Glimmering

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lady of Situations

Through some miracle of coincidence—he would not have been surprised to learn that The Golden Family was behind it—Jack was able to complete a call to Jule Gardino and leave a message on the answering machine. It had been months since he’d put a call through this easily.

“Julie! It’s Jack. Listen, I need to talk to you, about some business. I mean lawyer-type business. I mean I’d like to talk to you anyway, of course. So call me if and when you can. Oh, and tell Emma hi. Hi, Emma! Bye…”

He set the phone down. He felt exhausted, and experienced a familiar anxiety. Had he taken all his medications that morning? Was it time to begin the next round of his remaining pills and inhalants and herbal tinctures, or had he already missed something? He looked around for a working timepiece, saw only ornate horological confections with hands set at odd hours: twenty past seven, five past noon, or was it midnight? He decided it was time to go back in. He gathered the GFI prospectus and The King in Yellow, thinking morosely how once again he had gotten no work done. Then he returned to the main house.

It was later than he had imagined, well past noon. Mrs. Iverson had made lunch: tinned sardines on stale crispbread with a drizzle of the olive oil left by Leonard at Christmas. Jack ate absently and alone, preoccupied with thoughts of corporate largesse and with the lingering image of Larry Muso’s dark eyes and ivory-colored skin. His grandmother had lain down for a nap. When he finished lunch he did the same, first checking his arsenal of pills to make sure he hadn’t missed any. He squeezed a dropperful of Fusax onto his tongue, placed The Golden Family’s prospectus on his nightstand. He heard the faint tinkling of chimes. He was looking forward to thinking about Larry Muso’s offer, to imagining what three million dollars might buy. Perhaps even some time with Larry Muso himself? But within minutes he was sound asleep.

He woke not knowing how long he had slept, or what time of day it was. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling out of sorts. He stood and recalled his morning in the carriage house, Larry Muso’s sloe eyes and the small triumph of a telephone call successfully placed to Jule. With a yawn he crossed to the window.

Outside the lawn stretched grey beneath a seething sky. Rain-fed streams crisscrossed the matted grass, culminating in a boggy stretch at the bottom of the garden, where a few stolid birch trees rose from the mulch. Earlier that week he had seen figures moving down there, well within the boundaries of the estate. There was a security fence, of course, but it was an electrical fence, useless now. At night he could glimpse fires through the windows of the fallen houses adjoining Lazyland; he tried to take that for a good omen, since it meant the encamped fellahin were content to remain within their own broken homes and leave his alone. He leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the flickering sky.

How long has it been since I’ve seen the stars? One year? Two?

Jack’s breath left a fog on the glass. He rubbed at it, frowning as he touched the bull’s-eye left by the Fusax bottle.

Could you see the stars in Mongolia, or Japan? Was there anyplace left where you could see them at all?

Certainly not here, where the sky had given itself over to a perpetual carnival of night. Fires raging in empty towers, the waters of New York Harbor burning where freighters had released their cargoes, glowing traceries of fuselage left by jets that had failed in transit. Lightning streamed across the sky and lit upon the Palisades, crimson and violet. A wash of corrosive orange swept across the cliffs and was gone. From the darkness came a howl, a dog’s, Jack thought, but then the sound fractured into laughter.

Horror choked him poisonous as the rain gnawing at Lazyland’s ruined lawns. Horror not of the grinning refugees but of what came next, when pestilence and famine claimed them all.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

The awful laughter rose, louder and louder. Wind beat against the house, and the smell of smoke seeped through the walls, thick with the reek of burning plywood, foam insulation, paint fumes. He covered his mouth; the wind gusted and as quickly as it had come the smoke was gone. On the window where his finger had smudged the glass, he saw a darkness like fine fur: some new kind of spore or fungus, already hungrily seizing upon the warmth and dead tissue left by his touch. He felt the pulse of blood inside his veins, and knew it not for his own life but the mindless tremor of nature. He shook his head and realized that he had leaned against the window again, both hands pressed against the smooth surface. When he reared back the imprints of his fingers blackened upon the glass as though charred by an invisible flame. But it was not ash but innumerable threads of living matter: he could smell them, a whiff of foul gas. He stepped back from the window but there was no escaping it, it was all around him, a shroud woven by a tireless army.

He had gone to sleep in one world but woken to the wasteland.

Later he came to, lying on the floor beneath the window. He had been dreaming of Leonard. Leonard’s hand upon his breast, his own hand on Leonard’s cock. He gasped awake, flooded with desire and an aching sorrow as he took in the room around him and remembered: he was forty-two years old, he was ill, Leonard had fled him long ago.

A somber radiance on the eastern horizon made Jack think it must be dawn. But when he found his watch, a Cartier hermetic timepiece with radium numerals, it said 10:15. The little brass carriage clock was chiming two. He stood and gazed at a dark imprint on the window. Nothing horrible there, only the normal amount of dirt and grit and grease. He frowned. The wind blessedly had died away. Even more remarkable, the rain had stopped. It must have been this that woke him, the unaccustomed silence after so many weeks of storm.

But the air felt dank and chill. There was a cloyingness to it, a weirdly palpable sense of vitality. Jack turned and started for his bed.

That was when he heard her. Sobbing, faint but clear from somewhere just below the morning balcony. It made him think of his sister at play long ago, hiding in the hydrangea bush and crying because he was taking too long to find her. He waited, expecting the sound to fall into silence or flame into one of those unnerving screams. Instead it continued no louder or softer than before, frail and piteous.

He rubbed his eyes, walked back to the window, wrenched it open, and leaned outside to scan the garden below. The crying stopped. He could imagine whoever was there looking up and seeing him, a tall wraith commanding this battered ship. The crying began again, as miserable as before. The thought of someone down there gazing frightened, at him, was too much for Jack to bear. He hurried downstairs, pulled on boots and his grandfather’s ancient raincoat, and went outside.

The air was so still that he could hear the thrum of a single car echoing from far away, solid and portentous as the tolling of a church bell. He listened raptly as it drove off; then the sound of weeping stirred him again and he strode down toward the garden.

He had thought—hoped, actually—that whoever it was would have fled by the time he got outside, or at least fallen silent. Instead the cries grew louder and more desperate. Jack shook his head, dismayed.

“Hey,” he called softly. “It’s okay. I’m not—I won’t hurt you.”

The weeping ceased, then with a hoarse cry resumed, so close that Jack took a nervous sideways step. He looked at the sodden limbs of juniper and ilex, streaked black and shimmering in the purplish light. Water pooled about his boots, releasing a thick rank smell as of spoiled mushrooms. He was just starting for the yew hedge when he saw her.

It was the child he had seen in his vision: the child who had led the procession of horned men. The same white face and windblown hair, the same wide empty eyes, the same thin mouth opened now to weep rather than blow upon a flute. But even as he stared aghast the child turned, so that Jack saw it was not a child but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, so emaciated and frail she looked younger. Her cheeks were hollowed, touched with violet where the light struck them, her sunken eyes a vivid troubling blue. She crouched beneath a hydrangea bush, fingers curled about a handful of moldering leaves and her lips drawn back so that he could see her teeth, very white above gums that were almost black. She wore some kind of cheap raincoat, the plastic ripped and gummed with filth. Beneath it Jack could glimpse filthy white pants and a shapeless shirt, ripped so that her small breasts were exposed. As she stared at him she made a hissing sound.

“Hey,” whispered Jack, and backed away. The girl watched him with eyes empty of anything but raw fear. If he extended a hand to her, he was certain she would bite, and he knew what that bite would bring: plague, pestilence, death.

But then, without thinking, Jack did reach for her, palm up as he would approach a strange dog. The girl’s gaze wavered between his face and his hand, as though weighing which held the greater threat. With a low cry she lifted her head and stared unblinking into his eyes. He stared back and saw hatred, dreadful hunger, and an unassailable fear; but mostly fear.

And so he knelt before her, awkwardly pulling at his raincoat as he murmured, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you, come here, come here…”

The coat billowed about her shoulders and he reached clumsily to straighten it, but it was like cloaking a bare scaffold: he could feel nothing but the dead stalks of hydrangea. He drew back, forcing a smile.

“There. Are you better now? Warmer?”

The girl looked up at him, her lusterless hair like dead grass. She seemed not to understand, but finally she nodded.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She had a vaguely European accent.

“You’re welcome.” He stood and he gazed down at the girl, torn between his desire to hurry back inside and the burgeoning awareness that, having started something, he couldn’t leave it unfinished.

“Shit,” he said. The girl began to weep again, silently, tears fine as needles streaking her gaunt face. Not just the act of cloaking her but the coat itself had given something of humanity back to her. For a cruel moment Jack cursed himself for not going out in his pajamas.

“Come on, then.” He sighed. “I can’t leave you out here to die on the fucking lawn.”

Once again he stretched his hand toward her. The girl crouched, then with a shiver stood on unsteady feet. She ignored his hand and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then faster and faster, passing from grass to broken tarmac as she hurried up the drive. Jack hoped she would break into a run and flee Lazyland. But when he reached the top of the drive she was waiting, clutching his grandfather’s raincoat around her narrow shoulders.

Jack’s resignation burned into soft despair. “The front door.” He gestured at the house. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.

“Now listen,” Jack said as he pulled the outer door shut. She smelled like rotting leaves. “My grandmother lives here, she’s very old and frail, and I don’t want you—bugging her.”

The girl stared as though he had barked like a dog. Jack elbowed past her toward the inner door, calling out.

“Grandmother? Grandmother, there’s someone here, don’t—”

He stopped and glanced back at the girl. I must be fucking crazy. What was he thinking, telling her about his grandmother? Some insane little bitch planning to rob them in their sleep, or waiting to signal her cronies to break into Lazyland and kill them all…

His grandmother appeared at the foot of the stairs.

“Yes, Jackie?”

The girl made a low mewling sound, and with surprising strength, pushed past him.

“Grandmother.” Her grim little face contorted. Jack edged forward protectively. The girl looked up at Keeley, ran a hand self-consciously through her filthy hair, and smiled.

“Well.” Keeley’s hands tightened on her gold-topped walking stick. “Is this a—friend? Of Leonard’s?”

“Umm, well, no—” A smile broke across Keeley’s face.

“Lunantishee, ” she said. “A cailin a vic O! What are you doing here?”

The girl’s smile faded. She glanced over her shoulder at Jack. He forced himself to smile reassuringly—for Keeley’s sake, not the girl’s. “She was outside in the cold, I just thought we might let her in to dry off, and then—”

“Of course,” said Keeley. She continued to gaze at the girl, but the wonder drained from her faded blue eyes; whatever she saw now, it was not the lunantishee. “Bring her in, she can sit by the stove”—she raised her walking stick and motioned toward the kitchen—“I’ll have Larena find something for her to wear. Go on now—” This to the girl, in the same brisk tone she’d used on generations of animals and children. “Go on.”

The girl clutched at her torn clothes, walked down the dark hallway toward the kitchen. Jack turned to his grandmother, but Keeley was already standing at the foot of the staircase, thumping her walking stick.

“Larena! Larena dear—”

With a sigh Jack headed for the huge kitchen, the most modern room in the great shaky pile that was Lazyland. His grandfather had renovated it shortly before his death in the early 1970s, as a gift for Keeley; all the original woodwork had been replaced with shiny blond cabinets and turquoise Naugahyde.

Now the fluorescent bulbs had long since flickered out. The electric range was covered with ancient outdoor gear dredged up from one of Lazyland’s subbasements: a blackened Coleman stove and tiny white gas-driven heater that boiled water and scorched rice. The refrigerator was unplugged, the occult pantry with its folding doors and lazy Susans sadly underutilized. Still, with the vivid light falling through its windows, the kitchen was the brightest room in the house, and Larena Iverson kept it scrupulously clean.

Certainly the ragged girl was impressed. Jack found her standing beside the stool where younger cousins had been wont to take their afternoon cocoa, her expression somewhere between suspicion and awe.

“This your house?”

“Yes,” said Jack. “I mean, my family’s,” he added, trying to evoke a vast hidden clan that dealt speedily and fatally with all intruders. “Look, we’re pretty busy right now, maybe I can find you a towel or something, you can dry off, and then—”

Behind him there was a soft wheeze and the pad of slippered feet. “Oh, poor thing! Look at you, soaked to the skin, what was your mother thinking?”

Mrs. Iverson struggled across the room, burdened with heavy wintry-looking clothes and a pink appliquéd bath towel. The girl looked up, confused. “Mother?”

“Wait till I have a word with her,” Mrs. Iverson went on. “Look at you, a skinny wretch, what were you thinking, get into the bathroom now! Right this minute—”

The housekeeper began herding the girl back toward the dark corridor. A moment later Jack heard the bathroom door creak shut, the gasp and blast of water surging up through the recalcitrant pipes. Mrs. Iverson’s voice rose and fell, and after a minute or two he heard the girl laughing.

“Great,” he muttered, and crossed over to the stove. A Thermos held what was left of the morning’s brew. He poured himself a mug, grimacing as he picked out bits of dandelion root and grounds, and stared unhappily out the window. The kitchen telephone sat on a shelf there beside a ragged copy of the Yonkers telephone book. He thought of picking up the receiver to see if there would be a dial tone today, checking in the Yellow Pages for whatever defunct agency had once dealt with circumstances like this. Child Welfare? New Hope for Women? Emma would know what to do. He could call her, arrange for Jule to hydroplane down the Saw Mill River Parkway and take the girl to an appropriate shelter somewhere.

Oh please! He could just hear Leonard’s derisive laughter. Shelter? Where’s your sense of Christian duty, Jackie-boy? Throw her back to the wolves!

Oh, fuck off, thought Jack, and reached for the receiver. He’d long ago stopped trying to find any sort of pattern in when the phones would work, just as he had stopped trying to find a reason for the power outages. It’s just the Way We Live Now! Leonard would cry gleefully, but more than the outages themselves it was the constant uncertainty that maddened Jack.

Because if you knew there would be no electricity for, say, the next fifty years, you could Just Make Do. Remember the Depression? Remember Sarajevo? Some people live like this all the time!

But when the power popped back on at 3 A.M., there was always the same insane rush for lights and a hot shower, the cappuccino maker, the computer, and the television. It made no difference that this just made it all worse. Jack himself knew that when faint music rose from a forgotten radio, he would find Mrs. Iverson struggling downstairs to the washing machine and his grandmother rolling pie crust in the kitchen, even as Jack made a beeline for the stereo.

Jule told him that in the city it was even worse. Brokers and traders camping out on the floor of the Exchange, so as not to miss that instant when its black cavernous reaches suddenly burst into light and life; the wealthy pouring from their luxury towers and commandeering hansoms for impromptu parties and lightning visits to restaurants, nightclubs, galleries that opened only by electric light. People addicted to the new interactive drugs rushed to the electric avenues where they could sate themselves. Musicians and club kids filled streets and warehouses and tunnels, and for a little while life began to take on some of its old contours: trains running, businesses operating, people complaining about jobs and missed flights instead of the search for bottled water and fresh produce.

But sooner or later it would all come crashing down again. And an entire secondary industry had sprung up around that—people who made it their business to handicap whether or not the NYSE would be open on a particular day, or when the Tokyo Exchange would kick in. Jule—who had many friends, if not clients, and occasionally still ventured into the city with them—told of watching a beautifully dressed young woman decapitate a black rooster on the floor of the Exchange, while her partner collected international currency and more useful offerings—chocolate, coffee, a small strand of black pearls—from a crowd of commodities brokers.

So it was with mild trepidation that Jack lifted the telephone from its cradle. And yes, there was a dial tone and the familiar recording that warned of delays.

“…constantly working to improve our service to our customers…”

“All right, dear!” He started, replacing the handset as Mrs. Iverson’s shrill voice heralded the opening of the bathroom door. “Let’s go stand in front of the fire and get warm—”

Jack listened to the soft parade of footsteps going from hall to entryway. Was there a fire today? He certainly hadn’t made one. But when he got to the living room he found the girl crouched in front of the blazing hearth, wearing clothes that were much too big for her.

