Glimmering

CHAPTER ONE

March 26, 1997: At Lazyland

On the night of his fortieth birthday, John Chanvers Finnegan stood upon the balcony of his Yonkers mansion and watched the sky explode above the Hudson River. It was the end of March, an unusually warm and beautiful day in early spring; though all the days now seemed lovely and warm, bathed as they were in the vernal glow of a dying century. From the house beneath him came the sigh and hum of conversation, an occasional ritornello of raucous laughter—Leonard’s, Jack thought, and allowed himself a melancholy smile. He had come outside, not so much to be alone as to savor the notion that everyone he loved best in the world was there with him now: his surviving friends, his ex-lover, his grandmother, his brothers. From here he could listen to them all, see them even, if he leaned over the balcony and craned his neck to look back at the house.

But he didn’t do that. It was enough, to know they were there; enough to sip champagne from a crystal lily, and listen.

The house was called Lazyland. It had been built in 1884 by the department store entrepreneur Myles Finnegan, Jack’s great-grandfather. Just four years earlier, in 1880, Myles had worked in Stevens’s variety store on North Broadway in Yonkers, stocking shelves and sweeping the day’s detritus of torn paper, bent nails, and broken glass out onto the sidewalk. One rainy morning in September his employer, suffering from an attack of gout, sent Myles in his place to the import warehouse of a toy wholesaler in Brooklyn. There Myles was to inspect the company’s selection of new and unusual items to sell at Christmas.

“Here,” the importer said, pointing to excelsior-filled crates in which nestled papier-mâché crèches from Salzburg’s kristkindlmarket; porcelain dolls from Germany; English lead soldiers and French soubrettes of colored paper, with lace roses and spun-glass hair. There were boxes of tin flowers and images of the Christ Child cast in wax, silver-embossed cardboard animals from Dresden, and little metal candleholders to clip onto fragrant pine boughs. Myles, tall and dark and lean, with an expression of perpetual surprise, had big bony hands more accustomed to handling cartons of dry goods than these fragile toys. He wondered aloud if there wasn’t anything new.

The importer turned, affronted, from admiring his painted lead battalions. “These I just received yesterday.”

Myles shook his head. “Different,” he said. “I wonder now, haven’t you anything different? Unusual, I mean—” He fingered a doll’s tartan gown and tried to look knowledgeable.

“Unusual?” The importer nodded eagerly, suddenly blessed with an idea. “I didn’t understand that your employer is looking for the unusual this season. Has Mr. Stevens seen these?”

He took Myles’s arm and led him to a darker part of the warehouse. Overhead a single gas lantern cast a fluttering light, but on the floor beneath there seemed to be myriad candles glowing within a row of wooden boxes: a cache of rubies and sapphires and golden orbs that made Myles suck in his breath, amazed.

“What is it, then?” he whispered.

The importer tilted his head. “These are Christmas tree dressings from Sonneberg.” He stooped and very carefully removed a blown-glass dog, held it up so that it turned gleaming in the gaslight. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

“They’re beautiful,” breathed Myles Finnegan. He knelt beside the rows of boxes, took first one and then another of the brilliant confections from their paper wrappings, and raised them to the light.

“They reflect the candlelight, you understand,” the importer explained somewhat officiously. “It reduces the cost of buying many candles, which as you know are so expensive right now…”

His voice trailed off. He did not offer to Myles Finnegan that the ornaments had been in the warehouse for some months, having proved impossible to sell. They were too expensive, too fragile; no one but German immigrants would want them, and who amongst the poor Germans could afford such frivolities?

Myles continued to gaze entranced upon the shining glass figures. He thought of the Christmas tree in his employer’s house, the only one he had ever seen. Magical, with the sweet wild smells of wax and balsam, and Mr. Stevens’s children shrieking with delight as they pulled their gifts from the dressed boughs; but to see a tree glittering with such things as these! He drew a multicolored teardrop close to his face, saw within its glorious curve his cheeks streaked gold and green and crimson and his eyes like stars. “How much?” he asked.

The importer quoted a figure seven times what he had paid his business counterpart in Sonneberg. But Myles proved to be more astute than that; they argued and dickered for fifteen minutes before agreeing upon a price that Longfellow Stevens would not consider too dear.

Unfortunately, when the crates of ornaments arrived some weeks later, Mr. Stevens reacted much as the importer’s other customers had when shown the pearls of Sonneberg.

“I can’t sell these!” he fumed. “Glass! Mr. Finnegan, what were you thinking?” He kicked angrily at a carton, then turned a red face upon his employee. “I have no use for them. Send them back.”

“He—he won’t take them, sir.” Myles swallowed. “It was the agreement we made, we would take them at this price—”

“We? We? ” roared Longfellow Stevens. “We agreed to nothing! As of this week your employment is terminated, Mr. Finnegan!”

Myles stared at him, too stunned to be angry. But when Mr. Stevens began talking of withholding his wages to pay for the shipment, Myles spoke.

“I’ll take them, then. The Christmas boxes.”

“You will not.”

“In place of my wages.” He was already bending over the cartons, light as the egg panniers that came daily from Flatbush. “I’ll take the Christmas dressings.”

And he did. Late in November he took them in a borrowed wagon to Getty Square, and hawked them to the well-dressed shoppers along South Broadway. In two days he had sold them all, and returned to Brooklyn for more, and then again a week later for the rest of the importer’s stock. By January of 1881, Myles Finnegan was well on his way to being a rich man. By January 1882, after the first of his many visits to Lauscha, where the glassblowers who supplied Sonneberg lived, he was a rich man. And by the following year he was very rich indeed, having purchased Stevens’s Variety and renamed it Finnegan’s: the flagship store of what was to become a vast American retail empire, built upon blown glass and candlelight. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Finnegan’s first Sparkle-Glo factory opened on Long Island, mass-producing Christmas balls; but by then the family fortunes were well in place.

While he was still in high school, Myles’s great-grandson Jack could look out from the attic window at Lazyland, across the Hudson to the Palisades, and read atop the cliffs there the defiant legend emblazoned on the abandoned factory, like a thought untethered from a dream—

Lazyland belonged to Jack now, even though his grandmother Keeley—Myles’s only child, who had been born there in 1899—still held formal title to the house. Upon her death the mansion would pass to Jack. The thought made him almost unbearably sad, even though his grandmother had only a few months ago celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday, and Jack himself had never expected to see forty.

“Hey, Birthday Boy.”

Jack turned, smiling, and raised his champagne flute. “Hi, Jule.”

“I wondered where you were.” Jule Gardino, Jack’s oldest friend and sometime legal advisor, ducked as he passed through the doorway. “Hey, nice night, huh?” He propped his elbows on the balcony beside his friend, blinking at the muzzy violet light, then pointed in mock excitement. “Peter! I can see your house from here!”

Jack laughed: the tag line from an old joke. “Here—”

He grabbed the bottle of Veuve Clicquot from beside his feet and handed it to Jule. Jule swigged from it, wiped his mouth, and took another gulp. “Whooee! Thanks—”

“Everyone behaving downstairs?”

Jule shrugged. “Leonard dropped trou and showed Grandmother his apadravya again.”

Jack took the bottle from Jule and refilled his glass, laughing. “I guess I better get back down, then.”

“No hurry.” Jule draped an arm around his friend and stared out across the sloping lawn. “Mmm. Daffodils?”

Jack nodded, gesturing with his champagne. “And hyacinths. And lilacs. And the apple trees are budding.”

“Wow. Amazing.”

Below them stretched the grounds of the little estate, two acres upon a hillside overlooking Untermeyer Park and, below that, the Hudson. The park had years before fallen into decay. It was haunted now by crack dealers and fellahin, teenage runaways who drifted to the City, then north, until they reached the no-man’s-land that was Yonkers and the southernmost reaches of Westchester County. From Jack’s balcony at Lazyland one could glimpse the ruins of other estates, mansions that had belonged to Van Cortlandts and Van Rensselaers and McGuires and Phillipses. All had been abandoned. Those who could afford to had fled. Those who could not had been driven out by the gangs, by the drive-by shootings and random bombings, the murderous attacks of fellahin and cranks; or by the sight of mange-ridden coyotes staggering north from the wastelands of the Bronx, and south from the woodlands bordering the Saw Mill River and the Sprain Brook parkways. Two months ago the house nearest to Lazyland, a shingle-style Victorian whose elaborate dormers could once be glimpsed through the new green of oaks and tulip trees, had been forsaken by the maharani who bought it only five years earlier. Jack had watched her go, and the sad small parade of sons and housekeepers who followed the stooped middle-aged woman in her yellow sari and high-heeled sandals. The men got into their cars, the housekeepers clambered into three rented Ryder trucks; the maharani and her eldest son and his wife stood for several minutes staring up at the gilded silhouette of their manse. Then they left, for Canada, Jack thought. Two nights later their house burned to the ground; only one fire truck responded to the emergency call. Now Lazyland stood alone upon the hill.

Jack sighed, poured the last bit of champagne into Jule’s glass. All about them trees rustled in the gentle night wind from the river. The air was fragrant from the flowers blooming in the grass below; but there was also the fishy reek of the Hudson, the charred damp smell of all those other ruined mansions, and the omnipresent scent of marijuana smoke and carrion from the fellahin encampments. Overhead a few faint stars shone in the deepening violet sky; far below the Hudson stretched, a swath of black and indigo flecked here and there with gold.

“Nice,” Jule murmured, sipping his champagne. He looked at his old friend and nodded. “You oughta do this more often, Jackie. Get out more. Or have people in.”

Jack smiled sadly. “All the people I used to have in are dead, Julie.” He turned and leaned against the balcony rail, stared for several minutes at the twilight. “Do you remember my fourteenth birthday?” he finally asked. “At Saint Bartholomew’s?”

“Was that when you and Leonard—”

“That was sixteen. No—don’t you remember? The world was supposed to end,” Jack said wistfully, turning to stare down at the unruly patches of daffodils that were like a yellow mist settled onto the lawn. “A two-headed cow was born somewhere, Mahopac, I think, and there was something about a baby born with a caul. The Herald Statesmen had a big article on it, about how everyone thought the world was going to end on Good Friday. March 26, 1971. And that was my birthday.”

Jule shook his head. “I don’t remember. Did we do something? I mean, was there a party?”

“No.” Jack tapped the rim of his glass against his lower lip. “That was the whole thing. It was this beautiful, beautiful day—like today, actually—and I was with you and a couple of other people. Don’t you remember? We all had to go to afternoon Mass in the auditorium, because it was Good Friday, and afterward there was like fifteen minutes before the next period started, and so we sat outside on that little hill overlooking the lake. Everyone was there, I mean, practically the whole school was outside, and we all just lay on the grass. I don’t really remember anything about it at all, except that someone gave me a Hostess cupcake with a candle in it and we were talking about how the world might end.

“But I thought, You know, this is it—I am perfectly happy. Right now, on my birthday, on this beautiful day with my friends—if this really is the end of the world, I don’t even care, because right now I am perfectly happy.”

“And was it?” asked Jule. “The end of the world?”

Jack smiled. “No.” He set his empty champagne flute on the broad railing and turned to leave. “And I’ve always been kind of sorry.”

The darkened glass of the doorway threw back his reflection. Jack caught a glimpse of Jule gazing at him fondly. He dipped his head slightly in embarrassment, knowing what his friend saw: a tall spare figure, with the Finnegans’ ridiculously patrician Celtic profile—straight sharp nose, a strong chin deeply cleft (legacy of a childhood bicycle accident), high broad forehead with its sweep of blond hair yielding at last to gray—so at odds with the melancholy cast of his pale blue eyes and his boyish, rather mannered, swagger. Those big knotted hands jammed into his pockets, his head always tipped a little to one side, as though he were listening for something. Larksong, a distant train, the dying strains of “Telstar”: one of those dreamy sounds that would keep Jack long awake when he and Jule and Leonard were all boys of a summer night, lying side by side by side in a rope hammock beneath the stars.

Now there was nothing so nostalgic as that to hear. Only a far-off drone, the weary exodus of buses and automobiles from the City, the sound of broken glass echoing up from the fellahin’s thickets of sumac and brambles. Jule smiled reassuringly, as though Jack had said something that needed a reply. Then he set his empty glass upon the balcony and started back inside. He didn’t notice that Jack had taken a step back out onto the balcony, and was standing there with his head cocked. Jule ran right into him.

“Owff! Christ, Jack—”

“Listen.”

Jack stood, frozen. One hand clutched the jamb above him; the other bunched into a fist inside his pocket. “Did you hear that?”

Jule shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

“Shhhh! Listen!”

Jack strode back out to the railing. Dimly he was aware that something was wrong; the way he had once felt when there had been a fire in his dorm at Georgetown, and he had to be carried from his room in a smoke-thick stupor. An abrupt tingling in his hands and face, a sort of psychic shiver. As though every nerve in his body was firing, trying desperately to send him terrible news, and for this one split second he had not yet heard.

There it was again. From somewhere down the hill toward the river, a girl’s voice, screaming.

“Oh, shit.” Jule groaned. “Here we go again. I’ll call 911—”

Jack shook his head. “No—”

His mouth was dry, his eyes unfocused. What’s wrong, there’s something wrong—

“No, Jule. Wait. There! It’s—”

And now Jule felt it, too, Jack could tell. His friend stood in the doorway with his head thrown back, eyes rapt as he stared up at the sky. From down the hillside came a man’s voice—

“Fuck! Jesus fuck—”

—and a sudden burst of sirens: home systems, car alarms, car horns, police sirens, a whooping shriek from Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Voices everywhere, from every direction: like the wind rising before a hurricane, an approaching storm of wings. Jack thought of the night Harvey Milk was murdered: it had been like this, all of San Francisco yelling and guns being fired, car horns and heaved bricks and breaking glass.

But now there was no outrage; not even fear. Just amazement, a sort of horrified disbelief. And, after a moment, distant explosions—first one, then another, and still more, like a string of demonic firecrackers; and then flames streaming upward from electrical power plants in Bergen County. Jack clutched the rail and stared out across the river. For an instant he saw burning towers, transformers and blazing pylons like lightning poised between sky and the familiar pointillist array of lights upon the Palisades.

Then the lights went out: everywhere.

“Jule! Jule—”

From downstairs, Jack heard Jule’s wife Emma cry out for her husband, and Leonard’s fey tones abruptly gave way to a howl.

“Jack? Where the hell are you? Jackie! ”

Jack Finnegan said nothing; only stood, and stared.

On the western horizon, above the Hudson and the dark shelf of rock that was the New Jersey Palisades, the sky was erupting into flame. An immense molten globe, brighter and huger than anything he could have imagined. And Jack could imagine many things. Nuclear disaster, gas explosion, stray weather balloons, terrorists bombing Bear Mountain, 757s shot from the sky like geese, forest fires, mustard gas—

This was none of these. This was—

Jack shook his head, out of breath, heart pounding though he hadn’t stirred. This was—

What ? A star? A nova? The Northern Lights? But Jack had seen auroras, boreal and hyperboreal; auroras and Saint Elmo’s fire and the magnetic image of his father’s brain, the tumor pulsing there like a candle flame.

But not this, never this! A rapture of gold and black and emerald green, sheets of flame leaping from the cliffs as the vast globe grew, flattening as it stretched across the horizon, as though it were an inconceivably huge and swollen camber being crushed by an even huger hand. Within twenty-four hours the news would start to drift in, garnered from shouted conversation with fellahin and Jack’s ancient shortwave radio: the terrible confluence of a solar storm and the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf, the atmosphere ignited like grease—

—but now Jack only stared at the spectral sky, the coruscating heavens, and knew it had come at last. What they had all been waiting for, consciously or not—the whip coming down, the other shoe dropping, the sound of sixteen hooves beating measured and far off upon the tarmac, still distant but not for long. The sound of something chipping at the earth as though it were an egg; the sound of the fabric of the century being torn.

The world had changed, changed utterly, and was no longer his, or humanity’s. It had been occupied, they had all been seized, were all possessed, strange particles charged by what loomed above them; all now shivering beneath the severed heavens; all now aglow, and glimmering.

CHAPTER TWO

1999: Natal Astrology

Actually, it would have been easier for Jack Chanvers Finnegan if the world had ended that night at Lazyland. And so, of course, it had not.

That was a bad year, 1997. The tenth anniversary of his acquiring the AIDS virus—and he thought of it as an acquisition, like a bad investment. Say, a forged Artaud notebook, or a painting mistakenly attributed to Thomas Cole—the year his dear friend and former lover Eric died. Nineteen ninety-seven was the year his grandmother fell and broke her hip. It was the year Jack developed full-blown AIDS; the year the glimmering began.

After that first night at the end of March, it was weeks before things returned to normal. Though, in fact, “normal” was gone forever, at least for people like Jack; in other places, of course, they’d never gotten word that normal had ever been there at all.

Miles above the earth, the filmy ozone veil had in places deteriorated from three millimeters in thickness to less than one. The chlorine-based chemicals that for decades had been kept in check by this, now floated like so many toxic feathers into the uppermost levels of the atmosphere. There they fell victim to devouring ultraviolet radiation, which rent the CFCs into chlorine atoms. These free radicals could each destroy a hundred thousand ozone molecules, momentarily linking to form chlorine monoxide before flying apart again and continuing their rampage. Added to the atmospheric stew were independent molecules released from BRITE, as well as the ceaseless solar rain no longer deflected by a fragile ozone parasol.

One relatively benign side effect of all this was the disruption of television broadcasts worldwide. What had once been the stuff of tight-lipped television news reports—food riots, looting, cannibalism in Laos and Kansas City, Bible school vans set on fire by antifundamentalists, killing hail in Orange County, starving migrant workers storming a locked-gate enclave in the Napa Valley, war between the Koreas, children dying of dysentery and cholera in Minneapolis, Amarillo, London—became stories repeated in line at Delmonico’s and the Grand Union, where Jack walked in generally fruitless efforts to get fresh vegetables, bread, dented cans of tomatoes and chili, The New York Times. Eventually power was restored, but never for long; and so at Lazyland they grew accustomed to eating by lamplight, or in the dark. When the power did come on, when the television managed to lock onto a station broadcasting news from a studio that looked reassuringly like normal life, with reruns and talk shows and music videos that belied the coruscating heavens outside, they might forget to eat at all.

“One gets used to anything, even dying,” Jack’s grandmother Keeley used to say when he was growing up. He recalled that now, a lot : when he was thinking of complaining about a ConEd bill delivered by moped courier (an electric bill! when waking to find the power on was like winning at fucking Lotto!), or about the bonfires that could be glimpsed each night from Lazyland’s windows, sullen flames where the fellahin squatted and played their boom boxes or, when the music failed, sang hoarsely while beating upon empty metal oil drums.

Still, life went on (“That’s what life does,” Keeley snapped at him one night, during one of Jack’s sinking spells), and Jack watched it, mostly on TV, when the TV worked. Amazed at the compelling illusion of canonical American Life cast there: talk shows, baseball and football games (though the cameramen avoided crowd shots of Wrigley Field, which had been severely damaged in the riots), reruns, and a few tentative, new episodes of the most popular sitcoms, which Jack found himself analyzing obsessively for what they might tell him of the world outside. Recycled advertisements were, gradually, replaced by new ones; apparently not even intimations of apocalypse could interfere with sales and production of Coke, Pepsi, Big Macs, Miller beer. Jack thought of the old joke, about what would survive a nuclear holocaust. Cockroaches and Cher; and it seemed that there would be plenty of junk food for them to eat. Not that Jack ever saw any of it.

That was 1997. By 1998 he had grown accustomed to life under wartime conditions; that was a bad year, too. Nineteen ninety-eight was the year during which Jack was certain that The Gaudy Book, after a century, and more incarnations than the Dalai Lama, would finally expire. And while he had never confessed it to anyone—not even Jule, not even Grandmother Keeley—for his entire life Jack had believed that his fate was tied inextricably with that of his family’s magazine. If The Gaudy Book died, so would he.

In September, The New York Times had run a sad little front-page piece, a preliminary obituary embalming The Gaudy Book in three inches of newsprint and electronic lettering. Travelers on the Infobahn (Leonard amongst them) had chortled, seeing this as another death spasm of the Written Word.

Still, the magazine continued to limp along. There were a few thousand stalwart subscribers: Jack imagined them as silver-haired toffs sitting upright in deck chairs aboard the Titanic, Gaudy Books firmly in hand, reading from the Slings and Arrows feature while the band played “God Save the Queen.” And there were dwindling loans from Jack’s own dwindling finances, the last copper pennies from what had been one of the great fortunes of the twentieth century. Leonard had helped, too, improbable as that seemed; but then…

“It’s the least he can do. The bastard.” Since high school Jule had suspected Leonard of the worst of intentions, and time had proven that Jule was usually correct. “If I were you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

Jack tilted back in his chair. They were in the carriage house, the office of The Gaudy Book. “I know, I know. But…”

His voice trailed off. Jule snorted in annoyance: Jack had never quite gotten over an intense relationship with Leonard that had seen him through his twenties. “But nothing.” Jule gazed with distaste at one of Leonard’s prints, framed in silver on Jack’s desk. It showed the charred carcass of an Antarctic snow petrel, now extinct. “He’s gonna fuck you up again, Jackie, you know he will. Don’t do it, Jackie. Don’t talk to him.”

Jack stared at the ceiling through half-closed eyes. After a moment he shrugged. “Well, anyway, he has this idea to help bail me out. I just want you to look over the proposals and make sure I’m not liable for anything.”

He handed Jule the thick folder Leonard had sent via bike courier that morning. His friend took the package and stuck it into his knapsack, then stood to go.

“Right.” Jule pushed a lock of longish graying hair from his forehead, grimaced, and tugged at his shirt collar. “God, I hate fucking court appearances. The phones are dead, so you can’t call anyone, you get down to the courthouse and you’re fucked ’cause the DA couldn’t get a fucking message to you that the case has been dismissed. I haven’t had a decent haircut in a year. Do I look like an asshole?”

Jack laughed. “You look very nice, Jule. Emma pick out your tie?”

Jule looked wounded. “No, she did not.”

“I figured.” Jack pointed with his pencil. “It’s got something on it.”

“Shit! Really?” Jule stared down in alarm.

“Ha-ha. Made you look.”

Jule glared at him, then started toward the door. “Later. Don’t sign anything till you hear from me.”

“How long will that be?”

“Who fucking knows? Maybe tomorrow if the phones are up, maybe a week. See you, Jackie.”

When Jack was alone again he sighed. On his desk scattered bills and manuscripts, collection notices, and invitations to charity dinners formed a jagged white plain, like a field of broken ice. He picked up a small card, hand-lettered in pale blue ink on Crane’s stationery.

Jack tossed it into an overflowing wastebasket. It had been a decade since The Gaudy Book could afford a secretary, or even an ambitious high school student, to help him in the office.

“Well.” His chair thumped noisily as he leaned forward and swept the papers off his desk and into a cardboard box. “Time to re-ordure.”

The office was filled with paper. Boxes and filing cabinets, wastebaskets and piles of unopened manila envelopes. A moosehead with antlers draped with ticker tape from the 1974 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Two IBM Selectric typewriters with old contracts still sitting in them; the Underwood typewriter on which Jack had learned to write. There were also several Macintosh computers that had been difficult to service even before the glimmering, and a Telex machine that occasionally sputtered to life with strange queries from readers in Bangkok or Iowa City. Leonard Thrope found it all very quaint. He had never stopped mocking Jack’s refusal to invest in nascent technologies when he had the chance.

“Netscape, man! I called you about that! And Evans Laboratories, you were crazy not to go with them!”

Now, perversely, Leonard wanted to save Jack’s magazine. Once Jule gave the go-ahead, he organized the special Memento Mori issue and its concomitant exhibition at the Whitney. It was the biggest-selling issue of The Gaudy Book in twenty-three years, and the most controversial show ever mounted at the museum. And, despite Jule’s best efforts—he was a very good man, but a rather bad lawyer—there were lawsuits, as there inevitably were if Leonard Thrope was involved. These came in the wake of Leslie Harcourt’s unassisted planned suicide (a ticketed event and a sellout), but Leonard handled them with his usual flair, half ringmaster, half dominatrix, and with his usual phalanx of attorneys. When the smoke cleared, there was a multicolored paper check on the breakfast table beside Jack’s coffee cup, holographed blue and brown like the fragment of a morpho butterfly’s wing.

Enough money to keep the magazine afloat for perhaps another year.

“And we’ll bury it then, Jackie!” Leonard crowed. He leaned across the breakfast table for the powdered milk. “But now I have to go.”

Jack nodded at his friend, then started as the phone rang on the wall behind him. “Hello?” He cleared his throat nervously; it had been a week since the phone lines were up. “Ah, hello?”

But of course the call was for Leonard. Three species of Madagascan forest-dwelling frogs were to become extinct. The last of their kind, they had fallen prey to a fungus within the protected crystal walls of their habilab at the Ampijeroa Forest Station. Was Mr. Thrope interested? A very rich, anonymous patron would arrange for air transport to Mahajanga on a private Learjet supplied with black-market fuel.

“Another job for the Angel of Death.” Grandmother Keeley regarded Leonard coldly from the other side of the breakfast nook. “How can you stand it?”

Leonard smiled. The placebit in his front tooth winked from ruby to gold. Jack stared at it resentfully, wondering if he would be more cheerful if he could afford implants that would pipe a steady flow of serotonin and melatonin and vitamin K into his beleaguered body. Probably not. Wistful melancholy was Jack’s default setting, as cheerful chaos was Leonard’s.

“Oh, Keeley. Please,” said Leonard, and sipped his coffee. Real coffee, just as the small yellow brick he had given Grandmother was real cheese. Despite the faint odors of bedlam and decay that trailed after him, Leonard was always welcome at Lazyland. He set his coffee back on the table, and for a moment let his hand rest upon Jack’s. “You know that I don’t kill them. Ramo Resorts International does it for me. In Africa, at least. Excuse me.”

He left the room to make several quick calls from his own phone, then found Jack again and kissed him.

“Now, now,” said Leonard. “Don’t look like that, you’ll see me soon enough.”

Jack smiled wanly. “I know. Thank you, Leonard, for—”

“Shhh.” Leonard placed a scarred finger on Jack’s lips. “Bye, Jackie.”

From inside, Jack watched as Leonard slid into the limo that would take him to White Plains Airport. At the top of the winding drive the limo paused in front of Lazyland’s security gates, then swept through as they swung open. Jack waited to make sure they shut securely again and returned to the kitchen. He picked up the phone to call Jule, to tell him that Leonard had come through with the check; but this time the line was dead.

Now it was almost two years later, early spring of 1999. But Jack still winced at the memory of how Leonard had saved The Gaudy Book.

“What is it, dear?” His grandmother took another sip from her whiskey sour, put the glass back upon her side table with its collection of glass millefleurs and knitting needles.

“Hum? Oh, nothing.” From the kitchen Jack could hear the comfortable rattle and clink of Larena Iverson, Lazyland’s venerable housekeeper, clearing the dishes. “You know. Things. Leonard.”

Grandmother Keeley scowled. “That dwarf.”

