Glimmering

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Into the Mystic

They made preparations for leaving.

Diana began saving vegetables for greasing the launching ways. Nothing from her garden ever went to waste—if it wasn’t cooked, or baked, or dried, or canned, it was fed to the chickens or the pigs, or put into compost—but the pigs’ rations were cut back, the mealy ends of potatoes and zucchini and pockmarked eggplants put into a new bin marked WENDAMEEN.

And the ways itself was completed. It stretched twenty-seven feet from shore to waterline, then extended several more yards into the bay, where the wooden struts and pallets were anchored with lengths of automobile chain. Martin spent two days trying to figure out how to weight the cradle he’d designed for the boat. He finally pillaged his own car, a Toyota Camry whose engine he and Trip removed and which Trip then fastened with more chain to the wooden cradle. But that didn’t seem like it would be enough. So he went to Adele Grose and received permission to gut her car, a 1956 Cadillac that hadn’t run for decades. When that still didn’t seem enough weight, he and Trip trussed the entire structure with more automotive chains and the doors from the Camry.

“It looks like it’s going to take off,” remarked Trip when they were done. “You think it’ll do her?”

Martin privately thought the boat now resembled something from Waterworld. “I guess if the cradle doesn’t sink, we can just hack away at it until it does,” he said doubtfully, staring up at the Wendameer’s white hull. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of that gear stowed away.”

He bartered with Diana for food, giving her two paintings she had long admired in exchange for jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and the promise of fresh eggs the morning of their voyage.

“But aren’t you going to miss these?” Diana asked when Martin and Trip brought the two canvases over. “I mean, they were hanging in your place, it’s not like you had them stored away somewhere.”

“I can always come and visit them, right?”

“Sure,” Diana said absently. She was already measuring her walls for the canvases, and so didn’t see Martin’s stricken look. But it was too late now. He was committed to the voyage because Trip was; and because he could no more imagine not taking the boy south to Manhattan than he could imagine leaving him there, forever.

Still, there was a little time left at Mars Hill. The last few days of Indian summer, blisteringly hot beneath a sky like cracked cloisonné, the beach steaming where hailstones the size of fists hammered against stone and Trip stumbled round gathering them, to fill an Igloo cooler for as long as the ice would last. Not long, it turned out, a day or two. Enough to keep the last four bottles of beer cold; enough for Martin to fill an ice pack to lay across his brow, fighting fever.

“You’re letting him kill you!” his son Jason had raged. “You’re going to leave me here alone—you’re going to leave Moony and me and the baby—”

“But the world will know that I died for love,” he had told his son, and with a strangled sob Jason fled down the beach.

Ah well, nothing to be done. He devoted himself to teaching Trip what he could of seamanship. On the deck of the Wendameen, Trip’s face scrunched into that little-boy scowl of concentration as he followed Martin’s nimble fingers through the labyrinth of sailor’s knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, rolling hitch. Martin showed him where the harness was, in the cockpit, and warned him that in case of rough weather he was to put it on.

“Some boats have lifelines—ropes you can grab on to, if you have to. This one doesn’t,” Martin said, pacing from bow to stern while Trip struggled with a bowline. “So you’ve always got to keep your head up. You always have to have one hand for yourself and one for the boat.”

Trip nodded, not really listening; and so Martin said the same things again, and again, just as he endlessly showed the boy how to thread the knots, how to secure the anchor line, how to maintain the proper tension between jibstay and jumpers and backstay. Somehow, some of it would stick, he thought, smiling as Trip bellowed with triumph and held up a length of rope.

Weeks passed. Their nights were spent poring over the charts. Martin decided they would travel point to point, always within sight of shore. With no navigational aids beyond a compass and sextant (which was pretty useless, since you couldn’t see the stars to steer by), and with storms a near-constant threat, it seemed the only reasonable thing to do. He showed him the sextant, its deft interlocking of mirrors, prism, filters, vernier; even took him out onto the porch to explain how it worked. How it was futile if you couldn’t shoot the stars, although you could theoretically take a shot onshore, angle on three points on land, and find your way thus. The Graffams had told him that many of the old lighthouses along the coast of Maine were occupied again, since the Coast Guard no longer chased off squatters. It was rumored that some of the lights were even operational—Dick Graffam had seen one for himself, at Quoddy Head—and that a number of the old solar-powered light buoys still worked. The worst part of the journey would be getting around the ships’ graveyard off Cape Cod. The Cape Cod Canal would be too dangerous, without any advance warning of pirate ships coming through, and so Martin plotted another course. Which would also be perilous, but he and John had sailed it before. Martin felt fairly confident that if the seas were calm, they would have little trouble.

“Let’s aim for Friday,” he said one night, pushing his chair away from the cluttered table.

Trip’s face lit up. “To leave?”

“Well, to get the boat into the water, at least. There’s no point waiting any longer.” He felt a stabbing at his heart: why wait? The boy wasn’t going to fall in love with him, the stars weren’t suddenly going to show their faces through the broken sky, the tide wasn’t going to turn. “We should go now,” he went on, “before it gets worse.”

“Before what gets worse?” asked Trip cheerfully. “At least it’s not cold. And we’ve got the wind from the north, you said that’s good.”

Clueless, Martin marveled; he’s just so absolutely clueless. He smiled and nodded. “I did, and it is: it’s all good.”

But lying alone on the couch that night—listening to Trip’s even breathing in the next room, in Martin’s own bed—he could only sob, in rage and frustrated desire.

Stop killing me.

They launched on Friday in mid-December. Morning came, sky corrugating into emerald and cerulean and the brilliant yellow that seeps beneath a door closed to fire. On the porch Martin watched the day crack open. He had not slept, chased by fever and the knowledge that this would be the last time he’d sit here and look down Mars Hill to the bay, past decrepit cottages and leggy phlox and the Wendameen’s silhouette, to sparkling water and the eastern horizon. He felt beyond sorrow, oddly ebullient; buoyed by the very futility of his task. When he heard the first birds rustling in the lilacs he stood. He went inside to boil water for tea, then walked quietly into the bedroom to rouse Trip.

He slept soundly, as always. For a long time Martin stood above him, one hand on the headboard, and watched. He had always loved to do this, observe his lovers sleeping. It was like laying claim to a hidden part of them, like watching years fall away to reveal the other’s pith. John had always looked childlike when sleeping, one hand curled close to his face upon the pillow, mouth parted, brow furrowed.

Trip did not. Trip, sleeping, seemed least himself. He never moved—and Martin checked, Martin would stand there, memorizing the precise pattern of cheek against pillow, outflung arm, crooked knee. The boy’s face had a strangely slack look, not relaxed but deflated, the skin waxen and dull, lips pale, eyelids like little white shells laid across his eyes. As though some vitalizing spirit had gone. Martin frowned, thinking of all those stories where the hero’s soul flees him at night, of shamans who can leave their bodies and travel to the other world, returning with magic stones, coals wrapped in leaves, miraculous cures for blindness and plague. He gazed at Trip’s right hand, coiled against his breast, the gold ring there. He sighed, and gently shook Trip’s shoulder.

They had a small audience for the launch—Mrs. Grose, Diana, Doug from the Beach Store. Jason had made his farewells, stiffly, during his last visit; finally collapsed into tears and let Martin hold him. Martin had hoped Dick Graffam might come, but the weather was clear, no clouds that he could see; Graffam would be out fishing. It was high tide, waves lapping at pilings and gulls swooping overhead. On her jackstand the Wendameen gleamed cerise, reflecting the bright sky.

“You ready?” Martin clapped a hand on Trip’s shoulder.

“I’m ready.” Trip grinned.

“Let’s do ’er, then.”

Diana and Doug helped them spread rotten vegetables along the ways, cabbages and zucchini and stalks of jewelweed which spurted clear liquid when you broke them. Martin removed the wooden gate that held the boat within her cradle and, with a flourish, tossed it into a patch of withered tiger lilies. The boat creaked, its bow angling down—it looked monstrously huge up there, a terrible lion whose cage had been flung open—and began to slide forward.

“She’s coming!” yelled Martin. Doug cheered. Diana waited at a safe distance with a pail of sand to throw onto the ways, to slow the boat if necessary. Martin and Trip stood to each side, armed with crowbars, but they didn’t need them. As though in a dream of sailing through the sky, the Wendameen slid down the launching ways as Martin and Trip walked alongside, both of them gazing up and laughing for sheer wonder.

“Look at her!” yelled Trip. “Holy cow, she’s gonna do it!”

And she did, leaving a crushed trail of green and red and brown in her wake, like the track of some immense slug: she swept down the gravel beach and into the bay. There was an awful moment when she listed to one side, and the cradle seemed to be caught. Martin gave an anguished yell and ran down the shingle, but before he could reach the water she righted herself. Trip and Doug held two of the lines, walking out onto the pier. Martin followed, so excited he could scarcely talk.

“We did it! We did it!”

Trip turned to him with shining eyes. “You did it,” he said, and looked out to where the cradle rested in the shallows, the doors of Martin’s Camry showing faint yellow from beneath dark water. “You got her in the water…”

But they didn’t leave that day; and by the next morning a storm broke. It raged for almost a week, hurricane winds, Trip and Martin frantic that the Wendameen would sink. She didn’t; but she was damaged, so that there were more repairs to make. And another week slipped by, and another; more bad weather, and more time passing still. Until when they finally did get under way it was late in December, an insane month to be sailing, but what was to be done?

They made their farewells quickly. Everything had been loaded below, containers of water and extra foul-weather gear, lines and charts, sleeping bags and mildewed wool blankets that Mrs. Grose forced on them, just in case.

“Godspeed, Martin,” she said, and held her pug to her breast. Her tortoiseshell eyes were bright with tears. Looking into them Martin knew what she saw for him, but he was not afraid.

“Right,” he said softly, and kissed her. Diana gave him a small mesh bag with a few onions in it. Doug produced a six-pack of Blackfly Ale. And Mrs. Grose gave him a bottle of brandy, almost full.

“It may make things easier.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her fingers lingering against his neck. “Oh, my dearest Martin…”

He drew back gently, trying not to cry. When he looked down she smiled and shook her head.

“It is not such a bad world to be leaving, Martin,” she whispered, and turned away. Martin and Trip boarded. They would motor out of the harbor, and hope for a northerly wind once they got beyond the point. Martin started the engine. Greasy black smoke rolled across the deck. On the pier everyone cheered.

“Good-bye, Martin! Good-bye!”

Martin grinned, Trip at his side in John’s weather-beaten anorak. He raised his hand in farewell. The boat moved slowly, noisily out into the bay. Behind them Mars Hill grew smaller and smaller, the waving figures on the pier no bigger than gulls. Then they were gone, and Mars Hill with them. The Wendameen was under way.

It took them over two weeks, dropping anchor at night to sleep within the shadow of pine trees, or offshore from sandy beaches along the Cape, or within sight of the drowned ruins of aircraft factories in Connecticut, the submarine works in Groton. Trip was seasick once, Martin often; he wished he had some Dramamine in his stores, or at least a pair of sunglasses. Above them stretched endless channels of phosphorescent green and violet and gold, with here and there a rent showing the great darkness beyond, the brave wink of a star and once a nacred tooth Martin knew must be the moon. Below them the sea reflected the sky’s broken face, with an underlying gesso of copper green. Martin felt they were not sailing so much as they were suspended within some vast crucible: just a matter of time before the Wendameen and its passengers were smelted down, given back to ore and ash and bone.

They saw strange things, journeying south. A pod of whales who breached to starboard and followed them, mountains moving with great belching sighs, enameled blue and silver in the night. A creature like an immense brittle basket star, twice as large as the Wendameen, its central arms radiating outward like the sun before giving birth to an explosion of smaller arms, all writhing upon the surface of the sea as the omphalos turned slowly, counterclockwise, and breathed forth a scent like apples. Rippling mats of phosphorescent plankton colored like Easter eggs, pink, pale green, blue; gulls nesting upon unmoored buoys, that rose to squawk at the boat’s passage and so revealed their eggs, large as an infant’s skull and pied with glowing silver.

To all of these wonders Trip seemed oblivious. If Martin pointed something out—a dismembered tentacle the size of a telephone pole, a school of flying fish—Trip would only shrug, and smile.

“Didn’t see that when I was out with my uncle,” he said, sitting beside Martin on deck one evening and watching as a single fin, long and serrated, sliced the water near shore. “Guess they don’t have them up by us.”

Martin shook his head and leaned over the rail, trying to see if the fin made for shore; to see if perhaps it might clamber there on shaky new legs. “They didn’t used to have them anywhere, Trip,” he said.

And amongst all these, other things. Ruins of houses, roofs floating like Dorothy’s farm felled on its way to Oz, porches where terns rested and barnacles massed thick as wet concrete. Uprooted trees whose leaves had turned to bronze but had not died, had grown instead long streaming bladders and filaments that moved whiplike across the water’s surface. Other boats—abandoned trawlers that sent a chill through Martin as they drifted past; battered sloops with patched sails and sailors who hallooed and waved but did not approach; a dinghy that appeared full of birds and clothes, and which Martin tried very hard to keep Trip from gazing into as the Wendameen passed it with terrible slowness, the gulls scarcely lifting their heads from worrying small heaps of bones.

Hourly they grew closer to New York. Alongshore unbroken darkness, save where fires leapt upon distant hillsides or burned within windowed towers. Snow and freezing rain that made the sails brittle as ice. The occasional terrifying surge of power through the grid, horizontal lightning that ripped through hamlets and towns and cities, erupting sometimes as flame from atop high-rises, or roaring from radio towers and airport beacons before it all collapsed once more into the endless bacchanal night, the great serpent stirring and then falling back into uneasy sleep. New Haven’s breakwaters, flooded now, a channel buoy still blinking from the tip of a skeleton tower. Ships black and huge as islands, freighters or cruise ships or factory ships, that seemed immobile, unmovable, in the lavender dusk but were gone before the rippling red false dawn. It was these that unsettled Martin most; but they sailed on, past bell buoys tolling unseen beneath the remains of bridges and ferry landings. Drowned mansions. Defunct factories rising from webs of girders and shattered gantries. The art deco splendor of an amusement park, the roller coaster’s spine rising like a dream of dragons from emerald water.

And Trip gazing upon it all unperturbed, unmoved. Unknowing? wondered Martin. But could not bring himself to ask, could not bear to think what answer he might receive: that the boy had seen it all before, that the drowned kingdoms were not new to him, or strange; that the scoured ruins of the earth belonged to Trip more than they had ever belonged to Martin.

One night they anchored in mid-channel. After a makeshift meal of spongy fried potatoes and the last of Diana’s rosemary they sat on deck, facing shore and watching the sky convulse above them, a slowly turning wheel of purple and indigo and a bruised red that was almost black. Martin had Mrs. Grose’s farewell bottle of brandy beside him, and every now and then poured a jot into an enameled mug. He poured some for Trip as well. The boy didn’t drink it; he balanced the cup on his lap, every now and then raising it to his face to sniff it warily. The air felt dank and viscous. It wasn’t hot, but Martin still broke into a sweat.

Maybe that was the brandy, he thought, or just fatigue. He took another sip from his mug, and winced. A strange indefinable smell hung in the air, like burning dust or gunpowder. In the distance a silvery flare leapt from a high promontory, as though something there had exploded soundlessly.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

He nestled the mug against his chest and glanced at Trip. “What?”

“The sky.” Trip’s voice was subdued. He stuck his chin out to indicate the lurid tableau above them. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.”

Martin looked up. He shrugged, feeling a sliver of cold where the heavy night air nosed down his shirt. “Is it? I guess I can’t tell, anymore. Maybe we’re just getting closer to the city—you know, more houses, more lights…”

“No.” Trip raised the mug to his lips and took a sizable mouthful. “Ugh—!”

Martin laughed. “It’s not beer. You’re supposed to savor it—”

Trip swallowed and took a cautious sip. “Okay.” He grimaced.

Martin leaned back, gazing into the sky. “How much worse could it get?” he said. “Diana was talking about those space stations they’re sending up at the end of the month—I mean, joint Japanese/American technology, how can we lose?”

Trip shook his head. “I don’t know.” His eyes in the infernal light seemed translucent. “It’s like it really is the Rapture…”

“The Rapture?” Martin stared at him. “You mean the end of the world? You think this is the end of the world?”

Trip nodded. “The Last Days. That’s what John Drinkwater used to say. My choir director,” he added at Martin’s quizzical look. “And my grandmother—”

He took another sip of brandy. “—she totally believed in all that stuff. If she could see me now—”

Trip traced the outline of the cross branded on his forehead. “Man, if she could see me, she’d definitely think this was it. The end of the world. The end of the fucking world.”

Martin listened, fearful lest the boy stop: it was the most he’d heard Trip say of himself since he’d found him on the beach at Mars Hill. Beneath them the Wendameen rocked gently. Finally he asked, “Is that—is that what you believe?”

Trip gazed upward. Streamers of gold spun from the ominous spiral, slid down to disappear behind that far-off promontory where something burned, smoke like dark thumbprints against the lurid sky. After a moment he shook his head.

“I don’t know. I guess. Or no—no, maybe I don’t.” He frowned. “I mean, if I really thought that, probably I wouldn’t be doing this—”

He opened his hands, cradling the mug of brandy. “I mean, I wouldn’t be letting you take me to New York,” he said. “To look for her. If I really thought it was the end, I guess I wouldn’t care.”

Martin looked away. Because Martin did think it was the end—for him, at least—and somehow that didn’t stop him from caring at all.

“She’s your girlfriend, then? This person you’re going to find in the city?”

“No, she’s not my girlfriend,” he said “Actually, I hardly even know her.”

“Was she—is she someone you knew from—well, your church?”

“My church?” Trip drank the rest of his brandy, then reached for the bottle and poured more into the mug. “No. She wasn’t exactly a churchgoing girl. I mean, I doubt she was saved or anything like that. She was foreign, for one thing. Russia or someplace, I forget.”

“But—so you want to save her? That’s, um, thoughtful.”

“No, I don’t want to save her. I just want to—to see her again. That’s all.”

He turned away. His profile against the burning sky looked sharp, almost cruel, the hollows of his cheeks touched with flame, his eyes colorless. Martin’s heart clenched. He tried desperately to think of something to say, something that might redeem the moment, save him from looking pathetic as he sat there staring at this boy as though he were the Rapture, his last best hope of sunrise.

Trip only shook his head. “Thanks for the brandy,” he said, easing himself to his feet. He stretched, looking down at Martin, and smiled; but the older man could see that it was forced. “I’ll do first watch, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“No prob.” Trip turned and walked away.

The night passed with no more talk between them. Trip woke Martin to stand his watch; then, as night soured into dawn, he brought him a mug of hot tea on deck.

“Thanks,” said Martin, feeling hung over. “We should be shoving off, I guess.”

Unexpectedly, Trip smiled. “It’s been kind of cool, hasn’t it? I mean this whole thing with the boat? ’Cause like you got it all fixed up, and into the water, and—”

He spun on his bare foot, letting his arm swing out to indicate the rainbow sweep of sea, the jutting headlands beyond. “And we made it! We’re there!”

Martin smiled. “Yeah,” he said, gazing into Trip’s blue eyes. “We really have almost made it.”

That night, they came to the East River: College Point, Rikers Island, South Brother Island. To starboard the horizon stretched green and yellow, a waste of spartina and cattails, reek of mussels and mudflats and red crabs like scorpions that nudged up against the Wendameen’s hull upon mats of seagrass. Martin had thought, at least, that he could point out to Trip the glory that was Manhattan.

But from here the island seemed nothing but marshland. A glittering haze hung above the fens, sparked here and there with blue or red. It took Martin some minutes to realize that this was the New York skyline, not so grand a thing as it had been; more a memory of a city moored there above the restless grasses. As they drew nearer the marsh gradually gave way to decrepit waterfronts where buildings had tumbled into the channel, some frozen in mid-fall, beams and flooring and stairs like the gears of an unsprung clock hanging above the water. Pilings, black and reamed with rot, thrust dangerously close to the little boat as it made its passage. Now and then a dinghy or barge, men and women fishing or dragging seines through the ruddy waters. Once they saw three dirigibles in formation above the river, towing something behind them. On shore people moved, the same slow dance of making and unmaking: fires, food, children, shelter; between and behind and atop broken buildings, under tarps, in cars, in houses and apartments and trees. Martin thought of Calcutta, of children living in oil drums along the canals in Djakarta—how quickly New Yorkers had caught up. Odors wafted out to the Wendameen, so that Martin would suddenly grow faint with hunger. Frying fish, chapati, garlic and onions, woodsmoke, meaty reek of unwashed clothes, excrement, incense, disinfectant, autumn leaves: he breathed it all in where he stood in the cockpit, motoring now, a sign of journey’s end; breathed it all out again, saying good-bye.

“So where’re we going to stop?” Trip hopped down into the cockpit, stooping to coil a loose line and set it alongside life jackets and a can of baked beans licked clean. “You know someplace?”

Martin looked at him. Trip’s eyes were wide and shining, his cheekbones streaked with sunburn and hair with silver-blond. He looked absurdly happy and healthy, the very picture of boat-trash in his floppy cable sweater and rolled white pants.

“Do I know someplace?” Martin raised an eyebrow. “You said it was about a girl you had to find. Now where would she be?”

Trip was silent. He leaned against the coaming, steadying himself as they motored between uneven rows of pilings. Martin watched him but said nothing more. They continued on, into a seemingly endless ruined landscape. You think New York looks bad from a Greyhound bus, thought Martin, you think it can never get worse, but hey! Check it out—

He almost laughed.

Refuse bumped up against the boat. From somewhere onshore echoed music, guitar chords churned by bad radio reception or shitty boom box into something almost indecipherable; but Martin realized that he did know it—Sonic Youth, “The Sprawl.”

He did laugh, then. Because just when you think it can never, ever, possibly get anything but worse, someone comes up and bops you on the head with something like this, radiant guitars ringing in the wreckage of New York City, lemony afternoon light masquerading as sunshine, beautiful boy on deck…

For just a moment, for just that one instant, it was perfect. Even if the world was ruined, even if Martin was going to die, even if he would never know love again, never fuck again, never hear another song: if the world ended right now, it would have been perfect.

He began to cry.

Because it was beautiful. Because for that moment he had glimpsed the perfect geometry of desire, death at its apex, art and beauty and yearning bright angles below. He wiped his eyes, took a deep breath, and felt it fall away; felt the world claim him again, for just a little longer.

The breeze left salt and a fine film of oil upon his cheek. He swiped at that as the Wendameen nosed on through the crimson water and the music fell silent and Trip assiduously avoided looking at him. But something of the moment’s radiance remained, something that Martin wouldn’t let go of, not that easily, not without a fight. He adjusted the tiller, tossed his long grey hair back with what he hoped looked like defiance, shot Trip a grin; and began to sing.

It made his chest ache, and his throat; he had trouble catching his breath. Still he sang everything he could remember the words to. Not a great deal, actually. Martin had a terrible voice, there had never been much outside encouragement. He sang “My Little Red Book” and “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Camelot” and “Yellow Submarine” and “Valentine,” which had an impossible chorus; “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Amazing Grace” and something he’d learned for his First Holy Communion and hadn’t sung since. He bellowed “Coney Island Baby” and “Baby’s on Fire”—Trip took the tiller, still not a word. Rodgers and Hammerstein and old drinking songs,

He felt as though he were drunk, or tripping. He had thought—hoped, maybe—that he might drive the boy away like this, such an unapologetic show of The Old Queer Cracks at Last: Rapture of the Creep.

Instead Trip continued to stare at the passing shoreline. Ahead of them an intricate network of docks and piers thrust out into the water, small freighters and workboats anchored amongst them. Onshore the mottled patchwork of a cobblestone street had collapsed beneath a block of eighteenth-century buildings, abattoirs that had been turned into warehouses and artists’ studios. Martin looked down into sanguine water and saw the outline of a train car there, sparkling where the light touched it. He glanced back at the shore, street sign skimming a few inches above the rippling surface; looked back down and started to laugh.

It was not a train car at all but the Starlight Diner. He had always hated it. “What?” said Trip; the first word he had spoken in an hour.

Martin shook his head. He was shaking. He was burning up. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. There was dust or grit in the outer corner of his eye; he ran his finger there: nothing. He blinked, raised his head, and saw it was not dust but the shadow of someone moving along the boom.

“Fuck,” he said, shading his eyes. “Who the—”

But there was no one there; of course not, was he crazy? He turned away so as to avoid seeing Trip’s expression—not accusatory, not disgusted, not grateful, not anything, the little prick—the wind raw against his face as once again Martin began to sing.

He faltered. Martin’s mouth dropped open, and he turned in astonishment. Trip was singing.

Not just singing but seizing the song, taking the old words and transforming them, so that Martin felt as though someone had shoved an icy hand down his back.

Trip’s voice was clear and sweet and piercing, as pure a sound as Martin had ever heard, and loud—he sang like someone who had been given to it as parents used to sell their sons to bel canto; born to it.

Martin listened, amazed and a little frightened. Was this what the boy had been hiding all these months with his self-contained silence, not a voice but A Voice?

Or—with a shiver Martin recalled the luminous vistas they had seen, moon like a rabid eye, krakens and coelacanths rising from Buzzards Bay—had something happened to Trip these last few days?

Trip stood, hand on the tiller, head thrown back. His voice died into the slap of waves and gulls keening. For a moment he stared up into the shimmering sky, gold and purple sequins stitched upon his skin. Then he lowered his face and gazed at Martin, with a look of such joy that Martin felt suddenly shy in his presence, as though he had glimpsed lovemaking through a keyhole and been caught.

He stammered, tried to cover his embarrassment with uneasy laughter. “How did you—you can sing… ?”

Trip grinned. “Yeah. It’s what I did, before. What I used to do…”

He glanced down at the tiller and then at Martin. Without a word Martin stepped over and took it from him.

“I—you think maybe this would be somewhere you could leave me?” Trip frowned, looking at the silhouettes of broken buildings lining the shore, the spires of skyscrapers that pinked the sky behind them. “I mean, it’s like downtown, right?”

Martin looked at him, wondering if this was an attempt at irony.

