Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Mikey,” he shouted above the music. “Get the others. We’re going. You—”

  He turned to Trip. “You’re coming with me—”

  “The fuck I am.” But before he could pull away another Barbie appeared, identical to the first shimmering plasteen mask, effaced eyes, latex catsuit.

  “Bring him to the limo,” Leonard commanded. “We’re going. Now.”

  The second woman dragged Trip through the crowd, following Leonard as he pushed his way downstairs. By the makeshift doors the caftaned bouncers stood, talking. As Leonard approached one began to shout.

  “Hey man, no one leaves till—”

  But then the others broke in.

  “Leonard!”

  “Yo, Lenny! Takin’ off?”

  Leonard nodded as the caftaned men pulled aside a heavy metal fire door. Icy air roared inside, a flurry of ashes.

  “’Night, Leonard.”

  “Later, Leonard—”

  They were outside. The ashes were snow; it coated the ground like dark fur. In the street a huge seal-grey limousine idled. A figure in black rubber and mouthless black mask stepped from the driver’s seat and opened one of the back doors, holding it as Leonard slid inside.

  “Fayal, this young gentleman will be accompanying us,” said Leonard, jerking a thumb at Trip.

  “Wh—” Trip began, but before he could say more was shoved into the seat beside Leonard.

  “Shut up.” The older man smiled coldly, reached to take Trip’s chin in his hand. “You ought to thank me,” he said, as the two Barbies and several other people clambered into the limo’s backseats, laughing and complaining.

  “Oh yeah?” Trip hunched against the window, trying to sound tough. He and Leonard had the middle seat to themselves. He could see the others watching him with amusement.

  “Sure.” With a soft thump the last door closed. “You’re going to a party, Trip.”

  “A what?”

  “A big party. And you weren’t even invited.” As the limo shot into the street Leonard gazed out to where the sky moved overhead, gyring in upon itself. “You lucky kid.”

  Trip stared at him. He cradled his knapsack and stared resolutely at his knees. “What kind of party?”

  “What kind of party?” Leonard raised his eyebrows. From the backseat came raucous laughter. “Don’t you know what today is, Trip?”

  The boy sank sullenly into the seat. “Yeah.”

  “So!” Leonard reached over and grabbed Trip’s knee, shook it in mock excitement. His hazel eyes narrowed. He leaned in close as the limo roared around a corner and his entourage shrieked delightedly. “Well, gee whiz, Trip, gee whiz—Happy fucking New Year.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Chairman Dances

  The elevator opened onto night: thousands of stars thrown across the sky, tree limbs scratching at streaks of cloud, silver moon. Beneath his feet crunched a thin layer of snow, and beneath the snow the firm-mattress spring of earth. There was the perfume of balsam, so fragrant Jack felt as though his face had been thrust into a soft-needled bed, and underlying that the faint sickly smell of Viconix.

  “May I see your ID, please?”

  He was so enraptured of the sky that it wasn’t until someone touched him lightly but insistently on the arm that he realized he’d been questioned.

  “Sir?”

  Jack looked up into the broad face of a veritable security giant, former linebacker or WWF hero in GFI’s red-and-gold livery, the outlines of his formal jacket corrugated by the bulletproof vest he wore beneath, his head haloed with chatlinks: headphones, mic, beepers, vocoder.

  Oh: and three guns.

  “Yeah, sure, wait—”

  Jack patted anxiously at pockets for his wallet. He sensed shadows moving just beyond his vision, the premonition of many huge hands about to clap onto his shoulders.

  “Oh! No—of course, wait,” he stammered, recalling his hand, the image scanned there by the foot courier months before. “You need this—”

  He grinned feebly and held up his palm. The gryphon glowed a brilliant red-gold. A huge black-gloved hand encircled Jack’s wrist, held it steady while the other hand drew a flattened disc across his palm. There was a reassuring chime. Jack felt a warm, not-quite-painful tingling. The guard did a thorough pat-down, checking Jack’s pockets, running fingers through his lank hair.

