Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “No. I mean, it’s a mess up here. Hardly anyone’s been able to call in or out.”

  Pause. Then, “Well, okay, that’s okay. I still think we can swing this. We’ve got Legal behind us, in case there’s any question. But probably you shouldn’t talk this up yet, ’cause it’s just gonna be you. I mean they don’t want the rest of the band, not this time. Capisce? I want you to go to MIT, Trip: just you. The studio’s at the Atkinson Center, I have no idea where that is, but I’m sure somebody can get you there—”

  Trip stared bewildered out the window. “What? When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “But I don’t understand. I mean, I can’t do a recording without a band. Plus there’s no power up here, not for stuff like that—”

  “Believe me, sweetie, the world could end and MIT would not lose power. They siphon off the grid: as long as someone’s got power, somewhere, they’re okay. And it’s not a video. It’s an IT studio. Since you haven’t actually signed the contracts yet we’ll call it an independent demo, just in case anyone gives us a hard time later—”

  Trip shook his head, a little desperately. “But—”

  “But they won’t! I promise you they won’t.” Nellie’s voice faded into static. Relief flooded him, but after a moment she was back, her tone lower now, conspiratorial.

  “Listen, Trip—the truth is I ran into Leonard Thrope the other day, down at Hellgate. I told him you were signing on, and he got real excited, I mean I haven’t seen him so psyched about something for a while. I told him I wanted you to do an IT and he told me about the studio at MIT; he’s friends with some guy there and he wants to shoot you, Trip! An icon and some stills, I mean, can you believe it? Leonard fucking Thrope!”

  Trip bit his thumb. “Who’s Leonard Thrope?”

  “What, they keep you guys under a news blackout?” Nellie laughed. “Actually, Leonard Thrope is probably not your basic Xian poster boy. He’s a very, very famous photographer—he founded the mori school, you’ve heard of that, right?”

  Trip grimaced. “That guy who makes movies of dead people?”

  “Mors Ultima. Yeah, that was Leonard. But he does other stuff, too, fashion shoots, a lot of stuff for private patrons. He’s on Radium all the time, you must have seen his stuff—”

  “Look, Nellie—I don’t know, this guy is kind of weird, isn’t he? I mean, maybe this isn’t the sort of thing I should be doing, ’cause like I know for a fact that Peter Paul Joseph would have a heart attack if he—”

  Nellie sighed. “We should be so lucky. Listen, Trip, I’m not going to pressure you. And maybe you need to think some more about all of this. Mustard Seed’s been good to you. Your sales are solid, you got a nice little fan base. Maybe you should stay there, maybe we should talk again in a couple months, you know? Maybe in a year GFI buys out your whole fucking company and all our problems are solved.”

  Her voice grew faint and staticky. A shaft of fear ran through him—he had no number for the blond girl, nothing to bind her to him save this little voice chirping in his head, distinctly less cheerful than it had been a few minutes ago.

  “…so we’ll just—”

  “No! No, it’s okay, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. But you’ve got to tell me how to find this place—”

  She told him. “And listen, sweetie, don’t worry, it’ll be great, you are going to be so happy you did this. Leonard’s a sweetheart, all that other stuff is mostly just PR, you know that, right? Go on now, I’m gonna call Ray and tell him you’re—”

  Her voice crackled out. Trip shook the receiver. Silence. He stuck the phone in his pocket. Nellie had told him one o’clock. It was 11:30, which meant people would be gathering soon for lunch. If he left now, someone would be bound to come looking for him. But if he stuck around for lunch and then tried to sneak out, he might not have time to find the MIT campus, let alone some mysterious basement studio. He decided to leave. He pulled his worn pea coat over his old fisherman’s sweater and hurried downstairs and out the back door.

  Finding the MIT campus didn’t take as long as he’d feared. Once there he saw students everywhere. Black-clad, intense-looking young men and women, and more Asians than Trip had ever seen in his life, carrying backpacks and looking as though it would take much more than an East Coast blackout to disrupt their studies. Trip wondered if classes had even been canceled. Probably not, he decided, watching two blond girls with blinking placebits in their eyebrows hunched over a palmtop. They glanced up at him, then went back to their work. Trip observed them with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain. He read at a sixth-grade level: even simple algebra and the most basic computing skills were remote as astrophysics. But he had a remarkable memory: he could quote Scripture and even Shakespeare if only he could be made to understand the words on the screen in front of him, or if someone were to read them aloud.

