Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  Trip recognized the frog part. It had been a surprise dance hit a year ago, a melancholy amphibian chant du cygne recorded in a remote part of Quebec, where there were still a few spring peepers left. Their wistful music gave way once again to gongs. Trip began to move more artfully, recalling the graceful hands of the Javanese dancer on television.

  “I will give you the morning star,” he sang, his voice rising in counterpoint to the gamelan. “I will bring you the end of the end. The end of the end…”

  He pulled his shirt off, ran his hands across his sweat-streaked chest, toyed with the cross on its gold chain. He shut his eyes and thought of the blond girl on a bed strewn with lilacs, her fine hair tangled in his mouth. He danced and sang, songs from his album, new songs he had only thought of and never written down, songs he hadn’t sung since he was on a ramshackle school bus crossing the Kennebec. Finally, after hours had passed and the room was littered with cameras like spent ammunition, Leonard Thrope announced, “Okay. That’s enough.”

  Trip sank onto his haunches. He was breathing hard, but he felt exhilarated, better than he had felt in days; since before he met the blond girl. “Okay,” he said, panting, and grinned.

  For some minutes he sat there. Leonard rewound film into canisters and plugged tapes and discs into a monitor, scanning them before shoving them into a leather carryall. A technician tossed Trip some bottled water.

  “That was cool,” the technician said. It was the first time he had spoken all afternoon. “You want to see what I’ve done so far?”

  Trip rose, but the technician motioned him back. “No, stay there—”

  One hand glided across the keyboard. The other slowly turned a small projecting lens. Out of nowhere a figure appeared, crouching on the floor. Trip gasped. The figure stood and began to sing. The technician smiled.

  “I possess the keys of hell and death, I will give you the morning star…”

  It was Trip himself, of course. But not the Xian Trip, with his haunted eyes and the cross hanging from a gold chain about his neck. Instead the analogue was that of an Indonesian Baris dancer, barefoot and wearing a sort of brocade loincloth stiff with gold and crimson beads. Its hair was lost beneath a dizzyingly ornate headdress that rose pagodalike from its skull. The face was Trip’s, but no longer human: it had become a mask the color of new leaves, through which Trip’s blue eyes glowed. The figure moved as Trip had, but impossibly fast. As it spun and pirouetted, gold flecked the air, and little flames licked at its heels.

  Trip stared, aghast. “How—how—”

  “Wait, I’ll give you some music.” The technician reached for the keyboard and the monotonous tones of a gamelan rang out, the same four notes repeated in time with the figure’s singing. “It’s an icon—we just scan your image, right? And then—”

  “No!” Trip glanced around for Leonard, but the photographer sat cross-legged on the floor, scribbling on film canisters. “I know how it works! I mean, how’d you know,” he said agitatedly, gesturing at his demonic shadow. “To make it look like that.”

  The technician shrugged. “Stock footage. Just pulled it out of some file. I dunno, the music I guess, it reminded me of something. But this isn’t final—”

  His tone indicated that Trip was an idiot for thinking so. “—we’re just fooling around here. The master’ll go to New York; they’ll dub it in their studio. This is just the playback.”

  He turned and switched the sound off, began conferring with his mate at the console. Trip sank back onto the floor. Above him his phantom double silently whirled and crouched within its golden cloud. An analogue; an icon.

  “Pretty intense, huh?”

  Trip didn’t look up when he heard Leonard behind him. “I’ve seen them before,” he said sullenly. In fact he had only seen an IT recording once, in Dallas, when during a few unchaperoned hours Jerry dragged him to a skin show in Deep Ellum.

  “I meant watching yourself.” Leonard scraped the stool across the floor and perched on it. “I think it’s kind of a trip—”

  He laughed. “—Trip. I do it whenever I can,” he added confidingly. His eyes were fixed on the singer’s shining twin. “It makes for a pretty amazing fuck.”