Contempt sharpened the word into something stealthy and menacing. In fact Leonard, while slight, was not at all dwarfish. Instead he had the supreme self-confidence and feckless daring of all those youngest sons in fairy tales—all those legendary Jacks whom John Chanvers Finnegan so painfully failed to be—joined to the lithe body of a circus acrobat and the scruples of a heroin dealer. Dark as Jack was fair, with black curly hair and hazel eyes and an intoxicating laugh, Leonard was the nimble demon who sat on his friend’s shoulder whispering Drink it! Eat it! Do it! between glasses of vintage Taittinger and lines of cocaine.

This evening Jack could have borne the diversion of listening to Leonard’s advice, if only to ignore it. He had been so tired these last few days. Not mere physical exhaustion but that deeper, sadder fatigue he had glimpsed in others, those friends who had gone before him and died before their time. He had seen it over and over again. You could live for years—five, ten, nearly twelve years if you were Jack Finnegan and could afford to keep up with the drugs, if the drugs were still being manufactured; seemingly forever if you were Leonard Thrope.

But then one day it happened. You began to die. In spite of the drugs, the acupuncture therapies, the shiatsu massages and fungus teas and wave after wave of chemicals and vitamins; in spite of everything, you died. One day you were home with your geraniums and cats and a hundred bottles of medicine. The next you were in ICU with flowers brought up from that vendor in midtown who was the only person who had fresh flowers anymore. Then you were gone, and they were holding white roses at a memorial service and trying not to notice who else had a rattle in the throat and shaky hands.

And it was worse, now, of course—everything was worse. The experimental AIDS vaccine that had been given via lottery mutated into the petra virus, whose hosts were immune to HIV but died of other things. Even the drugs that worked no longer worked, because who could afford them, and the glimmering interfered with the labs producing them, and the factories that distributed them, and the doctors who no longer went to their offices because they couldn’t get gas for their Mercedes and Range Rovers.

“…dear?”

Jack started, looked up shamefaced. “I’m sorry, Grandmother? What did you say?”

Keeley smiled sadly. “I said you looked tired, my dear. Why don’t you go to bed early?”

“I think I will.” Jack nodded and sank onto the couch beside her, leaning back with his eyes closed. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

His grandmother took his hand and squeezed it. She had recovered from her broken hip—miraculously, Jack thought—but it had left her more frail, dreamier, than before. Still, her grip was strong and limber as a girl’s; her skin smelled of almond oil and Chanel No. 19. “I feel the same way. It’s this weather—can’t decide whether it’s spring or winter still.”

She let go of his hand and reached for her drink. Her last remaining vice, along with the single cigarette she would smoke later, leaning out her bedroom window in deference to her grandson’s health. Leonard brought them for her, and when he was visiting insisted on joining her when she smoked, much to Keeley’s annoyance. He liked to suggest other bad habits she might enjoy.

“There’s IZE; I know you can’t have tried that. Or heroin—I could teach you to shoot up! I could probably get a cover feature out of it,” he would say thoughtfully, watching the Japanese dirigibles make their test flights through the crimson air above the river. “‘Former Deb Now Centenarian Junkie…”

Now Jack watched as Keeley drank her whiskey. “Up in Stonington they call it March Hill,” she went on. Her pale blue eyes went to gray, the way they did whenever she spoke of the family’s summer cottage in Maine, long since sold to developers to keep The Gaudy Book alive. “Every spring the obituaries come, and you read them in the paper, so many of them it seems, and the old folks say, ‘Oh old Virge, you know, he didn’t make it over March Hill.’”

The luster dimmed in her gaze. Jack knew she was thinking of her husband James, who twenty-six years before had not made it over March Hill. “Ah, but what am I saying? It’s just the weather, Jackie. Spring snow, that’s all.” She patted his hand. “You go to bed now; Larena will help me later. Go on, now.”

Jack yawned and draped an arm around her thin shoulders. “You sure?”

She kissed his cheek and shoved him gently. “Go.”

He went. Behind him he heard his grandmother calling to Larena and the housekeeper’s plaintive reply.

“Yes, Keeley, I am coming.”

Jack smiled in spite of himself. He slung his hands in his pockets—it was always cold at Lazyland—and nodded as Mrs. Iverson bustled past him. He had this, at least: loving grandmother and faithful retainer, guarding him in his castle from the storm outside. In the middle of the entry room he paused, listening to make sure Mrs. Iverson had not fallen. Her health was more precarious than Keeley’s, though at eighty-nine Larena was a full decade younger. Then he walked to the broad curving staircase.

At its foot he paused. To one side of the stairs loomed Lazyland’s grandfather clock. The grandfather clock, so called to distinguish it from the dozens and dozens of other clocks that Jack’s grandfather James Finnegan had collected. Grandmother clocks and case clocks, gallery clocks and shelf clocks, cottage clocks and tourbillion watches. A clock with a white mouse that ran down its side when it struck one. A gold- and velvet-encrusted clock that had been made for the Shah of Turkey. An Athenian water clock. They filled the house not with staccato ticking but with a gentle undercurrent of sound like waves upon a beach. Jack usually did not notice them at all, any more than he noticed the sound of his own breathing or the even beating of his heart.

But it was difficult to ignore the huge grandfather clock, especially if you were standing at the foot of the stairs. James Finnegan used to joke that he would like to be buried in it. In fact it would have swallowed him, with room for his Irish setter Fergus, too. The clock dated from the early nineteenth century, but its face had come from an eighteenth-century astronomical clock he had found in a wooden box of oddments purchased at Christie’s in 1937. The main dial had dragon hands to tell the hour, tiny golden salamanders on the twelve concentric hour-position dials, sun and moon effigies, moonballs, indicators to indicate the hours of light and darkness, the month and day and year, mean and solar time, and a Julian perpetual calendar.

There was also, just beneath the clockface, a holy-water font that had been in the same box. Jack’s grandfather (with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, save that manufactured a sentimental nature; he was a famous weeper at weddings) decided the clockface had come from the High Court Monastery in Vienna during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa. Sadly, the immense clock itself had not worked for some years now. Jack’s best efforts to keep Lazyland’s clocks running could not duplicate the love that James Finnegan had lavished upon them. Their gears rusted, their levers warped, without his nimble, nicotine-stained fingers to soothe them.

The font was quite old, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Italian, of very fine blue-glazed porcelain aswarm with adipose cherubim and small flowers like violets. When his grandfather was alive, it was always filled with holy water from Sacred Heart up on Broadway. Whenever he visited Jack would take some and flick it onto his forehead; not from any sense of spiritual devotion but because it was such a heady novelty, to be in a house that had holy water. Back then Lazyland was always filled with priests, their shouting laughter from his grandfather’s study and their marvelous smell, frankincense and cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey, the crisp retort of their street shoes on the highly polished wooden floors. Whatever private sorrows and torments they endured, they had never shown Jack or his brothers anything but kindness and how to throw a football so it soared.

But then they had failed to save his grandfather during his brief final illness. After that there were no more priests at Lazyland, except for old blind Father Warren. Grandmother Keeley drove them away, Jack’s mother said. Jack always thought of the picture of Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple: Grandmother wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails, as myriad black-clad figures fled out onto North Broadway.

So, no more holy water. For years a fine film of dust had clung to the ancient porcelain, and Jack had been able to invoke the ghost of a scent from his childhood. Now even that was gone. Still, he couldn’t resist probing the font with a fingertip.

Nothing, of course. He smiled wryly and began the long ascent up curving staircases to his room on the third floor.

For most of his life he’d taken those stairs at a run. A habit carried over from childhood, when he and his brothers and cousins would race up the first set of broad golden oak steps, kept polished to a near-fatal slickness by Mrs. Iverson, and then continue in a sort of exhilarated terror up the second, darker, narrower curved stair, like the innermost chamber of a nautilus. A twelve-point elk shot by Jack’s father was mounted high above these steps, its glass eyes sanguine with the glimmering’s reflected glow. As he approached the third-floor landing he felt the same primal dread that had gripped him as a boy: that huge gray muzzle with its blackened lips, the long shadows of the elk’s tines, like dead tree limbs. Jack shuddered, heart hammering and chest tight from the effort of climbing, and took the last few steps two at a time.

His bedroom door hung open. He bumped against it, staggered to his bed, and collapsed, one hand automatically switching the light on the nightstand as the other grabbed his inhaler. He gave himself two jolts of his asthma medication, then pulled the drawer open and scrabbled amongst his stockpile of bottles until he found the alprazolam. He took one pill, swallowing it dry, and flung himself back upon his pillow.

After a minute the inhaler began to take effect. He breathed slowly, deeply, then opened the nightstand again and took out a bottle of over-the-counter cold medicine from Emma’s private stash—she had a huge closet full of drugs she’d been hoarding since the glimmering began. Emma had told him to use this instead of sleeping pills, and so he swallowed two capsules, chasing them with the dregs from last night’s water glass.

Too late he wondered if this perhaps had been a mistake, one of those badly mixed pharmaceutical cocktails that would send him to Saint Joseph’s in the middle of the night. But within fifteen or twenty minutes he felt better. He could breathe again; soon the alprazolam would calm him. Maybe he was just sick (of course he was sick! he could hear Leonard shrieking); maybe he just had a cold. Without moving from the bed he nudged his shoes off and heard them drop onto the worn old oriental rug. He sighed and yawned, stretching luxuriously. The yellow light from his bedside lamp gave everything a sweetly nostalgic look: burnishing the dark arabesques of the walnut sleigh bed, showing off the cobwebs and dust filigreeing the old Indian headdress hanging on the far wall. More than a few of its regal feathers had been purloined over the years by Jack and his brothers and cousins, to be used for quill pens and darts. Other than that, nothing much had changed.

It had been his father’s childhood bedroom, the room where Jack had always slept during childhood visits, and it was his room now. A small tucked-in spot on the third floor, catty-corner to the airy nursery attic and the other bedroom, the one where his cousins used to sleep. The walls held a framed picture of dogs playing poker, an exquisite black-and-white print of one of Leonard’s flower studies, a photo of Jack’s aunt Mary Anne, who went to California in 1967 and disappeared, a painting by the San Francisco artist/activist Martin Dionysos, who had briefly been Leonard’s lover. Beside the window hung a spavined pair of wooden snowshoes. The floor still bore round scorched scars like bullet holes, where Jack and his brothers once lit Black Cats on the Fourth of July.

Now it was March. Outside the wind railed at the eaves. Even with the two old Hudson Bay blankets pulled up to his chin, and a nearly new down comforter (his Christmas present from Jule and Emma), Jack felt cold—Lazyland was famously uninsulated. As boys, he and Jule and Leonard had sat in this same room and watched snow sift through the walls, covering the floor like fine white silk. Things were no different tonight, save that he was alone.

Once again he yawned, reached for the tipsy stack of magazines and manuscripts that held his bedside reading. No matter that the written word was dead (Leonard and the other mori artists had held its funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where copies of The Gaudy Book, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review were ignited within a brazier, their ashes dispersed in the adjoining cemetery); hard-copy submissions for The Gaudy Book continued to arrive whenever the mail got through. Jack tried to draw solace from them—“the claustrophobic, fascistic tyranny of the written word,” some WIRED wag had called it—but it was difficult. He recalled his grandfather railing, “Don’t they teach these kids to read anymore?”

But of course now they didn’t. After all these centuries, children finally had shaken off the yoke of inauspicious words and replaced it with whatever it was they did with their goggles and retinal implants and drugs, so many drugs even Leonard couldn’t keep up with them. Jack preferred not to know. Jack preferred to hide within the failing fastness of Lazyland and muddle through his manuscripts, waiting to die.

Which it didn’t seem he was to do this evening. The alprazolam kicked in, its sedative effect boosted by antihistamine. He felt a pleasantly perverse sensation-of febrile drowsiness. Emma, who had done time as a freelance chemist working with local motorcycle gangs before attending medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon, had explained to him once how the drug worked.

“These gates in your brain, the gates are on the neuronal membranes, and the Xanax, I mean the alprazolam, it closes the gate on one of these neuronal channels, and that causes a, a hyperpolarization of the postsynaptic neuron. So that neuron doesn’t fire, d’you see?”

Emma got very excited, talking about how psychotropic drugs worked; especially since Emma and Jule’s daughter, Rachel, had been killed by a drunk driver three years before. It was like listening to a recovering addict rave about Narc-Anon. “And all across your entire brain, that particular neuron doesn’t fire—it’s like a pinball game, think of it like a pinball game: it’s all about gates, gates opening and closing, so only certain balls can get through, only certain perceptions get through…”

Right now Jack felt as though all the balls were at rest. He had a disturbing momentary glimpse of them as eyeballs, the reflected sheen of falling snow upon their moist curves; but then that, too, faded. He dropped the unread manuscript upon the nightstand and within minutes was asleep.

Much later he awoke. A sound had disturbed him, but he waited to open his eyes, uncertain if he was asleep or dreaming. His various antidepressant and antianxiety drugs had an odd side effect on Jack. They made him feel curiously detached from his dreams, the emotions he experienced while asleep weirdly inappropriate, almost fetishistic, so that he would find himself being aroused to orgasm by the sight of a stone, or moved to tears by the smell of lighter fluid. Sometimes these bizarre emotions would carry over into his first waking moments. So Jack had learned to lie in bed and purge his mind of whatever strange fragments it had acquired during the night.

He was sure that he had heard something. The wind, maybe, nudging around the chimneys. He had almost drifted back to sleep when he heard it again and was shocked to full wakefulness, as though someone had yanked the covers from him.

It was a flute. No, not a flute. Something more primitive, a wooden instrument like a recorder or panpipe. He could hear the faint intake of breath between the notes, and the notes themselves, rich and plangent and somehow solid in a way that other sounds were not, rising into the air. The tune was simple, almost childish—four notes played over and over again, with a sweet refrain.

Yet for all its simplicity there was something terrifying in the music. It was like a recessional, like the subdued yet ominous tolling of a bell sounded at the end of the Latin Mass. With a muffled cry Jack sat bolt upright.

The room was still. The sound of wind had died, and the rattling gutters; but the piping music went on. Jack snatched at the bedclothes. The air was so cold he could feel his lungs tighten; he grabbed for his inhaler and sucked at it. After a minute or two his breathing eased. He shut his eyes and tried to slow his heartbeat, but it was keeping pace with those four notes—

Ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum…

He opened his eyes: nothing. Whatever light there was seemed to come from the veil of snow covering the floor, and from the window overlooking the lawn. As he stared the window shuddered, though there was still no wind. The sound of the recorder grew louder, as though whoever was playing it was moving slowly, and with each step drew nearer to the house.

“Shit.” Jack swore beneath his breath, shivering. He had had dreams like this: waking dreams, walking dreams. All his life he had been plagued by nightmares. But there was no comfort knowing that, because with dreams there came dream logic, inexorable and dreadful. And so he found himself sliding from bed and walking to the window.

Beneath his bare feet the snow was dry and fine as dust. The window’s pallid glow grew brighter, even as the music grew louder. But always it was a sere lonely music, the echo of another song like the echo of ice booming upon the great river.

At the window he stopped. His entire body shook with cold, so that he had to brace himself as he leaned forward to look out.

Below him the lawn shone with a dull blue gleam. Dead grass pierced the new snow, black spines like scattered bones. Overhead the glimmering showed through the cloud cover: grayish waves chased by crimson flares, an occasional burst of brilliant orange. Now and then the sloping hillside would be slashed with iridescence, like the glimpse of gold within a pocket, and though the snow had stopped, the air glittered fiercely. The piping music seemed to come from everywhere, the way the wind sounds during a hurricane.

Jack shuddered. Dread clenched his bones like grippe. His eyes watered from the caustic light, and there was an acrid taste in his mouth, a smell like wet ashes. He was backing away from the window when something on the lawn began to move.

From the tulip trees and overgrown sumac at the bottom of the garden a figure crept. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing only some kind of loose dark trousers and clutching something in one hand. Jack could not tell if it was a boy or girl. As it stood it raised its hands before its face. Wisps of white-blond hair fell across its eyes.

“Hey,” Jack whispered. “Hey—”

It did not seem to notice the cold at all. It stood up very straight—unnaturally so, like a child in a wedding party. Then, with exaggerated slowness, the child began to pace across the lawn. Its feet left no mark upon the snow, and while the scraggy trees cast wavering shadows, the child had none at all.

The haunting music swelled. Its echoes filled the room like water filling a sealed-off chamber, and the monotonous notes inundated Jack, driving out breath and blood and matter until, with a grunt, he slid forward, his hand smashing against the window.

Dull pain shot through his wrist. He cried out and found that he could breathe again. He brought his wrist to his mouth and nursed it, lifted his head to gaze outside.

On the lawn the child still marched and played its reed pipe. Beneath the poplars something else moved. Another figure emerged, much taller than the child; then another, and another; until there were six in all.

They were men; they had once been men. Tall and emaciated and naked in the snow, so thin the glimmering washed across their pale flesh like rain. Each bore within his hands a huge pair of antlers, raised so that they seemed to spring from his skull. They moved in an awkward stooping walk, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of those great horns. As Jack watched they followed the child across the lawn, until the child stopped. The six men bowed to it, each in turn, forming two rows of three with their antlers raised above them like tree limbs, and began to dance.

It was like nothing he had ever seen. A weird loping dance, the two rows moving backward and forward, heads alternately raised and bowed so that it seemed the horns must tangle and be wrenched from their skeletal hands. And yet the antlers never touched, their bodies never touched. Their feet left no sign upon the snow, and their movements made no sound. The motions were grotesquely childlike, almost crude; yet at the same time so terribly, horribly real that Jack felt as though he had never seen dancing before; as though this was The Dance from which all others had been wrung. The music of the reed pipe spiraled and wailed, the child stood as though frozen; the horned men moved back and forth like the shuttles of a loom. Above them the antlers curved like the spires of some unearthly cathedral. And like light falling from a cathedral window the flesh began to fall from their bodies, in small bright blades of gold and green and red, until only their bones remained, unearthly white and unconquerable, moving across the snow.

In his room Jack watched. Terror and beauty ravaged him; he could feel the boom of blood in his head and a softer throbbing in his chest, as though the child played him as nimbly as its flute. Still they danced, the horned men, with steps careful and measured as automatons. They might have been part of some infernal timepiece ringing the changes.

But then, very slowly, he became aware that the music was diminishing—he sensed rather than heard it, like warmth stealing back into his hands. He leaned forward and saw that the dancers had paused. The child bowed its head. Then, as slowly as it had arrived, the child turned and retraced its steps, pacing back across the lawn. When it reached the shadows of the trees the skeletal dancers followed. They moved now with a more somber grace, no longer rocking back and forth beneath the weight of those heavy racks—it seemed that the antlers had somehow grown and become part of them. All their bestial power had fused with the frail bones of men. Light clung to them, light falling from the sky or rising like mist from the ground. When they reached the shadows of the tulip poplars they were clothed in it. They did not turn their heads or look back to where Jack sat and watched them. And yet he knew that he was the reason they had come here: vision or dementia or the exalted remnant of a dream, they had come for him.

The last shining form dipped its head beneath the branches and disappeared. The music died away. Alone in his room stood Jack, robed in light and burning with fever, his pale eyes huge and glittering with the glory and horror of what he had seen. He was still there next morning when the housekeeper came to see what had kept him from breakfast.

“Jack? What is it, Jack? Are you sick? Good Lord, he isn’t—”

And he shook his head, unable to tell her No he was not dead nor even sick, but burning, burning, burning.

CHAPTER THREE

Trip Takes a Fall

He would die at Hell Head.

Trip Marlowe knew that was how the obituaries would begin. Never mind that no one from away knew that Hell Head was where you always went to die, if you were from Moody’s Island. For sure it was where you went to die if you were a Marlowe. It was where his father had gone when Trip was six years old, and blown his brains out with a thirty-aught-six; where Trip’s mother had gone a year later, to dive into the whirlpool and never be found. Hell Head was where the island children went on Halloween, daring each other to stare into the black water at low tide and glimpse the bones there, the bones he had never seen but they were there, for sure Trip knew they were there. Trip Marlowe knew all about bones.

He was twenty-two years old and the Voice of the Last Generation. That was what some flack on Radium had called him, after Trip’s first album—the one that originally came out on Mustard Seed, the one that got him six Dove Awards and an Emmy and his face on a zillion home pages and the cover of OUR magazine—was bought and rereleased by a Xian subsidiary of GFI Worldwide early in 1998. The album was called LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA. Trip stole the title from an old banned book in the hard stacks at Olive Mount Bible College. His best friend, Jerry Disney, had found the novel; God only knew how it got there. Trip never read the book—Trip didn’t read, except for the Bible and furtively hidden copies of Matrix comics—but he liked the title, and he knew how to use it. Even as a child on Moody’s Island, where he sang in the choir at the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church, he had always possessed what the people at GFI called marketing savvy. For instance, it had been Trip’s idea that alone of all the children in the choir, he should wear red when they performed.

“It’ll make me stand out.” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt: he had already dyed his white choir robe deep scarlet, using a packet of Rit Dye from the Moody’s Island beach store. “You know. When I sing.”

“You already stand out,” said John Drinkwater. He was the choir director. A skinned stick of a man who wouldn’t allow his own kids to use the computer in the broken-down trailer that was the island school. But he sounded amused. “But sure, okay. We’ll try it.”

It was August the first time Trip wore the red robe. They were singing at the Grace Fellowship Baptist Church over to Jonesport, not a long drive; otherwise, probably he would’ve passed out from the smell of Rit Dye. Deep scarlet came off on Trip’s hands, his skinny freckled arms and chest, and even his face. But it was so hot inside the church, the choir’s singing so pure and exalted, that no one at Grace Fellowship even noticed.

“Probably they just thought your face was all red and you were goin’ t’ pass out.” Jerry Disney fanned himself with his own crumpled-up robe and stared out the bus window at rows of boarded-up gas stations and abandoned shopping malls. “I sure thought I was.”

After that he always wore the red robe. When Trip grew out of it, John Drinkwater had his wife sew him another one, with fabric that came all the way from Bangor. And when Trip grew out of that one, John Drinkwater had his wife make him a dozen, in various sizes, “So’s you won’t ever have to be without.”

He’d been Trip Marlowe then, a golden star in heaven’s crown, for sure the star of the Fisher of Men Children’s Choir. Summer and winter they traveled inland, to Bangor and Caribou and Presque Isle, and up coastal Route One to Calais, which was practically Canada. Twenty-four children and their chaperones crammed into the church’s old blue school bus, where the stench of ethanol vied with that of squashed peanut-butter sandwiches and the Dignam twins, who always had to go to the bathroom. John Drinkwater sat in front behind Mrs. Spruce, who drove, and even after they sang themselves hoarse at church suppers and Christian Coalition fundraisers, country fairs and weddings, funerals and baptisms; even at twelve midnight, when the littlest children were so tired they lay across their mothers’ laps and wailed, John Drinkwater made them sing some more.

Exhausted as they were, the children sounded beautiful. Outside might be nothing but ravaged forests left by bankrupt paper companies, or the potato-field wasteland of Aroostook County; but inside the bus it was heaven. Even the poor bleary-eyed mothers would take a break from rummaging in paper sacks full of moldering apples and bottles of Coke, to lean back in their seats and smile and clap in time.

When the hymn was done they kissed the children, smoothing the boys’ buzz-cut hair and adjusting the girls’ dirty pink headbands, and told everyone how wonderful they sounded.

“Like angels, now then, hush, let’s try and get some sleep.”

That was what the mothers said as the bus jounced over the bridge to Verona Island, or as it sat with the engine turned off in Bath, waiting for the foot traffic at the ironworks to clear.

But later, when the children finally passed out in their mothers’ laps, those chaperones who were still awake would turn to each other and nod toward the back of the bus where Trip always sat.

“Isn’t he cunnin’, that one? When he sings! If only his mother could’ve heard him. He could be a star, you know. He really could be a star.”

It was Trip they spoke of, of course. He heard them and tried not to be proud, and it wasn’t so hard, because he didn’t feel proud, not really. It wasn’t like the way he felt at school, when someone told him he’d done a good job with an assignment he’d spent too many hours trying to understand. Because he worked at that, he worked at school, even though he knew it was useless. He was smart, he knew that, he wasn’t like the Dignams. But reading was difficult for him, and there never seemed to be a point to it.

So he just kept on singing. When he outgrew the children’s choir he joined the church’s praise and worship band, part of the youth group for teenagers. He was seventeen when John Drinkwater told him he might be able to go to college on a music scholarship. That was before John Drinkwater realized that there wasn’t anywhere Trip Marlowe couldn’t go. Not with a face like that; not with a voice like that.

Because if you were to take a cruse made of ice and drop it, the sound it would make, the sound of cold and crystal shattering—that would be the sound of the children’s choir. That would be their voices.

But the glitter in the air, the arcs of light and color and the stunned silence thereafter—that would be Trip Marlowe.

He had thought he would never fall. And, falling, he had never for an instant believed that he might crash. That the scattered pieces would be him. That there’d be no one there to catch him, no one there to help him gather what was left. Which was just Trip Marlowe, another little broken idol.

Once, there would have been someone there to hear him. John Drinkwater, at least, or Jerry Disney, or, for a few days, the blond girl. Now there was no one. When an angel falls, John Drinkwater said, it falls alone. Nobody but Satan hears it hit the ground.

Only of course that wasn’t true. Because Trip was sure that everyone on God’s green earth would hear the explosion when he crashed and burned. He’d been the first Xian artist to receive full media superstar treatment, with his “Don’t Forsake Me” video in constant rotation worldwide, an interactive disc, global concert tours, and Trip’s face on the cover of every mainstream magazine and gracing computer screens from Salt Lake City to Beijing. It was the face that did it, of course. Equal parts choirboy and catamite, his strong jaw offset by that full lower lip with its hint of a pout, those slanted electric blue eyes; the faint golden stubble on his chin and his yellow hair, like the sky streaked with emerald and bronze, the simple gold chain and cross nestled against his chest. John Drinkwater had a fit when he saw Trip’s dyed hair. Peter Paul Joseph, the president of Mustard Seed Music, only nodded, his thick face impassive but his eyes sharp and bright as needles.

“The kids’ll eat it up,” he drawled, and gave Trip a look that made the singer’s flesh prickle. “Hope you’re ready for it, Trip.” Then, to John Drinkwater, “He can paint his face blue for all I care. But not the dancing. None of that jumping into the crowd stuff. You understand, Trip—gets out of hand. You could get hurt.”

To make sure it didn’t get out of hand, Peter Paul Joseph hired a manager for the band. By then they were calling themselves Stand in the Temple. The manager was Lucius Chappell, a lean young man only four years older than Trip, with lupine eyes and a Maltese cross tattooed onto his shaved skull. He had put himself through law school managing another Xian group, and eventually signed them to a major label. When Trip and the other band members saw their morality clause, it was Lucius who had drawn it up, and Lucius who presented the signed document with a flourish to Peter Paul Joseph.

“Let the games begin,” Lucius said. His smile revealed white teeth glittering with tiny silver crosses that to Trip looked like miniature gravestones.

“Damn cracker,” Jerry muttered disdainfully; but Lucius just laughed.

