Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  Who is the third who walks always beside you?

  Who is that on the other side of you?

  —and then the air was split by the ringing thunder of a gong. The dome blazed white and gold, the constellations suddenly visible in all their primal glory. Superimposed across this radiance was an immense rotating wheel and the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.

  “SUPERSTITION DIES HARD.” No longer the soothing tones of the astronomer, but a man’s voice, boomingly confident.

  “EVEN THE HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGERY OF THE HUBBLE AND DESCARTES TELESCOPES CANNOT DESTROY CENTURIES OF IGNORANCE AND FEAR. YET EACH DAY CONTINUES TO BRING US NEW DISCOVERIES, NEW SKILLS, AND NEW TOOLS TO MASTER THE UNIVERSE. ASTRONOMERS AND ASTROPHYSICISTS PREACH A GOSPEL OF HOPE, NOT DOOM. WE MUST LOOK NOT TO THE DISTANT PAST BUT TO THE FUTURE AND A NEW MILLENNIUM: A NEW AGE FOR HUMANITY.”

  The constellations faded. A scarlet banner of words rippled across the dome.

  WHEN THE WHEEL OF TIME SHALL HAVE

  COME TO THE SEVENTH MILLENNIUM,

  THERE WILL BEGIN THE GAMES OF DEATH.

  —MICHEL DE NOSTREDAME

  The words faded into darkness and in their place another banner rose.

  FEAR IS THE MAIN SOURCE OF SUPERSTITION,

  AND ONE OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF CRUELTY.

  TO CONQUER FEAR IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Trip gaped: had this happened at the earlier show? If so, he had no memory of it. Maybe that was what sex did to you. With one last fanfare of gongs and drums, the planetarium went dark and the house lights came up. Trip blinked, and found himself staring into Marz’s waifish face.

  “Hey.” He scrambled to his feet, confused. “Ouch. Where’d you go?”

  She shrugged. “Nowhere. You know. Here.”

  Trip waited for something more in the way of an explanation. She said nothing, just stood and leaned over the seat to retrieve her raincoat. Her jodhpurs were slung so low about her waist that when she bent he could see the top of her ass. To his shame and amazement, his cock began to swell again. A giddy wave of desire swept through him. When Marz turned around he grabbed her and kissed her, the raincoat crushed noisily between them. Her mouth parted, but she felt limp and all but weightless. He might have been kissing a cloth doll. On the far side of the room someone snickered. Trip drew back, blushing, and stared at the floor.

  “I guess we better go,” he mumbled, and took her hand. She nodded and followed him out of the planetarium, dragging her raincoat behind her.

  The limousine was waiting outside. A thin icy rain nicked at the sidewalk, but the blond girl didn’t put on her raincoat. Silently the driver emerged to hold the car door open. Trip waited until she’d slid all the way over to the far window before he stepped inside. They sat without speaking at opposite ends of the car as it drove crosstown, music droning from the speakers.

  “Check out the dinosaurs?” the driver asked as they swung into traffic. Trip shook his head. The driver shot him a disbelieving look. “No dinosaurs?”

  “No,” Trip snapped.

  The driver shrugged. “Next time, huh? Where to now?”

  Trip gestured weakly. “Back to GFI, I guess.”

  They started crosstown. Trip stared at the flood of yellow cabs turned livid by sleet slanting down from a distempered sky. Just a short time ago he had seen it all for the first time, sitting beside Jerry Disney in another hired car and laughing in amazement at the legions of taxis (private cars were outlawed now, except on weekends, when the affluent fled the city and the streets were jammed with decrepit vehicles of every type), the buses with kids hanging from the doors. Kids everywhere. More feral children than he had ever seen in Nashville or Austin or even Seattle, begging and skating and stumbling out of icehouses, pink and orange wires tangled in their disheveled hair, or accompanying the youthfully middle-aged and wary, who paid them to serve as escorts and so deflect the attentions of other young thieves. Runaways and prostitutes, John Drinkwater said—though some of them looked Trip’s age, so they couldn’t really be called runaways, could they?—but Jerry told Trip that they were fellahin.

  “That’s an Arab word,” he explained as they stared out their hotel window at a dark-haired boy in kilt and football helmet, panhandling on the sidewalk. “I saw it on Radium. It means, like, whore” he added, staring in disgust as the kilted boy leaned into the window of a cab.

