I blink and my eyes feel scaly, like those of a reptile. “Snow,” I say. “He ate the snow.”
She holds my gaze and I know she is daring me to look away. “There is snow here, too,” she says. “There is snow right outside your window.”
At her words, I feel something surge inside me despite my weakness, and though I am afraid of movement, I nonetheless raise my left arm slowly. I inch it forward on my thigh and then lift it, moving it to the armrest. The exertion feels mammoth and I take a moment to catch my breath. But Ruth is right. There is water close by and I stretch my finger toward the button. I’m afraid the window won’t open, but still I stretch my finger forward. Something primal keeps me going. I hope the battery still works. It worked before, I tell myself again. It worked after the accident. Finally my finger meets the button and I push it forward.
And like a miracle, bitter cold suddenly invades the interior. The chill is brutal and a dab of snow lands on the back of my hand. So close now, but I am facing the wrong way. I must lift my head. The task seems insurmountable, but the water calls out to me and it is impossible not to answer.
I raise my head, and my arm and shoulder and collarbone explode. I see nothing but white and then nothing but black, but I keep on going. My face feels swollen, and for an instant, I don’t think I’ll make it. I want to put my head back down. I want the pain to end, yet my left hand is already moving toward me. The snow is already melting and I can feel the water dripping and my hand keeps moving.
And then, just when I’m on the brink of giving up, my hand meets my mouth. The snow is wonderful, and my mouth seems to come alive. I can feel the wetness on my tongue. It is cold and sharp and heavenly, and I feel the individual drops of water trace a path down my throat. The miracle emboldens me and I reach for another handful of snow. I swallow some more and the needles vanish. My throat is suddenly young like Ruth, and though the car is freezing, I do not even feel the cold. I take another handful of snow, and then another, and the exhaustion I felt just a minute ago has dissipated. I’m tired and weak, but this seems infinitely bearable by comparison. When I look at Ruth, I can see her clearly. She’s in her thirties, that age when she was most beautiful of all, and she is glowing.
“Thank you,” I finally say.
“There is no reason to thank me.” She shrugs. “But you should roll up the window now. Before you get too cold.”
I do as she tells me, my eyes never leaving hers. “I love you, Ruth,” I croak.
“I know,” she says, her expression tender. “That is why I have come.”
The water has restored me in a way that seemed impossible even a few hours earlier. By this, I mean my mind. My body is still a wreck and I am still afraid to move, but Ruth seems comforted by my recovery. She sits quietly, listening to the chatter of my thoughts. Mostly I am preoccupied with the question of whether someone will ever find me…
In this world, after all, I’ve become more or less invisible. Even when I filled my tank with gasoline – which led to me getting lost, I now think – the woman behind the counter looked past me, toward a young man in jeans. I’ve become what the young are afraid of becoming, just another member of the nameless elderly, an old and broken man with nothing left to offer to this world.
My days are inconsequential, comprising simple moments and even simpler pleasures. I eat and sleep and think of Ruth; I wander the house and stare at the paintings, and in the mornings, I feed the pigeons that gather in my backyard. My neighbor complains about this. He thinks the birds are a disease-ridden nuisance. He may have a point, but he also cut down a magnificent maple tree that straddled our properties simply because he was tired of raking the leaves, so his judgment isn’t something that I consider altogether trustworthy. Anyway, I like the birds. I like the gentle cooing noises they make and I enjoy watching their heads bob up and down as they pursue the seed I scatter for them.
I know that most people consider me to be a recluse. That’s how the journalist described me. As much as I despise the word and what it implies, there is some truth to what she wrote about me. I’ve been a widower for years, a man without children, and as far as I know, I have no living relatives. My friends, aside from my attorney, Howie Sanders, have long since passed away, and since the media storm – the one unleashed by the article in the New Yorker – I seldom leave the house. It’s easier that way, but I frequently wonder whether I should have ever talked to the journalist in the first place. Probably not, but when Janice or Janet or whatever her name was showed up at the door unannounced, her dark hair and intelligent eyes reminded me of Ruth, and the next thing I knew, she was standing in the living room. She didn’t leave for the next six hours. How she found out about the collection, I still don’t know. Probably from an art dealer up north – they can be bigger gossips than schoolgirls – but even so, I didn’t blame her for all that followed. She was doing her job and I could have asked her to leave, but instead I answered her questions and allowed her to take photographs. After she left, I promptly put her out of my mind. Then, a few months later, a squeaky-voiced young man who described himself as a fact-checker for the magazine phoned to verify things that I had said. Naively, I gave him the answers he wanted, only to receive a small package in the mail several weeks later. The journalist had been thoughtful enough to send me a copy of the issue in which the article appeared. Needless to say, the article enraged me. I threw it away after reading what she’d written, but later after I’d cooled down, I retrieved it from the trash and read it once more. In retrospect, I realized it wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t understood what I’d been trying to tell her. In her mind, after all, the collection was the entirety of the story.