At Trip’s insistence, John Drinkwater stayed with the band. There was a pretense of giving him duties, like checking everyone into hotels. But really he was just Trip’s moral support, his last threadbare lifeline to Moody’s Island. It was Lucius who made the arrangements, Lucius who knew how to get fuel for the tour bus and food for the crew, Lucius who somehow got through to booking agents and reporters and online magazines when the phone lines were down and the rest of the world seemed paralyzed.

“I got connections,” Lucius would say, raising his eyebrows and grinning to show his cruciferous enamel. He did, too. Not just with an extensive network of Christian compounds with impressive stockpiles of ethanol, petroleum, and advanced information technologies; but with radical Xian groups like Blood on the Door, which targeted women who had had abortions, and the Blue Antelope Fellowship, youthful preservationists whose firebombings had already killed twenty-three legislators who opposed various endangered species acts. In fact, Lucius’s outside interests took up much of the time in which he should have been monitoring Stand in the Temple. Refueling stops provided opportunities to talk to the pro-life radicals, who in some parts of the South and Northeast controlled much of the black market in firearms as well as fuel. There were cranks, too, with real metal spines protruding from their skulls alongside spiky hair, and metal chastity belts dangling from their waists and groins. Onstage Trip avoided their eyes, meth-crazed and staring, and tried to filter out their manic shrieks when Jerry struck the opening chords of a song they recognized.

It proved more difficult to avoid Blue Antelope. Radical Xian environmentalism was Chappell’s pet cause, and Blue Antelope was its army. During and after performances, he arranged meetings with local members and insisted that Trip greet them. The organization’s demographics were similar to those of the band’s ideal audience: young, white, rebellious Christians who had co-opted the term “Xian” from their neo-pagan counterparts. Their manager even encouraged Trip to write songs inspired by Blue Antelope.

“They’ve got money, man!” Lucius rubbed his fingers together and leered. “Many talents, Trippo—not to mention God on our side.”

“Uh, I’ll think about it,” Trip demurred, wondering how good it would be for album and ticket sales if word got out they were writing songs for the terrorist group that had firebombed an Arizona hospital because its new temporary wing encroached upon a nesting site of the blue-throated hummingbird.

“Where does he get off with this ‘our side’ shit?” Jerry fumed; but Trip had other things to think about. Because, busy as he was with Blue Antelope, Lucius Chappell wasn’t paying much attention to Trip’s gyrations onstage.

So:

No dancin’ in Anson! Trip wailed in Texas, his long arms and hands swaying above his head as he rocked back and forth in one spot onstage. No dancing in Lansing! No waltzing in New Paltz! No moshin’ in Tucson! During each performance he’d stay resolutely in one place, at the very edge of the stage, blue eyes flaring as his hands moved, sinuous and suggestive as one of those Javanese dancers he had seen on the Great Big World Channel in a hotel outside Austin. Wayang-wong, their dance was called; it had impressed the singer mightily.

The band almost always stayed in Christian-run hotels or hostels. Mustard Seed wanted to ensure that their artists were not exposed to the wrong kind of people. Even more insidious was the wrong kind of video programming: since the glimmering began, television had become a sort of deranged pachinko game.

Usually, Trip wouldn’t be able to pick up any stations at all. Other times he’d find himself watching local news, and the fat friendly weatherman would suddenly be displaced by heaving thighs and breasts, mass atrocities in Nigeria, entire city blocks evacuated because of abandoned cars, a reasoned discussion of filmed suicide by a panel of mori artists.

“Shoot. Talking.” Jerry Disney shook his head in disgust as the blurred image of a mass grave abruptly changed. He stood and walked to the door. “I’m gonna go eat.”

That was how Trip was left alone in a hotel room in Terre Haute. Onscreen, the mori artists disappeared. The Disaster Channel flickered in and out of sight with a quick look at a mud slide in Arizona, the heroin overdose of a singer Trip had opened for once in Boston, an unsuccessful surface-to-air missile strike against a commuter 707. Then the channel changed again. The moss-grown ruins of a pagan temple filled the screen.

“…ritual in Probolinggo, Java,” a woman’s voice said softly. Trip sat on the edge of his bed and stared transfixed at the retrofitted Magnavox.

On the temple steps stood a beautiful young man wearing mask-white makeup and silks stiff with pearls and glass beads. From his head rose a crown made of tropical flowers and long blue-black feathers. It trembled as he danced, his bare feet sliding across a cracked stone platform strewn with leaves. Behind the dancer the sky rippled mauve and grass green. The narrator, her voice sibilant and hushed as a child’s, recited in perfect, Oxford-accented English:

The end of the end. Trip was still repeating the words to himself when the television reception blipped out completely.

That night he wrote a song, staying up until John Drinkwater knocked at the door to wake him the next morning. On the bus he taught Jerry and the others the chord changes. They even had time to practice before that night, their very first New York appearance. The Beacon had its own power supply, and it took the road crew longer than usual to set up. In the green room, Trip and the rest of the band went over the song by the wavering light of a sodium lamp, then joined hands for a final prayer. When Stand in the Temple finally took the stage, Trip was shaking so hard his teeth hurt from chattering.

“This is, uh, something I wrote last night. A song—a song about the age we live in.” His body mic gave a weird hiss to the words, as though he were speaking from a room that was on fire. “The End of the End.”

The words were mostly nonsense, cribbed from the Bible John Drinkwater had given him long ago. I possess the keys of hell and death, I will give you the morning star. But the melody was eerie, even coming out of Jerry Disney’s poorly tuned electric guitar. Four chords echoing again and again, with Trip’s voice whispering the refrain:

“The end of the end. The end of the end…”

The audience went crazy for it, and finally Trip did, too, diving into the crowd and letting them catch him, letting them carry him, hand to hand and mouth to mouth, girls kissing him and boys, too, their hands like feeding starfish as he swam across them until Jerry finally pulled him back onto the stage, killing Trip’s body mic in the process. He lost his cross, too, the chain yanked from around his neck by an eager fan. Lucius bought him another the next day, elbowing amongst Russian gangsters and silver-masked drug dealers down in the jewelry district.

“Here,” he said, draping the chain over Trip’s head. An elaborate Abyssinian cross dangled from it, larger than the other one, at once archaic and fashionable. “They’ll notice this one.”

That was how it started, the end of the end, the beginning of the end. When Trip started dancing, everything changed. Within a week, Stand in the Temple became the first Xian band ever to hold the Number One slot on Billboard International.

CHRISTIAN RIGHT’S DARLING TURNS SALOME! shrieked the New York Beacon. XIAN STAR WALKS ON WATER! CHECK RADIUM @ Z.RO.com FOR PIXNFAX!

And later, when his first single was released and his picture appeared everywhere, silvery blue threads streaming from his eyes like tears, TRIP TAKES A TRIP! The holographic cover showed Trip posed as a blond Christ in Gethsemane, the image saved from smarminess or cries of heresy by the sheer intensity of Trip’s expression as he gazed upward at a golden bar of light slanting down from the sky. It was an expression that was at once exultant and doomed. The music’s apocalyptic mood suited those days of wrath: the web downloaded two million copies in twenty-three hours.

His audience grew. There were still the church groups bused in from suburbs and compounds and housing projects, and the mainstream alternative fans; but now there were others, too. Blocks of tickets were bought by Blue Antelope and other progressive fellowships. Trip could recognize the former by their masks. No demure white surgeons’ masks or the simple black crosses favored by mainstream Christians, but colorful representations of African elephants and pandas and the blue antelope, which was the first African species to be extinguished by humans, hunted to death by 1801 for dog meat. And, of course, there were droves of new fans who were obviously either newly anointed Xians or just old-fashioned heretics out for a good time listening to bad news.

In vain Trip argued with Xian talk-show hosts and church leaders. “It’s not just me, you know.” Online and onscreen his boyish tenor was soft, almost pleading: if you had no visuals, you might think he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “Some guy gets onstage and moves around, what’s the big deal? It’s these times, everyone’s so repressed—I’m just trying to, ummm, put some tension, some joy into it. I mean, even if it really is the end of the world, I don’t think Jesus meant for us never to have a good time.”

OUR ran a sidebar—GIVE US THAT GOOD-TIME RELIGION!—and sales continued to soar. During their second, fateful New York engagement, Lucius Chappell spent a lot of time speaking quietly and intently on the phone. A&R people started showing up backstage after the shows. Messages from entertainment moguls began appearing on Trip’s knee top. Foot and bike couriers arrived at the Stamford Four Seasons where the band was staying, their faces hidden behind masks, glinting the metallic green of a beetle’s wing or striped like yellow jackets, black and atomic gold. The couriers bore contracts, T-shirts, vacu-sealed bags of coffee. When these offerings were ignored, corporate flacks in ragged Xian garb would flag Trip in the street and offer to take him to lunch. And one afternoon Trip got a surprise visit from Peter Paul Joseph in his Stamford hotel suite.

“We don’t want to lose control of what we’ve got here,” Peter Paul said. He wore a plain white surgeon’s mask over his mouth and nose, something he seldom bothered with back in Branson. “Trip. Your—our—success. Bringing the Word to all these kids. We’re talking about a very special situation here, and we just have to be very careful about not losing control.” He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.

Sprawled in his chair facing Peter Paul, Trip didn’t laugh—he was too polite for that—but he did smile, tightly, a very controlled smile that didn’t show any teeth. “Sure,” he said in his soft voice, then lowered his head, one hand shading his eyes. “I understand.”

The next day he called Agrippa Music, the subsidiary of GFI Worldwide that had distributed LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA. “This is Trip Marlowe. I—I want to talk to someone about signing.”

The someone who returned his call was A&R head Nellie Candry, who was (to put it mildly) taken aback.

“Of course we’d love to, Trip, that would be awesome, I mean it would be better than awesome, but you have to go through the proper channels with these things.”

Trip could hear her voice catching, that tightness in the vocal cords people got when they were nervous or excited. He felt a quick surge of guilt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, go over someone’s head or something—”

“No! No—” The tremor in her voice eased and Trip relaxed, slumping down onto the hotel bed. “It’s just that—well, we should really talk to your attorney, find out the terms of your contract with Mustard Seed, things like that. I mean, I assume they control the rights to everything you’ve done so far—”

“Just LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA and the singles. I mean, we haven’t actually recorded anything else—”

He heard her take a breath. “Right! We’ll have to iron that out. But there’s always a way around these things, Trip, so don’t worry. I’ll get someone in Legal on it right away. Right away! ”

Trip didn’t tell her he didn’t have an attorney, except for those employed by Mustard Seed. Instead he arranged to meet her in the hotel lobby bar that evening at eleven-thirty.

“Eleven-thirty?” Nellie laughed. “In a bar? Isn’t that kind of weird? For you, I mean.”

Trip shook his head: it was one of those rare occasions when Lucius had booked them into a fancy secular hotel, and he was curious to check it out. “It’s a good time for me,” he said. “I don’t have a show tonight. I’ll see you later.” And he hung up.

It actually was late for him. Lucius never bothered to check, but John Drinkwater enforced a strict ten o’clock curfew on those nights when Trip wasn’t performing. This wasn’t for reasons of propriety, so much as to ensure that Trip, a lifelong night owl, would get enough sleep. Trip’s onstage shenanigans notwithstanding, John Drinkwater could no more imagine his protégé doing something truly outrageous—drinking, smoking, drugs, girls—than he could himself.

That night, John’s good-night call came at 9:17. Two hours later Trip went down to the lobby. His long green-streaked hair was shaved in the front, and he had a new cruciform brand on his forehead, still raw and red in the center. He wore black denim jeans, faded to steel gray, and a lumpen wool fisherman’s sweater that had been his father’s. He drew the attention of the hotel’s few ostentatiously dressed guests. It was impossible to read the expressions behind their masks, those artfully minimal Noh-like carapaces favored by the rich; but their conversation fell silent as he passed, and he could glimpse their eyes tracking him from inside their glittering shells.

Still, no one seemed to recognize him: that’s why they were staying in the secular Stamford Four Seasons, and not a church-owned place. He walked quickly, heart pounding as he glanced around for Lucius or John Drinkwater. But the lobby was nearly empty, save for uniformed bellhops and a lone woman waiting by the front doors, dark eyes regarding him suspiciously from behind her extravagant floral mask.

He had to show ID to get into the lobby bar, a roomy alcove overgrown with tropical plants. The golden retriever held by the security guard sniffed Trip apologetically, tail wagging.

“Enjoy your evening,” the guard said, and waved him past.

Just inside the lounge a discreet gold-lettered sign read For your health and safety, this area has been treated with Viconix. Little bamboo pagodas held tiny birds, finches and weavers that chirped plaintively as Trip passed. Hidden lanterns cast a twilight glow upon the overhanging branches and sent ripples of indigo and black washing across an elaborate fountain shaped like a dragon. There was a smell of rain, of newly turned earth, and the ubiquitous vanilla scent of the Viconix enzyme.

“Trip.”

He started. The voice came from behind a thicket of bamboo. When Trip peered around it he saw a youngish older woman sitting at a small glass table. She had short dark hair, very chic, and was heavily made up: chalk-white skin, eyes elaborately kohled with swirls of red and blue and yellow, mouth a crimson minnow’s curve. She wore a long-sleeved billowing silk dress, sand colored, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. A rubber mandrill mask lay beside her wineglass. Except for the enzyme-treated gauze that lined it, exuding the smell of vanilla, the mask resembled the sort of thing kids on Moody’s Island used to wear at Halloween. At the woman’s side sat a very thin blond girl who would not meet Trip’s gaze.

“Trip! Hi, Nellie Candry.” Extending a hand gloved in topaz silk. “And this is my daughter Marzana—”

“Marz,” the girl murmured. Trip caught a defiant glint in her eyes as she glanced up at him.

“—Marz, my daughter Marz. She’s actually my foster daughter,” Nellie went on in a conspiratorial tone, as though the girl weren’t there. “I mean, you can tell,’Cause I’m not like actually old enough to be her real mother. I was supposed to get another girl, I went over to Poland the week after the earthquake and—this is incredible—the other girl is dead, everyone at that particular orphanage was dead but Marz !”

Nellie leaned back in her chair and stared covetously at the girl beside her. “So I like bribed everyone I met and brought her back. Isn’t that amazing ? Not only that, she loves your music, and I thought, what the fuck, what’s the good of being A&R if you can’t do something like this, you know, bring the kid along so she can meet you. I didn’t think you’d mind. Oh! please, Trip, have a seat, have a seat—”

He sat. Nellie was asking him something, what he wanted to drink; he gestured weakly with one hand, nodding when he heard papaya juice but still not looking at Nellie, looking only at her—

The blond girl. He had no idea how old she was—fourteen? sixteen?—that was a part of him that never had the chance to develop: girl radar, boy radar. But she was so thin she looked younger, hands so long and pale and slender they were like bundled birch twigs; a white chip of a face with no makeup. Even her lips were pale, and her cheeks. The tiny indentations to each side of her delicate nose looked almost surreally dark, as though they had been daubed with black powder. A fringe of white corn-silk hair fell across her brow. She batted at it nervously with one hand, and he saw that her nails were bitten to the quick. On her right hand she wore a ring, a plain thin band of dull gold. Trip couldn’t tell how tall she was. She looked tiny, and he would have thought she really were a child were it not for the kingfisher flash of her eyes, oddly vigilant and twilight blue.

“Trip? Here’s your juice.”

A gloved hand pushed something across the table and he took it, drank it, but tasted nothing. He heard nothing, saw nothing except the girl staring back at him with such wild intensity that his face flushed and he could feel himself growing hard, so hard so suddenly that he moved awkwardly to hide it and nearly spilled his drink.

“Trip? You okay?” Nellie’s voice dipped in concern. “We could do this tomorrow—”

“No—no, this is good, this is fine…”

If he had looked up, he would have seen a flicker of satisfaction in Nellie Candry’s dark eyes as she glanced from Trip to the blond girl, and heard a very soft sigh as she leaned back in her chair. Somewhere in his head a lisping voice warned him: fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga…

But it was too late. He was bewitched.

They talked. Rather, Nellie talked, Kabuki makeup belying her excited tone.

“You know, I was at Todd and Haiko’s show, when all the girls were wearing these—” She held up the mandrill mask, made a face, and laughed. “I mean, talk about revolt into fucking style! The Surgeon General oughta give those guys a medal—you know, fashion fucking matters. It can save lives.” The mask fluttered in her hand as she motioned for their waiter. “Do you have irradiated skim milk? Trip? More juice?”

Trip nodded. Ceaselessly, restlessly, after a while not even pretending to look at Nellie or pay attention: he was simply riveted by the blond girl. She sat scarcely two feet away from him, but he might have beheld her upon a television screen. She seemed that distant, that detached; that unreal. She continued to stare at him with those feral eyes, every now and then tilting her head to regard something else, a slight movement in the lush branches above them, the clatter of a dropped glass like a gunshot at another table. But mostly she just stared back at him: two enchanted children, and not a word between them spoken.

“Well, Trip,” Nellie Candry said at last. Her gaze lingered on the boy. It was a look Trip might have recognized if he had seen it, a certain affinity with Lucius Chappell’s avid gaze; and if he had been less moonstruck, he might have wondered, too, at the mandrill mask, the discreet tattoo of a running antelope revealed on Nellie’s wrist where the silk glove cuffed above a spur of bone. “This has been enlightening. I guess I’ll just have Legal call someone tomorrow at Mustard Seed. You said you didn’t know who—”

“I’m sorry.” Trip wrenched his head around, forcing himself to look at her. “I mean, probably I could get a name for you—”

“Please. Not to worry.” Nellie’s fingers curled around a blinking plastic chip: somehow the check had been taken care of, his second empty glass replaced with a full one, and all without him noticing. “This will work out fabulously. Now—”

She slid the mask over her face, immediately was transformed into a simian goblin. As she stood Trip found himself stumbling to his feet, his hand outstretched imploringly; not to say good-bye but to beg her to stay, to leave the girl at least for another moment—

“Marz, would you mind waiting for me a few minutes?” From a pocket in her loose dress Nellie pulled a phone. “I’ve got to send a message. Trip—”

She turned to him. The rubber mask muffled her voice. “It’s been great talking to you.” Her hand when he shook it was small and fine boned. She lifted the mask so that he could see her smile. For the first time, Trip realized that the heavy makeup covered a network of scars, gashes that began beneath her eyes and extended to her jaw. Petra virus. Embarrassed and slightly horrified, he looked away as Nellie went on. “I’ll touch base with you tomorrow. And Marz—right back.”

Immediately he slid into her empty chair, the one nearest to the girl.

“Hey,” he said.

The girl smiled tentatively. “Hi.”

“So.” Trip cleared his throat. “She’s, like, your mother?”

The girl stared at the empty glass in front of her. Her expression clouded, and she brought a hand to her mouth, started nibbling at her thumb. After a moment she spoke, in a sullen tone. “Yeah. She’s okay, I guess.” Her voice was heavily accented; it made his skin break out in goose bumps. “I am supposed to be dead, you know.”

“Oh,” said Trip.

He was close enough that he could smell the sweetish fragrance that clung to the fine white hair brushing the nape of her neck. Without thinking he took one of her hands. The other remained at her mouth, where she continued to chew her thumbnail. In the room around them Trip could hear soft voices and the sleepy twittering of caged finches, the plink of water in the fountain. He thought that probably he should say something but had no idea what. He had practically no experience whatsoever with girls, except those heavily chaperoned at church outings; a big deal had been made of his signing a vow of celibacy along with his morality contract. Virginal as a nun at twenty-two, Trip Marlowe had never really understood what the big deal was all about.

Until now.

He squeezed the girl’s hand. She didn’t squeeze it back, but smiled at him with devastating sweetness. Her skin was the bluish white of skim milk, the hollow of her throat lavender-gray. When she tilted her head her eyes caught the light and glowed violet. “So,” Trip coughed self-consciously. “Marz. Your real name is Marzana? Is that, uh, Polish?”

She shook her head. “They called me the hyacinth girl.” Her voice was raspy, with a slight lisp. “So—just Marz. Okay?”

“Sure. Listen—” He took her other hand, the thumb still damp, and held it tightly on the tabletop. “Could you—you want to do something? Like see a movie or something?”

Marz laughed. “It’s kind of late—”

“I mean tomorrow. I could meet you somewhere, pick you up. John Drinkwater could come with us, from my church. So you can tell her—Nellie, your mother—”

“I don’t know.” The girl slipped her hands from his. She looked away, very deliberately. “Plus I just met you. I like your video, though. But yeah, okay.”

He met her the next afternoon in the city, in Nellie Candry’s office at Agrippa Music. He told himself he couldn’t believe it was so easy. In fact it was almost the hardest thing he’d ever done. He lied to John Drinkwater and Jerry and Lucius, telling them he wanted to go to the city to visit one of the museums, the one with the dinosaurs. John was surprised but not suspicious, and instantly said no.

“By yourself? You crazy, Trip? You never been in the city by yourself.”

“I won’t walk—I’ll take taxis everywhere,” Trip protested, trying not to sound desperate. He’d been up all night, figuring out what he’d say. Now his heart was beating so hard he was afraid John would hear it; he was afraid John would know he’d jerked off three times already, thinking of her. “Or get me a driver like we did in Austin—”

“You want to go to the city?” Lucius raised his eyebrows. “By yourself?”

The manager looked over at John Drinkwater and shrugged. “Hey, there’s always a first time, right? I turned Alabaster Jar loose in San Francisco once, turned out okay. And Trip’s not like Jerry. He’s not gonna get in any trouble.”

He turned back to Trip. “Sure, you can go, man. I’ll call Skylark Limo and get you a driver. Just—I dunno, don’t flash it all around who you are, okay? And don’t make a big deal out of it with the others. And definitely don’t tell Mr. John Paul Tightass Joseph.”

To Trip’s amazement, John Drinkwater sighed and agreed. “Okay. You’re a big boy now, you can take care of yourself. I guess. Here—”

John took out his wallet and carefully counted ten twenty-dollar bills. “Now put those in your shoe, in case you get mugged and they take your credit card. And tell the driver to have you back here by four. We got a show tomorrow, and I’ve got some stuff to discuss with you all.”

He walked Trip to the door of his hotel room, his hand on Trip’s shoulder. “And listen—”

Trip halted. He looked at John’s face but couldn’t meet his eyes. “You be careful, okay? Use your head, don’t do anything stupid.” And John hugged him, his unshaven cheek brushing Trip’s as he kissed him on the forehead.

The limo arrived, petrol-driven with an array of small solar cells atop it like so many black parasols, and monstrous tires, the better to hydroplane through the messier parts of the Merritt Parkway. The interior was clean but worn, smelling strongly of Viconix and stale cigarette smoke. The uniformed driver was a former marine whose Medal of Honor hung beside her ID card on the dashboard. Her mouth was hidden behind a utilitarian blue-and-gray mask embossed with the limo service’s logo.

“You going to the Pyramid?”

Trip shrugged and glanced nervously back at the shining outlines of the Stamford Four Seasons, fading into the rubescent streets behind them. “I guess. The GFI building?”

The driver nodded. “That’s the Pyramid. Ever been there?”

“Uh-uh.”

“It’s something else, man. Like Disney World, ever been to Disney World? But this Pyramid, miracle they even got it built, you know? All this shit coming down, they still throw that thing up in two years. Fucking Japanese, man, they can do anything. It’ll be a few hours before we get there. Want to hear some music?” Trip shook his head. “Sure? Okay. Let me know if you want anything.” She pressed a button and disappeared behind a plasmer shield.

He dozed most of the way, exhausted by expectation. He didn’t wake until they were on Riverside Drive, stalled in traffic beside a park, trees holding on to withered brown leaves, swing sets with no swings, some kind of playground structure that had been so vandalized its original purpose could only be guessed at. Broken blacktop and scuffed brown earth, no grass; but there were benches, and there were people: lots of them, faces protected from killing sky and viruses by hats or cheap plastic masks. Even through the car’s closed windows Trip could smell smoke, meat cooking—meat! The scent made Trip dizzy; he couldn’t recall where he had last smelled meat. Was it Austin? A radio blasted music that sounded like gunfire. Mothers watched children, dogs strained at leashes. A group of men and women sat cross-legged in a circle, chanting, heads tilted to the sky so that he could see the soft fleshy outlines of faces beneath their masks. Along the edge of the cracked sidewalk, people sold things from rickety card tables or blankets laid upon the ground. The crimson sky gave it all a harsh, premonitory glow.

Sudden loud tapping at the passenger window. Trip edged nervously into the center of the car seat as a maskless woman pressed her face against the glass.

“I will pray for you,” she shouted. She had sun-ravaged skin, gray-blond hair, and a red dot in the middle of her forehead. “Pray for me—”

He stared after her as the limo lurched forward. Several well-dressed black men in suits and ties and kente-cloth robes crossed the street in front of them, tending a small group of children. Boys on Rollerblades swept past, and the men smiled, calling out names: Robert, Fayal, Assad.

Trip turned away and watched as the park slid by them. On the broken sidewalk a man was selling coffins made of plywood, with a small and more elegant model of carved pine set atop them with a sign: Will Make To Order. Children hawked plastic shoelaces. Where the sidewalk trailed off into rubble, there were people selling food. Canned goods mostly, but one woman had a case of peanut butter. Trip stared longingly at the red and blue jars, touched the pocket where his wallet formed a reassuring square. Another woman was selling water from a blue five-gallon container, measuring shots into a chipped plastic mug, filling milk containers and those Day-Glo plastic drinktubes that kids wore around their necks.

Then the hired car turned onto a side street where the alleys had become canals, the main avenues a yellow churn of taxis and hired vehicles. They were approaching midtown. The driver lowered her shield and pointed out a few landmarks to him: Grand Central Terminal’s sandbagged facade, the never-completed Disney Towers. Trip rubbed his eyes and mimed interest.

His mouth was dry, his palms damp. The limo stopped abruptly, in front of a seemingly endless line of other limousines and expensive hired cars. The driver smiled and adjusted her mirrored sunglasses.

“Okay. Here she is. Got any idea how long you’ll be?”

It took him a minute to grasp the fact that here was the headquarters of GFI Worldwide Inc. He stuck his face against the window and peered upward, but could make out nothing but some kind of flashing marquee and, above that, a blinding slant of glass or metal that reflected the rippling sky. Beyond the line of waiting limos an immense crowd passed in and out of enormous revolving doors, like a huge deck of cards being endlessly shuffled.

The Pyramid itself was so huge it seemed almost extraneous, a monolithic backdrop to the street. He thought of what he had heard someone say on TV, shortly after the Pyramid opened but before the first waves of failed terrorist attacks directed at what had, so far, proved to be an inviolable structure. That it was like a hive, that the Pyramid had been constructed with hivelike precision and efficiency and speed. That, despite the myriad restaurants and boutiques and studios inside, despite the theaters and offices and all the galleria trappings of upscale commerce, it did not seem to have been designed with human beings in mind.

“Sir?”

Another moment before Trip remembered that he was “sir.” “Uh, I dunno. I mean, probably not long. I’m just picking someone up. We’re going to the museum.”

The driver nodded, then popped her door and slid into the street. An instant later Trip’s door opened and, with a flourish, she beckoned him out.

