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Glimmering

Page 12

by Elizabeth Hand


  Jack shook his head. “You’d better go,” he said. His knuckles throbbed from where he’d struck Leonard. He felt like he was going to burst into tears himself. “Okay? I just think you’d better go.”

  Leonard turned.

  “I know why you did that.” He rubbed his bruised face almost lovingly. “Jackie. You really need to get over it. You’d be a lot better off if you learned how to deal with your feelings for me, you know that? All that rage? It’ll kill you, Jackie-boy. But this—”

  He gazed out the window, to where the lawn shimmered beneath the golden sky. “—this,” he repeated, his voice starting to shake. “You may really have fucked up this time, Jackie.”

  Jack stared. Was Leonard threatening him? But then Leonard laid his hand upon Jack’s shoulder.

  “I have to leave now,” he said. “And I’ll be gone for a while. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  Leonard’s grip tightened, his fingers digging through Jack’s robe until they fastened on a cord of muscle. Jack writhed and let out a small moan.

  “ Ow—”

  “You better ‘Ow.’” The placebit in his front tooth sent out a ruby flare. “Pissing off Padmasambhava like that.”

  With a smile he let go of his friend. Jack fell back against the bed. Leonard picked up his bags, then headed for the door. In the hallway he stopped.

  “I’m not angry, you know, Jackie.” He hoisted a bag over his shoulder, bones and mirrors clattering. “Believe it or not. I really do understand—”

  He cast Jack a sly look, then, grinning, began to recite.

  Prince, when I took your goblet tall

  And smashed it with inebriate care,

  I knew not how from Rome and Gaul

  You gained it; I was unaware

  It stood by Charlemagne’s guest chair,

  And served St. Peter at High Mass.

  I’m sorry if the thing was rare;

  I like the noise of breaking glass.

  He grinned wolfishly. “Watch your back, Jackie-boy—”

  And with a soft clatter upon the stairs he was gone.

  It took Jack forever to fall asleep that night. His fever was back, his hand ached, he felt guilty and ashamed and generally overstimulated. An hour-long search of the grass beneath his window had failed to turn up anything except for a few rusted malt liquor cans and an IZE ampoule. He didn’t find so much as a shard of glass. When evening fell he had Mrs. Iverson bring dinner to his room, canned beef bouillon and a glass of tepid water. Exhausted, he fell into bed before nine o’clock, and proceeded to toss and turn until eleven-thirty, marking the hours by the chiming of Lazyland’s clocks. He finally resorted to his grandfather’s remedy and crept downstairs to warm some milk on the Coleman stove, adding a shot of Irish whiskey from his grandmother’s precious hoard. By the time he’d mounted the stairs again to the top floor, he was yawning and feeling pleasantly high. He sank back into bed and soon was breathing deeply.

  Just before midnight he awoke. A sound had broken his sleep. A familiar sound, beloved though only half-heard, so that for a few moments as he lay drowsily beneath the heaped quilts and down comforter, Jack felt utterly at peace. He was just drifting off to sleep once more when he heard it again. And froze.

  It was a tread upon the stairs: a slow, purposeful step. Jack could hear the creaking of the wide oaken floorboards, the softer echo of feet upon the second-floor landing below him. Two more steps and silence; then a nearly inaudible click. Jack held his breath. The footsteps resumed. He tracked them as they went from the landing into the next room, the one that had been his aunt Mary Anne’s when she was a girl, before she disappeared. He could not hear what went on in there, but he knew, he knew. His heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder he could hear anything at all, and he almost laughed aloud, crazily: he no longer had any doubt but that he was losing his mind. Because this was how it had always been when he was a child, this was how it was supposed to be.

  He was hearing silence at midnight, when all the clocks should be alive. The preternaturally loud ticking of the grandmother clock outside the linen closet had been stilled, and the gentle nick-nick of the old Dutch regulator. There was no loud clatter from the captain’s clocks in the living room; no hum from the little ladder-back clock with the white mouse that climbed until it struck one. Only that slippered tread, stopping here and there like a nurse checking for fevers; and after each pause Lazyland grew more still, its burden of silence increased as one by one the clocks were stopped.