  “You enjoy the evening, sir,” he finally pronounced, beckoning Jack forward. Somewhere behind him he heard excited voices, the sooosh of a revolving door.

  “Happy New Year.”

  Jack stepped away; when he was at a safe distance glanced down at his clothes. He was still wearing what he’d had on at Lazyland when Jule kidnapped him—white oxford-cloth shirt, quite soiled; dark green chinos; worn brown corduroy jacket. His temple throbbed; he rubbed it gingerly, trying to make sense of time. It had been, what? Wednesday morning when he left Lazyland? The twenty-ninth of December? He was fairly certain of the date, if not the day of the week.

  Nellie’s words came to him: You’ll be at the party tonight…

  He had lost a day; more than that, two days, squandered in a cell within the Pyramid. He had a flash of his grandmother sick with worry, his brother Dennis tending her; of the blond girl going into labor.

  He recalled what else Nellie Candry had told him—

  Blue Antelope. They’ve planned a terrorist strike against the SUNRA dirigibles…

  He looked up, saw trees and night sky and stars, behind them a faint crosshatching, lurid pulse of green and violet. When he tipped his head, he could make out slender beams of light flickering through the air, like the traplines of a spider’s web, and discern where the projected constellations spun off from the center.

  He turned back and saw a sweep of gold slanting upward: the Pyramid. The lozenges of black and gold at its base were elevators, tunnels, revolving doors, glowing corporate logos. The myriad multicolored figures—masked, helmeted, armored, sheathed—were other invited guests. He was in the staging area that adjoined the Pyramid, the atrium arena GFI had constructed for the Millennial Ball. The entire vast space had been turned into a kind of cyclorama. White flakes whirled in agitated arcs he associated with old movies and snowmaking machinery. Firs and leafless birch trees had been planted everywhere, receding into a silvery blur where he could make out raised stages, arcades, pavilions, gold-and-red-clothed tables, promenades of emerald glass, house-sized video monitors, red-and-gold information kiosks, Red Cross tents, pillars emblazoned with logos. The sight of so much stuff, so many people, made his head ache. When he blinked, phantom rockets spun off into the snow, so that for a moment he thought someone had set off fireworks.

  But no. He yawned nervously, tasting copper in the back of his throat, and salt. His edginess swelled into anticipation, something close to exhilaration. He thought of Larry Muso, his absurd hair, how surprisingly soft it had felt. What had he said about meeting him? A place called Electric Avenue, sometime in the morning…

  Jack was fairly certain that he’d missed morning. At the very least, the folks here at GFI had gone to a lot of trouble to create the illusion of a midwinter night, once upon a time. He gazed at tents and tables, fluttering pennons of gold and crimson video screens that showed GFI’s dirigibles silhouetted against a slowly turning pinwheel sky. There were people everywhere, revelers in costume and black tie, kimonoed men and women, guests in formal robes, and some who were all but naked, save for gold-mesh caches-sexe and dominoes covering their faces; and almost as many uniformed security personnel.

  “Let’s find a goddamn place to sit,” complained a white-haired man, maskless, tuxedoed, his eyes invisible behind silvery plasmer.

  “Let’s find a goddamn bar.”

  Jack looked over to see an elegantly spare woman with sleek blond hair, bare shoulders thrusting from a column of hyaline silk. For an instant he thought she must recognize him, from some long-ago New York Public Library benefit or barbecue in the Hamptons. Then he saw the qui
ver of fear in her eyes, a tremor in the too-taut skin around her mouth. She turned away and took her companion’s arm, steering him toward a cluster of security guards beneath a video screen displaying an aerial view of the Pyramid.

  Jack stopped, brow furrowed. The woman had been afraid of him. He was disheveled. Unshaven, too; and maskless; no expensive placebits or plasmer, no facial tattoos or identifying brands; nothing but skin.

