Glimmering

Tears burned his eyes. He dragged his sleeve across them and when he looked out again the bright spark was gone. He glanced at his hands, twin gold slivers winking from each one. Beneath him the engine thrummed, the boat stirred as swells lifted her and the breeze plucked at the sails. She wanted to be gone; she wanted to be underway.

“It’s time then,” said Martin. “It’s time.”

He killed the engine and pulled himself on deck. Freed the sails and trimmed them back, ducking as wind filled them and the boom sliced through the air a handspan away. Breathless, he eased into the cockpit and grasped the tiller. Ahead of him the sky coiled and uncoiled. Boats skimmed past, and seabirds. A shadow moved across the planks in front of him and Martin smiled and nodded without a word, recognizing the shape that streamed from the darkness, the long span of arms reaching for him and the breath that stirred the hairs on his neck. Felt his heart tear like a fist pounding its way out, as the tiller slipped from Martin’s hand and he turned at last, no longer afraid, falling into the embrace John and darkness and desire all stitched at last into one, all there, all healed; fell into it and he was light and joy, light and the end of waiting; he was nothing but nothing but light.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Catastrophe Theory

The power stayed on for almost three weeks, the longest stretch Jack could remember since the glimmering began. At first they all went charily from day to day, meeting at breakfast to exclaim over Mrs. Iverson’s coffee cake or date muffins. There were plenty of baking supplies, since she so rarely had the chance to bake, and plenty of time to spend eating, since no one had anything else to do. After breakfast they moved into the living room—everyone except Mrs. Iverson—to sit with all the lights on, heat wafting up from the floor registers and warm smells from the kitchen, and watch morning television. Keeley dozed, occasionally woke to shake her head in dismay at goings-on in Calgary or Bangkok. On the floor Marz lay like a beached zeppelin, her lunar belly occupying a formidable portion of Jack’s view of the TV screen. There were no more outbursts at music videos. Jack had not been able to get any kind of explanation out of the girl. He finally chalked it up to some bizarre Last Generation analogue of Beatlemania, and tried to convince himself that with the power restored, maybe the world had toppled back onto its axis, after all. Some evenings he found her standing in the second-floor stairwell, her swollen belly pressed against the sill, hands pressed against the glass as she stared out at the broken house next door. Chiaroscuro of flame and smoke and thrashing bodies, smash of bottles, raucous laughter; and the blond girl gazing hungrily as though she beheld a vision of Paradise.

I saved you from that! Jack wanted to shout when he saw her; but when she heard his tread she would turn and wobble off. Oh God, poor thing, he thought, at the notion of bringing a child into this world. But she didn’t see it so; her belly bloomed even as her rail-thin legs grew hard and thick with edema and her eyes took on a distant dreaming look, as though already she were asleep after the trauma of labor; as though dreaming she saw beyond this darkness.

The autumn passed. One day a postman arrived, with bills and a letter from Jack’s brother Dennis, postmarked eight months earlier. Lights worked, hot water came from the taps (never enough but that wasn’t new), Tristan und Isolde thundered from his old Bose speakers. Mrs. Iverson would do the dishes, then teeter downstairs to see to the laundry, then return to start on lunch and dinner, or to bring Keeley tea and Marz some more muffins—Jack didn’t eat much these days. All of them frantically tapping into the capricious current flowing through the house, as though that were the way to stave off chaos.

And perhaps it was, Jack mused as he checked the answering machine for the fourth time in an hour. There were no messages, had been no messages. The phone never rang. Power might have been restored to most of the metropolitan New York grid, but for some reason it didn’t extend to the telephone system. For all he knew there would be no messages for the rest of his life, but still Jack couldn’t stop fiddling with the machine, picking up the phone to see if there was a dial tone. There never was. Three, four, seven times a day he’d go out to the carriage house, peer into the fax machine, and check his computer for e-mail. Jack didn’t like to admit it, but he was looking for Larry Muso, in all the old familiar places. And since there had never been much Larry Muso to begin with, the search was frustrating and ultimately depressing.