14

I am in a room, high up, near some sort of exposed beams. The back of my head smacks the ceiling, and hair that is not my hair hangs around my face, uncoiling stiffly like the tails of chameleons. There is no motion, and time has fallen off its continuum, like gears skipping intervals. I am kept up, pushed up, by what I do not know. On one beam there is writing, code writing, a wicked code, legible to me—legible, and so I am wicked, I think; yes, I must be wicked.

My eyes opened from the nightmare, then immediately closed again, squeezing tight. The twilight seemed robust when I felt so very feeble, so I decided to lay in bed and wait for people to come home and switch on appliances. I wanted all the machines to be on. I did not like the way the appliances were sitting there, arrogant and fat and proving through muteness that everyone was elsewhere, involved with other things, things separate from me.

I switched on the lamp and retrieved the note from Jack that was beneath it. Yellow lamplight soaked the page. Faded gray letters were penciled between the blue rules, strung together and nearly indecipherable. There were words—love and me and mystery, also key and sleep. I fell back onto the mattress, dropping Jack’s note to the floor. My quilt felt soft around my neck, and I nestled into the pillow. Tiny shellfish burrow into the floor of the bay, hiding there. From the safety of their beds of sand they listen to the clamoring of the sea.

That morning I saw him at the record store, through the picture window of Long Island Sound. I was inside; he was walking past. There was no reason for me to turn from what I’d been doing, but when I did, Rourke was there. He stopped and stared incautiously, as though bewildered by me, or provoked. He was wearing a navy-blue down jacket that yielded obediently to his body, and his right hand was crammed halfway inside his jeans pocket. Under his open coat was a pine-green shirt with several unfastened buttons, and the waist of his pants came low around his hips. His black hair was wavy, tousled.

I smiled. He did not smile back.

He reached for the front door. It whooshed open, then clattered to a positive close. I returned to the wall of albums, and experienced that futile feeling of waiting when there’s no avoiding the thing you’re waiting for. If I tried to leave, he would watch my body on the way out, the way I was bound tight in my jeans. The store was empty except for the two of us, so there was no chance of disappearing among others. I slipped behind a display rack.

He started talking to Eddie, the record store guy. As they spoke, Rourke kept taking pieces of something from his hand, nuts maybe, or candy, and eating them. His jaw moved in even claps, and the muscles at the base of his cheeks flexed into knots. He hadn’t shaved.

“It’s definitely inferior,” Eddie was saying.

“It really is crap,” Rourke agreed, and from his coat pocket he withdrew a bottle of lime-green Gatorade, raised it to his lips, and drank.

There was something especially sexy about the random way he was dressed, making it easy to imagine him in bed that morning, thinking thoughts just as I had, jerking off probably, then deciding to alleviate a morning’s boredom by going into town for a while. I flipped mechanically through the section of albums marked S and imagined that I’d been home with him, wherever it was that his home may have been. I had thoughts of being beneath him, and alongside him, my body to his body, his hands on me, holding me, and his mouth, and his smell. For a moment I felt dizzy. I’d never had such thoughts so vividly: it was like thinking of things we’d already done.

Eddie was much scrawnier next to Rourke than he was beside Jack, practically like a voodoo doll. His badly scarred skin and arched eyebrows were visible to me just above the albums in the wooden aisle dividers as he led Rourke down the row by mine. They drifted to a halt at the Ps, facing me. I lowered my head over the record well, pretending to read.

“Petty was influenced by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds,” Eddie said. “McGuinn’s the one who figured out how to get the long sustains by using a compressor with the Rickenbacker. That’s how he got Coltrane’s horn sound on ‘Eight Miles High.’”

Eddie had an encyclopedic knowledge of music. The store had an “Ask Eddie” lockbox for questions. Answers got posted on a chalkboard by the register. Everyone took the process seriously, especially Jack, who regarded the system as something along the lines of “Ask God.”

“Yeah,” Rourke said, his voice slipping away from Eddie, moving sinuously, calling to me. Our eyes met. “I know McGuinn,” he said softly. “He toured with Dylan.”

