The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  “The body,” he said. “We can’t leave it here lying cold forever. His mother—”

  “He should be returned to her,” she said quickly. “Of course.”

  Elisa had always related to Yvonne’s need for Blue, but only now could she begin to fathom a mother’s need for her own child. What Yvonne had to face, though, that was too much to bear. The sickly woman had to come to terms with the fact that her son—her first son, her biological son—was truly dead. “Can you . . . Can you bring him back to New York?” Elisa said.

  Jason bent to retrieve his clothes from the floor. Next to him was her Konica, the one that contained her undeveloped photographs of the burn-ravaged Gavina, as well as those of the sky and sea: her mad attempt to capture Blue, who never could be truly captured. She reached for the camera but pulled away, and instead let her hand rest on Jason’s back.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, without turning to face her. “But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “I guess that’s everything.” Jason slammed shut the trunk of the Cadillac, its polished veneer glossed with rain. “I don’t know what you’re going to do without the car, but . . .”

  “We’ll get by.” Elisa looked back to the house where Gabe waited at the top of the porch steps, under the protection of the eaves. “Maureen said we could borrow hers whenever we need it.”

  “And when I hear from your parents?”

  “Tell them everything’s fine, that I’ll stay in touch. And not to come up for any reason.” Jason nodded, and she smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Well. Okay, then.” He ambled toward her, and started to raise his arms. “Do we . . .”

  “Sure.” They embraced, firmly and for the last time, perhaps. Though who knew what awaited any of them? There was still so far to go. “Have you made all the arrangements?”

  “The coroner’s office is going to meet me at the airport. I have more paperwork to sign, but since the autopsy is complete, they’re releasing him into my care.”

  “And what about Yvonne?”

  “No answer. I left another message, though, so I’m not sure what her story is. I’m going to bring him to a funeral parlor in the city, and from there . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe Flushing Cemetery, where my mom is. Or maybe somewhere in Brooklyn. I don’t know. I’ll figure the rest out when I get home.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, lightning without thunder. It was really raining now. “I know I’ve let you down,” Elisa said then. Couldn’t help but say, really, though there was little point anymore; all she could hope to accomplish would be to agitate the wound. “I know I’ve been a great disappointment to you.” She looked down at the gravel bed of the driveway before forcing herself to meet his eyes. “You must think I’m the most disloyal person on earth.”

  “You’ve got it wrong.” Jason put a gentle hand on her shoulder, a melancholy smile upon his lips. “I think you’re loyal as hell. Unfortunately, it’s just not to me.”

  He leaned in and kissed her forehead, and she felt anointed. “I love you,” he said, almost as an afterthought, and opened the car door. The safari hat she’d bought him at Frenchy’s rested on the passenger seat.

  “I love you too,” she replied, her throat an arid plain. And she did.

  Jason slid into the driver’s seat and eased the door shut, then raised a hand to Gabe, who did the same. He released the emergency brake and the car bucked, eager to descend the hill, off to more promising places. And then he lowered his window.

  “Elisa?” He squinted up at her, the dreary sky draped heavily above them. “You really think you’re going to find . . . whatever it is you’re looking for?”

  She laughed, though there was nothing funny about what he had said. She looked out at the cove and Kelly’s Mountain beyond; in the mounting rain, it was impossible to tell the road from the shore, the water from the hills from the sky, everything sheathed in a profoundly gray gray. What was she looking for, anyway? Blue? A daydreamed child? The state of sublime unconsciousness she’d craved as long as she could remember? Or simply somewhere to call home, a place to dance forever, even if that place was a subterranean grave?

  “I’m not sure,” she said at last, and combed back her soaking-wet hair. “But I have to try.” She wanted to touch him once more, but instead she remained outside the confines of the car, not so much as a finger placed inside its dry interior. It was too late to seek shelter now—in the car, in her husband, in anything. Those days had passed.

  Jason faced forward, shifted into drive, and the rental car started its slow crawl. The wheels spat up gravel, and a piece or two pinged Elisa’s feet as she stood in the car’s wake to watch its progress down the hill. It ground to a halt midway, and her heart skipped. Was he going to turn back? Only then did she see he had stopped in the spot where she had emerged naked from the woods, not so very long ago but still part of some other age.

