Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “It’ll make me stand out.” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt: he had already dyed his white choir robe deep scarlet, using a packet of Rit Dye from the Moody’s Island beach store. “You know. When I sing.”

  “You already stand out,” said John Drinkwater. He was the choir director. A skinned stick of a man who wouldn’t allow his own kids to use the computer in the broken-down trailer that was the island school. But he sounded amused. “But sure, okay. We’ll try it.”

  It was August the first time Trip wore the red robe. They were singing at the Grace Fellowship Baptist Church over to Jonesport, not a long drive; otherwise, probably he would’ve passed out from the smell of Rit Dye. Deep scarlet came off on Trip’s hands, his skinny freckled arms and chest, and even his face. But it was so hot inside the church, the choir’s singing so pure and exalted, that no one at Grace Fellowship even noticed.

  “Probably they just thought your face was all red and you were goin’ t’ pass out.” Jerry Disney fanned himself with his own crumpled-up robe and stared out the bus window at rows of boarded-up gas stations and abandoned shopping malls. “I sure thought I was.”

  After that he always wore the red robe. When Trip grew out of it, John Drinkwater had his wife sew him another one, with fabric that came all the way from Bangor. And when Trip grew out of that one, John Drinkwater had his wife make him a dozen, in various sizes, “So’s you won’t ever have to be without.”

  He’d been Trip Marlowe then, a golden star in heaven’s crown, for sure the star of the Fisher of Men Children’s Choir. Summer and winter they traveled inland, to Bangor and Caribou and Presque Isle, and up coastal Route One to Calais, which was practically Canada. Twenty-four children and their chaperones crammed into the church’s old blue school bus, where the stench of ethanol vied with that of squashed peanut-butter sandwiches and the Dignam twins, who always had to go to the bathroom. John Drinkwater sat in front behind Mrs. Spruce, who drove, and even after they sang themselves hoarse at church suppers and Christian Coalition fundraisers, country fairs and weddings, funerals and baptisms; even at twelve midnight, when the littlest children were so tired they lay across their mothers’ laps and wailed, John Drinkwater made them sing some more.

  Jesus is my friend and always will be

  Jesus walks beside me every day…

  Exhausted as they were, the children sounded beautiful. Outside might be nothing but ravaged forests left by bankrupt paper companies, or the potato-field wasteland of Aroostook County; but inside the bus it was heaven. Even the poor bleary-eyed mothers would take a break from rummaging in paper sacks full of moldering apples and bottles of Coke, to lean back in their seats and smile and clap in time.

  Don’t expect me to cry

  For I will never die!

  Jesus is the sun who shines for me…

  When the hymn was done they kissed the children, smoothing the boys’ buzz-cut hair and adjusting the girls’ dirty pink headbands, and told everyone how wonderful they sounded.

  “Like angels, now then, hush, let’s try and get some sleep.”

  That was what the mothers said as the bus jounced over the bridge to Verona Island, or as it sat with the engine turned off in Bath, waiting for the foot traffic at the ironworks to clear.

  But later, when the children finally passed out in their mothers’ laps, those chaperones who were still awake would turn to each other and nod toward the back of the bus where Trip always sat.

  “Isn’t he cunnin’, that one? When he sings! If only his mother could’ve heard him. He could be a star, you know. He really could be a star.”

  It was Trip they spoke of, of course. He heard them and tried not to be proud, and it wasn’t so hard, because he didn’t feel proud, not really. It wasn’t like the way he felt at school, when someone told him he’d done a good job with an assignment he’d spent too many hours trying to understand. Because he worked at that, he worked at school, even though he knew it was useless. He was smart, he knew that, he wasn’t like the Dignams. But reading was difficult for him, and there never seemed to be a point to it.

  So he just kept on singing. When he outgrew the children’s choir he joined the church’s praise and worship band, part of the youth group for teenagers. He was seventeen when John Drinkwater told him he might be able to go to college on a music scholarship. That was before John Drinkwater realized that there wasn’t anywhere Trip Marlowe couldn’t go. Not with a face like that; not with a voice like that.

