Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “But you know, I must be going,” said Leonard Thrope, and got to his feet.

  Trip. He felt as though he had been clubbed: his ears rang and there was a sharp knocking in his skull, his own tiny voice saying, no no no. Leonard shook his hair back from his face. He pulled his trousers tight about his waist and zipped them, eyes still fixed on Trip. A shining seam spilled down one pant leg; absently Leonard rubbed until it disappeared into cracked black leather. “Experimentum crucis,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, left it burning as he stooped and swung a camera bag over his shoulder. He started across the room, stopped beside one of the technicians and picked up a computer disc. He pocketed it, then took another object, a flattened silvery cube slightly smaller than the computer disc: the IT recording.

  “I’ll send someone for my things.” This to the technicians, who nodded as he strode toward the door. “Oh, and Trip—”

  His gaze flitted across the boy’s face. Leonard smiled, not unkindly. “It’s been a slice. Believe me—this thing is going to make you.” The ruby placebit winked as he turned and left, the door shutting softly behind him.

  For a moment Trip just stood there, hands hanging limply at his sides. Dimly he could hear the soft whir and tick of computer equipment, one technician asking his colleague a question. Someone had switched on a halogen lamp, so that dust motes ignited in a vivid parody of the IZE’s light show. Bright jots swirled, congealed into the mask of a grinning blue-eyed demon, blond hair aflame. Its mouth opened, showing a slit of scarlet and pearl, as Trip’s own reedy tenor pronounced,

  “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

  Trip turned, stumbled for the door, and fled down the deserted corridor.

  He did not return to the hostel. That door was closed to him forever as surely as if John Drinkwater had slammed it in his face. He staggered through the lobby, empty save for a few students huddled with their palmtops beneath a window. They looked up as Trip hurried past.

  “Kata tataki,” one student murmured. A tap on the shoulder: that is, bad news.

  “No—katoshil,” another said—death from overwork—and they all laughed.

  Outside the streets were empty, the sky a raging glory of green-shot violet. Frigid wind tore at Trip, but it wasn’t until he had gone a good five or six blocks that he remembered he had left his pea coat at the studio. The realization was almost a relief, the way terrible news is a relief—your mother is dead, your father is dead, and now you are going to freeze to death. He lurched down an alley where a fine sifting of snow covered leaves and broken glass. He walked and walked and walked, until the city fell behind him, its bonfires and makeshift generators spun from old cars and photovoltaic cells, its windows aglow with candlelight and the sound of voices falling into the street like hail. He walked until he was breathless with cold; until the sky curdled into dawn, milky yellow streaked with lavender and green, and the distant roar of the city’s single electric train echoed from Back Bay; until the last small stars trickled into the pulsing core of gold and emerald that was the sun. He walked until he could walk no more; for two days, with a ride now and then from someone in an electric car or eighteen-wheeler racing toward the Canadian border. He walked and sometimes he slept, and sometimes even ate, food from a kindly woman who said he reminded him of her daughter and bread scavenged from a Dumpster in Kittery. He walked until his feet bled inside his old Converse sneakers, until the rusted bridge that spanned the bay between Lockport and Moody’s Island appeared before him, until he reached the ruins of his grandmother’s Half-Moon trailer off Slab City Road. He walked until he reached Hell Head, and then he lay down to die.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Golden Family

  Jack started taking the Fusax. After all, he’d spent the last twenty-five years jumping off bridges because Leonard Thrope told him to: why stop now? He had nothing to lose except his life, and that was pretty much in hock to the virus anyway. So he took the dropper from one of Emma’s vials of organic skullcap, sterilized it in boiling water, and proceeded to play home pharmacy. He had no way of knowing what the proper dosage would be, and no way of getting in touch with the mysterious Dr. Hanada to ask. But if this bottle was all there was, Jack figured he’d better make it last.