“What was her mother thinking?” Mrs. Iverson demanded of Jack. “Make sure she stays warm while I take care of those—” Her eyes narrowed, fixing on the pathetic mound of tattered cloth she’d dropped in the hallway. “We should call the doctor, too,” she added vaguely, and toddled off.

At the word doctor the girl shot Jack an alarmed look.

“Don’t worry. There’s no doctor. Not unless we bundle you off to the hospital.” He crossed his arms, trying to strike a pose between beneficence and menace. The girl looked so puzzled that he gave up and sank into an armchair. “Oh, screw it. So what’s your name?”

The fire’s crackling all but drowned her reply. “Marz.”

“’Scuse me?”

“Marz. Marz Candry.”

“Marcie?”

“No. It’s short for Marzana—Mary, in Polish. Just call me Marz, okay?”

“Polish, huh?” That would account for the accent, also the starved-refugee look. “Mary, that was my aunt’s name. Mary Anne. I never knew her, really,” he added, as though she had asked. “She disappeared when I was a kid.”

He drew himself up in the chair. “As a matter of fact, those are some of her clothes, I think.”

He pointed at the heathery pink sweater that billowed across the girl’s chest, the voluminous folds of a dirndl skirt that spread about her like a pool of melting wax. “Let me see, move over here…”

He tugged at the sweater until it grew taut as a tent flap in front of her, smiling when he found what he was looking for: the remains of an embroidered monogram.

“Mary Anne Finnegan. See?” He shook his head. “No one knows what happened to her. She ran away to California in the sixties and never came back. A couple of people told me some character in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was actually her. Probably she just OD’ed somewhere. But weird, huh?”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind. So are you, uh—what? A runaway? Or something?”

“Something.” Jack waited for her to go on, but she only inched closer to the fire, strands of lank hair falling across her cheeks. The girl extended her bare toes onto the hearth.

“Nice and warm at least,” Jack suggested.

The girl yawned. Watching her, Jack wondered how he could have ever mistaken her for the child from his dream. She was obviously older, and obviously female. There was a piquant, almost hungry sharpness about her features: hollow cheeks and small pinched nose, black slit of a mouth. No jewelry save a simple gold ring. There was nothing remotely pretty about her, save those deep-set slanted eyes, so deep a blue as to be almost purple in the flickering light. Even now, crouched safely on the hearth, she twitched and glanced suspiciously over her shoulder, as though willing him to leave.

Keeley’s voice sounded from the entry room. There was the thump of her walking stick. A moment later she appeared in the doorway.

“Now, dear.” Jack looked up obediently, but his grandmother was staring at the girl. “Larena said she found you some clothes? Let me see if they fit.”

The girl glanced up but didn’t move. “Stand up,” commanded Keeley. “I want to see, she said they were too big.”

The girl got to her feet. The sweater’s sleeves dangled almost to her calves. Keeley shook her head.

“We’ll have to do better than that,” she said flatly. “Did Larena get you something to eat?”

The girl shrugged. “No.”

“Larena!” Keeley turned and pounded her walking stick on the floor. “Larena—”

From upstairs came a shrill reply.

“Larena will make you something.” Keeley swung back around. She reached to tug at the sweater and scowled. “Why ever did she give you that? Mary Anne would have made three of you.”

Keeley regarded her with icy blue eyes. When Larena entered, she turned away.

“Larena dear, see if there’s any of that soup left.”

“Well.” Jack stood. “I guess I’ll check the furnace.”

He headed downstairs, stopping in the basement bathroom to get a surgical mask from the box Emma had given him. Then he went to the coal cellar, a room the size of a big closet, and started shoveling.

It took forty-three shovelsful and the better part of an hour. Once he could have done it in fifteen minutes. Now the effort exhausted him. After a few minutes he had to pause between loads, turning his face from the rising cloud of black dust. He thought of the vial of Fusax on his nightstand. Had it been only yesterday that he felt so much better? He coughed, imagining the girl upstairs: a stranger’s mouth to feed, a stranger’s body soaking up warmth while Jack struggled in the mansion’s bowels like some medieval lackey.

Finally he was done. Sweating, he trudged back upstairs.

He found his grandmother in the living room, sitting in her wing chair with a tumbler of whiskey on the table beside her. No lamps had been lit. The fire had burned down to embers. “How was the furnace, dear? Did it bother your lungs?”

Jack removed his mask and stuffed it in a pocket. He jabbed ineffectually at the embers with a poker, then settled into a chair. “Fine. No trouble this time.”

“Is there enough coal?”

“Plenty. And it will be spring, soon…”

His voice died as he gazed at the window behind his grandmother, whorled with the pulsing greens and purples of an early sunset. “Well, it will be May, anyhow.”

His grandmother nodded and reached for her glass. “Your father was so set on taking that furnace out, back when he put those solar panels in. I don’t remember now how James talked him out of it.”

Jack shook his head, stifling a yawn. “He didn’t. It would have cost too much to remove it, so they decided to just leave it.”

“Lucky thing.” Keeley tugged at the mohair shawl draped across the back of her chair.

“Where’s the girl?”

“Larena put her to bed in Mary Anne’s room. Where did you say you met her?”

“I met her in the backyard. Under the hydrangeas.”

“Under the hydrangeas! How did she get in?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask—she just looked so miserable—”

“Of course, of course.”

“I’ll call someone tomorrow. Emma will know somebody.”

“Have you talked to them? How are they?”

Jack nodded. “A week or so ago. They’ve been busy—well, Emma’s been busy at the hospital, and I guess Jule’s got a few clients in the city. I think it’s hard for them right now—there’s not a lot of work for him…” His voice trailed off.

“Well, doctors are always busier than lawyers,” Keeley said loyally. She loved Jule, who had lived at Lazyland while attending law school at Fordham twenty years before. “People are always getting sick. Especially now.” She sighed. “Did they say when they could come visit?”

“Maybe before too long, if the rain keeps off,” Jack lied. “Emma used all her time off to come take care of me. Every time I talk to them, they want us to move up there with them—”

Keeley shook her head determinedly. “Too far away.”

“I know. They just worry, that’s all.”

“Well, I hope they can find her parents.”

Jack stared at her. “Her parents?” He realized she was talking about the girl. “Oh! Right—”

“She said she lived with someone in the city,” Keeley went on. “I think she was lying. Who would raise a child in the city?”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Then, Jack asked, “What was that Irish word you used before, Grandmother? Like ‘banshee’—?”

Keeley tilted her head, as though listening to faraway music.

“Lunantishee, you mean? That’s what your grandfather used to call me. They were fairies of some kind, I don’t remember. Pretty girls. That’s all I meant.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you go check on her on your way upstairs, dear. Thank you.”

He was being dismissed. “All right. Maybe I’ll try calling Emma tonight—the phone was up a little while ago.”

“Very good, dear.”

He stood and stared out the window. Beyond the line of the Palisades a molten glow lingered, sending ruddy flourishes across the rain-swollen Hudson. Jack felt the strange blurry sensation that overcame him sometimes, when some bright fleck of his childhood surfaced and the terrible weight of the poisoned sky momentarily lifted. Almost he could imagine the sun bulging red upon the western horizon; almost he could see the first stars showing through, and the glitter of electric lights in distant skyscrapers. A spark of gold leapt across the darkness and Jack’s heart with it, as upon its promontory overlooking the Hudson the skeletal arches of the Sparkle-Glo factory blazed with sunset.

And then it was gone. A blast of wind shook the window as a rain squall swept through, bringing with it sheets of coruscating yellow and acid blue. The sun disappeared, swallowed by brilliant gouts of green. Day had ended, but there was no night, only a tumult of hail against glass.

“Good night.” Jack kissed his grandmother’s cheek and left.

On the second-floor landing a candle burned within a glass mantle. There was the creak of a shutter that had gotten loose, the tired exhalation from a hot-air register. Jack debated going straight up to bed, but then he heard a small sound from the bedroom that had been his aunt Mary Anne’s. He peered inside. A hurricane lamp cast its glow across the huge old four-poster. He could barely make out a lump beneath the spread.

“Knock knock.” He rapped softly at the door. “Can I come in?”

“Okay,” a muffled voice replied.

“Uhumm.” He cleared his throat. “Are you—how are you feeling?”

The bed loomed before him, an eighteenth-century cherry four-poster complete with white chenille spread and canopy. An alpine array of pillows marched across its head; at its foot a down comforter waited like an immense nougat to be devoured at need. Somewhere in between was the girl. He could hear her breathing, uneven and noisy.

But it was another minute before he could pinpoint a bulge beneath the worn chenille, neither long nor wide enough to form a decent bolster, with a faint feathering of silver where her hair tufted from beneath the blankets. He could make out her slanted eyes staring at him with a ferocity that might have been fear or just fatigue.

“I feel like shit,” she snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said, immediately aware of how un-sorry he sounded. He asked in a gentler voice, “Can I get you anything?”

“No.”

This time the voice sounded distinctly like a sob. It would have been nice if the sound had torn at Jack’s heart, but in fact it annoyed him—everything about this girl annoyed him—and that in turn made him feel guilty.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. He traced a raised diamond on the bedspread, trying hard not to stare at the sharp little face an arm’s length away. “Can’t I get you something? Some milk maybe?”

“I hate milk.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good, because there isn’t any. But—are you hungry? Did Mrs. Iverson get you anything to eat?”

A small shudder beneath the blankets. “Some soup. And some crackers.” The shudder extended into a snaky sort of motion that ended with the girl sitting up. “Actually, do you like have a Coke or something?”

“Actually, no. I think there’s some tea, chamomile tea? No? Okay, let’s see, there might be—”

With a dramatic sigh the girl flopped back against the pillows. She pulled the covers up to her chin. “Oh forget it.”

Jack took in her fierce wedge of face, that voice so inflated with childish annoyance: the butterfly that stamped. Unexpectedly he laughed.

“What?” she demanded.

Jack shook his head, moving aside the hurricane lamp so he could lean against the nightstand. “Nothing. Just, I think it’s customary under these circumstances to say ‘Thank you.’”

“What? Oh.” The face shrank still deeper into the bed, like a currant in bread dough. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He toyed with an old electric lamp, clicked the switch experimentally a few times. “Marzana Candry. Is that your real name?”

“I already told you.”

“I mean your real last name. It doesn’t sound Polish.”

Hostile silence. He could see her eyes glittering. After a moment she hissed, “Yes.”

“Marzana Candry.” At her baleful look Jack corrected himself. “Marz Candry. Where are you from, Marz? Where in Poland?”

Silence.

“Let’s try again: where were you before you came here? New York? New Jersey?” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Connecticut? Long Island?”

Still nothing. Jack’s momentary good humor vanished. He thought of going through all fifty states, and then starting on individual cities, but before he could the girl said, “My parents are fucking dead, okay? And I’ll fucking kill myself before I go back to Poland, and I’ll never tell you where I came from so forget it, okay? Okay?” she ended in a near shriek.

“Okay,” Jack agreed, startled.

“The only reason I even came to your stupid house was by mistake. I was—I was with my friends and we got, like separated, okay? And I got lost, it was night and raining and I didn’t know where the fuck I was going and if I did I wouldn’t have come here to your stupid fucking house, all right?”

Jack looked beyond at the wide dormer window, its panes slashed with blue and gold.

“Your friends. Fellahin?”

The girl snorted and rolled her eyes. “What, you get that from the web? Some subway hippie Scientologist? Fuck that. They were my family. We were living down by the river and the fucking cops blew us out.”

“What happened to the rest? Your friends?”

“I dunno. Wasted, I guess. Who cares? You care?” She fixed him with a defiant stare. “Huh?”

Jack stared back. “No. I guess I don’t actually give a fuck.”

That shut her up. An odd look played across her face. She sat up and made a small gesture with one hand.

“So what is this?” she asked, a little hesitantly. “A museum?”

Jack laughed. “A museum? Yeah. And I’m the mummy.”

The girl frowned. “Really—is it a museum?”

“No—it’s my house—my grandmother’s house, actually. My family’s.”

Her eyes widened. “You live here?”

“Sure. If you can call this living,” he added. “Why?”

“It’s just so…”

Her voice trailed off. Jack looked around and tried to see it all as she must. The worn oriental carpet, its threadbare pathways trodden by generations of bare feet; the marble fireplace with its carved wooden screen and dried hydrangeas; the monolithic Victorian furniture, caparisoned with doilies and antimacassars and bits of velvet patchwork. A Chatty Cathy doll that had been his aunt’s; a Marymount College mug filled with pens and eyebrow pencils; a corner where a brass incense burner and peeling plastic daisy decals were all that remained of a shrine to The Turtles.

“It doesn’t look like my house,” Marz said at last, very softly.

Outside the wind tore at the dormer window. Shadows washed across the floor, scattering the carpet with dark roseates. An odd sort of peace came over Jack: how long had it been since he’d sat in this room? As a child he’d slept here, as he’d slept everywhere in Lazyland. But this room had always held an unspoken sadness after his aunt had run away. When she had left Yonkers, hitchhiking cross-country to disappear in the winter after the Summer of Love, she had been scarcely older than the sullen girl before him.

He thought of what a terrible grief his family must have gone through, his father and grandparents and uncles. And he had sensed it only as a child senses death, as an inexplicable absence that has less to do with the disappearance of the dead themselves than with the empty places left in those who mourn, the empty places left in the house itself.

“Mmmmm…”

Jack looked up to see the girl yawning, her defiant expression softened by weariness. He made an awkward little bow.

“I guess I’ll say good night, then.” He waited for the girl to say something, but she only stared at the ceiling. “All right. Good night.”

At the door he turned. The girl lay in the enormous bed like a shipwrecked child in a battered lifeboat. A profound uneasiness pierced Jack, to gaze into that familiar place and see a stranger there. He closed the door and hurried upstairs to his own room.

CHAPTER NINE

What the Storm Said

Spring came late to Mars Hill. Even before the glimmering, the season had always been a slow sputtering fuse: ice-out on the lakes in late March or early April, followed by the first few sparks of green amidst lichen-covered stones and the sloping shoulders of the Camden Hills ten miles to the south. What most people recognized as spring didn’t come to Maine until the end of May, or even June. And of course the chimerical weather of the last two years had changed even that.

This spring, ice-out didn’t occur until the morning of April 19. Martin knew when he saw the first loons flying overhead, making their way inland from the bay to Swan Lake. Somehow the loons always knew, and would arrive at their summer homes within an hour of the final thaw. Martin Dionysos (né Schuster) stood on the porch of his tumbledown cottage, the hairs on his neck prickling as he watched them arrow overhead.

Tears sprang to his eyes and he let them come, weak and shivery with gratitude—it had not been so very long ago that he had been terrified he would never be able to cry again, just as he had been certain the loons would not return, or the peepers in the marsh. But while there was nothing that could keep the broken sky at bay, or the terrible weather, enough magic resided still in the bones of this place that Martin could lie awake at night in his bed, haunted by the song of frogs. Now he clutched the decrepit porch railing and watched the loons fly past.

“There they go.” From a neighboring cottage wafted the voice of old Mrs. Grose, one of the three year-round residents at the crumbling spiritualist community. “Magic birds.”

Martin smiled. “Magic birds.” That was what the Abenaki Indians had named them. “I guess spring’ll be here someday, too.”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Grose said, hugging her windbreaker tight around her ample chest. At her feet wheezed her ancient pug. Martin’s son, Jason, and Jason’s wife Moony had once figured that the pug must be well over two hundred in dog years. Even Jason resisted the temptation to try and calculate Mrs. Grose’s age. “But spring isn’t really spring anymore, is it? My primroses, they were so sickly last year. And the lupines…”

Her voice died as she turned, staring past the other toy Victorians nestled on the hillside to where Penobscot Bay sparkled blue and gold and violet in the early-morning light. Martin felt his initial burst of joy ebb.

