Glimmering

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 multicolored 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.