Book review: Christian Bernd's short novel, Cantabile

(Translated by Esther Weiss from the German, Faber – 157 pages with preface by George Steiner)

　

　

　

　

One of the more baffling imports of this season, Christian Bernd’s Cantabile offers an intriguing glimpse of an author, well-known and much-feted in his homeland, East Germany, but unknown elsewhere. Faber’s publication of this curious novella, ably, if prosaically, translated by Esther Weiss, is a welcome addition to the firm’s commitment to providing English readers with access to literature from behind the former Iron Curtain. Although the demand for such writing may be limited, it is to be hoped that this singular work, and others in Faber’s series, will find an audience.

Cantabile’s first edition bears the imprint of the Hohmeyer Verlag Leipzig dated 1949. Bernd, born in Erfurt in 1910, seems to have been a prolific man of letters – his biography lists 13 novels, including the monumental trilogy Schlachtenberg, historical fiction set during the period of the Protestant Reformantion and Peasant’s Rebellion. Writing in many genres, Bernd was a central figure in the literature of the now-defunct DDR – he is credited with several plays, wrote film scripts, and published, at least, six volumes of poetry along with criticism, political journalism, and essays. He died in a car crash in 1962 in Havana, Cuba, about the time of the famous Missile Crisis – he seems to have been on assignment as a journalist covering the mobilization of the Cuban people in the face of alleged American aggression. On the basis of Cantabile, Bernd, known to be an avid amateur musician (he played the cello), was well-versed in arcane aspects of music theory and history as well as the technology of organ construction and repair. He writes with penetrating aplomb about organ performance practice and the development of different styles in sacred music. Elaborate descriptions of musical composition in Cantabile sometimes verge on the academic and Bernd’s more ecstatic effusions on his subject pointedly demonstrate the difficulty of putting into words concepts expressed originally in rhythm, timbre, and musical notes. At times, Bernd’s prose resembles similar passages in Thomas Mann’s vast and magisterial Dr. Faustus, a work written around the same time as Bernd’s Cantabile. It should be noted, however, that Cantabile is about one-fifth the size of Dr. Faustus, more witty and agile in its prose, and, for most readers, easier to appreciate because, indisputably, less daunting and ambitious.

Readers expecting grim Socialist realism will be pleasantly surprised by Bernd’s narrative, a globe-trotting plot that seems to anticipate the more playful magical realism that would astound the literary world in later works by Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, and, ultimately, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (There is an nice photograph taken on Havana’s emblematic Calle 23 showing Marquez offering an immense and unsightly cigar to a nonplussed Bernd, the image published in the East Berlin periodical Form und Zweck. On the evidence of the picture, Bernd had the lithe Aryan good looks of German matinee idol.) Bernd’s hero, Stratus, is a Swiss organ maker. Around 1911, Stratus travels to Windhoek in Geman West Africa to install and tune an organ in the Christuskirche, a Lutheran church built to commemorate the triumph of colonists over Herero and Owamba rebels. Stratus discovers that the uprising resulted in horrific genocide inflicted upon the native people and concludes that the church, supposedly commemorating peace, is founded upon a lie. As a covert protest, Stratus installs a single high-pitched pipe that is savagely discordant. When the pipe is played, the organ emits a shriek like a sjamboked child. The church organist, who has participated in the massacre of the native people, commits suicide. Before his death, this organist, an old Boer named Hoestoen, plays for Stratus an old composition, apparently the product of either Buxtehude or one of his contemporaries, Franz Tunder or Nicholas Bruhns. Stratus is enchanted by the music but recognizes that the composition simply can not be played successfully to its original effect in the Christuskirche. The climate, humidity, and geometry of the church with its vaulted ceiling create reverberative effects that confound the music. It simply doesn’t sound right in the Christuskirche, a discord that is symbolically significant in that the score is notated Dona nobis pacim ("Grant us peace"). While playing the composition, the old organist several times is obliged to sound notes that make the screaming sound by which Stratus has signified his protest against the organ’s installation and the setting in which it is played. Bernd suggests that this discordant sound so disturbs Hoestoen with agonizing memories of his complicity in the genocide that he takes his own life.

Through Stratus’ musings (the book is narrated in the first person), Bernd develops the notion that great composers for the organ don’t create their works in isolation from the instrument and the physical environment in which the music is played. To the contrary, the greatest compositions for pipe organ are, so to speak, bespoke – that is, designed for the exact instrument on which they were composed. Such pieces are, in effect, site-specific art-works. They are most effective, and sound best, when played on the original instrument and at the place where the composition occurred. Bernd gives as an example the well-known fact that compositions by Bach don’t sound good at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris – the church as a reverberation of seven seconds and the echoes in the cathedral muddle the polyphonic texture of the composition. By contrast, works by Marcel Dupre, the organist at St. Sulpice and a frequent guest organist at Notre Dame, are designed for the sonic characteristics of those cathedrals and most effectively performed in situ. Bernd, acting as ventriloquist for Stratus, makes similar arguments about the work of Olivier Messiaen, observing that the harmonies and interaction between instrumental voices in that composer’s Quartet for the End of Time in effect replicate sonic characteristics of the Eglise de la Sainte Trinite in Paris where the composer was employed as organist before the Second World War.