“I know.” He stared down at the first blades of dandelions thrusting through the earth, a pallid brownish yellow. “Mine too…”

Last spring, after years of watching his friends and lovers die, Martin himself had finally succumbed to his illness. At Jason’s urging, he’d left his apartment in San Francisco and moved back to Mars Hill for good. The virus had gone into remission almost immediately. But his weakness remained, the damage done to his lungs by pneumonia, lesions on his arms and calves that even Mars Hill’s singular magic could not heal. And the ceaseless gnawing at his heart that was grief for not just lovers and friends but for an entire world that had been destroyed: books that would never be written, songs never sung, children never born, tracts of the heart and soul that would remain unmapped. Martin himself terra incognita, the undiscovered country; because who was left now to love him? He had Mrs. Grose for company, of course. And his son Jason and his wife, Moony, came up as often as they could, but flights to Maine were all but nonexistent unless you chartered a plane, and Jason couldn’t afford that.

So Martin spent his days indoors, priming canvases with his failing reserves of linseed oil and turpentine, or scouring the beach for usable things: driftwood, salt-sodden telephone poles, plastic milk cartons, beer bottles. The bleak loneliness of the Maine winter left him depleted and depressed. He did no painting. The stretched canvases were left standing about the cottage like so many blank windows and doors. His online columns faded to bi- and then trimonthly, not because of the lack of power (fitful, but you could usually count on at least one day in the week to bring electricity) but because he had lost all heart. This caused webwide speculation as to whether he was still alive. Martin of course knew more people now who were dead than not, and spent mordant hours in bed devising new addresses for himself: timormort@acadia.com. He moved the photograph of his dead lover John deMartino from the bedside table, because some nights it seemed to speak to him. He read the same lines of poetry over and over again, as though tracing the lineaments of his lover’s cheek—

Martin could not die yet, but he was not healed. Days and nights on end he waited at a window overlooking the wasteland, eyes seared by what lay before him, wounded sky and stranded dolphins rotting upon the beach; he stood and waited for death to come.

At night he lay awake and heard people moving softly in the room about him. They whispered, and he could hear his name amidst other words only half-understood, and he recognized the voices. His father was there; his first lover and many others; and once he knew the corrosive chime of laughter from his old nemesis, Leonard Thrope. He had not heard that Leonard had died, but was not surprised at the thought; nor by the twinge of sorrow that accompanied it.

But mostly he heard John. The voices, of course, must be the first stages of dementia. He knew there was no Good Death awaiting him; yet somehow he had not expected this. One night the whisperings grew so intrusive—scrape of bat wings against the window, giggling cold breath against his forehead—that he took a deep breath and opened his eyes, determined to prove to them, at least, that there was nothing there.

Only there was: an entire roomful of phantoms, all familiar faces as at a spectral cocktail party, chatting and moving their hands quite animatedly. The one nearest to him—it was John—turned and with a smile opened his mouth to greet him. Martin screamed. His entire body spasmed with such horror that he shat the bed. He did not repeat the experiment. He took to swallowing tranquilizers at night and slept with a pillow over his head.

So it was with more than the usual green-starved longing that Martin awaited spring that year. One by one he’d cast off the few remaining ties that bound him to the rest of the world—lovers and friends, telephone, television, radio, car, computer—surprised at how easy it had become, and how commonplace, to take up all the antediluvian burdens this Hotspur century had thrown aside. Chopping and carrying firewood, retrofitting an old hand pump for the kitchen, getting used to the sheen of ice on the interior walls and windows of his poorly insulated cottage. Mrs. Grose’s canned zucchini and wax beans (the only things that grew reliably anymore, though they hardly flourished), a hot bath once a week. He’d offset the expense of wax candles by gathering stunted bayberries in the fall, and cursed himself for not installing solar panels years ago, as John had urged him. Now, of course, it was too late.

“Tired?”

From his porch Martin smiled wanly at Mrs. Grose. “A little,” he confessed. No use lying to a centenarian psychic. “I was thinking I might walk down to the beach.”

Mrs. Grose cocked her head, still staring across the bay. “That was some storm we had, eh?” At her feet the little pug gasped, as though at a bad memory. “I thought the roof would blow away!”

“I’m surprised it didn’t,” said Martin.

They stood in silence, watching the uneasy sky. “Well, I guess I’ll go down and see what the storm washed up,” Martin said at last.

“Dinner tonight?” Mrs. Grose called after him. “Diana’s supposed to come and bring us a chicken.”

“Then I’ll be there.”

He bent to pick up the canvas bag he took with him on his sea walks. Then, waving, he stepped from the porch and started downhill to the pier, past the sign so faded that its letters were imprinted only in his memory.

Drifts of leaves clung to the base of the signpost, but not so many as there had been, once. Martin glanced down at the few sickly daffodils thrusting through the mulch, and winced. Moony had always said she hated spring at Mars Hill: “It’s so hopeless!” To which Mrs. Grose had patiently explained that there was always hope—spring always came, followed by that sudden brilliant burst of northern summer that you never were quite prepared for, no matter how many times you’d seen it. But when Martin had last seen Moony a few weeks earlier, she’d avoided any mention of spring, avoided her annual rants against mud season and snow in May and the necessity of fires in cranky woodstoves that aggravated her asthma. At the time he and Jason had laughed about it (though not within Moony’s hearing). Now Moony’s unaccustomed silence seemed ominous.

She knows something, Martin thought as he trudged down the gravel road to the beach. She knows and she’s not telling.

Overhead the sky gleamed a soft metallic grey, streaked with undulating bands of violet and green. Seagulls called plaintively, trailing in the wake of a solitary lobster boat. The air had a harsh scent, hard to pinpoint but unmistakable. Jason was a marine biologist, and he believed the massive die-offs of krill and other plankton were changing the chemical content of the ocean. In the water a few cormorants bobbed, their heads snaking beneath the surface. Beside the rickety building that served as the community’s storage shed, Martin’s sailboat stood raised on concrete blocks, WENDAMEEN painted on its bow in plain block letters. Martin looked at the boat and sighed, and walked the last few yards to the beach.

Here, at last, things looked pretty much as they always had. No sand, just rocks everywhere, smooth and rounded by aeons of pounding waves. Braids of kelp and bladder wrack, stony hollows filled with periwinkles and goose barnacles; every now and then the fractured puzzle of a broken sea urchin’s shell, the astral shadow of a starfish or sand dollar. If you stared at your feet as you walked along the shore, you might almost imagine the world was as it had been, as it should be. But a glance at the bruised sky, the reflected glare of purple and gold put the lie to that.

The gravel path petered out beside a shriveled stand of rugosa roses. For a few minutes Martin stood and watched the lobster boat disappear into the glowing horizon. In the storm’s aftermath the day was calm and almost windless. But the air had a nasty bite: there was no hint of warmth or snowmelt, none of the vernal promise that usually followed a spring nor’easter. Martin frowned and thought of returning to his cottage, but that would mean facing a sink full of dirty dishes and a recalcitrant hand pump. He began to walk once more.

He kept his head down. Now and then the wind would bring a strong scent of the sea untainted by that poisonous stench of dying krill. He picked up three flattened Budweiser cans and a single brown bottle and shoved them into his canvas sack to be traded later at the Beach Store for credit. Spray stung the back of his neck. He walked slowly, hoping for a find that would match his best days of beachcombing. A twenty-dollar bill, all but worthless now, prized for its novelty value; a diamond engagement ring, hocked for food; the Bakelite casing of an old radio, miraculously intact save for its plundered electronics.

Nothing so exciting today. A broken skate’s purse, many broken razor clams. The nubbin of a brick, too small to bother adding to his salvage walkway. Ubiquitous and seemingly innumerable petrified rubber bands that had once kept luncheon lobsters from pinching hungry picnickers. A dead gull lay upon a bed of kelp, feathers matted, small black crabs spoiling at its breast. A few yards farther on a gang of its fellows squawked and beat their wings just above the beach. Martin lifted his head, surprised because he had not smelled the salt-rot of beached whale or dolphin that almost daily drew skeins of gannets and shearwaters, petrels and the lovely white fulmars that almost alone of birds possessed a sense of smell that helped them find the dead.

But the dolphin was there, its pale grey body barely glimpsed beneath the moving shroud of seabirds. Martin’s step quickened. He always checked on the stranded animals, to report to Jason at the Woods Hole lab; another sad and terrible task, pressing his hands upon their sides only to feel the great proud hearts fall silent, the splendid envoys turned into grey slabs of stinking meat that protein-starved locals sometimes butchered right there on the beach, fighting off the greedy seabirds with sticks.

This time, though, it was different. This time it was not a dolphin, but a body.

“Oh, fuck,” whispered Martin.

He began to run. Shouting and waving his arms so that the birds screamed and lifted into the bright air. He reached the body, sliding on the dank stones and falling into a crouch beside it. He flinched, his breath catching in his throat.

It was a young man; a boy, really. He was naked save for a torn pair of pants twisted around his legs and an ornate cross hanging from a chain around his neck. His skin had turned the color of the sea, greyish green and blotched with bruises, pinked crescents where fish had nibbled but all bloodless as a sponge. Seaweeds wrapped about him, ropelike strands of kelp and maidenhair. His right hand lay upon his breast, broken at the wrist so that it curved outward at an impossible angle. When Martin moved it oh so gently he saw black grit under the fingernails, a cloudy white scum that was soft flesh. On the third finger a gold ring glinted dully. His hair was so thick with dulse and laver it looked red, but beneath the weed Martin could see a frayed blond mat heavy with sand. His face was scraped raw, a cusp of exposed cheekbone so startlingly white it was like a wedge of mother-of-pearl. A tiny fish louse had embedded itself upon one swollen eyelid. With a grunt of disgust Martin pulled the parasite loose and flung it into the sea. The eyelid fluttered open and revealed a blue iris in a crimson bed. It stared at Martin, insensible as a stone.

But alive: he was alive.

“Shit!” Martin fell backward onto the rocks. He had to hug himself, hard, to calm down. He leaned forward again and placed a hand upon the boy’s chest.

Yes. Alive, though less a heartbeat than a faint pressure, like another finger there beneath the cold rind of skin.

He had no time to think, to worry about moving the boy and so finishing the sea’s job of killing him. He knelt and took him in his arms, gasping not because the boy was heavy—he felt like nothing so much as a sodden bundle of cloth—but because he, Martin, was so much weaker now. With a groan he stood, turned, and stumbled up the rocky headland to his cottage.

He laid the boy upon his bed, taking care to put an old wool blanket beneath him. Then he rushed to boil water on the big kitchen woodstove, gathered towels and antibiotic ointment, latex gloves, and isopropyl alcohol. There was no point in trying to phone for help. Even if the phone were working, no ambulance would come. The hospital was too far away and too poorly equipped now to do much more than offer the reassurance of watching its few doctors complain about the lack of money, medicine, staff.

He cleansed him as best he could, scraping off sand and salt, shreds of seaweed and torn skin. What at first appeared as a blackened hole in the middle of his forehead proved instead to be some kind of cross-shaped scarification. Still, despite his wounds, there was no odor of decay; his flesh, though battered, seemed free of infection. Martin set the broken wrist as best he could, splinting it with the wood he used for frames and an old coat hanger. Finally, he swabbed the cuts with antibiotic gel. The broken skin stirred like small mouths beneath his gloved fingers.

Throughout the boy remained unconscious. Young man, Martin corrected himself. His face was too badly bruised to get a sense of how young, but his hair where it had not been torn from his scalp was long and blond, his musculature lithe. He pulled a sheet over the boy’s exposed body, checked the room’s woodstove to make sure it was warm enough. He removed his gloves and took them into the kitchen, to boil and save them. Then he stepped onto the front porch.

Outside the light had shifted, from violet to pale lavender. The sea was calm. Gulls flew above the island like sparks, flickering from indigo to gold as they rode the wind. Martin’s heart ached to look upon it all, so unspeakably lovely and strange that it preempted any effort to capture it on canvas.

Or anywhere else, it seemed. When he left San Francisco, the most common topic at parties and funerals was of how hard it was now to write, to paint, to compose or sing or dance. Chatter online dealt with the futility of even trying. Only Leonard Thrope and his cohort of mori artists seemed able to endure what the world had become, and profit from it.

Martin was determined to find another way of seeing. When he first returned to Mars Hill, he had sat outside with notebooks and drawing paper, canvas and palette knife. All for nought. The glimmering transfixed the eye while it froze the heart: he could stand and stare at the sky for hours, awed and terrified, then go back indoors and face his empty canvases not with disappointment but mere relief, that they offered a void that he could safely contemplate, an abyss that did not defy comprehension. After a few weeks he gave up. What need was left in the world for art? Nature had taken up its own knife and was scouring the page; they had all become the canvas. He turned and went back inside.

The young man was still unconscious. But his breathing had become stronger and more even. His face was tilted to one side, and through the bruises something of the boy himself now showed, a face more sweet than handsome. His ghastly pallor had eased into a nearly luminous albescence. Not the whiteness of bone or any flesh that Martin had ever seen but an eerie, almost iridescent overlay through which could be glimpsed all that lay beneath: shimmer of blood, spleen, ligaments, the heart’s chambers opening and closing. Martin felt a pang of amazed fear. Who was this boy? And what had saved him?

He tried to focus on the idea that this young man washed up on the shoals was very strange.

And, he thought, pulling up his old Windsor chair and sinking into it to spend the afternoon at the boy’s bedside, this boy—whoever he was, wherever he was, poised between death and waking, black ocean and Mars Hill—was quite the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He got up several times over the next few hours, to feed the woodstove and check on the boy. In late afternoon Mrs. Grose knocked on the front door, to remind him of dinner.

“Roast chicken,” she beamed. At her feet the pug yawned hungrily. “A nice fat one—”

“I can’t come.” Martin slipped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. “Something—I’ve got something to do.”

Mrs. Grose’s eyes widened. “Are you sick? You should not be outside so much—” “No, no, I’m not sick.” He hesitated. No way to keep a secret at Mars Hill. Probably no way to keep a secret from Mrs. Grose, anywhere. “Listen—can I tell you tomorrow? It’s—it’s important, but I think I need to be by myself this evening.”

Mrs. Grose regarded him with her wise tortoiseshell eyes. After a moment she nodded. “Of course, darling. I will even save some chicken for you.” She retreated heavily down the steps, at the bottom turned, clutching her windbreaker to her bosom. “Be careful, Martin.”

“I will.” When she was out of sight he returned to his room to stand watch. He woke next morning, surprised by how well he had slept in his chair—no nightmares, no furtive whisperings. He stood, yawning, and stepped over to the bed.

The boy was still asleep. Carefully Martin drew the sheet down, to check on his myriad cuts. They seemed no worse, at least, than before. The unblemished skin around them still had that pearly sheen, but now Martin was more inclined to think that had to do with the antibiotic gel. He found his gloves and applied some more, took a clean washcloth from the basin and moistened the boy’s lips, then went to get more water. When he turned back to the bed, the boy was staring at him.

Martin dropped the washcloth, retrieved it and hurried to the bedside. “Are you all right? Are you—”

He bit his lip. The boy looked like death: how could he be all right? Beneath its gloss of ointment his face was battered and swollen. He blinked, bloodshot eyes mere slits beneath sunburned lids. He seemed to comprehend nothing around him.

Martin extended his hand so that it hung trembling a few inches above the boy’s head. “My—my name is Martin,” he said softly. “I found you. On the beach, you’d washed up. Can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me your name?”

The boy closed his eyes. Martin lowered his hand until it rested upon the boy’s head. Beneath his gloved fingers the boy’s hair felt friable as dried kelp. “Can you tell me your name? Do you—do you remember what happened?”

The boy’s head moved. His mouth opened to croak a single word.

“Trip.”

“A trip.” Martin nodded. He lifted his head to gaze out the window at the bay. “On a boat? In the storm? Do you remember where you were going?” Gently he touched the third finger of the boy’s right hand, where the gold ring winked. “Do you have a family? Is there someone I can call?”

The boy tried to speak, was overcome by coughing.

Martin ran to the kitchen and found a plastic cup with lid and straw, relic of John’s last illness. He filled it with water and returned to the bedroom. “Here—just sip it, okay, don’t try to drink too much—”

He slid the straw between the boy’s lips and waited as he sucked at it, fruitlessly at first, then greedily as he tasted water. “Not too much!” cried Martin, but he smiled. “Better?”

