Authors: Elizabeth Hand

Glimmering (18 page)

BOOK: Glimmering

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“Look, Nellie—I don’t know, this guy is kind of weird, isn’t he? I mean, maybe this isn’t the sort of thing I should be doing, ’cause like I know for a fact that Peter Paul Joseph would have a heart attack if he—”

Nellie sighed. “We should be so lucky. Listen, Trip, I’m not going to pressure you. And maybe you need to think some more about all of this. Mustard Seed’s been good to you. Your sales are solid, you got a nice little fan base. Maybe you should stay there, maybe we should talk again in a couple months, you know? Maybe in a year GFI buys out your whole fucking company and all our problems are solved.”

Her voice grew faint and staticky. A shaft of fear ran through him—he had no number for the blond girl, nothing to bind her to him save this little voice chirping in his head, distinctly less cheerful than it had been a few minutes ago.

“. . . so we’ll just—”

“No! No, it’s okay, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. But you’ve got to tell me how to find this place—”

She told him. “And listen, sweetie, don’t
worry
, it’ll be great, you are going to be so
happy
you did this. Leonard’s a sweetheart, all that other stuff is mostly just PR, you know that, right? Go on now, I’m gonna call Ray and tell him you’re—”

Her voice crackled out. Trip shook the receiver. Silence. He stuck the phone in his pocket. Nellie had told him one o’clock. It was 11:30, which meant people would be gathering soon for lunch. If he left now, someone would be bound to come looking for him. But if he stuck around for lunch and then tried to sneak out, he might not have time to find the MIT campus, let alone some mysterious basement studio. He decided to leave. He pulled his worn pea coat over his old fisherman’s sweater and hurried downstairs and out the back door.

Finding the MIT campus didn’t take as long as he’d feared. Once there he saw students everywhere. Black-clad, intense-looking young men and women, and more Asians than Trip had ever seen in his life, carrying backpacks and looking as though it would take much more than an East Coast blackout to disrupt their studies. Trip wondered if classes had even been canceled. Probably not, he decided, watching two blond girls with blinking placebits in their eyebrows hunched over a palmtop. They glanced up at him, then went back to their work. Trip observed them with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain. He read at a sixth-grade level: even simple algebra and the most basic computing skills were remote as astrophysics. But he had a remarkable memory: he could quote Scripture and even Shakespeare if only he could be made to understand the words on the screen in front of him, or if someone were to read them aloud.

He could, fortunately, read the words MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY on a metal sign glazed with ice. He stopped in front of the sign, shivering in the lurid orange glow of midday. He was too embarrassed to ask a student for directions. They all looked so
expensive
. Dressed in black, or wrapped in cardboard and rags like the
fellahin
, they would betray themselves by smiling, showing even white teeth and glinting placebits. Except for the cranks, whose eyes within shrouds of spun acrylic were uniformly silver-gray; what hair they had was glossy and flecked with light. Like Trip himself, few of the students wore masks—this, along with The Last Generation’s continued sexual and pharmacological indulgences, was a constant source of head-shaking and hand-wringing for parents. Overhead the sky shimmered from green to gold to blue. He felt awkward and out of place, no longer the nascent Xian supernova but trailer trash from Moody’s Island. For a miserable quarter hour he wandered around, before getting up the courage to stop an older man in a worn overcoat.

“’Scuse me, I’m looking for the divit lab?”

The man shrugged. He pointed, at a very thin middle-aged woman with a shaved head and a bright red faux-mink coat. “Sorry. Ask Sonya there, she’s in computer dialectics—”

Trip crossed to her. “Uh—excuse me—”

The woman looked at him curiously. A transparent silken web covered her vividly lipsticked mouth.

“Are you one of my students?” Her scalp had been neatly incised with paragraphs of text, not tattooed but scarified black lines fine as drypoint. On her right temple scowled Ignatz Mouse, a word balloon hovering above his mouth.

Trip looked away.

“N-no,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. But—”

She smiled. “That’s okay. You just looked familiar, that’s all. You want the Bloembergen Lab—”

Trip shook his head. “She said divit. I mean the lady who sent me, she said the divit lab, or something like that.”

“That’s Bloembergen. DVI-IT technologies; they call it divit. Come on. I’m heading that way, I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”

He walked beside her. The wind sent eddies of dust and grit flying up into their faces. The woman coughed, tugged a heavy woolen scarf from the collar of her coat, and swept it across her face.

“Doesn’t that get cold?” Trip asked. The icy wind made him shudder. “Your head like that?”

“This?” She patted her scalp, and Ignatz winked at him. “No. Feel it—central heating.”

He gave her a dubious look. “Go ahead,” she urged, stopping. “Colar implants. You’ve never seen them?”

She lowered her head. The raised flesh felt warm and rubbery, like a lure worm. As his fingers moved across the words thin music sounded very softly, a
glissando
of piano and fluttering drumbeats. From the back of her neck a voice whispered.

Think twice before causing
Just anything to be.

Trip snatched his hand away. The woman laughed. “Morton Feldman. Isn’t that neat? I treated myself when I got tenure. Okay, here’s your stop—the lab’s downstairs, I think there’s a sign, but you basically just keep turning right. See you later.”

