Glimmering (12 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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There was nothing there. His neck prickled as his fingers ticked along the edge of the chair, the plush cloth like cool skin, but she was not there, she wasn’t there, and in a horrible moment of clarity he knew that she never
had
been there. He looked around frantically. Could she have left without him seeing? Had she crawled over the back of the seat and fled? His fingers clawed the soft velvet as he pulled himself up. His mouth opened to call out when he saw in the darkness before him two pale glowing orbs. At first he thought they were astral images projected upon the wall behind the rows of seats. But then they moved closer to him, and he knew that they were her eyes.
“
No,
” whispered Trip.
He had no hint whatsoever of a face or body. Two deathly white globes. A bit of nonsense spurted into his consciousness, something he had heard or read in school—
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
Who is that on the other side of you?
 
 
—and then the air was split by the ringing thunder of a gong. The dome blazed white and gold, the constellations suddenly visible in all their primal glory. Superimposed across this radiance was an immense rotating wheel and the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.
“SUPERSTITION DIES HARD.” No longer the soothing tones of the astronomer, but a man’s voice, boomingly confident.
“EVEN THE HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGERY OF THE HUBBLE AND DESCARTES TELESCOPES CANNOT DESTROY CENTURIES OF IGNORANCE AND FEAR. YET EACH DAY CONTINUES TO BRING US NEW DISCOVERIES, NEW SKILLS, AND NEW TOOLS TO MASTER THE UNIVERSE. ASTRONOMERS AND ASTROPHYSICISTS PREACH A GOSPEL OF HOPE, NOT DOOM. WE MUST LOOK NOT TO THE DISTANT PAST BUT TO THE FUTURE AND A NEW MILLENNIUM: A NEW AGE FOR HUMANITY.”
The constellations faded. A scarlet banner of words rippled across the dome.
WHEN THE WHEEL OF TIME SHALL HAVE
COME TO THE SEVENTH MILLENNIUM,
THERE WILL BEGIN THE GAMES OF DEATH.
 
—MICHEL DE NOSTREDAME
 
 
The words faded into darkness and in their place another banner rose.
FEAR IS THE MAIN SOURCE OF SUPERSTITION,
AND ONE OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF CRUELTY.
TO CONQUER FEAR IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.
 
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
 
 
Trip gaped: had this happened at the earlier show? If so, he had no memory of it. Maybe that was what sex did to you. With one last fanfare of gongs and drums, the planetarium went dark and the house lights came up. Trip blinked, and found himself staring into Marz’s waifish face.
“Hey.” He scrambled to his feet, confused. “Ouch. Where’d you go?”
She shrugged. “Nowhere. You know. Here.”
Trip waited for something more in the way of an explanation. She said nothing, just stood and leaned over the seat to retrieve her raincoat. Her jodhpurs were slung so low about her waist that when she bent he could see the top of her ass. To his shame and amazement, his cock began to swell again. A giddy wave of desire swept through him. When Marz turned around he grabbed her and kissed her, the raincoat crushed noisily between them. Her mouth parted, but she felt limp and all but weightless. He might have been kissing a cloth doll. On the far side of the room someone snickered. Trip drew back, blushing, and stared at the floor.
“I guess we better go,” he mumbled, and took her hand. She nodded and followed him out of the planetarium, dragging her raincoat behind her.
 
 
The limousine was waiting outside. A thin icy rain nicked at the sidewalk, but the blond girl didn’t put on her raincoat. Silently the driver emerged to hold the car door open. Trip waited until she’d slid all the way over to the far window before he stepped inside. They sat without speaking at opposite ends of the car as it drove crosstown, music droning from the speakers.
“Check out the dinosaurs?” the driver asked as they swung into traffic. Trip shook his head. The driver shot him a disbelieving look. “No dinosaurs?”
“
No,
” Trip snapped.
The driver shrugged. “Next time, huh? Where to now?”
Trip gestured weakly. “Back to GFI, I guess.”
They started crosstown. Trip stared at the flood of yellow cabs turned livid by sleet slanting down from a distempered sky. Just a short time ago he had seen it all for the first time, sitting beside Jerry Disney in another hired car and laughing in amazement at the legions of taxis (private cars were outlawed now, except on weekends, when the affluent fled the city and the streets were jammed with decrepit vehicles of every type), the buses with kids hanging from the doors. Kids everywhere. More feral children than he had ever seen in Nashville or Austin or even Seattle, begging and skating and stumbling out of icehouses, pink and orange wires tangled in their disheveled hair, or accompanying the youthfully middle-aged and wary, who paid them to serve as escorts and so deflect the attentions of other young thieves. Runaways and prostitutes, John Drinkwater said—though some of them looked Trip’s age, so they couldn’t really be called runaways, could they?—but Jerry told Trip that they were
fellahin
.
“That’s an Arab word,” he explained as they stared out their hotel window at a dark-haired boy in kilt and football helmet, panhandling on the sidewalk. “I saw it on Radium. It means, like,
whore
” he added, staring in disgust as the kilted boy leaned into the window of a cab.
Actually, the original meaning was closer to
peasant
, as Trip learned when he mentioned this newfound bit of esoterica during
his
interview on Radium with Lotte Sa’adah. But as Lotte said,
Hey! whore z-head
fux populi
wtf! f *ck! whatever! so ok areet?!
Back then even the runaways had seemed exotic—romantic even, because pitiable—to Trip. Now, with a girl he barely knew slouched silently at the other end of the hired car, the
fellahin
seemed more sinister. Trip dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sank farther into his seat.
It was late afternoon. Sandbagged sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians and cyclists crowding subway entrances and storefronts to keep out of the rain. In the bright aperture between skyscrapers Trip saw a writhing shape like an amoeba, one of the city’s solex shields come loose. He glimpsed the brass-colored capsule of one of GFI’s famous fleet of advertising dirigibles, fresh from its factory in Northern Japan, moving slowly across the sky.
NEW ZEALAND/MALAYSIAN PEACE TALKS!
LOVETT-FORBES WEDDING!
 