All the features of the place we inhabited vanished, leaving me alone, with him alone. My heart began to beat rapidly. I adjusted the underwire of my bra beneath my left breast because I did not like to feel my heart against it, the way the blurps felt so miniature, the way the organ strived but failed to be timely. Weeks had elapsed since I’d seen him last, and though I’d thought of him, those thoughts had not affected my mood or disposition. Yet having him before me now, I knew I’d been deprived. I recalled the way he looked at me through the store window. Despite his obvious interest and my real desire, we were impotent with respect to circumstance, and that made me angry, and my anger bound me to him. Rourke understood: he seemed angry as well. In those moments we stepped out equally, we confessed equally, we were rendered equally weak, and as weakened equals we met, victoriously, at some median of daring and possibility.

I was thinking, I must, oh, you know, say something.

Eddie pulled out Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, then they returned to the front. Rourke’s eyes passed over mine once more. I looked away.

Rourke paid, and while he waited for change, he took his wallet between his teeth and yanked his pants up by the belt loops. Eddie inquired about his New Year’s plans. I couldn’t hear the answer. Probably Rourke’s plans involved a girl. When he left, he just left, not looking back, with his head high and his eyes steady on their course, causing me to wonder if perhaps I was wrong. It was possible that he pitied my naïve infatuation.

——

Right after knocking, Kate burst into my room, her coat still on. “I’m sorry!” she said brightly. “Were you napping?”

“Can you go put the radio on for me?” I asked. “And the lights.”

“Sure,” she said. She hopped back out to the living room, and within seconds, the lights were on and the radio burst to life. It had been broadcasting all afternoon, transmitting to bodies in kitchens and cars. I had the sickening feeling I’d missed so much.

When Kate returned, she dropped down on the foot of the bed. “I was at the movies,” she said. “The matinee. With Harrison Rourke.”

I was surprised. I couldn’t help it. Sometimes Kate surprised me. I said, “What?”

“Actually,” she amended, “he was alone in the theater, so we asked if we could sit with him.”

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Michelle Sui. Michelle was with me.” Kate played with the zipper on her parka. “He said he saw you in the record store. Did you see him?”

“It was pretty crowded in there.”

“He said you never say hello.”

“I don’t really know him.”

“Well, he knows you,” she said. “You should try to be nice.”

I tried to put him out of my mind, the effortless way he had been dressed, the lazy curl of his hair, the hidden influence of his chest beneath his shirt. Unfortunately, the memory proved too powerful to erase. The muscles between my legs squeezed to hold nothing. There was a shiver in my groin, this nagging need to push my hips, and an opposing pull inching up my back.

“Listen,” I said, going blank on her name for a second. “Kate. Let’s just drop it.”

“My God,” she replied, offended. “What did he ever do to you?”

For a long time we just sat there. I wondered if she was sweating beneath the bulk of her coat. I toyed with Jack’s letter, folding it into an origami swan. Kate said Rourke said he’d seen me; he told her I never say hello. Rourke did not exactly lie to her, but he did not exactly tell the truth either. He spoke in code to reach me, or so I thought. I had no proof.

“You’re coming to Coco’s New Year’s party, right?” she asked. “You’re invited.”

“I feel a little sick,” I said, gesturing to my throat. “Thanks anyway.”

“Want to come upstairs with me while I get dressed? I don’t want to be alone.”

Between the twin closets in her room, there was an alcove and, squarely in its center, a window. I sat and propped my feet against the sill and looked into the snowy gray sky, which appeared to be hollow, like it had depth, like you could climb inside if only you could get close enough. I listened to the sounds of Kate dressing: the crinkle of paper-covered hangers, the slippery whisper of plastic bags, the oaky snap of dresser drawers, the clank of miniature buckles, the thin tap of pointed heels against the floor. It was strange to think that I would be home, safe in the ease of my solitude, but Kate would be out. When you set forth, things really do happen.

“What do you think?” she asked. She was wearing light black pants and a silk blouse, ivory and sleeveless. It’s weird that people like Kate who normally have strict rules about seasonal dressing, such as no rayon or short sleeves in winter, suspend those rules for New Year’s Eve, the one night they probably ought to dress practically.

“What about the blue sweater Lowie gave you?”

She extracted the sweater from the section of her closet devoted to blues, held it to her chest, and pirouetted before the mirror. “It’s not too juvenile?” she asked.

The streetlamps switched on; their light reflected up and hit the clouds, turning the front yard into an amphitheater. Flurries were falling faster, toppling like butterflies shot from the sky. In the distance they fell fast, but near the house they scrolled and slowly scrambled, acquiring alarming new dimension. I thought of the line I liked from The Night Before Christmas.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.

