By the time he returned to the edge of Penn Yards, his father had already left on his own wild-eyed expedition, the search for Vik that had begun so ignominiously at Cinema West. That father and son didn’t cross paths was just another cruel coincidence on a night full of them. Vik picked a brownstone just east of the yard, one whose windows were dark, climbed the stoop, and tucked himself into the lee side of the porch.
From his pocket he took the Tami, a black and silver cylinder that, collapsed into its protective cup, fit neatly in the palm of a hand and might have been mistaken for a candle snuffer. It was German-manufactured, an artifact from the 1920s that fifty years later remained a coveted item among botanists doing deep fieldwork. Vik was enormously proud of the scope. It had been the first-place award, middle-grade division, 1977 New York State Science Fair, for his experiment tracking Brownian motion in smoke cells.
He cleared a protected corner of the porch of snow, unscrewed the Tami’s hood, and set it down next to the velvet to allow them to equalize to the air temperature.
The blizzard howled off the river, its shoulders down, plowing through the open air above the rail yard. Yet when Vik told me about that night, he never mentioned being cold. He never mentioned the stinging slap of precipitation against his face. When he talked about it, it sounded as if that night he’d gone into a trance, a sort of spiritual snow blindness. I have my suspicions but he insisted he wasn’t stoned. The only thing he mentioned about the weather was that the rail yard was concealed by a variegated wall of snow undulating in the air—his words, not mine. His presence in the blizzard was an act of poetic import, an experience of the same rare clarity I was about to lose, his vision unencumbered by linguistic blinders. The night was transient, not a future page in the brief history of his life. He had no way to record the snowflakes he observed, no camera, no sketchbook. He intended only to catch them on the velvet bed, observe their structure up close, perhaps report back to his science teacher that among the needles and prisms he’d spotted some stellar dendrites, a signal that cloud temperature and humidity were oscillating, a sort of exciting phenomenon to observe from down among the terrans, picking through the diamonds coughed up by the heavenly volcanoes.
And when a figure emerged from the old YMCA, a black blur within the snow globe, and climbed the stairs up to Freedom Place, Vik embraced the poetic visitation he’d been waiting for all along, some untamed, untranslatable figure emerging from the wastes, a welcome mystery. Odd, since he knew the crowd at Sal’s, the cross-eyed weirdos who stashed tacos in their coat pockets and on a good day exuded all the personality of wet plaster, and he must have known that whoever had decided to trek home through the blizzard could only be an exemplar of that homuncular brotherhood, yet he watched the man cross the yard, slowly ascend the iron stairs, and pass directly in front of his bivouac in the shadowed portico of the brownstone.
Before the man turned onto West End he stopped and looked up at the brownstone. He shielded his eyes. Vik raised a hand in greeting, but the man didn’t wave back. He tucked his head and turned north onto West End.
Vik collapsed the Tami and followed him. When the man stopped at 72nd and West End to dig into a snowbank, Vik hung back, a detective shadowing his perp. When the man lifted a table—a full-sized dining table!—onto his back and continued up West End, Vik maintained tail discipline, keeping a block’s distance. His gaspingly lonely adolescent brain was filling out the man’s résumé to fit the form he so desperately sought. A rambler, a stranger in a city of strangers, a quiet outlaw, one whose cutting insights sought a receptive and finely tuned ear, which Vik happened to have two of.
But Vik got too close. John Caldwell was, after all, a New Yorker born and bred, eyes in the back of his head, and he’d already had one run-in that night. It’s not that John feared for his physical well-being. He knew the kid on his six was the missing boy. But he’d already done him one favor by leaving him alone. Now he’d gotten himself into some kind of lost-puppy situation, and John had already made his decision, back there at Cinema West. Around 75th Street, he ditched the table, spun toward Vik, and charged. Not a jog or a slippery trudge through the snow, but a full-tilt attack-speed charge. He was waving his arms and yelling, and Vik fled through the intersection before cutting toward Riverside Park. He didn’t slow down when he hit the waist-deep snow that covered the open field between Riverside and the Hudson. Vik crossed the park, fighting the drifts until he saw nothing but icy river in front him.
He crouched against a tree by the river, roughed up by the wind, bummed out. And it was there that he encountered his second Caldwell of the night, making passage through the blizzard, leaning into the driving wind as he picked his way along the railing that was intended to keep pedestrians from falling into the Hudson.
21.
At grade, the average American walks a mile in about twenty minutes, at a speed just a hair over three miles per hour, and an average American heart prefers to beat about seventy-five times a minute. Between the two exists a proportional, rhythmic relationship. You ask most
