Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Better?” He nodded. “Okay. Here.”

  She picked up the crystal fish of aquavit and handed it to him. He sipped it gratefully, nodding thanks.

  “I’m Nellie Candry,” the woman said. “Christ. I saw what happened: Your friend…” Her gaze shifted to the Pyramid’s entrance, and she brushed nervously at her hair. “Horrible. And then I saw you sitting here, you looked like you were going to pass out…”

  She hesitated. Her gloved fingers pressed at the table’s stone edge, as though she were clinging to it. “I work here—my office is upstairs. I thought, if you wanted to get away, have some privacy. If you needed to make some phone calls. Or just rest—I have a futon…”

  He must have been looking at her strangely. “You can check me out with security if you want,” she reassured him. “I mean, I’m a fucking vice president, okay, I’m not going to hurt you. Or maybe you just want to be left alone… ?”

  “No.” He winced. “No, I don’t really want to be alone. I—I’ve been ill, this was the first time I’ve left my house in a long while, and—”

  His voice broke. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “It was—horrible. Don’t you have any friends nearby?”

  “Not now—I used to, but…”

  “Yeah, well, I know what that’s like.” She picked up the half-empty crystal of aquavit, put it back down. “Look. Why don’t you come upstairs with me. You can have some time alone, at least.”

  “But the police—they were going to find me a ride—”

  “We’ll call them from upstairs.”

  Before he knew it she was helping him to his feet. The waiter appeared. Nellie waved away Jack’s hand as he reached for his pocket. “No—let me—”

  She gave the waiter a credit card and waited as he processed it. Then she touched Jack’s elbow, pointing at a softly lit alcove where elevator doors glowed blue and green.

  The elevator brought them to the thirtieth floor, midway up the Pyramid’s interior, then opened onto a space blazing with video monitors. Huge doors of cobalt blue glass bore a holographic logo and the words AGRIPPA MUSIC.

  “This way,” Nellie took him by the shoulder and gently pushed him down the hall. “We’ll go to my editing room. Quieter there…”

  He followed her down another corridor, and another, ended up in a nondescript hallway. They made little effort at conversation, besides Jack telling Nellie his name. He walked beside her, squinting to read placards: Kingston Music, First Analysis Corp., Merton Defense Systems. At a door reading Pathfinder Films she pulled out a key and slid it into the wall. A grid of light exploded, flashed as she pulled the door open and motioned him inside.

  “This is it,” she said.

  Her office was a chilly warren of odd-shaped rooms stacked floor to ceiling with silver canisters of film. A few small battery-driven lights were affixed to the ceiling. They cast a sepia glow on everything, so that Jack felt as though he were in an old photograph. There was a small desk littered with curling ribbons of film, a broken light box and old-fashioned loupes, the remains of a boxed sushi lunch, some empty medicine vials. Nellie picked up the phone and rang downstairs. She gave her name and number to security and told them to notify her when someone arrived to drive John Finnegan home.

  “Okay.” She dropped the phone onto a pile of discs. “They’re waiting for an officer who’s going off duty, some guy who lives in the North Bronx. He says he’ll drive you, but it’ll be a few hours.”

  Jack nodded. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”

  More arcane objects filled the hallway. Cameras or recording equipment. Leaning in a corner was some kind of tall staff. Strips of leather hung from it, and red ceramic beads. On the floor beside it lay a crude mask with gouged eyes and an obscenely long wooden tongue dangling from its mouth. Mounted on one side was a single very large antler—it must have come from an immense stag. There was a hole where the other antler had been.

  “Three have been taken, but two are left,” Nellie said, looking at the grotesque face with an odd smile. “Sorry about the mess.” She nudged a canvas sack stuffed with books. “This way—”

  There was no other way. Four steps brought them to a miniscule bathroom with composting toilet and no running water; three more steps to a sleeping alcove taken up by a futon and a few paperback books, coffee mug, a torn T-shirt. On the wall hung a small frame with a piece of plain white paper inside. Jack edged past Nellie to read what was typed there.

