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My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache.

“What are you thinking?” my grandmother said.

The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.)

“A beauty,” he said.

He said it was true, the story he told: “Ven I vas a boy”—before the wars, before the influenza. He said Sully was owned by a neighbor he’d had. “A beautiful mare,” he said to me. “Magnificent. The apple of the village. The neighbor vas poor, of course.” At last and in time and at very great length, he was persuaded, this neighbor, with a marvelous regret, my grandfather said, to part with her, to sell her to a traveling show.

He missed this horse.

One day in the spring of the following year, the traveling show traveled back to the village. Everyone went, my grandfather said. Every last soul who could scrape the amount to pay for a ticket. “And vot do you think?” He raised his hands, reddened from labor. “Sully broke rank the minute she saw her old master again. A plume, she had. A feather. She ran to him, ran out of the ring.” He saw through the fence posts, my grandfather did. “He threw his arms around her neck! But he could not afford to buy her back.”

“And?” I said, though I had heard it before, and more than once, and asked again.

“The horse collapsed that very night.”

He was old, my grandfather. “A plume this high.”

“Why are you telling a story like this to a child?” said my grandmother, when all was done, as was her way.

She served us cake, golden.

I had a new question.

My grandfather chewed. “Vell,” he said. There was no one alive in the village, he said, not anymore, at least not that he knew. The man did not get out, he said. “So far as I know.”

“You know, there are people,” my grandmother said, as she captured a crumb, “who eat to live.”

“Ve live to eat,” he said.

She gave him a napkin.

He died when he was very old. He’d stopped speaking English.

“What is this?” the night nurse said. “This language of his?”

The blizzard shook the whole town like a cuff on the head and in ten minutes our house was not visible from the park across the street. It was a blessing and it obliterated the Christmas Day funk that had fallen over everything. There had been a two-day thaw and the old snow and raw grass had been only grim, even with the colored lights along the eaves in our neighborhood. I tucked my pants into my boots and pulled on my Klondike flaps hat and, in my dad’s Navy pea coat, I plunged into the storm. It had erased the world and the drifts were almost a foot deep. I walked backwards around the Little League diamond which was crazy under so much snow, the two dugouts and the home-run fence an arc of snow until I saw a figure down by the bandstand, and I knew it was Newton. He was staggering around kicking at the snow waiting for me. We were excited and walked in circles for a while knowing something would happen.

“Did you get a bike?” he asked me, and I remembered the shiny Sears bicycle I’d found by the tree. It had chrome fenders. I’d forgotten all of that in this amazing snowstorm; this was so much better than Christmas. We were both nine. This was fifty years ago and it was a day I want to tell about.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s black and chrome.”

“I got six birds,” he said, “and a coop kit and a feeder. They’re rollers.” I knew his dad would help him put the coop together behind their garage where his older brother kept his pigeons.

“Where are the birds?” I said.

“We pick them up next week. I got the pictures. Did you get any clothes?”

We were standing now behind the bandstand, but still the snow blew through relentlessly. “Yeah,” I said. “Dress pants.”

“I got a million socks,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can get clothes for Christmas.” He said it like he was going to fix it when he grew up. “Come on.”

He led me out past the lump of snow that we knew was the stone drinking fountain. Walking was like some kind of survival drill.

“Let’s pelt cars,” he said. We’d always hid behind the long row of park bushes and thrown snowballs at cars. I loved to throw snowballs, to throw in an arc ahead of the car and watch the car drive into it. My favorite was the bus, because it never slowed after the snowball hit. Sometimes cars would slow or stop and somebody would chase us and once a guy caught Newton after a long run and threw him down in the snow. Today, there were no cars. Indiana Avenue was a blank heaping plate of snow in the blizzard. We made some snowballs and waited, and then we walked out into the street and stood absolutely still in the storm looking both ways.

“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” he said. “Watch.”

He fell backwards there. As far as I could tell, we were in the exact center of the street. He made a snow angel. It worried me, but after he did a second angel, I did a couple there on Indiana Avenue just off Eleventh West.
“Ho!” Newton called and I scrambled up into the biting snow before I could be run over. He was pointing to two headlights coming our way dimly. In a minute we could see the lit square above the windshield: the bus. It was going very slowly.

