Chicago Untitled 2
Snow.
Snow, snow, snow, and more snow.
Wyatt looked out the window and watched it pile up on the el tracks, the trains stalled for days now, held up by the storm that paralyzed the city. It was a small blessing, the rumble of the CTA mercifully stilled.
He turned away from the window, paced back and forth across the frayed throw rug, his footsteps the only sound in the room. The television was dark, the radio too, mutely chiding him for his dependence on the current that had failed two nights before. Stopping in the middle of the room, he cast his eyes about, a caged beast in search of distraction.
“Cabin fever,” he said, his words sounding harsh in the silence.
He’d gone out into the street that morning, had found an open bodega three blocks away, the shop owner stranded like the rest of them, standing sentinel over his dwindling supply of overpriced goods. He’d gathered an armful of things-some candy bars, a jar of peanuts, a few blue boxes of mac and cheese, a celebrity magazine-and dumped them on the counter. The shop owner, eyes narrowed in the gloom, licked the end of a pencil, and began jotting on a piece of paper.
“Twenty-three fifty,” he said in lilting, accented English. He was dark skinned and small, with a hairy wen in the crease between his nose and lip, and beads of sweat on his forehead, despite the chill. Bundled up in layers of wool and acrylic, a dirty brown scarf wound tightly around his neck, he looked up in challenge, as if expecting an outburst, ready to defend his outrageous profiteering.
But Wyatt only shrugged, and reached beneath his overcoat, past the layers of sweaters and long johns, for his wallet. Pulling it out, he withdrew a credit card, and slapped it on the counter, beside the magazine with the idiot face of another fallen starlet.
“No credit,” said the shopkeeper, his words evoking desert sands and belly dancers in Wyatt’s imagination. He caught a whiff of garlic and cardamom off the man, and he wondered if the smell was in his clothes, or oozing from the large pores of his sweaty face. “No credit,” the man repeated, “only cash.”
Wyatt had walked three blocks through waist deep snow to get there, crouched low against the freezing gusts swirling off Lake Michigan, and for a second it seemed to him that he should argue, should stand firm in his right as an American to buy anything he wanted, and pay later, if at all. But there was something in the man’s eyes, something about the way his hands strayed beneath the counter that stopped him. Instead he pulled out a few crumpled bills, and rummaged in his pockets for change.
He counted it out, bill by bill, coin by coin. “Eight forty-eight,” he announced.
The swarthy little man nodded brusquely, and began moving things off the counter, watching Wyatt’s eyes for sign of disagreement: one candy bar, then two, and then three; the jar of peanuts; a box of Kraft dinner, then another. But when he made as if to take away the magazine, Wyatt stopped him with a shake of his head.
“Ah,” said the shopkeeper with a knowing, conspiratorial smile, “Nicole Ritchie. Very pretty.”
Wyatt shrugged. “The magazine and what else?” he asked wearily, surprised that he didn’t feel the tiniest bit guilty that the greasy little man had guessed his intentions. Ever since his older sister had caught him masturbating in the bathroom twenty years earlier, he’d been ashamed of his Onanism, but somehow admitting it to this despicable creature brought no humiliation. Still, he quietly resolved never to shop there again.
Wyatt left the bodega with the magazine, a box of mac and cheese, and one candy bar in a bag beneath his coat, and trudged back through the snow to his building. Already the path he’d made to get there had filled in, as if the storm were mocking his effort to connect with a world beyond the confines of his apartment. He passed cars like the hunchbacked corpses of ogres and trolls, slogged beneath ice-draped power lines, and crossed below wind-tossed stoplights, their lenses dark and sightless.
He was the only one in the street, and it was easy to believe he was the only one left alive in the city. He half expected to see Rod Serling, cigarette in hand, in dark suit and dark tie, ready to utter some monochrome moral about loneliness, but even that figment of his imagination could not materialize in the snow and wind. There was fitful light in some of the windows, candles and lanterns and flashlights challenging the gloom, but no sign of life, no proof of the inhabitants behind shades and curtains. The tang of wood smoke was sharp in the air, bringing to mind conflicted childhood memories of sleepaway camp, smores, and the first girl he’d ever fingerfucked. It was a strange scent, unusual for the city, and he wondered if there was a fire somewhere, burning unchecked, the ladder trucks and pumpers useless on clogged streets, or if someone were burning their furniture in a hearth that had been ornamental until the week before.
As he turned the last corner, and faced full into the gale, the snow stinging his cheeks, he imagined ten thousand Donner parties in ten thousand co-ops, the strong feeding on the flesh of the weak.
The last hundred yards were the hardest, walking face first into the storm that had stalled over the lake, lashing Chicago with an anger usually reserved for Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. There was an apocalyptic fury to the blizzard, something so strong and unassailable, so Old Testament, that he felt a temptation to give in, to just lie down and let it bury him. Bury him with his Snickers bar, his Kraft dinner, and the glossy images of the magazine clutched pathetically to his breast. They would find him in the spring, would uncover him and see the resignation on his face, the surrender, before they piled him up beside the other bodies caused by the storm.
There would be a mass grave, a long ditch dug in Grant Park, and the corpses would be stacked there without ceremony, like plague victims. Buried in dark earth by bulldozers, the grass would grow over their frost blackened limbs, and the city would move on, like it had after the fire.
