Michael cunningham the snow queen. The Snow Queen Michael Cunningham

Appreciated the book

Oh, how enticing the cover of the reader is!
Perhaps the most original of all Cunningham's novels
The New York Times

Best Cunningham Novel in Ten Years
Vogue

No, I understand that print media should also earn money, arrange PR and so on and so forth; it is clear that fans of Cunningham should be attracted by "originality", while casual readers should be attracted by "the best novel in the last ten years," "" parable, "and so on and so forth.
So, this is not the most original, no it is best in ten years, this is the usual Cunningham. The most common Cunningham. Piercing, slightly ironic, moderately original (Cunningham had nothing more original than "The Chosen Days"), about loneliness and love, about finding oneself, with its traditional heroes - homosexuals, drug addicts, bohemians, people lost in society. Everything is recognizable. Even the mild irony of Cunningham. ABOUT! And further! How I forgot! His heroes, as always, are books, as always, he refers the reader to the heroes or events of these very books, and often to the mood of the book. Flaubert and his "Madame Bovary" are also mentioned here. There, the hero of the novel Barrett sends the reader to Emma Bovary. Here and "The Great Gatsby", and Virginia Woolf with her marvelous novel "To the Lighthouse", and, of course, "The Snow Queen".
Most of us all our lives have been trying to put together such a coveted word from ice cubes - "happiness" ". The heroes of the book also tried to fold on the lake "Mirrors of the Mind" "from icy pieces of their own hearts, their own happiness - who to write song of my life who add up from different people the only one, someone to put together from these pieces their own life. And to find your place in this life, which characterizes the midlife crisis, in fact, the whole book is about this very crisis, when half of life has been lived - in youth there were dreams, hopes, prospects, faith in happiness and love, and by the middle of life it suddenly turns out that all this was lost somewhere. And loneliness, and the purpose of the world is incomprehensible. And it turns out that life is wasted. At idle speed. And as you sat in the middle of the lake "Mirror of the Mind" "with ice cubes, you sit, trying to fold happiness mind, not heart. What is now to rush out of the window into the icy and fluffy flakes of snow or throw yourself into a new sense of feeling. How to live like a human being? How to act humanly? How to melt a heart frozen from the breath of the Snow Queen so as not to feel pain from the upcoming losses. This search for Cunningham is always piercing, always on the edge, always alive, at the tips of nerve endings. Always with a feeling of being drawn into the spiritual life of the characters, in any case, I never manage to just watch the characters of Cunningham from the outside, only when you go inside you begin to feel the characters' pain, loneliness, their search for love and love itself.
But all they need is only love .
And nothing but love. To my brother, to loved ones, to parents. And to the city.

Another hero of the novel is diverse and beautiful New York. With snowflakes, bohemians, homeless people, just beggars, freaks, the Statue of Liberty, galleries, shops of all kinds of stylish junk, amazing New Yorkers, the glow of light in the night sky. The city is like a living character of a book - it breathes, lives, pulsates.

P.S. And I also want to add that the book has been published monstrously ... A huge number of typos, unread translation text, in places just clumsy.

Appreciated the book

We rarely get to the destination we are aiming for, right? It seems to us that our hopes are coming true, but, most likely, we simply do not hope so.

You know, probably, to write aerobatics so that it becomes absolutely all the same what the text is about, as long as it lasts, multiplying pages, and the novel does not download longer ...
Although there is some degree of cunning in my words: it will not cling to what is written, no matter how brilliantly it is performed, if the text lacks meaning, soul, mind ... and so on.

With Cunningham, I have no other relationship than a fascinated, enthusiastic... How else to react to the author's magic in action. Sheer fortune-telling ... Isn't it a literary skill to make you breathe a book like oxygen? There are only a few such modern authors - those whose works possess an inexplicable magic of mood, a particular fragility of phrases, ornateness of their construction, reminiscent of a smoky frosty pattern on glass.

Cunningham is typical to ... genius. Yes exactly. His heroes are ordinary people in a midlife crisis, in an eternal search for themselves. Often rejected by society, they find shelter in their own loneliness, in the underground of being.

Brothers Barrett and Tyler, cancer patient Beth ... They are all frustrated at what life has to offer.

Barrett is a brilliant university graduate, once promising and now down to the level of a second-rate jeans store seller. Abandoned by another lover, lonely and depressed, forced to live in the apartment of his older brother. One snowy morning, returning home from a visit to the dentist, he soars. It seems to him that heaven has finally descended to him, sending some valuable sign, winking with a bright flash of light. Only for a moment, but they told about their favor. Indifference.

Perhaps this is a hint of a change for the better? The fact that the beloved woman of your older brother, who is fighting cancer, will definitely get better? Waiting for Christmas, the approaching holiday miracles, who would not want to feel this inner tremor of almost childish, naive anticipation?

Silently falling snow, as if draping New York into a white shroud, covered in large flakes of snow, "entering" in small steps into the open window in the bedroom - it feeds the deep, ossified melancholy of the heroes, burdening the consciousness with the frailty of existence.
Whether Barrett saw light from the sky, or whether it really happened, is probably not very important. The main thing is to have hope, to believe in it.

CORPUS ® Publishing House

* * *

Dedicated to Billy Howe

It was cold and deserted in the spacious halls of the Snow Queen. They were illuminated by the northern lights, it flashed brighter in the sky, then suddenly weakened. In the middle of the largest and most deserted snow hall lay a frozen lake. The ice on it split into thousands of pieces, surprisingly even and regular. In the middle of the lake, when she was at home, the Snow Queen sat on a throne. She called the lake “Mirror of the Mind” and said that it was the best and only mirror in the world.

Hans Christian Andersen

Evening

Barrett Meeks saw the skies above Central Park four days after he was once again thrown. Love before, of course, rewarded him with slaps in the face, but never before did they take the form of five lines of text, while the fifth consisted of a deadly formal wish for good luck and ended with three lowercase x's, like kisses.

For four days, Barrett struggled to maintain his presence of mind in the face of a series of partings, which, as he now saw, each time turned out to be more laconic and cooler. When he was twenty or twenty-five, his romances usually ended with sobs and noisy quarrels that woke the neighbors' dogs. Once they had a fist fight with five minutes before their former lover (Barrett still has the rumble of an overturned table in his ears and an uneven knock with which a pepper mill rolled across the floorboards). Another time there was a loud squabble in the middle of Barrow Street, a bottle broken in hearts (at the word “fall in love”, Barrett still inevitably recalls fragments of green glass glittering on the asphalt in the light of a street lamp) and an old woman's voice - even and not scandalous, what- then wearily maternal, - heard from somewhere in the darkness of the first floors: "Guys, people live here, and they want to sleep."

After thirty and further, closer to forty, partings began to resemble negotiations on the termination of business relations. There was still enough pain and mutual reproaches, but the anguish was noticeably reduced. Yes, they say, what can you do - we pinned great hopes on joint investments, but, alas, they did not come true.

This latest breakup, however, was the first he learned about from text messages, unexpected and unwelcome parting words that floated on a screen the size of a bar of hotel soap. Hi Barrett, you probably already figured it out. We've already done everything that depended on us, haven't we?

Barrett didn't really understand anything. Naturally, it dawned on him - there is no more love, just as there is no future implied by it. But this you yourself probably already understood everything ... It's like a dermatologist told you casually after a routine annual check-up: you probably already realized that this mole on your cheek is a charming dark chocolate speck, which, as many rightly believe, only adds to your attractiveness (I don’t remember who told me that Marie Antoinette drew herself a fly exactly in the same place?), so this mole is skin cancer.

Barrett also answered by text message. An e-mail, he decided, would look too old-fashioned in this situation and a phone call too dramatic. On a tiny keyboard, he typed: Somehow it's sudden, maybe we'd better meet to talk. I'm there, xxx.

By the end of the second day, Barrett had sent two more text messages and left two voice messages. The night that followed the second day, he fought the urge to leave one more. By the evening of the third day, he not only received no answer, but also began to realize that it was pointless to wait; that a well-built Canadian, a graduate psychologist from Columbia University, with whom Barrett shared a bed, a table and playful conversations for five months, a man who said: “I guess I still love you,” when Barrett, sitting in the same bathtub with him, read it by heart Ave maria Frank O'Hara, and who knew the name of all the trees in the Adirondack Mountains, where they spent that weekend together, that this man went on his own way, already without him; that Barrett remained on the platform, wondering how he had managed to miss the train.

I wish you happiness and good luck in the future. xxx. On the evening of the fourth day, Barrett walked through Central Park, returning from the dentist, a visit to which, on the one hand, oppressed him with its banality, but, on the other hand, could pass for a manifestation of courage. He got rid of me with five empty and offensively impersonal lines - well, please! (It's a shame that we didn't succeed, but we both did our best.) I’m not going to neglect dental care because of you. Better I learn - with joy and relief I learn - that at the moment there is no need for root canal depulpation.

And yet the thought that he would never again enjoy the pure and carefree charm of this guy who looks so much like the young, lithe and innocent athletes in Thomas Eakins's adorable paintings; that he will never again see him take off his underpants before going to bed, how innocently delights in pleasant trifles like the collection of Leonard Cohen, which Barrett recorded for him on tape and called "Why don't you kill yourself", or victories “New York Rangers” - this idea seemed to him absolutely impossible, contrary to all the laws of the physics of love. Incompatible with them was the fact that Barrett would most likely never know what was to blame. In the past month or so, they have had several skirmishes and awkward pauses in conversation. But Barrett explained this for himself by the fact that their relationship was entering a new phase, he saw in small quarrels ("Although sometimes you can try not to be late? Why should I take the rap for you in front of my friends?") Signs of growing intimacy. He could not even remotely imagine how one fine morning he would discover, after checking the incoming text messages, that love was over and it was no more pitiful than a pair of lost sunglasses.

