The Blizzard Party

in an unseen iron fence on Riverside Drive and smashing through a bench before shushing downhill toward the water. He might have slid all the way into the Hudson if he hadn’t run into a gargantuan drift that ate the car and forced him to exit via the window. He’d gone the rest of the way on foot, and had been working south along the railing at the river’s edge, stopping to peer down at the Hudson every few feet, seeking a spot where he might throw himself in, because the river wore a skirt of ice thirty feet wide, and Albert, not thinking clearly, barely thinking at all, in fact, operating in a hallucinatory state brought on by exhaustion, alcohol, and incipient hypothermia, had decided he might as well jump down onto the ice, a twenty-foot drop, and from there proceed to the water’s edge, when he came into Vik’s sight line.

Vik didn’t leap into action immediately, fearing at first that he’d been backtracked by the poet-terror from Cinema West, but after a moment observing the man, he decided that this was another classification of nut entirely, one who intended to commit an act of self-harm, as Albert was by then attempting to straddle the railing, with minimal success. Vik was only about twenty feet away, a distance that somehow made him responsible for Albert’s well-being, and he called out to the potential fence-hopper: Excuse me!

Albert: Who’s there?

Vik: Over here! Do you need help?

Albert squinted into the storm. It seemed to him that the trees themselves were speaking. He drew back his leg from the railing and replied in code. He said: There are a lot of people who don’t know how to read a newspaper!

Vik moved closer, toward unknown dangers, driven by an empathetic impulse, a genetic flaw that drove Bonny to drink over his son’s chances for survival in the wolvish arena of, well, everything: school, import/export, love. Wrong paternal instinct, Bonny. You should have deprogrammed his unyielding punctuality. Vik said: Sorry?

Albert, now apprehending the non-tree before him: I say, a lot of people who don’t even know how to read a newspaper!

Vik, desperately trying to understand: Illiterates?

Albert: No idea that it’s all fibs. They get so exercised.

Vik, clueing in: Oh yes, I understand.

Albert: Other than newspapers, however, where would one get one’s information?

Vik: The television?

Albert: Fool! The television hasn’t even been invented!

Vik: Sir, do you need a cop? (And none of that New York smart-ass on the sir, either.)

Albert: Certainly not. They are the last to know. If they knew anything about how to do their jobs, they’d arrive before the crime, wouldn’t they?

Vik: Do you live nearby, sir?

Albert: Why would I go home?

Vik: Because it’s cold out here.

Albert: Why would I go home?

Vik: To see your family.

Albert: At the Apelles?

Vik: The big place on 78th?

Albert: The Apelles, yes.

Vik: That’s where you live?

Albert: I suppose so. I suppose I should go home? Is that it?

Vik: I think so?

See? Easy, simple, nothing sinister in their exchange, just a decent kid helping a senile old man on the worst night of the year. Their little story might have rounded out a blizzard box deep inside the Times, nestled in there among the rowdy Queens runts chucking snowballs at the police cruisers (say hey, whaddya want, city kids, amirite?) and Stella Kilgore age ninety-seven’s first-person account of the great blow job of 1888 (ma’am, you have to stop saying that, no, what, never mind, go ahead, I’ll just put down…), a bridge club from Hartford on their way to Key West for a tournament, stuck at JFK for the night but guess what they did? Played bridge! Enterprising bartender invents the Manhattan Whiteout to delight of trapped guests at the Plaza! Etc.

Nothing pulls the city together like a natural disaster. Metro section, B5:

Apology Accepted: Blizzard Thaws Hearts

By A. L. KNAPP

John Caldwell, 31, involved in an altercation at the Cosmic Diner on the Upper West Side Monday afternoon, later sought out his adversary at Roosevelt Hospital to apologize. Caldwell attributed his decision to a change of heart, and made a peace offering of a cup of coffee.

“I thought it was decent of him,” said the employee of the Cosmic, who asked that his name be withheld, having been released after treatment for a mild concussion. “I don’t know I would have done the same thing.”

When asked why he and the Cosmic employee had tangled, Caldwell had no comment. One witness to the reconciliation noted that it was “a sort of good will to man kind of night.”

“Drugs,” said a nurse who spoke anonymously, as she was not authorized to speak to the press. “They’re all on drugs.”

32.

We reach the hot, molten center of my discord. Vik, age thirteen, had deposited Albert Caldwell, age seventy-four, a man on a mission of self-erasure, alone in a bedroom with me, age six. It was the innocent mistake of a boy to whom an old man was an authority, trustworthy by virtue of age alone. He said later he thought my presence in the room might have been a solace to Albert.

The revel was thumping away just outside the door. I was facedown, the razor-sharp creases of my uniform skirt’s box pleats bowed suggestively open or snapped suggestively shut, my shirt untucked, a sliver of glowing skin exposed at my waistband, the line of skin at the bottom of my leggings, the buttons of my elbows, the radii of my wrists as delicate as tulip stems, every inch of it an enticement. The dried blood on my scalp some sort of symbol. Albert, whose eyes no longer functioned as traps for light, didn’t see me, but he sensed me. He removed his clothing.

Albert was practiced in the art of occupation. He was receptive to the thoughts and feelings of the child in the room with him, postmaster to my mental correspondence. Chief among these communications was my dream, the dream of Slade, again pawing along the high beam in the barn. Already