Stratus survives both world wars and, like Hoestoen, recognizes his complicity in atrocities committed by the Nazis. (Bernd is hesitant to mention the destruction of the Jews by the Germans. From a political perspective, East Germany tended to emphasize that Nazi violence was largely directed against Communists, thus, avoiding the subject of the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population. It’s a defect in Cantabile that Bernd descends to this naive and evasive perspective on Hitler’s genocide, treating the murder of the Jews as the persecution of noble, and courageous, Communist dissenters. A sympathetic reader will grasp the political constraints under which Bernd worked and, perhaps, forgive his for this aspect of the novella.) After the Russian occupation, Stratus acknowledges the existence near the East Prussian village where he lives of a concentration camp. Everyone knew that political prisoners were murdered in this camp but Stratus, along with his neighbors had turned a blind eye to this crime. In the aftermath of the War, Stratus is guilt-stricken and, when the full enormity of the crimes are disclosed, like Hoestoen, seems on the verge of taking his own life.

But an obsession intervenes to save Cantabile’s protagonist. One afternoon, Stratus happens upon an old church in a town now located in Poland. The German graveyard next to the old edifice has been torn apart and the tombstones smashed. Stratus enters the church and finds near the organ a manuscript copy of Dona nobis pacem, the piece by Buxtehude or one of his unnamed contemporaries. He plays the piece on the church’s half-ruined, neglected, and poorly tuned organ. Of course, the music sounds awful. But the experience inspires Stratus to a quixotic quest: he will reverse engineer from the music the organ and the church for which the piece was written. That is, Stratus will determine the acoustic characteristics of both the instrument and the church in which the instrument was located from the sound of Dona nobis pacem. And he is confident that he will be able to find that church among the ruined cities of post-War Europe. The second half of the short novella (it’s only about 140 pages) concerns Stratus’ quest to find the organ and church where Dona nobis pacem will sound best – that is, the place for which the composition was written.

This subject matter sounds a bit dour, but, in fact, the latter portions of Cantabile are both suspenseful and witty. Stratus’ quest gives new direction to the novella threatening to decay into post-War German existential angst and aimlessness. Calculation establish the probable volume and geometry of the space for which Dona nobis pacem was written. Other assumptions as to the interior characteristics of this hypothesized church guide Stratus on his search. Along the way, the protagonist encounters a colorful and intriguing cast of scheming architects, demented preachers, and black marketeers – everyone hustling to rebuild the ruins from the war as quickly and cheaply as possible. Post-war central Europe is portrayed as a sort of charnel house where traumatized survivors, messianic prophets, and a variety of hucksters and charlatans compete to loot what remains after the warring armies have withdrawn from the field. Bernd is clear-eyed about the savagery of the forces contending in this landscapes of ruined churches, starving people and abandoned cemeteries. The author even finds space to limn a romantic subplot involving Stratus and a prostitute that he meets in the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden. An element of suspense, as well as gallow’s humor, arises from Stratus’ efforts to find the church where the organ work was composed in the face of his own deteriorating physical condition. The book’s hero is an old man and subject to the ravages of time, and Bernd, avoiding pathos, makes Stratus’ ailments a source of grotesque humor. Surrounded on all sides by ruins, and threatened with the collapse of his own mind and body, Stratus struggles to locate the church before his own physical and mental decay immobilize him.

Two themes motivate the novella’s final chapters. First, the fit between the organ composition and the three-dimensional space in which it originated, becomes an analogy for erotic love. Bernd writes:


It was a mysterious and perfect thing, this exact fit between the sonic dimensions of the music and the vaulted chamber hewn from yielding sandstone. The music fit within the space that had been its womb like a hand in a glove, both shaping (and being shaped) by the building’s form. The magical congruity between lover and the beloved was similar – two becoming one until there was no distinction between them. The soul shapes the body, I think, just as the body forms the soul – so it was with love and the hymn to peace penetrating the carved stone cavities where it had been formed.
Second, Stratus becomes dangerously obsessed with the notion of the lost church as a kind of ideal temple of peace:


All that had gone before – the air raids and cannonades, the starvation and murder – these things were banished from the Temple of Peace that had harbored and, then, given birth to the wonderful composition. If the Church were found and could be mapped precisely, war would be banished. Men would no longer study war and peace would prevail among the nations.
Bernd subtly implies that Stratus may be losing his mind, that the steady deterioration of his body as he treks through the smashed detritus of the War may parallel the decay of his mind. Ultimately, Stratus’ quest ends in the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden. The novella’s ending is surprising and, also, ambiguous: either Stratus finds what he is looking for, or, perhaps, read another way, his search demonstrates the impossibility of ever finding his idealized temple of peace. Under either interpretation, Bernd’s novella Cantabile is a striking achievement and Faber is to be applauded for making this fascinating work of fiction available to English readers.