  Trip felt himself blushing. “Not a fuck, exactly,” Leonard went on in a lower voice, “I mean, with an icon there’s nothing actually there; but—”

  His hand moved. Trip froze, terrified that Leonard was going to touch him, but instead Leonard began to stroke his own upper thigh, smoothing the stiff folds in his cracked leather trousers and probing a small rent near his groin. His gaze was fixed on Trip’s doppelgänger, its blank masked face, arms drawing arabesques in the glittering air.

  “It’s really beautiful,” Leonard breathed, his tone for once without mockery. A ridiculous anger fought through Trip’s unease.

  I’m really beautiful! he thought. “That mask looks stupid,” he lied.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Leonard replied, his voice catching. Trip tried to force himself not to look but failed: he glanced over and saw the outline of Leonard’s swollen cock, a sheen of smooth red skin through the rip in the leather. “People are so obsessed with masks now, I think the mask is what makes it—”

  Leonard let his breath out in a shuddering sigh. He stood, crossed the room, walking right through Trip’s double, and crouched beside one of his leather carryalls. Trip closed his eyes.

  Go, he ordered himself. They have the recording, what the hell are you still doing here, GO!—

  He jumped when someone touched his shoulder.

  “Here.” It was Leonard, hand outstretched. In his palm he held two emerald-green capsules. “One’s for you.”

  “Wh-what is it?” But he knew what it was.

  “IZE.” Leonard lowered himself beside him. “It heightens the whole IT experience—oh for Christ’s sake, don’t look at me like that!”

  “I’m not taking it,” Trip said.

  “Look, it’s practically legal, approval is pending from the fucking FDA, okay? It’ll just—relax you—”

  “I’m not—”

  “Look, Trip—you know that everyone who sees this disc is going to be on IZE, right? I mean, who do you think this stuff is for? Don’t you think you should have some fucking idea of what your audience is seeing? Jesus!” Leonard shook his head. “You think this is like Reefer Fucking Madness, right? Well, it’s not—it just relaxes the inhibitors in your brain. So you, like, register the IT stuff as real, get it? You’re watching Macbeth or something, but you no longer have this perceptual curtain drawn between you and what you’re seeing—you’re part of it.”

  “No,” Trip repeated. “Look, I better go…”

  “Wait.” Leonard grabbed him. “Millions of people are going to see this—hundreds of millions. And this is just a demo, Trip—Agrippa’s going to want you to do more. A lot more. You owe it to them, at least, to have some vague fucking idea of just what it is you’re doing. By the time your single’s out, these are going to be like aspirin—”

  He raised his palm, so that Trip could see the ampoules: each emerald cone as long as the first joint of his little finger, with a tiny needlelike projection emerging from the cone’s apex. “It doesn’t make you high or anything,” Leonard explained. Behind him Trip’s analogue froze, then began moving backwards, faster and faster, until it was a golden blur of legs and hands. “It just increases the amount of calcium entering some of your nerve terminals—calcium, right? Not a scary drug—and it boosts the production of gamma-aminobutyric acid, this neurotransmitter that inhibits anxiety and—stuff. And, well, then it helps create these new neural pathways within the various areas of the visual cortex. You get your visual stimuli coming in through the retina, processed through all these neurocellular layers of the visual cortex; but then the stimuli sort of get rerouted into other parts of the brain, like the limbic system. All the inhibitory mechanisms that would normally tell you that this is just like, a video, are overruled. So you get this incredible emotio
nal response to what you’re seeing. It’s like the reverse of this weird thing called blindsight—people who are totally blind, but they can still process visual information because parts of their brain respond to stimuli, even though they’re not aware of it.”

  Leonard’s voice grew softer. When Trip looked up he saw that the photographer’s expression was rapt and without guile. “I mean, it’s really very beautiful, how it works—”

  “How do you know so much about it?” Trip demanded, but his tone was more curious than hostile.

  Leonard shrugged. “Just part of the job.” He smiled, the crimson implant in his tooth glowing. “Look, I told you—it’s not going to make you high or anything like that, you’ll be disappointed if you’re expecting some kind of teenage head-rush. It’s just going to help you integrate better with what you’re watching. Like when you’re hypnotized—you’re not going to do anything you wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

  Leonard leaned back, his proffered hand still holding the IZE cones. Trip swallowed. He thought of the blond girl in the planetarium, her head bowed between his legs, her slim body sliding fishlike through his hands and wondered if there was anything he wouldn’t ordinarily do. “I better not,” he said.

