Winter's Tale Part 20

They got along in a fashion. Going to work became for Christiana an extraordinary entertainment, for Boonya's declarations and p.r.o.nouncements were never-ending, she could clean like a demon, she sang songs in languages that no one knew, and she had recipes for a thousand foods that did not exist.

NOT until winter, when during a prolonged blizzard The Sun's launch was idle, did Christiana discover the inhabitant of the apartment on the other side of the wall. A steady northwest wind drove the snow in hypnotic trajectories as the blizzard rushed through the garden, turning it into an alpine cirque. Asbury and Christiana sat facing one another for hours, though between them were two fires and several thicknesses of brick.

She was deep in Thorgard's Winter Seas, speeding along at two pages an hour in the original Danish. Asbury was at a little table before the fire, struggling with Dutton's Problems in Advanced Navigation, over which he soon had to triumph if he were to continue his progress toward a master's certificate. For six months, they had lived in adjoining rooms, and been completely unaware of one another's presence, though they slept literally less than a foot apart.

Were the forces of nature less concerned with the mounting of stupendous blizzards and the greening of mountain ranges than with maneuvering together a good man and a good woman, the bricks that separated them would have crumbled long before. But the forces of nature did not seem to care, and it was not until Asbury got up to get his fire going that he and his neighbor were finally enabled to meet. He rocked the logs with a poker, watching the red coals chip off into devil's candy. When he was satisfied with the activity he had promoted in the crucible before him, he banged the poker again the back wall of the fireplace three times, to rid it of a few glowing embers that had lodged in its hook.

Christiana put down her book and stared at the inner wall the fireplace. Then she got up, seized a poker, and knocked back three times. It was answered. Soon the telegraphy moved from the firewall to the wall above the mantel, and then to the wall betweentheir beds. There, discovering that voices could carry through, they introduced themselves, but then cut off their conversation quite rapidly thereafter, out of embarra.s.sment."What place is this in your apartment?" she had asked.

"My bed," he had answered."What about you?"

"The same," she had said, realizing that they slept only inches apart.

"Are you going to move it now?" Asbury asked.

"No."

Sometimes they spent hours lying next to the wall, saying anything that came to mind, telling their histories, what they had thought, and what they had dreamed. In this way, they became so intimate that it was as if they were having a blistering love affair without anything like a wall between them. In the summer, he told her, they could travel by their narrow balconies to a valley between the peaks of the roof."From there you can see the river," he told her.

She said that she would like to go there. But was it dangerous to climb up? "No," he answered. They would meet during the summer. But not until then.

"What do you look like?" Asbury asked one night, months later, because he knew that, since it was already the beginning of May, he would soon see her.

"I'm not pretty. I'm not pretty at all," she said.

"I think you're beautiful," he shot back through the wall.

"No," Christiana insisted."It's not true. You'll see."

"I don't care," he answered."I love you."

When he heard her crying, he thought that perhaps he hadgotten himself in deeper than he should have. But he did love her, I he didn't care if, as she steadily maintained, she was homely. This he made clear to her on a number of occasions during the late spring. Finally, he asked her to marry him.

Everyone, including Hardesty, thought that Asbury had madea terrible mistake."I understand," Hardesty said,"how people, especially lonely people, might fall in love through a wall. But if she is, as she claims, physically repulsive, you'll need that wall between you for the rest of your lives."

I know," Asbury said."If she's really hideous, you might beright. But she says that she's just overly plain, whatever that means. I still can't see how she could fail to appear to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world."

Hardesty offered to go look, and received a resounding lecture on trust, after which Asbury affirmed that he was going to take the risk. Her voice was beautiful, and he knew that he loved hera"that was enough.

She agreed to marry him, and they decided to meet in the roof valley on the first fine day. Naturally, it rained throughout most of the spring.

But one day early in June, in the morning, before the sun was too hot, Asbury went out on the roof. At first he climbed to the peak of his own side and stayed there, looking at the river, trying not to tremble too much, because it was the perfectly blue day for which he had been waiting. h.e.l.l, he thought, let's just do it. He went into the valley and up again, and spoke through a chimney.

