Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  I will give you the morning star:

  The end of the end, the end of the end…

  ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999,

  HUMANKIND WILL ENTER A NEW MILLENNIUM:

  A NEW ERA, A NEW DAWN!

  THE GOLDEN FAMILY OF

  GORITA-FOLHAM-IZED

  INVITES YOU, JOHN “JACK” FINNEGAN,

  TO BE THERE AT THE GOLDEN PYRAMID WHEN

  SUNRA™ IS LAUNCHED

  AND THE FUTURE BEGINS…

  There followed a lengthy list of attending international celebrities, musical entertainments, fashion models, sports and religious figures and CEOs from across the globe, as well as both units of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus (incorporating Cirque du Soleil, the Moscow Circus, and the Mongolian Entertainers Alliance). The only persons who it appeared would not be at the Pyramid on New Year’s Eve were the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and John “Jack” Finnegan, if he chose not to go.

  Only, it appeared that he had decided to go. He closed his eyes and pressed the invitation against his forehead. Larry Muso’s sloe eyes shimmered in front of him; he felt again that brisk electricity when their hands had touched, a scent of chypre…

  VERY MUCH want to see you again! All best & warm wishes, Larry M.

  He shook his head: Larry M. might get his warm wish. Jack set the invitation back upon the table and stood to go. As he did, his hand passed through a shaft of light falling from the window. Emerald brilliance glanced off his palm, bright enough to catch his eye; bright enough to ignite within the whorled and crosshatched flesh the ghostly holographic image of a gryphon rampant, clasping a pyramid within its claws.

  A week later, Mrs. Iverson told him the blond girl was pregnant.

  “WHAT?”

  “She is. She won’t talk about it, but it won’t go away. She has to eat better.” The housekeeper funneled powdered milk into a plastic jug. “Can you imagine? That tiny thing—”

  “Are you sure? How can she—”

  “She is. She says she was with a boy in March. She won’t say who, not that it would do any good.”

  “But her family! There must be someone—”

  Mrs. Iverson turned scolding blue eyes on him. “But there’s not. She’s been with us all this while, she won’t say who she belongs to, she won’t go back—we’ll have to care for her, Jack. And the baby; and barely enough as it is.” She sighed. “But I guess you’ll be getting your million dollars soon enough. We’ll just keep our fingers crossed, that’s all.”

  She filled the jug with water and shook it into an unappetizing white froth. Jack gazed despairingly at the ceiling.

  “I don’t believe it! Does Keeley know? She hasn’t even seen a doctor! I mean, this is just medieval—we’ll be boiling water and tearing up fucking bedsheets—”

  “Oh, hush your language, Jack.” Mrs. Iverson glared. “Babies get born all the time without your help. If she needs a doctor, we’ll bring her to Saint Joseph’s.”

  “But folic acid—you’re supposed to take things—”

  Mrs. Iverson rolled her eyes. “What would you know from taking things for babies? You and your friends… That poor little girl, all this time and she didn’t even know. I think she pretended not to know. Your grandmother saw her in the bath Sunday and called me in. Poor little girl—just a stick with a big belly. But you could feel it kicking. She’ll be all right.”

  “March…” Jack did the math in his head: almost five months. “I had no idea.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t be a one to know about girls. But just as well, everything considered; she doesn’t need any more trouble with boys.” With a sigh the housekeeper turned to go. “But it would be nice if you’d go and talk to her sometimes, Jack. She likes you—”

  “She does?”

  “—and she’s lonely. Ah God, that poor girl…”

  She went upstairs. Jack went out onto the porch and leaned on the balcony above a scraggy patch of hydrangeas.

  A baby! It was medieval. Worse than that—crudely archaic, like one of those awful engravings from the time of the Black Death, crazy-eyed monks, strangers turning up like stray animals to drop their young on the floor. He ran his hands through thinning hair, too long, when had he cut it last? Over a year. He must look medieval, himself. We all must.

