The Snow Queen Read Online Free Page A

crash course in the baseness and beastliness of love); the entering of the Ph.D. program (
It’s been good for me, it has been, to know for myself that going out into the Mad American Night tends to involve sitting in a Burger King in Seattle because it’s the only place open after midnight
) and the leaving of same (
Just because I was wrong about life on the road doesn’t mean I wasn’t right about not wanting to spend my life arguing about the use of the parenthetical in late James
); the failed Internet venture with his computer-geek boyfriend; the still-thriving café in Fort Green that Barrett abandoned along with his subsequent boyfriend, after the guy came at him with a boning knife; et cetera …
    All of them seemed, at their times, either like good ideas or (Tyler’s preference) fabulously strange ideas, the sort of off-kilter illogic that a smattering of inspired citizens follow to greatness.
    None of them, however, seems to have led anywhere in particular.
    And now Barrett, the family’s tortured Candide, Barrett who seemed so clearly destined for vertiginous heights or true disaster, has committed the most prosaic of human acts—he’s lost his apartment and, having nothing like the money required to rent a new one, moved in with his older brother. Barrett has done what was least expected of him—he’s become another of New York’s just-barelies, a guy whose modest Hobbitty setup on Horatio Street worked fine as long as the building didn’t go co-op.
    Still. It’s Barrett, and Tyler has not ceased marveling at him in some low-grade but ongoing way.
    The current Barrett, the one running bathwater down the hall, is the same Barrett who’d seemed for so long to be the magical child, until it began to look as if that boy would have been the third, unborn son. The Meeks of Harrisburg appear to have stopped one son too soon. They produced Tyler, with his fierce concentration and his athletic ease and his singular gift for music (who knew, at the beginning, just
how
gifted you’ve got to be?), and then Barrett, who arrived with his array of languid capabilities (he can recite more than a hundred poems; he knows enough about Western philosophy to do a lecture series, should anyone ask him to; he picked up nearly fluent French after two months in Paris), but without the ability to choose, and persist.
    Barrett, now, is about to take a bath.
    Tyler will wait until he hears the water stop running. Even with Barrett, there are formalities. Tyler can hang around with his brother once he’s in the tub, but can’t, for some real but inexplicable reason, watch him enter the water.
    Tyler pulls the vial back out of the nightstand drawer, draws himself two lines, perches on the edge of the mattress to Hoover them up. There’s nothing, really nothing, like the morning ones (though this morning is the last, it’s his farewell morning); the ones that slap you into beauty, that scour sloth away, that vaporize the vagaries, the residue of dreams; that blast you out of slumberland, the shadow realm in which you wonder, and ask yourself why, and think about going back to sleep, about how lovely and sweet it would be to just go on sleeping.
    The water stops. Barrett must be immersed.
    Tyler puts yesterday’s boxer shorts back on (black, emblazoned with tiny white skulls), treads down the hall, opens the bathroom door. The bathroom is in its way the least upsetting room in the apartment, being the only room that has not been changed and changed and changed over the last century-plus. The other rooms are haunted by innumerable attempts to erase some past or other with paint or fake wood paneling, with an acoustic ceiling (the apartment’s most horrific aspect: pockmarked, dingily white squares made of god-knows-what, Tyler thinks of them as blocks of freeze-dried sorrow), with carpet that covers linoleum that covers splintery pine-plank floors. Only the bathroom is essentially as it was, dingy white hexagonal tiles and a