Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  Between Planets

  For nearly two weeks Jack passed in and out of fevers, in and out of ER and ICU, in and out of consciousness. There were glimpses of white-masked faces floating in the burnished bubble that was Saint Joseph’s jury-rigged AIDS ward, a terrifying memory of sudden darkness and screams, flame and shouted curses and the horrific certainty that he had somehow missed his own death and plunged straight into hell. But that was just the first minutes of the first blackout, before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked in and the ward’s sodium lights began to glow. Jack missed the next few blackouts, being too busy manufacturing his own. His fever soared and dipped. When he was conscious he felt giddy and exalted despite excruciating pain; felt himself wheeling far above the hospital building and looking down upon Untermeyer Park, the broad ruddy sweep of the river, and the Palisades. These flights would be interrupted by someone taking his temperature, his blood, fecal samples, swabs of tissue from inside his mouth. His upper arm ached from repeated stabbings with a hypodermic needle; his hands, when he could feel them, were cold, and his feet. This did not prevent him from flying—jumping, actually—after the first few forays he realized he could move faster and farther if he leapt into the air rather than attempting to pump his arms like wings. So he would leap, bouncing as upon a trampoline and holding his breath until he began to hang up there, each time a few moments longer, and at last he did not fall, he was above the world, between feedings and fevers, between planets.

  Sometimes he saw faces that he knew. His brother Dennis; Jule Gardino; Leonard, but it was the Leonard of long ago, his sloe eyes brimming and his mouth close to Jack’s. He saw his former lover Eric, too, which confused him but filled his heart with such joy that he shouted, and was confused again when the nurses came. And once his aunt Mary Anne drifted past, long blond hair and paisley wrappings trailing behind her. Sometimes he heard music. Another man in the ward had a boom box; the nurses fiddled with it relentlessly, until they found a working broadcast band. What spilled out then was like what was going on inside Jack’s head, “Gimme Shelter” and La Traviata, Rent and old Ajax commercials, a man shouting about Jesus and the murdered pope. During his flights the music faded, and sometimes the carnival light as well. It was then that he would see a great unblinking eye moving slowly across the heavens, like a hot-air balloon. The eye terrified him: it grew larger and larger, until it filled the sky, turning slowly as it stared down upon the world, its black pupil opening into the abyss. He woke screaming, barely conscious of hands pushing him back onto the cot and the hot sting of a needle in his upper arm.

  A day came when a new voice cut through the babble. A woman’s voice, half-familiar, but it wasn’t until he heard his doctor arguing with her that he realized it was Jule’s wife, Emma.

  “Are you fucking crazy ?” That much morphine for two weeks—”

  “Six days,” the other voice protested.

  “—you goddamn bastards, you’re trying to kill him, aren’t you? You fucking cannibals.”

  There was a clatter and the sound of scuffling, a shriek, and feeble applause from one of the other cots.

  “—sterile, you’re not sterile !” the doctor cried.

  “I’ll sterilize you, you son of a bitch—”

  What happened next was mostly pain, experienced at varying speeds, as Dr. Emma Isikoff shouted and waved her phone and stalked between cots, yanking up patients’ charts and scanning them. “‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine! ’ ” she read, and in a rage threw the last chart onto an IV pump. “What, is this Verdun? You’re killing them! ”

  Jack still hadn’t managed to do more than shake his head admiringly, when Emma commandeered a wheelchair from somewhere, lifted him, and deposited him gently on the frayed vinyl seat, thick with duct tape and newspaper padding. The trip from the hospital to Lazyland was a blur, barely glimpsed through the filthy, barbed-wire-framed windows of Emma’s Range Rover. And the next few days were horrible, more fever and convulsions from the abrupt morphine withdrawal, and a new regime of herbs and antibiotics administered by Emma.

  “Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind? That’s what it was like in there.” Emma was a neurosurgeon on the staff at Northern Westchester, where (apparently) sick people were treated like gold: when the power went they operated by candlelight and never lost a patient. “Next time you have a seizure and go to the emergency room, I want you to call me, okay? Jesus.”

  Jack smiled. Emma’s shift—nine days on, four days off—allowed her to stay with him. Which was lucky, since Keeley was too frail to serve as nurse, and all of Jack’s brothers were too far away or, in Dennis’s case, too burdened with their own children to help out.