“No, this isn’t exactly downtown, Trip.” Martin raked damp hair from his face. “Do you have any idea where she might be? This woman you need to find?”

Trip stared at the shore. Finally he said, “No. I guess I don’t. I mean I only actually saw her here once.”

Martin resisted the urge to shout in frustration. He mopped his face with a bandanna, eased back until he could perch upon the edge of the coaming. A shadow passed across the floor; he glanced up but saw nothing. “Okay.” He wanted to crawl into his bunk belowdecks and fall into blind sleep. “Okay. So you saw her once—where was that? Do you remember an address, or anything?”

Trip nodded. “That big place at Times Square—the Golden Pyramid or whatever it’s called.”

“The GFI Pyramid.” Great, this is fucking great, I’ve sailed five hundred miles so this kid can look for someone he doesn’t know in the middle of Times Fucking Square. “Okay. That’s a start, I guess. I guess we could find someplace to tie up and walk—”

“I—I need to go alone.” The boy’s voice was strained. “I mean, I know you brought me all this way, I don’t mean to be like rude or something, but I—she was, I have to—”

The boat surged shoreward as Martin yanked the tiller too hard. He shot Trip a furious look.

But his anger gave way when he saw Trip’s expression, irradiated with a desire futile and intense as his own. Trip’s gaze remained fixed on shore. Unexpectedly he turned. For the first time since Martin had found him upon the shingle at Mars Hill, Trip extended his hand and touched Martin’s.

“Thank you,” he said. “If we could maybe pull up here, somewhere—I could go.”

Martin sat dumbly, waiting to see if there would be more. There was not.

“All right.” He turned away, blinking back tears; feeling old and ill and immeasurably stupid. What had he been expecting? Not the prince’s magic kiss but more than this, certainly—a concerned hand on the shoulder, a low voice asking Will you be all right? Won’t you tell me what it is, isn’t there anything I can do?

A minute passed. Martin nodded. “I’ll pull up here.”

He brought the boat around, steered her toward where a mound of blasted rubble, brick and stone and concrete, had fallen into the harbor, forming a sort of quay. Small dark shapes sloped along the stones. There was a putrefying smell. Martin felt a spike of mean triumph, what a god-awful place; then despair, and fear.

“This doesn’t seem too safe, Trip.” His mouth was dry. “Are you sure—”

Trip nodded, then hoisted himself down the companionway ladder into the cabin. He returned with the knapsack Martin had packed for him. Some canned beans, dried fruit from Diana, extra clothes, sunscreen, socks. Water purification tablets past their prime. Over his arm John’s anorak; John’s cable-knit sweater dangling halfway to his knees. He stood awkwardly, as though trying to think of something to say; then dipped his head and stepped up on deck.

“Wait,” cried Martin. He motioned for Trip to mind the engine and climbed into the cabin, coughing at the exertion. Walked unsteadily past galley and chart table until he reached his bunk, fumbling in the darkness at the pile of clothes and blankets until he found what he wanted.

“Here,” he said.

He held them out to Trip, a wallet of worn brown cowhide and a small wooden box.

“Hey, no,” Trip stammered, not all that convincingly. “I can’t—”

“There’s hardly any money”—Martin coughed, “—don’t get excited. But there’s a credit card, it should have some credit left. Not a photo one, so you might be able to use it.”

Trip nodded. He shoved the wallet into his pocket, then looked at the box. “What’s this?”

“The sextant.” Martin turned away. “I—I’d like you to have it.”

Trip shook his head. “But don’t you need it? Can’t you use it, to steer by?”

“I won’t need it, no. You go ahead, keep it—”

He wanted to say, To remember me by, instead only smiled.

“Okay.” Trip stared at him. His mouth twisted as though frowning, and for an awful instant Martin thought he was undone: Trip had seen through him, the Fundamentalist monster would stand finally revealed on deck beside the queer activist. Instead, to his shock, he realized that Trip was fighting tears.

“Okay,” he repeated, thickly. He glanced away into the darkness of the cabin, then down at the sextant. Something seemed to catch his eye. Without looking up he pulled something from his hand, then held it out to the older man.

“Here,” he said. “You can, um, have this—”

It was his ring.

“Oh.” Martin gave a stunned gasp. He shook his head. “Trip! I—Christ, I couldn’t. I mean, that’s your—isn’t it from her? Your—well, whoever?”

“Take it,” Trip urged. He held the sextant to his breast as he nudged Martin with his other hand. “Please,” he added softly. “I want you to—”

“But—”

“I don’t know where it came from. I mean, she did have a ring like this, and so did her mother—but she didn’t give it to me. I really don’t remember how I got it.”

“Well.” Martin took it. The metal band was thin and weighed almost nothing. He pinched it between two fingers, then slid it onto the pointer finger of his left hand. “It fits.” He fought to keep his tone light. “Thank you, Trip. Really.”

“Okay.” Trip looked at him, then at the sextant, and grinned. “Wow. We really made it, huh?”

Martin smiled. “We really made it.”

The boy nodded, then opened his knapsack and stuffed the box inside. “Okay,” he said, clambering up on deck with Martin behind him. “I guess I’m off.”

He stood in front of the older man, suddenly looking awkward and very young. Martin smiled again, thought What the hell, and leaned forward to hug him. He could feel Trip’s shoulders tighten. After a moment he backed away.

“All right. You better go, before it gets too late—”

Martin sank into the cockpit and clasped the tiller, watching as Trip poised himself on the traveler and measured the jump he’d have to make to the stony mound below. Without a backward glance he leapt, stumbling but catching himself before he could fall.

“All right!” Trip shouted excitedly. He turned and shaded his eyes, looked up at the Wendameen and waved. “Thanks, Martin! Thanks a million! Good luck—”

Martin nodded. His face hurt where tears scored his cheeks, but it no longer mattered if Trip noticed. “Good luck, Trip. Good luck—”

He revved the engine, then angled the tiller so that the boat slid from the quay, her hull grating against bricks and rubbish. I won’t look back I won’t look back he thought; and for several minutes cut through the viscous waters, his eyes fixed on a horizon that boiled with lurid clouds and the shifting forms of distant boats.

Finally he could stand it no longer. He was far enough out that a fresh wind began to play across the deck, tugging at furled canvas and cooling Martin’s scorched face. If he squinted into the harsh light he could just make out the bright triangles of other sailboats braving the reach. He could hoist sail now, if he wanted to, make it past Staten Island and Raritan Bay and into open water. He took a deep breath and turned to gaze behind him.

In the distance the island reared, its shore a shabby tartan of decayed buildings, collapsed roads, twisted girders, glass and steel towers erupting from the ruins like spaceships from the desert. His eyes sought desperately to find the mound where he had left Trip, but it all looked the same now.

He had waited too long. Then as in a dream Martin saw a bright jot moving against black ruins, disjoined from the surrounding landscape as a gull in flight. Martin cried out, madly waving—

“Trip ! Trip!”

—and the brightness halted before the immense backdrop of the ruined city, and almost Martin could imagine a raised hand meeting his farewell.

“Martin! Martin, good-bye—”

Tears burned his eyes. He dragged his sleeve across them and when he looked out again the bright spark was gone. He glanced at his hands, twin gold slivers winking from each one. Beneath him the engine thrummed, the boat stirred as swells lifted her and the breeze plucked at the sails. She wanted to be gone; she wanted to be underway.

“It’s time then,” said Martin. “It’s time.”

He killed the engine and pulled himself on deck. Freed the sails and trimmed them back, ducking as wind filled them and the boom sliced through the air a handspan away. Breathless, he eased into the cockpit and grasped the tiller. Ahead of him the sky coiled and uncoiled. Boats skimmed past, and seabirds. A shadow moved across the planks in front of him and Martin smiled and nodded without a word, recognizing the shape that streamed from the darkness, the long span of arms reaching for him and the breath that stirred the hairs on his neck. Felt his heart tear like a fist pounding its way out, as the tiller slipped from Martin’s hand and he turned at last, no longer afraid, falling into the embrace John and darkness and desire all stitched at last into one, all there, all healed; fell into it and he was light and joy, light and the end of waiting; he was nothing but nothing but light.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Catastrophe Theory

The power stayed on for almost three weeks, the longest stretch Jack could remember since the glimmering began. At first they all went charily from day to day, meeting at breakfast to exclaim over Mrs. Iverson’s coffee cake or date muffins. There were plenty of baking supplies, since she so rarely had the chance to bake, and plenty of time to spend eating, since no one had anything else to do. After breakfast they moved into the living room—everyone except Mrs. Iverson—to sit with all the lights on, heat wafting up from the floor registers and warm smells from the kitchen, and watch morning television. Keeley dozed, occasionally woke to shake her head in dismay at goings-on in Calgary or Bangkok. On the floor Marz lay like a beached zeppelin, her lunar belly occupying a formidable portion of Jack’s view of the TV screen. There were no more outbursts at music videos. Jack had not been able to get any kind of explanation out of the girl. He finally chalked it up to some bizarre Last Generation analogue of Beatlemania, and tried to convince himself that with the power restored, maybe the world had toppled back onto its axis, after all. Some evenings he found her standing in the second-floor stairwell, her swollen belly pressed against the sill, hands pressed against the glass as she stared out at the broken house next door. Chiaroscuro of flame and smoke and thrashing bodies, smash of bottles, raucous laughter; and the blond girl gazing hungrily as though she beheld a vision of Paradise.

I saved you from that! Jack wanted to shout when he saw her; but when she heard his tread she would turn and wobble off. Oh God, poor thing, he thought, at the notion of bringing a child into this world. But she didn’t see it so; her belly bloomed even as her rail-thin legs grew hard and thick with edema and her eyes took on a distant dreaming look, as though already she were asleep after the trauma of labor; as though dreaming she saw beyond this darkness.

The autumn passed. One day a postman arrived, with bills and a letter from Jack’s brother Dennis, postmarked eight months earlier. Lights worked, hot water came from the taps (never enough but that wasn’t new), Tristan und Isolde thundered from his old Bose speakers. Mrs. Iverson would do the dishes, then teeter downstairs to see to the laundry, then return to start on lunch and dinner, or to bring Keeley tea and Marz some more muffins—Jack didn’t eat much these days. All of them frantically tapping into the capricious current flowing through the house, as though that were the way to stave off chaos.

And perhaps it was, Jack mused as he checked the answering machine for the fourth time in an hour. There were no messages, had been no messages. The phone never rang. Power might have been restored to most of the metropolitan New York grid, but for some reason it didn’t extend to the telephone system. For all he knew there would be no messages for the rest of his life, but still Jack couldn’t stop fiddling with the machine, picking up the phone to see if there was a dial tone. There never was. Three, four, seven times a day he’d go out to the carriage house, peer into the fax machine, and check his computer for e-mail. Jack didn’t like to admit it, but he was looking for Larry Muso, in all the old familiar places. And since there had never been much Larry Muso to begin with, the search was frustrating and ultimately depressing.

Now he sank into the same wicker chair where eight months ago he had sat with The Golden Family’s envoy, and picked up (not for the first time) the copy of The King in Yellow. Opened it at random and read.

He waited. What choice did he have? It would not be much longer. Christmas was approaching, and his New Year’s Eve bash in the shadow of a corporate temple. The end of the century, the end of the millennium.

The end of the Kali Yuga? he wondered, watching for the hundredth time Stand in the Temple’s video on TV and that iconic singer Jack couldn’t help but think of as another emissary from GFI. Trip Marlowe, his name was: Jack learned that by sitting through one of the legion of interviews, documentaries, flatulent news bulletins, and good old-fashioned commercials promoting the band.

“This is so shameless.” Onscreen, Trip Marlowe spoke in reverential tones of the work being done by multinational corporations to restore the environment.

“… like, in the Rockies, they’re trying to reestablish all these extinct species of frogs, and in some places people, like, heard the frogs singing for the first time in ten years…”

“What, dear?” Keeley raised her head; she had been asleep. “I’m sorry…”

“Oh, nothing.” Jack sprawled on the couch, disgusted equally by the singer’s ingenuous blue-eyed gaze and his own lassitude. “It’s just—I mean, look at this guy! It’s like his entire face was reconstructed or something, he looks like he was designed by some damn corporate committee. He probably was.” He reached for the remote.

Keeley peered at the screen. “Is that what’s-his-name? The one with the nose job and the face?”

“No. I mean yes, this one probably has a nose job, but it’s a different nose. Jeez.” He flashed through channels, more than had been available for a year. Bombs exploding above the desert somewhere (Texas? Algeria?), an ad for a winged Barbie that morphed into her own makeup-equipped carrying case (just in time for Christmas, Supplies Very Limited), talk shows featuring people claiming to have spoken with deceased loved ones, a bit on CNN about the upcoming millennial New Year’s bash being hosted by GFI Worldwide in New York City.

“Hey!” said Jack. “That’s—”

He almost said, “That’s my party.” But then remembered he had never mentioned GFI’s invitation to Keeley or anyone else.

Keeley nodded absently. A moment later she began to snore, leaving Jack to stare at a video montage. GFI’s brazen airships in formation against an indigo sky; sturgeon slitted open so that their roe spurted onto dirty grey ice; a vault filled with ranks of champagne bottles; vintage limousines; a Japanese woman being outfitted in a stiffly embroidered kimono four times as large as she was; an aerial shot of some kind of arena, swelling out from one side of the Pyramid like a wasps’ nest and covered with workers and scaffolding and construction equipment. Then the arena faded, replaced by the shuffled images of two or three hundred people Jack assumed must be famous for something. He only recognized a few of them—the beloved sports figure disfigured by petra virus, a much-married millionaire Jack had thought was dead. And the ubiquitous Trip Marlowe, natch, dancing on one foot atop a Day-Glo Sphinx.

“… billing it as the most fabulous bash since King Tut partied on the Nile!” exulted the announcer.

The segment ended and another began, this one about millenarian cults like the Montana-based Cognitive Dissidents, who were planning their own mass suicide at the stroke of midnight, December 31. There was a commercial for telephone insurance. Then a few more worried-looking people speculated about the end of the world. Jack made a rude noise. He turned the volume off, but left the TV on—he was superstitious about turning it off—and went into the kitchen.

It was hard to believe that anything was coming to an end, except for Lazyland’s supply of coffee, which was dismayingly meager: only one vacuum-sealed bag remained. Leonard was their sole link with the world of such luxuries, but Leonard had not returned to Lazyland since he’d brought the Fusax. And Jack knew better than to hope that coffee would materialize on the shelves at Delmonico’s during one of his forays there for supplies.

Still, later that morning he was amazed to see what Delmonico’s could produce. Christmas was only a week off. Mrs. Delmonico had brought out the old cardboard decorations—Santas and elves and angels, all from Finnegan’s Variety Shops circa 1967—and strung up tired garlands. Like some old-time general store, the venerable Yonkers grocery had begun to exhibit delicacies of the season. Oranges in wooden crates, their knurled skins more green than orange, and fist-sized pomegranates wrapped in varicolored tissue. (The paper could be used for wrapping presents, Mrs. Delmonico advised Jack. Wasn’t it pretty?) White rabbits and evil-looking chickens dangled upside down from their feet above the butcher counter. There were boxes of handmade toys, cars and boats and rocket ships carved from Popsicle sticks, sock puppets, old Barbies whose plastic faces had been scrubbed and repainted with ballpoint ink, dressed in new hand-stitched clothes.

And one afternoon, beneath a churning claret sky, an ancient pickup truck pulled up in front of the grocery, its bed piled ten feet high with—

“Christmas trees!” exclaimed Jack.

A crowd was gathering, fellahin who camped at Getty Square and a few wary shoppers like Jack, who carried baseball bats and wore football helmets. A fellahin girl, dressed in shredded garbage bags, stood on tiptoe beside the truck to breathe in rapturously.

“I remember these!” she cried.

Jack smiled. He moved closer, lifted his surgical mask, and touched the soft boughs behind their protective plastic mesh. The trees were leggy, their limbs swept into torturous angles by the webbing. He ran a finger along one slender branch. Needles rained onto the truck bed—it was covered with needles, rust-colored and greenish yellow, and twisted pine cones like arthritic fingers, and scaly bits of bark.

But then Jack closed his eyes. Immediately darkness was there, the expectant predawn hush of a house buried in snow, whispers from his brothers’ bed and that smell, the holiest scent he had ever known: evergreen. To Jack that had always been Christmas. Not the toys, not the lights, not even the baby in the barn, but this: night and bitter cold, snow beneath and desolate stars above, a green tree in the wood that breathed in the darkness but breathed out spring.

“’Scuse me, ’scuse me, sir—”

He jolted from his dream, stood to let the driver and his lanky teenage son open up the truck bed. They unloaded the trees—white pine, he heard the driver say, lumber trees but they were harvesting them now, they needed the money too badly—and leaned them up against the storefront, hiding the plywood and sheet metal that covered its windows. Someone asked how much the trees were. Jack sucked his breath in at the price, but then thought of the money that would be coming from the sale of The Gaudy Book. Any day, maybe; besides which his credit was always good at Delmonico’s—a hundred years ago it had been his great-grandfather’s store, old Sabe Delmonico had bought it during the Depression but the Delmonicos considered the Finnegans part of their extended family, even now.

He bought a tree.

“Can you get that home by yourself?” Mrs. Delmonico eyed Jack dubiously, and before he could answer shouted out at the truck driver’s son. “Hey! YOU! C’mere, we got a job for you—carry this nice man’s tree for him, okay? Just a couple blocks. Tip him nice, Jackie, eh?”

She winked, turned to survey the fragrant benison that had befallen her shop.

So they brought the tree home, Jack and the boy. His name was Eben, he and his dad had driven down from New Hampshire, it took them three days.

“Truck kept breaking. We ran out of gas, then some guy tried to steal our tires, but my dad pounded him, hah!” The boy was thin but tall, exhilarated to be so far away from home. He smelled of pine resin and diesel oil. He shouldered the tree like a rifle and loped ahead of Jack, repeating over and over how he’d never been to New York and his father had promised they’d go to the city, after the trees were sold.

“My mom, she don’t like that!”

Jack shook his head. “I’m with her, Eben.”

At the gate to Lazyland Jack made the boy hand the tree over. “I can get it from here,” he explained. He wanted to bring the tree down to the house himself. “But wait, here—”

He held out a fifty-dollar bill. It wasn’t much, and for a moment he was afraid Eben would refuse to take it, or complain. But the boy only smiled, shook his head, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Hey, no sir, you just enjoy your tree, okay? Merry Christmas!” And he spun away, whistling to himself.

The tree was heavier than it had looked, for all that it was scrawny compared to Lazyland’s trees of yore. Jack dragged it down the driveway, looking back anxiously to see if he was leaving a trail of needles. Inside he was met by Keeley and Marz and Mrs. Iverson, who exclaimed and offered advice as to how to prop it up in the dining room until the old wrought-iron tree stand could be found.

“It’s like Charlie Brown’s tree!” Mrs. Iverson poked the tree where it leaned against the china cupboard, gazing disapprovingly at the needles that littered the carpet beneath.

“It’s beautiful, dear,” said Keeley. “Hush, Larena.”

“Can I help decorate?” begged Marz.

So then he had to go up to the attic, rooting around in one of the odd-shaped closets under the eaves until he found the boxes there, each carton big enough to hide several children and stuffed to overflowing with Christmas: garlands, plastic holly, tangled strands of dangerous-looking lights, old cards that turned to dust when he touched them, waterfalls of tinsel, ancient embossed Santas with cotton-batting beards that had frightened Jack when he was small, the wrought-iron stand (hooray!), wax balls from Germany with flowers on them, pine cones, ceramic and papier-mâché and cardboard Santas, elves, reindeer, trees, bells, chapels, snowmen, angels, and wreaths, as well as four statues of crippled boys and reformed cranks.

Last of all he pulled out an enormous carton that contained box upon box of Sparkle-Glo ornaments: rubies and emeralds and diamonds of blown glass, purple grapes, grinning clowns and leering dogs, churches and fish and a sailing ship with tissue-paper mast and rigging of gold filigree.

“Oh, look, look!” cried Marzana, sitting on the attic floor with legs akimbo, her belly awash in wrappings and ribbons and pine needles. She held up an icicle of blown glass, striated silver and cobalt. “They used to sell these in Rybnik!”

Jack smiled. “Is that where you grew up?”

The girl watched the little dagger turn slowly in the air before her. After a moment she said, “I don’t remember,” her voice distant.

Jack waited, but she said no more. “Okay.” He picked up one of the cartons. “I don’t think you better carry any of these.”

“But they’re not heavy!”

“I know, but they’re big. Here, you can carry this down, okay, that’s the star for the top, just don’t drop it—”

He made five trips, pausing on each landing to catch his breath then plunge back upward. There was only a single naked electric bulb in the old nursery attic, which cast shadows over more of the room than it lit. Outside, night was chasing the sky in harlequin colors, crimson and cadmium yellow, giving everything an expectant, febrile glow. The sensation that something was going to happen filled Jack, as well; a subcutaneous anticipation of Christmas, even a Christmas as threadbare as this one promised to be. There had been no more visits from the postman, and no word from GFI as to when he might expect the money from the sale of The Gaudy Book. So Christmas would pretty much consist of what he and Mrs. Iverson could cobble together, or from the largesse of Mrs. Delmonico. He had put aside any notion of attending GFI’s party—what could he have been thinking, with Marz ready to blow like the Hindenburg and no one but Jack and two ancients to attend her?

He walked to the far side of the room, and stared out the row of attic windows, down the black slope to the river. There was a sequined scatter of lights upon the Palisades, where for so long there had been darkness, and farther south the luminous arch of the George Washington Bridge, red and green curves like slices of neon watermelon, nibbled black where lights had burned out on the spans. The sight should have comforted him. Instead it made him uneasy. It was like seeing Marzana in his aunt Mary Anne’s bed that first night she appeared at Lazyland—he felt certain that something was very wrong, somewhere, despite this brave false show. Any moment now he would find out what it was.

He shivered and turned from the window. What a way to think at Christmas. Then he hefted the last carton of ornaments, switched off the attic light, and hurried downstairs to attend to the tree.

But of course the power was down again when Jule arrived unexpectedly at Lazyland, a week and a half later. It had failed the same night that Jack and Marzana and Mrs. Iverson decorated the tree in the formal dining room, with Keeley officiating from a chair. It was not exactly resplendent. Even with the lights turned off it retained its sadly etiolated quality, and drooped in the shadow of the robust Chippendale cabinet because there was no true darkness against which the glory of glass and gold and painted tin could shine. The strings of old lights (dangerously frayed and much repaired with electrical tape) glowed bravely, but they were overshadowed by the vulgar show outside.

Still, they all stood and admired it. Jack made some adjustments (Marz lacked a light touch with tinsel). Keeley suggested that the crenellated spike that topped the tree could perhaps go a little more to the left, and Jack was just clambering back onto the kitchen stool when—

Eeeeep…

Dying wail of the CO detector, chorus of clicks from answering machine; and the gallant tree went dark.

“Nooo!” cried Marzana.

Jack shook his head. “It was these damn lights.”

He began the search for lanterns and candles, berating himself for not making a point of retrieving them while the power was on. You couldn’t find candles anymore, anywhere or batteries, or oil lanterns. Occasionally Jack might glimpse a flashlight behind the counter at Delmonico’s, bartered for food; but it would never find its way onto a shelf. The Delmonicos had family all across the city who needed light just like everyone else.

In the linen closet he found an unopened box of white tapers. He tore the cellophane wrapping and removed four, thought for a moment, and replaced one. He could find his way in the dark; someone had better start finding their way in the dark. Wind clawed its way through the narrow back stairwell, brought with it shrieking laughter. He turned and pressed his face against the small oriel window that faced north, to where other mansions had once stood in line with Lazyland gazing down upon the Hudson.

In the last few weeks he had made a deliberate effort not to look out upon them. If he saw Marz there in her customary trance, he would continue quickly up to his own room. So he never knew whether or not electric lights ever brightened the broken windows, and he tried not to think about what kind of people were inside the ruins, starving or fighting or fucking on the floor.

Now he could not turn away.

In the shattered buildings fires leapt, the broken windows gleamed as though they opened onto the inferno. He heard music, cymbals, and drums; someone singing. There was light within, light and music and many moving shadows. He imagined they were dancing amidst the rubble.

It struck him, as though he had been knocked on the head: people were living out there in the ruins. They weren’t holed up like himself or the other scared customers who could barely muster the courage to raid Delmonico’s for food. They weren’t killing themselves with drink and grief like Jule, or pretending nothing had changed, like Emma. Certainly they weren’t bashing their heads against the wall because there were no candles left. If they were bashing their heads it was because they were dancing. They didn’t wear masks or helmets to protect themselves from the world; they scarcely wore clothes. He recalled Marzana’s words, her first night at Lazyland—

They were my family. We were living down by the river and the fucking cops blew us out…

Family. The realization that something like that could be out there, just yards away, made Jack dizzy. He yanked the window open and heard singing, a complicated contrapuntal chant, women and men and children, too.

Even if he didn’t recognize it, it was music, and had been all along. It wasn’t squatters out there in the carnival darkness, crude creatures leering at him from their gutted mansions. It was civilization.

They’re adapting, he thought.

The last scenes of Fantasia flashed before him, lumbering Technicolor giants on their doomed exhausted search for water, heedless of the tiny bright mammalian eyes that watched them from the shadows…

Leaning from his window out into the December air, Jack stared up into the cold whirling sky, and heard lemurs and shrews and megazostrodons rustling in the night.

Christmas Day was muted, as it had been for several years now. Rachel Gardino had been killed by a drunken driver on Christmas Eve, and the holiday had been poisoned by that, for Jack and his family as well as for Jule and Emma. There were a few makeshift presents exchanged: some baby clothes Mrs. Iverson dredged up from the attic and cleaned; gingersnaps hard and aromatic as amber; the copy of The King in Yellow, which Jack presented to his grandmother in its elaborate cloth wrapping. They ate by candlelight, bean soup and flatbread and dried fruit; then sang a few rounds of the more melancholy carols, “O Holy Night” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and went to bed early.