That evening, when he had an appearance, Barrett, reassured by the safe condition of the root canal and vowed to use dental floss more regularly, crossed the Great Lawn and was already approaching the iceberg of the Metropolitan Museum flooded with light. It was dripping from the trees, Barrett crunched through the silvery-gray crust with a crunch, cutting directly to the station of the sixth line of the subway, and was glad that he would soon be at home with Tyler and Beth, glad that they were waiting for him. His whole body was numb, as if from a novocaine injection. My head wondered if he was turning by his thirty-eight years from a hero of tragic passion, from a holy fool for love to a middle-level manager who, having failed one deal (yes, the company suffered some damage, but by no means catastrophic), starts preparing the next , pinning on it no less, perhaps a little more realistic hopes. He no longer wanted to go up in a counterattack, slander hourly messages on an answering machine, stand guard at the entrance of his former lover for a long time, despite the fact that ten years ago he certainly did all this - Barrett Meeks was a staunch soldier of love. And now he was getting old and suffering loss after loss. Even if he were worthy of a gesture of rage and passion, it would turn out that he just wants to hide that he is bankrupt, that he is completely broken, that ... listen, brother, you can't help out with a trifle?

Barrett walked with his head bowed - not out of shame, but out of fatigue; she seemed too heavy to be carried straight. His own bluish-gray shadow flickered in the snow in front of his eyes, slipping over a pine cone and a runic scattering of pine needles, over the glittering wrapper from a chocolate bar "Oh Henry!" (are they still being released?), with a rustle carried away by a gust of wind.

At some point, the microlandscape under his feet - too cold and prosaic - tired Barrett. He raised his heavy head, looked up.

And he saw a greenish-blue veil shining with a pale, false light; it hovered at the height of the stars, or not, still lower, but still high, higher than the luminous point of the satellite floating above the silhouettes of the trees. The shining veil was either slowly growing or not; brighter in the middle, she paled to the laced edges.

Barrett thought he was seeing the drifting aurora borealis, not a common sight in Central Park, but as he stood on the streak of lantern light that stretched across the ice, a citizen in a coat and scarf, sad and disappointed, but otherwise quite ordinary, while he looked to the heavenly light, which, he thought, is now being talked about in the news on all channels, while he was wondering what is better - to admire the curiosity alone or to go and stop a passer-by to make sure that he also sees this light - there were other people around, black silhouettes scattered here and there on the Great Lawn ...

He stood so, numb with uncertainty, in the yellow "Timberlands", and suddenly realized - just as he looks at the heavenly light, he looks at him from above.

No, it doesn't look. Contemplates. How, it seemed to him, a whale can contemplate a swimmer - with sedate regal and absolutely fearless curiosity.

He felt the attention of this light on him - it was transmitted to him by a short electrical impulse; a slight current pleasantly penetrated his body, warmed it and even seemed to illuminate it from the inside, which made the skin lighter than it was - not by much, by a tone or two; it was phosphorescent, but very naturally, without bluish-gas tinges, and as if the light carried by the blood rushed slightly to the skin.

And then the light scattered - scattered into a flock of blue-white flickering sparks that seemed alive, as if it were a playful child of a phlegmatic giant. Then the sparks faded, and the sky again became what it always is.

Barrett stood there for a while, looking up at the sky, as if at a TV screen that had suddenly gone out, but could, by some miracle, turn on again. The sky, however, showed only its usual spoiled darkness (the lights of New York smear the blackness of the night with gray) and a rare scattering of the brightest stars. And Barrett moved on, home, where Beth and Tyler were waiting for him in the modest comfort of the Bushwick apartment.

What else, in fact, was he supposed to do?

November 2004

It's snowing in Tyler and Beth's bedroom. Snowflakes are dense, freezing grains, and not flakes at all, in the wrong twilight of the early morning, rather gray, not white, - whirling, they fall on the floor and on the foot of the bed. Tyler wakes up, the dream immediately disappears almost without a trace - only a feeling of anxious, slightly nervous joy remains. He opens his eyes, and at the first moment a swarm of snowflakes in the room seems to him a continuation of a dream, an icy evidence of heavenly mercy. But then it becomes clear that the snow is real and that it was blown through the window, which he and Beth left open for the night.

Beth sleeps curled up in Tyler's arm. He gently releases his hand from under her and gets up to close the window. Stepping barefoot on the thinly snow-covered floor, he goes to do what should be done. He is pleased to be aware of his own prudence. In Beth, Tyler met the first person in his life even more impractical than himself. Wake up Beth now, she probably would have asked not to close the window. She likes it when their cramped, cluttered bedroom (stacks of books and treasures that Beth drags and drags into the house: a lamp in the form of a Hawaiian dancer, which in principle can still be repaired; a shabby leather suitcase; a pair of flimsy, thin-legged chairs) turns into a toy - a Christmas snow globe.

Tyler closes the window with an effort. Everything in this apartment is somehow uneven and skewed. If you drop a glass ball on the floor in the middle of the living room, it will roll straight to the front door. At the last moment, when Tyler had already almost lowered the window frame, a desperate snow charge bursts into the crack from the street - as if in a hurry to use the last chance ... A chance for what? .. To find himself in the murderous warmth of the bedroom? To soak up the heat and melt away?

With this last impulse, a speck flies into Tyler's eye, or maybe not a speck, but a microscopic piece of ice, very tiny, no larger than the smallest fragment of a broken mirror. Tyler rubs his eye, but the speck does not come out, it is firmly stuck in his cornea. And so he stands and looks - one can see normally with one eye, the other is completely clouded with tears - how the snow crumbs beat against the glass. The very beginning of the seventh. Outside the window is white and white. The accumulated drifts that day after day grew around the perimeter of the parking lot and looked like low gray mountains, sprinkled here and there with sparkles of city soot, now shine with whiteness, like on a Christmas card; although no, to get a real Christmas card, you need to focus your gaze in a special way, remove from the field of view the light-chocolate cement wall of the former warehouse opposite (the calligraphic word "cement" appears on it as an otherworldly shadow, as if this is a structure, so long ago abandoned by people, reminds them of themselves, whispering their name in a faded voice) and a quiet street that has not yet departed from sleep, above which a neon letter in the sign of a liquor store blinks and buzzes with a signal fire. Even the tinsel decorations of this ghostly, uncrowded quarter, where the skeleton of a burnt-out Buick has not been removed from under Tyler's windows for a year (rusty, gutted, painted with graffiti, it looks bizarrely blissful in its absolute uselessness), dress succinctly in the predawn gloom - severe beauty, breathe shaken, but not killed hope. Yes, it happens in Bushwick too. The snow is falling, thick and immaculately clean - and there is something of a divine gift in it, as if the company supplying better peace and harmony to the neighborhoods had for once been the wrong address.

When you do not choose the place and way of life yourself, it is useful to be able to thank fate even for modest favors.

And Tyler just did not choose this peacefully impoverished area of warehouses and parking lots, where the walls of buildings are finished with ancient aluminum siding, where during the construction they thought only about how cheaper it is, where small businesses and offices barely make ends meet, and the quieter inhabitants (for the most part theirs are the Dominicans, who put a lot of effort into getting here, and probably harbored more daring hopes than those that come true in Bushwick) obediently trudge to or from work, the most penniless, and their whole appearance suggests that that it is pointless to fight further and that we must be content with what we have. The local streets are no longer particularly dangerous, from time to time someone in the neighborhood is, of course, robbed, but as if reluctantly, by inertia. When you stand by the window and watch the snow sweep over the overflowing garbage cans (garbage trucks only occasionally and in the most unpredictable moments remember that it is also worth looking in here) and slide tongues along the cracked pavement, it’s hard not to think about what lies ahead for this snow - about how it will become brown slush, and from it, closer to the intersections, ankle-deep puddles are formed, where cigarette butts and lumps of foil from gum will float.

We must go back to bed. Another sleepy interlude - and who knows, it may turn out that the world in which Tyler wakes up will be even cleaner, covered over the dust and hard work with an even thicker white blanket.

But he is dreary and dreary and does not want to go to bed in such a state. Moving away from the window now, he will become like the viewer of a subtle psychological play that does not receive either a tragic or a happy ending, but gradually fades away until the last actor disappears from the stage and the audience finally understands that the performance is over and it is time to go home.

Tyler promised himself to cut his dose. The last couple of days he did it. But now, at this very moment, the situation of metaphysical necessity has arisen. Beth's condition does not get worse, but it does not improve either. Knickerbocker Avenue obediently froze in an unexpected splendor, before being covered with the usual mud and puddles again.

Okay. Today you can indulge yourself. Then he will easily pull himself together again. And now he needs to support himself - and he will support.

Tyler walks over to the bedside table, pulls out a vial and inhales each nostril in turn.

Two gulps of life - and Tyler instantly returns from his sleepy night wandering, everything around him regains its clarity and meaning. He again lives in the world of people who compete and cooperate, have serious intentions, are eager, do not forget anything, go through life without fear and doubt.

He walks over to the window again. If that piece of ice brought by the wind really intended to grow together with his eye, then she succeeded - thanks to a tiny magnifying mirror, he now sees everything much more clearly.

Below in front of him is the same Knickerbocker Avenue, and soon her usual urban facelessness will return to her. Not that Tyler forgot about it for a while - no, no, just the inevitably coming dullness does not mean anything, like Beth says that morphine does not kill pain, but pushes it aside, turns it into some kind of plug-in number of the show, optional, obscene (And here, look, a boy-snake! And here is a woman with a beard!), But leaving indifferent - we know that this is a deception, the work of a make-up artist and props.