  In the great house beneath him his grandfather was walking. Room to room, floor to floor, always aware of midnight looming, when if they were not silenced, all the clocks would strike at once. Pausing a dozen times or more upon each landing to gently open countless glass faces, then to lay a finger upon the hands to halt them. As he had always done when Jack or any of the grandchildren stayed over, quieting each clock in turn, so that the song of all those chimes would not awaken them.

  It was the last sound Jack had heard every night at Lazyland, when he would awaken to that patient tread. Lying in bed confused by twilight sleep, hoping to catch a glimpse of his grandfather as the old man mounted the last steps to the top floor, where the old nursery clock on its oaken library table gently ticked off the hours. In all those years Jack had never once seen his grandfather on his errand; only awakened each morning to the smells of coffee and bacon and cigarette smoke drifting up from the kitchen, sunlight in neat yellow squares upon the floor, and a triumphant cascade of chimes echoing through the house as all the clocks struck seven.

  Now Jack lay rigid in bed. He could hear the steps move from his Uncle Peter’s old room into Aunt Susan’s, the room where Mrs. Iverson now slept. There the thick oriental carpet muffled all noise. But after a minute the tread sounded once more. It moved into the tiny corner room, that held only a cobbler’s bench on which sat a cottage clock. Snap as the casing was opened; snick as it closed again. Creak of the door pushed shut. The footsteps hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then began their final ascent.

  Jack listened spellbound. His dread was gone. Instead he felt anaesthetized, almost giddy; because surely this was what it was like to die? Didn’t loved ones sometimes arrive to take you to the other side? A thought lodged like a stone at the bottom of his consciousness told him that this was just a dream—he had often dreamed of his grandfather in the years since his death—and yet that did nothing to mute his exhilaration. He tried to sit up, but his arms and legs were paralyzed. This, too, happened in dreams, you tried to move and could not, struggled in vain to open eyes weighted with stones and earth; but he only fought harder, writhing beneath the covers. The footsteps came more slowly now—it was a long haul up all those steps—but Jack was ready, his heart thundered, and his breath came faster, he was almost gasping with joy. He would see him, finally, all those fruitless nights of waiting up would be redeemed; all those mornings waking to find that it was just a dream, Grandfather was really dead and the world not as it had been when Jackie Finnegan was a boy.

  And now he heard the solid thump of Grandfather’s foot upon the landing, then another as the old man pushed himself forward, one hand lingering upon the banister to keep his balance. The door to Jack’s room flew open. A breath of cool air wafted inside, followed by a close warm smell, cigarette smoke and Jameson’s, the scent of starch on a white cotton shirt. Jack opened his mouth to cry aloud but gaped within a sudden airless void, the scents of tobacco and whiskey sucked away.

  In the doorway a figure loomed. He was cast of light as a shadow is drawn of darkness, light everywhere, so that he seemed to be aflame. Jack recognized the unruly crest of white hair above a broad high brow, the proud beaked nose and the eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, icy blue, deep-set. His grandfather’s mouth opened as though to speak. A roaring filled Jack’s ears. His grandfather smiled and stepped into the room. Jack strove to rise but all strength was gone from him. He lay limp abed like a sick child, staring.

  “Jackie.”


  That deep voice, with its slight smoker’s rasp. He thought he would swoon as the old man drew near the bed. Upon Jack’s brow was the touch of a hand, cool and dry as paper. A blurred shadow moved before his eyes. He gazed up and saw what, as a sleeping child, he had always missed: his grandfather standing there with tears in his eyes, gazing down upon him.

  “Jackie.”

  Something brushed his cheek, like a moth or leaf blowing past. The voice came again: what his grandfather had always said when Jack left Lazyland to return to his own home.

  “Jackie-boy. Be well.”

  Like rushing water, air filled his lungs again. Jack gasped, found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, sweat-soaked, the damp covers tumbling to the floor. About him the room swam with gold and emerald. Greenish sunlight streamed from the window with its small, neat bull’s-eye. From downstairs echoed the old grandfather clock striking seven.

