“Hi,” she whispered.
A fringe of corn-silk hair hung across her eyes. She wore very tight, white jodhpurs, a fuzzy lavender sweater, and a hugely oversize raincoat of transparent pink vinyl that made a crunching sound when she moved. Her feet were clad in pink plastic mules with bunnies on them.
Trip shook his head. It was the end of March, and freezing outside.
“Aren’t you going to be cold?”
Marz shot him a disdainful look. “No.”
Nellie laughed. “What’d I tell you?” She pointed a finger at Trip and smiled triumphantly. “You’ll take better care of her than me—I told her to wear that coat.”
He sat uneasily, staring at the blond girl. Nellie was asking him questions—had he ever made an IT recording? Had he ever been to New York before? Had he ever done drugs? IZE?
This last was odd enough that Trip looked away, startled. “Drugs? Jeez, no.”
“Never?” Nellie tilted her head, her eyes unreadable: was he being tested? She picked up several 8xl0s, black-and-white photos of blank-faced people standing in line, and fanned herself with them. “A lot of people don’t really think of IZE as a drug, you know. I mean, they practically had FDA approval before—”
Her hand waved disdainfully at the wall with its square of dark protective glass. Outside the glimmering could be glimpsed only as arabesques of black and gray moving above the skyscrapers. “—before all this came down.”
Trip hunched his shoulders. He wanted to leave. This woman was acting fucking bizarre. “Uh, yeah. I guess. But I don’t do drugs. I mean, I’m not just saying that. I never, ever did anything. My father was an alcoholic and he, like, killed himself. I signed a pledge when I was in sixth grade, and I’ve kept it.”
Nellie smiled. “Of course. I read that somewhere, or no—I saw you on Midnight, that’s it. Well, that’s great, Trip, really!” Her eyes grew soft as she leaned across the desk, smoothing the photos and setting them aside. “’Cause a lot of these bands, they’re just cashing in on the whole Xian phenomenon, just riding the wave—but you feel like the real thing to me. I think you’re just going to get bigger and bigger, Trip. I think you’re going to be huge.”
He nodded, forcing himself to smile; then let his glance ride back to Marz. She stared at him, eyes narrowed, and very slowly licked her upper lip.
The phone rang. “Okay!” crowed Nellie, cradling the receiver in her palm. “Off you go, kiddies. Marz—be good—”
They left. Even with her head down and eyes blanketed by her hair, Marz managed to navigate the Pyramid lobby with enviable ease. At her side Trip tried desperately to think of something to say. He did remember to let her go first into the limo, the driver holding the door open for them.
“The museum?” she asked. Trip nodded, and they were off.
The limo let them off in front of the planetarium’s unfinished new entrance, hidden behind plywood and rusted scaffolding. Trip told the driver to come back in three hours. Then he scrambled out behind Marz, stepping on her raincoat so that she lurched forward against the curb.
“Oh—hey, I’m sorry, I—”
He tried to grab her arm but came up with a crackling handful of vinyl. As the car pulled away he found himself staring down at her small pale face, nestled in its bright pink wrappings like a marzipan sweet.
“It’s okay,” she said, and headed toward the entrance. For a moment he stared, stunned by the sight of the girl’s gumdrop coat flapping around her white-clad legs. Then he hurried after her.
He paid for their tickets, and they stood in line for the first show of the day. The planetarium complex seemed not so much unfinished as partially excavated from an archaeological dig. There were yawning pits crisscrossed by boards and metal catwalks, monolithic objects—kiosks, dioramas, monitors, IT booths—strewn seemingly at random throughout the cavernous space, and a fine layer of sawdust and grit overall. Trip felt as though he were lurching around inside of someone else’s movie, doing simple things—buying tickets, waiting behind the worn brass stanchions—without actually sensing the two slips of paper in his hand or the rough velvet rope beneath his fingers. He had never been on his own like this before, not in a city. Was it okay to pay with a fifty-dollar bill instead of a credit card? What would happen if he took off his heavy old pea coat? Should he give Marz her own ticket, or hold them both? There were only a handful of other people waiting to get in, an annoyingly convivial family whose masks identified them as part of TeamAmericon! and a small school group wearing uniforms and wrist monitors, desert boots and tiny ID implants that glowed on the backs of their hands.
“So.” He coughed nervously. “You ever been here before?”
Marz shook her head. “No.” She stared hungrily at the school group. Trip watched her face, the way her tongue flicked out to lick her lower lip and her strange violet eyes as she watched the children elbow each other and snigger at their cabal of chaperones. Her expression was sad yet intense; after a minute she looked up at him.
“I used to wear one of those monitors.” She leaned back so that her arm stuck out from its plastic wrapping, displaying a wrist so thin Trip marveled that anything could have remained there without sliding off. “When Nellie first brought me over. But I was allergic.” She traced a circle where the flesh still held a grayish shadow, like the stain left by a cheap metal bracelet. “See?”
Trip nodded, reached with a tentative finger to stroke the smooth soft skin inside her wrist, then to touch the simple gold band on her ring finger. “Did it hurt?”
“No.” She glanced at the schoolchildren. The line started to move, the children arranging themselves in an orderly row alongside their teachers. “I wish I still had it.”
Trip handed their tickets to a solemn usher, and they went inside. The huge dimly lit space reminded him of a cathedral he had visited once, barely occupied and chilly as this place was and with the same whisper of ambient music and rustling papers. It smelled faintly of vanilla and balsam disinfectant. He took Marz’s hand and led her to the far side of the room, where no one else was sitting, and they took their seats in a middle row. The program started, an energetically produced but intrinsically dull explication of the atmospheric effects that produced the glimmering and which now seemed to be giving birth to still more and stranger celestial events. There was a protracted discussion of millennial cults and prophecies through the ages. Trip yawned and scrunched way down in his seat. Beside him Marz did the same, her raincoat popping explosively.
“I better take it off.” She giggled. “Before they throw me out. That happened once, you know.”
She dropped the raincoat over the row of seats in front of them. In the middle of the room the aged Zeiss planetarium moved up and down like an avid mantis, a huge ungainly mechanism covered with round lenses and bulging optics. Overhead the dome with its spectral colors faded to a night sky, and a woman’s recorded voice began intoning the names of constellations.
“Aquarius,” she said. “The Water Bearer.”
Trip stared at the false sky. He had not seen so many stars since he was a boy in Maine. Everywhere else he had traveled, the sky had been either poisoned by the glimmering or given a sickly yellowish cast by crime lights and glowing smog. Here inside the planetarium it was as though he were back on Moody’s Island. Suddenly he felt homesick. Even the chill bite of air conditioning made him think of home; though he had always hated it there, the rancid smell from the fish-processing plant and the buckled floor of the grimy little Half-Moon trailer where he lived with his grandmother.