Glimmering

Jack listened spellbound. His dread was gone. Instead he felt anaesthetized, almost giddy; because surely this was what it was like to die? Didn’t loved ones sometimes arrive to take you to the other side? A thought lodged like a stone at the bottom of his consciousness told him that this was just a dream—he had often dreamed of his grandfather in the years since his death—and yet that did nothing to mute his exhilaration. He tried to sit up, but his arms and legs were paralyzed. This, too, happened in dreams, you tried to move and could not, struggled in vain to open eyes weighted with stones and earth; but he only fought harder, writhing beneath the covers. The footsteps came more slowly now—it was a long haul up all those steps—but Jack was ready, his heart thundered, and his breath came faster, he was almost gasping with joy. He would see him, finally, all those fruitless nights of waiting up would be redeemed; all those mornings waking to find that it was just a dream, Grandfather was really dead and the world not as it had been when Jackie Finnegan was a boy.

And now he heard the solid thump of Grandfather’s foot upon the landing, then another as the old man pushed himself forward, one hand lingering upon the banister to keep his balance. The door to Jack’s room flew open. A breath of cool air wafted inside, followed by a close warm smell, cigarette smoke and Jameson’s, the scent of starch on a white cotton shirt. Jack opened his mouth to cry aloud but gaped within a sudden airless void, the scents of tobacco and whiskey sucked away.

In the doorway a figure loomed. He was cast of light as a shadow is drawn of darkness, light everywhere, so that he seemed to be aflame. Jack recognized the unruly crest of white hair above a broad high brow, the proud beaked nose and the eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, icy blue, deep-set. His grandfather’s mouth opened as though to speak. A roaring filled Jack’s ears. His grandfather smiled and stepped into the room. Jack strove to rise but all strength was gone from him. He lay limp abed like a sick child, staring.

“Jackie.”

That deep voice, with its slight smoker’s rasp. He thought he would swoon as the old man drew near the bed. Upon Jack’s brow was the touch of a hand, cool and dry as paper. A blurred shadow moved before his eyes. He gazed up and saw what, as a sleeping child, he had always missed: his grandfather standing there with tears in his eyes, gazing down upon him.

“Jackie.”

Something brushed his cheek, like a moth or leaf blowing past. The voice came again: what his grandfather had always said when Jack left Lazyland to return to his own home.

“Jackie-boy. Be well.”

Like rushing water, air filled his lungs again. Jack gasped, found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, sweat-soaked, the damp covers tumbling to the floor. About him the room swam with gold and emerald. Greenish sunlight streamed from the window with its small, neat bull’s-eye. From downstairs echoed the old grandfather clock striking seven.

Jack dragged a hand across his brow. He was trembling fiercely. “Another fucking dream.”

It was only when he stood, tugging his pajama sleeve from beneath his pillow, that he saw in the hollow where his head had lain a small parcel wrapped in tissue.

Be well…

His heart began to thump as he picked up the parcel and unraveled the thin paper. He turned to the window and raised his hand, so that sunlight nicked what he held. A small glass bottle stoppered with lead and wax, and the label:

FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA

FUSAX 687

CHAPTER FIVE

Iconography

Their second day in Boston, after their very last tour performance, Trip woke and thought his room was on fire.

They were staying at a church-owned hostel near Cambridge. The rooms were spare but many-windowed, the obsolete unfiltered arches facing southeast across the Charles River. Trip’s bedside cabinet held furled copies of Guideposts, The Screwtape Letters, a tiny book of meditations. The only television was in the common room downstairs, beneath a framed photograph of the president. And a hostel prefect at the inaugural ball held by the Christian Majority Alliance/United We Stand for Freedom. The television, when it worked, was tuned to JC-1, so that now and then Trip heard his own voice echoing from downstairs. The entire house had an agreeably antiseptic smell, not the cloying sweetness of Viconix but the old-fashioned scents of pine deodorizer and ammonia. Trip’s bed was narrow, the coverings clean and cool and white. It all made him think of the single summer he had gone to camp down in Union, Maine, before his father died. The night after his performance he lay in bed with his eyes closed and tried to project himself back to Alford Lake, with loons wailing instead of sirens, water lapping softly at Old Town canoes and Sunfish.