The Snow Queen. Michael Cunningham

he’s seen something extraordinary, and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a mortal ailment he failed to find on the Internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, he is exactly who he was last night.

      However. The question arises: Who was he last night? Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his own ongoing condition? It’s a hard one to answer.

      An answer might account for how and why Barrett and Tyler have lived so randomly (they, the National Merit boys—well, Barrett; Tyler was a runner-up—club presidents, Tyler crowned king of the fucking prom); why they happened to meet Liz when he and Tyler went, as each other’s date, to what has lived on as the Worst Party in History; why the three of them escaped the party and passed midnight together in some divey Irish pub; why Liz would eventually introduce Beth, newly arrived from Chicago; Beth who in no way resembles any of Tyler’s previous girlfriends, and with whom he’d fallen so immediately in love that he resembled some captive animal, fed for years on what its keepers believed to be its natural diet and then suddenly, one day, by accident, given what it actually ate, in the wild.

      None of it has ever felt predetermined. It’s sequential, but not exactly orderly. It’s all been going to this party instead of that one, happening to meet someone who knew someone who by the evening’s end had fucked you in a doorway on Tenth Avenue or given you K for the first time or said something shockingly kind, out of nowhere, and then gone away forever, promising to call; or, with an equally haphazard aspect, happening to meet someone who’ll change everything, forever.

      And now it’s a Tuesday in November. Barrett has gone for his morning run, had his morning bath. He’s going to work. What is there to do but what he always does? He’ll sell the wares (it’ll be slow today, because of the weather). He’ll continue with his exercise regimen and the no-carbs diet that will not make any difference to Andrew but will, might, help Barrett feel more agile and tragic, less like a badger besotted by a lion cub.

      Will he see the light again? What if he doesn’t? Maybe he’ll grow old as a tale-teller who once saw something inexplicable; a UFO person, a Bigfoot person, a codger who experienced a brief, wondrous sighting of something inexplicable, and then went on about the business of getting older; who is part of the ongoing subhistory of crackpots and delusionals, the legions of geezers who know what they saw, decades ago, and if you don’t believe it, young one, that’s all right, maybe one day you, too, will see something you can’t explain, and then, well, then I guess you’ll know.

      Beth is looking for something.

      The trouble: She can’t seem to remember what it is.

      She knows this much: She’s been careless, she’s misplaced … what? Something that matters, something that must be found, because … it’s needed. Because she’ll be held accountable when its absence is noticed.

      She’s searching a house, although she’s not sure if it (what?) is here. It seems possible. Because she’s been in this house before. She recognizes it, or remembers it, in the way she remembers the houses of her childhood. The house multiplies into the houses in which she lived, variously, until she went away to college. There’s the gray-and-white-striped wallpaper of the house in Evanston, the French doors from Winnetka (were they really this narrow?), the crown molding from the second house in Winnetka (was it wound in these white plaster leaves, was there this suggestion of wise but astonished eyes, peering through the leaves?).

      They’ll be back soon. Somebody will be back soon. Someone stern. The harder Beth searches, though, the less sense she has of what it is she’s lost. It’s small, isn’t it? Spherical? Is it too small to be visible? It might be. But that doesn’t alter the urgency of its discovery.

      She’s the girl in the fairy tale, told to turn snow into gold by morning.

      She can’t do that, of course she can’t, but there seems to be snow everywhere, it’s falling from the ceiling, snowdrifts shimmer in the corners. She remembers dreaming about searching through a house, when what she needs to do is turn snow into gold, how could she have forgotten …

      She looks down at her feet. Although the floor is dusted with snow, she can see that she’s standing on a door, a trapdoor, contiguous with the floorboards, made apparent only by its pair of brass hinges and its tiny brass knob, no bigger than a gumball.

      Her mother gives her a penny for a gumball machine outside the A&P. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother that one of the gumballs is poisoned, no one should put a penny into this machine, but her mother is so delighted by Beth’s delight, she’s got to put the penny in, hasn’t she?

      There’s a trapdoor at her feet, in the sidewalk in front of the A&P. It’s snowing here, too.

      Her mother urges her to put the penny into the slot. Beth can hear laughter, coming from underneath the door.

      An annihilating force, a swirling orb of malevolence, is what’s laughing under the trapdoor. Beth knows this to be true. Is the door beginning, ever so slowly, to open?

      She’s holding the penny. Her mother says, “Put it in.” It comes to her that the penny is what she thought she was searching for. She seems to have found it, by accident.

      Tyler sits in the kitchen, sipping coffee and doing one last line. He’s still wearing the boxer shorts, and has put on Barrett’s old Yale sweatshirt, its grimacing bulldog faded, by now, from red to a faint, candyish pink. Tyler sits at the table Beth found on the street, cloudy gray Formica that’s chipped away in one corner, a ragged-edged gap the shape of the state of Idaho. When this table was new, people expected domed cities to rise on the ocean floor. They believed that they lived on the brink of a holy and ecstatic conjuring of metal and glass and silent, rubberized speed.

      The world is older now. It can, at times, seem very old indeed.

      They will not reelect George Bush. They cannot reelect George Bush.

      Tyler pushes the thought out of his mind. It would be foolish to spend this lambent early hour obsessing. He’s got a song to finish.

      So as not to awaken Beth, he leaves his guitar in the corner. He whisper-sings, a cappella, the verse he wrote last night.

       To walk the frozen halls at night

       To find you on your throne of ice

       To melt this sliver in my heart

       Oh, that’s not what I came for

       No, that’s not what I came for.

      Hmm. It’s crap, is it?

      The trouble is …

      The trouble is he’s determined to write a wedding song that won’t be all treacle and devotion, but won’t be cool or calm, either. How, exactly, do you write a song for a dying bride? How do you account for love and mortality (the real thing, not some till-death-do-us-part throwaway) without morbidity?

      It needs to be a serious song. Or, rather, it needs not to be a frivolous song.

      The melody will help. Please, let the melody help. This time, though, the lyrics need to come first. Once the lyrics feel right (once they feel less wrong), he’ll lay them over … a minimal tune, something simple and direct, not childish of course but possessed of a childlike, beginner’s earnestness, a beginner’s innocence of tricks. It should be all major chords, with one minor, at the end of the bridge—that single jolt of gravitas; that moment when the lyrics’ romantic solemnity departs from the contrast of its upbeat chords and matches—fleetingly—a darkness in the music itself. The song should reside in the general vicinity of Dylan, of the Velvet Underground. It should not be faux-Dylan, not fake Lou Reed; it should be original (original, naturally; preferably unprecedented; preferably tinged with genius), but it helps, it helps a little, to aim in a general direction. Dylan’s righteous banishment of sentimentality, Reed’s ability to mingle passion with irony.

      The