The boy nodded. He looked around, but the effort was too much. A moment later he was asleep again. Martin spent the morning watching him. Whenever the boy stirred, he plied him with water, heavily laced with honey. Hours passed; the older man sat in his chair, looking in vain for some sign of recovery. A wash of crimson to the boy’s translucent flesh; murmured words; even an anguished moan. Anything that might tether him to that room.

But the boy hardly moved. His breathing was not labored. He barely seemed to breathe at all. Martin was afraid to probe for a pulse, the boy’s arms and neck were so badly lacerated. He finally resorted to clumsily holding a large gilt-framed mirror above the boy’s mouth. And yes, a faint fog appeared at last, so little breath, it seemed not enough to keep a mouse alive. Martin sighed with relief. The boy’s chest rose and fell. Martin could hear the sigh of air leaving him, a soft wheezing in his lungs. Almost surely the boy had inhaled water: he could be developing pneumonia. Martin fetched the plastic bin that held eight years’ harvest of medications and hurriedly rifled it, tossing aside morphine syringes, inhalers, empty bottles of AZT and erythromycin and crixivan. At the very bottom, buried beneath wads of sterile gauze and hospital-size tubes of antibiotic ointment, there was a package of penicillin ampoules. Martin squinted at the label.

It had expired over a year ago. He removed one of the ampoules and held it up to the light. It looked fine. Meaningless, he knew, and probably the drug was useless now; but he would chance it.

For several minutes he stood staring down at the wasted body within its nest of blankets. At last he took a deep breath and began searching for a spot to inject the drug. He found a place above the young man’s elbow where the skin was raw but unbroken. The antiseptic smell of ointment mingled with that of seawater as carefully he straightened the arm, stroking the pale turquoise tendril of a vein, then jabbed the ampoule against it.

He had not expected the boy to react. But he did, jerking his arm from Martin’s hand and gasping. Martin looked up, frightened, and saw the boy’s eyes fly open, his mouth agape. He coughed, then gagged, choking as Martin grabbed his shoulders and tried to restrain him.

“Wait!” Martin cried. “Please, don’t—”

He pushed him against the mattress. A nurse’s voice shouted in his head: Keep him upright, they choke on their own sputum. Horrified, he watched as the boy wrenched away from him, arms and legs moving convulsively as he thrashed at the edge of the bed, as though trying to stand. Without warning he coughed violently. A gout of water poured from his mouth. Martin stumbled backward. Slowly the boy raised his head and stared at him with burning eyes.

“Where is she?”

Martin raised his hands. “Who?”

“The girl—the dead girl—” The boy’s voice was like something dragged across stones. “Is she here?”

“I only found you—on the beach, outside.” Martin forced himself to ask as calmly as he could, “Can you remember anything? Were you on a boat? In the storm? Were there others with you?”

“They’re everywhere.” His pupils were swollen, his eyes wide and staring, though it was not Martin he saw. “They came through the holes—can you find her? Can you find her?”

His voice became a shriek, babbling strings of nonsense. Frantically, he staggered to his feet. Martin seized him, wrestled him back into bed and pinned him there. His skin was slick and soft beneath Martin’s hands, like fallen petals.

“… see them? see them?”

Martin reached with one hand for the night table, knocking aside water bottle and candlesticks. The penicillin went flying before his fingers closed about what he wanted: a Ziploc plastic bag filled with morphine syringes. Without looking, he tugged one free, turned, and plunged it against the boy’s neck. The boy continued to struggle as Martin pulled the needle loose and tossed it onto the floor.

“… where…”

Martin gazed in pity and revulsion at where the young man’s flesh bore fresh abrasions; at his maddened blue eyes and frantic hands. But after several minutes the boy was quieter. His eyes grew calm and his body grew still, no longer rigid with dread. He even smiled, the same soft silly smile Martin knew from tending dying friends. His gaze focused on the older man. The smile became a grin, grotesque in his beautifully ruinous face.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Martin Dionysos.” Martin leaned forward. “I found you on the beach. Yesterday. You were—I thought you were dead, at first. Do you remember what happened to you? Did your boat sink? Can you tell me your name?”

The boy shook his head. “I jumped. I was scared. The bay.” He looked down at his chest, plucked feebly at his breastbone. “I jumped.” His gaze moved distractedly across the room.

“Your name? I want to help you—”

That silly grin. “Don’t you know? I’m not changing it.”

With a sigh Martin turned away. Glancing back at the boy he saw that his eyes had closed. He looked peaceful; Martin knew he was only stoned. He was at the door when the voice came behind him.

“Trip.” The boy’s eyes remained closed. He raised a hand like a bruised iris. “My name is Trip Marlowe.” And slept.

Days passed. Then weeks. You wouldn’t know it from the sky or shrouded sun that skulked across it; but Martin could gauge a sort of summer blooming as the boy’s wounds healed. First his broken skin; then his broken wrist. What next? wondered Martin, who spent a lot of time staring at that gold ring on the third finger of the boy’s right hand. “The nameless finger,” his Swedish grandmother would have called it. To Martin it was infinitely something. He and John had been married by a Universalist minister, exchanging rings that they wore on their right hands. Martin still bore his. So did John, in a San Francisco cemetery two thousand miles away.

“Are you married, Trip? Do you have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—I could try to contact them—”

Trip said nothing.

“The ring,” urged Martin softly. “Where did the ring come from?”

Trip stared down at it with dull surprise, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She had one, too…”

Okay, thought Martin, fighting an unreasonable disappointment. “Okay.”

There were no more tussles with morphine, but the sweet smile stayed. Martin wondered if he had suffered brain damage in the wake of his accident, or if he had been simpleminded to begin with. Mrs. Grose had been consulted, and the Graffams, about any foundering boats. And yes, a trawler had gone down in the storm, off the Libby Islands. There was a light there, but it had been unmanned for years; the Graffams knew only that pieces of the trawler had washed up at Bucks Head. No one knew who had died, or how many. The boat had shipped from Cutler, and that was very far away, now. In an old telephone book Martin found only two Marlowes, both in Liberty. He had no listings for anything farther down east than Bar Harbor, and there were no Marlowes there at all.

He was relieved.

Mornings he would prepare breakfast. Oatmeal and raw milk and maple syrup, dark as motor oil and with an ineffably sweet, scorched taste. Sometimes eggs from their neighbor Diana, their shells tea-colored, pale yellow, the soft blue-green of a vein too near the surface of the skin. Martin and Trip would sit at the kitchen table, Trip wearing a loose worn flannel shirt and pajama pants that had belonged to John. Too big by far for his slight frame, but Martin was fearful of fabric catching against the flesh not quite healed, and it was not warm enough to go shirtless. While Trip spooned oatmeal or liquescent yolk Martin would try to engage him in conversation. Where was he from? Where had he grown up?

But Trip never replied. He would talk, uninspired musings on the weather, the eggs, how he had slept; but he would not answer questions, or ask them. At first Martin thought this, too, a manifestation of whatever disaster had befallen him. But as the weeks went by and he came to map the boy as once he had mapped canvas, he started to recognize a certain look that Trip had. Or rather, the absence of a look: a shuttering of his eyes, a retreat that Martin could observe as certainly as he could mark a falling leaf. The boy was not amnesiac, not as simple as Martin suspected. He was reticent, skittish, purposefully shy. He was in hiding.

After breakfast, and everything tidied up, they would walk to the beach. Trip was stronger, now. He could have walked by himself, and though he never said anything, he seemed to welcome Martin’s company. He did not like to be left alone in the bungalow; he did not like to be alone. Nights, sleeping on the couch in the living room, Martin would often be awakened by the boy’s cries. He would go to him, murmuring until Trip fell asleep once more. The boy claimed not to recall his nightmares. Only once, Martin let his fingertips graze Trip’s healed wrist: the boy looked at him and said, “She was already dead.”

Martin nodded, waiting for him to go on; but the boy withdrew his hand and said no more.

“The rest must have drowned,” Martin explained to Mrs. Grose one evening, surrounded by flickering candles in her cozy living room. “He said they went through the holes. He keeps saying something about a dead girl…”

Mrs. Grose sipped her brandy thoughtfully. “His sweetheart, you think?”

“I guess.” Martin stared into his glass. “He wears a wedding ring, but it’s on this finger—like mine.” He turned his hand, so that candlelight slid across the thick gold band. “And some kind of Maltese cross. She must have drowned.”

“Perhaps.” In her lap the pug snorted, and she stroked his head. “Have you tried to find his family?”

Martin shrugged, uncomfortable. “Yes. But how can I? He won’t say anything, I mean he won’t tell me where he’s from, who they are…”

Outside, in the endless shifting twilight, branches tapped against the windows, overgrown lilacs that Mrs. Grose was afraid to prune lest they never grow back. The pug yawned. Mrs. Grose shifted on the couch, cradling her brandy against her chest. “Why are you keeping him, Martin?”

He started to respond testily, but stopped. A candle sputtered, then went out. “Where could he go? If he left here—”

“He is not like you, Martin,” she said gently. “He does not have a disease. He seems strong enough, strong in the body. It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin.”

Martin ran a hand through his long greying hair. He whispered, “I know. I know. But where could he go?”

“It doesn’t matter. Not to us. I know it’s hard, Martin. It’s because you saved him—”

“I didn’t—”

“He would have died there, if not for you.” She stood, the pug tumbling from her lap with an affronted groan, and crossed the room to lay a hand upon his shoulder. “You saved him, Martin. And for some reason he’s still alive. But he has to go…”

“Reason?” The face Martin lifted to her was raw with despair. “What reason can there be? What?”

Mrs. Grose sighed. She stared past him, to where the lilacs scratched at the panes. “I do not know. Maybe none,” she said, and stooped to pick up the gasping pug. “But you must act as though there is one, anyway. Good night, my dear—”

She lowered her head to kiss him, leaving a breath of brandy and Sen-Sen upon his cheek. Her tortoiseshell eyes seemed bleary, not with that vague distant expression Martin knew so well but with something more disturbing. Genuine weariness, the detached surrender of great age to a well-earned sleep, or more.

“Adele? Are you all right? Do you feel bad?” His voice was unsteady: he had never asked her that.

“Just tired,” she replied, and began to walk heavily toward her room. “Just tired. That’s all.”

He went the next day to the beach alone. Trip seemed content to sit in the living room, gazing at the expensive array of stereo and video equipment that had been John’s.

“Sometimes it works.” Martin picked up a remote and tentatively pressed a few buttons. “But not today, I guess. I’ll be back in a while. Okay?”

Trip nodded without looking up. “Okay.”

The wind was from the north, bearing with it the acrid scent of burning. He had heard there were fires along the border in Canada, started by renegade environmentalists: the kind of vague rumors passed amongst the denizens of the Beach Store more freely than currency. Certainly there was fire somewhere—the air cloaked in a thick yellowish haze that stung the eyes and throat and nearly made Martin turn back.

But he did not, and by the time he reached the shore the wind had shifted again, and the smoke dispersed, leaving only a dank foul smell. His eyes moved restlessly across the ground as he walked, longing to find something familiar, yearning for it as Martin had never dreamed possible. Fallen white-pine branches pressed into the mud, their green fans mimicking gingkoes; ferns; new growth beneath the sickly mulch of leaves and yellowing birch bark. Everywhere he looked he saw a world robbed of color save for a lurid yellow burst of lichen upon an oak tree, the mauve carpet of wintergreen leaves, and copper-green scraping of tamaracks against the sky. Brazen sky, guilty sky, with its stolen hues like rippling pennons, grass-green, luminous orange, periwinkle blue. It sickened him, and he hurried on.

Alongside the decrepit boathouse the Wendameen sat up on blocks, tarp flapping. Gaps in the plastic covering showed where the wooden hull needed to be scraped and repainted, seams that needed to be filled, floats replaced. Martin looked away, thinking how long it had been since he worked on the boat—a year? Two? It wouldn’t be worth salvaging if he didn’t get to it soon. He knew he never would.

From high up in a scraggly red oak a woodpecker clattered. Martin kicked along the beach, miserable but without the accustomed baggage of things that he knew made him miserable. He was not thinking of John, he was not thinking of dead friends, he was not thinking of tumors or T cells piling themselves into a caravan and driving off a cliff. He was thinking of Trip Marlowe and the way his long hair fell across his cheek, leaving it half in shadow; of the small protuberant knob in the wrist Martin had set, badly, which was like a stone under the skin. He was thinking of Trip’s eyes, winking blue like a gas jet turned too low; and somewhere behind that he was thinking of Adele Grose’s eyes, how last night they had seemed less vivid, once-bright marbles gone opaque from too much use.

It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin…

His foot struck savagely at a stone. But I’m not keeping him…

But you are, you are… the gulls answered. He stooped and grabbed a rock, hurled it at the sky. The birds dived as it plummeted into the red-streaked sea. He could feel rage building inside him like a fever, even as he turned and headed back to the cottage. He shoved the door open with such force that it slammed against the inside wall. Trip looked up from where he sat on the couch, idly turning the pages of a magazine.

“Trip.” Martin stood in the middle of the room, panting a little.

“Do you need to go somewhere? I mean away from here—do you want to go?”

The boy gazed at him with calm blue eyes. “New York,” he said after a moment.

“New York?”

Trip nodded. “She—I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York.”

“New York.” Martin sank onto the couch beside him, shaking his head. “You mean Manhattan? You were in New York City?”

“Just a few days.”

He waited, but Trip said nothing else; just stared at the magazine in his lap. Finally Martin said, “New York. You’re sure? That’s where you want to go?”

The boy lifted his face. “Yes.”

Martin stared at him. After a moment he reached and gently pushed a lank strand of hair from Trip’s eyes.

“Then I’ll take you,” he said. His gaze passed beyond the boy, to the window that looked down upon the rocky beach where a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter was raised on wooden sawhorses and concrete blocks. He leaned forward, and for an instant hugged the boy’s spare frame to his own, before he felt Trip flinch and start away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you—wherever you want to go.”

CHAPTER TEN

Heart and Soul

At Lazyland, spring staggered into summer. The daffodils bloomed, rust-streaked, their inner horns twisted into fantastic shapes, and gave off a scent like lilies. From the tulip poplars a fragrant pollen fell, staining Lazyland’s cracked drive acid green and orange. The sky shivered in its Stygian dance; some mornings, stars appeared amongst the clouds, and sun dogs chased them above the swollen Hudson.

When news reached Lazyland it seemed like a mishandled communiqué from another century: plague vaccines that caused mass hallucinations; children awaiting spaceships upon the Golden Gate Bridge; Disney World seized by tattooed militia wearing animal masks, who took orders from a teenage girl in combat uniform and a Blue Antelope T-shirt. Militias and strange millennial cults begetting their own plagues, their own viruses, electronic and corporeal; their own rites and rhythms of destruction, their own precarious groynes and parapets thrown up against what was immanent, and imminent.

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

Jack would stand upon the mansion’s grand old porch, surrounded by ancient furniture and his grandfather’s telescopes, and stare across the river to the ruined Sparkle-Glo factory, black and gold and crimson in the night. In the carriage house the fax machine would now and then stir, like a restless sleeper, then spew forth press releases detailing myriad magnanimous ventures spearheaded by The Golden Family. Snow leopard DNA encoded on the head of a pin, test launches of the dirigible fleet that would tow SUNRA to its place in the poisoned sky. The archival purchase, for $3.3 million U.S., of the historic American literary magazine The Gaudy Book. During these electrical intermissions the answering machine would blink and beep, and Leonard’s voice would hail Jack from London or Voronezh or the Waterton Glacier. Mrs. Iverson would do laundry and make toast. From somewhere within Lazyland a radio cried out with more strange bulletins. Fragments of pop music and Gotterdämmerung; the advertising slogan for GFI’s new global network: Only Connect. A new song that got extraordinary airplay, considering the broken bandwidths one had to gyre through these days—

Jack kept watch, listening as he fingered the vial of Fusax in his pocket, holding it up to the light to measure its diminished contents and praying that it might, somehow, be enough. He heard the fellahin laughing in Untermeyer Park, marked the progress of a dirigible moving slowly through the clouds. He looked at his hands. He was losing weight. His sight was strained as well; bright shapes flitted at the corner of his eyes, and sometimes he heard voices that did not arise from radios or rooms within the house.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m going out to work,” he said.