  The terrible illness turned out to be flu. It had not progressed into pneumonia (“No thanks to them,” Emma snarled), which almost certainly would have killed him. Paradoxically, the morphine might have helped, by forcing him to rest.

  “But no more drugs, understand? Unless I give them to you. And I’m taking these,” she announced, the bottle of alprazolam clutched in her fist like the scalp of an enemy. “I mean, are you totally insane? I told you these interact with tricyclics, not to mention you could get sleep apnea. Jesus!” Emma was small and round and blond as a newborn chick; Leonard called her Doctor Duck. She shoved the alprazolam into a pocket and pulled another bottle from his nightstand. “Who gave you these? Not Dr. Kornel, tell me Ed Kornel did not prescribe these—”

  Jack gestured weakly. “Leonard,” he croaked.

  “Leonard! Leonard! ” Emma actually jumped up and down in fury, blond curls shaking and floppy sweater rising to give him a glimpse of her round white stomach. For an instant Jack thought she would explode, like Rumpelstiltskin. “If Leonard Thrope told you to jump off the—”

  “Emma. Please.”

  Emma stopped and took a deep breath. She smoothed her hair, opened her voluminous leather sack, and dropped the bottle into its maw. “Okay. Okay. Leonard wants to kill you and take pictures of your rotting corpse, that’s okay with me. Okay? But not on my watch. If you are going to pop whatever Leonard gives you, Jackie, then I am going to stop coming to save you. Because I don’t want to be the one talking to the ambulance crew. Understand?”

  “Okay,” he whispered. “But,” he couldn’t resist adding, “you know, I’ve taken them before and nothing—”

  Emma fixed him with a glare. “You are playing Russian roulette with your body, Jack—”

  I thought it was pinball; but Jack only nodded.

  “—anyway, here. I brought you these.” She placed a number of small brown glass dropper-bottles on his nightstand, each with its hand-lettered label in Emma’s miniscule penmanship. “Skullcap, that’ll help you sleep only not too much because it can cause bad dreams plus there’s a possible reverse effect of insomnia. Valerian, blessed thistle. More echinacea. Here’s some goldenseal. And garlic.” She dropped a fat papery corm in his lap.

  “Jeez. Vampires now, I’m worried about vampires?”

  “Jule said you were having bad dreams.”

  “And indigestion will help me?”

  Emma gathered her things: stained white linen jacket, Zabar’s shopping bag, leather purse. She leaned over and kissed Jack’s forehead, let her hand rest there a moment. He remembered seeing her do that to Rachel when she had chicken pox, not so much testing for fever as she seemed to be seeking to draw it out through her palm.

  She hesitated. “Dreams. What did you dream, Jack?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing,” he lied. “Just—you know. Some nightmare I don’t remember. Night terrors.”

  Emma nodded. “Rachel used to have those,” she said. She always made a point of talking about Rachel. It made Jack uncomfortable, this false bravura; after two years he preferred Jules’ unrelenting drunken grief. “Has Julie told you about what he’s dreamed?”

  Jack moved the garlic to the side table. “No,” he said, curious. “What kind of dreams?”

  Emma eyed him t
houghtfully. “Just—dreams,” she said finally. “I better go, sweetie. I wish I could stay—”

  “Hush—” He held out his hand. She took it, and he saw tears in her eyes, a terrible weariness. “You’re my angel, Emma.”

  She bent to kiss his forehead. “Lots of rest, lots of fluids—no alcohol!—and please, please, watch your meds. Okay? Okay.”

  He watched her go, hearing her cheery good-byes to Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson as she descended through the house. Then he crawled back beneath the covers and fell asleep.

  A week later Leonard arrived. It was eight-thirty on a Friday morning. Jack was always unnerved at the way Leonard kept these businessman’s hours; such discipline gave weight and credence to Leonard’s work, which even after all these years Jack preferred to think of as a repellent hobby, like Leonard’s penchant for S/M and body piercings.

