Glimmering (29 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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He tried to focus on the idea that this young man washed up on the shoals was very strange.
And, he thought, pulling up his old Windsor chair and sinking into it to spend the afternoon at the boy’s bedside, this boy—whoever he was,
wherever
he was, poised between death and waking, black ocean and Mars Hill—was quite the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
 
 
He got up several times over the next few hours, to feed the woodstove and check on the boy. In late afternoon Mrs. Grose knocked on the front door, to remind him of dinner.
“Roast chicken,” she beamed. At her feet the pug yawned hungrily. “A nice
fat
one—”
“I can’t come.” Martin slipped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. “Something—I’ve got something to do.”
Mrs. Grose’s eyes widened. “Are you sick? You should not be outside so much—” “No, no, I’m not sick.” He hesitated. No way to keep a secret at Mars Hill. Probably no way to keep a secret from Mrs. Grose, anywhere. “Listen—can I tell you tomorrow? It’s—it’s important, but I think I need to be by myself this evening.”
Mrs. Grose regarded him with her wise tortoiseshell eyes. After a moment she nodded. “Of course, darling. I will even save some chicken for you.” She retreated heavily down the steps, at the bottom turned, clutching her windbreaker to her bosom. “Be careful, Martin.”
“I will.” When she was out of sight he returned to his room to stand watch. He woke next morning, surprised by how well he had slept in his chair—no nightmares, no furtive whisperings. He stood, yawning, and stepped over to the bed.
The boy was still asleep. Carefully Martin drew the sheet down, to check on his myriad cuts. They seemed no worse, at least, than before. The unblemished skin around them still had that pearly sheen, but now Martin was more inclined to think that had to do with the antibiotic gel. He found his gloves and applied some more, took a clean washcloth from the basin and moistened the boy’s lips, then went to get more water. When he turned back to the bed, the boy was staring at him.
Martin dropped the washcloth, retrieved it and hurried to the bedside. “Are you all right? Are you—”
He bit his lip. The boy looked like death: how could he be all right? Beneath its gloss of ointment his face was battered and swollen. He blinked, bloodshot eyes mere slits beneath sunburned lids. He seemed to comprehend nothing around him.
Martin extended his hand so that it hung trembling a few inches above the boy’s head. “My—my name is Martin,” he said softly. “I found you. On the beach, you’d washed up. Can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me your name?”
The boy closed his eyes. Martin lowered his hand until it rested upon the boy’s head. Beneath his gloved fingers the boy’s hair felt friable as dried kelp. “Can you tell me your name? Do you—do you remember what happened?”
The boy’s head moved. His mouth opened to croak a single word.
“Trip.”
“A trip.” Martin nodded. He lifted his head to gaze out the window at the bay. “On a boat? In the storm? Do you remember where you were going?” Gently he touched the third finger of the boy’s right hand, where the gold ring winked. “Do you have a family? Is there someone I can call?”
The boy tried to speak, was overcome by coughing.
Martin ran to the kitchen and found a plastic cup with lid and straw, relic of John’s last illness. He filled it with water and returned to the bedroom. “Here—just sip it, okay, don’t try to drink too much—”
He slid the straw between the boy’s lips and waited as he sucked at it, fruitlessly at first, then greedily as he tasted water. “Not too much!” cried Martin, but he smiled. “Better?”
The boy nodded. He looked around, but the effort was too much. A moment later he was asleep again. Martin spent the morning watching him. Whenever the boy stirred, he plied him with water, heavily laced with honey. Hours passed; the older man sat in his chair, looking in vain for some sign of recovery. A wash of crimson to the boy’s translucent flesh; murmured words; even an anguished moan. Anything that might tether him to that room.