At the table three heads turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That would be me,” Jack admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her gloved hand took his and held it outspread while she fitted the scanner against his palm. There was buzzing, a dull stinging sensation. Immediately she drew her hand back, removed a disposable sheath from the end of the scanner, stuffed that into a tiny biohazard container, and slid the scanner back into her pack. “Okay, that’s all! The entry chip won’t be activated until December 31—that’s New Year’s Eve, at 12:01 A.M. It’ll last exactly thirty-four hours. Then you turn into a pumpkin.” She grinned and gave him a mock salute. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Finnegan! Don’t lose that envelope—it’s got all the instructions and stuff, in case nobody’s able to get in touch with you between now and then. Ciao—”

She turned and strode back up the drive. Halfway to the gate she began to sing again.

Jack looked down at his palm. Nothing there whatsoever that he could see. He heard the courier’s bike firing up as he went back inside and locked the door after him.

The house was still, save for the perfunctory drip of snowmelt falling from the gutters. In the air hung a stale smell of that morning’s burned toast, scorched over the Coleman stove’s flame—there had been no electricity for eleven days. Jack walked into the study and settled into the chair by the window. He took a silver letter opener and deftly slit the gorgeously patterned envelope. A small explosion of glitter and green smoke filled the air. Jack yelped and nearly dropped the envelope. The smoke faded, leaving a tropical scent; the glitter turned out to be more permanent, evading all of Mrs. Iverson’s later efforts to remove it from the oriental rug. Jack looked up, half-fearful that he would see Marz smirking at him from the doorway.

But he was alone, except for the oversize and very beautiful piece of paper he held in his hand. Tissue-thin, it had the watery sheen of fine silk and was patterned with shifting designs: golden zeppelins, a medieval sun, samurai in armor, a velvety black sky covered with glowing constellations, the grasping skeletal gryphon that was GFI’s corporate logo: what at first he thought were extraordinary watermarks, but which instead seemed to be more tricks from GFI’s technological inventory. He spent several minutes just staring at the page, turning it so that it caught the light in different ways to display different patterns. Letters appeared, now Roman, now Japanese characters, now Arabic and Cyrillic. Between his fingers the paper seemed to move on its own, as though he grasped a moth by its wings. Faint bell-like music played, the same song he’d been hearing off and on for months now:

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

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

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

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

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

“WHAT?”

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

“Are you sure? How can she—”

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

“But her family! There must be someone—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She does?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what the fuck was that?

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

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

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

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

He would wear the shirt, for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Marzana? What kind of name—”

“Jule,” warned Emma.

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

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

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

“She’s a runaway.”

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

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

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

“How long?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She sounds foreign,” brooded Jule.

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

Jule and Emma exchanged another look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When they were gone Jule refilled his glass.

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

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

“What, like feed her?”

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

“Have you tried the police?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But she’s pregnant.”

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

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

“Does she help out? With Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson?”

“I guess. I don’t know what she does, really. I think maybe she sleeps a lot. I haven’t spent much time with her. Alone, I mean. But no, she’s no trouble. And Keeley and Larena, they just seem to love her. I guess because she’s a girl.” Jack gave a broken laugh. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

Jule leaned back on the couch, balancing his glass on one knee. “A girl. Yeah, girls are different.”

His tone grew wistful, and Jack looked up, fearful of what he might see on his friend’s face. But Jule seemed peaceful. After a moment he asked, “But how are you, Jackie? You look pretty good—”

“Good, good, I feel—”

“—but you look skinny.” Jule’s red face folded into worry. “You getting enough to eat here? I mean, all of you soaking wet weigh five pounds—you getting enough to eat?”

“Of course we are. The grocery at Delmonico’s still delivers, every couple of weeks. We do okay. And—”

“Delmonico’s! God. They still have that caponata? You don’t get shit where we are. I mean, the movie people can get it flown in, sometimes, but the rest of us, stores and stuff—if you can even get there, they don’t got shit for food. But Emma grows everything, anyway…”

They talked for a long time. As evening came, the room a swirl of lavender and yellow, Emma brought them food—cumin-scented rice, tiny bitter eggplant, last year’s dried apples—then left. It had been a year, at least, since they’d had the luxury of time, a night together without the long treacherous drive back north for Jule, without Jack having to worry about whether his friend would make it home in one piece—Jule drank heavily since Rachel’s death, there was nothing else to be said about it—and no assurance that Jule would be able to call to let him know that he’d gotten there safely. And it had been much longer than a year since they’d really talked, unfettered by business or the need to break bad news, or to console—could it have been since Jack’s fortieth birthday?

“Yeah, you gotta watch those birthdays, Jackie,” said Jule. “Fuckin’ A, Jackie Finnegan turns forty, and the world comes to an end!” He roared, wiping his eyes; then abruptly was weeping.

“Oh Jule—” Jack reached for him. The first bottle of Jack Daniel’s was long empty, a second only half-full. “Don’t cry, Julie,” he stammered, not yet aware he was weeping himself. “Oh please don’t cry—”

Jule raised a hand, begging silence. His big ugly face crumpled in upon itself like a broken box. He grabbed his friend and pulled him close.

“Oh Jackie Jackie, why’s it all happening? Why? Why—” that big arm shaking as it hugged Jackie close, the two of them huddled in the endless twilight, little Jackie and big Jule, together at the end of all things, as they had never thought to be.

Jack rose late the next day (he guessed it was late), went into the bathroom and threw up, poured water from an old pitcher to wash his face and clean the sink. He passed the blond girl’s bedroom and noted his grandmother in there with her, the two of them going through old clothes on the four-poster. When he got downstairs he sank into one of the Stickley chairs to catch his breath and stared up at the grandfather clock’s intricate face. Placid three-quarter moon peeking out from behind a beaming sun, dials showing high tide, low tide, the stars, the seasons, everything that could be calibrated by chime rods and winding drums, brass bobs, and golden slaves. Was there a dial there for Jackie Finnegan? For Jule? A clatter from down the hall drove him to the kitchen.

“Good morning, Jackie,” said Emma, smiling beside a window she had filled with mason jars full of dried beans, pasta, different-colored lentils. “You look like you spent the night with my husband.”

“I did,” whispered Jack, falling into another chair. “Remind me never to do it again.”

Emma laughed. Her eyes betrayed something else. Not anger or annoyance; a kind of habitual assessment as she gazed at Jack holding his head in his hands. He raised his eyes to her and saw there what she did: he looked sick. He wasn’t getting better. She was a doctor. She thought he was dying.

“Well.” Her lips pursed, and she returned his look, complicitous: we understand each other. “Jackie, I want to look at you later. Okay?”

He nodded, and Emma turned away, to place another jar upon the sill. Then Mrs. Iverson came in, shaking her head and frowning at Jack.

“Some people never learn, ” she announced. “At least Leonard isn’t here.”

She poured him coffee with real milk in it, more of Emma’s bounty, and Emma gave him some bread she’d baked, a little stale but rich with molasses and sunflower seeds.

“How come you can do this and we can’t?” Jack asked, misty-eyed with gratitude. “Grow all this stuff. Bake…”

Emma bustled around the room, swiping at countertops, checking cabinets, collecting spent jars and replacing them with what she’d brought: tea, flour, powdered milk, dried fruit.

“Because this is what women do,” she answered, mouth a little prim: Doctor Duck does not approve of strong drink. “Get food. Make sure everybody has enough to eat—”

“Perform brain surgery?”

“—perform brain surgery. Ugh, is this oatmeal? ” She glanced accusingly at Jack, who only shrugged. “The world doesn’t come to an end just because the phones are dead.”

“Emma, we haven’t had power for ages. And before that—”

“Neither have we. It doesn’t matter.” She dumped the oatmeal into a bowl of things destined for compost, handed it to Mrs. Iverson. “Jule Gardino, taking the fucking luxury of killing himself with alcohol—”

He was shocked to see how angry she was, jars rattling as she shoved them in the cupboard. “—it doesn’t all come screeching to a goddamn fucking halt.”

“You mean the world doesn’t come to an end, just because the world is coming to an end.”

Jack turned to see Jule filling the doorway. He was unshaven, his hair mussed; otherwise, he seemed unaffected by the night’s bout. Emma took a long breath, turned to a window. “Oh, Julie. Please spare me.”

“You know what your problem—”

“I’m going upstairs.” Emma shoved her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and crossed the room. She paused to kiss first the top of Jack’s head, then stood on tiptoe to kiss Jule’s chin. He twisted in the doorway to let her go by, his hand touching her ass as he winked at Jack. In the hall she turned and stared back at them.

“You know he’s killing himself?” she said to Jack, as though they were alone in the room. “You know he’s going to kill himself, one of these days?” Then disappeared down the corridor.

“Yeah, but not today,” Jule said cheerfully. “I’m not scheduled for today.”

He poured himself some coffee from the Thermos, went to the cupboard where liquor was kept and rummaged there until he found a bottle of Irish Mist. Jack watched silently as he poured some into his mug, then sat.

“Morning, Jackster. You look like shit.”

“Yeah, no lie.” The smell of whiskey floated up to him. “Christ, Jule, get that away from me before I puke.”

“You know what you’re problem is, Jackie? Pacing. You don’t pace yourself. It’s like the marathon—”

“I am not fucking interested in running a Jack Daniel’s marathon, especially with you. Okay?”

Jule whooped. “The Kip Keino of booze! Whoa baby, I’m breaking records here, Jackie!”

“Oh, shut up.” Jack shook his head. “Jesus Christ. This is like that time the door fell on me.”

Jule laughed. “Yeah! You got nine lives, Jackie.”

“Well, I’m probably running down to the last one.”

Jule took a long sip of his spiked coffee. “You feeling bad, Jackie?”

“I don’t know. I mean, no. I actually feel better than I did a few months ago, when I was in the hospital.” He traced the rim of his coffee cup, seeing how the bones of his hand stuck out, like a bat’s vestigial fingers. “But no one believes me.”

“I believe you,” said Jule in a low voice. “I’ve seen some things lately, made me think differently about all this—”

He waved his hand, vaguely indicating the deteriorating house around them, the world. “Not anything I can really share with you right now—Emma doesn’t like me talking about it.” His big face took on an absurdly furtive look, the cartoon hound trying to hide something under the rug. “But I’ll tell you about it at some point, Jackie. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

Jack looked into his friend’s fervid eyes, already showing a fine glister of drink. “Right, Jackie? Right?”

“Uh, sure.” He had no idea what Jule was talking about. “You hungry, Julie? There’s some bread—”

“Nah. Maybe in a little bit. Got to wake up first—”

He returned to the cabinet and poured more Irish Mist into his mug. Jack watched, suddenly undone by his own sorrow, and anger, the smell of Irish whiskey. “Look,” he said. “Julie, I feel pretty lousy. I’m going to try and lie down again for a while, see if I can sleep. You’re going to be here all day, right?”

Jule stared thoughtfully out the window. “I think so. Maybe tonight, too, if that’s okay with you all. Unless the Allied Commander’s changed her mind.”

“Okay. So in an hour or two, okay, I’ll be back down—”

Jule turned to him, eyes far too bright. “Sure, Jackie, sure. We’ll talk, later.”

He slept, though badly. Dreams of Leonard, Jack’s formerly derailed system of arousal now, oddly, back in place. Lowering his head between Leonard’s thighs, his hands parting Leonard’s muscular legs, taking Leonard’s cock in his mouth. Then Jack himself coming, the first time in ages like that, from a dream: arcing himself awake, hand between his own legs, groaning.

“Ah, fuck.” Orgasm blindsided into a skull-jarring headache; he fumbled at his nightstand until he found the precautionary water glass he’d set there earlier. Leonard, why am I dreaming about LEONARD?

The real question, of course, was Why haven’t I ever stopped dreaming about Leonard? Something he should have taken up with his therapist, back when New York had therapists instead of soothsayers on the stock exchange.

He lay there for a while trying to will away his headache, a dreadful underlying tiredness that, he was beginning to sense, had too little to do with too much Jack Daniel’s. After fifteen minutes he sat up, painfully, and pulled open the drawer of his nightstand. Took out the vial of Fusax, placed a half dropperful beneath his tongue. He had just replaced the bottle when there was a knock at his door.

“Jack? It’s Emma. May I come in?”

“Sure,” he croaked, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He smiled gamely as she entered, wearing a faded denim jumper and cotton blouse, her tousled curls held back by a child’s flowered headband, and carrying a big canvas bag.

“Feeling a little better? You shouldn’t try to keep up with Jule, you know—”

“I wasn’t, I wasn’t—”

“You should leave that to the professionals. When was the last time you saw a doctor, Jackie?”

He thought back: the hospital, early spring. “A month,” he lied. “Maybe two.”

“Where? Those assholes at Saint Joseph’s?”

He stared at the floor, mumbled something about another clinic.

Emma looked unimpressed. “What are your numbers these days? When was the last time you got them?”

“I don’t know, Emma. I mean, I don’t remember.”

“When you were in the hospital they were pretty lousy, Jackie.” She sighed, sitting beside him on the bed with the canvas bag at her feet: “I’m not going to fuck with you, Jack. Right now, to me, you look pretty bad.”

“I’m just thin, Emma. I don’t feel—”

“Even before last night: you just don’t look healthy to me. So. I want to check you out. Okay?”

She pulled on latex gloves, took his temperature, blood pressure, pulse. Felt his joints and examined him for lesions, scabs that hadn’t healed, damp spots in the crook of knee or elbow. Stethoscope to his chest and back, first warming it with her gloved hand, then checking for the telltale sough of fluid in his lungs. Jack sat through it all with troubled patience: something medieval in this, or Victorian: doctor armed with ear trumpet and little else, certainly nothing that could shout above the din of invisibles swarming, replicating inside him. I don’t think there’s anything in that black bag for me.

Away with the stethoscope, out with the ophthalmoscope to peer into his eyes, then change the instrument’s black avian head to examine ears and throat and nostrils.

“Huh.” Emma drew back from him, frowning.

“What?” demanded Jack.

Off with the laryngoscope and back to the eyes again. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. She looked puzzled. “Have you had thrush?”

“No.” Spark of panic. “Do I now?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so. But there’s something weird in there. Like a growth—”

“A growth? What kind of growth—”

“I don’t know. Here—” She slid a tongue depressor from a sterile packet, and something like a very long Q-Tip, what they used for throat cultures. “Say ‘Ah,’ I want to scrape some of it…”

He said, “Ah,” gagging. Growths. Fungus.

“Huh.” Emma’s eyes widened as she turned to hold first the wooden depressor and then the culture probe to the light. “This is very strange.”

“WHAT?”

“Well, look—there’s definitely something going on in there. See?” She held the tongue depressor so he could see what was on it, a thin film of something granular, faintly greenish—not a sickly mucousy green, but crystalline, like dyed salt. The same thing adhered to the Q-Tip.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Emma shook her head. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it. Or heard of anything like it.” She stared at him. “It appears to be in your eyes, too, Jack. Are you having trouble seeing? Blurred vision, anything like that?”

“Uh, well—well, yes, maybe a little.” He gazed at the cultures in her hands. “Jesus, Emma, what is it? Is it a fungus?”

“No. It’s definitely not a fungus. Not thrush. A fungal infection doesn’t look like this. I don’t know what looks like this. And your temperature isn’t elevated, for whatever that’s worth, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in your lungs.

“Actually, you do seem sort of okay—I don’t see any lesions, or anything like that. But you have obviously lost quite a bit of weight, which isn’t so great. Any nausea?”

“Not really. Just—I don’t feel all that hungry. I feel kind of speedy, actually, most of the time. And my dreams are weird…”

He thought of the Fusax, inches from his elbow in the nightstand drawer.