  He leaned in the direction of the passenger seat and stared out the window into the trees. Still searching, she thought, presumably for the wife he had lost. But I’m right here.

  Jason put the safari hat on his head, and the car continued its descent until it reached the turnoff onto the main road. With a glint of light in the slate matte pane of sky and sea and pavement, he was gone.

  Gabe appeared at her side and put his arm around her. There was a chill in the air, a real chill, Gabe’s body against hers now the only thing in the world that carried any warmth at all. After a while she turned to face him. His cheeks were wet with either rain or tears, it was hard to tell which. She brought him in close, holding him to her as she breathed against his chest, Blue’s scent still on his clothes. Her heart swelled, and she inhaled deeply, then forced herself to pull away. There was nothing sweeter in the world.

  She looked up at his face, his skin dotted with moisture.

  “I know where he is,” she said. “Where they all are.”

  Now she could see Gabe really was crying, his bright blue eyes brimming with newfound joy.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything. And start at the beginning.”

  Part Four

  * * *

  GABRIEL

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  The first time Gabe felt the frequency he was six years old. That was back in New Jersey, when he was playing hide-and-seek with his older sister, Eve, one winter’s night while their parents were at a church function. He must have searched for her for over an hour before he began to sob, all alone in the dark of the attic as heavy sleet pelted their slanted roof. He wiped at his tears and listened to the rain’s steady beating just above his head, until another sound reached him, a delicate scratching noise from someplace close by. It appeared to be coming from an armoire on the other side of the attic, one he’d already searched at least twice. Sure that he’d found his sister at last, Gabe crept over to the armoire, took hold of its tarnished brass handles, and swung open the doors.

  It wasn’t her. Instead, it was a little boy. About Gabe’s age and size, he was naked and backed into one of the corners behind the hanging clothes, knees pulled up to his chin. He was sickly yellow and resembled a smirking grotesque carved upon a cathedral ledge, tilted and perched inside the cabinet in such a way that he appeared to be emerging from the wood itself. Gabe should have been terrified, the intruder cast in shadow with only the whites of his eyes and his tiny sharp teeth fully visible in the dim light through the casements. But instead he felt a soothing energy emanating from the odd little boy, a feeling of rightness and even reunion—as if all the many times over the many years he had gone looking for his sister he’d unwittingly been searching for this other child instead. Gabe’s body sung with the sensation; it felt like nothing so much as home.

  The yellow boy pulled his smiling lips back into a distorted and clownish leer, which made Gabe laugh. He reached between two of his mother’s summer dresses to touch the stranger’s color-stripped mop of hair, but it was like plunging his fingers into a pot of boiling w
ater: the boy burned. Gabe yanked his arm back. His hand was on fire, and he screamed. Flames arched across the air, sparks sent scattering over him, across the clothes inside the armoire, the rafters above his head. He waved his arm wildly, tried to step on his fingers to put out the fire but it only served to spread the flames, smoke wisping from blazing paths that rushed higgledy-piggledy across the floorboards in bright veins.

  At once Gabe was knocked to the ground, the wind going out of him. When he next looked up he was no longer on fire, his sister Eve beside him and using a blanket to stamp out the flames encircling them until they were extinguished, only the smell of seared wood and meat remaining. He sat up. The naked little boy was gone, the armoire’s shadowy depths now barren save the clothes smoldering upon their hangers. Resting on one of the shelves inside was a book of red-tipped matches, the cover folded open with most of the matches ripped from their stems.

  Eve, wild-eyed, stared down at Gabe’s hand, his fingers puffed up with blisters, round white mushroom caps that swelled as they watched. She screamed, and the sound was hollow and muted, as if she were some distance away. His pain seemed far off as well, a scary story someone was telling in the next room, whispered for effect. Eve rushed him downstairs. She called 911, then lifted Gabe to the kitchen sink, where she ran the faucet cold and submerged his hand beneath the water. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, her screams turned to soothing words as the savory scent of burned flesh permeated the room.

