Glimmering

For most of his life he’d taken those stairs at a run. A habit carried over from childhood, when he and his brothers and cousins would race up the first set of broad golden oak steps, kept polished to a near-fatal slickness by Mrs. Iverson, and then continue in a sort of exhilarated terror up the second, darker, narrower curved stair, like the innermost chamber of a nautilus. A twelve-point elk shot by Jack’s father was mounted high above these steps, its glass eyes sanguine with the glimmering’s reflected glow. As he approached the third-floor landing he felt the same primal dread that had gripped him as a boy: that huge gray muzzle with its blackened lips, the long shadows of the elk’s tines, like dead tree limbs. Jack shuddered, heart hammering and chest tight from the effort of climbing, and took the last few steps two at a time.

His bedroom door hung open. He bumped against it, staggered to his bed, and collapsed, one hand automatically switching the light on the nightstand as the other grabbed his inhaler. He gave himself two jolts of his asthma medication, then pulled the drawer open and scrabbled amongst his stockpile of bottles until he found the alprazolam. He took one pill, swallowing it dry, and flung himself back upon his pillow.

After a minute the inhaler began to take effect. He breathed slowly, deeply, then opened the nightstand again and took out a bottle of over-the-counter cold medicine from Emma’s private stash—she had a huge closet full of drugs she’d been hoarding since the glimmering began. Emma had told him to use this instead of sleeping pills, and so he swallowed two capsules, chasing them with the dregs from last night’s water glass.

Too late he wondered if this perhaps had been a mistake, one of those badly mixed pharmaceutical cocktails that would send him to Saint Joseph’s in the middle of the night. But within fifteen or twenty minutes he felt better. He could breathe again; soon the alprazolam would calm him. Maybe he was just sick (of course he was sick! he could hear Leonard shrieking); maybe he just had a cold. Without moving from the bed he nudged his shoes off and heard them drop onto the worn old oriental rug. He sighed and yawned, stretching luxuriously. The yellow light from his bedside lamp gave everything a sweetly nostalgic look: burnishing the dark arabesques of the walnut sleigh bed, showing off the cobwebs and dust filigreeing the old Indian headdress hanging on the far wall. More than a few of its regal feathers had been purloined over the years by Jack and his brothers and cousins, to be used for quill pens and darts. Other than that, nothing much had changed.

It had been his father’s childhood bedroom, the room where Jack had always slept during childhood visits, and it was his room now. A small tucked-in spot on the third floor, catty-corner to the airy nursery attic and the other bedroom, the one where his cousins used to sleep. The walls held a framed picture of dogs playing poker, an exquisite black-and-white print of one of Leonard’s flower studies, a photo of Jack’s aunt Mary Anne, who went to California in 1967 and disappeared, a painting by the San Francisco artist/activist Martin Dionysos, who had briefly been Leonard’s lover. Beside the window hung a spavined pair of wooden snowshoes. The floor still bore round scorched scars like bullet holes, where Jack and his brothers once lit Black Cats on the Fourth of July.

Now it was March. Outside the wind railed at the eaves. Even with the two old Hudson Bay blankets pulled up to his chin, and a nearly new down comforter (his Christmas present from Jule and Emma), Jack felt cold—Lazyland was famously uninsulated. As boys, he and Jule and Leonard had sat in this same room and watched snow sift through the walls, covering the floor like fine white silk. Things were no different tonight, save that he was alone.

Once again he yawned, reached for the tipsy stack of magazines and manuscripts that held his bedside reading. No matter that the written word was dead (Leonard and the other mori artists had held its funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where copies of The Gaudy Book, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review were ignited within a brazier, their ashes dispersed in the adjoining cemetery); hard-copy submissions for The Gaudy Book continued to arrive whenever the mail got through. Jack tried to draw solace from them—“the claustrophobic, fascistic tyranny of the written word,” some WIRED wag had called it—but it was difficult. He recalled his grandfather railing, “Don’t they teach these kids to read anymore?”