"Christiana," he shouted."Are you up? I hope I have the right chimney."

"I'm up," she yelled into her fireplace, her heart racing.

"Come to the roof. It's time we met." He tried not to be nervous."After we get over the shock of this, one way or another, we can go sailing. Maybe all the way to Amagansett."

"Coming," she said, in motion, in a voice that had reverted to nearly pure Scandinavian, though the word was hardly audible as she sprang away from the hearth.

Asbury went down to where the two roofs met, and stood with a foot on each one, facing the direction from which she would appear.

First, her hand came over the edge while she climbed up on the balcony rail. Then she rose in one quick movement, and stood before the lover that she had never seen. She was more than pleased. And he was stunned.

"I knew it," he said, in triumph, struggling to take her in all at once."I knew that you would be the most beautiful woman in the world. And G.o.ddammit," he said, stepping back a pace so as not to be overwhelmed,"you are."

NOTHING IS RANDOM.

NOTHING is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one can be certain.

And yet there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been givena"so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, isa"and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

PETER LAKE RETURNS.

FOR several years or more, the run of severewinters had been broken by a series of sunny counterfeits that were called winter only by Hawaiians. The worker-devils who tore up the streets in mid-Manhattan as traffic swirled about them like floodwaters around a caisson, did so in the middle of January with their shirts off. At Christmastime, women were seen on high terraces, sunning themselves. There was no snow; the garment industry was convulsed; the news weeklies had a series of identical covers about the weather. (Newsweeka""No more winters?";Timea""Where are the snows of yesteryear?"; The Ghost News Magazinea""It's Hot.") Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was a.s.sumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was. .h.i.t by a cataclysmic freeze, and once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

Snow filled the parks in volumes that would have impressed the inhabitants of the Coheeries, overwhelming half the trees and hills. It soon became the custom to ski from place to place, pa.s.sing silently over dead and buried cars. The air was so clear that people said,"Shake it and it will shatter," and day after day, week after week, month after month, a dense freezing wind descended from the north, pushing snow and ice before it like a calving glacier. Winter abounded and exploded. Always the season of testing and extremes, it made some people euphoric and others suicidal; it split granite boulders, tree trunks, and marriages; it tripled the rate of winter romances; brought back sleds and skis, and chapbooks about Christmas in New England; and it froze the Hudson into a solid highway. It even froze half the harbor.

Though it was said that winters like this one had come before, hardly anyone was old enough to remember them. The last one of such severity that it threatened not only the physical world, but beliefs and inst.i.tutions, had been not too long after the turn of the century. Only the great wars had obliterated it from people's memories. During that winter, it was as if time itself had been alive, had a will of its own, and wanted to be forgotten. Much about those years remained unexplained, as if they had been preparing a coup, and, shortly before they might have been discovered, had retreated to await a more propitious moment. The expressions of the men and women of that era, surviving in photographs, seemed all-knowing, and the subjects of the portraitists seemed to peer through time and know the innermost thoughts of those who studied their images decades after they had died. Such faces and eyes, constructed of light and truth, did not anymore exist.

A plain of ice encircled Manhattan. Its southern limit was about a mile and a half past the Statue of Liberty (to which one could now walk), and icebreakers continually ploughed across it to keep a channel open for the Staten Island ferry. Even after the ferry moved into open water, however, it had to pa.s.s gingerly between enormous blocksof ice that had broken from the shelf and were floating toward the sea.

One January evening at dusk, in a blinding downpour of driven snow, the ferry was halfway to Staten Island when it smashed its rear shafts and propellers against a submerged reef of ice, and went dead in the water. The captain chose to steam on the front blades and go back to Manhattan rather than to turn among the icebergs. The ferry was drifting slowly in the snow, about to shift power. This was a routine task, but it had to be accomplished quickly, because the boat drifted at a different rate than the ice, and was bound therefore to suffer collisions with it.