Four days after this, very early in the morning Jack heard the familiar groaning roar of the Range Rover. He groaned, slid from his bed, and trudged across the hall to look out the window. Down Hudson Terrace crept Jule’s old car, dodging potholes and piles of refuse like a tipsy dowager, a loose strand of barbed wire trailing in its wake.

At the head of the drive it stopped. Jack watched as his friend emerged, an imposingly tall if unsteady figure in navy overcoat and fedora, brandishing a very large black umbrella. Jule walked over to the gate, regarded it balefully before starting to poke at the LED readout with the tip of his umbrella. Jule had always been intimidated by the security system, all the more so since he was one of the few people granted knowledge of the code that granted access (Leonard had paid one of his hacker minions to break it for him). Ever since the glimmering began, when Lazyland’s power came and went as casually as socialites once had, Jule’s anxiety had become outright phobic: he was terrified he would be electrocuted by the gate. Jack sat, elbows propped on the sill, and observed as Jule tried unsuccessfully to gain entry.

After five minutes he couldn’t stand it anymore. He shoved the window open. “For Christ’s sake, Jule! There’s no power! Just get in the car and drive through!”

Jule looked up. “But what if it comes back on?”

“It won’t come back!”

“But what if it does?”

“Just drive through.”

Jule got back into his car. Clouds of blue exhaust engulfed the end of the drive as the car nudged at the gate, until slowly it swung open. A minute later the Range Rover shuddered to a halt in front of the house. Jule got out, removing his fedora and mopping his head with a white handkerchief.

“Now go back up and close the gate,” Jack yelled down. Jule shot him an angry look. He reached back into the car, emerging with his umbrella and a pair of bright yellow electrician’s gloves, and plodded up the drive to shut the gate. When he returned to the house, Jack was on the front porch.

“You know, Jule, very few security gates were originally designed actually to kill people.”

“You’re wrong, Jackie, you’re wrong. Somebody was just telling me about this thing he saw up at Pocantico Hills, this sort of electrified moat—”

Jack ushered Jule toward the front door. “Well, our system hasn’t killed anyone yet. C’mon, it’s freezing—”

“Yeah, but you guys could actually use something like that here.” Jule looked worriedly back at the Range Rover. “My car gonna be safe?”

“Yes, your car is going to be safe. What, you leave Emma at home and fall apart? Jesus, just relax for five minutes, okay? You drive up to Poughkeepsie in your sleep, go into the city, and have a picnic on the fucking Major Deegan Expressway, but every time you come to my house you have a goddamn heart attack.”

“Emma’s not feeling so good these days. And electricity makes me nervous,” Jule said meekly.

“Then you should be very, very happy, because you will find no electricity at Lazyland today.”

Inside there was the flurry of footsteps in the hallway, the scent of Chanel Number 19; and Jule was bending to hug first Keeley and then Mrs. Iverson.

“Jule dear! What a surprise!”

“I know, Grandmother, I’m sorry. Sort of unexpected, gotta do something in the city…”

“Of course, dear, we’re just so happy to see you! How is Emma?”

“Oh, she’s okay, just great—” He stared over their heads to Jack, who felt a bump of fear at his friend’s haunted expression. “Uh, listen, I can’t stay today, I just needed to, uh—well, I wanted to borrow Jackie.”

Keeley’s gaze softened. “Borrow Jackie! Why, of course you can borrow him!”

“ What?” Jack eased himself between Jule and his grandmother. “What’re you talking about, Jule?”

“I, uh, got an errand in the city. I, well, I didn’t want to—”

“The city.” Keeley glanced at the old grandfather clock. “Well! Do you still go down there, Jule?”

“Sometimes.” He pulled at his collar. “Jackie?”

Jack shook his head. He was close enough to Jule that he could smell whiskey, not just on his breath but everywhere, as though he’d doused himself with it. He had a flickering vision, the Range Rover careening through the flooded canals that had been the Merritt Parkway, a bottle tucked between Jule’s legs.

“Jule, dear, would you like some tea?”

“No thanks, Mrs. Iverson.” Jule’s big hands twisted his fedora. His hazel eyes were moist with supplication. “Jackie?”

No thanks, Mr. Gardino, thought Jack. But then the chorus began shrilling in his head. What, you jumped off all those bridges for Leonard Thrope, now you can’t get into a car with your best friend?

But he’s drunk. He’s—

“Go ahead, dear,” said Keeley. She turned to Jule. “But you’ll have him back by tonight?”

Jack swore under his breath; as though he were still fifteen fucking years old. “I’ll be back by tonight, Grandmother,” he said. His eyes sought Jule’s. “This better be good, Julie.”

“Mary Anne is asleep.” Mrs. Iverson looked plaintively at Jule. “Don’t you think Emma could come down to help her have the baby?”

Jule smiled. “That would be nice, huh? I know she’d like to…”

“Well.” Keeley smiled bravely. “You’d better go, if you’re going to be back by dark.”

Jack stood, trying to think of some last-minute excuse. “It’s just a few hours,” pleaded Jule.

“Oh, all right,” Jack said, crossly. “Just let me get a few things, okay?”

He went upstairs, fighting all the fears that assailed him—Jule’s obvious distress and the thought of leaving his grandmother alone, not to mention the girl, she could have the baby any minute—but also feeling something he hadn’t felt in years. He was going to the city with his friend. They would have an adventure. He grabbed the Fusax from his nightstand, did a quick blast from his inhaler—it was empty, he was sure of it, but prayed there might be a few bronchio-dilating atoms left to fight their way into his lungs—pulled his grandfather’s old Burberry raincoat from the closet, and went back down. On the second floor he paused to glance into Marz’s bedroom, her leviathan form beneath the blankets, white-blond hair across the pillow.

“’Bye,” he whispered, and shut the door.

They made their farewells to Keeley and Mrs. Iverson.

“Drive carefully.” The faintest tremor entered Keeley’s voice. “You’ll call if you’re going to be late?”

Jack glared at Jule. “We won’t be late.”

“Of course not,” Jule said. He leaned to kiss Keeley’s forehead, and for a moment held her tenderly. Only Jack noticed that his hands were trembling. “I promise Jackie’ll be back tonight. It’s just a quick trip into the city, people do it all the time.”

“Do they?” Keeley murmured. “Well, be careful, boys.”

“Get back in there!” shouted Jack. “Before you catch cold.”

He had a glimpse of Keeley’s white face and waving hand; then the oaken door slammed shut.

“ Now,” said Jack, following his friend to the car. “Will you tell me what the fuck is going on? Where’s Emma?”

“I told you. She’s not feeling so good,” Jule said shortly, then fiddled with his door. “And, well, I got to take a little road trip, and I thought maybe you might want to come with me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you’re becoming a fucking agoraphobic, that’s why. I think so, and Emma thinks so—”

“Emma thinks I should get in a car with you?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake! You’ve been in a car with me a hundred thousand times—”

“Jule, you’re drunk.”

Jule looked hurt. “You used to drive with me when I was drunk.”

“Oh, forget it. Look, Jule, why don’t I try calling someone—”

“Fuck you.” Jule’s tone was even. He smiled affably, pulling the door open and easing his bulk into the seat. “Just get in the fucking car, Jackie. You know, Emma tried to have a, a what-you-call-it—an intervention. Because I’m an alcoholic. Ha! Like where the fuck they gonna lock me up? Her and some people we know at home, this guy from the hospital and Edgar Evans.” Edgar was senior partner at Jule’s old law firm. “You know what I did?”

He stopped and fixed Jack with a challenging gaze. Jack stared back, holding open the passenger door. “No. What did you do?”

“I belted him. Edgar. Laid him out right on the floor of the fucking kitchen. I would have hit someone else, too, but there were four of them, counting Emma, and only one of me.” He leaned across the seat and stared up at Jack. “I told them, and I’ll tell you, Jackie—

“I do this by choice. By choice. I may be an alcoholic but I have my reasons. You understand, Jackie?”

“I don’t think it’s that we don’t understand, Jule, everyone understands—”

“You do not. You do not have the slightest fucking intimation of an idea.” Jule’s voice was calm. “Something’s happened to me, Jackie, something very strange. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.”

He thumped the car seat and laughed. “Maybe even today. Maybe that’s why I came here to get you! Ever think of that?”

Jack took a step backward. “Look, I’d love to go with you, Jule, but—you know, I’m thinking about this now, and I really shouldn’t leave Grandmother alone, or—”

“Don’t sweat it.” Jule grabbed Jack’s arm and yanked him into the car, then pulled the door shut after him. “Here, look at this, Jackie—”

Jule patted at his pockets, grandly pulled out a small red oblong. “See this here? This is Emma’s. One of those beeper things, they plug into some relay somewhere so they work even when the power’s down, they give ’em to all the senior doctors at Northern Westchester. I’ll leave this with Grandmother. If there’s any problem, she can call Emma.”

“And what? Emma’s going to come down here with a scalpel? She’s forty miles away, Jule! Plus you said she’s sick—”

“I don’t know that she’s sick. She just—she doesn’t look so good, that’s all. Probably it’s nothing.” Jule shook his head. “Look, leave the beeper here, okay? Emma could at least call the police or something. Don’t sweat it, Jackie, please?”

“You just told me—”

But Jule had already bolted from the car and loped onto the porch to bang at the door. It cracked open and Jack could see Mrs. Iverson’s face, the beeper disappearing into her hand. Before he could do anything, the car shuddered as Jule jumped back into the seat beside him.

“C’mon, Jackie-boy,” he begged. “How often do I ask you to do anything? I just want some company, okay? I have a client up in Goldens Bridge, an actress, she’s on Till the End of the World, I’m representing her in a breach-of-contract thing. It’s the weekend, I got to deliver something to the studio, down at the Pyramid, and—something else, something I have to do. I thought maybe you’d like to come with me. We could talk, Jackie. It was nice, seeing you this summer. It’s been a long time since we talked like that.”

His tone grew wistful. Jack looked at his friend’s unshaven face, glanced down and saw the glint of glass on the floor at his feet. “Well, yeah,” Jack said. “But couldn’t you just stay overnight here? Then we could—”

Jule shook his head. “I have this errand. I mean, one reason I agreed to it is I thought we could do this—I could pick you up, drop you off on the way back—”

His voice trailed off. He stared mournfully at the ceiling. Jack sighed.

“All right. But we have to be back by tonight.”

“No prob.” Jule turned the ignition. “Great! You’re so great, Jackie!”

“I’m a fucking pushover, is what I am. Let’s get going. I don’t want to be in the city after dark.”

“You won’t.” With a groan the Range Rover started up the drive. “Isn’t this great, Jackie?”

Jack sat in silence, trying to breathe through his mouth, so as not to smell the odor of stale liquor, and stared outside. Jule navigated the burned-out corridor of Hudson Terrace, the garish shells of mansions spray-painted with tribal designs, their verandas braided with barbed wire and broken strings of Christmas lights. Now and then they saw delivery vans, or automobiles creeping cautiously around potholes. Jack recognized the battered Jeep that belonged to his doctor, lurching away from the hospital.

They headed south on the Saw Mill. The road was corrugated with frost heaves, the median and shoulder lined with abandoned vehicles gutted of everything; even their paint had been burned or rusted away. Some wrecks had been dragged back from the road to form hivelike clusters where people moved with everyday calm: tending fires, chasing children, making windbreaks out of plywood and dead trees. As the car barreled past, dogs ran up behind them, yelping.

“Fucking leeches.” Jule swerved the Rover toward a clutch of yellow mongrels. “Someone oughta torch ’em.”

Jack said nothing. The crimson sky gave the dead cars and crumbling overpasses an archaic look. He thought of the ruined Claudian aqueduct, where he and Leonard had fucked in the dusty grass with cicadas shrilling overhead. He sighed, gazing at the monoliths of Co-op City looming up from the smoke and rubble of a fellahin encampment.

“Thinking of Leonard?” Jule asked.

“How’d you know?”

“I can just tell.” Jule eased the car around a pile of burning refuse. “You have this—noise—you make, when you’re thinking of Leonard. That son of a bitch.” He scowled at a trio of boys throwing rocks at the passing traffic.

“Oh well,” Jack said, embarrassed. “You know how it is…”

“I don’t know how it is, but I know how it should b—Jesus Christ!”

A dangerously overcrowded bus cut them off, passengers hanging from the open doors as it veered past. Jule pounded his horn, which made no sound, then turned to Jack. “You’re worth ten of him, Jackie. I mean, I could understand it when you guys were kids. But carrying a torch for someone who dumped you and lives just to torment you…”

He shook his head. They drove by the George Washington Bridge, its skeleton black against the sky. Torn banners fluttered from the girders.

“I’m not carrying a fucking torch.” Jack stared up at a defaced billboard, advertising GFI’s e-service:

“It’s just—I can be with him, you know?” Jack went on. “I can see him and get pissed at him and laugh at him and all the rest, it doesn’t bother me at all. But sometimes, if I think of him… sometimes it’s just hard. Even though it was so long ago. Because it was different then,” he ended awkwardly. “Leonard was different.”

“It was all different,” said Jule. He pounded his useless horn again and passed the bus, empty whiskey bottles rattling across the floor. “We’re talking about a whole new ball game, Jackie. And you oughta get a new first baseman.” He took one hand from the wheel, reached beneath the seat, and pulled out a bright pink plastic Thermos with a straw sticking out of it. “Twenty years is a long time to wait to fall in love again.”

“I mind my own fucking business about your drinking. So why don’t you—”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Jule stuck the Thermos between his legs. “Didn’t sound like you were minding your own business back at Lazyland. But listen, I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I’m sorry, Jackie.” He shot Jack an abject look. “Really I am—”

“For Christ’s sakes, Jule, keep your eyes on the road—”

Jule grinned and stomped on the gas. They roared up an exit ramp, down a side street and onto the Harlem River Drive. “What shit is this?” bellowed Jule.

Traffic was at a standstill. Ragged children darted between cars, throwing themselves across the hoods to snap off windshield wipers and run away before an enraged driver could shoot at them. From overhead fell a thick rain of black ash. Jack coughed. His stomach knotted. Jule turned on the wipers; they swept across the glass, leaving broad grey streaks. Then, miraculously, traffic inched forward again. The ash disappeared, as though they had driven clear of a snow squall, though a poisonous chemical reek now battled the odor of Scotch inside the car.

“Relax, Jack,” said Jule as they crept along. “You’d need a bazooka to blast in here.” He belted back another mouthful of whiskey, held the Thermos out to Jack.

“Yeah, well, I think that guy has one.” Jack ignored the Thermos and pointed at a Cadillac wrapped with so much razor wire it was difficult to imagine where or how the driver could gain entry. “Jesus.”

“These kids, they’ll smash your window with a baseball bat and kill you, just for grins. Remember back when it was just washing your windows?”

“I hated that.”

“Everyone hated it. That’s why they kill us now.”

Jack’s gut tightened.

“Goddamn it, Jule,” he gasped. Outside a girl with very black skin and filed teeth held up a broken rearview mirror. He had a glimpse of his own face, sunken cheeks and wide eyes like some demonic mask. “Let’s go back—”

“No, no, no.” Ahead of them a gap opened in traffic. Jule veered the car onto a side street, bouncing over a pile of railroad ties that had once formed part of a barricade. “See? We got through. Now if I can just figure out where the hell” we are…”

Jack stared desolately out the window. “Riverside Drive?”

“Riverside Drive is the river now, Jackie-boy. Okay, I think this’ll work—” With a shriek of brakes the car made another turn. They were in an even narrower alley, slick with filth. To either side rose deserted grey buildings, their crumbling concrete walls smeared with graffiti: stick figures, crude faces; hands and breasts and dicks. No words, except for a warning stenciled over and over in grimy white paint.

Only the uppermost stories had windows, black squares empty of glass. There were a few sad remnants of habitation. A towel hung out to dry into a dirty yellow stalactite; a plastic poinsettia; a child’s shoe atop a pile of broken glass. Jack couldn’t imagine what catastrophe would have driven people from that awful place to the worse horrors of the street.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” murmured Jule. The Range Rover crawled forward, its barbed wire scraping menacingly across the broken walls. “I think this is one of those projects where the children all got that virus and died. They had to evacuate, then they ran out of money to clean it up. Nice, huh?”

Jule blinked, as though they had driven into sunlight, and went on. “It’s funny. You never know just how horrible anything can be, until you have a child die. Anyone at all in the world, doesn’t matter who—something like that happens, the only person can understand is someone else who lost their kid. The Final Club. We all join that one, sooner or later. But this club is tougher to get into, Jackie. Too goddamn fucking tough.”

Jule grabbed the plastic Thermos, sucked at it until a gurgle sounded. He swore and tossed it behind him. His eyes grew cloudy, as though filling with some opaque liquid. He muttered, nothing Jack could understand.

“Jule?” he asked.

A bottle shattered beneath the Range Rover’s wheels. A few yards ahead the alley grew dark. A dead end; but the car kept moving. Jule’s face was grey, his eyes set with the calm that precedes drunken rage.

Jack glanced around. What the fuck is going on? In the back he saw a folding snow shovel, what looked like a plastic bag full of dirt. Ghastly scenarios flashed through his mind—Jule pulling a gun on him, Emma bashed across the head with a shovel and buried somewhere in Putnam County…

“Uh, Jule? I think this is a dead end…”

Jule smiled. His foot tapped the gas pedal; the car surged forward, into the shadows. Jack sat beside him, clutching at his seat.

Oh fuck this is it—

Only instead of slamming into concrete, the Range Rover nosed into what proved to be not a wall or a building, but an immense pile of garbage, perhaps ten feet high. Plywood, broken chairs, window frames, plastic trash bags… the car plowed through them all, until with a heart-stopping lurch it shot out onto Lenox Avenue.

“Hey hey hey,” said Jule. He reached under his seat and withdrew another plastic bottle, this one emblazoned with a Barbie logo. He popped it open and took a long pull. “Used to be a good Ethiopian restaurant around here. Christ, Jack, what’s the matter? You look terrible.”

Jack ran a hand across his forehead. His fingers were icy. “Listen, Jule, I really don’t feel very good. Can’t you take me back?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Jack swallowed. His tongue felt coated with bitter dust. “How long is this going to take?”

“Not long. The studio’s down at the Pyramid. I’ll leave you in the car so we don’t have to hassle about parking. I’ll be in and—”

“I am not waiting in this fucking car.”

Jule shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

They drove in silence for a long time. There was surprisingly little traffic, considering it was the holiday season and most driving restrictions were lifted. The usual mess of taxis and buses; robust-looking vehicles—pickups, Jeeps, Range Rovers and Land Rovers—commandeered by drivers wealthy enough to afford gas and parking; astonishingly dilapidated old American cars crowded with what appeared to be three or four generations’ worth of families, all moving slowly but steadily toward midtown. Water was everywhere, sluicing in a strong current down either side of the street and forming whirlpools above sewer grates and spots where manhole covers had been removed. The sky had darkened from yellow to a tigerish orange. It made the water look molten, the silhouetted buildings like columns of smoke. Jack thought of people fleeing Pompeii beneath the lowering cone of Vesuvius.

The Range Rover breasted through an intersection swollen with rain. To one side the road had collapsed and was blockaded by sandbags and sawhorses. A man in an orange kayak hove into view, his paddle cutting smoothly through blazing water as he propelled himself toward the river.

Jack shook his head, fear chased away by the sheer strangeness and perverse beauty of it all. He cracked his window, letting in a blast of cold salt air heavily laced with exhaust. Water seeped through the floor. He drew his feet up to sit cross-legged on the damp seat and wondered if the Range Rover would be swept like the kayak to the Hudson.

“Look at that,” marveled Jule. It was the first time either of them had spoken for nearly an hour. “Over there—”

A huge tree had smashed upside down against a building. Twenty feet above the washed-out sidewalk its immense root mass hung like a black cloud.

“Wow. I didn’t know there were still trees that big here.”

“Probably it came uprooted somewhere upstate and just floated down. But look behind it—”

Jack pressed his face to the window, straining to see through the filthy glass and barbed wire. He made out something caught in the limbs, ten feet from the ground. “What the hell ?”

Above the tree trunk bobbed four skeletal faces. The water’s reflected gold touched hollows where cheeks, eyes, nose had been; sent strands of light rippling across the surface like fine hair. Antlers branched from each skull like lightning. It was a full minute before Jack realized that the ghastly faces were masks, and that the stags’ horns were not bloodied but wrapped with red ribbons.

He half gasped, half laughed as the Range Rover sloshed past the macabre vision. “Jesus! That scared me.”

Impulsively he turned to Jule.

“I had a dream like that,” he said. “That’s why it scared me. About these people—men, with horns like that.”

Jule nodded. He slowed the car to take a corner, sending a jeweled arc of water against the barricaded facade of the Empire Hotel. “Yeah. Rachel comes to talk to me.”

“They were—” Jack stopped. “Rachel?”

“It started about a year ago,” Jule continued. “When I had to go to court up in Poughkeepsie. I was just coming back, getting onto 684, and she was there”—he pointed at Jack’s seat—“sitting right there. She told me I forgot to put on my turn signal.”

“Oh.” Jack tried to keep his tone even. “So!—was it on? The turn signal?”

“Sure it was on. A little kid, what does she know from cars? But I just about had a heart attack, I can tell you. That’s why I drive around so much. She rides with me, Jackie. She talks to me.”

“Oh.”

“She doesn’t forgive me. I mean, she doesn’t blame me, I wasn’t driving the car that killed her. But all this shit now, my drinking, all that—she doesn’t forgive me, Jackie. She doesn’t forgive me.”

Jack glanced up. He saw Jule’s face, not slack with alcohol but hardened by it, calcified; his eyes dry and glittering as quartz. “Does—have you told Emma about this?”

“Sure.”

“What does she think?”

Jule shrugged. “She doesn’t believe me. She thinks it’s the DTs or something. Actually, what she thinks is that I haven’t processed through my grief. She thinks I’m still in denial.” He stared at Jack measuringly. “I mean, you think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

Jack took in his friend’s haggard unshaven face, the carpet of bottles and empty Thermoses covering the floor. What would be nuts right now would be to get into an argument with Jule.

“I don’t think you’re nuts. I think Emma’s probably right—you’re still grieving, or—”

A delivery van pulled in front of them. Jule beat on the silent horn. “Of course I’m still grieving. You’re still grieving for that guy Eric you were in love with, aren’t you?”

Jack stiffened. “Yes.”

“And Peter and all those other guys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it doesn’t ever really end, does it?” Jule’s voice dropped. “It’s like you wake up one day and they chopped off your hand. Maybe sometime it stops bleeding and scars over, but you don’t grow a new one.” He added matter-of-factly, “I know Rachel’s dead. I never said she wasn’t dead, I’m not denying that she’s dead. I just said I see her sometimes. She comes…”

Jack’s heart welled as he watched his friend tighten his hold on the steering wheel.

“She comes. Right there, where you’re sitting. The first couple of times it was at night—I just looked over and there she was. She’d say, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ I almost went off the road.

“And now she’s here all the time. I mean, no matter what I do, if I drink, if I don’t drink: she’s still there. Afterward, it always seems like maybe I was dreaming; but then she always comes back.”

Unexpectedly he grabbed Jack’s shoulder. “And she doesn’t forgive me. I thought maybe if I explained things, maybe she’d understand. But it doesn’t work that way. I guess they have their own itinerary. Their own way of doing things.”

“Who?”

“The dead. Like people always think they can be summoned, with a Ouija board or a séance or whatever; but really they just do what they want to. Just like us. It’s not even like they have some message. Sometimes they just want to be with us, I think.”

Jack recalled the sound of his grandfather’s tread upon the stairs at Lazyland, the smell of cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey and his touch upon Jack’s cheek, cold and feathery as snow. Before he could stop himself he blurted, “I know—I know what you mean. A few months ago I had this dream, about my grandfather. Only it wasn’t really a dream. He was really there, and he—he gave me something.”

Jule nodded. “What did he give you?”

Jack hesitated. For one moment he considered telling Jule about the Fusax.

“It was just something I’d lost,” he said at last.

“Like your mind? ”

Jack forced a grin. “Something like that.”

Around them vehicles slowed as though stuck in quicksand. They were in midtown. A few blocks to the south glittered a vast triangular complex of buildings, glass-and-steel walls shining gold and green and red like some monstrous Christmas ornament. From one side bulged a huge glass-domed arena, ovoid, still fluttering with orange construction tape and DANGER: KEEP OUT signs: the site of the millennial ball two days hence. High overhead, an array of solar shields blinked from black to silver, turning this way and that in an urgent search for light. There were bristling antennae like the spines of some huge undersea animal. Satellite dishes and windmills vied for space with hotel and television logos, a neon sign for a restaurant named Pynchon. Across the central pyramid’s surface, rippling letters splashed bright as water.

Jack gazed awestruck. Jule laughed.

“Don’t get out much, huh?”

“It’s been a while.” Jack smiled sheepishly. “I mean, they built that thing so fast… I remember when this was all live sex shows.”

“Oh yeah. The good old days.” He stared up at the monolith with its swags of Christmas lights. “Fucking Christmas. I hate fucking Christmas. And this place,” he said. “I really hate this place. Because they think it makes up for all that other shit, you know? They think you can walk inside and forget about everything here—”

He gestured fiercely at the flaming sky that could be glimpsed between the buildings. “They think we’ll just forget. Like with their fucking blimps. They think we can just pick up the pieces and start over again…

“But I’ll tell you something, Jackie.” Jule’s words were like granite falling. “You can’t ever start over again. Not once you’ve crapped in your own mess kit like we have. You don’t get a fucking second chance. That’s not how the world works, Jackie. That’s not how it works anymore.”

Jack was silent. Jule said nothing more. The Range Rover inched beneath a marquee whose titles melted into sherbet-colored grids.

Jack pointed at the shimmering edifice, the waves of people flowing in and out of revolving doors at its base. “How is it powered?”

Jule slid the car into a long line of idling taxis and limousines. He held up one hand, rubbing together the thumb and first two fingers. “Dinero, Jackie-boy.”

“But do they have their own generators? Or what?”

