Looking back, Kris remembered the white peacocks. Lapis lazuli irises like glacier water, pure. The rest: snow. Wind-kissed mountain tops bleached into fine, thin feathers. A robe of white and a semi-circular curtain of crystal. He remembered how they stood out, how misplaced they looked in the green grass. It was summer; there shouldn’t be snow during the summer. Yet, here they were: misplaced summertime snowflakes caught in an inner-city zoo.

The year was 1938 and the sun was out. Kris’ dad had taken him to the zoo and he sat on a wooden bench nearby, his eyes torn between his five-year old son and the business pages of The New York Times. Kris’s eyes had no such trouble; they were fully trapped in white snow. His hands, too, were trapped, but not in snow. They were glued by cotton-candy threads to the sun-toasted metal railing, which was painted green to resemble foliage. Iron leaves and steel tree trunks. An empty popcorn bag was swept up into the air, and the sun shone through it. The bag’s red stripes becoming shadowy bars on the peacock enclosure. Kris smiled. This made sense, he thought, this was right. Snow needed an overcast.

With the smell of butter and burnt oil in the air, there was a flash of light and a pop, and Kris was back in his rocking chair at the nursing home in Schenectady. A woman wiped away the saliva glazing over his chin. Her hand touched his skin and he found himself whisked away into 1956.

Kris was standing in a brutal Australian heatwave. It was the Olympics. He looked down and saw that he had a long, wooden pole in his hand. His forearms were exposed and his shoulder blades became wings as they gleamed in the sunlight. A man asked him if he was ready. He nodded. A gun was fired and Kris sprinted off towards the uprights. The ground beneath his feet was hard, thirsty for water. Kris was thirsty too, but he didn’t know it at the time; he was focused on the crossbar. Deftly, he planted his pole in the box and flung himself over the bar. The crowd gasped and little flashbulbs went off with little pops. As Kris reached the apex of his flight, the sun gleamed in his eyes and there was a big pop. He was in bed now, and two men and a woman looked over him.

They were talking, but to Kris they sounded like they were just detuned radios. He reached out to try to turn their knobs. It was four o’clock and WQXR was broadcasting Gould. Maybe they would stop humming static and start singing the piano if he could turn their knobs. As he reached out, one of the men intercepted him and grabbed his hand. Alarmed at first, Kris relaxed. This felt right, Kris thought. This is the snow and the overcast.

The man was his son. Kris didn’t know that. He just knew that the white table clothes at his teenage Thanksgivings had floral patterns and that his Aunt Margaret always drank too much. He knew that his teddy was missing an eye and that Arky Vaughan had 112 runs in 1943 and that if he held his thumb out in front of him, it would look differently depending on which eye he had closed.

The other man, dressed in a white coat, was speaking in static to the woman. She cried as the other man comforted her. Kris looked into the eyes of the man who was holding his hand. They were blue and full of oceans. Kris smiled.

White-coat man came over and whispered something into blue-eyed man’s ear. Blue-eyed man nodded to white-coat man, and then turned to Kris. Bubble-bee words zipped out of the man’s mouth, humming. They pollinated Kris’s eardrums, lacing yellow powder into his incudes and knitting curtains of nectar over his brain.

The bees retreated to their hive and blue-eyed man turned away. The woman replaced him. She didn’t speak with bumbles-bees. She didn’t speak at all. She just cried.

Resting her head into her father’s hand, Kris’s daughter cried the morning dew onto his hospital bedsheets. The doctor placed a consoling hand on her shoulder. Lifting her head, she looked into her father’s eyes, but she saw nothing of him. She just saw two opaque crystal balls, divining the past.

Kris’s daughter stood up and walked away. The doctor walked over to a machine and started turning dials and pressing buttons. Good, Kris thought. Maybe he’s fixing the station. Maybe he’s turning on WQXR.

Comforted, Kris saw blue-eyed man and the woman left the room. White-coat man stayed. Gradually, the room became dimmer and Kris decided that he should go to sleep.

As he closed his eyes, Kris was whisked away to Vietnam. The year was 1971. A stethoscope hung around his neck and a clipboard was tucked beneath his arm. The tent he was standing in was dark green and filled with the sick and dying. Beds filled with half-men and dead homecoming kings, lying in the filth like peasants, crowded the enclosure.

A man on a stretcher was urgently carried over to Kris by two baby-faced men wearing army uniforms. His right leg was gone and his left one was bleeding onto the stretcher, staining its whiteness. A frown, or perhaps a smile, flashed across his scarred face and his hands curled up like dying trees in winter frost. Kris looked into the man’s eyes. They were white and empty. There was a chatter of gunfire outside the tent and then a loud pop. The world was pulled out from beneath Kris’s feet.

This time, there was no nursing home and there was no hospital.

Just darkness.