I slip out the door and lecherous January rakes its dirty fingernails up my shirt, scratching under my armpits, scuttling up my pant legs, drawing goosebumps high-up on my thighs. I dart under the next-door awning of an abandoned storefront, leaning up against the spongy give of the storefront grate. A mucus-thick sob does its best to break out from my throat, but I cover it with a wet cough, doing my best to deny, damn and send to Hell the inescapable meaninglessness of the quantum convergence of some counter-girl’s lazy tongue and a remark on the weather. But of course, these convergences, they’re the quartz-hard heart of remembering.
Nothing to be done for it. Sorrow calcifies; there’s a hard, spiky bezor lodged in my gut that no amount of yellow beer sloshing in my stomach or heat between my thighs or good times with a book at the beach will ever shatter apart. To forget to remember, to forget utterly, that’s all the grace that’s left to have, but it’s too much to be given.
Fuck me. I left the prescription on the counter.
I’ve lost her voice, her smell, her fine, small fingers, the gray in her hair, I’ve lost the old arguments, the happy meetings, the long, tedious phone calls, her awful taste in fashion. But I have her handwriting, though, that’s something. Her address book, I snuck it into my purse the day after the funeral – that long, looped cursive catalog of names and numbers (they don’t teach the Palmer method anymore), the scribbled notes made while nattering away on the phone. She went into school left-handed, but came out right; the nuns believing that left-handed children made poor students, but the truth of it is the old story, that the left hand is closer to the Devil, even though the left hand is closer to the heart.
The problem with the dead isn’t that they die, isn’t that they leave us, no, the problem with the dead is quite the opposite, that they never leave us. That they are always with us, that they cannot be shaken off, forgotten – the only thing you can forget about your dead is that they are, in fact, dead. You forget and think to tell them some story, some anecdote, the latest episode, chapter or cantos in your weekday-weekend world, like how a drug-store counter-girl couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce your first name and, moreover, how she made you Jewish, but. Then you say, as I have said, said it a thousand times, aloud, to myself, thought it: “Ahh, of course, she’s dead now.”
The weatherman was right. There’s snow in the air. I wonder if he celebrates? Breaks out a fancy bottle of wine, something pricey, something he bought at an auction and clinks himself a toast for a well-done prediction? I wonder if he’s happy.
The snow swirls and swoops above the rooftops and just-brightening streetlamps, shaping unknowable geometries, perhaps making words in God’s first language, perhaps a belated New Year’s wishing-well to all His moody angels, roosting on brownstone lintels and on the back of air conditioner ducts, restlessly changing colors. But I can’t read it and perhaps, neither can they, it being so long ago that Eve had her apple and the Devil got his due.
The silence of snow is quelling the city. And although I can see but my small portion of it, hidden as I am in the deep shadows under a street awning in an unremarkable section of Brooklyn, I know that the snow is general throughout the boroughs, that impossibly precarious snowdrifts are accumulating on fire-escape railings from the Battery to the Grand Concourse, from Astoria to Red Hook and even to far away Rockaway.
I slip out from under the awning, joining the herd of street traffic in that long trudge home. The snow kisses my bare neck, makes epaulets on my shoulders. But there’s nothing to be done for it, not for me, nor any of us, fellow walkers in the city. Not one of us, after all, has ever, or will ever, believe in such things as weathermen or death, a fact made all too clear by our gloveless hands and hatless heads and all the ghosts that trail behind us.