Copyright

Fourth Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in the United States in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © Mare Vaporum Corp 2014

The right of Michael Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007557677

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007557684

Version: 2015-02-19

Dedication

This book is for Billy Hough

Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen. The flickering flame of the northern lights could be plainly seen, whether they rose high or low in the heavens, from every part of the castle. In the midst of its empty, endless hall of snow was a frozen lake, broken on its surface into a thousand forms; each piece resembled another, from being in itself perfect as a work of art, and in the centre of this lake sat the Snow Queen, when she was at home. She called the lake “The Mirror of Reason,” and said that it was the best, and indeed the only one in the world.

—Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

A Night

November 2004

New Year’s Eve, 2006

A Night

November 2008

Acknowledgments

Also by Michael Cunningham

About the Publisher

A NIGHT

A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s.

During the past four days, Barrett had been doing his best to remain undiscouraged by what seemed, lately, to be a series of progressively terse and tepid breakups. In his twenties, love had usually ended in fits of weeping, in shouts loud enough to set off the neighbors’ dogs. On one occasion, he and his soon-to-be-ex had fought with their fists (Barrett can still hear the table tipping over, the sound the pepper mill made as it rolled lopsidedly across the floorboards). On another: a shouting match on Barrow Street, a bottle shattered (the words “falling in love” still suggest, to Barrett, green glass shards on a sidewalk under a streetlamp), and the voice of an old woman, neither shrill nor scolding, emanating from some low dark window, saying, simply, “Don’t you boys understand that people live here, people are trying to sleep,” like the voice of an exhausted mother.

As Barrett moved into his mid-, and then late, thirties, though, the partings increasingly tended to resemble business negotiations. They were not devoid of sorrow and accusation, but they had without question become less hysterical. They’d come to resemble deals and investments that had, unfortunately, gone wrong, despite early promises of solid returns.

This last parting, however, was his first to be conveyed by text, the farewell appearing, uninvited, unanticipated, on a screen no bigger than a bar of hotel soap. Hi Barrett I guess u know what this is about. Hey we gave it our best shot right?

Barrett did not, in fact, know what this was about. He got the message, of course—love, and whatever future love implied, had been canceled. But, I guess u know what this is about? That had been something like a dermatologist saying, offhandedly, after your annual checkup, I guess you know that that beauty mark on your cheek, that little chocolate-colored speck that has been referred to, more than once, as an aspect of your general loveliness (who was it who said Marie Antoinette’s penciled-on version had been in precisely that spot?), is actually skin cancer.

Barrett responded initially in kind, by text. An e-mail seemed elderly, a phone call desperate. So he tapped out, on tiny keys, Wow this is sudden how bout we talk a little, I’m where I always am. xxx.

By the end of the second day, Barrett had left two more texts, followed by two voice mails, and had spent most of the second night not leaving a third. By the end of day number three, he had not only received no reply of any kind, but also had begun to realize there would be no reply at all; that the sturdily built, earnest Canadian Ph.D. candidate (psychology, Columbia) with whom he’d shared five months of sex and food and private jokes, the man who’d said “I might actually love you” after Barrett recited Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria” while they were taking a bath together, the one who’d known the names of the trees when they spent that weekend in the Adirondacks, was simply moving on; that Barrett had been left standing on the platform, wondering how exactly he seemed to have missed his train.

I wish you happiness and luck in the future. xxx.

On the fourth night, Barrett was walking across Central Park, headed home after a dental exam, which struck him on one hand as depressingly commonplace but, on the other, as a demonstration of his fortitude. Go ahead, rid yourself of me in five uninformative and woundingly anonymous lines. (I’m sorry it just hasn’t worked out the way we’d hoped it would, but I know we both tried our best.) I’m not going to neglect my teeth for you. I’m going to be pleased, pleased and thankful, to know that I don’t need a root canal, after all.

Still, the idea that, without having been offered any time to prepare for it, he’d never witness the pure careless loveliness of this young man, who was so much like those lithe, innocent young athletes adoringly painted by Thomas Eakins; the idea that Barrett would never again watch the boy peel his briefs off before bed, never witness his lavish, innocent delight in small satisfactions (a Leonard Cohen mix tape Barrett made for him, called Why Don’t You Just Kill Yourself; a victory for the Rangers), seemed literally impossible, a violation of love-physics. As did the fact that Barrett would, apparently, never know what it was that had gone so wrong. There had been, during the last month or so, the occasional fight, the awkward lapse in conversation. But Barrett had assumed that the two of them were merely entering the next phase; that their disagreements (Do you think you could try not to be late some of the time? Why would you put me down like that in front of my friends?) were signposts of their growing intimacy. He hadn’t remotely imagined that one morning he’d check his text messages and find love to have been lost, with approximately the degree of remorse one would feel over the loss of a pair of sunglasses.

On the night of the apparition, Barrett, having been relieved of the threatened root canal, having promised to floss more faithfully, had crossed the Great Lawn and was nearing the floodlit, glacial mass of the Metropolitan Museum. He was crunching over ice-coated silver-gray snow, taking a shortcut to the number 6 train, dripped on by tree branches, glad at least to be going home to Tyler and Beth, glad to have someone waiting for him. He felt numb, as if his whole being had been injected with novocaine. He wondered if he was becoming, at the age of thirty-eight, less a figure of tragic ardency, love’s holy fool, and more a middle manager who wrote off one deal (yes, there’ve been some losses to the company portfolio, but nothing catastrophic) and went on to the next, with renewed if slightly more reasonable aspirations. He no longer felt inclined to stage a counterattack, to leave hourly voice mails or stand sentry outside his ex’s building, although, ten years ago, that’s exactly what he’d have done: Barrett Meeks, a soldier of love. Now he could only picture himself as aging and destitute. If he summoned up a show of anger and ardency it would merely be meant to disguise the fact that he was broke, he was broken, please, brother, have you got anything you can spare?

Barrett hung his head as he walked through the park, not from shame but weariness, as if his head had become too heavy to hold upright. He looked down at the modest blue-gray puddle of his own shadow, cast by the lampposts onto the snow. He watched his shadow glide over a pinecone, a vaguely runic scattering of pine needles, and the wrapper of an Oh Henry! bar (they still made Oh Henry! bars?) that rattled by, raggedly silver, windblown.

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its center, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood—a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice—as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news—as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration—there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn …

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing stolid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed—he knew—that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him.

No. Not looking. Apprehending. As he imagined a whale might apprehend a swimmer, with a grave and regal and utterly unfrightened curiosity.

He felt the light’s attention, a tingle that ran through him, a minute electrical buzz; a mild and pleasing voltage that permeated him, warmed him, seemed perhaps ever so slightly to illuminate him, so that he was brighter than he’d been, just a shade or two; phosphorescent, but pinkly so, humanly so, nothing of swamp gas about it, just a gathering of faint blood-light that rose to the surface of his skin.

And then, neither slowly nor quickly, the light dissipated. It waned into a scattering of pale blue sparks that seemed somehow animated, like the playful offspring of a placid and titanic parent. Then they, too, winked out, and the sky was as it had been, as it has always been.

He remained standing for a while, watching the sky as if it were a television screen that had suddenly gone blank and might, just as mysteriously, turn itself on again. The sky, however, continued to offer only its compromised darkness (the lights of New York City gray the nocturnal blackness), and the sparse pinpoints of stars powerful enough to be seen at all. Finally, he continued on his way home, to Beth and Tyler, to the modest comforts of the apartment in Bushwick.

What else, after all, was he supposed to do?

NOVEMBER 2004

It’s snowing in Tyler and Beth’s bedroom. Flecks of snow—tough little ice balls, more BB than flake, more gray than white in the early morning dimness—swirl onto the floorboards and the foot of the bed.

Tyler awakens from a dream, which dissolves almost entirely, leaving only a sensation of queasy and peevish joy. When he opens his eyes it seems, for a moment, that the skeins of snow blowing around the room are part of his dream, a manifestation of icy and divine mercy. But it is in fact real snow, blowing in through the window he and Beth left open last night.