“Yes. And or what.’” Jule peered up at the great Pyramid. “Let’s see. Solar panels, some kind of plasma grid. Windmills. A champagne-effect reflexive waterfall. Supposedly they’ve got their own nuclear reactor, too.”

“So how come I can’t make a fucking phone call?”

“’Cause you’re not GFI Worldwide. Hey, get over it! I mean, here you are looking at where they make The Danny Show! What else do you want?”

Before Jack could reply Jule gunned the motor. In front of them a lapis-colored limousine slid away from the sidewalk. The Range Rover roared into its spot. A doorman in Four Seasons livery started for the passenger door, but Jack waved him off.

“All right, listen,” commanded Jule. He rummaged in the seat behind him until he found a leather portfolio, sat for a minute staring at his friend. He reached out and rested one hand on Jack’s cheek. “You know how to drive a standard, right?”

“I’m not waiting in the—”

“Listen. It costs forty dollars to park here for five minutes. This’ll take me thirty seconds. You wait here, anyone asks tell them you’re picking up someone from The Danny Show. Or Sunshine Skye,” he said, glancing up at the marquee. “A cop comes, just drive around the block, okay? Okay.”

Jack watched as he got out of the car and strode to the sidewalk, carrying the portfolio officiously in front of him. Before he went inside Jule turned. He was swaying slightly, and he looked immeasurably sad.

“Fuck you!” Jack said under his breath, then waved. Jule nodded and disappeared into the crowd at the entrance. Jack turned his attention back to the scene outside. Well-dressed men and women came and went in a steady stream of overly bright colors. Lime green, candy pink, electric blue. Glittering swathes of Christmas lights hung above the revolving doors. A knot of Japanese businessmen in retro Infoguide sunglasses that made them look like extras from Not of This Earth. Models in silly masks, posturing with smokeless cigarettes. A bizarrely tall, thin man like a giant insect, surrounded by people waving cordless microphones. Jack tried to keep his expression blank as more vehicles pulled up beside him and honked.

“Shit,” he muttered. At least fifteen minutes had passed, he was sure of that. He could see cars entering and leaving the public parking area with clockwork regularity. He briefly thought of parking—he wouldn’t admit it to Jule, but he was dying to peek inside the world’s most famous corporate complex. But he’d be damned if he’d spend his own money on this idiotic venture.

He leaned forward and starting playing with the Range Rover’s entertainment system. Lights blinked off and on. When he tried the radio he got only static, then a very long advertisement for the Global Pyramid Four Seasons, recited by a woman with a brisk Pacific Rim accent broadcasting from the hotel. Jack craned his neck to look up at the marquee again.

He opened the glove compartment to see what was in there, found only papers and a squashed plastic cup. He sighed and glanced out the window. There seemed to be a bottleneck at one of the revolving doors. Several uniformed security guards ran down the sidewalk and began pushing their way through the growing crowd. One held a phone to his mouth and was speaking intently, his face grim.

Maybe Danny had a heart attack, thought Jack. He decided to take his chances with whatever music Jule had been listening to earlier, punched the music console’s Play button, and closed his eyes. Low hissing came from the speakers.

Only Jule would spend an extra three thousand dollars for a state-of-the-art music center, and then have nothing to play on it. He was reaching to stab the OFF button when the static cleared. Jule’s voice filled the car.

“Jackie. I’m sorry this isn’t Brian Eno.” A pause; something clinking against the tape recorder. “This is gonna sound really melodramatic. I’m sorry, Jackie. By the time you hear this…”

“No.”

The voice went on, the words blurring into each other—

“… because she’s sick, she thinks I don’t know but I heard her on the phone. She may have—she may have gotten it from me—”

“Fuck!” Jack shouted, pounding the dashboard; “fuck, fuck!—”

“… can’t live like this. But I—I don’t want you to think it had anything to do with you, Jackie, Emma either. I know it’s selfish—”

—and then Jack was out of the car and running, shoving people aside.

“Hey! Asshole! What—”

“Julie.” He began to shout above his roaring heart. “Julie! ”

There were armed guards at the revolving doors, eyes flicking nervously across the excited mob. “Let me in!” Jack yelled. “Goddammit, I know him! Please, let me—”

One of the guards raised her arms to block him. Her head mic blared, and there was an answering blast from a speaker overhead. When she looked up Jack pushed through the door and into the security checkpoint.

“—WHITE MALE, ARMED, GATE SEVENTEEN—”

More guards, dogs straining at leashes, overturned chairs, and papers blown across the floor. Monitors chattered and shrieked, the high-pitched hum of head mics soared off into static. A masked man in a black suit was shouting at several guards. Directly behind them was the glowing arc of the metal detector, and through that Jack glimpsed uniforms and well-dressed women covering their mouths, people being pushed away by city police, all under a blinding sun. He moved through the shadowy booth, pushing aside a fallen chair. The man in the suit turned, his mouth open, but Jack heard nothing. Hands reached for him but he swept them aside, reached the metal detector and passed through it. Then he was in the sun, blinking. A few feet in front of him the crowd had formed a broad half circle, as though watching street musicians. Men and women in uniform knelt on the ground shouting at each other while armed guards waved back the crowd. Someone grabbed Jack and restrained him, he could not pull away so stood there with the rest, staring at the floor.

Jule lay there on his back. His face was pale save for a circular bruise, red and blackish purple, that radiated from mouth to chin, across his shattered nose to touch the pouched skin beneath his eyes. A corona of blood and what looked like black earth was etched around his head; his eyes were open, staring up into the brilliance. His big hand splayed open and a policeman crouched there with a white cloth and a plastic bag, fingering a gun delicately, as though it were an orchid.

“Julie,” whispered Jack. He lifted his head. Behind the crowd there were trees, stones, a waterfall; clouds of twinkling red and green lights. A young man comforted a slender woman who was shaking convulsively. A crimson arc was sprayed across the bodice of her dress. Jack shook his head, then froze as he saw the child.

She stood within the crowd, Emma’s tumbled blond curls and Jule’s hazel eyes, her hands raised before her, clasped. Sun made a glare of her clothes, if she even wore clothes. She was smiling. As he stared she raised her head. Her eyes locked with his, Julie’s eyes. Her lips moved, and Jack strained to hear her voice.

“—please, go!”

Someone jarred him, and he stumbled. When he looked up the child was gone. Where she had been a woman with short dark hair stood in dappled sun as though entranced, staring not at Jule’s body but at a point a few feet above it in the bright air. Her features were obscured behind Noh-mask makeup. Her lips moved, and her hands. Amidst the crackle of walkie-talkies and sirens Jack could hear her voice, clear and thin.

“He has come through.”

Then someone grabbed him and pulled him backwards, into the security booth.

“You know this guy? You know him?” a policeman shouted.

Jack nodded, straining to look back out into the light.

“HOLD HIM! ” someone screamed, and he was shoved against the wall. They held him for questioning, first by security and then by city police, and finally brought him to another security checkpoint on the main floor, with an adjoining office that was nothing but a holding area for suspicious persons who violated GFI security. He was strip-searched and sprayed with Viconix, made to fill out numerous forms with GFI logos. Jack sat numbly and watched on a monitor as an emergency crew hurried in, after some minutes rushed out again, pushing a long white-draped gurney.

“His wife works in Mount Kisco,” he said hoarsely, though he had no idea if anyone was even listening. “Northern Westchester Medical Center…”

“She’s been notified.” The police detective who had been questioning him turned from another monitor. She sighed as a masked officer affixed a magnetic strip around Jack’s wrist. “They’re going to want to see you again, after the autopsy.”

He nodded.

“Do you want anything? Something to eat?” On her console a tiny artificial Christmas tree listed to one side. “There’s some kind of fake coffee…”

“No.”

He listened as the detective fielded calls from hospitals, police stations, other offices within the Pyramid. The Range Rover had been impounded. Jack sat forgotten in a swivel chair by the wall, wondering if he would have to wait for Emma to appear before he could go home. He drank tepid water from a bottle. It tasted of plastic and something harshly chemical. His stomach recoiled; he clenched his teeth, fighting nausea, a darkness that pulsed before his eyes no matter where he looked.

“You can leave now.”

A shadow moved toward him. The police detective.

“Mr. Finnegan?”

“Yes?” It hurt to speak.

“You can go. We located Dr. Isikoff. She—”

“Oh God.”

“She’s trying to make arrangements. To get down here. It will probably take her a while. She said something about a brother-in-law or a friend up there?”

He recognized the effort at kindness in her tone, but could only gaze at her. After a moment she asked, “Do you have a car?”

He shook his head.

“Do you have any friends or relatives here you could stay with? Do you want to find a hotel? No. Well. Okay, then.”

She crossed to the door and remained there. He realized she was waiting for him to leave. “I’ll see what I can do about arranging to get you back home. Rye, is it?”

“Yonkers.”

“Right. Yonkers.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. But I’ll have to ask you to leave now, Mr. Finnegan. I have to finish filing my report.”

He stood. At the doorway he stopped, that darkness rushing in, his head spinning…

“You can wait in the atrium.” He saw but did not feel her hand upon his arm, propelling him through the door. “I cleared it with security. There’s places to eat under the waterfall, you can sit there and wait. I’ll see about getting you a ride home.”

He nodded and walked down a blue-lit passage he had no memory of entering. Gradually its dimness gave way to the atrium’s artificial daylight. He left the passage, walked slowly across the atrium’s stone floor, staring at his feet as they crushed a thin layer of moss and lichen, soft grass that had the look of infant hair. Tiny colored lights were strung between stands of birch trees. In front of the revolving doors a small crowd still lingered, people with cameras and vidcams, security guards in GFI red and gold. There was no sign of any medical personnel, no sign that earlier a body had lain crumpled on the grass. Outside, the ambulance had gone, and the police cars. Through the doors he could glimpse the same dark line of limos beaded here and there with a yellow taxi. Another gaudy knot of Bright Young Things burst in, giggling as they left the security station. Jack could smell their perfumes, the vanilla scent of Viconix.

He took a few steps, stared down at the grass where Jule had fallen. It looked scorched, there was a blurred outline where they had poured disinfectant onto the ground. The heaviness in his chest became nausea. He turned away and stumbled across the vast room.

He found a table on the far side of the atrium. The waterfall cascaded from several stories above him, a glittering curtain with rainbows dancing where the sun pierced it. The air smelled of dirt and sun. Birds darted past him and lit upon the branches of a Japanese maple. Jack sat with hands on his knees, concentrating on the warmth spilling across his face.

It will hit me later, he thought. It will hit me later. A waiter came and he ordered mineral water and pepper-flavored aquavit. The liquor came in a tiny bottle shaped like a fish, prettily arranged on a glass tray with sprigs of watercress and myrtle. It was icily restorative; he ordered a second bottle, and swallowed a dropperful of Fusax as he waited.

“May I join you?”

A dark-haired woman stood on the other side of the granite block that served as a table. She wore a black dress interwoven with shreds of Mylar, very ugly, very fashionable. At first he thought she was wearing a mask, but he saw that it was makeup, chalky white foundation, redlined eyes, birdlime mouth. He had a dim sense of recognition, after a moment recalled that she had been in the crowd surrounding Jule’s body. She had been the one who cried He has come over. The odd words rushed at him, his head began to swim again. He moaned and covered his face with his hands.

“Here—put your head between your knees, take a deep breath—”

He felt her fingers on his neck—she had gloved hands, warm inside their silken sheathing. “Breathe, breathe—”

He did as she said, sucking in quick gulps of air.

“Slowly, slowly…”

Her voice was low and brusque. Her touch upon his bare neck grew warmer, so much so that after a minute it hurt, as though someone had placed a heating pad there.

“Okay—I’m—I’m better now.” When he started to sit up she grabbed his shoulder.

“Slow down! You’ll pass out—”

He was upright again. She sat beside him, her hand still on his shoulder, and peered at him intently.

“Better?” He nodded. “Okay. Here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not now—I used to, but…”

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

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

“We’ll call them from upstairs.”

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

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

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

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

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

“This is it,” she said.

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

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

Jack nodded. “Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a filmmaker?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gasped.

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

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

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

Jack shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Leonard.”

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

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

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

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

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

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

“You’re awake.”

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

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

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

“Jesus. My grandmother must be frantic—”

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

“Dennis.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

“Tea.”

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

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

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

“How do you feel?”

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

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

“What is it? What did you give me?”

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

“What?”

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

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

“You drugged me—”

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

Jack bent over and began to retch.

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

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

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

Nellie nodded.

“You saw Rachel.”

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

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

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

“The dead. You’ve seen them, too.”

“No.”

“Yes. You saw her—the girl, downstairs—”

“I knew what she was. You recognized her. Who was she?”

He said nothing. After a moment he forced out the words, “Jule’s daughter. She was hit by a car and killed four years ago on Christmas Eve. He—before he killed himself, he told me that he had seen her. He said she didn’t forgive him.”

“Of course not.” Nellie’s voice was dreamy. “That’s why they’re here—because they don’t forgive us. That’s why we can see them.”

Jack felt a chill as though a window had been thrown open, in that place with no windows.

“It’s true.” Nellie’s voice rose and fell in a sort of chant. “They’ve come to take it back. This is the world of the dead now. We gave them Verdun and Auschwitz and Chelmno and Sarajevo and Montreal, we gave them the forests, we gave them the oceans. We gave them fucking Antarctica. And now we’ve given them the sky, too…

“We killed everything, Jack. We made this world a dead world, and now the dead have come to take it. It is Ruto’s world, now—”

She got to her feet, stumbling. She was holding the staff and the wooden mask. “Ruto is the Sami goddess of the plague. She takes us from our beds and brings us to Tuonela, the Land of the Dead. She crosses Pohjola the wasteland and brings us to our graves.”

She turned away. Jack tried to stand, but before he could she looked back again. The gaping mask was gone. A slight dark-haired woman stood there, eyes shining as she began to sing.

Jack staggered to his feet. She reached to steady him and he took her hand, frightened yet comforted by the sense that something in the room was real.

“It’s all really happening, Jack,” she murmured, as though she read his thoughts.

“That’s how it works, when it doesn’t kill us. We become gates.”

“Gates?”

“This.” Her hand fumbled at her jeans pocket. When she held it up again he saw a small bottle there, brown glass, rubber dropper-bulb, white label with black letters—Fusax 687.

He dug into his own pocket. His fingers closed around the familiar vial, drew it out. He stared at it in terror, then at her.

“Yes.” Nellie nodded. “Me too. And more—more of us than you can imagine.”

Jack shook his head. “But—how?” he whispered.

“Leonard Thrope. Among others. He travels, he gives them to people he meets—”

“But why? Why?”

“So that we can change. Petra virus, hanta virus, AIDS, torminos simplex—they change our bodies and make us vulnerable. Even exposure to UV light can do it. It all makes us susceptible, Jack—do you understand what that means? It means we are capable of taking, of receiving. The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside. They kill us—usually, depending on what we have—but sometimes they make it possible for other changes to happen—”

“Fuck you. AIDS is not a fucking gate, this is not some fucking—”

Nellie smiled, maddeningly. “Fusax is what makes us gates, Jack. Do you know what it really is?”

He stared, desperate, trying to remember what Leonard had said about the drug, dredged up nothing save the image of a grinning demon who held a staff impaled with human skulls.

“It’s a type of bacteria.” Her hands moved as she spoke, drawing circles in the air. “A kind of spirochete: a symbiotic microbe. We all have remnants of them inside our brains. These particular spirochetes—the fusarium—once they were just simple bacteria. But millions of years ago they attached themselves to us. They merged with our brain cells, they became neurotubules—part of the passageways that transmit thought and sensation, part of our neurochemistry. And now they’re part of us—all of us, not just you and me. They orchestrate the way we think; they may even be what gives us consciousness.

“Fusarium is a mutation. An independent researcher discovered it, and then he decided to share it, with people here, in the States. And in Japan. At first they thought it might keep the petra virus from replicating. Because in the right individuals—people whose body chemistry has been altered by cancer, or UV radiation; people whose immune systems have been damaged by AIDS or petra virus or chemotherapy; in people whose immune systems have already been changed—the fusarium attach themselves to proteins and—”

“You’re fucking nuts.” Jack stumbled backward and bumped into the wall. “This is crazy, you’re—”

Nellie shook her head emphatically. “No. It works. It threads itself inside us—within our brain cells, within our neurochemistry, our immune systems. There’s no one place where it happens. The immune system is like a cloud, it’s everywhere inside us. Like consciousness. It’s not just in our lymph nodes, or liver—it’s there, too, of course, but the immune system can move, just like consciousness can move. That’s why people die from a broken heart, or depression. That’s why sometimes we live, even when we should die: because our emotions and T cells, our thoughts and our blood are all woven together. There are things dancing inside us, Jack—cells and bacteria and bits of light. They make a cloud, they form a web. And now, with fusarium, this cloud of—of knowing—it can move outside us. Our consciousness can move between us. Over great distances, between the living and the dead.”

He shook his head.

“There are doors opening everywhere, Jack. The world has changed. We must change, too, or die—and that’s what the Fusax does. It changes us. It doesn’t always work, but when it does—it’s not crazy, Jack. It’s evolution.”

“Get the fuck away from me! You’re a fucking lunatic—how would you even know—”

“It’s everywhere, Jack. It’s on the street, in IZE. Do you know about ice?” Her voice dropped. “GFI holds the patent on the IT discs. Without IZE they’re just 3-D TV. But with the drug—” She hunched her shoulders, shivering. “It’s incredible. I did it a few times, before I met Leonard. The chemical effects produced by the fusarium aren’t addictive—but IZE is. GFI owns the pharmaceutical company that developed it. It’s not a street drug at all. GFI owns it; GFI has made it addictive; they’re making it available now, through drug cartels. Eventually, once everything’s restored, they’ll market it. They’ve got the sky stations repairing the ozone layer, so they’ll be able to continue broadcasting. They’ve got the IT technology to tie into TV and the web. And they’ve got IZE.”

Jack stammered, “But—why?”

“Why not? It’s not a conspiracy. If GFI really can repair the atmosphere, the rest will fall into place. Everyone will just pick up where they left off. The technology exists to retrofit televisions for IT, and GFI has already invested in front-end manufacturing sites in Malaysia. It’s not such a big deal, really. Except that an incredibly powerful new psychotropic drug has been introduced all over the world, as part of a multinational corporation’s five-year plan,” she ended. “So you see that Leonard Thrope is just a very small messenger—”

Jack struck her hand. “How do you know all this? Who told you, who started it, how do you know?”

She tilted her head toward the door. “The movie. The documentary materials.”

She ducked from the alcove, out of sight and back again. “Here.” She handed him a stack of legal-sized papers. “Look.”

A rusted paper clip clamped them together, that slick heavy mimeograph paper he hadn’t seen since childhood. He glanced at the top sheet. Japanese, but there were scattered English words in there too, amidst tiny smudged photographs—

He turned the page, scanning down columns of unreadable text until he found a list of Japanese names printed in English. One name seized him—

He heard Leonard’s voice, saying, “He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war… He had set up this sort of laboratory—”

“Oh my God,” breathed Jack. “He’s a fucking war criminal—what the fuck are they doing?”

Nellie crouched beside him. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he’s making amends. Because this drug could be a fantastic thing. Some day we may all think of him like Louis Pasteur.”

Jack thought of invasive bacteria that did not respond to antibiotics; of viruses that replicated hundreds of times in a heartbeat. He drew a finger to the inner corner of his eye, felt the faint encrustation, grains of emerald sand.

Nellie nodded. “Blue Antelope, all those fundamentalists—they think we should all just die—”

She touched the scarred aureole. “They think that would be making amends. They’re wrong. I was with them for a while, but not anymore. When I first got sick, I just wanted to kill people—do you know what I mean?”

Jack stared down at his hands. “Yes.”

“But then Leonard contacted me about the documentary, and after we met he gave me the Fusax. And after a while I saw that it could be different. That it was different.”

She reached for the ripped T-shirt at the edge of the futon, plucked something from it. A needle. “Look—”

She took the bedsheet, held it so that he saw the candlelight through it, showing the fabric’s weave. “Here—”

She gave him one end of the sheet to hold. She began piercing the cloth with the needle. Tiny perforations appeared. In one spot the fabric grew weaker, thinner, until a small hole gaped there and the flame glowed, as though it had burned its way through the cloth.

“Do you see?” said Nellie. She took the sheet from him and held it taut, moved it back and forth to make a shifting cloud of light and dark against the candle glow. “Where there are enough of us—people like you and me, people who’re taking Fusax, or ice—it can be like this. Our consciousness can weave itself together. We can make a new web, a new pattern; even if we are making holes in the old pattern. See?”

Jack shook his head. “No.”

But it did make a kind of sense, as though he could intuit her meaning on some submolecular level, without intending or wanting to. Which angered and frightened him; because he did not see a web, but legions of alien creatures swarming in his body, microbial threads corkscrewing themselves into his brain.

It sickened him.

“I’m dying,” he said, and looked up at Nellie. “I’m dying.”

“We all are,” she said. “I know, everyone always says that; but it wasn’t until I got sick that I really understood.

“It’s like we all have two jobs: living, and dying. We just don’t like to think about the dying very much. There’s music that people have recorded, of what it sounds like to die—What it sounds like when your body starts to break up, when the cells all begin to decay. Leonard played it for me one night. And when I heard it, I freaked. Because it wasn’t new to me. It was something I’d heard before. It sounded like the wind, or the sea. Or like after you’ve been running and you hear your own pulse in your ears…”

She touched his hand. “It’s not something to be afraid of, Jack. We are inside the engine of the end, you and me. It doesn’t heal us. All it does is change us. But maybe change will be enough.”

She placed her hands on his shoulders, gently pushed him down upon the mattress. He felt as though he were choking, this mass of unbearable knowledge being shoved at him—

“Hush,” murmured Nellie. She began tugging at her jeans, until she sat beside him, naked. “I’ll help you, let me show you.”

He shook his head.

But then Nellie touched a finger to his chin and rested her hand upon his knee. Her touch grounded him; that and her voice, wordless yet reassuring.

He had not been so near a woman since he was fifteen. Her body was small and compact, narrow-waisted and wide-hipped, her skin the color of amber. “Do you feel better?” she asked.

“No.” His voice caught as she moved closer to him. Her breasts were full, dark-tipped, the nipples almost indistinguishable from the cicatrices left by petra virus. Displaced wonder settled upon him: why had he never noticed how lovely petra’s scars were, the tiny furrows where disease had harrowed flesh, what might they engender?

He looked away. “Please—leave me—”

“I can’t hurt you, Jack.” Her face hung before his, her mouth parted in a smile. “You’re safe, here…”

She touched his breast, her head dipped and she took Jack’s cock in her hands.

“No. I’m immune, remember?” she whispered. And, of course, that was what the petra virus did, made you immune to the HIV virus while it infected you with another. “I’m not contagious, Jack. I can’t hurt you.”

He saw in her face nothing of desire, nothing he could recognize except a weird kind of joy. His fear fell back. Not gone, but quieted, amazed at this arousal as by everything else—what was he doing with a woman? With this woman? He raised his hand to touch her cheek. A moment later he felt her mouth around the head of his cock, and her tongue, constricting warmth as her fingers tightened around him. He was hard, but his desire was detached from everything he could see: the woman drawing momentarily away, so that he glimpsed her breasts, her narrow thighs. She smiled, but her hands never left his cock, and an instant later her head dipped once more, lips parted as she took him into her mouth.

His breathing quickened; he waited for his erection to fade but it didn’t. When he shut his eyes he saw her still, gold against the pulsing darkness. He could smell her, so different from Leonard or Eric or any of his lovers. Not the raw pollen scent of semen but musk and salt.

“I know,” she whispered. “But I wanted to see what happens…”

She knelt and took his hands, drew them to her waist and pressed them there. He felt her ribs. She made a soft urgent sound, and so he moved his hands lower, until they stroked the inside of her thighs, muscular as a boy’s, then slid between her legs to her cunt. Her pubis had been shaved; when she opened her legs her labia had the split sheen of an apricot. His finger found the soft node there and probed it, even as he leaned forward and nuzzled his face against her neck, pressed his open mouth against her. Tasting salt, a faint crystalline bitterness. He closed his eyes and saw Emma standing in his bedroom, mouth tight as she gazed at emerald granules adhering to a tongue depressor.

The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside.

He drew back as Nellie moaned. She moved against him forcefully, reminding him that she was there—that’s how it works when it doesn’t kill us: we become gates—reminding him that her body was nothing like his, and that none of this was happening by accident.

“I—I don’t know if I can,” he murmured. “If we can…”

Though he was still hard, and when she took his hand and pressed it to her groin the skin there was soft and yielding.

“We can,” she whispered. “This way.”

She leaned back upon the mattress, guiding him until he lay beside her, his head facing the V formed by her outspread legs. He could see the scars upon her thighs, dark fissures that seemed to be strewn upon a landscape of stone not flesh. He let his hand trail across her leg, then moved forward to kiss her knee, let his mouth linger upon one of the cicatrices. His other hand stroked her inner thigh, soft and unblemished; she made a low sound and took him in her mouth. Not his favorite sexual conjunction: he had always found it too distracting, too difficult to concentrate on his own response.

But now the symmetry entranced him, distant pulse of pleasure as she sucked his cock, his own inexplicable delight as he explored the unknown landscape before him, caressing her legs, inching forward until his face was pressed against her pubis. He slid his tongue inside her, and she cried out; there was an intense explosion of warm liquid flooding his mouth. Some minutes later she came, the muscles in her thighs rippling and a slow coursing pulse in the skin beneath his mouth; was less certain of his own climax, which he sensed first as ruddy light, his lips prickling as at the taste of lemons; then suffused heat, a sigh as the woman drew her head back from his groin and awkwardly raised herself to kiss him. Her tongue small and hot and languid, the taste of his come in her mouth. He moved away, one hand still clasping hers. She stared at him, wide eyes belying her calm expression.

He blinked and took a deep breath. The room was still dark, the candles seemed not to have burned down at all; but perhaps Nellie had replaced them. She leaned against the wall of the sleeping alcove, her dark hair flat and damp against her skull. The cicatrices upon her breasts had opened. They glistened like the mouths of flowers, saturated with nectar; he could see silvery threads of moisture spilling down her abdomen.

