’s name?

  Sparky.

  That’s right. Sparky.

  Don’t threaten me with Sparky.

  No one’s threatening you, Albert.

  I was skinning rabbits when I was six. I could field-dress a deer when I was eight. My father had to hold me up to reach the hams. Don’t threaten me with stories about your little dead dog.

  Erica moved closer to his chair. Mind your manners, Albert.

  He waved the back of his hand at her. I need to eat, he said. I need you to go get Chinese.

  Erica put her hands on the arms of his chair and leaned in until her face was so close to his that her eyes became blurs. Their noses touched.

  How much have you had tonight?

  You think I can remember? he whispered. He felt her breath on his lips.

  You want me to leave.

  Yes, he said.

  I’ve already left, Albert. Do you understand?

  I understand.

  I left so that you can do what you need to do.

  I understand, he whispered.

  I hope you’ll have more courage when it comes to the rest of it.

  I will.

  This is what people do for people they love, she said.

  I know, he said.

  You’ve made a plan? You know what you’re going to do?

  Yes, he said.

  You know what to do, Erica said. Her eyes were closed.

  I do, Albert said. He had closed his eyes but opened them now. He gently pushed Erica back by the shoulders, only enough to be able to see her face clearly.

  Didn’t I already send you away? he said. Didn’t I remove you from danger? You’d have tried to stop me, he said. I got rid of you for your own good.

  I know what you’re going to do.

  You do? he said. Did she? he thought. Don’t tell, he said.

  Albert, you shouldn’t go tonight. If you fall on a patch of ice you could break your leg. You could get lost. You could freeze to death. How are you going to find your way?

  I’ll find my way.

  Go tomorrow.

  No. You’re trying to trick me. It must be tonight.

  He turned his face away from hers, but she was so close, her body over his, that struggling was pointless. Her legs were astride his, her feet pinning his on either side. The silver cross around her neck tapped against the underside of his chin. Her hair poured over his face.

  Tomorrow I’ll have lost my nerve, he said. I feel it draining from me already.

  He felt the wet of her lips against the dry granite of his own.

  You’ve thought this through? she said.

  Yes.

  Hardheaded old man, she said. She pulled back.

  What’s my dog’s name? she said.

  Sparky.

  You know how you’re going to do it?

  I know. It’s clear in my mind. Go, he said.

  And she went, like a vapor, back to the ether world she’d come from.

  It was time. The rug beneath his feet was rotting flesh, the walls the sides of a dank tomb. Go.

  Choices: Would he experience numbness, palpitations, shortness of breath, coldness in the extremities, burning of the bowels, blurring of vision, failure of vision, agita, tremors, organ malfunction?

  He would call Roosevelt. He located the phone book and painstakingly worked his way through it. Every time his eye attached itself to a new name, he plunged into a dark well. What was he doing, again? He climbed back out and resumed the search. Finally, he arrived at the number. He dialed. He hung up quickly. Work out a dialogue first. Anything worth doing is worth doing pro
perly. Prepare and strategize. He pulled out the Parker from his breast pocket and a legal pad from the side table.

  Help me, I’m in agony, he wrote.

  I’m experiencing shortness of breath. There is some numbness in my limbs.

  He looked at what he’d written. He read it aloud, and struck out the last sentence.

  I can’t feel my hands! he wrote.

  He ran through the dialogue a few times, found his address on the Journal ’s delivery label, jotted it down, practiced the dialogue once more.

  That sound again, barely audible, from far away. He recognized it this time. He knew exactly what it was. The river.

  25.

  My photographs of Vik are medleys of smudge and blur, thumbs effecting solar eclipse, plan views of shoelaces. When I managed to align focus and f-stop, I was a mug-shot artist. Videos, same: catalogues of a wide range of ground cover species, off-camera directions that always end with, Okay, ready? and as the frame swings up to capture the subject … blackout—or worse, when I captured him standing uneasily at the edge of a swimming pool, stage-mothering him to Do something, do something! Move around or, like, dance!, and he would, saggy trunks dripping all over the place, tentatively bouncing on one leg then the other as if testing their structural integrity, his mouth a rictus of mortal embarrassment.

  Vik was director of our tripod-assisted sex tapes, all of them either metronomed by low-light warnings (though the audio has been, in years since, an effective enough lubricant if mixed with vodka; melancholy, sure, but what’s the brain doing during masturbation, anyway, but pining after an absent set of hands, mouth, body, way of life?) or, when well lit, comedies starring a Parkinsonian ghost writhing abstractly about our mattress, disgorging here and there a foot or arm before redevouring the escapee; sexy snapshots, likewise, were lightning flashes of bleached landscape and shadow, a cloud of saltpeter storming on our affections, carving into the foreground horrors of cleft and gap.

  It was if we’d undergone a training program for photographers of industrial flange and pipe-fitting catalogues, steeped in an objectivist approach that treated every bolt, bushing, and return bend equally, everything shot under the same flat illumination, a triumph of truth over perspective.

