“Reason?” The face Martin lifted to her was raw with despair. “What reason can there be? What?”
Mrs. Grose sighed. She stared past him, to where the lilacs scratched at the panes. “I do not know. Maybe none,” she said, and stooped to pick up the gasping pug. “But you must act as though there is one, anyway. Good night, my dear—”
She lowered her head to kiss him, leaving a breath of brandy and Sen-Sen upon his cheek. Her tortoiseshell eyes seemed bleary, not with that vague distant expression Martin knew so well but with something more disturbing. Genuine weariness, the detached surrender of great age to a well-earned sleep, or more.
“Adele? Are you all right? Do you feel bad?” His voice was unsteady: he had never asked her that.
“Just tired,” she replied, and began to walk heavily toward her room. “Just tired. That’s all.”
He went the next day to the beach alone. Trip seemed content to sit in the living room, gazing at the expensive array of stereo and video equipment that had been John’s.
“Sometimes it works.” Martin picked up a remote and tentatively pressed a few buttons. “But not today, I guess. I’ll be back in a while. Okay?”
Trip nodded without looking up. “Okay.”
The wind was from the north, bearing with it the acrid scent of burning. He had heard there were fires along the border in Canada, started by renegade environmentalists: the kind of vague rumors passed amongst the denizens of the Beach Store more freely than currency. Certainly there was fire somewhere—the air cloaked in a thick yellowish haze that stung the eyes and throat and nearly made Martin turn back.
But he did not, and by the time he reached the shore the wind had shifted again, and the smoke dispersed, leaving only a dank foul smell. His eyes moved restlessly across the ground as he walked, longing to find something familiar, yearning for it as Martin had never dreamed possible. Fallen white-pine branches pressed into the mud, their green fans mimicking gingkoes; ferns; new growth beneath the sickly mulch of leaves and yellowing birch bark. Everywhere he looked he saw a world robbed of color save for a lurid yellow burst of lichen upon an oak tree, the mauve carpet of wintergreen leaves, and copper-green scraping of tamaracks against the sky. Brazen sky, guilty sky, with its stolen hues like rippling pennons, grass-green, luminous orange, periwinkle blue. It sickened him, and he hurried on.
Alongside the decrepit boathouse the Wendameen sat up on blocks, tarp flapping. Gaps in the plastic covering showed where the wooden hull needed to be scraped and repainted, seams that needed to be filled, floats replaced. Martin looked away, thinking how long it had been since he worked on the boat—a year? Two? It wouldn’t be worth salvaging if he didn’t get to it soon. He knew he never would.
From high up in a scraggly red oak a woodpecker clattered. Martin kicked along the beach, miserable but without the accustomed baggage of things that he knew made him miserable. He was not thinking of John, he was not thinking of dead friends, he was not thinking of tumors or T cells piling themselves into a caravan and driving off a cliff. He was thinking of Trip Marlowe and the way his long hair fell across his cheek, leaving it half in shadow; of the small protuberant knob in the wrist Martin had set, badly, which was like a stone under the skin. He was thinking of Trip’s eyes, winking blue like a gas jet turned too low; and somewhere behind that he was thinking of Adele Grose’s eyes, how last night they had seemed less vivid, once-bright marbles gone opaque from too much use.
It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin…
His foot struck savagely at a stone. But I’m not keeping him…
But you are, you are… the gulls answered. He stooped and grabbed a rock, hurled it at the sky. The birds dived as it plummeted into the red-streaked sea. He could feel rage building inside him like a fever, even as he turned and headed back to the cottage. He shoved the door open with such force that it slammed against the inside wall. Trip looked up from where he sat on the couch, idly turning the pages of a magazine.
“Trip.” Martin stood in the middle of the room, panting a little.
“Do you need to go somewhere? I mean away from here—do you want to go?”
The boy gazed at him with calm blue eyes. “New York,” he said after a moment.
“New York?”
Trip nodded. “She—I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York.”
“New York.” Martin sank onto the couch beside him, shaking his head. “You mean Manhattan? You were in New York City?”
“Just a few days.”
He waited, but Trip said nothing else; just stared at the magazine in his lap. Finally Martin said, “New York. You’re sure? That’s where you want to go?”
The boy lifted his face. “Yes.”
Martin stared at him. After a moment he reached and gently pushed a lank strand of hair from Trip’s eyes.
“Then I’ll take you,” he said. His gaze passed beyond the boy, to the window that looked down upon the rocky beach where a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter was raised on wooden sawhorses and concrete blocks. He leaned forward, and for an instant hugged the boy’s spare frame to his own, before he felt Trip flinch and start away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you—wherever you want to go.”
CHAPTER TEN
Heart and Soul
At Lazyland, spring staggered into summer. The daffodils bloomed, rust-streaked, their inner horns twisted into fantastic shapes, and gave off a scent like lilies. From the tulip poplars a fragrant pollen fell, staining Lazyland’s cracked drive acid green and orange. The sky shivered in its Stygian dance; some mornings, stars appeared amongst the clouds, and sun dogs chased them above the swollen Hudson.
When news reached Lazyland it seemed like a mishandled communiqué from another century: plague vaccines that caused mass hallucinations; children awaiting spaceships upon the Golden Gate Bridge; Disney World seized by tattooed militia wearing animal masks, who took orders from a teenage girl in combat uniform and a Blue Antelope T-shirt. Militias and strange millennial cults begetting their own plagues, their own viruses, electronic and corporeal; their own rites and rhythms of destruction, their own precarious groynes and parapets thrown up against what was immanent, and imminent.
… the end of the end, the end of the end…
Jack would stand upon the mansion’s grand old porch, surrounded by ancient furniture and his grandfather’s telescopes, and stare across the river to the ruined Sparkle-Glo factory, black and gold and crimson in the night. In the carriage house the fax machine would now and then stir, like a restless sleeper, then spew forth press releases detailing myriad magnanimous ventures spearheaded by The Golden Family. Snow leopard DNA encoded on the head of a pin, test launches of the dirigible fleet that would tow SUNRA to its place in the poisoned sky. The archival purchase, for $3.3 million U.S., of the historic American literary magazine The Gaudy Book. During these electrical intermissions the answering machine would blink and beep, and Leonard’s voice would hail Jack from London or Voronezh or the Waterton Glacier. Mrs. Iverson would do laundry and make toast. From somewhere within Lazyland a radio cried out with more strange bulletins. Fragments of pop music and Gotterdämmerung; the advertising slogan for GFI’s new global network: Only Connect. A new song that got extraordinary airplay, considering the broken bandwidths one had to gyre through these days—