Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  But at the same time it was as though some new and more subtle sense filled him, even as his old ones faltered. He felt the century round him hurtling harum-scarum toward its end: an infortuitous concourse of atoms, a runaway train slamming into the roundhouse with everything it contained slingshot skyward: quarks, drag queens, The King and I, Einstein, Telstar, Hitler, mustard gas, Thomas Mann, Jerry Mahoney, Victor Frankl, IBM and AT&T and GFI. He felt his blood quicken, hearing footsteps in the parlor, unseen musicians tuning up for the grand finale.

  And, finally, one afternoon he entered the carriage house to find a fax scrolled onto the floor: yet another missive from GFI. SUNRA was to be set aloft six months hence, on the evening of December 31, from GFI’s pyramid in Times Square. Gala celebration, many celebrities, at especial request of Yukio Tatsumi the presence of your company is desired. At the very bottom there was a scrawled addendum to the corporation’s formal invitation.

  FYI: New Year’s Eve, 1999: Will I see you there? RSVP, regrets only. With very warm regards, Larry Muso.

  ^ ^ ^

  The next morning, Jack went downstairs. He found the blond girl in the kitchen, eating stale Cheerios with his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson. More of his aunt Mary Anne’s clothes had been found for her, a pair of corduroy bell-bottom trousers, too long and cuffed around her ankles, and a bright red plaid flannel shirt. Her hair had not been combed; it stuck out around her head in a ragged white halo, and once again Jack marveled at his grandmother’s self-control during these last few months, that she hadn’t attacked the girl with a brush and scissors. Otherwise, Marz seemed alarmingly well behaved. She murmured “hello” to Jack as he poured himself some of the brown bitter liquid that passed for coffee, and said “thank you” when Mrs. Iverson handed her a napkin.

  Still, her presence at the table never failed to unsettle Jack. He poked desultorily at his Cheerios with a spoon, pouring a thin stream of powdered milk dissolved in water into the center. He forced himself to eat, imagining Jule and Emma at their breakfast table sixty miles to the north, with the remains of whatever frugal harvest they’d taken from Emma’s garden, dried apples and cherries, blueberries and black walnuts. It was an image that usually fortified him. This morning it only made him sad, seeing Marz in the chair where Jule and Emma’s young daughter Rachel had once perched. He finished his Cheerios quickly and excused himself, setting the empty bowl in the sink. There was electricity today: he let hot water dribble from the tap into his bowl, inhaling the steam as though it were perfume.

  “I’m going out to work,” he said.

  At the table three heads turned.

  “Will you be busy, dear?” His grandmother sipped at her ersatz coffee in its Limoges china cup. “Have you found another printer?”

  “No, I haven’t found another printer.” Larry Muso’s face stared calmly up at him from the rippling surface of his cereal bowl. “I—I have to try to send some faxes. While the power’s on.”

  “Of course, darling,” his grandmother said. He looked back and saw her smiling as Marz shoveled Cheerios into her mouth. “Will you be going to the city today?”

  “The city? No, Grandmother—I don’t go to the city anymore. Remember?”

  “Of course, dear. I thought your grandfather said he had a meeting this afternoon, that’s all.”

  God, she’s drifting! Jack turned away and his heart constricted; but why shouldn’t she drift? In six months she would be one hundred years old, her wizened body still remarkably strong but how long could, or should, that last? She had been a widow for twenty-five years, she had lost one child to God knows what, drugs or suicide or murder, and two others to more ordinary circumstances. She had outlived all her friends; should she outlive the century, too?

  “It’s all right, Grandmother,” he murmured, crossing the kitchen to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be in for lunch…”

  In the carriage house he turned on everything—lamps, radio, television, fax, answering machine, computers, electric typewriter, stereo. Even with the volume turned down on the TV and radio, the office hummed and rustled as though he’d smashed open a wasps’ nest. He could feel the electrical currents surging through the room, and watched as dust motes circled purposefully above the compact fluorescent bulbs, insectlike. He sat at his desk.

  If circumstances permit I will be happy to attend GFI’s New Year’s celebration. However, transportation from here can be difficult…

  He faxed off the reply, for good measure also sent an electronic response to the address on Larry Muso’s postscript. Faster than he would have thought possible, an icon on his monitor began flashing to signal that a message had arrived.

  FROM: muso.shugenja@Pelgye.gfi.com

  Jack! So glad to hear from you! Don’t worry about transport, lodging, all will be attended to on this end. Julie Braxton-Kotani from Special Events will have a courier be in touch with you by midsummer, to arrange security clearances, etc. & I anticipate no difficulties. I am on special assignment til Sept/Oct at the earliest but VERY MUCH want to see you again! All best & warm wishes, Larry M. P.S. Mr. Tatsumi says that he enjoyed the last issue of The Gaudy Book. Please let us know when we can expect the next one.

