Out in the blowing snow, Albert looked for a cab, but the arcing drive down to the street was empty. Albert thought: Satan’s fiery red hell. And with that, his memory recovered enough ground for him to orient himself. Southward, south to the water.
The coat was heavy but the wind cut right into it, and he huddled behind a concrete pillar. What was he supposed to do, walk from here? If so, which direction? All he saw were dim outlines and snow.
Remarkably, his grandson, the impetus for this entire escapade, had been absent from his thoughts since he’d placed the phone call that set in motion his creaky machine, as if a final settlement had been agreed upon and his accounts, so long out of balance, had been paid in full. As he cowered from the wind, a strange thought bloomed, perhaps unfolding to fill the space vacated by the boy. Strange, because it was the first time he’d considered the question of who would maintain the memory of the boy’s death once he was gone. He’d written down none of his thoughts on the matter. He couldn’t remember having told anyone about what had happened. Shouldn’t he have? Shouldn’t he have ensured that his own memorial would be one of unabashed hatred, that someone would daily think of him with scorn? He was, after all, responsible for the boy’s death. Architect and contractor for the gallows, knotter of the noose.
Did he think these things or did I? Perhaps none of these thoughts crossed the transom of Albert’s conscious mind—they existed, I promise, within him, I’m sure of it, but as to the question of when I became aware of them, that’s a little like attempting to mark the moment one’s eyes become adjusted to darkness. Outlines, gradations. How long have the objects slowly coming into focus been there? A second? A minute? Decades?
So I’ve poured some of my own ink into the waters of his mind. But I only want to be fair. It’s true that I long for an impartial ear, and can only ask as much of you as Albert did of me.
He was about to start walking when a Checker cab crept around the curve. Albert waited motionless in the lee of the pillar while the driver got out, shoulders up around his ears, and danced over the icy concrete to the back door, where he helped out an old woman in slippers. Her terry-cloth housecoat hung below the hem of her black overcoat, whipping around her shins as she shuffled into the hospital on the driver’s arm.
Albert’s first step sent him slipping and pinwheeling across an icy patch but he caught his balance on the other side and shuffled around the front end toward the driver’s door. The wind pushed at him as he made his way around the big chrome bumper, the coat filling like a spinnaker, and he held on as well as he could to the car’s cold wet hood, working his way back until his fingers found the seam of the door. He pulled it open, got in, struggled it closed. A cigarette was smoking in the ashtray, and Albert opened a crease in the window and pushed it out, where it stuck against the wet glass.
Albert had not driven a car in a decade. Like all New Yorkers, he prided himself on his poor driving skills and the rarity with which he needed to employ them. Even when he’d driven the Coupe de Ville every weekend on Long Island, he’d never felt at one with the machine, not in the way of a man who’d come of age with his elbow out the window, wrist on the wheel, who’d learned to smoke sitting on the hood, had his first misaligned sexual experiences in a backseat. He’d come along too early and too poor. As if bringing himself physically closer to the machine might correct for his lack of experience, he’d always driven with the seat dumped forward, body hugging the wheel. He accelerated in pulses, the car surging forward like a rowboat, the children in the back lurching in time, while in the passenger seat Sydney perpetually kept her hand on his knee in an attempt to smooth their progress. He yelled when he drove. From the moment he slid the key into the ignition, he was locked in battle with the goddamn idiots populating the roadways, the unpredictable decelerators, the nervous Nellies, those with liberal signaling habits. Old men in hats were dependable targets. It’s not a wagon train! he’d growl if anyone rode his bumper. As soon as he parked and got out, he settled. The farther he was from the detestable Cadillac, the better. When he kicked the tires, and he often did, he did so with the intention of inflicting pain. Nothing in the world quite so brazenly represented his inability to master the subtleties of mechanical control. His partners zapped around the island in Alfa Romeos and MGs, in the manner of exiled Russian counts, behavior he found wholly inappropriate for men of their fiduciary responsibilities. The legal profession was a service industry, not a beauty pageant. He hated those cars.
He was especially unqualified, then, to handle two tons of Checker Marathon in a snowstorm. Not all that quick off the line in normal conditions, on the snowpack the cab’s handling was decidedly slicker and it sluiced around the curving hospital driveway like a pinball out of the shooter lane, crashed into the street, the front bumper gouging into the snow, tagging the pavement with a shriek. To avoid plowing into the cars on the opposite curb Albert cranked the wheel like a helmsman in a gale, narrowly avoided that disaster, and bounded off pulsingly up powdery Columbus.
The cabbie came out of the hospital’s revolving door just in time to see his car disappearing up the avenue, rooster tails spraying from the back tires. Typical. You try to do a nice thing. You take somebody’s grammy to the hospital in the middle of the storm of the decade, and some punk boosts your ride. Thanks a fucking lot, New York.
16.
By then the snow had erased the city. On West End, just outside the Apelles, the wind was whipping a NO PARKING sign like it was a fighter getting worked in the corner of the ring. Snow covered the streets, and the streets covered the pipes, the tunnels, the conduits, the corridors, the ancient veins of the city ferrying transmissions telephonic and electric, the steam, the words and water and waste, ever excavated and re-entombed by Con Ed hardhats. Traffic lights jounced around on their guy wires. Streetlights burned like quasars, tinting the white surface of the roadway tangerine, painting the flakes as they shot by. This snow did not twinkle or float. It crashed down. This storm meant to do harm to the earth, to obscure the land and all who walked upon it. It had silenced the mechanical thrum of the city, the grating metal and the horns and the incessant wail of sirens that proscribed its functional limits more than any boundary on a map. No cars out except for the ones crash-landed and abandoned at drunken angles to the glacial curbs. Even that ambient hum, the background noise audible on the quietest corners of residential streets in the dead of a summer night, beneath the air conditioners, beneath the distant hum of traffic on the FDR, the machinery inside the island that kept it inflated and breathing, a sound like air rushing through a canyon, even that noise was gone. People? Only a few. The city had been swept clean.
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.