“She does?”
“—and she’s lonely. Ah God, that poor girl…”
She went upstairs. Jack went out onto the porch and leaned on the balcony above a scraggy patch of hydrangeas.
A baby! It was medieval. Worse than that—crudely archaic, like one of those awful engravings from the time of the Black Death, crazy-eyed monks, strangers turning up like stray animals to drop their young on the floor. He ran his hands through thinning hair, too long, when had he cut it last? Over a year. He must look medieval, himself. We all must.
He began to laugh. Thinking how impossible, how ridiculously apocalyptic this all would have seemed, just three years ago: the sky in flames, coyotes in the South Bronx, oceans rising and burning. People fondling old issues of Vanity Fair and Vogue as though they were rare Victorian pornography. Daffodils blooming black. The world dismantling Lazyland, plucking at the water supply and electricity, plundering floorboards, foundation giving way because somewhere down the long slope to the Hudson a tree had fallen; because somewhere within the basement another tree was starting to grow. Because we forgot to buy end-of-the-world insurance. Because we forgot other things.
And still the flowers bloom, he thought, gazing down at the hydrangeas. A brave, sickly show. But blooming. See?
He grazed the wilted flowers with his fingertips. The blossoms felt damp and cankered, like moldering fungi. He wrinkled his nose, trying to find their scent in air that smelled of burning; leaned down until he could cup them beneath his palms. To his shock, the corrupted flower head moved beneath his hand. He reared back, clutching at the rotten balustrade, cautiously looked down again.
The entire bush was aswarm with numberless insects. Myriad ruddy beads like spilled paint, each no bigger than a ladybug. But they weren’t ladybugs; their carapaces were true red untinged by orange, and they had no spots. What they did have was very large, beautiful golden eyes. Not the kind of eyes that beetles had, insofar as Jack knew; more like a wasp’s, or fly’s, casting vitreous sparks of gold and blue. Something about their movement fascinated him, and after a few minutes he realized what it was: they were not swarming mindlessly as he had always assumed bugs did, but in a very particular circular pattern, stemming from the center of each hydrangea blossom then swirling slowly outward, as though they were creating the pattern of the flower rather than merely treading upon it. It was like watching waves on a beach, a random motion propelled by some greater thing. Jack glanced up at the flame-colored sky, half-expecting to see the Insect God there choreographing the waltz.
But no, no Insect God today. He looked back down upon the dance. It had not slowed or quickened, it had not changed; but it seemed that its symmetry had within it a certain stillness; that the shifting pattern of legs and wings and eyes, pistil, petals, stem all formed a single image. He leaned over the parapet and saw that the pattern the insects had formed upon each flower head was an eye: myriad crystalline eyes, each solitary beetle a facet. He felt a throb of nausea, to see all those living things put to one purpose—
And what the fuck was that?
All at once the insects erupted into a blizzard of wings. There was an acrid smell, then insects everywhere, not a horror but a glorious cloud, and alive. He stumbled backward as they flew around him, his arms outspread and head thrown back so that he felt the tremble of their thousand wings against his skin, wings and little legs everywhere, as focused in their intent as the hand of a lover. Like a lover he responded, not with arousal but with a sense of transport, of enchantment, as startled by this shock of joy as he was by the shimmering brood. They moved around him like falling water, red and gold. And for a minute Jack spun there with them, the center of that live storm. For an instant he could see himself as something else must: part of the world’s strange change.
Then they were gone, dispersed into the sky like a waterspout. Jack stood alone on the ramshackle porch, dazed and breathless. He could hear an airship thrumming somewhere above the river, and a bird chirping sleepily. The air was warm; he stripped off his shirt and saw numberless welts upon his arms and hands. The welts were painless, though he felt the faintest tingling when he touched one. And they were on his face, too: he drew his hand across his cheek and felt more small raised bumps, a whisper of sensation. A series of alarms rang off in his skull—hives! shingles! anaphylactic shock!—but before he could go inside to raid the medicine chest the welts began to fade. He touched his chest and upper arms, and felt the tiniest electrical shock.
But the welts were gone. He started to pull his shirt back on, stopped. The insects had touched it, he could smell their acrid odor upon the fabric. Perhaps it would be dangerous to wear?
But with their scent came the rush of memory: that prescient eye and himself within it. What little Jack knew of magic, he knew it faded, sure as love and paint.
He would wear the shirt, for a while.
Not long after this Emma and Jule came to dinner. They did not come for dinner—the phones were down at Lazyland and they’d been unable to call—but there had been fuel deliveries in the northern part of the county, Jule’s battered Range Rover had a full tank of gas and several ten-gallon containers in the back of the car, and Emma had earned four days off from her work at the hospital, by virtue of having been on duty when the survivors of a train derailment at Chappaqua were brought in.
“Round the clock for seventy-two hours, almost,” she told Jack and Keeley and Mrs. Iverson over tea in the living room. “I haven’t gone without sleep like that since—since my residency.” She looked down at her teacup; Jack knew she had started to say since Rachel was killed.
“I don’t know how you go on, dear,” said Keeley. “James could go without sleep, but I never could—”
“Me neither.” Jule grabbed his wife’s hand and squeezed it, then reached for his glass. He had brought several bottles of Jack Daniel’s (“Comes from the same fuckers who drive the gas trucks,” he’d explained cheerfully to Jack, “your one-stop fuel shop!”) and one was set on the table in front of him beside an untouched teacup. “I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I’m a mess.”
Keeley laughed. “Oh darling, I’m so glad you came!” Of all Jack’s friends, Jule had won her heart thirty years before, when he had shoveled her new forest green Mustang out from under two feet of snow during the 1969 blizzard. From the beginning they had been an odd sight, the unruly giant from the Italian neighborhood in Tuckahoe and the aging Irish beauty who doted on him as she never had on her own boys. After James Finnegan’s death, it was the teenage Jule who fixed things at Lazyland, replacing washers and fuses and lightbulbs, calling the men who mowed the lawn, arranging for the house to be painted when its shingles began to peel and crack. Keeley would feed him roast beef and popovers and apple pie, then send him back to the bus stop with a Wanamaker shopping bag full of Snickerdoodles. Later, during summers off from rooming together at Georgetown, he and Jack took over Lazyland’s top floor. Keeley would decorously ignore the occasional waft of marijuana smoke that made its way downstairs, the sound of footsteps at 4 A.M. as some furtive guest made his or her way outside.
“… really, we were just talking about you! Jule, do you remember…”
On the couch Jule held his big hands carefully in his lap, cupping his highball glass like a votive candle. Now and then he leaned over to touch Emma’s hair, or pat her knee, or to adjust Keeley’s shawl. “No,” he boomed, “but my ears must’ve been burning. Go on, go on—”