  Life becomes useful when you confront a difficulty; it provides a kind of value to your life to have the kind of responsibility to confront it and overcome it. So from that angle it is a great honor, a great privilege, to face these times, to confront them.

  The Dalai Lama

  Nellie laughed. “I know, I’m a dharma bimbo! Come on.”

  At the end of the hall was another small room, dark except for a monitor set into an old-fashioned editing table. Nellie edged past more film canisters, a metal cabinet, and manila envelopes crammed with papers and black-and-white photographs. She pointed at the glowing white screen. “My Steenbeck.”

  “You’re a filmmaker?”

  “Yeah. I know, another dying art.” She ran a hand through her close-cropped hair and gave him a wry sideways glance. “I mean, that’s not how I make my money—I really am a VP, I’m in A&R at Agrippa. This other stuff, though—”

  She hesitated, chewing her lower lip. “It’s what keeps me alive. Making movies, maybe that seems frivolous these days. But in art everything is frivolous. Or deadly serious.”

  There were deep fissures in her makeup; he realized she was older than he had first thought. Her eyes were a clear sky blue. It wasn’t until she reached to adjust a light box that he saw the makeup hid scars, the gouged marks of petra virus.

  “You’re right.” He looked away. Speaking was an effort; he plunged on, as though scaling a peak that seemed impassable. “Where did you study?”

  She slid into a swivel chair in front of the editing table, pulling aside the folds of her artfully tattered dress. “University of Chicago. I started in social anthropology—ethnobotany. Then I went to NYU for grad school. Knocked around for a while, finally got a grant to make a television film about the Sami—my mother’s American, but my father’s from Finland. Do you know who they are? Laplanders, you would probably call them, aborigines. They call themselves Sami. Those who are left, ” she added. “I wanted to make more films. Only of course they do everything with computers now, so there’s no audience for location films. Not to mention who goes to the movies these days? So, I had some friends who were in a band, and I managed them for a while. They did okay, and eventually I got this job at Agrippa. Figured that was it for the movies, like, forever.

  “But then, I found a patron—a very rich patron. He had a project he was interested in. He’d seen my film.” She laughed. “He may be the only person who ever saw my film! He wanted to know if I would be interested in his project—”

  She indicated the anarchic mass of tapes and photos and film equipment. “All this? It came from him. He’d gathered all this stuff to make a documentary, but he didn’t have time. So he asked me if I would film it for him.”

  She paused and looked pointedly at Jack. “And—of course—you did.”

  “No fucking way. Not at first. It was—it is—a horrible project. The first time he showed me some of the archival materials, I—Jesus. It was—”

  She turned in the swivel chair and began to thread a strip of film into the Steenbeck. “It was like seeing films of people at Auschwitz. Or Chelmno. Horror. It was pure horror.

  “But then I got curious. I looked at the stuff he’d collected, all those photos, old film stock. He’d already transferred a lot of it to disc or tape, so that made my job easier. Yeah, for the money; but there was more. It just—it became important to me. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, I think, and make people look at them. Even things that people don’t
want to see, or read about or listen to. Especially those things.”

  She bent and slowly began turning a dial. There was a whirring sound. Across the screen images flickered. Black-and-white, some grainy, others sharply focused. Blurred faces, scarred as Nellie’s own; objects that might have been machinery or aircraft or broken umbrellas. He spent several futile moments trying to find a coherent narrative thread in the film, before realizing that it was nothing but hundreds of still frames strung together; thousands of them.

  “I had to do it.” Nellie’s voice grew strained. “He knew that I would, in the end. And he paid me really well. Maybe it would have been better if he hadn’t—if I hadn’t taken the money. But I did. And he gave me all this”—a wave at the editing room—“in exchange for this.”

  Abruptly the whirring stopped, and the streaming images. A single black-and-white frame filled the screen. It seemed to be some kind of glass bottle or pickling jar, the photograph enlarged so that its contents looked grotesquely out of scale. Nellie leaned back in her chair so that Jack could see more clearly.