  Because if you were to take a cruse made of ice and drop it, the sound it would make, the sound of cold and crystal shattering—that would be the sound of the children’s choir. That would be their voices.

  But the glitter in the air, the arcs of light and color and the stunned silence thereafter—that would be Trip Marlowe.

  He had thought he would never fall. And, falling, he had never for an instant believed that he might crash. That the scattered pieces would be him. That there’d be no one there to catch him, no one there to help him gather what was left. Which was just Trip Marlowe, another little broken idol.

  Once, there would have been someone there to hear him. John Drinkwater, at least, or Jerry Disney, or, for a few days, the blond girl. Now there was no one. When an angel falls, John Drinkwater said, it falls alone. Nobody but Satan hears it hit the ground.

  Only of course that wasn’t true. Because Trip was sure that everyone on God’s green earth would hear the explosion when he crashed and burned. He’d been the first Xian artist to receive full media superstar treatment, with his “Don’t Forsake Me” video in constant rotation worldwide, an interactive disc, global concert tours, and Trip’s face on the cover of every mainstream magazine and gracing computer screens from Salt Lake City to Beijing. It was the face that did it, of course. Equal parts choirboy and catamite, his strong jaw offset by that full lower lip with its hint of a pout, those slanted electric blue eyes; the faint golden stubble on his chin and his yellow hair, like the sky streaked with emerald and bronze, the simple gold chain and cross nestled against his chest. John Drinkwater had a fit when he saw Trip’s dyed hair. Peter Paul Joseph, the president of Mustard Seed Music, only nodded, his thick face impassive but his eyes sharp and bright as needles.

  “The kids’ll eat it up,” he drawled, and gave Trip a look that made the singer’s flesh prickle. “Hope you’re ready for it, Trip.” Then, to John Drinkwater, “He can paint his face blue for all I care. But not the dancing. None of that jumping into the crowd stuff. You understand, Trip—gets out of hand. You could get hurt.”

  To make sure it didn’t get out of hand, Peter Paul Joseph hired a manager for the band. By then they were calling themselves Stand in the Temple. The manager was Lucius Chappell, a lean young man only four years older than Trip, with lupine eyes and a Maltese cross tattooed onto his shaved skull. He had put himself through law school managing another Xian group, and eventually signed them to a major label. When Trip and the other band members saw their morality clause, it was Lucius who had drawn it up, and Lucius who presented the signed document with a flourish to Peter Paul Joseph.

  “Let the games begin,” Lucius said. His smile revealed white teeth glittering with tiny silver crosses that to Trip looked like miniature gravestones.

  “Damn cracker,” Jerry muttered disdainfully; but Lucius just laughed.

  At Trip’s insistence, John Drinkwater stayed with the band. There was a pretense of giving him duties, like checking everyone into hotels. But really he was just Trip’s moral support, his last threadbare lifeline to Moody’s Island. It was Lucius who made the arrangements, Lucius who knew how to get fuel for the tour bus and food for the crew, Lucius who somehow got through to booking agents and reporters and online magazines when the phone lines were down and the rest of the world seemed paralyzed.

  “I got connections,” Lucius would say, raising his eyebrows and grinning to show his cruciferous enamel. He did, too. Not just with an extensive network of Christian compounds with
impressive stockpiles of ethanol, petroleum, and advanced information technologies; but with radical Xian groups like Blood on the Door, which targeted women who had had abortions, and the Blue Antelope Fellowship, youthful preservationists whose firebombings had already killed twenty-three legislators who opposed various endangered species acts. In fact, Lucius’s outside interests took up much of the time in which he should have been monitoring Stand in the Temple. Refueling stops provided opportunities to talk to the pro-life radicals, who in some parts of the South and Northeast controlled much of the black market in firearms as well as fuel. There were cranks, too, with real metal spines protruding from their skulls alongside spiky hair, and metal chastity belts dangling from their waists and groins. Onstage Trip avoided their eyes, meth-crazed and staring, and tried to filter out their manic shrieks when Jerry struck the opening chords of a song they recognized.