But the boy hardly moved. His breathing was not labored. He barely seemed to breathe at all. Martin was afraid to probe for a pulse, the boy’s arms and neck were so badly lacerated. He finally resorted to clumsily holding a large gilt-framed mirror above the boy’s mouth. And yes, a faint fog appeared at last, so little breath, it seemed not enough to keep a mouse alive. Martin sighed with relief. The boy’s chest rose and fell. Martin could hear the sigh of air leaving him, a soft wheezing in his lungs. Almost surely the boy had inhaled water: he could be developing pneumonia. Martin fetched the plastic bin that held eight years’ harvest of medications and hurriedly rifled it, tossing aside morphine syringes, inhalers, empty bottles of AZT and erythromycin and crixivan. At the very bottom, buried beneath wads of sterile gauze and hospital-size tubes of antibiotic ointment, there was a package of penicillin ampoules. Martin squinted at the label.
It had expired over a year ago. He removed one of the ampoules and held it up to the light. It looked fine. Meaningless, he knew, and probably the drug was useless now; but he would chance it.
For several minutes he stood staring down at the wasted body within its nest of blankets. At last he took a deep breath and began searching for a spot to inject the drug. He found a place above the young man’s elbow where the skin was raw but unbroken. The antiseptic smell of ointment mingled with that of seawater as carefully he straightened the arm, stroking the pale turquoise tendril of a vein, then jabbed the ampoule against it.
He had not expected the boy to react. But he did, jerking his arm from Martin’s hand and gasping. Martin looked up, frightened, and saw the boy’s eyes fly open, his mouth agape. He coughed, then gagged, choking as Martin grabbed his shoulders and tried to restrain him.
“Wait!”
Martin cried. “Please, don’t—”
He pushed him against the mattress. A nurse’s voice shouted in his head:
Keep him upright, they choke on their own sputum.
Horrified, he watched as the boy wrenched away from him, arms and legs moving convulsively as he thrashed at the edge of the bed, as though trying to stand. Without warning he coughed violently. A gout of water poured from his mouth. Martin stumbled backward. Slowly the boy raised his head and stared at him with burning eyes.
“Where is she?”
Martin raised his hands. “Who?”
“The girl—the dead girl—” The boy’s voice was like something dragged across stones. “Is she here?”
“I only found you—on the beach, outside.” Martin forced himself to ask as calmly as he could, “Can you remember anything? Were you on a boat? In the storm? Were there others with you?”
“They’re everywhere.” His pupils were swollen, his eyes wide and staring, though it was not Martin he saw. “They came through the holes—can you find her? Can you find her?”
His voice became a shriek, babbling strings of nonsense. Frantically, he staggered to his feet. Martin seized him, wrestled him back into bed and pinned him there. His skin was slick and soft beneath Martin’s hands, like fallen petals.
“. . . see them? see
them
?
”
Martin reached with one hand for the night table, knocking aside water bottle and candlesticks. The penicillin went flying before his fingers closed about what he wanted: a Ziploc plastic bag filled with morphine syringes. Without looking, he tugged one free, turned, and plunged it against the boy’s neck. The boy continued to struggle as Martin pulled the needle loose and tossed it onto the floor.
“. . . where . . .”
Martin gazed in pity and revulsion at where the young man’s flesh bore fresh abrasions; at his maddened blue eyes and frantic hands. But after several minutes the boy was quieter. His eyes grew calm and his body grew still, no longer rigid with dread. He even smiled, the same soft silly smile Martin knew from tending dying friends. His gaze focused on the older man. The smile became a grin, grotesque in his beautifully ruinous face.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Martin Dionysos.” Martin leaned forward. “I found you on the beach. Yesterday. You were—I thought you were dead, at first. Do you remember what happened to you? Did your boat sink? Can you tell me your name?”
The boy shook his head. “I jumped. I was scared. The bay.” He looked down at his chest, plucked feebly at his breastbone. “I jumped.” His gaze moved distractedly across the room.
“Your name? I want to help you—”
That silly grin. “Don’t you know? I’m not changing it.”
With a sigh Martin turned away. Glancing back at the boy he saw that his eyes had closed. He looked peaceful; Martin knew he was only stoned. He was at the door when the voice came behind him.
