White Tiger on Snow Mountain (12 page)

Madness, I thought, the most ridiculous thing in my whole ridiculous life. Leah didn’t want a rabbi. She didn’t even want a Jew. She wanted me. And how could I be a rabbi if I didn’t believe? But if, by some chance, God did exist, then how could I refuse to play the hand he dealt me? With the stakes so high, how could I not bet my life? And if there was nothing? It was true: I did not believe in God, but I was beginning to believe in miracles, miracles and whatever is the opposite of miracles, terrible wonders. Yes, this life is a whirlwind, and what can guide
us through it? Not our eyes, not our ears, not our brain. What difference does it make what we believe?

“OK,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

He stood and grasped my hands, guiding me to my feet. His eyes were sad, wet, blazing. He squeezed my shoulders. “My son,” he said. Then he kissed me, right on the mouth. I felt his beard on my lips. “Now go,” he said. “Go to her. Run.”

I ran. I didn’t go back around the block. I ran out the door and across the street and cut through the neighbors’ yards. I jumped over their bushes. I stopped for a second to yank a flower, a big orange flower, the best one, out of the ground, roots and all. A car honked and someone yelled and the dogs started barking and I ran past them, across the alley and over the wall, back to where my wild bride lay sleeping.

Vampires of Queens

My mother buzzes me in. I cross the dim lobby with its red tile floor, its fake electric torches and threadbare, medieval furniture, and there it is, open, humming, as if waiting just for me. I hesitate. I stalk ghosts through the hallways of this building, track assassins with my disc gun in the basement, fight off hordes with spinning kung fu leaps on the stairways, three perfect scratches on my chest like Bruce Lee in the posters on my walls, but I’m not allowed to ride the elevator alone. It tends to get stuck between floors. Still, seeing it there, with no one looking, I walk toward it slowly, dawdling, planting a foot in the center of each tile, almost hoping it will close and roll up past the window in the door, but it doesn’t, it waits and, as though climbing aboard a ship in bad seas, I step on, one foot at a time. The door slides shut behind me. It’s only then that I see him there, in the corner, the old blind man who lives on the top floor. He’s wrapped in the wings of his black overcoat, with the high collar and the burn holes and the crusted egg yolk on the sleeve. One white hand folds over the other on top of his white cane, and in the pocket, I see the neck of a flat brown bottle with a pink paper seal on the cap. His chalk head faces nothing,
the skin like old wallpaper peeling from his skull. A veined egg. I hold my breath and freeze as the cage begins to rise, turning the arrow above the door. He turns to me and shows his dog teeth and says, “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.”

As soon as he smiles, I know what he is.

That night it snows and, as if in celebration, my family goes out for Chinese food. Fat as petals, white as clouds, the silent flakes come parachuting in. You’d think heaven had finally invaded the earth. By tomorrow, all this will be gray slush and icy wind. But tonight it is a comforter spread by the sky, softening every sound, brightening every light, pillowing each mailbox and water tower and frosting every wire. Round, padded figures, barely recognizable as our neighbors, lumber about in mittens and hats, thumping and sliding, like furry, awkward creatures, newly made and just learning to walk on the slick ground, to catch rich flakes on their tongues. The lines between street and sidewalk, lamppost and tree, erase themselves like the line between horizon and sky. The stars flicker down like moths. They dance in the haloed lamps.

Later, at the restaurant, I toss a penny in the fake stone fountain of candy-colored lights and make a solemn wish that I am, even now, forbidden to utter. But fate answers, and before my soup is gone, my hands begin to itch. Tiny pink spots form like lichen, and the more I scratch them, the larger they grow. Burning pins jump across my arms, twitching and biting like wires.

By the time we get home, hives have risen on my face and my mother sends me to bed. The pink eruptions unfold in my skin like crushed flowers. Roses clog my throat. Electricity crackles
over the surface of my body. I get lost in the living room and can’t reach my door. A menacing brown couch blocks my way. The carpet sways like a field of wheat. When they find me, I’m burning up. All my features are blown up to twice their regular size. I’m a cartoon. I feel a black hand in my chest, squeezing my lungs. A skeleton hand, tight in a black leather glove. The air sings through my windpipe and fever eats holes in my mind, like salt burning through the ice. The doctor appears, pajamas under his gray pin-striped suit. White hair wings his pink skull. The needle stings going in, and I smell something burning, like birthday candles melting in cake. Outside my window, as frost grows on the glass and the world retreats into whiteness, a vast sky opens like a furnace above us, a black heart consuming stars and grinding them into embers.

