Glimmering

He pushed him against the mattress. A nurse’s voice shouted in his head: Keep him upright, they choke on their own sputum. Horrified, he watched as the boy wrenched away from him, arms and legs moving convulsively as he thrashed at the edge of the bed, as though trying to stand. Without warning he coughed violently. A gout of water poured from his mouth. Martin stumbled backward. Slowly the boy raised his head and stared at him with burning eyes.

“Where is she?”

Martin raised his hands. “Who?”

“The girl—the dead girl—” The boy’s voice was like something dragged across stones. “Is she here?”

“I only found you—on the beach, outside.” Martin forced himself to ask as calmly as he could, “Can you remember anything? Were you on a boat? In the storm? Were there others with you?”

“They’re everywhere.” His pupils were swollen, his eyes wide and staring, though it was not Martin he saw. “They came through the holes—can you find her? Can you find her?”

His voice became a shriek, babbling strings of nonsense. Frantically, he staggered to his feet. Martin seized him, wrestled him back into bed and pinned him there. His skin was slick and soft beneath Martin’s hands, like fallen petals.

“… see them? see them?”

Martin reached with one hand for the night table, knocking aside water bottle and candlesticks. The penicillin went flying before his fingers closed about what he wanted: a Ziploc plastic bag filled with morphine syringes. Without looking, he tugged one free, turned, and plunged it against the boy’s neck. The boy continued to struggle as Martin pulled the needle loose and tossed it onto the floor.

“… where…”

Martin gazed in pity and revulsion at where the young man’s flesh bore fresh abrasions; at his maddened blue eyes and frantic hands. But after several minutes the boy was quieter. His eyes grew calm and his body grew still, no longer rigid with dread. He even smiled, the same soft silly smile Martin knew from tending dying friends. His gaze focused on the older man. The smile became a grin, grotesque in his beautifully ruinous face.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Martin Dionysos.” Martin leaned forward. “I found you on the beach. Yesterday. You were—I thought you were dead, at first. Do you remember what happened to you? Did your boat sink? Can you tell me your name?”

The boy shook his head. “I jumped. I was scared. The bay.” He looked down at his chest, plucked feebly at his breastbone. “I jumped.” His gaze moved distractedly across the room.

“Your name? I want to help you—”

That silly grin. “Don’t you know? I’m not changing it.”

With a sigh Martin turned away. Glancing back at the boy he saw that his eyes had closed. He looked peaceful; Martin knew he was only stoned. He was at the door when the voice came behind him.

“Trip.” The boy’s eyes remained closed. He raised a hand like a bruised iris. “My name is Trip Marlowe.” And slept.

Days passed. Then weeks. You wouldn’t know it from the sky or shrouded sun that skulked across it; but Martin could gauge a sort of summer blooming as the boy’s wounds healed. First his broken skin; then his broken wrist. What next? wondered Martin, who spent a lot of time staring at that gold ring on the third finger of the boy’s right hand. “The nameless finger,” his Swedish grandmother would have called it. To Martin it was infinitely something. He and John had been married by a Universalist minister, exchanging rings that they wore on their right hands. Martin still bore his. So did John, in a San Francisco cemetery two thousand miles away.

“Are you married, Trip? Do you have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—I could try to contact them—”

Trip said nothing.

“The ring,” urged Martin softly. “Where did the ring come from?”

Trip stared down at it with dull surprise, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She had one, too…”

Okay, thought Martin, fighting an unreasonable disappointment. “Okay.”

There were no more tussles with morphine, but the sweet smile stayed. Martin wondered if he had suffered brain damage in the wake of his accident, or if he had been simpleminded to begin with. Mrs. Grose had been consulted, and the Graffams, about any foundering boats. And yes, a trawler had gone down in the storm, off the Libby Islands. There was a light there, but it had been unmanned for years; the Graffams knew only that pieces of the trawler had washed up at Bucks Head. No one knew who had died, or how many. The boat had shipped from Cutler, and that was very far away, now. In an old telephone book Martin found only two Marlowes, both in Liberty. He had no listings for anything farther down east than Bar Harbor, and there were no Marlowes there at all.

He was relieved.