  He could, fortunately, read the words MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY on a metal sign glazed with ice. He stopped in front of the sign, shivering in the lurid orange glow of midday. He was too embarrassed to ask a student for directions. They all looked so expensive. Dressed in black, or wrapped in cardboard and rags like the fellahin, they would betray themselves by smiling, showing even white teeth and glinting placebits. Except for the cranks, whose eyes within shrouds of spun acrylic were uniformly silver-gray; what hair they had was glossy and flecked with light. Like Trip himself, few of the students wore masks—this, along with The Last Generation’s continued sexual and pharmacological indulgences, was a constant source of head-shaking and hand-wringing for parents. Overhead the sky shimmered from green to gold to blue. He felt awkward and out of place, no longer the nascent Xian supernova but trailer trash from Moody’s Island. For a miserable quarter hour he wandered around, before getting up the courage to stop an older man in a worn overcoat.

  “’Scuse me, I’m looking for the divit lab?”

  The man shrugged. He pointed, at a very thin middle-aged woman with a shaved head and a bright red faux-mink coat. “Sorry. Ask Sonya there, she’s in computer dialectics—”

  Trip crossed to her. “Uh—excuse me—”

  The woman looked at him curiously. A transparent silken web covered her vividly lipsticked mouth.

  “Are you one of my students?” Her scalp had been neatly incised with paragraphs of text, not tattooed but scarified black lines fine as drypoint. On her right temple scowled Ignatz Mouse, a word balloon hovering above his mouth.

  Trip looked away.

  “N-no,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. But—”

  She smiled. “That’s okay. You just looked familiar, that’s all. You want the Bloembergen Lab—”

  Trip shook his head. “She said divit. I mean the lady who sent me, she said the divit lab, or something like that.”

  “That’s Bloembergen. DVI-IT technologies; they call it divit. Come on. I’m heading that way, I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”

  He walked beside her. The wind sent eddies of dust and grit flying up into their faces. The woman coughed, tugged a heavy woolen scarf from the collar of her coat, and swept it across her face.

  “Doesn’t that get cold?” Trip asked. The icy wind made him shudder. “Your head like that?”

  “This?” She patted her scalp, and Ignatz winked at him. “No. Feel it—central heating.”

  He gave her a dubious look. “Go ahead,” she urged, stopping. “Colar implants. You’ve never seen them?”

  She lowered her head. The raised flesh felt warm and rubbery, like a lure worm. As his fingers moved across the words thin music sounded very softly, a glissando of piano and fluttering drumbeats. From the back of her neck a voice whispered.

  Think twice before causing

  Just anything to be.

  Trip snatched his hand away. The woman laughed. “Morton Feldman. Isn’t that neat? I treated myself when I got tenure. Okay, here’s your stop—the lab’s downstairs, I think there’s a sign, but you basically just keep turning right. See
you later.”

  Inside the building was softly lit by bursts of gold falling from the windows. There were no guards, no electric lights. The security checkpoint had been deactivated; beside the magnetic arch a hand-lettered sign read SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, with Japanese characters penciled beneath. A few students sat in a hallway eating and listening to music percolating from a colorful spinning top. Trip found the stairs and went down slowly. He felt tired and anxious and completely unprepared to do a recording session of any kind. The basement was numbingly cold. Emergency panel-lights cast a faint gray glow. All of the rooms seemed abandoned, heaped with metal chairs and desks and old computer monitors. Finally he reached a black metal door.

  BLOEMBERGEN LABORATORY:

  DIRECT-VOICE INTERACTION/INTERTEXT RECORDING

  STUDENTS: BE PREPARED TO SHOW YOUR PASS!

  Under this someone had taped a piece of paper scrawled with magic marker.

  PRIVATE RECORDING SESSION. SORRY. NO ADMITTANCE.

  T. Marlowe please knock!

  He knocked. No one came. He listened but could hear nothing, had his knuckles raised to knock again when the door cracked open.

  “Yee-es?” a voice drawled.

  Before Trip could say anything someone grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. The door slammed shut.

