Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

He pushed against the first hard swell of fear: he was alone in a city, he was alone in The City. I’m a total fucking idiot.

Wind ripped off the water. He shivered and buttoned the top of his anorak. Surely it had not been this cold on board the Wendameen ? The memory of the last few months was fleeing from him, as though it had been a dream recalled in a noisy room. He knew it was not, he knew it had all been real, as real in its way as the shadow of another dream, the dream of drowning that came at him sometimes, a small dark animal nudging to be recognized.

But he did not want to remember that. What he wanted to remember was the blond girl. Her image was inescapable: it might have been stitched upon his eyelids. Her twilit eyes, her hot thrusting mouth; but more than those things her simple sheer being. The fact that she had been there beside him once, that he had touched her, that she had been real—

Do you remember nothing? she had asked him in a dream of flowers. Now, with the December wind pressing upon him like a cloak of ice, he remembered nothing else. He was only a vessel, broken and halfheartedly repaired, holding her within him like a flame. He hugged his arms against his chest, forced himself to look at the unpromising landscape before him. The smell of shit and decay was overpowering; he’d have to get away from the water or he’d be sick. He adjusted his backpack and stared at a derelict building that blocked his view of anything but itself. The walls had fallen away from its upper stories, so that he could see inside. Like gazing into a mutated ants’ nest. Heaps of rubble, beams and joists twisted like coat hangers, insulation and drywall hanging from the metal like old clothes. The wind sent crumbled mortar and gypsum dust and ash spinning down, so that Trip stepped back, covering his eyes.

Throughout the whole god-awful structure, people were living.

He saw a white-haired woman in black pants, no shirt, no bra, step across a gap in the wall, sheets of plywood spliced together with chicken wire and electrical cord. She was shouting to someone he couldn’t see, her white breasts moving as she stood on tiptoe. He couldn’t make out her words, but then she looked down and her face twisted.

“Hey! Fucking asshole, get the fuck, what the fuck you looking at, you goddamn fucking —”

He took off, stumbling along the ruptured spine of what had once been a road. After a few minutes he stopped, not because he felt safe but because his knee hurt too much. When he looked down he saw a rip in the white duck trousers Martin had given him, a leafy smear of dirt and blood.

“Shit,” he said. They were the only pants he had. “Motherfucking shit .”

He’d never cursed like that before. It felt good. He looked up and shouted at the woman in the building, though he couldn’t see her anymore, couldn’t even see the building.

“You fucking piece of cunt shit!”

When he turned to walk away he saw a figure strolling just a few yards ahead of him, a young man wearing cowboy boots and a long patchwork overcoat. His face was heavily tattooed with spirals. The streaky purple light from the sky gave his flesh a ghoulish cast.

“Yo, Happy New Year!” The man grinned, gave Trip a thumbs-up, and continued in his direction. Trip tightened his grip on his knapsack. The man stopped, rocking back and forth on his heels. “I’m looking for Avenue B. Know where that is?”

Trip stared at him, panicked, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t reveal he was totally lost, totally without a single fucking clue.

“Actually,” the man went on, “I’m looking for a place called Marquee Moon. It’s supposed to be around here somewhere—” He glanced at a lightless alley that ran between two empty buildings, then back at Trip. “Ever hear of it?”

“No.”

The guy kept on nodding, a speedy mindless mannerism. He was tall, broad-shouldered, not too much older than Trip, twenty-five or -six. A golden placebit glowed above one eyebrow. His hair was dark and close-cropped, his face despite the tattoos and corpselike coloring amiable, even goofy. Trip had first thought the man’s long overcoat to be shabby and much-repaired, the kind of thing you saw homeless people wearing. In fact it was stitched from hundreds of pieces of fabric—brilliant silks and brocades and jacquards, elaborately embroidered—with here and there mirrored cloth, and prisms, glass beads like eyes, jangly arrays of computer circuitry and feathers. It was, Trip realized, a very expensive coat, and the man’s boots were very expensive boots. Alligator and totally illegal.

“Yeah, well it’s supposed to be around here,” the man went on genially. He had a pronounced drawl. “A bunch of those places’re supposed to be around here, in the same building even, Magyar and Hit and the Chancery.”

Trip shifted his knapsack to the other shoulder. Enough seconds had passed, he knew he should either say something or leave, fast, before this guy drew a knife on him or decided to prolong the conversation.

“You’re not from here, are you?” The man’s gaze fixed on him. His hand moved, and Trip backed away, elbowing him roughly. “Hey, ouch! Jeez, calm down, buddy!”

His hand continued its arc until it touched Trip’s knapsack, lightly. “I was just gonna say, you probably haven’t been here very long. So you probably don’t know where the fuck you are , either.”

He gave him a rueful smile, revealing multicolored teeth like tiles.

Trip stiffened. The guy reminded him of Leonard Thrope. “Fuck you,” he muttered. He spun and started into the alley, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a run.

“Hey! Hey —”

As footsteps rattled up behind him, he made a fist, and turned. Fighting was something else he’d never done, but he jabbed at the air breathlessly, his back colliding with a wall.

“Whoa! Hey, man—” The guy in the overcoat sidestepped, easily avoiding Trip’s lame throw, and raised one hand palm out in a placating gesture. “Calm the Christ down, will you! I was just gonna say, this is not really a part of town you want to go wandering around in by yourself, especially on New Year’s Eve.”

As he spoke he moved carefully around Trip, holding his gaze as though talking him down from a ledge. “You look a little spooked, but I ain’t gonna jump you. Hell, if I was, I would’ve done it already.” He laughed, his mouthful of colored teeth gleaming. “Man, you’re the first person I seen in a while looks more like a tourist’n me—”

He plucked at Trip’s knapsack. “You gotta do better’n that, man! C’mon,” he urged, glancing to either end of the alley, “I can’t leave you here, and I ain’t staying.”

The man shoved his hands in his coat pockets, balanced himself on a cement block, and cocked his head. When Trip said nothing, he shrugged. “Hey, suit yourself, man.” He jumped off the cinder block and strode toward the far end of the alley. Trip watched him, and, when the man stepped back out of the alley, followed at a safe distance.

Out on the street the man was waiting, perched on the curb. There were junked cars everywhere, and on the other side of the road shuttered storefronts of corrugated iron, yawning doorways, walls pasted over with stripped-off posters. Two bald children hitting something with a stick. A rangy dog nosed at foul bright green water pooling in the sidewalk. He remembered a statistic he had heard once before the glimmering, something about there being a hundred million homeless people in the world, and untold thousands in New York City alone.

But if anything, the city seemed emptier now than it had a few months before, when he’d been here with the blond girl. What had happened to everyone. Had they died? Been taken off to one of the life-enhancement centers that Jerry claimed were really prisons? He glanced at the man, whose clothes and incongruously amiable confidence disturbed Trip as much as the ravaged streets did, then looked the other way. A few blocks off he could see people crossing streets, the comforting yellow blur of a speeding cab.