Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “No ! NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”

  Jack saw Marzana staggering to her feet.

  “IT’S NOT HIM! IT’S NOT HIM! THEY DID SOMETHING! IT’S NOT—”

  “Marzana!” Jack cried, aghast. “Marzana, what is it? Who—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”

  “THEY DID IT! THAT BITCH DID IT! THEY FUCKING—”

  “Marz!”

  Her screams gave way to hysterical crying, the girl kicking at him though her eyes never left the screen. In a panic Jack yelled at her to be quiet and tried to drag her from the room. But she was too strong for him, and so big now. With an explosive gasp she rammed her elbow into his stomach. Jack went reeling backward as the girl swept past him, stumbled to her knees, and began to wail.

  “No, oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE—”

  Jack groaned and sat up. The girl knelt with her back to him, swaying as she moaned something he couldn’t understand—it sounded like rippp, rippp. Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.

  “THE END OF THE END”

  STAND IN THE TEMPLE

  AGRIPPA MUSIC/GFIDISC

  Jack leaned forward to put his arms around Marzana’s shaking form. His eyes remained fixed on the glittering corporate logo that appeared at the end of the line of block letters—

  A golden pyramid surmounted by the sun, a phantom gryphon shimmering within its rays.

  PART THREE

  Regrets Only

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Into the Mystic

  They made preparations for leaving.

  Diana began saving vegetables for greasing the launching ways. Nothing from her garden ever went to waste—if it wasn’t cooked, or baked, or dried, or canned, it was fed to the chickens or the pigs, or put into compost—but the pigs’ rations were cut back, the mealy ends of potatoes and zucchini and pockmarked eggplants put into a new bin marked WENDAMEEN.

  And the ways itself was completed. It stretched twenty-seven feet from shore to waterline, then extended several more yards into the bay, where the wooden struts and pallets were anchored with lengths of automobile chain. Martin spent two days trying to figure out how to weight the cradle he’d designed for the boat. He finally pillaged his own car, a Toyota Camry whose engine he and Trip removed and which Trip then fastened with more chain to the wooden cradle. But that didn’t seem like it would be enough. So he went to Adele Grose and received permission to gut her car, a 1956 Cadillac that hadn’t run for decades. When that still didn’t seem enough weight, he and Trip trussed the entire structure with more automotive chains and the doors from the Camry.

  “It looks like it’s going to take off,” remarked Trip when they were done. “You think it’ll do her?”

  Martin privately thought the boat now resembled something from Waterworld. “I guess if the cradle doesn’t sink, we can just hack away at it until it does,” he said doubtfully, staring up at the Wendameer’s white hull. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of that gear stowed away.”

  He bartered with Diana for food, giving her two paintings she had long admired in exchange for jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and the promise of fresh eggs the morning of their voyage.

  “But aren’t you going to miss these?” Diana asked when Martin and Trip brought the two canvases over. “I mean, they were hanging in your place, it’s not like you had them stored away somewhere.”

  “I can always come and visit them, right?”

  “Sure,” Diana said absently. She was already measuring her walls for the canvases, and so didn’t see Martin’s stricken look. But it was too late now. He was committed to the voyage because Trip was; and because he could no more imagine not taking the boy south to Manhattan than he could imagine leaving him there, forever.

  Still, there was a little time left at Mars Hill. The last few days of Indian summer, blisteringly hot beneath a sky like cracked cloisonné, the beach steaming where hailstones the size of fists hammered against stone and Trip stumbled round gathering them, to fill an Igloo cooler for as long as the ice would last. Not long, it turned out, a day or two. Enough to keep the last four bottles of beer cold; enough for Martin to fill an ice pack to lay across his brow, fighting fever.

  “You’re letting him kill you!” his son Jason had raged. “You’re going to leave me here alone—you’re going to leave Moony and me and the baby—”

  “But the world will know that I died for love,” he had told his son, and with a strangled sob Jason fled down the beach.

