“Boston tomorrow, Trip!” Jerry yelled after him. “College boys and girls! We’re gonna be wicked big stars! Wicked big!”
“We already are,” said Trip, as the elevator door slid shut.
In his room, Trip moaned and collapsed into an armchair.
“Jesus God.” He stared dazedly at the pathetic handful of lilacs he still clutched. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth…
Since the glimmering began, flowers no longer thrived, especially early-spring flowers like lilacs. These looked puny to begin with, but he didn’t have the heart to toss them away. So he put the lilacs in a tumbler of water on the table beside his bed, shoving aside one of John’s Guideposts discs to make room. Then he took another shower. Afterward he walked dripping from the bathroom, tossing the towel onto a heap of dirty clothes as he made his way to bed. He stopped.
When he’d put the lilacs in their glass, the flowers had been lank and gray, leaves curled as discolored ribbon. Now the stems were supple and thick as his finger, the heart-shaped leaves fresh and green. The blossoms fairly glowed. The scent of lilacs was everywhere, and the soft monotonous buzz of a bumblebee. He stared open mouthed, then closed his eyes and inhaled.
He saw his grandmother’s trailer on Moody’s Island, crowded by the ancient lilac trees that were the sole remnant of the farm that had once stood there. The bee droned past him and he twitched involuntarily, sank onto the bed and he pressed the blossoms to his face. The wind blew warm as blood, the trees moved against a sky so purely blue it made his heart ache, a sky he only saw in dreams now. He knew he was half-asleep, but he made no move to get under the covers, or to put the flowers back into their glass. Instead his fingers tightened upon the mass of blossoms, crushing them against his cheeks and eyelids. The wind rose and the trees thrashed, the sun’s warmth faded as one by one the stars sprang out against the blue. The bee’s humming ceased. The air grew cooler as he flattened his palms against broken blossoms and moved upon the bed.
Beyond the tracery of limbs and sky a darkness stretched. True night, black and fathomless, with no spectral glare to rend the constellations as they passed above him. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis; Andromeda and Dagon. Amidst the stars a small figure shaded her eyes, as though gazing into a great distance, then began to walk toward him. Beneath her feet the darkness churned into sand, the stars to flecks of dust. As she drew closer he could see her face, small and pale and unsmiling. She was naked save for the aniline glitter of her raincoat, the streaming bands of green and amethyst that bloomed around her.
“My feet are upon the New City.” The words licked like flame against his ears. “And my heart beneath my feet.” He could feel her warm breath upon his cheeks. “But we who were living are now dying, here at the end of all things; for a foolish man bears our world away with him, who did not speak one word to the king concerning the anguish that he saw.”
The smell of lilacs flowed from her. She knelt between his legs, arms outstretched, and with a hand light as rain brushed the flowers from his cheeks. “Do you remember nothing?” she asked.
He started to reply, but she kissed him, her mouth cool and sweet as sap. His arms enfolded her and he drew her in, her fine hair a mist across his eyes as she moved against him. When he came it was like falling into sleep, a long slow shudder and the girl’s sighing breath in his hair. He lay there, trying to hold in his mind the image of stars and green trees, the odor of lilacs and rain falling upon a withered land.
Then he woke. There was a pounding at the door and John Drinkwater’s voice echoing from the telephone with his 6:00 A.M. wake-up call. Trip rose groggily, brushing leaves from his hair as he stumbled to his feet; and looked out upon his room to see lilacs, twigs and limbs and heaps of lilacs: lilacs everywhere.
He never saw the girl again. They were unable to get enough fuel for the bus to drive them to Boston, so Lucius arranged a morning flight from Westchester Airport. A hired car drove them; their equipment would follow.
At the airport Trip and John Drinkwater and the others sat in the crowded first-class terminal, with its smells of stale vanilla and ersatz coffee. Trip watched impassively as airport security surrounded a well-dressed Asian man whose mask fell away to reveal the garish cicatrices and facial tics of petra virus in its secondary, infectious phase. Lucius Chappell averted his eyes. Jerry Disney made a disgusted sound and headed for the bathroom. John Drinkwater lowered his head. His lips moved, praying—Lord, grant Thy love and healing grace upon those who suffer—and Trip felt a small surge of love for him. Meanwhile the Asian man stood wordlessly as his briefcase and roll-along were taken and sheathed in protective latex. He waited with the starkly composed expression of despair as orange-suited men pulled a transparent hood over his head and bore him away. Shortly thereafter someone whose mask and silvery eyes were embossed with the NatLink logo informed Lucius that their plane was ready to board. As it turned out, it was the only flight that would leave New York that week.
CHAPTER FOUR
Between Planets
For nearly two weeks Jack passed in and out of fevers, in and out of ER and ICU, in and out of consciousness. There were glimpses of white-masked faces floating in the burnished bubble that was Saint Joseph’s jury-rigged AIDS ward, a terrifying memory of sudden darkness and screams, flame and shouted curses and the horrific certainty that he had somehow missed his own death and plunged straight into hell. But that was just the first minutes of the first blackout, before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked in and the ward’s sodium lights began to glow. Jack missed the next few blackouts, being too busy manufacturing his own. His fever soared and dipped. When he was conscious he felt giddy and exalted despite excruciating pain; felt himself wheeling far above the hospital building and looking down upon Untermeyer Park, the broad ruddy sweep of the river, and the Palisades. These flights would be interrupted by someone taking his temperature, his blood, fecal samples, swabs of tissue from inside his mouth. His upper arm ached from repeated stabbings with a hypodermic needle; his hands, when he could feel them, were cold, and his feet. This did not prevent him from flying—jumping, actually—after the first few forays he realized he could move faster and farther if he leapt into the air rather than attempting to pump his arms like wings. So he would leap, bouncing as upon a trampoline and holding his breath until he began to hang up there, each time a few moments longer, and at last he did not fall, he was above the world, between feedings and fevers, between planets.
Sometimes he saw faces that he knew. His brother Dennis; Jule Gardino; Leonard, but it was the Leonard of long ago, his sloe eyes brimming and his mouth close to Jack’s. He saw his former lover Eric, too, which confused him but filled his heart with such joy that he shouted, and was confused again when the nurses came. And once his aunt Mary Anne drifted past, long blond hair and paisley wrappings trailing behind her. Sometimes he heard music. Another man in the ward had a boom box; the nurses fiddled with it relentlessly, until they found a working broadcast band. What spilled out then was like what was going on inside Jack’s head, “Gimme Shelter” and La Traviata, Rent and old Ajax commercials, a man shouting about Jesus and the murdered pope. During his flights the music faded, and sometimes the carnival light as well. It was then that he would see a great unblinking eye moving slowly across the heavens, like a hot-air balloon. The eye terrified him: it grew larger and larger, until it filled the sky, turning slowly as it stared down upon the world, its black pupil opening into the abyss. He woke screaming, barely conscious of hands pushing him back onto the cot and the hot sting of a needle in his upper arm.