Glimmering

“No! Back to bed, you.” Keeley drew herself up and motioned at the housekeeper. “Larena—”

Mrs. Iverson took Keeley’s arm. Jack hovered over the two of them, clutching his bathrobe closed. Despite his grandmother’s protests, he followed them down to the second-floor landing. There he steered them into Keeley’s bedroom, kissed her, carefully shut the door, and went back upstairs.

“I think she secretly likes me,” said Leonard.

Jack sank into a chair by the window. “You asshole. You give my grandmother a heart attack and I’ll kill you.”

Leonard stooped to pick up his leopard skin. “Hating me’s what keeps her alive, Jackie-boy. What is she, a hundred?”

“Ninety-nine.” Jack sighed. “She’ll be a hundred around Christmas.”

“A century baby! I should do something—”

“Forget it, Leonard.”

“Huh.” Leonard sniffed, turned to look disdainfully at the painting by Martin Dionysos that hung beside the window. An abstract sunstruck landscape, all greens and yellows and sea blues that stood in opposition to Leonard’s own icy aesthetic. “God, I hate that picture.”

Jack ignored him, gazing out at the distant river, turned molten by the spectral display overhead. Like sunspots, the glimmering came and went, flaring up for weeks at a time; then receding, so that for a day or two, or an hour, one could almost imagine the world was as it had been. No one seemed able to predict when it would be active, or what caused the remission. Jack imagined masked scientists aboard icebreakers in the Weddell Sea peering up through telescopes, watching as the ozone hole above them dilated like the pupil of some malevolent eye. “Jeez, it’s busy out there today, isn’t it?” he said absently.

“Yeah. I heard there’s a heavy-duty UV alert. I had to cancel a morning shoot out at Rikers. That’s how come I’m here—”

Jack turned from the window. “I should have guessed.”

Leonard looked aggrieved. “I was going to come yesterday—”

“I’m kidding, Leonard. Yesterday I felt too sick to see anyone—this is the first day I’ve gotten out of bed, really. I’m sorry your shoot got canceled. What was it?”

“Hmm?” Leonard looked distracted. “The shoot? Nothing big.”

He fell silent and stared thoughtfully at a picture of Aunt Mary Anne on the wall. At last he said, “I have something else for you, Jackie.”

Jack’s heart sank as Leonard sat on the bed and pulled his camera bag beside him. “Something else?”

“Don’t look at me like it’s a horse’s head.” Leonard unzipped a pocket, reached inside, and withdrew a small cloth pouch. He let it rest in his palm for a moment, as though weighing it. In a low voice he said, “Come here, Jackie.”

Jack didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on the window, the light flickering like so many darting fish. He could hear Leonard’s breathing, the ticking and tocking of Lazyland’s clocks. But surely there was something else… ?

He cocked his head and listened, uneasy. Not at all sure what it was he listened for, but certain it must be there. The echo of a voice, the piping of a distant flute—

He heard neither. Only a soft fumpp fumpp as Leonard tossed the small cloth pouch up and down in his palm.

“Jackie,” his old lover repeated. Jack felt his neck prickle with gooseflesh. “Come here, Jackie.”

He stood and crossed to the bed.

“Sit.” Leonard patted the comforter beside him. Jack sat. Leonard looked at him and frowned, as though he’d been sent the wrong model for a shoot. Finally he said, “I was planning to give this to you. But I was going to wait—”

He hesitated. “—to wait just a little longer. Then Jule called me and said you were so sick—”

“It was just the fucking flu, Leonard,” Jack broke in. He felt anxious and angry and aroused, as he usually did when Leonard visited. “You didn’t—”

Leonard hushed him, touching a finger to Jack’s lips. “He said you were really quite ill; and so I decided this was not the time to be patient.”

“Oh, right. Leonard Thrope’s famous patience—”

Leonard ignored him. He stood, peeked into the corridor, then closed the bedroom door.

“You’re not going to smoke, are you?” Jack tried not to sound peevish.

“No.” Leonard settled back onto the bed. He looked so serious that Jack’s anxiety began to churn into fear.

“Now,” said Leonard, “I want you to listen to me very carefully. You know I was in Tibet, right?”

Jack nodded. His gaze was fixed on the little bag in Leonard’s hand.

“Well, I met someone there—”

“Congratulations.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I mean, I met a very extraordinary person, someone who—well, someone who just may have been the most important person I’ve ever met in my life. The most important person any of us might meet…”

Jack suppressed a groan, thinking of all the other Most Important People in Leonard’s life, from the Dalai Lama to Gunther, Leonard’s personal scarification artist.