Inside the building was softly lit by bursts of gold falling from the windows. There were no guards, no electric lights. The security checkpoint had been deactivated; beside the magnetic arch a hand-lettered sign read SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, with Japanese characters penciled beneath. A few students sat in a hallway eating and listening to music percolating from a colorful spinning top. Trip found the stairs and went down slowly. He felt tired and anxious and completely unprepared to do a recording session of any kind. The basement was numbingly cold. Emergency panel-lights cast a faint gray glow. All of the rooms seemed abandoned, heaped with metal chairs and desks and old computer monitors. Finally he reached a black metal door.

BLOEMBERGEN LABORATORY:
DIRECT-VOICE INTERACTION/INTERTEXT RECORDING
STUDENTS: BE PREPARED TO SHOW YOUR PASS!

Under this someone had taped a piece of paper scrawled with magic marker.

PRIVATE RECORDING SESSION. SORRY.
NO
ADMITTANCE.

T. Marlowe please knock!

He knocked. No one came. He listened but could hear nothing, had his knuckles raised to knock again when the door cracked open.

“Yee-es?” a voice drawled.

Before Trip could say anything someone grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. The door slammed shut.

“Trip Marlowe! You made it!” A slight black-clad man much shorter than Trip whirled him into the room. “Great, this is great! Sammy, get your shit together, we got a go here. Look, boys:
Trip Marlowe.
”

Trip glanced around helplessly, embarrassed by the man’s mocking tone, the bored expressions of the two technicians who slouched in swivel chairs beside a bank of recording equipment. They were watching television; it showed the GFI experimental dirigible fleet at rest on an airfield, then abruptly cut away to a scene of flames, the tiny cartoonish Blue Antelope logo in a corner of the screen.

“I guess this is the right place?” Trip asked, hoping it wasn’t.

“Oh, ab-so-po-
lute
ly,” the man replied. He clamped a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the far end of the room, where white crosshatched screens rose in front of a lethal-seeming array of still cameras, vidcams, halogen lights, and what appeared to be surgical equipment. There was an indefinable but suspicious smell of smoke. “Nellie said you’d be here, but things have been so fucked up, I was supposed to be in Mirbat for another oil spill—like, where do
they
get the oil?—but of course our little atmospheric challenge changed all
that
. I was marooned for
two days
! Then, of course, the only place I was cleared to land was Logan. I had to leave the troupe back in the city. A total wipeout, but then, thank God, YOU were here—”

The man gazed at him appraisingly. “Leonard Thrope,” he announced.

“Uh—Trip,” said Trip. “Marlowe.”

“Please.” Leonard gestured at an empty chair. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Trip sat. Leonard strode to a pile of bags and began pulling bottles out of a knapsack. Without a glance at labels or contents he opened them, ingesting their contents in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

“
Not
what you think,” he reassured Trip. “Selenium, pantothenic acid, astragalus, this is some kind of blood purifier. Vitamin K. Spirulina. Saquinavar.” He replaced everything except a tiny lacquered snuffbox. “
This
of course is Persian Cat,” he added and took a few discreet sniffs. “Want some?”

Trip shook his head, horrified and dazzled. “No. Thanks.” If all the preachers he had ever known had been able to get together and create, from scratch, their own unqualified, indubious, and absurdly outfitted vision of the abyss, this would be it. Leonard Thrope moved with the savage authority of a very small dog approaching an unwary child. His tangled gray-streaked hair was long and braided with glass beads. What little of Leonard’s flesh Trip could see—hands, face, a scabby bit of ankle—was covered with an intricate web of flowers, cuneiform characters, and sexual graffiti. When he moved, flashes of virulent green and yellow appeared through rents in his clothes, like trapped fireflies.

Leonard curled his fingers around the proffered snuffbox. “Right,” he said. “Probably better you don’t,” and tossed it into a bag. “Okay. Let’s roll ’em.”

He walked to Trip and took him by the hand. Involuntarily Trip shrank from him. He expected something dry and scabrous; a crudely illustrated church pamphlet featuring Eve and a boa constrictor leapt unbidden to his mind. Instead Leonard’s hand was muscular and smooth, his lingering touch feather-light as he eased him from the chair.

“Hey,” he said gently. He looked into Trip’s eyes, brushing a wisp of blond hair from his forehead and letting his hand rest for a moment on the boy’s cheek. “It’s okay. Really, I don’t bite. You’ve probably had kind of a sheltered life, huh? You Xian kids. But this’ll be fine, it’ll go really well, and when we’re done GFI will sell every other act they own to buy this disc. So just try to relax and enjoy it—”

As he talked he steered Trip through the maze of recording equipment until the boy stood in front of the white screens. “You’ve never done this before, right?”

Trip shook his head.

“Good. It’s better that way. Not so self-conscious.” Leonard hunched behind a tripod and adjusted a series of lenses. One of the technicians switched off the TV; they pulled their chairs closer to the monitors and began playing with keyboards and dials. “What we do is, we get some footage of you, dancing or whatever. Picking your nose. I mean, you can lie there asleep if you want to, it doesn’t matter. Later it all gets jacked up on computer. They just want something to work with. Get your essence, right?

“That’s for the IT stuff. Me, I want to take some pictures.”

Trip glanced at the technicians. “You just want me to stand here?” he asked doubtfully.

“Whatever,” one of the young men said.

“
I
don’t.” Leonard’s hazel eyes glittered. “Pure white light: that’s what
I
want. Wait . . .”

He reached for a leather satchel plastered with Orgone holograms and shiny new Blue Antelope decals. “Music, you’d like that, right? Here—”

BOOK: Glimmering

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