Beth sleeps curled into the circle of Tyler’s arm. He gently disengages himself, gets up to close the window. He walks barefoot across the snow-sparkled floor, doing what needs to be done. This is satisfying. He’s the sensible one. In Beth, he has finally found someone more romantically impractical than he. Beth, if she woke, would, in all likelihood, ask him to leave the window open. She’d like the idea of their cramped, crowded little bedroom (the books pile up, and Beth won’t shed her habit of bringing home treasures she finds on the streets—the hula-girl lamp that could, in theory, be rewired; the battered leather suitcase; the two spindly, maidenly chairs) as a life-size snow globe.

Tyler shuts the window, with effort. Everything in this apartment is warped. A marble dropped in the middle of the living room would roll right out the front door. As he forces the sash down, a final fury of snow blows in, as if seeking its last chance at … what? … the annihilating warmth of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom, this brief offer of heat and dissolution? … As the miniature flurry blasts over him, a cinder blows into his eye; or maybe some obdurate microscopic ice crystal, like the tiniest imaginable sliver of glass. Tyler rubs his eye, can’t seem to get at the speck that’s embedded itself there. It’s as if he’s been subjected to a minor mutation; as if the clear speck had attached itself to his cornea, and so he stands with one eye clear and one bleary and watering, watching the snowflakes hurl themselves against the glass. It’s barely six o’clock. It’s white outside, everywhere. The elderly snow-piles that have been, day after day, plowed to the edges of the next-door parking—that have solidified into miniature gray mountains, touched toxically, here and there, with spangles of soot—are now, for now, alpine, like something out of a Christmas card; or, rather, something out of a Christmas card if you focus tightly, edit out the cocoa-colored, concrete facade of the empty warehouse (upon which the ghost of the word “concrete” is still emblazoned, although grown so faint it’s as if the building itself, so long neglected, still insists on announcing its own name) and the still-slumbering street where the neon q in the liquor sign winks and buzzes like a distress flare. Even in this tawdry cityscape, though—this haunted, half-empty neighborhood, where the burned carcass of an old Buick has remained (strangely pious in its rusted-out, gutted and graffitied, absolute uselessness) for the last year, on the street beneath Tyler’s window—there’s a gaunt beauty summoned by the pre-dawn light; a sense of compromised but still-living hope. Even in Bushwick. Here’s a fall of new snow, serious snow, immaculate, with its hint of benediction, as if some company that delivers hush and accord to the better neighborhoods had gotten the wrong address.

If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you’d better learn to praise the small felicities.

And, living as Tyler does in this place, in this placidly impoverished neighborhood of elderly aluminum siding, of warehouses and parking lots, all utilitarian, all built on the cheap, with its just-barely-managing little businesses and its daunted denizens (Dominicans, mostly, people who went to considerable effort to get here—who had, must have had, higher hopes than those that Bushwick has granted them) trudging dutifully along to or from minimum-wage jobs—as if defeat could no longer be defeated, as if one were lucky to have anything at all. It isn’t even particularly dangerous anymore; there is of course the occasional robbery but it seems, for the most part, that even the criminals have lost their ambition. In a place like this, praise is elusive. It’s difficult to stand at a window, watching snow feather onto the overflowing garbage cans (the garbage trucks seem to remember, sporadically, unpredictably, that there’s garbage to collect here, too) and the cracked cobblestones, without thinking ahead to its devolution into dun-colored sludge, the brown tarns of ankle-deep street-corner puddles upon which cigarette butts and balls of foil gum wrappers (fool’s silver) will float.

Tyler should go back to bed. Another interlude of sleep and who knows, he might wake into a world of more advanced, resolute cleanliness, a world wearing a still-heavier white blanket over its bedrock of drudgery and ash.

He’s reluctant, however, to leave the window in this condition of sludgy wistfulness. Going back to bed now would be too much like seeing a delicately emotional stage play that comes to neither a tragic nor happy ending, that begins to sputter out until there are no more actors onstage, until the audience realizes that the play must be over, that it’s time to get up and leave the theater.

Tyler has promised he’ll cut down. He’s been good about it, for the past couple of days. But now, right now, it’s a minor metaphysical emergency. Beth isn’t worse, but she isn’t better, either. Knickerbocker Avenue is waiting patiently through its brief interlude of accidental beauty until it can return to the slush and puddle that is its natural state.

All right. This morning, he’ll give himself a break. He can re-summon his rigor easily enough. This is only a boost, at a time when a boost is needed.

He goes to the nightstand, takes his vial from the drawer, and sucks up a couple of quick ones.

And here it is. Here’s the sting of livingness. He’s back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he’s renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

He returns to the window. If that windblown ice crystal meant to weld itself to his eye, the transformation is already complete; he can see more clearly now with the aid of this minuscule magnifying mirror …

Here’s Knickerbocker Avenue again, and, yes, it will soon return to its ongoing condition of anywhereness, it’s not as if Tyler has forgotten that, but the grimy impending future doesn’t matter, in very much the way Beth says that morphine doesn’t eradicate the pain but puts it aside, renders it unimportant, a sideshow curiosity, mortifying (See the Snake Boy! See the Bearded Lady!) but remote and, of course, a hoax, just spirit gum and latex.

Tyler’s own, lesser pain, the dampness of his inner workings, all those wires that hiss and spark in his brain, has been snapped dry by the coke. A moment ago, he was fuzzed out and mordant, but now—quick suck of harsh magic—he’s all acuity and verve. He’s shed his own costume, and the true suit of himself fits him perfectly. Tyler is a one-man audience, standing naked at a window at the start of the twenty-first century, with hope clattering in his rib cage. It seems possible that all the surprises (he didn’t exactly plan on being an unknown musician at forty-three, living in eroticized chastity with his dying girlfriend and his younger brother, who has turned, by slow degrees, from a young wizard into a tired middle-aged magician, summoning doves out of a hat for the ten thousandth time) have been part of an inscrutable effort, too immense to see; some accumulation of lost chances and canceled plans and girls who were almost but not quite, all of which seemed random at the time but have brought him here, to this window, to his difficult but interesting life, his bulldoggish loves, his still-taut belly (the drugs help) and jut of dick (his own) as the Republicans are about to go down and a new world, cold and clean, is set to begin.

Tyler will get a rag and wipe the melted snow off the floorboards. He will take care of it. He will adore Beth and Barrett with more purity. He will gather and procure, take on an extra shift at the bar, praise the snow and all it touches. He will get them out of this grim apartment, sing ferociously into the heart of the world, find an agent, stitch it all together, remember to soak the beans for cassoulet, get Beth to chemo on time, do less coke and cut out Dilaudid entirely, finally finish reading The Scarlet and the Black. He will hold Beth and Barrett, console them, remind them of how little there is to worry about, feed them, tell them the stories that render them that much more visible to themselves.

Outside, the snow shifts with a shift in the wind, and it seems as if some benign force, some vast invisible watcher, has known what Tyler wanted, the moment before he knew it himself—a sudden animation, a change, the gentle steady snowfall taken up and turned into fluttering sheets, an airy map of the wind currents; and yes—are you ready, Tyler?—it’s time to release the pigeons, five of them, from the liquor store roof, time to set them aflight and then (are you watching?) turn them, silvered by early light, counter to the windblown flakes, sail them effortlessly west into the agitated air that’s blowing the snow toward the East River (where barges will be plowing, whitened like ships of ice, through the choppy water); and yes, right, a moment later it’s time to turn the streetlights off and, simultaneously, bring a truck around the corner of Rock Street, its headlights still on and its flat silver top blinking little warning lights, garnet and ruby, that’s perfect, that’s amazing, thank you.