  But Leonard was a businessman, the very modern avatar of artist as financial entrepreneur—even his T-cell count was part of his portfolio. He traveled via a vast seal-gray diesel-powered limousine that belched foul smoke and was reputedly a gift from a Russian heroin overlord. And Leonard traveled with an entourage, an amorphous group which changed with current fashions—this week young and blond and trembling from amphetamines and IZE excess; next week a half dozen street people with the dull crimson eyes of birds of prey, who left the leather interior of the limo flecked with scabs and dead skin and spit.

  Jack shuddered each time he heard the car entering Lazyland’s compound. He had long since forsaken going outside to greet his friend, for fear of finding himself face-to-face with lepers flown in from Bangladesh or some convicted serial murderer sprung from prison by Leonard’s army of legal counselors. Instead Jack tracked Leonard’s current cult status by means of outdated tabloids or patter overheard on TV. Leonard himself he always recognized, because in twenty years Leonard had not altered his uniform of gold and black leather. Though the gold was more subtle now, the leather was cracked and faded as old gesso, and Leonard’s flamboyant mane of curling black hair was streaked with gray and braided into a single long plait.

  “Jack? Oh Jackie-boy!”

  Leonard’s voice echoed through the house, his footsteps pounding as he took the stairs two and three at a time, as he always had. In his bed Jack moaned.

  “Please, Leonard,” he called out into the hallway, coughing for effect. “I’m sick—” “Of course you’re sick. That’s why I’m here!” With a thump Leonard gained the third floor. Jack heard the familiar boom as his friend slid across the landing and crashed into the wall opposite. Then, grinning like Mister Punch, Leonard’s head popped through the open doorway. “Please say you’re glad to see me, Jackie.”

  In spite of himself Jack laughed. “Christ, Leonard. What is that—?” He pointed in revulsion at Leonard’s back.

  “It’s a leopard skin. D’you like it?”

  Leonard whirled so that Jack could admire his slight rangy form in its cracked leathers, hair braided and ornamented with an array of bones—Jack knew better than to ask about them—hands and cheeks so tattooed, scarified, beaded, bruised, and bedecked with light implants that the press had named him The Illuminated Man. Mirrors hung everywhere from his clothes. His left eyebrow had been shaved and replaced with a series of chips representing the weighing of souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A camera bag hung from his waist. Draped over his shoulder was a huge if moth-eaten pelt, complete with eyeless mask and dragging tail and two front paws tied loosely about his neck, like a sweater.

  “Leopard?” Jack looked horrified. “Aren’t they endangered?”

  Leonard pranced to the bedside, his feet in their steel-toed boots scuffing at the oriental rug. “Snow leopard, Jackie. Not endangered. Extinct.” He unlooped the two paws and let the pelt fall to the floor with a thud. “It was a gift.”

  At least it wasn’t a human head, which was what Leonard had worn to the opening of the last Whitney Biennial. “So that makes it okay—”

  “Oh hush. Here, I brought you a present.”

  Jack instinctively yanked the covers up around him as Leonard thrust his hand into a pocket of his leather kilt. “Wait a minute—okay, here it is—”

  Jack peered into Leonard’s open palm and saw a small highly polished stone, incised with a few lines. “It’s a kind of dream-catcher,” Leonard explained. “I got it in Nepal. One of the priests gave it to me, because I was—well, Jule told me you had been having nightmares. I figured you could use it more than me. I’m used to bad dreams.”

  Leonard put the stone into his friend’s hand and closed Jack’s fingers around it. Then he raised the hand to his mouth and kissed Jack’s knuckles, one by one. “I’m sorry you’re sick, sweetie,” he said.

  A creak as the door behind them opened wider. Jack saw his grandmother standing there, immaculately dressed in a Lagerfeld woolen suit and white silk blouse. Behind her stood Mrs. Iverson, a meek shadow in blue moiré, breathing heavily—she seldom ventured above the second floor.

  “Jack dear. I heard voices—” Keeley’s cane struck the floor with a resonant thud. She stepped carefully into the room, bringing with her the scent of Chanel No. 19. Her narrowed gaze showed she knew exactly who his visitor was. “Oh. Leonard. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  Leonard grinned, light glancing from his ruby placebit. “Hello, Grandmother.”