  Actually, the original meaning was closer to peasant, as Trip learned when he mentioned this newfound bit of esoterica during his interview on Radium with Lotte Sa’adah. But as Lotte said,

  Hey! whore z-head fux populi wtf! f *ck! whatever! so ok areet?!

  Back then even the runaways had seemed exotic—romantic even, because pitiable—to Trip. Now, with a girl he barely knew slouched silently at the other end of the hired car, the fellahin seemed more sinister. Trip dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sank farther into his seat.

  It was late afternoon. Sandbagged sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians and cyclists crowding subway entrances and storefronts to keep out of the rain. In the bright aperture between skyscrapers Trip saw a writhing shape like an amoeba, one of the city’s solex shields come loose. He glimpsed the brass-colored capsule of one of GFI’s famous fleet of advertising dirigibles, fresh from its factory in Northern Japan, moving slowly across the sky.

  NEW ZEALAND/MALAYSIAN PEACE TALKS!

  LOVETT-FORBES WEDDING!

  As the car crawled uptown, the sidewalks became thickets of metal trusses, where new protective shields were being installed in corporate buildings, the reflective sheets of solex rippling in the wind as workers struggled to hold them. Trip cracked his window and smelled steam and roasting garlic and exhaust. Between restaurant awnings well-dressed men and women scurried like ants. Some wore sunglasses, despite the rain, or wide-brimmed hats. Many more had the blank silvery gaze that came from plasmer implants. They walked with exaggerated caution, as though drunk. When the hired car stopped at a light, Trip stared at one woman who sat astride a black horse extravagantly caparisoned with metal spikes. The woman’s elegantly masked face tilted upward, so that the rain streamed down her cheeks and pooled on the collar of her black rubber shawl. Her eyes, like her mount’s, were silvery gray. In the minutes that Trip watched them, neither woman nor horse once blinked.

  After nearly an hour they reached the GFI complex. Trip and the blond girl said not a word, though once or twice Trip responded briefly to a question from the driver. The rain had stopped by the time the car pulled beneath the huge solex awning that fanned out across Fifty-third Street. Ribbons of pink and orange streaming across the sky made Trip look up, past the solex shield. The girl shrugged on her raincoat and looked at him.

  “Thanks,” she said. The driver held the door open, but Marz remained inside, her expression so remote she might not have seen him there at all. Trip waited for her to say good-bye, wanting desperately for her to be gone. He himself could say nothing, could only stare miserably at his hands. When after a minute he looked up he saw a glister of pink vinyl disappearing through the Pyramid’s revolving doors.

  The ride back to Stamford took several hours. Trip stretched across the backseat and slept, awakening as they hydroplaned onto the Hutch. Flooded fields and golf courses reflected the early-twilight sky, calm pools of gold and violet with dying trees rising from them like scaffolds. They passed onto the Merritt Parkway and the alluvial plain that had been Connecticut’s gold coast, its abandoned shorefront condos and mansions given over to the rising Atlantic. In the gold-slashed dusk Trip could see lights flickering from the upper stories of some of the houses, and on dilapidated barges and houseboats. He opened his window; the car filled with the low-tide reek of fish rotting on the strand, the faint and sweetly ominous sound of drums and singing children.

  It was after six when he got back to the hotel. John Drinkwater collared him in the hall, already dressed in the stylish hempen suit he insisted on wearing when Trip perform
ed.

  “Where have you been? ”

  Trip pushed past him and into his room. “I need to take a shower.”

  “You don’t have time! We have to go now, Jerry needs a sound check on—”

  Trip shook his head. Without a backward glance he started for the bathroom, peeling off his shirt as he went. “He can go, then. You too. Get me another car—”

  John grabbed Trip’s arm, his voice rising. “Hey! You were supposed to be here two hours ago! You listen to me, Trip—”

  “No.” Trip whirled, yanking his arm back so hard that John staggered away from him. “I’m taking a shower, okay? Okay?”

  He shouted the last word and stormed into the bathroom. John Drinkwater blinked before recovering himself.

  “Eight o’clock, Trip!” he yelled as the door slammed shut. “You go on at eight o—”

  “I’ll go on when I’m fucking ready.” Trip’s voice echoed through the suite, followed by the roar of water.

