Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

“I think it’s that way.” The man tilted his head. “Yeah. There used to be this club down there.”

He flashed Trip a Technicolor grin. “Princess Volupine used to play there, and Alex Chilton. Ever see them?”

Trip shook his head.

“Well, I’m going.” The man started walking. “See you.”

Trip stayed where he was. The man glanced over his shoulder, lifted his hand, and waved. Trip marked where he went. About three blocks to the south, the man slowed, then crossed the street and continued for another block, turned, and disappeared down a passage overshadowed by a very ornate old building. Trip waited several minutes, to make certain the guy wasn’t going to pop back out again, and headed the same way he’d gone.

To either side buildings reared, their windows uniformly dark. A power line bearing a traffic signal sagged across the middle of the intersection. A man stood in the shelter of a cracked plastic awning, smoking a cigarette and chanting as to himself.

“… cat ice hash acid ice cat… ”

Trip walked by quickly, keeping his head down. He passed a few people. Two young women wearing black, faces hidden behind cheap white masks. An older woman, also in black, whose eyes glowed plasmer silver. A man in cracked leathers, his face hidden behind a Mexican wrestler’s mask, cantered past on a white horse. A girl walking an enormous dog: all with enough purpose to their movements that Trip felt reassured. There was order, somewhere. There was food, somewhere, for humans and horses, too. Life was going on.

Which meant it could be going on at the Pyramid, where he had last seen the blond girl. He shoved salt-corded hair from his eyes and nodded determinedly, glanced at the skyline to see if there was anything like the apex of a golden triangle. No; but he’d find it. If he had to, he’d just take a cab, squander whatever cash Martin Dionysos had given him, and that would be that.

Because if he could get to the Pyramid, he could speak to Nellie Candry, beg her to help him find the girl so he could do what he should have done before, what he should have done in the first place. He would arrange to see her again, talk to her, spend time getting to know her. He’d contact John Drinkwater and figure out a way to take her home with him to Moody’s Island. He didn’t care about touring anymore, didn’t care about the band, or money, or singing, or God. All he wanted was to find the girl. All he wanted was to take her to the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church and marry her, the way he should have in the very beginning.

It didn’t take him long to realize that he was lost, way lost: meaning, he couldn’t find the man he had set out to follow, he didn’t see anything that said Marquee Moon, and he certainly didn’t see the Pyramid. He passed a small park, a woman selling water from a blue plastic jug. Behind its wrought-iron fence, the old brownstone building proved to be a branch of the New York Public Library. Wind stirred drifts of dead leaves and papers that had piled up in its corners. Broken scaffolding hung from an upper story, and the remains of a banner. A large cracked wooden sign, much defaced, proclaimed that due to funding cuts this branch was closed, effective June 1, 1997, and that the bulk of its collection had been transferred to the Ottendorfer Branch at Second Avenue.

Still, the library didn’t look closed. A small group of people stood on the grand front steps, talking excitedly. They seemed to be about Trip’s age, wearing long patchwork coats—it must be a fashion—over the kind of slashed finery and jangling carpenter’s belts he associated with front-row seating at his shows; or conversely, dressed in very conservative, dumpy-looking men’s suits with plain white shirts and somber ties. No masks, no protective implants or headgear; shaved heads for boys and girls alike, or else long ostentatiously uncombed knotted hair streaked with garish colors. Plastic tubes around their necks that could hold water, or booze, God knows what. Club kids, Lucius used to call them, derisively; and now Trip thought of what the man had said earlier—Marquee Moon, the Chancery. Club names. He stared up at the library steps until a girl with torn red leggings and tunic looked down and smiled at him lazily. He started to smile back, had an anxious instant when he thought, She knows who I am! Imagining the devouring rush of fans, hands pulling at him—

But no, she was just smiling, already she had turned back to the others. He saw that the pattern on her tunic was repeated on her flesh. The cloth had been torn so that one braless breast was completely exposed. Trip looked away and hurried on.

He crossed the street and entered the park. The wind tore at his anorak, bringing with it the garbage-dump scent of the river. The sky had deepened from violet to indigo. Rents of glittering silver and crimson showed in it, as though some unimaginable brilliance lay beyond. He remembered the planetarium show he had seen with the blond girl, her voice in the false night. The stars so firmly fixed in the sky, how immovable they had seemed, how lovely and bright and true. There were no stars now. There had been no stars for years. He stared up into a sky that seemed to turn slowly, clockwise, like a weather image of a hurricane, its central eye a deeper darkness that revealed nothing. He squinted, trying to remember another kind of sky; but not.

And he could not remember the stars; when he tried to picture them all that came to mind was the girl’s white face and burning eyes, and behind her a shining banner.

From the street came a roar, an answering chorus of shouts. Trip whirled to glimpse a car hurtling past, and then a second. From the shadow of a building children darted. They took off running, purposeful as birds in flight, shot down an alley, and disappeared.

For the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.

The Biblical words were remote as his memories of the stars. They had lost all meaning for him. Without the world he had known to frame them—without John Drinkwater, without his music, without the night sky over Moody’s Island or the sound of voices in a dilapidated clapboard church, without the girl—without these things, Trip saw with a clarity that left him breathless, God and the stars could not exist.

He had always thought it was the other way around.

Something cold brushed his cheek. He blinked and saw a few stray snowflakes spinning down, not white but pink. He wondered what time it was. Late, probably; night—New Year’s Eve, the man had said, could that be true?—and he was alone in the city. Echoing voices and the sound of breaking glass came from a block of shabby apartment buildings. He turned and walked quickly back the way he’d come.

At the edge of the park a bunch of children had gathered between two benches, sweeping back and forth on Rollerblades and skateboards, sometimes in tandem, playing an elaborate game that seemed to involve knocking down their friends. He was a little shocked to hear the way they cursed; none of them could be more than eleven years old. As he drew nearer they began to look over at him with the same bright hunger he had seen in the eyes of feral dogs.

Too late he realized his mistake. Something came whipping past him, a blur of yellow and green, and pounded him in the stomach. He caught himself before he hit the ground, turned, and saw a mass of bodies rocketing through the twilight.

Trip tried to run, staggering behind a bench. A few yards before him was the open street, but there were more figures there, jumping the curb and landing with such force that the wheels of their blades struck sparks from the gravel. Trip flung out his knapsack to sidearm a figure that grabbed his elbow.