One of those people was my father. At shortly after midnight (twenty-one degrees, sustained winds from the northwest at around twenty-eight knots, gusting to fifty) he emerged from the Apelles. He had picked up a leather jacket from the apartment to wear over his enormous wool sweater, gray, with red and blue snowflakes encircling the midsection. The sweater was itself as thick as a coat, a Scottish invention capable of warding off anything gale force on up, and was such a tight fit inside the leather jacket that the two created a sort of vacuum seal against the elements. The furry edge hung below the bottom of the jacket, and the rolled neck extended so high that it made a scarf superfluous. He was also wearing wool pants, his writing pants, the seat nearly obliterated, and he was holding in his right hand the plastic bag containing the stinking, charred remains of the bluefish fillets.
The bag was snapping around like a ferocious little dog straining at its leash. The round yellow face on one side was a familiar hieroglyph commanding the user to Have a Nice Day!, hardly despotic but offering little choice in the matter, and fell into a common category of menacing American commands, along with Enjoy! and Smile! and Have Fun!, all of which rankled my father acutely with their insistence that he attain a lighter state of being, pronto. Having performed upon the bag the same inquiry he would have leveled at any other communication (being the sort of person whose mental filter trapped everything, everything, from legal disclaimers to the hierarchy of movie credits to the endless stream of advertising tag lines pounding on him every time he left the apartment, which he subjected to analysis normally reserved for exegeses of poems), he’d determined that in this case he was being commanded (by whom? God? Mother? McCann Erickson?) to experience a sublime joy, something like a hundred simultaneous orgasms—no, even more, the endorphin flood that soaks the brainpan at the moment of death. This required him to feel not just orgasmic joy but Death Joy. The happiness that surpasses all happiness. Not bad for a slogan bashed out by a speedballed copywriter at a Madison Avenue shop, picking through embers of his own dying life force for some flickering memory of joy, riffling through images from those months camping in Big Sur after graduation, where he’d dropped acid with his friends and achieved a state of ecstasy that manifested, like really manifested, projecting him upward on a beam of light, up above the trees, above the clouds, into space so that he could observe the complete blue marble herself, whence he inhaled all of America, the clouds and sun, viewed the top of every citizen’s beautiful unique head, from sea to shining sea, each one as perfect as a pin, before coming down, experiencing a hunger as wide as the plains, hopping in the VW, driving out of the forest to buy supplies and experiencing the aura of that girl behind the counter, the one whose eyes blew right through him, and who ten years later still haunted his memory, who had said to him when he pushed open the screen door to leave, Have a nice day, baby.
Normally my father wouldn’t have been caught dead carrying such a bag. He usually tried to sidestep the transubstantiation that rendered human beings billboards for all manner of capitalist sub-philosophies, philosophies of consumption he couldn’t even understand, ideas that made people meaningless except as ambulant advertising, but he’d been distracted by the smoke and the fire and the fish, and the distraction had almost turned him into a normal person who could simply grope around under the sink, grab a bag, and go.
So, while he hadn’t quite been able to ignore the yellow face, he hadn’t balled it up and whipped it into the trash in favor of a plain brown paper bag, which was, he’d always thought, his personal analogue in the world of bags: plain, square, liable to fall apart in the rain. He’d dropped the fish into the plastic bag as though he were not a man who could be thrown into a spiral of rage by an insipid piece of graphic art commanding him to alter his behavior.
Waist-deep drifts had blown in against the foundations of buildings on the east side of the street, the snow packing in alleys, on the cross streets turning brownstone stoops into ramps, but where my father was standing, just outside the arched west entrance to the Apelles, maintenance—on this lonesome night a crew of one, long-suffering Sandor—had been working his way nonstop around the building, the footprint of which filled an entire city block, salting and shoveling, resalting, reshoveling, a task my father quickly classified as the philosophical equal of suspension bridge painting, those crews who spent their entire working lives yo-yoing back and forth across the same ironwork span. He supposed that for any given worker, which side was considered the starting point was a personal matter, one that depended entirely on which direction the crew was moving on that particular guy’s first day on the job, so that painting crews all over the world must be divided into two
