Elizabeth Hand: Glimmering

“Oh, shit.” Jule groaned. “Here we go again. I’ll call 911—”

Jack shook his head. “No—”

His mouth was dry, his eyes unfocused. What’s wrong, there’s something wrong—

“No, Jule. Wait. There! It’s—”

And now Jule felt it, too, Jack could tell. His friend stood in the doorway with his head thrown back, eyes rapt as he stared up at the sky. From down the hillside came a man’s voice—

“ Fuck! Jesus fuck— ”

—and a sudden burst of sirens: home systems, car alarms, car horns, police sirens, a whooping shriek from Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Voices everywhere, from every direction: like the wind rising before a hurricane, an approaching storm of wings. Jack thought of the night Harvey Milk was murdered: it had been like this, all of San Francisco yelling and guns being fired, car horns and heaved bricks and breaking glass.

But now there was no outrage; not even fear. Just amazement, a sort of horrified disbelief. And, after a moment, distant explosions—first one, then another, and still more, like a string of demonic firecrackers; and then flames streaming upward from electrical power plants in Bergen County. Jack clutched the rail and stared out across the river. For an instant he saw burning towers, transformers and blazing pylons like lightning poised between sky and the familiar pointillist array of lights upon the Palisades.

Then the lights went out: everywhere.

“Jule! Jule —”

From downstairs, Jack heard Jule’s wife Emma cry out for her husband, and Leonard’s fey tones abruptly gave way to a howl.

“ Jack? Where the hell are you? Jackie! ”

Jack Finnegan said nothing; only stood, and stared.

On the western horizon, above the Hudson and the dark shelf of rock that was the New Jersey Palisades, the sky was erupting into flame. An immense molten globe, brighter and huger than anything he could have imagined. And Jack could imagine many things. Nuclear disaster, gas explosion, stray weather balloons, terrorists bombing Bear Mountain, 757s shot from the sky like geese, forest fires, mustard gas—

This was none of these. This was—

Jack shook his head, out of breath, heart pounding though he hadn’t stirred. This was—

What ? A star? A nova? The Northern Lights? But Jack had seen auroras, boreal and hyperboreal; auroras and Saint Elmo’s fire and the magnetic image of his father’s brain, the tumor pulsing there like a candle flame.

But not this, never this! A rapture of gold and black and emerald green, sheets of flame leaping from the cliffs as the vast globe grew, flattening as it stretched across the horizon, as though it were an inconceivably huge and swollen camber being crushed by an even huger hand. Within twenty-four hours the news would start to drift in, garnered from shouted conversation with fellahin and Jack’s ancient shortwave radio: the terrible confluence of a solar storm and the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf, the atmosphere ignited like grease—

—but now Jack only stared at the spectral sky, the coruscating heavens, and knew it had come at last. What they had all been waiting for, consciously or not—the whip coming down, the other shoe dropping, the sound of sixteen hooves beating measured and far off upon the tarmac, still distant but not for long. The sound of something chipping at the earth as though it were an egg; the sound of the fabric of the century being torn.

The world had changed, changed utterly, and was no longer his, or humanity’s. It had been occupied, they had all been seized, were all possessed, strange particles charged by what loomed above them; all now shivering beneath the severed heavens; all now aglow, and glimmering.

1999: Natal Astrology

Actually, it would have been easier for Jack Chanvers Finnegan if the world had ended that night at Lazyland. And so, of course, it had not.

That was a bad year, 1997. The tenth anniversary of his acquiring the AIDS virus—and he thought of it as an acquisition, like a bad investment. Say, a forged Artaud notebook, or a painting mistakenly attributed to Thomas Cole—the year his dear friend and former lover Eric died. Nineteen ninety-seven was the year his grandmother fell and broke her hip. It was the year Jack developed full-blown AIDS; the year the glimmering began.

After that first night at the end of March, it was weeks before things returned to normal. Though, in fact, “normal” was gone forever, at least for people like Jack; in other places, of course, they’d never gotten word that normal had ever been there at all.

Miles above the earth, the filmy ozone veil had in places deteriorated from three millimeters in thickness to less than one. The chlorine-based chemicals that for decades had been kept in check by this, now floated like so many toxic feathers into the uppermost levels of the atmosphere. There they fell victim to devouring ultraviolet radiation, which rent the CFCs into chlorine atoms. These free radicals could each destroy a hundred thousand ozone molecules, momentarily linking to form chlorine monoxide before flying apart again and continuing their rampage. Added to the atmospheric stew were independent molecules released from BRITE, as well as the ceaseless solar rain no longer deflected by a fragile ozone parasol.

One relatively benign side effect of all this was the disruption of television broadcasts worldwide. What had once been the stuff of tight-lipped television news reports—food riots, looting, cannibalism in Laos and Kansas City, Bible school vans set on fire by antifundamentalists, killing hail in Orange County, starving migrant workers storming a locked-gate enclave in the Napa Valley, war between the Koreas, children dying of dysentery and cholera in Minneapolis, Amarillo, London—became stories repeated in line at Delmonico’s and the Grand Union, where Jack walked in generally fruitless efforts to get fresh vegetables, bread, dented cans of tomatoes and chili, The New York Times . Eventually power was restored, but never for long; and so at Lazyland they grew accustomed to eating by lamplight, or in the dark. When the power did come on, when the television managed to lock onto a station broadcasting news from a studio that looked reassuringly like normal life, with reruns and talk shows and music videos that belied the coruscating heavens outside, they might forget to eat at all.

“One gets used to anything, even dying,” Jack’s grandmother Keeley used to say when he was growing up. He recalled that now, a lot : when he was thinking of complaining about a ConEd bill delivered by moped courier (an electric bill! when waking to find the power on was like winning at fucking Lotto!), or about the bonfires that could be glimpsed each night from Lazyland’s windows, sullen flames where the fellahin squatted and played their boom boxes or, when the music failed, sang hoarsely while beating upon empty metal oil drums.

Still, life went on (“That’s what life does,” Keeley snapped at him one night, during one of Jack’s sinking spells), and Jack watched it, mostly on TV, when the TV worked. Amazed at the compelling illusion of canonical American Life cast there: talk shows, baseball and football games (though the cameramen avoided crowd shots of Wrigley Field, which had been severely damaged in the riots), reruns, and a few tentative, new episodes of the most popular sitcoms, which Jack found himself analyzing obsessively for what they might tell him of the world outside. Recycled advertisements were, gradually, replaced by new ones; apparently not even intimations of apocalypse could interfere with sales and production of Coke, Pepsi, Big Macs, Miller beer. Jack thought of the old joke, about what would survive a nuclear holocaust. Cockroaches and Cher; and it seemed that there would be plenty of junk food for them to eat. Not that Jack ever saw any of it.