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Leonard stared at her admiringly. “God, she’s amazing! She just never gives up.” He raised his voice and pronounced with exaggerated slowness, “It’s Leonard, Grandmother—Leonard Thrope! You remember, Jackie’s old friend from Saint Bartholomew’s—”

  Keeley raised a hand as though to strike him. Before she could, Jack swung himself from bed, shuffled to her side, and kissed her. “Shut up, Leonard. Grandmother, I told you not to come all the way up here—”

  “Pog mo thoín,” Keeley spit. She glared at Jack. “I told you I don’t want to see him—”

  Leonard’s eyes widened. “Hey! She just cursed me in Gaelic.”

  “Okay, he’s leaving, he’s leaving. He just dropped by on his way out of town, that’s all—” Jack walked Grandmother back out the door, past Mrs. Iverson watching everything with her customary stunned expression. “Come on, Grandmother, I’ll help you downstairs—”

  “No! Back to bed, you.” Keeley drew herself up and motioned at the housekeeper. “Larena—”

  Mrs. Iverson took Keeley’s arm. Jack hovered over the two of them, clutching his bathrobe closed. Despite his grandmother’s protests, he followed them down to the second-floor landing. There he steered them into Keeley’s bedroom, kissed her, carefully shut the door, and went back upstairs.

  “I think she secretly likes me,” said Leonard.

  Jack sank into a chair by the window. “You asshole. You give my grandmother a heart attack and I’ll kill you.”

  Leonard stooped to pick up his leopard skin. “Hating me’s what keeps her alive, Jackie-boy. What is she, a hundred?”

  “Ninety-nine.” Jack sighed. “She’ll be a hundred around Christmas.”

  “A century baby! I should do something—”

  “Forget it, Leonard.”

  “Huh.” Leonard sniffed, turned to look disdainfully at the painting by Martin Dionysos that hung beside the window. An abstract sunstruck landscape, all greens and yellows and sea blues that stood in opposition to Leonard’s own icy aesthetic. “God, I hate that picture.”

  Jack ignored him, gazing out at the distant river, turned molten by the spectral display overhead. Like sunspots, the glimmering came and went, flaring up for weeks at a time; then receding, so that for a day or two, or an hour, one could almost imagine the world was as it had been. No one seemed able to predict when it would be active, or what caused the remission. Jack imagined masked scientists aboard icebreakers in the Weddell Sea peering up through telescopes, watching as the ozone hole above them dilated like the pupil of some malevolent eye. “Jeez, it’s bus
y out there today, isn’t it?” he said absently.

  “Yeah. I heard there’s a heavy-duty UV alert. I had to cancel a morning shoot out at Rikers. That’s how come I’m here—”

  Jack turned from the window. “I should have guessed.”

  Leonard looked aggrieved. “I was going to come yesterday—”

  “I’m kidding, Leonard. Yesterday I felt too sick to see anyone—this is the first day I’ve gotten out of bed, really. I’m sorry your shoot got canceled. What was it?”

  “Hmm?” Leonard looked distracted. “The shoot? Nothing big.”

  He fell silent and stared thoughtfully at a picture of Aunt Mary Anne on the wall. At last he said, “I have something else for you, Jackie.”

  Jack’s heart sank as Leonard sat on the bed and pulled his camera bag beside him. “Something else?”

  “Don’t look at me like it’s a horse’s head.” Leonard unzipped a pocket, reached inside, and withdrew a small cloth pouch. He let it rest in his palm for a moment, as though weighing it. In a low voice he said, “Come here, Jackie.”

  Jack didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on the window, the light flickering like so many darting fish. He could hear Leonard’s breathing, the ticking and tocking of Lazyland’s clocks. But surely there was something else… ?

  He cocked his head and listened, uneasy. Not at all sure what it was he listened for, but certain it must be there. The echo of a voice, the piping of a distant flute—

  He heard neither. Only a soft fumpp fumpp as Leonard tossed the small cloth pouch up and down in his palm.

  “Jackie,” his old lover repeated. Jack felt his neck prickle with gooseflesh. “Come here, Jackie.”

  He stood and crossed to the bed.

  “Sit.” Leonard patted the comforter beside him. Jack sat. Leonard looked at him and frowned, as though he’d been sent the wrong model for a shoot. Finally he said, “I was planning to give this to you. But I was going to wait—”

  He hesitated. “—to wait just a little longer. Then Jule called me and said you were so sick—”