14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  “Can I see him sometime?” Ramona blurted out, holding her wet thumb in front of her tear-streaked face.

  “Of course, honey,” Jay said. “I promise. Stephen really loves you. We’ll wait a little while, and then I’ll call him. I’ll bet he’d love to take you to a movie or something.”

  “With popcorn and soda pop?” Ramona said, calming down.

  “All you want,” Jay said.

  “OK,” Ramona allowed, slumping as though absorbing another in a long series of defeats.

  “Hey, honey, what would you think about living someplace else?” Jay said, keeping her voice as soothing as she could.

  “Like where?” Ramona asked, the thumb shooting back into her mouth.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Jay said. “Maybe another city.”

  Ramona’s eyes widened. “What about Grampa Lewis?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jay. “I’m just thinking.”

  “He’d be OK,” Ramona said.

  Jay rubbed Ramona’s shoulder. Another surprise—how easily the idea of being away from Lewis passed through Ramona’s mind.

  “But would Grandma Anna be able to find us?” Ramona asked gravely.

  “What do you mean?” Jay asked.

  “She would,” Ramona said confidently. She rubbed at her eyes. “Grandma Anna will find us wherever we are.”

  17. THE VOID WAS REACHING OUT AND CREATING A MONUMENT.

  In the morning it was snowing again. By rights, it was the time of year in which a big fluffy snow like that of the days before might be expected to melt before the prolonged freeze set in. But this wasn’t going to be one of those years. Stephen hadn’t been in Minnesota long, but he recognized the beginnings of an epochal winter when he saw one.

  He had completed his morning office hours without doing anything stupid—such as arguing with one of his male challengers or reaching out and caressing the hair of one of his young would-be suitors. To his students he was a blank slate onto which they projected their first tentative outpourings of independence. He had a knack for being taken as an appropriate post-Daddy figure—and he was the age most of their daddies were when they were children and beginning to compile all the tendencies of their particular personalities. Their responses were so transparent: fight, fuck, destroy, captivate, curry favor. The problem was that he wanted to do all those things as well, and if he became weak he was going to fall in love with some brilliant, fresh-faced girl one of these days. He knew he wasn’t immune to doing something precisely because it was a very bad idea.

  But he had gotten through, stayed cool and untouchable even though he had woken in the morning feeling as though he rose from the ashes of a smoking ruin. The woman he loved had cut off his prick—metaphor, metaphor—and he’d had to get drunk by himself in front of the television. He’d scoured his brain and could think of no one with whom to telephone and share his misery. He’d never been close with his father, who despite the accident of having a family only wanted to be left to his pot pipe and basement wood shop. Stephen hadn’t talked to his brother in more than five years. The few friends who might be candidates for commiseration were scattered around the country, mostly with families, and he knew from experience that the unfamiliar sound of their voices on the phone line would preclude any hope of intimacy.

  Face it—intimacy is vastly overrated. Stephen could have found someone to listen to his tale of woe, even a friendly bartender. But was it even worth telling? Man gets girl, girl loses heart. Girl’s father pulls gun. Man files for restraining order.

  Stephen closed his office door and stripped off his clothes. He folded his slacks and laid them over the chair along with his shirt and tie. He began pulling on his black running tights, a laborious exercise made worse by the close confines of the room.

  The restraining order had been a spur-of-the-moment thing—Stephen had actually been downtown at the Government Center renewing the tags on his car when it occurred to him that he could legally order Lewis to lay off. He briefly considered finding a police desk and asking about filing charges, but that seemed too vindictive. When Lewis had silently approached and flashed the gun, he had seemed pretty lost and befuddled—a man unraveling, if Stephen was any judge. So Stephen found the right office, filled out the paperwork, and had Lewis served with papers. Hopefully it had been enough to shock Lewis out of his funk of weirdness. While it was of course impossible for Stephen and Lewis to reach any sort of accord, Stephen had a sort of residual fondness for the old boy, and a muted respect. Now that he never had to deal with him again, Stephen realized that he sort of liked Lewis, and would miss him.