“Huh.” She fixed him with an odd look. “Jule has weird dreams, too. Has he told you?”

“No.”

She bent beside her canvas bag, withdrew two plastic Ziploc bags. Deposited the cultures, one in each, then scribbled something on the labels. “I’m going to have these checked out. It’s very strange, these crystals—they almost look like uric acid does, when you get dehydrated.”

“What could it be?” Viruses from rain forests and newly exposed meteorites, mass amphibian die-outs and now a new disease, courtesy of Leonard Thrope.

“I don’t know. Did you ever see The Andromeda Strain?”

He started to laugh—horrified, almost delirious.

“I’m sorry!” She swept him into a hug, cradling his head with latex hands. “Oh God, Jack, I didn’t mean that—”

“It’s okay,” he gasped. “It’s okay—”

“It’s just so strange, you read all the time about these weird new things. But some of them are good, Jackie—you know? At least in theory, this could be good,” she added somewhat dubiously. “I’ll run it by the lab, have some other people look at it. Are you doing anything different? Some weird therapy?”

Again, the Fusax in the drawer. “No.”

“Huh. Okay, then.” She peeled off the gloves and slid them into a biohazard container. “Well. You feel up to eating, after all this?”

He laughed again, more easily. “Oh, sure, Emma! This is like, a real stimulant to the appetite—”

“Not right now. Maybe a little while?” She slung the canvas bag over her shoulder. “I’ll have Julie come get you.”

He watched her, heart spilling. There were deep lines around her eyes; her skin looked grey and listless. “You look tired, too, Emma,” he said. “You never get a break, do you?”

She smiled sadly. “No. But that’s okay. I’ve been overdoing it, probably. I’ve felt for a while now like I’m coming down with something. Occupational hazard.”

At the door she stopped. “Oh—I forgot. I looked at Mary Anne—”

“Marzana.”

“Whatever. She’s definitely pregnant. But she seems okay, as far as I can see. I gave her some vitamins. I brought some for you, too—can you make sure she takes them?”

“Sure, Emma. Anything you say.”

“All right. I’ll see you later.” And she went downstairs.

They left early the next morning, rush-hour-traffic time, back when there had been traffic. Emma very small behind the wheel of the Range Rover, with all its weird protective encrustations—barbed wire, kryptonite locks, chains. Jule beside her, looking, at last, defeated by drink and fatigue. Jack had gone to bed early the night before, leaving his friend by himself in the living room with a bottle. When Jack had come down for breakfast Jule was there still, planed awkwardly into the couch. His big hand curled, conchlike, several inches above the floor, where one of Keeley’s heavy glass paperweights lay broken in two, a crystal heart revealing splintered chambers. Now Jack watched as Emma started the car. He’d already filled the tank for her, hefting the heavy plastic gas can and spilling some on the drive—one didn’t need television or radio to hear horror stories about people who ran out of gas on the Hutch or Saw Mill or the Cross Bronx Expressway—and then replacing the container in the back of the Range Rover amidst coils of barbed wire and unknown objects covered with tarpaulins.

“Well,” said Emma, cracking her window and speaking from behind a stainless-steel veil. “I guess we’re off.”

Jack nodded and made himself smile. “Yeah. Drive carefully, guys.”

Beside him Keeley sniffed. Instinctively he put his arm around her, looked down and saw her smile, painful as his, her worn blue eyes filled with tears. He wanted to pull her close but her shoulders seemed thin and insubstantial as balsa wood; he might break something.

“You take care of your grandma now, you hear?” bellowed Jule. Jack nodded, assuming Jule spoke to him. But at that moment the blond girl stepped down from the porch where she had been standing with Mrs. Iverson.

“I will. Don’t worry.” Her voice was sweet and high and cold, like a bird’s. “Don’t worry.”

She hugged Keeley tightly to her slender frame, and Keeley smiled, detaching from Jack. Jack stared at them, flushing. Surprised, stunned even, to suddenly realize how physically alike they were: the same fragile build and finely etched bone structure, long fingers and slender wrists, large eyes and thin mouths; the same thin bright hair, Marzana’s corona inclined to sun, Keeley’s to moon.

The car’s engine roared. “Good-bye!” cried Mrs. Iverson from the steps. She blew her nose loudly. “Be careful, don’t stop anywhere!”

“Good-bye!” called Emma, smiling. “We’ll call, call us, Jackie! Take your vitamins!”

“Good-bye!” shouted Jule, and everyone else, watching the car nose up the twisting drive. “Good-bye!”

Jack’s throat tight, hurting now too, and his eyes.

Good-bye, good-bye.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Wendameen Responds

It was high summer at Mars Hill. Heat without true warmth, UV rays but no sun splattering the rocky beach; birches and rugosa roses furred with yellow-green, leaves stunted but growing, barely. Lobster boats and trawlers puttering out to fish the Grand Banks, but no fish. Martin tossing awake at night on the couch, suffused with longing, raging with it: love but no lover. Knowing always that the boy was in the next room, in Martin’s own bed, John’s bed, breathing deeply and imperturbably as waves moved upon the shingle. Two things that don’t change, even at the end of the world—sound of the sea and straight boys sleeping soundly in other rooms.

Some nights, Martin could bear it, as he had all the greater sorrows of his life. Breathing through this as he had breathed through John’s death, and others. But now even this was harder, breathing. He had to use his inhalers more often, every three or four hours, gasping as he sucked at first one little plastic tube and then the next, waiting for the steroids to kick in, the permeable walls of mast cells to thicken. He was in danger of coming down with pneumonia—his precarious emotional state made him vulnerable, as it always had, to illness. Arguments with John would within twelve hours escalate into strep throat, a vast secret army hidden within that waited only for such carelessness as this to attack with fevers, blisters, white spots in the mouth.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

But yes, for love.

This could kill me, thought Martin Dionysos in the night, as he had, oh, perhaps a hundred thousand times before. Watching as some beautiful club kid thrashed around on the dance floor wearing a water bottle taped to his thigh and not much else. Dappled light spilling from mirror balls or lasers, or summer sun or stars. He thought of a song John had loved, dancing to it even at the end; the two of them swaying in bed together and singing along with the tape player.

Martin buried his face in his pillow even as he thrust against the couch, cock straining against his hand and all of him exploding too quickly as he came. He gasped, imagining the boy there beneath him, his blue eyes seeing something inside of Martin that had not been warped by the horror of standing on a shoreline and watching as it was eaten away by the storm, watching as everyone he ever loved slowly drowned.

And yet, desire flickered, even as black water lapped at his feet. He felt like a broken clock, innards unsprung, heart uncoiled, gears rusting; but the alarm still works, clamoring until the hand reaches out to silence it. Thinking of the boy in the next room, who would not die, probably; might even be here later, maybe, after Martin himself was gone.

He slept.

And hours later, started awake. The room was all but filled with the strange moving colors that sometimes came after midnight, like moths drawn to the cottage windows. Velvety blue and violet and a shimmering white. To lie there was to watch their wings stir, and wait for sleep to fall again. Someone had spoken his name. Martin blinked and stared at the doorway, wondering if it had been the boy? But no—he was dazed with sleep, most certainly Trip had not stirred. He never did.

But still, someone had spoken—

“Martin…”

Even before he turned he knew who would be there.

“John.”

The name was ice on his tongue.

He stood in front of the window, gazing outside. He was naked, as thin as when he had died. Light streamed over him, that strange milky white, and seemed to clothe him, filling the hollows of ribs and throat, his sunken cheeks and pitted eyes. A long moment passed, in which the figure continued to stare up at the sky, and Martin’s dread grew—the only thing worse than a ghost would be a ghost that ignored you. But then the figure turned.

“Martin,” he whispered, smiling.

The smile undid Martin: it was so much John, it was what he had never thought to see again in all eternity. He began to sob, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Is it difficult, Martin?” The figure crossed the room to stand beside the bed. Pityingly, and yet there was something remote in its gaze, too. “Martin?” the figure asked again. “Is it so very hard?”

Martin looked up, saw that within the hollow of its eyes something flickered that was not an eye. Hastily he lowered his gaze.

“It is—very hard,” he said at last. He forced himself to raise his head. “And you, John—is it—is it—”

The figure stared down at him. The misty white light seemed to fall away, so that Martin was not looking upon a glowing creature but only a man who stood in shadow. John tilted his head. His face grew gentle, and he stretched out his hand to touch Martin’s brow. But Martin felt nothing, not cold nor warmth nor the faintest breath of movement. He saw that the hand cast no shadow.

“It’s not so hard for us,” said John. “Because we remember, it’s not so hard as it is for you—”

“You remember?” Martin seized on the words. “You do remember?”

“Oh, sure,” answered John, grinning. “We remember. I remember—”

The grin spread as he opened his mouth, a glimpse there of more darkness, roots of teeth exposed like pilings.

Then John whispered, “Go with him. You won’t lose your way, Martin. I’ll find you…”

His words hung in the air, notes settling like dust. He wept so hard he couldn’t see, had to close his eyes to keep from exploding into grief. When he opened them the room was empty. A thin wind stirred across his skin. He sat up, fumbled for the bedside clock, and saw that it was 5:00 A.M.

He put the clock down, saw an object in the middle of the floor. A small wooden box, its corners rounded from being handled over the years. His bare feet skidded across the floor until he dropped to his knees, picked up the box, and cradled it in his hands—

“Oh John, John—”

—then opened the lid, trembling fingers feeling the worn velvet within and what it protected, cool metal forming the apex of a triangle and the sharper edges of the mirror and glass filters, a slip of pale green paper with a message written in peacock ink. Martin raised his voice in disbelief.

“—GOD! John, how—”

It had been lost for five years, since right before John’s last illness. He had looked everywhere for it, here and in the house in San Francisco and in the Wendameen because he had wanted to bury it with John, the present he had given Martin when they bought the boat for their seventeenth anniversary.

A sextant, bronze tipped with amethyst where the light struck it, the little mirror sending out sparks as he tilted it this way and that, then clutched it to his chest.

After some minutes he got up, still clasping the sextant to his breast, and went into the room with the boy. Martin watched him breathe, Trip’s chest rising and falling, his yellow hair spreading over the pillow like pollen; his face half-turned so that Martin could see his mouth parted like a child’s. Restless light played across his cheeks, indigo and orange, touched the cross on his breast so that it glowed. The topography of desire. His gaze shifted to the flickering square of window, the Wendameen upon its scaffold.

New York, Trip had said. I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York. Slowly Martin drew the sextant upward to his face, until he held it cupped beneath his chin. His stare remained fixed on the Wendameen.

The next day he began work on the boat. First clambering up the ladder and climbing down into the cockpit and then the companionway, to check the seams between planking. Looking for spots where the boards had shrunk and the light came through, replacing cotton caulking and running seam compound into the gaps. The boat had been up on jack stands for over two years now, but it had not dried out as badly as he had feared. He worked by the light of one of the Wendameen’s kerosene lanterns. There, belowdecks, with the familiar smells of kerosene and salt and Callahan’s Wax and the warm golden glow of varnished wood, all was just as it had always been, as it should be. It was exhausting, but it enlivened him, too, because he could lose himself, lose the world around him. After three days he was sorry to turn to other work, but by then it had all come back to him, the hours and days of labor needed to keep a boat alive, and the cries of gulls above the bay.

He moved the ladder, climbed down, and walked around beneath, so that he could see to the hull and begin the task of repainting the entire boat. The Wendameen had a copper-sheathed bottom, which protected it from worms and rot; but it all still had to be scraped and sanded and primed. He spent hours in Mars Hill’s old boathouse, scavenging half-empty cans of primer, scraping rust from tools and cleaning brushes with the turpentine he used for his paintings. Then came days of scraping, hands and fingers aching inside heavy suede gloves, paint scales covering the ground beneath like gull droppings. Prising out a rotten plank and replacing it, the slow process of planing, honey-colored curls of wood and the smell of shellac in the salt air. Then fitting the new boards between the old, like setting a falsely bright new tooth. Then sanding it all, again and again, by hand, the wood beneath his palm growing smoother and smoother still, until it was like milk, like silk, like skin. There is a love of wood as of other things that do not answer to our touch; entranced and exhausted, heedless of the fever that had begun to tear at him, Martin shaped the Wendameen into a boy.

When it came time to paint the exterior, Trip came down to help.

“I can do that,” he said, cocking his head. “I used to help my uncle.” A few yards away high tide lapped at the gravel. Trip bent and picked up a flat stone, expertly skipped it across a wave.

“Can you.” Martin looked down from the ladder and smiled through his exhaustion. It was the first time the boy had spoken, without prompting, of something in his past. An uncle, then, and a boat. “Well, there’s another ladder in the boathouse. Do you think you can get it by yourself? If you need help, just holler.”

Trip dragged the ladder out. He looked a little better these last few weeks, not so thin, his hair growing out. Not great, but better, like someone fighting a long illness; like Martin himself. Though the odd translucence of Trip’s skin remained; in the endless sunset he was sometimes hard to see, another trick of the light. He hauled up the rusted cans of paint and more ratty brushes and set to. Martin explained the color scheme: white hull and topside, magenta boot stripe, bulwark two shades of grey, like the breast and wings of a shearwater. Trip listened distractedly. He ran his finger along a seam and frowned, gently freed a pine needle that had gotten mired in damp paint. Martin watched him, heart so full he felt dizzy; Trip with the intense scowl of a child laboring at paint, brushes, wood.

It took them two weeks. Every evening they had to set the cracked blue tarps on a wooden frame above the boat, in case of rain. Geese flew overhead, honking. There was the nightly confusion of phoebes and chickadees in the white pines by the boathouse, trying to decide if it was really time to roost. One afternoon Martin walked up to the Beach Store, more exhausted than he could have imagined possible by the additional effort, and asked Doug to bring by a case of beer if and when they got some in. A few days later beer arrived. After that, Martin and Trip would sit on the ladders and each have two, sometimes talking, usually not. Watching amethyst-colored lightning play over the bay, the occasional passing of a lobster boat; once the huge silhouette of a Russian factory ship, merging into the darkness far away. In the extreme humidity it took a long time for the paint to dry, several days between coats, so they started on the interior. Cleaning out the bulkheads. Putting bunk cushions on deck to air, and the sails, smelling of mildew but, happily, undamaged. Checking out the engine. Martin cannibalized furniture and machinery in the boathouse and cottage for screws, nails, shims. He collected unopened and nearly empty pints of oil, carefully cleaned old filters because there were no new ones, and finally went to the big old plastic gas tanks he had stored the diesel in over two years before.

“Shit,” he said. “Water.” So there was the task of getting water out of the fuel, and then filling the tank, and starting the engine in a cloud of foul smoke while Trip cheered, and then praying that when the time came, the engine would remember what it had to do.

“This is a beautiful boat, Martin,” said Trip one afternoon. The Wendameen was almost ready, as ready as boats get, and they were having lunch in her shadow, eating mealy tomatoes from Diana’s garden. Martin swallowed them all, even the rough nub where the stem had been. Trip fastidiously ate around the soft core as though it were an apple. He leaned happily against a jack stand, flushed and pearled with sweat, his blond hair capped by a red bandanna that had been John’s, every inch of him speckled with white and red paint. His face was sunburned, which worried Martin; but Trip shrugged it off. “A really beautiful boat. You took good care of it.”

“Not really.”

“Someone did. Some cunnin’, this boat.” Trip’s voice roughened easily into the broad northern accent, and he grinned. “Ayah. She’ll do, Martin. She’ll do.”

Martin laughed. “She’ll have to do pretty goddamn good, if we’re going to get to New York before hurricane season.”

Trip tossed his head back, staring at the sky. His eyes flashed a deeper blue, and for an instant Martin saw him lying on the beach, weeds snarled upon his breast, eyelids parting to reveal that same distant flame. “I never been sailing. Just once, over to Jonesport, when I was a kid. I threw up.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve thrown up, too.” His brow furrowed. “You sure you want to do this, Trip? I mean are you sure you’re up to it? We could—we could wait a little while.”

