Glimmering Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ha-ha. Made you look.”

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

  “How long will that be?”

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

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

  Dr. Peter Fulbright & Ms. Anna Herrin-Fulbright

  Request the Honor of Your Presence at the

  1998 Harlequin Ball

  Proceeds to Benefit

  The World Wildlife Fund Genome Project

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

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

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

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

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

  $289,747.32, To Be Paid to the Order of The Gaudy Book. Memo: Mori

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Grandmother Keeley scowled. “That dwarf.”

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

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

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

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

  “…dear?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, Keeley, I am coming.”

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

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

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

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