  “That might be going too far,” Stephen muttered to his own Greek chorus, bent over the laces of his running shoes. He slipped on his reflective tunic, a hat and gloves, and opened the door to his office.

  He stopped in the hallway to view himself in the mirror. He looked preposterous. His hat made his hair flare out around his ears like a pair of wings, and his ridiculous getup combined the worst elements of a football uniform with a ballet outfit. But damn it, he was going on a run. He had to defy the snow, and Jay, and Lewis, and English Literature, and the crushing reality of his own incarnation. He wasn’t going to recoil from the snow and the cold like every molecule of his California-reared body demanded. No, he would go out and enjoy the weather, and his life.

  “You are not dressed like that,” said Sonia Wiley, walking down the hall with a pile of folders under her arm.

  “Your eyes do not lie,” Stephen replied.

  Sonia was a secretary in the department, a few years older than Stephen and married with two small children. She was compact and wiry and, though she seemed perfectly content with her family life, Stephen found her extraordinarily attractive. Not least among her many virtues were a pair of perspicacious brown eyes set in the flawless skin of her face, eyes that bespoke a radiant nuance of perception that made her sarcasm and casual ribbing all the more provocative.

  “Well, your legs sort of look good in those tights,” Sonia said.

  “My God,” Stephen said. “The first compliment I’ve heard in ages.”

  “Yeah, like I believe that,” Sonia said, brushing her dark hair from her forehead.

  Students were passing by—thankfully, none of them Stephen’s. He didn’t want this interrupted.

  “No, I mean it,” he said. “Your small kindness is going to buoy me for the rest of the day.”

  “Oh, you are so full of shit.” Sonia adjusted her load of folders. “But really, come on—you’re going out running? Today? Have you noticed the weather?”

  “Clear and sunny,” said Stephen. He tapped his forehead. “The weather’s all a state of mind.”

  “Your state of mind is crazy.” Sonia laughed. “No kidding, Stephen. Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I run on the path by the river,” he said, feeling his confidence in his endeavor begin to wane. It was snowing like hell—he could see that through a window at the far end of the hall. But what was he to do? He was already wearing his silly costume.

  “Stephen,” Sonia said, with a tone she must have reserved for her children. “Seriously. You could slip and hurt yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m too nimble for that.” He laughed. “See, you don’t know that about me. I have many talents.”

  Sonia smiled an enigmatic smile. “So you say.”

  “Well, anyway.” Stephen scuffed his shoes against the floor, feeling very intimidated by the depths and confidence he sensed in Sonia’s sexuality. That was the thing about flirting—he wasn’t particularly good at it. Sonia, if she chose, could probably turn Stephen into an intemperate lunatic. She was the kind of woman who understood this and found it amusing. She was far more sensible than Stephen, and at the end of the day would go home to her husband and children—the life she had chosen, the one that suited her. Stephen, like most men, was a penis on legs careening from one opportunity to the next. Some men, he supposed, had the skill and audacity to go around ch
oosing partners, but he was not one of them. He was always the one who got chosen. And Sonia, if she wanted, could choose him.

  But she wasn’t going to.

  “Don’t do it,” she said in a stern voice. “Change back into your regular clothes. Have a cup of coffee. If you have to run, there are treadmills at the fitness center.”

  “I want to be outside,” Stephen said. “I have things to work through.”

  “Your girlfriend,” Sonia said, flashing a galaxy of comprehension.

  “Ex-girlfriend,” Stephen corrected.

  Sonia nodded, a little sadly, as though in pity for those who hadn’t sorted their lives out.

  “Just be careful,” she said. “It’s cold. It’s snowing hard. There’s a lot of ice out there.”

  “I’ll be back in about half an hour,” Stephen said.

  “It’s your funeral,” Sonia said over her shoulder, making her way back to her office.