Tyler's own pain, not as strong as Beth's, recedes, cocaine dries out the dampness in his interior, which sparked the wires in his brain. Fooz-beating brutal magic instantly melts sound into crystal purity and clarity. Tyler puts on his usual dress, and it sits on him like a glove. A lone spectator, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he stands naked by the window, his chest is full of hope. At this moment, he believes that everything in life is unpleasant surprises (after all, he did not expect at all that by the age of forty-three he would be an unknown musician, living in erotic chastity with a dying woman and in the same apartment with his younger brother, who gradually turned from a young wizard into a tired middle-aged magician who for the ten thousandth time releasing pigeons from a cylinder) folds into some incomprehensible plan, too huge to be understood; that in the implementation of this plan all the opportunities he missed and the failed plans played a role, all the women who lacked the least bit to the ideal - everything that at one time seemed accidental, but in fact led him to this window, to the present a difficult but interesting life, to obsessive falling in love, a toned stomach (drugs contribute to this) and a strong penis (they have nothing to do with it), to the imminent fall of the Republicans, which will give a chance to a new, cold and pure world to be born.

In that newborn world, Tyler would take a rag and remove the attacking snow from the floor - who else would do that? His love for Beth and Barrett will become even purer, more pure. Make sure they don't need anything, take an extra shift at the bar, praise the snow and whatever the snow touches. He will pull the three of them out of this dull apartment, reach out with a frantic song to the heart of the universe, find a normal agent for himself, sew a sprawling cloth, remember to soak beans for cassoulet, take Beth to chemotherapy on time, start to sniff coke less, and tie up completely with dilaudid and finish reading finally "Red and Black". He will squeeze Beth and Barrett tightly in his arms, comfort them, remind them that there are very few things in life that are really worth worrying about, will feed them and occupy them with stories that will open their eyes wider to themselves.

The wind changed, and the snow outside the window began to fall differently, as if some good force, some huge invisible observer foresaw Tyler's desire a moment before he realized what he wanted, and revived the picture - evenly and slowly falling snow suddenly fluttered in fluttering ribbons and began draw a map of the turbulence of air currents; and then - are you ready, Tyler? - the moment comes to release the pigeons, scare five birds from the roof of the liquor store and almost immediately (are you watching?) Deploy them, silvered by the first light of dawn, against the snow waves, running from the west and rushing towards the East River (its choppy waters are just about will pierce barges wrapped in white, as if made of ice); and the next moment - yes, you guessed it - it's time to turn off the lights and let the truck out around the corner of Rock Street with the headlights still on and the garnet-ruby signal lights flashing on its flat silver roof - perfection itself, delightful, Thank you.

* * *

Barrett, naked to the waist, runs through the snow. His chest is flushed, and his breath is escaping in puffs of steam. He slept little and restlessly. And now he's out for a run. This habitual morning activity calms him down, he comes to his senses as he runs down Knickerbocker Avenue, leaving behind a cloud of his own vapors, like a steam locomotive that drives through an unawakened, snow-covered town, although Bushwick sometimes looks like a city with the logic of the device laid down ( whereas in reality it is a conglomerate of assorted buildings and wastelands littered with construction waste without signs of separation into the center and outskirts) only early in the morning, while around the last minutes of cold silence. Soon, shops and shops will open on Flushing Avenue, car horns will bleat, and the city madman - a long-unwashed prophet, glowing with madness no worse than the most frenzied and successful saints in carnal asceticism - will take his post at the corner of Knickerbocker and Rock with the usual diligence of a sentry. But so far, nothing breaks the silence. The street is just crawling out of a dream, in which there were no dreams, rare cars make their way along it, cutting the shroud of snowfall with the light of their headlights.

It has been snowing since midnight. He pours everything and circles, until the day gradually comes into its own and the sky, imperceptibly for the eyes, changes the night blackish-brown color to the transparent gray velvet of early morning, that fleeting period of time when the New York sky seems immaculate.

Last night the sky woke up, opened its eyes - and saw only Barrett Meeks walking home in a fitted double-breasted coat on the icy plain of Central Park, and then stopped. The sky looked up at him, noted the fact of his existence and closed his eyelids again so that, as Barrett's imagination suggested, plunge into more intimate visions - fiery dreams of flying along the spirals of the galaxy.

It’s scary - what if nothing special happened yesterday, but just as it happens from time to time, for a moment the heavenly curtain was opened by accident. And Barrett has no more reason to be considered the chosen one than the maid - to get married to the eldest of the master's sons just because she saw him go naked into the bathroom, thinking that there was no one in the corridor.

And it is also scary from the thought that yesterday's phenomenon is full of meaning, but there is no way to unravel it, even if only approximately. In the memory of Barrett, a Catholic who irrevocably lost his way already in primary school (the relief of the abdominal muscles and biceps of marble, in the gray veins-veins of Christ above the entrance to the school of the Transfiguration of the Lord turned him on in earnest), even the most stubborn nuns did not talk about divine visions that would have happened like this for no reason, out of any context. Visions are answers. And to answer you need a question.

No, Barrett has a lot of questions, like anyone else. But not the kind to bother the oracle or the prophet. Even if there was such an opportunity, would he want the messenger-apostle, running in his socks along the corridor barely lit by false flashes, disturb the clairvoyant with a question like: "Why do all Barrett Meeks' boyfriends turn out to be goats and sadists?" Or: "Is there an occupation that Barrett will not lose interest in even after six months?"

If, nevertheless, yesterday's phenomenon was not accidental and the heavenly eye was opened precisely for Barrett - what was the meaning of this evangelism? What path did the heavenly light assign him, what did he want him to do?

At home, Barrett asked Tyler if he had seen this (Beth was in bed, more and more held in orbit by the growing gravity of the twilight zone). Hearing in response from Tyler: "Saw what?", Barrett realized that he did not want to talk about the heavenly light. There was a very rational explanation for this reluctance - who needs an older brother to hold you for a nutcase? But it was rather that Barrett felt the need to keep a secret, as if he had received a tacit order to do so.

Then he watched the news.

Nothing. They talked about the elections. About the fact that Arafat is dying; that the facts of torture at Guantanamo were confirmed; that the capsule with the long-awaited particles of solar matter crashed to the ground, because the brake parachute did not open.

But none of these square-jawed presenters cast a heartfelt glance into the camera lens with the words: tonight the gaze of God has turned to the earth ...

Barrett began to cook dinner (Tyler hardly remembers on days like this that people need to eat from time to time, and Beth is too sick). Here he even allowed himself to think about at what moment his last lover became an ex. Maybe during that night phone conversation when Barrett, who already understood this then, talked too long about a crazy customer who wanted to get proof before buying a jacket that no animal was harmed during its tailoring, because Barrett sometimes boring, right? Or it all happened that evening when he knocked the cue ball off the billiard table and that lesbian said that nasty thing about him to her friend (after all, it’s embarrassing for Barrett, too, sometimes).

But he did not manage to think too long about his own mysterious oversights. Thoughts returned to an unimaginable sight, which, apparently, no one but him had seen.

He made dinner. He tried to continue the list of alleged reasons for being dumped.

And now, the next morning, he went for a run. Why would he change the habit?

Exactly the instant he jumps over the frozen puddle at the corner of Knickerbocker and Thames, the street lamps go out. After a completely different light appeared to him the day before, he catches himself that in his fantasy there is a connection between jumping and turning off the lights, it seems to him that it was he, Barrett, who told them to turn off, pushing his foot off the asphalt, like a lone runner at the usual three-mile distance can be the instigator of a new day.

That's the whole difference between today and yesterday.

* * *

Tyler is tempted to climb onto the windowsill. No, not to commit suicide. Not a damn thing. Yes, even if he thought about suicide, there is only the second floor. In the best case, he will break his leg - well, or he will crack his head on the pavement and get a concussion. And everything will turn into a wretched trick, a mediocre parody of the tired-defiant, doomed-delicate decision to pronounce: I'm over it,- and retreat from the stage. He does not have the slightest desire, with a nonsense dislocation and a couple of abrasions, to lie flat in an awkward position on the sidewalk after jumping into an abyss at least twenty feet deep.

He wants not to commit suicide, but to plunge into a blizzard, to expose himself entirely to the stinging blows of wind and snow. The big drawback of this apartment (she has enough of them) is that you have to choose: either you are inside and look outside through the window, or outside and down from the street you look at its windows. And how wonderful, how great it would be to surrender naked to the will of the weather element, to completely obey it.

As a result, it is only enough to stick out the window as far as possible - and be content with the blows of the frosty wind in the face and how the snow croup sticks to the hair.

* * *

After a run, Barrett returns to the apartment, into its warmth and its aromas: the old radiators breathe in the damp wood of the sauna, a special hospital spirit comes from Beth's medicines, the paint and varnish half tones will not completely disappear from the rooms, as if something in this old hole still refuses to accept the fact of the renovation, as if the ghost building itself does not want and cannot believe that its walls are no longer covered with unpainted smoked plaster, and the rooms are not inhabited by women in long skirts sweating by the stove while their husbands return from the factory cursing at the kitchen table while waiting for dinner. The newly introduced mixed scent of paint and doctor's office lays a thin surface layer on the thick, primal scent of roasted lard, sweat, semen, armpits, whiskey and wet black rot.

In the warmth of the apartment, Barrett's naked skin grows numb. Running in the morning, he plunges into the cold, gets along with it, like a long-distance swimmer gets along with water, and only upon returning home does he notice that he is numb. He is not a comet, but a man, a living creature, and therefore he has to return - to an apartment, to a boat, to a spaceship - so as not to perish in murderous beauty, in an infinitely cold, airless and silent space, in blackness speckled and twisted in spirals, which he would happily call his real home.

Light appeared to him. Appeared and immediately disappeared, like an unwanted memory of church childhood. At fifteen, Barrett had developed into the unwavering atheist that only a former Catholic can get. For many decades since then, he has lived without stupidity and prejudice, without holy blood delivered by a parcel post with a courier, without priests with their boring and fruitless cheerfulness.