  He gasped.

  The jar was not out of scale. It was huge, and it held a man. He had been bisected from head to groin. Viscera floated in murky formaldehyde beside his upheld arms, and it was still possible to discern a grimace upon the distorted features of one side of his ruptured face. On the spongy white palm of one hand characters had been inked or tattooed; not numbers but ideograms. Above his broken skull his hair rose like ragged black flames.

  Jack felt as though he had been dropped from a great height. His mind raced crazily trying to create some fathomable explanation for the photograph. There was none.

  “Unit 909,” said Nellie without looking at him. “Have you heard of it?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “A secret Japanese research project to create biological weapons during World War II. They were headquartered near Dzoraangad, in Mongolia. The Gobi Desert. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians. Some Europeans and Americans, too. They were experimenting with bubonic plague, with nerve gas and anthrax and cholera. The Geneva Convention had banned biological warfare, so the Japanese figured this must be some pretty intense shit. In 1937 they formed Unit 909. They were trying to come up with new pathogens to use against the United States in the war. They did all kinds of shit—even sent balloons across the Pacific Ocean, to drop canisters of plague-bearing fleas in the United States. Two years ago they found the remains of one of the balloons in Utah.”

  Her hand touched the controls. Once more images began to move across the screen, but slowly. A chamber empty save for a screaming child. Human heads floating in tall jars. White-clad surgeons standing around a table where a man sat upright, his mouth an enlarged O of pure anguish: his chest had been sawed open, and one of the doctors held something darkly shining in his gloved hand. Rows of men and women marching across a blinding white plain. Rows of lockers with Japanese characters written on them. Rows of human feet. An infant’s hand with needles protruding from the fingertips. A half-inflated balloon dangling from a scaffold. Teeth.

  “‘The human capacity for barbarism is, seemingly, bottomless.’”

  He thought Nellie had spoken. But it was her voice on a soundtrack, harsh and disembodied. A minute’s worth of motion picture frames danced jerkily. Badly scratched black-and-white film showed the same screaming child depicted before, now glimpsed through an observation window. Smoke began to fill the chamber; at the same time, a door swung open and a woman ran inside. Her mouth opened and closed in mute agony as she covered the child with her own body, trying to save him from the gas. In the corner of the frame a shadowy hand moved, camera operator or one of the watching torturers.

  “‘We sons of pious races,’” a man’s voice recited as the screen went black.

  Onetime defenders of right and truth,

  Became despisers of God and man,

  Amid hellish laughter.

  Wherever I look, grasp, or seize

  There is only the impenetrable darkness.

  Across the bottom screen letters appeared. Night Voices in Tegel, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The frame filled with words written in a fine, runic-looking hand.

  NIGHT VOICES

  UNIT 909: THE IMPENETRABLE DARKNESS

  A DOCUMENTARY BY NELLIE CANDRY

  PRODUCED BY LEONARD THROPE

  “Leonard.”

  Jack was not aware that he had shouted until he saw her drawn face beside him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

  He stumbled to his feet but she caught him. “Lie down, you should lie down—”

  Nellie half dragged, half carried him into the room with the futon. He fought her in avid silence, feeling as though he had lost his mind; then suddenly collapsed onto the mattress. He knelt there weeping in the near darkness, his breath coming in savage bursts. With a soft cry he fell upon the futon, and slept.

  He woke to silence. A blanket had been pulled over his shoulders. He had no idea how much time had passed. The image of Jule’s crumpled body glowed as though branded upon his retina. For an instant he thought the suicide had been a terrible dream.

  Then he saw that the bed was not his own. There were papers and photographs scattered along the wall. The pillow he leaned upon smelled of sweat and stale makeup. Jule was dead, and Jack was somewhere within the GFI Pyramid, surrounded by evidence of a forgotten wartime atrocity.

  “You’re awake.”

  Nellie Candry knelt at the end of the futon, brass candleholder before her. In it three small candle ends burned brightly. She picked it up to move closer to Jack.