  My funeral. The great dream—attending one’s own memorial. The way things were going, there wouldn’t be too much trouble arranging a sufficient number of chairs.

  When he got out of the department and started jogging down the path toward the river, Stephen labored to breathe until he felt his lungs reach an uneasy accord with the cold, dense air. The sky was gray and glowing with the sun’s radiance diffused through the clouds, and the snow, which was falling quite heavily. There were far fewer cars than usual on the road, and the campus had an about-to-shut-down quality. But Stephen knew better. It was going to take more than a foot of snow to close down an institution in Minnesota. Soon the plows would be at work, the shovels would be scraping, it would be as though nothing had happened.

  Quickly the campus began to thin out and the path branched off. The snow fell in heavy clumps and his breath condensed in a fog around his head. Stephen followed a fork over a rise into a patch of woods. His legs ached—it had been more than a week since his last run—and his eyes watered in the cold and his nose began to fill up.

  But then he took a bend in the road and everything changed. He was alone on a pathway that threaded along the Mississippi—the actual river was far below, at the bottom of a small canyon it had carved out over the millennia. Here, in the heavy snowfall, in some of the coldest air he had ever sensed, Stephen had lucked onto perfection.

  There was next to no sound save for the cushioned impact of his running shoes. The snow was falling hard enough to create a shimmering curtain over all things, and the sky was shining with that strange diffuse luminosity—it made Stephen think of the long adagio in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

  “Good lord,” Stephen whispered to himself as he ran. And this was no appeal to a Christian God, or to secular reason, but to the view itself. If it was possible to pray to the force he was witnessing, that was what he wanted to do.

  The landscape wound in gentle curves. The tree-lined edge of the land gave way to a slope; below was the river, silent and white. On the other side the land rose again in birches and elms. All was white. It fell from the sky, it accumulated at his feet, and it covered every branch and shrub. It was as though the void was reaching out and creating a monument to itself, a crystalline, bleached, padded, silent cathedral in which Stephen was the sole worshiper. His pulse rose, and he no longer even felt the cold as anything other than refreshing ambience. He could see not a single other person. Fools. They were inside? Missing this?

  He ran down a small depression, feet skidding a little, the weight of all the snow in the air overwhelming him. Problems? He had no problems. This experience, he felt without irony, would be enough to get him by for weeks. It was snowing so heavily that it looked as if the flakes were rising up from the ground and ascending into the sky.

  It was enough to make him laugh out loud. It was snowing so heavily that Stephen wanted to walk upon it, to rise in its midst, to take it like a staircase into the sky. And the sky was so close, close enough that he could almost jump up and touch it.

  Then he was no longer alone. The figure that stepped from the trees was tall, wearing a hat and scarf, and it moved from the woods into the center of the path, on an interception course.

  Lewis?

  Lewis stood blinking snowflakes out of his eyes, looking shocked and surprised as though it was Stephen who had appeared out of nowhere like an apparition.

  Stephen stopped running as he neared Lewis, slowing to a jog then halting. He stood panting, reaching down to rub his hamstrings.

  “What is this?” he asked, his voice sounding odd as he panted to catch his breath.

  “We can’t go on the way we have been,” Lewis said, his voice thick and cold as the air. His strong features were composed into a visage of decision.

  “What are you—” Stephen paused, moving around Lewis in a half-circle. “Didn’t you hear? Jay broke up with me. She walked out. You got what you wanted, all right? Just fuck off and leave me alone.”

  “Nothing’s right,” Lewis said, reaching up to caress his chest through his coat. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “Lewis, I filed a restraining order against you,” Stephen said. “What you’re doing is illegal.”

  “None of this is right,” Lewis said.

  Stephen understood that the man had actually gone off the rails. Lewis was distracted, as though taking in more than one level of reality at the same time. He was talking to Stephen in the oddest fashion, with a complete absence of social inference or any of the little habits and markers that people utilize in their efforts to be understood. It was as though Lewis was talking to himself in a dream.