  The bottle was difficult to open. The wax had hardened, and he had to chip at it with a nutpick, then prise free the lead seal. Whatever was inside had a faint, alcoholic smell, like one of Emma’s tinctures. A slightly grassy odor. Jack sniffed it curiously—he had thought it would smell bad, but the scent was pleasantly innocuous. He glanced at the glass of water he’d set on his nightstand. He’d planned on putting the Fusax in there and sipping it slowly and mindfully, the way Emma told him herbal remedies should be ingested. Instead he took the dropper and squeezed a few drops of the fluid beneath his tongue.

  He felt a slight burning from the volatile spirits, again not unpleasant. That was all. He sat on the edge of his bed for a full hour, watching the hands of the old captain’s clock sweep from 5:00 A.M. to 6:00. Nothing happened. This was mostly a relief; Jack’s previous experiences with putting things Leonard gave him into his mouth had been unfortunate. But he felt disappointed, too—which was absurd, even the most miraculous of cures wouldn’t work within the first hour. Finally, when he could hear his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson moving around downstairs, he found a tiny cork to replace the lead stopper and put the vial into the drawer alongside his other medication. Then he got dressed and went down for breakfast.

  ^ ^ ^

  March trudged into April and the wettest spring on record. At first the rain was almost welcome. Although the storms couldn’t hide the glimmering completely, the clouds did mute the spectral disturbances, so that some days, for an hour or even an entire afternoon, you could almost forget the shattered sky was there.

  In the west, heavy weather took a more bizarre turn. An unrelenting series of fronts hung above the plains and farmlands, a squall line that stretched from Texas north to the Dakotas. Storms broke constantly, but in the phenomenon known as virga, the rain evaporated before it hit the ground. Immense scythes of lightning raked sky and drought-ridden prairie, starting fires that burned until there was nothing left for them to feed upon. In the wake of the thunderstorms, mesocyclones spawned scud clouds and funnel clouds and tornadoes, land spouts, and, upon the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, waterspouts that swallowed pleasure boats and freight barges. Some of the tornadoes were tracked spinning clockwise, all but unheard of in the northern hemisphere. As the deadly fronts moved east and the twisters collapsed, they left mounds of debris, the remains of houses and livestock, planted fields and shopping malls. In Kansas a church filled with refugees was flattened, killing more than three hundred people. Afterward the church marquee was photographed in the branches of a scrub oak tree seven miles away.

  I SAW A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH

  FOR THE FIRST HEAVEN AND THE FIRST

  EARTH WERE PASSED AWAY

  Across North America crops failed. In the cities, the first soft footsteps of famine could be heard. There were rumors of cultists who claimed to see a shimmering green brilliance hanging about the bodies of those who would die within twenty-four hours.

  By the time the storms reached the Atlantic Coast, they had dissipated to warm rain and a steady wind. From his room at Lazyland Jack watched the fronts moving across the Hudson, passing overhead to break at sea like so many vast leaden waves. At night the usual array of flickering bonfires was gone, as were the tents that marked the fellahin encampments. Instead, through the tattered scrim of trees, Jack could see figures inside the ruined mansions that flanked Lazyland. He smelled the caustic scent of burning plywood, and heard staccato bursts of music from the smoke-blackened remains of the maharani’s carriage house. Sometimes he glimpsed the squatters themselves, all but naked despite the spring chill, their long hair matted as they stood in the shattered windows and stare
d defiantly across the filth-strewn lawn at Jack. Once he heard a baby crying.

  It all infuriated him.

  How can they live like that, he thought. Until one day, returning home exhausted and empty-handed from yet another futile trek up to Getty Square in search of food, it struck him—

  We all live like that, now. The fellahin were just better at it than he was.

  Still, inside Lazyland all was relatively warm and bright. The house was heated by an ancient coal furnace. In January, Jack had had the coal cellar filled; there was enough fuel to see them through the next winter. When there was electricity, television reception became such a game of chance that most nights they didn’t bother—the risk of seeing something horrible outweighed even Jack’s considerable hunger for news. When the phone lines worked, there were obscene faxes from Leonard to break the monotony, and the usual trickle of calls regarding submissions for The Gaudy Book. Jack’s network of loyal editors and writers continued in their doomed efforts at triage, arranging for articles to appear online, for popular artists to have their holographic or recorded likenesses on the magazine’s cover in a futile effort to boost sales. He never wondered if The Gaudy Book was worth it. It was not, certainly not from any financial standpoint, and as a cause of stress in his own life he would certainly be better off without the dying magazine. But he was haunted by the image of his father and grandfather, who had never doubted that The Gaudy Book would greet the new millennium.