Jack hated that I liked that poem. He was always telling me to read Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.

“You’re right,” Kate said in reference to the sweater. “This is better.”

The floorboards creaked outside Kate’s bedroom door, and Mom came in wearing a crushed velvet bodysuit. It was purplish, the color of pomegranates. She was on her way to a party in Bridgehampton.

“Kate, you look beautiful.”

Kate giggled in the self-effacing style of someone who knows she is beautiful, who is always told that she is beautiful, but who, deep down, does not feel very beautiful. She sat at her dressing table and brushed her hair. It was winning hair, populous and blond.

“And you,” my mother said to me, referring to my torn long johns and stained sweatshirt. “Miss Appalachia,” she joked, touching my cheek. “Remember, I used to call you that?” The pink polish of her thumbnail passed the edge of my eye—once, twice. “Not going out tonight?”

“She’s sick,” Kate informed her.

“Sick?” Mom asked, then she turned back to Kate. “By the way, your brother called earlier to say Happy New Year. Call him back before you leave, but keep it short.” When she reached the door, she said, “Be careful, Kate. Don’t get in any cars.”

Then the squeaking steps again, and the front door popping open, and outside blowing in. I heard my mother’s tread dimming and dulling into the snow-covered path to the driveway. The car engine coughed to a dubious start, and she was gone.

The snow looked nice so I decided to walk to Coco’s with Kate. While she waited in the yard for me to grab my coat, the phone rang. It was Jack calling from Dan’s house. “You coming?”

I answered but he did not hear. The music was deafening.

“What?” he shouted. “Christ, hold on. Daniel, turn that shit off!” The music vanished with a flushing zzzt sound. “What did you say?”

“I said, I’m not feeling well.”

“We-ll,” Jack said deliberately, as if stating the obvious to a stubborn child, “come over here. Smokey will make you Irish coffee. He’s a master chemist.”

“I think I’d better stay home.” I untangled the knotted phone cord and poked around my mother’s desk, straightening out her papers and reading a few lines from a half-graded essay titled, “Christianity and Salvation in the Works of Flannery O’Connor.”

“You think you’d better stay home,” he repeated.

I pulled at my bottom lip. It had not been a good day. Not a secure day. I said, “Yeah.”

“So then, you’re not going out at all.”

My coat was in hand. Jack had a way of forcing a lie. I said, “No.”

There was a pause. “Fine,” he grumbled. “See you later.”

“Bye, Jack,” I said. Before hanging up, I thanked him. I wasn’t sure why I thanked him, except to say that he seemed to be doing me a favor.

I met Kate out on the path. “That was Jack,” I said. “He’s at Dan’s.”

“You’d better not go over there or you’ll really get sick. I bet they’re getting totally wasted.”

Main Street was silent and lonesome. Blanketed in a carpet of white, and alive with the smoke of small wood fires that joined rooftop to rooftop, East Hampton revealed its colonial heritage. Sometimes a place rises up with a memory of itself, like a company of ghosts trumpeting out from the tops of tombstones. It was nearly impossible not to be transported back to the 1600s, to the time the town was settled.

“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

“What is?” Kate asked.

“The snow,” I said. “The way it changes everything.” It made the treetops into lace and the branches into panther tails, long and leaning with tiny kinks. On the crooks and twiggy ends of things the snow sat in balls like cotton ready to be picked. The streets were completely carless; it felt as though we were wading through a lake.

“It is pretty,” Kate agreed.

As we walked, I kept thinking about “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” wondering what made the story a legend. There was one character called Ichabod Crane and another called Brom Bones. Both names were suitable for those living in the post-Revolutionary American countryside, iconoclastic and frightening, calling to mind half-lit lanterns and bitter gusts of wind and leaves that twist inward at the prongs like a witch’s fingernails. Neither character was particularly sympathetic; the author seemed to be making a point.

I asked Kate if the Headless Horseman story had a moral.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what does it stand for?” It wasn’t a fable—there were no animals or values.

“It stands for—well, Ichabod Crane was superstitious, and he let himself be run out of town. That’s why he lost the girl. I guess the moral is, ‘Don’t believe in ghosts.’”