  “It doesn’t even hurt. Look—”

  Leonard pinched one of the cones between thumb and forefinger, held it so that the tip rested against the inner crook of his elbow. Gently he pushed the ampoule against the chiaroscuro of tattoos and raised scars, then squeezed it. Within the cone there was a phosphorescent flash. After a second Leonard pulled the ampoule away and tossed it onto the floor. Trip’s brightly spinning icon raised up on tiptoe above it.

  “See?” Leonard murmured. The icon winked out. “Now you—”

  He took Trip’s hand and pulled his arm straight. Trip grew rigid. Before he could protest there was a prick at his inner arm. He gasped as warmth suffused his entire body, a rush that started at his gut and spread down through his groin, up through his torso. Heat spread across his face, his skin flushed: but there was no pain, only an almost unbearably heightened awareness of every atom of his being. He could feel each hair upon his body stiffening, pores opening and closing across his cheeks. His hands and feet tingled as though he had thrust them into a swarm of stinging ants, and he realized that he was actually sensing the blood swimming through his extremities, the countless explosive bursts of neurons firing—really feeling them, as though he were an ocean and all the complex systems of his body myriad creatures passing through him in electric waves. He shuddered. The sensation was like a symphony, spangled lights flickering everywhere and warmth flooding his skull until it centered upon his eyes. He blinked, sending glowing orange pinwheels reeling across his field of vision, and mouthed the words Holy cow.

  “It’ll calm down.” Leonard’s soothing voice came with its own explosive accompaniment, thunderous booms and an array of twinkling fish. “The initial rush provokes mild synesthesia, it goes away…”

  It did, almost immediately. Trip felt an intense burst of regret. His eyes welled with tears as the waves of sensation condensed into a sort of mental strobing, an intermittent, seemingly random pulse of emotions—sorrow, rage, lust, dismay—that gradually subsided, until he found himself sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring fixedly at the air before him.

  “Feel better?” Leonard settled beside him, slowly, as though trying to avoid frightening a skittish colt. “The first time is a little intense…”

  Trip nodded: yes. He perched on the edge of his stool, his hands gripping his knees, his eyes wide and staring.

  But not with fear. Rather, he had never felt his attention so incredibly, intensely focused: on the dust motes moving in the air; on the bitter sneezy smell of dust burning on the halogen bulbs; on the sound of Leonard’s breathing, the faint wheeze when he inhaled and the almost imperceptible hum of the placebit in his front tooth.

  “All right then,” Leonard murmured. The air exploded with light and sound. Trip stumbled to his feet, knocking the stool to the floor. Momentarily he was blinded by his own heightened sentience: unable to distinguish between his hand fluttering before his eyes and Leonard’s grinning face, between a sweet chiming sound and the trilling of blood in his skull. Sparks of gold and scarlet filled the air, like the afterglow of fireworks. He blinked, and gazed enraptured.

  In front of Trip, his jeweled shadow stood poised on one foot, head cocked as its blue eyes burned into the singer’s. The mask was gone, and the towering golden crown. The face that stared adoringly at him was Trip’s own: Trip’s strong jaw shaved of blond stubble, the cleft in his chin more pronounced, the scar left by a childhood fall smoothed away. Light settled into the hollows of its cheeks. Trip’s mouth parted as he tentatively reached to stroke the long hair that fell across the icon’s brow. As he did, the icon raised its hand, its astonished expression mirroring Trip’s own. Their fingers met in the glittering air, a shimmer of flesh and flame; but Trip’s hand closed on nothing. His heart jolted with disappointment, but his face was still there gazing at him with wide blue eyes. The tip of a crimson tongue flicked across its lips, left them gleaming like the moist curve of an apple. He could see the rayed petals of its irises, its skin smooth and unmarred by pores or scars but with a sheen like sweat. Overwhelmed, a little frightened, Trip sank to the floor. The icon didn’t move. Its eyes remained fixed on Trip, its hands extended imploringly.

