Glimmering

“Have you ever seen someone look tortured? I don’t mean depressed, or sad, Jackie, but really tortured. Tormented. There’s this expression they get—it’s like they’re looking beyond, like they’re seeing the other side of something… When I did that series in Nairobi, after the femicides—I saw it there. Or remember that poem we learned in freshman English? ‘And then I saw his face/Like a devil’s sick of sin’—remember? Well, that was what Dr. Hanada looked like.

“He’s a kind of saint, Jack. I mean a real, live saint, like Mother Teresa, or—well, I don’t know. Thomas Merton, maybe? The Dalai Lama? I mean, I’ve met the Dalai Lama, Jack, and it wasn’t like this.

“Because Dr. Hanada—he had done things. Like Merton, you know? He hadn’t just been in this monastery his whole life, he’d had this whole other life, this—Christ, you wouldn’t have believed it, Jackie. I didn’t believe it, at first—I thought he was just some crazy, senile old man.

“But he had the photographs. And he had that lab. He’s been there for over fifty years now…”

Jack shivered, watching his old lover’s face trapped somewhere between horror and ecstasy, seeing in the ragged sky something Jack could not comprehend.

But Leonard had always seen it. The end of the century, the end of the world: Leonard had always known what was coming. In high school, the two of them on summer nights would sneak into the Episcopal church and in the darkness they would fuck breathless, nearly hysterical at their adolescent daring. Afterward Jack would lie exhausted across the front pew, his T-shirt pulled up to cool himself, bare feet pressed against the smooth wood. Leonard would sit at the church’s old pipe organ, and play and sing. He knew only one song. He played it over and over again, hands pounding the worn keys and feet stomping the treadles, shouting in his scorched voice until Jack’s hair stood on end—

“How do you think it feels?”

He sang himself hoarse, his face growing red and damp as he hunched over the keyboard. To Jack the words sounded like prophecy, or a threat.

“How do you think it feels?
And when do you think it stops?”

Whatever secret horrors fed Leonard’s vision, Jack had always believed his friend wanted nothing more than this: to make everyone else see what he saw: corpses rotting in a suburban bedroom, the husks of butterflies drained by spiders, naked men trussed like cattle in darkened basements.

And now we know, thought Jack. His gaze fell upon his friend’s ravaged face, the death’s-heads tattooed and branded and scarified across his wiry arms and the arc of glowing chips above his left eye. Nothing was left of the smooth-skinned boy Jack had loved except his eyes, which had never been boyish at all. The rest Leonard himself had smelted away, leaving bones and scars and unruly pockets of flesh; the only things that had ever interested him, anyway.

“Fifty years,” whispered Leonard. “You know what he was like? Have you ever seen a picture of Padmasambhava?”

Jack made a face. “Not in Yonkers. Not recently.”

“Really? Well, here, look—” Leonard rummaged in a knapsack until he found a battered leather wallet, opened it, and flipped through its contents. “This guy,” he said, holding up a little rectangle like a trading card, its lurid colors tempered by a crosshatch of tears and folds. “Padmasambhava. He’s a Tibetan magician, this legendary yogi. Anyway, that’s who Dr. Hanada looks like.”

Jack took the picture. It showed a demonic-looking figure with madly rolling eyes standing on one leg. In his left hand he clutched a staff almost twice his height, impaled with human skulls.

“Right,” said Jack. Very deliberately he placed first the picture and then the vial of Fusax into Leonard’s hand. “You know, I don’t think I want to hear any more about any of this, Leonard. Thank you all the same. And I’m pretty tired, so maybe we could see about getting together some other—”

“It’s the cure, Jack.”

Jack gaped at him. His friend stared back, his expression withdrawn, almost hostile, then Leonard dropped the picture of Padmasambhava. It wafted across the floor and beneath the bed.

“The cure.” Leonard held up the vial so light from the window flowed over it, gold and green. “A miracle, Jackie.”

Rage swelled inside Jack. “What?”

“You heard me, Jackie.” Leonard’s eyes glittered. His mouth stretched into a grin as broad as it was merciless. “All that other stuff they’ve been giving to us all these years? It’s bullshit, sweetheart. Bullshit—

“This is it. This is the cure. For AIDS, for petra virus, all of it. This is what’s going to change fucking human history. Fusax.”

Jack stared at the corona of light around Leonard’s hair, the little bottle in his hand like a bright grenade.

Then, “You fucking son of a bitch,” said Jack.

And he decked him.

“Hey—!”