Incident Report

　

　

　

Nothing avails, neither your strength nor your competency nor all your years of experience and training, not your skill in shooting, nor the certificates of qualification in riot control and driving and marksmanship, nor the awards of commendation – the blizzard make this clear: that’s tonight’s teaching. "You did it!" That’s for sure, but it was futile... And it all sure does put you in a mind to consider that zero equals zero and that nothing you have done, or could have done, prepares you for this realization, occurring at the moment you made the arrest, but, now, looming ever more significant, more prominent in your thought processes and, when your nerves settle down enough to let you compose your report, the incident report that, of course, is required since it is the paperwork that defines the job, the official report that controls what will now happen...but, first, you’ve got to shake-off the jangled nerves, get your thoughts back in order, move them into a line so that they can march them with regularity and discipline out of your head and troop them, one by one, onto the paper, that’s the next task: report-writing which drinking coffee here in the LEC obstructs, just as the officers hanging around the sally-port and stomping snow off their boots in the corridors, all gossiping like little old ladies, and all of them anxious to hear the story, to hear you tell the tale, when, in fact, it’s really best just to put it down one time only in the incident report when it’s all fresh in your mind (including the zero = zero aspect of events), let the facts speak for themselves, and, then, go on to the next thing, because there’s always a next thing that’s for sure. But life and experience teach you – there’s no denying that: you learn even if you don’t want to -- and what this night’s work has shown me is that nothing avails: you can lift weights in the exercise room until your muscles bulge out like Popeye the Sailor Man and you can qualify with your service revolver every six months and, in fact, win sharpshooting marksmanship awards, qualify for SWAT and you can navigate the Emergency Response course in your squad car in record time, but, then, when you’re actually up against it – well, then, you’ll see that the truth is that all preparedness, strength, and skill is just some kind of a joke and a waste of time ‘cause zero = zero. Once the feeling returns to my fingers, I guess, I’ll do the incident report and wait out the rest of the shift and, then, maybe have a couple pops when I come off-duty, that’ll ease my mind a little, calm things down --

So the TV is on because the TV is always on, but I must have fallen asleep here on the couch waiting for my mom to come home, holding my puppy, and, then, there’s the pounding in the door, but mom told me never let them in, never let any of them in, and so I get up and take my puppy and run to hide under the bed and, then, there’s all this slamming and crashing like when Daddy’s home except I know that Daddy can’t come home tonight because he’s in the jail, more slamming and crashing and I see boots, boots all frosted with snow like the frost on a birthday cake and it would best if mom were here, but maybe not, although she seemed awfully nervous earlier today, awfully nervous before she had to go out even though it’s snowy and cold and she said that it would be just fifteen minutes, a quarter hour, but this can stretch out to a long time, to the longest time when you’re alone, even all night long sometimes, although this isn’t morning, but still night and the big men are tromping around and, then, they pull me out from under the bed and I have dog hair in my hair and dust bunnies on my pjs and the men have cold hands and there is a woman like a grandma among the big men with the snow on their shoulders and grandma says: "It’s okay, honey. It’s okay, Latoya." The puppy is squirming to get away and flops down on the carpet and goes to hide in the dirty clothes where I wish I could hide too and, then, they are picking me up and, in each room as they leave, they shut off the light to make it dark, because I’ve turned on all the lights because mom is gone and I like the light and I like the TV talking to me, and, what do you know?, they turn off the TV too – who would have thought such a thing? Because the TV’s never off, you know...

It’s not supposed to be more than a quarter hour, I’m trying to be dependable, but the streets are full of snow and the windshield keeps freezing up and the wipers can’t keep pace with the storm. Then, I have to stop and look at my phone and the maps there because I’m not exactly familiar with these streets, probably due to the snow and the sickness, the ache and flu feeling that makes every part of my body seem so old and so weary. It’s a park. It’s always a park, I guess, a public place with an old school building somewhere near, brown bricks and sticks and those old windows supposed to let in the light so the students can learn their reading and arithmetic – Latoya will be fine; it’s just fifteen minutes. She’s got the puppy for company and TV is turned on and I don’t think this transaction will take more than a quarter hour although looking at the time on my phone I see that this quarter hour is now longer than a quarter hour, but there it is: there’s the car, headlights showing rays of white falling snow, and the man gets out and I get out and we meet between the cars and I can see that he’s just a scrawny little guy with a tremor in his head and hands, nothing to see, just a little man with a mullet hair-do and a tattoo on his neck that didn’t turn out right because I can’t tell what it is supposed to be and the snow is dusting his little red beard that’s like a goat’s beard and his lips and I show him the money first and he shows me his stuff and, then, we reach across each other’s hands to make the trade and, at that moment, across the park a light pops on, a blue flashing light and the little man who is only three-quarters my size says are you a CI? and I say no I’m not a CI but are you a CI? and he says the CI’s always want you to make the deal in a public park within a thousand yards of a public school so that’s it’s a felony and the DA has that charge to use to negotiate so you must be a CI and I say: Are you crazy? You picked the place. You set this up. Then, the siren starts up, a howl, and, I think, Oh no, this is gonna be a long night and the little man takes my wrist and pulls me to his car and, then, we are both in the car and he says if you’re a CI I’ll kill you right here and now because I’m not interesting in going back inside, I didn’t like it there, I didn’t like it one bit. And, I say, No, No, I’m not a Confidential Informant, what do you think? Are you crazy, dude? And, then, he starts u the car and guns it good and we go fishtailing down the street that’s all full of knee-deep snow and that answers my question, sure enough, the fucking dude is crazy --