“It’s always different,” she said. She lay one hand upon her breast, eyes shutting as though she were in pain. “But I wanted you to see—to know what it can be like.”

Why? he wanted to ask; but he was too tired. He closed his eyes and slept dreamlessly. When he woke the room was exactly as it had been before—candles burning, a close smell of flesh and unwashed hair—save that he noticed how terribly thin Nellie was. Before, the cicatrices had seemed like blossoms strewn upon her flesh. Now he could see her ribs thrusting out between them, and the smooth hollows of her cheeks.

“I am going to tell you something important,” she said. She dabbed a finger at the corner of one eye. When she withdrew her hand he saw a very faint virent flash. “Because you’ll be at the party tonight.”

Tonight? When he licked his lips they were cracked and desiccated; his tongue, too, felt hard and swollen as a parrot’s. Nellie moved her hand to touch him, and shook her head.

“I can’t go. I’m supposed to be there, but I won’t be. But you’ll be there—” She pointed at his hand. He looked down and saw the faintly glowing outline of a gryphon upon his palm. “And so will Blue Antelope. They’ve planned a terrorist strike against the SUNRA dirigibles.”

He croaked, “Blue Antelope?”

Nellie nodded. “They think the sky stations are interfering with God’s plan for humanity. Which is that we should die. Having poisoned His earth and destroyed His creatures, we all deserve to die. They’re going to destroy the Fouga fleet. Assisted cultural suicide. Without the sky stations in place, the atmosphere cannot be repaired. We’ll die, maybe everything will die, but then other forms of life will be ascendant. Blue Antelope doesn’t look upon it as a sin.”

“How do you know?” Jack’s voice was a ragged whisper.

“Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure. That was after I got sick.”

She coughed.

“They’ll do nothing except destroy eighteen months of work. And the Pyramid. And kill a lot of people. But that will be enough. GFI won’t be able to rebuild the fleet—it was a miracle they could do it in the first place—and eventually most of us will die.”

“But you’re telling me this—why?” Jack’s voice cracked.

Nellie grabbed his hand. “Stop them. When I saw you downstairs, I saw this—”

She stabbed at the glowing gryphon on his palm. “You’ll be inside the arena. Tell someone about the terrorists. Stop them.”

“You’re—you’re lying, this is some—”

“No. I am not lying. I was with Blue Antelope for three years, since before the ice shelf collapsed. The glimmering was the best thing that ever happened to them, and all those other radicals. It gave them a focus. It made them stronger. When they learned I’d received the experimental petra vaccine, they threw me out—because I was thwarting God’s will. Because if I was the sort of person who was running any risk of infection, then I was exactly the sort of person God wanted to die. But when I developed petra virus they took me back—because obviously His will was being enforced.

“And I was so enraged, I hated everyone so much, that I worked for them. In Atlanta and LA and here, in the Pyramid—”

She motioned at the walls. “I was a plant. There are a lot of us here. That’s how Blue Antelope gained access to the Millennial Ball. And they had plants in the factories where the Fougas were constructed. Everywhere. Blue Antelope is everywhere. Christians—”

She shook with a spasmodic laugh. “God’s fucking people—they’re everywhere. They’re going to kill me, you know. Because I left. But I won’t let them.”

Jack swallowed, tasting bile and grit. He turned, looking around for something, anything, that would give the lie to this. His gaze fell upon a silvery film canister pushed against the far wall.

“Leonard.” The word exploded from him. “Does he—does Leonard know?”

“Of course he knows. He knows everything.”

Jack gasped, amazement forcing through despair. “Leonard’s a terrorist.”

“No. He’s not a terrorist. He’s not a member of Blue Antelope—he hates Fundamentalists, but I’m sure he knows about the attack. His work, recording all the extinctions, donating all that money to the Noah Genome Project—he may not belong to Blue Antelope, but he believes in them. And he’ll be at the Ball, as a guest of GFI. He plays both sides of the fence, Leonard. I think he’s just waiting to see who’ll come out on top. To see who’ll win.”

“No. You’re wrong.” Jack shook his head. “Leonard Thrope has never given a fuck about winning. He just likes total fucking chaos. In high school he was cast as the Lord of Misrule in some play, and it was so perfect—because that’s what he is. That’s why he’d be a perfect terrorist—”

“They would never take him,” Nellie broke in. “He’s a loose cannon. A security risk. Your friend is not a terrorist, Jack—”

He’s not my friend! Jack started to cry out; how could someone who tried to poison me be my friend?

But as clearly as if he were in the room beside him, he saw Leonard as a boy with a hot small mouth and eyes that broke too easily into tears; Leonard leaving him, a farewell fuck in Athens and that was it. Years later Leonard drinking champagne at Jack’s fortieth birthday party. Leonard in Jack’s bedroom handing him a small glass bottle and saying This is what’s going to change fucking human history…

Leonard was playing dice with the world; and so were Blue Antelope, and GFI.

“Stop them,” whispered Nellie.

“No.”

Nellie’s voice grew shrill. “Those solar shields are the only chance we have—”

“Why the fuck should I care? I’m dying! You poisoned me—you and Leonard, your goddamn pharmaceutical corporations! Let them die. Let them all fucking die.”

His words echoed in the tiny room. He could hear the slurring of Nellie’s breath as she stared at him. He glared back at her, the moisture between the folds of her abdomen, sparks of green and gold there. When she raised her arm he saw that the flesh hung loosely from her bones—not like flesh at all, more like lichen, or shimmering algae; and that her impossibly slender, spatulate fingers held something long and thin and metal, something she looked at very carefully, eyes narrowed. There was the smell of wet leaves, a sharp glitter as her lips parted and he saw she held some sort of capsule.

“Stop them,” she said. She bit down upon the shining tube. “Just stop them.” Stench of sulfur and almonds. Jack gasped, stunned, as the woman’s body slumped onto the bed. He started to move toward her, then stopped, seeing a fine white cloud of mist about her mouth. Holding his breath he staggered to his feet and stumbled from the room. It wasn’t until he reached the door that he realized he was naked. With a groan he turned back, hesitating at the entrance to the alcove.

Nellie sprawled facedown upon the futon, motionless. Her body looked badly decomposed, but the smell that hung about the room was fragrant, rain-sweet.

Like lilacs, thought Jack, as he grabbed his clothes and dressed, fighting horror. She smells like lilacs. He shoved his feet into his shoes and fled.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Heroes and Villains (Alternate Take)

He had thought that he would be able to see the Golden Pyramid from anywhere within the city. Such a gigantic structure, it would loom over everything else and he would set his course by it, make his way through the streets, how hard could it be?

I’m an idiot, Trip thought, and glanced at the harbor behind him. The Wendameen was gone. As far as he could see there was only viscous water speared with metal spikes and floating planks, a shattered portico like the prow of a sunken ship. To either side the shoreline stretched, bridge girders and highway overpasses that had been bitten off in midair, eviscerated skyscrapers that tolled as the tide swept inside them. The sky shuddered, and flaming gouts of gold and violet spewed from horizon to horizon. After the silence and solitude of Mars Hill, after the weeks at sea with Martin, it was like waking in hell.

He pushed against the first hard swell of fear: he was alone in a city, he was alone in The City. I’m a total fucking idiot.

Wind ripped off the water. He shivered and buttoned the top of his anorak. Surely it had not been this cold on board the Wendameen? The memory of the last few months was fleeing from him, as though it had been a dream recalled in a noisy room. He knew it was not, he knew it had all been real, as real in its way as the shadow of another dream, the dream of drowning that came at him sometimes, a small dark animal nudging to be recognized.

But he did not want to remember that. What he wanted to remember was the blond girl. Her image was inescapable: it might have been stitched upon his eyelids. Her twilit eyes, her hot thrusting mouth; but more than those things her simple sheer being. The fact that she had been there beside him once, that he had touched her, that she had been real—

Do you remember nothing? she had asked him in a dream of flowers. Now, with the December wind pressing upon him like a cloak of ice, he remembered nothing else. He was only a vessel, broken and halfheartedly repaired, holding her within him like a flame. He hugged his arms against his chest, forced himself to look at the unpromising landscape before him. The smell of shit and decay was overpowering; he’d have to get away from the water or he’d be sick. He adjusted his backpack and stared at a derelict building that blocked his view of anything but itself. The walls had fallen away from its upper stories, so that he could see inside. Like gazing into a mutated ants’ nest. Heaps of rubble, beams and joists twisted like coat hangers, insulation and drywall hanging from the metal like old clothes. The wind sent crumbled mortar and gypsum dust and ash spinning down, so that Trip stepped back, covering his eyes.

Throughout the whole god-awful structure, people were living.

He saw a white-haired woman in black pants, no shirt, no bra, step across a gap in the wall, sheets of plywood spliced together with chicken wire and electrical cord. She was shouting to someone he couldn’t see, her white breasts moving as she stood on tiptoe. He couldn’t make out her words, but then she looked down and her face twisted.

“Hey! Fucking asshole, get the fuck, what the fuck you looking at, you goddamn fucking—”

He took off, stumbling along the ruptured spine of what had once been a road. After a few minutes he stopped, not because he felt safe but because his knee hurt too much. When he looked down he saw a rip in the white duck trousers Martin had given him, a leafy smear of dirt and blood.

“Shit,” he said. They were the only pants he had. “Motherfucking shit.”

He’d never cursed like that before. It felt good. He looked up and shouted at the woman in the building, though he couldn’t see her anymore, couldn’t even see the building.

“You fucking piece of cunt shit!”

When he turned to walk away he saw a figure strolling just a few yards ahead of him, a young man wearing cowboy boots and a long patchwork overcoat. His face was heavily tattooed with spirals. The streaky purple light from the sky gave his flesh a ghoulish cast.

“Yo, Happy New Year!” The man grinned, gave Trip a thumbs-up, and continued in his direction. Trip tightened his grip on his knapsack. The man stopped, rocking back and forth on his heels. “I’m looking for Avenue B. Know where that is?”

Trip stared at him, panicked, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t reveal he was totally lost, totally without a single fucking clue.

“Actually,” the man went on, “I’m looking for a place called Marquee Moon. It’s supposed to be around here somewhere—” He glanced at a lightless alley that ran between two empty buildings, then back at Trip. “Ever hear of it?”

“No.”

The guy kept on nodding, a speedy mindless mannerism. He was tall, broad-shouldered, not too much older than Trip, twenty-five or -six. A golden placebit glowed above one eyebrow. His hair was dark and close-cropped, his face despite the tattoos and corpselike coloring amiable, even goofy. Trip had first thought the man’s long overcoat to be shabby and much-repaired, the kind of thing you saw homeless people wearing. In fact it was stitched from hundreds of pieces of fabric—brilliant silks and brocades and jacquards, elaborately embroidered—with here and there mirrored cloth, and prisms, glass beads like eyes, jangly arrays of computer circuitry and feathers. It was, Trip realized, a very expensive coat, and the man’s boots were very expensive boots. Alligator and totally illegal.

“Yeah, well it’s supposed to be around here,” the man went on genially. He had a pronounced drawl. “A bunch of those places’re supposed to be around here, in the same building even, Magyar and Hit and the Chancery.”

Trip shifted his knapsack to the other shoulder. Enough seconds had passed, he knew he should either say something or leave, fast, before this guy drew a knife on him or decided to prolong the conversation.

“You’re not from here, are you?” The man’s gaze fixed on him. His hand moved, and Trip backed away, elbowing him roughly. “Hey, ouch! Jeez, calm down, buddy!”

His hand continued its arc until it touched Trip’s knapsack, lightly. “I was just gonna say, you probably haven’t been here very long. So you probably don’t know where the fuck you are, either.”

He gave him a rueful smile, revealing multicolored teeth like tiles.

Trip stiffened. The guy reminded him of Leonard Thrope. “Fuck you,” he muttered. He spun and started into the alley, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a run.

“Hey! Hey—”

As footsteps rattled up behind him, he made a fist, and turned. Fighting was something else he’d never done, but he jabbed at the air breathlessly, his back colliding with a wall.

“Whoa! Hey, man—” The guy in the overcoat sidestepped, easily avoiding Trip’s lame throw, and raised one hand palm out in a placating gesture. “Calm the Christ down, will you! I was just gonna say, this is not really a part of town you want to go wandering around in by yourself, especially on New Year’s Eve.”

As he spoke he moved carefully around Trip, holding his gaze as though talking him down from a ledge. “You look a little spooked, but I ain’t gonna jump you. Hell, if I was, I would’ve done it already.” He laughed, his mouthful of colored teeth gleaming. “Man, you’re the first person I seen in a while looks more like a tourist’n me—”

He plucked at Trip’s knapsack. “You gotta do better’n that, man! C’mon,” he urged, glancing to either end of the alley, “I can’t leave you here, and I ain’t staying.”

The man shoved his hands in his coat pockets, balanced himself on a cement block, and cocked his head. When Trip said nothing, he shrugged. “Hey, suit yourself, man.” He jumped off the cinder block and strode toward the far end of the alley. Trip watched him, and, when the man stepped back out of the alley, followed at a safe distance.

Out on the street the man was waiting, perched on the curb. There were junked cars everywhere, and on the other side of the road shuttered storefronts of corrugated iron, yawning doorways, walls pasted over with stripped-off posters. Two bald children hitting something with a stick. A rangy dog nosed at foul bright green water pooling in the sidewalk. He remembered a statistic he had heard once before the glimmering, something about there being a hundred million homeless people in the world, and untold thousands in New York City alone.

But if anything, the city seemed emptier now than it had a few months before, when he’d been here with the blond girl. What had happened to everyone. Had they died? Been taken off to one of the life-enhancement centers that Jerry claimed were really prisons? He glanced at the man, whose clothes and incongruously amiable confidence disturbed Trip as much as the ravaged streets did, then looked the other way. A few blocks off he could see people crossing streets, the comforting yellow blur of a speeding cab.

“I think it’s that way.” The man tilted his head. “Yeah. There used to be this club down there.”

He flashed Trip a Technicolor grin. “Princess Volupine used to play there, and Alex Chilton. Ever see them?”

Trip shook his head.

“Well, I’m going.” The man started walking. “See you.”

Trip stayed where he was. The man glanced over his shoulder, lifted his hand, and waved. Trip marked where he went. About three blocks to the south, the man slowed, then crossed the street and continued for another block, turned, and disappeared down a passage overshadowed by a very ornate old building. Trip waited several minutes, to make certain the guy wasn’t going to pop back out again, and headed the same way he’d gone.

To either side buildings reared, their windows uniformly dark. A power line bearing a traffic signal sagged across the middle of the intersection. A man stood in the shelter of a cracked plastic awning, smoking a cigarette and chanting as to himself.

“…cat ice hash acid ice cat…”

Trip walked by quickly, keeping his head down. He passed a few people. Two young women wearing black, faces hidden behind cheap white masks. An older woman, also in black, whose eyes glowed plasmer silver. A man in cracked leathers, his face hidden behind a Mexican wrestler’s mask, cantered past on a white horse. A girl walking an enormous dog: all with enough purpose to their movements that Trip felt reassured. There was order, somewhere. There was food, somewhere, for humans and horses, too. Life was going on.

Which meant it could be going on at the Pyramid, where he had last seen the blond girl. He shoved salt-corded hair from his eyes and nodded determinedly, glanced at the skyline to see if there was anything like the apex of a golden triangle. No; but he’d find it. If he had to, he’d just take a cab, squander whatever cash Martin Dionysos had given him, and that would be that.

Because if he could get to the Pyramid, he could speak to Nellie Candry, beg her to help him find the girl so he could do what he should have done before, what he should have done in the first place. He would arrange to see her again, talk to her, spend time getting to know her. He’d contact John Drinkwater and figure out a way to take her home with him to Moody’s Island. He didn’t care about touring anymore, didn’t care about the band, or money, or singing, or God. All he wanted was to find the girl. All he wanted was to take her to the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church and marry her, the way he should have in the very beginning.

It didn’t take him long to realize that he was lost, way lost: meaning, he couldn’t find the man he had set out to follow, he didn’t see anything that said Marquee Moon, and he certainly didn’t see the Pyramid. He passed a small park, a woman selling water from a blue plastic jug. Behind its wrought-iron fence, the old brownstone building proved to be a branch of the New York Public Library. Wind stirred drifts of dead leaves and papers that had piled up in its corners. Broken scaffolding hung from an upper story, and the remains of a banner. A large cracked wooden sign, much defaced, proclaimed that due to funding cuts this branch was closed, effective June 1, 1997, and that the bulk of its collection had been transferred to the Ottendorfer Branch at Second Avenue.

Still, the library didn’t look closed. A small group of people stood on the grand front steps, talking excitedly. They seemed to be about Trip’s age, wearing long patchwork coats—it must be a fashion—over the kind of slashed finery and jangling carpenter’s belts he associated with front-row seating at his shows; or conversely, dressed in very conservative, dumpy-looking men’s suits with plain white shirts and somber ties. No masks, no protective implants or headgear; shaved heads for boys and girls alike, or else long ostentatiously uncombed knotted hair streaked with garish colors. Plastic tubes around their necks that could hold water, or booze, God knows what. Club kids, Lucius used to call them, derisively; and now Trip thought of what the man had said earlier—Marquee Moon, the Chancery. Club names. He stared up at the library steps until a girl with torn red leggings and tunic looked down and smiled at him lazily. He started to smile back, had an anxious instant when he thought, She knows who I am! Imagining the devouring rush of fans, hands pulling at him—

But no, she was just smiling, already she had turned back to the others. He saw that the pattern on her tunic was repeated on her flesh. The cloth had been torn so that one braless breast was completely exposed. Trip looked away and hurried on.

He crossed the street and entered the park. The wind tore at his anorak, bringing with it the garbage-dump scent of the river. The sky had deepened from violet to indigo. Rents of glittering silver and crimson showed in it, as though some unimaginable brilliance lay beyond. He remembered the planetarium show he had seen with the blond girl, her voice in the false night. The stars so firmly fixed in the sky, how immovable they had seemed, how lovely and bright and true. There were no stars now. There had been no stars for years. He stared up into a sky that seemed to turn slowly, clockwise, like a weather image of a hurricane, its central eye a deeper darkness that revealed nothing. He squinted, trying to remember another kind of sky; but not.

And he could not remember the stars; when he tried to picture them all that came to mind was the girl’s white face and burning eyes, and behind her a shining banner.

From the street came a roar, an answering chorus of shouts. Trip whirled to glimpse a car hurtling past, and then a second. From the shadow of a building children darted. They took off running, purposeful as birds in flight, shot down an alley, and disappeared.

For the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.

The Biblical words were remote as his memories of the stars. They had lost all meaning for him. Without the world he had known to frame them—without John Drinkwater, without his music, without the night sky over Moody’s Island or the sound of voices in a dilapidated clapboard church, without the girl—without these things, Trip saw with a clarity that left him breathless, God and the stars could not exist.

He had always thought it was the other way around.

Something cold brushed his cheek. He blinked and saw a few stray snowflakes spinning down, not white but pink. He wondered what time it was. Late, probably; night—New Year’s Eve, the man had said, could that be true?—and he was alone in the city. Echoing voices and the sound of breaking glass came from a block of shabby apartment buildings. He turned and walked quickly back the way he’d come.

At the edge of the park a bunch of children had gathered between two benches, sweeping back and forth on Rollerblades and skateboards, sometimes in tandem, playing an elaborate game that seemed to involve knocking down their friends. He was a little shocked to hear the way they cursed; none of them could be more than eleven years old. As he drew nearer they began to look over at him with the same bright hunger he had seen in the eyes of feral dogs.

Too late he realized his mistake. Something came whipping past him, a blur of yellow and green, and pounded him in the stomach. He caught himself before he hit the ground, turned, and saw a mass of bodies rocketing through the twilight.

Trip tried to run, staggering behind a bench. A few yards before him was the open street, but there were more figures there, jumping the curb and landing with such force that the wheels of their blades struck sparks from the gravel. Trip flung out his knapsack to sidearm a figure that grabbed his elbow.

A voice yelped, jubilant. Trip looked down to see a pale grinning girl with scabbed cheeks yanking at him. Her grin became a snarl as she twisted his arm viciously, then savagely bit him.

Trip shouted in pain, kicked her as another child ran up. The air rang with shrieking wheels. Their hands were everywhere, their sharp knees digging into his ribs and blood trickling into his eye. One of them had his head in a hammerlock and was slamming it into the pavement—

—and then there was an instant of shocked silence; followed by a deafening roar, a ping like rock striking metal. And Trip was on his hands and knees, coughing and weeping, and someone was beside him.

“Whoa, buddy! Shit, they almost nailed you—”

Trip swiveled his head painfully and saw the man he had followed earlier crouching beside him, a gun in his hand. His patchwork overcoat flapped open to reveal an intricate holster holding some kind of compact assault weapon, and what looked like dental equipment.

“Whee doggy.” Then got to his feet. He looked around, the gun light as a toy in his big hand, and tipped his chin. “See there?”

Trip stood groggily and looked. A small form lay on the ground at the far end of the park.

“Nailed her,” the man said. “But she wasn’t on wheels. Not that she wouldn’t’ve taken you out,” he added. “Fuckin’ A. But they nailed you BT, buddy—”

He slid the gun into the holster, flicked a catch, and let the overcoat fall across his chest, made a gun with his finger and cocked it at Trip’s forehead. “What’s your stats, pro?”

“Huh?” Trip’s jaw ached. He swiped at his face and saw a smear of blood on his hand. “Aw shit—”

“Your status, man,” the man went on. “You’re losing some bodily fluids there, don’t you got a bandanna or something?”

“Oh—yeah, yeah—” Trip shoved his hand into the knapsack and pulled out a T-shirt, mopped his face with it. “It’s okay, it doesn’t really hurt—”

“Fuck if it hurts, man! Are you fucking negative?”

Trip looked at him through a fold of dark cloth. “Yeah, I’m fucking negative.”

“Well, here—” The man tossed him a silvery object. Trip caught it, a little sani-pack of sterile gauze treated with Viconix.

For Travel and Emergency Use. For When You NEED to Feel Safe, the label read, with smaller letters proclaiming, THERE IS NO KNOWN CURE FOR THE FOLLOWING VIRUSES. FOR PROPHYLACTIC USE ONLY, PLEASE CONSULT A HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL IF—

Trip tore the packet open, took the damp towelette, and swabbed his forehead with it, wincing at the cloying smell of vanilla and antiseptic.

“I’m taking your word on that, buddy,” the man said. He cocked his head and watched Trip, nodding agreeably. “Can’t suspect everyone, right? Plus it’s only a scratch”—he squinted at Trip’s forehead—“plus only a lily-white tourist’d be out here by himself on New Year’s Eve.”

The man turned and spit, surveyed the encroaching shadows, and shook his head. “Fuck this shit. Let’s get outta here. Come on.”

He stood expectantly. Trip wadded up the Viconix pad and threw it at a bench, looked at that small form motionless on the ground. He took a deep breath. His throat hurt, he felt winded and a little bruised but otherwise okay.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

The man shrugged. In the darkness, all coiling orange clouds and cobalt sky, the spiral tattoos on his cheeks glowed. “Hey, it happens. Listen, I found out where that place is. Walked right by it. You probably did too.”

He headed for the street, coattails flapping, alligator boots clacking loudly on the asphalt. “My name’s Clovis Tyner,” the man said. “I come up from Houston, and you know I ain’t gonna take no shit from some little fuckass kid like that—”

He thrust his chin in the direction of the park. “Used to come here on business two-three times a year, before the shit came down. Commodities. Pissed away more money’n my ma made her whole life, not that she woulda known what to do with it, ’sides buy a thirty-aught-six. You ain’t even holdin’ a piece there, are you?” he asked, giving Trip a curious look. “Fuckin’ A. You’re here in this part of town—hell, you’re right here in this city, you must be the only little peckerwood here ain’t holding. My my.” He laughed. “You’re pretty fucking lucky I came along, huh? This must be your goddamn lucky day!”

Trip managed a sickly grin. The man just kept on walking. Trip had to jog to keep up. They were across from the park now, heading back toward the abandoned library.

“So you gonna introduce yourself? I ain’t gonna jump your bones, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Clovis drawled. “Fuck no. You’re too skinny for one thing. For another, you got a dick!”

He threw his head back and hooted. “Admit it! You thought I was playin’ for the pink team—well, fuck that! Yo, this is it—”

Trip looked where he was pointing: the library. “This?”

Clovis paid no attention. He was peering over the wrought-iron fence at the crowd on the front steps. Tie-dye and crinkly plastic clothing—pink, green, turquoise—glowed among the ubiquitous patchwork overcoats, sleek short hair, dreadlocks braided with strands of glass and metal, shaven heads and foreheads branded with arcane symbols and the names of bands: Commanche Baby Music, Diskomo, 334. The wind brought a haze of marijuana smoke, something that smelled like bug spray. Shrill galvanic music echoed from somewhere, drum machines and what sounded like distant traffic. More people were crossing the street now, animated groups all merging on the sidewalk. A few joined the crowd on the steps, but the rest jumped the fence and headed for the building’s perimeter, where the massive structure made its own night. At the end of the block four younger children on blades whizzed back and forth, yelping obscenities. Trip swallowed, a stab of the terror he had felt before; but the people around him seemed pumped up with more attitude than anger. They reminded him of the crowds that had shown up for Stand in the Temple: college kids, kids who still managed to have money, whether it came from parents or hustling drugs or rolling cars in the suburbs.

“Hey, let us in!” someone yelled from the steps. A jar went whizzing past Trip’s head; he ducked as it crashed onto the pavement behind him, sending out a whiff of raw spirits.

“Whoa, dude!” laughed Clovis. He grabbed the fence, gazed through twisted iron railings at the building’s facade. “C’mon, we better go, else we won’t get in at all.”

With a grunt he hauled himself over, cursing as his coat snagged.

“Here,” said Clovis, urging him to follow. “Give me your bag, you can climb over—”

In your fucking dreams, thought Trip; though there was nothing of any value in the knapsack save Martin’s sextant. Still, he checked to make sure the catch was secure, hitched the bag tight onto his shoulder, and clambered the way Clovis had gone, gasping as his hurt knee scraped against a jagged edge.