  John stared at the bathroom door. Then he walked to the phone and called the concierge.

  “I’ll need an additional limousine for Mr. Marlowe. Tell the others to go on now, and we’ll meet them.”

  He hung up and started for the door, stopped when he saw Trip’s shirt crumpled on the sisal rug. For a moment he stared at it, then stooped and picked it up. Tentatively he brought it to his face and inhaled, breathing in the stale odors of lilacs and sweat, and a fainter, muskier scent.

  “Hah.” John Drinkwater stared at the shirt, then flung it back onto the floor. Women, he thought balefully and stalked from the room.

  ^ ^ ^

  Trip’s performance that night was off-kilter, almost frenzied. At first Jerry and the other musicians were nonplussed, but after the first three songs they seemed to catch Trip’s frantic buzz, segueing from a cover of “Walking with the Big Man” into “The End of the End.” Trip crouched bare-chested at the edge of the stage and sang in a soft moan, his bare skin glistening in the spotlights. John Drinkwater stood in the wings and watched in silence. When Trip finally walked off, the front of the stage was heaped with crosses and flowers and T-shirts flung there by fans, and a single broken-spined Bible.

  Backstage, an exhausted Trip made straight for the door that led outside, where the limos waited to bring him and the others back to the hotel. Three teenage girls and their parents stood beneath the EXIT sign, beaming as he approached. In the shadows nearby, John Drinkwater stood in his hempen suit.

  “Hi, thanks for coming to the show, hi,” Trip mumbled. The girls giggled and held out copies of LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA for him to sign. Trip glanced at John Drinkwater.

  “Kind of a short set tonight, huh, Trip?” one of the fathers asked in a conspiratorial tone. He lowered his surgeon’s mask, looked askance at the cross branded on Trip’s forehead.

  “Uh, I hate these darn masks—”

  “Yeah, me too,” murmured Trip. He scrawled his name across the disc and shoved it back at the girl, shot her a quick smile.

  “Kayla, huh? Pretty name.”

  The girl’s father shook his head. “You look tired, Trip,” he boomed, clapping Trip’s shoulder with a powerful hand. “Singing takes it out of you, eh?”

  Trip forced another smile. The girl, rosy-cheeked and golden-haired, plucked her surgeon’s mask from her face and smiled beatifically. “These are for you,” she said, and shyly thrust a fistful of lilacs at him. Trip took the flowers, his smile frozen; they were limp and warm and grayish, wrapped in damp shreds of paper towel.

  “Th-thanks.” He glanced at the outside door, then at John Drinkwater. “Thanks again. Uh, I better go—”

  On the way back to the hotel, Trip deliberately sat between Jerry Disney and their bass player. That didn’t stop John Drinkwater from giving them all a brief lecture on the perils of the road, along with a reminder of the terms of their morality contracts. Trip looked contrite, but when they got to the Four Seasons Jerry cornered him in the hotel lobby.

  “That was some crazy shit you pulled!” he exclaimed exultantly, punching Trip’s arm. “Man, I almost swallowed my gum—”

  Trip went cold. He knows! he thought, and saw the blond girl’s luminous eyes staring at him from between the yellow leaves. But then Jerry grabbed him. ‘“Walking with the Big Man!’ I forgot I even knew that song!”

  “Yeah,” Trip said, relieved. “Yeah, it sounded good.”

  “It was fucking great! We gotta put that on the next album—maybe live, huh? LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA LIVE! Oooweee—” Jerry spun in place, laughing. “This is so great—”

  Trip watched his friend. The next album… He thought of Nellie Candry of Agrippa Music and Mustard Seed’s army of red-faced lawyers back in Branson. He thought of Marz. “I’m going to bed,” he announced, and headed for the elevator.

  “Boston tomorrow, Trip!” Jerry yelled after him. “College boys and girls! We’re gonna be wicked big stars! Wicked big!”

  “We already are,” said Trip, as the elevator door slid shut.

  In his room, Trip moaned and collapsed into an armchair.

