Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  They ran from floor to floor, the girl puffing and swearing as she gathered sheets and a plastic basket heaped with yellowed infant clothes; Jack loped past her with armfuls of shirts, khaki pants, mismatched socks, Keeley’s turtlenecks. In the laundry room Mrs. Iverson disappeared behind piles of clothes, and the washer groaned as cold water poured through the pipes. Marz panted back upstairs and went from room to room turning on lights, looking for radios to crank up, checking the answering machine.

  “Stop!” shouted Jack from the basement. “You’ll blow a fuse!”

  When he got back to the first floor he found her in the living room, remote in hand, staring rapturously at the TV “This is so fucking great,” she announced. “We can, like, watch Thanksgiving specials.”

  He laughed. “See if King Kong is on—”

  He took the remote and began flashing through channels.

  “Too fast!” Marz yelped, and grabbed it back. She rocked on her heels, squealing when the screen showed game shows, mud slides, music videos, groaning at the more numerous bursts of static where stations had been, once.

  He left her and went out to the carriage house. He booted up his computer, looked for messages there and on the answering machine and fax. There was an update on the GFI New Year’s celebration, dated some weeks ago, and a letter from Leonard, photographing fish die-outs and human birth defects in someplace called Komsomolsk-na-Amure.

  And there was a note from Larry Muso.

  Dear Jack,

  I have attempted to be in touch once or twice, offering my congratulations upon our pending acquisition of The Gaudy Book. But my messages came back, so I assume you are experiencing some problems there at your house Lazyland. I hope they will have improved by the time you get this.

  I understand that a GFI courier tagged you this summer and that you plan to be at the Big Party. Can we get together beforehand? They are expecting a huge number of people, and in any case I am committed to attending upon our Chairman at dinner. But I would very much like to meet with you, for drinks or perhaps breakfast, depending upon how early you are able to make the transport to the Pyramid. My recommendation (I was at Woodstock III) would be that you take advantage of GFI’s services and arrive as early as possible, to avoid the inevitable tie-ups that will occur as the day progresses. As communication is so difficult these days, perhaps I might suggest a meeting spot at the gala grounds, and at your convenience you could respond if that would suit you? There will be a tent called Electric Avenue, sponsored by the AT&T/IBM joint venture, which might be of interest to you. I can arrange to be there for part of the morning (depending, of course, upon Mr. Tatsumi’s plans for me), and we could enjoy a meal together, which I would like very much. If you are able to let me know of your willingness to do this, I would be very glad to oblige.

  I trust that all is well with you and your grandmother, and that your house has not been affected by the severe storms in New York.

  With Very Warm Regards,

  Larry Muso

  Jack read the message several times, his face growing hot. He had not thought of either Larry Muso or the Big Party for some time, and had in fact never seriously considered that he would go, despite the invisible gryphon etched onto his right palm. It all seemed too Dance-Band-on-the-Titanic, too Last Big Fling, too Suppose They Gave an Apocalypse and Everybody Came?

  And how could he even consider leaving Keeley or Mrs. Iverson, not to mention Marzana, whose baby was due right about then?

  I would very much like to meet with you, for drinks or perhaps breakfast…

  But then Larry Muso’s high cheekbones and darkly lustrous eyes came back to him, the feathery touch of his hair as it grazed Jack’s cheek. He felt a shaft of desire and shut his eyes, lingering for a moment upon the memory of that brief meeting.

  I was so rude, he thought, and transposed the thought into a bit of postcoital reverie, him lying beside that slight figure, stroking that hair: I was so fucking rude to you, why was I so rude?

  He opened his eyes upon the screen before him—it could go black at any moment, New Year’s was scarcely more than a month away, he could lose it all just like that. Quickly he typed a reply—

  Dear Larry,

  I’d be delighted to meet you at Electric Avenue, sometime the morning of the 31st. I haven’t heard anything more from GFI about transportation, so I really have no idea how or when (or even *if*) I could be there. But count me in.

  Best,

  Jack Finnegan

  There. He read the message three or four times, agonizing over whether he should say more, or less. Feeling, too, that it was highly improbable, almost impossible, in fact, that he would actually go through with something so insane, leave Lazyland and attend some corporate rout, just to meet someone he didn’t know for breakfast at the millennium.

  Still, he thought—and pressed the key that would send the message, that did send the message, assuming there was someone out there in left field to catch it—you never can tell.

  Afterward he checked the fax to make sure it had enough paper. He rewound the answering machine tape, changed a lightbulb, listened to a few minutes of a Philip Glass CD. He straightened a few things on the walls—his father’s law degree, one of Leonard’s prints, his aunt Mary Anne Finnegan’s sixth-grade picture.

  That reminded him of something. He went to a bookshelf and found a bunch of family photo albums from the sixties and seventies.

  He withdrew one, bound in plastic with curling daisy decals all over it, settled onto the floor and opened it gingerly. Most of the photos inside had fallen out of the plastic sleeves. He sorted them, black-and-white Polaroids with scalloped edges, overexposed color prints with dates carefully printed on the bottom: November 1967. December 1967. January 1968. March 1968.

