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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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We need the Earth, both the Heideggerian earth and the real earth under our feet and inside our bodies. We can’t do without it. This is what dystopian fiction often says, but seldom so forcefully as in Hand’s dark, intense requiem, her heartfelt warning. If we don’t recognize this need in time, we too will find ourselves in the situation of Jack and his little household of survivors, of Martin and Trip in their Maine refuge, all doing their best to keep humanity not only alive, but human. You won’t forget their story, and that’s good. Take heed.
PROLOGUE
 
Afterward he would think
, We should have known it was coming. Should have seen it in the fiery darkness above the Palisades, or traced it in the flaming contrails left by disintegrating jets as they plunged into that watery cleft between the Battery and Liberty Island. Fingerprints upon a windowpane, etched in August ice; crocuses blooming in December, then November; peepers waking in the February mud to sing, too early by far, to sing again next spring, and then never to wake again
.
We should have known, I should have known
, he thought, a hole in the sky, the fabric of the world rent, and we the living should have known what would stream through that shimmering gap, we should have remembered before they returned to remind us: we the dying at the end of the world should never have forgotten the dead.
RUBRIC
 
I In June 1996, an emergency meeting of the United Nations World Council I. on Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Global Warming was held in Rio Gallegos, Argentina, to discuss the unpredicted and potentially disastrous rise in global temperatures during the previous eighteen months. In a desperate effort to stabilize the atmospheric concentrations of carbon gases, the European Union, allying itself with Trinidad, Tobago, New Zealand, and Australia, led the push for ratifying the 1991 UN climate treaty and the earlier Montreal Protocol. This revised treaty, very narrowly passed despite the vocal and hostile opposition of the United States, China, and Russia, provided for immediate worldwide implementation of an involuntary cap on emissions, as well as an international ban on CFCs and HCFCs. In a concession to pressure from the conservative governments of the U.S., Japan, Russia, and China, the council also passed a bill that permitted limited industrial use of the experimental refrigerant and heating agent bromotetrachloride, or BRITE.
 
 
I I In the early 1990s, BRITE had been developed in Finland as a substitute II. for chlorofluorocarbons and hexachlorofluorocarbons, and had been used in experiments to mine gas hydrate in the Arctic. The polar regions’ vast deposits of gas hydrate, with their frozen stores of methane, held the potential to provide twice as much carbon energy as the fossil fuels that had helped cause the rapid degradation of the ozone layer. BRITE appeared to have no adverse environmental effects; unlike CFCs and HCFCs, it degraded in the upper levels of the atmosphere. It was also relatively inexpensive to produce.
By the end of 1996, BRITE was in common use throughout the industrialized world.
 
 
III. In March 1997, during an American gas hydrate–mining expedition off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a massive series of ocean floor avalanches occurred, releasing a sudden, almost inconceivably vast store of methane from the hydrate reservoir. The Antarctic deposits alone contained over three times the amount of methane found in the atmosphere; methane has a greenhouse effect eleven times that of carbon dioxide. Along with the loss of life and scientific equipment in Antarctica, three thousand canisters of BRITE were destroyed, their contents voided into the atmosphere like smoke.
The gas hydrate explosion had the misfortune to occur at the same time as a massive solar storm, predicted some three days earlier by NOAA’s newly launched Hermes X-ray satellite. Solar physicists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab cheered as the first images crept across their monitors: the sun’s corona disappearing as a billion tons of gas spewed forth. Three days later, this river of solar particles streamed into the Van Allen radiation belt like a celestial lava flow, even as the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed.
This disastrous confluence of events created a surging electrical current that altered the earth’s magnetic field. Transformers exploded; circuit breakers shut down; satellite transmissions were lost as an early night descended upon the world’s cities. Fifty kilometers above the earth, the sun’s ultraviolet rays began a complicated pavane with bromotetrachloride.
 