“Awright,” Clovis sang out as Trip jumped. He pounded Trip’s back so hard he staggered. “Here we are now, entertain us!”

Clovis spun around and began to walk. Trip followed. Heavy shadows fell across the ground, broken by columns of pulsing pink and crimson where the night sky streamed down. Kids darted in and out of the light. Some of them wore luminous coils around their necks; others had patterns etched into their skin or scalps that shimmered eerily when they dipped back into shadow. Trip glanced at Clovis: the swirls on his face burned ultraviolet. He looked down at his own ripped white pants and old grey anorak.

“Hold on,” he muttered. Clovis stopped and bounced restlessly on his bootheels. Trip pulled off the anorak and shoved it into the knapsack, stood shivering in his flannel shirt and the thick wool sweater Martin had given him. He ran a hand through his hair, traced the outline of the cross branded above his eyes—he must look like shit, no one would recognize him now. He shrugged the knapsack back onto his shoulder.

The way in proved to be not via the library’s main entrance, which was blocked off with sheets of stainless steel and plywood, but through myriad service doors and windows that had been linked via a slapdash array of building materials—foam rubber, plastic bags, planks and Styrofoam insulation and hurricane fencing—to form an elaborate network of chutes and passageways, all leading into the basement. Dozens of solar panels leaned up against the building’s exterior walls. Like the makeshift entryways they had a haphazard look, but people seemed careful not to knock into them. And while the crowd had grown substantial—Trip guessed there might be a thousand people out there in the frigid wind, which seemed pretty good for an abandoned library in a city with no electric lights—once some secret signal had been given, and the doors and windows opened, everyone disappeared inside within minutes.

“Once you’re in you can’t get out till morning,” explained Clovis. “Unless we get busted.” Trip wondered if someone would search him and find the guns in their hidden holster; but when it was their turn to crawl through a rusted culvert, he found no one on the other side inclined to do anything except shout at them to move.

“G’wan! Keep going, keep going! ”

A hugely fat man in a caftan and surgical mask waved them on. He held a green lightstick, and waved it like a traffic cop’s baton. “Pay inside!” he bellowed. “Pay inside! Keep moving—”

It was dark, and suffocatingly hot. A mechanical drumbeat throbbed relentlessly from upstairs, loud enough to make the room shake. Muscular men in white caftans elbowed through the mob. They wore money belts, and each had a third eye tattooed on his forehead.

“Twenty dollars!” they shouted, breasting through a sea of rippling arms as people shoved money at them. “Twenty bucks, no barter!”

Trip struggled to reach his wallet, managed to pull out two tens. The bills were snatched from him, he hoped by one of the bouncers; then the three men were gone. The crowd’s peristaltic motion carried him forward. Bass-heavy electronic music thundered directly overhead. Trip braced himself, praying that he wouldn’t fall.

“Stay tight!” Clovis shouted. “Stay tight—”

The room was black, save for the luminous tattoos and scarifications on the people pressing against him, the fat man’s baton and, stuck on the ceiling, a few plastic light boxes. The crush of bodies exuded a thick rank smell—sweat and marijuana smoke and Viconix and a bitter chemical odor Trip almost recognized. A smell that was more like a taste, something that nudged the back of his throat, something he could almost name—

But then the crowd surged forward. Trip grabbed at Clovis to keep from being trampled underfoot.

“We’re there, buddy, we’re there!” Clovis said.

There turned out to be a broad ascending stairway. Deafening percussion raged down it like an avalanche. Trip bounded up behind Clovis.

Clovis yelled over the thunderous music. “You ready?”

Trip nodded, not ready at all. As he stumbled into a vast space rent with flickering lights and shadows, moving bodies, music.

“That way—” Clovis forced his way through the crowd.

Solar panels lined the perimeter of the room, flickering jade, cobalt, scarlet beneath banks of empty bookshelves. People stood or sat, talking, drinking, selling things—T-shirts, silvery crescents and discs, luminous drinking coils, fake tattoos…

“Hey, man—acid? X? Ice?”

A tattooed girl in ripped tunic and leggings stopped in front of him. Within her flat grey eyes the pupils had almost disappeared; the corners of her mouth were cracked and raw.

“Ice, man?” Her voice rose a little desperately. Trip was unsure whether she was looking to buy or sell. He glanced down, saw her bare feet shuffling restlessly back and forth across the dirty floor. When he looked up again she licked her lips and made as though to grab him, her hand twitching ineffectually a good six inches from his chest.

“Eeeeyyesssss…” She coughed, then wiped her eyes. With a beseeching expression she raised her hand, so that Trip could see a greenish crust glinting on her fingertips.

“Izzit?” the girl croaked, blinking. “Whadizzit?” Her hand flailed, trying to grasp him again, but Trip turned in disgust.

He saw Clovis talking to a cluster of dreadlocked men in kilts and sleeveless flannel shirts. Clovis dug into his pocket, handed one of them a small object that sparkled; the man looked away from him, his eyes locking for a moment with Trip’s as he palmed something to Clovis. Trip hesitated, then began edging through the crowd toward them. Music flowed from unseen speakers, switching from techno to jackhammer to Japanese covers of antediluvian disco to enhanced versions of TV music—commercial jingles, theme songs—that Trip recalled from childhood. He edged past a jury-rigged DJ’s booth laid out across a long table, a tangle of power cords and speaker wire and equipment, some kind of video projector. In the middle of it sat a woman, headphones threaded into her shaven skull, fingers stabbing at a knee top. Her eyes glittered metallic red, her cheeks were pierced with dozens of long silver needles. He could smell her, patchouli and another smell—that weirdly familiar, corrosive scent he’d first noticed when he entered the library. Like hot metal or burning plastic or gunpowder.

He frowned, trying to place it; and stumbled over a knot of electrical cords.

“Watch it!” the red-eyed woman shouted.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He picked his way carefully back into the mob of dancers, his eyes fixed on the floor. When he looked up, Clovis was gone.

Trip clutched his knapsack, trying to still the panic boiling inside him. Someone jostled his arm, a dreadlocked boy wearing a velvet smoking jacket and very little else.

“Uh—sorry, hey man, I’m sorry—” The boy’s eyes were preternaturally wide. Sweat blackened the velvet jacket and matted the tangled hair across his forehead. “Are you—you—?”

Cigarette smoke, and that same sharply unpleasant odor again. The boy stuttered, bewildered; then stammered something incomprehensible and shambled off. Trip watched him go, neck hairs prickling.

And suddenly he remembered Leonard Thrope pressing an emerald ampoule against the crook of his elbow, hand splayed across his leather trousers. The smell was everywhere, Trip knew what it was.

IZE. He was in an icehouse. All around the music soared and stuttered; someone bumped into him. Trip whirled and struck out with his arm.

He panted, pausing to catch his breath. His heart pounded, his sides were hot and damp with sweat; he had to blink furiously to clear his vision, focus on something besides glittering pinwheels and faces like exploded blossoms. His breath caught in his throat.

Because suddenly the smell was no longer all around him. It was in him, it filled his nostrils like rank water and coursed down his throat, coated his tongue as he felt that same liquid heat flashing through him, the same prickling of his flesh. He shuddered, clutching at his stomach; squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t see a garden of faces turned rapturously sunwise where there was no sun, hair moving like sea anemones. Even with eyes closed he saw them: disembodied arms and legs, mouths and eyes swarming like plankton; a scintillance exploding upon his flesh. And sound, too, that he felt as a thinning in his blood, skin taut between his fingers, a saline film clotting tongue and gums. A girl walked past him, laughing. Her eyes were wide and staring. Flecks of emerald glittered in their corners.

“I’m a hive,” she said, grinning to show a cracked front tooth. “Buzz buzz.”

Trip clenched his fists, fighting the realization that his body could be so terrifyingly free of his control. Strands of percussion and synthesizer fused into a relentless high-pitched drone. His ears ached; the bitter taste flooded his mouth again and he spit, wiping his mouth on his shirt.

“—yo there, buddy, looks like you drank the wrong punch!” A hand clasped his shoulder. Trip looked up to see Clovis Tyner, his tattooed face creased with amused concern. “First time?”

“Ahh—” Trip gasped and shook his head. “Nooo.”

Clovis nodded. His eyes were wide, a shimmering blue; the pupils were all but invisible. “That can make it worse. You get the surge but not enough to carry you through. An’ all this—”

He cocked his head to indicate the room around them—the quickening dance, speakers humming like wasps, abandoned shoes and empty bottles spinning across the floor. Within all the frantic revelry Trip glimpsed flickers of blinding white light, as though someone was aiming a laser at the crowd.

“—it just makes it worse. Contact high.” Clovis laughed, a sound that made Trip’s skin crawl. “What you oughta do is take some more—now, before things get really crazy. Once they get the light show going—”

Trip shook his head so fast he felt dizzy; felt again as though he were perched above the whirlpool at Hell Head. “No! Just tell me how I can get out—”

“I told you, buddy: you’re in here now.” Clovis stood swaying at Trip’s side, his gaze unfocused. “They never open the doors till morning. Especially tonight. Cops. Can’t have all these fucked-up people spilling in the streets—that’s a bad fucking scene, man, I saw it in Austin once, and here they don’t even have anyplace to put you, I mean it’s not like they got spare room in the Tombs or something. I heard they just like, dump you in the river. Bodies wash up—But you don’t need to hear that, right? You’ve been in the scene, right?”

Trip shook his head.

“No? Well, shit!” Clovis whistled. “What the fuck you doing here? ’Cause I was gonna say it’s like that scene—”

“Hive?”

“Yeah, man. ’Cause of the ice. I mean, you’ve done it, right? You know what I’m talking about. Contact high. Contact…”

Clovis repeated the word under his breath, as though he’d never said it before. “Contact—yeah, that’s what I mean. Like X, you know? You get that rush…”

His voice drifted off. The music shifted, channeled into a familiar backwash of guitar chords and feedback and gongs, a shrieking dub version of a song Trip recognized but couldn’t name. His skin yawned open, his mouth filled with saliva, salt; the scent of roses and lilacs. A girl’s breathy voice plucked at his spine—

And she was there, her kingfisher, her small hands pressed against him, her fingers icy as they kneaded his skin, her breath hot and coming in quick bursts.

“Marz—” He tried to pull her to him, felt her hair between his fingers like water. “Marz—”

She was gone. Another girl stood in front of him, long dark hair whipping around a heart-shaped face, eyes carefully outlined in kohl and gold dust. Skin glowing as though doused in flame. She was singing, and as she sang her arms threw off birds like sparks. There was an odd perturbation in the air around her, a cloud of grey and white that was like a hole. Trip could see through it and glimpse the ruined library, flailing shadows. The dark-haired girl laughed, a sound thick with the scent of burning grass, and reached for his hand. He felt her fingernails drag across his palm and shook his head, took a shuffling backward step as she sang.

Her body shimmered. He could see vines tattooed upon her bare arms and a tiny green lizard skittering down one leg. Her voice rose into a howl as she twirled into a thicket of flame. Behind her another figure knelt, a black-skinned man coaxing a blaze from something on the floor, smoke and scorched metal. Trip swallowed as it all came together, words and music and a movie he’d seen once in a hotel room. For an instant the man raised his head. His eyes were yellow, like a cat’s. Iridescent green beetles crawled inside them.

Then a shaft of brilliant white light ripped through the air. The dark-haired girl and the kneeling man blinked from sight, then back again. Feedback echoed. Streamers of lavender and lilac threaded down through the crowd. The dark-haired singer stared right at him, her eyes flexing like wings.

She began to dissolve into blobs of yellow and orange and chartreuse. People were cheering and shouting. Where the girl had been fiery letters traced across the air, like the tracks left by sparklers on a summer night.

Above him ripples of green and gold and violet lashed the air. There was a brilliant pulse of orange in one corner of the room, a sound like low thunder. Then it was as though the ceiling were torn away. Trip blinked, staring into the prismatic sky. The room grew still, voices hushed, feet shuffling impatiently. There was a smell of the sea; there was the scent of lilacs. Something damp pressed against the palm of his hand, like an open mouth. He jerked backward, saw more words spinning in the air.

Small teeth tried to pierce his skin. Warmth probed his ear, a woman’s voice that made him go rigid.

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

Something began to spin in front of Trip’s face: a golden pyramid no bigger than an insect. As he watched it began to grow larger. Beams of light played across it, a clamor of gongs and bells where they intersected. The sky was gone, and the hive of stoned dancers. There was only that monolithic golden shape, and within it a pulsing core that resolved into a vast irradiating eye, its iris sky-blue. The eye wheeled away, growing smaller yet more brilliant, until it hung like a tiny perfect star upon the brow of a boy with glowing blue eyes and sinuously moving hands.

“I possess the keys of hell and death,” he sang, “I will give you the morning star: the end of the end…”

It was the icon. Face tilted upward as it sang, eyes staring into the shattered sky as it danced. From its head reared a glittering ornament like a pagoda that sent forth dazzling sparks of aquamarine and ruby and emerald green.

Trip felt the same stirrings of bewitchment that he had in the studio at MIT. The icon grinned. It was real. Between the crowd of dancers and the earlier image of the girl singing there had still been a veil, the blinkered effect of senses struggling with what was before them.

This icon was different. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was all but unrecognizable as an analogue of Trip Marlowe, even to Trip himself: if he hadn’t experienced it before, if he hadn’t remembered writing the words and melody it sang, would he have known it wasn’t real? He wasn’t sure; and the uncertainty terrified him. His entire body yearned for it, even as some spark of his consciousness recoiled.

He felt sick and feverish; revolted. The icon commanded desire and adoration and awe: it danced upon an invisible plane several inches above the library floor, and its dance made that unseen stratum more real than anything else. Something crashed beside Trip. He wrenched his gaze from the icon and saw a weeping girl sprawled beside him, her eyes huge and black and staring, though it was not Trip they saw. She had tried to follow the dancer, and fallen.

The icon spun and flashed. Trip could hear people talking to themselves, whispers of recognition; cries of grief. The music roared on, bells and gamelan; but now Trip could hear how insignificant the song was. Too clumsy, with its words and trumped-up tracking; too corporeal. Like the girl pawing pathetically at Trip’s feet: an ugly reminder that, despite the IZE, they were all still bound to earth by filaments of muscle and meat and memory. They were all still flesh, inherently flawed.

And the icon was not.

He glanced down, saw the girl had been sick. The icon shimmered. There was a break in the image, a subtle rippling that for an instant distorted its eerily beautiful face. Trip felt a brisk clarity at the foul smell that rose from the floor behind him. He shut his eyes, but the impulse to see the icon was irresistible.

“Make it stop,” someone cried out. “Oh God make it stop…”

Trip swallowed. Fear nudged at him; too late he tried to wrest his gaze from the icon, one leg drawn up beneath it like a heron’s.

Whirling stars swept across its eyes, green trees and blue water, a rippling brown mat of living creatures racing across an emerald plain. The icon opened its hands. Within its palms golden-eyed frogs crawled, throats bubbling as they sang. They leapt into the air, forelegs extended so that he could see their tiny toe pads, their glistening skin. Where they had been an egg trembled in the icon’s cupped hand, its shell a color that Trip had forgotten he ever knew. Cracks appeared upon the shell, the clawed nub of a minute beak. Something pushed its way free until it sat with lidless glaring eyes. Something like a tiny feathered dragon, eagle’s curved beak and claws, pointed ears that flattened against its skull as it hissed at him.

Trip’s flesh prickled. With all his will he forced himself to look away, to stagger in the other direction; and directly into Leonard Thrope.

“Trip…” Trip looked up to see the slight man standing somewhat unsteadily. “Trip Marlowe?”

Trip swung at him. Leonard moved backwards as a hand grabbed Trip’s and yanked him sideways. “Oh, hey, Trip, nice to see you too—”

Flash of crimson as he smiled; another flash as someone struck Trip on the side of the face. He cried out, looked up through watering eyes to see a blond woman a full head and shoulders taller than he was, her body sheathed in pink latex, face hidden behind a Barbie mask.

“Check him, Mikey,” said Leonard.

Within the mask a mouth opened, showing white teeth filed to a point and tipped with gold. “Okay,” she said to Trip. “C’mere, you—”

She spun him to face her, ran her hands expertly up and down his sweater and pants; found the wallet Martin had given him. She glanced inside, with a shrug handed it to Leonard and reached for his knapsack. At Leonard’s admonitory glance she set it down. “Nothing on him but that.”

As she stepped away Trip slumped to the floor. His cheek throbbed where she’d hit him, his head felt as though it’d been pumped full of Novocain. He stared murderously up at Leonard Thrope, who only grinned and took the wallet. He opened it, raising his eyebrows at the amount of cash; then screwed up his face to examine the driver’s license. “Old enough to drink yet, Trip? Let’s see.”

Leonard frowned. Then his appearance changed, melted from malign amusement into something Trip had only seen once before, when his mother received the news of his father’s suicide. An utter void of expression, lines smoothed away, eyes blank. He looked at Trip, then at the license. He perused it for a good minute, thumbed through the rest of the wallet, examining business cards, photographs, whatever was in there. Leonard held the driver’s license between two fingers and stared at it, finally slid it into a pocket of his leather jacket.

“Where did you get this, Trip?”

Trip glared at him sullenly. He thought of lying, of saying he’d stolen it. Instead he got to his feet, squaring off with his fists at his sides. The Barbie Amazon edged closer to him. “He gave it to me.”

“Who gave it to you?” Leonard asked.

“He gave it to me.” Trip said defiantly. He stuck out his hand. “Martin Dionysos. Can I have it back?”

“Martin Dionysos gave this to you.” Leonard glanced at Mikey. He nodded and she backed away to lean against a wall, eyes blank as pewter, her body giving off the scent of rubber and vanilla.

Leonard turned back to Trip. “Where, Trip? Here? In this club?”

Trip shook his head. The other man seemed uneasy, staring back at Trip with an intense, fearful hunger. Trip felt a sting of poisonous exultation: so Leonard Thrope could be afraid of something!

“No.” He grinned disarmingly. When Leonard ventured a wary smile back, he snatched the wallet from his hand, ducking as Mikey lashed out at him.

“You little fucker—”

“Mikey—no!” Leonard shouted. Like a snake she drew back. “Leave him…” Quickly he turned back to Trip, who had grabbed his knapsack and was breathing heavily. “Is he here? Martin—is he in the city?”

Trip shook his head. “No. It was back in Maine. At a place called Mars Hill…”

Leonard nodded, eyes distant.

“Though actually, he did give me this here”—Trip held up the wallet, then shoved it into his front pocket—“on his boat.”

“When?”

“Yesterday—” Trip frowned. “No, this morning.”

“What were you doing with him?”

Trip hesitated. “He saved me. I—I tried to kill myself, up there. At home. I jumped into the water to drown. But I was washed up on shore. Martin found me.”

Leonard’s gaze shifted from whatever far-off thing he had seen to Trip’s face. “This is after I saw you. After we made the recording.” Trip nodded. “Lucius said you’d do that—he said you’d split and go back to Maine. He thought you’d freak out on tour. He said you wouldn’t be able to handle it—he said you’d go home. Nellie thought you took off with her foster daughter.” Leonard nibbled his lip; a ruby spark flared and died. “That’s what I thought, too. But you didn’t?”

“No. Do you know where she is?”

Leonard shook his head. “No,” he said. “I really don’t.”

He sighed, ran a hand through his long mass of greying curls. He tugged at an intricate braid of gold and leather and tiny mirrors until it stretched before him; stared into the spectrum of tangled glass and metal as though divining something there. He raised his eyes to Trip’s. “You said Martin gave you his wallet, here in the city. He left Mars Hill, then? He came with you? Where is he now?”

Trip shrugged. He had lost his balance: Leonard Thrope had moved his hand and once again the world had shifted under Trip’s feet.

“Where is he? ” repeated Leonard.

“He left,” said Trip. The words tore at his heart. Because suddenly he saw the blond girl again, a shaft of bright pink disappearing through a revolving door.

“To where? Did he tell you?”

“I don’t know. He had his boat—we sailed down here, we left about two weeks ago—”

“But why did he leave?” Leonard’s tone grew anguished. “He was so sick! The only thing keeping him alive was that he stayed up there—why would he leave?”

“Well—he brought me here. I mean, I asked him to,” Trip said; then, with slowly dawning astonishment, “You know him?”

“I’ve known Martin Dionysos for twenty fucking years. We were at RISD together, I left my goddamn high-school sweetheart for him. Then Martin dumped me. We ended up at different galleries—”

He laughed harshly. “—we had, oh, different views about art. Among other things. He hasn’t left that place up in Maine for years, now.”

“But he wanted to—” Trip’s voice rose defensively. “I mean, I didn’t, like, force him or something—”

Leonard stared at Trip.

“Didn’t you know how sick he was?” he asked. “Couldn’t you tell? You stupid fucking kid.”

“No! He wanted to do it—”

“Of course he wanted to do it!” Leonard grabbed Trip’s arm and shook him. “Look at you! Little blond piece—he fucking fell in love with you, you little prick! Christ, he thought he saved you? Martin spent his whole life looking for stray dogs! You fucking asshole!” Trip saw tears glowing in the basilisk eyes. “Didn’t you notice anything? Didn’t you see he was sick?”

“No.”

For a long moment he held Trip’s gaze. The boy stiffened, sure that Leonard was going to strike him. Instead he shook his head and glanced over his shoulder.

“Mikey,” he shouted above the music. “Get the others. We’re going. You—”

He turned to Trip. “You’re coming with me—”

“The fuck I am.” But before he could pull away another Barbie appeared, identical to the first shimmering plasteen mask, effaced eyes, latex catsuit.

“Bring him to the limo,” Leonard commanded. “We’re going. Now.”

The second woman dragged Trip through the crowd, following Leonard as he pushed his way downstairs. By the makeshift doors the caftaned bouncers stood, talking. As Leonard approached one began to shout.

“Hey man, no one leaves till—”

But then the others broke in.

“Leonard!”

“Yo, Lenny! Takin’ off?”

Leonard nodded as the caftaned men pulled aside a heavy metal fire door. Icy air roared inside, a flurry of ashes.

“’Night, Leonard.”

“Later, Leonard—”

They were outside. The ashes were snow; it coated the ground like dark fur. In the street a huge seal-grey limousine idled. A figure in black rubber and mouthless black mask stepped from the driver’s seat and opened one of the back doors, holding it as Leonard slid inside.

“Fayal, this young gentleman will be accompanying us,” said Leonard, jerking a thumb at Trip.

“Wh—” Trip began, but before he could say more was shoved into the seat beside Leonard.

“Shut up.” The older man smiled coldly, reached to take Trip’s chin in his hand. “You ought to thank me,” he said, as the two Barbies and several other people clambered into the limo’s backseats, laughing and complaining.

“Oh yeah?” Trip hunched against the window, trying to sound tough. He and Leonard had the middle seat to themselves. He could see the others watching him with amusement.

“Sure.” With a soft thump the last door closed. “You’re going to a party, Trip.”

“A what?”

“A big party. And you weren’t even invited.” As the limo shot into the street Leonard gazed out to where the sky moved overhead, gyring in upon itself. “You lucky kid.”

Trip stared at him. He cradled his knapsack and stared resolutely at his knees. “What kind of party?”

“What kind of party?” Leonard raised his eyebrows. From the backseat came raucous laughter. “Don’t you know what today is, Trip?”

The boy sank sullenly into the seat. “Yeah.”

“So!” Leonard reached over and grabbed Trip’s knee, shook it in mock excitement. His hazel eyes narrowed. He leaned in close as the limo roared around a corner and his entourage shrieked delightedly. “Well, gee whiz, Trip, gee whiz—Happy fucking New Year.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Chairman Dances

The elevator opened onto night: thousands of stars thrown across the sky, tree limbs scratching at streaks of cloud, silver moon. Beneath his feet crunched a thin layer of snow, and beneath the snow the firm-mattress spring of earth. There was the perfume of balsam, so fragrant Jack felt as though his face had been thrust into a soft-needled bed, and underlying that the faint sickly smell of Viconix.

“May I see your ID, please?”

He was so enraptured of the sky that it wasn’t until someone touched him lightly but insistently on the arm that he realized he’d been questioned.

“Sir?”

Jack looked up into the broad face of a veritable security giant, former linebacker or WWF hero in GFI’s red-and-gold livery, the outlines of his formal jacket corrugated by the bulletproof vest he wore beneath, his head haloed with chatlinks: headphones, mic, beepers, vocoder.

Oh: and three guns.

“Yeah, sure, wait—”

Jack patted anxiously at pockets for his wallet. He sensed shadows moving just beyond his vision, the premonition of many huge hands about to clap onto his shoulders.

“Oh! No—of course, wait,” he stammered, recalling his hand, the image scanned there by the foot courier months before. “You need this—”

He grinned feebly and held up his palm. The gryphon glowed a brilliant red-gold. A huge black-gloved hand encircled Jack’s wrist, held it steady while the other hand drew a flattened disc across his palm. There was a reassuring chime. Jack felt a warm, not-quite-painful tingling. The guard did a thorough pat-down, checking Jack’s pockets, running fingers through his lank hair.

“You enjoy the evening, sir,” he finally pronounced, beckoning Jack forward. Somewhere behind him he heard excited voices, the sooosh of a revolving door.

“Happy New Year.”

Jack stepped away; when he was at a safe distance glanced down at his clothes. He was still wearing what he’d had on at Lazyland when Jule kidnapped him—white oxford-cloth shirt, quite soiled; dark green chinos; worn brown corduroy jacket. His temple throbbed; he rubbed it gingerly, trying to make sense of time. It had been, what? Wednesday morning when he left Lazyland? The twenty-ninth of December? He was fairly certain of the date, if not the day of the week.

Nellie’s words came to him: You’ll be at the party tonight…

He had lost a day; more than that, two days, squandered in a cell within the Pyramid. He had a flash of his grandmother sick with worry, his brother Dennis tending her; of the blond girl going into labor.

