Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Jeez.” Trip’s expression went from stricken to sheer disbelief. “It slides into the water?”

  Martin shook his head. “No, really—we saw it once, at the Rockport Apprenticeshop. They were launching a Friendship sloop they’d built for someone. You make this long ramp, and you grease the boards up. They used vegetables—”

  “Vegetables?”

  “I swear to God.” Martin laughed. “They used lard, and vegetables—pumpkins, squash. All those zucchini you never want to eat. And some Shell gear lube, but we don’t have enough of that. You build the ways at a gentle enough slope, the boat can pretty much launch itself. They had about a hundred people there, apprentices and people watching, and if it started moving too fast, they threw sand on the skids, to slow it down.”

  “A hundred people? But—”

  “But you could do it,” Martin said, staring beyond Trip to the window that framed the Wendameen, resplendent in its new paint beneath a glowering sky, “if you had crowbars, and were really, really careful, and took it slow, and if the ways was done right—you could do it, I think, with two.”

  And that’s how they did it; though first they had to build the launching ways. Mrs. Grose, of course, came to watch (she had been there all along, on her decrepit porch with her pug, occasionally wandering over to offer advice on avoiding paint drips and foul weather), and Doug from the Beach Store and a few of his cronies, who donated some more beer and valuable scrap lumber. The rest of the wood came from warped boards and planks and plywood stored beneath the boathouse, augmented by birch trees that Martin had Trip take down, Martin himself being too weak to handle an ax. One of the Graffams heard about Martin’s plan, and dropped by one windy morning to inspect the ways.

  “Not too bad, there,” he pronounced, ducking his head to light a hand-rolled cigarette, “but you’re going to have t’weight that cradle, else it ain’t going to fall away when you get her into the water.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Martin said glumly, and Dick Graffam’s look told him that’s about what he would’ve expected, someone from away trying to launch a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter in hurricane season and sail down to New York City.

  So then Martin had to figure out what to weight the cradle with. Lead is what you’d use, if you had it; but who had lead in their summer bungalow? He kicked around for most of the morning after Graffam left, bad tempered and shaking with fatigue. A raw wind was blowing from the southwest, a tropical storm brewing somewhere. Martin swore and paced down the beach, the hood of his anorak flapping back from his face. The sheer lunacy of his plan had all been there in Graffam’s look. It was the first week of October, the butt end of the season even for experienced sailors, of which Martin was not one. In the best of times, you wouldn’t get underway this late.

  And this was, in every possible way that Martin could imagine, not the best of times. But it was done, the boat was done, and the launching ways would be completed soon. He slid his hand into the pocket of his anorak, felt the smooth wooden box that he carried always. A voice stirred in his head like a breeze from a warmer place.

  “Go with him. You won’t lose your way, Martin. I’ll find you…”

  His hand tightened around the sextant’s box, and he looked out to sea with something like dread. Something like resignation, and relief. Knowing for the first time, and with absolute certainty, that he would not be coming back.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Pyramid Meets the Eye

  The power had been down for almost a month, autumn skidding into winter, October so fast Jack would have missed it, save for Marzana’s swelling stomach. November an uneasy dream of lurid yellow skies, bare trees and smell of burning and a harsh northeast wind that tore the shingles from Lazyland’s gables. He felt well these days, thin but strong, untroubled by coughs or fevers, though his eyesight did blur sometimes, there was always that sense of things half-seen, motes of living matter swimming across his cornea. He received a courier-delivered postcard and a book from Emma, telling him that she had sent the odd samples off to several labs for identification. One sample had been lost, but she hoped to hear about the other, someday, soon. That had been in early October; he had no news since from either Emma or Jule. Whatever the peculiar granular encrustations had been, they seemed to clear up by November. He checked his throat and eyes several times a day, scraping at the inside of his mouth so much he had a raw spot there that took a while to heal. But it did heal, and the crystalline matter did disappear. One day it was just gone and never recurred. Jack chalked it up to the extra vitamins Emma had left, and was relieved.