“Yeah, but the guy who ran him out of town tricked him. So, there would have to be a second moral, such as ‘Don’t believe in ghosts—but go ahead and use other people’s fear of them to get what you want.’ Or maybe just, ‘It’s okay to be mean.’ And the whole survival of the fittest message doesn’t hold up, since Ichabod was a teacher and Brom Bones was a thug and a cheat, kind of like a used car salesman. Why should he get to marry the girl and make more little Brom Boneses?” It wasn’t a very good statement about America—or was it?

“I don’t know what to tell you, Evie,” Kate said. “It’s just a story.”

I kicked at the snow. “I’m just saying it’s weird, that’s all.” We were standing at the top of David’s Lane near the Presbyterian church; Coco lived five houses down. I got the feeling Kate didn’t want me to go any farther.

“I told Coco you were sick,” Kate said. “What if someone saw you? I’d seem like a liar.”

I waved, saying, “No problem, okay,” and also, “I understand.” Then I watched her slip away, vanishing into white.

The snow in the empty A&P parking lot looked like the uplands of a layer cake. I cut through the drifts, walking without raising my feet. Under the snow was asphalt, and under that, smothered things. It was comforting to think that you could excavate and plow down and begin the world again, though to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know who “you” might be, unless “you” was Jack. Jack was always trying to return the earth to its original state. He kept trying to organize a mall-razing party at the shopping plaza in Bridgehampton where the drive-in used to be, modeled after Amish barn raisings in Pennsylvania, the ones where everyone gets together and builds a barn in two days. Only in this case, they’d tear the shopping center to the ground.

“I have an idea,” he would say at Atomic Tangerine concerts, slipping into his popular imitation of a real estate developer. “Let’s destroy the character of the nation! Let’s tear down trees and fill open space! Let’s build cheaply and irresponsibly! Let’s increase tax and real estate revenue by moving shopping off Main Street and into barren roadside plazas! Let’s lease to an endless stream of monster chains that can survive exorbitant rents by selling cheap goods at top dollar to ignorant consumers.” Jack’s voice would deepen, reverting to his own. “And assholes like you will burn fossil fuels driving to buy bounceable dinnerware and fireproof pajamas on credit.”

As Jack spoke, Dan would play chords and Smokey would beat the drums, sometimes playing bongos throughout, and the room would go wild, with everyone shouting, “Down with the Man!”

As luck would have it, one house they played at was Pip’s, and Mr. Harriman was a school board member and an employee of Tamco, a mall developer Jack liked to refer to as a “terrorist group.” When the guys got called to Principal Laughlin’s office that Monday, Atomic Tangerine was given a cease and desist order.

“It’s over with, Fleming,” the principal said. “No more Hammer and Sickle Society.”

According to Dan, Jack froze back in his chair, with his hands pressing into the armrests. Smokey would add, “Like Lincoln glued to the Memorial.”

“If Mr. Harriman had a legitimate problem, Laughlin, he should have thrown me out himself. And unless there’s something you’d like to share, I don’t think the school owns his house,” Jack reportedly said. “So why don’t you commit your fascist demands to letterhead, and I’ll review them with an attorney. Or better yet, the press. Make sure the letter includes the part about a public school official pulling students from classes to harass them on behalf of a private citizen.”

I stomped the snow from my Timberlands and looked at my tracks. They made a twining design, like a maze. It was funny that I’d made it while thinking of Jack. It looked the way Jack would think, if, in fact, his thinking could have a look. It looked like a meltable wreath. For the rest of the way home I tore through every untouched snowbank, thinking, Humans ruin everything anyway, so why pretend otherwise?

The cats converged on my ankles in the driveway, lifting their legs high and prancing like miniature show horses. They shoved past me through the front door and bolted into the living room. I changed into dry clothes and turned on appliances again. I wished we had a dishwasher. Dishwashers can be really noisy.

I built a fire, wondering whether the record store was the last time I’d ever see Rourke. The time before that was the last time for quite a while, for weeks. One day would be the last, I informed myself, perhaps today. The way he looked at me through the window was strange, as though I’d caused a dramatic impasse in his day. Inside he examined me as if for flaws. Maybe he was looking for a way to release himself.

It was odd that we’d never spoken but we understood each other. Sometimes you work hard to understand someone; sometimes you don’t work at all. Some people are advocates of shrewd choices. They choose partners more carefully than careers. My mother’s college friend Nonnie is a sleep lab technician who ran a classified ad to find a husband. After studying the resumes and photographs of dozens of applicants, she dated all the men from the A pile, and half of the B’s, before choosing Brian from the middle of the B’s. Within seven years they’d had four children.

