The Snow Queen. Michael Cunningham

conversation and her concerns and her mannerisms aren’t so clearly struggling to survive the failing of her body.

      Has Barrett been given a sign about Beth? Does the fact that some immense inhuman intelligence elected to appear to him at this particular time have anything to do with Beth slipping off into more and more sleep?

      Or was the vision just a little flesh-stone pressing against his cerebral cortex? How will he feel when, a year or so from now, someone in an emergency room tells him they could have caught that tumor if only he’d acted sooner?

      He’s not going to see a doctor. If he had a regular doctor (he imagines her as Swedish, sixty-plus, stern but not fanatical about his health; prone to mild, mock-serious scoldings about his modest amalgam of less-than-salubrious pleasures), he’d call her. Given that he’s uninsured, subject to clinics and the ministrations of medical students who are learning on the job, he can’t seem to bring himself to face the questions an unknown doctor would pose about his history of mental health. It’s only possible for him to imagine discussing the celestial light with someone who knows him, already, as fundamentally sane.

      Would he rather risk death than embarrassment? It seems that he would.

      Quietly (he’s still in his socks, shoes are left by the front door, a strange local custom, given the apartment’s less-than-tidy nature), Barrett walks into the room and stands beside the bed, listening to the steady murmur of Beth’s breathing.

      He can smell her—the lavender soap they all use, mingled with a smell he can only think of as womanly, a ripe cleanliness that’s somehow enhanced and deepened by sleep, all mixed up now with the powder and nettle of her medicines, the strangest roil of pharmaceutical immaculacy and some sour chamomile-family herb that has in all likelihood been gathered for centuries in bogs and marshes, along with a sickroom smell he can only think of as electric, the indescribable cauterizing invisible whatever that runs through wires hidden in the walls of rooms in which someone is mortally ill.

      He bends over, looks closely at Beth’s face, which is pretty, pretty enough, but, at the same time, better than pretty, more personal. If prettiness implies a certain quality of banal resemblance, Beth looks like no one but herself. Her lips, slightly parted, issuing the faint whistle of her breath, are puffy and puckery; her nose some remnant of an Asian ancestor, with its flattened humility, its little slits of nostrils; her eyelids blue-white, the lashes sable; the pallid pinkish melon scalp of her chemo-induced baldness.

      She’s lovely, but she’s not a great beauty, and her accomplishments are charming, but minor. She’s a good baker. She has fashion sense. She’s smart, an avid reader. She’s kind to just about everyone.

      Is it possible that the light, by choosing to appear to him as Beth fades, meant something about a life that continues beyond the limits of the flesh?

      Or is that some messianic bent of Barrett’s?

      Could that be why his lover left? Because he’s too prone to Signs of Significance?

      Barrett bends low, puts his face so close to Beth’s that he can feel her breath on his chin. She’s alive. She’s alive right now. Her eyelids twitch over a dream.

      He imagines her dreams as pale and buoyant, bright even in extremis; no lurking invisible terrors, no shriek of annihilation, no innocent-seeming heads turning to reveal black holes instead of eyes, or teeth like razors. He hopes that’s true.

      A moment later he stands, abruptly, as if somebody had called his name. He almost stumbles backward over the fact that Beth is being taken out so early, and that her absence will be felt by a small body of people, but will otherwise go unnoticed. It’s not a surprise. But it strikes him now with particular force. Is it more tragic, or is it less, to slip so quietly and briefly into and out of the world? To have added, and altered, so little.

      An unwelcome thought: Beth’s primary accomplishment may be to have loved and been loved by Tyler. Tyler, who sees something invisible even to everyone else who loves her. She is widely loved. But Tyler adores her, Tyler is fascinated by her, Tyler finds her extraordinary.

      As does Barrett, though he does so because Tyler does. Still. Beth will have been loved ardently by a main man and a backup man. She will have been, in a certain sense, doubly married.

      How exactly will Tyler live on after she’s departed? Barrett adores Beth, and (as far as he knows) she adores him in return, but it’s Tyler, and Tyler alone, who delivers the daily ministrations. How will he live not only with the loss of her but also the loss of the purpose she’s created, these past two years? Caring for Beth has been his career. He’s played and composed his music on the side, whenever he’s not too urgently needed.

      Somehow, Barrett has failed to fully apprehend it until now: Tyler is worried, Tyler is aggrieved, but also, since Beth’s diagnosis, he’s been more content than Barrett has seen him in years. Tyler would never admit it, not even to himself, but seeing to Beth—comforting her, feeding her, keeping track of her medication, arguing with her doctors—has made him successful. Here is something he can do, and can do well, as the music flicks teasingly around him, just out of reach. And there is, probably, isn’t there, something dreadful but calming about the certainty of failure, in the end. Hardly anyone becomes a great musician. No one can reach into the body of a loved one, and scrape the cancer away. One blames oneself for the former. One has nothing to say about the latter.

      Barrett places his hand, gently, onto Beth’s forehead, though he hadn’t exactly intended to. He feels as if he’s watching his hand perform an act he didn’t ask of it. Beth murmurs, but doesn’t awaken.

      Barrett does his best to transmit some kind of healing force, through the palm of his hand. Then he walks back out of the sickroom, returns to the comforting normalcy of the hall, and heads for the kitchen, where Tyler is awake, where coffee has been made, where the rampancy of life, even in its most rudimentary form, plays like an enchanted piper; where Tyler, suitor and swain, ferocious of brow, thin but athletically tendoned legs protruding from boxer shorts, does what he can to prepare for his forthcoming marriage.

      The marriage thing is very weird,” Liz says to Andrew. They’re standing on her roof, with snow billowing around them. They’ve come up to the roof for the shock of it, after a night that just rolled off the time-spool (my god, Andrew, it’s four in the morning; shit, Andrew, how’d it suddenly get to be five thirty, we’ve got to get some sleep). They’ve been too high to have sex, but there were moments, there were moments, during the night, when it seemed to Liz that she was explaining herself entirely; that she was able to hold her very being in her outstretched palms and say, here I am, here’s the golden box all tricked open, every hidden drawer and false bottom released; here is my honor and my generosity, here are my wounds and my fears, the real as well as the imaginary; here is what I see and think and feel; here is my acuity and my hope and my way of turning a phrase; here is the … me-ness of me, the tangible but inchoate entity that shifts and buzzes within the flesh, the central part that simply is, the part that finds it wonderful and appalling and strange to be a woman named Liz who lives in Brooklyn and owns a shop; the unnamed and unnameable; that which God would recognize after the flesh has fallen away.

      Really, who needed to have sex?

      Now she is quieting, returning, reconnecting (with both sorrow and gratitude) to her more corporeal self, the self that still blazes with its own light and heat but is tethered by all the sinewy little strings—the self that’s capable of pettiness and irritation, skepticism and needless anxiety. She is no longer aloft, no longer spreading a star-studded cloak over the nocturnal woods; she is still full of mingled magic but she is also a woman standing on a roof with her much-younger boyfriend, pelted by blowing snow, a denizen of the ordinary world, someone who might say, The marriage thing is very weird.