“Jack? Oh Jackie-boy!”
Leonard’s voice echoed through the house, his footsteps pounding as he took the stairs two and three at a time, as he always had. In his bed Jack moaned.
“Please, Leonard,” he called out into the hallway, coughing for effect. “I’m sick—” “Of course you’re sick. That’s why I’m here!” With a thump Leonard gained the third floor. Jack heard the familiar boom as his friend slid across the landing and crashed into the wall opposite. Then, grinning like Mister Punch, Leonard’s head popped through the open doorway. “Please say you’re glad to see me, Jackie.”
In spite of himself Jack laughed. “Christ, Leonard. What is that—?” He pointed in revulsion at Leonard’s back.
“It’s a leopard skin. D’you like it?”
Leonard whirled so that Jack could admire his slight rangy form in its cracked leathers, hair braided and ornamented with an array of bones—Jack knew better than to ask about them—hands and cheeks so tattooed, scarified, beaded, bruised, and bedecked with light implants that the press had named him The Illuminated Man. Mirrors hung everywhere from his clothes. His left eyebrow had been shaved and replaced with a series of chips representing the weighing of souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A camera bag hung from his waist. Draped over his shoulder was a huge if moth-eaten pelt, complete with eyeless mask and dragging tail and two front paws tied loosely about his neck, like a sweater.
“Leopard?” Jack looked horrified. “Aren’t they endangered?”
Leonard pranced to the bedside, his feet in their steel-toed boots scuffing at the oriental rug. “Snow leopard, Jackie. Not endangered. Extinct.” He unlooped the two paws and let the pelt fall to the floor with a thud. “It was a gift.”
At least it wasn’t a human head, which was what Leonard had worn to the opening of the last Whitney Biennial. “So that makes it okay—”
“Oh hush. Here, I brought you a present.”
Jack instinctively yanked the covers up around him as Leonard thrust his hand into a pocket of his leather kilt. “Wait a minute—okay, here it is—”
Jack peered into Leonard’s open palm and saw a small highly polished stone, incised with a few lines. “It’s a kind of dream-catcher,” Leonard explained. “I got it in Nepal. One of the priests gave it to me, because I was—well, Jule told me you had been having nightmares. I figured you could use it more than me. I’m used to bad dreams.”
Leonard put the stone into his friend’s hand and closed Jack’s fingers around it. Then he raised the hand to his mouth and kissed Jack’s knuckles, one by one. “I’m sorry you’re sick, sweetie,” he said.
A creak as the door behind them opened wider. Jack saw his grandmother standing there, immaculately dressed in a Lagerfeld woolen suit and white silk blouse. Behind her stood Mrs. Iverson, a meek shadow in blue moiré, breathing heavily—she seldom ventured above the second floor.
“Jack dear. I heard voices—” Keeley’s cane struck the floor with a resonant thud. She stepped carefully into the room, bringing with her the scent of Chanel No. 19. Her narrowed gaze showed she knew exactly who his visitor was. “Oh. Leonard. I didn’t hear you come in.”
Leonard grinned, light glancing from his ruby placebit. “Hello, Grandmother.”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
Leonard stared at her admiringly. “God, she’s amazing! She just never gives up.” He raised his voice and pronounced with exaggerated slowness, “It’s Leonard, Grandmother—Leonard Thrope! You remember, Jackie’s old friend from Saint Bartholomew’s—”
Keeley raised a hand as though to strike him. Before she could, Jack swung himself from bed, shuffled to her side, and kissed her. “Shut up, Leonard. Grandmother, I told you not to come all the way up here—”
“Pog mo thoín,” Keeley spit. She glared at Jack. “I told you I don’t want to see him—”
Leonard’s eyes widened. “Hey! She just cursed me in Gaelic.”
“Okay, he’s leaving, he’s leaving. He just dropped by on his way out of town, that’s all—” Jack walked Grandmother back out the door, past Mrs. Iverson watching everything with her customary stunned expression. “Come on, Grandmother, I’ll help you downstairs—”
“No! Back to bed, you.” Keeley drew herself up and motioned at the housekeeper. “Larena—”
Mrs. Iverson took Keeley’s arm. Jack hovered over the two of them, clutching his bathrobe closed. Despite his grandmother’s protests, he followed them down to the second-floor landing. There he steered them into Keeley’s bedroom, kissed her, carefully shut the door, and went back upstairs.
“I think she secretly likes me,” said Leonard.
Jack sank into a chair by the window. “You asshole. You give my grandmother a heart attack and I’ll kill you.”
Leonard stooped to pick up his leopard skin. “Hating me’s what keeps her alive, Jackie-boy. What is she, a hundred?”
“Ninety-nine.” Jack sighed. “She’ll be a hundred around Christmas.”
“A century baby! I should do something—”
“Forget it, Leonard.”
“Huh.” Leonard sniffed, turned to look disdainfully at the painting by Martin Dionysos that hung beside the window. An abstract sunstruck landscape, all greens and yellows and sea blues that stood in opposition to Leonard’s own icy aesthetic. “God, I hate that picture.”
Jack ignored him, gazing out at the distant river, turned molten by the spectral display overhead. Like sunspots, the glimmering came and went, flaring up for weeks at a time; then receding, so that for a day or two, or an hour, one could almost imagine the world was as it had been. No one seemed able to predict when it would be active, or what caused the remission. Jack imagined masked scientists aboard icebreakers in the Weddell Sea peering up through telescopes, watching as the ozone hole above them dilated like the pupil of some malevolent eye. “Jeez, it’s busy out there today, isn’t it?” he said absently.
“Yeah. I heard there’s a heavy-duty UV alert. I had to cancel a morning shoot out at Rikers. That’s how come I’m here—”
Jack turned from the window. “I should have guessed.”
Leonard looked aggrieved. “I was going to come yesterday—”
“I’m kidding, Leonard. Yesterday I felt too sick to see anyone—this is the first day I’ve gotten out of bed, really. I’m sorry your shoot got canceled. What was it?”
“Hmm?” Leonard looked distracted. “The shoot? Nothing big.”
He fell silent and stared thoughtfully at a picture of Aunt Mary Anne on the wall. At last he said, “I have something else for you, Jackie.”
Jack’s heart sank as Leonard sat on the bed and pulled his camera bag beside him. “Something else?”