“You can never be too careful,” Nonnie would caution. “Never.”

Mom would smile and say, “Nonnie, you’re a brave woman,” which, knowing my mother, could have meant any number of things.

At nine-thirty, the front door opened, and Jack and Dan came in. I felt I hadn’t seen Jack in so long, though in fact I’d seen him just the night before. Behind him Dan was slender and tall and high-haired, tipped like a pencil engaged in the act of writing. Jack kicked off his boots and scuffed in floppy socks to the fire. He was wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt over a shredded wool sweater. His cheeks were two red circles and the hair that had come loose from his ponytail was frozen in strips. Dan flopped onto the couch, saying “Happy New Year!”

Jack’s eyes surveyed the room gloomily. Everything transformed beneath the dismal heft of his regard. He narrowed his eyes to view me. I didn’t move. It was like standing still to let a bee buzz past.

“We passed your tracks,” he said, leadingly.

I said “oh,” and I moved past the couch. “I’m making coffee. You guys want some?”

Dan grabbed at my leg. “Hold on. The ones in the parking lot. You really made them?”

“I guess.”

“And Jack figured it out? That’s fucked up. You two are totally fucked up.”

“It’s a small town, Daniel,” Jack barked. “A gnat’s-ass town.”

Jack followed me to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and began to hunt around. I jumped onto the counter and waited for the coffee to finish. “So you must be feeling better,” he said, plucking olives from a jar, “seeing that you went out.”

I ignored his question and turned to watch the coffee bubbles burst through the spout of the pot. “How was rehearsal?” I asked.

“We fucked with the music for that stupid play, and by the time we got to Tangerine, those guys were too wasted to rehearse. Dan puked twice and Smokey passed out on the floor,” Jack muttered in disgust. Jack did not like people to pass out or vomit. He said it defeated the whole point of getting high. Why waste money and drugs, he would say, when you could lick raw chicken to achieve a similar effect. “I tied Smokey’s ponytail to the drum stand,” Jack said, “so he’s in for, like, a totally rude awakening.”

“I’m glad you came,” I told him, which was true; I was glad.

That seemed to make him happy. “I came up with a decent melody—want to hear it? Da-da da-da da-da dum dum da da-ah da.”

“God, Jack. That’s really beautiful.”

We listened to Ella Fitzgerald singing “Cow Cow Boogie,” and every time the song ended, Jack would lift the needle back to the beginning.

That cat was raised on local weed,
He’s what they call a swing half-breed
Singin’ his Cow Cow Boogie in the strangest way—

We were staring at this candle we really liked. Each side depicted the same scene in a translucent mosaic of eggshell-white, moon-yellow, lapis-blue: the seashore, with equally spaced planes of sand, sea, and sky, and directly in the center, a flying bird. Because the landscape was collapsed, it was hard to tell whether the bird was flying over the beach or over the ocean.

Dan looked inside. “Are you sure that’s the original wax?”

“Positive,” I said.

“It’s the candle that Jesus blessed,” Jack said caustically.

Dan respectfully replaced it. “It’s definitely over the beach,” he declared, referring to the bird. He wiped his wire-rimmed glasses with the hem of his shirt. “If it were over the ocean,” Dan speculated, “it’d be closer to the line between sand and sea.”

Jack agreed. “If the bird had been positioned at the bottom of the middle instead of at the top, you would think low—small. Small, meaning farther away, meaning over the ocean.”

“But it’s high in the middle,” Dan went on, “meaning big and near. It’s over the sand.”

“Exactly.” Jack sucked on a joint as he spoke, his voice constricting with a chestful of smoke. He offered the end of it to Dan, and Dan accepted it gingerly.

It didn’t seem exact to me. The candle had no converging lines, no infinite distance, no vanishing point. There was no inferred single light source—after all, it was a candle. There were three flat planes and a bird within a field with no apparent dimension. Comparatively the bird was huge. And it was on the central plane—the water.

Dan screwed his face to one side and coughed. “She doesn’t seem convinced, Jack.”

Jack squeezed my shoulders. His cheek on my cheek. “No? Why not?”

“The way it looks. I suppose you can apply laws of perspective to something without perspective, but why bother? Meaning can be conveyed perfectly well without math and science. After all, Giotto painted gold rings on the heads of saints—the rings are obviously halos, not sunrises.” I pointed to the candle. “There’s no reason to think about close or far, over, or under. There’s just on.”

