Glimmering

Tears sprang to his eyes and he let them come, weak and shivery with gratitude—it had not been so very long ago that he had been terrified he would never be able to cry again, just as he had been certain the loons would not return, or the peepers in the marsh. But while there was nothing that could keep the broken sky at bay, or the terrible weather, enough magic resided still in the bones of this place that Martin could lie awake at night in his bed, haunted by the song of frogs. Now he clutched the decrepit porch railing and watched the loons fly past.

“There they go.” From a neighboring cottage wafted the voice of old Mrs. Grose, one of the three year-round residents at the crumbling spiritualist community. “Magic birds.”

Martin smiled. “Magic birds.” That was what the Abenaki Indians had named them. “I guess spring’ll be here someday, too.”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Grose said, hugging her windbreaker tight around her ample chest. At her feet wheezed her ancient pug. Martin’s son, Jason, and Jason’s wife Moony had once figured that the pug must be well over two hundred in dog years. Even Jason resisted the temptation to try and calculate Mrs. Grose’s age. “But spring isn’t really spring anymore, is it? My primroses, they were so sickly last year. And the lupines…”

Her voice died as she turned, staring past the other toy Victorians nestled on the hillside to where Penobscot Bay sparkled blue and gold and violet in the early-morning light. Martin felt his initial burst of joy ebb.

“I know.” He stared down at the first blades of dandelions thrusting through the earth, a pallid brownish yellow. “Mine too…”

Last spring, after years of watching his friends and lovers die, Martin himself had finally succumbed to his illness. At Jason’s urging, he’d left his apartment in San Francisco and moved back to Mars Hill for good. The virus had gone into remission almost immediately. But his weakness remained, the damage done to his lungs by pneumonia, lesions on his arms and calves that even Mars Hill’s singular magic could not heal. And the ceaseless gnawing at his heart that was grief for not just lovers and friends but for an entire world that had been destroyed: books that would never be written, songs never sung, children never born, tracts of the heart and soul that would remain unmapped. Martin himself terra incognita, the undiscovered country; because who was left now to love him? He had Mrs. Grose for company, of course. And his son Jason and his wife, Moony, came up as often as they could, but flights to Maine were all but nonexistent unless you chartered a plane, and Jason couldn’t afford that.

So Martin spent his days indoors, priming canvases with his failing reserves of linseed oil and turpentine, or scouring the beach for usable things: driftwood, salt-sodden telephone poles, plastic milk cartons, beer bottles. The bleak loneliness of the Maine winter left him depleted and depressed. He did no painting. The stretched canvases were left standing about the cottage like so many blank windows and doors. His online columns faded to bi- and then trimonthly, not because of the lack of power (fitful, but you could usually count on at least one day in the week to bring electricity) but because he had lost all heart. This caused webwide speculation as to whether he was still alive. Martin of course knew more people now who were dead than not, and spent mordant hours in bed devising new addresses for himself: [email protected]. He moved the photograph of his dead lover John deMartino from the bedside table, because some nights it seemed to speak to him. He read the same lines of poetry over and over again, as though tracing the lineaments of his lover’s cheek—

so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Martin could not die yet, but he was not healed. Days and nights on end he waited at a window overlooking the wasteland, eyes seared by what lay before him, wounded sky and stranded dolphins rotting upon the beach; he stood and waited for death to come.

At night he lay awake and heard people moving softly in the room about him. They whispered, and he could hear his name amidst other words only half-understood, and he recognized the voices. His father was there; his first lover and many others; and once he knew the corrosive chime of laughter from his old nemesis, Leonard Thrope. He had not heard that Leonard had died, but was not surprised at the thought; nor by the twinge of sorrow that accompanied it.

But mostly he heard John. The voices, of course, must be the first stages of dementia. He knew there was no Good Death awaiting him; yet somehow he had not expected this. One night the whisperings grew so intrusive—scrape of bat wings against the window, giggling cold breath against his forehead—that he took a deep breath and opened his eyes, determined to prove to them, at least, that there was nothing there.