 
IV
.
On March 26, 1997, the glimmering began.
PART ONE
 
Come As You Are
 
CHAPTER ONE
 
March 26, 1997: At Lazyland
On the night of his fortieth birthday, John Chanvers Finnegan stood upon the balcony of his Yonkers mansion and watched the sky explode above the Hudson River. It was the end of March, an unusually warm and beautiful day in early spring; though all the days now seemed lovely and warm, bathed as they were in the vernal glow of a dying century. From the house beneath him came the sigh and hum of conversation, an occasional ritornello of raucous laughter—Leonard’s, Jack thought, and allowed himself a melancholy smile. He had come outside, not so much to be alone as to savor the notion that everyone he loved best in the world was there with him now: his surviving friends, his ex-lover, his grandmother, his brothers. From here he could listen to them all, see them even, if he leaned over the balcony and craned his neck to look back at the house.
But he didn’t do that. It was enough, to know they were there; enough to sip champagne from a crystal lily, and listen.
The house was called Lazyland. It had been built in 1884 by the department store entrepreneur Myles Finnegan, Jack’s great-grandfather. Just four years earlier, in 1880, Myles had worked in Stevens’s variety store on North Broadway in Yonkers, stocking shelves and sweeping the day’s detritus of torn paper, bent nails, and broken glass out onto the sidewalk. One rainy morning in September his employer, suffering from an attack of gout, sent Myles in his place to the import warehouse of a toy wholesaler in Brooklyn. There Myles was to inspect the company’s selection of new and unusual items to sell at Christmas.
“Here,” the importer said, pointing to excelsior-filled crates in which nestled papier-mâché crèches from Salzburg’s kristkindlmarket; porcelain dolls from Germany; English lead soldiers and French soubrettes of colored paper, with lace roses and spun-glass hair. There were boxes of tin flowers and images of the Christ Child cast in wax, silver-embossed cardboard animals from Dresden, and little metal candleholders to clip onto fragrant pine boughs. Myles, tall and dark and lean, with an expression of perpetual surprise, had big bony hands more accustomed to handling cartons of dry goods than these fragile toys. He wondered aloud if there wasn’t anything new.
The importer turned, affronted, from admiring his painted lead battalions. “These I just received yesterday.”
Myles shook his head. “
Different
,” he said. “I wonder now, haven’t you anything different? Unusual, I mean—” He fingered a doll’s tartan gown and tried to look knowledgeable.
“Unusual?” The importer nodded eagerly, suddenly blessed with an idea. “I didn’t understand that your employer is looking for the unusual this season. Has Mr. Stevens seen these?”
He took Myles’s arm and led him to a darker part of the warehouse. Overhead a single gas lantern cast a fluttering light, but on the floor beneath there seemed to be myriad candles glowing within a row of wooden boxes: a cache of rubies and sapphires and golden orbs that made Myles suck in his breath, amazed.
“What is it, then?” he whispered.
The importer tilted his head. “These are Christmas tree dressings from Sonneberg.” He stooped and very carefully removed a blown-glass dog, held it up so that it turned gleaming in the gaslight. “Lovely, aren’t they?”
“They’re beautiful,” breathed Myles Finnegan. He knelt beside the rows of boxes, took first one and then another of the brilliant confections from their paper wrappings, and raised them to the light.
“They reflect the candlelight, you understand,” the importer explained somewhat officiously. “It reduces the cost of buying many candles, which as you know are so expensive right now . . .”
His voice trailed off. He did not offer to Myles Finnegan that the ornaments had been in the warehouse for some months, having proved impossible to sell. They were too expensive, too fragile; no one but German immigrants would want them, and who amongst the poor Germans could afford such frivolities?
Myles continued to gaze entranced upon the shining glass figures. He thought of the Christmas tree in his employer’s house, the only one he had ever seen. Magical, with the sweet wild smells of wax and balsam, and Mr. Stevens’s children shrieking with delight as they pulled their gifts from the dressed boughs; but to see a tree glittering with such things as these! He drew a multicolored teardrop close to his face, saw within its glorious curve his cheeks streaked gold and green and crimson and his eyes like stars. “How much?” he asked.
The importer quoted a figure seven times what he had paid his business counterpart in Sonneberg. But Myles proved to be more astute than that; they argued and dickered for fifteen minutes before agreeing upon a price that Longfellow Stevens would not consider too dear.
Unfortunately, when the crates of ornaments arrived some weeks later, Mr. Stevens reacted much as the importer’s other customers had when shown the pearls of Sonneberg.
“I can’t sell these!” he fumed. “
Glass!
Mr. Finnegan, what were you thinking?” He kicked angrily at a carton, then turned a red face upon his employee. “I have no use for them. Send them back.”
“He—he won’t take them, sir.” Myles swallowed. “It was the agreement we made, we would take them at this price—”
“We? We
?
” roared Longfellow Stevens. “
We
agreed to nothing! As of this week your employment is terminated, Mr. Finnegan!”
Myles stared at him, too stunned to be angry. But when Mr. Stevens began talking of withholding his wages to pay for the shipment, Myles spoke.
“I’ll take them, then. The Christmas boxes.”
“You will
not
.”
“In place of my wages.” He was already bending over the cartons, light as the egg panniers that came daily from Flatbush. “I’ll take the Christmas dressings.”
And he did. Late in November he took them in a borrowed wagon to Getty Square, and hawked them to the well-dressed shoppers along South Broadway. In two days he had sold them all, and returned to Brooklyn for more, and then again a week later for the rest of the importer’s stock. By January of 1881, Myles Finnegan was well on his way to being a rich man. By January 1882, after the first of his many visits to Lauscha, where the glassblowers who supplied Sonneberg lived, he
was
a rich man. And by the following year he was very rich indeed, having purchased Stevens’s Variety and renamed it Finnegan’s: the flagship store of what was to become a vast American retail empire, built upon blown glass and candlelight. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Finnegan’s first Sparkle-Glo factory opened on Long Island, mass-producing Christmas balls; but by then the family fortunes were well in place.
While he was still in high school, Myles’s great-grandson Jack could look out from the attic window at Lazyland, across the Hudson to the Palisades, and read atop the cliffs there the defiant legend emblazoned on the abandoned factory, like a thought untethered from a dream—
SPARKLE-GLO
 
 
Lazyland belonged to Jack now, even though his grandmother Keeley—Myles’s only child, who had been born there in 1899—still held formal title to the house. Upon her death the mansion would pass to Jack. The thought made him almost unbearably sad, even though his grandmother had only a few months ago celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday, and Jack himself had never expected to see forty.
“Hey, Birthday Boy.”
Jack turned, smiling, and raised his champagne flute. “Hi, Jule.”
“I wondered where you were.” Jule Gardino, Jack’s oldest friend and sometime legal advisor, ducked as he passed through the doorway. “Hey, nice night, huh?” He propped his elbows on the balcony beside his friend, blinking at the muzzy violet light, then pointed in mock excitement. “Peter! I can see your house from here!”
Jack laughed: the tag line from an old joke. “Here—”
He grabbed the bottle of Veuve Clicquot from beside his feet and handed it to Jule. Jule swigged from it, wiped his mouth, and took another gulp. “Whooee! Thanks—”
“Everyone behaving downstairs?”
Jule shrugged. “Leonard dropped trou and showed Grandmother his
apadravya
again.”
Jack took the bottle from Jule and refilled his glass, laughing. “I guess I better get back down, then.”
“No hurry.” Jule draped an arm around his friend and stared out across the sloping lawn. “Mmm. Daffodils?”

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