Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

He felt much better and fell asleep atop his bed, sweating and drunk. His body seemed lifted, as if he’d been tied to a kite and set afloat thirty feet above the ground, watching lesser mortals moving in their small and slow ways below.

He woke at his usual time, shivering, and when he went to boil water for coffee, there was no electricity, no heat. Behind the curtains the forest could have been made of glass, the way it dazzled in the last moonlight. In the deep night, the ice had descended, coating the fields and trees as if in epoxy. He had been so drunk he hadn’t awoken, although great tree branches had cracked and fallen all around and lay in the darkness, as stunned as soldiers after an ambush. Lancelot could hardly open the screen door to his cabin. He took one confident step out onto the ice, and for a long moment, he slid gracefully, his weak foot extended back in an arabesque, but though his right toe stubbed up against a rock and stopped the slide of the foot, his body kept going forward and he spun around and cracked his tailbone so hard he had to roll to his side and gnash his teeth. He moaned for a long time in pain. When he went to stand, the skin of his cheek stuck to the ice, and he pulled the top layer off and there was a little blood on his fingertips when he touched it.

Like a mountaineer, he grimped his way hand over hand back onto the porch, into the house, and lay exhausted on the floor, breathing heavily.

Good old Robby Frost, he thought. The ones who said the world would end in ice were right. [Wrong. Fire.]

He would starve here. On the shelf he had one apple kept back from a lunch, a box of skinny-person granola bars that Mathilde had packed, one last ramen cup. He would bleed to death from his cheek. The tailbone fracture would go septic inside him. No electricity and he’d burned up all his firewood in his gluttonous frenzy last night: he would freeze. No coffee either, caffeine withdrawal the real tragedy here. He bundled himself in every article of clothing he could find, making a cloak of the lap blanket. He made a secondary hat out of his laptop case. Big as a rugby prop now, he put his legs up on the bed and ate the entire box of granola bars. When he finished, he knew it was a mistake, because they tasted like tennis balls that had been lost in the bushes for three seasons. Also, they each contained 83 percent of one’s daily fiber, and therefore he’d just ingested 498 percent of his daily fiber and would die from the intestinal roughage before the bleeding or cold would do him in.

Also, he had run his laptop battery down to death the evening before and hadn’t worried about plugging it in because there would always be electricity in the morning; and he had long ago gotten away from writing anything by hand. Why did he not write anything by hand? Why had he gotten away from this most essential art?

He was composing in his head, like Milton, when he heard a motor and opened the curtains and here was blessed Blaine. His pickup truck was in chains. It was pausing at the door, and Blaine was tossing sand out his window, then getting out and crunching up in ice-mountaineering cleats to knock.

“My savior,” Lancelot said, opening the door, forgetting his getup. Blaine took him in head to toe, and his sweet face cracked wide open.

There were camp beds made up in the colony house, and generators, and the stoves were gas and there was plenty of food. The telephones would be back, they said, in a day or so. All was comfortable. The artists had the laughing camaraderie of disaster survivors, and when composer Walt Whitman poured out shots of slivovitz for all and sundry, Lancelot clinked glasses with him and nodded, and the men smiled at each other, letting bygones be bygones. A friendly kindliness settled over them, Lancelot fetching more gingerbread out of the refrigerator for Walt Whitman, the composer lending Lancelot thick cashmere socks.

All afternoon, Lancelot waited and waited, but Leo never came. At last, he cornered Blaine, who had just brought in enough wood to last a month and was getting ready to return home to chip his own house out of the ice.

“Oh,” Blaine said. “Leo said no, thanks, he had enough wood, and he showed me the peanut butter and loaf of bread and jug of water and said he’d prefer to just keep on working. I didn’t think there was harm in it. Oh, dear. Was I wrong?”

No, no, no, Lancelot assured him. But he thought, Yes, horrible, you never leave a man to fend alone with the cold, haven’t you ever read about Shackleton and HMS Endurance ? Glaciers and cannibalism. Or fairy tales, the ice goblins coming out of the woods to knock. In the deep night, working, Leo would hear someone moving at the door and go over in his bare feet to investigate, and there would be an eerie soft singing out beyond the circle of trees, and intrigued, Leo would step out briefly into the cold, and the door would close behind him. It would be locked with the ice goblins having stolen inside, and try as he might, there would be no getting back in to the devilishly hot fire, the naked dancing beasties inside, while he did a Little Match Girl huddle against the door and faded off into visions of distant happiness as his breathing slowed to nothing. Frozen. Dead! Poor Leo, stiff corpse blue of hue. Lancelot shivered, even though the colony house was tropical in the good glow of the artists’ relief and the heat from the fireplaces.

Even after the kerosene lamps were blown out and the novelist had put away his guitar and the slivovitz had warmed everyone’s bellies and they had fallen asleep in the communal area, feeling warm and safe, Lancelot worried about the poor boy alone in the forest, deep freeze all around. He tried not to toss and turn on his camp bed for fear of his squeaking springs and blanket rustle keeping the other artists awake, but he gave up on sleep in the wee hours and went down to the frigid telephone booth to see if the wires were up and he could call Mathilde. But the phones were still dead, and the basement was frigid. He came back up to the library and sat in the window overlooking the back fields and watched the night wash itself away.

Sitting there, thinking of Leo’s quick hot flushing, the shock of his hair, Lotto fell into a fitful sleep in the armchair though he dreamt he was awake.

He came to and saw a small figure making its slow and stuttering way out of the forest. In the gleam off the ice and the moonlit dark, it could have been a messenger from a grim story. He watched as the white face under the watch cap came clear, and he felt a slow sun begin to dawn in him when he knew for certain it was Leo.

He met the boy at the kitchen door, silently opening it to him, and though there was an unspoken interdiction against their touching, Lancelot couldn’t help himself; he took Leo’s slight, strong shoulders in his arms and hugged him fiercely, breathing in the persimmon smell of the skin behind the ear, the hair baby fine against his face.

“I was so worried about you,” he said low to keep the others from waking. He let go reluctantly.

Leo held his eyes closed, and when he opened them, it was with some effort. He seemed weary to death. “I’ve finished Go’s aria,” he said. “Of course, I haven’t slept in three nights. I’m ragged with fatigue. I’m going to go home and sleep. But, well. If Blaine can drop you off with a packed supper before he leaves for the night, I will play what I have for you.”

“Yes,” Lancelot said. “Of course. I’ll get up a little picnic and we can talk into the wee hours. But stay now and have some breakfast with me.”

Leo shook his head. “If I don’t get home, I’ll shatter. I just wanted to invite you to my studio. Then, oh, blessed oblivion of sleep for as long as I can remain under.” He smiled. “Or until you come in and wake me.”