  It proved more difficult to avoid Blue Antelope. Radical Xian environmentalism was Chappell’s pet cause, and Blue Antelope was its army. During and after performances, he arranged meetings with local members and insisted that Trip greet them. The organization’s demographics were similar to those of the band’s ideal audience: young, white, rebellious Christians who had co-opted the term “Xian” from their neo-pagan counterparts. Their manager even encouraged Trip to write songs inspired by Blue Antelope.

  “They’ve got money, man!” Lucius rubbed his fingers together and leered. “Many talents, Trippo—not to mention God on our side.”

  “Uh, I’ll think about it,” Trip demurred, wondering how good it would be for album and ticket sales if word got out they were writing songs for the terrorist group that had firebombed an Arizona hospital because its new temporary wing encroached upon a nesting site of the blue-throated hummingbird.

  “Where does he get off with this ‘our side’ shit?” Jerry fumed; but Trip had other things to think about. Because, busy as he was with Blue Antelope, Lucius Chappell wasn’t paying much attention to Trip’s gyrations onstage.

  So:

  No dancin’ in Anson! Trip wailed in Texas, his long arms and hands swaying above his head as he rocked back and forth in one spot onstage. No dancing in Lansing! No waltzing in New Paltz! No moshin’ in Tucson! During each performance he’d stay resolutely in one place, at the very edge of the stage, blue eyes flaring as his hands moved, sinuous and suggestive as one of those Javanese dancers he had seen on the Great Big World Channel in a hotel outside Austin. Wayang-wong, their dance was called; it had impressed the singer mightily.

  The band almost always stayed in Christian-run hotels or hostels. Mustard Seed wanted to ensure that their artists were not exposed to the wrong kind of people. Even more insidious was the wrong kind of video programming: since the glimmering began, television had become a sort of deranged pachinko game.

  Usually, Trip wouldn’t be able to pick up any stations at all. Other times he’d find himself watching local news, and the fat friendly weatherman would suddenly be displaced by heaving thighs and breasts, mass atrocities in Nigeria, entire city blocks evacuated because of abandoned cars, a reasoned discussion of filmed suicide by a panel of mori artists.

  “Shoot. Talking.” Jerry Disney shook his head in disgust as the blurred image of a mass grave abruptly changed. He stood and walked to the door. “I’m gonna go eat.”

  That was how Trip was left alone in a hotel room in Terre Haute. Onscreen, the mori artists disappeared. The Disaster Channel flickered in and out of sight with a quick look at a mud slide in Arizona, the heroin overdose of a singer Trip had opened for once in Boston, an unsuccessful surface-to-air missile strike against a commuter 707. Then the channel changed again. The moss-grown ruins of a pagan temple filled the screen.

  “…ritual in Probolinggo, Java,” a woman’s voice said softly. Trip sat on the edge of his bed and stared transfixed at the retrofitted Magnavox.

  On the temple steps stood a beautiful young man wearing mask-white makeup and silks stiff with pearls and glass beads. From his head rose a crown made of tropical flowers and long blue-black feathers. It trembled as he danced, his bare feet sliding across a cracked stone platform strewn with leaves. Behind the dancer the sky rippled mauve and grass green. The narrator, her voice sibilant and hushed as a child’s, recited in perfect, Oxford-accented English:

  King Klono, the wanderer from afar, has come to Java seeking the Princess Chandra Kirana. He has seen her only in his dreams and fallen in love with her, but his love will destroy him. He wears red to show his passion and gold because he is a god; but even gods die if they forsake their kingdoms for the base hungers of the world. So did the Victorious One, the Buddha, warn us: “Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing magicians phantoms of the Kali Yuga”—that is to say, the final age that is now upon us: the end of the end.

  The end of the end. Trip was still repeating the words to himself when the television reception blipped out completely.

  That night he wrote a song, staying up until John Drinkwater knocked at the door to wake him the next morning. On the bus he taught Jerry and the others the chord changes. They even had time to practice before that night, their very first New York appearance. The Beacon had its own power supply, and it took the road crew longer than usual to set up. In the green room, Trip and the rest of the band went over the song by the wavering light of a sodium lamp, then joined hands for a final prayer. When Stand in the Temple finally took the stage, Trip was shaking so hard his teeth hurt from chattering.

