Glimmering (32 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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Her gloved hand took his and held it outspread while she fitted the scanner against his palm. There was buzzing, a dull stinging sensation. Immediately she drew her hand back, removed a disposable sheath from the end of the scanner, stuffed that into a tiny biohazard container, and slid the scanner back into her pack. “Okay, that’s all! The entry chip won’t be activated until December 31—that’s New Year’s Eve, at 12:01 A.M. It’ll last exactly thirty-four hours. Then you turn into a pumpkin.” She grinned and gave him a mock salute. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Finnegan! Don’t lose that envelope—it’s got all the instructions and stuff, in case nobody’s able to get in touch with you between now and then. Ciao—”
She turned and strode back up the drive. Halfway to the gate she began to sing again.
Jack looked down at his palm. Nothing there whatsoever that he could see. He heard the courier’s bike firing up as he went back inside and locked the door after him.
The house was still, save for the perfunctory drip of snowmelt falling from the gutters. In the air hung a stale smell of that morning’s burned toast, scorched over the Coleman stove’s flame—there had been no electricity for eleven days. Jack walked into the study and settled into the chair by the window. He took a silver letter opener and deftly slit the gorgeously patterned envelope. A small explosion of glitter and green smoke filled the air. Jack yelped and nearly dropped the envelope. The smoke faded, leaving a tropical scent; the glitter turned out to be more permanent, evading all of Mrs. Iverson’s later efforts to remove it from the oriental rug. Jack looked up, half-fearful that he would see Marz smirking at him from the doorway.
But he was alone, except for the oversize and very beautiful piece of paper he held in his hand. Tissue-thin, it had the watery sheen of fine silk and was patterned with shifting designs: golden zeppelins, a medieval sun, samurai in armor, a velvety black sky covered with glowing constellations, the grasping skeletal gryphon that was GFI’s corporate logo: what at first he thought were extraordinary watermarks, but which instead seemed to be more tricks from GFI’s technological inventory. He spent several minutes just staring at the page, turning it so that it caught the light in different ways to display different patterns. Letters appeared, now Roman, now Japanese characters, now Arabic and Cyrillic. Between his fingers the paper seemed to move on its own, as though he grasped a moth by its wings. Faint bell-like music played, the same song he’d been hearing off and on for months now:
I will give you the morning star:
The end of the end, the end of the end . . .
 
 
 
 
ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999,
HUMANKIND WILL ENTER A NEW MILLENNIUM:
A NEW ERA, A NEW DAWN!
THE GOLDEN FAMILY OF
GORITA-FOLHAM-IZED
INVITES YOU, JOHN “JACK” FINNEGAN,
TO BE THERE AT THE GOLDEN PYRAMID WHEN
SUNRA™ IS LAUNCHED
AND THE FUTURE BEGINS . . .
 
There followed a lengthy list of attending international celebrities, musical entertainments, fashion models, sports and religious figures and CEOs from across the globe, as well as both units of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus (incorporating Cirque du Soleil, the Moscow Circus, and the Mongolian Entertainers Alliance). The only persons who it appeared would
not
be at the Pyramid on New Year’s Eve were the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and John “Jack” Finnegan, if he chose not to go.
Only, it appeared that he
had
decided to go. He closed his eyes and pressed the invitation against his forehead. Larry Muso’s sloe eyes shimmered in front of him; he felt again that brisk electricity when their hands had touched, a scent of chypre . . .
VERY MUCH
want to see you again! All best & warm wishes, Larry M.
He shook his head: Larry M. might get his warm wish. Jack set the invitation back upon the table and stood to go. As he did, his hand passed through a shaft of light falling from the window. Emerald brilliance glanced off his palm, bright enough to catch his eye; bright enough to ignite within the whorled and crosshatched flesh the ghostly holographic image of a gryphon rampant, clasping a pyramid within its claws.
 