 
As the car crawled uptown, the sidewalks became thickets of metal trusses, where new protective shields were being installed in corporate buildings, the reflective sheets of solex rippling in the wind as workers struggled to hold them. Trip cracked his window and smelled steam and roasting garlic and exhaust. Between restaurant awnings well-dressed men and women scurried like ants. Some wore sunglasses, despite the rain, or wide-brimmed hats. Many more had the blank silvery gaze that came from plasmer implants. They walked with exaggerated caution, as though drunk. When the hired car stopped at a light, Trip stared at one woman who sat astride a black horse extravagantly caparisoned with metal spikes. The woman’s elegantly masked face tilted upward, so that the rain streamed down her cheeks and pooled on the collar of her black rubber shawl. Her eyes, like her mount’s, were silvery gray. In the minutes that Trip watched them, neither woman nor horse once blinked.
After nearly an hour they reached the GFI complex. Trip and the blond girl said not a word, though once or twice Trip responded briefly to a question from the driver. The rain had stopped by the time the car pulled beneath the huge solex awning that fanned out across Fifty-third Street. Ribbons of pink and orange streaming across the sky made Trip look up, past the solex shield. The girl shrugged on her raincoat and looked at him.
“Thanks,” she said. The driver held the door open, but Marz remained inside, her expression so remote she might not have seen him there at all. Trip waited for her to say good-bye, wanting desperately for her to be gone. He himself could say nothing, could only stare miserably at his hands. When after a minute he looked up he saw a glister of pink vinyl disappearing through the Pyramid’s revolving doors.
The ride back to Stamford took several hours. Trip stretched across the backseat and slept, awakening as they hydroplaned onto the Hutch. Flooded fields and golf courses reflected the early-twilight sky, calm pools of gold and violet with dying trees rising from them like scaffolds. They passed onto the Merritt Parkway and the alluvial plain that had been Connecticut’s gold coast, its abandoned shorefront condos and mansions given over to the rising Atlantic. In the gold-slashed dusk Trip could see lights flickering from the upper stories of some of the houses, and on dilapidated barges and houseboats. He opened his window; the car filled with the low-tide reek of fish rotting on the strand, the faint and sweetly ominous sound of drums and singing children.
 
 
It was after six when he got back to the hotel. John Drinkwater collared him in the hall, already dressed in the stylish hempen suit he insisted on wearing when Trip performed.
“
Where have you been?
”
Trip pushed past him and into his room. “I need to take a shower.”
“You don’t have time! We have to go
now
, Jerry needs a sound check on—”
Trip shook his head. Without a backward glance he started for the bathroom, peeling off his shirt as he went. “He can go, then. You too. Get me another car—”
John grabbed Trip’s arm, his voice rising. “Hey! You were supposed to be here
two hours
ago! You listen to me, Trip—”
“
No
.” Trip whirled, yanking his arm back so hard that John staggered away from him. “I’m taking a
shower
, okay?
Okay?
”
He shouted the last word and stormed into the bathroom. John Drinkwater blinked before recovering himself.
“Eight o’clock, Trip!” he yelled as the door slammed shut. “You go on at eight o—”
“
I’ll go on when I’m fucking ready.
” Trip’s voice echoed through the suite, followed by the roar of water.
John stared at the bathroom door. Then he walked to the phone and called the concierge.
“I’ll need an additional limousine for Mr. Marlowe. Tell the others to go on now, and we’ll meet them.”
He hung up and started for the door, stopped when he saw Trip’s shirt crumpled on the sisal rug. For a moment he stared at it, then stooped and picked it up. Tentatively he brought it to his face and inhaled, breathing in the stale odors of lilacs and sweat, and a fainter, muskier scent.
“
Hah.
” John Drinkwater stared at the shirt, then flung it back onto the floor.
Women
, he thought balefully and stalked from the room.
Trip’s performance that night was off-kilter, almost frenzied. At first Jerry and the other musicians were nonplussed, but after the first three songs they seemed to catch Trip’s frantic buzz, segueing from a cover of “Walking with the Big Man” into “The End of the End.” Trip crouched bare-chested at the edge of the stage and sang in a soft moan, his bare skin glistening in the spotlights. John Drinkwater stood in the wings and watched in silence. When Trip finally walked off, the front of the stage was heaped with crosses and flowers and T-shirts flung there by fans, and a single broken-spined Bible.
Backstage, an exhausted Trip made straight for the door that led outside, where the limos waited to bring him and the others back to the hotel. Three teenage girls and their parents stood beneath the EXIT sign, beaming as he approached. In the shadows nearby, John Drinkwater stood in his hempen suit.
“Hi, thanks for coming to the show, hi,” Trip mumbled. The girls giggled and held out copies of
LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA
for him to sign. Trip glanced at John Drinkwater.

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