  “Jesus God.” He stared dazedly at the pathetic handful of lilacs he still clutched. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth…

  Since the glimmering began, flowers no longer thrived, especially early-spring flowers like lilacs. These looked puny to begin with, but he didn’t have the heart to toss them away. So he put the lilacs in a tumbler of water on the table beside his bed, shoving aside one of John’s Guideposts discs to make room. Then he took another shower. Afterward he walked dripping from the bathroom, tossing the towel onto a heap of dirty clothes as he made his way to bed. He stopped.

  When he’d put the lilacs in their glass, the flowers had been lank and gray, leaves curled as discolored ribbon. Now the stems were supple and thick as his finger, the heart-shaped leaves fresh and green. The blossoms fairly glowed. The scent of lilacs was everywhere, and the soft monotonous buzz of a bumblebee. He stared open mouthed, then closed his eyes and inhaled.

  He saw his grandmother’s trailer on Moody’s Island, crowded by the ancient lilac trees that were the sole remnant of the farm that had once stood there. The bee droned past him and he twitched involuntarily, sank onto the bed and he pressed the blossoms to his face. The wind blew warm as blood, the trees moved against a sky so purely blue it made his heart ache, a sky he only saw in dreams now. He knew he was half-asleep, but he made no move to get under the covers, or to put the flowers back into their glass. Instead his fingers tightened upon the mass of blossoms, crushing them against his cheeks and eyelids. The wind rose and the trees thrashed, the sun’s warmth faded as one by one the stars sprang out against the blue. The bee’s humming ceased. The air grew cooler as he flattened his palms against broken blossoms and moved upon the bed.

  Beyond the tracery of limbs and sky a darkness stretched. True night, black and fathomless, with no spectral glare to rend the constellations as they passed above him. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis; Andromeda and Dagon. Amidst the stars a small figure shaded her eyes, as though gazing into a great distance, then began to walk toward him. Beneath her feet the darkness churned into sand, the stars to flecks of dust. As she drew closer he could see her face, small and pale and unsmiling. She was naked save for the aniline glitter of her raincoat, the streaming bands of green and amethyst that bloomed around her.

  “My feet are upon the New City.” The words licked like flame against his ears. “And my heart beneath my feet.” He could feel her warm breath upon his cheeks. “But we who were living are now dying, here at the end of all things; for a foolish man bears our world away with him, who did not speak one word to the king concerning the anguish that he saw.”

  The smell of lilacs flowed from her. She knelt between his legs, arms outstretched, and with a hand light as rain brushed the flowers from his cheeks. “Do you remember nothing?” she asked.

  He started to reply, but she kissed him, her mouth cool and sweet as sap. His arms enfolded her and he drew her in, he
r fine hair a mist across his eyes as she moved against him. When he came it was like falling into sleep, a long slow shudder and the girl’s sighing breath in his hair. He lay there, trying to hold in his mind the image of stars and green trees, the odor of lilacs and rain falling upon a withered land.

  Then he woke. There was a pounding at the door and John Drinkwater’s voice echoing from the telephone with his 6:00 A.M. wake-up call. Trip rose groggily, brushing leaves from his hair as he stumbled to his feet; and looked out upon his room to see lilacs, twigs and limbs and heaps of lilacs: lilacs everywhere.

  He never saw the girl again. They were unable to get enough fuel for the bus to drive them to Boston, so Lucius arranged a morning flight from Westchester Airport. A hired car drove them; their equipment would follow.

  At the airport Trip and John Drinkwater and the others sat in the crowded first-class terminal, with its smells of stale vanilla and ersatz coffee. Trip watched impassively as airport security surrounded a well-dressed Asian man whose mask fell away to reveal the garish cicatrices and facial tics of petra virus in its secondary, infectious phase. Lucius Chappell averted his eyes. Jerry Disney made a disgusted sound and headed for the bathroom. John Drinkwater lowered his head. His lips moved, praying—Lord, grant Thy love and healing grace upon those who suffer—and Trip felt a small surge of love for him. Meanwhile the Asian man stood wordlessly as his briefcase and roll-along were taken and sheathed in protective latex. He waited with the starkly composed expression of despair as orange-suited men pulled a transparent hood over his head and bore him away. Shortly thereafter someone whose mask and silvery eyes were embossed with the NatLink logo informed Lucius that their plane was ready to board. As it turned out, it was the only flight that would leave New York that week.

  CHAPTER FOUR