On the bridge, officers and crew were properly calma"alert professionals enjoying the tension of the moment and the silent precision that it elicited from them. Suddenly, a pa.s.senger burst in. The public was not allowed on the bridge for any reason, and this gesticulating lunatic had not only interrupted the satisfying drama of the propeller transfer, he had also brought into a dim and elegant silence some of the cacophony of the city from which the ferry was usually able to keep a comfortable distance. He hardly spoke English, and none of the pilots spoke Spanish. Throwing himself around in a sort of epileptic dance, he seemed like the more dangerous type of escapee.

"What do you want?" the captain screamed, enraged.

The man took a deep breath, tried not to shake, and pointed out the window. When they looked through the falling snow, they saw an object in the water, about fifty feet away. It was moving in barely visible spasms. It was a man.

As soon as they could hack the ice off the davits, they lowered a lifeboat, and pulled him in. He was so badly wounded and stunned that they didn't expect him to talk. They would not have been surprised had he rattled over and died.

Propped up in the crew's shower, he faced the steaming water in apparent grat.i.tude. Several minutes more in the chill harbor would have frozen him brittle.

A Spanish speaker was found to interpret the account of the discoverer, now inflated with pride. He had been gazing absent-mindedly into the snow, when he heard a whistle in the air like thatof an approaching artillery sh.e.l.l. Before him appeared a bright streak of light, and the water under it exploded as if someone had set off a dynamite charge to break apart the ice. Surprised by the intense white flash, he was further amazed when a body was elevated on the mushrooming foam. Then he had run to the bridge.

"Are you sure you didn't push him during a fight?" asked the captain of the Cornelius G. Koffa"an ancient boat that was still in service."I'm told he's wounded."

The man who could hardly speak English stormed off the bridge. His countenance was enough to prove his innocence.

"Call an ambulance to the slip," the captain told his mate."If the overboard wants to press charges against anyone, inform the police. If not, forget it. We have enough to do."

Several decks below, the overboard in the shower heard the engines start, and felt the boat lurch ahead. Someone beyond the shower curtain asked if he wanted to press charges.

"Press charges against who?" inquired the wounded man, from within the hot water stream, startled by his own Irish accent.

"Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure," said Peter Lake, staring in amazement at his wounds, which, from their appearance, had to have been received recently.

"But you're all cut up."

"I see that," answered Peter Lake."I think I got some bullets in me, too."

"How did it happen?"

The mate heard the shower dashing off Peter Lake's pale skin."I don't know," Peter Lake answered.

"What's your name?" There was no reply."It's not important, though they might want to know at the hospital. If you don't want to say anything, that's your business."

Feeling so weak that the foghorns speaking to each other across the winter harbor seemed like the music of a dream, Peter Lake struggled to put on a pair of torn pants, a work shirt, and a wo sweater that was dotted with specks of white paint. He was also given a pair of old shoes which, by some accident, fit perfectly. Leaning over to tie them made his heart race, and spots appeared before hiseyes, but this was almost as pleasant as getting into a warm bed on a cold night. He was told that his own clothesa"nothing more than soft shredsa"had peeled off him and disintegrated when he had been hauled into the lifeboat.

As the ferry was docking, he stepped before a small broken mirror on the bulkhead.

"There's an ambulance at the pier," the mate said."You're bleeding like h.e.l.l, but we had to put you in the shower. You would have froze to death. Besides, the harbor's not exactly lily-white."

Peter Lake put his hands against the wall to steady himself. He was faint from loss of blood, and he felt and moved like a drunk. Staring at his image in the mirror, he shuddered."Funny," he said."I don't know who that is."

Then he saw two ambulance attendants coming down the stairs, carrying a stretcher between them. They caught him just as he was about to hit the floor.

HE awoke at dawn in one of the very old ward rooms of St. Vincent's Hospital, looking out on Tenth Street. It was snowing, and because the light was diffuse, all the shadows in the room were gray. He remembered the cold water, the ferry, the shower, and little else. Certainly, he would snap to at any moment. Sometimes you forget your name, he thought. Like h.e.l.l you do. Maybe he was drunk. Perhaps he was dreaming.