  He spent nearly the entire month of April indoors, except when he walked out to his office in the carriage house. Then the smell of rotting vegetation choked him. For the last four weeks he had been taking the Fusax religiously, half a dropperful every morning, on an empty stomach. The little bottle was about a quarter empty.

  And he was feeling better: no doubt about it. His brush with pneumonia had left him weak, with a ghastly cough. At the hospital they’d given him antibiotics, which Jack took religiously until they ran out. The cough, however, had lingered, as did his general malaise and the too-familiar checkpoints of fever, diarrhea, loss of appetite.

  Now the cough was gone. The diarrhea was gone, and the fevers. He still had little appetite, but there was no nausea and no weight loss. Instead he began to wake each day with the sort of joy he had not felt in over twenty years, a rapturous delight over the simple act of opening his eyes and finding the world there to pry open, like the door to some enchanted place. There was no rational reason for this feeling, he knew that. It must be the Fusax.

  “It’s working,” he whispered to himself one morning, staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His skin was no longer dried and flaking. When he stuck his tongue out, there was no telltale curd presaging thrush. His eyes were clear; the dreadful ache he had carried within his chest like a stone was gone. Only a faint dizziness worried him occasionally, and the fact that sometimes he saw blurred shapes at the corners of his eyes. When he bounded downstairs, his grandmother looked up from her chair in alarm.

  “Jack?”

  Grinning, he kissed her. “Any calls?”

  Keeley gestured dismissively at the huge mahogany table. “Oh, I don’t know. Someone might have called, but I didn’t answer; I was in the kitchen, and Larena is taking her nap…”

  Jack nodded cheerfully and started for the door. “Fine. I’ll be in the carriage house.” He glanced back at her. “Do you need anything, Grandmother?”

  She adjusted her gold-topped cane, gnarled fingers closing around the gryphon’s beak that formed its capital. “No, dear. You go do your work. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  The carriage house was large enough to qualify as one of those shingle-style “cottages” built by wealthy rusticators in New England a hundred years before. There was an apartment upstairs where Jack’s great-grandmother had lived, and which until recently had been rented out to a series of increasingly unreliable tenants. Clerestory windows framed discrete bits of sky. The far wall held a huge picture window overlooking the Hudson, but Jack had drawn its louvered shutters. There were no lamps lit, only the spectral glitter that fell from the narrow clerestories and a single glowing computer screen.

  The weird light suited the offices of The Gaudy Book, trapped as it was between two eras, like a moth pressed in glass. There were old overstuffed armchairs, their chintz worn by authorial bottoms, and scoliotic bookshelves warped by decades’ worth of The Gaudy Book amid its rivals—The New Yorker, the Yellow Book, Spy, Harper’s, Granta. The walls were covered work by with Edward Steichen, Leonard Thrope, Charles Addams. A Windsor chair held curling prints by Leonard and some of the other mori artists, photos that Jack lacked the nerve either to look at or throw away. There were computers, monitors, printers, CD players, fax and vox and transix and his father’s ancient Magnavox Hi-Fi. Jack’s office pharmacopoeia occupied a shelf between tattered dictionaries and The Elements of Style. There was the mummified corpse of a cat, also from Leonard. A silver frame held a society-page photo of Jack, wearing his customary garb of chinos and oxford-cloth shirt, blond hair falling across his broad forehead, his teeth bared in an uneasy grin. He looked much younger than his forty years; much younger than he did this moment, for all that the picture had been taken only a few years before. Jack stared at all of it, and the windows shuttered against the world, and sighed.