But it would not be a little while. It was September now, it would be eight or nine months of waiting out the long Maine winter, almost another year. The boy here for that long… Martin’s heart pounded at the thought.

Trip shook his head. “Might as well go now,” he said cheerfully, Martin could hear what was underneath the brightness. He wants to go. He knows and he wants to go…

“Right,” Martin said, finishing another tomato. He grimaced, his stomach thrashed inside him like a snake—that was what happened when he ate, these days—and thought how Trip never wondered how he was; never commented on how Martin looked flushed, pretended not to notice when he was sick in the middle of the night, said nothing when they stripped off their shirts to race into the cold water of the bay and Martin stood there, ribs like the fingers of an immense hand pushing out from within his chest.

He’s afraid, thought Martin. But also perhaps he was being polite, the way Mainers were when they were uncomfortable, or embarrassed, or just plain shy. Talking to you with eyes averted, you right there beside them and them focusing several feet away in front of the woodstove.

“Well,” Martin said, wiping his hands. “Let’s get going, then.”

That night he got the charts out, and the Coast Guard light list, and the Coast Pilots showing the Atlantic from Eastport to Cape Cod, Cape Cod southeast to King’s Point.

All hopelessly out of date—the most recent one read 1988—but there was nothing to be done, except maybe visit the Graffams and see if they had anything to offer in the way of advice. They piled the charts on the dining-room table, and the faded pilots, stiff and cumbersome from age and water. Trip was enthralled, and spent an hour exclaiming over the chart that showed Moody’s Island, but Martin was puzzling over something else.

“What is it?” Trip finally asked.

“Hmmm? Oh, well…” Martin leaned back so that the front of his Windsor chair lifted from the floor. “Well, I’m just wondering, how are we going to get the boat into the water?”

Trip gaped. “Holy cow! I never even thought—how are we going to get it into the water?”

Martin stared thoughtfully at the pile of charts. “Well, in the olden days we could’ve just gotten Allen Drinkwater to come over with a flatbed and a lift, or someone from Belfast with a big hydraulic trailer.”

“Do they still do that?”

“I doubt it. There’s no gas for the trucks, for one. Plus we could never afford it, even if there was gas.”

Trip looked stricken. “But then—what are we going to do?”

“Well, in the really olden days, to launch a boat you’d have to build a launching ways. Like a wooden ramp, down to the water. And you’d have to build a wooden cradle around the boat, and then you’d let it go, so it’d go down onto the skids and kind of slide into the water at high tide.”

“Jeez.” Trip’s expression went from stricken to sheer disbelief. “It slides into the water?”

Martin shook his head. “No, really—we saw it once, at the Rockport Apprenticeshop. They were launching a Friendship sloop they’d built for someone. You make this long ramp, and you grease the boards up. They used vegetables—”

“Vegetables?”

“I swear to God.” Martin laughed. “They used lard, and vegetables—pumpkins, squash. All those zucchini you never want to eat. And some Shell gear lube, but we don’t have enough of that. You build the ways at a gentle enough slope, the boat can pretty much launch itself. They had about a hundred people there, apprentices and people watching, and if it started moving too fast, they threw sand on the skids, to slow it down.”

“A hundred people? But—”

“But you could do it,” Martin said, staring beyond Trip to the window that framed the Wendameen, resplendent in its new paint beneath a glowering sky, “if you had crowbars, and were really, really careful, and took it slow, and if the ways was done right—you could do it, I think, with two.”

And that’s how they did it; though first they had to build the launching ways. Mrs. Grose, of course, came to watch (she had been there all along, on her decrepit porch with her pug, occasionally wandering over to offer advice on avoiding paint drips and foul weather), and Doug from the Beach Store and a few of his cronies, who donated some more beer and valuable scrap lumber. The rest of the wood came from warped boards and planks and plywood stored beneath the boathouse, augmented by birch trees that Martin had Trip take down, Martin himself being too weak to handle an ax. One of the Graffams heard about Martin’s plan, and dropped by one windy morning to inspect the ways.

“Not too bad, there,” he pronounced, ducking his head to light a hand-rolled cigarette, “but you’re going to have t’weight that cradle, else it ain’t going to fall away when you get her into the water.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Martin said glumly, and Dick Graffam’s look told him that’s about what he would’ve expected, someone from away trying to launch a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter in hurricane season and sail down to New York City.

So then Martin had to figure out what to weight the cradle with. Lead is what you’d use, if you had it; but who had lead in their summer bungalow? He kicked around for most of the morning after Graffam left, bad tempered and shaking with fatigue. A raw wind was blowing from the southwest, a tropical storm brewing somewhere. Martin swore and paced down the beach, the hood of his anorak flapping back from his face. The sheer lunacy of his plan had all been there in Graffam’s look. It was the first week of October, the butt end of the season even for experienced sailors, of which Martin was not one. In the best of times, you wouldn’t get underway this late.

And this was, in every possible way that Martin could imagine, not the best of times. But it was done, the boat was done, and the launching ways would be completed soon. He slid his hand into the pocket of his anorak, felt the smooth wooden box that he carried always. A voice stirred in his head like a breeze from a warmer place.

“Go with him. You won’t lose your way, Martin. I’ll find you…”

His hand tightened around the sextant’s box, and he looked out to sea with something like dread. Something like resignation, and relief. Knowing for the first time, and with absolute certainty, that he would not be coming back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Pyramid Meets the Eye

The power had been down for almost a month, autumn skidding into winter, October so fast Jack would have missed it, save for Marzana’s swelling stomach. November an uneasy dream of lurid yellow skies, bare trees and smell of burning and a harsh northeast wind that tore the shingles from Lazyland’s gables. He felt well these days, thin but strong, untroubled by coughs or fevers, though his eyesight did blur sometimes, there was always that sense of things half-seen, motes of living matter swimming across his cornea. He received a courier-delivered postcard and a book from Emma, telling him that she had sent the odd samples off to several labs for identification. One sample had been lost, but she hoped to hear about the other, someday, soon. That had been in early October; he had no news since from either Emma or Jule. Whatever the peculiar granular encrustations had been, they seemed to clear up by November. He checked his throat and eyes several times a day, scraping at the inside of his mouth so much he had a raw spot there that took a while to heal. But it did heal, and the crystalline matter did disappear. One day it was just gone and never recurred. Jack chalked it up to the extra vitamins Emma had left, and was relieved.

A stoic calm claimed Lazyland as winter approached. The weather was awful, the air smoke-filled when not thick with greasy rain. Jack spent most of his time indoors, reading by lamplight in his grandfather’s study, or walking around the mansion flicking electrical switches and lifting telephone receivers as apprehensively as he examined his throat and eyes. It was like an endless restless rainy afternoon, unrelieved by sun or weather reports promising a break in the clouds. One day he found a crop of tiny orange mushrooms growing along the edge of one of the silk Chinese carpets. After that he added a Fungus Alert to his list of things to watch for on his rambles around the house.

He took to visiting the girl each morning, and again at night on his way to bed. Rapping softly at the door to her room, because sometimes she slept later than he did, and it was important (his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson reminded him sternly, nightly, giving him cups of chamomile tea to carry up to her bed), VERY Important, that an Expectant Mother get enough rest. He wondered, often, how it was babies had been born all these years, without him; without the entire world going on leave to take care of all those mothers. The book Emma had sent was a worn paperback guide to the oft-charted territories of pregnancy. Jack read it at night, in bed, tracking week by week the body’s journey into this terra infirma, bemused and occasionally awed by what could be found there—you can do that? With THAT? Then next morning, perched at the end of Marz’s four-poster, ersatz coffee for him, oatmeal and soy powder for her, reading the pertinent sections aloud and thinking how this wasn’t so strange, really, it was a little bit like traveling in Thailand or rural Italy with Leonard, learning about the monasteries the day before a visit, trying not to be grossed out by the local customs. Like, Marz’s gums bled easily, because there was so much more blood now, everywhere inside her. And her hair grew longer and thicker, because of the protein supplements (also courtesy of Emma). Her pale peaked face grew rounder, and pink, though the rest of her remained thin, save of course her belly, which seemed absolutely enormous.

“Feel it?” She pulled up her flannel nightdress, grabbed his hand, and put it on her stomach. “Ow, you’re cold, Jack!”

“Sorry,” he smiled. “Cold hands, warm heart; dirty feet, no sweetheart.”

She laughed; that, too, was new. “Can you tell? It has the hiccups.” Her stomach distending grotesquely as the baby kicked, Jack resisting the urge to say this reminded him of that scene in Alien. Moving his fingers across the taut bulge until they picked up an arrhythmic tap-tap. How could it have the hiccups, when it couldn’t even breathe?

Biology was amazing.

Toward the end of the month they had a Thanksgiving celebration, on what Jack was pretty sure would have been Thanksgiving Day. No turkey, but some Italian sausages he had gotten from Delmonico’s in October, and saved for a special occasion. Sausage sputtering dangerously on the Coleman stove while Jack poked at them, grease flying everywhere and the occasional dramatic burst of flame. Then sitting down to dinner at the formal dining-room table beneath the Viennese crystal chandelier, unlit but its prisms twinkling magnificently in the glow of candles and Coleman lanterns. Cut-glass bowls of pickles, olives, even some canned jellied cranberry sauce.

“It’s beautiful, dear,” Keeley murmured, as Jack helped her into her armchair. The four of them sat at one end of the table, with Keeley at its head. “Just beautiful.”

He smiled, pondering Thanksgivings past. House abrim with cousins, priests smoking cigarettes in his grandfather’s study, Captain Kangaroo in the living room broadcasting live from the Macy’s parade. His brother Dennis sending an arrow through the center of a painting by a member of the Hudson River School, and never being punished for it. Heaps of mashed potatoes and turnips and green beans, turkey the size of a shoat, whiskey glinting in crystal tumblers like chunks of topaz; and, best of all, the knowledge that this was just the beginning, the front door nudging open upon the vast sparkling treasure-house that was the Christmas season, then.

Today there were sausages, on a too-big platter. They were more highly seasoned than Marz would have liked. She did not complain, but she did grimace, like an exotic monkey with her new thick fringe of bright hair, and then proceeded to eat without stopping for a quarter hour. There was whole-wheat rotini from Emma’s hoard, with dried basil, and canned tomatoes, and some nasty canned spinach which Jack had tried to save with garlic salt, which nobody ate. A gruesome-looking apple pudding from Emma’s dried apples, which tasted marvelous, and which everyone did eat. Jack put a two-thirds-full bottle of Glenlivet on the table. He poured a half inch for Keeley, who sipped it slowly throughout the meal, and proceeded to drink most of the rest himself. Afterward, a little wobbly in the head, he helped Mrs. Iverson with the dishes, while Keeley and Marz retired upstairs for late-afternoon naps.

“Not like it used to be,” Mrs. Iverson sighed, wiping greasy water from a plate with a linen rag. “Your grandfather… I think, What would he have thought of all this—”

She lifted her head to gaze out the kitchen window. Beyond the slope of leafless trees the Hudson was marbled black and orange, like the interior of a forge. There was the occasional spatter of rain, the bite of a cold draft making its way through the walls. These—along with the smells of fresh cooking, the growing stack of cleaned dishes, the smell of Scotch—made for one of those rare moments when chronology and atmospheric effects conspired to make everything seem not all that unchanged. It really could be Thanksgiving Day.

“He would have thought it was the end of the world,” said Jack. In fact his grandfather probably wouldn’t have thought that at all. But Jack did. It reminded him of a January afternoon with Leonard, when they were both seventeen. Side by side on the floor of an empty classroom at Saint Bartholomew’s, an hour or so after fucking in a closet; watching a blazing sunset fall through blackened tree limbs to ignite the windows. The sight had filled Jack with exhilaration and dread, confused with sexual fever and its aftermath, the sense of things burning, dangerously, somewhere just out of sight. Since then winter sunsets always moved him thus, a touch of terror amidst the glory. He was surprised, now, to realize he had not felt this way in some time—because there had been no real sunsets, no real winter, for over two years; and because he had grown accustomed to that soft hem of terror brushing against him daily.

“… think I would ever live this long,” Mrs. Iverson was ending with a sigh.

Jack looked up guiltily. “Oh, please don’t say that.”

The housekeeper moved a stack of plates from counter to cupboard. “Doesn’t matter what I say.” She turned and smiled, placed a hand still damp with soapsuds on his. “Oh now, Jackie, don’t you go looking like you just got the bad news about Santa Claus! That was a lovely meal you put together—you saw how Mary Anne ate, and your grandmother, too! You’re a good boy, Jackie. Go on now, I’ll finish up—”

She shooed him out of the kitchen. He went, still feeling guilty—men never seemed to stick around until every last dish was done, no matter how good their intentions—but grateful to have some time alone. Like all Thanksgivings, it had been long. The shadows and sense of repleteness made it feel late, but a consensus of Lazyland’s clocks seemed to agree that it was only around four. He wandered through the dining room, his grandfather’s study, living room, then out into the entry, feeling lost and melancholy. He finally settled into the Stickley chair beneath the grandfather clock, leaned his elbows on the battered table, and stared mournfully at the telephone. He lifted the receiver. The line was dead. He went upstairs.

On the second-floor landing he paused. Loud snoring came from his grandmother’s room and Marz’s. Jack shook his head: so much noise from two such little people. Three, if you counted the baby. From the back steps behind the linen closet he heard Mrs. Iverson exclaiming to herself, her heavy tread as she began to climb. He turned and hurried up the curving stairway to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time and being careful to chuck the moth-eaten caribou under the chin as he went past.

He went into his bedroom. Darkness was falling quickly through the old house, low heavy clouds in the west streaked with vermilion. Jack found matches and lit the lantern, went to his night table and squirted some Fusax beneath his tongue, chased it with stale water from a plastic tumbler. For several minutes he sat at the edge of the bed, watching sheaves of light ripple across the windows, black and scarlet and silvery grey. The light oppressed him, made him think of Good Friday, the altar stripped of everything save shadows and candles guttering in red glass holders. It was like that now, he thought, seeing the world without her makeup was not a pretty sight. Wind tore at the shingles, a rattle of rain or hail swept across the roof. From somewhere down near the river echoed laughter, the explosive roaring of an engine that grew ominously silent. A sense of something terrible about to happen swept over him, certain as the rain; but what could be done? There was no one to call for help, no one to wake; nothing to do but ride it out.

His mother had always said, No matter how bad things are, they will look better in the morning. But now morning never came. The glimmering had stolen the promise of dawn. He could only take a deep breath and wait for the horror to pass.

It did, slowly. He was not conscious of having shut his eyes, but it seemed he must have—when he blinked, the room had changed. The wind had died. A sharp, foul smell clung to the air, as of burned hair or feathers. The light had shifted. It was no longer black and scarlet but a lambent red, the deep lurid red of blood, so brilliant it cast no shadows. It was like staring at the world through an infrared lens. He stumbled to his feet and lurched to the window.

The sky was in flames. Not clouds that resembled flames, but fire, huge explosive gouts of fire stretching from horizon to horizon, roiling and expanding as though they would devour the entire sky. He watched in horror, looked down but saw nothing—no trees, no earth, not even the walls of the house beneath him. Only a vast cauldron of molten light, seething like some monstrous bacillus. The light tore at his eyes, made them stream and burn. He turned and staggered to the door. He crashed against the doorframe and all but fell downstairs, blinded.

“Grandmother! Grandmother—”

He stumbled into Keeley’s room. The heavy jacquard curtains were drawn, as always. They filtered out the light, so that he could see his startled grandmother sitting up in bed, still wearing her fisherman’s sweater, a sleep mask pushed up over her white curls.

“Jack! What is it—”

“The fire! Are you all right—”

Fire? Keeley started to climb from the bed. “Where, where—”

“Grandmother, don’t! Please—”

Someone appeared in the doorway: the blond girl. She yawned and shook her head, staring at Jack through sleep-slit eyes. “Fire? There’s no fire. What, you have a dream or something?”

“A dream?” He shook his head. “No, I…”

His voice trailed off.