I guess I’m allergic to the world or something. Invisible enemies inflame my eyes and skin. Microscopic mold spores in the air clog my chest. Bronchial asthma, some doctors claim. Others say asthmatic bronchitis. I can’t have corn or cucumbers or eggs. And for the first time I realize how much I love these things that I’ve always been indifferent to.

“I want eggs, I want eggs,” I moan over juice and toast. Milk is phlegm-producing, so I have to watch dairy too. Twice a week I go to the doctor’s office for injections. He takes the steel needles from the sterilizing machine and pushes them through the rubber seal on the little bottles of clear fluid. It burns a little, but I don’t care. It’s a small price to pay for the miracle he has bestowed: a note permanently excusing me from gym. Finally, I am delivered from that hell they call phys ed. Awkward, weak, and timid, I can’t shoot or dribble or hit. Balls thrown at me
bounce off my hands, if I’m lucky. My eyes flame up in the light, and I can’t see well enough to swing a bat. So my parents buy me mirrored sunglasses to shield my red, raw eyes, and during gym I sit on the sidelines with my book or chat with Bill, the epileptic kid.

On the weekends, I stay in and read. Then, as day ends, I am let out to play for an hour or two in the twilight. Sometimes, as I wheel my bike through the lobby, I see the blind man, sprawled and snoring in the tall, tattered armchair that commands a regal view of the mailboxes. My mother clucks and tells my father that she saw him passed out drunk again, but I know what he is really doing. I picked out my dark glasses to be like his. I go out when everyone else comes in. He is waiting for dark, when he is free and everyone else is blind.

Everyone feels sorry for me, but secretly I’m thrilled. Without the pressure of having to take part in something, do something, be something, I pass whole days without fear or boredom. Who could get tired of reading? I carry a book at all times, and at any moment, on the train, in a store, at Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by shouting relatives, I can open the cover like an escape hatch and drop through. I read to disappear and carry books like spies carry cyanide in their teeth. Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

After school Christine and I stop along Northern Boulevard and build a fort. The snow along the street is streaked with soot and shit, but pure flakes spiral in to shawl our shoulders. The plows have thrown up huge drifts, bristling with unearthed trash. Ducking low behind the wall, we pack the snow into dozens
of hard bombs. It will be days before reinforcements arrive and we have to hold them off ourselves, sniping at the enemy supply line. Christine’s straight blond hair has never been cut. Her eyes are a frozen blue. The wind whips gold strands around her hat and her tiny ears, and the tip of her small nose turns red.

“Fire!” We launch an attack on a truck going down the avenue. A snowball echoes loudly as it whacks the side of the truck. Direct hit. A bus comes along.

“Fire!” We stand and take careful aim at the windows. It’s an express bus and not allowed to stop, so the driver can’t get us even though he glances over just as I open up. The snowballs stick where they hit. A car comes next. This time we shoot too early, and a snowball thumps the hood. The car skids, lurching across the ice, and stops. The driver pops out, a big man with a beard.

“Hey, you little shits!”

“Retreat!” We run down the alley behind Woolworth’s and jump on garbage cans to clamber over the wall. We come out on the other side of the block and slip into a basement window I know is never locked. We flatten ourselves to the pocked concrete wall, breathing hard, while my eyes adjust to the dark.

“Do you think he followed us?” Christine gasps, chest heaving.

“Shh . . .” I listen hard, trying to pick out our bearded pursuer from the landscape of crunching snow and hissing tires above. Now I can see the piled cartons and spiderwebs around us. In the corner where we’re crouching, white cigarette butts and an empty bottle glow in the snowlight, covered in a lifetime’s dust.
I see a plastic cap like the one from the needles the doctor sticks me with. I pick it up and put it my pocket for evidence.

Holding my breath, I stand on a box and peek over the windowsill. Suddenly, it’s evening and the streetlights are on outside, burning white in the blue air, with a swarm of pinpoint snowflakes clouding each lamp like static. Legs go by. Cars bounce through potholes full of black water and shards of ice.