  The day before, he had spent an hour on the phone with the company that handled printing of The Gaudy Book. The printer was going under, effective April 30—just eleven days away (their distributor had long since folded). This wasn’t exactly news, with the cost of paper what it was; not to mention the cost of transportation, when it could be arranged; not to mention The Gaudy Book’s microscopic subscription base. Along with his largesse, Leonard’s momentary interest in The Gaudy Book had disappeared, and with it the readers he had tantalized. Still, Jack had vainly hoped for another miracle. The glimmering might be stopped—they were working on it; a multinational concern was going to set up sky stations from which to repair the ozone layer. People might start reading again.

  And I’m Marie of Romania. He stood by the door, his good humor dampened. After a moment he crossed to where the floor was covered with cartons containing the most recent issue of The Gaudy Book. The last issue, it seemed; the boxes had been sitting there for several months now. The cover displayed the familiar eidolon—half Cupid, half death mask, an impudent retort to Eustace Tilley’s supercilious gaze—and the familiar scroll of words with their passementerie border.

  The Gaudy Book

  A CODEX FOR THE CENTURY

  ISSUED QUARTERLY

  SPRING 1999

  The century referred to was not the present one. Across the cover’s lower edge trailed the magazine’s motto, from Juvenal.

  Aude aliquid brevibus/Gyaris et carcere dignum/Si vis esse aliquis.

  Dare to do something worthy of imprisonment, if you mean to be of consequence.

  During one of his visits, Leonard had suggested the Latin would best be changed to reflect the changing times.

  “‘Fidelis ad urnam scribendi,’ that might be a nice epitaph.’”

  Jack scowled. “And what does that mean?”

  “‘Faithful to the memory of the written word.’”

  And Leonard tossed the last issue to the floor.

  The magazine still lay where Leonard had dropped it. Jack picked it up and stared at the glossy cover. Tiny holograms winked up at him, hinting at what lay within, and there was the musky scent of a popular new cologne. He flipped through the pages, past advertisements for Broadway musicals and vintage Bentleys, embalming parlors and dance recordings and IT portraiture. Amidst all the enticing ads articles appeared like nutritious bits of grain in a bowl of sugar and colored fluff.

  He flipped past the Chutes & Ladders section, with its desperate efforts to salvage some gossipy dignity from the detritus of the city, glanced at a few cartoons. The lead story was about the international success of a Xian crossover artist named Trip Marlowe. Its headline flickered c
rimson and gold—

  STORMING HELL!

  —while a musical chip played the opening chords of Marlowe’s most recent hit, complete with gamelan and what sounded like a woman’s dying screams. With a shudder Jack let the magazine fall. He had half turned to go to his desk, when the front door began to shake.

  “Hello?” someone called.

  Jack stiffened. “Who is it?”

  The door shook more violently. Jack had a flash of what lay behind it: wasted fellahin with sawed-off assault rifles; anorexic cranks with filed teeth and hybrid mastiffs. He glanced helplessly around the room. The door swung open.

  “Mister John Finnegan?”

  Outside, rainbow light swept across broken blacktop stitched with chickweed and rust-colored grass. It was a moment before he made out the figure standing in the doorway, blinking in the spectral glare.

  “Mr. John Finnegan?” A Japanese accent. “You are Mr. John Finnegan? Editor in chief of The Gaudy Book?”

  “Uh—yes?” Jack shaded his eyes and squinted.

  It was a man. Perhaps twenty-five and a head shorter than Jack, with delicate features and beautiful soft black eyes. He wore a zoot suit of green-and-orange plaid, ornamented with amulet bottles. A stylish rubber satchel was slung over his shoulder. Jack glimpsed its insignia, kirin or gryphon, its claws grasping a pyramid. The young man’s black hair was glazed into a fabulous pompadour that added several inches to his height and seemed to provide the same kind of UV protection a hat would. Jack, embarrassed, found himself thinking of the curl of Hokusai’s Under the Wave at Kanagawa. His visitor seemed to have anticipated this, and bowing slightly gave him a smile that held within it everything of forgiveness and generosity and gentle amusement.