  A stoic calm claimed Lazyland as winter approached. The weather was awful, the air smoke-filled when not thick with greasy rain. Jack spent most of his time indoors, reading by lamplight in his grandfather’s study, or walking around the mansion flicking electrical switches and lifting telephone receivers as apprehensively as he examined his throat and eyes. It was like an endless restless rainy afternoon, unrelieved by sun or weather reports promising a break in the clouds. One day he found a crop of tiny orange mushrooms growing along the edge of one of the silk Chinese carpets. After that he added a Fungus Alert to his list of things to watch for on his rambles around the house.

  He took to visiting the girl each morning, and again at night on his way to bed. Rapping softly at the door to her room, because sometimes she slept later than he did, and it was important (his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson reminded him sternly, nightly, giving him cups of chamomile tea to carry up to her bed), VERY Important, that an Expectant Mother get enough rest. He wondered, often, how it was babies had been born all these years, without him; without the entire world going on leave to take care of all those mothers. The book Emma had sent was a worn paperback guide to the oft-charted territories of pregnancy. Jack read it at night, in bed, tracking week by week the body’s journey into this terra infirma, bemused and occasionally awed by what could be found there—you can do that? With THAT? Then next morning, perched at the end of Marz’s four-poster, ersatz coffee for him, oatmeal and soy powder for her, reading the pertinent sections aloud and thinking how this wasn’t so strange, really, it was a little bit like traveling in Thailand or rural Italy with Leonard, learning about the monasteries the day before a visit, trying not to be grossed out by the local customs. Like, Marz’s gums bled easily, because there was so much more blood now, everywhere inside her. And her hair grew longer and thicker, because of the protein supplements (also courtesy of Emma). Her pale peaked face grew rounder, and pink, though the rest of her remained thin, save of course her belly, which seemed absolutely enormous.

  “Feel it?” She pulled up her flannel nightdress, grabbed his hand, and put it on her stomach. “Ow, you’re cold, Jack!”

  “Sorry,” he smiled. “Cold hands, warm heart; dirty feet, no sweetheart.”

  She laughed; that, too, was new. “Can you tell? It has the hiccups.” Her stomach distending grotesquely as the baby kicked, Jack resisting the urge to say this reminded him of that scene in Alien. Moving his fingers across the taut bulge until they picked up an arrhythmic tap-tap. How could it have the hiccups, when it couldn’t even breathe?

  Biology was amazing.

  Toward the end of the month they had a Thanksgiving celebration, on what Jack was pretty sure would have been Thanksgiving Day. No turkey, but some Italian sausages he had gotten from Delmonico’s in October, and saved for a special occasion. Sausage sputtering dangerously on the Coleman stove while Jack poked at them, grease flying everywhere and the occasional dramatic burst of flame. Then sitting down to dinner at the formal dining-room table beneath the Viennese crystal chandelier, unlit but its prisms twinkling magnificently in the glow of candles and Coleman lanterns. Cut-glass bowls of pickles, olives, even some canned jellied cranberry sauce.

  “It’s beautiful, dear,” Keeley murmured, as Jack helped her into her armchair. The four of them sat at one end of the table, with Keeley at its head. “Just beautiful.”

 
He smiled, pondering Thanksgivings past. House abrim with cousins, priests smoking cigarettes in his grandfather’s study, Captain Kangaroo in the living room broadcasting live from the Macy’s parade. His brother Dennis sending an arrow through the center of a painting by a member of the Hudson River School, and never being punished for it. Heaps of mashed potatoes and turnips and green beans, turkey the size of a shoat, whiskey glinting in crystal tumblers like chunks of topaz; and, best of all, the knowledge that this was just the beginning, the front door nudging open upon the vast sparkling treasure-house that was the Christmas season, then.