  He began to laugh. Thinking how impossible, how ridiculously apocalyptic this all would have seemed, just three years ago: the sky in flames, coyotes in the South Bronx, oceans rising and burning. People fondling old issues of Vanity Fair and Vogue as though they were rare Victorian pornography. Daffodils blooming black. The world dismantling Lazyland, plucking at the water supply and electricity, plundering floorboards, foundation giving way because somewhere down the long slope to the Hudson a tree had fallen; because somewhere within the basement another tree was starting to grow. Because we forgot to buy end-of-the-world insurance. Because we forgot other things.

  And still the flowers bloom, he thought, gazing down at the hydrangeas. A brave, sickly show. But blooming. See?

  He grazed the wilted flowers with his fingertips. The blossoms felt damp and cankered, like moldering fungi. He wrinkled his nose, trying to find their scent in air that smelled of burning; leaned down until he could cup them beneath his palms. To his shock, the corrupted flower head moved beneath his hand. He reared back, clutching at the rotten balustrade, cautiously looked down again.

  The entire bush was aswarm with numberless insects. Myriad ruddy beads like spilled paint, each no bigger than a ladybug. But they weren’t ladybugs; their carapaces were true red untinged by orange, and they had no spots. What they did have was very large, beautiful golden eyes. Not the kind of eyes that beetles had, insofar as Jack knew; more like a wasp’s, or fly’s, casting vitreous sparks of gold and blue. Something about their movement fascinated him, and after a few minutes he realized what it was: they were not swarming mindlessly as he had always assumed bugs did, but in a very particular circular pattern, stemming from the center of each hydrangea blossom then swirling slowly outward, as though they were creating the pattern of the flower rather than merely treading upon it. It was like watching waves on a beach, a random motion propelled by some greater thing. Jack glanced up at the flame-colored sky, half-expecting to see the Insect God there choreographing the waltz.

  But no, no Insect God today. He looked back down upon the dance. It had not slowed or quickened, it had not changed; but it seemed that its symmetry had within it a certain stillness; that the shifting pattern of legs and wings and eyes, pistil, petals, stem all formed a single image. He leaned over the parapet and saw that the pattern the insects had formed upon each flower head was an eye: myriad crystalline eyes, each solitary beetle a facet. He felt a throb of nausea, to see all those living things put to one purpose—

  And what the fuck was that?

  All at once the insects erupted into a blizzard of wings. There was an acrid smell, then insects everywhere, not a horror but a glorious cloud, and alive. He stumbled backward as they flew around him, his arms outspread and head thrown back so that he felt the tremble of their thousand wings against his skin, wings and little legs everywhere, as focused in their intent as the hand of a lover. Like a lover he responded, not with arousal but with a sense of transport, of enchantment, as startled by this shock of joy as he was by the shimmering brood. They moved around him like falling water, red and gold. And for a minute Jack spun there with them, the center of that live storm. For an instant he could see himself as something else must: part of the world’s strange change.

  Then they were gone, dispersed into the sky like a waterspout. Jack stood alone on the ramshackle porch, dazed and breathless. He could hear an airship thrumming somewhere above the river, and a bird chirping sleepily. The air was warm; he stripped off his shirt and saw numberless welts upon his arms and hands. The welts were painless, though he felt the faintest tingling when he touched one. And they were on his face, too: he drew his hand across his cheek and felt more sm
all raised bumps, a whisper of sensation. A series of alarms rang off in his skull—hives! shingles! anaphylactic shock!—but before he could go inside to raid the medicine chest the welts began to fade. He touched his chest and upper arms, and felt the tiniest electrical shock.

  But the welts were gone. He started to pull his shirt back on, stopped. The insects had touched it, he could smell their acrid odor upon the fabric. Perhaps it would be dangerous to wear?

  But with their scent came the rush of memory: that prescient eye and himself within it. What little Jack knew of magic, he knew it faded, sure as love and paint.

  He would wear the shirt, for a while.

  Not long after this Emma and Jule came to dinner. They did not come for dinner—the phones were down at Lazyland and they’d been unable to call—but there had been fuel deliveries in the northern part of the county, Jule’s battered Range Rover had a full tank of gas and several ten-gallon containers in the back of the car, and Emma had earned four days off from her work at the hospital, by virtue of having been on duty when the survivors of a train derailment at Chappaqua were brought in.