  Jack dragged a hand across his brow. He was trembling fiercely. “Another fucking dream.”

  It was only when he stood, tugging his pajama sleeve from beneath his pillow, that he saw in the hollow where his head had lain a small parcel wrapped in tissue.

  Be well…

  His heart began to thump as he picked up the parcel and unraveled the thin paper. He turned to the window and raised his hand, so that sunlight nicked what he held. A small glass bottle stoppered with lead and wax, and the label:

  FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA

  FUSAX 687

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Iconography

  Their second day in Boston, after their very last tour performance, Trip woke and thought his room was on fire.

  They were staying at a church-owned hostel near Cambridge. The rooms were spare but many-windowed, the obsolete unfiltered arches facing southeast across the Charles River. Trip’s bedside cabinet held furled copies of Guideposts, The Screwtape Letters, a tiny book of meditations. The only television was in the common room downstairs, beneath a framed photograph of the president. And a hostel prefect at the inaugural ball held by the Christian Majority Alliance/United We Stand for Freedom. The television, when it worked, was tuned to JC-1, so that now and then Trip heard his own voice echoing from downstairs. The entire house had an agreeably antiseptic smell, not the cloying sweetness of Viconix but the old-fashioned scents of pine deodorizer and ammonia. Trip’s bed was narrow, the coverings clean and cool and white. It all made him think of the single summer he had gone to camp down in Union, Maine, before his father died. The night after his performance he lay in bed with his eyes closed and tried to project himself back to Alford Lake, with loons wailing instead of sirens, water lapping softly at Old Town canoes and Sunfish.

  It didn’t work. Instead a dream of burning desert sand edged Trip into wakefulness. He blinked, staring confusedly at the tiny room. Suddenly he sat bolt upright.

  “What the—!!”

  Flaming columns rose from floor to ceiling. They flickered from crimson to gold to the lambent white of an empty IT disc. With a cry Trip started for the door, then stopped.

  The room was filled not with flames but light, so brilliant he had to shade his eyes. Even the floor glowed, plain pine burnished to molten bronze. From the corridor he could hear excited voices.

  “What is it?” Trip asked breathlessly as he opened the door. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” Jerry Disney yawned, running a hand across his shaven forehead. He was standing with one of the hostel’s prefects still in her bathrobe. “The glimmering. Sunspots or whatever it does. Everything’s down again. Go back to bed.” He turned and shuffled down the hall to his room.

  “Robert’s checking on his shortwave.” The prefect was more excited than Jerry, her face rose pink in the shifting light. “I mean, it’s four A.M., and it looks like broad daylight! Isn’t this terrible? Last month we were without electricity for almost a week. Did you all get that?”

  Trip shook his head. “We were in Dallas. But I heard about it.”

  “Were you supposed to leave today?”

  “Tonight, I think.”

  “Well, don’t bother packing. I’ll let you know if Robert patches into any news.” They were stranded for a week. Power was disrupted across the entire northern hemisphere, knocking out computer networks, satellite links, airports from Greenland to Norfolk. The oceanic system of telecom cables was already weakened by an increase in volcanic activity since the Ross Ice Shelf disaster. Now the increased demands for power crippled it still further. Communications were scrambled worldwide. Several air crashes occurred, as the shift in the magnetic field played havoc with automatic flight systems. There were riots on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In Durham, New Hampshire, seventeen people died in the city hospital when emergency generators failed. Outbreaks of E. coli bacteria left dozens of children dead; in Boston, the National Guard had to assist the Red Cross in getting potable water to the South Side.

  Word of the extent of the disaster gradually filtered into the hostel in Cambridge, where they made do with camping equipment left over from happier times. Coleman stoves and lanterns, wool blankets and water purification kits for what they could hand-carry from the green and viscous Charles. Except for a few group forays to the river, Lucius Chappell made the tour members stay inside—he was terrified of riots.

  “Scared shitless of Negroes and fellahin,” sniffed Jerry Disney. He looked over at Trip and grinned. “Probably thinks you’ll just book.”