 
A week later, Mrs. Iverson told him the blond girl was pregnant.
“WHAT?”
“She is. She won’t talk about it, but it won’t go away. She has to eat better.” The housekeeper funneled powdered milk into a plastic jug. “Can you imagine? That tiny thing—”
“Are you sure? How can she—”
“She is. She says she was with a boy in March. She won’t say who, not that it would do any good.”
“But her family! There must be someone—”
Mrs. Iverson turned scolding blue eyes on him. “But there’s
not.
She’s been with us all this while, she won’t say who she belongs to, she won’t go back—we’ll have to care for her, Jack. And the baby; and barely enough as it is.” She sighed. “But I guess you’ll be getting your million dollars soon enough. We’ll just keep our fingers crossed, that’s all.”
She filled the jug with water and shook it into an unappetizing white froth. Jack gazed despairingly at the ceiling.
“I don’t believe it! Does Keeley know? She hasn’t even seen a doctor! I mean, this is just medieval—we’ll be boiling water and tearing up fucking bedsheets—”
“Oh, hush your language, Jack.” Mrs. Iverson glared. “Babies get born all the time without your help. If she needs a doctor, we’ll bring her to Saint Joseph’s.”
“But folic acid—you’re supposed to take things—”
Mrs. Iverson rolled her eyes. “What would you know from taking things for babies? You and your friends . . . That poor little girl, all this time and she didn’t even know. I think she pretended not to know. Your grandmother saw her in the bath Sunday and called me in. Poor little girl—just a stick with a big belly. But you could feel it kicking. She’ll be all right.”
“March . . .” Jack did the math in his head: almost five months. “I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t be a one to know about girls. But just as well, everything considered; she doesn’t need any more trouble with boys.” With a sigh the housekeeper turned to go. “But it would be nice if you’d go and talk to her sometimes, Jack. She likes you—”
“She does?”
“—and she’s lonely. Ah God, that poor girl . . .”
She went upstairs. Jack went out onto the porch and leaned on the balcony above a scraggy patch of hydrangeas.
A baby! It was medieval. Worse than that—crudely archaic, like one of those awful engravings from the time of the Black Death, crazy-eyed monks, strangers turning up like stray animals to drop their young on the floor. He ran his hands through thinning hair, too long, when had he cut it last? Over a year. He must look medieval, himself. We all must.
He began to laugh. Thinking how impossible, how ridiculously apocalyptic this all would have seemed, just three years ago: the sky in flames, coyotes in the South Bronx, oceans rising and burning. People fondling old issues of
Vanity Fair
and
Vogue
as though they were rare Victorian pornography. Daffodils blooming black. The world dismantling Lazyland, plucking at the water supply and electricity, plundering floorboards, foundation giving way because somewhere down the long slope to the Hudson a tree had fallen; because somewhere within the basement another tree was starting to grow. Because we forgot to buy end-of-the-world insurance. Because we forgot other things.
And still the flowers bloom,
he thought, gazing down at the hydrangeas. A brave, sickly show. But blooming
.
See?
He grazed the wilted flowers with his fingertips. The blossoms felt damp and cankered, like moldering fungi. He wrinkled his nose, trying to find their scent in air that smelled of burning; leaned down until he could cup them beneath his palms. To his shock, the corrupted flower head moved beneath his hand. He reared back, clutching at the rotten balustrade, cautiously looked down again.
The entire bush was aswarm with numberless insects. Myriad ruddy beads like spilled paint, each no bigger than a ladybug. But they weren’t ladybugs; their carapaces were true red untinged by orange, and they had no spots. What they did have was very large, beautiful golden eyes. Not the kind of eyes that beetles had, insofar as Jack knew; more like a wasp’s, or fly’s, casting vitreous sparks of gold and blue. Something about their movement fascinated him, and after a few minutes he realized what it was: they were not swarming mindlessly as he had always assumed bugs did, but in a very particular circular pattern, stemming from the center of each hydrangea blossom then swirling slowly outward, as though they were creating the pattern of the flower rather than merely treading upon it. It was like watching waves on a beach, a random motion propelled by some greater thing. Jack glanced up at the flame-colored sky, half-expecting to see the Insect God there choreographing the waltz.
But no, no Insect God today. He looked back down upon the dance. It had not slowed or quickened, it had not changed; but it seemed that its symmetry had within it a certain stillness; that the shifting pattern of legs and wings and eyes, pistil, petals, stem all formed a single image. He leaned over the parapet and saw that the pattern the insects had formed upon each flower head was an eye: myriad crystalline eyes, each solitary beetle a facet. He felt a throb of nausea, to see all those living things put to one purpose—
And what the fuck was that
?
All at once the insects erupted into a blizzard of wings. There was an acrid smell, then insects everywhere, not a horror but a glorious cloud, and alive. He stumbled backward as they flew around him, his arms outspread and head thrown back so that he felt the tremble of their thousand wings against his skin, wings and little legs everywhere, as focused in their intent as the hand of a lover. Like a lover he responded, not with arousal but with a sense of transport, of enchantment, as startled by this shock of joy as he was by the shimmering brood. They moved around him like falling water, red and gold. And for a minute Jack spun there with them, the center of that live storm. For an instant he could see himself as something else must: part of the world’s strange change.
Then they were gone, dispersed into the sky like a waterspout. Jack stood alone on the ramshackle porch, dazed and breathless. He could hear an airship thrumming somewhere above the river, and a bird chirping sleepily. The air was warm; he stripped off his shirt and saw numberless welts upon his arms and hands. The welts were painless, though he felt the faintest tingling when he touched one. And they were on his face, too: he drew his hand across his cheek and felt more small raised bumps, a whisper of sensation. A series of alarms rang off in his skull—hives! shingles! anaphylactic shock!—but before he could go inside to raid the medicine chest the welts began to fade. He touched his chest and upper arms, and felt the tiniest electrical shock.
But the welts were gone. He started to pull his shirt back on, stopped. The insects had touched it, he could smell their acrid odor upon the fabric. Perhaps it would be dangerous to wear?
But with their scent came the rush of memory: that prescient eye and himself within it. What little Jack knew of magic, he knew it faded, sure as love and paint.
He would wear the shirt, for a while.
 