“They’re expecting you, sir? Security’s tight here.”

Trip’s throat contracted. “Yeah.” His voice came out in a whisper, but the driver seemed satisfied. She smiled again and pointed at the building’s immense maw, the doors changing color to keep pace with the rainbow sky.

“Well, I’ll be here!” Once more she took her place behind the wheel. Trip swallowed, shoved his hands into his pockets, and forged on into the building.

He had to go through a metal detector and a crowded disinfectant chamber, where a yawning woman in a surgical mask gave him a perfunctory blast of Viconix.

“Any recent infections?” She glanced at his face and hands. A masked guard held a dog that sniffed Trip perfunctorily. Trip smiled at the dog; then, as the guard motioned him on, went through the door, into the Pyramid. And outside.

He gasped, stopping so quickly that he was immediately buffeted by more people hurrying by.

“Watch it, asshole,” someone hissed. Trip stepped aside, blinking in amazement.

Overhead, the sun shone radiantly in a blue sky. Golden sun like the first day of summer vacation, sky so brilliant it was like blue paint thrown into his eyes. A faint warm wind was blowing, just enough that Trip could feel the hair on the back of his neck stir. The breeze smelled sweetly of earth and pine needles, and fresh water. Beneath his feet the ground felt uneven. But it was all there, branches of trees moving against very high thin white clouds, light exploding behind leaves and limbs in a thousand rayed parhelions. There were people everywhere, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, walking and running and talking animatedly. Most of them were expensively dressed and masked, in what looked to Trip like evening clothes, or outfits for a costume party; but other people were wearing ostentatiously casual outdoor clothing, the kind you bought at L.L. Bean once upon a time, or from catalogs that pretended to outfit expeditions.

And there was not the cacophony of sound he might have expected: instead all those voices spiraled up and out of earshot, like doves loosed in an auditorium. He stood with his mouth open, as though to catch rain upon his tongue, his eyes closed because you can’t look into the sun. He felt dazed with unthinking joy. It wasn’t until someone else elbowed him, though with an apology this time, that he opened his eyes and began looking around with intense curiosity, suspicion almost, trying to figure out how it was done.

At first he couldn’t tell. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the light he began to get a fix on the immense space soaring above him. Somewhere, very very high above the trees, above the clouds even, and the radiant sun, there seemed to be wires, or catwalks, or some kind of grid that moved in subtle ways, so that his eyes were never quite able to focus on what was there. When he turned to look around, he saw in the distance numerous mezzanines and balconies and glass elevators that did not climb any walls—there were no walls that he could see—but crept along glowing green cables that slanted above the crowds like a spider’s draglines, moving toward some unimaginably distant apex. When he looked down he saw earth, and stones. There was a faint purl of running water, the smell of crushed ferns. But he saw no pebbles, no twigs or fallen leaves. And when he began to walk, slowly, as he used to on the beach at Moody’s Island looking for shells, he saw that all the stones were fairly large, and flat. When he tried to nudge one with his foot it didn’t move. None of them did. He strolled past several trees, white birches with great masses of granite grouped around them, like benches, where people sat and laughed. Ferns grew beneath the trees, and moss; but when he looked carefully he could see that the ferns were set in some kind of elaborate planter, designed to look like stone. So were the trees. He noticed other things—faucets poking up from the ground like mushrooms, cables threaded along tree trunks like vines. After a few minutes even some of the people started to look odd: they smiled at him, but their gaze remained on him a little too long: if he glanced back they would still be staring at him, and only pretending to have a conversation. He wondered if they were security guards, or if someone in this vast complex actually paid people to sit around in mountain-climbing gear and look as though they were enjoying the great outdoors.

This thought brought Trip to his senses. He tried to look purposeful, jostling into people until he found an information kiosk where he was directed to yet another glass booth from which enclosed walkways radiated like the arms of a sea star. He went inside and sat on a patchwork sofa as another security dog nuzzled his legs, waiting as a guard buzzed Nellie Candry’s office.

“You’re all clear.” The guard watched Trip sign a logbook, then pointed him down one of the enclosed walkways, to an elevator. A minute later Trip got off at the thirtieth level, dizzy and slightly nauseated by the ride.

“Welcome to Agrippa Music,” a voice announced. Trip opened his mouth to respond, snapped it shut when he saw there was no one there. “Bien venu à Agrippa Music,” the voice went on, repeating the welcome in Japanese and German and Spanish. “Living in the Light…”

Everywhere he looked there were video screens showcasing various Agrippa acts. It took him a moment to find the door, cobalt glass with AGRIPPA MUSIC spelled out in shifting holographic letters. Behind it a young man sat monitoring phone calls.

“Hi!” he called cheerily as Trip entered. Silvery plasmer implants hid his eyes, but he didn’t wear a mask, and his smile seemed genuine. “You must be Trip Marlowe! Come on in, come on in!” He adjusted his body mic and announced, “Nellie? Your date’s here,” then gestured at a chair. “Sit down, honey, she’ll be right with you.”

Trip’s heart sank when Nellie Candry stepped into the reception area, alone. “Aren’t you sweet to ask Marzie out!” she said, then laughed. She wasn’t wearing a mask today, or heavy makeup. Beneath a sheen of light foundation her scars had the silvery roughness of beech bark; the cicatrices left by petra virus gleamed like lacquer. “Hey, don’t worry—she’s upstairs, waiting for you. Did you think you were going to be stuck with me ?”

“He should be so lucky!” the receptionist cried as Nellie pulled Trip through another door.

“So. The Museum of Natural History.” Nellie grinned as they padded down a hall carpeted with thick spongy black rubber, the second life of a hundred old steel radials. “Is that where you nice Xian boys go on a first date?”

Trip tried to smile. “Yeah, I guess. I’ve never been, actually. I wanted to see the planetarium.”

Nellie laughed again; it made the vertical gashes on her cheeks move in a strange way, as though they were composed of a different material than the rest of her face. “The planetarium! God, that’s great! Real James Dean, huh?” Trip looked at her blankly. “You know, Rebel Without a Cause ? Oh shit, never mind. They never finished the renovation there, you knew that, right? Here we are.”

They turned a corner, and she took him by the arm.

“Listen,” she said in a lower voice. They stood in a softly lit alcove before a set of black glass doors with Nellie Candry etched in gold script. “I just want you to know this is a really nice thing you’re doing. It really means a lot to Marz. She’s had a hard time in the last year or so, coming from a war zone, you know? She and I are still getting used to each other, and she hasn’t really made any friends at the Brearley School yet. So it’s a pretty big deal that someone like you would take her somewhere. She’s just a kid, you know?”

A flutter of panic in Trip’s chest: how old was she, anyway?

Nellie rattled on. “But I figured, well, we’re nice guys, right?” She cocked her head and gazed at him with those disconcertingly lovely eyes. “Us Christians. I mean Xians. You especially. I mean, I probably wouldn’t let her go out with that guy from Slag Hammadi, you know?”

Trip blushed, but already Nellie was steering him through the black doors and into her office. There were posters tacked to the walls, rollaway stands holding video monitors and VCRs and, surprisingly, piles of old-fashioned silver film canisters. In one corner leaned some kind of staff, topped with a grotesque wooden mask and deer’s antlers.

“My secret life,” Nellie confessed. She paused to rub a strip of acetate between her fingers. “I started out as a maker of documentary films. Then I got sick—”

She grimaced. Trip looked away from her scarred face, to her hands, and noticed that she wore a dull gold ring like Marzana’s. “—though actually, I’ve got another film project I’m working on now. This A&R stuff, it’s just a day job, you know? Not that I don’t take it seriously,” she added, grinning. “Okay, Marzie! Company!”

Nellie edged past Trip and slid behind a tiny banana yellow desk strewn with IT discs and promotional gadgets: Viconix dispensers, crucifix penlights, body gloves. Atop her telephone perched a snowy owl mask. “Here he is. Now, if you guys can hang here for just a minute—”

“Hey,” said Trip, trying to keep his voice from breaking. “Marz. Hi.”

Marz lifted her head and peered out from between the arms of the chair in front of Nellie’s desk.

“Hi,” she whispered.

A fringe of corn-silk hair hung across her eyes. She wore very tight, white jodhpurs, a fuzzy lavender sweater, and a hugely oversize raincoat of transparent pink vinyl that made a crunching sound when she moved. Her feet were clad in pink plastic mules with bunnies on them.

Trip shook his head. It was the end of March, and freezing outside.

“Aren’t you going to be cold?”

Marz shot him a disdainful look. “No.”

Nellie laughed. “What’d I tell you?” She pointed a finger at Trip and smiled triumphantly. “You’ll take better care of her than me—I told her to wear that coat.”

He sat uneasily, staring at the blond girl. Nellie was asking him questions—had he ever made an IT recording? Had he ever been to New York before? Had he ever done drugs? IZE?

This last was odd enough that Trip looked away, startled. “Drugs? Jeez, no.”

“Never?” Nellie tilted her head, her eyes unreadable: was he being tested? She picked up several 8xl0s, black-and-white photos of blank-faced people standing in line, and fanned herself with them. “A lot of people don’t really think of IZE as a drug, you know. I mean, they practically had FDA approval before—”

Her hand waved disdainfully at the wall with its square of dark protective glass. Outside the glimmering could be glimpsed only as arabesques of black and gray moving above the skyscrapers. “—before all this came down.”

Trip hunched his shoulders. He wanted to leave. This woman was acting fucking bizarre. “Uh, yeah. I guess. But I don’t do drugs. I mean, I’m not just saying that. I never, ever did anything. My father was an alcoholic and he, like, killed himself. I signed a pledge when I was in sixth grade, and I’ve kept it.”

Nellie smiled. “Of course. I read that somewhere, or no—I saw you on Midnight, that’s it. Well, that’s great, Trip, really!” Her eyes grew soft as she leaned across the desk, smoothing the photos and setting them aside. “’Cause a lot of these bands, they’re just cashing in on the whole Xian phenomenon, just riding the wave—but you feel like the real thing to me. I think you’re just going to get bigger and bigger, Trip. I think you’re going to be huge.”

He nodded, forcing himself to smile; then let his glance ride back to Marz. She stared at him, eyes narrowed, and very slowly licked her upper lip.

The phone rang. “Okay!” crowed Nellie, cradling the receiver in her palm. “Off you go, kiddies. Marz—be good—”

They left. Even with her head down and eyes blanketed by her hair, Marz managed to navigate the Pyramid lobby with enviable ease. At her side Trip tried desperately to think of something to say. He did remember to let her go first into the limo, the driver holding the door open for them.

“The museum?” she asked. Trip nodded, and they were off.

The limo let them off in front of the planetarium’s unfinished new entrance, hidden behind plywood and rusted scaffolding. Trip told the driver to come back in three hours. Then he scrambled out behind Marz, stepping on her raincoat so that she lurched forward against the curb.

“Oh—hey, I’m sorry, I—”

He tried to grab her arm but came up with a crackling handful of vinyl. As the car pulled away he found himself staring down at her small pale face, nestled in its bright pink wrappings like a marzipan sweet.

“It’s okay,” she said, and headed toward the entrance. For a moment he stared, stunned by the sight of the girl’s gumdrop coat flapping around her white-clad legs. Then he hurried after her.

He paid for their tickets, and they stood in line for the first show of the day. The planetarium complex seemed not so much unfinished as partially excavated from an archaeological dig. There were yawning pits crisscrossed by boards and metal catwalks, monolithic objects—kiosks, dioramas, monitors, IT booths—strewn seemingly at random throughout the cavernous space, and a fine layer of sawdust and grit overall. Trip felt as though he were lurching around inside of someone else’s movie, doing simple things—buying tickets, waiting behind the worn brass stanchions—without actually sensing the two slips of paper in his hand or the rough velvet rope beneath his fingers. He had never been on his own like this before, not in a city. Was it okay to pay with a fifty-dollar bill instead of a credit card? What would happen if he took off his heavy old pea coat? Should he give Marz her own ticket, or hold them both? There were only a handful of other people waiting to get in, an annoyingly convivial family whose masks identified them as part of TeamAmericon! and a small school group wearing uniforms and wrist monitors, desert boots and tiny ID implants that glowed on the backs of their hands.

“So.” He coughed nervously. “You ever been here before?”

Marz shook her head. “No.” She stared hungrily at the school group. Trip watched her face, the way her tongue flicked out to lick her lower lip and her strange violet eyes as she watched the children elbow each other and snigger at their cabal of chaperones. Her expression was sad yet intense; after a minute she looked up at him.

“I used to wear one of those monitors.” She leaned back so that her arm stuck out from its plastic wrapping, displaying a wrist so thin Trip marveled that anything could have remained there without sliding off. “When Nellie first brought me over. But I was allergic.” She traced a circle where the flesh still held a grayish shadow, like the stain left by a cheap metal bracelet. “See?”

Trip nodded, reached with a tentative finger to stroke the smooth soft skin inside her wrist, then to touch the simple gold band on her ring finger. “Did it hurt?”

“No.” She glanced at the schoolchildren. The line started to move, the children arranging themselves in an orderly row alongside their teachers. “I wish I still had it.”

Trip handed their tickets to a solemn usher, and they went inside. The huge dimly lit space reminded him of a cathedral he had visited once, barely occupied and chilly as this place was and with the same whisper of ambient music and rustling papers. It smelled faintly of vanilla and balsam disinfectant. He took Marz’s hand and led her to the far side of the room, where no one else was sitting, and they took their seats in a middle row. The program started, an energetically produced but intrinsically dull explication of the atmospheric effects that produced the glimmering and which now seemed to be giving birth to still more and stranger celestial events. There was a protracted discussion of millennial cults and prophecies through the ages. Trip yawned and scrunched way down in his seat. Beside him Marz did the same, her raincoat popping explosively.

“I better take it off.” She giggled. “Before they throw me out. That happened once, you know.”

She dropped the raincoat over the row of seats in front of them. In the middle of the room the aged Zeiss planetarium moved up and down like an avid mantis, a huge ungainly mechanism covered with round lenses and bulging optics. Overhead the dome with its spectral colors faded to a night sky, and a woman’s recorded voice began intoning the names of constellations.

“Aquarius,” she said. “The Water Bearer.”

Trip stared at the false sky. He had not seen so many stars since he was a boy in Maine. Everywhere else he had traveled, the sky had been either poisoned by the glimmering or given a sickly yellowish cast by crime lights and glowing smog. Here inside the planetarium it was as though he were back on Moody’s Island. Suddenly he felt homesick. Even the chill bite of air conditioning made him think of home; though he had always hated it there, the rancid smell from the fish-processing plant and the buckled floor of the grimy little Half-Moon trailer where he lived with his grandmother.

“It’s so cold,” a voice came in his ear, so soft it might have been his own thought. A small, very cold hand plopped on top of his. Not moving, not curling its fingers around his, just lying there as though it had fallen from the sky. He could feel her ring, the slender band of gold like a chip of ice against his knuckle. Glancing sideways he saw the girl gazing at the dome, her mouth slightly open. She turned and looked at him, not saying anything, not moving her hand. Just staring at him with those strange shadowed eyes, and smiling.

Afterward Trip recalled that moment and knew it for the one in which his life was cleaved in two. Sitting there in the make-believe night, with make-believe peepers crying and make-believe stars, and the warm sweet dusty scent of the girl beside him with her face upturned. The Zeiss whirred and spun. Stars washed across her cheeks as the astronomer spoke their names. Algol in Perseus, Regulus in Leo, the winter sky tumbling into spring and Corona Borealis rising to shine upon her brow with such brilliance that he had to look away. When he glanced up again she was staring at him. The pixie light gave a strange luster to her skin, as though it were made of some brittle nacreous material that would splinter into dust if he were to touch it. But all he wanted to do was touch it. His lips were parted, and he was breathing hard, his heart pounding, hands unsteady, until suddenly he leaned over, crushing her arm into the seat rest as he kissed her. Her mouth so small and hot it was like some warm liquid spilling into his, her fine hair like pollen filling his nostrils until he had to draw back, sneezing. Before he could catch his breath she was tugging at his hands, pulling him gently but irresistibly toward her. He kissed her everywhere, not just her mouth but the fine soft flesh of her cheeks and chin and jaw, her throat, with its pulse beating like a trapped bird, and the rough, gnawed tips of her fingers. He could hear her gasp and feel her heart knocking in her chest; smelled her, a hot pungent scent like the inside of a winter barn. But for all that she did not stir, not once she had pulled him to her. He closed his arms about her—he almost felt they could have circled her twice, she was so small and thin—but she did not embrace him. When he kissed her, her mouth parted, he could taste her fluid sweetness like melted chocolate. But her lips and tongue did not move. Her hand did not stir where it lay upon her thigh, with the golden ring winking softly in the darkness. Trip had never kissed a girl before. In a horrified rush of embarrassment, he realized he must be doing it wrong. Abruptly he pulled away from her.

“… the star Fomalhaut. Above it you can see Aquarius, perhaps the most ancient of all the constellations, with its alpha star Sadalmelik resting almost exactly on the ecliptic, the celestial equator. Sadalmelik means ‘beloved of the king’ in Arabic, and Aquarius shows up in all kinds of ancient myths, including several deluge myths that predate the Biblical story of the flood. As an astrological sign, it is associated with air, and danger. Now if you follow my pointer to the north…”

The blond girl’s eyes were wide but without expression. Her arm still lay upon the velvet seat rest. As the projected stars crept across the dome her eyes would hold their light and for an instant seem to candle with passion or curiosity. Gazing at her Trip felt gooseflesh break out on his arms and the back of his neck.

“Who are you really?” he whispered. But then the dome grew pale, the lights came up, and he was blinking painfully. “Oh,” he said, neither disappointed nor relieved, just confused. “I guess it’s over.”

“I want to see it again.”

Trip laughed, thinking she was joking, and started to reach for her raincoat.

“Really,” the girl said. “I want to see it again. Can we stay?”

Trip looked around, shaking his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, we can see it again. If you really want to. But we’ll have to get tickets…”

He waited for her to say Jeez no, once is enough, it was so boring! Instead she slid down in her seat, the front of the chair folding up so that her legs hung over it like a child’s. “I like these seats. Let’s just wait here, okay?”

He stared at her. “Okay.” His throat was so dry it hurt to speak. “If you want.”

“I do,” she murmured, smiling; and he knew he was doomed.

No one cleared the room after the first show. Marz remained half-hidden in her folding seat, but Trip sat bolt upright beside her—that way, he thought, if anyone confronted them it wouldn’t look like they were trying to sneak in without paying. Trip’s amazement at his own obliquity had faded to a sort of stunned bewilderment. He still had a hard-on, but he did none of the things he’d been taught to do in such a terrible circumstance: think of his mother, recite some bit of Scripture, get up and leave the room and wait until he was married to her to touch the girl again. Instead he found himself staring at the white skin above the cleft of her lavender sweater, the way her legs hung over the edge of her seat and her pants bunched up at her crotch. A flush had spread across her cheeks, the skin so fine he could see the cellular array of crimson dots, as though she had been spattered with red ink. Her eyes were closed, her mouth barely parted; she looked as though she were asleep. He thought he would go mad, watching her. He was certain he would come in his pants if he stayed there looking at her, but he no longer cared. Dimly he was aware of the soft drone of music, doors opening, and people entering, another school group from the sound of it. Still he couldn’t wrench his eyes from the girl.

The school group took their seats on the other side of the room. The music paused, then swelled. Overhead the dome grew dark. A panpipe wailed as sheets of green and gold swept across the sky. Without a word Trip grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pulled her toward him.

She was as passive as before, but he didn’t care. He thrust his hands under her loose sweater, kneading roughly at her flesh until he found her breasts, so small he could cup each in a palm, her nipples burning his hands. He kissed her; her mouth moved slightly beneath his, and she moaned. He drew back, gasping, but before he could touch her again she slid from her seat to kneel on the floor in front of him.

“What?” Trip whispered hoarsely, shaking his head. “What? ”

Of course he knew what she was doing—he may have been a virgin, but he wasn’t an idiot—but this was so far beyond anything he had experienced that for one awful moment he was certain that he had gone insane. Then he heard the sound of his fly being unzipped. He felt the girl’s fingers fumbling with the loose fabric, and then the exquisite softness of her hair brushing across his cock as she withdrew it from his shorts. He couldn’t breathe. He sat absolutely rigid, every atom of his body keeping time with his heart, as he stared straight ahead and felt the girl’s small hot mouth close upon him. His hands clenched his knees as her tongue fluttered up and down the length of his cock. He moved his head imperceptibly, gazing down upon the silvery corona of her hair, another star blooming between his legs. For an instant he caught the violet flicker of her eyes as she stared up at him. Then he came, exploding into her mouth as she lowered her head, and her fingers pressed against his groin. He felt as though his heart had burst; he must have cried aloud because suddenly she was back in the seat beside him, making soft shushing noises as she stroked his cheeks and kissed his mouth, silencing him. He pushed her away, gasping for breath, then quickly pulled her back.

“You,” he whispered. Her hair was like water in his hands as he kissed her, the soured sweetness of her tongue and her small teeth clicking against his. He kept his eyes open, because he had never seen anything like this before, could never in his life have imagined this strange girl with the white hair and amethyst eyes, curling into his lap with her delicate fingers flexed against his chest, moving the heavy gold cross aside to feel his heart beat. “You…”

She tilted her head to gaze at him, unsmiling. Her eyes were wide. They caught the reflected shimmer of the constellations processing across the dome: Canes Venatici, Coma Berenices, Virgo. He could see her small front teeth, a spark of saliva glinting upon her lower lip. Her chest moved in time with his and her hands pressed against his belly; but her expression was coldly, almost malevolently, ferine. It should have frightened him. Instead he was getting hard again.

“… most famous are those of the sixteen th-cen tury French medical doctor known to us as Nostradamus. His prediction that ‘in the New City the sky burns at forty-five degrees’ has been interpreted by many as a warning of the destruction of the ozone layer here above Manhattan and of the atmospheric disturbances that followed…”

Trip scanned the rows in front of them. They seemed to be empty, as were the two rows behind them. On the other side of the circular room, he could barely make out the shapes of schoolchildren staring raptly at the dome.

“… also spoke of plagues that would devour man and animals alike. Millennial cultists such as the Wheel of Light and the New Puseyites believe that Nostradamus’s references to ‘The Last Conflagration’ dovetail neatly with the famous apocalyptic visions of Saint John the Divine, and that these in turn point indisputably to the celestial special effects dubbed ‘the glimmering’ by Stanford astrophysicist Francis Partridge. Scientists, of course…”

“Come here,” Trip whispered. He slid from his chair to the floor, crouching. The blond girl sank deeper into her chair, so that her disembodied head seemed to rest upon the points of her skinny knees. “Come here,” he repeated more urgently.

She went to him. Without a word, seemingly without even moving. One moment she was there above him. The next he was staring into her huge eyes, and her hands were upon his knees.

“Hey,” he whispered, startled. “I—”

She shook her head, raised her hand, and brushed it across his lips. Her fingers smelled of earth, her touch was oddly damp. But her mouth was hot as before, and tasted like buttermilk. He put his arms around her and drew her to him, clumsily. She was so frail, he could feel her bones like the spars of a kite. If he handled her roughly her skin might tear.

“Marz.” He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, the wisps of hair at her temples. “Marz—”

“Shhh,” she said, then murmured, “I love you.”

She tilted her head, staring at him. Her hair held the restless sheen of leaves in moonlight. Her pale eyes gleamed as she drew away, and he could see her pupils, not swollen and black as they should be in this darkness but mere specks, like the dark pistils at the heart of a myrtle blossom. Her gaze unnerved him, it was so detached, but before he could say anything or even look away she smiled, her little white teeth glinting.

“Come here,” she whispered.

Trip’s breath caught in his throat. He started to back away, but her hand closed upon his wrist, surprisingly strong. “No. Wait,” she commanded, and dipped her head and in one smooth motion pulled off her sweater. Then she leaned forward and took his hands in hers.

“Like this,” she murmured.

He shook his head, glancing up at the rows of seats, the spinning stars overhead. “Hey—n-no, we can’t, I’m—”

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. He wanted to pull away but she was too close, she was everywhere, it was too late. He was lying upon her, and she was unbuttoning his shirt, so that he could feel her flesh against his, so warm and yielding it was like floating in a tepid pool. Her hands tugged at his pants, unzipped them, and pulled them down until his cock sprang out, nestling between her thighs. He groaned and pressed his face against her throat, tasting her skin, the soft prickle of her hair across his mouth. He moved his hands slowly, as though trailing his fingers through still water, until he found her breasts. Their nipples hardened, and he thought of plucking flowers from the water, hyacinths and wild iris. A sweet musky scent filled his nostrils; he moaned, and seemed to hear from very far away a childish voice saying They called me the hyacinth girl.

The musky fragrance grew stronger, choking him. He tried to raise his head but could not. The girl’s hands had tightened around his back and she was pulling him close, her legs coiling around his, the heat of her groin pushing against his cock. She was making mewling sounds, unh unh unh, her eyes shut tight as she buried her face against his breast. Her scent was everywhere, his legs were trapped by hers but it didn’t matter, she had found him somehow, her cunt another greedy mouth upon his cock as she swallowed him, and he could feel the sharp jolt of her hipbones as she thrust against him, again and again and again, until with a hoarse cry he came inside her.

“What is that noise?” From across the room, a child’s whisper. “What is that noise?”

Trip gasped, in a panic yanked at his trousers, shoving the girl aside and fumbling for his shirt, his fly, buttons, and zipper. He crouched in the narrow space between rows, holding his breath and waiting for some terrible rector to descend and make public his disgrace.

But no one appeared. The planetarium show continued without interruption. Someone on the other side of the room loudly blew his nose, and children giggled. He heard the muted hum of a child monitor, the clash of cymbals accompanying a nova bursting overhead. Finally he started to grope his way back into his seat, but stopped when he saw the girl already there, gazing at him.

“Oh man,” he said, and sank back down. She looked so tiny, sitting there. So goddamn young.

She’s just a kid, you know.

Shame like a fever surged through him; he thought he might pass out, as his stomach churned with guilt and fear. Had he gone insane? John Drinkwater’s face loomed in the darkness before him, and Peter Paul Joseph’s plump pale hands, holding Trip’s morality contract and the results of a lab test.

For the lips of a strange woman drip as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

Trip ground his knuckles against the rough carpet. He knew nothing about her, but Nellie Candry had the scars from petra virus, and the girl had come from some foreign place… He could die now, as surely as if he had walked into a radiation chamber; bones and blood poisoned, and all his magic gone, that clear white veil he had carried about himself for twenty-two years torn beyond hope of repair.

Woe is me! For I am undone: because I am a man of unclean lips…

Yet as he groaned he could feel once more the girl’s moist warm skin, the lilac musk of her hair seeping into his nostrils, and her small mouth pressed against his. The stars shifted in the sky above him, the astronomer’s voice purred on.

“… along with the glimmering an increase in the sightings of other previously rare phenomena, parhelia or sun dogs and the refracted moonlight called paraselenae which sometimes appears in the darkness…”

He forced himself to look at the girl. Her sweater had slipped from one thin shoulder, and he could see a small bruise there, like a dark thumbprint. Otherwise, she seemed utterly composed. He had expected her to be angry, or scared. Instead she hunched down into her seat. Her eyes opened wider than he would have thought possible, and it seemed they held neither iris nor pupil, only an awful empty whiteness.

