Glimmering

He laid the boy upon his bed, taking care to put an old wool blanket beneath him. Then he rushed to boil water on the big kitchen woodstove, gathered towels and antibiotic ointment, latex gloves, and isopropyl alcohol. There was no point in trying to phone for help. Even if the phone were working, no ambulance would come. The hospital was too far away and too poorly equipped now to do much more than offer the reassurance of watching its few doctors complain about the lack of money, medicine, staff.

He cleansed him as best he could, scraping off sand and salt, shreds of seaweed and torn skin. What at first appeared as a blackened hole in the middle of his forehead proved instead to be some kind of cross-shaped scarification. Still, despite his wounds, there was no odor of decay; his flesh, though battered, seemed free of infection. Martin set the broken wrist as best he could, splinting it with the wood he used for frames and an old coat hanger. Finally, he swabbed the cuts with antibiotic gel. The broken skin stirred like small mouths beneath his gloved fingers.

Throughout the boy remained unconscious. Young man, Martin corrected himself. His face was too badly bruised to get a sense of how young, but his hair where it had not been torn from his scalp was long and blond, his musculature lithe. He pulled a sheet over the boy’s exposed body, checked the room’s woodstove to make sure it was warm enough. He removed his gloves and took them into the kitchen, to boil and save them. Then he stepped onto the front porch.

Outside the light had shifted, from violet to pale lavender. The sea was calm. Gulls flew above the island like sparks, flickering from indigo to gold as they rode the wind. Martin’s heart ached to look upon it all, so unspeakably lovely and strange that it preempted any effort to capture it on canvas.

Or anywhere else, it seemed. When he left San Francisco, the most common topic at parties and funerals was of how hard it was now to write, to paint, to compose or sing or dance. Chatter online dealt with the futility of even trying. Only Leonard Thrope and his cohort of mori artists seemed able to endure what the world had become, and profit from it.

Martin was determined to find another way of seeing. When he first returned to Mars Hill, he had sat outside with notebooks and drawing paper, canvas and palette knife. All for nought. The glimmering transfixed the eye while it froze the heart: he could stand and stare at the sky for hours, awed and terrified, then go back indoors and face his empty canvases not with disappointment but mere relief, that they offered a void that he could safely contemplate, an abyss that did not defy comprehension. After a few weeks he gave up. What need was left in the world for art? Nature had taken up its own knife and was scouring the page; they had all become the canvas. He turned and went back inside.

The young man was still unconscious. But his breathing had become stronger and more even. His face was tilted to one side, and through the bruises something of the boy himself now showed, a face more sweet than handsome. His ghastly pallor had eased into a nearly luminous albescence. Not the whiteness of bone or any flesh that Martin had ever seen but an eerie, almost iridescent overlay through which could be glimpsed all that lay beneath: shimmer of blood, spleen, ligaments, the heart’s chambers opening and closing. Martin felt a pang of amazed fear. Who was this boy? And what had saved him?

He tried to focus on the idea that this young man washed up on the shoals was very strange.

And, he thought, pulling up his old Windsor chair and sinking into it to spend the afternoon at the boy’s bedside, this boy—whoever he was, wherever he was, poised between death and waking, black ocean and Mars Hill—was quite the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He got up several times over the next few hours, to feed the woodstove and check on the boy. In late afternoon Mrs. Grose knocked on the front door, to remind him of dinner.

“Roast chicken,” she beamed. At her feet the pug yawned hungrily. “A nice fat one—”

“I can’t come.” Martin slipped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. “Something—I’ve got something to do.”

Mrs. Grose’s eyes widened. “Are you sick? You should not be outside so much—” “No, no, I’m not sick.” He hesitated. No way to keep a secret at Mars Hill. Probably no way to keep a secret from Mrs. Grose, anywhere. “Listen—can I tell you tomorrow? It’s—it’s important, but I think I need to be by myself this evening.”

Mrs. Grose regarded him with her wise tortoiseshell eyes. After a moment she nodded. “Of course, darling. I will even save some chicken for you.” She retreated heavily down the steps, at the bottom turned, clutching her windbreaker to her bosom. “Be careful, Martin.”