“There was a fire.” He cleared his throat. “Outside. There was a fire.”

Marz walked into the room, arms crossed above her waxing belly. She went to the window and fiddled until she found a heavy sateen cord. She yanked on it. The curtains opened.

“You were dreaming ,” she said. “See?”

The window framed the same view as his own did—dark trees, carriage house, sloping lawn, sluggish river. All untouched by any flames save a few bright brief flashes from the evening sky, silvery purple and acid green.

“No,” Jack said, but the girl had already crawled into bed with Keeley, grinning.

“I have dreams like that, sometimes.” Marz shivered, and Keeley draped a blanket over her thin shoulders. “Like I’ll see the sky at night, there’ll be words written up on the sky, but I can’t understand them. And bridges—I have this dream, a lot, this dream about a bridge…”

Jack walked to the window and looked out. She was right, there were no fires. He rubbed his eyes.

Jesus fuck, it seemed so real.

“I never remember my dreams,” Keeley said. “Not anymore. Your father, he used to have dreams. And nightmares…”

Jack turned, thinking she spoke to him. But the way Keeley smiled at Marzana, the way her hand traced the headboard’s carven whorls—as though another palm moved there beneath her own—told him that she spoke to the girl. That she was seeing the girl, again, as Mary Anne. Your father was his grandfather.

“… one time he thought the hotel was on fire! He jumped up, and—”

Lightning exploded within the room. Jack cried out, and Marzana; but Keeley stared at the ceiling, where the lightning stayed, trapped within the trumpets of an Art Nouveau ceiling lamp.

“The power!” shrieked Marz. “The power’s on!”

She flung herself from the bed and raced across the room, flicking the light switch on and off. “It’s on, it’s on!”

“Stop!” Jack yelled. “You’ll blow the bulb—”

But Marz was already gone, stampeding to her own room, where he could hear the sudden joyful blare of a radio.

“—LAST DAYS! THREE DAYS ONLY!—”

“Good Lord, what’s this—oh look, Keeley darling, power’s on!” Mrs. Iverson tottered onto the landing. “Good heavens, tell that girl to be quiet! Quick, Jack, help me bring the laundry down. Mary Anne! You help, too, bring those baby things we got out—”

They ran from floor to floor, the girl puffing and swearing as she gathered sheets and a plastic basket heaped with yellowed infant clothes; Jack loped past her with armfuls of shirts, khaki pants, mismatched socks, Keeley’s turtlenecks. In the laundry room Mrs. Iverson disappeared behind piles of clothes, and the washer groaned as cold water poured through the pipes. Marz panted back upstairs and went from room to room turning on lights, looking for radios to crank up, checking the answering machine.

“Stop!” shouted Jack from the basement. “You’ll blow a fuse!”

When he got back to the first floor he found her in the living room, remote in hand, staring rapturously at the TV “This is so fucking great,” she announced. “We can, like, watch Thanksgiving specials.”

He laughed. “See if King Kong is on—”

He took the remote and began flashing through channels.

“Too fast!” Marz yelped, and grabbed it back. She rocked on her heels, squealing when the screen showed game shows, mud slides, music videos, groaning at the more numerous bursts of static where stations had been, once.

He left her and went out to the carriage house. He booted up his computer, looked for messages there and on the answering machine and fax. There was an update on the GFI New Year’s celebration, dated some weeks ago, and a letter from Leonard, photographing fish die-outs and human birth defects in someplace called Komsomolsk-na-Amure.

And there was a note from Larry Muso.

Jack read the message several times, his face growing hot. He had not thought of either Larry Muso or the Big Party for some time, and had in fact never seriously considered that he would go, despite the invisible gryphon etched onto his right palm. It all seemed too Dance-Band-on-the-Titanic, too Last Big Fling, too Suppose They Gave an Apocalypse and Everybody Came?

And how could he even consider leaving Keeley or Mrs. Iverson, not to mention Marzana, whose baby was due right about then?

I would very much like to meet with you, for drinks or perhaps breakfast…

But then Larry Muso’s high cheekbones and darkly lustrous eyes came back to him, the feathery touch of his hair as it grazed Jack’s cheek. He felt a shaft of desire and shut his eyes, lingering for a moment upon the memory of that brief meeting.

I was so rude, he thought, and transposed the thought into a bit of postcoital reverie, him lying beside that slight figure, stroking that hair: I was so fucking rude to you, why was I so rude?

He opened his eyes upon the screen before him—it could go black at any moment, New Year’s was scarcely more than a month away, he could lose it all just like that. Quickly he typed a reply—

There. He read the message three or four times, agonizing over whether he should say more, or less. Feeling, too, that it was highly improbable, almost impossible, in fact, that he would actually go through with something so insane, leave Lazyland and attend some corporate rout, just to meet someone he didn’t know for breakfast at the millennium.

Still, he thought—and pressed the key that would send the message, that did send the message, assuming there was someone out there in left field to catch it—you never can tell.

Afterward he checked the fax to make sure it had enough paper. He rewound the answering machine tape, changed a lightbulb, listened to a few minutes of a Philip Glass CD. He straightened a few things on the walls—his father’s law degree, one of Leonard’s prints, his aunt Mary Anne Finnegan’s sixth-grade picture.

That reminded him of something. He went to a bookshelf and found a bunch of family photo albums from the sixties and seventies.

He withdrew one, bound in plastic with curling daisy decals all over it, settled onto the floor and opened it gingerly. Most of the photos inside had fallen out of the plastic sleeves. He sorted them, black-and-white Polaroids with scalloped edges, overexposed color prints with dates carefully printed on the bottom: November 1967. December 1967. January 1968. March 1968.

They were pictures of Mary Anne in California. Mary Anne at the San Diego Zoo, wearing a floppy yellow cotton hat. Mary Anne at Big Sur. Mary Anne at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, wearing a hideous green velvet blouse and pink miniskirt, eyes hidden behind immense Day-Glo sunglasses, no doubt imagining herself the eidos of hippie cool but looking frighteningly young. She hadn’t been much older than Marz.

But there was no other resemblance that Jack could see. Mary Anne was tall, snub-nosed, freckled, her long straight blond hair inclining to wheat rather than Marz’s gossamer. He rifled through more pictures. Except for a single photo of Mary Anne with two girls in a forest, she was always alone.

So who had taken the photos?

He frowned, then, turning a page, came upon a cache of small color snapshots all set at the Golden Gate Bridge. He laid them upon the floor.

The photos showed Mary Anne posing antically with the bridge in the background, spires rising from a golden mist. She wore a bubble-gum-pink plastic raincoat, matching rain hat, and white go-go boots, and held a bunch of purple flowers. She was aping fashion spreads of the time, those silly displays of leggy models making like Egyptian wall paintings, Edie Sedgwick poised for flight atop a leather elephant. Only Mary Anne’s pixie face was far too animated, in spite of chalky lipstick and spidery eyelashes and an impressive pair of fishnet-clad legs. In this, too, she was unlike Marz, whose sullen passivity drove Jack crazy.

And yet—and yet there was something there. He picked up one of the pictures and examined it. A close-up of Mary Anne’s face, slightly out of focus. She pressed the flowers close against her chin, lilacs and grape hyacinths contrasting with her white skin and golden hair. Her eyes were very wide, round childlike eyes as opposed to Marz’s narrow rather sly gaze. The pupils were tiny, the irises a deep blue-violet with tiny radiating lines of yellow: one of the lilac blossoms might have fallen into her face, as into a pool.

She must have been stoned out of her mind, he thought, and felt chilled. Who took the photos? Who was with her?

The longer he stared at the photo, the more its unfocused quality seemed to emanate from her eyes: their gaze distant but not the least bit dreamy, and suffused with that eerie acid clarity he suddenly remembered all too well: seeing the subtle shifting patterns within one’s own hands, the staggering urgency of a million cells suddenly revealed to him, the revelation that his body was a hive and had always been so.

He realized that he had glimpsed that same expression on Marz’s face. Not once, but often. A look as though she were seeing the multitude within him; as though she had seen a ghost.

Or been one.

He hastily began rearranging the photos in front of him. Unreasoning dread swept over him. It was one thing to have deliriums brought on by illness, bad dreams of his grandfather and skeletons dancing on the lawn; quite another to consider even momentarily that Lazyland was being visited by the revenant of his long-lost aunt. An old song rang through his head, one of Leonard’s favorites—

Ain’t you never seen a disembodied soul before?

He glanced at the pictures one last time, quickly stuck them back in the album. He flipped through the remaining pages, barely glancing at what was there—a few more scratched Polaroids, some photos of an empty storefront. At the very end, he found a small stained envelope stuck to the back cover. It was addressed in blue ballpoint ink, in the same handwriting he recognized from the back of the photographs. Here the penmanship was definitely worse, drunken scrawl rather than that careful looped Palmer hand.

For a minute he sat holding it. The postmark read San Francisco, April 17, 1968. He drew the envelope to his face and inhaled, caught the faintest spicy-sweet breath of incense. There was no return address.

And beneath the signature, in uneven block letters:

He read it two, three, five times. Finally, he placed the letter and the envelope on the floor and went back through the photos, checking dates. Nothing was marked later than March 1968. He thought back to when he had found the girl in the garden, beneath the hydrangeas. Sometime in April; impossible to remember just when.

And when had Mary Anne disappeared? He could vaguely recall that it had been summer, he and his brothers fighting over the porch swing while strained grown-up voices spoke, out of sight on the porch, while the scent of charcoal billowed up from the lawn. Nothing had ever been found of her, no clothes, no body washed up under the bridge, nothing. As an adult, his sister had said once at another family cookout, she thought Mary Anne had gone out there and gotten pregnant and killed herself, rather than face her parents. He had never asked his grandmother if there was a putative date for Mary Anne’s death; never asked his father, or anyone else.

He wouldn’t now, either.

He put it all away, carefully but quickly. The letter last of all, pressed between transparent plastic membranes like something on a medical slide. He replaced the album on its shelf, shut down his computer, and left. Halfway up the drive he stared up at Lazyland’s windows, glowing like stained glass in the discordant light. Behind one of them a shadow moved, up and down, as though signaling him—

There is someone here.

Back inside Lazyland, the house’s usual dark silence had been laid siege by electric bulbs, rumble-thump of washing machine and dryer, water pounding through the pipes, lights glowing on the answering machine and coffeemaker and microwave.

And music: the television turned up so loud that Jack winced.

“Marz!” he shouted, striding into the living room and punching the volume control. “Turn it down!” Then, at Marz’s outraged look, “Jesus Christ, it’s so distorted, how can you even hear it?”

She glowered, which was reassuring—surely ghosts didn’t slouch in the middle of the living-room floor and scowl when you turned the TV down.

Jack regarded the screen with what he hoped was an acceptable level of adult interest. “Now at least you can hear what they’re saying.”

“It’s a fucking commercial,” said Marz in a venomous tone; her accent made it into a focking commairshell.

“Then you certainly don’t need it turned all the way up, do you?” Jack gave her a deliberately prissy smile, which Marz ignored. “Where’s Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson?”

“Kitchen.” Marz leaned against a pillow, gaze fixed on the television.

Jack frowned. “You comfortable like that?”

Marz twiddled her hair. He repeated the question.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

He stood there for another minute, watching her watch TV, a kaleidoscopically animated commercial for some kind of soft drink. It was amazing—miraculous, almost—how quickly the world reclaimed its commonplace aspect, if only you could turn the TV on.

“Let’s see what’s on Public Television,” he suggested.

“No!” Marz shrieked, and clutched the remote to her huge belly.

“Just joking.”

The commercial segued almost indistinguishably into the music station’s corporate ID. Marz fidgeted, bumping her heels against the floor. Jack noticed that her socks did not match. When he glanced at the TV again it showed a swirling background of green and purple and gold, violently redolent of the sky outside. Across the screen letters flowed, formed of varicolored smoke.

“Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing…”

A woman’s voice began repeating the words, eerily affectless and breathy, as though it had been generated by a computer; like one of those voices you got on the phone during the rare periods it worked, warning you to expect extensive difficulties and delays in placing your call. Low, ominous music began to creep from the TV: gamelans and drums, a growing crescendo of guitar feedback. Within the garish whorls of color a tiny object appeared. A golden pyramid beset by rays of light and spinning like a pinwheel until it was large enough to fill the screen. Then the pyramid was gone. A huge glittering eye stared out from the television, blinked so that a tarantula fringe of lashes swept across its sky-blue iris, and wheeled back to become fixed like a gem within the face of a radiantly beautiful young man.

“Ah,” gasped Jack. “It’s that song…”

“I possess the keys of hell and death,” the young man sang. “I will give you the morning star. The end of the end. The end of the end…”

He was dressed like a temple dancer. Face ash white, lips and eyes outlined in scarlet, his blond hair all but hidden beneath a pagodalike headdress. His clothes were heavy with jewels and long fringes of brocade. Flowering vines swept across his body as he swayed and spun, crouched and leapt across what seemed a vertiginous height. Beneath his unshod feet clouds and sea churned like dust, and the ragged peaks of mountains. Jack watched raptly. There was something eerie, yet self-consciously hyperbolic, about the dancing figure which was at odds with the doomy music—that was merely (though gorgeously) anthemic, an irresistible pop coda to the century.

But the dancing boy—he reminded Jack of the Hindi films Leonard dragged him to when they were in Bombay in the late seventies and early eighties, bizarre epics where blue-skinned actors played gods who raped then embraced weeping ecstatic women, only to be interrupted by waves of sari-clad Busby Berkeley chorines on acid, all singing, all dancing, all for the greater glory of the avatars of Vishnu…

And that, too, was oddly familiar.

“… fear the phantoms of the Kali Yuga…”

A shiver of recognition edged up Jack’s spine. He frowned, remembering a coke-fueled evening in 1983. He and Leonard and one of Bollywood’s rising film stars, a golden-skinned man named Ashok Sonerwalla, sat on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Khambhat, talking long into the night and drinking a beverage the color of Pepto-Bismol. Even now Jack recalled their conversation very clearly, because Leonard (much impressed by My Dinner with Andre) had videotaped the entire evening. During the months of editing that followed, Jack was forced to watch an endless loop of his intoxicated self drooling over the actor.

Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—

“That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many yugas, of course. But this is the most evil yuga, this one we are in right now.”

He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each yuga has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always very exciting!”

Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences samadhi—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a lot of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the future, so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”

Jack’s memory of that particular night was of divine balance being restored somewhere within Ashok’s spacious Bhaunagar bedroom. A change in the music brought his attention back to the TV screen, the face of the dancing boy in close-up. High rounded cheekbones, strong jaw, cleft chin, strands of damp blond hair falling across his forehead. A distinctly occidental face—whatever it possessed of Eastern Mystery had been drawn there with makeup and computer theurgy. In the blue-white hollow of his throat a silver crucifix bobbed from a silver chain, the camera fixing for an instant upon a rapturous face that mirrored the boy’s own. The music pulsed and clanged. What was it about this song, that voice, the—

“No ! NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”

Jack saw Marzana staggering to her feet.

“IT’S NOT HIM! IT’S NOT HIM! THEY DID SOMETHING! IT’S NOT—”

“Marzana!” Jack cried, aghast. “Marzana, what is it? Who—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”

“THEY DID IT! THAT BITCH DID IT! THEY FUCKING—”

“Marz!”

Her screams gave way to hysterical crying, the girl kicking at him though her eyes never left the screen. In a panic Jack yelled at her to be quiet and tried to drag her from the room. But she was too strong for him, and so big now. With an explosive gasp she rammed her elbow into his stomach. Jack went reeling backward as the girl swept past him, stumbled to her knees, and began to wail.

“No, oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE—”

Jack groaned and sat up. The girl knelt with her back to him, swaying as she moaned something he couldn’t understand—it sounded like rippp, rippp. Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.

Jack leaned forward to put his arms around Marzana’s shaking form. His eyes remained fixed on the glittering corporate logo that appeared at the end of the line of block letters—

A golden pyramid surmounted by the sun, a phantom gryphon shimmering within its rays.