Glimmering (39 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—
“That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many
yugas,
of course. But this is the most evil
yuga,
this one we are in right now
.”
yugas,
of course. But this is the most evil
yuga,
this one we are in right now
.”
He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each
yuga
has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always
very
exciting!”
yuga
has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always
very
exciting!”
Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences
samadhi
—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a
lot
of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the
future,
so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”
samadhi
—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a
lot
of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the
future,
so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”
Jack’s memory of that particular night was of divine balance being restored somewhere within Ashok’s spacious Bhaunagar bedroom. A change in the music brought his attention back to the TV screen, the face of the dancing boy in close-up. High rounded cheekbones, strong jaw, cleft chin, strands of damp blond hair falling across his forehead. A distinctly occidental face—whatever it possessed of Eastern Mystery had been drawn there with makeup and computer theurgy. In the blue-white hollow of his throat a silver crucifix bobbed from a silver chain, the camera fixing for an instant upon a rapturous face that mirrored the boy’s own. The music pulsed and clanged. What was it about this song, that voice, the—
“No !
NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”
NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”
Jack saw Marzana staggering to her feet.
“IT’S NOT HIM! IT ’S NOT HIM! THEY DID SOMETHING! IT’S NOT—”
“Marzana!” Jack cried, aghast. “Marzana, what is it?
Who
—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”
Who
—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”
“THEY DID IT! THAT BITCH DID IT! THEY FUCKING—”
“Marz!”
Her screams gave way to hysterical crying, the girl kicking at him though her eyes never left the screen. In a panic Jack yelled at her to be quiet and tried to drag her from the room. But she was too strong for him, and so big now. With an explosive gasp she rammed her elbow into his stomach. Jack went reeling backward as the girl swept past him, stumbled to her knees, and began to wail.
“No,
oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE
—”
oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE
—”
Jack groaned and sat up. The girl knelt with her back to him, swaying as she moaned something he couldn’t understand—it sounded like
rippp, rippp.
Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.
rippp, rippp.
Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.
“THE END OF THE END”
STAND IN THE TEMPLE
AGRIPPA MUSIC/GFIDISC
Jack leaned forward to put his arms around Marzana’s shaking form. His eyes remained fixed on the glittering corporate logo that appeared at the end of the line of block letters—
A golden pyramid surmounted by the sun, a phantom gryphon shimmering within its rays.
PART THREE
Regrets Only
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Into the Mystic
They made preparations for leaving.
Diana began saving vegetables for greasing the launching ways. Nothing from her garden ever went to waste—if it wasn’t cooked, or baked, or dried, or canned, it was fed to the chickens or the pigs, or put into compost—but the pigs’ rations were cut back, the mealy ends of potatoes and zucchini and pockmarked eggplants put into a new bin marked WENDAMEEN.
And the ways itself was completed. It stretched twenty-seven feet from shore to waterline, then extended several more yards into the bay, where the wooden struts and pallets were anchored with lengths of automobile chain. Martin spent two days trying to figure out how to weight the cradle he’d designed for the boat. He finally pillaged his own car, a Toyota Camry whose engine he and Trip removed and which Trip then fastened with more chain to the wooden cradle. But that didn’t seem like it would be enough. So he went to Adele Grose and received permission to gut
her
car, a 1956 Cadillac that hadn’t run for decades. When that still didn’t seem enough weight, he and Trip trussed the entire structure with more automotive chains and the doors from the Camry.
her
car, a 1956 Cadillac that hadn’t run for decades. When that still didn’t seem enough weight, he and Trip trussed the entire structure with more automotive chains and the doors from the Camry.
“It looks like it’s going to take off,” remarked Trip when they were done. “You think it’ll do her?”
Martin privately thought the boat now resembled something from
Waterworld.
“I guess if the cradle doesn’t sink, we can just hack away at it until it does,” he said doubtfully, staring up at the
Wendameer
’s white hull. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of that gear stowed away.”
Waterworld.
“I guess if the cradle doesn’t sink, we can just hack away at it until it does,” he said doubtfully, staring up at the
Wendameer
’s white hull. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of that gear stowed away.”
He bartered with Diana for food, giving her two paintings she had long admired in exchange for jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and the promise of fresh eggs the morning of their voyage.
“But aren’t you going to miss these?” Diana asked when Martin and Trip brought the two canvases over. “I mean, they were hanging in your place, it’s not like you had them stored away somewhere.”
“I can always come and visit them, right?”
“Sure,” Diana said absently. She was already measuring her walls for the canvases, and so didn’t see Martin’s stricken look. But it was too late now. He was committed to the voyage because Trip was; and because he could no more imagine not taking the boy south to Manhattan than he could imagine leaving him there, forever.
Still, there was a little time left at Mars Hill. The last few days of Indian summer, blisteringly hot beneath a sky like cracked cloisonné, the beach steaming where hailstones the size of fists hammered against stone and Trip stumbled round gathering them, to fill an Igloo cooler for as long as the ice would last. Not long, it turned out, a day or two. Enough to keep the last four bottles of beer cold; enough for Martin to fill an ice pack to lay across his brow, fighting fever.
“You’re letting him kill you!” his son Jason had raged. “You’re going to leave me here alone—you’re going to leave Moony and me and the baby—”
“But the world will know that I died for love,” he had told his son, and with a strangled sob Jason fled down the beach.