Barrett runs shirtless through the snow flurries. His chest is scarlet; his breath explodes in steam-puffs. He’s slept for a few agitated hours. Now he’s going for his morning run. He finds that he’s comforted by this utterly usual act, sprinting along Knickerbocker, leaving behind a small, quickly evaporating trail of his own exhalations, like a locomotive rumbling through some still-slumbering, snow-decked town, though Bushwick feels like an actual town, subject to a town’s structural logic (as opposed to its true condition of random buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots, possessed of neither center nor outskirts), only at daybreak, only in its gelid hush, which is soon to end. Soon the delis and shops will open on Flushing, car horns will bleat, the deranged man—filthy and oracular, glowing with insanity like some of the more livid and mortified saints—will take up his station, with a sentry’s diligence, on the corner of Knickerbocker and Rock. But at the moment, for the moment, it’s actually quiet. Knickerbocker is muffled and nascent and dreamless, empty except for a few cars crawling cautiously along, cutting their headlights into the falling snow.

It’s been coming down since midnight. Snow eddies and tumbles as the point of equinox passes, and the sky starts all but imperceptibly turning from its nocturnal blackish brown to the lucid velvety gray of first morning, New York’s only innocent sky.

Last night the sky awakened, opened an eye, and saw neither more nor less than Barrett Meeks, homeward bound in a Cossack-style overcoat, standing on the icy platter of Central Park. The sky regarded him, noted him, closed its eye again, and returned to what were, as Barrett can only imagine, more revelatory, incandescent, galaxy-wheeling dreams.

A fear: last night was nothing, a blip, an accidental glimpse behind a celestial curtain, just one of those things. Barrett was no more “chosen” than an upstairs maid would be destined to marry into the family because she happened to see the eldest son naked, on his way to his bath, when he’d assumed the hall to be empty.

Another fear: last night was something, but it’s impossible to know, or even guess at, what. Barrett, a perverse, wrong-headed Catholic even in his grade school days (the gray-veined marble Christ at the entrance to the Transfiguration School was hot, he had a six-pack and biceps and that mournful, maidenly face), can’t remember being told, not even by the most despairing of the nuns, of a vision delivered so arbitrarily, so absent of context. Visions are answers. Answers imply questions.

It’s not as if Barrett lacks questions. Who does? But nothing much that begs response from prophet or oracle. Even if the chance were offered, would he want a disciple to run sock-footed down a dim and flickering corridor to interrupt the seer for the purpose of asking, Why do Barrett Meeks’s boyfriends all turn out to be sadistic dweebs? Or, What occupation will finally hold Barrett’s interest for longer than six months?

What, then—if intention was expressed last night, if that celestial eye opened specifically for Barrett—was the annunciation? What exactly did the light want him to go forth and do?

When he got home, he asked Tyler if he’d seen it (Beth was in bed, held in orbit by the increasing gravitational pull of her twilight zone). When Tyler said, “Seen what?” Barrett found, to his surprise, that he was reluctant to say anything about the light. There was of course the obvious explanation—who wants his older brother to suspect he’s delusional?—but there was as well a more peculiar sense, for Barrett, of a need for discretion, as if he’d been silently instructed to tell no one. So he made up something quick, about a hit-and-run on the corner of Thames Street.

And then he checked the news.

Nothing. The election, of course. And the fact that Arafat is dying; that the torture at Guantánamo has been confirmed; that a much-anticipated space capsule containing samples taken from the sun has crashed, because its parachute failed to open.

But no lantern-jawed newscaster locked eyes with the camera and said, This evening the eye of God looked down upon the earth …

Barrett made dinner (Tyler can’t be counted on these days to remember that people need to eat periodically, and Beth is too ill). He allowed himself to return to wondering about this last, lost love. Maybe it was that late-night phone conversation, when Barrett knew he was going on too long about the deranged customer who’d insisted that, before he bought a particular jacket, he’d need proof that it had been made under cruelty-free conditions—Barrett can be a bore sometimes, right?—or maybe it was the night he hit the cue ball right off the table, and the lesbian made that remark to her girlfriend (he can be an embarrassment sometimes, too).

He could not, however, contemplate his mysterious misdeeds for long. He’d seen something impossible. Something that, apparently, no one else saw.

He made dinner. He tried to continue compiling his list of reasons for having been dumped.

Now, the following morning, he’s going for his run. Why wouldn’t he?

As he leaps over a frozen puddle at the corner of Knickerbocker and Thames, the streetlights turn themselves off. Now that a very different light has shown itself to him, he finds himself imagining some connection between the leap and the extinguishment, as if he, Barrett, had ordered the streetlights dimmed, by jumping. As if a lone man, out for his regular three miles, could be the instigator of the new day.

There’s that difference, between yesterday and today.

Tyler battles an urge to step up onto the bedroom windowsill. He’s not thinking of suicide. Fuck no. And, all right, if he were thinking of suicide, this is only the second floor. The best he might do is break a leg, and maybe—maybe—his skull might kiss the pavement with enough force to produce a concussion. But it would be a pathetic gesture—the loser version of that wearily defiant, ineluctably suave decision to say That’s enough, and waltz offstage. He has no desire to end up lying on the sidewalk, merely sprained and bruised, akimbo, after a leap into a void that can’t have been more than twenty feet.

He’s not thinking suicide, he’s thinking merely of going into the storm; of being more stingingly assaulted by wind and snow. The trouble (one of the troubles) with this apartment is one can only be inside it, looking out a window, or outside, on the street, looking up at the window. It would be so fine, so brilliant, to be naked in the weather; to be that available to it.

He contents himself, as he must, by leaning out as far as he can, which produces little more than a frosty wind-smack across his face, and snow pelting his hair.

Back from his run, Barrett enters the apartment, its warmth and its smell: the damp-wood sauna steam exhaled by its ancient radiators; the powdery scent of Beth’s medicines; the varnish-and-paint undertones that refuse to dissipate, as if something in this old dump can’t fully absorb any attempt at improvement; as if the ghost that is the building itself cannot and will not believe that its walls aren’t still bare, smoke-stained plaster, its rooms no longer inhabited by long-skirted women sweating over stoves as their factory-worker husbands sit cursing at kitchen tables. These recently enforced home-improvement smells, this mix of paint and doctor’s office, can’t do much more than float over a deep ur-smell of ham fat and sweat and spunk, of armpit and whiskey and wet dark rot.

The apartment’s warmth brings a tingling numbness to Barrett’s skin. On his morning runs he joins the cold, inhabits it the way a long-distance swimmer must inhabit water, and only when he’s back inside does he understand that he is in fact half frozen. He’s not a comet after all, but a man, hopelessly so, and, being human, must be pulled back in—to the apartment, the boat, the space shuttle—before he perishes of the annihilating beauties, the frigid airless silent places, the helixed and spiraled blackness he’d love to claim as his true home.

A light appeared to him. And vanished again, like some unwelcome memory of his churchly childhood. Barrett has, since the age of fifteen, been adamantly secular, as only an ex-Catholic can be. He released himself, decades ago, from folly and prejudice, from the holy blood that arrived in cardboard cartons by way of UPS; from the stodgy, defeated cheerfulness of priests.

He saw a light, though. The light saw him.

What should he do about that?

For now, it’s time for his morning bath.

In the hall, on his way to the bathroom, Barrett passes Tyler and Beth’s door, which has yawned open during the night, as do all the doors and drawers and cabinets in this slanty apartment. Barrett pauses, doesn’t speak. Tyler is leaning out the window, naked, with his back to the open door, getting snowed upon.

Barrett has always been fascinated by his brother’s body. He and Tyler are not particularly similar, as brothers go. Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with avid yellow eyes, love’s first kiss. Tyler is lithe and stringy, tensely muscled. He can look, even in repose, like an aerialist about to jump from a platform. Tyler’s is, somehow, a lean but decorative body, a performer’s body; for some reason the word “jaunty” comes to mind. Tyler is irreverent in his body. He exudes the minor devilishness of a circus performer.