It’s not so much disrespect for me that irks, although, of course, that’s painful enough – but, rather, disrepect for the badge, disrespect for law and order in other words: that’s the filthy thing. The squad car is old and doesn’t even have a functioning radio so the city council told me: "just use your cell-phone. You have a cell-phone right?" Of course, I have a cell-phone but, then, what about the tires, half-bald for sure? Or the suspension that feels shot every time I take her out on a gravel road? the brakes that squeal like a cat in heat?...it just isn’t right and seems to me to be disrespect for the badge, that’s right, not so much as anything else, not economy or prudence, but simple disrespect... Folks can say what they want about me – I was never the best student at the academy and washed out of probation on the patrol job in the city over a misunderstanding as to evidence retention policies and, then, there was the screw-up involving the pepper spray and the retarded inmate when I was working as a jailer – that whole thing was regrettable to be sure, but I want you to know I’m a legit peace officer, conscientious and brave even if my car is shit, not some kind of Barney Fife of Hicksville USA, and I’m ready for service even if most of my patrols amount to nothing more than barking dog reports and teenagers smoking dope in empty sheds, I’m ready for all challenges, and tonight with the snow blowing white as death and the cold come down from outer-space and, now, the voices on the police scanner telling me that there’s a chase, a high-speed chase, and it’s coming off the freeway in my direction, I’m hustling to make the intercept, no one will disrespect me if I make that intercept, and that’s what I intend at this very moment, plowing through the snow drifts, skidding sideways on the streets between the place I live above the tavern – not even a garage for my squad, can you imagine -- the cheap bastards! -- and the CSAH, County State-Aid Highway, that’s where I’ve got to go: hand on the steering wheel numb from knocking snow and ice off the windshield, but, now, the blowers are going and the windshield wipers shaking their black fingers at me and I’m out and away ---

The Detox isn’t connected to the hospital, I know that from other times – it’s a walk across the parking lot from the ER to the old brick place that used to be the hospital before the new one was built -- too cold tonight to make the stroll, I guess, and so they put back on the handcuffs and take me the hundred yards in the cruiser with the snow swept up by wind by the shovelfuls and poured over the cop car and, then, I’m at intake in a room with green tiles with the spaces between those tiles black with dirt and the drunks and meth-heads and opiod addicts howling down the hallways and, of course, at reception, a little dribble of pee on the tiles to make them extra-special slick and I’m saying: "I need to get home to my daughter, I need to get home" and the cops saying my first name over and over again (although I never gave them permission to use my first name) and repeating that my kid is okay, she’s just fine, staying with superb, excellent, very nice people, foster parents, the same people, I suppose, that they can use when they make a petition to terminate my parental rights and the whole time talking sweet as honey, but meaning (as clear as a bell) that I’m neither superb nor excellent nor nice at all – just some drug-hag who can’t keep things together, who can’t cope at all – and I’m telling them that I’m the victim here, a kidnap victim, and my tongue and teeth know that my lip is split wide-open and my nose feels broken although I can’t touch it due to the cuffs and, when I inhale, I hear a sharp buzz and whistle where the nose doesn’t work anymore – I’m the victim, kidnaped, and beat up, I guess, by my kidnapper although I can’t exactly recall when or who it was that punched me in the mouth and the nose – that’s just par for the course. Then, the handcuffs are off and my fingers go up to my busted nose and I can hear the whistle there when I inhale and exhale and a nurse is coming with a syringe, sedatives, I suppose, "just something for anxiety," and phenobarbital to avoid seizures, who knows what all? And, so, I say again: Just let me go home to my kid, don’t you hear me? But they don’t hear me.