  “No, no,” Lewis said. “You’ve created far too many problems. You’re behind this.”

  “I’m going to complete my run,” Stephen said. “You’re going to go home. And I’m never going to see you again. Do you follow me?”

  Lewis looked up at Stephen with a chilling emptiness in his eyes.

  “It’s all coming to an end,” he declared. “But it isn’t over yet. I’m going to fight this. I’m going to find her.”

  He closed the distance between himself and Stephen, and before Stephen could begin to comprehend what was happening, they began to struggle. Lewis was alarmingly strong, and Stephen’s sneakers slipped and skidded on the icy pavement. Lewis was working his hands up toward Stephen’s throat, and Stephen managed to hack them away and plant a decent open-handed slap onto the thick wool of Lewis’s hat. Stephen stumbled a couple of steps, and considered whether it would be a humiliation to run for it.

  He glanced up and down the path. No one. There was no one to witness what was happening.

  In that instant, when he looked away from Lewis, the old boy decided to change his tactic. He lowered his shoulder and drove himself into Stephen—how strange it was to be lifted off his feet.

  Lewis propelled Stephen off the path and over the snow that separated it from the drop to the river. Stephen felt as though he was flying through the snow with the sky close enough to touch. He almost enjoyed the experience until he realized what was happening.

  He grabbed at Lewis as balance totally left him, desperate to cling to the earth, terrified of leaving it—but then the fight was lost. He tumbled over the edge. He fell and fell, and could not stop himself.

  His mind was in a riot as he felt his body breaking. The cold was no longer a friend, and no one, it seemed, was going to save him.

  Lewis watched Stephen go over the edge. His own body gave a huge convulsive jerk, as though it was he who was doing the falling, and he planted his feet hard in the snow and gasped like he was waking up from a dream. He took a couple of steps forward and looked down to see Stephen tumbling, twisting, moving downward and tossing up snow as he went.

  Lewis had woken that morning feeling sure of himself, though filled with strangeness—it was as if he was slipping away and had to do something to set things right. He had swallowed his pills at the kitchen sink with Carew at his feet, the dog nervous and unsettled, sensing the veil of insubstantial breaking-up his master was suf
fering. Lewis remembered putting his hand on the dog, trying to be reassuring; despite the drifting away in his spirit, Lewis did feel sure of himself. He knew this was going to be a day in which everything changed.

  He looked around. She wasn’t there.

  Stephen had gone limp about halfway down the slope and rolled the final dozen feet or so through a snow-covered thicket and—could it be? was it possible?—into the water. Lewis watched in rapt fascination as Stephen broke through the ice and sank slowly into the shallow water. He must have been hurt, because he surely could have simply sat up and saved himself.

  But he didn’t. He sank. His face, looking up to the gray sky, disappeared under the black water.

  Lewis looked around again. There was no one on the path. No one had seen what had taken place.

  Was the situation redeemable? I just wanted to talk. He started the fight. It was an accident that he went over the edge. The restraining order he filed against me? Hysteria. I was trying to explain why it was unnecessary.

  Of course the point of restraining orders was that the time for explaining was past.

  Cars crossed the bridge. No one seemed to be slowing. Lewis could see Stephen’s knees poking out of the water’s surface, but his head remained submerged.

  Got to go down there! a voice screamed inside Lewis’s head. Got to save him! For God’s sake, don’t let this happen!

  He took a step toward the edge. He could be down there in thirty seconds. He could pull Stephen from the water and haul him to a doctor. No, no: the cell phone. He turned it on.

  He could dial 911 and put a stop to this. He could simply tell the truth: that he had found Stephen’s office door unlocked and saw his clothes inside, deduced that Stephen had gone running, remembered that the path along the river was his route of choice. He wasn’t armed. He hadn’t premeditated murder.

  And murder was what this was becoming. Another murder.