But yesterday he saw the light. And the light saw him. And what should he do with it now?

In the meantime, it's time to take a bath.

On his way to the bathroom, Barrett passes Tyler's room with Beth; the door to it swung open at night, like all the other doors and doors in this apartment, skewed in all directions. Barrett pauses silently. Tyler, naked, leaned out of the window, snow falling on his back and on his head.

Barrett has always admired his figure. She and Tyler are not very similar, less than you expect from brothers. Barrett is larger, not fat (yet), but overweight, a prince, witchcraft turned into either a gray-red wolf or a lion, irresistible (as he liked to think) in his sensual slyness, obediently waiting in a slumber for the first kiss of love. And Tyler is flexible and wiry, very muscular. Even at rest, he looks like a trapeze artist getting ready to jump. His thinness is decorative, at the sight of his body - the body of an artist - the definition of "dapper" comes to mind. In such a body, it is natural for Tyler to spit on convention and exude the devil befitting a circus performer.

CORPUS ® Publishing House

Dedicated to Billy Howe

It was cold and deserted in the spacious halls of the Snow Queen. They were illuminated by the northern lights, it flashed brighter in the sky, then suddenly weakened. In the middle of the largest and most deserted snow hall lay a frozen lake. The ice on it split into thousands of pieces, surprisingly even and regular. In the middle of the lake, when she was at home, the Snow Queen sat on a throne. She called the lake “Mirror of the Mind” and said that it was the best and only mirror in the world.

Hans Christian Andersen "The Snow Queen"

The heroes of the novel "The Snow Queen" are brothers Barrett and Tyler, true residents of bohemian New York, lonely and vulnerable, not ready to put up with losses, in the eternal search for the meaning of life and their vocation. They remained children - like the heroes of Andersen's fairy tale, they wander in an endless labyrinth, trying to save themselves and their loved ones, not to betray anyone and not to freeze. A special role in the narrative of a city that looks like a junk shop and an unknown planet at the same time, traveled far and wide - and still full of secrets. From a place of action, New York imperceptibly turns into a character, and almost the main thing. Michael Cunningham, author of the famous "Clock" and "Houses at the End of the World," reaffirmed his fame as one of the best American prose writers, a brilliant heir to the modernists. A keen sense of modernity, Cunningham tries to capture its elusive essence, weaving past and future, everyday and mystical in a bright moment of illumination.

November 2004

When you do not choose the place and way of life yourself, it is useful to be able to thank fate even for modest favors.

Okay. Today you can indulge yourself. Then he will easily pull himself together again. And now he needs to support himself - and he will support.

Tyler walks over to the bedside table, pulls out a vial and inhales each nostril in turn.

Then he watched the news.

But none of these square-jawed presenters cast a heartfelt glance into the camera lens with the words: tonight the gaze of God has turned to the earth ...

But he did not manage to think too long about his own mysterious oversights. Thoughts returned to an unimaginable sight, which, apparently, no one but him had seen.

He made dinner. He tried to continue the list of alleged reasons for being dumped.

And now, the next morning, he went for a run. Why would he change the habit?

That's the whole difference between today and yesterday.

As a result, it is only enough to stick out the window as far as possible - and be content with the blows of the frosty wind in the face and how the snow croup sticks to the hair.

But yesterday he saw the light. And the light saw him. And what should he do with it now?

In the meantime, it's time to take a bath.

Few people immediately realize that they are brothers. And yet there is an incomprehensible genetic link between them. Barrett is sure of this, but cannot explain what it is. About how Barrett and Tyler are similar, only the two of them know. They have some kind of primitive, physiological knowledge about each other. A brother understands his brother's motives, even when they puzzle outsiders. And it’s not that they never argued and didn’t try to beat each other - no, the fact is that under no circumstances can one of them bewilder the other by deed or word. It seems that a long time ago, without even starting a conversation on this topic, they agreed to hide their closeness in public, and for this to dive at dinner parties, compete for the attention of others, insulting and ignoring each other, that is, behave as they behave the most ordinary brothers, and meanwhile to protect their chaste ardent romance, as if they were members of a tiny, of two of them, a sect, pretending to be peaceful philistines in anticipation of the day when the time comes to act.

Tyler turns around, looks back, away from the window. He is ready to swear: someone from behind has just looked at him, and although there is no one there now, the air behind the doorway still retains the memory of the figure melted in him.

And then the sound of water being thrown into the bath is heard. Barrett is back from a run.

Why, why on earth does Barrett's appearance, whenever and wherever he return from, still become an event for Tyler every time? After all, it’s only Barrett, the little brother, the fat boy who has his breakfast briefcase with the Brady Family on the lid to his chest and sobs after the school bus leaves; a funny lump, who by some miracle escaped the fate that befell all - almost indiscriminately - freckled fat men at school; Barrett, a bard from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who acted out the courtroom at the school cafeteria; Barrett, with whom they had endlessly fought for territory and had spoken words in childhood, fought for the regally changeable disposition of their mother; Barrett, whose body he knows more thoroughly than even Beth's; Barrett, whom a powerful and quick mind brought to Yale and who then patiently explained to Tyler - and no one else in the world - the impeccable logic of his subsequent tosses: after university he traveled around the country for several years (eventually crossed twenty-seven state borders), changed classes (worked as a cook in a diner, as an administrator in a motel, as an auxiliary worker at a construction site), because he believed that with an excess of knowledge he could not do anything with his hands; was a prostitute (completely captured by the element of romance, too seriously intent on becoming a modern Byron, he considered it necessary to take an intensive express course in the low, animal aspects of love); entered graduate school ( it was useful for me, yes, very useful to understand for myself that it is impossible to immerse yourself in a crazy American nightwithout visiting Burger King in Seattle - there is the only place open after midnight) and left it ( if I was wrong about life on wheels, that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong when I don’t want to devote the rest of my life to studying introductory words from the late Henry James); started a soon failed internet project with a computer boyfriend; he opened a café near Fort Green Park with his next boyfriend, now quite thriving, but withdrew from the business after the companion lover he had left rushed at Barrett with a boning knife; and so on ...

All these undertakings seemed at one time either simply well conceived, or (and then Tyler liked them more) based on fabulously bizarre ideas, on that extravagant illogical logic that paves the way for a handful of inspired people to greatness.

None of them, however, really paved the way anywhere.

And now Barrett, long-suffering home Candide, Barrett, who seemed destined to rise to dizzying heights, and if not, then become the hero of a genuine tragedy - this very Barrett commits the most prosaic act: he loses a rented apartment and, even Not having nearly enough money to rent a new one, he moves to his older brother.

Barrett did what was least expected of him - he joined the homeless New Yorker community when the house where he set up his humble hobbit burrow became a cooperative.

But, be that as it may, Barrett remains the Barrett, whom Tyler still admires - in his own way, quietly, but faithfully.

The current Barrett, the one who is now pouring water in the bathroom, is the same Barrett who was known as a magic child for a long time, until a third, unborn child became a more real candidate for the title of magic. The Harrisburg Meeks seem to have stopped early, they should have had another son in addition to Tyler's concentration, athletic grace and rare musical talent (who can predict at the very beginning how great your gift will be?) And Barrett, who has a lot of vague talents (he knows by heart more than a hundred poems, he can easily read a decent course of lectures on Western philosophy if suddenly asked about it, and after living for two months in Paris, he speaks French almost fluently), but is unable to make a choice and insist on your own.

Barrett is about to take a bath.

Tyler waits for him to turn off the water. Even in his relationship with Barrett, he adheres to some formalities. Tyler can easily chat with his brother when he is in the tub, but he cannot watch Barrett sink into the water - for that he has a good inexplicable reason.

Tyler takes a vial from the nightstand, sprinkles two lanes out of it, sits on the edge of the mattress and takes turns inhaling. There is nothing like that, absolutely nothing, just a morning charge (and besides, the last one, tomorrow morning already no, no); he pushes you into the arms of beauty, drives away apathy and laziness, wipes out the confused remnants of sleep from your head; pulls you out of the land of dreams, from the ghostly realm in which you linger, thinking whether to fall asleep again, you ask yourself, why wake up at all, because it would be so nice to sleep and sleep now.

Water is no longer heard. So Barrett is already in the tub.

Tyler puts on yesterday's boxer shorts (black, dotted with tiny white skulls) and walks through the hallway to open the bathroom door. In the whole apartment, this is the least depressing room; of all the rooms, only the bathroom has not been subjected to endless repairs and alterations over the past century and more. The rest of the rooms bear the memory of multiple attempts to hide scattered fragments of the past with paint and cheap wood-like finishes, with the help of a suspended ceiling (the most monstrous element of the local interior is pockmarked, dirty white square panels made of you don't understand what - or from freeze-dried grief, Tyler thinks) and the carpet that covers the linoleum that covers the crumbling pine plank floor. And only the bathroom has retained a more or less pristine appearance - there is an octagonal tile on the floor, in the same place there is a countertop washbasin and a toilet bowl with a high-raised cistern, from which a chain for draining water hangs down from the side. The bathroom, these chambers of untouchable antiquity, remained the only place in the apartment that avoided economical renovations by tenants who hoped to revive the interior, believing that if all kitchen countertops were pasted over with foil with Chinese roses or clumsily cut a word on the lintel Suerte, it will become more comfortable for them to live - both in this apartment and in the big world outside; all of them have now either moved out or are dead.

Barrett in the bath. He cannot be denied the ability to be comically majestic, to keep dignity everywhere and always; regal habits, it seems, went to him by inheritance - such can neither be brought up in himself, nor imitated. In the bath, Barrett does not lie, but sits with a straight back and a frozen face, as suburbanites sit on a train, returning home from work.

- What are you so early? He asks Tyler.

Tyler tries to remove a cigarette from the pack he keeps in his medicine drawer. Because of Beth, he only smokes in the bathroom.

