Something, going somewhere

Bitterness like the cold snow encasing his window. A cousin slept on the couch in the living room. He had deliberately never bought a fold-out sofa so there wouldn’t be random guests drifting into Brooklyn and staying for indeterminate amounts of time, answering every question with I don’t know and I have an open ticket.

So he went out on a snow day, when there was no need to move the car, and sat behind the wheel as if he were about to switch sides for alternate parking—though he was really just sitting there. The window was frozen inside and out. A fine line of ice bubbled beneath the snow. His hands went numb. The car wouldn’t start. He blew on the windshield in one small circle and watched it fog. He thought maybe he could wait out the winter. His failing marriage. The unwanted guest in his modified igloo.

His wife hadn’t said much. He displaced his anger in the tiny cold-water kitchen, snapping WHAT, NO COFFEE, as if it were supposed to appear. On the stairs there was Beverly, who kept the building at seventy-eight. A temperature chosen to punish sleep. The windows stayed open. The heating bill climbed. Everyone lost.

What was this life—work, cold, unspoken emotions. He looked at the frosted window and thought they might find his body here in the spring. A short funeral. Not much accomplished. Not much impact. The bugs would get something out of it.

He imagined the cousin pouring coffee from a metal urn, smiling. “What, no coffee?” At least it would get a laugh. Someone would ask how long he was staying. Don’t know. Open ticket.

Maybe he was just hungry.

There was one hole in the snow on the windshield. Through it, the top of a building on Willow Street. At the roofline, a gargoyle he’d never noticed. It was perched there like it had been keeping notes.

In the glove box, an old pack of peanut butter cups. Stale, but not bad. Things felt like they might be turning around.

The gargoyle remembered when people struggled here before coats stopped mattering, before feeling winter became optional. He thought about money, how it moved without touching anyone, how jobs disappeared and people profited from it, thinking they were geniuses because they had a lot of zeros on the end of their checks.

He stopped. Who was he to judge. He worked in advertising. And self-loathing.

Oh yeah. He was doing his best work. Filming Tomogatchi Angels. Saving children from the despair of forgetting to feed their digital pets. The pets died. The kids blamed their parents. So angels were invented, an afterlife for the ones and zeros. An afterlife for neglect. This was how he helped.

It was something they could put on his tombstone: He now rests with the ones and zeros.

Really, though, he needed a coffee more than he needed to freeze to death.

There was a knock on the car door. Only the gargoyle seemed to notice.

His cousin stood there, lanky, underdressed, holding two coffees.

“I don’t think you need to sit in the car today.”

“You can never be too sure.”

They laughed, briefly.

They walked toward the water. On the promenade, his cousin said, “I’m taking off tomorrow. It’s too cold here for me.”

He felt a small, misplaced wistfulness. Already.

“I’ll come back sometime,” his cousin added. “We’ll see.”

Then, as if closing an account: “Thanks again. Really. For everything.”

He stood there with the warm cup and watched the steam rise. When a ship passed, he lined the cup up with its stack, letting the steam pretend it belonged to something going somewhere.