Trip’s hands grew cold, his cock shrank to a damp spot between his legs. He glanced away, then back again. Still she stared at him, her expression unchanged. The stars faded, and with them the reassuring recorded voice of the planetarium’s narrator. For an instant the room was absolutely black, save for the dull crimson lozenge of an EXIT sign. Trip could hear snorts and nervous laughter from the schoolchildren, their teacher’s loud hush. In the silence the air-conditioning’s breath became the sound of waves receding from an infinite shore. He stared at the darkness where the blond girl sat, trying to muster up some memory of what he had felt just minutes before. But his desire was utterly gone. In its place he felt a desperate queasiness, a growing certainty that if he were to extend his hand to her chair, he would find it empty. He felt like an idiot, but that’s just what he did, willing his hand to be steady as he groped tentatively at the seat.

There was nothing there. His neck prickled as his fingers ticked along the edge of the chair, the plush cloth like cool skin, but she was not there, she wasn’t there, and in a horrible moment of clarity he knew that she never had been there. He looked around frantically. Could she have left without him seeing? Had she crawled over the back of the seat and fled? His fingers clawed the soft velvet as he pulled himself up. His mouth opened to call out when he saw in the darkness before him two pale glowing orbs. At first he thought they were astral images projected upon the wall behind the rows of seats. But then they moved closer to him, and he knew that they were her eyes.

“No,” whispered Trip.

He had no hint whatsoever of a face or body. Two deathly white globes. A bit of nonsense spurted into his consciousness, something he had heard or read in school—

—and then the air was split by the ringing thunder of a gong. The dome blazed white and gold, the constellations suddenly visible in all their primal glory. Superimposed across this radiance was an immense rotating wheel and the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.

“SUPERSTITION DIES HARD.” No longer the soothing tones of the astronomer, but a man’s voice, boomingly confident.

“EVEN THE HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGERY OF THE HUBBLE AND DESCARTES TELESCOPES CANNOT DESTROY CENTURIES OF IGNORANCE AND FEAR. YET EACH DAY CONTINUES TO BRING US NEW DISCOVERIES, NEW SKILLS, AND NEW TOOLS TO MASTER THE UNIVERSE. ASTRONOMERS AND ASTROPHYSICISTS PREACH A GOSPEL OF HOPE, NOT DOOM. WE MUST LOOK NOT TO THE DISTANT PAST BUT TO THE FUTURE AND A NEW MILLENNIUM: A NEW AGE FOR HUMANITY.”

The constellations faded. A scarlet banner of words rippled across the dome.

The words faded into darkness and in their place another banner rose.

Trip gaped: had this happened at the earlier show? If so, he had no memory of it. Maybe that was what sex did to you. With one last fanfare of gongs and drums, the planetarium went dark and the house lights came up. Trip blinked, and found himself staring into Marz’s waifish face.

“Hey.” He scrambled to his feet, confused. “Ouch. Where’d you go?”

She shrugged. “Nowhere. You know. Here.”

Trip waited for something more in the way of an explanation. She said nothing, just stood and leaned over the seat to retrieve her raincoat. Her jodhpurs were slung so low about her waist that when she bent he could see the top of her ass. To his shame and amazement, his cock began to swell again. A giddy wave of desire swept through him. When Marz turned around he grabbed her and kissed her, the raincoat crushed noisily between them. Her mouth parted, but she felt limp and all but weightless. He might have been kissing a cloth doll. On the far side of the room someone snickered. Trip drew back, blushing, and stared at the floor.

“I guess we better go,” he mumbled, and took her hand. She nodded and followed him out of the planetarium, dragging her raincoat behind her.

The limousine was waiting outside. A thin icy rain nicked at the sidewalk, but the blond girl didn’t put on her raincoat. Silently the driver emerged to hold the car door open. Trip waited until she’d slid all the way over to the far window before he stepped inside. They sat without speaking at opposite ends of the car as it drove crosstown, music droning from the speakers.

“Check out the dinosaurs?” the driver asked as they swung into traffic. Trip shook his head. The driver shot him a disbelieving look. “No dinosaurs?”

“No,” Trip snapped.

The driver shrugged. “Next time, huh? Where to now?”

Trip gestured weakly. “Back to GFI, I guess.”

They started crosstown. Trip stared at the flood of yellow cabs turned livid by sleet slanting down from a distempered sky. Just a short time ago he had seen it all for the first time, sitting beside Jerry Disney in another hired car and laughing in amazement at the legions of taxis (private cars were outlawed now, except on weekends, when the affluent fled the city and the streets were jammed with decrepit vehicles of every type), the buses with kids hanging from the doors. Kids everywhere. More feral children than he had ever seen in Nashville or Austin or even Seattle, begging and skating and stumbling out of icehouses, pink and orange wires tangled in their disheveled hair, or accompanying the youthfully middle-aged and wary, who paid them to serve as escorts and so deflect the attentions of other young thieves. Runaways and prostitutes, John Drinkwater said—though some of them looked Trip’s age, so they couldn’t really be called runaways, could they?—but Jerry told Trip that they were fellahin.

“That’s an Arab word,” he explained as they stared out their hotel window at a dark-haired boy in kilt and football helmet, panhandling on the sidewalk. “I saw it on Radium. It means, like, whore” he added, staring in disgust as the kilted boy leaned into the window of a cab.

Actually, the original meaning was closer to peasant, as Trip learned when he mentioned this newfound bit of esoterica during his interview on Radium with Lotte Sa’adah. But as Lotte said,

Hey! whore z-head fux populi wtf! f *ck! whatever! so ok areet?!

Back then even the runaways had seemed exotic—romantic even, because pitiable—to Trip. Now, with a girl he barely knew slouched silently at the other end of the hired car, the fellahin seemed more sinister. Trip dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sank farther into his seat.

It was late afternoon. Sandbagged sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians and cyclists crowding subway entrances and storefronts to keep out of the rain. In the bright aperture between skyscrapers Trip saw a writhing shape like an amoeba, one of the city’s solex shields come loose. He glimpsed the brass-colored capsule of one of GFI’s famous fleet of advertising dirigibles, fresh from its factory in Northern Japan, moving slowly across the sky.

As the car crawled uptown, the sidewalks became thickets of metal trusses, where new protective shields were being installed in corporate buildings, the reflective sheets of solex rippling in the wind as workers struggled to hold them. Trip cracked his window and smelled steam and roasting garlic and exhaust. Between restaurant awnings well-dressed men and women scurried like ants. Some wore sunglasses, despite the rain, or wide-brimmed hats. Many more had the blank silvery gaze that came from plasmer implants. They walked with exaggerated caution, as though drunk. When the hired car stopped at a light, Trip stared at one woman who sat astride a black horse extravagantly caparisoned with metal spikes. The woman’s elegantly masked face tilted upward, so that the rain streamed down her cheeks and pooled on the collar of her black rubber shawl. Her eyes, like her mount’s, were silvery gray. In the minutes that Trip watched them, neither woman nor horse once blinked.

After nearly an hour they reached the GFI complex. Trip and the blond girl said not a word, though once or twice Trip responded briefly to a question from the driver. The rain had stopped by the time the car pulled beneath the huge solex awning that fanned out across Fifty-third Street. Ribbons of pink and orange streaming across the sky made Trip look up, past the solex shield. The girl shrugged on her raincoat and looked at him.

“Thanks,” she said. The driver held the door open, but Marz remained inside, her expression so remote she might not have seen him there at all. Trip waited for her to say good-bye, wanting desperately for her to be gone. He himself could say nothing, could only stare miserably at his hands. When after a minute he looked up he saw a glister of pink vinyl disappearing through the Pyramid’s revolving doors.

The ride back to Stamford took several hours. Trip stretched across the backseat and slept, awakening as they hydroplaned onto the Hutch. Flooded fields and golf courses reflected the early-twilight sky, calm pools of gold and violet with dying trees rising from them like scaffolds. They passed onto the Merritt Parkway and the alluvial plain that had been Connecticut’s gold coast, its abandoned shorefront condos and mansions given over to the rising Atlantic. In the gold-slashed dusk Trip could see lights flickering from the upper stories of some of the houses, and on dilapidated barges and houseboats. He opened his window; the car filled with the low-tide reek of fish rotting on the strand, the faint and sweetly ominous sound of drums and singing children.

It was after six when he got back to the hotel. John Drinkwater collared him in the hall, already dressed in the stylish hempen suit he insisted on wearing when Trip performed.

“Where have you been? ”

Trip pushed past him and into his room. “I need to take a shower.”

“You don’t have time! We have to go now, Jerry needs a sound check on—”

Trip shook his head. Without a backward glance he started for the bathroom, peeling off his shirt as he went. “He can go, then. You too. Get me another car—”

John grabbed Trip’s arm, his voice rising. “Hey! You were supposed to be here two hours ago! You listen to me, Trip—”

“No.” Trip whirled, yanking his arm back so hard that John staggered away from him. “I’m taking a shower, okay? Okay?”

He shouted the last word and stormed into the bathroom. John Drinkwater blinked before recovering himself.

“Eight o’clock, Trip!” he yelled as the door slammed shut. “You go on at eight o—”

“I’ll go on when I’m fucking ready.” Trip’s voice echoed through the suite, followed by the roar of water.

John stared at the bathroom door. Then he walked to the phone and called the concierge.

“I’ll need an additional limousine for Mr. Marlowe. Tell the others to go on now, and we’ll meet them.”

He hung up and started for the door, stopped when he saw Trip’s shirt crumpled on the sisal rug. For a moment he stared at it, then stooped and picked it up. Tentatively he brought it to his face and inhaled, breathing in the stale odors of lilacs and sweat, and a fainter, muskier scent.

“Hah.” John Drinkwater stared at the shirt, then flung it back onto the floor. Women, he thought balefully and stalked from the room.

Trip’s performance that night was off-kilter, almost frenzied. At first Jerry and the other musicians were nonplussed, but after the first three songs they seemed to catch Trip’s frantic buzz, segueing from a cover of “Walking with the Big Man” into “The End of the End.” Trip crouched bare-chested at the edge of the stage and sang in a soft moan, his bare skin glistening in the spotlights. John Drinkwater stood in the wings and watched in silence. When Trip finally walked off, the front of the stage was heaped with crosses and flowers and T-shirts flung there by fans, and a single broken-spined Bible.

Backstage, an exhausted Trip made straight for the door that led outside, where the limos waited to bring him and the others back to the hotel. Three teenage girls and their parents stood beneath the EXIT sign, beaming as he approached. In the shadows nearby, John Drinkwater stood in his hempen suit.

“Hi, thanks for coming to the show, hi,” Trip mumbled. The girls giggled and held out copies of LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA for him to sign. Trip glanced at John Drinkwater.

“Kind of a short set tonight, huh, Trip?” one of the fathers asked in a conspiratorial tone. He lowered his surgeon’s mask, looked askance at the cross branded on Trip’s forehead.

“Uh, I hate these darn masks—”

“Yeah, me too,” murmured Trip. He scrawled his name across the disc and shoved it back at the girl, shot her a quick smile.

“Kayla, huh? Pretty name.”

The girl’s father shook his head. “You look tired, Trip,” he boomed, clapping Trip’s shoulder with a powerful hand. “Singing takes it out of you, eh?”

Trip forced another smile. The girl, rosy-cheeked and golden-haired, plucked her surgeon’s mask from her face and smiled beatifically. “These are for you,” she said, and shyly thrust a fistful of lilacs at him. Trip took the flowers, his smile frozen; they were limp and warm and grayish, wrapped in damp shreds of paper towel.

“Th-thanks.” He glanced at the outside door, then at John Drinkwater. “Thanks again. Uh, I better go—”

On the way back to the hotel, Trip deliberately sat between Jerry Disney and their bass player. That didn’t stop John Drinkwater from giving them all a brief lecture on the perils of the road, along with a reminder of the terms of their morality contracts. Trip looked contrite, but when they got to the Four Seasons Jerry cornered him in the hotel lobby.

“That was some crazy shit you pulled!” he exclaimed exultantly, punching Trip’s arm. “Man, I almost swallowed my gum—”

Trip went cold. He knows! he thought, and saw the blond girl’s luminous eyes staring at him from between the yellow leaves. But then Jerry grabbed him. ‘“Walking with the Big Man!’ I forgot I even knew that song!”

“Yeah,” Trip said, relieved. “Yeah, it sounded good.”

“It was fucking great! We gotta put that on the next album—maybe live, huh? LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA LIVE! Oooweee—” Jerry spun in place, laughing. “This is so great—”

Trip watched his friend. The next album… He thought of Nellie Candry of Agrippa Music and Mustard Seed’s army of red-faced lawyers back in Branson. He thought of Marz. “I’m going to bed,” he announced, and headed for the elevator.

“Boston tomorrow, Trip!” Jerry yelled after him. “College boys and girls! We’re gonna be wicked big stars! Wicked big!”

“We already are,” said Trip, as the elevator door slid shut.

In his room, Trip moaned and collapsed into an armchair.

“Jesus God.” He stared dazedly at the pathetic handful of lilacs he still clutched. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth…

Since the glimmering began, flowers no longer thrived, especially early-spring flowers like lilacs. These looked puny to begin with, but he didn’t have the heart to toss them away. So he put the lilacs in a tumbler of water on the table beside his bed, shoving aside one of John’s Guideposts discs to make room. Then he took another shower. Afterward he walked dripping from the bathroom, tossing the towel onto a heap of dirty clothes as he made his way to bed. He stopped.

When he’d put the lilacs in their glass, the flowers had been lank and gray, leaves curled as discolored ribbon. Now the stems were supple and thick as his finger, the heart-shaped leaves fresh and green. The blossoms fairly glowed. The scent of lilacs was everywhere, and the soft monotonous buzz of a bumblebee. He stared open mouthed, then closed his eyes and inhaled.

He saw his grandmother’s trailer on Moody’s Island, crowded by the ancient lilac trees that were the sole remnant of the farm that had once stood there. The bee droned past him and he twitched involuntarily, sank onto the bed and he pressed the blossoms to his face. The wind blew warm as blood, the trees moved against a sky so purely blue it made his heart ache, a sky he only saw in dreams now. He knew he was half-asleep, but he made no move to get under the covers, or to put the flowers back into their glass. Instead his fingers tightened upon the mass of blossoms, crushing them against his cheeks and eyelids. The wind rose and the trees thrashed, the sun’s warmth faded as one by one the stars sprang out against the blue. The bee’s humming ceased. The air grew cooler as he flattened his palms against broken blossoms and moved upon the bed.

Beyond the tracery of limbs and sky a darkness stretched. True night, black and fathomless, with no spectral glare to rend the constellations as they passed above him. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis; Andromeda and Dagon. Amidst the stars a small figure shaded her eyes, as though gazing into a great distance, then began to walk toward him. Beneath her feet the darkness churned into sand, the stars to flecks of dust. As she drew closer he could see her face, small and pale and unsmiling. She was naked save for the aniline glitter of her raincoat, the streaming bands of green and amethyst that bloomed around her.

“My feet are upon the New City.” The words licked like flame against his ears. “And my heart beneath my feet.” He could feel her warm breath upon his cheeks. “But we who were living are now dying, here at the end of all things; for a foolish man bears our world away with him, who did not speak one word to the king concerning the anguish that he saw.”

The smell of lilacs flowed from her. She knelt between his legs, arms outstretched, and with a hand light as rain brushed the flowers from his cheeks. “Do you remember nothing?” she asked.

He started to reply, but she kissed him, her mouth cool and sweet as sap. His arms enfolded her and he drew her in, her fine hair a mist across his eyes as she moved against him. When he came it was like falling into sleep, a long slow shudder and the girl’s sighing breath in his hair. He lay there, trying to hold in his mind the image of stars and green trees, the odor of lilacs and rain falling upon a withered land.

Then he woke. There was a pounding at the door and John Drinkwater’s voice echoing from the telephone with his 6:00 A.M. wake-up call. Trip rose groggily, brushing leaves from his hair as he stumbled to his feet; and looked out upon his room to see lilacs, twigs and limbs and heaps of lilacs: lilacs everywhere.

He never saw the girl again. They were unable to get enough fuel for the bus to drive them to Boston, so Lucius arranged a morning flight from Westchester Airport. A hired car drove them; their equipment would follow.

At the airport Trip and John Drinkwater and the others sat in the crowded first-class terminal, with its smells of stale vanilla and ersatz coffee. Trip watched impassively as airport security surrounded a well-dressed Asian man whose mask fell away to reveal the garish cicatrices and facial tics of petra virus in its secondary, infectious phase. Lucius Chappell averted his eyes. Jerry Disney made a disgusted sound and headed for the bathroom. John Drinkwater lowered his head. His lips moved, praying—Lord, grant Thy love and healing grace upon those who suffer—and Trip felt a small surge of love for him. Meanwhile the Asian man stood wordlessly as his briefcase and roll-along were taken and sheathed in protective latex. He waited with the starkly composed expression of despair as orange-suited men pulled a transparent hood over his head and bore him away. Shortly thereafter someone whose mask and silvery eyes were embossed with the NatLink logo informed Lucius that their plane was ready to board. As it turned out, it was the only flight that would leave New York that week.

CHAPTER FOUR

Between Planets

For nearly two weeks Jack passed in and out of fevers, in and out of ER and ICU, in and out of consciousness. There were glimpses of white-masked faces floating in the burnished bubble that was Saint Joseph’s jury-rigged AIDS ward, a terrifying memory of sudden darkness and screams, flame and shouted curses and the horrific certainty that he had somehow missed his own death and plunged straight into hell. But that was just the first minutes of the first blackout, before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked in and the ward’s sodium lights began to glow. Jack missed the next few blackouts, being too busy manufacturing his own. His fever soared and dipped. When he was conscious he felt giddy and exalted despite excruciating pain; felt himself wheeling far above the hospital building and looking down upon Untermeyer Park, the broad ruddy sweep of the river, and the Palisades. These flights would be interrupted by someone taking his temperature, his blood, fecal samples, swabs of tissue from inside his mouth. His upper arm ached from repeated stabbings with a hypodermic needle; his hands, when he could feel them, were cold, and his feet. This did not prevent him from flying—jumping, actually—after the first few forays he realized he could move faster and farther if he leapt into the air rather than attempting to pump his arms like wings. So he would leap, bouncing as upon a trampoline and holding his breath until he began to hang up there, each time a few moments longer, and at last he did not fall, he was above the world, between feedings and fevers, between planets.

Sometimes he saw faces that he knew. His brother Dennis; Jule Gardino; Leonard, but it was the Leonard of long ago, his sloe eyes brimming and his mouth close to Jack’s. He saw his former lover Eric, too, which confused him but filled his heart with such joy that he shouted, and was confused again when the nurses came. And once his aunt Mary Anne drifted past, long blond hair and paisley wrappings trailing behind her. Sometimes he heard music. Another man in the ward had a boom box; the nurses fiddled with it relentlessly, until they found a working broadcast band. What spilled out then was like what was going on inside Jack’s head, “Gimme Shelter” and La Traviata, Rent and old Ajax commercials, a man shouting about Jesus and the murdered pope. During his flights the music faded, and sometimes the carnival light as well. It was then that he would see a great unblinking eye moving slowly across the heavens, like a hot-air balloon. The eye terrified him: it grew larger and larger, until it filled the sky, turning slowly as it stared down upon the world, its black pupil opening into the abyss. He woke screaming, barely conscious of hands pushing him back onto the cot and the hot sting of a needle in his upper arm.

A day came when a new voice cut through the babble. A woman’s voice, half-familiar, but it wasn’t until he heard his doctor arguing with her that he realized it was Jule’s wife, Emma.

“Are you fucking crazy ?” That much morphine for two weeks—”

“Six days,” the other voice protested.

“—you goddamn bastards, you’re trying to kill him, aren’t you? You fucking cannibals.”

There was a clatter and the sound of scuffling, a shriek, and feeble applause from one of the other cots.

“—sterile, you’re not sterile !” the doctor cried.

“I’ll sterilize you, you son of a bitch—”

What happened next was mostly pain, experienced at varying speeds, as Dr. Emma Isikoff shouted and waved her phone and stalked between cots, yanking up patients’ charts and scanning them. “‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine! ’ ” she read, and in a rage threw the last chart onto an IV pump. “What, is this Verdun? You’re killing them! ”

Jack still hadn’t managed to do more than shake his head admiringly, when Emma commandeered a wheelchair from somewhere, lifted him, and deposited him gently on the frayed vinyl seat, thick with duct tape and newspaper padding. The trip from the hospital to Lazyland was a blur, barely glimpsed through the filthy, barbed-wire-framed windows of Emma’s Range Rover. And the next few days were horrible, more fever and convulsions from the abrupt morphine withdrawal, and a new regime of herbs and antibiotics administered by Emma.

“Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind? That’s what it was like in there.” Emma was a neurosurgeon on the staff at Northern Westchester, where (apparently) sick people were treated like gold: when the power went they operated by candlelight and never lost a patient. “Next time you have a seizure and go to the emergency room, I want you to call me, okay? Jesus.”

Jack smiled. Emma’s shift—nine days on, four days off—allowed her to stay with him. Which was lucky, since Keeley was too frail to serve as nurse, and all of Jack’s brothers were too far away or, in Dennis’s case, too burdened with their own children to help out.

The terrible illness turned out to be flu. It had not progressed into pneumonia (“No thanks to them,” Emma snarled), which almost certainly would have killed him. Paradoxically, the morphine might have helped, by forcing him to rest.

“But no more drugs, understand? Unless I give them to you. And I’m taking these,” she announced, the bottle of alprazolam clutched in her fist like the scalp of an enemy. “I mean, are you totally insane? I told you these interact with tricyclics, not to mention you could get sleep apnea. Jesus!” Emma was small and round and blond as a newborn chick; Leonard called her Doctor Duck. She shoved the alprazolam into a pocket and pulled another bottle from his nightstand. “Who gave you these? Not Dr. Kornel, tell me Ed Kornel did not prescribe these—”

Jack gestured weakly. “Leonard,” he croaked.

“Leonard! Leonard! ” Emma actually jumped up and down in fury, blond curls shaking and floppy sweater rising to give him a glimpse of her round white stomach. For an instant Jack thought she would explode, like Rumpelstiltskin. “If Leonard Thrope told you to jump off the—”

“Emma. Please.”

Emma stopped and took a deep breath. She smoothed her hair, opened her voluminous leather sack, and dropped the bottle into its maw. “Okay. Okay. Leonard wants to kill you and take pictures of your rotting corpse, that’s okay with me. Okay? But not on my watch. If you are going to pop whatever Leonard gives you, Jackie, then I am going to stop coming to save you. Because I don’t want to be the one talking to the ambulance crew. Understand?”

“Okay,” he whispered. “But,” he couldn’t resist adding, “you know, I’ve taken them before and nothing—”

Emma fixed him with a glare. “You are playing Russian roulette with your body, Jack—”

I thought it was pinball; but Jack only nodded.

“—anyway, here. I brought you these.” She placed a number of small brown glass dropper-bottles on his nightstand, each with its hand-lettered label in Emma’s miniscule penmanship. “Skullcap, that’ll help you sleep only not too much because it can cause bad dreams plus there’s a possible reverse effect of insomnia. Valerian, blessed thistle. More echinacea. Here’s some goldenseal. And garlic.” She dropped a fat papery corm in his lap.

“Jeez. Vampires now, I’m worried about vampires?”

“Jule said you were having bad dreams.”

“And indigestion will help me?”

Emma gathered her things: stained white linen jacket, Zabar’s shopping bag, leather purse. She leaned over and kissed Jack’s forehead, let her hand rest there a moment. He remembered seeing her do that to Rachel when she had chicken pox, not so much testing for fever as she seemed to be seeking to draw it out through her palm.

She hesitated. “Dreams. What did you dream, Jack?”

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he lied. “Just—you know. Some nightmare I don’t remember. Night terrors.”

Emma nodded. “Rachel used to have those,” she said. She always made a point of talking about Rachel. It made Jack uncomfortable, this false bravura; after two years he preferred Jules’ unrelenting drunken grief. “Has Julie told you about what he’s dreamed?”

Jack moved the garlic to the side table. “No,” he said, curious. “What kind of dreams?”

Emma eyed him thoughtfully. “Just—dreams,” she said finally. “I better go, sweetie. I wish I could stay—”

“Hush—” He held out his hand. She took it, and he saw tears in her eyes, a terrible weariness. “You’re my angel, Emma.”

She bent to kiss his forehead. “Lots of rest, lots of fluids—no alcohol!—and please, please, watch your meds. Okay? Okay.”

He watched her go, hearing her cheery good-byes to Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson as she descended through the house. Then he crawled back beneath the covers and fell asleep.

A week later Leonard arrived. It was eight-thirty on a Friday morning. Jack was always unnerved at the way Leonard kept these businessman’s hours; such discipline gave weight and credence to Leonard’s work, which even after all these years Jack preferred to think of as a repellent hobby, like Leonard’s penchant for S/M and body piercings.

But Leonard was a businessman, the very modern avatar of artist as financial entrepreneur—even his T-cell count was part of his portfolio. He traveled via a vast seal-gray diesel-powered limousine that belched foul smoke and was reputedly a gift from a Russian heroin overlord. And Leonard traveled with an entourage, an amorphous group which changed with current fashions—this week young and blond and trembling from amphetamines and IZE excess; next week a half dozen street people with the dull crimson eyes of birds of prey, who left the leather interior of the limo flecked with scabs and dead skin and spit.

Jack shuddered each time he heard the car entering Lazyland’s compound. He had long since forsaken going outside to greet his friend, for fear of finding himself face-to-face with lepers flown in from Bangladesh or some convicted serial murderer sprung from prison by Leonard’s army of legal counselors. Instead Jack tracked Leonard’s current cult status by means of outdated tabloids or patter overheard on TV. Leonard himself he always recognized, because in twenty years Leonard had not altered his uniform of gold and black leather. Though the gold was more subtle now, the leather was cracked and faded as old gesso, and Leonard’s flamboyant mane of curling black hair was streaked with gray and braided into a single long plait.

“Jack? Oh Jackie-boy!”

Leonard’s voice echoed through the house, his footsteps pounding as he took the stairs two and three at a time, as he always had. In his bed Jack moaned.

“Please, Leonard,” he called out into the hallway, coughing for effect. “I’m sick—” “Of course you’re sick. That’s why I’m here!” With a thump Leonard gained the third floor. Jack heard the familiar boom as his friend slid across the landing and crashed into the wall opposite. Then, grinning like Mister Punch, Leonard’s head popped through the open doorway. “Please say you’re glad to see me, Jackie.”

In spite of himself Jack laughed. “Christ, Leonard. What is that—?” He pointed in revulsion at Leonard’s back.

“It’s a leopard skin. D’you like it?”