“You are very fucking high,” Jack said to me. “Aren’t you?”

Maybe I was. “Where did you get that pot? It’s pretty trippy.”

“From Frankie,” Jack said.

“Fat Frankie?” He was always talking about Fat Frankie.

“Yeah, except he’s not fat anymore. He lost fifty-five pounds.”

“Fifty-five!” Dan exclaimed. “That’s almost half my body weight.”

“He went on that Moonie thing. That thing Dennis does.”

“The Scarsdale Diet?” I said. “That’s weird.”

We were interrupted by a thump at the front door—Kate. We all called out, “Kate!” She stomped her feet on the mat and unwrapped her scarf. Behind her through the glass was a wall of white, like a down quilt. “Oh, no,” she moaned, “not the candle, again.”

“Katie,” Jack said, “who’d you kiss at midnight?”

“No one, Jack,” she replied. “Yet.”

Dan stood, combing back his hair. “What time is it?”

Kate draped her coat over the banister and checked her watch. “Twenty to twelve.”

Dan said, “Shit. I thought it was, like, two in the morning.”

“That’s because you’ve been drinking since breakfast,” Jack said.

“The roads are really bad,” Kate told us. “Coco is having people sleep over. Denny and Michelle are coming here. Did Mom call?”

“She did,” I said. “She’s staying at Lowie’s.”

Dan asked if Kate had seen the tracks I’d made in the snow by the A&P.

“Tracks?” she said dismissively. “I didn’t see any tracks.”

“Maybe they’re gone by now,” Dan speculated.

Jack peeked to see my face, to see if I was sad, then he held me. Jack was most virile near a hearth fire. If in public he used me—the look of me—to indicate his mannishness, by a fire he was truly invincible.

Kate went upstairs to get undressed, and I followed. From the corner of her bed, I watched her shadow on the floor beneath the partly opened bathroom door. She seemed quiet. I wondered what had happened. Maybe someone had hurt her feelings. Hopefully, it had just been overbright lighting or cheap cologne or music by Journey or Boston. Coco might have served pigs in a blanket, with blankets made of Bisquick. Or possibly she’d had mismatching cocktail napkins. If the cocktail napkins were Halloween leftovers with pictures of grinning pumpkins and arched black cats, that could be depressing.

“How was the party?” I asked.

“Everyone was drunk. They were acting like complete assholes.”

I retied the string on my sweatpants. It embarrassed me when Kate cursed, not because I objected to profanity, but because she was not particularly good at it. Jack swore so effectively and so constantly that he would exercise restraint for emphasis. When Kate said “asshole,” she pronounced the A like in aha or like when you stick out your tongue at the doctor’s office. AAAAhhhhh.

She unpinned her hair. In the mirror her eyes were like plums. It was strange to reconvene there, in the same spot where earlier she’d been looking forward to the evening. Jack always said the trick to happiness is to expect things to be shitty, then you won’t be disappointed. “Just keep a low-level plane of dissatisfaction going,” he’d advise.

Dan called up the stairs. “Happy New Year!”

“Oh, gosh,” Kate said, shaking herself awake. She came halfway to me, and I came as far to her. Our cheeks met like praying hands. “Happy New Year,” we said in unison, sending the words out into the universe beyond the petite round of each other’s shoulder.

To commemorate the snow Jack put on Oscar Peterson’s version of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” It was the snow song, the anthem to the snow.

We cuddled on the couch, the four of us, eight legs, eight knees and feet, all high and drinking tea, facing the fire, thinking but not believing that it would be our last New Year’s together. We had all just sent in our college applications. If everything went as planned, in one year, I would be in Manhattan at NYU and Kate in Montreal at McGill. Jack would probably be in Boston at Berklee for music, if he went anywhere at all, and Dan would either be at Tulane in New Orleans for jazz studies, or at Juilliard, where his dad was a teacher.

“I have some thoughts,” Dan said, “on the psychology of perception and the problems of consciousness. Does anyone mind?”

Kate and I did not, but Jack stipulated provisions.

“No talk of functional neuroses or maladjustments. No dream analyses.”

“Actually,” Dan said, “I was just thinking about qualities that are essentially incommunicable, like color. For instance, take roses. Kate and I can both call a rose red, though I might see coral and she might see pink.”

“Do you mean color blindness?” Kate asked.

