The Snow Queen Read Free

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.

B arrett 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,