  In July it snowed in New York. Environmental terrorists seized the George Washington Bridge and closed it off to traffic, erecting makeshift shelters and hanging an immense banner painted with a cerulean antelope. The strike forces marshaled by city and federal government were destroyed by napalm guns Blue Antelope had obtained from the sympathetic interim governments of Madagascar, New Zealand, and Kalimantan, as well as by ecologically noninvasive nerve gas smuggled in from the group’s Icelandic mission. News of other attacks by radicals filtered through the net to reach Jack at Lazyland: logging operations brought to a halt in the Pacific Northwest and Brazilian rain forest; the flooded ancient temples at Ayutthaya in Thailand captured by armed Buddhists who joined forces with the Christian environmental extremists. Pope Gregory XVII’s weekly message from St. Paul’s was interrupted by students wearing animal masks. In North America and Japan, outlaw electronic and video broadcasts by Blue Antelope spokesman Lucius Chappell made outraged claims that multinational corporations including GFI, TRW, Matsushita-Krupp and Gibson/Skorax were involved in a global conspiracy to release newly developed neurological toxins into the water supplies of First and Third World countries. The wife of Yukio Tatsumi, CEO of multinational giant Gorita-Folham-Ized, was found dead in their Paris apartment, an apparent suicide. Friends said she had been despondent for some time. The wildfires that had consumed Houston roared their way into Galveston Bay and on into the Gulf of Mexico, igniting offshore drilling platforms like Catherine wheels. The poisonous chemicals released into the clouds caused spectacular effects that could be seen as far away as Tampico and New Orleans.

  At Lazyland, life teetered on. Jack had several messages from lawyers representing both The Golden Family and the interests of The Gaudy Book—the latter, despite all Jack’s protests, arranged by Leonard Thrope. It appeared that the sale would proceed without any difficulties; by year’s end, little Jackie Finnegan would be a relatively wealthy man. The realization caused him neither great happiness nor distress, only gratitude that he would be able to provide better for his ancient grandmother. Keeley and Jack’s brothers had to approve the sale, which they did. Jack had already spoken to Jule Gardino about changing his will once the sale was complete: upon his death, the estate would be divided amongst his siblings and their children, with provisions made for Keeley, if she should outlive him. Provisions also had to be made for someone to take over the helm of The Gaudy Book itself—Jack was serious about no longer wanting to be responsible for managing an outdated literary quarterly, even one that would continue under the benison of a zillion-dollar multinational corporation. Especially one that would continue under a multinational corporation.

  But qualified prospective candidates were few. Articles about the magazine’s sale had appeared on all the major financial sites, sparking inquirie
s from a number of corporate leaders and venture capitalists with literary ambitions, as well as from an incarcerated former director of corporate finance who had written a best-selling autobiography. There was also a witty letter and set of vitae from a professor of American Popular Food Culture at Tokyo University, and several annoying foot couriers sent by an agent representing the author of Lovemaking Secrets of Chianghis Khan. Jack left these unread on his computer or his desk, and found himself experiencing bursts of happiness whenever the electricity failed.

  The truth was, he was more preoccupied with the dwindling level of his vial of Fusax. Or rather, in the curious fact that while the Fusax seemed to dwindle and dwindle and dwindle, the bottle never quite emptied. He was only taking a few drops a day now, under the tongue. Even so he was certain that any day there would be nothing left in the vial.

  But there always was. Not much, surely not enough to last more than a few days, a week at most; but then the weeks became one month, and another, and then it was summer, or what passed for summer with its fractal sky, its scintillant air that shone like gaudy night but smelled like burning petroleum.

  And still, when he held up the brown bottle he saw the tiniest swash of liquid, as though he held one of those miniature environments sold at expensive department stores, a few precious milliliters of seawater and algae and endangered krill. Whatever it was he did hold was no less beautiful and strange, and he wondered at what shifted within him now, what had been replenished or transubstantiated within the cloud of moving particles that formed his immune system. Could it be alive, somehow, and breeding? He felt better, he thought; perhaps he had never felt better. Though he was troubled almost nightly (and sometimes daily) by strange dreams; though his sight bothered him; though he could see in his grandmother’s eyes and Mrs. Iverson’s, as well as in his own reflection, that he was losing weight at an alarming pace. But he never felt nauseated or feverish, as he had before. He had no more problems with his breathing. His dry skin cleared up. So did the violent cluster headaches that had plagued him since childhood. He showed no symptoms of thrush. If anything, he was acutely aware of an increasingly heightened sensual consciousness: being able to hear a yellowed leaf falling from the tulip poplar; noticing from across the kitchen table a fleck of bright green in Marz’s left iris; waking to smell carnations, and then searching the decrepit garden for forty minutes before he found a single frayed dianthus blossom that, when he drew it to his face, breathed the same peppery scent. When one evening his grandmother suggested he visit the clinic at Saint Joseph’s he shook his head.

