The Blizzard Party

father was standing. He caught a glimpse of white hair, hands cranking at the wheel. Engine gunning, the cab continued to drift to port until the whitewalls caught for a moment and the car lurched forward, but alas, they only held to the next slick patch, where the slide recommenced, and it was then that my father’s adrenal glands awoke to the insistent banging at their door, and they basically flipped over the bed, chair, and everything else in the room scrambling to see what the hell was going on, which shot some voltage into his sympathetic nervous system, as it had been lazing around just downstairs but now everyone was up and they were throwing open the windows and sticking out their heads, and all at once he had become a black hole, sucking in snow, air, car, howl of wind, cast of streetlight, the sort of distracted wonder with which he’d been watching the night suddenly frozen in place, as was he, his legs having turned to concrete, braced for impact, his muscles taut, sphincter locked down, his jaw a sprung bear trap. The cab kept coming, sliding elegantly, like a dancer emitting a spiritual code, its frictionless progress penetrating into my father, the buildings, the falling snow, the light posts, projecting inevitability in the way that only the elephantine in motion can. In a category headlined by tidal waves and mushroom clouds a taxi is only a footnote, but it nonetheless shares the same operational principles of irreversibility and the blind, objective destruction of anything lying in its path.

My father’s teeth were bared and he’d stopped breathing. His eyes clamped shut and his brain fired a monstrously pedestrian message of utter surrender: an image of the fish that had brought him to the spot on which he was about to perish. Throw the bag! Throw the bag at the cab! his brain told his body. Of course his arm did not move. He was helpless, about to meet his end in the manner he’d always imagined. The taxi kept coming, floating across the surface, drawing ever closer, growing larger and larger until it broadsided the snowbank with an exquisite boom, a shattering noise that resonated up through the concrete and snow, into his feet, setting his organs ashudder.

By exactly the type of coincidence that my father didn’t believe possible, between the cab and him, frozen deep within the snowbank, was a row of newspaper boxes encased in ice, each one bolted to the sidewalk so no one could boost them, and to which a winter’s worth of trash bags, cardboard, and ripped-out plasterboard panels had all attached to form a substructure as solid as concrete, so that instead of blowing through the pile of snow and making a red blotch of my father, the ton and a half of inevitability sprung up on its creaking shocks and came thudding back down, wheels spinning madly, and shot directly at a Chevrolet Caprice marooned near the corner of 78th. The violent tearing sound of the big aluminum bumper gouging the snowbank ricocheted off the buildings on either side of the canyon.

The cab shot right, away from the snowbank, clipping the Caprice’s bumper and swerving into the intersection, where a berm created by crisscrossing snowplows loomed twice the height of the cab. It plunged through the pile like a football team storming the field, the snow exploding in a shower of festive chunks.

Its engine revving and retreating, pulsing, one might say, it then ran two blurry stoplights before sliding into a right turn, in the direction of Riverside, headed the wrong way down a one-way street. The sound of the engine faded and there was nothing left but wind and clanging street signs.

Mother of Christ, my father whispered.

He could see down the sidewalk that the dark figure was still closing the distance. It appeared that he was carrying something on his back.

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled across the sky.

17.

Manny was pulling a double because Dolan, the night man, hadn’t been able to get across the bridge, and he’d been praying for a respite from the couples who’d been showing up all night for the Vornados’ party, though up to that point never more than a few at a time, traipsing into the lobby as though their arrivals had been timed by a precise randomization equation, completely unpredictable, making it impossible to catch a wink, but finally there’d been a lull and he’d been able to tuck his chin and close his eyes just long enough to zone out. He wasn’t even bothering to call up, anyway. No one was answering. If Chewbacca walked in, it was PH1, enjoy the party. He might as well be asleep. He lifted an eyelid just in time to see my father heading out the lobby doors, the faint smell of charred fish lingering behind him.

When Manny heard the muffled whump of the cab hitting the snowbank, he sat up on his stool. He thought about it for a while, arguing with himself about whether Mr. Saltwater might be involved, and whether it was his responsibility to check on him if he was, and he was still arguing with himself when he pulled on his overcoat, slipped the rain rubber over his hat, and went out. Resigned but nonchalant. Like to check that the pavers had been sufficiently salted.

He watched my father through the spike-topped gate, closed and locked tight at all times, and, like its twin on the opposite side of the courtyard, adorned with curlicues, stylized smoke buoying APELLES in a golden rainbow. A door-shaped gate within the gate allowed residents in and out, and Manny pulled it open and stepped through, the iron clanging behind him. He noted that my father did not turn in his direction. Manny knew he had heard the gate, and something about my father’s arrogant posture reminded him of a lieutenant he’d served under whose perverse interest in the suffering of others, the godlike detachment