Which was why, on the October morning when the world finally did arrive, in the form of a new Hyundai sedan parked halfway down his driveway, in the overgrown turnout where Mitch and Brenda had once kept their boat, he didn’t stop to see who was in it. He was hurrying to get on the road to a Conservancy meeting in Duluth, and he slowed down only enough to see that the driver’s seat was reclined, the driver perhaps sleeping. He had reason to hope that whoever was in the car would be gone by the time he returned, because why else hadn’t they knocked on his door? But the car was still there, its reflective rear plastic catching his headlights, when he turned off the county road at eight o’clock that evening.
He got out and peered through the parked car’s windows and saw that it was empty, the driver’s seat restored to its upright position. The woods were cold; the air was still and smelled capable of snow; the only sound was a faint human burble from the direction of Canterbridge Estates. He got back in his car and proceeded to the house, where a woman, Patty, was sitting on the front step in the dark. She was wearing blue jeans and a thin corduroy jacket. Her legs were drawn up to her chest for warmth, her chin resting on her knees.
He shut off his car and waited for some longish while, some twenty or thirty minutes, for her to stand up and speak to him, if that was what she’d come here for. But she refused to move, and eventually he summoned the courage to leave his car and head inside. He paused briefly on the doorstep, not more than a foot away from her, to give her a chance to speak. But her head remained bowed. His own refusal to speak to her was so childish that he couldn’t resist smiling. But this smile was a dangerous admission, and he stifled it brutally, steeling himself, and entered the house and shut the door behind him.
His strength wasn’t infinite, however. He couldn’t help waiting in the dark, by the door, for another long while, maybe an hour, and straining to hear if she was moving, straining not to miss even a very faint tapping on the door. What he heard, instead, in his imagination, was Jessica telling him that he needed to be fair: that he owed his wife at least the courtesy of telling her to go away. And yet, after six years of silence, he felt that to speak even one word would be to take back everything-would undo all of his refusal and negate everything he’d meant by it.
At length, as if waking from some half-sleeping dream, he turned on a light and drank a glass of water and found himself drawn to his file cabinet by way of compromise; he could at least take a look at what the world had to say to him. He opened first the mailer from Jersey City. There was no note inside it, just a CD in impenetrable plastic wrapping. It appeared to be a small-label Richard Katz solo effort, with a boreal landscape on the front, superimposed with the title Songs for Walter.
He heard a sharp cry of pain, his own, as if it were someone else’s. The fucker, the fucker, it wasn’t fair. He turned over the CD with shaking hands and read the track list. The first song was called “Two Kids Good, No Kids Better.”
“God, what an asshole you are,” he said, smiling and weeping. “This is so unfair, you asshole.”
After he’d cried for a while at the unfairness, and at the possibility that Richard wasn’t wholly heartless, he put the CD back into the mailer and opened the envelope from Patty. It contained a manuscript that he read only one short paragraph of before running to the front door, pulling it open, and shaking the pages at her.
“I don’t want this!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want to read you! I want you to take this and get in your car and warm up, because it’s fucking freezing out here.”
She was, indeed, shuddering with chills, but she appeared to be locked in her huddled position and didn’t look up to see what he was holding. If anything, she lowered her head further, as if he were beating on it.
“Get in your car! Warm up! I didn’t ask you to come here!”
It may have just been an especially violent shudder, but she seemed to shake her head at this, a little bit.
“I promise I’ll call you,” he said. “I promise to have a conversation on the phone with you if you’ll go away now and get yourself warmed up.”
“No,” she said in a very small voice.
“Fine, then! Freeze!”
He slammed the door and ran through the house and out the back door, all the way down to the lake. He was determined to be cold himself if she was so intent on freezing. Somehow he was still clutching her manuscript. Across the lake were the blazing wasteful lights of Canterbridge Estates, the jumbo screens flashing with whatever the world believed was happening to it tonight. Everybody warm in their dens, the coal-fired Iron Range power plants pushing current through the grid, the Arctic still arctic enough to send frost down through the temperate October woods. However little he’d ever known how to live, he’d never known less than he knew now. But as the bite in the air became less bracing and more serious, more of a chill in his bones, he began to worry about Patty. Teeth chattering, he went back up the hill and around to the front step and found her tipped over, less tightly balled up, her head in the grass. She was, ominously, no longer shivering.
“Patty, OK,” he said, kneeling down. “This is not good, OK? I’ll bring you inside.”
She stirred a little, stiffly. Her muscles seemed inelastic, and no warmth was coming through the corduroy of her jacket. He tried to get her to stand up, but it didn’t work, and so he carried her inside and laid her on the sofa and piled blankets on her.
“This was so stupid,” he said, putting a teakettle on. “People die from doing these things. Patty? It doesn’t have to be below zero, you can die when it’s thirty degrees out. You’re just stupid to sit out there for so long. I mean, how many years did you live in Minnesota? Did you not learn anything? This is so fucking stupid of you.”
He turned up the furnace and brought her a mug of hot water and made her sit up to take a drink, but she blew it right back onto the upholstery. When he tried to give her more, she shook her head and made vague noises of resistance. Her fingers were icy, her arms and shoulders dully cold.
“Fuck, Patty, this is so stupid. What were you thinking? This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done to me.”
She fell asleep while he took off his clothes, and she woke up only a little as he peeled back the blankets and took off her jacket and struggled to remove her pants and then lay down with her, wearing only his underpants, and arranged the blankets on top of them. “OK, so stay awake, right?” he said, pressing as much of his surface as he could against her marmoreally cold skin. “What would be particularly stupid of you right now would be to lose consciousness. Right?”
“Mm-m,” she said.
He hugged her and lightly rubbed her, cursing her constantly, cursing the position she’d put him in. For a long time she didn’t get any warmer, kept falling asleep and barely waking up, but finally something clicked on inside her, and she began to shiver and clutch him. He kept rubbing and hugging, and then, all at once, her eyes were wide open and she was looking into him.
Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.