  Today there were sausages, on a too-big platter. They were more highly seasoned than Marz would have liked. She did not complain, but she did grimace, like an exotic monkey with her new thick fringe of bright hair, and then proceeded to eat without stopping for a quarter hour. There was whole-wheat rotini from Emma’s hoard, with dried basil, and canned tomatoes, and some nasty canned spinach which Jack had tried to save with garlic salt, which nobody ate. A gruesome-looking apple pudding from Emma’s dried apples, which tasted marvelous, and which everyone did eat. Jack put a two-thirds-full bottle of Glenlivet on the table. He poured a half inch for Keeley, who sipped it slowly throughout the meal, and proceeded to drink most of the rest himself. Afterward, a little wobbly in the head, he helped Mrs. Iverson with the dishes, while Keeley and Marz retired upstairs for late-afternoon naps.

  “Not like it used to be,” Mrs. Iverson sighed, wiping greasy water from a plate with a linen rag. “Your grandfather… I think, What would he have thought of all this—”

  She lifted her head to gaze out the kitchen window. Beyond the slope of leafless trees the Hudson was marbled black and orange, like the interior of a forge. There was the occasional spatter of rain, the bite of a cold draft making its way through the walls. These—along with the smells of fresh cooking, the growing stack of cleaned dishes, the smell of Scotch—made for one of those rare moments when chronology and atmospheric effects conspired to make everything seem not all that unchanged. It really could be Thanksgiving Day.

  “He would have thought it was the end of the world,” said Jack. In fact his grandfather probably wouldn’t have thought that at all. But Jack did. It reminded him of a January afternoon with Leonard, when they were both seventeen. Side by side on the floor of an empty classroom at Saint Bartholomew’s, an hour or so after fucking in a closet; watching a blazing sunset fall through blackened tree limbs to ignite the windows. The sight had filled Jack with exhilaration and dread, confused with sexual fever and its aftermath, the sense of things burning, dangerously, somewhere just out of sight. Since then winter sunsets always moved him thus, a touch of terror amidst the glory. He was surprised, now, to realize he had not felt this way in some time—because there had been no real sunsets, no real winter, for over two years; and because he had grown accustomed to that soft hem of terror brushing against him daily.

  “… think I would ever live this long,” Mrs. Iverson was ending with a sigh.

  Jack looked up guiltily. “Oh, please don’t say that.”

  The housekeeper moved a stack of plates from counter to cupboard. “Doesn’t matter what I say.” She turned and smiled, placed a hand still damp with soapsuds on his. “Oh now, Jackie, don’t you go looking like you just got the bad news about Santa Claus! That was a lovely meal you put together—you saw how Mary Anne ate, and your grandmother, too! You’re a good boy, Jackie. Go on now, I’ll finish up—”

  She shooed him out of the kitchen. He went, still feeling guilty—men never seemed to stick around until every last dish was done, no matter how good their intentions—but grateful to have some time alone. Like all Thanksgivings, it had been long. The shadows and sense of repleteness made it feel late, but a consensus of Lazyland’s clocks seemed to agree that it was only around four. He wandered through the dining room, his grandfather’s study, living room, then out into the entry, feeling lost and melancholy. He finally settled into the Stickley chair beneath the grandfather clock, leaned his elbows on the battered table, and stared mournfully at the telephone. He lifted the receiver. The line was dead. He went upstairs.

  On the second-floor landing he paused. Loud snoring came from his grandmother’s room and Marz’s. Jack shook his head: so much noise from two such little people. Three, if you counted the baby. From the back steps behind the linen closet he heard Mrs. Iverson exclaiming to herself, her heavy tread as she began to climb. He turned and hurried up the curving stairway to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time and being careful to chuck the moth-eaten caribou under the chin as he went past.

  He went into his bedroom. Darkness was falling quickly through the old house, low heavy clouds in the west streaked with vermilion. Jack found matches and lit the lantern, went to his night table and squirted some Fusax beneath his tongue, chased it with stale water from a plastic tumbler. For several minutes he sat at the edge of the bed, watching sheaves of light ripple across the windows, black and scarlet and silvery grey. The light oppressed him, made him think of Good Friday, the altar stripped of everything save shadows and candles guttering in red glass holders. It was like that now, he thought, seeing the world without her makeup was not a pretty sight. Wind tore at the shingles, a rattle of rain or hail swept across the roof. From somewhere down near the river echoed laughter, the explosive roaring of an engine that grew ominously silent. A sense of something terrible about to happen swept over him, certain as the rain; but what could be done? There was no one to call for help, no one to wake; nothing to do but ride it out.