  They were pictures of Mary Anne in California. Mary Anne at the San Diego Zoo, wearing a floppy yellow cotton hat. Mary Anne at Big Sur. Mary Anne at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, wearing a hideous green velvet blouse and pink miniskirt, eyes hidden behind immense Day-Glo sunglasses, no doubt imagining herself the eidos of hippie cool but looking frighteningly young. She hadn’t been much older than Marz.

  But there was no other resemblance that Jack could see. Mary Anne was tall, snub-nosed, freckled, her long straight blond hair inclining to wheat rather than Marz’s gossamer. He rifled through more pictures. Except for a single photo of Mary Anne with two girls in a forest, she was always alone.

  So who had taken the photos?

  He frowned, then, turning a page, came upon a cache of small color snapshots all set at the Golden Gate Bridge. He laid them upon the floor.

  The photos showed Mary Anne posing antically with the bridge in the background, spires rising from a golden mist. She wore a bubble-gum-pink plastic raincoat, matching rain hat, and white go-go boots, and held a bunch of purple flowers. She was aping fashion spreads of the time, those silly displays of leggy models making like Egyptian wall paintings, Edie Sedgwick poised for flight atop a leather elephant. Only Mary Anne’s pixie face was far too animated, in spite of chalky lipstick and spidery eyelashes and an impressive pair of fishnet-clad legs. In this, too, she was unlike Marz, whose sullen passivity drove Jack crazy.

  And yet—and yet there was something there. He picked up one of the pictures and examined it. A close-up of Mary Anne’s face, slightly out of focus. She pressed the flowers close against her chin, lilacs and grape hyacinths contrasting with her white skin and golden hair. Her eyes were very wide, round childlike eyes as opposed to Marz’s narrow rather sly gaze. The pupils were tiny, the irises a deep blue-violet with tiny radiating lines of yellow: one of the lilac blossoms might have fallen into her face, as into a pool.

  She must have been stoned out of her mind, he thought, and felt chilled. Who took the photos? Who was with her?

  The longer he stared at the photo, the more its unfocused quality seemed to emanate from her eyes: their gaze distant but not the least bit dreamy, and suffused with that eerie acid cl
arity he suddenly remembered all too well: seeing the subtle shifting patterns within one’s own hands, the staggering urgency of a million cells suddenly revealed to him, the revelation that his body was a hive and had always been so.

  He realized that he had glimpsed that same expression on Marz’s face. Not once, but often. A look as though she were seeing the multitude within him; as though she had seen a ghost.

  Or been one.

  He hastily began rearranging the photos in front of him. Unreasoning dread swept over him. It was one thing to have deliriums brought on by illness, bad dreams of his grandfather and skeletons dancing on the lawn; quite another to consider even momentarily that Lazyland was being visited by the revenant of his long-lost aunt. An old song rang through his head, one of Leonard’s favorites—

  Ain’t you never seen a disembodied soul before?

  He glanced at the pictures one last time, quickly stuck them back in the album. He flipped through the remaining pages, barely glancing at what was there—a few more scratched Polaroids, some photos of an empty storefront. At the very end, he found a small stained envelope stuck to the back cover. It was addressed in blue ballpoint ink, in the same handwriting he recognized from the back of the photographs. Here the penmanship was definitely worse, drunken scrawl rather than that careful looped Palmer hand.

  Mr. and Mrs. James F. Finnegan

  109 Hudson Terrace

  Yonkers, N.Y. 10701

  For a minute he sat holding it. The postmark read San Francisco, April 17, 1968. He drew the envelope to his face and inhaled, caught the faintest spicy-sweet breath of incense. There was no return address.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  There’s a bridge, lots of people are going over the Golden Bridge. I love you love you SO Much! Please don’t worry.

  I LOVE YOU!

  Mary Anne

  And beneath the signature, in uneven block letters:

  THERE IS SOMEONE HERE

  He read it two, three, five times. Finally, he placed the letter and the envelope on the floor and went back through the photos, checking dates. Nothing was marked later than March 1968. He thought back to when he had found the girl in the garden, beneath the hydrangeas. Sometime in April; impossible to remember just when.

  And when had Mary Anne disappeared? He could vaguely recall that it had been summer, he and his brothers fighting over the porch swing while strained grown-up voices spoke, out of sight on the porch, while the scent of charcoal billowed up from the lawn. Nothing had ever been found of her, no clothes, no body washed up under the bridge, nothing. As an adult, his sister had said once at another family cookout, she thought Mary Anne had gone out there and gotten pregnant and killed herself, rather than face her parents. He had never asked his grandmother if there was a putative date for Mary Anne’s death; never asked his father, or anyone else.

  He wouldn’t now, either.

  He put it all away, carefully but quickly. The letter last of all, pressed between transparent plastic membranes like something on a medical slide. He replaced the album on its shelf, shut down his computer, and left. Halfway up the drive he stared up at Lazyland’s windows, glowing like stained glass in the discordant light. Behind one of them a shadow moved, up and down, as though signaling him—

  There is someone here.