  Ah well, nothing to be done. He devoted himself to teaching Trip what he could of seamanship. On the deck of the Wendameen, Trip’s face scrunched into that little-boy scowl of concentration as he followed Martin’s nimble fingers through the labyrinth of sailor’s knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, rolling hitch. Martin showed him where the harness was, in the cockpit, and warned him that in case of rough weather he was to put it on.

  “Some boats have lifelines—ropes you can grab on to, if you have to. This one doesn’t,” Martin said, pacing from bow to stern while Trip struggled with a bowline. “So you’ve always got to keep your head up. You always have to have one hand for yourself and one for the boat.”

  Trip nodded, not really listening; and so Martin said the same things again, and again, just as he endlessly showed the boy how to thread the knots, how to secure the anchor line, how to maintain the proper tension between jibstay and jumpers and backstay. Somehow, some of it would stick, he thought, smiling as Trip bellowed with triumph and held up a length of rope.

  Weeks passed. Their nights were spent poring over the charts. Martin decided they would travel point to point, always within sight of shore. With no navigational aids beyond a compass and sextant (which was pretty useless, since you couldn’t see the stars to steer by), and with storms a near-constant threat, it seemed the only reasonable thing to do. He showed him the sextant, its deft interlocking of mirrors, prism, filters, vernier; even took him out onto the porch to explain how it worked. How it was futile if you couldn’t shoot the stars, although you could theoretically take a shot onshore, angle on three points on land, and find your way thus. The Graffams had told him that many of the old lighthouses along the coast of Maine were occupied again, since the Coast Guard no longer chased off squatters. It was rumored that some of the lights were even operational—Dick Graffam had seen one for himself, at Quoddy Head—and that a number of the old solar-powered light buoys still worked. The worst part of the journey would be getting around the ships’ graveyard off Cape Cod. The Cape Cod Canal would be too dangerous, without any advance warning of pirate ships coming through, and so Martin plotted another course. Which would also be perilous, but he and John had sailed it before. Martin felt fairly confident that if the seas were calm, they would have little trouble.

  “Let’s aim for Friday,” he said one night, pushing his chair away from the cluttered table.

  Trip’s face lit up. “To leave?”

  “Well, to get the boat into the water, at least. There’s no point waiting any longer.” He felt a stabbing at his heart: why wait? The boy wasn’t going to fall in love with him, the stars weren’t suddenly going to show their faces through the broken sky, the tide wasn’t going to turn. “We should go now,” he went on, “before it gets worse.”

  “Before what gets worse?” asked Trip cheerfully. “At least it’s not cold. And we’ve g
ot the wind from the north, you said that’s good.”

  Clueless, Martin marveled; he’s just so absolutely clueless. He smiled and nodded. “I did, and it is: it’s all good.”

  But lying alone on the couch that night—listening to Trip’s even breathing in the next room, in Martin’s own bed—he could only sob, in rage and frustrated desire.

  Stop killing me.

  ^ ^ ^

  They launched on Friday in mid-December. Morning came, sky corrugating into emerald and cerulean and the brilliant yellow that seeps beneath a door closed to fire. On the porch Martin watched the day crack open. He had not slept, chased by fever and the knowledge that this would be the last time he’d sit here and look down Mars Hill to the bay, past decrepit cottages and leggy phlox and the Wendameen’s silhouette, to sparkling water and the eastern horizon. He felt beyond sorrow, oddly ebullient; buoyed by the very futility of his task. When he heard the first birds rustling in the lilacs he stood. He went inside to boil water for tea, then walked quietly into the bedroom to rouse Trip.

  He slept soundly, as always. For a long time Martin stood above him, one hand on the headboard, and watched. He had always loved to do this, observe his lovers sleeping. It was like laying claim to a hidden part of them, like watching years fall away to reveal the other’s pith. John had always looked childlike when sleeping, one hand curled close to his face upon the pillow, mouth parted, brow furrowed.