Written on a plastic band around his wrist were the day and month that he was admitted, a four-digit number, and "No Name." Never before had he seen plastic. He felt how smooth it was, not knowing why he was amazed, because, although he knew it was not familiar, he couldn't imagine that he had never come across it. There were certain things that he simply could not recollect, and this he found unbearably annoying. Who was he? How old? What month was it (the bracelet said "2/18")? Still, he believed that everything was near at hand, at the tip of his tongue.

A group of doctors and medical students entered the ward and began their rounds. By the time they got to Peter Lake, attendants were serving breakfast to the patients who had been examined, mostof the white curtains were drawn back, and the silvery lighta"within which the snow wound and unwound in the manic convulsions of a spinning jennya"had a bright daylike sheen.

As a dozen medical students and nurses gathered around Peter Lake's bed, the senior physician s.n.a.t.c.hed a clipboard from the bedstead, glanced at it, and addressed the patient."Good morning," he said."How are we feeling this morning?"

A shot of hostility welled up in Peter Lake. Although he didn't like the doctor and he didn't know why, he trusted himself, perhaps because he had nothing else.

"I don't know," he snapped back, eying them one by one."You should know how you feel."

"I see," the doctor said."If that's how you want it, that's how you'll get it."

"Just don't saw off my legs," Peter Lake responded.

"Then let's start with your name. You were unconscious when you were admitted. You had no identification...."

"What's identification?"

"A driver's license, for example."

"For what, a locomotive?"

"No. For a car."

"When you say *car' do you mean an automobile?" Peter Lake asked. The students nodded their heads."You don't need a license to drive an automobile."

"Look," the senior physician said,"you had three bullet wounds. We had to take your fingerprints and give them to the police. They'll have your name, so you might as well tell us."

At the mention of the police, Peter Lake lunged forward, and discovered that he was handcuffed to the bed. The medical students started at the rattle of the chains."What are fingerprints?" he asked. But they had lost their patience. Rather than an answer, he got a needle in the arm, and he watched them depart.

Breathing slowly, Peter Lake stared at the ceiling. He had no strength, and could not move. His eyes were wide open, and a million thoughts crowded his head, like snowflakes in a blizzard. And yet, despite manacles, wounds, and drugs, he felt as if he had some fight left in him. He didn't know from where it came any more thanhe knew who he was. But he did know that deep inside the immobile body handcuffed to a hospital bed, there was still a lot of fire. And when he fell asleep, he was smiling.

FIVE days later, Peter Lake awakened to a springlike evening. The ward was quiet, and he had been corralled within a screen of frilly snow-white cloth. Opening his eyes, he saw a dark violet sky through the upper corner of a window, and strange white lights in the ceiling, which he took to be some sort of adaptation of a cathode ray tube. When he turned his head to the side, he saw that there was a young girl in the cubicle with him.

She was sitting on a chair at his bedside, staring with a youthful optimism that seemed to flow from every atom in her body. She looked no more than fourteen or fifteen, had astonishing green eyes, and red hair that was piled up in beautiful waves and falling tresses. She was freckled, as someone of her coloring might be, and she was slightly chubby. Peter Lake noticed (and then felt properly ashamed for making such an observation about so young a girl) that she had a most attractive bosom, moving visibly and seductively under her white blouse. This he attributed to early development and healthy plumpness.

The girl, in fact, was twenty-seven years old, and looked young for her age. She was a former resident of Baltimore, a hardworking, good-natured young womana"his attending physician. But, of course, he didn't know that, and he smiled at her with a slight elongation of the strange smile that he had had during his five days of sleep."h.e.l.lo, missy," he said.

Hi," she answered, responding to the warmth of his greeting.

"How long have I been asleep; do you know?"

She shook her head to indicate that she did."Five days."

"Jesus Christ."

*You got a lot better in that time. Sleep did wonders for your wounds."

"It did?"

"Yes. You should be up and about in less than a week."

"Is that what they said?"

"Who?"

"The doctors."

"No, it's what I say."

"That's nice, but what do they say?"

"They generally agree," she stated, after thinking for a moment."If the matter isn't too complicated. These things are pretty straightforward."

"No handcuffs," Peter Lake said, looking at his wrists."When did they take them off?"