  “This is, uh, something I wrote last night. A song—a song about the age we live in.” His body mic gave a weird hiss to the words, as though he were speaking from a room that was on fire. “The End of the End.”

  The words were mostly nonsense, cribbed from the Bible John Drinkwater had given him long ago. I possess the keys of hell and death, I will give you the morning star. But the melody was eerie, even coming out of Jerry Disney’s poorly tuned electric guitar. Four chords echoing again and again, with Trip’s voice whispering the refrain:

  “The end of the end. The end of the end…”

  The audience went crazy for it, and finally Trip did, too, diving into the crowd and letting them catch him, letting them carry him, hand to hand and mouth to mouth, girls kissing him and boys, too, their hands like feeding starfish as he swam across them until Jerry finally pulled him back onto the stage, killing Trip’s body mic in the process. He lost his cross, too, the chain yanked from around his neck by an eager fan. Lucius bought him another the next day, elbowing amongst Russian gangsters and silver-masked drug dealers down in the jewelry district.

  “Here,” he said, draping the chain over Trip’s head. An elaborate Abyssinian cross dangled from it, larger than the other one, at once archaic and fashionable. “They’ll notice this one.”

  That was how it started, the end of the end, the beginning of the end. When Trip started dancing, everything changed. Within a week, Stand in the Temple became the first Xian band ever to hold the Number One slot on Billboard International.

  CHRISTIAN RIGHT’S DARLING TURNS SALOME! shrieked the New York Beacon. XIAN STAR WALKS ON WATER! CHECK RADIUM @ Z.RO.com FOR PIXNFAX!

  And later, when his first single was released and his picture appeared everywhere, silvery blue threads streaming from his eyes like tears, TRIP TAKES A TRIP! The holographic cover showed Trip posed as a blond Christ in Gethsemane, the image saved from smarminess or cries of heresy by the sheer intensity of Trip’s expression as he gazed upward at a golden bar of light slanting down from the sky. It was an expression that was at once exultant and doomed. The music’s apocalyptic mood suited those days of wrath: the web downloaded two million copies in twenty-three hours.

  His audience grew. There were still the church groups bused in from suburbs and compounds and housing projects, and the mainstream alternative fans; but now there were others, too. Blocks of tickets were bought by Blue Antelope and other progressive fellowships. Trip could recognize the former by their masks.
No demure white surgeons’ masks or the simple black crosses favored by mainstream Christians, but colorful representations of African elephants and pandas and the blue antelope, which was the first African species to be extinguished by humans, hunted to death by 1801 for dog meat. And, of course, there were droves of new fans who were obviously either newly anointed Xians or just old-fashioned heretics out for a good time listening to bad news.

  More confusions, blood transfusions

  The news of today will be the movies of tomorrow

  ’Cause the water’s turned to blood

  And if you don’t think so

  Go turn on your tub…

  In vain Trip argued with Xian talk-show hosts and church leaders. “It’s not just me, you know.” Online and onscreen his boyish tenor was soft, almost pleading: if you had no visuals, you might think he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “Some guy gets onstage and moves around, what’s the big deal? It’s these times, everyone’s so repressed—I’m just trying to, ummm, put some tension, some joy into it. I mean, even if it really is the end of the world, I don’t think Jesus meant for us never to have a good time.”

  OUR ran a sidebar—GIVE US THAT GOOD-TIME RELIGION!—and sales continued to soar. During their second, fateful New York engagement, Lucius Chappell spent a lot of time speaking quietly and intently on the phone. A&R people started showing up backstage after the shows. Messages from entertainment moguls began appearing on Trip’s knee top. Foot and bike couriers arrived at the Stamford Four Seasons where the band was staying, their faces hidden behind masks, glinting the metallic green of a beetle’s wing or striped like yellow jackets, black and atomic gold. The couriers bore contracts, T-shirts, vacu-sealed bags of coffee. When these offerings were ignored, corporate flacks in ragged Xian garb would flag Trip in the street and offer to take him to lunch. And one afternoon Trip got a surprise visit from Peter Paul Joseph in his Stamford hotel suite.