As Simple as Snow (13 page)

“Just a little while ago. I’m sure she’ll be there soon.” I said good-bye and called Anna’s cell phone.

“Worried?” she said, before I could say anything.

“Where are you?”

“I’m down by the river, watching the storm, watching the ice.”

“Why?”

“Come down and find out for yourself.”

I wasn’t going anywhere. “I can’t figure you out,” I said.

“That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to have it all figured out. Think how boring that would be. Mysteries are the most interesting, the stuff in the shadows or underneath the surface. Don’t you think? I mean, certainty is the worst, worse than death.”

I could hear ice-covered limbs cracking in the background, and tires spinning on the slippery bridge. “Go home soon, okay?” I said.

“I will.”

An hour or so later, the power went out and the whole town went dark. I sat in my room and listened to trucks rumble up and down the hill, fighting the ice with sand and salt and scraping plows. I heard at least two accidents, drivers foolishly trying to make it down the hill and spinning out of control. My father had built fires in both fireplaces and the whole house smelled of wood and smoke. He brought me a flashlight and a candle, but I preferred to stay in the dark.

Anna called me on my cell. “There’s nothing but a sheet of ice between us,” she said. “Why don’t you act like Hans Brinker and skate over here.”

I heard music in the background, fading in and out. “What is that?”

“Anton von Webern, I think. Something classical.”

“I mean, where’s it coming from?”

“My father keeps walking by with a boom box. My mother wants him to start the generator, but he’s procrastinating. He likes the dark.”

“Is that where you get it from?”

“Not really. My father and I have a lot of the same tastes, but I really get that stuff from my mother. She just chooses to ignore it in herself. How about you, who do you take after, your mother or your father?”

“Neither, really. I guess if I was like anyone in my family it would be my sister.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She left.”

“Disappeared?”

“She might as well have. She just left and we haven’t heard from her in quite a while.”

“So that’s what you’re like? You’re going to leave one day and no one will hear from you again?”

“Sometimes I think that way.”

“Well, don’t leave yet, Hans. I just got here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

disc one

The next day I received a package, a shoe box wrapped in plain brown paper. Anna’s stamps were in one corner. The box was filled with turkey feathers, and buried in the feathers was a CD. The cover was a photograph of dead gold-finches, each body tagged and numbered, all laid out in a white drawer. “A drawer full of birds” was written on the spine of the jewel case. She had printed out a list of the songs on the back:

1. The Replacements—i will dare

2. Dinosaur Jr.—freak scene

3. Teenage Fanclub—everything flows

4. Sonic Youth—shadow of a doubt

5. Chet Baker—let’s get lost

6. Yo La Tengo—cast a shadow

7. The Bobby Fuller Four—never to be forgotten

8. T. Rex—ride a white swan

9. George Harrison—beware of darkness

10. Pretenders—talk of the town

11. Big Star—daisy glaze

12. Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers—mean old world

13. Bonnie “Prince” Billy—death to everyone

14. Nina Simone—i put a spell on you

15. This Mortal Coil—song to the siren

16. Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians—airscape

17. The Cure—a forest

18. Calla—awake and under

19. Tom McRae—ghost of a shark

20. Bauhaus—bela lugosi’s dead

 

 

She had also included a card, a black card with writing in silver ink.

 

 

Read Rimbaud. “A Season in Hell”:

 

 

Read the rest. Read it all.

christmas

My brother and his family came up for Christmas. They drove all the way from Louisiana—packed everything and everyone into their big Suburban—which meant that they would spend most of his vacation days on the road and couldn’t stay long. “It’s a long way to drive for such a short time,” my father said, minutes after they had pulled into the driveway. It was about the only thing he said.

I was struck by the fact that my brother looked like a younger version of my father. I had never seen the resemblance before, but sometime since I’d last seen him he had lost the genetic battle and my father had emerged. My brother had put on weight, and his hairline was creeping back across his forehead. He had even started to slouch, ever so slightly. A few years from thirty, and already he looked like an old guy. But then, he had three young kids, twin two-year-old boys and a daughter who was not yet a year old.

The twins were maniacs. They became obsessed with the drawers in the kitchen, and ran to them and pulled them out completely, spilling knives and forks and spoons onto the floor. They wanted the knives, it seemed. They would fight each other over a single knife, even though there were seven more just like it right there. You had to watch them constantly; at any opportunity they would race toward the drawers, and if you didn’t beat them there, everything would be dumped on the floor in a split second. “Just let them get at the knives,” my father said, “they’ll learn to stay clear of them.” Finally my brother came from the garage with some yardsticks and bungee cords. He put the yardsticks through the handles of the drawers that were stacked one atop another, and bungeed the single drawers to nearby cabinets. It looked terrible, but it stopped the twins. The problem was, it also stopped my mother. She was frustrated and confused, unable to navigate around the kitchen with everything lashed down. “Can’t we just leave the drawers alone, and tie the twins,” she said. No one was sure whether she was joking. We might have fasted through the holiday if it hadn’t been for my sister-in-law.

At least the house was filled with noise for a change. There was commotion and conversation and life. My parents were miserable. No wonder my brother rarely visited. I imagined when I would be out of the house, off to college and after, when we could get together without our parents, not even invite them. They could stay home in their grumpy silence and the rest of us could have a good time.

My parents put an extra bed in my brother’s old room, and the twins stayed there. They put a crib in my sister’s old room, which was next door to my room, and the baby slept there. My brother and his wife took over my room, and I had to sleep downstairs on the couch in the living room. This meant that I couldn’t e-mail Anna at night, as I usually did. She wasn’t supposed to make any calls after ten, so we sent text messages on our cells. I was lying on the couch, waiting for a response from her, when my brother came down and sat in the living room.