  A person viewing our collected works could be forgiven for thinking it was all an intentional, if not quite realized, project, some hyper-ironic thrift shop approach to the saccharine naïveté of the knock-kneed, blepharoplastied Japanese hipster. But nope. Just bad composition and shyness, a headshot collection for the jacket flap of an anti-anagraphist manifesto.

  Look at me. What a drag, a sullen mug mouthing the words at the back of a group sing-along. Stiff as a board at the Pantheon, exhibiting lifelessness on the Spanish Steps, idling uncomfortably in a gondola, tonguing a plasticine gelato. Wait, there’s more! Here Comrade Hazel refuses to strike pose at Bolshoi! Look there, poor madam impersonates a wilting rhododendron in the Yumthang Valley. Vik: There he stands, hands in pockets, shallow smile, a wax figurine, a chroma-key shot, an action figure propped against a rock.

  If not for his friends, I would have no proof that he ever smiled. Their donations came in manila envelopes, email attachments, on CDs with accompanying thumbnails helpfully preprinted on glossy photo stock. Most are from the days before we were together, when our pasts ran parallel, back when my history didn’t require a revision quite so desperately as it does now. Eventually our timelines merge and in some of those photos we stand together looking not entirely bloodless. Enough of them, at least, to assure me that we lived not quite so statutory a life as our portraits of each other suggest.

  I’d sent the blanket request in advance of the funeral, and his friends, being competent and thoughtful types, top-notch custodians of their pasts, had responded with an archive, every shot suitable for framing, the deluge a long-overdue spring clean. I suppose his friends welcomed the invitation to initiate an act of catharsis. Dear man had been in hiding for fifteen years, what could they do? What could I do? Keep on stroking the organ responsible for pain, whichever one that is. The brain? The heart? An electric finger on the dorsal posterior insula, prodding mercilessly until it was a swollen, pulsing mass of signals, throwing off cyclones of barbed wire and hailstones?

  The Pavlovian compact by which all Americans live, the promise that anguish is eventually terminated by an endorphin release, took a rain check on this one. Someone forgot to pay the electric on the effervescent promise that as long as I worked through my pain it would all pay off in the end, because anything that pays off is worth it, worth it because we are made stronger by our suffering.

  Fifteen years they couldn’t find Vik. He was everywhere and nowhere, scattered across Lower Manhattan in an untidy Bayesian distribution, no easier to locate for the blanketing effect of his disintegration, but eventually he emerged, and I have placed that artifact, the first and only, once a shard of bone, now a white powder reconstituted by a Fisher Scientific Sonic Dismembrator, treated to Bode Technology patented DNA-extraction procedures, the full arsenal of forensic science available to the New York City medical examiner’s office, in an oak coffin, and I performed the ritual of mourning and remembrance. Correction: I put seventy-five percent of his remains, by weight, into the coffin. The other twenty-five percent I placed on my tongue.

  Sure, he was a little late to the party, but we all remembered the steps, we being the widows, by then having put parts of thirty-six of Vik’s colleagues in the ground. Vik had been elusive, that old fox, doping around in the shadows while I stood on the dance floor swaying to the dirge. Fifteen years.

  In 2001, I had offered up personal item reference samples and bio samples, per instructions from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I’d expected his blood relatives’ spiral lattices to do the heavy lifting, but I obliged with the trinity of hairbrush, comb, razor, and a river card: the panties I wore Monday, the day before he was killed, and the spermatic deposits thereupon. Later, I discovered a fork in the dishwasher. I delivered it to OCME. A few weeks later I found hairs in the bed, bagged and delivered those. In December, a fingernail clipping revealed itself from within the padded confines of a ball of dust behind the toilet. I bagged it. I gave away every tangible piece of Vik I could find.

  I was told that he, like his colleagues, was pulverized, reduced infinitesimally, reduced to dust. A finely sifted flour. Particulate matter. A single particle. A speck floating among motes. He was made so small that photons in a sunbeam struck him like waves breaking over the bow of a ship. He was inhaled, expelled in a mass of phlegm, transported by Kleenex to waste bin, to garbage truck, entombed in a landfill to await the next millennium’s archaeologists. Arguably, he still existed in some microscopic sense. What constituted him? Two molecules retaining their bond? A single molecule once associated with his cellular structure? And after his dust degraded and he was split into the component atomic elements, where was he then? When did he cease to be?

  Elusive Vik. At first I forced myself to believe these things, to believe that he’d vanished into the mound of rubble, been pestled by the concrete slabs and plummeting I-beams. I forced myself to believe he’d been incinerated, his carbonized particles elevated in the pillar of black smoke, absorbed into the mesosphere. In the absence of a body, paperwork became his corpse. I had the DX certificate, official pronouncement of death by judicial decree. But what I wanted—what we all wanted—was the DM, the physical remains certificate. Eventually all the other girls got theirs. Goddamnit, Vik, where was mine?

  Were they my friends, the other widows? If we’d been friendly before, cocktail party cohorts, left-hand partners at dinners requiring the presence of a full contingent, the smiling soft-serve ice cream our husbands brought around to please potential investors, now we were comrades, veterans of a flash battle that had wiped out half our battalion.

