Elizabeth Hand: Glimmering

That was 1997. By 1998 he had grown accustomed to life under wartime conditions; that was a bad year, too. Nineteen ninety-eight was the year during which Jack was certain that The Gaudy Book , after a century, and more incarnations than the Dalai Lama, would finally expire. And while he had never confessed it to anyone—not even Jule, not even Grandmother Keeley—for his entire life Jack had believed that his fate was tied inextricably with that of his family’s magazine. If The Gaudy Book died, so would he.

In September, The New York Times had run a sad little front-page piece, a preliminary obituary embalming The Gaudy Book in three inches of newsprint and electronic lettering. Travelers on the Infobahn (Leonard amongst them) had chortled, seeing this as another death spasm of the Written Word.

Still, the magazine continued to limp along. There were a few thousand stalwart subscribers: Jack imagined them as silver-haired toffs sitting upright in deck chairs aboard the Titanic , Gaudy Books firmly in hand, reading from the Slings and Arrows feature while the band played “God Save the Queen.” And there were dwindling loans from Jack’s own dwindling finances, the last copper pennies from what had been one of the great fortunes of the twentieth century. Leonard had helped, too, improbable as that seemed; but then…

“It’s the least he can do. The bastard.” Since high school Jule had suspected Leonard of the worst of intentions, and time had proven that Jule was usually correct. “If I were you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

Jack tilted back in his chair. They were in the carriage house, the office of The Gaudy Book . “I know, I know. But…”

His voice trailed off. Jule snorted in annoyance: Jack had never quite gotten over an intense relationship with Leonard that had seen him through his twenties. “But nothing.” Jule gazed with distaste at one of Leonard’s prints, framed in silver on Jack’s desk. It showed the charred carcass of an Antarctic snow petrel, now extinct. “He’s gonna fuck you up again, Jackie, you know he will. Don’t do it, Jackie. Don’t talk to him.”

Jack stared at the ceiling through half-closed eyes. After a moment he shrugged. “Well, anyway, he has this idea to help bail me out. I just want you to look over the proposals and make sure I’m not liable for anything.”

He handed Jule the thick folder Leonard had sent via bike courier that morning. His friend took the package and stuck it into his knapsack, then stood to go.

“Right.” Jule pushed a lock of longish graying hair from his forehead, grimaced, and tugged at his shirt collar. “God, I hate fucking court appearances. The phones are dead, so you can’t call anyone, you get down to the courthouse and you’re fucked ’cause the DA couldn’t get a fucking message to you that the case has been dismissed. I haven’t had a decent haircut in a year. Do I look like an asshole?”

Jack laughed. “You look very nice, Jule. Emma pick out your tie?”

Jule looked wounded. “No, she did not.”

“I figured.” Jack pointed with his pencil. “It’s got something on it.”

“Shit! Really?” Jule stared down in alarm.

“Ha-ha. Made you look.”

Jule glared at him, then started toward the door. “Later. Don’t sign anything till you hear from me.”

“How long will that be?”

“Who fucking knows? Maybe tomorrow if the phones are up, maybe a week. See you, Jackie.”

When Jack was alone again he sighed. On his desk scattered bills and manuscripts, collection notices, and invitations to charity dinners formed a jagged white plain, like a field of broken ice. He picked up a small card, hand-lettered in pale blue ink on Crane’s stationery.

Jack tossed it into an overflowing wastebasket. It had been a decade since The Gaudy Book could afford a secretary, or even an ambitious high school student, to help him in the office.

“Well.” His chair thumped noisily as he leaned forward and swept the papers off his desk and into a cardboard box. “Time to re-ordure.”

The office was filled with paper. Boxes and filing cabinets, wastebaskets and piles of unopened manila envelopes. A moosehead with antlers draped with ticker tape from the 1974 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Two IBM Selectric typewriters with old contracts still sitting in them; the Underwood typewriter on which Jack had learned to write. There were also several Macintosh computers that had been difficult to service even before the glimmering, and a Telex machine that occasionally sputtered to life with strange queries from readers in Bangkok or Iowa City. Leonard Thrope found it all very quaint. He had never stopped mocking Jack’s refusal to invest in nascent technologies when he had the chance.

“Netscape, man! I called you about that! And Evans Laboratories, you were crazy not to go with them!”

Now, perversely, Leonard wanted to save Jack’s magazine. Once Jule gave the go-ahead, he organized the special Memento Mori issue and its concomitant exhibition at the Whitney. It was the biggest-selling issue of The Gaudy Book in twenty-three years, and the most controversial show ever mounted at the museum. And, despite Jule’s best efforts—he was a very good man, but a rather bad lawyer—there were lawsuits, as there inevitably were if Leonard Thrope was involved. These came in the wake of Leslie Harcourt’s unassisted planned suicide (a ticketed event and a sellout), but Leonard handled them with his usual flair, half ringmaster, half dominatrix, and with his usual phalanx of attorneys. When the smoke cleared, there was a multicolored paper check on the breakfast table beside Jack’s coffee cup, holographed blue and brown like the fragment of a morpho butterfly’s wing.

$289,747.32, To Be Paid to the Order of The Gaudy Book . Memo: Mori

Enough money to keep the magazine afloat for perhaps another year.

“And we’ll bury it then, Jackie!” Leonard crowed. He leaned across the breakfast table for the powdered milk. “But now I have to go.”

Jack nodded at his friend, then started as the phone rang on the wall behind him. “Hello?” He cleared his throat nervously; it had been a week since the phone lines were up. “Ah, hello?”

But of course the call was for Leonard. Three species of Madagascan forest-dwelling frogs were to become extinct. The last of their kind, they had fallen prey to a fungus within the protected crystal walls of their habilab at the Ampijeroa Forest Station. Was Mr. Thrope interested? A very rich, anonymous patron would arrange for air transport to Mahajanga on a private Learjet supplied with black-market fuel.

“Another job for the Angel of Death.” Grandmother Keeley regarded Leonard coldly from the other side of the breakfast nook. “How can you stand it?”

Leonard smiled. The placebit in his front tooth winked from ruby to gold. Jack stared at it resentfully, wondering if he would be more cheerful if he could afford implants that would pipe a steady flow of serotonin and melatonin and vitamin K into his beleaguered body. Probably not. Wistful melancholy was Jack’s default setting, as cheerful chaos was Leonard’s.

“Oh, Keeley. Please ,” said Leonard, and sipped his coffee. Real coffee, just as the small yellow brick he had given Grandmother was real cheese. Despite the faint odors of bedlam and decay that trailed after him, Leonard was always welcome at Lazyland. He set his coffee back on the table, and for a moment let his hand rest upon Jack’s. “You know that I don’t kill them. Ramo Resorts International does it for me. In Africa, at least. Excuse me.”