An Artic cold front moved into the city and laid down just in time for the holidays.
“Horri-daze” was how Barker Ajax said it. He shuddered from the chill as he picked his way carefully over icy sidewalks. So cold, feeling like a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag, determined not to fall on his ass.
He’d already fallen once that day. Once yesterday. Twice the day before. Barker had finally changed his shoes.
He liked the idea of falling on slippery slopes and rising again. There was an analogy there, surely. He was concerned another might lie in the fact he’d landed on his butt a half dozen times before he made the necessary correction. That’s the truth. Barker knew that was pretty inattentive. Stubborn some might even say.
It was Christmas, it was his birthday, he was alone and he was broke. He’d just lost his weekly gig at the magazine. He’d fallen off the wagon: he’d gotten back on. He’d quit smoking, too.
Barker was edgy. The next loveofhislife had rejected him before they’d even gotten started.
Which may have been a good thing. Likely. Doubtlessly.
He was by himself at the one time of year the entire Western world seemed to be getting together to return gifts and suck fruitcake. Then, can this even be, oh my god, after five years of carrying a torch like an oven’s pilot light, he bumped into THE GREAT LOVEOFHISLIFE. There is a Santa Claus.
“I always knew as long as we were both alive, this was bound to happen,” was the first thing Barker had thought to say to her. More beautiful than ever, she showed him her wedding ring with a diamond that would make Liz Taylor blush. He wished her the best and his heart cried.
Yesterday morning he’d gotten the news an old friend had committed suicide. Slashed his wrists, the long way. Yesterday afternoon, he’d called his parents to wish them a happy anniversary and they told him Barker Sr. had prostate cancer.
“We’re hoping for the best,” his mom had said, optimistic as always. As always, his dad hadn’t said anything.
When Barker decided nothing more could go wrong, he crashed his car on a patch of black ice. Just two more payments until it was paid off.
He felt buried alive. “I am not depressed,” he’d told a friend, a therapist who was himself more than a little down in the dumps. “I am not depressed. Depression is negative, it’s sick. Me, I’m sad. Sad is romantic.”
The damn cold was the worst. Worse than the bills and the overdrawn checking account and getting canned because he’d “not sufficiently focused on the consumer lifestyle aspects” of his columns. The form letter said he was being replaced by a syndicated astrological celebrity gossip. “For the good of the publication.” Think about it.
So very cold. Only seemed to exaggerate the empty pillow next to him each morning. Christmas was not a great time to sleep solo.
Barker almost lost his balance. Made him briefly interrupt the litany of tribulations that seemed these days his mental muzak. He was headed to the movies; he’d forget all his troubles just as soon as Schwarzenegger blasted the first half-dozen aliens. That and a couple pints of beer.
Up ahead, outlined in streetlight silhouette, another figure struggled to maintain his footing. He seemed to be having less success than Barker. Imagine that.
He was certainly slower. As Barker came up behind him, a reflexive chuckle, down inside the throat, became audible. Not quite hysterical. Barker couldn’t help himself.
“I mean no disrespect, sir, but just looking at you really perks me up.”
The other man stopped. His white cane with its red tip stopped poking at the darkness in front of him. “Jim? Is that you?”
“No. It’s not Jim. You don’t know me. My name is Barker.”
“Oh. Hi.
“I was feeling really sorry for myself, then I saw you, a blind man on ice, and I decided I wasn’t so bad off.”
“I guess I can appreciate that.”
“Where you headed?,” Barker asked, guessing it was not the movie theatre.
“Up to Northwest Twenty-third.”
“Gonna do some window shopping, are you?” Then Barker fell. He was laid out on the ice and he couldn’t stop laughing.
“It wasn’t that funny,” the blind man said, offering Barker a gloved hand up.
“I know, I know,” Barker acknowledged, accepting his help. “It’s just…it’s just….”
“What?,” the blind man wanted to share in the joke. “What?”
Barker – suddenly without a care in the world – put an arm around the man’s shoulder and gently pointed him in the opposite direction.
“You’re lost, too.”
The next day the cold front moved on, the snow melted, the sidewalks were safe to walk again.
Barker didn’t change his shoes.