Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  He stared after her as the limo lurched forward. Several well-dressed black men in suits and ties and kente-cloth robes crossed the street in front of them, tending a small group of children. Boys on Rollerblades swept past, and the men smiled, calling out names: Robert, Fayal, Assad.

  Trip turned away and watched as the park slid by them. On the broken sidewalk a man was selling coffins made of plywood, with a small and more elegant model of carved pine set atop them with a sign: Will Make To Order. Children hawked plastic shoelaces. Where the sidewalk trailed off into rubble, there were people selling food. Canned goods mostly, but one woman had a case of peanut butter. Trip stared longingly at the red and blue jars, touched the pocket where his wallet formed a reassuring square. Another woman was selling water from a blue five-gallon container, measuring shots into a chipped plastic mug, filling milk containers and those Day-Glo plastic drinktubes that kids wore around their necks.

  Then the hired car turned onto a side street where the alleys had become canals, the main avenues a yellow churn of taxis and hired vehicles. They were approaching midtown. The driver lowered her shield and pointed out a few landmarks to him: Grand Central Terminal’s sandbagged facade, the never-completed Disney Towers. Trip rubbed his eyes and mimed interest.

  His mouth was dry, his palms damp. The limo stopped abruptly, in front of a seemingly endless line of other limousines and expensive hired cars. The driver smiled and adjusted her mirrored sunglasses.

  “Okay. Here she is. Got any idea how long you’ll be?”

  It took him a minute to grasp the fact that here was the headquarters of GFI Worldwide Inc. He stuck his face against the window and peered upward, but could make out nothing but some kind of flashing marquee and, above that, a blinding slant of glass or metal that reflected the rippling sky. Beyond the line of waiting limos an immense crowd passed in and out of enormous revolving doors, like a huge deck of cards being endlessly shuffled.

  The Pyramid itself was so huge it seemed almost extraneous, a monolithic backdrop to the street. He thought of what he had heard someone say on TV, shortly after the Pyramid opened but before the first waves of failed terrorist attacks directed at what had, so far, proved to be an inviolable structure. That it was like a hive, that the Pyramid had been constructed with hivelike precision and efficiency and speed. That, despite the myriad restaurants and boutiques and studios inside, despite the theaters and offices and all the galleria trappings of upscale commerce, it did not seem to have been designed with human beings in mind.

  “Sir?”

  Another moment before Trip remembered that he was “sir.” “Uh, I dunno. I mean, probably not long. I’m just picking someone up. We’re going to the museum.”

  The driver nodded, then popped her door and slid into the street. An instant later Trip’s door opened and, with a flourish, she beckoned him out.

  “They’re expecting you, sir? Security’s tight here.”

  Trip’s throat contracted. “Yeah.” His voice came out in a whisper, but the driver seemed satisfied. She smiled again and pointed at the building’s immense maw, the doors changing color to keep pace with the rainbow sky.

  “Well, I’ll be here!” Once more she took her place behind the wheel. Trip swallowed, shoved his hands into his pockets, and forged on into the building.

  He had to go through a metal detector and a crowded disinfectant chamber, where a yawning woman in a surgical mask gave him a perfunctory blast of Viconix.

  “Any recent infections?” She glanced at his face and hands. A masked guard held a dog that sniffed Trip perfunctorily. Trip smiled at the dog; then, as the guard motioned him on, went through the door, into the Pyramid. And outside.

  He gasped, stopping so quickly that he was immediately buffeted by more people hurrying by.

  “Watch it, asshole,” someone hissed. Trip stepped aside, blinking in amazement.

  Overhead, the sun shone radiantly in a blue sky. Golden sun like the first day of summer vacation, sky so brilliant it was like blue paint thrown into his eyes. A faint warm wind was blowing, just enough that Trip could feel the hair on the back of his neck stir. The breeze smelled sweetly of earth and pine needles, and fresh water. Beneath his feet the ground felt uneven. But it was all there, branches of trees moving against very high thin white clouds, light exploding behind leaves and limbs in a thousand rayed parhelions. There were people everywhere, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, walking and running and talking animatedly. Most of them were expensively dressed and masked, in what looked to Trip like evening clothes, or outfits for a costume party; but other people were wearing ostentatiously casual outdoor clothing, the kind you bought at L.L. Bean once upon a time, or from catalogs that pretended to outfit expeditions.