  For everyone else, for the DMs, the problem wasn’t that their husbands had vanished, but that they kept coming back. There was a white tent on 30th Street overl
ooking the East River, a high-quality aluminum frame shrink-wrapped in slick polyester. The remains were stored there until the memorial park was finished and they were relocated to subterranean shelf space beneath the plaza’s selfie zone. Officers of the state tested and retested the remains, turning an infinite row of prayer wheels while chanting the mantras of forensic tech. When the universe granted a hit, they’d call. They’d call every time until you couldn’t handle any more and signed the form begging them to stop.

  I never saw the blue glow of the caller ID: OCME MTTN. But they kept pushing the prayer wheels, retesting, retesting—thousands of unidentified tissue remains, thousands of bone fragments. And there were millions more out there in the world, too small to detect. I kept up with the literature. I knew the technology was advancing toward infinite sensitivity. It was only a matter of time before they’d point a spectrometer wand at the sky and transmit me the coordinates of Vik’s atomic remnants. There he is, hovering over Germany today, tomorrow Sweden, drifting Arcticward, catching a lift on the polar jet, circumnavigating the world’s crown. There he is, parting the seas from atop a plankton’s rostrum. Look there, in yonder deer gut, amongst the honeycomb of the reticulum. In a volcano, in a carburetor, under my fingernail. Everywhere, nowhere.

  Unless you asked, they didn’t tell you where they were finding all the new pieces. You had to go to the white tent and they’d point to a map. Your husband was here: The pit. Fresh Kills. A rooftop. Sewer. A shard here, a sliver there.

  But after so long and no call, I’d formed some theories, some unsound ideas, by the time he came home. Ideas like: not dead, just gone.

  On the occasion of the initial identification he returned with a herald. An officer of the NYPD, fidelis ad mortem, was in the lobby asking to see me. I told Peter, the doorman, to send him up and Peter, stooped Peter who could barely climb off his stool, escorted the officer himself. I didn’t trust it, he said to me. A cop? You? No, I didn’t trust it one bit.

  Even so many years later, standard operating procedure still applied in the case of this particular mass-fatality incident. Upon identification of human remains, OCME issued the coveted DM certificate and notified NYPD, which was then compelled to notify me in person. So, there he was, an old hand from the Twentieth Precinct, wedding ring, removed his hat and secured the threshold, framed in full 3D by the jambs, which gave way to his elbows as he awaited my invitation, Peter doing his best impersonation of an octopus behind him. Come on in, I said. We sat, I displayed my government-issued identification, he said, no, not necessary while scanning it nonetheless, he on the couch, me on the ottoman—weird, right, my apartment, but with bad news/good news in the pipe we’d assumed stage positions intended, though unintentionally, to communicate to our audience, dear old Peter, that order and authority were in balance, all was right in the world, chaos held at bay for just a moment more. The officer did then address our rheumatic chaperone, whose pose of angular discomfort, one gnarled hand on the jamb of the French doors open to the living room, his body all juts and doglegs inside the uniform that fit him like a set of drapes, indicated that he was suffering a hell of spasmodic agony, to suggest that we could be left alone, and I, concurring, said something along the lines of, Thank you, Peter, as though I were dame of the manor in a perfect little Fieldian table setting of a screenplay. He took his leave hitchingly, and the cop, whose name, no kidding, was Postman, Officer Postman, a low-grade amusement on par with the doctor named Nurse or the funeral director named Lively, just a little distraction from the news at hand, of course, forgive me, because I was listening with one ear, as they say, comparing his dialogue to the teleprompter scrolling in my head, checking for deviation from the déjà vu, and my concerns shifted quite naturally to allowing him to complete his assignment with minimum delay, which, by the way, flying colors, old boy, direct, calm, and collected, no euphemisms, just the facts, ma’am, presented from his breast pocket, right, the precinct’s card, the left being somewhat obscured by a terrace of gold bars atop the badge, the black-banded badge, certainly not in honor of Vik but some lawman recently departed, and I would of course, if asked, assign him high marks on professionalism, and though I wanted to ask if he’d been to the apartments of Cynthia and (the former) Evan Mask or Megan and (the former) Terrance Plenge, both located within the boundaries of the Twentieth Precinct, I restrained myself from undertaking that foray into the social macabre (if I cared enough one way or another I could just ask Cynthia or Megan if Postman had been their guy lo those many years ago, and had they, too, noticed the third finger, right hand, shortened by a single segment north of the knuckle, shop class/band saw, or perp/knife, or possibly something that had happened in the lengthy interregnum, goddamnit, Vik), and I showed him out, transferred the card from my right to my left hand so that I might present him with a firm handshake, with thanks, upon his exit, restraining myself from doing anything so bald as ushering him out or hurrying him on his way, because, after all, he’s only doing his job, good news/bad news, pretty hairy stuff, plunging into these estrogen-soaked apartments where virtually anything could happen, these women, even all these years later they’re grieving, you know, they’re not moving on, they’re not in their right minds, got to keep your wits about you, man, anything could happen, anything, shoot, stab, grope, smack the messenger, you’ve gotta stay on your toes with those gals, better send in old Postman, he knows his way around an NOK.