He and Barrett are rarely recognized as brothers. And yet, some inscrutable genetic intention is apparent in them. Barrett knows it with certainty, though he couldn’t explain. They are similar in ways known only to them. They possess a certain feral knowledge of each other, excrescence and scat. They are never mysterious, one to another, even when they’re mysterious to everybody else. It’s not that they don’t argue or challenge; it’s just that nothing one of them does or says ever seems to actually baffle the other. They seem to have agreed, long ago, without ever speaking about it, to keep their affinities secret when they’re in company; to bicker at dinner parties, to vie for attention, to carelessly insult and dismiss; to act, in public, like ordinary brothers, and keep their chaste, ardent romance to themselves, as if they were a two-member sect, passing as regular citizens, waiting for their moment to act.

Tyler turns from the window. He could swear he felt eyes on the back of his head, and although there’s no one there he feels an essence, a dissolved form that the air in the doorway has not yet entirely forgotten.

And then, the sound of water running in the bathtub. Barrett is back from his run.

How is it that Barrett’s presence, whenever he returns from anywhere, still feels like an event to Tyler? The prodigal returned, every single time. It is, after all, just Barrett, the little brother, fat kid clutching a Brady Bunch lunch box, weeping as the bus pulled away; adolescent clown who somehow escaped the fate that was all but automatically doled out to the freckled and rotund; Barrett who held court in the high school cafeteria, the bard of Harrisburg, PA; Barrett with whom Tyler has done uncountable childhood battles over turf and tattlings, has vied for their mother’s fickle and queenly attentions; Barrett whose sheer creatureliness is more familiar than anyone’s, even Beth’s; Barrett whose capacious and quirky mind sailed him into Yale, and who, since then, has patiently explained to Tyler, and Tyler alone, the irrefutable logic of his various plans: the post-graduation years of driving around the country (he crossed twenty-seven state lines), picking up jobs (fry cook, motel receptionist, apprentice construction worker) because his mind had grown too full as his hands remained unskilled; then the hustling (because he was too much caught up in romance, too determined to be a latter-day Bryon, it was time for a crash course in the baseness and beastliness of love); the entering of the Ph.D. program (It’s been good for me, it has been, to know for myself that going out into the Mad American Night tends to involve sitting in a Burger King in Seattle because it’s the only place open after midnight) and the leaving of same (Just because I was wrong about life on the road doesn’t mean I wasn’t right about not wanting to spend my life arguing about the use of the parenthetical in late James); the failed Internet venture with his computer-geek boyfriend; the still-thriving café in Fort Green that Barrett abandoned along with his subsequent boyfriend, after the guy came at him with a boning knife; et cetera …

All of them seemed, at their times, either like good ideas or (Tyler’s preference) fabulously strange ideas, the sort of off-kilter illogic that a smattering of inspired citizens follow to greatness.

None of them, however, seems to have led anywhere in particular.

And now Barrett, the family’s tortured Candide, Barrett who seemed so clearly destined for vertiginous heights or true disaster, has committed the most prosaic of human acts—he’s lost his apartment and, having nothing like the money required to rent a new one, moved in with his older brother. Barrett has done what was least expected of him—he’s become another of New York’s just-barelies, a guy whose modest Hobbitty setup on Horatio Street worked fine as long as the building didn’t go co-op.

Still. It’s Barrett, and Tyler has not ceased marveling at him in some low-grade but ongoing way.

The current Barrett, the one running bathwater down the hall, is the same Barrett who’d seemed for so long to be the magical child, until it began to look as if that boy would have been the third, unborn son. The Meeks of Harrisburg appear to have stopped one son too soon. They produced Tyler, with his fierce concentration and his athletic ease and his singular gift for music (who knew, at the beginning, just how gifted you’ve got to be?), and then Barrett, who arrived with his array of languid capabilities (he can recite more than a hundred poems; he knows enough about Western philosophy to do a lecture series, should anyone ask him to; he picked up nearly fluent French after two months in Paris), but without the ability to choose, and persist.

Barrett, now, is about to take a bath.

Tyler will wait until he hears the water stop running. Even with Barrett, there are formalities. Tyler can hang around with his brother once he’s in the tub, but can’t, for some real but inexplicable reason, watch him enter the water.

Tyler pulls the vial back out of the nightstand drawer, draws himself two lines, perches on the edge of the mattress to Hoover them up. There’s nothing, really nothing, like the morning ones (though this morning is the last, it’s his farewell morning); the ones that slap you into beauty, that scour sloth away, that vaporize the vagaries, the residue of dreams; that blast you out of slumberland, the shadow realm in which you wonder, and ask yourself why, and think about going back to sleep, about how lovely and sweet it would be to just go on sleeping.

The water stops. Barrett must be immersed.

Tyler puts yesterday’s boxer shorts back on (black, emblazoned with tiny white skulls), treads down the hall, opens the bathroom door. The bathroom is in its way the least upsetting room in the apartment, being the only room that has not been changed and changed and changed over the last century-plus. The other rooms are haunted by innumerable attempts to erase some past or other with paint or fake wood paneling, with an acoustic ceiling (the apartment’s most horrific aspect: pockmarked, dingily white squares made of god-knows-what, Tyler thinks of them as blocks of freeze-dried sorrow), with carpet that covers linoleum that covers splintery pine-plank floors. Only the bathroom is essentially as it was, dingy white hexagonal tiles and a pedestal sink and a toilet that actually still dangles a pull-chain flush from its tank. The bathroom is a chamber of unmolested oldness, the only place in which to escape the on-the-cheap improvements wrought by renters who’d hoped to brighten things up a bit, who’d imagined that the hibiscus-patterned contact paper affixed to the kitchen counters, or the word “Suerte” inexpertly carved into the lintel, would help make them feel more at home, in this apartment and in the larger world; and who, all of them, have either moved on by now, or died.

Barrett is in the tub. There’s no denying his capacity for a certain comic grandeur; a pride of being he carries with him everywhere; something royal, something that can in all likelihood only be inherited, never constructed or feigned. Barrett doesn’t lie in the tub. He sits straight-backed, blank-faced, like a commuter going home on a train.

He asks Tyler, “What are you doing up?”

Tyler takes a cigarette from the pack he keeps in the medicine cabinet. He doesn’t smoke anywhere but in the bathroom, for Beth’s sake.

“We left the window open last night. Our bedroom is full of snow.”

He taps the pack, violently, before extracting a cigarette. He’s not entirely sure why people do that (to concentrate the tobacco?), but he likes doing it, he likes that one sure and punishing whack as part of the lighting-up ritual.

Barrett says, “Dreams?”

Tyler lights his cigarette. He goes to the window, cracks it open, blows the smokestream out into the air shaft. His exhalation is answered by a tickle of frigid air, seeping in.

“Some windy joy,” he answers. “No specifics. Weather as happiness, but gritty, happiness blowing in unwanted, maybe in a town in Latin America. You?”

“A statue with a hard-on,” Barrett says. “A skulking dog. I’m afraid that’s it.”

They pause as if they were scientists, taking notes.

Barrett asks, “Have you listened to the news yet?”

“No. I’m a little bit afraid to.”

“He was still ahead in the polls at six.”

“He’s not going to win,” Tyler says. “I mean, there were no fucking weapons of mass destruction. Zero. Zip.”

Barrett’s attention is briefly diverted by a search, among the shampoo bottles, for one that still contains shampoo. Which is just as well. Tyler knows he can get crazy on the subject, monomaniacal; he can be tiresome about his conviction that if others only saw, if they only understood …

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.

And, by the way, he’s destroyed the economy. He’s squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.

It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane. And now that he’s no longer looking out onto his private snow kingdom, now that he’s coked himself up from that languid, awake-too-early state, he’s not only alert as a rabbit, he’s also available, once again, to the forces of fretfulness and dread.

He blows another plume out into the inrushing cold, watches his furls of smoke evaporate in the falling snow.

Barrett says, “What I’m really worried about is Kerry’s haircut.”

Tyler shuts his eyes, wincingly, as he would at the onset of a headache. He does not want to be, will not be, the one who won’t tolerate a joke, the uncle who has to be invited at the holidays even though we all know how he’s going to carry on about … whatever injustice or betrayal or historical malfeasance he wears like a suit of iron, soldered to his body.