  “Round the clock for seventy-two hours, almost,” she told Jack and Keeley and Mrs. Iverson over tea in the living room. “I haven’t gone without sleep like that since—since my residency.” She looked down at her teacup; Jack knew she had started to say since Rachel was killed.

  “I don’t know how you go on, dear,” said Keeley. “James could go without sleep, but I never could—”

  “Me neither.” Jule grabbed his wife’s hand and squeezed it, then reached for his glass. He had brought several bottles of Jack Daniel’s (“Comes from the same fuckers who drive the gas trucks,” he’d explained cheerfully to Jack, “your one-stop fuel shop!”) and one was set on the table in front of him beside an untouched teacup. “I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I’m a mess.”

  Keeley laughed. “Oh darling, I’m so glad you came!” Of all Jack’s friends, Jule had won her heart thirty years before, when he had shoveled her new forest green Mustang out from under two feet of snow during the 1969 blizzard. From the beginning they had been an odd sight, the unruly giant from the Italian neighborhood in Tuckahoe and the aging Irish beauty who doted on him as she never had on her own boys. After James Finnegan’s death, it was the teenage Jule who fixed things at Lazyland, replacing washers and fuses and lightbulbs, calling the men who mowed the lawn, arranging for the house to be painted when its shingles began to peel and crack. Keeley would feed him roast beef and popovers and apple pie, then send him back to the bus stop with a Wanamaker shopping bag full of Snickerdoodles. Later, during summers off from rooming together at Georgetown, he and Jack took over Lazyland’s top floor. Keeley would decorously ignore the occasional waft of marijuana smoke that made its way downstairs, the sound of footsteps at 4 A.M. as some furtive guest made his or her way outside.

  “… really, we were just talking about you! Jule, do you remember…”

  On the couch Jule held his big hands carefully in his lap, cupping his highball glass like a votive candle. Now and then he leaned over to touch Emma’s hair, or pat her knee, or to adjust Keeley’s shawl. “No,” he boomed, “but my ears must’ve been burning. Go on, go on—”

  Jack smiled at his friend’s genteel déshabillé. Buttons missing from the stained cashmere overcoat, expensive Italian shoes scuffed and cracked, the lapels of his Donna Karan jacket frayed: all part of Jule’s slow-motion decline since his daughter’s death. Emma had lost herself in her work; Jule merely got lost. He was a big man, six-foot-three, burly and elegant as a gangland lawyer, with curly black hair shot with white and the woeful brown eyes of a cartoon hound.

  “That sonofabitch! I wondered what happened to him!” Jule roared with laughter, some joke that Jack had missed. At his side Emma shook her fuzzy blond curls as she cast a wary glance at Jule’s glass, and then at Jack.

  “Mmm, he was kind of a head case,” she began, but her glance had drawn Jule’s: he downed his whiskey and poured another. Emma said nothing, only stared at Jack, her blue eyes beseeching.

  Jack turned to his friend with a huge fake grin. “Uh hey, Jule—you wanna help me with something?” He motioned at the door behind them. “I got to fill the coal bin, you could do it in about three—”

  Jule opened his mouth to boom some reply, then stopped, whiskey poised in midair as he stared into the entry room. Emma raised her eyebrows, Doctor Duck meeting a new patient.

  “Umm—hello?” she suggested. “More company?”

  Jack turned to see Marz standing in the doorway. Struwwelpeter hair combed for once, wearing a pink Shetland sweater and shapeless plaid uniform skirt. White bony bare legs, bare feet. She really did look like a refugee.

  “Ah—who’s that?” said Jule sotto voce. “Kate Moss’s cadaver double?”

  Jack frowned. “That is our houseguest. Marzana.”

  “Marzana? What kind of name—”

  “Jule,” warned Emma.

  “Mary Anne,” said Keeley with a sweet smile.

  “Hi,” said Marz. “I’m going to take a nap. Okay?” She turned to go upstairs.

  “Let me help her,” cried Mrs. Iverson, and followed. Jule stared after them. When they were out of sight, he raised an eyebrow at Jack. “So tell me—did Fagin kick her out for not meeting her quota? Or what?”