We backed off the street a few feet and watched it come like a big riverboat down the snowy river and we made a few snowballs, but it was going ten miles an hour and we didn’t even throw. When our angels fell under the wheels, Newton cried out, “Ahhhh!” and then we both ran behind the bus, and hooked the bumper and hunkered down sliding on our boots for half a block and then we rolled into the snow and watched the whiteness swallow the frosted bus lights. We walked in the beautiful new crisp bus tread for a block or two, sort of lost, the whole neighborhood on each side in disguise, and then we were on the bridge and the old river was below us, cut and narrowed into a new contour by the falling snow.

This was the edge of our knowledge. We were not to cross the bridge and we were not to go down by the river. Across the way were the oldest houses in the city and they were not fine houses, but shelters built long ago in this lowland and they weren’t even all facing the same way, but two dozen wooden houses built wherever they could be. There were apple and pear trees here in profusion and we stole apples and pears all summer long. Everyone in our neighborhood carried a little tiny Morton Salt container in his front pocket along with a pocket knife and, in Newton’s case, matches. We’d steal the apples and then sit in the park and salt the slices and eat them like pirates on furlough. We’d been chased from the yards over there by men and women who didn’t have children and who knows what they would have done if they’d caught us.

I watched the snow falling into the dark water and like everything else it wanted to hypnotize me and then I saw Newton appear on the riverbank running past Millard’s house. He was going to slide down the embankment, and I saw it all. We’d been down there twenty times, all forbidden, and we had thrown things in the river and thrown rocks at bottles, and now in the curtain of snow, Newton left his feet and slid down the hill and he was too fast and it was like something crazy: He went right into the water. We’d never been in the river, not once, not even in the summer. I knew there was no way he was going to stop and he was going faster when the snow parted and he disappeared into the Jordan River.

I ran around the bridge and could hear him swearing. I slid down the short hill on my feet as if skiing and I had to throw myself down to stop and I met him where he crawled on all fours onto the snowy riverside. “Oh shit,” he was calling over and over. His face was white and he was crying and he kept repeating those words. He was soaked and stood with his legs apart and his arms out. “Am I going to die?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Let’s go home.” The snow was thick and I had him by the elbows. I didn’t know if he was going to die or not. You die in the books. His house was two blocks away. He was trembling and a little bluish, but he could walk and I dragged him up toward Indiana Avenue. We fell several times getting to the top, and when we did, we heard a scream.

“What the hell?” he said, and we turned and saw something across the river behind one of the strange houses and it was a figure playing with a black dog. The person was waving a red cloth and the dog was jumping and tearing at it. The person screamed again and it was a woman and then she screamed again and fell down and then she cried, “Help me.”

Newton had stopped crying, but he was very wet and very worried. “Let’s go,” I said, and we pushed through the wind-driven snow. In a minute we couldn’t see the figure anymore, but there were still screams and now the dog was barking, muffled through the storm.

Newton pulled his arm from me; I guess we’d been holding gloves, and he said, “Go see what that is and I’ll see you later.” Moving had warmed him up and he was going right along.

“OK,” I said and turned away, the snow now at my back. There still wasn’t a car on any street, and it was impossible to determine where the streets even began. Everything was gone. Across the bridge I saw the woman and the dog in the river bottom. Now the dog was doing a sort of dance around the woman who was on her knees in the snow. The dog had the red cloth and waved it like it was a game. I called, but he kept at it, and then I crossed the bridge and descended the slope, falling finally and sliding down on my butt.

It was a woman and she was naked. I have no idea how old she was, but her face was savaged with crying and she was only white and blue, and in some stories the person who was me would look away, but I did not look away, and I saw her body entire, the hair below her belly and her hanging breasts white in the white universe. There are more than a thousand whites in this world. She was terrified of the dog and I stood between her and the dog and now the dog wanted to play with me and I saw the red rag was a shirt and I grabbed one end and then quickly reached and snagged the other end from his mouth. He bounded on me with his front paws. He was heavy, but I pushed him down. I wadded the shirt up and stuffed it inside my coat and I pushed the dog away again. I have never handled a dog that way in my life, but I was ready to kick him. He sat, perplexed. The shirt was gone.

Now I felt the woman’s hands on my back and she pulled herself up and leaned against me barefoot in that snow. “Is this your shirt?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. She had taken my arm now and was leaning against me, her hair in strings. There was blood on the inside of one of her legs and her arms were marked red where the dog had raked her.

“Where do you live?” I asked her.

“There,” she said. She pointed to the second house, one side coated with the blown snow.

“Can you walk?” I said. “I can’t carry you.”

“Yes,” she said. She was acting as if it weren’t cold at all. I have no idea what the two of us looked like climbing up the river hill, but I pulled her up the incline and I watched her all the way feasting on the strangeness. A word came to my mind: disorder. There was some disorder she had. I’d never seen such a human.
The dog was gone along the river and I could see him heading up toward the iron bridge. There were four snowy steps at her house and I pushed her up these. She looked real for the first time now against the old house and she stumbled against the door before disappearing inside.

This is when I remembered the shirt and I just dropped it there on the wooden planking.

The snow fell unabated, great sheets of eternal snow on Christmas Day, real snow that I could now feel melted in my boots and around the cuffs of my gloves. I had to walk over to Newton’s and see how he was. My mouth was shut and I walked in the magnificent weather, the firmament of snow holding me up.

“Want an animal cracker?” Renee asked, as they pulled away from a Shell along route 80. While Jack had pumped gas and cleaned the windshield, she’d gone in to buy bottled waters. They’d just crossed the Platt River, and had another day’s drive before them.

“I didn’t know they still made these,” Renee said. “I used to love them with cocoa when I was a kid. I think there’s a song about that, but I don’t remember it. Have you ever had that eerie feeling when you’re not sure if you remember something or only imagined it? Here’s a sheep. Baaaaaa.”

“I don’t want a sheep.”

“Yesterday, when we saw herds of them, you said they were beautiful.”

“Know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”

“No, Jack, but I was just wondering.”

“Sheep can hear a zipper at a hundred yards.”

“All right, how’s about a monkey with a banana?”

“Very unappetizing,” Jack said as he opened his window to the smell of diesel fumes, fertilizer, and green corn—in that order.

“Say wha? Jack, I can’t hear when wind is roaring in.”

“Too bad, I just hummed the song you couldn’t remember,” Jack said. “It’s called ‘Animal Crackers and Cocoa to Drink.’ ”

“Cocoa what?” Renee clutched her head like The Thinker, holding her hair down as if it might blow off. Her hair, she’d complained, was at an in-between length. She was growing out the spiky boyish style she’d sported since her divorce. That cut was a feminist statement, she said, not to mention a conversation starter in bars. She’d dyed her hair a streaky sun-on-straw to match the moussed way it poked up. But now she felt beyond the age of someone with a cut like that. She was allowing her natural color back, too, a shade she called “almost blonde.” Before giving up her sun-streaked spiky look, she’d had a professional photographer take a set of photos. She’d worn an off-the-shoulder dress so that once the photos were cropped it appeared as if she’d posed nude. She’d given Jack a blow-up mounted in an art deco silver frame. When he opened the gift wrapping, he stared at the photo as if lost in thought, then looked at Renee and said, There never was a question for me, was there?

Does that mean you like it? she’d asked.

Jack raised his window and turned on the air. “I said eating a monkey sounds disgusting.” His voice sounded overly loud without the road racket to shout over.

“A simple ‘No thanks’ would have sufficed.”

“No simians, thank you,” Jack said.

“Are you still in a bad mood?”

“Still? I was never in a bad mood. Why would I be in a bad mood?”

“About the stories we, you know, exchanged. It’s not fair to ask and then sulk about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“It was your idea to break up the ride by telling secrets.”

“Like my sharing the deep, dark secret that when I was nine, me and my cross-eyed cousin Cindy would sneak into the garage and show each other our hairless privates?”

“I think it was more what I told you.”

“You mean, since I’d mentioned cousins, your story about a sailing lesson with a cousin you’d always had a crush on …”

“Uh-huh.”

“… At the family cottage in Wisconsin the summer you first streaked your hair blonde when you were—seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen, wearing a green bikini, and he says the color goes great with your hair, and then asks what color your pubic hair is, and if he’ll ever see it, and the two of you end up making the Sunfish rock out there in the middle of Moon Lake, and later he says, thank god neither of us gets sea sick. You think that’s bothering me?”

“You got quiet after that.”

“I’ve been driving all day, give me a break. That was cute about sea sick.”

“We weren’t having a competition,” Renee said.

“Good thing, too, since I don’t have anything to top incest.”

“For the record, you added that part about the green bikini. I never specified. Green is your favorite color.”

“Well, that changes it completely,” Jack said.

Sudden splats of mustard and yolk streaked across the windshield that Jack had industriously squeegeed clean at the Shell station. He gripped the wheel with both hands as if navigating through a blizzard that required total concentration.

“God! Can you see the road?” Renee asked. “Try the wipers.”

“You want to resist spraying with wiper fluid,” he said. “I made that mistake once.”

When Felix’s special phone rang at 2:00 in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?”

“Because I’m on call,” he said.

“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.”

“It’s my job,” he said.

“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”

He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.
Five minutes later, Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a Ditchwitch through the main conduit into the data center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored twenty-four/seven to splice ten thousand wires back together.

His phone went off twice more in the car; he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.

“Hi,” he said.

“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”

“I love you, Felix,” she said.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”

“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, The Gold Master just shipped! They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little bastard was born to suck tit.” 

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2:00 a.m. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.
“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.”
“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night.”

“Kelly—”

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”
“OK,” he said.

“Simple as that?”

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe.”

“That’s my boy,” he said.

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data–center’s lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at one of his sleep-depped eyeballs.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

I heard a story at my great-aunt’s place that I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?,” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never before had occasion to meet and whom I doubt I will meet again, explained over coffee (and after the whitefish salad was served, and after I took off my funeral heels, and while we sat watching the boats that were sailing along the lake, through the great, paned windows of my great-aunt’s apartment where she had passed so many years in bed alone—for the most part alone) how it was that our great-aunt came to be born in Chicago.

“Our story begins in Poland,” I said.

“Where?” my sister said.

“You heard me,” I said. I was walking through my living room.

“Where? Where in Poland? Was it the city where the cousins were buried?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” I said. “It wasn’t that side.”

“I know but—”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Is that your line?”

“They’ll go away. So anyway, our Great Aunt X’s mother was born in Poland, but fell in love with a man who was German. She followed him—”

“Uh, oh,” my sister said.

“You know,” I said. “But when she arrived, the lover deserted her. Very sorry story. And so, at least according to the cousin—”

“What cousin?”

“I told you,” I said. “So rather than go back to Poland alone, she stayed as a tutor or governess—whatever they called it—”
“In Germany?” my sister said.

“I said that,” I said. I put a book on the shelf. I was straightening up as I was speaking to my sister. “A friend of the family played the violin—a star of sorts. Anyway, he fell in love—”

“Aha,” my sister said.

“Not yet,” I said. “She didn’t care. He played for her. He courted her. Nothing could move her.”

“But,” my sister said.

“Finally, the story goes, she agreed to marry him only on condition that he take her to America—Chicago, where her sister had settled.”

“And?” my sister said.

“This was all before the war. Meanwhile, the cousin said—meanwhile, the lover who’d left her married someone else and had a family with her. Of course, you know. The lover, the children—none of them got out. Because the camps … are you there?”

“Your phone.”

“It will stop in a minute, I think,” I said.

“That’s horrible,” my sister said.

“Listen, there ought to be a moral to the story, or anyway a point.”

“Like what?” my sister said. “God has a plan? What kind of a—”

“God?”

“Plan.”

Hang on,” I said.

“But anyway, did that man—” my sister said.

“If you change your name,” I said. “The things they don’t tell you—”

“Don’t interrupt. The father. The husband. Aunt X’s father. Did he, when he came to Chicago, continue to play?”

“What?” I said.

“The instrument.”

“Well,” I said. “Great Aunt X could sing, I’m told. Although I never heard her. But what I was saying—”

“What are you saying?” my sister said.

“There is someone who apparently really needs to reach me.”

My sweater was itching.

“Wait,” she said. “Just tell me this. Who do you think she loved in the end?”

“Who?” I said. “Great Aunt X? Or great-great—”

“The mother.”

“I’ve really got to go,” I said. “What are you asking? The one who broke her heart or the one who saved her life?”

“Which?” my sister said. “And how do you know that one of them didn’t do both?”

“Or maybe her child.”

“Or maybe her sister,” my sister said.

My hand was on the button. “Forgive me,” I said.