“We didn't close the window yesterday. During the night, snow poured into the bedroom.

Before reaching for a cigarette, Tyler slaps the packet with his palm. He doesn't really understand why everyone is doing this (so that the tobacco is more evenly distributed?), But he likes it - the punishing slap pleasantly complements the lighting ritual.

- What was your dream? Barrett asks.

Tyler lights a cigarette and, opening the window, blows smoke into the gap. A spiky trickle of frosty air seeps from the street to meet his exhalation.

“Some kind of windy joy,” Tyler says. - Nothing specific. The weather is like happiness, but a little with sand, unwanted, in a Latin American town. What do you want?

- Statue with an erection. Crouching dog. More, I'm afraid, nothing.

They are silent, like scientists recording smart thoughts.

Then Barrett asks:

- Have you already watched the news?

- Not. Somehow I'm afraid.

“They won’t choose him,” Tyler says. - Because, at least shit, there were no weapons of mass destruction... Everything. Point.

Barrett is briefly distracted, searching among the many bottles of shampoo for one where there is still something left. The pause comes in handy. Tyler knows how easily this topic pisses him off, how terribly it pisses him off, realizes that he can tire anyone, explaining: if only people seen, if understood…

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.

And along the way, he, by the way, destroyed the economy. He squandered something like a trillion dollars.

Tyler's mind does not fit someone else's indifference to the fact that he is literally driving him crazy. Now, when his personal snow kingdom is no longer spread out in front of him, and the coke has chased away the dull languor of an unusually early awakening, he is alert, like a rabbit, and ready to soar over any nonsense.

Tyler blows another jet of smoke into the cold outside the window and watches the smoky curls dissolve in the snow.

“What really worries me is Kerry’s hairstyle,” Barrett says.

Tyler grimaces like a sharp headache. He does not want to be a man who does not understand jokes, an uncle who has to be invited to visit, despite the fact that he gets terribly turned on every time ... Tyler wears any injustice, betrayal, historical atrocity like steel armor welded to his naked body ...

“Everything will be all right there,” Barrett says. - It seems to me. Or rather, I really hope.

He, you see, hopes. Hope today is an old faded buffoonish cap with a bell at the end. Does anyone have the guts to put it on these days? On the other hand, who would have the courage to rip this cap off his head and throw it under his feet with a rag? Certainly not Tyler.

“I hope so too,” he says. - And I hope, and I believe, and even a little I believe.

- What about the song for Beth?

- Stuck slightly. But last night I seemed to get off the ground.

- It's good. Very good.

- Don't you think that giving her a song ... is somehow not enough?

- Of course not. And what gift do you think would be more pleasant for her to receive for the wedding? New Blackberry?

“I don’t know what I’ll do.

- Well, yes, writing songs is not easy. In general, almost everything is not easy in life, don't you think?

“You're right,” Tyler says.

Barrett nods. For a few moments, a silence is established, which is as old as they remember each other, the silence of their growing up together, days and nights spent in the same room; their general silence, which has always been their native element, although it was broken now and then by chatter, fights, farting and laughter at the farting element, to which they invariably returned, a region of soundless oxygen formed from a mixture of atoms of their two selves.

“Mom was struck by lightning on the golf course,” Tyler says.

- I, in general, know about it.

- Betty Ferguson said at the commemoration that she did a five-pair hole in two strokes that day.

“I know about that too.

- And Parnyaga was hit twice by the same car. With a difference of a year. He survived both times. And then choked to death on his Halloween Snickers.

- Tyler, please.

- Then we brought in a new beagle, named Guy-second. He was run over by the son of the woman who knocked down Parnyaga the first two times. He then got behind the wheel for the first time, he just turned sixteen.

- Why are you saying all this?

“I’m just listing the impossible events that did happen,” Tyler replies.

- As impossible as Bush's second term.

And Tyler doesn't say that Beth will survive. He doesn't say that chemotherapy will help either.

- I want this damn song to work.

- It will work out.

“You’re just like your mom speaks.

- And I am like a mother. You know perfectly well, no matter what song comes out. Beth for sure.

- It’s important for me.

Barrett looks at him knowingly and does it even more expressively than his and Tyler's father. Their father does not have a special parental gift, but he does something great. For example, to gaze with wide eyes, as if telling the sons: everything is fine, more is not required from you now.

I have to call him, otherwise they haven't called for a whole week. Maybe two.

Why did he marry Marwa so soon after his mother's death? Why did they move to Atlanta? What have you forgotten there?

And what happened to this man in general, how could he fall in love with Marva - there are no questions for her, she, if it turns out not to stare at the scar, is even pretty at her rude, "hold on-with-me" way, - but a father like him could give up the role of a repentant-caring mother's companion? The roles between them were distributed very clearly. She needed care and was always exposed to some kind of danger (and the lightning did overtake her), all this was clearly read in her face (porcelain, milky-blue purity of Slavic, with all possible care of sculpted features). And her father was always ready to get behind the wheel, as soon as he laid her down for a nap and guarded her sleep, he went crazy, as soon as she stayed somewhere for at least half an hour; a middle-aged boy, he would only be glad to spend the rest of his days in the rain at her window.

And who this man has become now. He wears Tommy Bahama shorts and Teva sandals and drives Marwa through Atlanta in a Chrysler Imperial convertible, blowing cigar smoke upward toward the constellations in the Georgia sky.

Perhaps this new role is easier for him. And for that, Tyler is not offended by his father.

And what to be offended - he was relieved of parental responsibilities a long time ago. And this happened, most likely, when the brothers started drinking immediately after their mother's funeral.

One was seventeen, the other twenty-two. For several days they hung around the house in shorts and socks, purposefully destroying the stocks of alcohol (from scotch and vodka they switched to gin, then to dubious tequila, and at the end they finished a quarter of a bottle of Tia Maria and Drambui liqueur, which was not drunk by someone at least about twenty years before; it was two fingers from the bottom).

For days on end, unwashed and disheveled, quieted down with fright, in only shorts and socks, Tyler and Barrett got drunk in the suddenly not-just-so-so living room, where all the long-familiar things quickly became her things. It was then that one of the evenings happened (everything points to this) that change ...

Did it occur to you?

What didn't come?

They lay in the living room on the sofa, which had always stood there, squeezed, filthy cream, stubbornly turning from junk into a sacred memory of the past.

You know what.

Where did you get that I know?

Don't be here, eh!

Well yes. Sometimes it also seems to me that my father was so afraid for her because of all the crap that ...

What he called.

Yeah thanks. Correct word.

That some deity there heard him always tremble, no matter how she was robbed, no matter how she ... I don't know ... she didn't get hair cancer ...

He heard and arranged something that even he did not have enough imagination to fear.

But this is not true.

Sure.

And yet we both think about it.

This must be where they got engaged to each other. It was then that they gave a vow: from now on we are not just children of the same parents - we are partners, we survived the wreck of a spaceship and now together we are exploring the cliffs and crevices of an unknown planet, on which, perhaps, except for the two of us, there is no one else. From now on, we do not want us to have a father, we do not need him.

And all the same it would be necessary to call him, otherwise they haven’t called many times.

“I see,” Barrett says. - I understand that this is important to you. But not for her, I think you need to remember that.

The grayish water mutes the now especially intense pink and white tones of his naked body.

“I want to make coffee,” Tyler says.

Barrett rises to his feet and stands in the tub, flowing around. Strong stocky masculinity is combined in his figure with childish plumpness.

Curiously, Tyler is not at all worried about the sight of Barrett coming out of the bath. But for some mysterious reason, it's hard for Tyler to watch how he plunges into it.

Could it be that in immersion he sees danger? Maybe quite.

What is also curious: it is far from always important to understand the deep motives of another person's behavior, to know where his weaknesses and lying ideas come from.

“I'll go to the store,” Barrett says.

- Right now?

- I would like to be alone.

“You have your own room here. Or are you close to me under the same roof?

- Shut up, okay?

Tyler hands Barrett a towel.

“I think it's right that the song will be about snow,” says Barrett.

- It seemed to me right away that it was right.

- Of course. Whatever you undertake, everything seems right at first, cool and terribly promising ... Sorry, I won't load.

Tyler hesitates to fully enjoy the moment. They stare at each other - very simple, ordinary. There is no passion, no drive, no shadow of awkwardness in their views, but at the same time there is something important. This something can be called recognition, and this is true, but not all. In this recognition, Barrett and Tyler seem to evoke the spirit of a third, ghostly brother, who did not quite manage to be born and who therefore in his ghostly being - and even less than ghostly and less than being - serves them as a medium, a kind genius. This brother, this boy (he is not destined to outgrow the rosy-cheeked cherubic corporeality) is their common, united “I”.

Barrett is drying off. When he got out of the bath, the water in it, as it usually happens, from transparent and scalding, became tepid-turbid. Why is this happening? Where does the haze come from - whether it is soap or his, Barrett's, particles - the outer layer of urban soot and dead cells of the epidermis, and with them (he cannot get rid of this thought) a little bit of his true essence, his petty envy and vanity, narcissism and the habit of always feeling sorry for oneself - baths washed away with soap and now swirling into the drain.

He fixes his gaze on the water. Water is like water. She did not change at all the next morning, after he saw what, in principle, he could not see.

And why did Tyler suddenly decide to talk about his mother this morning?

A picture from the past: his mother smokes, lounging on the couch (he is here, in Bushwick, standing in the living room), good-naturedly relaxed after a few glasses of "old fashion" (Barrett loves when his mother drinks - alcohol emphasizes in her appearance the stamp of deep and full of conscious defeat, that mocking carelessness that is never sober in her, when, with her too clear mind, it is simply impossible not to remember that grandiose disappointments, although they carry pain, but fill life with Chekhov's sad sublimity). Barrett is nine. Mother smiles at him — a drunken light gleams in her eyes — as she would smile at a tame leopard sprawling at her feet.

