Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

By the way, corny melodrama: Tuesday night, only three nights ago, they were all watching television in the dorm. At St. Pete’s, where Paul was incarcerated. It was the last night before Thanksgiving vacation, and he was in the common room. Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the box.

Seemed like every year they started these Xmas specials earlier and earlier. Someone had turned off the lights. They all cozied together in the dim, flickering images of holiday myth. Didn’t matter who was there. Paul had been lucky enough to score some Thai weed from some math club guys who doubled as drug dealers. He had just smoked it.

One problem he had was that drugs had sort of stopped working for him. When he had stuffed his head for the first time, he had felt his teen death sentence lift temporarily. He had felt the kindness of inanimate objects, the kindness of trees, the kindness of old dormitories. He had found brilliant comedy in the connections between things. He had talked to girls and told them that he didn’t want to go home, he didn’t want to go home, he couldn’t talk to anybody, he couldn’t talk, oh, he didn’t want to graduate, ever, and these girls had cupped his forehead with their palms and held him tight.

But lately these drugs had not been working. Lately, nothing made it through his paraffin shell. His skin crawled. And that night, Tuesday, after smoking the Thai stick, no matter where he looked he saw red dots. The screen was all red dots, shifting patterns of red dots. Like a pestilence of ladybugs. Rudolph made no sense at all. The story of Rudolph was menacing. In Rudolph’s ascen-dance to lead reindeer, Paul sensed the machinations of thought control and government intrusion. He kept coming out of his hallucination to find the abominable snowman threatening the town. He had tried to cheer himself up by singing along with “Silver and Gold,” but it didn’t do the trick.

— Hood, someone said. Hood, something wrong?

— Don’t interrupt. Concentrating. Or maybe he was feigning romantic transportation.

Suddenly. Because the Bear, Caria Bear, not only a fan of Rudolph and his cousin Frosty the Snowman, but the kind of girl who could quote from Miracle on 34th Street and dance along with the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of The Nutcracker, was sitting next to him. And yes, he realized that the Bear was trying to calm him down. Caria Bear, one of the intrepid first women of St. Pete’s. She had enrolled as a third-former in 1971, the first year of coeducation. She was leaning against him on the gray synthetic banquette and comforting him. And during a sequence in which Rudolph was being ridiculed by the other reindeer, or was it later, he encircled her in his arms. It overcame him. He yielded.

— It’s okay, kiddo, she said. It’s okay. She had a big maternal heart.

— I hate Thanksgiving, too, kiddo, she said. Who wouldn’t? Why would you want to go home? On the other hand, staying here isn’t so great either, y’know?

And Paul was sure she was telling the truth. St. Pete’s was where the affluent families of the East unloaded their heirs, where they penned them until college. The Bear knew, because, he had heard, her own mother, her single mother, was ill. Dying. Tumors. Cancer of some kind. There were kids at St. Pete’s whose parents would be removed from this very Thanksgiving table to have their stomachs pumped of sleeping pills. Whose siblings had hanged themselves or gassed themselves or who had driven expensive cars into the ocean. There were kids here whose only relative was a trust-fund officer. These were kids from devastated families. Devastated and wealthy. — Shut up, someone said.

Paul couldn’t hear the program. He had his arms around Caria. A little elf cheerfully rode a Noreico cordless razor across a snow-covered landscape. Over a mogul, into the air. Paul wanted this embrace to work magic. He was dimly aware that the common room was full of writhing embraces. He was seized with laughter. Something wasn’t working.

So Paul put his hand inside the Bear’s pink button-down shirt and felt the lace margins of her brassiere. There was an overpowering gentleness in the space close to a woman’s heart. He was drawn to it, but at that moment he couldn’t possibly say why. Caria the Bear neither encouraged nor denied. In the next stillness, during the next commercial break, he let his hand stray even further, to her breast — small, serene, and comforting. Not sexy so much as reassuring. She clamped her hand around his wrist. She restored it to his lap. All around the room-the room swimming in red dots — girls were clamping their hands on the wrists of boys. The whole thing messed with his high. His eyes were occluded by irritations.

— I know, kiddo, the Bear was saying, shoving his hand back down into his lap. I know, I know.

So he did the only sensible thing. He fled the common room. He waited for the drug, and for his shame, to pass. He fled.

That story was connected to this one just as events were linked in the world of Marvel Comics — where The Sub-Mariner #67 was folded between two panels in F.F. #140, which itself contained information primarily available in F.F. annual #6. This imaginary world and its inhabitants coexisted with the so-called real inhabitants of the so-called real world in just the way the dead saints of antiquity were supposed to be frolicking around him — right on this platform at the Stamford Conrail station. In the world of Marvel, his parents were off exposing the malfeasance of a local political figure whose daughter was the girl Paul would one day marry, while his sister, meanwhile, was seducing an art collector and amateur nuclear physicist who would one day be Paul’s employer. This physicist just happened to be a part-time Balkan spy raised from the dead who was working on the Apollo-Soyez mission and carrying out, on the side, a high-level conspiracy to destroy Benjamin Hood’s business. All these things were happening at once, simultaneously. In the world of Marvel, Caria Bear might show up on the train, in the seat next to him, to say that she had always loved him. The train would then be attacked by hordes of spear-bearing Connecticut Indians. Or this train would lead into the main action of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Where Paul would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the abominable snowman, until Richard Nixon appeared, in person, to plead for peace, as he had done in F.F. #106.

Paul’s dad hated comic books, of course. The idea that hard-earned Schackley and Schwimmer dollars might trickle down into the hands of the Marvel Comics Group needled him. Maybe it was because he and Ben Grimm were too much alike. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of it. But it wasn’t only the comics that his father disliked. He disliked Paul’s helmet of long, wavy hair, and his loneliness, and his lack of athletic prowess. Radio club and chorus and recreational tennis failed to impress Paul’s dad.

So Paul had given up trying. He hung out with the stoners. Paul was a garbage head! A loser, as they were called among stoners. Paul bought oregano and thought it was good shit. He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over The Chronicles of Narnia and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire-frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent. There was a rush along the Fulham Road!