Glimmering

“Hum? Oh, nothing.” From the kitchen Jack could hear the comfortable rattle and clink of Larena Iverson, Lazyland’s venerable housekeeper, clearing the dishes. “You know. Things. Leonard.”

Grandmother Keeley scowled. “That dwarf.”

Contempt sharpened the word into something stealthy and menacing. In fact Leonard, while slight, was not at all dwarfish. Instead he had the supreme self-confidence and feckless daring of all those youngest sons in fairy tales—all those legendary Jacks whom John Chanvers Finnegan so painfully failed to be—joined to the lithe body of a circus acrobat and the scruples of a heroin dealer. Dark as Jack was fair, with black curly hair and hazel eyes and an intoxicating laugh, Leonard was the nimble demon who sat on his friend’s shoulder whispering Drink it! Eat it! Do it! between glasses of vintage Taittinger and lines of cocaine.

This evening Jack could have borne the diversion of listening to Leonard’s advice, if only to ignore it. He had been so tired these last few days. Not mere physical exhaustion but that deeper, sadder fatigue he had glimpsed in others, those friends who had gone before him and died before their time. He had seen it over and over again. You could live for years—five, ten, nearly twelve years if you were Jack Finnegan and could afford to keep up with the drugs, if the drugs were still being manufactured; seemingly forever if you were Leonard Thrope.

But then one day it happened. You began to die. In spite of the drugs, the acupuncture therapies, the shiatsu massages and fungus teas and wave after wave of chemicals and vitamins; in spite of everything, you died. One day you were home with your geraniums and cats and a hundred bottles of medicine. The next you were in ICU with flowers brought up from that vendor in midtown who was the only person who had fresh flowers anymore. Then you were gone, and they were holding white roses at a memorial service and trying not to notice who else had a rattle in the throat and shaky hands.

And it was worse, now, of course—everything was worse. The experimental AIDS vaccine that had been given via lottery mutated into the petra virus, whose hosts were immune to HIV but died of other things. Even the drugs that worked no longer worked, because who could afford them, and the glimmering interfered with the labs producing them, and the factories that distributed them, and the doctors who no longer went to their offices because they couldn’t get gas for their Mercedes and Range Rovers.

“…dear?”

Jack started, looked up shamefaced. “I’m sorry, Grandmother? What did you say?”

Keeley smiled sadly. “I said you looked tired, my dear. Why don’t you go to bed early?”

“I think I will.” Jack nodded and sank onto the couch beside her, leaning back with his eyes closed. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

His grandmother took his hand and squeezed it. She had recovered from her broken hip—miraculously, Jack thought—but it had left her more frail, dreamier, than before. Still, her grip was strong and limber as a girl’s; her skin smelled of almond oil and Chanel No. 19. “I feel the same way. It’s this weather—can’t decide whether it’s spring or winter still.”

She let go of his hand and reached for her drink. Her last remaining vice, along with the single cigarette she would smoke later, leaning out her bedroom window in deference to her grandson’s health. Leonard brought them for her, and when he was visiting insisted on joining her when she smoked, much to Keeley’s annoyance. He liked to suggest other bad habits she might enjoy.

“There’s IZE; I know you can’t have tried that. Or heroin—I could teach you to shoot up! I could probably get a cover feature out of it,” he would say thoughtfully, watching the Japanese dirigibles make their test flights through the crimson air above the river. “‘Former Deb Now Centenarian Junkie…”

Now Jack watched as Keeley drank her whiskey. “Up in Stonington they call it March Hill,” she went on. Her pale blue eyes went to gray, the way they did whenever she spoke of the family’s summer cottage in Maine, long since sold to developers to keep The Gaudy Book alive. “Every spring the obituaries come, and you read them in the paper, so many of them it seems, and the old folks say, ‘Oh old Virge, you know, he didn’t make it over March Hill.’”

The luster dimmed in her gaze. Jack knew she was thinking of her husband James, who twenty-six years before had not made it over March Hill. “Ah, but what am I saying? It’s just the weather, Jackie. Spring snow, that’s all.” She patted his hand. “You go to bed now; Larena will help me later. Go on, now.”

Jack yawned and draped an arm around her thin shoulders. “You sure?”

She kissed his cheek and shoved him gently. “Go.”

He went. Behind him he heard his grandmother calling to Larena and the housekeeper’s plaintive reply.

“Yes, Keeley, I am coming.”