“I don’t think he saw us,” I report. “But we better hide here awhile. He might still be out there looking.” We sit on the floor and pull off our wet gloves. My pants are soaked, and I’ve lost another scarf. I must have left it at the fort, but I can’t go back there now. Christine takes a bag of M&M’s from her coat pocket.

“Want some?”

“Thanks.”

“Do you know what I do sometimes?” she asks, sorting the M&M’s by color and giving me half the reds. “I hide candy under my pillow, and then in bed, after I’ve brushed my teeth and said my prayers and everything, I eat it.” Prayers? I brushed my teeth but didn’t say prayers.

“Why do you say prayers?”

“So that God doesn’t kill you while you’re sleeping. Otherwise you could die while you’re sleeping and never even know you were dead.” I suck an M&M until the chocolate bleeds through the shell. Christine finishes counting the yellows and looks up at me.

“Elliot?”

“Yeah?”

“What sign are you?”

I search my mind for a clue.

“We don’t have signs. We’re Jewish.”

“Oh,” she says, seemingly satisfied with that answer. Maybe, I think, that’s why I don’t pray either. God won’t kill Jews. Although, according to my mother, almost everyone else will.

“Elliot?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know how to kiss?”

I shrug. I don’t.

“Me either.” We sit in silence. I hear the blood booming in my ears, as if I were slipping over a waterfall. I want to say something but I can’t.

“Should we try it?” Christine asks. I nod. We bring our faces close, and I feel her breath like a flower brushing my cheeks, like a warm snowflake feathering down. Carefully, we press our lips together. Her mouth is soft and tastes like chocolate. It’s good so we try it again. She wraps her arms around my shoulders. I can’t believe this is happening, so I kiss her cheeks. She seems to like it. I kiss her neck. It is even whiter and smoother than her cheek, the pale chill touched with rose, warm beneath the skin, like burning snow.

“Elliot, stop it. That hurt.” I pull back. There are tears in her eyes. “Why did you bite me?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s late. I have to go.”

Outside, the sky is a torn black cloak, wavering in the wind. Through the ripped stars a little light leaks in, from the world beyond. I bend my head beneath it and run home as fast as I can.

That night at dinner I can’t eat a thing. My lungs are full of ice crystals that ache and blaze when I breathe. Snow drifts block my chest. When my mother presses her lips to my forehead, she says I have a fever and puts me to bed, propped up with three pillows so I can breathe and sleep sitting up. On a snack table by my bed the humidifier steams, its mouth slathered with Vicks VapoRub. Straining at the shadows on the ceiling, my mind reels with bats, screaming in blind circles. I pray deliriously not to die while I sleep. I pray to the vampire upstairs.

Past midnight, a skull smiles. Its eyes sparkle like sugar. A hand crosses the windowsill, bloodless as the flat moon, each long finger bound in a different ring, the skull, the eye, the rose, the star. Fog hisses from the machine, reeking of menthol. The shadow of great wings spreads against the wall. He wraps his cloak about my shoulders. Everything that daylight hides, blinding us with false colors and the illusion of visibility, is dissolved and rendered clear now in the dark. He takes my hand, and we sail out over the city. He shows me what he sees.

What can I say about this night? That Queens rolls over like a snoring fat lady, in a shift of crumbling lace, and lays herself wide open, weeping in the arms of her dreams? Anyone could walk right in for a free show. The rooftops glow beneath us, pillows dusted in white. Roads curl up and draw their sheets over their heads. The white city is a bed brushed smooth by the sky, which rushes overhead in a river, moon and cloudy stars tossing on currents of wind. Every water tower, every ledge or sill or branch, every clothesline and antenna and each power wire is sugared with the same bright ice.

A man stands in a phone booth on a corner, pleading his case. He clutches the receiver in both hands, cupping it, afraid
she’ll let go of her end and cast him adrift in the waves. He is completely exposed in that glass box, like a lighthouse on the farthest point. Up the street, two men trade punches. Too drunk to duck or dodge, they just stand eye to eye, like dance partners, hitting each other in the face as hard as they can. They lean into the blows. Blood puddles between them. All that’s holding them up is the support of a friend’s fist. An ambulance cruises by, slowing while the driver considers the damage, then shrugs and speeds off. From the doorway of the neon-lit bar a woman watches in silence. Her face is bathed in glory, pink and blue.