Leonard whirled so that Jack could admire his slight rangy form in its cracked leathers, hair braided and ornamented with an array of bones—Jack knew better than to ask about them—hands and cheeks so tattooed, scarified, beaded, bruised, and bedecked with light implants that the press had named him The Illuminated Man. Mirrors hung everywhere from his clothes. His left eyebrow had been shaved and replaced with a series of chips representing the weighing of souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A camera bag hung from his waist. Draped over his shoulder was a huge if moth-eaten pelt, complete with eyeless mask and dragging tail and two front paws tied loosely about his neck, like a sweater.

“Leopard?” Jack looked horrified. “Aren’t they endangered?”

Leonard pranced to the bedside, his feet in their steel-toed boots scuffing at the oriental rug. “Snow leopard, Jackie. Not endangered. Extinct.” He unlooped the two paws and let the pelt fall to the floor with a thud. “It was a gift.”

At least it wasn’t a human head, which was what Leonard had worn to the opening of the last Whitney Biennial. “So that makes it okay—”

“Oh hush. Here, I brought you a present.”

Jack instinctively yanked the covers up around him as Leonard thrust his hand into a pocket of his leather kilt. “Wait a minute—okay, here it is—”

Jack peered into Leonard’s open palm and saw a small highly polished stone, incised with a few lines. “It’s a kind of dream-catcher,” Leonard explained. “I got it in Nepal. One of the priests gave it to me, because I was—well, Jule told me you had been having nightmares. I figured you could use it more than me. I’m used to bad dreams.”

Leonard put the stone into his friend’s hand and closed Jack’s fingers around it. Then he raised the hand to his mouth and kissed Jack’s knuckles, one by one. “I’m sorry you’re sick, sweetie,” he said.

A creak as the door behind them opened wider. Jack saw his grandmother standing there, immaculately dressed in a Lagerfeld woolen suit and white silk blouse. Behind her stood Mrs. Iverson, a meek shadow in blue moiré, breathing heavily—she seldom ventured above the second floor.

“Jack dear. I heard voices—” Keeley’s cane struck the floor with a resonant thud. She stepped carefully into the room, bringing with her the scent of Chanel No. 19. Her narrowed gaze showed she knew exactly who his visitor was. “Oh. Leonard. I didn’t hear you come in.”

Leonard grinned, light glancing from his ruby placebit. “Hello, Grandmother.”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Leonard stared at her admiringly. “God, she’s amazing! She just never gives up.” He raised his voice and pronounced with exaggerated slowness, “It’s Leonard, Grandmother—Leonard Thrope! You remember, Jackie’s old friend from Saint Bartholomew’s—”

Keeley raised a hand as though to strike him. Before she could, Jack swung himself from bed, shuffled to her side, and kissed her. “Shut up, Leonard. Grandmother, I told you not to come all the way up here—”

“Pog mo thoín,” Keeley spit. She glared at Jack. “I told you I don’t want to see him—”

Leonard’s eyes widened. “Hey! She just cursed me in Gaelic.”

“Okay, he’s leaving, he’s leaving. He just dropped by on his way out of town, that’s all—” Jack walked Grandmother back out the door, past Mrs. Iverson watching everything with her customary stunned expression. “Come on, Grandmother, I’ll help you downstairs—”

“No! Back to bed, you.” Keeley drew herself up and motioned at the housekeeper. “Larena—”

Mrs. Iverson took Keeley’s arm. Jack hovered over the two of them, clutching his bathrobe closed. Despite his grandmother’s protests, he followed them down to the second-floor landing. There he steered them into Keeley’s bedroom, kissed her, carefully shut the door, and went back upstairs.

“I think she secretly likes me,” said Leonard.

Jack sank into a chair by the window. “You asshole. You give my grandmother a heart attack and I’ll kill you.”

Leonard stooped to pick up his leopard skin. “Hating me’s what keeps her alive, Jackie-boy. What is she, a hundred?”

“Ninety-nine.” Jack sighed. “She’ll be a hundred around Christmas.”

“A century baby! I should do something—”

“Forget it, Leonard.”

“Huh.” Leonard sniffed, turned to look disdainfully at the painting by Martin Dionysos that hung beside the window. An abstract sunstruck landscape, all greens and yellows and sea blues that stood in opposition to Leonard’s own icy aesthetic. “God, I hate that picture.”

Jack ignored him, gazing out at the distant river, turned molten by the spectral display overhead. Like sunspots, the glimmering came and went, flaring up for weeks at a time; then receding, so that for a day or two, or an hour, one could almost imagine the world was as it had been. No one seemed able to predict when it would be active, or what caused the remission. Jack imagined masked scientists aboard icebreakers in the Weddell Sea peering up through telescopes, watching as the ozone hole above them dilated like the pupil of some malevolent eye. “Jeez, it’s busy out there today, isn’t it?” he said absently.

“Yeah. I heard there’s a heavy-duty UV alert. I had to cancel a morning shoot out at Rikers. That’s how come I’m here—”

Jack turned from the window. “I should have guessed.”

Leonard looked aggrieved. “I was going to come yesterday—”

“I’m kidding, Leonard. Yesterday I felt too sick to see anyone—this is the first day I’ve gotten out of bed, really. I’m sorry your shoot got canceled. What was it?”

“Hmm?” Leonard looked distracted. “The shoot? Nothing big.”

He fell silent and stared thoughtfully at a picture of Aunt Mary Anne on the wall. At last he said, “I have something else for you, Jackie.”

Jack’s heart sank as Leonard sat on the bed and pulled his camera bag beside him. “Something else?”

“Don’t look at me like it’s a horse’s head.” Leonard unzipped a pocket, reached inside, and withdrew a small cloth pouch. He let it rest in his palm for a moment, as though weighing it. In a low voice he said, “Come here, Jackie.”

Jack didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on the window, the light flickering like so many darting fish. He could hear Leonard’s breathing, the ticking and tocking of Lazyland’s clocks. But surely there was something else… ?

He cocked his head and listened, uneasy. Not at all sure what it was he listened for, but certain it must be there. The echo of a voice, the piping of a distant flute—

He heard neither. Only a soft fumpp fumpp as Leonard tossed the small cloth pouch up and down in his palm.

“Jackie,” his old lover repeated. Jack felt his neck prickle with gooseflesh. “Come here, Jackie.”

He stood and crossed to the bed.

“Sit.” Leonard patted the comforter beside him. Jack sat. Leonard looked at him and frowned, as though he’d been sent the wrong model for a shoot. Finally he said, “I was planning to give this to you. But I was going to wait—”

He hesitated. “—to wait just a little longer. Then Jule called me and said you were so sick—”

“It was just the fucking flu, Leonard,” Jack broke in. He felt anxious and angry and aroused, as he usually did when Leonard visited. “You didn’t—”

Leonard hushed him, touching a finger to Jack’s lips. “He said you were really quite ill; and so I decided this was not the time to be patient.”

“Oh, right. Leonard Thrope’s famous patience—”

Leonard ignored him. He stood, peeked into the corridor, then closed the bedroom door.

“You’re not going to smoke, are you?” Jack tried not to sound peevish.

“No.” Leonard settled back onto the bed. He looked so serious that Jack’s anxiety began to churn into fear.

“Now,” said Leonard, “I want you to listen to me very carefully. You know I was in Tibet, right?”

Jack nodded. His gaze was fixed on the little bag in Leonard’s hand.

“Well, I met someone there—”

“Congratulations.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I mean, I met a very extraordinary person, someone who—well, someone who just may have been the most important person I’ve ever met in my life. The most important person any of us might meet…”

Jack suppressed a groan, thinking of all the other Most Important People in Leonard’s life, from the Dalai Lama to Gunther, Leonard’s personal scarification artist.

“Don’t you look at me like that.” His tone startled Jack: not Leonard’s usual imperious command, but something that held a warning. Leonard looked distinctly uncomfortable, almost frightened. And that worried Jack most of all, because Leonard Thrope made his art, and his living, by not being afraid of anything.

“Jackie, I am doing you a favor. A very big favor. I think.” He glanced down at the cloth bag.

“Oh.” Jack swallowed. He imagined any number of horrors that Leonard might have brought back from Tibet—scorpions, a mummified penis, a chunk of uranium. “Well. Maybe you shouldn’t have.”

Leonard sighed. His fingers closed around the sack. For an instant Jack’s heart leapt: he wouldn’t be able to part with it, after all. But then Leonard let out his breath and, leaning forward, opened Jack’s hand and placed the cloth pouch inside it.

“Okay. There—I’ve done it. It’s yours, now.”

Jack tried to shove the thing back at Leonard. Leonard shook his head.

“Hey! Relax, Jack—it’s not a goddamn monkey’s paw—”

“Leonard, I don’t really—”

“Just open it, okay? For chrissake.” Leonard stared at his friend in disgust. “And be careful—”

Jack looked down at his open palm. The pouch lay there, small and oddly heavy.

“Open it,” Leonard urged.

The pouch was closed with a narrow strip of leather. Jack teased it loose, his heart beating much too fast. He turned so that Leonard would not see how his hands trembled.

“Right,” Jack whispered. Now the pouch was open. He tilted it above his palm, half-expecting something to spill forth, bones or stones or magic beans. But whatever it held was too big. Jack bit his lip, then stuck his finger and thumb into the pouch and pulled whatever was inside, out.

“There!” Leonard grinned triumphantly, the same expression he’d had when he first talked Jack into visiting the Anvil with him oh, a hundred years ago.

Jack held a small bottle up to the light. A brown-glass medical vial, of the sort Jack had become too familiar with over the last few years, wide-mouthed and stoppered with a lump of soft lead and a wax seal. A neatly hand-lettered label was pasted across it. Jack squinted, trying to read, but it was covered with Japanese characters. Only at the very bottom someone had written in a shaky hand.

Jack turned to Leonard. “What is it?”

Leonard hesitated. “It’s an experimental drug. Dr. Hanada calls it Fusax. The 687 is a batch number—it’s the most recent one.”

“Dr. who ?” Jack shook his head. “Leonard—what the hell is this?”

Leonard smoothed his leather kilt, fiddled with a gold chain dangling from a sleeve.

“I have a client, a CEO at Zeising, who collects birds,” he said, “Apparently there was a sighting a few months ago of a Himalayan griffon. Of course they’re supposed to be extinct, like everything else, but you’d be surprised what turns up.

“Anyway, my client arranged for me to go to Gyantse. Private jet, fake visas—the usual shit. Only when I got there the guide who’d been arranged for me had mysteriously disappeared—I never found out what happened—and I was stranded for two weeks in Lhasa. Just as well, since I needed the extra time to acclimate, so I wouldn’t get altitude sickness. I spent most of my time at Nechung Monastery. The monks weren’t crazy about having me at first, but eventually we came to an understanding and they allowed me to live there for several days.

“It was the griffon that did it. Sky burials, you know. In Tibet they chop you up and put the pieces on a mountaintop for the vultures, unless you’re a lama, in which case you’re cremated or buried. I—”

Jack sighed. “I remember.” Five years earlier, Leonard’s customarily graphic Cemetery of the 84 Mahasiddhas had caused some problems at Sundance. With a grim expression, Jack held up the vial of Fusax. “Leonard. What does this have to—”

“—I told them about the griffon,” Leonard went on. “They consider it sacred in Nechung. It’s a holdover from the Bon faith. Very rarely, holy men are given sky burial; if the griffon comes to the funeral, it’s considered a sign that the dead man has been accepted into the highest level of existence in the afterlife, and will not be reborn. Griffons oversee the passage between this world and the world of the dead. Really, it’s just a vulture—a very beautiful vulture.

“One night, a monk came to my room. He spoke a little English, and he understood that I didn’t want to hunt the griffon, or to kill it—they’d seen all my equipment, helped me hide it, as a matter of fact, in case the PSB came looking for me. He told me that there was a place I should visit, another monastery on an island in the sacred lake of Yandrok-tso. He said I might see the griffon there; but he also said there was a man I should meet. A monk. Someone who had been waiting many years for me to come.”

Leonard fell silent, his dark gaze fixed upon the window. Jack grew increasingly uneasy. In motion Leonard possessed a certain predictability; sitting still he filled Jack with alarm. He tried to think of something to say that would disarm the moment—like, who in their right mind would have been waiting for Leonard ?—but any answer to this question was too ominous to contemplate.

“So I went to Pelgye Kieria. That was the name of the island, and the monastery. An amazing place, Jack! Only seven monks are left there, from this sect that goes back to Genghis Khan. They say they protect the door between the worlds. They protect us from Brag-srin-mo, the demon of the cliff. Beneath Pelgye Kieria is the secret gate to her heart, which leads to the underworld. That’s what the monks believe, anyway…

“I was at Pelgye Kieria for three days before I learned that there was a Japanese monk there with them. Quite an elderly man—the others were relatively young, I mean in their forties or fifties—but this monk was old, and very frail. He didn’t take his meals with the rest, and no one at Pelgye Kieria mentioned him to me, even though I told them that the monks at Nechung had sent me there specifically to meet someone.

“I tell you, Jackie, the whole place gave me the fucking creeps, and by then I was pretty goddamn sick of yak butter and tsampa. They wouldn’t let me take any pictures inside the monastery, so I spent all my time out on the rocks, looking for the Himalayan griffon.

“Without any luck, as it turned out; for all I know they are extinct. By the third day I figured I’d just about shot my wad at Pelgye Kieria. I was outside taking pictures of the cliffs, trying to think of some way to get back to shore, when this very old man came up and started talking to me.

“He had his head shaved, and he was wearing the same robes and everything as the rest of them. So I probably wouldn’t have figured out that he was Japanese and not Tibetan: he just looked like another incredibly ancient monk. But he spoke English—I just about swallowed my gum when he started talking to me—and he said that he had heard I was looking for him. I told him about the monk at Nechung; he just nodded, like he knew all about it. But when I asked what he was doing there, he just shook his head and said ‘Nga lam khag lag song. Ha ko ma song?’

“‘That means ‘I’m lost,’” Leonard explained, smiling wryly. “One of the few bits of Tibetan I do know. ‘I am lost: do you understand?’ I thought he was joking, and so I laughed.

“His name was Keisuke Hanada. Doctor Keisuke Hanada; he was careful to tell me that. He had heard that an American photographer had somehow managed to enter the country, looking for the griffon, and had visited Nechung and shown interest in the paintings of the demons there. He thought I was a newspaper reporter; he very much wanted to talk to me.

“He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war. I don’t know how or why they admitted him; he was pretty evasive about answering any questions. He described himself as samsara—‘wandering on’—you know, that whole Buddhist thing of being trapped between here and various afterlives. He’d had virtually no contact with the outside world since after the war, and the other monks at Pelgye Kieria pretty much left him alone. I guess if you were to look at it from our perspective, he was there to make atonement, to ease his guilt. But guilt’s a pretty Western concept—I don’t think that’s how Dr. Hanada would have put it.

“He invited me to his room, and—and showed me what he had in there. He said the time had come for him to tell someone the truth about his life. He wanted to tell an American. It was very important to him, that he talk to an American…”

Jack looked up, surprised at the hesitancy in Leonard’s voice. His friend only stared at the window, then continued.

“His room was your typical Tibetan monk’s cell. But he had set up this sort of—laboratory—in it. Not exactly state-of-the-art, either. He’d brought his own equipment with him fifty years ago, and since then he’s just sort of jury-rigged everything with—well, you can imagine the kind of shit you’d find in a Tibetan monastery, right? No electricity whatsoever. We’re talking Dr. Caligari here, Jackie. And he had a bunch of other stuff—photos and documentation, field notes—though he didn’t show me those on that particular visit.

“But it was a real working lab, and he’d been working in it, for all those years. He showed me. And he told me this—story. This very long, almost unbelievable, story. For two days, he told me—oh, everything! It would take me a week to do it justice.”

Leonard turned. There was something in his expression that Jack had never seen before. A look of abundance, of satiety. It would have been captivating in anyone else. Seeing it on Leonard’s merry death’s-mask of a face, Jack shuddered. When Leonard spoke again, his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“Have you ever seen someone look tortured? I don’t mean depressed, or sad, Jackie, but really tortured. Tormented. There’s this expression they get—it’s like they’re looking beyond, like they’re seeing the other side of something… When I did that series in Nairobi, after the femicides—I saw it there. Or remember that poem we learned in freshman English? ‘And then I saw his face/Like a devil’s sick of sin’—remember? Well, that was what Dr. Hanada looked like.

“He’s a kind of saint, Jack. I mean a real, live saint, like Mother Teresa, or—well, I don’t know. Thomas Merton, maybe? The Dalai Lama? I mean, I’ve met the Dalai Lama, Jack, and it wasn’t like this.

“Because Dr. Hanada—he had done things. Like Merton, you know? He hadn’t just been in this monastery his whole life, he’d had this whole other life, this—Christ, you wouldn’t have believed it, Jackie. I didn’t believe it, at first—I thought he was just some crazy, senile old man.

“But he had the photographs. And he had that lab. He’s been there for over fifty years now…”

Jack shivered, watching his old lover’s face trapped somewhere between horror and ecstasy, seeing in the ragged sky something Jack could not comprehend.

But Leonard had always seen it. The end of the century, the end of the world: Leonard had always known what was coming. In high school, the two of them on summer nights would sneak into the Episcopal church and in the darkness they would fuck breathless, nearly hysterical at their adolescent daring. Afterward Jack would lie exhausted across the front pew, his T-shirt pulled up to cool himself, bare feet pressed against the smooth wood. Leonard would sit at the church’s old pipe organ, and play and sing. He knew only one song. He played it over and over again, hands pounding the worn keys and feet stomping the treadles, shouting in his scorched voice until Jack’s hair stood on end—

He sang himself hoarse, his face growing red and damp as he hunched over the keyboard. To Jack the words sounded like prophecy, or a threat.

Whatever secret horrors fed Leonard’s vision, Jack had always believed his friend wanted nothing more than this: to make everyone else see what he saw: corpses rotting in a suburban bedroom, the husks of butterflies drained by spiders, naked men trussed like cattle in darkened basements.

And now we know, thought Jack. His gaze fell upon his friend’s ravaged face, the death’s-heads tattooed and branded and scarified across his wiry arms and the arc of glowing chips above his left eye. Nothing was left of the smooth-skinned boy Jack had loved except his eyes, which had never been boyish at all. The rest Leonard himself had smelted away, leaving bones and scars and unruly pockets of flesh; the only things that had ever interested him, anyway.

“Fifty years,” whispered Leonard. “You know what he was like? Have you ever seen a picture of Padmasambhava?”

Jack made a face. “Not in Yonkers. Not recently.”

“Really? Well, here, look—” Leonard rummaged in a knapsack until he found a battered leather wallet, opened it, and flipped through its contents. “This guy,” he said, holding up a little rectangle like a trading card, its lurid colors tempered by a crosshatch of tears and folds. “Padmasambhava. He’s a Tibetan magician, this legendary yogi. Anyway, that’s who Dr. Hanada looks like.”

Jack took the picture. It showed a demonic-looking figure with madly rolling eyes standing on one leg. In his left hand he clutched a staff almost twice his height, impaled with human skulls.

“Right,” said Jack. Very deliberately he placed first the picture and then the vial of Fusax into Leonard’s hand. “You know, I don’t think I want to hear any more about any of this, Leonard. Thank you all the same. And I’m pretty tired, so maybe we could see about getting together some other—”

“It’s the cure, Jack.”

Jack gaped at him. His friend stared back, his expression withdrawn, almost hostile, then Leonard dropped the picture of Padmasambhava. It wafted across the floor and beneath the bed.

“The cure.” Leonard held up the vial so light from the window flowed over it, gold and green. “A miracle, Jackie.”

Rage swelled inside Jack. “What?”

“You heard me, Jackie.” Leonard’s eyes glittered. His mouth stretched into a grin as broad as it was merciless. “All that other stuff they’ve been giving to us all these years? It’s bullshit, sweetheart. Bullshit—

“This is it. This is the cure. For AIDS, for petra virus, all of it. This is what’s going to change fucking human history. Fusax.”

Jack stared at the corona of light around Leonard’s hair, the little bottle in his hand like a bright grenade.

Then, “You fucking son of a bitch,” said Jack.

And he decked him.

“Hey—!”

Leonard crashed to the floor. Jack heard the crack of his friend’s skull against wood and felt his heart start joyously, as though a lover had called his name.

“What the fuck?” Leonard flung his arms across his face, the bottle rolling toward the wall. “WHAT THE—”

Jack ignored him. He walked over to where the vial had come to rest against the leg of his father’s old desk. He picked up the bottle and eyed it warily.

He pondered the indecipherable Japanese characters above the Latin name. But of course they had nothing to tell him, good old dependable Jackie-boy. Mysterious doctors never shared their secrets with him, and the only demon Jack had ever known sprawled on the floor, moaning and cursing.

“…fucking nuts, Jackie, you know that? Fucking…”

Jack continued to stare at the vial, giving it this last chance to redeem itself. At last he turned, facing the window with its rippling carnival light, and with all his strength hurled the bottle from him.

“JACKIE! NO—”

He had expected it to shatter against the pane. Instead the vial shot right through the glass, leaving a surprisingly small neat opening, like a bullet hole. Jack walked over and examined it.

“Wow.” He crouched down and eyeballed it, shaking his head in wonderment at a hole the size of an old-fashioned silver dollar. There was no radius of cracks, no broken glass. Just that perfect bull’s-eye. “I was sure it would break.”

Behind him Leonard stumbled to his feet and limped to the window. Jack flinched, but the other man seemed not even to notice him. Leonard put his hands upon the glass and pressed his face close, his breath fogging the pane as he peered at the lawn below. A bruise was already darkening his left cheek. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Me neither.” Jack glanced at him warily, but his friend only stared outside. His dark eyes were filled with tears.

“Oh, shit.” Jack’s bravado melted into remorse. He’d only seen Leonard cry once before, at Rachel Gardino’s funeral. “Leonard, I’m—oh, Jeez, Leonard…”

“I can’t believe it. I was only trying to—trying to—”

Jack shook his head. “You’d better go,” he said. His knuckles throbbed from where he’d struck Leonard. He felt like he was going to burst into tears himself. “Okay? I just think you’d better go.”

Leonard turned.

“I know why you did that.” He rubbed his bruised face almost lovingly. “Jackie. You really need to get over it. You’d be a lot better off if you learned how to deal with your feelings for me, you know that? All that rage? It’ll kill you, Jackie-boy. But this—”

He gazed out the window, to where the lawn shimmered beneath the golden sky. “—this,” he repeated, his voice starting to shake. “You may really have fucked up this time, Jackie.”

Jack stared. Was Leonard threatening him? But then Leonard laid his hand upon Jack’s shoulder.

“I have to leave now,” he said. “And I’ll be gone for a while. I’ll call you when I get back.”

Leonard’s grip tightened, his fingers digging through Jack’s robe until they fastened on a cord of muscle. Jack writhed and let out a small moan.

“ Ow—”

“You better ‘Ow.’” The placebit in his front tooth sent out a ruby flare. “Pissing off Padmasambhava like that.”

With a smile he let go of his friend. Jack fell back against the bed. Leonard picked up his bags, then headed for the door. In the hallway he stopped.

“I’m not angry, you know, Jackie.” He hoisted a bag over his shoulder, bones and mirrors clattering. “Believe it or not. I really do understand—”

He cast Jack a sly look, then, grinning, began to recite.

He grinned wolfishly. “Watch your back, Jackie-boy—”

And with a soft clatter upon the stairs he was gone.

It took Jack forever to fall asleep that night. His fever was back, his hand ached, he felt guilty and ashamed and generally overstimulated. An hour-long search of the grass beneath his window had failed to turn up anything except for a few rusted malt liquor cans and an IZE ampoule. He didn’t find so much as a shard of glass. When evening fell he had Mrs. Iverson bring dinner to his room, canned beef bouillon and a glass of tepid water. Exhausted, he fell into bed before nine o’clock, and proceeded to toss and turn until eleven-thirty, marking the hours by the chiming of Lazyland’s clocks. He finally resorted to his grandfather’s remedy and crept downstairs to warm some milk on the Coleman stove, adding a shot of Irish whiskey from his grandmother’s precious hoard. By the time he’d mounted the stairs again to the top floor, he was yawning and feeling pleasantly high. He sank back into bed and soon was breathing deeply.

Just before midnight he awoke. A sound had broken his sleep. A familiar sound, beloved though only half-heard, so that for a few moments as he lay drowsily beneath the heaped quilts and down comforter, Jack felt utterly at peace. He was just drifting off to sleep once more when he heard it again. And froze.

It was a tread upon the stairs: a slow, purposeful step. Jack could hear the creaking of the wide oaken floorboards, the softer echo of feet upon the second-floor landing below him. Two more steps and silence; then a nearly inaudible click. Jack held his breath. The footsteps resumed. He tracked them as they went from the landing into the next room, the one that had been his aunt Mary Anne’s when she was a girl, before she disappeared. He could not hear what went on in there, but he knew, he knew. His heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder he could hear anything at all, and he almost laughed aloud, crazily: he no longer had any doubt but that he was losing his mind. Because this was how it had always been when he was a child, this was how it was supposed to be.

He was hearing silence at midnight, when all the clocks should be alive. The preternaturally loud ticking of the grandmother clock outside the linen closet had been stilled, and the gentle nick-nick of the old Dutch regulator. There was no loud clatter from the captain’s clocks in the living room; no hum from the little ladder-back clock with the white mouse that climbed until it struck one. Only that slippered tread, stopping here and there like a nurse checking for fevers; and after each pause Lazyland grew more still, its burden of silence increased as one by one the clocks were stopped.

In the great house beneath him his grandfather was walking. Room to room, floor to floor, always aware of midnight looming, when if they were not silenced, all the clocks would strike at once. Pausing a dozen times or more upon each landing to gently open countless glass faces, then to lay a finger upon the hands to halt them. As he had always done when Jack or any of the grandchildren stayed over, quieting each clock in turn, so that the song of all those chimes would not awaken them.

It was the last sound Jack had heard every night at Lazyland, when he would awaken to that patient tread. Lying in bed confused by twilight sleep, hoping to catch a glimpse of his grandfather as the old man mounted the last steps to the top floor, where the old nursery clock on its oaken library table gently ticked off the hours. In all those years Jack had never once seen his grandfather on his errand; only awakened each morning to the smells of coffee and bacon and cigarette smoke drifting up from the kitchen, sunlight in neat yellow squares upon the floor, and a triumphant cascade of chimes echoing through the house as all the clocks struck seven.

Now Jack lay rigid in bed. He could hear the steps move from his Uncle Peter’s old room into Aunt Susan’s, the room where Mrs. Iverson now slept. There the thick oriental carpet muffled all noise. But after a minute the tread sounded once more. It moved into the tiny corner room, that held only a cobbler’s bench on which sat a cottage clock. Snap as the casing was opened; snick as it closed again. Creak of the door pushed shut. The footsteps hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then began their final ascent.

