The Snow Queen. Michael Cunningham

to be empty.

      Another fear: last night was something, but it’s impossible to know, or even guess at, what. Barrett, a perverse, wrong-headed Catholic even in his grade school days (the gray-veined marble Christ at the entrance to the Transfiguration School was hot, he had a six-pack and biceps and that mournful, maidenly face), can’t remember being told, not even by the most despairing of the nuns, of a vision delivered so arbitrarily, so absent of context. Visions are answers. Answers imply questions.

      It’s not as if Barrett lacks questions. Who does? But nothing much that begs response from prophet or oracle. Even if the chance were offered, would he want a disciple to run sock-footed down a dim and flickering corridor to interrupt the seer for the purpose of asking, Why do Barrett Meeks’s boyfriends all turn out to be sadistic dweebs? Or, What occupation will finally hold Barrett’s interest for longer than six months?

      What, then—if intention was expressed last night, if that celestial eye opened specifically for Barrett—was the annunciation? What exactly did the light want him to go forth and do?

      When he got home, he asked Tyler if he’d seen it (Beth was in bed, held in orbit by the increasing gravitational pull of her twilight zone). When Tyler said, “Seen what?” Barrett found, to his surprise, that he was reluctant to say anything about the light. There was of course the obvious explanation—who wants his older brother to suspect he’s delusional?—but there was as well a more peculiar sense, for Barrett, of a need for discretion, as if he’d been silently instructed to tell no one. So he made up something quick, about a hit-and-run on the corner of Thames Street.

      And then he checked the news.

      Nothing. The election, of course. And the fact that Arafat is dying; that the torture at Guantánamo has been confirmed; that a much-anticipated space capsule containing samples taken from the sun has crashed, because its parachute failed to open.

      But no lantern-jawed newscaster locked eyes with the camera and said, This evening the eye of God looked down upon the earth …

      Barrett made dinner (Tyler can’t be counted on these days to remember that people need to eat periodically, and Beth is too ill). He allowed himself to return to wondering about this last, lost love. Maybe it was that late-night phone conversation, when Barrett knew he was going on too long about the deranged customer who’d insisted that, before he bought a particular jacket, he’d need proof that it had been made under cruelty-free conditions—Barrett can be a bore sometimes, right?—or maybe it was the night he hit the cue ball right off the table, and the lesbian made that remark to her girlfriend (he can be an embarrassment sometimes, too).

      He could not, however, contemplate his mysterious misdeeds for long. He’d seen something impossible. Something that, apparently, no one else saw.

      He made dinner. He tried to continue compiling his list of reasons for having been dumped.

      Now, the following morning, he’s going for his run. Why wouldn’t he?

      As he leaps over a frozen puddle at the corner of Knickerbocker and Thames, the streetlights turn themselves off. Now that a very different light has shown itself to him, he finds himself imagining some connection between the leap and the extinguishment, as if he, Barrett, had ordered the streetlights dimmed, by jumping. As if a lone man, out for his regular three miles, could be the instigator of the new day.

      There’s that difference, between yesterday and today.

      Tyler battles an urge to step up onto the bedroom windowsill. He’s not thinking of suicide. Fuck no. And, all right, if he were thinking of suicide, this is only the second floor. The best he might do is break a leg, and maybe—maybe—his skull might kiss the pavement with enough force to produce a concussion. But it would be a pathetic gesture—the loser version of that wearily defiant, ineluctably suave decision to say That’s enough, and waltz offstage. He has no desire to end up lying on the sidewalk, merely sprained and bruised, akimbo, after a leap into a void that can’t have been more than twenty feet.

      He’s not thinking suicide, he’s thinking merely of going into the storm; of being more stingingly assaulted by wind and snow. The trouble (one of the troubles) with this apartment is one can only be inside it, looking out a window, or outside, on the street, looking up at the window. It would be so fine, so brilliant, to be naked in the weather; to be that available to it.

      He contents himself, as he must, by leaning out as far as he can, which produces little more than a frosty wind-smack across his face, and snow pelting his hair.

      Back from his run, Barrett enters the apartment, its warmth and its smell: the damp-wood sauna steam exhaled by its ancient radiators; the powdery scent of Beth’s medicines; the varnish-and-paint undertones that refuse to dissipate, as if something in this old dump can’t fully absorb any attempt at improvement; as if the ghost that is the building itself cannot and will not believe that its walls aren’t still bare, smoke-stained plaster, its rooms no longer inhabited by long-skirted women sweating over stoves as their factory-worker husbands sit cursing at kitchen tables. These recently enforced home-improvement smells, this mix of paint and doctor’s office, can’t do much more than float over a deep ur-smell of ham fat and sweat and spunk, of armpit and whiskey and wet dark rot.

      The apartment’s warmth brings a tingling numbness to Barrett’s skin. On his morning runs he joins the cold, inhabits it the way a long-distance swimmer must inhabit water, and only when he’s back inside does he understand that he is in fact half frozen. He’s not a comet after all, but a man, hopelessly so, and, being human, must be pulled back in—to the apartment, the boat, the space shuttle—before he perishes of the annihilating beauties, the frigid airless silent places, the helixed and spiraled blackness he’d love to claim as his true home.

      A light appeared to him. And vanished again, like some unwelcome memory of his churchly childhood. Barrett has, since the age of fifteen, been adamantly secular, as only an ex-Catholic can be. He released himself, decades ago, from folly and prejudice, from the holy blood that arrived in cardboard cartons by way of UPS; from the stodgy, defeated cheerfulness of priests.

      He saw a light, though. The light saw him.

      What should he do about that?

      For now, it’s time for his morning bath.

      In the hall, on his way to the bathroom, Barrett passes Tyler and Beth’s door, which has yawned open during the night, as do all the doors and drawers and cabinets in this slanty apartment. Barrett pauses, doesn’t speak. Tyler is leaning out the window, naked, with his back to the open door, getting snowed upon.

      Barrett has always been fascinated by his brother’s body. He and Tyler are not particularly similar, as brothers go. Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with avid yellow eyes, love’s first kiss. Tyler is lithe and stringy, tensely muscled. He can look, even in repose, like an aerialist about to jump from a platform. Tyler’s is, somehow, a lean but decorative body, a performer’s body; for some reason the word “jaunty” comes to mind. Tyler is irreverent in his body. He exudes the minor devilishness of a circus performer.

      He and Barrett are rarely recognized as brothers. And yet, some inscrutable genetic intention is apparent in them. Barrett knows it with certainty, though he couldn’t explain. They are similar in ways known only to them. They possess a certain feral knowledge of each other, excrescence and scat. They are never mysterious, one to another, even when they’re mysterious to everybody else. It’s not that they don’t argue or challenge; it’s just that nothing one of them does or says ever seems to actually baffle the other. They seem to have agreed, long ago, without ever speaking about it, to keep their affinities secret when they’re in company; to bicker at dinner parties, to vie for attention, to carelessly insult and dismiss; to act, in public, like ordinary brothers, and keep their chaste, ardent romance to themselves, as if they were a two-member sect, passing as regular citizens, waiting for their moment to act.

      Tyler turns from the window.