But the boy hardly moved. His breathing was not labored. He barely seemed to breathe at all. Martin was afraid to probe for a pulse, the boy’s arms and neck were so badly lacerated. He finally resorted to clumsily holding a large gilt-framed mirror above the boy’s mouth. And yes, a faint fog appeared at last, so little breath, it seemed not enough to keep a mouse alive. Martin sighed with relief. The boy’s chest rose and fell. Martin could hear the sigh of air leaving him, a soft wheezing in his lungs. Almost surely the boy had inhaled water: he could be developing pneumonia. Martin fetched the plastic bin that held eight years’ harvest of medications and hurriedly rifled it, tossing aside morphine syringes, inhalers, empty bottles of AZT and erythromycin and crixivan. At the very bottom, buried beneath wads of sterile gauze and hospital-size tubes of antibiotic ointment, there was a package of penicillin ampoules. Martin squinted at the label.
It had expired over a year ago. He removed one of the ampoules and held it up to the light. It looked fine. Meaningless, he knew, and probably the drug was useless now; but he would chance it.
For several minutes he stood staring down at the wasted body within its nest of blankets. At last he took a deep breath and began searching for a spot to inject the drug. He found a place above the young man’s elbow where the skin was raw but unbroken. The antiseptic smell of ointment mingled with that of seawater as carefully he straightened the arm, stroking the pale turquoise tendril of a vein, then jabbed the ampoule against it.
He had not expected the boy to react. But he did, jerking his arm from Martin’s hand and gasping. Martin looked up, frightened, and saw the boy’s eyes fly open, his mouth agape. He coughed, then gagged, choking as Martin grabbed his shoulders and tried to restrain him.
“Wait!” Martin cried. “Please, don’t—”
He pushed him against the mattress. A nurse’s voice shouted in his head: Keep him upright, they choke on their own sputum. Horrified, he watched as the boy wrenched away from him, arms and legs moving convulsively as he thrashed at the edge of the bed, as though trying to stand. Without warning he coughed violently. A gout of water poured from his mouth. Martin stumbled backward. Slowly the boy raised his head and stared at him with burning eyes.
“Where is she?”
Martin raised his hands. “Who?”
“The girl—the dead girl—” The boy’s voice was like something dragged across stones. “Is she here?”
“I only found you—on the beach, outside.” Martin forced himself to ask as calmly as he could, “Can you remember anything? Were you on a boat? In the storm? Were there others with you?”
“They’re everywhere.” His pupils were swollen, his eyes wide and staring, though it was not Martin he saw. “They came through the holes—can you find her? Can you find her?”
His voice became a shriek, babbling strings of nonsense. Frantically, he staggered to his feet. Martin seized him, wrestled him back into bed and pinned him there. His skin was slick and soft beneath Martin’s hands, like fallen petals.
“… see them? see them?”
Martin reached with one hand for the night table, knocking aside water bottle and candlesticks. The penicillin went flying before his fingers closed about what he wanted: a Ziploc plastic bag filled with morphine syringes. Without looking, he tugged one free, turned, and plunged it against the boy’s neck. The boy continued to struggle as Martin pulled the needle loose and tossed it onto the floor.
“… where…”
Martin gazed in pity and revulsion at where the young man’s flesh bore fresh abrasions; at his maddened blue eyes and frantic hands. But after several minutes the boy was quieter. His eyes grew calm and his body grew still, no longer rigid with dread. He even smiled, the same soft silly smile Martin knew from tending dying friends. His gaze focused on the older man. The smile became a grin, grotesque in his beautifully ruinous face.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Martin Dionysos.” Martin leaned forward. “I found you on the beach. Yesterday. You were—I thought you were dead, at first. Do you remember what happened to you? Did your boat sink? Can you tell me your name?”
The boy shook his head. “I jumped. I was scared. The bay.” He looked down at his chest, plucked feebly at his breastbone. “I jumped.” His gaze moved distractedly across the room.
“Your name? I want to help you—”
That silly grin. “Don’t you know? I’m not changing it.”
With a sigh Martin turned away. Glancing back at the boy he saw that his eyes had closed. He looked peaceful; Martin knew he was only stoned. He was at the door when the voice came behind him.
“Trip.” The boy’s eyes remained closed. He raised a hand like a bruised iris. “My name is Trip Marlowe.” And slept.
Days passed. Then weeks. You wouldn’t know it from the sky or shrouded sun that skulked across it; but Martin could gauge a sort of summer blooming as the boy’s wounds healed. First his broken skin; then his broken wrist. What next? wondered Martin, who spent a lot of time staring at that gold ring on the third finger of the boy’s right hand. “The nameless finger,” his Swedish grandmother would have called it. To Martin it was infinitely something. He and John had been married by a Universalist minister, exchanging rings that they wore on their right hands. Martin still bore his. So did John, in a San Francisco cemetery two thousand miles away.
“Are you married, Trip? Do you have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—I could try to contact them—”
Trip said nothing.
“The ring,” urged Martin softly. “Where did the ring come from?”
Trip stared down at it with dull surprise, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She had one, too…”
Okay, thought Martin, fighting an unreasonable disappointment. “Okay.”
There were no more tussles with morphine, but the sweet smile stayed. Martin wondered if he had suffered brain damage in the wake of his accident, or if he had been simpleminded to begin with. Mrs. Grose had been consulted, and the Graffams, about any foundering boats. And yes, a trawler had gone down in the storm, off the Libby Islands. There was a light there, but it had been unmanned for years; the Graffams knew only that pieces of the trawler had washed up at Bucks Head. No one knew who had died, or how many. The boat had shipped from Cutler, and that was very far away, now. In an old telephone book Martin found only two Marlowes, both in Liberty. He had no listings for anything farther down east than Bar Harbor, and there were no Marlowes there at all.
He was relieved.
Mornings he would prepare breakfast. Oatmeal and raw milk and maple syrup, dark as motor oil and with an ineffably sweet, scorched taste. Sometimes eggs from their neighbor Diana, their shells tea-colored, pale yellow, the soft blue-green of a vein too near the surface of the skin. Martin and Trip would sit at the kitchen table, Trip wearing a loose worn flannel shirt and pajama pants that had belonged to John. Too big by far for his slight frame, but Martin was fearful of fabric catching against the flesh not quite healed, and it was not warm enough to go shirtless. While Trip spooned oatmeal or liquescent yolk Martin would try to engage him in conversation. Where was he from? Where had he grown up?
But Trip never replied. He would talk, uninspired musings on the weather, the eggs, how he had slept; but he would not answer questions, or ask them. At first Martin thought this, too, a manifestation of whatever disaster had befallen him. But as the weeks went by and he came to map the boy as once he had mapped canvas, he started to recognize a certain look that Trip had. Or rather, the absence of a look: a shuttering of his eyes, a retreat that Martin could observe as certainly as he could mark a falling leaf. The boy was not amnesiac, not as simple as Martin suspected. He was reticent, skittish, purposefully shy. He was in hiding.
After breakfast, and everything tidied up, they would walk to the beach. Trip was stronger, now. He could have walked by himself, and though he never said anything, he seemed to welcome Martin’s company. He did not like to be left alone
in the bungalow; he did not like to be alone. Nights, sleeping on the couch in the living room, Martin would often be awakened by the boy’s cries. He would go to him, murmuring until Trip fell asleep once more. The boy claimed not to recall his nightmares. Only once, Martin let his fingertips graze Trip’s healed wrist: the boy looked at him and said, “She was already dead.”
Martin nodded, waiting for him to go on; but the boy withdrew his hand and said no more.
“The rest must have drowned,” Martin explained to Mrs. Grose one evening, surrounded by flickering candles in her cozy living room. “He said they went through the holes. He keeps saying something about a dead girl…”
Mrs. Grose sipped her brandy thoughtfully. “His sweetheart, you think?”
“I guess.” Martin stared into his glass. “He wears a wedding ring, but it’s on this finger—like mine.” He turned his hand, so that candlelight slid across the thick gold band. “And some kind of Maltese cross. She must have drowned.”
“Perhaps.” In her lap the pug snorted, and she stroked his head. “Have you tried to find his family?”
Martin shrugged, uncomfortable. “Yes. But how can I? He won’t say anything, I mean he won’t tell me where he’s from, who they are…”
Outside, in the endless shifting twilight, branches tapped against the windows, overgrown lilacs that Mrs. Grose was afraid to prune lest they never grow back. The pug yawned. Mrs. Grose shifted on the couch, cradling her brandy against her chest. “Why are you keeping him, Martin?”
He started to respond testily, but stopped. A candle sputtered, then went out. “Where could he go? If he left here—”
“He is not like you, Martin,” she said gently. “He does not have a disease. He seems strong enough, strong in the body. It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin.”
Martin ran a hand through his long greying hair. He whispered, “I know. I know. But where could he go?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not to us. I know it’s hard, Martin. It’s because you saved him—”
“I didn’t—”
“He would have died there, if not for you.” She stood, the pug tumbling from her lap with an affronted groan, and crossed the room to lay a hand upon his shoulder. “You saved him, Martin. And for some reason he’s still alive. But he has to go…”
“Reason?” The face Martin lifted to her was raw with despair. “What reason can there be? What?”
Mrs. Grose sighed. She stared past him, to where the lilacs scratched at the panes. “I do not know. Maybe none,” she said, and stooped to pick up the gasping pug. “But you must act as though there is one, anyway. Good night, my dear—”
She lowered her head to kiss him, leaving a breath of brandy and Sen-Sen upon his cheek. Her tortoiseshell eyes seemed bleary, not with that vague distant expression Martin knew so well but with something more disturbing. Genuine weariness, the detached surrender of great age to a well-earned sleep, or more.
“Adele? Are you all right? Do you feel bad?” His voice was unsteady: he had never asked her that.
“Just tired,” she replied, and began to walk heavily toward her room. “Just tired. That’s all.”
He went the next day to the beach alone. Trip seemed content to sit in the living room, gazing at the expensive array of stereo and video equipment that had been John’s.
“Sometimes it works.” Martin picked up a remote and tentatively pressed a few buttons. “But not today, I guess. I’ll be back in a while. Okay?”
Trip nodded without looking up. “Okay.”
The wind was from the north, bearing with it the acrid scent of burning. He had heard there were fires along the border in Canada, started by renegade environmentalists: the kind of vague rumors passed amongst the denizens of the Beach Store more freely than currency. Certainly there was fire somewhere—the air cloaked in a thick yellowish haze that stung the eyes and throat and nearly made Martin turn back.
But he did not, and by the time he reached the shore the wind had shifted again, and the smoke dispersed, leaving only a dank foul smell. His eyes moved restlessly across the ground as he walked, longing to find something familiar, yearning for it as Martin had never dreamed possible. Fallen white-pine branches pressed into the mud, their green fans mimicking gingkoes; ferns; new growth beneath the sickly mulch of leaves and yellowing birch bark. Everywhere he looked he saw a world robbed of color save for a lurid yellow burst of lichen upon an oak tree, the mauve carpet of wintergreen leaves, and copper-green scraping of tamaracks against the sky. Brazen sky, guilty sky, with its stolen hues like rippling pennons, grass-green, luminous orange, periwinkle blue. It sickened him, and he hurried on.
Alongside the decrepit boathouse the Wendameen sat up on blocks, tarp flapping. Gaps in the plastic covering showed where the wooden hull needed to be scraped and repainted, seams that needed to be filled, floats replaced. Martin looked away, thinking how long it had been since he worked on the boat—a year? Two? It wouldn’t be worth salvaging if he didn’t get to it soon. He knew he never would.
From high up in a scraggly red oak a woodpecker clattered. Martin kicked along the beach, miserable but without the accustomed baggage of things that he knew made him miserable. He was not thinking of John, he was not thinking of dead friends, he was not thinking of tumors or T cells piling themselves into a caravan and driving off a cliff. He was thinking of Trip Marlowe and the way his long hair fell across his cheek, leaving it half in shadow; of the small protuberant knob in the wrist Martin had set, badly, which was like a stone under the skin. He was thinking of Trip’s eyes, winking blue like a gas jet turned too low; and somewhere behind that he was thinking of Adele Grose’s eyes, how last night they had seemed less vivid, once-bright marbles gone opaque from too much use.
It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin…
His foot struck savagely at a stone. But I’m not keeping him…
But you are, you are… the gulls answered. He stooped and grabbed a rock, hurled it at the sky. The birds dived as it plummeted into the red-streaked sea. He could feel rage building inside him like a fever, even as he turned and headed back to the cottage. He shoved the door open with such force that it slammed against the inside wall. Trip looked up from where he sat on the couch, idly turning the pages of a magazine.
“Trip.” Martin stood in the middle of the room, panting a little.
“Do you need to go somewhere? I mean away from here—do you want to go?”
The boy gazed at him with calm blue eyes. “New York,” he said after a moment.
“New York?”
Trip nodded. “She—I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York.”
“New York.” Martin sank onto the couch beside him, shaking his head. “You mean Manhattan? You were in New York City?”
“Just a few days.”
He waited, but Trip said nothing else; just stared at the magazine in his lap. Finally Martin said, “New York. You’re sure? That’s where you want to go?”
The boy lifted his face. “Yes.”
Martin stared at him. After a moment he reached and gently pushed a lank strand of hair from Trip’s eyes.
“Then I’ll take you,” he said. His gaze passed beyond the boy, to the window that looked down upon the rocky beach where a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter was raised on wooden sawhorses and concrete blocks. He leaned forward, and for an instant hugged the boy’s spare frame to his own, before he felt Trip flinch and start away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you—wherever you want to go.”
CHAPTER TEN
Heart and Soul
At Lazyland, spring staggered into summer. The daffodils bloomed, rust-streaked, their inner horns twisted into fantastic shapes, and gave off a scent like lilies. From the tulip poplars a fragrant pollen fell, staining Lazyland’s cracked drive acid green and orange. The sky shivered in its Stygian dance; some mornings, stars appeared amongst the clouds, and sun dogs chased them above the swollen Hudson.
When news reached
Lazyland it seemed like a mishandled communiqué from another century: plague vaccines that caused mass hallucinations; children awaiting spaceships upon the Golden Gate Bridge; Disney World seized by tattooed militia wearing animal masks, who took orders from a teenage girl in combat uniform and a Blue Antelope T-shirt. Militias and strange millennial cults begetting their own plagues, their own viruses, electronic and corporeal; their own rites and rhythms of destruction, their own precarious groynes and parapets thrown up against what was immanent, and imminent.
… the end of the end, the end of the end…
Jack would stand upon the mansion’s grand old porch, surrounded by ancient furniture and his grandfather’s telescopes, and stare across the river to the ruined Sparkle-Glo factory, black and gold and crimson in the night. In the carriage house the fax machine would now and then stir, like a restless sleeper, then spew forth press releases detailing myriad magnanimous ventures spearheaded by The Golden Family. Snow leopard DNA encoded on the head of a pin, test launches of the dirigible fleet that would tow SUNRA to its place in the poisoned sky. The archival purchase, for $3.3 million U.S., of the historic American literary magazine The Gaudy Book. During these electrical intermissions the answering machine would blink and beep, and Leonard’s voice would hail Jack from London or Voronezh or the Waterton Glacier. Mrs. Iverson would do laundry and make toast. From somewhere within Lazyland a radio cried out with more strange bulletins. Fragments of pop music and Gotterdämmerung; the advertising slogan for GFI’s new global network: Only Connect. A new song that got extraordinary airplay, considering the broken bandwidths one had to gyre through these days—
I possess the keys of hell and death,
I will give you the morning star:
The end of the end, the end of the end…
Jack kept watch, listening as he fingered the vial of Fusax in his pocket, holding it up to the light to measure its diminished contents and praying that it might, somehow, be enough. He heard the fellahin laughing in Untermeyer Park, marked the progress of a dirigible moving slowly through the clouds. He looked at his hands. He was losing weight. His sight was strained as well; bright shapes flitted at the corner of his eyes, and sometimes he heard voices that did not arise from radios or rooms within the house.
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