Jack listened spellbound. His dread was gone. Instead he felt anaesthetized, almost giddy; because surely this was what it was like to die? Didn’t loved ones sometimes arrive to take you to the other side? A thought lodged like a stone at the bottom of his consciousness told him that this was just a dream—he had often dreamed of his grandfather in the years since his death—and yet that did nothing to mute his exhilaration. He tried to sit up, but his arms and legs were paralyzed. This, too, happened in dreams, you tried to move and could not, struggled in vain to open eyes weighted with stones and earth; but he only fought harder, writhing beneath the covers. The footsteps came more slowly now—it was a long haul up all those steps—but Jack was ready, his heart thundered, and his breath came faster, he was almost gasping with joy. He would see him, finally, all those fruitless nights of waiting up would be redeemed; all those mornings waking to find that it was just a dream, Grandfather was really dead and the world not as it had been when Jackie Finnegan was a boy.

And now he heard the solid thump of Grandfather’s foot upon the landing, then another as the old man pushed himself forward, one hand lingering upon the banister to keep his balance. The door to Jack’s room flew open. A breath of cool air wafted inside, followed by a close warm smell, cigarette smoke and Jameson’s, the scent of starch on a white cotton shirt. Jack opened his mouth to cry aloud but gaped within a sudden airless void, the scents of tobacco and whiskey sucked away.

In the doorway a figure loomed. He was cast of light as a shadow is drawn of darkness, light everywhere, so that he seemed to be aflame. Jack recognized the unruly crest of white hair above a broad high brow, the proud beaked nose and the eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, icy blue, deep-set. His grandfather’s mouth opened as though to speak. A roaring filled Jack’s ears. His grandfather smiled and stepped into the room. Jack strove to rise but all strength was gone from him. He lay limp abed like a sick child, staring.

“Jackie.”

That deep voice, with its slight smoker’s rasp. He thought he would swoon as the old man drew near the bed. Upon Jack’s brow was the touch of a hand, cool and dry as paper. A blurred shadow moved before his eyes. He gazed up and saw what, as a sleeping child, he had always missed: his grandfather standing there with tears in his eyes, gazing down upon him.

“Jackie.”

Something brushed his cheek, like a moth or leaf blowing past. The voice came again: what his grandfather had always said when Jack left Lazyland to return to his own home.

“Jackie-boy. Be well.”

Like rushing water, air filled his lungs again. Jack gasped, found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, sweat-soaked, the damp covers tumbling to the floor. About him the room swam with gold and emerald. Greenish sunlight streamed from the window with its small, neat bull’s-eye. From downstairs echoed the old grandfather clock striking seven.

Jack dragged a hand across his brow. He was trembling fiercely. “Another fucking dream.”

It was only when he stood, tugging his pajama sleeve from beneath his pillow, that he saw in the hollow where his head had lain a small parcel wrapped in tissue.

Be well…

His heart began to thump as he picked up the parcel and unraveled the thin paper. He turned to the window and raised his hand, so that sunlight nicked what he held. A small glass bottle stoppered with lead and wax, and the label:

CHAPTER FIVE

Iconography

Their second day in Boston, after their very last tour performance, Trip woke and thought his room was on fire.

They were staying at a church-owned hostel near Cambridge. The rooms were spare but many-windowed, the obsolete unfiltered arches facing southeast across the Charles River. Trip’s bedside cabinet held furled copies of Guideposts, The Screwtape Letters, a tiny book of meditations. The only television was in the common room downstairs, beneath a framed photograph of the president. And a hostel prefect at the inaugural ball held by the Christian Majority Alliance/United We Stand for Freedom. The television, when it worked, was tuned to JC-1, so that now and then Trip heard his own voice echoing from downstairs. The entire house had an agreeably antiseptic smell, not the cloying sweetness of Viconix but the old-fashioned scents of pine deodorizer and ammonia. Trip’s bed was narrow, the coverings clean and cool and white. It all made him think of the single summer he had gone to camp down in Union, Maine, before his father died. The night after his performance he lay in bed with his eyes closed and tried to project himself back to Alford Lake, with loons wailing instead of sirens, water lapping softly at Old Town canoes and Sunfish.

It didn’t work. Instead a dream of burning desert sand edged Trip into wakefulness. He blinked, staring confusedly at the tiny room. Suddenly he sat bolt upright.

“What the—!!”

Flaming columns rose from floor to ceiling. They flickered from crimson to gold to the lambent white of an empty IT disc. With a cry Trip started for the door, then stopped.

The room was filled not with flames but light, so brilliant he had to shade his eyes. Even the floor glowed, plain pine burnished to molten bronze. From the corridor he could hear excited voices.

“What is it?” Trip asked breathlessly as he opened the door. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” Jerry Disney yawned, running a hand across his shaven forehead. He was standing with one of the hostel’s prefects still in her bathrobe. “The glimmering. Sunspots or whatever it does. Everything’s down again. Go back to bed.” He turned and shuffled down the hall to his room.

“Robert’s checking on his shortwave.” The prefect was more excited than Jerry, her face rose pink in the shifting light. “I mean, it’s four A.M., and it looks like broad daylight! Isn’t this terrible? Last month we were without electricity for almost a week. Did you all get that?”

Trip shook his head. “We were in Dallas. But I heard about it.”

“Were you supposed to leave today?”

“Tonight, I think.”

“Well, don’t bother packing. I’ll let you know if Robert patches into any news.” They were stranded for a week. Power was disrupted across the entire northern hemisphere, knocking out computer networks, satellite links, airports from Greenland to Norfolk. The oceanic system of telecom cables was already weakened by an increase in volcanic activity since the Ross Ice Shelf disaster. Now the increased demands for power crippled it still further. Communications were scrambled worldwide. Several air crashes occurred, as the shift in the magnetic field played havoc with automatic flight systems. There were riots on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In Durham, New Hampshire, seventeen people died in the city hospital when emergency generators failed. Outbreaks of E. coli bacteria left dozens of children dead; in Boston, the National Guard had to assist the Red Cross in getting potable water to the South Side.

Word of the extent of the disaster gradually filtered into the hostel in Cambridge, where they made do with camping equipment left over from happier times. Coleman stoves and lanterns, wool blankets and water purification kits for what they could hand-carry from the green and viscous Charles. Except for a few group forays to the river, Lucius Chappell made the tour members stay inside—he was terrified of riots.

“Scared shitless of Negroes and fellahin,” sniffed Jerry Disney. He looked over at Trip and grinned. “Probably thinks you’ll just book.”

By Thursday rudimentary power was restored in some places. At the hostel they still ate by candlelight, working their way though canned soups, canned beans, freeze-dried pasta dinners. Now the only television station they could pick up was an equal-access cable hookup from MIT, staffed mostly by wild-eyed cranks who could be glimpsed inhaling bluish powder on camera.

“Boil water, avoid brownouts, stay indoors, don’t run that A/C, folks,” a girl said, giggling as she read from a torn page. She glanced at a bearded young man beside her who was shouting into a cell phone. “A/C. What’s that?”

“Air conditioning,” he replied.

“Jesus, air conditioning!” She twirled a plastic Frank Sinatra mask, knocking over a bottle of diet soda and registering more alarm than she had while reporting a fire downtown that had killed six people. “Shit! That was my LAST ONE—”

Through it all, Trip seldom ventured from his room. He slept with a towel over his eyes, to shield them from the glowing crimson ribbons streaming down through the windows day and night. His dreams were troubled. He wanted to dream of Alford Lake. He wanted to dream of the blond girl. He never did, but he thought about her constantly, masturbating even though it left him feeling more depleted and depressed than ever. When they left Stamford, he’d crammed a small canvas bag with lilac blossoms. The flowers had since crumbled into brown fragments, but they retained a sweet faint smell. Hour after hour he lay in bed, pressing handfuls of perfumed dust against his face as he tried to summon up the girl’s wan image, her twilight eyes. He refused meals and company, pleading sickness; but John Drinkwater at least wasn’t fooled.

“You want to talk?” he asked once, standing in Trip’s doorway and staring worriedly at the pale figure hunched beneath the blankets.

“No. Tired, that’s all.” Trip thought of his mother, saying the same thing over and over in the months following his father’s suicide. When she finally got out of bed it was to go to Roque Beach and the whirlpool at Hell Head. “I think maybe I need some time off from touring.”

John gave a short laugh. “Well, you’re getting it. But Peggy said she thinks she can get a doctor to come by tomorrow, someone with the church—”

“I’m fine. I told you, I’m just tired—”

John stared at him measuringly. “Well, I hope so. God forbid you got something from that guy at the airport—”

“You don’t get petra virus that way. Look—”

“Forget it.” John turned to go. “But if you want to talk to someone—well, you don’t have to talk to me. There’s Peggy, or Robert. And the minister’s coming by tonight. Just keep it in mind, okay?”

Trip forced a smile. “Okay.” When John left he burrowed deeper into his bed, his legs and chest and groin matted with dead lilacs.

By the weekend, a few airports were open, accommodating those passengers (and airline crews) willing to risk traveling. Jerry and the other band members were impatient to leave. Even Trip was ready. But John Drinkwater refused.

“You guys crazy? It’s going to be a madhouse at Logan, might as well wait a few days until things ease up. We’re just going home, so relax, okay? Pretend you’re on retreat.”

“More like freaking house arrest,” Jerry muttered, and for once Trip nodded in agreement.

The next morning Trip got a phone call. On his private number; it woke him, and he had to dig through mounds of sheets until he found his phone.

“Yeah?” he said guardedly.

“Trip, Nellie Candry—”

A flash of panic: she knew! The girl had told her—

“—how you kids doing up there?” Her cheerful voice sounded impossibly small and far away, a ladybug’s voice.

“Uh—we’re fine. I mean, the same as everyone, I guess.” He moved around the room in hopes of improving the reception. “How’d you find me?”

“Remember? You gave me the number. At the hotel that night—”

“I mean how’d you find me here. We haven’t been able to talk to anyone—”

Her laughter tinkled from the phone. “Sweetie! I’m GFI—we talk to Elvis! We never shut down! But listen—you’re in Cambridge, right? By MIT?”

“Uh, yeah,” Trip said warily. “I think.”

“Well, I need you to go there. I’ve set something up for you—they have a studio, they’re like the only people who’ve managed to stay up all week. Did Ray Venuto get in touch with you?”

“Who?”

“Our contracts lawyer. He was supposed to fax you—”

“No. I mean, it’s a mess up here. Hardly anyone’s been able to call in or out.”

Pause. Then, “Well, okay, that’s okay. I still think we can swing this. We’ve got Legal behind us, in case there’s any question. But probably you shouldn’t talk this up yet, ’cause it’s just gonna be you. I mean they don’t want the rest of the band, not this time. Capisce? I want you to go to MIT, Trip: just you. The studio’s at the Atkinson Center, I have no idea where that is, but I’m sure somebody can get you there—”

Trip stared bewildered out the window. “What? When?”

“This afternoon.”

“But I don’t understand. I mean, I can’t do a recording without a band. Plus there’s no power up here, not for stuff like that—”

“Believe me, sweetie, the world could end and MIT would not lose power. They siphon off the grid: as long as someone’s got power, somewhere, they’re okay. And it’s not a video. It’s an IT studio. Since you haven’t actually signed the contracts yet we’ll call it an independent demo, just in case anyone gives us a hard time later—”

Trip shook his head, a little desperately. “But—”

“But they won’t! I promise you they won’t.” Nellie’s voice faded into static. Relief flooded him, but after a moment she was back, her tone lower now, conspiratorial.

“Listen, Trip—the truth is I ran into Leonard Thrope the other day, down at Hellgate. I told him you were signing on, and he got real excited, I mean I haven’t seen him so psyched about something for a while. I told him I wanted you to do an IT and he told me about the studio at MIT; he’s friends with some guy there and he wants to shoot you, Trip! An icon and some stills, I mean, can you believe it? Leonard fucking Thrope!”

Trip bit his thumb. “Who’s Leonard Thrope?”

“What, they keep you guys under a news blackout?” Nellie laughed. “Actually, Leonard Thrope is probably not your basic Xian poster boy. He’s a very, very famous photographer—he founded the mori school, you’ve heard of that, right?”

Trip grimaced. “That guy who makes movies of dead people?”

“Mors Ultima. Yeah, that was Leonard. But he does other stuff, too, fashion shoots, a lot of stuff for private patrons. He’s on Radium all the time, you must have seen his stuff—”

“Look, Nellie—I don’t know, this guy is kind of weird, isn’t he? I mean, maybe this isn’t the sort of thing I should be doing, ’cause like I know for a fact that Peter Paul Joseph would have a heart attack if he—”

Nellie sighed. “We should be so lucky. Listen, Trip, I’m not going to pressure you. And maybe you need to think some more about all of this. Mustard Seed’s been good to you. Your sales are solid, you got a nice little fan base. Maybe you should stay there, maybe we should talk again in a couple months, you know? Maybe in a year GFI buys out your whole fucking company and all our problems are solved.”

Her voice grew faint and staticky. A shaft of fear ran through him—he had no number for the blond girl, nothing to bind her to him save this little voice chirping in his head, distinctly less cheerful than it had been a few minutes ago.

“…so we’ll just—”

“No! No, it’s okay, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. But you’ve got to tell me how to find this place—”

She told him. “And listen, sweetie, don’t worry, it’ll be great, you are going to be so happy you did this. Leonard’s a sweetheart, all that other stuff is mostly just PR, you know that, right? Go on now, I’m gonna call Ray and tell him you’re—”

Her voice crackled out. Trip shook the receiver. Silence. He stuck the phone in his pocket. Nellie had told him one o’clock. It was 11:30, which meant people would be gathering soon for lunch. If he left now, someone would be bound to come looking for him. But if he stuck around for lunch and then tried to sneak out, he might not have time to find the MIT campus, let alone some mysterious basement studio. He decided to leave. He pulled his worn pea coat over his old fisherman’s sweater and hurried downstairs and out the back door.

Finding the MIT campus didn’t take as long as he’d feared. Once there he saw students everywhere. Black-clad, intense-looking young men and women, and more Asians than Trip had ever seen in his life, carrying backpacks and looking as though it would take much more than an East Coast blackout to disrupt their studies. Trip wondered if classes had even been canceled. Probably not, he decided, watching two blond girls with blinking placebits in their eyebrows hunched over a palmtop. They glanced up at him, then went back to their work. Trip observed them with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain. He read at a sixth-grade level: even simple algebra and the most basic computing skills were remote as astrophysics. But he had a remarkable memory: he could quote Scripture and even Shakespeare if only he could be made to understand the words on the screen in front of him, or if someone were to read them aloud.

He could, fortunately, read the words MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY on a metal sign glazed with ice. He stopped in front of the sign, shivering in the lurid orange glow of midday. He was too embarrassed to ask a student for directions. They all looked so expensive. Dressed in black, or wrapped in cardboard and rags like the fellahin, they would betray themselves by smiling, showing even white teeth and glinting placebits. Except for the cranks, whose eyes within shrouds of spun acrylic were uniformly silver-gray; what hair they had was glossy and flecked with light. Like Trip himself, few of the students wore masks—this, along with The Last Generation’s continued sexual and pharmacological indulgences, was a constant source of head-shaking and hand-wringing for parents. Overhead the sky shimmered from green to gold to blue. He felt awkward and out of place, no longer the nascent Xian supernova but trailer trash from Moody’s Island. For a miserable quarter hour he wandered around, before getting up the courage to stop an older man in a worn overcoat.

“’Scuse me, I’m looking for the divit lab?”

The man shrugged. He pointed, at a very thin middle-aged woman with a shaved head and a bright red faux-mink coat. “Sorry. Ask Sonya there, she’s in computer dialectics—”

Trip crossed to her. “Uh—excuse me—”

The woman looked at him curiously. A transparent silken web covered her vividly lipsticked mouth.

“Are you one of my students?” Her scalp had been neatly incised with paragraphs of text, not tattooed but scarified black lines fine as drypoint. On her right temple scowled Ignatz Mouse, a word balloon hovering above his mouth.

Trip looked away.

“N-no,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. But—”

She smiled. “That’s okay. You just looked familiar, that’s all. You want the Bloembergen Lab—”

Trip shook his head. “She said divit. I mean the lady who sent me, she said the divit lab, or something like that.”

“That’s Bloembergen. DVI-IT technologies; they call it divit. Come on. I’m heading that way, I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”

He walked beside her. The wind sent eddies of dust and grit flying up into their faces. The woman coughed, tugged a heavy woolen scarf from the collar of her coat, and swept it across her face.

“Doesn’t that get cold?” Trip asked. The icy wind made him shudder. “Your head like that?”

“This?” She patted her scalp, and Ignatz winked at him. “No. Feel it—central heating.”

He gave her a dubious look. “Go ahead,” she urged, stopping. “Colar implants. You’ve never seen them?”

She lowered her head. The raised flesh felt warm and rubbery, like a lure worm. As his fingers moved across the words thin music sounded very softly, a glissando of piano and fluttering drumbeats. From the back of her neck a voice whispered.

Trip snatched his hand away. The woman laughed. “Morton Feldman. Isn’t that neat? I treated myself when I got tenure. Okay, here’s your stop—the lab’s downstairs, I think there’s a sign, but you basically just keep turning right. See you later.”

Inside the building was softly lit by bursts of gold falling from the windows. There were no guards, no electric lights. The security checkpoint had been deactivated; beside the magnetic arch a hand-lettered sign read SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, with Japanese characters penciled beneath. A few students sat in a hallway eating and listening to music percolating from a colorful spinning top. Trip found the stairs and went down slowly. He felt tired and anxious and completely unprepared to do a recording session of any kind. The basement was numbingly cold. Emergency panel-lights cast a faint gray glow. All of the rooms seemed abandoned, heaped with metal chairs and desks and old computer monitors. Finally he reached a black metal door.

Under this someone had taped a piece of paper scrawled with magic marker.

He knocked. No one came. He listened but could hear nothing, had his knuckles raised to knock again when the door cracked open.

“Yee-es?” a voice drawled.

Before Trip could say anything someone grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. The door slammed shut.

“Trip Marlowe! You made it!” A slight black-clad man much shorter than Trip whirled him into the room. “Great, this is great! Sammy, get your shit together, we got a go here. Look, boys: Trip Marlowe.”

Trip glanced around helplessly, embarrassed by the man’s mocking tone, the bored expressions of the two technicians who slouched in swivel chairs beside a bank of recording equipment. They were watching television; it showed the GFI experimental dirigible fleet at rest on an airfield, then abruptly cut away to a scene of flames, the tiny cartoonish Blue Antelope logo in a corner of the screen.

“I guess this is the right place?” Trip asked, hoping it wasn’t.

“Oh, ab-so-po-lutely,” the man replied. He clamped a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the far end of the room, where white crosshatched screens rose in front of a lethal-seeming array of still cameras, vidcams, halogen lights, and what appeared to be surgical equipment. There was an indefinable but suspicious smell of smoke. “Nellie said you’d be here, but things have been so fucked up, I was supposed to be in Mirbat for another oil spill—like, where do they get the oil?—but of course our little atmospheric challenge changed all that. I was marooned for two days! Then, of course, the only place I was cleared to land was Logan. I had to leave the troupe back in the city. A total wipeout, but then, thank God, YOU were here—”

The man gazed at him appraisingly. “Leonard Thrope,” he announced.

“Uh—Trip,” said Trip. “Marlowe.”

“Please.” Leonard gestured at an empty chair. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Trip sat. Leonard strode to a pile of bags and began pulling bottles out of a knapsack. Without a glance at labels or contents he opened them, ingesting their contents in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

“Not what you think,” he reassured Trip. “Selenium, pantothenic acid, astragalus, this is some kind of blood purifier. Vitamin K. Spirulina. Saquinavar.” He replaced everything except a tiny lacquered snuffbox. “This of course is Persian Cat,” he added and took a few discreet sniffs. “Want some?”

Trip shook his head, horrified and dazzled. “No. Thanks.” If all the preachers he had ever known had been able to get together and create, from scratch, their own unqualified, indubious, and absurdly outfitted vision of the abyss, this would be it. Leonard Thrope moved with the savage authority of a very small dog approaching an unwary child. His tangled gray-streaked hair was long and braided with glass beads. What little of Leonard’s flesh Trip could see—hands, face, a scabby bit of ankle—was covered with an intricate web of flowers, cuneiform characters, and sexual graffiti. When he moved, flashes of virulent green and yellow appeared through rents in his clothes, like trapped fireflies.

Leonard curled his fingers around the proffered snuffbox. “Right,” he said. “Probably better you don’t,” and tossed it into a bag. “Okay. Let’s roll ’em.”

He walked to Trip and took him by the hand. Involuntarily Trip shrank from him. He expected something dry and scabrous; a crudely illustrated church pamphlet featuring Eve and a boa constrictor leapt unbidden to his mind. Instead Leonard’s hand was muscular and smooth, his lingering touch feather-light as he eased him from the chair.

“Hey,” he said gently. He looked into Trip’s eyes, brushing a wisp of blond hair from his forehead and letting his hand rest for a moment on the boy’s cheek. “It’s okay. Really, I don’t bite. You’ve probably had kind of a sheltered life, huh? You Xian kids. But this’ll be fine, it’ll go really well, and when we’re done GFI will sell every other act they own to buy this disc. So just try to relax and enjoy it—”

As he talked he steered Trip through the maze of recording equipment until the boy stood in front of the white screens. “You’ve never done this before, right?”

Trip shook his head.

“Good. It’s better that way. Not so self-conscious.” Leonard hunched behind a tripod and adjusted a series of lenses. One of the technicians switched off the TV; they pulled their chairs closer to the monitors and began playing with keyboards and dials. “What we do is, we get some footage of you, dancing or whatever. Picking your nose. I mean, you can lie there asleep if you want to, it doesn’t matter. Later it all gets jacked up on computer. They just want something to work with. Get your essence, right?

“That’s for the IT stuff. Me, I want to take some pictures.”

Trip glanced at the technicians. “You just want me to stand here?” he asked doubtfully.

“Whatever,” one of the young men said.

“I don’t.” Leonard’s hazel eyes glittered. “Pure white light: that’s what I want. Wait…”

He reached for a leather satchel plastered with Orgone holograms and shiny new Blue Antelope decals. “Music, you’d like that, right? Here—”

Leonard tossed something at one of the technicians. A moment later a haze of feedback filled the room.

Trip cleared his throat, took a few practice steps in front of the screen. “You’re a photographer, huh?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

Leonard disappeared behind a huge black lens. “Sociocultural pathologist, actually.”

Trip stared blankly. “Photography’s dead,” Leonard went on. There was a series of soft clicks, a faint humming from one of the more dangerous-looking tripods. “Everything’s dead. The world needs an undertaker. Atlantis sinks, Pompeii burns—I’m there. I’m doing some stuff for Blue Antelope now. You know them, right? All you little Xian apocalypse nuts. Portfolio called Vanishing Act. Last month I got this thing in Ruwenzori. Dwarf otter-shrew, gorgeous. I’ve got some proofs here, check ’em out—”

He grabbed yet another bag, pulled out a folder, and handed it to Trip. Clear plastic sleeves held Cibachrome prints of a small lithe brown animal emerging from a stream. Its most distinguishing feature was a bristling mass of whiskers around a bulbous nose.

Leonard peered over his shoulder and sighed. “Micropotamogale ruwenzori. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Trip glanced up to see if he was joking. “It looks like a rat,” he said.

“It’s not. See its nose?” Leonard’s finger stabbed at a print. “It works like a hydrofoil, sniffs out little crabs and things in the water. This is the last one, probably—that’s why I was there. Blue Antelope’s filed a lawsuit—there’s a big fight going on, whether it should be put in a lab so they can save its genoprint or just leave it there. In case another one shows up.”

He laughed and turned to the next photo, showing a fan-shaped array of bones with shreds of flesh between them, like a desiccated leaf. “That’s a horseshoe bat. Or was. Rhinolophus ruwenzori. Another interesting nose. I was a little late for that one. Fortunately I have a patron who prefers them that way. Dead, I mean. Really the last of their kind.”

Trip grimaced. “But they’re so ugly.” He looked up and saw Leonard staring at him, his green-flecked eyes narrowed.

“No, darling,” Leonard said in a very soft voice. Carefully he put aside the portfolio, then took Trip’s chin in his hand and pulled him forward, until he was only inches from Leonard’s face. Trip swallowed. He glanced out of the corner of his eyes to see if the technicians were watching, but they stared raptly at their monitors. Leonard’s fingers traced the outline of the cross branded upon his forehead, then his jaw, lingering on the soft hollow of his cheeks.

“You’ve got it all wrong, Trip,” he murmured. “They’re not ugly. They’re the most beautiful things in the world. But you and I—”

His fingers tightened. The nails dug into Trip’s flesh until the boy cried out, trying to twist away. “—you and I, Trip? We’re dirt.”

Trip could feel his jawbone shift beneath Leonard’s grip, his teeth grinding together like misplaced gears. “Just dirt,” Leonard repeated, his tone dreamy. Trip flailed helplessly, until Leonard wrenched his hand away.

“Caput mortuum,” he whispered. For an instant his gaze rested upon the portfolio. Then he turned and strode back to the waiting cameras. Trip caught his breath, gasping.

One of the technicians glanced over his shoulder with a questioning look. Trip got to his feet and started for the door, head throbbing with pain and rage.

“What? Did I hurt you?” Leonard called after him.

Trip stopped. “Yes.” he spit, rubbing his chin.

Leonard smiled. “Good,” he said, raising a camera to his face. “Now get the fuck over here, and let’s do our job.”

Trip hesitated. “Come on, Trip, don’t be an asshole,” called Leonard. “Meter’s running. Don’t blow it, okay?”

He did the shoot. The afternoon passed in a haze of heat and burning dust from the halogen lamps. The constant click and whir of recording equipment was like the buzz of locusts. He felt dizzy, not a little sick. His jaw ached, his head. But the pain seemed to spur him in front of the camera. After a few stiff minutes he moved antically through the small studio, neatly avoiding bundled cables and Leonard’s bags. A technician replaced the music with something atonal and clamorous, that faded into somber gongs and chanting, the high-pitched singing of frogs set to the hollow boom of djembe drums.

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.

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 emotional 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.

“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.

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

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 crimson and gold—

—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.

“Mr. Finnegan. Good morning. You received my message?”

Jack shook his head. “No,” he began, then sighed. “Don’t tell me. Leonard sent yo u—”

The man frowned.

“Leonard Thrope,” Jack went on. “He’s a friend. A very bad friend,” he added darkly. “Did he—”

“Yes. Mr. Thrope. He—”

“I am sorry. But we don’t—I mean I don’t, the magazine does not, we don’t have visitors. To the office. No interviews, submissions by mail only—”

“Please.” The young man opened his hands. “I am not a—” Pause, as though steeling himself to pronounce the next word. “—a writer.”

The man took a step forward.

“May I?” he asked, tilting his head and peering up through that absurd pompadour.

Oh why the fuck not, thought Jack. “Of course—please. Come in.”

His visitor stepped inside. Jack pulled the door shut after him. The room filled with the same musky fragrance that had risen from the pages of The Gaudy Book, and for a moment Jack had the ridiculous fear that he had been cornered by a perfume salesman. Then the man smiled, a disarmingly childlike smile that showed off two dimples in his cherubic face. With his dark eyes and smooth skin he reminded Jack of Leonard in his youth. Despite himself, he smiled wanly back.

“Larry Muso,” the man said. His brow furrowed. “You are John Finnegan?”

