Glimmering

Jack’s memory of that particular night was of divine balance being restored somewhere within Ashok’s spacious Bhaunagar bedroom. A change in the music brought his attention back to the TV screen, the face of the dancing boy in close-up. High rounded cheekbones, strong jaw, cleft chin, strands of damp blond hair falling across his forehead. A distinctly occidental face—whatever it possessed of Eastern Mystery had been drawn there with makeup and computer theurgy. In the blue-white hollow of his throat a silver crucifix bobbed from a silver chain, the camera fixing for an instant upon a rapturous face that mirrored the boy’s own. The music pulsed and clanged. What was it about this song, that voice, the—

“No ! NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”

Jack saw Marzana staggering to her feet.

“IT’S NOT HIM! IT’S NOT HIM! THEY DID SOMETHING! IT’S NOT—”

“Marzana!” Jack cried, aghast. “Marzana, what is it? Who—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”

“THEY DID IT! THAT BITCH DID IT! THEY FUCKING—”

“Marz!”

Her screams gave way to hysterical crying, the girl kicking at him though her eyes never left the screen. In a panic Jack yelled at her to be quiet and tried to drag her from the room. But she was too strong for him, and so big now. With an explosive gasp she rammed her elbow into his stomach. Jack went reeling backward as the girl swept past him, stumbled to her knees, and began to wail.

“No, oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE—”

Jack groaned and sat up. The girl knelt with her back to him, swaying as she moaned something he couldn’t understand—it sounded like rippp, rippp. Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.

“THE END OF THE END”

STAND IN THE TEMPLE

AGRIPPA MUSIC/GFIDISC

Jack leaned forward to put his arms around Marzana’s shaking form. His eyes remained fixed on the glittering corporate logo that appeared at the end of the line of block letters—

A golden pyramid surmounted by the sun, a phantom gryphon shimmering within its rays.

PART THREE Regrets Only

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?”