  By Thursday rudimentary power was restored in some places. At the hostel they still ate by candlelight, working their way though canned soups, canned beans, freeze-dried pasta dinners. Now the only television station they could pick up was an equal-access cable hookup from MIT, staffed mostly by wild-eyed cranks who could be glimpsed inhaling bluish powder on camera.

  “Boil water, avoid brownouts, stay indoors, don’t run that A/C, folks,” a girl said, giggling as she read from a torn page. She glanced at a bearded young man beside her who was shouting into a cell phone. “A/C. What’s that?”

  “Air conditioning,” he replied.

  “Jesus, air conditioning!” She twirled a plastic Frank Sinatra mask, knocking over a bottle of diet soda and registering more alarm than she had while reporting a fire downtown that had killed six people. “Shit! That was my LAST ONE—”

  Through it all, Trip seldom ventured from his room. He slept with a towel over his eyes, to shield them from the glowing crimson ribbons streaming down through the windows day and night. His dreams were troubled. He wanted to dream of Alford Lake. He wanted to dream of the blond girl. He never did, but he thought about her constantly, masturbating even though it left him feeling more depleted and depressed than ever. When they left Stamford, he’d crammed a small canvas bag with lilac blossoms. The flowers had since crumbled into brown fragments, but they retained a sweet faint smell. Hour after hour he lay in bed, pressing handfuls of perfumed dust against his face as he tried to summon up the girl’s wan image, her twilight eyes. He refused meals and company, pleading sickness; but John Drinkwater at least wasn’t fooled.

  “You want to talk?” he asked once, standing in Trip’s doorway and staring worriedly at the pale figure hunched beneath the blankets.

  “No. Tired, that’s all.” Trip thought of his mother, saying the same thing over and over in the months following his father’s suicide. When she finally got out of bed it was to go to Roque Beach and the whirlpool at Hell Head. “I think maybe I need some time off from touring.”

  John gave a short laugh. “Well, you’re getting it. But Peggy said she thinks she can get a doctor to come by tomorrow, someone with the church—”

  “I’m fine. I told you, I’m just tired—”

  John stared at him measuringly. “Well, I hope so. God forbid you got something from that guy at the airport—”

  “You don’t get petra virus that way. Look—”

  “Forget it.” John turned to go. “But if you want to talk to someone—well, you don’t ha
ve to talk to me. There’s Peggy, or Robert. And the minister’s coming by tonight. Just keep it in mind, okay?”

  Trip forced a smile. “Okay.” When John left he burrowed deeper into his bed, his legs and chest and groin matted with dead lilacs.

  By the weekend, a few airports were open, accommodating those passengers (and airline crews) willing to risk traveling. Jerry and the other band members were impatient to leave. Even Trip was ready. But John Drinkwater refused.

  “You guys crazy? It’s going to be a madhouse at Logan, might as well wait a few days until things ease up. We’re just going home, so relax, okay? Pretend you’re on retreat.”

  “More like freaking house arrest,” Jerry muttered, and for once Trip nodded in agreement.

  The next morning Trip got a phone call. On his private number; it woke him, and he had to dig through mounds of sheets until he found his phone.

  “Yeah?” he said guardedly.

  “Trip, Nellie Candry—”

  A flash of panic: she knew! The girl had told her—

  “—how you kids doing up there?” Her cheerful voice sounded impossibly small and far away, a ladybug’s voice.

  “Uh—we’re fine. I mean, the same as everyone, I guess.” He moved around the room in hopes of improving the reception. “How’d you find me?”

  “Remember? You gave me the number. At the hotel that night—”

  “I mean how’d you find me here. We haven’t been able to talk to anyone—”

  Her laughter tinkled from the phone. “Sweetie! I’m GFI—we talk to Elvis! We never shut down! But listen—you’re in Cambridge, right? By MIT?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Trip said warily. “I think.”

  “Well, I need you to go there. I’ve set something up for you—they have a studio, they’re like the only people who’ve managed to stay up all week. Did Ray Venuto get in touch with you?”

  “Who?”

  “Our contracts lawyer. He was supposed to fax you—”

 

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