Glimmering

And still, when he held up the brown bottle he saw the tiniest swash of liquid, as though he held one of those miniature environments sold at expensive department stores, a few precious milliliters of seawater and algae and endangered krill. Whatever it was he did hold was no less beautiful and strange, and he wondered at what shifted within him now, what had been replenished or transubstantiated within the cloud of moving particles that formed his immune system. Could it be alive, somehow, and breeding? He felt better, he thought; perhaps he had never felt better. Though he was troubled almost nightly (and sometimes daily) by strange dreams; though his sight bothered him; though he could see in his grandmother’s eyes and Mrs. Iverson’s, as well as in his own reflection, that he was losing weight at an alarming pace. But he never felt nauseated or feverish, as he had before. He had no more problems with his breathing. His dry skin cleared up. So did the violent cluster headaches that had plagued him since childhood. He showed no symptoms of thrush. If anything, he was acutely aware of an increasingly heightened sensual consciousness: being able to hear a yellowed leaf falling from the tulip poplar; noticing from across the kitchen table a fleck of bright green in Marz’s left iris; waking to smell carnations, and then searching the decrepit garden for forty minutes before he found a single frayed dianthus blossom that, when he drew it to his face, breathed the same peppery scent. When one evening his grandmother suggested he visit the clinic at Saint Joseph’s he shook his head.

“I feel okay,” he said, and having pronounced the words savored them with faint surprise. “I really do think I’m okay.”

Keeley stared at him. “You don’t look very well, dear. You look thin. Are you still taking all your medicine?”

“Yes,” he lied. It had been over a year since he’d been able to get his prescriptions filled. “But I feel really, really good. And I’m strong—I mean, I’m not as tired as I was, I don’t feel sick all the time…”

Something is working, he wanted to say; something has changed. He crossed the living room to hug her. “Don’t worry, Grandmother.”

“But I do.” She sighed and shut her eyes. “I’m so tired, Jackie. And you shouldn’t be sick. It’s not the way it should be, Jackie.”

He let his cheek rest against hers, groaning when he felt tears there. “Oh—don’t cry, don’t cry…”

“It’s not—” Her voice broke, not with sorrow but the same unforgiving rage she had shown when her husband died. “Where are they now, where is all the good of it, where are they… ?”

She began to shake, and he held her close as she wept and railed, knowing that whoever it was she blamed—priests, angels, family, doctors, the beautiful unfaithful sidhe—they had left him long ago.

On the 27th of July, a courier in black helmet and the red-and-gold livery of GFI puttered down Hudson Terrace on a solaped. She parked and chained it to the fence, climbed over the security gate, and strolled down Lazyland’s winding drive, singing to herself. Jack watched her from the living-room window. His grandmother and Mrs. Iverson and Marz were all napping upstairs. When the doorbell rang he flinched, then walked silently into the foyer.

“John Finnegan?” Beneath a hazy violet sky her retinal implants glowed silvery blue.

“That would be me,” Jack admitted.

“Do you have some identification?” Before Jack could retort she explained,

“I’m from GFI—” and simultaneously flashed an ID badge and held up her palm so he could see a gryphon tattooed there beneath numbers and the name Luralay Pearlstein.

“Yeah, just hold on,” he muttered, locking her outside while he went to find his wallet. When he got back she was sitting on the porch in the lotus position, silvery eyes wide open and staring at the sky. The skin on her face and hands had the chrome yellow taint of the acaraspora lichen ingested for its UV-repelling properties by those who had to work outdoors. Jack stared down at her. “Okay. Here it is—”

She looked carefully at the driver’s license. “It’s expired.”

“Yes, it has.” A nasty edge crept into his voice. “That’s because it’s impossible to get gas anymore on the North American continent, and because I no longer have a car, and also because I have nowhere to fucking go.”

The courier returned his license. “You should join one of those religious cooperatives,” she said mildly. “They don’t seem to have any problem. Okay, this looks fine.” She yanked at her shoulder pack and pulled out a large envelope printed with peacock feathers, held it out to him, and declaimed, “This is your official invitation to GFI’s gala New Year’s celebration and SUNRA launching, to be held at the Golden Pyramid on Friday, December 31.”

He took the envelope, and she went on in a slightly less officious tone. “That is only your invitation. It won’t get you onto the field. For that, you need this—”