The Blizzard Party

escorted the crew to 12C, and to whom it appeared that Mr. Caldwell had winked, onto the elevator, down, out, and through the lobby, not yet stuffed to the gills with party people, and across the wet cobblestones, where he was shunted into the back of the rig like a slice of pizza into an oven. The snow swirled in, the doors slammed shut. In the sudden stillness of the medical bay, the snowflakes sashayed down and melted into the fat wales of Albert’s pants. Strapped tight, he nonetheless bounced on the stretcher as the snow chains scrabbled against cobblestones, found purchase, and the ambulance scooted through the archway and onto Broadway for its skidding voyage to Roosevelt, where doctors administered a bevy of tests, a second wave of which presumed to measure Albert’s mental acuity (D-minus, dunce cap), and where, owing to his advanced age, inebriation, what appeared to be memory impairment, his inability to provide the phone numbers of any relatives, no answer at his home address, and the deteriorating weather conditions, the chief resident declared he should be held overnight for observation.
When the physician had asked if there was anyone they could contact, Albert had patted helplessly at his trouser pockets until a nurse inserted her fingers and plucked out a storm of paper—slips of memory, most numerical: account numbers, dates, times, ages of his grandchildren (without corresponding names), phone numbers (also without corresponding names), all scrupulously inscribed before being pitched into the abyss. Had he remembered to pick up the scrap of paper bearing the name of his final destination, it’s unlikely Albert would have been able to make heads or tails of it. He had no memory of copying it onto the paper. At the moment he had no memory of why he’d done anything. His plan was nothing more than a little turbulence on the surface of rough seas.
He had only a feeling that, like a migrating goose, he was to travel south. An image of water.
Is there a number here we can call? A relative? the doctor said, probing the pile, which had been deposited on an instrument tray, with the tip of a pen.
Albert opened his mouth. He closed his mouth.
What was he trying to remember, again? He’d given the doorman the slip, but then what? Perhaps that alone had been the goal. He stared up at the big lights. His shirt was splayed open, the skin of his torso so loose that it appeared to be draining over his sides like melted icing. Oh, the hands that palpated that papery skin and his narrow bones, his stringy muscles, so many hands. His flickering nerves, relit and glowing brightly, bright as a twenty-year-old’s, buried within this worn-out machinery. Birds alighting on a lake at dawn.
No immediate relations, Mister Caldwell? No one to call?
He moaned when they touched him, not with pain or sexual delight, but as only a lonesome being can moan, with sorrow and joy at once, in communion with his fellow man, in thanks for their affection. The body is made to be handled. It aches to be embraced. Oh, the hands.
Immediate relations?
Albert shook his head at the doctor. No relations.
Then allow me to invite you to join us here at Camelot, said the chief resident. Albert stared back at him. None of the nurses laughed. The chief resident’s hapless witticisms were an endless source of embarrassment for him, yet he couldn’t stop himself, and he thought of the ways he’d injure himself later, when he was home alone with his alligator clips and lighter. Admit ’im, he said, before thudding off to another failed interaction with the rest of the species.
Once the hands went away, Albert tried to bring his thoughts into focus. If his brain was a collection of millions of tiny light bulbs, and if certain bulbs lit up in sequence to indicate certain actions that were to take place, the series of bulbs in his brain assigned to light up when it was time to enact his plan were, at best, faulty. All his bulbs were faulty. Their sockets were rusty, their filaments carbonized. They lit erratically, if at all. By the time his comedic failure of a doctor admitted him, half of his bulbs were burned out. The other half could barely get it together long enough to form an unbroken beam pointing to the Hudson River, his final destination.
The problem with so many bulbs having burned out was that the bulbs that did work had to pull double-time, which meant that when he tried to remember his plan, bulbs that had nothing to do with the plan lit up, just trying to help out. Lying there on the examination table, he wondered: What happens next? And, seeing that the plan bulbs were as dark and unexcited as jars of molasses, the bulbs in charge of remembering a case he tried in Germany in the 1940s, just pitching in, just trying to be good neighbors, would light up, and he’d be back in Nuremberg, time-warped, which was not where he wanted to be at all.
Constant use had preserved a few of the most important bulb sequences, but he was down to only a handful of those, which meant that the same old memories kept coming back to him no matter what he was trying to think of. The most common was the memory of his grandson, and when that sequence lit up, it pointed at the first step of the plan. That first step never failed to light bright and true. It was a bulb that said it was time for Albert to die.
From there he could piece the plan together, but it was a laborious process, and because of his rusted-out jalopy of a brain, he’d have to re-create the plan from scratch every single time the memory of his grandson relit, which was about fifty times a day. Thus, for the last week he’d spent entire days conceiving and reconceiving the plan. Sometimes