So you need to steady yourself to write out this incident report. A lot of times, you feel the fear and get another buzz of adrenalin, a big surge, when you go to the computer to type out the incident report – sometimes, you feel more than you felt during the incident itself as if you are only coming to understand things now as you reflect upon them and start to write up the report... And, it’s always disappointing, adventures always end, and they are always disappointing, anti-climactic that’s for sure, but it goes something like this: The blizzard has tossed a semi-tractor-trailer into the ditch at around mile-marker 111 (that’s easy to remember) and I’m out with the trucker, braving the blowing snow and the cars passing by too fast for the conditions, putting down flares to mark where the trailer is jack-knifed a little onto the traveled-upon portion of the Interstate. And the night is enormous with the storm, the winds screaming like banshees and blasts of snow coming horizontally off the drifts and sanding off your forehead with an icy rasp and freezing in your eyes so that the snow on your eyelashes is melting to make tears on your cheeks and the tears are freezing in the howling wind and the truck-driver is shaking the flare in his hand, waving it like a lantern and setting down a flare-path, a lane change for the traffic coming from west to east, although really there shouldn’t be any traffic, this crash proves the point, they ought to pull the plows and the rescue vehicles and just barricade the freeway because it’s too dangerous for anyone to be out tonight and I’m calling to the trucker to be careful, but he can’t hear me because the wind takes the words out of my mouth and breaks them into syllables and, then, throws the syllables into the snowy fangs of the ditch all lined with drifts. I’m calling to him to be careful because something is coming up through the blue-white wind, a vehicle of some sort, just a flare of headlights at first sweeping down the road and fading and brightening depending upon the wind with its freight of blowing ice, and, then, I can see the Impala, Chevy Impala, and I wave to the truckdriver to watch out, the car’s coming up behind him and the driver’s all muffled in stocking cap, scarves, snowmobile suit, a ball of coats and sweaters and hats and mittens, and he doesn’t hear me until the last moment, and, then, the Impala is bearing down on him, a car-length away and he jettisons the flare throws it up and away and the Impala doesn’t quite nudge him, doesn’t quite bump him over, but he still loses footing and falls, a fall that is surely padded by the coats and the caps and the sweaters, and, then, the flare is sizzling in the median, smoking furiously with the black smoke driven laterally, and the Impala fishtails by, sliding sideways to nick my squad car and knock out a tail-light before the storms swallows up everything and the wind booms like a great drum being beaten on the horizon and down the road, far away, I can see a streak of spinning red and blue lights, some other cops in pursuit of the bad guy and it’s a wild night, a wild night for sure, an exciting wild exhilarating night and, so, I check on the trucker and his red face looms up close to me and we are shouting in each other’s ears – "the son of a bitch! the son of a bitch!" – and, after I have confirmed that the man’s okay, no bones broken, no apparent cuts or lacerations, I run to my squad and radio my position and tell Dispatch that I am in pursuit of a hit-and-run driver and Dispatch says that a Deputy Sheriff is coming, a couple of Deputies because the crash is really under County jurisdiction and that there is already a pursuit underway on the Chevy Impala and I tell them that I’m underway too, in pursuit also, with the storm between me and the fleeing suspect...

It’s easy to sleep in the warm room with the sheets and blankets cool at first but, then, warming around me to make me toasty-warm as well and the wind pounding the windows outside... but, then, this is a different sound, like fingers scraping the glass pane, trying to come inside, like something outside in the cold that wants to come inside and I open my eyes and see the strange room, everything put away, the carpet and the nightlight shaped like an angel and the strange, strange room, so empty because, everything, I guess, has been put away and I look at the window where that cold thing is trying to come through the glass and hear the wind howling and I wonder if the puppy is okay, where is the puppy? and, then, where is my mommy? and why am I in this strange room where everything is neat and seems to have been put away?

I can see that the suspect is veering right, zigzagging between drifts up the exit ramp and, then, spinning left toward Lassville and I’m on the radio, distracted I guess so that I slow down, and, then, the two squads in pursuit zip by me in a huge cloud of blowing snow lit from within by their spinning red lights and, apparently, they mistake me for the suspect, think I’m the bad guy because they get out ahead and start to slow to box off the right-of-way to block my way, but that’s not my direction, instead I veer right also and plow up the exit ramp and the two squads get entangled somehow, crunch together and do a little waltz with interlocked bumpers whirling down the interstate with lights still illumining the vortex of snow in which they are traveling, lighting that vortex up from within as if it were a hot air balloon, and, then, the rotating cars slide off into the median and the lights go dead and I can see this from the overpass above them, looking down the freeway to the crash, and, then, accelerating to follow the Impala ahead of me, wagging its tail back and forth as if to tease me and I alert Dispatch to my present position and advise that I think two cop cars have gone in the ditch just beyond the Lassville exit and, looking in my rear view, I can see one or two additional squad cars coming up from behind...

If I can just get this piece-of-shit car up through the drifts, I’ll make the intercept. The police scanner is spraying static all over, but I can hear the voices: two squads crashed on the interstate, the Chevy Impala bearing down on Lassville, one cop in pursuit, then, others behind, a babble of voices with Dispatch making it clear that this is no night fit for man nor beast and, if they want to call the whole thing off, that’s okay too, but, for now, it’s still hot pursuit and coming right my way, falling right into my lap, and this will be my redemption, this will put me back on the straight and narrow, I make the intercept and bring this whole perilous thing to a safe and satisfying conclusion – that’s the plan...

So I’m saying: Why don’t we just stop? You can’t see nothing in this snow Why don’t we just stop? And mullet red Goat Beard is shrieking every dirty word in the book (or not in the book) at me and this seems to calm him down and so I say: "Just call me whatever you want but please don’t crash and kill us because I’ve got a kid at home." So on we go, with the car seeming to sway back and forth as if the tires were stilts and we were close to toppling over, and, outside, a procession of ghosts, white whirling things beckoning to the car and, then, the car seems to be swimming, no longer on stilts but bobbing on waves and Goat Beard is howling every insult he can think of at me and I don’t care because cursing seems somehow to calm him down.

Lassville is hunkered down against the blizzard, the semaphore at the lone controlled intersection swinging back and forth like a huge and heavy pendulum and the Impala pauses for a moment, slowing as if, perhaps, to throw in the towel and give up the fight, but, then, something seems to inspire the little car and it bolts forward bursting through knee-high drifts that have encroached on the road and I’m thinking: this driver is one courageous son of a bitch to be out in this night alone, with a flotilla of cop cars coming after him, in the worst blizzard of the decade, and his Impala small and dwarfed by the mastodon-huge storm, rolling forward notwithstanding the lack of traction and the visibility ahead that shrinks to nothing, to less than nothing when we get to the edge of the town and shelter-belts give way and walls of snow close in pounding against the side of the squad – if would be nice if that doofus in town, li’l Barney Fife, fired for torturing a retard in the county jail, it would be nice if that doofus asshole would come out of hibernation, and shrug off his hangover to help in this pursuit, but I don’t see any sign of him, and, now, we’re on the tundra again heading north into the teeth of the storm...

Before the drugs take hold, the nurse leans in and says: "That split lip, we’ll have to assess for a stitch, maybe or a couple stitches tomorrow – you got punched-up bad, honey" and her breath smells like mint, like creme de menthe and I can’t stop crying because I’m thinking of my kid but, then, the drugs shave off all the hard edges and make everything soft and warm...

I can make the intercept -- that’s what I’m thinking as I get the big old squad limbered up, warming to the pursuit -- at least, I’m heavy enough to pound down the snow drifts and keep from spinning out, and I’m pretty sure I can get to the intersection with the traffic semaphore and block the way, except, as it happens, I can’t – I’m still three blocks away and busting through snow-drifts when I see the Impala ahead, just a glimpse between bursts of blowing snow, and, then, ten car-lengths behind, the cop car, a city cop, coming momentarily under the amber light that is blowing back and forth like wind-chimes, the cop car, even with its spinning red, all dowsed for a moment in the honey-color coming down from above and, then, gone and, so, I’ve missed the intercept – but there’s another way, a gravel road that cuts diagonally slashing across two section roads to cross the CSAH about two miles northwest where the asphalt two-lane makes a big bend, turning to the west to avoid a lake and swamp and running that way for three or four miles before bending back north. If I can make time on the shortcut, the gravel country road angling northwest I’ll get ahead of the chase and implement the intercept up there – this will work and shows ingenuity to boot, local knowledge is always the best, home-cooking is the most nutritious and I know this route, know it well enough to make this work and, when the intercept is accomplished, then, in a way, I’m redeemed, not wholly redeemed, but I’ve shown my merit and intestinal fortitude and, maybe, that wipes out, at least, the pepper spray in the jail with the retard, not the other stuff to be sure, but, maybe, the thing with the pepper spray and the retard because, you know, as they say: no harm, no foul...

Some of these drifts, edged with torches of white blowing snow like acetylene in the headlights – I can see the Impala has smashed through them, but how? It’s all I can do to keep on the road, keep between the fog lines as the snow bears down on me...how is he getting through this stuff?

All a white blur: can’t see through my window -- all fogged-up. The longer we drive the more the snow and ice and wind gets into the car, it’s a presence, like someone sitting in his filthy backseat, all full of energy drink cans and papers and a rifle back there too I suppose – "Mister, can you let me out, just let me out somewhere?" He turns to me and gnashes his teeth, literally gnashes his teeth, grinds them until something white oozes over his lips, bits of tooth enamel maybe, but, probably, just spit – I’ve never seen anyone gnash their teeth, I didn’t know it could be done. Then, he drifts off the road for a moment and, there’s a big puff of snow that goes up over the windshield, and, I think, well at least this is over and it’s a relief, a great relief, but, then, the tires get traction again, on the edge of the road, on the gravel, and the car lunges forward...

This gravel road is not easy, not easy at all because I can’t see the way – the road is white and the drifts are white and the fields are white and so where should I keep my tires? It’s all one white and moving treacherously around me. If I recall, the road runs arrow-straight, but I keep feeling the snow-pack below twist out from under the tires and I can’t keep up enough speed to make the intercept, at least, that’s what worries me now and, so, I guess I have to put pedal to the medal if I intend to reach the crossroads ahead of the Impala and the City Cop. So courage, take courage, you can drive blind if you have to –

This guy keeps ahead, even accelerating – he’s some kind of super-star blizzard driver: some sort of Dale Earnhardt, the Intimidator, a fuckin’ super-hero behind the wheel –

Won’t go forward. Won’t go back. I’m twisted sideways and seem to be slipping into some sort of deep fissure in this glacier of snow and ice. The headlights are drowned in the snow and blaze a way like two yellow-white veins pulsing in the drifts. Then, I look sideways and see a car at the intersection sixty yards away, headlights busting through a hip-high drift and, then, a beat and another beat and ten beats, pulses of the arteries in your brow and biceps and the cop car scrambles through the intersection too, as if the wheels are climbing up a steep hill although it’s all horizontal – then, more cop cars and here I am stuck, completely stuck, in a shuddering wall of blowing snow.

Reaching for the puppy, but the puppy isn’t here. This is a neat, uncluttered room. A night-light like a candle except it’s not a candle but a white angel plugged into the wall.

Now what? There’s a shovel in the trunk and, maybe, I can dig my way out and, then, go back to town and hope no one knows about this shame, this new humiliation, this failure... I tried, I always try, but I’m unlucky, one unlucky son-of-a-bitch...

It just goes on and on. A couple times, the car seems stuck and, then, the driver beats it forward and beats it back, punching the steering wheel and the gear shift like he’s pounding a living animal, and, then, we’re back on the road, running again, edging forward against the huge avalanche of snow pouring down on us – it’s like a dream, a series of scenes, a drift like a whale’s mouth, a farm buried in the snow with its blue yard-light flickering, a moment, when we are stopped again, and Goat Beard gets out and kicks the car and howls at it like it’s a dying animal, and, then, somehow, we are underway again.

The two squads behind me seem insistent that I speed up, but it’s impossible and I’m not going to spin-out and end up with my ass freezing in a ditch and, so, at an intersection with another County State Aid Highway, a forlorn place filling up with black snow, I angle sideways and let them scoot by ahead of me – and, then, just as I suspected, first one cop car crashes, sailing lazily into the ditch and fluffing up the snow into a big, fat plume and, then, another quarter mile down the road, the other misses a curve and rolls windshield deep into the drifts and, all I can do, is signal their positions and keep going forward, sure, but steady, do this sure but steady or, otherwise, it’s all in vain...

No shovel in the trunk. Then, I remember: I didn’t want to buy a shovel for my driveway and sidewalk at Walmart and so I used the shovel in the trunk of the cop car, not supposed to use public property for private use, but what the hell? I’m paying the price, I guess, and, now, as I hunker here freezing my balls off, the shovel is standing like a little sentinel upright, poked into a shell-shaped white drift right next to my front door back in town –

How long can this possibly go on? I’m singing a little lullaby to myself in my head.

It’s just me and him, now – the two of us. And he’s not your typical bear, no, not by a long shot: he’s fearless and intrepid and the most skilled driver that I’ve ever seen and it’s just the two of us, Roadrunner and Mr. Wile E. Coyote, alone locked in this duel in a small, and private part of the blizzard, everything shrunk to the beam of my headlight, the glint of his tail lights and his beam flung ahead of us both, but mostly extinguished by the storm – a narrow filament of highway illumined against the howling storm...

It’s okay. It’ll be okay. The white smothers us and we seem to be inching up a great hill – two steps forward, three steps back. It’s calm now, once you accept things – you’re in god’s pocket, that’s for sure.

Of course, I’ve got no shovel, no radio, and the fucking bald tires on the squad have flung me off the road. No way to signal my position. The cell-phone battery is dead and the tablet is cold and inert in my hands. Nothing to do but walk toward the farm-light that comes in and out of focus as the wind sweeps the snow past my wrecked car –

He seems to be tiring. He went wide around that last curve and almost hit the guard-rail on the bridge over the frozen creek. If I maintain my concentration, he’ll tire – it’s just the two of us now in this universe of blowing snow.

Harder to walk than I expected and the snow pummels you, hard in the face and eyes, fills up your mouth with snow – should turn back to the Squad, I guess – this wasn’t the smartest move, I mean, you retard, you fucking retard, you spraying pepper spray into the eyes of that retard, but it’s really you, your own eyes, really your own fucking stupidity that you’ve got to punish...

So, it seems, that the world has all gone asleep and the snow seeps into every nook and cranny, even here in this dirty front seat rocking like a cradle, the goat-bearded driver cursing, cursing the car and the snow and me, and this fine powder of snow sifting into the car as he curses mostly under his breath, a stream of bad words like water flowing from a tap...

How many miles have we gone? Roadrunner and Mr. Wile E. Coyote – neither gaining on him, nor falling behind, our two cars linked like those subatomic particles you hear about on the radio: when he swerves or skids, I swerve and skid at the same time. Roadrunner turns, Wile E. Coyote turns. When the storm takes hold of his car and twists it a little, the same storm seizes my wheels and hood and twists them also – and, so it goes, on and on and on –

He’s still cussing me out as a CI, but I don’t pay him no mind: he can’t touch me. Somehow, the snow seems to come at us now with different qualities, a succession of states: first, loud and violent with a roar, then, gasping as if exhausted and the snow-flakes reversing and flowing back up into the sky, sucked up into the vortices like tornadoes overhead, and, then, it’s stately, marble veined with blue darkness, then, crystalline with the light scintillating in a million tiny diamonds blowing on the wind and dancing in the headlights and, then, deep and dark, filling the shelter-belts – whose woods these are I do not know (What is the rest? How does it go?) – a huge stately presence, a mourner come to a funeral in a foaming cloud of white, snow like a pelt around the mourner’s head and hands, and, then, a flash of white, white as a little girl’s skin –

The puppy is crying. In the crate. Whining. But, then, I open my eyes and the room is unfamiliar, an angel nightlight like a big pale butterfly perched on the wall socket, and there’s no puppy – it’s my lips moving, crying, I guess. So I stand up, slip out of the bed with the clean sheets, and go to find the toilet and I can smell that small room, humid, an odor like flowers and antiseptic, some sort of chemical smell, and the rooms are all empty, uncluttered: it’s like nobody is left alive in this house, like there’s nobody home, like no one has ever even lived here –

Why do I keep falling? My feet are unsteady and the wind punches my face and throat and I’m slipping now and then, toppling over and landing in the soft, pillowy cushions of the snow – there’s a yard-light ahead, shuddering in the wind, and I’m pretty sure that someone will open a door for me at the farm, let me into a warm room where I can unthaw a moment and tell my story –

So some local cops have been radioed out into the blizzard and they’re setting an intercept four or five miles down this road. The lanes are all buried in snow and this high-speed chase is now slow – cars crawling forward at 20 or 30 miles per hour. Roadrunner is ahead, his tail lights blinking on and off as he jerks back and forth across the highway – still skillful, even, in this torrent of snow, driving with ease and grace so that I can barely keep my distance behind him, close enough to drive Roadrunner ahead of me into the trap set my local cops and some troopers from the State Patrol, but, far enough, behind to avoid a crash if he were to suddenly stop – crackle of voices on the radio up at the intercept, approaching the intersection at the outskirts of the town. You have to get up pretty early to outsmart Roadrunner, that’s what I’m telling them, that’s my advice – and, of course, although I shouldn’t admit it to you or anyone else, I’m secretly rooting for the Roadrunner, on his side, hoping he’ll somehow dash through the intercept because now that we’ve come all this way, we might as well go to the end, right up to the end of night –

Flare of red lights ahead, this is the end – Goat-beard’s brow shines suddenly blood-red.

It’s not a yard-light, just a lamp at an empty intersection, an empty intersection far out in the country and, now, hip-deep full of snow, and I’m wading, wading through the drifts, staggering up to the light pole and looking up because I can sense that there’s warmth above me, the light shedding its rays down through the chaos of whirling snow – no place to go, really, no place to go –

The Impala plows into the blaze of spinning lights and seems to lose control, skidding wildly to the side, except there must be a street there or an alley or some kind of wormhole in the blizzard, because the car now is running lateral along the blazing barricades of light at the intercept, and he’s escaped again, yet again, too skillful and ingenious to be stopped and the cars scramble, spin their wheels and a couple of them nudge one another and the sirens are all shrieking in indignation as I slow, make the turn also to follow him, fishtailing on the scum of ice under the snow, then, hurrying up a lane behind houses, with garbage cans blown by the gale blocking the way – tail-lights ahead, a turn, then, another turn and ahead a traffic light trembling in the storm overlooking a vacant, peaceful crossroads with snow sculpted into waist-high drifts.

At least, it’s not cold. The storm must have moderated and, perhaps, it’s like a hurricane with a still, warm and humid eye. The snowflakes are still glittering around my head but they seem warm as tear-drops.

Roadrunner’s Impala goes sideways into the parking lot of a big box store, leaping over drifts, diving and leaping like a dolphin and, then, catches a fin on the iron pillar of a lamp – bam! The Impala contorts and slides into a drift, wheels spinning and snow flying, but the car, now disabled –

We’re going nowhere. The cop car light glints on the kidnaper’s teeth. I knock the door open and crash out into the storm that takes away my breath and spins me like a top and, then, a fist crashes into my face not once but twice and my nose goes awry and I fall face-down in the snow, voices bellowing over me --

I’m out, gun drawn, storm in my mouth, ready to beat the shit out of Mr. Roadrunner, adrenalin pumping so that I can hear the roar of my heart and the breath boiling out of me in my ears, a wild run with snow up to my thighs, and there’s a woman ahead of me, diving out of the car and, then, trying to tackle me so I pop her one, a good one, right in the mouth, but she doesn’t go down – these junkies sometimes have superhuman strength – and I pop her again, right on the nose and that does the trick and, then, I’m screaming something like "Show me your hands! Show me your hands!" and I want him to jerk the wrong way so that I can blow him away but the man in the car just wearily raises his hands, one after another as if there were great weights on them, and says: "I’m done, I’m done..."

Strange to feel such overwhelming heat, not just heat, but pressure – as if my chest, my torso is gonna explode with the fire inside and so I claw off my coat and drop it in the snow and, still I’m on fire, so I pull my shirt off, popping the buttons that fall outward and I see them fall, falling and gracefully spiraling down to make indentations in the snow – it takes all my attention to watch the buttons falling away from me – and, then, the heat rises again, persisting, and burns in my throat and I start to pull my undershirt up over my head and get it part way off, covering my eyes, and, then, the exertion is just too much – I have to sit down, I have to find a nice, fluffy place to sit down and rest awhile.

I’ve got the handcuffs on him, squashing the Roadrunner son-of-a-bitch down against the iced-over hood of the crashed Impala. I step back to survey him. Mr. Roadrunner, Mr. Intimidator Dale Fucking Earnhardt, Mr. Blizzard Racer and Roadrunner, there he is: just a little scrawny junky, half my size if that, slim as a girl and old also, with a mullet and a braided red-grey beard like what you might find under the chin of a billy-goat. It’s anti-climactic, definitely anti-climactic, no super-hero here, just a beaten man with sloping shoulders and dull colorless eyes as the other cop cars ride to the rescue across the frozen, empty parking lot –

"You did it, you did it" cops fist-bumping me. "You did it!" But what? Just fortunate, I guess, that no one got hurt. My left hand hurts, and there’s a scrape on my knuckles as if I hit someone, but I can’t recall hitting anyone... "Just a good deal," someone says, "that no one got hurt."