He recalled what else Nellie Candry had told him—

Blue Antelope. They’ve planned a terrorist strike against the SUNRA dirigibles…

He looked up, saw trees and night sky and stars, behind them a faint crosshatching, lurid pulse of green and violet. When he tipped his head, he could make out slender beams of light flickering through the air, like the traplines of a spider’s web, and discern where the projected constellations spun off from the center.

He turned back and saw a sweep of gold slanting upward: the Pyramid. The lozenges of black and gold at its base were elevators, tunnels, revolving doors, glowing corporate logos. The myriad multicolored figures—masked, helmeted, armored, sheathed—were other invited guests. He was in the staging area that adjoined the Pyramid, the atrium arena GFI had constructed for the Millennial Ball. The entire vast space had been turned into a kind of cyclorama. White flakes whirled in agitated arcs he associated with old movies and snowmaking machinery. Firs and leafless birch trees had been planted everywhere, receding into a silvery blur where he could make out raised stages, arcades, pavilions, gold-and-red-clothed tables, promenades of emerald glass, house-sized video monitors, red-and-gold information kiosks, Red Cross tents, pillars emblazoned with logos. The sight of so much stuff, so many people, made his head ache. When he blinked, phantom rockets spun off into the snow, so that for a moment he thought someone had set off fireworks.

But no. He yawned nervously, tasting copper in the back of his throat, and salt. His edginess swelled into anticipation, something close to exhilaration. He thought of Larry Muso, his absurd hair, how surprisingly soft it had felt. What had he said about meeting him? A place called Electric Avenue, sometime in the morning…

Jack was fairly certain that he’d missed morning. At the very least, the folks here at GFI had gone to a lot of trouble to create the illusion of a midwinter night, once upon a time. He gazed at tents and tables, fluttering pennons of gold and crimson video screens that showed GFI’s dirigibles silhouetted against a slowly turning pinwheel sky. There were people everywhere, revelers in costume and black tie, kimonoed men and women, guests in formal robes, and some who were all but naked, save for gold-mesh caches-sexe and dominoes covering their faces; and almost as many uniformed security personnel.

“Let’s find a goddamn place to sit,” complained a white-haired man, maskless, tuxedoed, his eyes invisible behind silvery plasmer.

“Let’s find a goddamn bar.”

Jack looked over to see an elegantly spare woman with sleek blond hair, bare shoulders thrusting from a column of hyaline silk. For an instant he thought she must recognize him, from some long-ago New York Public Library benefit or barbecue in the Hamptons. Then he saw the quiver of fear in her eyes, a tremor in the too-taut skin around her mouth. She turned away and took her companion’s arm, steering him toward a cluster of security guards beneath a video screen displaying an aerial view of the Pyramid.

Jack stopped, brow furrowed. The woman had been afraid of him. He was disheveled. Unshaven, too; and maskless; no expensive placebits or plasmer, no facial tattoos or identifying brands; nothing but skin.

He shivered. Snow brushed his forehead. When he wiped it away, it left a greenish sheen to his fingers. He thought of what Nellie had told him of GFI’s plans to distribute the fusarium bacteria, and a wave of nausea went through him. Cold wind played at his face, redolent of balsam; he could also smell a trace of acrid smoke, raw sewage, the standing-water scent of the city. If he stared beyond the scrim of stars and pared moon, he could see the structural grid of the dome; beyond that, something else lodged within the real sky like a bullet in a wound. A glistening golden shape, outlined with red lights that spelled out GFI then melted into the image of a gryphon holding a globe in its claws. Not far from it another, and another. He counted seven of them, an unmoving school of skyborne leviathans. A field of black spread between them like a stain—the sky platform, part of the payload to be towed into the upper atmosphere tonight.

…Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure…

In the distance he heard an orchestra tuning up, the echoing snarl of feedback, and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. A liveried woman approached him, carrying a tray of champagne flutes. Jack took a glass from her gloved hand. As she left, two security people passed in a haze of electrified chatter, glancing at him. Jack sipped his champagne. Within minutes he felt light-headed. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He still didn’t feel hungry; the opposite, in fact, strung-out but intently focused. He wondered what would happen if he approached security and told them about the bomb.

He finished the champagne. The waitress reappeared. He set his empty glass on her tray and took another full one, watched as more and more people filled GFI’s winter palace.

Someone sure had a lot of friends. And probably they wouldn’t like it if some emaciated, scruffy-looking, no doubt virulent guy, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a mask, started raving about bombs. He thought of Jule, of Nellie Candry slumped elsewhere within the Pyramid. He would be detained again, maybe permanently, an unknown man connected with two suspicious deaths.

“Happy New Year!” A creamy-skinned young girl, no makeup, no mask, tossed a handful of glitter at him. “Happy New Year!”

She turned giggling back to her friends. He watched them go, and thought of flames raining from the sky, burning fuselage, ten thousand panicked people dying in a crush of fire and twisted girders. The world unredeemed by solex shields, all of humanity doomed because Jack Finnegan hadn’t acted on a tip about a terrorist bomb threat. Weighed that against the image of himself being questioned, insisting on the veracity of a dead woman’s ravings about terrorists and psychotropic drugs, while the party of the century went on till dawn without him, and he was finally released to stumble home to his brother’s accusing eyes. He thought of Leonard here, somewhere in his stained leather motley: the Lord of Misrule. He thought of kissing Larry Muso, of making love to him and holding him afterward, the two of them laughing—bombs! what bombs? He thought of Nellie Candry, of the web of connectedness she’d shown him; how easily it could be torn but how that was how the light got through, sometimes.

I should leave, he thought. I could escape now, I could get away from here, somehow get back to Lazyland…

But that would mean never seeing Larry Muso again. That would mean never knowing how it might have all turned out. And he wasn’t quite ready to forgo the chance to see what might have been.

And suddenly, with a clarity that took his breath away, he realized that Leonard had won, after all. They had all won, Julie and Leonard and everyone who had ever urged Jackie Finnegan to go for a dangerous drive, cross against the light, leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, fall in love with strangers.

Because Jack saw it was the jump that mattered: not the presumed safety of the cliff edge, nor the certainty of annihilation at the bottom. It was Chance that mattered, the dizzying recognition that somebody or something was, in fact, playing dice with the world, and had been all along.

Phantom sparks glimmered in the air, green and gold and violet. He glanced again at the dome, half-expecting to see the real and broken sky there, mirroring his own dislocation. He heard a soft roaring, a sound he had heard before—in the wind, in the sea, in the pulse of blood through his ears.

It was, he realized, the sound of things falling apart.

He began to laugh. For the first time in forty-two years, he realized that Free Will and Free Fall could feel very much the same.

I love the sound of breaking glass, he thought.

And hurried to find Larry Muso.

It took him forever to find Electric Avenue. Threading his way among partygoers and fire-eaters, little people, a woman whose body was a mosaic of video-circuitry reflecting the faces of those gawping at her—pausing now and then to take in one of the stage shows. Overhead, corporate logos flamed like Roman candles, their reflections trailing across faces and masks. An orchestra played “Begin the Beguine.” The Jayne County Dance Theater performed excerpts from Elektra. There was a survey of the Broadway musical from its vaudeville origins to Assassins; the Kronos Quartet, halfway through Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. Palm readers, an onychomancer. Clocks, analog and digital, that showed the time here in New York—9:48 P.M.—as well as the hour in every time zone across the world.

And food—acres and acres of food, more food than Jack had dreamed was left in the world. He bypassed the McDonald’s World Market, stopped to eat some caviar and a gummy slice of nova that tasted of petroleum, washed down with more champagne. The alcohol seemed to intensify the effects of the fusarium, if that’s what was causing the flares that pulsed just beyond his vision, the sense of a burgeoning rapture that, like the phantom lights, was just beyond his full comprehension.

He walked unsteadily through what had become a huge crowd. People mobbed the food tents as though they held celebrities. He saw one man filling the pockets of his morning coat with triangles of toast and foie gras. Scuffles broke out, to be immediately put down by security police in flak jackets. Immense video displays showed scenes of millennial revels around the globe: blue-faced dancers in Delhi, drunken parties in Queensland, an ominously quiet Tehran street. The green silence of vanilla farms on Tafahi in the Kingdom of Tonga, the first place on earth where the new millennium would break. Now and then, glimpses of the crowd below. Screaming would erupt then, and cheers. He glanced overhead to see if the Fougas were still there, saw only the shimmer of false stars and the glow of reflected lights within the dome.

BONG.

A thunderous gong: more cheers. Ten o’clock. The snow had stopped—he overheard someone say the hydraulic system was clogged, dredging up God knows what from the New York City water supply—and what was on the ground had melted, making it sloppy going underfoot. He began to think about finding a quiet place to sit, maybe even trying to figure out a way home, when he saw the marquee.

Blazing neon against a background of video confetti and flaking brick: a pavilion designed to look like a decrepit apartment building—an icehouse. He hurried through the entrance, pushing past three ragged teenagers with pincushion faces and retro crew cuts and eyes like mill wheels, sprawled in the mud against the building’s facade.

“Spare change?” one croaked.

Jack stepped over her. Inside was a warren of dank hallways and crumbling rooms, emblazoned with video screens that were doors into sunlight, ocean, mountaintop, sky. A few people milled about, a Japanese businessman, more stoned kids, an elderly woman whose plasmer lenses matched her cropped violet hair. It wasn’t until he wandered into the same rubble-strewn corridor for the third time that Jack realized the elderly violet-haired woman was turning her head in the exact same way she had before. He sucked his breath in; the woman continued to stare at a tape loop of erupting volcanoes. He stood, trying to find the lie to the illusion; finally approached her.

“Hello?” he said.

The woman ignored him. He moved his hand—it should have brushed the sleeve of her satin sheath. There was nothing there. When he jabbed at her his hand momentarily flickered from view; and then he could see it again, floating disembodied within the folds of her dress.

“Jack? Jack Finnegan?”

Someone grabbed his elbow.

“It is Jack, isn’t it!” Delighted laughter. “I thought I’d missed you, or you’d missed me—”

It was Larry Muso, looking extremely pleased. He wore a happi coat embroidered with sea animals—cuttlefish, octopuses, sea horses—over a black tunic and loose black trousers. His hair had been coiffed into a chambered nautilus threaded with gold and blue wire, tiny seashells, gilt starfish. Gold dust powdered his cheeks. His eyes were carefully edged in kohl.

“I know, I look like the Sea Hag!” he went on. “Were you here earlier? Did I miss you? Are you okay?”

He peered up into Jack’s face. “Jack? You don’t look very well, perhaps you should sit down?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Jack ran a hand across his forehead. “Actually, I am a little hot—this exhibit, I just figured out—”

“Aren’t they remarkable? They’ve been in development for a while, but this is the first time we’ve run the programs in public. There are still a few bugs,” he confided, taking Jack’s arm and leading him to where a staircase spilled outside. “Of course it doesn’t work in daylight, so we’ve done it like this.”

They were outside now, treading carefully down the steps until they stood in a puddle of snowmelt and squashed grass. Larry stared into Jack’s face with disarming happiness, after a moment touched his hand.

“I am glad to see you. Are you hungry? Busy? I mean, do you have—plans?”

Jack laughed. “You mean, what am I doing New Year’s Eve? Nothing but this—”

He grabbed Larry’s shoulder, looked down to see Larry staring at him. For a moment they stood in silence. Jack’s heart thrummed inside him, there was a soft roaring in his ears, ghostly sparks behind his eyes. When he let his hand fall away from Larry’s arm, he heard the other man release his breath in a long sigh.

“So.” Larry Muso cleared his throat. “Would you like to have dinner?”

“Dinner? Sure.”

“Wait—there’s a catch. Because I have to be at GFI’s private tent in”—Larry withdrew a pocket watch from his coat—“thirteen minutes. This is the formal dinner for Mr. Tatsumi and our Board of Directors, also some very hush-hush guests, and maybe some surprises. I am required to be there, but I could arrange for you to be there as well.”

“But—Jesus, I’m not dressed for it, Larry.” Jack shook his head, “This has been a pretty horrible few days. A friend of mine died, and—”

“Hush.” Larry rested a finger against his lips. “I can find you a jacket and tie, my friend. They may even fit,” he added, eyeing Jack’s lanky frame. “You look very tired.”

“I know. I’m in pretty bad shape. Probably I shouldn’t even have come.”

“No.” Larry took his arm. “I’m so glad you did. Come with me now—”

And Jack went.

GFI’s private pavilion was walled with light, pulsing columns twenty feet high arranged in a great circle.

“A new kind of full-spectrum fluorescent,” Larry Muso explained as they stopped at a checkpoint. “Very low wattage, very efficient. They promote serotonin production.”

“That’s great.” said Jack. Larry’s relentless enthusiasm was pure balm, Larry himself was balm, his ridiculous clothes and laughter, those lovely dark eyes.

“Yes, it is.” Larry stepped aside so that the security guards could search Jack, photograph and fingerprint him. A jacket had been found, black silk Armani, far too big. Jack did the best he could, rolling up the sleeves, took the paisley foulard Larry gave him and tied it loosely about his throat.

“Do I look like an idiot?”

“You look very, very good.”

Jack lifted his hand to touch Larry’s cheek. He leaned forward until that absurd pelagic curl of hair brushed his face, and felt something fall away inside him, an iceberg calving; a grief so old he hadn’t even known he was frozen.

I could love him, he thought. If it’s not too late.

“Late?”

Jack saw Larry’s head cocked questioningly. Had he spoken aloud?

“It is almost ten-thirty,” Larry said. “But the party goes on through tomorrow.”

They passed beneath a glowing arch where a holographic gryphon reared and clasped the sun to its breast, into an open space where tables were laid out with bloodred cloths, spare arrangements of black twigs, and golden ornaments shaped like sun and moon and stars, crystal glasses, gleaming flatware, bone white chopsticks. Overhead the space yawned into the glittering uppermost reaches of the dome, false stars twinkling, moon now at full. Fifty or so people were scattered around the area. Men in black tie and robes and kente cloth, women in elegant evening wear, masks held in bejeweled hands. Jack recognized a few of them—a well-known stage actress of middle years, a television anchorman who had covered the war in South Korea; a mori artist who’d been a protégé of Leonard’s. Clink of glasses, soft tread of waiters. Tuxedoed men bore champagne, Scotch, trays of sushi and tiny fresh strawberries.

“Here.” Larry Muso scooped several pieces of uni and tow onto a chilled plate and handed it to Jack. “I won’t be able to sit with you, but I’ve put you at a table with—”

He broke off as an austerely dressed blond woman approached them. She nodded politely, spoke in a low voice to Larry. He glanced sideways at Jack. “Mr. Tatsumi needs to speak with me about a few things. I believe you’re at Table Seven. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

He bowed and walked with the woman across the room. Jack watched them go. With Larry gone, he felt Nellie’s warning lodged like a poison dart within his breast. He felt the way he had the last few times he’d flown, in the wake of the Jihad 9 bombings: anxious but not frightened enough to forgo the trip. He took another glass of champagne and walked around.

At one end of the room a dance floor had been set up. A technician sat behind an array of computers and other equipment. Six black-clad women crossed the dance floor, carrying musical instruments, sat beside him, and began tuning up. Two violins, two kotos, viola, and cello. They started to play, a heartbreakingly plangent melody. Jack stood, listening, turned away as they launched into a more familiar piece.

People were getting seated now. Waiters moved gracefully, pouring wine, setting out decanters of sake and cast-iron teapots. The wall of lights dimmed to a bluish glow as Jack found Table Seven.

The other guests’ names had been painted in gold leaf on porcelain tablets. Jack saw none that he recognized. His own was written in a swooping calligraphic hand—Mr. John Finnegan—on a square of thick handmade paper. He took his seat, leaned over to read the china place card at the setting to his right.

He was wondering who Peter Stillman Loomis was, when a hand tattooed with death’s-heads and flaming trees plucked the bit of porcelain from its holder and replaced it with another.

He whirled and saw Leonard step over to the neighboring table. There Leonard shuffled several more place cards, grabbed a bottle of champagne from a silver bucket, and ambled back.

“Hello, Jackie-boy.” He yanked out the chair beside Jack and slid into it, leathers creaking, chains and amulets tinkling. “May I join you?”

“I guess so. I guess you’re invited?”

“Long before you were.” Leonard raised a gold-bedecked eyebrow at Jack’s place card. “Paper and ink. How quaint.” He laughed, baring white sharp teeth like a fox’s, and clapped a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “So! You actually got here. Congratulations. I’m amazed. I didn’t think you’d really come.”

Jack shook his head. “Leonard, listen to me. Julie’s dead. He—he—”

Leonard’s grin tightened into a grimace. “I know.” He stared at his fingers, the network of scars and interlacing coils, reached out and covered Jack’s hand with his own. “Emma called me. To help her with some of the police stuff. They had him pegged as some kind of fucking terrorist or something. Julie. Can you imagine? I called a couple of people, to help her out. To figure out what the hell to do with the body, how to get him back to Westchester. She was going to go to your house, Jackie—we could only get an ambulance to take him that far.”

“To Lazyland?”

“Yeah. I have no idea what’ll happen from there. What a mess. What a goddamn mess.” Leonard sighed. “Christ, Jackie. Just thee and me, now, and I’m not so sure about thee.”

Jack sat in silence. In the background the sextet played, strings chased by the kotos’ plangent notes. The thought of Emma at Lazyland soothed him, despite his grief. Doctor Duck calming Keeley and Mrs. Iverson, tending to Marz even as she laid out her own dead husband…

“Oh God.” He covered his eyes.

“Poor Jackie.” Leonard put an arm around him. “It’s okay, Jackie, it’s okay—”

“Of course it’s not okay.” Jack looked at Leonard. “Nothing’s fucking okay. You know that.”

“Of course I know that. I’ve always known that.” Leonard’s eyes grew hard. He reached for Jack’s champagne and downed it at a gulp. “It’s poor idiots like you, just now catching on—you’re the ones having a bad time.” His placebit glittered as he poured another glassful. “End of the fucking end, Jackie-boy. Might as well whoop it up.”

At the table more people were seating themselves, glancing companionably at each other and making introductions. Leonard ignored them, and for once Jack sided with him. “So. Are you alone?”

Leonard made a rude sound. “Am I ever alone? No. But tonight—you’ll like this, Jackie—tonight I found this poor lost soul, this Xian kid who thinks he’s got a lawsuit or something against Agrippa Music for stealing his intellectual property. Broke my heart, let me tell you. I was going to bring him in, but then I decided, probably not such a great idea. So he’s waiting out in the limo. Otnay ootay ightbray, if you take my meaning.” He tilted back in his chair. “But he’s cute.”

Jack gave him a disgusted look. “Glad I asked.” He lowered his voice. “Something else happened. I met someone, a woman named Nellie Candry—”

“I know Nellie Candry.”

“She’s dead.”

Leonard’s green-flecked eyes closed, after a beat opened again. They would not meet Jack’s gaze. “She’s dead,” Leonard said at last.

Jack nodded. “Blue Antelope,” said Leonard.

“No. She killed herself. Before they could get to her, I guess. Some kind of—I don’t know, a poison capsule.”

Behind them the music soared, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth with kotos. A plate was set before Jack, curls of green and pearl pink, an octopus no bigger than his thumbnail.

“Yummy,” said Leonard. He picked up his chopsticks and pushed desultorily at his plate. “She knew they were going to kill her. They found out she defected.”

“Couldn’t you have helped her?” Jack pushed his plate away. The young Asian woman to his left glanced at him, her skin creamy orange from lichen supplements, teeth capped to look like blue-veined marble. “I mean, you could have—”

“Couldn’t do a fucking thing, Jackie-boy.” Leonard grinned cheerlessly. “God’s Mafia. And the young ones are the worst. All that energy they should put into drugs and fucking? Goes right into this other shit. Blowing up hospitals. Save the whales.”

To his side, a well-dressed man with a graying ponytail frowned. Leonard lifted his champagne glass to him and pronounced, “‘Curse God and die.’ I say, fuck Him.” The man turned away as Leonard continued. “Admit it, Jackie. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be bored out of your mind. You’d be—”

“Shut up, Leonard,” Jack said wearily. “Just shut up.”

Leonard focused his attention back on his food. Jack swiveled to look across the room. At the head table, a middle-aged Japanese man sat between two men in tuxedos and their wives. Several scary-looking bodyguards stood behind him, all flak jackets and plasmer eyes.

That would be Mr. Tatsumi, thought Jack. He wondered about Mrs. Tatsumi, recalling the news report he’d heard some time ago—that her death had been a suicide. He gazed across the head table until he spotted Larry Muso, seated between two young men conventionally dressed in tuxedos and luminous cummerbunds. The three of them smiled and nodded to one another, oblivious to his stare.

The sextet took a break. A bland old Europop hit oozed from the speakers. Jack toyed with his chopsticks. When a waiter started to remove his plate Leonard snagged the octopus and popped it into his mouth. The waiter slid a new plate in front of Jack, this one with salad greens.

“Eat,” ordered Leonard. He poked Jack with his fork. “Not even the Pope gets food like this. Eat your goddamn salad.”

Jack ate. When it was gone he took a gulp of champagne, hesitated, then said, “She told me Blue Antelope was going to blow this place up. Nellie Candry. She said there was going to be some kind of terrorist attack.”

Leonard shook his head. “Not this place per se. Just the Fougas. They want to sabotage any attempt to interfere with the Big Guy’s plan for us. Which seems to be not unlike His plan for T. Rex.”

Jack stared at Leonard, incredulous. “It’s true?”

“True? Yeah, probably.”

“They’re going to blow it up?” Jack pointed at the dome high above them. “She was telling me the goddamn truth? The drugs, and now this? Why the fuck didn’t you—”

He started from his chair, but Leonard yanked him back down. “Shut up, Jackie,” he said evenly. “You want to get arrested?”

“I don’t give a—”

“That’s right! That’s the attitude to take. Don’t—give—a fuck,” Leonard said very carefully. “Who knows what the hell’s going to happen? Who cares?”

“I do. I mean, I care if I die—”

“Get over it.” Leonard leaned forward. “What are you going to do, go and tell security? What do think will happen then? I’ll tell you: you’ll get a long vacation in a holding cell, with interrogators and other friendly visitors. That’s if you make it out of here. I bet half the staff in this room are Blue Antelope operatives.

“Drink your champagne, Jackie-boy. ’Cause this is it, apocalypse ciao. Those Fougas?”

Leonard cocked his thumb at the dome. The stars had abruptly dimmed, and the moon. Jack saw the grid of glass and metal, and beyond it a churning whirlpool of purple and green and blue, speared by crimson lightning. Within it the seven dirigibles floated serenely, a pod of whales in a Satanic storm.

“They’re not going to do shit,” Leonard hissed. “What, you think this is Star Wars? You think you can save the fucking world by having it put on sunglasses? This is terminal, Jack. Goddamn cancer ward. The best we can hope for now is a good show. And good drugs.”

Jack stared at him, aghast. “Then why did you come here?”

“‘The sky is full of good and bad, but mortals never know.’”

“What’s that? Fucking Euripides?”

“Robert Plant. It’s a party, Jackie. ‘Here we are now, entertain us!’ Why the hell not? What else were you going to do? Sit up there in the family mausoleum and watch the river rise while you wait to die? I couldn’t let you do that. At least this way you got a night out. I mean, isn’t it better this way? Aren’t you happy, Jackie-boy?” He took Jack’s hand. “Aren’t you glad to be with me, Jackie? Here at the end of all things?”

“Fuck you.” Jack shoved his chair back. “Julie’s right, you’re a fucking psychotic.”

“Maybe. But Julie’s dead, and I’m not. I’m here, now. I’m alive, even if it’s just for another”—Leonard thrust his wrist out and perused the moon-phase Rolodex there. “Oh, another twenty-three minutes.”

“What happens in twenty-three minutes?”

“Last call, last dance. Closing time. Or nothing, maybe. The Fougas are scheduled to launch at 11:55. The fireworks start at midnight, all that ‘Auld Lang Syne’ shit. We’ll see what happens after that. My advice to you?” He attacked the lacquered box of Kobe beef that had appeared before him. “Finish your dinner. No one ever saved the world on an empty stomach.”

Jack speared a shred of beef speckled with dulse flakes. It tasted like the salmon had earlier, of petroleum and raw spirits. He set his chopsticks in the box and pushed it away, glanced at the entrance where he’d been admitted with Larry Muso. The security giant stood there with a dozen armed, uniformed men who might all have been cloned from the same linebacker. Jack grit his teeth, then poured more champagne.

All around him people ate and laughed. Leonard was listening to the man beside him, some kind of European investor.

“Security encryption devices for virtual private networks and intranets,” he explained as Leonard feigned interest.

Waiters brought green tea sorbet, pickled beets, scallops the size of pencil erasers. Roast pork with green apples, quail stuffed with unborn eggs, smoked domestic elk. Another sorbet, anise-flavored. Finally a flurry of desserts—profiteroles, something puffy and livid pink, like a jellyfish—and coffee, real coffee, greeted with hushed excitement; not even the very rich could find coffee anymore. Jack took a sip of his, trying not to show revulsion. It all tasted bad to him, almost poisonous.

“Well,” announced Leonard. “That wasn’t exactly Trimalchio’s feast, but—”

A soft voice cut him off, amplified from directly overhead.

“My friends—”

Jack turned with everyone else, to see the spare figure at the center of the head table standing, hands clasped against his stomach. His body mic gave the words an eerily hollow timbre. Behind him, bodyguards turned their heads back and forth, tracking something unseen.

“This is a moment I have awaited for a very long time.” Mr. Tatsumi paused, his expression somber. He blinked several times before continuing. “To be here in company with all of you, in such fine surroundings, on such an important day. On what may be the most important day in human history…”

Leonard made a face.

“… In the last eighteen months we have achieved quantum leaps in the areas of resource management and environmental reclamation, as well as breakthroughs in medical research that will affect every single person in this room. That may someday affect everyone on this planet.”

Enthusiastic applause.

“Hear that, Jackie?” said Leonard. “We’ll all be tan and rested in no time.” Leonard’s eyes narrowed as the chairman went on.

“We have made advances in entertainment technology that will change the way we see that world. Most importantly, in a few minutes you will all witness the moment when we move from making world history, to remaking the world itself, when we launch the SUNRA platform.”

