Jack Livings - The Blizzard Party

Long-term effects became apparent years later. Test subjects saw all manner of spooks, specters, blurry ghosts zipping around at the periphery, and some began trading stories about abductions, wild visions of leather straps and filmstrips run at high speed. Sal Fumoso, proprietor of Cinema West and a son of Montauk, claimed to have been one of the abductees.

Lazlo Brunn’s desk at the Apelles had faced east; when he ran his tape deck experiments, I have no doubt that his inner eye projected beyond the river, past Brookhaven National Laboratory, all the way out to the dark fingertip of Montauk. His binaural research was done under contract to the lab at Camp Hero. Maybe Krupp money was deep behind the Army’s research. Surely, given the decades that had passed since Lazlo and Magda’s escape to the United States, word would have gotten back to his relatives. Maybe it did and maybe they didn’t care. Bygones. Maybe Krupp had nothing to do with the robbery of his decks and tapes. War at the heart of it all, though. Destruction, domination, pulverization.

Ghosts? Blips on the scope, a weak glow as the green wiper swished by trailing its veil of excited electrons? Symbols, the imaginings of a long-dead futurist, a dream they were sharing, an acid trip? Were they even out there or was it just a superior hallucination courtesy of the ministry of snow and ice? There was nothing to see, everything to see, it was prisoner’s cinema, frothing forms that coalesced and evaporated, and my father was awaiting the famed Third Man, who would any second appear to guide them home through the knee-deep soufflé when he walked right into the back of John (fuck, the hell, ow!), who’d stopped dead in his tracks because while my father’s mental radiator popped its cap back there at the hospital, John’s motor had a copious snort of sweet green ethylene glycol pulsing through its hoses, maintaining chambré, and despite the gravity of dread, his dead son hair shirt, and despite the hairline fracture in his third metacarpal due to his spill at the Cosmic (cutely: scrapper’s fracture, well-known to ER docs working third-shift Saturdays), which manifested a dull, full-paw throb punctuated with exciting, unpredictable doses of electrocution-level zaps that ran clear to his collarbone and, despite the knowledge that his father was out here, somewhere, possibly entombed in a mound he’d already tromped over, despite those distractions—wait, no, it was because of them, in fact—his young brain had been purring along like a dream, operating at max efficiency, and he had had a moment of insight, a flash, an eclipse, a black pupil in a fiery iris, a sense of absolute clarity at the edge of the snowy hyperspace tunnel hurtling past him, and he’d run smack into his own bloody realization (oof, hey!) that he should turn around and go back to the hospital.

He had to pull away his scarf and put his lips very close to my father’s ear to communicate his intention, the snow adhering to a hard-line horizontalist platform, pegging each word like a dart and whisking it southward, and by the time he’d finished explaining, his declarations had carried deep into the theater district; a few unlucky syllables caught by downdrafts were dashed against the drifts and lost forever, but some were cross-winded to the river, snagged on looping updrafts and corkscrewed into the convulsive digestive tract hovering over the city, pummeled and twisted through the inner workings of the cumulonimbus before being funneled into the inverted colon of frigid air rising toward the nailhead moon like a fistful of confetti, and ejected into the constellate sky to wander the aether for eternity, dodging cherubim and decommissioned telsats.

Thus, he repeated himself until my father got the gist and had to decide, then, whether to follow hoary Ahab or to carry on in a homebound direction. Didn’t take a heartbeat. He patted John on the shoulder, wished him godspeed, and pushed on home. Always a moment of terrible import in the historical record, two intrepid explorers agreeing to divide, exercising free will, the wages of such shortsightedness their inevitable demise. But wait. A juke, sidestep: not everyone’s demise, only Albert Caldwell’s, John’s, and mine.

Vik had by this time already led Albert back to the Apelles. The elder Caldwell had abandoned the stolen taxi in Riverside Park after punching a hole in an unseen iron fence on Riverside Drive and smashing through a bench before shushing downhill toward the water. He might have slid all the way into the Hudson if he hadn’t run into a gargantuan drift that ate the car and forced him to exit via the window. He’d gone the rest of the way on foot, and had been working south along the railing at the river’s edge, stopping to peer down at the Hudson every few feet, seeking a spot where he might throw himself in, because the river wore a skirt of ice thirty feet wide, and Albert, not thinking clearly, barely thinking at all, in fact, operating in a hallucinatory state brought on by exhaustion, alcohol, and incipient hypothermia, had decided he might as well jump down onto the ice, a twenty-foot drop, and from there proceed to the water’s edge, when he came into Vik’s sight line.

Vik didn’t leap into action immediately, fearing at first that he’d been backtracked by the poet-terror from Cinema West, but after a moment observing the man, he decided that this was another classification of nut entirely, one who intended to commit an act of self-harm, as Albert was by then attempting to straddle the railing, with minimal success. Vik was only about twenty feet away, a distance that somehow made him responsible for Albert’s well-being, and he called out to the potential fence-hopper: Excuse me!

Albert: Who’s there?

Vik: Over here! Do you need help?

Albert squinted into the storm. It seemed to him that the trees themselves were speaking. He drew back his leg from the railing and replied in code. He said: There are a lot of people who don’t know how to read a newspaper!

Vik moved closer, toward unknown dangers, driven by an empathetic impulse, a genetic flaw that drove Bonny to drink over his son’s chances for survival in the wolvish arena of, well, everything: school, import/export, love. Wrong paternal instinct, Bonny. You should have deprogrammed his unyielding punctuality. Vik said: Sorry?

Albert, now apprehending the non-tree before him: I say, a lot of people who don’t even know how to read a newspaper!

Vik, desperately trying to understand: Illiterates?

Albert: No idea that it’s all fibs. They get so exercised.

Vik, clueing in: Oh yes, I understand.

Albert: Other than newspapers, however, where would one get one’s information?

Vik: The television?

Albert: Fool! The television hasn’t even been invented!

Vik: Sir, do you need a cop? (And none of that New York smart-ass on the sir , either.)

Albert: Certainly not. They are the last to know. If they knew anything about how to do their jobs, they’d arrive before the crime, wouldn’t they?

Vik: Do you live nearby, sir?

Albert: Why would I go home?

Vik: Because it’s cold out here.

Albert: Why would I go home?

Vik: To see your family.

Albert: At the Apelles?

Vik: The big place on 78th?

Albert: The Apelles, yes.

Vik: That’s where you live?

Albert: I suppose so. I suppose I should go home? Is that it?

Vik: I think so?

See? Easy, simple, nothing sinister in their exchange, just a decent kid helping a senile old man on the worst night of the year. Their little story might have rounded out a blizzard box deep inside the Times , nestled in there among the rowdy Queens runts chucking snowballs at the police cruisers (say hey, whaddya want, city kids, amirite?) and Stella Kilgore age ninety-seven’s first-person account of the great blow job of 1888 (ma’am, you have to stop saying that, no, what, never mind, go ahead, I’ll just put down…), a bridge club from Hartford on their way to Key West for a tournament, stuck at JFK for the night but guess what they did? Played bridge! Enterprising bartender invents the Manhattan Whiteout to delight of trapped guests at the Plaza! Etc.