The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page A

up, go ahead. I’ll open. And it’s not like there’s going to be any customers on a day like this. Bye.”
    Andrew. The most ideal being among Barrett’s inner population; graceful and inscrutable as a figure from the Parthenon friezes; Barrett’s singular experience of the godly. Andrew is as close as Barrett has come to a sense of divine presence in the world.
    A minor epiphany circles his head like a persistent fly. Did his most recent boyfriend leave so casually because he sensed Barrett’s fixation on Andrew, which Barrett never, ever, mentioned? Is it possible that the departed boy perceived himself as an imitation, of sorts; as the most possessable version of Andrew’s offhand, no-big-deal beauty; Andrew who will do, for now and possibly forever, as the most persuasive living evidence of God’s genius, coupled with God’s inscrutable propensity for sculpting some of the clay with a degree of attention to the symmetries and precisions He (She?) withholds from most of the population at large?
    No. Probably not. The guy wasn’t, frankly, a particularly subtle or intuitive thinker, and Barrett’s devotion to Andrew carries no hint of actual possibility. Barrett adores Andrew the way one might a Phidias Apollo. You don’t expect a marble sculpture to step down off its museum pedestal and take you in its arms. No one dumps a lover because the lover is besotted by art. Right?
    Who doesn’t want—who doesn’t need—a moon at which to marvel, a fabled city of glass and gold on the far side of the ocean? Who would insist that his corporeal lover—the guy in his bed, the man who forgets to throw his used Kleenexes away, who used the last of the coffee before he left for work—be the moon or the city?
    If Barrett’s latest ex did in fact desert him because Barrett maintains a private fascination with a boy he’ll never have … That might, in some perverse way, be good to know. Barrett prefers a version in which the vanished lover turns out to have been unreasonable, or paranoid, or even a little bit insane.
    On his way out, Barrett pauses, again, at the open door of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom. Beth is asleep. Tyler must be in the kitchen, cranking on coffee. Barrett is glad, of course—everybody is—that Tyler has stopped doing drugs.
    Barrett stands for a moment in the bedroom doorway, watching Beth sleep. She’s as frail and ivory-colored as a comatose princess, slumbering through decades, waiting for the spell to be broken. She looks, strangely enough, less sick when she sleeps; when her conversation and her concerns and her mannerisms aren’t so clearly struggling to survive the failing of her body.
    Has Barrett been given a sign about Beth? Does the fact that some immense inhuman intelligence elected to appear to him at this particular time have anything to do with Beth slipping off into more and more sleep?
    Or was the vision just a little flesh-stone pressing against his cerebral cortex? How will he feel when, a year or so from now, someone in an emergency room tells him they could have caught that tumor if only he’d acted sooner?
    He’s not going to see a doctor. If he had a regular doctor (he imagines her as Swedish, sixty-plus, stern but not fanatical about his health; prone to mild, mock-serious scoldings about his modest amalgam of less-than-salubrious pleasures), he’d call her. Given that he’s uninsured, subject to clinics and the ministrations of medical students who are learning on the job, he can’t seem to bring himself to face the questions an unknown doctor would pose about his history of mental health. It’s only possible for him to imagine discussing the celestial light with someone who knows him, already, as fundamentally sane.
    Would he rather risk death than embarrassment? It seems that he would.
    Quietly (he’s still in his socks, shoes are left by the front door, a strange local custom, given the apartment’s less-than-tidy nature), Barrett walks into the room and