“What I’m worried about,” Tyler says, “is Ohio.”

“I think it’ll be all right,” Barrett answers. “I have a feeling. Or, well, I have hope.”

He has hope. Hope is an old jester’s cap by now. Faded motley, with that little tin bell at the tip. Who has the energy to wear it anymore? But who’s courageous enough to doff it, leave it crumpled in the lane? Not Tyler.

“I do too,” he says. “I have hope and belief and even a particle or two of actual faith.”

“How are you doing with Beth’s song?”

“I’m a little stuck,” Tyler says. “But I think I made some progress last night.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Giving her a song seems kind of … small, don’t you think?”

“Of course not. I mean, what kind of wedding gift do you think would mean more to her? A BlackBerry?”

“It’s so impossible.”

“Writing songs is hard. Well, pretty much everything is hard, right?”

“I guess,” Tyler says.

Barrett nods. They pass through a moment of silence as old as either of them can remember, the quietude of growing up together, of sleeping in the same room; the shared quiet that has always been their true element, interrupted of course by talks and fights and farts and laughter over the farts but essential, the atmosphere to which they’ve always returned, a field of soundless oxygen made up of their combined molecules.

Tyler says, “Mom got struck by lightning on a golf course.”

“Uh, you know, I know that.”

“Betty Ferguson said at the memorial that she’d been three under par that day.”

“I know that, too.”

“Big Boy got hit by the same car, twice. Two years in a row. And it didn’t kill him either time. Then he choked to death on a Snickers bar at Halloween.”

“Tyler, really.”

“Then we got another beagle and named him Big Boy Two, and he got squashed by the son of the woman who’d hit Big Boy One, twice. It was the first time the woman’s son had driven by himself, it was his sixteenth birthday.”

“Why are you saying all this?”

“I’m just listing the impossibilities that happened anyway,” Tyler says.

“So, like, Bush won’t be reelected.”

Tyler doesn’t say, And Beth will live. He doesn’t say, The chemo is working.

He says, “I just want this fucking song to be good.”

“It will be.”

“You sound like Mom.”

Barrett says, “I am like Mom. And you know, really, it won’t matter if the song isn’t great. Not to Beth.”

“It’ll matter to me.”

Barrett’s sympathy blooms in his eyes, which darken for Tyler the way their father’s do. Although their father is not an especially gifted father, this is one of his talents. He has the ability, when needed, to perform this little eye-shift, a deepening and dilating that says to his sons, You don’t have to matter any more than you do right now.

They should call him, it’s been, what, more than a week now. Maybe two.

Why did he marry Marva so soon after Mom died? Why did they move to Atlanta, what do they do down there?

Who is this guy, where did the plaid come from, how can he love Marva—Marva’s okay, she’s fun in her crude, shock-the-boys way, you learn not to stare at the scar, but how can their dad cease to be Mom’s solicitous penitent? The deal was always so clear. She was the cherished and endangered one (lightning found her), it was right there on her face (the milk-blue Slavic fineness of it, her hand-carved quality, her porcelain glaze). Their father was the designated driver, the guy who enforced naps, the one who got panicky when she was half an hour late; the middle-aged boy who’d sit under her window in the rain until he caught his death.

And now, this person. This man who wears Tommy Bahama shorts, and Tevas. This guy who rockets around Atlanta with Marva in a Chrysler Imperial convertible, blowing cigarillo smoke up at whatever constellations appear over Georgia.

It’s probably easier on him, being this guy. Tyler doesn’t, won’t, begrudge it.

And, really, their father was released from paternal duty years and years ago, wasn’t he? It may have occurred as early as those drinking sessions with Barrett, during the days after their mother’s service.

They were seventeen and twenty-two. They just hung around the house like stray dogs for a few days, in briefs and socks, drinking down the supply (the scotch and vodka led to the gin, which led to the off-brand tequila, which led eventually to a quarter-full bottle of Tia Maria, and an inch of Drambuie that had probably been there twenty years or more).

They languished for days in the suddenly famous living room, surrounded by all the ordinary things that had so abruptly become her things. Tyler and Barrett, sloppy and scared and shocked, getting hammered in their briefs and socks; it was (maybe it was) the night they turned a particular corner …

Do you ever think?

What?

They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare junk to holy artifact.

You know.

What if I don’t know?

You fucking do.

Okay, yeah. Yes. I, too, wonder if Dad worried so much about every single little goddamned thing …

That he summoned it.

Thanks. I couldn’t say it.

That some god or goddess heard him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether she’d been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer …

That they delivered the thing even he couldn’t imagine worrying about.

It’s not true.

I know.

But we’re both thinking about it.

That may have been their betrothal. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. We no longer need, or want, a father.

Still, they really have to call him. It’s been way too long.

“I know,” Barrett says. “I know it’ll matter to you. But I think you should remember that it won’t, to her. Not in the same way.”

Barrett, bluff-chested, naked in graying water, is in particular possession of his pink-white, grandly mortified glow.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” Tyler says.

Barrett stands up in the tub, streaming bathwater, a hybrid of stocky robust manliness and plump little boy.

This peculiarity: Tyler is untroubled by the sight of Barrett emerging from his bathwater. It is, for mysterious reasons, only Barrett’s immersion that’s difficult for Tyler to witness.

Might that have to do with endangerment, and rescue? Duh.

Another peculiarity: Knowledge of one’s deeper motives, the sources of one’s peccadilloes and paranoias, doesn’t necessarily make much difference.

“I’m going to go to the shop,” Barrett says.

“Now?”

“I feel like being alone there.”

“It’s not like you don’t have your own room. I mean, am I crowding you?”

“Shut up. Okay?”

Tyler tosses Barrett a towel from the rack.

“It seems right, that the song is about snow,” Barrett says.

“It seemed right when I started it.”

“I know. I mean, it all seems right when you start it, it seems infinitely promising and inspired and great … I’m not trying to be profound, or anything.”

Tyler lingers for a final moment, to fully feel the charge. They do the eye thing, once more, for each other. It’s simple, it’s undramatic, there’s nothing moist or abashed, nothing actually ardent, going on, but they pass something back and forth. Call it recognition, though it’s more than that. It’s recognition, and it’s the mutual conjuring of their ghost brother, the third one who didn’t quite manage to be born, and so, being spectral—less than spectral, being never—is their medium, their twinship, their daemon; the boy (he’ll never grow past the pink-faced, holy gravitas of the cherubim) who is the two of them, combined.

Barrett dries off. The bathwater, now that he’s out of the tub, has turned from its initial, steaming clarity to a tepid murk, as it always does. Why does that happen? Is it soap residue, or Barrett residue—the sloughed-off outermost layer of city grime and deceased epidermis and (he can’t help thinking this) some measure of his essence, his little greeds and vanities, his self-admiration, his habit of sorrow, washed away, for now, with soap, left behind, to spiral down the drain.

He stares for a moment longer at his bathwater. It’s the usual water. It’s no different the morning after the night he’s seen something he can’t really have seen.

Why, exactly, would Tyler believe this was a good morning to return them to the story of their mother?

A time-snap: Their mother reclines on the sofa (which is here now, right here in their Bushwick living room), smoking, cheerfully bleary on a few old-fashioneds (Barrett likes her best when she drinks—it emphasizes her aspect of extravagant and knowing defeat; the wry, amused carelessness she lacks when sober, when she’s forced by too much clarity to remember that a life of regal disappointment, while painful, is also Chekhovian; grave, and rather grand). Barrett is nine. His mother looks at him with drink-sparked eyes, smiles knowingly, as if she’s got a pet leopard lying at her feet, and says, “You’re going to have to watch out for your older brother, you know.”

Barrett waits, mutely, sitting on the sofa’s edge, at the curve of his mother’s knees, for meaning to arrive. His mother takes a drag, a sip, a drag.

“Because, sweetheart,” she says, “let’s face it. Let’s be candid, can we be candid?”

Barrett acknowledges that they can. Wouldn’t anything other than total candor between a mother and her nine-year-old son be an aberration?