“You know,” she says, “in time, you'll have to take care of your older brother.

Barrett is silent, sitting on the edge of the sofa at the knees of her tucked legs, waiting for her mother to explain what she means. The mother takes a drag, takes a drag on the cocktail, takes another drag.

“Because, my dear,” she finally continues, “let's face it ... Let's be honest with you. Can we be honest with each other?

Barrett agrees. After all, this is probably terribly wrong if the mother and her nine-year-old son are not completely frank with each other?

“Your brother is a handsome man, a real handsome man,” she says.

- And you, - puff, sip of cocktail, - you are completely different.

Barrett blinks away a tear of dread. He is scared to hear how he will now be assigned to Tyler in the service, appointed as a little fat jester, a cheerful, useful henchman of his older brother, a master to overwhelm a boar with one arrow and, half-heartedly hitting with an ax, split the trunk of a century-old tree.

“You have your own charm,” she says. - Where it came from, I have no idea. But I knew. I knew right away that you would have it. As soon as you were born.

Barrett blinks diligently so as not to burst into tears, but he is more and more curious and curious about what she is talking about.

“Everyone wants to be friends with Tyler. Tyler is handsome ... yes. He manages to throw the ball ... to throw it far, far away and exactly where the ball needs to be thrown.

“I know,” Barrett says.

What strange discontent was reflected on the mother's face? Why does she look at Barrett as if she had caught him thinking that he, wanting to please the Ramolytic aunt, with feigned greed catches her every word, although the story told by the aunt has long been familiar to him in the smallest detail?

- Whom the gods want to destroy ... - Mother releases a stream of tobacco smoke into the thick of glass pendants under the dome of the chandelier, and it rings like a tiara turned upside down. Barrett does not understand: either she is too lazy to finish the line, or she has forgotten what's next.

“Tyler is a good boy,” Barrett says, not knowing why, just because he thinks he shouldn't be silent.

“That's what I want to say. Mother looks up and seems to be referring not to Barrett, but to the chandelier.

Soon everything that is incomprehensible for the time being will form a coherent picture. The faceted glass chandeliers, each the size of a piece of refined sugar, disturbed by the whiff of an electric fan, shoot out short spasms of light.

“You will probably need to support him. No, not now, later. Today he has everything in openwork, he is a godfather to the king.

Kum to the king. Is this a great merit?

“What I wanted to tell you,” she continues. - You just remember what we are talking about now. For a long time ... forever remember: then, in the future, your brother will need help. He may need help, about which you cannot even know yet ... at your ten years old.

“Mom, I'm nine,” Barrett reminds her.

And now, nearly thirty years later, having fully lived up to the future, which his mother once spoke of, Barrett pulls out the plug from the bath drain. The water begins to subside with a familiar sucking sound. It's morning outside. The most ordinary thing, except ...

That vision was the first noticeable event in God knows how many years that Barrett did not tell Tyler and about which he remains silent. Since childhood, he has not had any secrets from Tyler.

But nothing like yesterday had ever happened to him either.

No, he will tell Tyler everything, but not right now, but a little later. The last thing in the world Barrett wants to stumble upon skepticism from his brother, and even less - to watch Tyler heroically try to believe him. It was not enough for Tyler to start worrying about him, as if Beth alone was not enough for him, who was not getting better or worse.

It's scary to think: sometimes Barrett wants Beth to either die or recover.

Sometimes it seems to him that it is better to mourn than to languish with anticipation and uncertainty (leukocytes increased that week, which is good, but tumors in the liver do not increase or decrease, and this is bad).

And it also suddenly turns out: there is no one to rely on. Beth has five doctors at the same time, none of the others is a boss, and often their testimonies differ greatly. No, they are not bad doctors (with the exception of Scarecrow Steve, a chemotherapist), they try, conscientiously try first this and then this ... But the whole horror is that Barrett - and Tyler too, and probably Beth, although he is not with her about it talked - that they all counted on a merciful porphyry warrior who would have confidence itself. Barrett did not expect to have to deal with the free militias - frighteningly young, if you count Big Betty - who are masterly proficient in the medical dialect, famously pouring seven-syllable words (forgetting - or simply not wanting to remember - that no one but doctors, does not understand and does not know), who are familiar with the most modern equipment, but - just something! - do not understand what needs to be done and what will happen next.

Still, it's better to keep quiet about the heavenly light for now - without Barrett's revelations, Tyler will do just fine now.

Of course, Barrett read on the Internet about every conceivable medical cause (retinal detachment, brain cancer, epilepsy, psychotic disorders) that would explain his vision - and did not find any suitable.

Although he experienced something extremely unusual (which, he hopes, was not a foreshadowing of a fatal disease that is not reported on the Internet), he did not receive instructions, did not accept the message or commandments, and in the morning he remained exactly the same who was the night before.

But the question is: who was he yesterday? What if there really was some barely perceptible change in him - or did he just become more attentive to the particulars of his current being? The answer is difficult.

In the meantime, the answer, if it were found, would help explain how it happened that they and Tyler had such a stupid life - and this is for them, once national scholars (well, in fact, Barrett was a scholar, Tyler fell a little short) , presidents of student clubs and kings of student balls (Tyler was crowned, but nonetheless); would help explain how it happened that when they showed up in the form of a couple in love at the most boring party in the world, they met Liz there; that then the three of them got out of there and hung out at midnight in a filthy Irish pub; that Liz soon introduced them to Beth, who had recently arrived from Chicago - to Beth, who was not even close to any of Tyler's previous passions and with whom he fell in love eagerly and swiftly, like a beast pounces on natural food for him, for many years plowed in a cage on a zoo feeding.

There was nothing like predestination in this series of events. They developed consistently, but not at all purposefully. You can go instead of one hangout to another, meet a friend there who will introduce you to a person who, at the end of the same evening, will fuck you at the entrance to Tenth Avenue, or treat you to the first path in your life, or for no reason at all will say incredibly kind words, and then, having agreed to call, you will part forever; but as a result of an equally random course of circumstances, you can meet someone who will change your life forever.

November Tuesday. Barrett returned from his morning run, took a bath and is now heading to work. And then today he will do the same that he does every day. Will sell rags (there is no need to wait for an influx of buyers, in such and such weather). He will continue to run and sit on a low-carbohydrate diet - sports and diet will not pave the way for Andrew's heart, but there is a chance that they will help him feel more collected and tragic, not quite like a badger, who has gone mad in love with a young handsome lion.

Will he see that heavenly light again? What if he doesn't see? Then, by old age, he will most likely turn into a storyteller who once saw something inexplicable like a UFO or Bigfoot, into an eccentric who experienced a brief extraordinary vision, and then continued to slowly grow old and joined the wide ranks of psychos and clairvoyants, those who know for sure what they saw - and if you, young man, do not believe, your business, perhaps one day, and something that you cannot explain will appear to you, then we will talk.

Beth is looking for something.

The trouble is, she doesn't really remember what. She knows it for herself: absent-minded, did not put it in place ... But what exactly did she put in the wrong place? Something very important that must be found, because…. Well, yes, because when the loss is discovered, she will have to answer.

She searches all over the house, although she's not sure if that thing (what is it?) Is here somewhere. But it seems to her that it is worth looking. Because she had been to this house before. She remembers, recognizes him, as she recognizes other houses of her childhood. The house she is now in is multiplying into the line of houses she lived in until she left for college. Here is the gray and white striped wallpaper from the house in Evanston, here are the glazed doors from Winnetka (were those, perhaps, wider?), The molded cornice from another house in Winnetka (but this gap in the plaster leaves, into which it seems as if someone -who observes with a wise amazed look, was there such in that house?).

Time is short, soon someone will return. Someone strict. But the more diligently Beth searches, the worse she realizes that she has lost. Something small? Round? So small that you can't see it? Yes, very similar. But this does not mean that you can not search.

She is a girl from a fairy tale, she is ordered to turn snow into gold by morning.

She cannot do this, of course, she cannot, but all the same, snow is everywhere, it is falling from the stream, snow drifts sparkle in the corners. She remembers how she dreamed that she needed to make gold out of snow, and instead she rushes about in search of the house ...

She looks down at her feet. The floor is covered with snow, but she can see that she is standing on the hatch - it merges with the floorboards, and only a couple of brass hinges and a brass handle no larger than a ball of gum betray its presence.

The mother gives her a penny to buy herself a ball of gum from the machine outside the A&P store. Beth does not know how to say that one of the balls is poisoned and that it is not necessary, therefore, to throw a coin into the slot of the machine, but the mother so wants to please her daughter that she simply has nowhere to go.

She is standing on a sidewalk hatch at the entrance to the A&P. It's snowing there too.

Mother pushes her to throw a penny in the slot. Below, from under the hatch, laughter reaches Beth. She knows: there, under the hatch, mortal danger laughs, a clot of evil swirls. The hatch begins to open slowly ... Or does it seem to her?

She froze with a penny in her hand. “Throw it in,” says the mother. And then it dawns on her that she was looking for this coin. And I accidentally found it.

Tyler sits in the kitchen, sips his coffee and writes a verse. He's still in his underpants, but he's wearing Barrett's Yale sweatshirt on top - the bulldog's face is completely faded, from red to caramel pink. Beth dragged the kitchen table from the street, and in the corner of the countertop the heavy-duty plastic peeled off and flew off, revealing an Idaho-shaped bald patch. At a time when the table was new, people were going to build cities at the bottom of the ocean, they thought they were living on the threshold of a righteous and enthusiastic world of metal, glass and silent, rubberized speed.

Since then, the world has grown older. Sometimes it even seems that he is very old.

George W. Bush will not be re-elected. It is impossible for George W. Bush to be re-elected.