  When the EMTs arrived, they swathed his hand in ointment and bandages and wrapped the rest of his body in sheets, mummifying him to prevent exacerbation of his wounds. As they loaded Gabe into the ambulance, he craned his head back toward the attic and peered up at the rain-spattered windows. And there was the yellow boy, perched on the sill behind one of the casements. He stared down at Gabe, the boy’s spectral face lit from within, bathed in a beatific light. The little visitor pressed a single palm to the latticed glass, two fingers bent in benediction, and bared his teeth in a wide and impossible Cheshire grin.

  The boy wasn’t real. At least that’s what his mother said at the hospital, when he told her about the fire and the visitation that had preceded it. She called him a liar, said he’d set that fire himself using one of his father’s old matchbooks. It isn’t real. She said the same thing three years later, when Gabe was nine and saw what he later determined was a cub-sized griffin tottering along the ledge outside his bedroom window, the tips of its bristled eagle wings tap-tapping against the pane. Gabe put down his Etch A Sketch and went to the window, beckoned by the warmth radiating from the otherwise fearsome creature, the same liquid brilliance that had emanated from the yellow boy in the armoire. Once the griffin had scrabbled on lion’s paws past the adjoining drainpipe, Gabe opened his window, stepped out onto the ledge, and subsequently plunged two stories into his mother’s rosebushes, nearly cracking open his skull.

  After that, he tried to be more careful, not to look too closely at the strange things he would sometimes glimpse out of the corner of his eye. He learned never to speak of the fantastical beings loosed in the dark of night, the ones only he could see or hear, like the bank of pay phones that cried out in ecstasy in the multilayered harmony of a church choir deep in the bowels of the New York Port Authority. When thirteen-year-old Gabe reached home, the swell of celestial voices still fresh in his ears, his father beat him for sneaking into the city, just as he’d beaten him for the fire in the attic, and for falling out the window.

  Gabe grew afraid. Mostly that he was “possessed of the Devil,” as his father maintained, though he did wonder if he might in fact be touched by the hand of God instead. Either way, he really had seen angels and demons, them and more. He cautioned himself not to give the apparitions credence, but oftentimes he couldn’t help it; they felt too good to ignore.

  The sightings continued after he ran away from home at fourteen. A cloud that rained blood over the Hudson River, just off the Christopher Street pier. A bodega cat on the corner of Avenue C and 12th, threatening passersby in what sounded like Aramaic. A man hanging upside down by his foot, high upon the branch of a lacebark pine in Prospect Park one foggy morning during Gabe’s stint in Brooklyn as Vincente Castro’s kept boy. All with that familiar electric radiance, as if his senses had unwittingly tuned in to a different station.

  He even saw the strange yellow boy again. Two years ago, when he was squatting with a displaced coven of Dianic priestesses in a condemned former power plant in Blackletter. The naked child appeared late at night, perched at the foot of Gabe’s water-stained mattress. Close-mouthed, it sang to him a lovely little wordless song, one that he recognized but couldn’t quite place. The new frequency. Something no one else could see or hear, beautiful and powerful and charged with an otherworldly current that rendered the waking world magical and, by turns, utterly mundane. And every time the brief transcendence of the frequency faded, Gabe was left shuddering and adrift, a withdrawal akin to delirium tremens.

  When Gabe met Blue, it all changed. Even before, from the very first moment he heard Blue’s voice pleading on Vinnie’s voicemail for another loan extension, Gabe sensed this was no ordinary man. The difference was that Blue was most certainly real, and therefore the most special thing of all. He radiated the frequency, the very same numinous current, and to be in his presence was to be holy by association. No wonder Gabe ended up building his life around him, leaving Vinnie the Shark for the menial job at Cyan. It wasn’t love, not exactly; or rather, it wasn’t a common love for another man. It was far greater than that, a need as essential as breathing.

  Most remarkable of all was that Blue hadn’t even thought himself special, and seemed to possess no knowledge of this fact whatsoever. But Gabe had known. It was hard for him to hide it all that time, impossible not to feel that being with Blue was a prideful form of sin, akin to keeping Christ all to oneself.