  Trip did not. Trip, sleeping, seemed least himself. He never moved—and Martin checked, Martin would stand there, memorizing the precise pattern of cheek against pillow, outflung arm, crooked knee. The boy’s face had a strangely slack look, not relaxed but deflated, the skin waxen and dull, lips pale, eyelids like little white shells laid across his eyes. As though some vitalizing spirit had gone. Martin frowned, thinking of all those stories where the hero’s soul flees him at night, of shamans who can leave their bodies and travel to the other world, returning with magic stones, coals wrapped in leaves, miraculous cures for blindness and plague. He gazed at Trip’s right hand, coiled against his breast, the gold ring there. He sighed, and gently shook Trip’s shoulder.

  They had a small audience for the launch—Mrs. Grose, Diana, Doug from the Beach Store. Jason had made his farewells, stiffly, during his last visit; finally collapsed into tears and let Martin hold him. Martin had hoped Dick Graffam might come, but the weather was clear, no clouds that he could see; Graffam would be out fishing. It was high tide, waves lapping at pilings and gulls swooping overhead. On her jackstand the Wendameen gleamed cerise, reflecting the bright sky.

  “You ready?” Martin clapped a hand on Trip’s shoulder.

  “I’m ready.” Trip grinned.

  “Let’s do ’er, then.”

  Diana and Doug helped them spread rotten vegetables along the ways, cabbages and zucchini and stalks of jewelweed which spurted clear liquid when you broke them. Martin removed the wooden gate that held the boat within her cradle and, with a flourish, tossed it into a patch of withered tiger lilies. The boat creaked, its bow angling down—it looked monstrously huge up there, a terrible lion whose cage had been flung open—and began to slide forward.

  “She’s coming!” yelled Martin. Doug cheered. Diana waited at a safe distance with a pail of sand to throw onto the ways, to slow the boat if necessary. Martin and Trip stood to each side, armed with crowbars, but they didn’t need them. As though in a dream of sailing through the sky, the Wendameen slid down the launching ways as Martin and Trip walked alongside, both of them gazing up and laughing for sheer wonder.

  “Look at her!” yelled Trip. “Holy cow, she’s gonna do it!”

  And she did, leaving a crushed trail of green and red and brown in her wake, like the track of some immense slug: she swept down the gravel beach and into the bay. There was an awful moment when she listed to one side, and the cradle seemed to be caught. Martin gave an anguished yell and ran down the shingle, but before he could reach the water she righted herself. Trip and Doug held two of the lines, walking out onto the pier. Martin followed, so excited he could scarcely talk.

  “We did it! We did it!”

  Trip turned to him with shining eyes. “You did it,” he said, and looked out to where the cradle rested in the shallows, the doors of Martin’s Camry showing faint yellow from beneath dark water. “You got her in the water…”

  But they didn’t leave that day; and by the next morning a storm broke. It raged for almost a week, hurricane winds, Trip and Martin frantic that the Wendameen would sink. She didn’t; but she was damaged, so that there were more repairs to make. And another week slipped by, and another; more bad weather, and more time passing still. Until when they finally did get under way it was late in December, an insane month to be sailing, but what was to be done?

  They made their farewells quickly. Everything had been loaded below, containers of water and extra foul-weather gear, lines and charts, sleeping bags and mildewed wool blankets that Mrs. Grose forced on them, just in case.

  “Godspeed, Martin,” she said, and held her pug to her breast. Her tortoiseshell eyes were bright with tears. Looking into them Martin knew what she saw for him, but he was not afraid.

  “Right,” he said softly, and kissed her. Diana gave him a small mesh bag with a few onions in it. Doug produced a six-pack of Blackfly Ale. And Mrs. Grose gave him a bottle of brandy, almost full.

  “It may make things easier.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her fingers lingering against his neck. “Oh, my dearest Martin…”

  He drew back gently, trying not to cry. When he looked down she smiled and shook her head.

  “It is not such a bad world to be leaving, Martin,” she whispered, and turned away. Martin and Trip boarded. They would motor out of the harbor, and hope for a northerly wind once they got beyond the point. Martin started the engine. Greasy black smoke rolled across the deck. On the pier everyone cheered.