  He shivered. Snow brushed his forehead. When he wiped it away, it left a greenish sheen to his fingers. He thought of what Nellie had told him of GFI’s plans to distribute the fusarium bacteria, and a wave of nausea went through him. Cold wind played at his face, redolent of balsam; he could also smell a trace of acrid smoke, raw sewage, the standing-water scent of the city. If he stared beyond the scrim of stars and pared moon, he could see the structural grid of the dome; beyond that, something else lodged within the real sky like a bullet in a wound. A glistening golden shape, outlined with red lights that spelled out GFI then melted into the image of a gryphon holding a globe in its claws. Not far from it another, and another. He counted seven of them, an unmoving school of skyborne leviathans. A field of black spread between them like a stain—the sky platform, part of the payload to be towed into the upper atmosphere tonight.

  …Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure…

  In the distance he heard an orchestra tuning up, the echoing snarl of feedback, and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. A liveried woman approached him, carrying a tray of champagne flutes. Jack took a glass from her gloved hand. As she left, two security people passed in a haze of electrified chatter, glancing at him. Jack sipped his champagne. Within minutes he felt light-headed. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He still didn’t feel hungry; the opposite, in fact, strung-out but intently focused. He wondered what would happen if he approached security and told them about the bomb.

  He finished the champagne. The waitress reappeared. He set his empty glass on her tray and took another full one, watched as more and more people filled GFI’s winter palace.

  Someone sure had a lot of friends. And probably they wouldn’t like it if some emaciated, scruffy-looking, no doubt virulent guy, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a mask, started raving about bombs. He thought of Jule, of Nellie Candry slumped elsewhere within the Pyramid. He would be detained again, maybe permanently, an unknown man connected with two suspicious deaths.

  “Happy New Year!” A creamy-skinned young girl, no makeup, no mask, tossed a handful of glitter at him. “Happy New Year!”

  She turned giggling back to her friends. He watched them go, and thought of flames raining from the sky, burning fuselage, ten thousand panicked people dying in a crush of fire and twisted girders. The world unredeemed by solex shields, all of humanity doomed because Jack Finnegan hadn’t acted on a tip about a terrorist bomb threat. Weighed that against the image of himself being questioned, insisting on the veracity of a dead woman’s ravings about terrorists and psychotropic drugs, while the party of the century went on till dawn without him, and he was finally released to stumble home to his brother’s accusing eyes. He thought of Leonard here, somewhere in his stained leather motley: the Lord of Misrule. He thought of kissing Larry Muso, of making love to him and holding him afterward, the two of them laughing—bombs! what bombs? He thought of Nellie Candry, of the web of connectedness she’d shown him; how easily it could be torn but how that was how the light got through, sometimes.

  I should leave, he thought. I could escape now, I could get away from here, somehow get back to Lazyland…

  But that would mean never seeing Larry Muso again. That would mean never knowing how it might have all turned out. And he wasn’t quite ready to forgo the chance to see what might have been.

  And suddenly, with a clarity that took his breath away, he realized that Leonard had won, after all. They had all won, Julie and Leonard and everyone who had ever urged Jackie Finnegan to go for a dangerous drive, cross against the light, leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, fall in love with strangers.

  Because Jack saw it was the jump that mattered: not the presumed safety of the cliff edge, nor the certainty of annihilation at the bottom. It was Chance that mattered, the dizzying recognition that somebody or something was, in fact, playing dice with the world, and had been all along.

  Phantom sparks glimmered in the air, green and gold and violet. He glanced again at the dome, half-expecting to see the real and broken sky there, mirroring his own dislocation. He heard a soft roaring, a sound he had heard before—in the wind, in the sea, in the pulse of blood through his ears.

  It was, he realized, the sound of things falling apart.

  He began to laugh. For the first time in forty-two years, he realized that Free Will and Free Fall could feel very much the same.

  I love the sound of breaking glass, he thought.

  And hurried to find Larry Muso.

  It took him forever to find Electric Avenue. Threading his way among partygoers and fire-eaters, little people, a woman whose body was a mosaic of video-circuitry reflecting the faces of those gawping at her—pausing now and then to take in one of the stage shows. Overhead, corporate logos flamed like Roman candles, their reflections trailing across faces and masks. An orchestra played “Begin the Beguine.” The Jayne County Dance Theater performed excerpts from Elektra. There was a survey of the Broadway musical from its vaudeville origins to Assassins; the Kronos Quartet, halfway through Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. Palm readers, an onychomancer. Clocks, analog and digital, that showed the time here in New York—9:48 P.M.—as well as the hour in every time zone across the world.