  Seated at the MacLeod House’s dining room table, Gabe popped three sugar cubes into his mouth, sipped off a can of Coke, and scanned Donald’s journal, the words Entomologia Generalis Vol. I embossed in cracked gold leaf upon purple leather. It was inside this book, past its battered and coffee-stained cover and upon its yellowed pages, that Gabe had learned of Donald’s past in Starling Cove. A cataloguing of its flora and fauna, maps of the land and its hidden corners, the story behind the founding of the Colony, and the fire that resulted in its dissolution. That was the best part of all.

  The journal’s seemingly innocuous content had swollen in meaning since Gabe first came across it almost a month ago, the afternoon before Elisa and Blue’s disappearance. Blue had gone to view his grandmother’s house, and when Elisa and Jason lingered by the water following a hike, they left Gabe alone up the hill. Stoned and bored, he sauntered down to Donald’s cabin, knocked, and let himself inside. No one was there, but something immediately seized his attention: the weathered old journal, resting upon the chair in front of Donald’s rolltop desk. Gabe was drawn to the field notes the way he was always drawn to certain objects, beckoned as if ensorcelled by the compelling clean buzz of the new frequency. He knew the journal would be important, and, since meeting Blue, he had learned to look these things right in the eye.

  He closed the book and tapped a burn-scarred finger against the cover, the erratic pulse interrupted by the sound of creaking floorboards as Elisa bounded down the stairs. Gabe pulled a half-eaten Mars bar from his pocket and bit off it, the candy gone stale but he didn’t much care. He’d been living on sugar for the past month. It was the only thing that kept him going, that made him feel anywhere near as good as Blue once had.

  “You ready?” Elisa stopped by the front door and slung her backpack over her shoulder. They had filled their packs light enough to manage: nonperishables and a first-aid kit, surveys and maps and a change of clothes, a pair of canteens, a rusty old jackknife, and a few keepsakes Gabe couldn’t help but bring along. Their supplies collected and divvied up between them, they didn’t really know wha
t they would need until they needed it.

  Despite Elisa’s assurances, they still had very little idea what they would find when they traveled to the place where the Other Kind had taken her. All Gabe knew was that today was the day, the designated time for their walk down to the dock and the canoe that would take them to the Fairy Hole beneath Kelly’s Mountain. Elisa had insisted they journey during the new moon and total darkness, just as it was the night of the disappearance. So they were going now, really going, and his heart filled to bursting with the possibility of reuniting with Blue. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Ready.” Gabe stuffed the book into his pack as they stepped outside. “Just doing some last-minute thinking.”

  “Try not to do too much of that.”

  He glanced up to find her watching him, her expression unreadable. Was it one of wariness, or concern? Let me inside your head, Gabe thought. Let me see what you’ve seen, so we can see it all and together as one.

  “We’re going to bring him home,” Gabe said. “Right?”

  “That’s the plan.” Elisa dropped her pack to the porch steps and grasped Gabe by the shoulders. “Listen, if anything goes wrong, I want you to turn back. There’s no point in both of us . . . dying.”

  “Now who’s thinking too much?” he said, but she only stared at him. “Of course. The same goes for you. Okay?” He said the words, but in truth he had no intention of leaving her side, aboveground or below. She was the one who was going to show him the way to Blue.

  Maureen and Donald’s red Toyota rumbled up the drive. They’d closed the house down and were on their way to Halifax for the winter season, the car packed to overflowing, with a plastic storage container strapped to the roof. As Gabe watched the car climb the hill he wiped a black fly from his face with the sleeve of his Liquid Sky shirt, the ratty one with the cartoon alien on the front. Blue’s shirt, once, its smell sweet with burned cedar. Seventy-three hours had passed since Jason had left, seventy-three hours spent sleeping in front of the woodstove, Gabe and Elisa sharing Blue’s old mattress from the tartan room, which they’d dragged downstairs and positioned before the fire to combat the crisping air. They both wore Blue’s clothes now: to bed, out in the woods, while they cooked over the range in the kitchen. Their hands upon the same spice jars as Blue’s hands once were, the same pots and pans and spoons he used—anything that might act as camouflage. They took on everything of him they could.