  “Good-bye, Martin! Good-bye!”

  Martin grinned, Trip at his side in John’s weather-beaten anorak. He raised his hand in farewell. The boat moved slowly, noisily out into the bay. Behind them Mars Hill grew smaller and smaller, the waving figures on the pier no bigger than gulls. Then they were gone, and Mars Hill with them. The Wendameen was under way.

  It took them over two weeks, dropping anchor at night to sleep within the shadow of pine trees, or offshore from sandy beaches along the Cape, or within sight of the drowned ruins of aircraft factories in Connecticut, the submarine works in Groton. Trip was seasick once, Martin often; he wished he had some Dramamine in his stores, or at least a pair of sunglasses. Above them stretched endless channels of phosphorescent green and violet and gold, with here and there a rent showing the great darkness beyond, the brave wink of a star and once a nacred tooth Martin knew must be the moon. Below them the sea reflected the sky’s broken face, with an underlying gesso of copper green. Martin felt they were not sailing so much as they were suspended within some vast crucible: just a matter of time before the Wendameen and its passengers were smelted down, given back to ore and ash and bone.

  They saw strange things, journeying south. A pod of whales who breached to starboard and followed them, mountains moving with great belching sighs, enameled blue and silver in the night. A creature like an immense brittle basket star, twice as large as the Wendameen, its central arms radiating outward like the sun before giving birth to an explosion of smaller arms, all writhing upon the surface of the sea as the omphalos turned slowly, counterclockwise, and breathed forth a scent like apples. Rippling mats of phosphorescent plankton colored like Easter eggs, pink, pale green, blue; gulls nesting upon unmoored buoys, that rose to squawk at the boat’s passage and so revealed their eggs, large as an infant’s skull and pied with glowing silver.

  To all of these wonders Trip seemed oblivious. If Martin pointed something out—a dismembered tentacle the size of a telephone pole, a school of flying fish—Trip would only shrug, and smile.

  “Didn’t see that when I was out with
my uncle,” he said, sitting beside Martin on deck one evening and watching as a single fin, long and serrated, sliced the water near shore. “Guess they don’t have them up by us.”

  Martin shook his head and leaned over the rail, trying to see if the fin made for shore; to see if perhaps it might clamber there on shaky new legs. “They didn’t used to have them anywhere, Trip,” he said.

  And amongst all these, other things. Ruins of houses, roofs floating like Dorothy’s farm felled on its way to Oz, porches where terns rested and barnacles massed thick as wet concrete. Uprooted trees whose leaves had turned to bronze but had not died, had grown instead long streaming bladders and filaments that moved whiplike across the water’s surface. Other boats—abandoned trawlers that sent a chill through Martin as they drifted past; battered sloops with patched sails and sailors who hallooed and waved but did not approach; a dinghy that appeared full of birds and clothes, and which Martin tried very hard to keep Trip from gazing into as the Wendameen passed it with terrible slowness, the gulls scarcely lifting their heads from worrying small heaps of bones.

  Hourly they grew closer to New York. Alongshore unbroken darkness, save where fires leapt upon distant hillsides or burned within windowed towers. Snow and freezing rain that made the sails brittle as ice. The occasional terrifying surge of power through the grid, horizontal lightning that ripped through hamlets and towns and cities, erupting sometimes as flame from atop high-rises, or roaring from radio towers and airport beacons before it all collapsed once more into the endless bacchanal night, the great serpent stirring and then falling back into uneasy sleep. New Haven’s breakwaters, flooded now, a channel buoy still blinking from the tip of a skeleton tower. Ships black and huge as islands, freighters or cruise ships or factory ships, that seemed immobile, unmovable, in the lavender dusk but were gone before the rippling red false dawn. It was these that unsettled Martin most; but they sailed on, past bell buoys tolling unseen beneath the remains of bridges and ferry landings. Drowned mansions. Defunct factories rising from webs of girders and shattered gantries. The art deco splendor of an amusement park, the roller coaster’s spine rising like a dream of dragons from emerald water.