Tumultuous clapping and cheers.

“Thank you. Thank you all very much.” Mr. Tatsumi bowed, first to his tablemates, then to the gathered diners. He raised a hand, looked to where the lone technician sat behind his banks of equipment. Jack heard a scatter of Japanese from the CEO’s body mic. In the seats beside him, men and women stared expectantly at the dance floor.

The applause died away. Across the table from Jack, people nodded happily at each other, flushed and well fed. Women reached for handbags, men stretched. Dinner was finished, coffee drunk. Everyone was anxious to leave. Everyone was ready to find the real party. For the first time since he’d entered the room, Jack heard a cresting wave of sound from outside the GFI area, cheers and shrieks and a voice bellowing from a loudspeaker.

“ARE YOU READY? ELEVEN MINUTES AND—”

Jack glanced at Mr. Tatsumi, still standing by himself. The CEO looked small and rather lost, and impatient. A few tentative notes wafted from where the sextet sat very straight in their folding chairs. Around the perimeter of the dining area, the lighttubes flickered from blue to soft lavender. People who had been standing quickly settled back into their seats. The room grew quiet as the strings’ scattered notes resolved into the opening bars of “The Blue Danube.”

At one end of the dance floor a single follow spot appeared. Mr. Tatsumi stared at it, frowning. Jack moved his chair to get a better view, the hairs on his arms prickling. The follow spot bloomed larger, brighter, resolved into a column of blazing white. The column pulsed and trembled: something was taking shape within it. Then the adamant brilliance grew still. Light coursed into the figure at its center, like quicksilver filling a glass. People gasped. Jack heard someone whisper a name.

On the dance floor stood a woman, radiance streaming around her like water. She was small, black-haired, with a white face and burning black eyes. She wore a fabulously elaborate kimono, iridescent as a diamond, and so much larger than the woman it seemed as though she were impaled upon it. The waltz strains faltered; Jack glanced at the sextet, saw them gazing awed as everyone else at the vision in white. Very slowly, with careful steps and head downcast, the luminous figure walked to the center of the dance floor.

“Holy Christ,” breathed Leonard. “It’s Michiko.”

Jack shook his head. “Who?”

“His wife. The one who killed herself. Michiko Tatsumi. They made an icon of her.”

Jack looked for Mr. Tatsumi. The CEO was bent double, clutching the edge of the table in front of him. His eyes were fixed on the icon. Several men clustered at his side, Larry Muso among them, but Mr. Tatsumi motioned them away. The CEO straightened, and haltingly walked to the dance floor.

The woman stood, arms outstretched, the sleeves of her kimono spilling from her arms like wings. Her mouth parted in a rapturous smile. As the chairman approached, she moved her head slightly back and forth, as though struggling to see him in a darkened room. When he stopped in front of her she cocked her head and opened her arms to him. The waltz swept joyously on. For a moment they were absolutely still, the frail black-clad man staring down into that glorious nimbus of a face, the icon’s mouth fluttering as though she were trying to speak. With exquisite care, he took her in his arms, and they began to dance.

Jack wiped his eyes and glanced around furtively, to see who else was crying. At his table, everyone. With the exception of Leonard, whose expression shifted from wonder to amusement to something Jack couldn’t read. He turned, looked at Jack, then shook his head.

Enough, Jack thought. Leonard Thrope is rendered speechless.

The room was still, all eyes fixed on the dancing pair. As “The Blue Danube” ended and the strings swept into another waltz, a couple from the head table stood and walked to the dance floor. Another couple joined them, and another, a zephyr of flowing gowns and coattails, until the entire room flowed with dancers, men and women, men and men, women and women, Mr. Tatsumi and his luminous bride, whirling like gorgeous clockwork toys. Jack watched them, so enthralled that he jumped when someone tapped his shoulder.

“Jack?” Larry stood there, smiling. “Would you like to dance?”

Jack stared at him, then nodded. “Yes,” he said, getting to his feet. “Of course.”

There were so many waltzing couples that they could only move very slowly, and nowhere near the dance floor. Jack held Larry hesitantly, his hand poised upon the smaller man’s shoulder. Larry tilted his head and stared up at him with such naked joy that nothing mattered but this, that he was no longer alone; that he could still dance, hear music, feel the warmth of Larry Muso’s neck beneath his hand. They turned, clockwise, counterclockwise, first one leading and then the other. Jack glanced up to see other faces mirroring his own joy, women with their husbands, daughters with their fathers, lovers and businessmen, scientists and artists. Only Leonard Thrope seemed to be sitting it out, leaning back in his chair with legs crossed, watching with an expression at once wistful and satisfied: as though finally, after all these years, he had gotten what he’d paid for.

“Look,” murmured Larry. He tipped his head to stare upward. “It must be almost midnight.”

High above them the stars were gone. The dome seemed to have melted away as well; the grid of glass and metal had disappeared. Where it had been an aperture was an opening in the ceiling, a circle spiraling outward like a huge blinking eye, until it revealed the naked sky in all its livid glory, and within it the Fougas, blindingly lit. It was as though sunlight spilled onto the assembled waltzers, sun and the glimmering’s bacchic pennons streaming across the heavens. The sounds of the waltz grew faint as couples clutched each other and cried out in amazement. Jack heard an exultant roar as the Pyramid’s ten thousand invited guests looked upon this crack in the dying century’s defenses. From an even greater distance he heard the almost unimaginable thunder of the city’s trembling revelry; the world’s.

“They’re ready,” said Larry Muso. Jack could only nod, watching raptly as the Fougas began to move. A darkness blotted out the whirling sky, as though a cloud passed between the Pyramid and the heavens.

“That’s the platform.” Larry grabbed Jack’s hand. “That’s what it’ll look like again, soon—we’ll see the sky again! We’ll see the stars—”

“It’s—it’s amazing.” Jack was trembling, with fatigue and exhilaration and something he could only think of as rapture. “I mean, that they’re going to do it.”

Larry squeezed his hand. “We’re going to do it. All of us. We’re going to make it all right again.”

The music had stopped. There was a deafening wave of sound, but Jack could still hear the Fougas’ steady thrum. He stared into open sky, the icy air dispersing the scents of perfume and sweat and Viconix. The dirigibles with their heraldic gryphons began to drift in formation, the SUNRA platform a swath of darkness behind them. Jack’s eyes hurt, he saw once more those luciferian flashes of emerald green. He found himself shouting, one hand on Larry’s shoulder, the other pounding at the air; cheering on the fleet.

Beneath one Fouga there was a starburst of white and crimson, a Catherine wheel of orange flame. Everyone applauded wildly, and Jack laughed, exultant.

“Look!” he cried. “God, look at it!”

He glanced at Larry. His eyes were wide, his smile gone.

“No,” said Larry Muso. “That’s wrong, they’ve got the timing wrong.”

“What do you mean—”

And then Jack looked up at the sky and saw that it was not fireworks but a conflagration, the night on fire:

Blue Antelope had struck.

Horrified screams as flame rained down and metal joists, burning fuselage and liquid fire. Glass exploded everywhere, there were bodies flying as people ran blindly, trampling tables and chairs, bodies. The forest of lighttubes shattered into bolts of violet and green. Jack stood, too stunned to move. Something slashed his arm. He looked down and saw a piece of glass protruding above his wrist. As in a nightmare he plucked it out, staring as blood welled from the seam of flesh.

“Jack! Jack!” Oily black smoke stung his eyes as someone barreled past him. “JACK! ”

“Larry!” Jack cried, and desperately searched until he saw him, sprawled on the floor. “Larry!”

The other man lifted his head, stumbling to his feet. His face was dead white, but as his eyes met Jack’s he nodded and raised his hand.

“I’m okay!” Larry shouted. “Go back to your house—wait for me there, Jack, I’ll meet you as soon as I can!”

There was a roar as a slab of burning fuselage crashed to the floor, and Larry’s voice echoed from behind smoke and leaping flame. “I’ll find you, just GO! ”

Jack staggered toward the blaze. His mouth formed Larry’s name, but he could no longer think of anything but the smell of burning metal, burning flesh, the screams of a woman made of light lurching toward him—

“Jackie ! Goddammit, Jackie—”

A hand grabbed him and yanked him back. Through that infernal chiaroscuro he saw forms like great scorched insects staggering through the murk. Someone shoved him through smoking rubble, the heaped bricks of a fallen tenement. A video monitor opened onto the ocean’s calm blue eye, blinked into sparks and the stink of melting wires. Jack fell to his knees, gagging, was pulled to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried into a passage dense with smoke, walls radiating heat as though he stumbled through a furnace. He coughed, choking on poisonous fumes. Whoever had pulled him to safety was gone. There was only smoke and echoing screams, an airless passage funneling into darkness.

As though he had plunged from a cliff, that world fell away. Smoke faded into frigid air. The darkness broke into plumes of crimson and violet. Jack shivered uncontrollably and looked around, dazed, saw that he was outside, in the street. There were people everywhere, thousands of them, the roar of flames and myriad explosions; sirens, screams, shouted orders, and the hoot of bullhorns. He saw a line of blazing cars, and overhead a vast pinwheel of green and violet, smoke and flames roiled into its core. A figure shook him fiercely and began to push him through the crowd.

“Keep moving, Jackie, keep moving—”

He turned and saw Leonard Thrope.

“Leonard,” he choked. “What—”

“Shut up.” Leonard pulled Jack close, holding him so tightly it hurt. “Fuck, I hope they’re here…”

Leonard stopped, panting. His skin was dark with soot. His cheek had been ripped open; Jack could see a spur of bone beneath the blackened skin. Leonard turned his head, spit blood, and pointed down a side street. “They should be there. Come on—”

He began to run and Jack followed, gasping with pain. “Who?”

“My limo. I told them to wait for me—”

They ran to where the sidewalk ended in a vacant lot strewn with wrecked cars. On the other side of the lot a grey stretch limo was parked. A man stood by the driver’s door, his mouthless mask shoved onto his forehead as he punched frantically at a cellphone. Another figure crouched beside the passenger door, face buried in his hands.

“Leonard!” the first man shouted, as Leonard and Jack ran up. “What the—”

“They blew ’em up!” Leonard yelled. The figure on the ground looked up: a young man in an anorak, stringy blond hair falling to his shoulders. “What the fuck’d you think, Fayal? Here—”

Leonard flung the passenger door open and reached inside, pulled out camera bags, and tossed them into the street. He looked over his shoulder at his driver and pointed first at Jack, then at the young man. “Okay, listen, Fayal,” he commanded. “I want you to take them to Yonkers—”

“Yonkers! The fuck I’m going to—”

“Just fucking do it!” Leonard thrust his hand into his leather jacket and withdrew a wallet. “Here,” he said, shoving a wad of bills at Fayal. “That’s for you. You’ve done a great job, now you’re fired. Take the car, take it and go—it’s yours, go wherever you want! Just take them first—”

The chauffeur shoved the phone into his pocket. He stared at the cash, took it, and stuffed it into his coat. “Shit. Where in Yonkers?”

Leonard cocked his thumb at Jack. “He’ll give you directions. But go, now—”

He grabbed Jack by the shoulder and pushed him toward the car, then snapped something at the blond boy. The boy just sat there. Leonard dragged him to his feet. “Get in the fucking car! No—in the front, with Fayal. Now listen to me, Trip—”

Leonard pointed at Jack. “He’s bleeding. Find something to tie off his hand with, your sock or something, and then just sit tight till you get to Lazyland. There’s a doctor there who can help.”

“ Doctor?” the boy repeated. “What do you mean, a—”

Leonard pushed him roughly. “Just get in the fucking car, Trip.” Leonard turned to Jack. “Okay, now listen, Jackie.”

Leonard grasped his friend’s upper arm and guided him to the middle seat, pulled a soiled bandanna from his leather jacket, and gave it to Jack. “Wrap this around your wrist. Trip! For Christ’s sake, find something for his hand!” he shouted angrily, then perched on the seat beside Jack.

“Now listen, Jackie. You know Fayal. He’s going to take you to Lazyland, okay? He’s going to take you home. Emma’s there, she can help you. You’ll be okay, Jackie. You hear me?” He shook him gently. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“What about you?” Jack whispered. It hurt to talk. Jack’s tongue probed at his lips, the inside of his mouth, and found blisters, scorched skin. “Leonard? Where’re you going?”

Leonard’s hand remained on Jack’s shoulder. He turned to look back, to where buildings like molten gems blazed against a churning violet sky. Above them pulsed a mountain of light, so brilliant Leonard shielded his eyes.

The Pyramid was in flames. Very slowly, the structure’s apex bulged outward, like an ampoule giving way. With a deafening roar it burst into an enveloping cloud of black and scarlet.

“Holy shit,” breathed Fayal, ducking into the front seat.

“Right,” said Leonard. He reached out onto the sidewalk, pulled open one of his leather satchels. There was a videocam inside. He slid the strap over his head, clicked the camera on and off a few times, playing with the focus.

“Leonard?” Jack demanded. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Coming with you? What, to Lazyland?” With a grin Leonard turned the camera on Jack. Sirens wailed behind them; there was the clatter of gunfire. “No, Jackie.”

“But you have to, Leonard—you can’t stay here—”

Leonard whipped the camera from his face and began to laugh. “Are you kidding?” he yelled gleefully, sweeping his arm out to take in boiling sky, flames flickering across buildings, the rain of ash that had started to fall. “Leave? And miss all this? No can do, Jackie-boy! Not for anything on earth—”

He grabbed Jack’s hand. “Oh, Jackie—I have loved you, in my fashion. You know that, right?” Jack nodded. “Okay. So you go on back to Grandmother’s house, and I’ll hang out at this swinging party.”

Leonard stretched his legs out onto the sidewalk, chains jingling. As he turned to leave, Jack touched him on the arm.

“Leonard—” His blue eyes met Leonard’s manic gaze. “Will I—will I ever see you again?”

Leonard grinned. “Will you see me? Sure, Jackie—you’ll see me again, we’ll see everybody again, real soon.” He stood on the sidewalk, vidcam nestled within the folds of his leather jacket. Unexpectedly, he leaned down, his eyes filled with tears. He let one hand rest upon his friend’s cheek, and kissed Jack on the mouth. “I promise.”

Jack gazed up at him. For a fraction of a second he saw them both there, the man who had saved him and the boy he had loved a hundred years ago, standing in a rain of fiery ash.

But before he could say anything, Leonard danced back from the limo and closed the door. He tapped on the driver’s window and shouted, “Get him home, Fayal, got me? You take care of him, Trip! Do your fucking Christian duty, okay?”

In the front seat the blond boy nodded.

“Fucking idiot,” muttered Leonard Thrope.

Jack stared out his window as the limo’s engine thrummed to life. “See you in the funny papers, Jackie-boy!” Leonard yelled. With a whoop he drew the vidcam to his eye. From behind the limo’s darkened glass two white faces gazed at him, bright flecks trapped in the lens and almost indistinguishable from the fluttering ash falling everywhere. The cam’s motor hummed as the recorded image flickered on the tiny monitor, dusted with electronic snow.

The limousine began to drive away. As it did, Leonard stepped backward, his camera fixed on the car, heedless of nearby gunfire and smoke billowing from burning buildings. He moved deftly from the sidewalk into the middle of the shattered street, not feeling where embers gnawed through the soles of his boots or noticing the scent of his own scorched hair as he tracked those two faces staring at him from the car, recording them through the scrim of ash and video noise, the two of them growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the cloud of moving particles, flesh and flames and falling sky all exactly where Leonard wanted them.

And Leonard himself exactly where he had always wanted to be: dancing in the century’s graveyard, laughing at the end of all things.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Glimmering

It took them six hours to get to Lazyland. Trip tore a piece of fabric from his anorak and handed it to Jack. Jack wrapped his wounded hand, then slumped against his seat and fell into an exhausted stupor lanced with pain. Now and then he heard shouts from outside, Fayal’s curses and pleas for divine guidance, the sound of other vehicles, police sirens, ambulances. The boy in the front seat said nothing, and Jack made no effort to speak to him; only offered directions to Fayal when after hours they finally passed Co-op City, the limo edging through the mass of cars like a queen bee making her way through a broken hive. When Jack peered out the window behind them, he saw a city in flames: smoke rising from skyscrapers, flickers of gold and scarlet leaping from shadowy canyons and avenues. Fires burned along the George Washington Bridge. On the western banks of the Hudson he could see more blazes. The air inside the limo was acrid with the scent of burning.

At last they broached the outskirts of the city of Yonkers. They drove past crowds of people, revelers and rioters who moved reluctantly to let the limo pass. Bottles crashed against the hood, rocks bounced off the roof, and once Jack dived to the floor when Fayal yelled at him, and automatic weapons-fire echoed in the street outside. The car plunged through a sea of bodies. Jack heard a sickening thump, but Fayal just kept on going, until at last they were bouncing down familiar rutted streets, past Delmonico’s and the ruins of Hudson Terrace, past gutted mansions where Jack could see figures capering beneath a sky like an open wound.

“This is it,” he said hoarsely. He pointed to his home’s security gate. The limo nosed through, eased down the driveway, finally came to a stop in front of the wide veranda.

“You guys—out fast, okay?” said Fayal. “I’m gonna piss and get the fuck out of here.”

Jack opened the door and stumbled onto the drive. He blinked in the glare of—what? Morning? Dawn? When he glanced at his watch it said almost six.

“Jack!”

He turned and was nearly knocked down by Emma. “Oh, Jack,” she murmured, hugging him. Behind her he could see his brother Dennis, his mouth an O of anguished relief. “Jack, I thought you were—we all thought—”

Emma drew back to look at him. “Holy shit. You’re bleeding! Get inside, come on—”

“Wait.” Jack looked to where Fayal was zipping up his trousers and sliding back behind the wheel. “There’s someone else.”

The blond boy stepped from the car. He moved away as the engine gunned, and in a spray of gravel the limo shot back up the drive. With a desultory roar it turned out onto Hudson Terrace and disappeared from sight.

“Who is he?” Emma demanded.

“I have no idea. A friend of Leonard’s, I think.”

“A friend of—” Emma scowled. “Jesus Christ. Well, tell him to get inside.”

She looked at Jack’s injured wrist as she steered him toward the porch. “I have to tell you, Jackie,” she said in a low voice, and began to cough. “I hope your friend can take care of himself. I’m not feeling that well, I don’t know what it is.”

They walked inside. Jack turned, saw the blond boy gazing up at the mansion’s crumbling exterior, and beyond it the venomous sky.

“Hey,” Jack called. “Move it, let’s go.”

The boy nodded and followed him inside.

The house was dark. Jack’s brother cleared his throat. He was eight years older than Jack; in the months since he’d visited Jack in the hospital, Dennis’s hair had gone white. His face was gaunt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. He squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “I’m—I’m glad you’re okay. I’m going to lie down—it’s been tough, Jackie.”

“Where’s Grandmother?”

“Upstairs. She’s all right. She’s sleeping. But—well, Emma will tell you. I’ll talk to you in a little while.”

Jack turned to Emma. “What happened? Is she really okay? Where’s Marz?”

Emma said nothing. Her face was grey with fatigue, blotched with small raised spots. She smoothed a hand across her head, the blond curls dank and flattened. “She’s dead, Jack,” she said. “She went into labor yesterday morning—”

“Oh Christ—”

“There wasn’t anything I could do.” She began to cry. Jack drew her to his breast, holding his injured hand out stiffly behind her. “She—it was twins. A boy and a girl. It would have been hard no matter what, she was so young, she was malnourished—”

“Twins? Did they—”

“They’re okay.” Emma laughed brokenly. “Can you believe that? Two mouths to feed. But I brought some Similac—there are cases stockpiled at the hospital—and Keeley found some old baby clothes…” She started to cry again.

“Emma, Emma…”

Jack pressed his face against her scalp, smelled her unwashed hair, the sharp scents of disinfectant and isopropyl alcohol. He glanced up and saw the blond boy walking hesitantly upstairs. Emma took a deep breath and drew away from him.

“Enough. You should go lie down, too, Jack. Right now.”

“Me?” He shook his head. “What about you? What about—what happened with Jule?”

“I don’t know. Dennis was able to get through on the phone for a while, but the lines are dead now. They’re supposed to be sending his body here, but—”

She waved a hand at the window, where skeins of purple and gold and red threaded across the sky. “Who the hell knows. Dennis and I—we buried the girl outside. But dogs kept trying to dig it up, and when Dennis went out to chase them off they came after him. The body’s gone.”

She looked at him, her eyes haunted. “What else could we do, Jackie?” she whispered. “What else could we do?”

“Nothing,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’ve done everything, Emma. You’ve done more than any human being could possibly do. Now you have to rest.”

He walked with her upstairs. On the second-floor landing he stopped and kissed her forehead.

“Where are you sleeping?”

Emma gestured at his uncle Peter’s old room. “There. Dennis is in the other bed. Your grandmother and Mrs. Iverson are in there—” She pointed at Keeley’s closed bedroom door. “And the babies—”

A sudden wail rent the air. Jack smiled in spite of himself, craned his neck to peer down the hall into Aunt Susan’s room. The sheets had been stripped from the canopied bed. Two bassinets lay side by side on the empty mattress, and between them the blond boy sat, staring into one of them.

“I think I know where the babies are,” said Jack. A second wail rang out. Trip leaned over, carefully picked up one of the babies, and awkwardly cradled it against his chest.

Jack shook his head. “Hey—”

“Hush.” Emma said. “He won’t hurt them. And I’m too beat right now to take care of them, and you shouldn’t do anything till you’re cleaned up. So just leave him, okay?”

Jack watched as the boy reached into the other bassinet for the second infant, straightened with them both in his arms.

“Is that doctor’s orders?” Jack asked.

“Absolutely.” Emma patted his good arm. “Go try to sleep, Jack. That’s the best thing any of us can do right now. Just try to sleep.”

He stood on the landing, watching as the boy sat with the babies. “Doctor Emma said there’s some formula downstairs,” he called into the room after a while. Trip looked up. His face broke into a smile.

“They’re so tiny,” he said. “But they’re really, really cute.”

Jack smiled back. “Yeah, well, be careful. They’re brand new. Maybe you could figure out how to feed them.”

The boy nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”

Jack turned away. Outside his grandmother’s door he hesitated, then peeked inside. Keeley and Mrs. Iverson lay side by side on the bed, mouths open, snoring loudly. Jack shut the door, and went upstairs to his room.

Somehow he had expected a seismic change, the roof caved in, bedclothes strewn anywhere. But no. Only the window had been opened, and the door leading onto the morning balcony. He closed the window, hesitated, then stepped out onto the balcony.

After the city’s rain of ash, the freezing air felt pure as spring rain: it washed away the stale smell of Leonard’s limo and the sickroom scent of the house beneath him. From downstairs he heard first one of the babies shrieking, and then the other. Then Keeley’s voice crying out for Emma, Emma calling back wearily, and Mrs. Iverson exclaiming, “Poor things!”

Then a deeper tone, Trip’s voice commanding them all: “Shhh, hey, everybody be quiet—they’re just hungry. I’ll take care of them.”

The wails grew louder but, miraculously, Emma and Mrs. Iverson and his grandmother were silent. Jack shook his head, imagining the boy pacing around the bedroom, trying fruitlessly to calm the infants. But after a few minutes the babies quieted. Lazyland grew still again.

He stepped to the railing and leaned out. A film of ice covered the rail; as he stood there he could feel it melting beneath his fingertips, giving forth a damp green smell. There was a strange emerald clarity to the air, a brilliance that he thought must be caused by ice crystals, or reflected light, one of those atmospheric things he had never understood. He looked up into the sky, the coiling clouds and haze of smoke above the Hudson. He felt no fear; only a sort of exhausted peace. A sense that he stood upon a battlefield, but at least he was still standing.

“Happy New Year!”

From the riverbank far below a voice echoed. There was a rapid burst of fireworks or gunfire, cheers and what sounded like a trombone blatting.

Jack yawned, rubbed his eyes, and indulged in the absurd wish for more champagne, recalling Larry Muso in his arms.

I should have kissed him, he thought. He remembered Larry’s words—Go back to your house—wait for me there, Jack, I’ll meet you as soon as I can—and Leonard’s—You’ll see me again, we’ll see everybody again, real soon.

He couldn’t remember the last time Leonard had said anything remotely comforting.

He stretched, wincing. His arms hurt, and his wrist, and his chest. His mouth and throat ached from where he’d inhaled burning fumes. He wondered if, by chance, Emma did have anything in that black bag for him. He scarcely felt strong enough to walk back to his bed. He looked out for one last time into the night.

Beneath him the estate’s overgrown lawns sloped into stands of sumac and alder, the ruins of all the other houses that had once stood guard upon the Hudson. Light shone through the tangle of trees and broken buildings—firelight, the flicker of a few moving headlights, myriad bonfires and a confetti of red and green marking the rowdy flotilla massed upon the river. The fires along the upper span of the George Washington Bridge still burned. Its struts glowed dull gold and citron yellow, and cast a spangled reflection in the black water below.

It’s beautiful, Jack thought. It’s really beautiful.

He lifted his head. For some reason—the cold; excessive moisture in the air; maybe just his blurred vision—the glimmering suddenly seemed less pronounced. He frowned, then sucked his breath in.

For one moment—so quick he was not even certain if it was real, or if it was another remnant of the fusarium stirring in his sight—for one moment, something seemed to move in the vault above him. A profound darkness that might have been a cloud, or wings, or a mile-long pennon; the silent flank of a dirigible passing at an unimaginable distance through the heavens or the shadow of something else, spirochete swimming across his eye’s inner orb, the silhouette of a face he loved. Something moved, a vast cyclonic eye that turned slowly in the blazing heavens, as though the sky was ready to burst at last.

But even farther overhead something else glimmered, faint as Jack’s breath in the chill morning air, faint as a heartbeat, faint as dawn.

“I see it!” he cried aloud. “I can see it, it’s there, it’s really there—”

And in that instant, the rush of wind and revelry dying into the sound of the sea and the wails of the infants downstairs: in that instant Jack smiled; and thought he saw the stars.