  And food—acres and acres of food, more food than Jack had dreamed was left in the world. He bypassed the McDonald’s World Market, stopped to eat some caviar and a gummy slice of nova that tasted of petroleum, washed down with more champagne. The alcohol seemed to intensify the effects of the fusarium, if that’s what was causing the flares that pulsed just beyond his vision, the sense of a burgeoning rapture that, like the phantom lights, was just beyond his full comprehension.

  He walked unsteadily through what had become a huge crowd. People mobbed the food tents as though they held celebrities. He saw one man filling the pockets of his morning coat with triangles of toast and foie gras. Scuffles broke out, to be immediately put down by security police in flak jackets. Immense video displays showed scenes of millennial revels around the globe: blue-faced dancers in Delhi, drunken parties in Queensland, an ominously quiet Tehran street. The green silence of vanilla farms on Tafahi in the Kingdom of Tonga, the first place on earth where the new millennium would break. Now and then, glimpses of the crowd below. Screaming would erupt then, and cheers. He glanced overhead to see if the Fougas were still there, saw only the shimmer of false stars and the glow of reflected lights within the dome.

  BONG.

  A thunderous gong: more cheers. Ten o’clock. The snow had stopped—he overheard someone say the hydraulic system was clogged, dredging up God knows what from the New York City water supply—and what was on the ground had melted, making it sloppy going underfoot. He began to think about finding a quiet place to sit, maybe even trying to figure out a way home, when he saw the marquee.

  ELECTRIC AVENUE

  Blazing neon against a background of video confetti and flaking brick: a pavilion designed to look like a decrepit apartment building—an icehouse. He hurried through the entrance, pushing past three ragged teenagers with pincushion faces and retro crew cuts and eyes like mill wheels, sprawled in the mud against the building’s facade.

  “Spare change?” one croaked.

  Jack stepped over her. Inside was a warren of dank hallways and crumbling rooms, emblazoned with video screens that were doors into sunlight, ocean, mountaintop, sky. A few people milled about, a Japanese businessman, more stoned kids, an elderly woman whose plasmer lenses match
ed her cropped violet hair. It wasn’t until he wandered into the same rubble-strewn corridor for the third time that Jack realized the elderly violet-haired woman was turning her head in the exact same way she had before. He sucked his breath in; the woman continued to stare at a tape loop of erupting volcanoes. He stood, trying to find the lie to the illusion; finally approached her.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The woman ignored him. He moved his hand—it should have brushed the sleeve of her satin sheath. There was nothing there. When he jabbed at her his hand momentarily flickered from view; and then he could see it again, floating disembodied within the folds of her dress.

  “Jack? Jack Finnegan?”

  Someone grabbed his elbow.

  “It is Jack, isn’t it!” Delighted laughter. “I thought I’d missed you, or you’d missed me—”

  It was Larry Muso, looking extremely pleased. He wore a happi coat embroidered with sea animals—cuttlefish, octopuses, sea horses—over a black tunic and loose black trousers. His hair had been coiffed into a chambered nautilus threaded with gold and blue wire, tiny seashells, gilt starfish. Gold dust powdered his cheeks. His eyes were carefully edged in kohl.

  “I know, I look like the Sea Hag!” he went on. “Were you here earlier? Did I miss you? Are you okay?”

  He peered up into Jack’s face. “Jack? You don’t look very well, perhaps you should sit down?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Jack ran a hand across his forehead. “Actually, I am a little hot—this exhibit, I just figured out—”

  “Aren’t they remarkable? They’ve been in development for a while, but this is the first time we’ve run the programs in public. There are still a few bugs,” he confided, taking Jack’s arm and leading him to where a staircase spilled outside. “Of course it doesn’t work in daylight, so we’ve done it like this.”