Tyler drives away the obsessive thought. It is foolish to spend this resonant morning hour on her. Besides, you have to finish the song.

He does not take the guitar, so as not to wake Beth, and quietly whispers a cappella poems written in the evening:

There to find you on a throne of ice

And finally melt the shard in the heart ...

But no, that's not why I walked here for a long time,

No, no, that's not why I came here for so long.

Hmmm, some kind of crap. The thing is…

The fact is that he firmly decided that the song would not have sugary tenderness, but there would be no calm detachment either. What should be the song for a dying bride? How, without mortal gloom, to tell about love and death (real, and not postcard types until death-do-part-us)?

A song like that should be serious. Or, conversely, extremely frivolous.

The melody helps you find words. That would help this time too. But no, now the words are more important. When it seems that the right ones (or not quite wrong ones) have been found, he will put them ... He will put them on a naive, very simple and pure melody, but so that it does not sound childish - not childish, but with childish spontaneity, student frankness receptions. In a major key - with a single minor chord, at the very end, when the romantically sublime text, until then contrasted with a cheerful melody, finally comes into fleeting sorrowful harmony with the music. The song should be more or less Dylan-like, Velvet underground. But not in any way under Dylan and not under Lou Reed. It is necessary to write an original thing (of course, original; but better - which we have not heard yet; and even better - with signs of genius), but at the same time it would be nice to stay within the framework, to maintain the style ... Like Dylan, throw away any sentimentality, like Lou Reed, combine passion with irony.

The melody should ... should radiate sincerity, and so that without a single note of narcissism, like, quickly check out what a cool guitarist I am... Because this song is a naked cry for love, it is a prayer mixed with ... with what? with anger? Yes, nevertheless, with anger - with the anger of a philosopher, anger of a poet, anger at the fact that the world is transitory, that its breathtaking beauty eternally encounters the inevitability of death and end, that, showing the wonders and treasures of the universe, we are constantly reminded: These treasures are not yours, they belong to the Sultan, and you are still terribly lucky (it is assumed that we should reckon it as good luck) to receive permission to contemplate them.

And also: the song should be imbued with ... no, not a banal hope, but rather a firm belief that ardent affection - if only this is possible in people at all, and the song will assert that yes, perhaps - will not leave the bride in the afterlife journey and will be with her forever. The song of the husband should come out, who considers himself as faithful her companion in death as he was in life, although he is forced to stay alive for a while.

Well, happy implementation.

He pours himself more coffee and prints out the last, now definitely the last line. What if he has not yet… woken up enough for his gift to speak in full force. What if one fine day - and why shouldn't this beautiful day be today? - he will finally shake off the usual doze.

Or maybe replace the "splinter" with a "splinter"? And finally dissolve the thorn in the heart?

No, it's better now.

Is this repetition at the end a godsend? or cheap? And does not the word “heart” sound too sentimental in verses?

It is necessary to make it clear: the words belong to a person who does not want to get rid of the edge that has stuck in the chest, has become so used to it that he fell in love with the pain inflicted by the edge.

Enter the frozen palaces into the night

What the hell is not kidding - in the light of day these lines may well sound better than now, in the early morning.

And yet: if Tyler is something, if he is determined to write the real thing, why is there so much doubt in him? Shouldn't he be feeling ... a guiding hand?

So what if he's forty-three and sings in a bar?

No, he will never take up his mind. This is a song of bitter aging. He has a crutch in his heart (here is another possible synonym), and he cannot and does not want to renounce it. He constantly feels his presence and without him would not be himself. No one ever advised him, having received a diploma in political science, to write songs and squander his modest maternal fortune by strumming his guitar in even more modest halls. This is his secret of Punchinelle, his “I” inside “I” - confidence in his own virtuosity, the ability to penetrate into the essence of things, which has not yet shown itself in any way. He's still just around the corner, and it pisses him off that everyone around him (everyone except Beth and Barrett) sees him as a loser, an elderly musician from the bar (no, better to say, an elderly bartender, whom the owner of the establishment allows to sing his songs on Friday and Saturday evenings), while he himself knows (knows for sure) how much is hidden in him, how much he promises to the world, not just genius, but all the new melodies and poems slowly and continuously fill him, great songs hover over his head , and at some moments it seems that a little more - and he will catch one of them, literally snatched it out of thin air, and he tries his best, oh, how he tries, but what he manages to catch never does not live up to expectations.

Wrong. Try again. Better wrong. So yes?

Tyler hums the first two lines, softly, to himself. He expects from them ... something like that. Magic, for sure, mysterious and ... good.

Enter the frozen palaces into the night

There, to find you on a throne of ice ...

He hums quietly in the kitchen, where the muffled smell of gas is, where the pale blue (at one time, must have been painted with aquamarine) walls are covered with photographs of Burroughs, Bowie, Dylan and (the handiwork of Beth) Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. How much he wants to write a beautiful song for Beth, sing at a wedding - and so that he can say exactly what he wanted, that it was a real gift, and not another almost good luck, not a bad attempt; so that it is a song that captures and pierces, gentle, but playing with edges, hard as a diamond ...

Well, let's try again.

He starts singing again, and Beth is sleeping behind the wall.

He quietly sings to his beloved, his future bride, his dying girlfriend - the girl for whom this song is intended and, quite possibly, all the songs in the world. He sings, and in the meantime it becomes brighter.

Barrett is dressed. Tapered (too narrow? - and let, you have to inspire others that you are handsome) woolen trousers, a T-shirt with the "Klash" group (worn to colorless transparency), a deliberately stretched sweater that hangs softly almost to the knees.

Here he is, after the bath, combed with gel, ready for the start of the day. Here is his reflection in the mirror on the wall of his room, here is the room in which he lives: in the Japanese spirit, from the furnishings only a mattress and a low table, the walls and floor are painted with white paint. This is Barrett's personal hideout, surrounded on all sides by the trash museum that Tyler and Beth turned their apartment into.

He picks up the phone. Liz probably hasn't turned on hers yet, but she needs to let her know that he will open the store today.

"Hi, this is Liz, leave your message." It is still sometimes strange for him to hear an assertive, cut-off voice in isolation from her mobile and very extraordinary physiognomy under a matted shock of gray hair (she, according to her, is one of those women who manage to be beautiful without looking back at others - but succeed this, it must be understood, is only for the owners of an impressive humpbacked nose and a large mouth with thin lips).

“Hi, I'll be early today, so you and Andrew, if you want to cuddle more, go ahead. You can take your time, I'll open it. Besides, it is unlikely that there will be many people today. Until".

Andrew. The most ideal creature among the close friends of Barrett, graceful and mysterious, like a figure from the frieze of the Parthenon, his only experience of contact with beauty of the highest order. If Barrett had ever felt a divine presence in his life before, it was because of Andrew.

An insight swirls in Barrett's head like an annoying fly: why not the last boyfriend left him so easily that he sensed how important Andrew was to him, about whom he never - never! - didn’t tell your boyfriend? Could it be that the beloved thought that he was serving Barrett only as a replacement, only an attainable embodiment of the organic, laid-back beauty of Andrew, the very Andrew who still served Barrett and, perhaps, will always serve as the most convincing proof of the genius of divine design and at the same time - inexplicable His (Her?) Craving from time to time to invest in the work on the next piece of clay incomparably more care, concern for symmetry and details than most of the animate creations?

Not. Most likely, nothing like that happened. That guy, to be honest, was not distinguished by the subtlety of intuition, and in the way Barrett reveres Andrew, there is not a hint of any development. Barrett admires Andrew as others admire Phidias Apollo. No one will live in the hope that the marble statue will come down from the pedestal and embrace him. And no one dumps lovers for a passion for art, right?

It's one thing to admire the moon spellbound, to rush with your soul to the magic crystal city on the other side of the ocean. And it is quite another to demand from a lover, from the one with whom you share the bed, who does not clean up used paper handkerchiefs and can drink the last coffee in the house in the morning, so that it replaces you both the moon and the magical city.

On the other hand, if, after all, the lover left Barrett out of tacit admiration for the young man, with whom there was no thought ... It would be even pleasant in some strange way. Barrett would be satisfied with the version that his ex was paranoid, if not completely crazy.

On the way to the hallway, Barrett again stops at the open door to Tyler and Beth's bedroom. She is sleeping. And Tyler seems to be in the kitchen with coffee. Barrett is calmer from the thought - not for him alone, everyone is calmer - that Tyler has slowed down with drugs.

Barrett hesitates for a while, looking at the sleeping Beth. She is all emaciated, with ivory skin, like a princess who has been in a lethargic sleep for many decades, waiting for someone to remove the spell from her. In a strange way, in a dream, it is less noticeable that she is sick - when Beth is awake, in every phrase she said, in every thought and every movement, the struggle with bodily weakness is striking.

Or maybe yesterday's sign related to Beth? Isn't the moment chosen by the immeasurable superhuman mind for the appearance of Barrett connected with the fact that Beth spends less and less time awake and more and more - in a dream?

Or was the vision caused by a small clump of cells pressing against his cerebral cortex? What would it be like for him in a year to hear from the emergency room doctor that if he applied on time, the tumor could be defeated?

He will not go to the doctor. Now, if he had a permanent doctor (his imagination drew him a Swede in her early sixties, strict but not too fanatical, a lover good-naturedly, half-jokingly grumble about a modest bouquet of his not very healthy life addictions), he would have called the doctor. But, since Barrett does not even have insurance and is usually used by future doctors in practice, it is unthinkable for him to go to the clinic, where some stranger will start asking him about mental health. If he is able to tell someone about the heavenly light, then only to someone who already knows him as a person who is generally sane.

And what, he would rather risk his life than put himself in a stupid position? It seems that yes.

Stepping silently (he is still in socks, because, according to a strange custom, in this not sparkling clean apartment it is customary to leave shoes in the hallway), Barrett enters the bedroom, freezes by the bed and listens to Beth breathing in her sleep.

