Glimmering

When news reached Lazyland it seemed like a mishandled communiqué from another century: plague vaccines that caused mass hallucinations; children awaiting spaceships upon the Golden Gate Bridge; Disney World seized by tattooed militia wearing animal masks, who took orders from a teenage girl in combat uniform and a Blue Antelope T-shirt. Militias and strange millennial cults begetting their own plagues, their own viruses, electronic and corporeal; their own rites and rhythms of destruction, their own precarious groynes and parapets thrown up against what was immanent, and imminent.

… the end of the end, the end of the end…

Jack would stand upon the mansion’s grand old porch, surrounded by ancient furniture and his grandfather’s telescopes, and stare across the river to the ruined Sparkle-Glo factory, black and gold and crimson in the night. In the carriage house the fax machine would now and then stir, like a restless sleeper, then spew forth press releases detailing myriad magnanimous ventures spearheaded by The Golden Family. Snow leopard DNA encoded on the head of a pin, test launches of the dirigible fleet that would tow SUNRA to its place in the poisoned sky. The archival purchase, for $3.3 million U.S., of the historic American literary magazine The Gaudy Book. During these electrical intermissions the answering machine would blink and beep, and Leonard’s voice would hail Jack from London or Voronezh or the Waterton Glacier. Mrs. Iverson would do laundry and make toast. From somewhere within Lazyland a radio cried out with more strange bulletins. Fragments of pop music and Gotterdämmerung; the advertising slogan for GFI’s new global network: Only Connect. A new song that got extraordinary airplay, considering the broken bandwidths one had to gyre through these days—

I possess the keys of hell and death,
I will give you the morning star:
The end of the end, the end of the end…

Jack kept watch, listening as he fingered the vial of Fusax in his pocket, holding it up to the light to measure its diminished contents and praying that it might, somehow, be enough. He heard the fellahin laughing in Untermeyer Park, marked the progress of a dirigible moving slowly through the clouds. He looked at his hands. He was losing weight. His sight was strained as well; bright shapes flitted at the corner of his eyes, and sometimes he heard voices that did not arise from radios or rooms within the house.

But at the same time it was as though some new and more subtle sense filled him, even as his old ones faltered. He felt the century round him hurtling harum-scarum toward its end: an infortuitous concourse of atoms, a runaway train slamming into the roundhouse with everything it contained slingshot skyward: quarks, drag queens, The King and I, Einstein, Telstar, Hitler, mustard gas, Thomas Mann, Jerry Mahoney, Victor Frankl, IBM and AT&T and GFI. He felt his blood quicken, hearing footsteps in the parlor, unseen musicians tuning up for the grand finale.

And, finally, one afternoon he entered the carriage house to find a fax scrolled onto the floor: yet another missive from GFI. SUNRA was to be set aloft six months hence, on the evening of December 31, from GFI’s pyramid in Times Square. Gala celebration, many celebrities, at especial request of Yukio Tatsumi the presence of your company is desired. At the very bottom there was a scrawled addendum to the corporation’s formal invitation.

FYI: New Year’s Eve, 1999: Will I see you there? RSVP, regrets only. With very warm regards, Larry Muso.

^ ^ ^

The next morning, Jack went downstairs. He found the blond girl in the kitchen, eating stale Cheerios with his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson. More of his aunt Mary Anne’s clothes had been found for her, a pair of corduroy bell-bottom trousers, too long and cuffed around her ankles, and a bright red plaid flannel shirt. Her hair had not been combed; it stuck out around her head in a ragged white halo, and once again Jack marveled at his grandmother’s self-control during these last few months, that she hadn’t attacked the girl with a brush and scissors. Otherwise, Marz seemed alarmingly well behaved. She murmured “hello” to Jack as he poured himself some of the brown bitter liquid that passed for coffee, and said “thank you” when Mrs. Iverson handed her a napkin.