She says, “Your brother is a lovely boy. A lovely, lovely boy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you” (drag, sip) “are something else.”

Barrett blinks, damp-eyed with incipient dread. He is about to be told that he’s subservient to Tyler; that he’s the portly little quipster, the comic relief, while his older brother can slay a boar with a single arrow, split a tree with one caress of an axe.

She says, “Some magic has been granted to you. I’m damned if I know where it came from. But I knew it. I knew it right away. When you were born.”

Barrett keeps blinking back the tears he’s determined not to shed in front of her, though he wonders, with increasing urgency, what, exactly, she’s talking about.

“Tyler is popular,” she says. “Tyler is good-looking. Tyler can throw a football … well, he can throw it pretty far, and in the direction footballs are supposed to go.”

“I know,” Barrett says.

What strange impatience rises now to his mother’s face? Why does she look at him as if he were sycophantically eager, desperate to please some doddering aunt by pretending surprise over every twist in a story he’s known by heart, for years?

“Those whom the gods would destroy …” his mother says, blowing smoke up into the crystals of the modest dome-shaped chandelier that clings like an upside-down tiara to the living room ceiling. Barrett isn’t sure whether she can’t, or won’t, finish the line.

“Tyler is a good guy,” Barrett says, for no reason he can name, beyond the fact that it seems he has to say something.

His mother speaks upward, toward the chandelier. She says, “My point exactly.”

This will all start making sense. It will, soon. The square crystals of the chandelier, worried by the electric fan, each crystal the size of a sugar cube, put out their modest, prismed spasms of light.

His mother says, “You may need to help him out, a little. Later. Not now. He’s fine, now. He’s cock o’ the walk.”

Cock o’ the walk. A virtue?

She says, “I just want you to, well … remember this conversation we’re having. Years from now. Remember that your brother may need help from you. He may need a kind of help you can’t possibly imagine, at the age of ten.”

“I’m nine,” Barrett reminds her.

Almost thirty years later, having arrived at the future to which his mother was referring, Barrett pulls the plug on the bathtub. There’s the familiar sound of water being sucked away. It’s a morning like any other, except …

The vision is the first event of any consequence, in how many years, about which Barrett hasn’t told Tyler; which he continues not mentioning to Tyler. Barrett has never, since he was a kid, been alone with a secret.

He has, of course, never kept a secret quite like this.

He’ll tell Tyler, he will, but not now, not yet. Barrett isn’t ready for Tyler’s skepticism, or his valiant efforts at belief. He’s really and truly not ready for Tyler to be worried about him. He can’t bring himself to be another cause for concern, not with Beth getting neither better nor worse.

A terrible thing: Barrett finds sometimes that he wants Beth either to recover or die.

The endless waiting, the uncertainty (higher white-cell count last week, that’s good, but the tumors on her liver are neither growing nor shrinking, that’s not so good), may be worse than grieving.

A surprise: There’s no one driving the bus. There are five different doctors now, none of them actually in charge, and sometimes their stories don’t match up. They make efforts, they’re not bad doctors (except for Scary Steve, the chemo guy), they’re not negligent, they try this and they try that, but Barrett (and Tyler, and probably Beth, though she’s never talked about it) had imagined a warrior, someone kind and august, someone who’d be sure. Barrett had not expected this disorganized squadron—all upsettingly young, except for Big Betty—who know the language of healing, who reel off seven-syllable terms (tending to forget, or to disregard, the fact that the words are incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a doctor), who can operate the machinery, but who, purely and simply, don’t know what’s going to work, or what’s going to happen.

Barrett can keep this one about the celestial light private, for a while. It’s not an announcement Tyler needs to receive.

Barrett has, naturally enough, Googled every possible malady (torn retina, brain tumor, epilepsy, psychotic break) that’s presaged by a vision of light. Nothing quite fits.

Although he’s seen something extraordinary, and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a mortal ailment he failed to find on the Internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, he is exactly who he was last night.

However. The question arises: Who was he last night? Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his own ongoing condition? It’s a hard one to answer.

An answer might account for how and why Barrett and Tyler have lived so randomly (they, the National Merit boys—well, Barrett; Tyler was a runner-up—club presidents, Tyler crowned king of the fucking prom); why they happened to meet Liz when he and Tyler went, as each other’s date, to what has lived on as the Worst Party in History; why the three of them escaped the party and passed midnight together in some divey Irish pub; why Liz would eventually introduce Beth, newly arrived from Chicago; Beth who in no way resembles any of Tyler’s previous girlfriends, and with whom he’d fallen so immediately in love that he resembled some captive animal, fed for years on what its keepers believed to be its natural diet and then suddenly, one day, by accident, given what it actually ate, in the wild.

None of it has ever felt predetermined. It’s sequential, but not exactly orderly. It’s all been going to this party instead of that one, happening to meet someone who knew someone who by the evening’s end had fucked you in a doorway on Tenth Avenue or given you K for the first time or said something shockingly kind, out of nowhere, and then gone away forever, promising to call; or, with an equally haphazard aspect, happening to meet someone who’ll change everything, forever.

And now it’s a Tuesday in November. Barrett has gone for his morning run, had his morning bath. He’s going to work. What is there to do but what he always does? He’ll sell the wares (it’ll be slow today, because of the weather). He’ll continue with his exercise regimen and the no-carbs diet that will not make any difference to Andrew but will, might, help Barrett feel more agile and tragic, less like a badger besotted by a lion cub.

Will he see the light again? What if he doesn’t? Maybe he’ll grow old as a tale-teller who once saw something inexplicable; a UFO person, a Bigfoot person, a codger who experienced a brief, wondrous sighting of something inexplicable, and then went on about the business of getting older; who is part of the ongoing subhistory of crackpots and delusionals, the legions of geezers who know what they saw, decades ago, and if you don’t believe it, young one, that’s all right, maybe one day you, too, will see something you can’t explain, and then, well, then I guess you’ll know.

Beth is looking for something.

The trouble: She can’t seem to remember what it is.

She knows this much: She’s been careless, she’s misplaced … what? Something that matters, something that must be found, because … it’s needed. Because she’ll be held accountable when its absence is noticed.

She’s searching a house, although she’s not sure if it (what?) is here. It seems possible. Because she’s been in this house before. She recognizes it, or remembers it, in the way she remembers the houses of her childhood. The house multiplies into the houses in which she lived, variously, until she went away to college. There’s the gray-and-white-striped wallpaper of the house in Evanston, the French doors from Winnetka (were they really this narrow?), the crown molding from the second house in Winnetka (was it wound in these white plaster leaves, was there this suggestion of wise but astonished eyes, peering through the leaves?).

They’ll be back soon. Somebody will be back soon. Someone stern. The harder Beth searches, though, the less sense she has of what it is she’s lost. It’s small, isn’t it? Spherical? Is it too small to be visible? It might be. But that doesn’t alter the urgency of its discovery.

She’s the girl in the fairy tale, told to turn snow into gold by morning.

She can’t do that, of course she can’t, but there seems to be snow everywhere, it’s falling from the ceiling, snowdrifts shimmer in the corners. She remembers dreaming about searching through a house, when what she needs to do is turn snow into gold, how could she have forgotten …

She looks down at her feet. Although the floor is dusted with snow, she can see that she’s standing on a door, a trapdoor, contiguous with the floorboards, made apparent only by its pair of brass hinges and its tiny brass knob, no bigger than a gumball.

Her mother gives her a penny for a gumball machine outside the A&P. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother that one of the gumballs is poisoned, no one should put a penny into this machine, but her mother is so delighted by Beth’s delight, she’s got to put the penny in, hasn’t she?

There’s a trapdoor at her feet, in the sidewalk in front of the A&P. It’s snowing here, too.

Her mother urges her to put the penny into the slot. Beth can hear laughter, coming from underneath the door.

An annihilating force, a swirling orb of malevolence, is what’s laughing under the trapdoor. Beth knows this to be true. Is the door beginning, ever so slowly, to open?

