Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

Jule grabbed the plastic Thermos, sucked at it until a gurgle sounded. He swore and tossed it behind him. His eyes grew cloudy, as though filling with some opaque liquid. He muttered, nothing Jack could understand.

“Jule?” he asked.

A bottle shattered beneath the Range Rover’s wheels. A few yards ahead the alley grew dark. A dead end; but the car kept moving. Jule’s face was grey, his eyes set with the calm that precedes drunken rage.

Jack glanced around. What the fuck is going on? In the back he saw a folding snow shovel, what looked like a plastic bag full of dirt. Ghastly scenarios flashed through his mind—Jule pulling a gun on him, Emma bashed across the head with a shovel and buried somewhere in Putnam County…

“Uh, Jule? I think this is a dead end…”

Jule smiled. His foot tapped the gas pedal; the car surged forward, into the shadows. Jack sat beside him, clutching at his seat.

Oh fuck this is it —

Only instead of slamming into concrete, the Range Rover nosed into what proved to be not a wall or a building, but an immense pile of garbage, perhaps ten feet high. Plywood, broken chairs, window frames, plastic trash bags… the car plowed through them all, until with a heart-stopping lurch it shot out onto Lenox Avenue.

“Hey hey hey,” said Jule. He reached under his seat and withdrew another plastic bottle, this one emblazoned with a Barbie logo. He popped it open and took a long pull. “Used to be a good Ethiopian restaurant around here. Christ, Jack, what’s the matter? You look terrible.”

Jack ran a hand across his forehead. His fingers were icy. “Listen, Jule, I really don’t feel very good. Can’t you take me back?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Jack swallowed. His tongue felt coated with bitter dust. “How long is this going to take?”

“Not long. The studio’s down at the Pyramid. I’ll leave you in the car so we don’t have to hassle about parking. I’ll be in and—”

“I am not waiting in this fucking car.”

Jule shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

They drove in silence for a long time. There was surprisingly little traffic, considering it was the holiday season and most driving restrictions were lifted. The usual mess of taxis and buses; robust-looking vehicles—pickups, Jeeps, Range Rovers and Land Rovers—commandeered by drivers wealthy enough to afford gas and parking; astonishingly dilapidated old American cars crowded with what appeared to be three or four generations’ worth of families, all moving slowly but steadily toward midtown. Water was everywhere, sluicing in a strong current down either side of the street and forming whirlpools above sewer grates and spots where manhole covers had been removed. The sky had darkened from yellow to a tigerish orange. It made the water look molten, the silhouetted buildings like columns of smoke. Jack thought of people fleeing Pompeii beneath the lowering cone of Vesuvius.

The Range Rover breasted through an intersection swollen with rain. To one side the road had collapsed and was blockaded by sandbags and sawhorses. A man in an orange kayak hove into view, his paddle cutting smoothly through blazing water as he propelled himself toward the river.

Jack shook his head, fear chased away by the sheer strangeness and perverse beauty of it all. He cracked his window, letting in a blast of cold salt air heavily laced with exhaust. Water seeped through the floor. He drew his feet up to sit cross-legged on the damp seat and wondered if the Range Rover would be swept like the kayak to the Hudson.

“Look at that,” marveled Jule. It was the first time either of them had spoken for nearly an hour. “Over there—”

A huge tree had smashed upside down against a building. Twenty feet above the washed-out sidewalk its immense root mass hung like a black cloud.

“Wow. I didn’t know there were still trees that big here.”

“Probably it came uprooted somewhere upstate and just floated down. But look behind it—”

Jack pressed his face to the window, straining to see through the filthy glass and barbed wire. He made out something caught in the limbs, ten feet from the ground. “What the hell ?”

Above the tree trunk bobbed four skeletal faces. The water’s reflected gold touched hollows where cheeks, eyes, nose had been; sent strands of light rippling across the surface like fine hair. Antlers branched from each skull like lightning. It was a full minute before Jack realized that the ghastly faces were masks, and that the stags’ horns were not bloodied but wrapped with red ribbons.

He half gasped, half laughed as the Range Rover sloshed past the macabre vision. “Jesus! That scared me.”

Impulsively he turned to Jule.

“I had a dream like that,” he said. “That’s why it scared me. About these people—men, with horns like that.”

Jule nodded. He slowed the car to take a corner, sending a jeweled arc of water against the barricaded facade of the Empire Hotel. “Yeah. Rachel comes to talk to me.”

“They were—” Jack stopped. “Rachel?”

“It started about a year ago,” Jule continued. “When I had to go to court up in Poughkeepsie. I was just coming back, getting onto 684, and she was there”—he pointed at Jack’s seat—“sitting right there. She told me I forgot to put on my turn signal.”

“Oh.” Jack tried to keep his tone even. “So!—was it on? The turn signal?”

“Sure it was on. A little kid, what does she know from cars? But I just about had a heart attack, I can tell you. That’s why I drive around so much. She rides with me, Jackie. She talks to me.”

“Oh.”

“She doesn’t forgive me. I mean, she doesn’t blame me, I wasn’t driving the car that killed her. But all this shit now, my drinking, all that—she doesn’t forgive me, Jackie. She doesn’t forgive me.”

Jack glanced up. He saw Jule’s face, not slack with alcohol but hardened by it, calcified; his eyes dry and glittering as quartz. “Does—have you told Emma about this?”

“Sure.”

“What does she think?”

Jule shrugged. “She doesn’t believe me. She thinks it’s the DTs or something. Actually, what she thinks is that I haven’t processed through my grief. She thinks I’m still in denial.” He stared at Jack measuringly. “I mean, you think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

Jack took in his friend’s haggard unshaven face, the carpet of bottles and empty Thermoses covering the floor. What would be nuts right now would be to get into an argument with Jule.

“I don’t think you’re nuts. I think Emma’s probably right—you’re still grieving, or—”

A delivery van pulled in front of them. Jule beat on the silent horn. “Of course I’m still grieving. You’re still grieving for that guy Eric you were in love with, aren’t you?”

Jack stiffened. “Yes.”

“And Peter and all those other guys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it doesn’t ever really end, does it?” Jule’s voice dropped. “It’s like you wake up one day and they chopped off your hand. Maybe sometime it stops bleeding and scars over, but you don’t grow a new one.” He added matter-of-factly, “I know Rachel’s dead. I never said she wasn’t dead, I’m not denying that she’s dead. I just said I see her sometimes. She comes…”

Jack’s heart welled as he watched his friend tighten his hold on the steering wheel.

“She comes. Right there, where you’re sitting. The first couple of times it was at night—I just looked over and there she was. She’d say, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ I almost went off the road.

“And now she’s here all the time. I mean, no matter what I do, if I drink, if I don’t drink: she’s still there. Afterward, it always seems like maybe I was dreaming; but then she always comes back.”