  “Trip Marlowe! You made it!” A slight black-clad man much shorter than Trip whirled him into the room. “Great, this is great! Sammy, get your shit together, we got a go here. Look, boys: Trip Marlowe.”

  Trip glanced around helplessly, embarrassed by the man’s mocking tone, the bored expressions of the two technicians who slouched in swivel chairs beside a bank of recording equipment. They were watching television; it showed the GFI experimental dirigible fleet at rest on an airfield, then abruptly cut away to a scene of flames, the tiny cartoonish Blue Antelope logo in a corner of the screen.

  “I guess this is the right place?” Trip asked, hoping it wasn’t.

  “Oh, ab-so-po-lutely,” the man replied. He clamped a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the far end of the room, where white crosshatched screens rose in front of a lethal-seeming array of still cameras, vidcams, halogen lights, and what appeared to be surgical equipment. There was an indefinable but suspicious smell of smoke. “Nellie said you’d be here, but things have been so fucked up, I was supposed to be in Mirbat for another oil spill—like, where do they get the oil?—but of course our little atmospheric challenge changed all that. I was marooned for two days! Then, of course, the only place I was cleared to land was Logan. I had to leave the troupe back in the city. A total wipeout, but then, thank God, YOU were here—”

  The man gazed at him appraisingly. “Leonard Thrope,” he announced.

  “Uh—Trip,” said Trip. “Marlowe.”

  “Please.” Leonard gestured at an empty chair. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Trip sat. Leonard strode to a pile of bags and began pulling bottles out of a knapsack. Without a glance at labels or contents he opened them, ingesting their contents in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

  “Not what you think,” he reassured Trip. “Selenium, pantothenic acid, astragalus, this is some kind of blood purifier. Vitamin K. Spirulina. Saquinavar.” He replaced everything except a tiny lacquered snuffbox. “This of course is Persian Cat,” he added and took a few discreet sniffs. “Want some?”

  Trip shook his head, horrified and dazzled. “No. Thanks.” If all the preachers he had ever known had been able to get together and create, from scratch, their own unqualified, indubious, and absurdly outfitted vision of the abyss, this would be it. Leonard Thrope moved with the savage authority of a very small dog approaching an unwary child. His tangled gray-streaked hair was long and braided with glass beads. What little of Leonard’s flesh Trip could see—hands, face, a scabby bit of ankle—was covered with an intricate web of flowers, cuneiform characters, and sexual graffiti. When he moved, flashes of virulent green and yellow appeared through rents in his clothes, like trapped fireflies.

  Leonard curled his fingers around the proffered snuffbox. “Right,” he said. “Probably better you don’t,” and tossed it into a bag. “Okay. Let’s roll ’em.”

  He walked to Trip and took him by the hand. Involuntarily Trip shrank from him. He expected something dry and scabrous; a crudely illustrated church pamphlet featuring Eve and a boa constrictor leapt unbidden to his mind. Instead Leonard’s hand was muscular and smooth, his lingering touch feather-light as he eased him from the chair.

  “Hey,” he said gently. He looked into Trip’s eyes, brushing a wisp of blond hair from his forehead and letting his hand rest for a moment on the boy’s cheek. “It’s okay. Really, I don’t bite. You’ve probably had kind of a sheltered life, huh? You Xian kids. But this’ll be fine, it’ll go really well, and when we’re done GFI will sell every other act they own to buy this disc. So just try to relax and enjoy it—”

  As he talked he steered Trip through the maze of recording equipment until the boy stood in front of the white screens. “You’ve never done this before, right?”

  Trip shook his head.

  “Good. It’s better that way. Not so self-conscious.” Leonard hunched behind a tripod and adjusted a series of lenses. One of the technicians switched off the TV; they pulled their chairs closer to the monitors and began playing with keyboards and dials. “What we do is, we get some footage of you, dancing or whatever. Picking your nose. I mean, you can lie there asleep if you want to, it doesn’t matter. Later it all gets jacked up on computer. They just want something to work with. Get your essence, right?

  “That’s for the IT stuff. Me, I want to take some pictures.”

  Trip glanced at the technicians. “You just want me to stand here?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Whatever,” one of the young men said.