She’s holding the penny. Her mother says, “Put it in.” It comes to her that the penny is what she thought she was searching for. She seems to have found it, by accident.

Tyler sits in the kitchen, sipping coffee and doing one last line. He’s still wearing the boxer shorts, and has put on Barrett’s old Yale sweatshirt, its grimacing bulldog faded, by now, from red to a faint, candyish pink. Tyler sits at the table Beth found on the street, cloudy gray Formica that’s chipped away in one corner, a ragged-edged gap the shape of the state of Idaho. When this table was new, people expected domed cities to rise on the ocean floor. They believed that they lived on the brink of a holy and ecstatic conjuring of metal and glass and silent, rubberized speed.

The world is older now. It can, at times, seem very old indeed.

They will not reelect George Bush. They cannot reelect George Bush.

Tyler pushes the thought out of his mind. It would be foolish to spend this lambent early hour obsessing. He’s got a song to finish.

So as not to awaken Beth, he leaves his guitar in the corner. He whisper-sings, a cappella, the verse he wrote last night.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

To melt this sliver in my heart

Oh, that’s not what I came for

No, that’s not what I came for.

Hmm. It’s crap, is it?

The trouble is …

The trouble is he’s determined to write a wedding song that won’t be all treacle and devotion, but won’t be cool or calm, either. How, exactly, do you write a song for a dying bride? How do you account for love and mortality (the real thing, not some till-death-do-us-part throwaway) without morbidity?

It needs to be a serious song. Or, rather, it needs not to be a frivolous song.

The melody will help. Please, let the melody help. This time, though, the lyrics need to come first. Once the lyrics feel right (once they feel less wrong), he’ll lay them over … a minimal tune, something simple and direct, not childish of course but possessed of a childlike, beginner’s earnestness, a beginner’s innocence of tricks. It should be all major chords, with one minor, at the end of the bridge—that single jolt of gravitas; that moment when the lyrics’ romantic solemnity departs from the contrast of its upbeat chords and matches—fleetingly—a darkness in the music itself. The song should reside in the general vicinity of Dylan, of the Velvet Underground. It should not be faux-Dylan, not fake Lou Reed; it should be original (original, naturally; preferably unprecedented; preferably tinged with genius), but it helps, it helps a little, to aim in a general direction. Dylan’s righteous banishment of sentimentality, Reed’s ability to mingle passion with irony.

The melody should have … a shimmering honesty, it should be egoless, no Hey, I can really play this guitar, do you get that? Because the song is an unvarnished love-shout, an implorement tinged with … anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosopher, the anger of a poet, an anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away; that we’re being shown marvels but reminded, always, that they don’t belong to us, they’re sultan’s treasures, we’re lucky (we’re expected to feel lucky) to have been invited to see them at all.

And there’s this, as well. The song has to be infused with … if not anything as banal as hope, an assertion of an ardency that can, if this is humanly possible (and the song must insist that it is), follow the bride in her journey to the netherworld, abide there with her. It has to be a song in which a husband and singer declares himself to be not only a woman’s life-mate, but her death-mate as well, although he, helpless, unconsulted, will keep on living.

Good luck with that one.

He pours himself more coffee, draws out a final, really final, line on the tabletop. Maybe he’s just not … awake enough to be gifted. Maybe one day, why not today, he’ll bust out of his lifelong drowse.

Would “shiver” be better than “sliver”? To melt this shiver in my heart?

No. It wouldn’t.

That repetition at the end—is it forceful or cheap?

Should he try for a half-rhyme with “heart”? Is it too sentimental to use the word “heart” at all?

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds this early in the morning. That’s a possibility.

But still. If Tyler were the real thing, if he were meant to do this, wouldn’t he have more confidence? Wouldn’t he feel … guided, somehow?

Never mind that he’s forty-three, and still playing in a bar.

He will not come to his senses. That’s the siren song of advancing age. He can’t, he won’t, deny the snag in his heart (there’s that word again). He can feel it, an undercurrent in his bloodstream, this urge that’s utterly his own. No one ever said to him, why don’t you use your degree in political science to write songs, why don’t you blow the modest inheritance your mother left by sitting in ever-smaller rooms, strumming a guitar. It’s his open secret, the self inside the self, secret because he believes he knows within himself a brilliance, or at least a penetrating clarity, that hasn’t come out yet. He’s still producing approximations, and it vexes him that most people (not Beth, not Barrett, just everybody else) see him as a sad case, a middle-aged bar singer (no, make that a middle-aged bartender, who’s permitted by the owner to sing on Friday and Saturday nights), when he knows (he knows) that he’s still nascent, no prodigy of course, but the music and poetry move slowly in him, great songs hover over his head, and there are moments, real moments, when he feels so certain he can reach them, he can almost literally pull them out of the air, and he tries, lord how he tries, but what he grabs hold of is never quite it.

Fail. Try again. Fail better. Right?

He sings the first two lines again, softly, to himself. He hopes they’ll open into … something. Something magical, and obscurely on target, and … good.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

He sings quietly in the kitchen, with its faint gassy smell and its pale blue walls (they must, once, have been aquamarine), its tacked-up photographs of Burroughs and Bowie and Dylan, and (Beth’s) Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. If he can write a beautiful song for Beth, if he can sing it to her at their wedding and know that it’s a proper testament—a true gift, not just another near miss, another nice try, but a song that lands, that lances, that’s gentle but faceted, gleaming, gem-hard …

Give it one more go, then.

He starts singing again, as Beth dreams in the next room. He sings quietly to his lover, his bride to be, his dying girl, the girl for whom this song and, probably, really, all the songs are meant. He sings into the brightening air of the room.

Barrett has gotten dressed. The tight (too tight? fuck it—if you present yourself as a beauty, people tend to believe you) wool pants, the Clash T-shirt (worn down to pearl-gray translucence), the ostentatiously ragged sweater that drapes limp and indolent almost to his knees.

Here he is, bathed, hair-gelled, dressed for the day. Here’s his reflection in his bedroom mirror, here’s the room in which he currently resides: Shinto-inspired, just a mattress and a low table, the walls and floor painted white, Barrett’s private sanctuary from the funky-junk museum that is the rest of Tyler and Beth’s apartment.

He takes out his cell phone. Liz’s phone will be turned off, of course, but he should tell her he’s going to open the shop this morning.

“Hey, it’s Liz, leave a message.”

He’s still surprised, sometimes, by the clipped force of her voice, when it transmits unaccompanied by her animated, rather off-kilter face (she’s one of those women who insists, successfully, on her own beauty—Barrett has learned from her; on the assertion that a hooked jut of nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth is, must be, added to the list of desirable features), the careless gray tangle of her hair.

Barrett speaks into (onto?) her voice mail.

“Hi. I’m going in early, just to lurk around, so if you and Andrew want to stay snuggled up, go ahead. I’ll open. And it’s not like there’s going to be any customers on a day like this. Bye.”

Andrew. The most ideal being among Barrett’s inner population; graceful and inscrutable as a figure from the Parthenon friezes; Barrett’s singular experience of the godly. Andrew is as close as Barrett has come to a sense of divine presence in the world.

A minor epiphany circles his head like a persistent fly. Did his most recent boyfriend leave so casually because he sensed Barrett’s fixation on Andrew, which Barrett never, ever, mentioned? Is it possible that the departed boy perceived himself as an imitation, of sorts; as the most possessable version of Andrew’s offhand, no-big-deal beauty; Andrew who will do, for now and possibly forever, as the most persuasive living evidence of God’s genius, coupled with God’s inscrutable propensity for sculpting some of the clay with a degree of attention to the symmetries and precisions He (She?) withholds from most of the population at large?

No. Probably not. The guy wasn’t, frankly, a particularly subtle or intuitive thinker, and Barrett’s devotion to Andrew carries no hint of actual possibility. Barrett adores Andrew the way one might a Phidias Apollo. You don’t expect a marble sculpture to step down off its museum pedestal and take you in its arms. No one dumps a lover because the lover is besotted by art. Right?

