Glimmering

Dear Larry,

I’d be delighted to meet you at Electric Avenue, sometime the morning of the 31st. I haven’t heard anything more from GFI about transportation, so I really have no idea how or when (or even *if*) I could be there. But count me in.

Best,

Jack Finnegan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who had taken the photos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or been one.