  “I don’t.” Leonard’s hazel eyes glittered. “Pure white light: that’s what I want. Wait…”

  He reached for a leather satchel plastered with Orgone holograms and shiny new Blue Antelope decals. “Music, you’d like that, right? Here—”

  Leonard tossed something at one of the technicians. A moment later a haze of feedback filled the room.

  Trip cleared his throat, took a few practice steps in front of the screen. “You’re a photographer, huh?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

  Leonard disappeared behind a huge black lens. “Sociocultural pathologist, actually.”

  Trip stared blankly. “Photography’s dead,” Leonard went on. There was a series of soft clicks, a faint humming from one of the more dangerous-looking tripods. “Everything’s dead. The world needs an undertaker. Atlantis sinks, Pompeii burns—I’m there. I’m doing some stuff for Blue Antelope now. You know them, right? All you little Xian apocalypse nuts. Portfolio called Vanishing Act. Last month I got this thing in Ruwenzori. Dwarf otter-shrew, gorgeous. I’ve got some proofs here, check ’em out—”

  He grabbed yet another bag, pulled out a folder, and handed it to Trip. Clear plastic sleeves held Cibachrome prints of a small lithe brown animal emerging from a stream. Its most distinguishing feature was a bristling mass of whiskers around a bulbous nose.

  Leonard peered over his shoulder and sighed. “Micropotamogale ruwenzori. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Trip glanced up to see if he was joking. “It looks like a rat,” he said.

  “It’s not. See its nose?” Leonard’s finger stabbed at a print. “It works like a hydrofoil, sniffs out little crabs and things in the water. This is the last one, probably—that’s why I was there. Blue Antelope’s filed a lawsuit—there’s a big fight going on, whether it should be put in a lab so they can save its genoprint or just leave it there. In case another one shows up.”

  He laughed and turned to the next photo, showing a fan-shaped array of bones with shreds of flesh between them, like a desiccated leaf. “That’s a horseshoe bat. Or was. Rhinolophus ruwenzori. Another interesting nose. I was a little late for that one. Fortunately I have a patron w
ho prefers them that way. Dead, I mean. Really the last of their kind.”

  Trip grimaced. “But they’re so ugly.” He looked up and saw Leonard staring at him, his green-flecked eyes narrowed.

  “No, darling,” Leonard said in a very soft voice. Carefully he put aside the portfolio, then took Trip’s chin in his hand and pulled him forward, until he was only inches from Leonard’s face. Trip swallowed. He glanced out of the corner of his eyes to see if the technicians were watching, but they stared raptly at their monitors. Leonard’s fingers traced the outline of the cross branded upon his forehead, then his jaw, lingering on the soft hollow of his cheeks.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Trip,” he murmured. “They’re not ugly. They’re the most beautiful things in the world. But you and I—”

  His fingers tightened. The nails dug into Trip’s flesh until the boy cried out, trying to twist away. “—you and I, Trip? We’re dirt.”

  Trip could feel his jawbone shift beneath Leonard’s grip, his teeth grinding together like misplaced gears. “Just dirt,” Leonard repeated, his tone dreamy. Trip flailed helplessly, until Leonard wrenched his hand away.

  “Caput mortuum,” he whispered. For an instant his gaze rested upon the portfolio. Then he turned and strode back to the waiting cameras. Trip caught his breath, gasping.

  One of the technicians glanced over his shoulder with a questioning look. Trip got to his feet and started for the door, head throbbing with pain and rage.

  “What? Did I hurt you?” Leonard called after him.

  Trip stopped. “Yes.” he spit, rubbing his chin.

  Leonard smiled. “Good,” he said, raising a camera to his face. “Now get the fuck over here, and let’s do our job.”

  Trip hesitated. “Come on, Trip, don’t be an asshole,” called Leonard. “Meter’s running. Don’t blow it, okay?”

  He did the shoot. The afternoon passed in a haze of heat and burning dust from the halogen lamps. The constant click and whir of recording equipment was like the buzz of locusts. He felt dizzy, not a little sick. His jaw ached, his head. But the pain seemed to spur him in front of the camera. After a few stiff minutes he moved antically through the small studio, neatly avoiding bundled cables and Leonard’s bags. A technician replaced the music with something atonal and clamorous, that faded into somber gongs and chanting, the high-pitched singing of frogs set to the hollow boom of djembe drums.