The Snow Queen. Michael Cunningham

though—this haunted, half-empty neighborhood, where the burned carcass of an old Buick has remained (strangely pious in its rusted-out, gutted and graffitied, absolute uselessness) for the last year, on the street beneath Tyler’s window—there’s a gaunt beauty summoned by the pre-dawn light; a sense of compromised but still-living hope. Even in Bushwick. Here’s a fall of new snow, serious snow, immaculate, with its hint of benediction, as if some company that delivers hush and accord to the better neighborhoods had gotten the wrong address.

      If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you’d better learn to praise the small felicities.

      And, living as Tyler does in this place, in this placidly impoverished neighborhood of elderly aluminum siding, of warehouses and parking lots, all utilitarian, all built on the cheap, with its just-barely-managing little businesses and its daunted denizens (Dominicans, mostly, people who went to considerable effort to get here—who had, must have had, higher hopes than those that Bushwick has granted them) trudging dutifully along to or from minimum-wage jobs—as if defeat could no longer be defeated, as if one were lucky to have anything at all. It isn’t even particularly dangerous anymore; there is of course the occasional robbery but it seems, for the most part, that even the criminals have lost their ambition. In a place like this, praise is elusive. It’s difficult to stand at a window, watching snow feather onto the overflowing garbage cans (the garbage trucks seem to remember, sporadically, unpredictably, that there’s garbage to collect here, too) and the cracked cobblestones, without thinking ahead to its devolution into dun-colored sludge, the brown tarns of ankle-deep street-corner puddles upon which cigarette butts and balls of foil gum wrappers (fool’s silver) will float.

      Tyler should go back to bed. Another interlude of sleep and who knows, he might wake into a world of more advanced, resolute cleanliness, a world wearing a still-heavier white blanket over its bedrock of drudgery and ash.

      He’s reluctant, however, to leave the window in this condition of sludgy wistfulness. Going back to bed now would be too much like seeing a delicately emotional stage play that comes to neither a tragic nor happy ending, that begins to sputter out until there are no more actors onstage, until the audience realizes that the play must be over, that it’s time to get up and leave the theater.

      Tyler has promised he’ll cut down. He’s been good about it, for the past couple of days. But now, right now, it’s a minor metaphysical emergency. Beth isn’t worse, but she isn’t better, either. Knickerbocker Avenue is waiting patiently through its brief interlude of accidental beauty until it can return to the slush and puddle that is its natural state.

      All right. This morning, he’ll give himself a break. He can re-summon his rigor easily enough. This is only a boost, at a time when a boost is needed.

      He goes to the nightstand, takes his vial from the drawer, and sucks up a couple of quick ones.

      And here it is. Here’s the sting of livingness. He’s back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he’s renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

      He returns to the window. If that windblown ice crystal meant to weld itself to his eye, the transformation is already complete; he can see more clearly now with the aid of this minuscule magnifying mirror …

      Here’s Knickerbocker Avenue again, and, yes, it will soon return to its ongoing condition of anywhereness, it’s not as if Tyler has forgotten that, but the grimy impending future doesn’t matter, in very much the way Beth says that morphine doesn’t eradicate the pain but puts it aside, renders it unimportant, a sideshow curiosity, mortifying (See the Snake Boy! See the Bearded Lady!) but remote and, of course, a hoax, just spirit gum and latex.

      Tyler’s own, lesser pain, the dampness of his inner workings, all those wires that hiss and spark in his brain, has been snapped dry by the coke. A moment ago, he was fuzzed out and mordant, but now—quick suck of harsh magic—he’s all acuity and verve. He’s shed his own costume, and the true suit of himself fits him perfectly. Tyler is a one-man audience, standing naked at a window at the start of the twenty-first century, with hope clattering in his rib cage. It seems possible that all the surprises (he didn’t exactly plan on being an unknown musician at forty-three, living in eroticized chastity with his dying girlfriend and his younger brother, who has turned, by slow degrees, from a young wizard into a tired middle-aged magician, summoning doves out of a hat for the ten thousandth time) have been part of an inscrutable effort, too immense to see; some accumulation of lost chances and canceled plans and girls who were almost but not quite, all of which seemed random at the time but have brought him here, to this window, to his difficult but interesting life, his bulldoggish loves, his still-taut belly (the drugs help) and jut of dick (his own) as the Republicans are about to go down and a new world, cold and clean, is set to begin.

      Tyler will get a rag and wipe the melted snow off the floorboards. He will take care of it. He will adore Beth and Barrett with more purity. He will gather and procure, take on an extra shift at the bar, praise the snow and all it touches. He will get them out of this grim apartment, sing ferociously into the heart of the world, find an agent, stitch it all together, remember to soak the beans for cassoulet, get Beth to chemo on time, do less coke and cut out Dilaudid entirely, finally finish reading The Scarlet and the Black. He will hold Beth and Barrett, console them, remind them of how little there is to worry about, feed them, tell them the stories that render them that much more visible to themselves.

      Outside, the snow shifts with a shift in the wind, and it seems as if some benign force, some vast invisible watcher, has known what Tyler wanted, the moment before he knew it himself—a sudden animation, a change, the gentle steady snowfall taken up and turned into fluttering sheets, an airy map of the wind currents; and yes—are you ready, Tyler?—it’s time to release the pigeons, five of them, from the liquor store roof, time to set them aflight and then (are you watching?) turn them, silvered by early light, counter to the windblown flakes, sail them effortlessly west into the agitated air that’s blowing the snow toward the East River (where barges will be plowing, whitened like ships of ice, through the choppy water); and yes, right, a moment later it’s time to turn the streetlights off and, simultaneously, bring a truck around the corner of Rock Street, its headlights still on and its flat silver top blinking little warning lights, garnet and ruby, that’s perfect, that’s amazing, thank you.

      Barrett runs shirtless through the snow flurries. His chest is scarlet; his breath explodes in steam-puffs. He’s slept for a few agitated hours. Now he’s going for his morning run. He finds that he’s comforted by this utterly usual act, sprinting along Knickerbocker, leaving behind a small, quickly evaporating trail of his own exhalations, like a locomotive rumbling through some still-slumbering, snow-decked town, though Bushwick feels like an actual town, subject to a town’s structural logic (as opposed to its true condition of random buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots, possessed of neither center nor outskirts), only at daybreak, only in its gelid hush, which is soon to end. Soon the delis and shops will open on Flushing, car horns will bleat, the deranged man—filthy and oracular, glowing with insanity like some of the more livid and mortified saints—will take up his station, with a sentry’s diligence, on the corner of Knickerbocker and Rock. But at the moment, for the moment, it’s actually quiet. Knickerbocker is muffled and nascent and dreamless, empty except for a few cars crawling cautiously along, cutting their headlights into the falling snow.

      It’s been coming down since midnight. Snow eddies and tumbles as the point of equinox passes, and the sky starts all but imperceptibly turning from its nocturnal blackish brown to the lucid velvety gray of first morning, New York’s only innocent sky.

      Last night the sky awakened, opened an eye, and saw neither more nor less than Barrett Meeks, homeward bound in a Cossack-style overcoat, standing on the icy platter of Central Park. The sky regarded him, noted him, closed its eye again, and returned to what were, as Barrett can only imagine, more revelatory, incandescent, galaxy-wheeling dreams.

      A fear: last night was nothing, a blip, an accidental glimpse behind a celestial curtain, just one of those things. Barrett was no more “chosen” than an upstairs maid would be destined to marry