The Ice Queen

Thankfully, Frances had no reason to suspect any of this. I was a model employee: polite to our patrons, cheerfully running books out to those who were housebound or in the hospital. I even made a weekly trip to the home for the aged with a box of travel books. Could anyone have discerned I was not to be trusted? Not for a second. Well, maybe those mothers from the nursery group, they seemed to know, but I wasn’t counting them. I avoided the children’s section as a matter of fact. The bright illustrations, the rhymes, the high hopes, all made me nervous. Child patrons always wanted something: directions to the bathroom, a drink of water, a sequel to a book that doesn’t have one.

The children’s section was where the tall windows were, and the sunlight filtering through in pale streams revealed how filthy the shelves were. There were dust motes everywhere. I ventured into that section one morning with a mop and a sponge. At least it was a school day, and there were no children around. Only me.

By accident, I found the book my brother had taken out.

Or perhaps there were no accidents; perhaps I saw the book out of the corner of my eye, and my brain processed the discovery in some deep place I couldn’t reach. However it happened, I turned and there it was, not put back properly, askew on the shelf. It was an old edition of Grimm’s, black with silver lettering. The pages smelled watery; when I held the book up to my nose I sneezed. Tears in my eyes. So what? I just happened to pick it up. I just happened to sit on the floor cross-legged and thumb through the pages.

One story in particular had clearly been a favorite, perhaps of my brother, with dog-eared pages and a coffee stain or two. It was “Godfather Death,” one of the stories I’d hated and had always passed by. In this tale, whenever Death stands at the feet of an ill person, that person belongs to him. To trick Death, a good doctor, the kind hero, turns the ill person around so that Death is at the head and therefore cannot take him. Fairy-tale logic can be intractable or fluid, and the hero never knows which it is. Especially if the hero is a rational man. This one is.

One more time and I’ll take you instead, Death says, but the doctor is a scientist through to his soul, a believer in order and in the rightness of things; he cannot accept this is the way the game of life and death is played. There have to be rules, and he is convinced that all he needs is to reverse Death’s direction. But when the doctor saves the girl he loves by turning her around to avoid her fate, Death scoops him up instead. Then and there. No explanations, just a single final act. A life for a life.

Is this the way the story ends? Not in Andersen’s tales surely, where right and might win out, but this is Grimm.

There is a single, simple rule to the game played between the doctor and Death, one the doctor-hero has ignored: When it comes to death, heads or tails matters not. There is no escape in the end.

It’s a sad tale, one that defies logic and thumbs its nose at any reasonable man’s attempt to impose order on the natural world. That my brother, of all people, would choose this obscure, dark story to read and reread was in itself a puzzle. I thought about the way he’d called to me when I’d stood out on the porch, watching our mother drive away. Turn around, that’s what he’d wanted me to do. If I had, would Death have passed us by?

Just when I thought my brother was determined to avoid me — I’d hardly seen him since my strike — he and Nina invited me to their house for a party. I’d been so taken aback when Ned called that I’d said yes when in fact I’d meant no. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a party outside of events at the library in New Jersey, and I’d arranged all of them. I’d come to realize that I was comfortable speaking only to people who’d experienced disaster, at least in a secondhand way, like my physical therapist, Peggy, whom I occasionally met for coffee. And of course Renny, not that he was a friend, not even close. Now I’d gone and committed myself to a party of mathematicians and scientists.

It turned out to be an annual event, filled with professors and graduate students from both Nina’s and Ned’s departments. Getting there was a trial for me; I took one wrong turn after another on those curlicue roads that cut through the campus and all looked alike. I realized then, I hadn’t once been invited over to my brother’s house since my arrival in Florida, and I thought this strange. I wondered if my sister-in-law held something against me. Or maybe it was Ned.

The house my brother and Nina owned was modern, glass and stucco, set on a cul-de-sac on the far side of the Orlon campus — faculty housing of the highest quality. No wonder some of the best minds chose to teach at Orlon; life here was pleasant, a fact that rubbed me the wrong way. I could feel the numbness in my fingertips, the clicking in my head when I pulled up to park. In times of stress, my symptoms intensified. I got out of my car and walked up the neat path. Nice lawn. Nice flowers. I was thinking about Lazarus Jones. I shouldn’t have been, but after a week I was still burning. I could see happy graduate students through the bay window of Nina and Ned’s house. I felt as though I had arrived from an alternate universe. Call it New Jersey, call it desperation, call it whatever you like.