Did he think these things or did I? Perhaps none of these thoughts crossed the transom of Albert’s conscious mind—they existed, I promise, within him, I’m sure of it, but as to the question of when I became aware of them, that’s a little like attempting to mark the moment one’s eyes become adjusted to darkness. Outlines, gradations. How long have the objects slowly coming into focus been there? A second? A minute? Decades?
So I’ve poured some of my own ink into the waters of his mind. But I only want to be fair. It’s true that I long for an impartial ear, and can only ask as much of you as Albert did of me.
He was about to start walking when a Checker cab crept around the curve. Albert waited motionless in the lee of the pillar while the driver got out, shoulders up around his ears, and danced over the icy concrete to the back door, where he helped out an old woman in slippers. Her terry-cloth housecoat hung below the hem of her black overcoat, whipping around her shins as she shuffled into the hospital on the driver’s arm.
Albert’s first step sent him slipping and pinwheeling across an icy patch but he caught his balance on the other side and shuffled around the front end toward the driver’s door. The wind pushed at him as he made his way around the big chrome bumper, the coat filling like a spinnaker, and he held on as well as he could to the car’s cold wet hood, working his way back until his fingers found the seam of the door. He pulled it open, got in, struggled it closed. A cigarette was smoking in the ashtray, and Albert opened a crease in the window and pushed it out, where it stuck against the wet glass.
Albert had not driven a car in a decade. Like all New Yorkers, he prided himself on his poor driving skills and the rarity with which he needed to employ them. Even when he’d driven the Coupe de Ville every weekend on Long Island, he’d never felt at one with the machine, not in the way of a man who’d come of age with his elbow out the window, wrist on the wheel, who’d learned to smoke sitting on the hood, had his first misaligned sexual experiences in a backseat. He’d come along too early and too poor. As if bringing himself physically closer to the machine might correct for his lack of experience, he’d always driven with the seat dumped forward, body hugging the wheel. He accelerated in pulses, the car surging forward like a rowboat, the children in the back lurching in time, while in the passenger seat Sydney perpetually kept her hand on his knee in an attempt to smooth their progress. He yelled when he drove. From the moment he slid the key into the ignition, he was locked in battle with the goddamn idiots populating the roadways, the unpredictable decelerators, the nervous Nellies, those with liberal signaling habits. Old men in hats were dependable targets. It’s not a wagon train! he’d growl if anyone rode his bumper. As soon as he parked and got out, he settled. The farther he was from the detestable Cadillac, the better. When he kicked the tires, and he often did, he did so with the intention of inflicting pain. Nothing in the world quite so brazenly represented his inability to master the subtleties of mechanical control. His partners zapped around the island in Alfa Romeos and MGs, in the manner of exiled Russian counts, behavior he found wholly inappropriate for men of their fiduciary responsibilities. The legal profession was a service industry, not a beauty pageant. He hated those cars.
He was especially unqualified, then, to handle two tons of Checker Marathon in a snowstorm. Not all that quick off the line in normal conditions, on the snowpack the cab’s handling was decidedly slicker and it sluiced around the curving hospital driveway like a pinball out of the shooter lane, crashed into the street, the front bumper gouging into the snow, tagging the pavement with a shriek. To avoid plowing into the cars on the opposite curb Albert cranked the wheel like a helmsman in a gale, narrowly avoided that disaster, and bounded off pulsingly up powdery Columbus.
The cabbie came out of the hospital’s revolving door just in time to see his car disappearing up the avenue, rooster tails spraying from the back tires. Typical. You try to do a nice thing. You take somebody’s grammy to the hospital in the middle of the storm of the decade, and some punk boosts your ride. Thanks a fucking lot, New York.
16.
By then the snow had erased the city. On West End, just outside the Apelles, the wind was whipping a NO PARKING sign like it was a fighter getting worked in the corner of the ring. Snow covered the streets, and the streets covered the pipes, the tunnels, the conduits, the corridors, the ancient veins of the city ferrying transmissions telephonic and electric, the steam, the words and water and waste, ever excavated and re-entombed by Con Ed hardhats. Traffic lights jounced around on their guy wires. Streetlights burned like quasars, tinting the white surface of the roadway tangerine, painting the flakes as they shot by. This snow did not twinkle or float. It crashed down. This storm meant to do harm to the earth, to obscure