  Trip sucked in air, his heart pounding dangerously fast. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. From where he sat he had a rather intimidating view of his double: it was naked, and it had an erection. The body mirrored Trip’s own, its slender torso plucked of the few stray hairs that always embarrassed Trip because there weren’t more of them. Its legs were smooth and muscular, and its arms. Its cock seemed no larger or smaller than Trip’s own, which was somehow disconcerting, as was the fact that as he stared at it, Trip found himself growing hard. But he couldn’t look away. His heart fluttered as it had when he’d been with the blond girl. His breath came in shallow gasps; he felt the same swooping vertiginous sensation as of flying or falling, the same insane realization that somehow this was his life, this was happening, this was real—

  “Hey.” It spoke to him, and he shuddered. His own tentative voice, the inflection questioning, half-fearful; shy. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath; opened them: he was still there. “You okay?”

  Trip nodded. The motion made him dizzy. The icon extended its hand and touched his cheek. Trip’s shudder became a low moan, but he didn’t move away, just sat there as the shining boy leaned forward and cupped Trip’s face in his hands. “Don’t be afraid…”

  Something in its voice slashed through Trip’s fear. A slight warbling, the barest hint of an echo that gave the voice a faintly mechanical quality. It was enough to remind Trip that what was before him was neither mirror nor memory but only his own borrowed mien. It was enough, momentarily, to break the spell.

  “No.” Trip’s voice cracked. Somehow that made him feel better, more sure of himself, more sure that he was himself; because surely the icon’s voice wouldn’t break? He remembered that Leonard Thrope had given him a drug, remembered that he was in a room, and there were other people there, even if he couldn’t see them. He looked around, saw only jagged rays of light and darkness, a glowing blue square. In front of him the icon crouched, blond hair falling in a bright wave across one eye.

  “‘Thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad, ’” it recited. “‘Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created. ’”

  Trip’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He tried to whisper No, but the word died in his throat.

  “‘For in Thee we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said; For we are also his offspring.’”

  Something warm brushed against his knee. Trip looked down and saw the icon’s hand there, like a bird lighting upon his jeans. As he stared the hand began to move along
the inside of his thigh until it reached his groin. He felt another hand stroking the taut fabric, watched in detached disbelief as the icon’s head, with its glittering sheaf of hair, nudged between his legs, its hands gently pulling them apart so that it could rub its cheek against his swollen crotch. Trip moved his own hands to his breast and crossed them there, gasping when he heard the soft shirr of his zipper and felt his shorts being tugged down, its hair spilling onto his exposed cock. He squeezed his eyes shut, but it was no good: he could see his own face as in a mirror, lips parted and sudden heat, its tongue flicking at his balls and then a shaft of molten pleasure as its mouth closed around him. With a groan he tried to push himself away from it, but it was too late, its hands slid behind him, shoving his jeans down farther as it grabbed his ass and pulled him roughly forward. He tried kicking, but there was nothing for his foot to connect with; only that ragged whorl of golden hair between his legs, the broken silhouette of a kneeling boy. Its fingers splayed across his ass, rough-edged nails and fingertips stroking then probing there. Tears flashed from Trip’s eyes as he abruptly came, a searing jolt that sent him arching backward as his double sucked greedily at his cock. Its hands tightened, slid upward, then fell away. Trip lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. There was the smell of semen, and smoke.

  “Well now. I guess this just proves that the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.”

  Trip sat up. The IZE’s wild glory had faded, and with it the room’s harlequin array. Instead he saw only the dark regiment of cameras and recording equipment and raised screens, now empty and lightless, and the shadowy figures of the two technicians beside their monitors. His jeans and underwear hung just above his knees. He had a glimpse of someone’s wrist bent across the fold of his waistband, a shimmer of luminous green as the wrist drew back and left a trail of gray smoke.