  His mother had always said, No matter how bad things are, they will look better in the morning. But now morning never came. The glimmering had stolen the promise of dawn. He could only take a deep breath and wait for the horror to pass.

  It did, slowly. He was not conscious of having shut his eyes, but it seemed he must have—when he blinked, the room had changed. The wind had died. A sharp, foul smell clung to the air, as of burned hair or feathers. The light had shifted. It was no longer black and scarlet but a lambent red, the deep lurid red of blood, so brilliant it cast no shadows. It was like staring at the world through an infrared lens. He stumbled to his feet and lurched to the window.

  The sky was in flames. Not clouds that resembled flames, but fire, huge explosive gouts of fire stretching from horizon to horizon, roiling and expanding as though they would devour the entire sky. He watched in horror, looked down but saw nothing—no trees, no earth, not even the walls of the house beneath him. Only a vast cauldron of molten light, seething like some monstrous bacillus. The light tore at his eyes, made them stream and burn. He turned and staggered to the door. He crashed against the doorframe and all but fell downstairs, blinded.

  “Grandmother! Grandmother—”

  He stumbled into Keeley’s room. The heavy jacquard curtains were drawn, as always. They filtered out the light, so that he could see his startled grandmother sitting up in bed, still wearing her fisherman’s sweater, a sleep mask pushed up over her white curls.

  “Jack! What is it—”

  “The fire! Are you all right—”

  Fire? Keeley started to climb from the bed. “Where, where—”

  “Grandmother, don’t! Please—”

  Someone appeared in the doorway: the blond girl. She yawned and shook her head, staring at Jack through sleep-slit eyes. “Fire? There’s no fire. What, you have a dream or something?”

  “A dream?” He shook his head. “No, I…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “There was a fire.” He cleared his throat. “Outside. There was a fire.”

  Marz walked into the room, arms crossed above her waxing belly. She went to the window and fiddled until she found a heavy sateen cord. She yanked on it. The curtains opened.

  “You were dreaming ,” she said. “See?”

  The window framed the same view as his own did—dark trees, carriage house, sloping lawn, sluggish river. All untouched by any flames save a few bright
brief flashes from the evening sky, silvery purple and acid green.

  “No,” Jack said, but the girl had already crawled into bed with Keeley, grinning.

  “I have dreams like that, sometimes.” Marz shivered, and Keeley draped a blanket over her thin shoulders. “Like I’ll see the sky at night, there’ll be words written up on the sky, but I can’t understand them. And bridges—I have this dream, a lot, this dream about a bridge…”

  Jack walked to the window and looked out. She was right, there were no fires. He rubbed his eyes.

  Jesus fuck, it seemed so real.

  “I never remember my dreams,” Keeley said. “Not anymore. Your father, he used to have dreams. And nightmares…”

  Jack turned, thinking she spoke to him. But the way Keeley smiled at Marzana, the way her hand traced the headboard’s carven whorls—as though another palm moved there beneath her own—told him that she spoke to the girl. That she was seeing the girl, again, as Mary Anne. Your father was his grandfather.

  “… one time he thought the hotel was on fire! He jumped up, and—”

  Lightning exploded within the room. Jack cried out, and Marzana; but Keeley stared at the ceiling, where the lightning stayed, trapped within the trumpets of an Art Nouveau ceiling lamp.

  “The power!” shrieked Marz. “The power’s on!”

  She flung herself from the bed and raced across the room, flicking the light switch on and off. “It’s on, it’s on!”

  “Stop!” Jack yelled. “You’ll blow the bulb—”

  But Marz was already gone, stampeding to her own room, where he could hear the sudden joyful blare of a radio.

  “—LAST DAYS! THREE DAYS ONLY!—”

  “Good Lord, what’s this—oh look, Keeley darling, power’s on!” Mrs. Iverson tottered onto the landing. “Good heavens, tell that girl to be quiet! Quick, Jack, help me bring the laundry down. Mary Anne! You help, too, bring those baby things we got out—”