  And there was not the cacophony of sound he might have expected: instead all those voices spiraled up and out of earshot, like doves loosed in an auditorium. He stood with his mouth open, as though to catch rain upon his tongue, his eyes closed because you can’t look into the sun. He felt dazed with unthinking joy. It wasn’t until someone else elbowed him, though with an apology this time, that he opened his eyes and began looking around with intense curiosity, suspicion almost, trying to figure out how it was done.

  At first he couldn’t tell. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the light he began to get a fix on the immense space soaring above him. Somewhere, very very high above the trees, above the clouds even, and the radiant sun, there seemed to be wires, or catwalks, or some kind of grid that moved in subtle ways, so that his eyes were never quite able to focus on what was there. When he turned to look around, he saw in the distance numerous mezzanines and balconies and glass elevators that did not climb any walls—there were no walls that he could see—but crept along glowing green cables that slanted above the crowds like a spider’s draglines, moving toward some unimaginably distant apex. When he looked down he saw earth, and stones. There was a faint purl of running water, the smell of crushed ferns. But he saw no pebbles, no twigs or fallen leaves. And when he began to walk, slowly, as he used to on the beach at Moody’s Island looking for shells, he saw that all the stones were fairly large, and flat. When he tried to nudge one with his foot it didn’t move. None of them did. He strolled past several trees, white birches with great masses of granite grouped around them, like benches, where people sat and laughed. Ferns grew beneath the trees, and moss; but when he looked carefully he could see that the ferns were set in some kind of elaborate planter, designed to look like stone. So were the trees. He noticed other things—faucets poking up from the ground like mushrooms, cables threaded along tree trunks like vines. After a few minutes even some of the people started to look odd: they smiled at him, but their gaze remained on him a little too long: if he glanced back they would still be staring at him, and only pretending to have a conversation. He wondered if they were security guards, or if someone in this vast complex actually paid people to sit around in mountain-climbing gear and look as though they were enjoying the great outdoors.

  This thought brought Trip to his senses. He tried to look purposeful, jostling into people until he found an information kiosk where he was directed to yet another glass booth from which enclosed walkways radiated like the arms of a sea star. He went inside and sat on a patchwork sofa as another security dog nuzzled his legs, waiting as a guard buzzed Nellie Candry’s office.

  “You’re all clear.” The guard watched Trip sign a logbook, then pointed him down one of the enclosed walkways, to an elevator. A minute later Trip got off at the thirtieth level, dizzy and slightly nauseated by the ride.

  “Welcome to Agrippa Music,” a voice announced. Trip opened his mouth to respond, snapped it shut when he saw there was no one there. “Bien venu à Agrippa Music,” the voice went on, repeating the welcome in Japanese and German and Spanish. “Living in the Light…”

  Everywhere he looked there were video screens showcasing various Agrippa acts. It took him a moment to find the door, cobalt glass with AGRIPPA MUSIC spelled o
ut in shifting holographic letters. Behind it a young man sat monitoring phone calls.

  “Hi!” he called cheerily as Trip entered. Silvery plasmer implants hid his eyes, but he didn’t wear a mask, and his smile seemed genuine. “You must be Trip Marlowe! Come on in, come on in!” He adjusted his body mic and announced, “Nellie? Your date’s here,” then gestured at a chair. “Sit down, honey, she’ll be right with you.”

  Trip’s heart sank when Nellie Candry stepped into the reception area, alone. “Aren’t you sweet to ask Marzie out!” she said, then laughed. She wasn’t wearing a mask today, or heavy makeup. Beneath a sheen of light foundation her scars had the silvery roughness of beech bark; the cicatrices left by petra virus gleamed like lacquer. “Hey, don’t worry—she’s upstairs, waiting for you. Did you think you were going to be stuck with me ?”

  “He should be so lucky!” the receptionist cried as Nellie pulled Trip through another door.

  “So. The Museum of Natural History.” Nellie grinned as they padded down a hall carpeted with thick spongy black rubber, the second life of a hundred old steel radials. “Is that where you nice Xian boys go on a first date?”