 
Not long after this Emma and Jule came to dinner. They did not come
for
dinner—the phones were down at Lazyland and they’d been unable to call—but there had been fuel deliveries in the northern part of the county, Jule’s battered Range Rover had a full tank of gas and several ten-gallon containers in the back of the car, and Emma had earned four days off from her work at the hospital, by virtue of having been on duty when the survivors of a train derailment at Chappaqua were brought in.
“Round the clock for seventy-two hours, almost,” she told Jack and Keeley and Mrs. Iverson over tea in the living room. “I haven’t gone without sleep like that since—since my residency.” She looked down at her teacup; Jack knew she had started to say
since Rachel was killed.
“I don’t know how you go on, dear,” said Keeley. “James could go without sleep, but I never could—”
“Me neither.” Jule grabbed his wife’s hand and squeezed it, then reached for his glass. He had brought several bottles of Jack Daniel’s (“Comes from the same fuckers who drive the gas trucks,” he’d explained cheerfully to Jack, “your one-stop fuel shop!”) and one was set on the table in front of him beside an untouched teacup. “I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I’m a mess.”
Keeley laughed. “Oh darling, I’m so glad you came!” Of all Jack’s friends, Jule had won her heart thirty years before, when he had shoveled her new forest green Mustang out from under two feet of snow during the 1969 blizzard. From the beginning they had been an odd sight, the unruly giant from the Italian neighborhood in Tuckahoe and the aging Irish beauty who doted on him as she never had on her own boys. After James Finnegan’s death, it was the teenage Jule who fixed things at Lazyland, replacing washers and fuses and lightbulbs, calling the men who mowed the lawn, arranging for the house to be painted when its shingles began to peel and crack. Keeley would feed him roast beef and popovers and apple pie, then send him back to the bus stop with a Wanamaker shopping bag full of Snickerdoodles. Later, during summers off from rooming together at Georgetown, he and Jack took over Lazyland’s top floor. Keeley would decorously ignore the occasional waft of marijuana smoke that made its way downstairs, the sound of footsteps at 4 A.M. as some furtive guest made his or her way outside.

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