“Yes—but Jack—please, everyone calls me Jack.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Um—so. Larry. What can I do for you?”

Larry Muso smiled again. “No—what can I do for you—”

He shrugged off the rubber satchel. Jack’s heart sank. Oh God. He is a salesman. He watched as Larry Muso opened the bag and pulled out a small parcel.

“For you,” his guest said.

Jack took a step backwards. A letter bomb? Delivered by suicide courier? He shook his head—they’d finally caught that guy in New Rochelle, but who knew how many others might be around here? But the young man only stepped forward and slid the package into Jack’s hands. The only way he could have refused it was by dropping it. Even faced with the possibility of receiving a bomb, Jack Finnegan was too polite to do that.

“It is a gift.” Larry Muso stepped back and dipped his head. “For you…”

Jack stared at the rectangular parcel, carefully wrapped in green fabric. He drew it to his face, smelled a pleasant, slightly musty scent.

“Please,” urged Larry Muso. “Open it.”

He did. Slowly, unfolding the fabric until he found it, nestled within the cloth like a gold ingot.

A book; a very old book. Its cover looked like watered silk, crocus-colored with an Art Nouveau pattern of acanthus, stippled with gold, and in the center the title in raised gold letters.

“Wow.” Jack laughed. “I don’t believe it.

“For your collection,” said Larry Muso.

Jack opened the book gingerly. The frontispiece showed a Beardsley-esque line drawing of a grotesque mask and the date 1895, opposite the title page.

“The King in Yellow,” said Jack. “This is incredible…” Carefully he turned the pages to the first tale, “The Repairer of Reputations.”

He closed the book and looked up. Larry Muso was beaming, stray light striking the tip of his pompadour so that he looked like a burning candle.

“It is very beautiful, isn’t it, Mr. Finnegan? The first edition. Eighteen ninety-five.”

Jack shook his head. “But—” He started to explain that it had been his grandfather, not him, who collected books, then stopped. “But I don’t understand. Who are you?”

His visitor slipped a hand inside his velveteen jacket, withdrew a card case embossed with a hologram of the same logo that appeared on his satchel. He opened it and presented Jack with an illurium business card. The iridescent metal was etched with Japanese characters and a skeletal winged creature with grasping claws. When Jack tilted the card, English letters flickered beneath the Japanese. There was the nearly imperceptible sound of bells. A woman’s voice whispered the words as Jack read.

“Gorita-Folham-Ized: The Golden Family.”

“Altyn Urik,” Larry Muso offered. “That is our name in the archaic tongue of the Mongol people.” With a soft click he snapped the card case shut and replaced it inside his jacket. “It means ‘The Golden Family.’”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “And that means… ?”

“My employer. We are a joint Japanese-American-Mongolian corporate enterprise, engaged in mining and other industrial operations, but also incorporating your ALTCOM and the entire NOREX Telecommunications Group. We are based in Dalandzagad, and of course the Pyramid here is our American headquarters, but our work extends very far, far beyond these places.”

Jack stared at his visitor with growing despair. He knew all about GFI, of course; but obviously this guy wasn’t from GFI. Some kind of terrorist? He had some vague sense that things were unsettled in Mongolia, but then they were unsettled everywhere. In the wake of the glimmering strange alliances had sprung up across the globe, most especially in those places heretofore ignored because of their very isolation. Places like central Canada and Siberia and Mongolia, now besieged with investors and developers fleeing the flooded coasts, the diseased cities and ruined farmlands.

“The Golden Family has many interests!” Larry Muso said brightly. “But today I am here on other business—”

He turned and for the first time seemed to take in the room around him: swaybacked bookshelves, outdated computers, and all. He breathed in sharply, and Jack watched, bemused, as a beatific expression spread across Larry Muso’s face. After a moment he looked back at his host.

“You have such beautiful things.” Larry Muso’s eyes were moist; his voice soft, almost chastened. “They told me you had very beautiful things, but—to see them, that is a different matter. You see, I studied library engineering, at Oxford—that is why I was chosen to come here. That—”

He tipped his head in the direction of the book in Jack’s hand. “I myself selected that for you, Mr.—I mean Jack—because, like yourself, I love beautiful things. Like yourself, we—The Golden Family—love beautiful things.”

Jack nodded. “I see.” He felt more at ease, now that it appeared he was not going to be murdered by an exploding antiquarian volume. “Well then. Won’t you have a seat?”

Larry Muso followed him to a small sitting area composed of a wicker table and three very old wicker chairs. He settled in one gingerly, turning to stare into the carriage house’s shadowy corners.

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything,” Jack continued. “But we really don’t receive people here. When my grandfather was alive, the magazine’s offices were in the city—”

“Gramercy Park.”

“Yes, that’s right. But needless to say we can’t afford offices there anymore—”

Larry Muso frowned. “But that, too, was your family’s home? Am I correct?”

“Well, yes, but—we sold that place years ago.” Jack stared at the book in his lap, his fingers tracing the raised gold letters, the smooth ribbony feel of the silk cover. His grandmother would adore it, of course; might not ever forgive him for letting it go.

So Jack wouldn’t tell her. With a sigh he wrapped The King in Yellow back in its cotton covering and placed it on the table. “Look, Mr. Muso—”

“Larry—”

“Mr. Muso,” Jack repeated firmly. “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is a bad time for me, okay? A bad time for The Gaudy Book—” He stared pointedly at the rows of cartons by the door. “That is probably our last issue, right there—”

“Yes!” Larry Muso exclaimed. “That is why I am here! The Gaudy Book! We want to buy The Gaudy Book!”

Jack’s dismay curdled into anger. This was worse than a terrorist.

“I’m sorry.” He started to his feet, no longer caring how rude he sounded. “This is our editorial office. We don’t handle subscriptions from here, we never handled subscriptions from here, the only reason those magazines are here at all is because, as I just told you, we’re going under, the printer folded, the distributor folded, and now presumably we are going to—”

Larry Muso waved his hands. “Yes, I know! I am here representing The Golden Family, and we would like to buy The Gaudy Book—the magazine enterprise itself—as an investment. A corporate investment. An aesthetic investment,” he went on quickly, “an artistic investment. You, of course, would retain all artistic control, Mr.—Jack—because we have the greatest respect for you, for your entire family, and the contributions you have made to literature. To literature in English,” he amended, and paused to pull a large silk handkerchief from his pocket.

Jack stared at him dumbfounded. He’s kind of cute, Jack found himself thinking; in a Japanese Elvis kind of way.

“You understand this?” Larry touched one corner of the handkerchief to his cheek, a gesture so subtle and affected that Jack wondered if it was some sort of coded message. Permit my multinational corporation to purchase your failing periodical, and I will be your love slave. “We believe in protecting the few beautiful things left in this world, while we can. Your magazine would be very precious to us. And we would, of course, seek to preserve it as a commercial property.”

Jack thought of Leonard, of his records of human and animal extinction purchased by collectors in Manhattan and Vancouver and Bloemfontein. He sank back into his chair. “Have you—have you ever actually read The Gaudy Book?”

Larry Muso pursed his lips shook his head. “Myself, personally? No. But Mr. Tatsumi, our CEO—he reads it. He used to travel a great deal. He said that The Gaudy Book was the only thing he could read on an airplane.”

Jack tried to figure out if this could possibly be a compliment. “Well,” he said at last, “does he still travel much?”

“Oh no. He has not left the desert in two years.”

“Probably behind in his reading, then,” Jack said, and was rewarded with a smile.

He straightened, putting on his best Face the Trustees expression, and stared at The King in Yellow on the table. “I’m afraid I can’t accept this.”

Larry Muso looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not in a position to do business with you. The Gaudy Book is no longer a going concern. We’re suspending publication—”

“I know, Mr. Finnegan.” Larry Muso’s voice sounded less conciliatory; more the voice of a man determined to do business, swiftly and with no interference. Surprised, Jack looked up and saw the other man draw a tiny palmtop from his pocket. “In the first quarter of this year, you showed a loss of—nearly two million dollars.” Larry Muso frowned, tapped once more at the keyboard. “Last year, your friend Leonard Thrope made the magazine the beneficiary of a modest grant—”

“A loan,” Jack said, but he knew he was losing.

“—which enabled you to produce the current spring issue.” Larry Muso tilted his head in the direction of the cartons by the wall. “Now you are unable to afford the cost of shipping those to your few remaining subscribers. If—”

“Did Leonard put you up to this?” Jack broke in angrily. “Because—”

“If you would let me finish, Mr. Finnegan,” Larry Muso went on, “I would be able to tell you that yes, Mr. Thrope has been in touch with us. We have mutual—friends.”

In another oddly poised gesture he opened his hand “Friend,” he corrected himself. His soft black eyes gazed searchingly into Jack’s. “Another collector.”

Jack made a grim little face. “I see.”

“I hope you do. You must understand, Mr. Tatsumi is not just a collector. He is a collector of Americana. But very eclectic. Mr. Thrope has helped him with many items. An Edward Hopper, some Winslow Homer. Notebooks of Sylvia Plath and Ariza Davis. A drawing by Jeffrey Dahmer. He owns Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of Oz. Many letters of Thomas Jefferson—Mr. Tatsumi is very fond of Thomas Jefferson.”

“As was Mr. Dahmer,” said Jack.

Larry Muso did not hear him. “As I mentioned, Mr. Tatsumi enjoys reading The Gaudy Book. And he is not insensitive to your plight—”

“Which he heard about from Leonard.”

“Which he heard about from Leonard. And so, I am here to deliver a proposal to you—”

The glossy black palmtop disappeared back into his voluminous jacket, and Larry Muso slid a folder onto the table.

In the center of the portfolio, the silvery holographic image of a skeletal gryphon reared and grasped within its claws a spinning orb.

“I see.” Jack stared at the portfolio, then picked it up. When he opened it, faint bells chimed, and a breathy female voice whispered The Golden Family Welcomes You. He flipped through the pages, incomprehensible sets of numbers, with here and there the small square IT image of an athletic-looking blond man in a conservative dark suit, poised to deliver instructive commentary to arbitrage-impaired readers.

Like me, thought Jack. He cleared his throat again, tapping the prospectus against his hand. “Well, okay. I’ll have our attorneys take a look at it.”

“Mr. Thrope suggested that perhaps you use his attorney, rather than Mr. Gardino.”

“Tell Mr. Thrope I’ll keep my own goddamn counsel.” To Jack’s horror he felt tears pricking at his eyes. He tossed the prospectus onto the table and stood. “Thank you, Mr. Muso—I have some things to do now—”

Larry Muso jumped to his feet. His knees knocked against the table, sending the prospectus sliding onto the floor. At once he stooped to retrieve it; Jack did the same. The two of them nearly collided, Larry straightening with the portfolio in his hand, his pompadour grazing Jack’s cheek as he stepped backward. At the touch of his hair Jack shivered, felt an involuntary frisson at how soft it was. Not hard and lacquered at all, but silky and fragrant with that expensive perfume. For an instant he imagined them somewhere else; not in bed but sitting side by side in some forever lost and ordinary place, a bookstore perhaps, an espresso bar, knees touching as they turned the pages of a magazine. The Gaudy Book, of course: the special anniversary double issue. He could smell new glossy paper and scalded milk and feel a hand resting upon his…

Then the vision was gone. He blinked, seeing again those odd whorls of light at the corners of his eyes, and drew back, trying to cover his confusion. When he looked up he saw Larry Muso staring at him: his cheeks were spotted each with a single bright red dot.

“Excuse me,” Larry Muso said in a low voice. He dropped the portfolio onto the table, where it clattered and whispered to itself.

“I’m sorry.” Jack shook his head. “I didn’t mean to be rude—”

“No, no—” Larry smiled, a false bright flash. “It is your decision, of course. Only we were under the impression that the magazine’s demise was—imminent. Perhaps we misunderstood… ?”

“No, you understood perfectly. God forbid Leonard should ever miss a deathwatch.” Larry stared at him, his expression still frozen in that mask of benign agreement, but his dark eyes held a flicker of unease. “I just—well, even if I did want to sell the magazine, there’s the matter of choosing a successor—another editor.”

The unease melted into another conciliatory smile. “Mr. Tatsumi would like you to continue as editor.”

“But I don’t want to be editor anymore. I’m sick,” Jack said, and no longer cared if bitterness leached into his voice. “I’ve spent my whole fucking life on this magazine. I’m ready to give it up. Can you give that message to Mr. Tatsumi?”

He had thought it might be gratifying to insult his visitor. Instead, Jack immediately felt awful. Larry Muso stared at him with such pity and embarrassment that Jack found himself reassuring him.

“Look, Mr. Muso, maybe I could help you find someone to replace me, someone who—”

“But your family—the magazine has been in your family—”

“Well, yes, but it was always just a sideline to the department stores. And it’s been a hundred years. I mean, we’ve had a good long run—”

“I am certain that Mr. Tatsumi wants the magazine intact.” Larry Muso shook his head; his pompadour waggled furiously. “It is part of the entire aesthetic of the purchase. We will have to discuss this, I think.”

Jack cast a quick look at the prospectus on the table. “Maybe,” he said, trying to imbue the word with menace. “But right now I really have to get back to work. So—”

He beckoned at the door. Instead Larry Muso stared at him with an oddly frank sort of interest, neither sexual nor businesslike; as though Jack were wearing some highly unusual item of clothing. After a moment he said, “What are you doing for it?”

Jack frowned. “Some phone calls—I have a few—”

“No, no—for your disease. What treatment are you undergoing?”

“That’s none of your fucking business.” Jack’s face tightened with anger, “I said—”

“Because you are looking very well.” Larry Muso stepped around Jack, still giving him that appraising stare. “There are some unusual drugs, we have several major pharmaceutical holdings, and I was just—”

“OUT! ”

Jack stormed after him, but at the door Muso stopped and made a mocking half bow.

“That was inexcusably rude. Please forgive me.” For a moment Jack thought Muso was going to burst out laughing. “But I should warn you, Mr. Finnegan—The Golden Family is quite serious about acquiring your magazine. I volunteered to make this inquiry, out of respect for what Leonard Thrope told me of your work, and because I thought it would be more—palatable—than introducing you to our attorneys so early in the negotiation process. But the attorneys will come…”

Absently he fingered his waistcoat. “There is a word we use, Mr. Finnegan—nemawashi. It is a business term, but the word is derived from gardening. It is what one does when planting a tree. To cut the roots, to wrest the plant from the earth too quickly, is to kill it. The roots wither, the tree will die. A wise gardener will pluck and prune carefully over several weeks, so that the tree can adjust to its new life.”

Larry Muso’s eyes gazed directly into Jack’s. “These are dangerous but very interesting times for investors, Mr. Finnegan. That is why The Golden Family is launching a sky station from the Mongolian desert. That is why we have very exceptional gardeners.”

With a flourish he smoothed the front of his coat, bowed again, and walked out the door. Jack could only watch, chastened and amazed, as the slender figure strode vigorously back up the rain-streaked drive, until it was lost to sight.

He turned and sank into a chair, picked up first The King in Yellow and then The Golden Family’s prospectus. The novel he gazed at longingly and set aside. The prospectus earned more resigned attention. He weighed it carefully in his palm, wondering what, exactly, the cover was made of—the material felt smooth and taut, but also supple, like the skin of an underripe fruit. Tentatively he pressed it with a finger, and was rewarded with a slight dimpling in the material.

“Another product of The Golden Family, GFI International,” breathed the portfolio. “Manufactured entirely in the Nippo-Altai Commonwealth.”

“What’s it made of ? ” demanded Jack, half-fearful that he would get a reply; but the portfolio was silent. He turned to the first page, activating the icon.

“John Finnegan! We welcome you,” spoke a brisk voice. “Within these pages you will see the future that The Golden Family has to offer you and The Gaudy Book—” A chiming, followed by a throaty boom, as of a gong being struck. “The Golden Family is a privately owned corporation formed by the merger of major international corporations from the United States, the European Union, Mongolia, and Japan. In 1987… .”

The voice was silenced as he turned the next page. Rows of numbers, interspersed with small but luminous photographs: trees, mountains, a welder smiling behind a mask as golden sparks fell about her head. He pressed another icon.

“… assets in excess of forty-seven billion dollars annually, chiefly from holdings in…”

The next page brought a molten sunset over Mongolia’s Flaming Cliffs, the sound of tinkling herd-bells and chanting.

“In 1995, GFI completed the acquisition of a 75 percent working interest in the Saraagalt Basin, Mongolia. GFI now owns 100 percent of two contract areas in the Saraagalt Basin in the Gobi Desert, totaling 7.32 million acres. Historically, Mongolia has not had access to its mineral and natural gas deposits. Consulting geologist and engineering firms hired by GFI determined that vast untapped stores of minerals and fossil fuels beneath the Gobi could in future…”

Jack shook his head in a sort of desultory amazement. The sky is falling and they’re still buying up mineral rights. He turned to the center of the prospectus, where a double-page spread showed a sky pulsing with color: purple, green, indigo, gamboge yellow, crimson. Stars showed very faintly through violet flames. In the foreground a shining silver dirigible towed some sort of platform, a huge golden grid with batlike wings. Behind it trailed glittering constellations like so many diamonds tossed upon a jeweler’s velvet table. The same earnest voice intoned.

“In late 1999 The Golden Family will set in place the first SunTerminus™ skystage. Designed and produced by an international team of the world’s foremost research scientists and aerospace engineers, Sun Terminus™ is the most innovative system ever designed to offset the dangerous effects of ozone depletion in the earth’s atmosphere. Unlike conventional satellites, which have been crippled by recent atmospheric disturbances, the worldwide network of SunTerminus™ stages will be set aloft by GFI’s Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) fleet of Fouga™ Dirigibles, each one capable of towing a five-ton payload. Once in place, SunTerminus™ will be the newest, most reliable telecommunications network on earth, providing broadcast and communications services. Because of their lower placement in the earth’s atmosphere, the stages will be unaffected by terrestrial catastrophes, and GFI’s unique and highly specialized security system will prevent any risk of terrorist attack.

“At the same time as the telecommunications system is introduced, The Golden Family will launch its remarkable Fouga™/SunTerminus™ configuration known as the Solar Universal Nucleo-Radial Array (SUNRA™). By first polarizing particulates and toxins in the earth’s atmosphere, SUNRA™ can then ‘attract’ unwanted compounds much as a magnet attracts iron filings, and so take the first step toward repairing the ozone layer…”

“Yeah, yeah, save the ozone. Very nice,” muttered Jack. “But what about me?” He turned the prospectus’s last few pages, and finally found there what he was looking for.

“The Golden Family International, henceforth known as GFI, lets it be known that of this date, April 19,1999, it has made to John Chanvers Finnegan II, editor in chief and owner of the periodical known as The Gaudy Book, an offer in the amount of $3,000,000 for purchase of said periodical. GFI would then become sole proprietors of…”

He closed the prospectus. Around him the room was silent, save for the tapping of rain at the windows.

Three million dollars. It was more money than his family had possessed in over twenty years. Illness and bad investments had shorn Jack’s father’s share of the Finnegan fortune. The bulk of his grandfather’s money had, of course, gone to Keeley; but it had long since been squandered on Lazyland’s upkeep, as well as gifts to various Finnegan children and great-grandchildren.

Three million dollars…

But what was that worth, nowadays? He could hear Leonard’s mocking voice—“Three million bucks’ll buy you a latte in Uzbekistan!”

But GFI was certainly solvent, at least right now. One of the world’s biggest corporations, after Disney and Matsushita; he could be fairly certain that the check wouldn’t bounce. He would use the money on the house; put in a stairlift for Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson, repair the damage left by ice dams and flooding. He could afford some of the medications he had stopped taking, if he could find a source for them. He could stop pretending to save his family’s dying literary legacy, and retire—his brothers had been telling him to do that ever since he became ill. He could travel.

He could buy time.

“Jesus,” he said aloud. He tapped the prospectus gently against his chin, and smiled. “Well—”

Quickly he turned and crossed to his battered desk, fished around until he found the telephone beneath a heap of unpaid bills. He grinned triumphantly when he heard a dial tone, then punched in Jule Gardino’s number.

“—I guess I need a lawyer.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Death by Water

He went home to die. It took him two days from Boston, and by the time he got there he was so sick and exhausted he might as well be dead already. Innocent that he was, Trip didn’t know that IZE was more addictive than crack or heroin: that it had been deliberately manufactured so that the brain’s receptors for the drug, once activated, would continue to crave it, even after a single dosage. He felt nauseated and almost frantic with anxiety; his head ached, and in the corners of his eyes he saw faint flickerings that mirrored the sky overhead.

Now Roque Beach stretched before him, glittering in the greenish sunlight. Maine was one of those places where rich people fled when the world fell apart. The small population base meant there were fewer viral outbreaks (though more militias), fewer attempts to impose quarantines and environmental interdictions—although the atmospheric effects of the glimmering were, if anything, intensified in the northern latitude. And not even the end of the world could temper the Maine winter. But Moody’s Island was too raw and remote to attract refugees from the Hamptons. Only people like Trip Marlowe called it home. And only a Marlowe would return to Hell Head to die.

He staggered to the huge rocky outcropping that overlooked the whirlpool and stared down into its vast turning eye. Expecting perhaps to see something there—his father’s battered face staring up at him; his mother with her long hair aswarm with tiny crabs. Instead there was only churning water, marbled black and green, the peeping cry of storm petrels as they fluttered above waves farther down the shore.

It was early April, but on Moody’s Island winter still held court. The sky was icy blue laced with silver. Underfoot the stones were greasy. More than once Trip nearly fell, his sneakers sliding into declivities filled with kelp and mussels and water the color of lager. His feet grew numb as he stumbled down the shoreline, periwinkles crunching like acorns beneath his heels. Sea spray and sweat coursed down his back; his flannel shirt grew stiff with rime. Stones went flying as he walked, and he swore at them, all the words he’d never been able to say aloud, all the words he’d never even been able to think—

“Shit fuck p iss shit piss fuck fuck fuck.”

The sky darkened from pale green to metallic indigo, shot with threads of lightning. The brilliance made his eyes ache. He stumbled across the beach, blinking painfully. He’d always been thin; now he looked emaciated, his eyes sunken and the corners of his mouth crosshatched with sores. He jammed his hands into his pockets, shivering, pulled up the collar of his shirt, and stared out across Grand Manan Channel, across the steely Atlantic to where a lone lobster boat plied the unsettled waters.

He had lost all track of time. He’d thought it was early when he stumbled onto the beach, but with the sun lost within lurid clouds there was no way of knowing what hour it was. The ominous sky made him think that a storm was blowing, but such portents were all but meaningless now. Fireflies no longer flew low before a rain, but clustered close upon screen windows at midday, blinking madly. Locusts brought not fine weather but sudden snows; spiders undid their webs and hid, storms or no. Jellyfish and crabs washed up on shore in the millions, and loons flew out to sea in the middle of lashing rains. Everywhere the natural order had been betrayed by the skies: you could fly from Newark to New Delhi and back again (if your navigational systems worked, if you had fuel enough, and money), and never see sunset, never see dawn; never see the sun nor true night at all, only the shifting spectacle of the world falling apart.

He turned and stepped down onto the long ledge of stone that stuck out over Hell Head like the plank on a pirate ship. Bladder wrack scrunched and popped underfoot. Acorn barnacles tore at the soles of his sneakers. When he stooped, he saw that some of them held their feathery cirri aloft, fooled by the whirlpool’s heavy spray into thinking they were still underwater.

In the distance the lobster boat appeared to stand still, buffeted by waves. A nor’easter blowing up, his grandmother would have said. What would she have thought of a storm that lasted six weeks, of the sight of the Mississippi delta spreading across the Midwest like a red stain? What would she have thought of her grandson fucking a young girl in a planetarium, then taking a drug that made it possible for him to have sex with his own double while a perverted homosexual watched?

His stomach clenched. He shut his eyes, fighting tears, then opened them. He took a few steps toward the edge of the narrow outcropping, his feet seeking familiar pockets in the stone hidden by rockweed. He could hear the grinding roar of the whirlpool, magnified by the rising gale. His clothes were soaked through, his hair stiff. The gold cross felt like a brand upon his chest.

A sharp cry made him look up. He almost lost his balance, flailing as he sank into a half crouch. When he stood again he saw a cormorant, perhaps ten yards off, futilely beating its wings as it sought to head inshore. The wind sent it keeling down and up, its long neck arcing and the yellow patch of its chin seeming to glow in the weird light. Its wicked beak opened, and it cried out: a desperate keening sound, cut off as a sudden downdraft caught the bird and it spun end over end and plummeted into the whirlpool.

The bird struck the water headfirst. For several moments it spun, caught in the curved lip of the whirlpool’s perimeter. Trip glimpsed the pale-flecked feathers of its throat, its staring eye already dulled and insensate. Its wings spread across the water like the shattered ribs of a Chinese fan. Then it fell into the center of the vortex. There was a froth of bloody spume, a prickling of stray feathers like the spines of a porcupine; and it was gone.

On the ledge Trip gazed into the black water. It seemed there should be something to show that a creature had just died there, but of course there was nothing, not even a feather. The wind wailed and sent grey sheets lashing above the waves. He could no longer feel his fingers; could no longer hear anything except the roar of wind and water. Rage built in him that something so strong and wild could so quickly be lost, and unmourned. He was shaking from the cold but still he stood there, still he gazed into that mindless eye, until finally he began to sing.

It was an old song, something his grandmother would sing to him when she returned from one of her beano nights, her breath warm with beer and cigarettes. Her reedy voice would quaver, whooping drunkenly on the chorus as she sat in front of the trailer in her lawn chair, swatting at blackflies and tossing spent cigarettes onto the dirt.

When his mouth opened he could taste the wind, its rich salt broth of decay, of fish and rotting kelp. It was a familiar taste, a familiar scent. A storm smell, that would send women running out to pull laundry from the line, and the men to the 52 Variety, where they’d smoke and swear about the ravaged ground-fisheries, the boats that no longer plied the bay.

He tried to shade his eyes. Weird blobs and jots of color swam across his field of vision.

He shook his head and stared into the boiling pit below him. He could see his breath in the heavy vaporous air above the whirlpool. When he sang the sound was harsh and bloodless as a gannet’s cry.

Spray lanced his bare flesh but he no longer felt it. He could see nothing but a slanting blur of green and grey. His nostrils filled with water, but still he sang, beating his arms against the air. He felt exhilarated, almost exalted, by the storm; by the thought that minutes from now he would be dead. He inched from the rubbery bed of sea wrack to the very tip of the protruding ledge. The stone slit through his sneaker and cut into his bare foot. A cluster of barnacles sliced his heel, and he shouted, caught his breath, and forced himself to go on.

A few inches of granite was all that held him there above the maelstrom. But he was not afraid, he had never been so unafraid. It was all a storm now, all the earth overtaken by tempest, and he was part of it, as much as the yellow foam curdling about his bloody foot, as much as the rain and boiling sky. Somewhere little crabs nibbled and fetched at the milky shreds of a cormorant’s flesh. For one last moment Trip stood there upon the ledge, blinking as he gazed upon the ruptured world.

Here goes nothing, he thought. And he was gone.