  Trip tried to smile. “Yeah, I guess. I’ve never been, actually. I wanted to see the planetarium.”

  Nellie laughed again; it made the vertical gashes on her cheeks move in a strange way, as though they were composed of a different material than the rest of her face. “The planetarium! God, that’s great! Real James Dean, huh?” Trip looked at her blankly. “You know, Rebel Without a Cause ? Oh shit, never mind. They never finished the renovation there, you knew that, right? Here we are.”

  They turned a corner, and she took him by the arm.

  “Listen,” she said in a lower voice. They stood in a softly lit alcove before a set of black glass doors with Nellie Candry etched in gold script. “I just want you to know this is a really nice thing you’re doing. It really means a lot to Marz. She’s had a hard time in the last year or so, coming from a war zone, you know? She and I are still getting used to each other, and she hasn’t really made any friends at the Brearley School yet. So it’s a pretty big deal that someone like you would take her somewhere. She’s just a kid, you know?”

  A flutter of panic in Trip’s chest: how old was she, anyway?

  Nellie rattled on. “But I figured, well, we’re nice guys, right?” She cocked her head and gazed at him with those disconcertingly lovely eyes. “Us Christians. I mean Xians. You especially. I mean, I probably wouldn’t let her go out with that guy from Slag Hammadi, you know?”

  Trip blushed, but already Nellie was steering him through the black doors and into her office. There were posters tacked to the walls, rollaway stands holding video monitors and VCRs and, surprisingly, piles of old-fashioned silver film canisters. In one corner leaned some kind of staff, topped with a grotesque wooden mask and deer’s antlers.

  “My secret life,” Nellie confessed. She paused to rub a strip of acetate between her fingers. “I started out as a maker of documentary films. Then I got sick—”

  She grimaced. Trip looked away from her scarred face, to her hands, and noticed that she wore a dull gold ring like Marzana’s. “—though actually, I’ve got another film project I’m working on now. This A&R stuff, it’s just a day job, you know? Not that I don’t take it seriously,” she added, grinning. “Okay, Marzie! Company!”

  Nellie edged past Trip and slid behind a tiny banana yellow desk strewn with IT discs and promotional gadgets: Viconix dispensers, crucifix penlights, body gloves. Atop her telephone perched a snowy owl mask. “Here he is. Now, if you guys can hang here for just a minute—”

  “Hey,” said Trip, trying to keep his voice from breaking. “Marz. Hi.”

  Marz lifted her head and peered out from between the arms of the chair in front of Nellie’s desk.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  A fringe of corn-silk hair hung across her eyes. She wore very tight, white jodhpurs, a fuzzy lavender sweater, and a hugely oversize raincoat of transparent pink vinyl that made a crunching sound when she moved. Her feet were clad in pink plastic mules with bunnies on them.

  Trip shook his head. It was the end of March, and freezing outside.

  “Aren’t you going to be cold?”

  Marz shot him a disdainful look. “No.”

  Nellie laughed. “What’d I tell you?” She pointed a finger at Trip and smiled triumphantly. “You’ll take better care of her than me—I told her to wear that coat.”

  He sat uneasily, staring at the blond girl. Nellie was asking him questions—had he ever made an IT recording? Had he ever been to New York before? Had he ever done drugs? IZE?

  This last was odd enough that Trip looked away, startled. “Drugs? Jeez, no.”

  “Never?” Nellie tilted her head, her eyes unreadable: was he being tested? She picked up several 8xl0s, black-and-white photos of blank-faced people standing in line, and fanned herself with them. “A lot of people don’t really think of IZE as a drug, you know. I mean, they practically had FDA approval before—”

  Her hand waved disdainfully at the wall with its square of dark protective glass. Outside the glimmering could be glimpsed only as arabesques of black and gray moving above the skyscrapers. “—before all this came down.”

  Trip hunched his shoulders. He wanted to leave. This woman was acting fucking bizarre. “Uh, yeah. I guess. But I don’t do drugs. I mean, I’m not just saying that. I never, ever did anything. My father was an alcoholic and he, like, killed himself. I signed a pledge when I was in sixth grade, and I’ve kept it.”