“Sorry about booting you out of your room.”

“That’s all right. It’s only for a couple of days.”

“We’ll try not to mess things up.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“So how are things around here?”

“Good.”

“Mom and Dad still phoning it in?”

“It’s like a ghost town. They vanish after dinner.”

“That has to suck.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Who wants to be around them, anyway? They’re weird when they don’t talk to you, but weirder when they do.”

“So what do you do?”

“I’ve got a lot going on. I’ve got a girlfriend, she keeps me busy.”

“Are we going to meet her?”

“I’ll try to bring her over. I’ve got to warn you, though, she’s a bit different.”

“What do you mean?”

“She likes to wear a lot of black, you know.”

“And you like that?”

“I like her. You’ll like her too.”

“Well, bring her around, then.”

“She’ll want your kids, though. For sacrifices or something.”

“She can have them. Call her now and tell her to come get them.”

disc two

There was something cold in the middle of my back. Really cold. I reached behind and felt a freezing wet hard something. I jumped off the couch and saw my brother standing next to the couch, laughing. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “That was on the front stoop. I think it’s for you.”

It was a block of ice about the size of a loaf of bread. Frozen in the middle was a CD case. It had a black-and-white picture inside that looked like fractals or odd geometric shapes—they were actually magnified snowflakes—and a title in green letters with red drop shadows—“baby, it’s cold outside.” A gift tag was also frozen in the ice. You could read it right through the block. “Merry Xmas, love Anastasia.”

“‘Love,’ it says,” my brother teased.

I went to the kitchen and put the ice in the sink to let my gift thaw. Anna later told me that she had frozen the two halves of the block most of the way separately, then put the CD and tag on the bottom half, then capped it with the top half and frozen the blocks together the rest of the way. “I had to add a little extra water to hide the seams,” she said. “I didn’t know if the CD would come out all right, so I made a duplicate, just in case.”

“If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have thawed the ice. I would have kept it in the freezer.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

The back cover was the negative of the front; the song titles were printed on the reverse of the front cover:

1. Dean Martin—a marshmallow world

2. Buffalo Tom—frozen lake

3. The Jesus and Mary Chain—you trip me up

4. The Cocteau Twins—iceblink luck

5. Galaxie 500—snowstorm

6. Damien Jurado—ghost in the snow

7. Kate Bush—under ice

8. Hank Williams—the first fall of snow

9. James P. Johnson—snowy morning blues

10. The Gentle Waves—dirty snow for the broken ground

11. Superchunk—silver leaf and snowy tears

12. Yoko Ono—walking on thin ice

13. Billie Holiday—i’ve got my love to keep me warm

14. The Handsome Family—cold, cold, cold

15. The Durutti Column—snowflakes

16. Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys—footprints in the snow

17. Tindersticks—snowy in f# minor

18. Nico—winter song

19. The Mountain Goats—snow crush killing song

20. Belle and Sebastian—the fox in the snow

21. Elliott Smith—angel in the snow

22. Nick Drake—winter is gone

 

 

Besides the CD, she gave me a portable shortwave. “It’s one of my father’s old ones,” she said. “He had to put some new parts in it, but it works. It’s kind of from the both of us. My father says that he’ll come over and help put up the antenna.” I gave her a copy of
The Devil’s Dictionary
by Ambrose Bierce. It was old, and the jacket was stained with coffee or something (“Maybe it’s blood,” Anna said), and inside were two strange drawings by a child or some crazy person. The first was on the back of the title page. It was a crude ink drawing of two people fighting or wrestling under a bridge or a tree limb. There was little detail, and lines started and ended randomly, or ran together, so it was hard to tell exactly what was going on. The two people (it could have been a man and a woman or a man and a child) looked terrified or crazy. The second drawing was on the inside of the back cover. It was slightly more accomplished, at least in some aspects. It was of a young girl, standing on the railing of a bridge, maybe, or the top of a tall building. She had on a nightgown or a long dress. She was looking up at the moon, and seemed to have tears running down her face. She had three pairs of arms; two arms were folded across her chest, two stretched in front of her, and the last two reached straight overhead, toward the moon.

I didn’t know about the drawings when I bought the book, but Anna thought they were the best part. I also gave her a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. It was a page torn from
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Poe was looking straight off the page, with his dark jacket buttoned to the top, and a tie or scarf wrapped around the collar of his shirt, which was turned up and curled under his chin. He appeared to have a slight smirk under his dark moustache, as if he were keeping a secret. I’d found both gifts on eBay and outbid everybody. “I noticed you didn’t have Poe up on your wall,” I said.

 

 

 

My brother took us bowling. His wife, Kate, stayed home with the kids. “You think we’d trust your mom and dad with them?” she said. Anna brought Claire with her. “You can’t bowl with three people,” she said. “Besides, I didn’t want to be the only freak there.” It was the only time I heard her refer to herself like that. I think she was nervous about meeting my brother, but Paul was all right. More than all right.

We drove into Hilliker and went to SkyMor Lanes. “That might be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard for a business that has nothing to do with flying,” Anna said. “But I like it.”

“It’s a great place,” my brother said. “Cheesy as hell.”

SkyMor had twenty-seven lanes. If you know anything about bowling, you know that it’s impossible to have an odd number of lanes. The last lane was an actual lane, but it was only for show. There was only half a ball return there, sticking out of the wall, and only half a scoring table—it looked as if the wall had split the lane in two. It was meant to be something everyone would talk about, make the place famous. Maybe so, back when the place first opened, but I’d never heard about it. About three-quarters of the lanes were being used, and my brother requested the lane at the far end from the famous half-lane. There was no one down there. I thought he might be embarrassed by his two Goth guests, but he was trying to get us away from everyone else for another reason.