If I was going to join Mort’s staff, however, I had to elevate my work. Over my first two years at the magazine, I’d never stopped seeking to impress him. As I sat at my desk that day in December and transcribed the Daniel Eastham interview, the author’s voice droning in my ears, I kept glancing over at Ross Briggs. His Enron piece was his second 12,000-word article of 2001. That’s what I wanted to do, something that mattered, not a profile of a soon-to-be-midlist novelist, as if I were just an extension of the publisher’s publicity arm. I wanted something to exceed what Mort expected of me, a story that would make him say, as he’d said about the igloo piece, “That’s when you reached a new level.”

3.

In the igloo, I went mute.

That’s how the story began in the Post-Intelligencer.

Mom never liked to talk about the accident, but over the years, I extracted enough from her to plug the gaps in my memory. By the time I wrote about it for the P-I, it was as if I remembered it myself.

When I was five, Mom and Dad took me to visit my grandparents in a Pittsburgh suburb over Christmas. Of the many cousins also visiting, I was the youngest, only barely tolerated in their group, which included some kids from the neighborhood. None of them could’ve been older than ten or eleven, but at age five, they seemed to me like the keepers of the secrets of adulthood. I allowed them to do what they liked with me: paint me like a clown, put me in goal to face slapshots, send me downhill on a trash can lid, it didn’t matter.

A few days before Christmas, my dad finally coaxed Mom away from the family to go to a bar in the city. He was always trying to get her to loosen up and quit organizing other people’s time. While my grandparents dozed by the TV, I followed my cousins to the front yard of one of the neighborhood kids. It was late afternoon. The dead stalks in the garden speared the crusted snow. The kid wanted to show off his igloo. At least that’s the word he used for a tunnel he’d burrowed into a tall snowbank that had been plowed off the street. He envisioned the igloo as a kind of clubhouse, but none of my cousins wanted to crawl into its cold black mouth. Whether I volunteered or was coerced, no one later confessed, and I don’t remember; there wasn’t any difference.

I see myself on hands and knees, wriggling into the hole, the attention of my cousins pushing me forward like a wind. In my purple snowsuit, it was a tight squeeze, but then the tunnel gave onto a shapeless cavern. The light of day faintly soaked the frozen walls, turning everything blue.