  Nellie smiled. “Of course. I read that somewhere, or no—I saw you on Midnight, that’s it. Well, that’s great, Trip, really!” Her eyes grew soft as she leaned across the desk, smoothing the photos and setting them aside. “’Cause a lot of these bands, they’re just cashing in on the whole Xian phenomenon, just riding the wave—but you feel like the real thing to me. I think you’re just going to get bigger and bigger, Trip. I think you’re going to be huge.”

  He nodded, forcing himself to smile; then let his glance ride back to Marz. She stared at him, eyes narrowed, and very slowly licked her upper lip.

  The phone rang. “Okay!” crowed Nellie, cradling the receiver in her palm. “Off you go, kiddies. Marz—be good—”

  They left. Even with her head down and eyes blanketed by her hair, Marz managed to navigate the Pyramid lobby with enviable ease. At her side Trip tried desperately to think of something to say. He did remember to let her go first into the limo, the driver holding the door open for them.

  “The museum?” she asked. Trip nodded, and they were off.

  The limo let them off in front of the planetarium’s unfinished new entrance, hidden behind plywood and rusted scaffolding. Trip told the driver to come back in three hours. Then he scrambled out behind Marz, stepping on her raincoat so that she lurched forward against the curb.

  “Oh—hey, I’m sorry, I—”

  He tried to grab her arm but came up with a crackling handful of vinyl. As the car pulled away he found himself staring down at her small pale face, nestled in its bright pink wrappings like a marzipan sweet.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and headed toward the entrance. For a moment he stared, stunned by the sight of the girl’s gumdrop coat flapping around her white-clad legs. Then he hurried after her.

  He paid for their tickets, and they stood in line for the first show of the day. The planetarium complex seemed not so much unfinished as partially excavated from an archaeological dig. There were yawning pits crisscrossed by boards and metal catwalks, monolithic objects—kiosks, dioramas, monitors, IT booths—strewn seemingly at random throughout the cavernous space, and a fine layer of sawdust and grit overall. Trip felt as though he were lurching around inside of someone else’s movie, doing simple things—buying tickets, waiting behind the worn brass stanchions—without actually sensing the two slips of paper in his hand or the rough velvet rope beneath his fingers. He had never been on his o
wn like this before, not in a city. Was it okay to pay with a fifty-dollar bill instead of a credit card? What would happen if he took off his heavy old pea coat? Should he give Marz her own ticket, or hold them both? There were only a handful of other people waiting to get in, an annoyingly convivial family whose masks identified them as part of TeamAmericon! and a small school group wearing uniforms and wrist monitors, desert boots and tiny ID implants that glowed on the backs of their hands.

  “So.” He coughed nervously. “You ever been here before?”

  Marz shook her head. “No.” She stared hungrily at the school group. Trip watched her face, the way her tongue flicked out to lick her lower lip and her strange violet eyes as she watched the children elbow each other and snigger at their cabal of chaperones. Her expression was sad yet intense; after a minute she looked up at him.

  “I used to wear one of those monitors.” She leaned back so that her arm stuck out from its plastic wrapping, displaying a wrist so thin Trip marveled that anything could have remained there without sliding off. “When Nellie first brought me over. But I was allergic.” She traced a circle where the flesh still held a grayish shadow, like the stain left by a cheap metal bracelet. “See?”

  Trip nodded, reached with a tentative finger to stroke the smooth soft skin inside her wrist, then to touch the simple gold band on her ring finger. “Did it hurt?”

  “No.” She glanced at the schoolchildren. The line started to move, the children arranging themselves in an orderly row alongside their teachers. “I wish I still had it.”

  Trip handed their tickets to a solemn usher, and they went inside. The huge dimly lit space reminded him of a cathedral he had visited once, barely occupied and chilly as this place was and with the same whisper of ambient music and rustling papers. It smelled faintly of vanilla and balsam disinfectant. He took Marz’s hand and led her to the far side of the room, where no one else was sitting, and they took their seats in a middle row. The program started, an energetically produced but intrinsically dull explication of the atmospheric effects that produced the glimmering and which now seemed to be giving birth to still more and stranger celestial events. There was a protracted discussion of millennial cults and prophecies through the ages. Trip yawned and scrunched way down in his seat. Beside him Marz did the same, her raincoat popping explosively.