Jack Livings - The Blizzard Party

The prosecutor—tall, thin, dangerous-looking Adam’s apple—had a witness list as long as his chimpanzee-proportioned arm. One by one, party guests ascended the stand, recounted to their best recollection the events of that evening, climaxing at Sid Feeney’s ejection of Albert Caldwell, and one by one, they were dismantled on cross by Feeney’s lawyer, who reminded them of their oath before asking them if they’d ingested any foreign substances on the night of the party. One by one, they descended from the stand with their eyewitness accounts broken in two. And, if it please the court, if not one soul who claimed to have seen the alleged murder was a reliable witness, then how could anyone say with assurance how the two bodies had materialized there in the snow, dead as doornails? Perhaps the crowd on the terrace had experienced a collective hallucination that coincided with the suicide of a senile old man who unfortunately—terrible tragedy—ended the life of his own son in the process. Perhaps, for all a reasonable person could deduce from the evidence, they had been arranged there just so by a sidewalk-level assassin who meant to thwart an investigation. Perhaps it had been a suicide pact, a deal sealed in blood between a father and son who, let’s face it, had all the reason in the world to share a bleak state of mind. Perhaps— Give it a rest, counselor. We get the picture.

A bunch of rich, amoral assholes saw a guy get thrown off a balcony and they kept right on partying? The papers went bananas. “BLIZZARD PARTY BUGOUT!” “SNOWBLIND MURDER!” “SKI NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL!” (the last accompanying a photo of Monteller Lavange, louche inheritor of a minor fortune, who’d skied over to the party and famously tried to plead the Fifth from the witness box).

It was all going Feeney’s way until the prosecutor put me on the stand and I told the court what I’d seen, and when Sid Feeney’s lawyer ambled over, introduced himself, and gently asked me if I’d had anything to drink or if I’d taken any drugs that night—did I know what drugs were? Yes, they’re pills, I said—and I responded that I had, indeed, had a drink and some drugs, his dim old eyes relit and he pressed on for details, so I told him orange juice and two Children’s Tylenol for the cut on my head. There was some laughter, and the judge gaveled, and the lawyer thanked me and went back to his table. On close, he argued that Feeney had meant to be my savior, that he’d acted valiantly in my interests, and that his own molestation as a child predisposed him to overreact in stressful situations, but no one on the jury thought any of it made it okay that he’d thrown Albert Caldwell off the roof of a building and killed John Caldwell in the process.

A noteworthy detail, the reason Feeney wasn’t my savior: Albert was dead before he went over the edge. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, from a legal standpoint, this might work in Feeney’s favor because, after all, you can’t kill a dead man. Albert wasn’t naked for the reason Feeney suspected, not at all. The chief medical examiner for the city of New York, whose office I would years later have occasion to visit no fewer than fifteen times, testified that his forensic work showed the elder Caldwell to have expired not from the shock of impact but from hypothermia. His limbs showed evidence of discoloration and his lungs the presence of pulmonary edema. He was naked because of a late-stage symptom called paradoxical undressing, not because he had sexual designs on me. Well known among alpinists, paradoxical undressing is the last stop before death, though it is sometimes accompanied by a symptom known as terminal burrowing, wherein a person will attempt to squeeze into a very small area—an opening in a tree trunk or a rock face, for instance—just as an animal finds a tight spot for hibernation. The chief medical examiner testified that Albert was dead before he reached that stage. But had anyone asked, I could have told them that Albert did, in fact, find an impossibly small space to squeeze himself into, and that he lives there to this day.

Albert’s reasons for being out in the blizzard that night barely even came up in court, and my father, who never even showed up at the Vornados’ place, never had to divulge his role in Albert’s suicide plans. As far as anyone knew, his motivations for walking to the hospital with John were entirely altruistic, and his book did nothing to disabuse anyone of that notion.

By the time Albert went over the parapet, my father had already settled into his chair, cleared his desk, dropped his novel about the Buddha’s life, seven years of work, into a drawer from which it would never emerge, and started typing what would become The Blizzard Party . Thus, he was no use as a witness.

My mother and the Jahanbanis, who were among the few people at the party capable of stating with any authority that they were not blasted on pills, had retreated to Bo’s office to talk art. So when it came to telling the cops what they knew about the incident in question, they could only frown and shake their heads. All the same, the court didn’t take kindly to the idea that I’d been left to fend for myself, and when I finished my testimony, the judge ordered my mother and father to stand up so that he could take a look at the loving parents who’d abandoned their daughter in the court of Caligula.

And Vik? Vik had met Bo, who was rummaging in the kitchen pantry for a package of Nilla Wafers, while searching for the elusive someone—anyone—who could give him a straight answer about where Mr. Caldwell lived. Bo, stoned but far from mentally incapacitated, inquired as to how this Indian kid, still wearing his overcoat, pockets bulging, came to be the minder of the old crank, and Vik, being Vik, explained what he’d been doing out in the snow, where he’d come across Mr. Caldwell, and why he’d felt motivated to help: Because it seemed like the right thing to do. Vik actually said that. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Okay, Bo said. We’ll take him downstairs together. But first I want to know is, is that a gun sticking out of your pocket?

Oh no! Vik said, shocked at the suggestion.

Later, when a guest drifted into the kitchen and casually mentioned to Bo that people were tossing his patio furniture onto West End, Bo indicated only that they were to stay the hell away from his Finnish smoker.

He and Vik were busy scooping snow off the windowsill and ferrying it to the refrigerator, which they’d disemboweled, racks and all, in the name of science, and where Vik had arranged the Tami and the black velvet on the vegetable crisper. And that’s where they were, peering at snowflakes, when Albert went over the railing.

One last stroll through the apartment, the sharp cedar/pine of floor polish, the aura of wool in the living room, of heating oil by the vents, mildew on the kitchen sponge, the curry and cumin in the cabinet, the vegetal aroma beneath the sink, ozone and tea in my father’s old office, the rank humanity of the laundry bag, the scent of impending snow in the bedroom I shared with Vik.

A place you spend your whole life becomes a memory vault, its walls hung with images encased in ice. At the front door I loop a finger around a coat hook and give it a tug. It’s seated as firmly as ever, as indestructible as the Apelles itself, for it is the Apelles itself, just as the faucets and floorboards are, each fixture as eternal as stone, each one laden with the past, and I feel as though I’m pulling them all along behind me, every last scrap of wallpaper, every sink and window. I wonder, as I have so many times, if Lazlo Brunn, time traveler in the great beyond, has ever spent one of his thousand-year seconds here, brushing his fingers over the coat hooks, passing through the door of his old apartment to sit with Turk, however briefly, a life being such a brief thing, quicker than a thought to the old doctor. Or would he have been wiser than that, too aware of the dangers of a place so freighted with the past, the near impossibility of escape?