  “She’s a runaway.”

  “Jack found her,” explained Keeley, “in the garden.”

  “What, under a cabbage leaf?” Jule ignored a sharp poke from Emma. “Jackie?”

  Jack sighed. “She was in the garden. She was crying—I mean, Christ, Jule, she’s just a kid—”

  “How long?”

  Jack hesitated. “Two months, I guess. Maybe three.”

  “Three months?” exploded Jule. “Jackie, you—”

  “She’s pregnant,” said Keeley. “I’m so glad you came, Emma—she hasn’t seen a doctor—”

  “Pregnant?” Emma tilted her head. “Oh! Wow. Well. This is quite a lot for you all to be handling, Keeley. Jack. And for three months… I didn’t think it was that long since we talked.” She shot Jack an accusing look. “But you’ve spoken to Julie, Jack. About the magazine—why didn’t you tell us?”

  “It wasn’t something I could just bring up. When it was—well, the phones,” said Jack defensively. “I wanted to call, I mean I tried to call—you know what it’s like.”

  “But you’re sure she’s pregnant? She’s been tested? She’s been tested for everything?”

  “Of course not! She hasn’t been tested for anything! I don’t even know who she is—”

  “She sounds foreign,” brooded Jule.

  Keeley set her teacup on the side table. “She’s Polish. Marzana is Polish for Mary Anne.”

  Jule and Emma exchanged another look.

  Keeley sighed. The Queen was weary of bickering courtiers. “I’m tired. Emma, could you help me upstairs?”

  “I’m sorry, Keeley, of course, of course—” Emma helped Keeley to her feet and guided her from the room.

  “You can stay for dinner?” Keeley’s voice was plaintive.

  “Of course—we brought food, Jule will bring it in. You’re not to do a thing, Keeley, I forbid it. But if it’s all right, we thought we’d stay over tonight—”

  “Oh, darling.” Keeley stopped, catching her breath, and looked up at Emma with full eyes. “We would love that.”

  “Great!” Emma straightened. Her voice took on the brisk cheerfulness of the doctor on duty. “All right! Up we go.”

  When they were gone Jule refilled his glass.

  “Jackie, Jackie,” he rumbled, “you fucking idiot. Some cracked-out kid—”

  Jack grabbed the bottle. He poured a shot into his teacup and gulped it. “I was going to call Emma. To ask what I should do with her.”

  “What, like feed her?”

  “No, you asshole. Like tell me whether I should call the Child Welfare League or whoever it is you call about things like this.�
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  “Have you tried the police?”

  “No. I told you, I haven’t told anyone. The phones are too screwed up.” Jack hesitated, trying to remember exactly why he hadn’t called anyone. “I mean, Keeley just took her over. You think I should call the police?”

  Jule shrugged and knocked back his drink. “Was she breaking into the house or anything like that?”

  “No. She was here, though. I mean she was on our land, so she was technically trespassing, I guess.”

  “Well, these days you’re not gonna get a big response to a call about some kid trespassing,” said Jule dryly. “My suggestion would be that you give her a nice meal—if you can get her to eat it, she looks like she’s pumping ice or some such shit—and send her packing before she causes trouble.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Jack broke in, “but Keeley is doing the whole stray-cat thing—”

  “Yeah? Well, then, maybe you should go the whole nine yards and do the whole stray-cat thing and like, dispose of her. Don’t give me that look. I just mean take her somewhere, drop her off, and let her go back to wherever she crawled from. Capische?”

  “I know, I know.” Jack nodded unhappily. “But she’s pregnant—”

  “And the sooner the better. I mean, weeping Christ on a stick, Jackie, what’re you thinking? A kid like that, alone here with you and all these old ladies? Sometimes I think you have no common sense.”

  “But she’s pregnant.”

  Jules looked aghast. “Jesus, Jackie—not by you? Okay, okay—I just thought, you know—it happens. That’d be right up there with the Immaculate Conception, huh, Jackie? Kinda skinny for my taste.”

  Jack grinned ruefully. “She’s not a bad kid. She’s incredibly quiet.”