Read The Snow Queen for Free Online Page B

floor. They believed that they lived on the brink of a holy and ecstatic conjuring of metal and glass and silent, rubberized speed.
    The world is older now. It can, at times, seem very old indeed.
    They will not reelect George Bush. They cannot reelect George Bush.
    Tyler pushes the thought out of his mind. It would be foolish to spend this lambent early hour obsessing. He’s got a song to finish.
    So as not to awaken Beth, he leaves his guitar in the corner. He whisper-sings, a cappella, the verse he wrote last night.
    To walk the frozen halls at night
    To find you on your throne of ice
    To melt this sliver in my heart
    Oh, that’s not what I came for
    No, that’s not what I came for.
    Hmm. It’s crap, is it?
    The trouble is …
    The trouble is he’s determined to write a wedding song that won’t be all treacle and devotion, but won’t be cool or calm, either. How, exactly, do you write a song for a dying bride? How do you account for love and mortality (the real thing, not some till-death-do-us-part throwaway) without morbidity?
    It needs to be a serious song. Or, rather, it needs not to be a frivolous song.
    The melody will help. Please, let the melody help. This time, though, the lyrics need to come first. Once the lyrics feel right (once they feel less wrong), he’ll lay them over … a minimal tune, something simple and direct, not childish of course but possessed of a childlike, beginner’s earnestness, a beginner’s innocence of tricks. It should be all major chords, with one minor, at the end of the bridge—that single jolt of gravitas; that moment when the lyrics’ romantic solemnity departs from the contrast of its upbeat chords and matches—fleetingly—a darkness in the music itself. The song should reside in the general vicinity of Dylan, of the Velvet Underground. It should not be faux-Dylan, not fake Lou Reed; it should be original (
original
, naturally; preferably
unprecedented
; preferably
tinged with genius
), but it helps, it helps a little, to aim in a general direction. Dylan’s righteous banishment of sentimentality, Reed’s ability to mingle passion with irony.
    The melody should have … a shimmering honesty, it should be egoless, no
Hey, I can really play this guitar, do you get that?
Because the song is an unvarnished love-shout, an implorement tinged with … anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosopher, the anger of a poet, an anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away; that we’re being shown marvels but reminded, always, that they don’t belong to us, they’re sultan’s treasures, we’re lucky (we’re expected to feel lucky) to have been invited to see them at all.
    And there’s this, as well. The song has to be infused with … if not anything as banal as hope, an assertion of an ardency that can, if this is humanly possible (and the song must insist that it is), follow the bride in her journey to the netherworld, abide there with her. It has to be a song in which a husband and singer declares himself to be not only a woman’s life-mate, but her death-mate as well, although he, helpless, unconsulted, will keep on living.
    Good luck with that one.
    He pours himself more coffee, draws out a final, really final, line on the tabletop. Maybe he’s just not …
awake
enough to be gifted. Maybe one day, why not today, he’ll bust out of his lifelong drowse.
    Would “shiver” be better than “sliver”?
To melt this shiver in my heart
?
    No. It wouldn’t.
    That repetition at the end—is it forceful or cheap?
    Should he try for a half-rhyme with “heart”? Is it too sentimental to use the word “heart” at all?
    He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
    To walk the frozen halls at night
    To find you on your