After all, Chicago had big shoulders, and grief was but another burden.
The cold brass of the doorknob woke him from his reverie, and he realized he was at the door of his building, standing on the tiles of the entryway. Behind him the squalls and gusts battered the city, but for now he was out of the gale, and he turned the handle with numb fingers, forcing the door open. He stumbled into the vestibule, the wind on his heels, trying to find purchase among the mailboxes, umbrellas, and bicycles. He leaned against the door, his ice-coated feet struggling for purchase on the tiles, fighting against the wind and the snow, denying this place to the storm, and when the door clicked shut, he leaned there, exhausted, trying to catch his breath.
For a moment the beating of his heart, the gasping of his lungs, became one with the storm, and the black fuzz before his eyes was like some photographic negative of the snow outside. It took some time to realize that he was in, that the blizzard was left outside, and he was safe, entire, and not given up for dead.
There was very little light, and the staircase was but a ghostly image of itself, the banisters dark and wavering, the stairs indistinct. He staggered forward, one hesitant step after another, the ice and slush falling from his boots with soft sighs, until he placed a foot on the lowest step. Wind born tears were frozen on his cheeks, and snow drifted off his shoulders onto the floor. He was nearly home, was in the building he’d lived in for four years now, but it had never seemed so strange, so terrifying. It shifted with the wind, groaned and moaned with the weight of the furious storm, creaking like a thing alive, woken in this moment to devour him, and, as he placed a shaking hand upon the banister, a strange and unaccountable fear gripped him, as if he’d just walked into the gaping maw of some insatiable monster.
And then he’d heard her; the girl in 2B. She was playing her cello, and the haunting strains revived him, allowed him to climb up, onto the first landing, where he could look at the two doors; hers, and his.
She’d moved in last summer, a music major at Depaul, and he’d watched her through the peephole in his door, lugging up box after box, and finally the cello, safe within its impact resistant case. She was strawberry blond and pale, her cheeks, nose, and forehead freckled, her hair matted against her head by the heat of a Chicago August, and he swore to himself that never in his life had he seen anything so beautiful. And there, in his apartment, caressed by the cool breeze of his laboring air-conditioner, he’d studied her, and longed for her, and cursed himself for his cowardice.
All it would take would be for him to open his door, and to offer gallantly to help.
“Can I give you a hand, miss?” he would ask, and she would be grateful, and offer him lemonade, or a cool glass of water after he’d carried up the last of her meager belongings. But instead he’d just watched, mortified by the very prospect of speaking to her, afraid of the shadow he might cast upon her, until she was done, and her door shut with finality.
And that night he’d heard her cello for the first time.
Since then he’d become well versed in Elgar, Hayden, Saint Säens, and Schumann, learning what she played in hopes he might summon the courage to actually impress her with his knowledge.
Since then he’d watched through his peephole as she led a procession of slouching, ultra-cool young men up the stairs, and cringed as he heard her moans of pleasure.
She was a vocalist, too, apparently.
And, since then, every time he ran into her on the stairs, or at the mailbox, or in the little sushi joint where they both got takeout, he was mute, dumbstruck, unable to tell her how he longed for her, or even how much he loved her music. More than once she seemed about to talk to him, about to make his acquaintance, but he’d ducked his head and ran like a beaten cur, terrified that she might guess in him the desire, might understand that at night he closed his eyes, and grasped himself, and thought of her.
Sometimes she would play Elgar deep into the night, over and over again, and it seemed that she was lonely, just like him, and that all he would have to do was knock on her door, and introduce himself, and tell her that he loved her.
“I’m Wyatt,” he would say, and look into her eyes, all the pent up heat released in one glance, “and you are perfect.”
But he never did.
She was playing Elgar, and the music seemed to carry him to the second landing, and now, made brave by his struggles through the wind and sleet and snow, he approached her door, and raised his hand as if to knock.
The plastic bag, heavy with overpriced purchases, slipped out from beneath his coat, no longer held there by the hand he so tentatively extended in a fist.
The plastic bag fell to the floor, and the box of Kraft dinner hit the tiles with a crash that seemed louder than a thousand gales, a terrifying peal of macaroni weighted thunder.
The music stopped.
Wyatt panicked.
The cheap plastic bag had split open, one dull Nicole Ritchie eye staring blankly back at him as he stooped to snatch it up. He could hear her footsteps on the hardwood floor as he staggered, hunched over his groceries, to his door, thanking all the gods that he hadn’t locked it. Falling in, he slammed it behind him, panting in fear and shame.
He heard her door open; the familiar squeak of the unoiled hinges. Summoning his courage, he pressed his eye to the peephole, and saw her standing there, looking curiously down at the Snickers bar, the only evidence of his presence. He watched, holding his breath, as she leaned down and picked up the candy, then strolled casually back into her apartment, closing the door behind her.
He stayed there, watching, until the strains of Elgar were heard once more. Then, stumbling into the kitchen, he laid out his purchases, staring stupidly at the blue box of macaroni and cheese, and then at the cold electric range.
Snow.
Snow, snow, snow, and more snow.
Limp and spent, Wyatt went to the window, and stared out at the train tracks, the magazine left open like some dead moth beside his bed, and wondered how long the storm would last.