Who doesn’t want—who doesn’t need—a moon at which to marvel, a fabled city of glass and gold on the far side of the ocean? Who would insist that his corporeal lover—the guy in his bed, the man who forgets to throw his used Kleenexes away, who used the last of the coffee before he left for work—be the moon or the city?

If Barrett’s latest ex did in fact desert him because Barrett maintains a private fascination with a boy he’ll never have … That might, in some perverse way, be good to know. Barrett prefers a version in which the vanished lover turns out to have been unreasonable, or paranoid, or even a little bit insane.

On his way out, Barrett pauses, again, at the open door of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom. Beth is asleep. Tyler must be in the kitchen, cranking on coffee. Barrett is glad, of course—everybody is—that Tyler has stopped doing drugs.

Barrett stands for a moment in the bedroom doorway, watching Beth sleep. She’s as frail and ivory-colored as a comatose princess, slumbering through decades, waiting for the spell to be broken. She looks, strangely enough, less sick when she sleeps; when her conversation and her concerns and her mannerisms aren’t so clearly struggling to survive the failing of her body.

Has Barrett been given a sign about Beth? Does the fact that some immense inhuman intelligence elected to appear to him at this particular time have anything to do with Beth slipping off into more and more sleep?

Or was the vision just a little flesh-stone pressing against his cerebral cortex? How will he feel when, a year or so from now, someone in an emergency room tells him they could have caught that tumor if only he’d acted sooner?

He’s not going to see a doctor. If he had a regular doctor (he imagines her as Swedish, sixty-plus, stern but not fanatical about his health; prone to mild, mock-serious scoldings about his modest amalgam of less-than-salubrious pleasures), he’d call her. Given that he’s uninsured, subject to clinics and the ministrations of medical students who are learning on the job, he can’t seem to bring himself to face the questions an unknown doctor would pose about his history of mental health. It’s only possible for him to imagine discussing the celestial light with someone who knows him, already, as fundamentally sane.

Would he rather risk death than embarrassment? It seems that he would.

Quietly (he’s still in his socks, shoes are left by the front door, a strange local custom, given the apartment’s less-than-tidy nature), Barrett walks into the room and stands beside the bed, listening to the steady murmur of Beth’s breathing.

He can smell her—the lavender soap they all use, mingled with a smell he can only think of as womanly, a ripe cleanliness that’s somehow enhanced and deepened by sleep, all mixed up now with the powder and nettle of her medicines, the strangest roil of pharmaceutical immaculacy and some sour chamomile-family herb that has in all likelihood been gathered for centuries in bogs and marshes, along with a sickroom smell he can only think of as electric, the indescribable cauterizing invisible whatever that runs through wires hidden in the walls of rooms in which someone is mortally ill.

He bends over, looks closely at Beth’s face, which is pretty, pretty enough, but, at the same time, better than pretty, more personal. If prettiness implies a certain quality of banal resemblance, Beth looks like no one but herself. Her lips, slightly parted, issuing the faint whistle of her breath, are puffy and puckery; her nose some remnant of an Asian ancestor, with its flattened humility, its little slits of nostrils; her eyelids blue-white, the lashes sable; the pallid pinkish melon scalp of her chemo-induced baldness.

She’s lovely, but she’s not a great beauty, and her accomplishments are charming, but minor. She’s a good baker. She has fashion sense. She’s smart, an avid reader. She’s kind to just about everyone.

Is it possible that the light, by choosing to appear to him as Beth fades, meant something about a life that continues beyond the limits of the flesh?

Or is that some messianic bent of Barrett’s?

Could that be why his lover left? Because he’s too prone to Signs of Significance?

Barrett bends low, puts his face so close to Beth’s that he can feel her breath on his chin. She’s alive. She’s alive right now. Her eyelids twitch over a dream.

He imagines her dreams as pale and buoyant, bright even in extremis; no lurking invisible terrors, no shriek of annihilation, no innocent-seeming heads turning to reveal black holes instead of eyes, or teeth like razors. He hopes that’s true.

A moment later he stands, abruptly, as if somebody had called his name. He almost stumbles backward over the fact that Beth is being taken out so early, and that her absence will be felt by a small body of people, but will otherwise go unnoticed. It’s not a surprise. But it strikes him now with particular force. Is it more tragic, or is it less, to slip so quietly and briefly into and out of the world? To have added, and altered, so little.

An unwelcome thought: Beth’s primary accomplishment may be to have loved and been loved by Tyler. Tyler, who sees something invisible even to everyone else who loves her. She is widely loved. But Tyler adores her, Tyler is fascinated by her, Tyler finds her extraordinary.

As does Barrett, though he does so because Tyler does. Still. Beth will have been loved ardently by a main man and a backup man. She will have been, in a certain sense, doubly married.

How exactly will Tyler live on after she’s departed? Barrett adores Beth, and (as far as he knows) she adores him in return, but it’s Tyler, and Tyler alone, who delivers the daily ministrations. How will he live not only with the loss of her but also the loss of the purpose she’s created, these past two years? Caring for Beth has been his career. He’s played and composed his music on the side, whenever he’s not too urgently needed.

Somehow, Barrett has failed to fully apprehend it until now: Tyler is worried, Tyler is aggrieved, but also, since Beth’s diagnosis, he’s been more content than Barrett has seen him in years. Tyler would never admit it, not even to himself, but seeing to Beth—comforting her, feeding her, keeping track of her medication, arguing with her doctors—has made him successful. Here is something he can do, and can do well, as the music flicks teasingly around him, just out of reach. And there is, probably, isn’t there, something dreadful but calming about the certainty of failure, in the end. Hardly anyone becomes a great musician. No one can reach into the body of a loved one, and scrape the cancer away. One blames oneself for the former. One has nothing to say about the latter.

Barrett places his hand, gently, onto Beth’s forehead, though he hadn’t exactly intended to. He feels as if he’s watching his hand perform an act he didn’t ask of it. Beth murmurs, but doesn’t awaken.

Barrett does his best to transmit some kind of healing force, through the palm of his hand. Then he walks back out of the sickroom, returns to the comforting normalcy of the hall, and heads for the kitchen, where Tyler is awake, where coffee has been made, where the rampancy of life, even in its most rudimentary form, plays like an enchanted piper; where Tyler, suitor and swain, ferocious of brow, thin but athletically tendoned legs protruding from boxer shorts, does what he can to prepare for his forthcoming marriage.

The marriage thing is very weird,” Liz says to Andrew. They’re standing on her roof, with snow billowing around them. They’ve come up to the roof for the shock of it, after a night that just rolled off the time-spool (my god, Andrew, it’s four in the morning; shit, Andrew, how’d it suddenly get to be five thirty, we’ve got to get some sleep). They’ve been too high to have sex, but there were moments, there were moments, during the night, when it seemed to Liz that she was explaining herself entirely; that she was able to hold her very being in her outstretched palms and say, here I am, here’s the golden box all tricked open, every hidden drawer and false bottom released; here is my honor and my generosity, here are my wounds and my fears, the real as well as the imaginary; here is what I see and think and feel; here is my acuity and my hope and my way of turning a phrase; here is the … me-ness of me, the tangible but inchoate entity that shifts and buzzes within the flesh, the central part that simply is, the part that finds it wonderful and appalling and strange to be a woman named Liz who lives in Brooklyn and owns a shop; the unnamed and unnameable; that which God would recognize after the flesh has fallen away.

Really, who needed to have sex?

Now she is quieting, returning, reconnecting (with both sorrow and gratitude) to her more corporeal self, the self that still blazes with its own light and heat but is tethered by all the sinewy little strings—the self that’s capable of pettiness and irritation, skepticism and needless anxiety. She is no longer aloft, no longer spreading a star-studded cloak over the nocturnal woods; she is still full of mingled magic but she is also a woman standing on a roof with her much-younger boyfriend, pelted by blowing snow, a denizen of the ordinary world, someone who might say, The marriage thing is very weird.

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