He hears Beth's scent, the lavender soap scent they all three use, mixed with female(this is the only definition that comes to his mind) by the smell of cleanly washed places, which for some reason becomes stronger in a dream; her smell is now inseparable from the powdered herbal medicinal spirit, the strangest mixture of pharmacy sterility and the spicy bitterness of chamomile, which must have been collected from time immemorial through swamps and swampy wastelands, and another smell is superimposed on top, a sick one, - in Barrett's mind he connected with electricity, with something intangible and invisible, running along wires hidden in the walls of a room where someone dies.

He leans towards Beth's face, which is quite beautiful and at the same time more than beautiful. Beauty presupposes a bit of a banal resemblance to a certain standard, and Beth is not like anyone, only herself. She breathes barely audibly, her mouth parted, her plump lips are chapped; the neatly flattened nose and small nostrils were clearly inherited from her Asian ancestors; the eyelids are bluish-white with thick black eyebrows; the skull, bald after chemotherapy, is lifeless, slightly pinkish.

She is good, but not dazzling, she has a lot of virtues - cute, but not outstanding. She bakes well. Knows how to dress. She is smart, reads a lot and eagerly. Kindness to almost everyone he meets.

Could the heavenly light appear to Barrett on the eve of its end, to remind that life does not end with the death of the flesh?

Or is it all of Barrett's messianic fantasies? What if because of this the lover left? Is it because of Barrett's obsession with signs?

Barrett leans lower, so close to Beth's lips that he can feel her breath on her cheek. She is alive. Alive right now. She is clearly dreaming, her eyelids twitch.

It seems to him that even in the last trait, her dreams are airy, bright and cheerful - invisible horror does not creep up to her, no one emits death screams, harmless-looking heads do not suddenly show black holes in their eye sockets and bared sharp teeth. He hopes that's the way it is.

A moment later, Barrett straightens up abruptly, as if someone called his name. And he almost recoils, dumbfounded by the consciousness of how early Beth leaves and how few people will feel her absence. A simple and understandable thought, but now it is especially poignant. Is it more tragic or vice versa - to appear so briefly in this world and leave it so imperceptibly, giving him almost nothing, changing nothing?

Unsolicited thought: Beth's main accomplishment is that she loves Tyler and is loved by him. Beth is loved by many, but Tyler worships her, admires her, does not see anyone in the whole world and is close to her equal.

Barrett has all the same feelings for her, but only as if following Tyler. It turns out that Beth is dearly loved by two - the main man and the spare. In a sense, she is twice married.

What will Tyler do when she's gone? Barrett loves Beth, and she (as far as he knows) loves him, too, in return, but the day-to-day care and maintenance are entirely up to Tyler. How would he manage without Beth and the sense she has brought to his life every day for the past two years? Taking care of Beth is his main occupation, his main job. He plays guitar and composes songs only in his spare time.

But one way or another (Barrett realized this quite recently), no matter how compassionate Tyler was to Beth, no matter how sad, he did not have such satisfaction for a long time, which appeared with the onset of her illness. Tyler would never admit it, even to himself, but going after Beth - comforting her, feeding her, making sure she doesn't miss her medications, arguing with her doctors - meant finding his place for him. Finally, he can do something, and do well, while the music leads its tantalizing existence somewhere nearby, but out of reach. And the inevitability of the impending defeat, apparently, not only terrifies him, but also brings peace. Rarely does anyone become a truly great musician. No one can enter the body of a loved one and expel cancer from there. But one is considered to be an offensive defeat, and the other is not.

Barrett gently puts his hand on Beth's forehead, although a moment ago he was not going to do this. The hand, as it were, acts of its own free will, and he just needs to watch it. Beth mutters something in her sleep, but does not wake up.

Barrett tries his best to convey some semblance of healing energy through her palm. Then the patient leaves the room and goes to the kitchen, where coffee has already been brewed, where the wildness of life beckons him like a rat-catcher; where Tyler, an admirer and adorer, sits in only his underpants, furiously wrinkling his forehead and stretching out his thin, athletic sinewy legs, and how can he prepare for his imminent wedding.

This is a strange idea of their wedding, - says Liz, referring to Andrew.

They are on the roof, snow is falling all around. The incredible spectacle of the snowfall led them to the roof after the swiftly passing night (my God, Andrew, it's already four; Andrew, go crazy, half past five, you need at least a little sleep). They did not engage in sex, both of them were too busy for this, but during the night there were moments when Liz seemed like she could explain everything, everything, everything to herself, she could present herself on her open palms and say - here I am, all in plain sight, all the cunning locks are unlocked, the doors are open, the secret drawers are pulled out, the double bottoms are opened, this is my honor and nobility, my fears and sore spots, fictional and real, this is how I see, think and feel, this is how I suffer, so I hope this is how I build phrases; but ... here is my whole essence, tangible, but unstable, restlessly tossing and turning under the body cover, that unnamed and unnamed core of mine, which is simply there is that it is surprising, unpleasant and strange to be a woman named Liz, a Brooklyn resident and owner of a store; this is the self that God will meet after the flesh has fallen from her.

And really, why do you need sex?

Now she calms down, reunites (feeling at the same time regret and gratitude) with her more mundane “I” - it still glows with light and warmth, but is already entangled in thin strong bonds, knows how to be petty and irritable, distrustful and unnecessarily anxious. She no longer soars in the sky, does not stretch her cloak strewn with stars over the night forests; the magic potion has not yet had time to disappear from her blood, but it no longer interferes with being a woman who, in the snow, stands on the roof next to a young, scary young lover, who has become accustomed to the everyday world and can easily say - their wedding is a strange idea.

“Yes,” Andrew says. - Do you think so?

He is supernaturally beautiful against the background of a snowy dawn, his skin glows with whiteness, like Giotto's saints, his shaved red head is sprinkled with snow. For a moment Liz is overwhelmed with joyful amazement - the boy wonders what she thinks. She knows that soon they will part, it simply cannot be otherwise, given that he is only twenty-eight. 52-year-old Liz Compton is just an episode in his life, which is all ahead. Nothing can be done about this, and the main thing now is that he is next to him, with eyes glazed from the night, wrapped in a blanket from her bed, porcelain-pale in the dawn rays, until it is someone else's, but hers.

“No, I understand everything perfectly,” she says. - But, in my opinion, they would not start with the wedding, if she ... if she were healthy. And I'm afraid she might feel stupid. And then it's like taking a sick child to Disneyland.

You're too cynical, Liz. Too harsh. Do not rush to part with the night, talk to the boy in the language of sincere benevolence, which he himself speaks.

- No, that's understandable. But you know, if I was seriously ill, I probably would not mind. I would not mind if they proved their love to me like that.

- It's just not clear whether Tyler is doing this for himself or rather for Beth.

Andrew looks at her with stoned eyes, clear and uncomprehending.

Does she talk too much? Or maybe he was tired of the feast of conversations that lasted all night? It did not take long to turn from a rare treasure into an aunt who does not know how to shut up in time.

The bonds of the flesh are taking their toll again. Doubts and minor reasons for self-torture return, which have become boring, but so familiar that they are somehow even calmer with them.

“I don’t really know them,” Andrew says.

He doesn't want to continue the conversation. She tired him. But Liz is not yet ready to let go of the frayed edges of a glorious night, to part with the belief that nothing incomprehensible happens.

“Let's go inside,” she says.

Here, in the morning snowfall, Liz is deprived of something very dear to her, as if the wind was blowing out of her swing and fuse, leaving only pebbles of skepticism, a neat rosary for counting offenses.

“No, wait a minute,” Andrew says. - I think…

She is waiting. He thinks hard. Wrapped in a blanket, sprinkled with snow sparks, he stands and decides what he thinks.

End of introductory snippet.

Buy the book, you will definitely not regret it!
With Cunningham, I have no other relationship than fascinated and enthusiastic. How else to react to the author's magic in action. Sheer fortune-telling ... Isn't it a literary skill to make you breathe a book like oxygen? There are only a few such modern authors - those whose works possess an inexplicable magic of mood, a particular fragility of phrases, ornateness of their construction, reminiscent of a smoky frosty pattern on glass.

Brothers Barrett and Tyler, cancer patient Beth ... They are all frustrated at what life has to offer.

Barrett is a brilliant university graduate who was once a promising student and is now down to the level of a second-rate jeans store salesman. Abandoned by another lover, lonely and depressed, forced to live in the apartment of his older brother. One snowy morning, returning home from a visit to the dentist, he soars. It seems to him that heaven has finally descended to him, sending some valuable sign, winking with a bright flash of light. Only for a moment, but they told about their favor. Indifference.

Beth's temporary remission, catching the whole trinity by surprise; the psychological instability of the unrecognized musician Tyler, who writes a love song for the bride and realizes that he is only capable of a worthless dummy instead of a cry from the heart; aging shopkeeper Liz, trying to stop time with the help of young lovers; the city of New York itself, bearing in itself the catastrophes of falls and ups of success, sometimes ruthless in its mercies - the plot is presented to readers in a stylish Cunningham style in short time intervals.
Life flows dispassionately, heroes clumsily flounder in the stream of reality ... A year has passed ... Three years have passed ... Ice cubes do not want to form the main words: eternity, happiness, love.
"I just usually assume the worst, and it sometimes looks like I know everything."
The most painful thing is to get lost ... no, not in the crowd. In yourself. Get confused, get lost in your own desires and aspirations. Find no way out and, in despair, slam the "shell". Hide, having lost the strength to fight, cutting off the possibility of help, manifestations of participation ...

Doubting heroes living in an era of dubious quality are undoubtedly a high-quality vintage novel of the famous author's "dressing". One of the best read this year.

Sad. Weightless. Vulnerable. Thin-skinned.

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