“Trip.” The boy’s eyes remained closed. He raised a hand like a bruised iris. “My name is Trip Marlowe.” And slept.
 
 
Days passed. Then weeks. You wouldn’t know it from the sky or shrouded sun that skulked across it; but Martin could gauge a sort of summer blooming as the boy’s wounds healed. First his broken skin; then his broken wrist.
What next?
wondered Martin, who spent a lot of time staring at that gold ring on the third finger of the boy’s right hand. “The nameless finger,” his Swedish grandmother would have called it. To Martin it was infinitely something. He and John had been married by a Universalist minister, exchanging rings that they wore on their right hands. Martin still bore his. So did John, in a San Francisco cemetery two thousand miles away.
“Are you married, Trip? Do you have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—I could try to contact them—”
Trip said nothing.
“The ring,” urged Martin softly. “Where did the ring come from?”
Trip stared down at it with dull surprise, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She had one, too . . .”
Okay,
thought Martin, fighting an unreasonable disappointment. “Okay.”
There were no more tussles with morphine, but the sweet smile stayed. Martin wondered if he had suffered brain damage in the wake of his accident, or if he had been simpleminded to begin with. Mrs. Grose had been consulted, and the Graffams, about any foundering boats. And yes, a trawler had gone down in the storm, off the Libby Islands. There was a light there, but it had been unmanned for years; the Graffams knew only that pieces of the trawler had washed up at Bucks Head. No one knew who had died, or how many. The boat had shipped from Cutler, and that was very far away, now. In an old telephone book Martin found only two Marlowes, both in Liberty. He had no listings for anything farther down east than Bar Harbor, and there were no Marlowes there at all.
He was relieved.
Mornings he would prepare breakfast. Oatmeal and raw milk and maple syrup, dark as motor oil and with an ineffably sweet, scorched taste. Sometimes eggs from their neighbor Diana, their shells tea-colored, pale yellow, the soft blue-green of a vein too near the surface of the skin. Martin and Trip would sit at the kitchen table, Trip wearing a loose worn flannel shirt and pajama pants that had belonged to John. Too big by far for his slight frame, but Martin was fearful of fabric catching against the flesh not quite healed, and it was not warm enough to go shirtless. While Trip spooned oatmeal or liquescent yolk Martin would try to engage him in conversation. Where was he from? Where had he grown up?
But Trip never replied. He would talk, uninspired musings on the weather, the eggs, how he had slept; but he would not answer questions, or ask them. At first Martin thought this, too, a manifestation of whatever disaster had befallen him. But as the weeks went by and he came to map the boy as once he had mapped canvas, he started to recognize a certain look that Trip had. Or rather, the absence of a look: a shuttering of his eyes, a retreat that Martin could observe as certainly as he could mark a falling leaf. The boy was not amnesiac, not as simple as Martin suspected. He was reticent, skittish, purposefully shy. He was in hiding.
After breakfast, and everything tidied up, they would walk to the beach. Trip was stronger, now. He could have walked by himself, and though he never said anything, he seemed to welcome Martin’s company. He did not like to be left alone in the bungalow; he did not like to be alone. Nights, sleeping on the couch in the living room, Martin would often be awakened by the boy’s cries. He would go to him, murmuring until Trip fell asleep once more. The boy claimed not to recall his nightmares. Only once, Martin let his fingertips graze Trip’s healed wrist: the boy looked at him and said, “She was already dead.”
Martin nodded, waiting for him to go on; but the boy withdrew his hand and said no more.
“The rest must have drowned,” Martin explained to Mrs. Grose one evening, surrounded by flickering candles in her cozy living room. “He said they went through the holes. He keeps saying something about a dead girl . . .”
Mrs. Grose sipped her brandy thoughtfully. “His sweetheart, you think?”
“I guess.” Martin stared into his glass. “He wears a wedding ring, but it’s on this finger—like mine.” He turned his hand, so that candlelight slid across the thick gold band. “And some kind of Maltese cross. She must have drowned.”

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