“Not exactly,” he guided gently. Dan was always gentle with Kate. At parties he would dedicate songs to her, or he would write compositions called “Kate 9” or “Kate 16.”

“My point is that it’s impossible to know that what I see matches what you see when we both say red. Comparisons of redness aren’t possible. Redness is ineffable: it has to be experienced to be known.”

“Big deal,” Jack said. “Perception is variable. If you perceive a speeding car to be forty feet away when it’s really four feet away, and I perceive it to be four feet away, I’ll jump, and you’ll get hit. Relative perception doesn’t change the position of the car, and it doesn’t affect the color of a rose. The rose doesn’t care what color you think it is.”

“I’m not saying that physical absolutes don’t exist,” Dan said. “You’re right—the rose is the color it is. I’m saying absolute perception doesn’t exist. That no one interpretation is more valid than another. Like redness, or jazz, or—”

“Nationality,” I added. “Or race.”

“What’s your point, Daniel?” Jack wanted to know.

“Well, I’m just thinking about the candle again.”

“That’s it!” Jack swatted at Dan. “Get rid of that fucking thing!”

“I’m just saying,” Dan said, defending himself with crisscrossed hands, “Evie has a point: art doesn’t have to be held accountable to accuracy, and there’s no one right way to look at things. Clearly, the candle’s artist was not looking to ‘prove’ a bird.”

“In terms of the ‘ineffable,’ we’re not talking about the birth experience here,” Jack said. “We’re talking about a piece of shit candle. Maybe there is no bird, but, for all we know, there was no artist either.”

Kate wanted to know what happened to the rose.

Jack said, “Exactly, Kate.”

And for a long time we were silent. I felt bad for Dan. It was nice of him to try to defend me, but he should have known better than to argue with Jack.

By three-thirty in the morning a curtain had closed on the house. The snow fit like a second house on the house, or a skin, and inside was bright without lights, snow bright. Shortly before Jack and Dan went home, Denny and Michelle arrived. I gave them my room, which was biggest. Michelle took my bed, and Denny took the floor, as usual, just lying flat on his back with his long legs crossed and his hands behind his head. It was a funny way to sleep, as though staring up at the clouds on a summer’s day.

All things through the living room window were pale cinder. My palms and cheeks left cool dripping circles on the frost-covered glass as I measured the frailness of the membrane that shielded me from the universe. I wondered by what accident of chance I’d been blessed with shelter. There were creatures whose only sanctuary was the flat valentine heart of night. If I looked, I believed I could see them, with their nestling necks and heavily lidded eyes, huddling in clusters between twigs and rocks, sharing fur and feathers, breathing in shallow puffs to make heat.

“You’re seeking to control your world,” my mother speculated when I told her that I always wake up at night to look out the window.

I didn’t disagree, because my mother seldom fawns on me. When she does, she does so excessively and briefly, like a toddler mothering a baby doll. But, in fact, control is not a requirement of mine. It’s just that I’m in awe of the darkness, and reassured by it—its obstinacy, its unmovability—so many things happen there. Beyond the metropolis of any night is a new day—beyond that, a new night to follow. If you look, you can see them, stacked like panels one behind the other. If you listen, you can hear them move. And you can think about your part to play being so very small.

The phone rang. I lifted the receiver and walked with it from the desk to the front door, pulling until the cord could stretch no farther. I stepped out into the snow, my bare legs vanishing to the knee.

Was I clear from the sky? Was I a speck, a stain, a tiny spot to spoil the white—tiny, so tiny—the eye of a needle, the head of a pin, a nick in the void, aimed like a compass through the inaugural waste to the place I knew Rourke lay? Or did I not appear, was I incapable of being seen, was I nothing to no one? Was I wrong to feel manifest, wrong to feel seeable? Wrong to feel like a giant just to know he was alive?

“Evie,” Jack called. “You there?”

“Hey,” I said, barely audible.

“They’re still there,” he informed me, meaning the tracks.

I didn’t reply. He was reaching to me. I felt him reaching.

He said, “Do you know what you made? A fleur-de-lis,” he said. “It’s nearly perfect. One part at the top was fucked up, but I fixed it.”

I thanked him for calling. On prairies there are creatures like weasels who live in packs. One stands sentry while the others sleep. The one waits, scrawny and long, perched on hind legs, reading the landscape with coalified eyes, scouting for predators. Its generosity is not without incentive. It gets to run first.