  “I feel okay,” he said, and having pronounced the words savored them with faint surprise. “I really do think I’m okay.”

  Keeley stared at him. “You don’t look very well, dear. You look thin. Are you still taking all your medicine?”

  “Yes,” he lied. It had been over a year since he’d been able to get his prescriptions filled. “But I feel really, really good. And I’m strong—I mean, I’m not as tired as I was, I don’t feel sick all the time…”

  Something is working, he wanted to say; something has changed. He crossed the living room to hug her. “Don’t worry, Grandmother.”

  “But I do.” She sighed and shut her eyes. “I’m so tired, Jackie. And you shouldn’t be sick. It’s not the way it should be, Jackie.”

  He let his cheek rest against hers, groaning when he felt tears there. “Oh—don’t cry, don’t cry…”

  “It’s not—” Her voice broke, not with sorrow but the same unforgiving rage she had shown when her husband died. “Where are they now, where is all the good of it, where are they… ?”

  She began to shake, and he held her close as she wept and railed, knowing that whoever it was she blamed—priests, angels, family, doctors, the beautiful unfaithful sidhe—they had left him long ago.

  On the 27th of July, a courier in black helmet and the red-and-gold livery of GFI puttered down Hudson Terrace on a solaped. She parked and chained it to the fence, climbed over the security gate, and strolled down Lazyland’s winding drive, singing to herself. Jack watched her from the living-room window. His grandmother and Mrs. Iverson and Marz were all napping upstairs. When the doorbell rang he flinched, then walked silently into the foyer.

  “John Finnegan?” Beneath a hazy violet sky her retinal implants glowed silvery blue.

  “That would be me,” Jack admitted.

  “Do you have some identification?” Before Jack could retort she explained,

  “I’m from GFI—” and simultaneously flashed an ID badge and held up her palm so he could see a gryphon tattooed there beneath numbers and the name Luralay Pearlstein.

  “Yeah, just hold on,” he muttered, locking her outside while he went to find his wallet. When he got back she was sitting on the porch in the lotus position, silvery eyes wide open and staring at the sky. The skin on her face and hands had the chrome yellow taint of the acaraspora lichen ingested for its UV-repelling properties by those who had to work outdoors. Jack stared down at her. “Okay. Here it is—”

  She looked carefully at the driver’s license. “It’s expired.”

  “Yes, it has.” A nasty edge crept into his voice. “That’s because it’s impossible to get gas anymore on the North American continent, and because I no longer have a car, and also because I have nowhere to fucking go.”

  The courier returned his license. “You should join one of those religious cooperatives,” she said mildly. “They don’t seem to have any problem. Okay, this looks fine.” She yanked at her shoulder pack and pulled out a large envelope printed with peacock feathers, held it out to him, and declaimed, “This is your official invitation to GFI’s gala New Year’s celebration and SUNRA launching, to be held at the Golden Pyramid on Friday, December 31.”

  He took the envelope, and she went on in a slightly less officious tone. “That is only your invitation. It won’t get you onto the field. For that, you need this—”

  She held up a small black object, the size and shape of a remote but with a rounded end like an old-fashioned telephone receiver. Blinking red lights chased themselves in a circle across the plastic as she explained. “I can give you a preliminary clearance code now, so that all you need to do at the gate is have them do a retinal and DNA scan—”

  Jack laughed incredulously. The courier gave him a sheepish look and shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? Better living through modern chemistry. But if I don’t do this today, you’ll have to get down to the Pyramid and go through the exact same shit. Only there you’ll have to stand in line.”

  Jack shook his head. “Isn’t that giving a courier an awful lot of power? What if I was lying or something? All you did was check an expired driver’s license!”

  The young woman smiled wryly. “Well, it looks like you, doesn’t it? Plus—”

  She lifted her helmet, so that he could see a slender black tube running just beneath the skin at her temple and disappearing at her hairline. “—see? I’m wired. My beta waves and pulse show anything weird, they scalp me. Bing-o! No more Luralay! But they have good health insurance, so give me a fucking break and let me scan you, okay?”

  “Uh, yeah. Okay.” Jack frowned. “Are you telling me they—”

  “Shhh—if I think about it too much, they get a hot reading. Now, just hold your hand up—no, right hand—it doesn’t hurt, kinda feels like holding a vibrator or something—”

  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: