As Simple as Snow Page 10

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “I’m not smart enough for you,” I said.

  “You’re fine.”

  “I’m a simpleton. I’m simple, like snow.”

  It was a joke. I meant it to be clever, but she was off again on one of her explanations and investigations, ignoring my point. “Snow isn’t simple at all,” she said. “It only looks that way. It’s actually very complicated.” She looked at me and laughed. “I can’t help myself.” She came over and kissed me with her cold mouth. It was like electricity. “I say stupid things sometimes.”

  “I’ve never heard you say anything stupid.”

  “I’m a freak,” she said. “I should just keep quiet. Be more like you.”

  “I should be more like you.”

  She wanted to take a run by herself. I watched her slide slowly off the hill and then quickly gain speed as she made the descent. She was fine at first, staying in the middle of the hill, following in the flattened path we had made together, but then, just before the dip of the hill, where it started to level off, she swerved toward the woods, disappearing from my view. She might have hit a bump or leaned the wrong way and lost control of the sled, but it almost looked like she wanted to go into the trees. I waited a few minutes for her to come back out into sight. She didn’t come. I waited a little more and began to think that maybe she had hit a tree. I ran down the hill, stumbling and falling into the snow. I followed the path of the sled and raced into the woods, expecting the worst.

  I was sweating and covered in snow and out of breath by the time I reached the trees. The cold air stung my lungs, and my breath shot out in cloudy bursts. Anna was lying on the ground on her back, her raspberry arms stretched straight above her head, her legs also stuck straight out. She had been making an angel in the snow. I started laughing at her.

  “I could be dead,” she said, “smashed against one of these trees. What would you do then?”

  “Leave you here and go on home and act as if it never happened.”

  “You would do that?”

  “I suppose I could bury you first, but no one would find you for a long time.”

  “You would just leave me?” She sat up and made room for me to sit beside her on the toboggan. Her eyes flickered, and I thought she might be enjoying herself.

  “People might think it was my fault.”

  “It would have been your fault.”

  “I wasn’t on the sled.”

  “You brought me here and then killed me and left me in the woods. That’s how they would see it. Just think how sad my parents would be, and you just left me here. It serves you right. You better not bury me in the woods. I’ll come back and torment you.”

  “Just come back,” I said.

  “Do you think I could?”

  “If anybody can, it’s you.”

  “But what if I couldn’t come back, what if I could only reach you through somebody else, like a psychic or a medium?”

  “I wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “That’s why we need a code, or something only the two of us know, something you can recognize,” she said.

  “Why do you think it’s you that’s going to be gone first?”

  “You didn’t almost hit a tree.”

  “And what would our code be?”

  “Something simple,” she said. “Something as simple as snow. That phrase: ‘Something as simple as snow.’”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “It’s easy to remember,” she said.

  “It’s not really a code.”

  “It’s a secret message. It’s a signal. It means the message is coming from one of us. That’s a code.”

  “So we start the message with that phrase?”

  “That’s what Houdini and his wife did.”

  “What was their phrase?”

  “It had a name in it, and then words that corresponded to letters in the alphabet. It spelled out the word ‘believe.’ The phrase was something like, ‘Rosabelle, answer tell pray-answer look tell answer-answer tell.’”

  “Was Rosabelle his wife?”

  “No, it was from a song.”

  “Why don’t we use that, then?”

  “Because it was theirs—it doesn’t mean anything to us. Besides, you don’t want to use Houdini’s code—what if he’s still using it?”

  “What does our code mean to us?”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “It means that we know something no one else does. It means that everyone else thinks the world is simple, but it’s not. It’s like snow—most people think that it’s just white, but if you look at it, really observe it, you’ll see that there are different shades, from a sort of grayish white to a brilliant white. This book I read, The Worst Journey in the World—about Scott’s last expedition to the South Pole—described the snow as cobalt blue, rose, mauve, and lilac, with gradations of all of those colors. And then there’s texture. Some snow is dry and granular, almost like sugar, while other snow is wet and clumpy. And that’s just the superficial stuff—once you start looking at each flake it gets really complicated.”

  “Maybe you’re making it more complicated than it really is,” I said. “Maybe it’s a myth about the uniqueness of snowflakes. Everybody thinks that no two snowflakes are alike, because they’ve never really been compared.” I scooped up a handful of snow and shook off some of the excess for effect. “Maybe I’m holding in my hand right now the very same sort of flakes, identical in every way, as some guy in Tibet or Switzerland or Iceland or Iowa is holding at the very same instant. But he thinks his are unique and I think mine are unique because we have no way to catalogue and compare them. And that’s just the snow that’s on the ground right now, what about last year’s snow and the year before that? You have billions and billions of flakes that would need to be compared.”

  She laughed. She laughed at me. “You just proved my point. Think how complicated it would be to catalogue all the individual snowflakes and then try and compare them. They can’t even do that with fingerprints, and there’s only a tiny fraction of those compared with all the snowflakes in any given winter, let alone all winters.”

  A freezing rain clicked through the trees and we headed toward home. Instead of trudging back up the hill and then walking down the road, we cut through the woods. By the time we reached Brook Road, the trees were shiny with a thin layer of ice. I wanted Anna to stay at my house for a while, but she changed her clothes to leave. “I’ll take your shortcut,” she said.

  “Be careful.”

  “I’ll call you when I get home.”

  A half-hour passed and I hadn’t heard from her. I called her house and Mrs. Cayne told me that she wasn’t home yet. “When did she leave?” she asked.

  “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”:

  I will tear the veils from every mystery—mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, and nothingness. I am a master of phantasmagoria.

  Listen!

  Every talent is mine!—There is no one here, and there is someone: I wouldn’t want to waste my treasure.—Shall I give you African chants, belly dancers? . . .

  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