The bag was snapping around like a ferocious little dog straining at its leash. The round yellow face on one side was a familiar hieroglyph commanding the user to Have a Nice Day!, hardly despotic but offering little choice in the matter, and fell into a common category of menacing American commands, along with Enjoy! and Smile! and Have Fun!, all of which rankled my father acutely with their insistence that he attain a lighter state of being, pronto. Having performed upon the bag the same inquiry he would have leveled at any other communication (being the sort of person whose mental filter trapped everything, everything, from legal disclaimers to the hierarchy of movie credits to the endless stream of advertising tag lines pounding on him every time he left the apartment, which he subjected to analysis normally reserved for exegeses of poems), he’d determined that in this case he was being commanded (by whom? God? Mother? McCann Erickson?) to experience a sublime joy, something like a hundred simultaneous orgasms—no, even more, the endorphin flood that soaks the brainpan at the moment of death. This required him to feel not just orgasmic joy but Death Joy. The happiness that surpasses all happiness. Not bad for a slogan bashed out by a speedballed copywriter at a Madison Avenue shop, picking through embers of his own dying life force for some flickering memory of joy, riffling through images from those months camping in Big Sur after graduation, where he’d dropped acid with his friends and achieved a state of ecstasy that manifested, like really manifested, projecting him upward on a beam of light, up above the trees, above the clouds, into space so that he could observe the complete blue marble herself, whence he inhaled all of America, the clouds and sun, viewed the top of every citizen’s beautiful unique head, from sea to shining sea, each one as perfect as a pin, before coming down, experiencing a hunger as wide as the plains, hopping in the VW, driving out of the forest to buy supplies and experiencing the aura of that girl behind the counter, the one whose eyes blew right through him, and who ten years later still haunted his memory, who had said to him when he pushed open the screen door to leave, Have a nice day, baby.
Normally my father wouldn’t have been caught dead carrying such a bag. He usually tried to sidestep the transubstantiation that rendered human beings billboards for all manner of capitalist sub-philosophies, philosophies of consumption he couldn’t even understand, ideas that made people meaningless except as ambulant advertising, but he’d been distracted by the smoke and the fire and the fish, and the distraction had almost turned him into a normal person who could simply grope around under the sink, grab a bag, and go.
So, while he hadn’t quite been able to ignore the yellow face, he hadn’t balled it up and whipped it into the trash in favor of a plain brown paper bag, which was, he’d always thought, his personal analogue in the world of bags: plain, square, liable to fall apart in the rain. He’d dropped the fish into the plastic bag as though he were not a man who could be thrown into a spiral of rage by an insipid piece of graphic art commanding him to alter his behavior.
Waist-deep drifts had blown in against the foundations of buildings on the east side of the street, the snow packing in alleys, on the cross streets turning brownstone stoops into ramps, but where my father was standing, just outside the arched west entrance to the Apelles, maintenance—on this lonesome night a crew of one, long-suffering Sandor—had been working his way nonstop around the building, the footprint of which filled an entire city block, salting and shoveling, resalting, reshoveling, a task my father quickly classified as the philosophical equal of suspension bridge painting, those crews who spent their entire working lives yo-yoing back and forth across the same ironwork span. He supposed that for any given worker, which side was considered the starting point was a personal matter, one that depended entirely on which direction the crew was moving on that particular guy’s first day on the job, so that painting crews all over the world must be divided into two factions, those who considered this side the start and that side the finish and those who considered that side the start and this side the finish, and surely they spent their professional lives in joking competition with the opposing faction while feeling just a touch more fraternal toward those in their own faction, heightened no doubt by the natural ease with which weekend bowling or pétanque or calcio squads were divided up according to faction, and perhaps it even came to influence which side of the bridge a worker chose to live on (a preference for this side because, between you and me, who wants to live on that side? I mean, sure, they’re regular slobs like the rest of us, but come on), which undoubtedly could lead to dissimilar political views, conscription into opposing militia factions when civil skirmishes broke out, and so on. And he wondered, of course, with all those internal pressures how the crews could be trusted to do even a halfway decent job of scraping the bird guano and applying the anti-corrosive paint to the exposed structure of the bridge. The answer, of course, was that they couldn’t, and there you had it.
Sandor, normally a retiring, thoughtful fellow himself, might have been driven to violence had he known that while he was aggravating his angina and adding to his collection of slipped disks, my father was watching him as if he were a zoo animal. Already he was going to rain hellfire down on the rest of the night crew for this. They all lived in the Bronx and had fled for home when the mayor’s office announced that nonessential government services were closing down. All except Sandor. Double overtime wasn’t going to buy him a new spine.
Sandor turned the corner onto 78th, and though my father had intended to pitch the bag of burned fish onto the four-foot wedge of ice and snow at the curb and hightail it back inside, it was hard not to notice that the street had become an alien thing, and he wondered at the silence, as out of place as a panther in this Upper West Side neighborhood. Before him the air was a curtain of undulating white and within the folds he saw a dark movement—another person. The figure was about three blocks away, advancing slowly, steadily forging north.
The figure passed into an orange cone of light, out of it, into another one, as if fixed on a strip of celluloid advancing a single frame at a time.
Heavy wet flakes clung to my father’s face and eyelashes, and he pawed at them with his free hand, but there was no way to see clearly. The wind had parted his hair in a neat line down the back of his head, snow packing into the seam like caulk. He squinted. He curled the fingers of his hand into a tube and brought it to his eye. He still couldn’t see.
No music, no delivery truck loading decks slamming against the concrete. No buses heaving into gear. Wind. Rattling street signs. Somewhere to the east, a snowplow clattering over the pavement. God, was it quiet. When was it, my father wondered, that we became frightened of silence? When he was a boy, his father had come home after work and had sat in a rocking chair by the window, pondering, sometimes smoking, the chair creaking back and forth while his children fanned out across the room to read. No one spoke. No one turned on the radio. It was quiet enough to hear the contraction of the timbers releasing the day’s heat into the cool dusk. Quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackle in his father’s pipe. When he was a child, the ability to hold his tongue, not to blurt out the answer, to keep thoughts to himself—these were pact and signal of adulthood, of a thoughtful nature, ideals to which he aspired and from which he sometimes wondered if he’d ever escaped.