  He rubbed his eyes. She had removed her death’s-mask makeup. In the dim light her scars looked fresh, unhealed. “What—what time is it? Did someone call from downstairs? About a ride?”

  “Not yet. I checked about an hour ago. We can try again. It’s just past four.”

  “Jesus. My grandmother must be frantic—”

  “No—it’s okay, someone got hold of her. I called downstairs to check with security. Apparently she’s very upset but one of your brothers should be there by now—”

  “Dennis.”

  “They’re very anxious for you to get back. Of course.”

  “I thought some cop was supposed to give me a ride. They kept me down there for two hours, and now they don’t have the decency to help me get home? What the fuck is going on?” He began to shake again. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Nellie moved to one side of the futon. She put some books on the mattress and set the candlestick atop them, reached for something at the foot of the bed. “Here.”

  It was a mug, steam lifting from it. Jack thought of knocking it from her hand.

  But of course he did not. He took the mug, gingerly and held it before his face. He hoped it would be coffee, but it seemed to be some kind of tea. The heavy warmth in his hands felt good. The steam had a rich herbal scent like cannabis. He sniffed it tentatively.

  “What is it?”

  “Tea.”

  He took a sip, swallowed, and made a face. “What kind of tea?”

  Nellie picked up another mug, identical to his. “It’s just some herbs and stuff. To help you feel better.”

  They drank in silence, inches apart on the futon. Jack felt the warmth of her body, too close to his. The simple act of drinking calmed him. As the heat dissipated, so did that earthy, rather unpleasant taste. He finished it and Nelly took the empty mug. She turned to him, sitting cross-legged and so near that her thigh nestled against his leg.

  “How do you feel?”

  Jule’s scorched eyes wavered in front of him. “Horrible. I feel horrible.” There was a dull tingling in his tongue and gums, as though he’d rubbed them with cocaine. “I need to go—Nellie. I want to go. I don’t want to be here.”

  He shuddered. The sensation rippled from his shoulder blades down his spine and outward. The tingling in his mouth became part of that same elemental shiver.
She had poisoned him.

  “What is it? What did you give me?”

  “It won’t hurt you.” In the tremulous light she looked more exotic, the slant of her dark eyes more pronounced, her sleek black hair thick and rough, like an animal’s pelt. “It’s something I learned about when I made my documentary in Iceland. They drink it there, during rituals—it helps the no’aidi on their journeys.”

  “What?”

  “Shamans. They send the gandus out, the no’aidi—” Her hand traced an arc above the candles. “The shamans. It helps them fly.”

  He recalled the stave he had seen in a corner, the lewdly grinning effigy with its single antler. “I started in social anthropology, ethnobotany…”

  “You drugged me—”

  “It won’t hurt you. Amanita muscaria—fly agaric. It grows on spruce and birch trees. The reindeer eat it because it intoxicates them. The active chemical is ibotenic acid. They excrete it in their urine. The shamans drink it, and then save their urine—the ibotenic acid is converted into a hallucinogen called muscimol. It’s not toxic. It just helps inaugurate the effects of other drugs.”

  Jack bent over and began to retch.

  “No!” Nellie knelt beside him. “It won’t hurt you, I’m sorry—really.”

  Her pupils were big “I was—so shocked—when I saw you down there. And your friend. And that little girl…”

  Jack stared back at her, then whispered, “Rachel. You could see her.”

  Nellie nodded.

  “You saw Rachel.”

  “I saw her,” she said, slowly. “I see them, sometimes. They’re everywhere.” Her face was dark and slick with sweat. She arched her neck as though her clothes scratched her; grimaced and pulled her dress off. Beneath it she was naked. There were dark blotches like myriad aureoles across her body, scars left by petra virus.

  She gazed at him with wide stoned eyes. “Everywhere, you can see them everywhere.”

  “Who?” Jack shivered. His fear suddenly seemed very distant, detached, and somehow observable—he knew it would be waiting for him, later. He felt bizarrely clearheaded. “Who do you see?”