  Back inside Lazyland, the house’s usual dark silence had been laid siege by electric bulbs, rumble-thump of washing machine and dryer, water pounding through the pipes, lights glowing on the answering machine and coffeemaker and microwave.

  And music: the television turned up so loud that Jack winced.

  “Marz!” he shouted, striding into the living room and punching the volume control. “Turn it down!” Then, at Marz’s outraged look, “Jesus Christ, it’s so distorted, how can you even hear it?”

  She glowered, which was reassuring—surely ghosts didn’t slouch in the middle of the living-room floor and scowl when you turned the TV down.

  Jack regarded the screen with what he hoped was an acceptable level of adult interest. “Now at least you can hear what they’re saying.”

  “It’s a fucking commercial,” said Marz in a venomous tone; her accent made it into a focking commairshell.

  “Then you certainly don’t need it turned all the way up, do you?” Jack gave her a deliberately prissy smile, which Marz ignored. “Where’s Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson?”

  “Kitchen.” Marz leaned against a pillow, gaze fixed on the television.

  Jack frowned. “You comfortable like that?”

  Marz twiddled her hair. He repeated the question.

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

  He stood there for another minute, watching her watch TV, a kaleidoscopically animated commercial for some kind of soft drink. It was amazing—miraculous, almost—how quickly the world reclaimed its commonplace aspect, if only you could turn the TV on.

  “Let’s see what’s on Public Television,” he suggested.

  “No!” Marz shrieked, and clutched the remote to her huge belly.

  “Just joking.”

  The commercial segued almost indistinguishably into the music station’s corporate ID. Marz fidgeted, bumping her heels against the floor. Jack noticed that her socks did not match. When he glanced at the TV again it showed a swirling background of green and purple and gold, violently redolent of the sky outside. Across the screen letters flowed, formed of varicolored smoke.

  “Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing…”

  A woman’s voice began repeating the words, eerily affectless and breathy, as though it had been generated by a computer; like one of those voices you got on the phone during the rare periods it worked, warning you to expect extensive difficulties and delays in placing your call. Low, ominous music began to creep from the TV: gamelans and drums, a growing crescendo of guitar feedback. Within the garish whorls of color a tiny object appeared. A golden pyramid beset by rays of light and spinning like a pinwheel until it was large enough to fill the screen. Then the pyramid was gone. A huge glittering eye stared out from the television, blinked so that a tarantula fringe of lashes swept across its sky-blue iris, and wheeled back to become fixed like a gem within the face of a radiantly beautiful young man.

  “Ah,” gasped Jack. “It’s that song…”

  “I possess the keys of hell and death,” the young man sang. “I will give you the morning star. The end of the end. The end of the end…”

  He was dressed like a temple dancer. Face ash white, lips and eyes outlined in scarlet, his blond hair all but hidden beneath a pagodalike headdress. His clothes were heavy with jewels and long fringes of brocade. Flowering vines swept across his body as he swayed and spun, crouched and leapt across what seemed a vertiginous height. Beneath his unshod feet clouds and sea churned like dust, and the ragged peaks of mountains. Jack watched raptly. There was something eerie, yet self-consciously hyperbolic, about the dancing figure which was at odds with the doomy music—that was merely (though gorgeously) anthemic, an irresistible pop coda to the century.

  But the dancing boy—he reminded Jack of the Hindi films Leonard dragged him to when they were in Bombay in the late seventies and early eighties, bizarre epics where blue-skinned actors played gods who raped then embraced weeping ecstatic women, only to be interrupted by waves of sari-clad Busby Berkeley chorines on acid, all singing, all dancing, all for the greater glory of the avatars of Vishnu…

  And that, too, was oddly familiar.

  “… fear the phantoms of the Kali Yuga…”

  A shiver of recognition edged up Jack’s spine. He frowned, remembering a coke-fueled evening in 1983. He and Leonard and one of Bollywood’s rising film stars, a golden-skinned man named Ashok Sonerwalla, sat on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Khambhat, talking long into the night and drinking a beverage the color of Pepto-Bismol. Even now
Jack recalled their conversation very clearly, because Leonard (much impressed by My Dinner with Andre) had videotaped the entire evening. During the months of editing that followed, Jack was forced to watch an endless loop of his intoxicated self drooling over the actor.

  Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—

  “That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many yugas, of course. But this is the most evil yuga, this one we are in right now.”

  He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each yuga has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always very exciting!”

  Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences samadhi—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a lot of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the future, so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”

  Jack’s memory of that particular night was of divine balance being restored somewhere within Ashok’s spacious Bhaunagar bedroom. A change in the music brought his attention back to the TV screen, the face of the dancing boy in close-up. High rounded cheekbones, strong jaw, cleft chin, strands of damp blond hair falling across his forehead. A distinctly occidental face—whatever it possessed of Eastern Mystery had been drawn there with makeup and computer theurgy. In the blue-white hollow of his throat a silver crucifix bobbed from a silver chain, the camera fixing for an instant upon a rapturous face that mirrored the boy’s own. The music pulsed and clanged. What was it about this song, that voice, the—