Ah well, nothing to be done. He devoted himself to teaching Trip what he could of seamanship. On the deck of the
Wendameen,
Trip’s face scrunched into that little-boy scowl of concentration as he followed Martin’s nimble fingers through the labyrinth of sailor’s knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, rolling hitch. Martin showed him where the harness was, in the cockpit, and warned him that in case of rough weather he was to put it on.
Wendameen,
Trip’s face scrunched into that little-boy scowl of concentration as he followed Martin’s nimble fingers through the labyrinth of sailor’s knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, rolling hitch. Martin showed him where the harness was, in the cockpit, and warned him that in case of rough weather he was to put it on.
“Some boats have lifelines—ropes you can grab on to, if you have to. This one doesn’t,” Martin said, pacing from bow to stern while Trip struggled with a bowline. “So you’ve always got to keep your head up. You always have to have one hand for yourself and one for the boat.”
Trip nodded, not really listening; and so Martin said the same things again, and again, just as he endlessly showed the boy how to thread the knots, how to secure the anchor line, how to maintain the proper tension between jibstay and jumpers and backstay. Somehow, some of it would stick, he thought, smiling as Trip bellowed with triumph and held up a length of rope.
Weeks passed. Their nights were spent poring over the charts. Martin decided they would travel point to point, always within sight of shore. With no navigational aids beyond a compass and sextant (which was pretty useless, since you couldn’t see the stars to steer by), and with storms a near-constant threat, it seemed the only reasonable thing to do. He showed him the sextant, its deft interlocking of mirrors, prism, filters, vernier; even took him out onto the porch to explain how it worked. How it was futile if you couldn’t shoot the stars, although you could theoretically take a shot onshore, angle on three points on land, and find your way thus. The Graffams had told him that many of the old lighthouses along the coast of Maine were occupied again, since the Coast Guard no longer chased off squatters. It was rumored that some of the lights were even operational—Dick Graffam had seen one for himself, at Quoddy Head—and that a number of the old solar-powered light buoys still worked. The worst part of the journey would be getting around the ships’ graveyard off Cape Cod. The Cape Cod Canal would be too dangerous, without any advance warning of pirate ships coming through, and so Martin plotted another course. Which would also be perilous, but he and John had sailed it before. Martin felt fairly confident that if the seas were calm, they would have little trouble.
“Let’s aim for Friday,” he said one night, pushing his chair away from the cluttered table.
Trip’s face lit up. “To leave?”
“Well, to get the boat into the water, at least. There’s no point waiting any longer.” He felt a stabbing at his heart: why wait? The boy wasn’t going to fall in love with him, the stars weren’t suddenly going to show their faces through the broken sky, the tide wasn’t going to turn. “We should go now,” he went on, “before it gets worse.”
“Before
what
gets worse?” asked Trip cheerfully. “At least it’s not cold. And we’ve got the wind from the north, you said that’s good.”
what
gets worse?” asked Trip cheerfully. “At least it’s not cold. And we’ve got the wind from the north, you said that’s good.”
Clueless
, Martin marveled; he’s just
so
absolutely
clueless.
He smiled and nodded. “I did, and it is: it’s all good.”
, Martin marveled; he’s just
so
absolutely
clueless.
He smiled and nodded. “I did, and it is: it’s all good.”
But lying alone on the couch that night—listening to Trip’s even breathing in the next room, in Martin’s own bed—he could only sob, in rage and frustrated desire.
Stop killing me.
They launched on Friday in mid-December. Morning came, sky corrugating into emerald and cerulean and the brilliant yellow that seeps beneath a door closed to fire. On the porch Martin watched the day crack open. He had not slept, chased by fever and the knowledge that this would be the last time he’d sit here and look down Mars Hill to the bay, past decrepit cottages and leggy phlox and the
Wendameen
’s silhouette, to sparkling water and the eastern horizon. He felt beyond sorrow, oddly ebullient; buoyed by the very futility of his task. When he heard the first birds rustling in the lilacs he stood. He went inside to boil water for tea, then walked quietly into the bedroom to rouse Trip.
Wendameen
’s silhouette, to sparkling water and the eastern horizon. He felt beyond sorrow, oddly ebullient; buoyed by the very futility of his task. When he heard the first birds rustling in the lilacs he stood. He went inside to boil water for tea, then walked quietly into the bedroom to rouse Trip.
He slept soundly, as always. For a long time Martin stood above him, one hand on the headboard, and watched. He had always loved to do this, observe his lovers sleeping. It was like laying claim to a hidden part of them, like watching years fall away to reveal the other’s pith. John had always looked childlike when sleeping, one hand curled close to his face upon the pillow, mouth parted, brow furrowed.
Trip did not. Trip, sleeping, seemed least himself. He never moved—and Martin checked, Martin would stand there, memorizing the precise pattern of cheek against pillow, outflung arm, crooked knee. The boy’s face had a strangely slack look, not relaxed but deflated, the skin waxen and dull, lips pale, eyelids like little white shells laid across his eyes. As though some vitalizing spirit had gone. Martin frowned, thinking of all those stories where the hero’s soul flees him at night, of shamans who can leave their bodies and travel to the other world, returning with magic stones, coals wrapped in leaves, miraculous cures for blindness and plague. He gazed at Trip’s right hand, coiled against his breast, the gold ring there. He sighed, and gently shook Trip’s shoulder.
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