Damp grass beneath me. The trunk of a tree, the bark as rough and solid as stone, against my back. I smell pears ripening overhead. The horizon snaps blue and more thunder follows. I count the collapsing seconds between the two while the electric air fills my lungs. I inhale the scent of blooming flowers and the wet lawn beneath me that isn’t. I can’t see you, but your leg is over mine, our ankles intertwined, and I feel the slow swell and collapse of your body breathing against me.
Glass to my lips, I taste sugar, lemon pulp, distant metal in the tap water and ice cubes. I dip my finger to flick an errant gnat from the surface.
A hot rain starts knocking the velvet white pear blossoms to the ground. Each drop smacks my skin while you’re curled against me, as though they’re falling through your body and hitting mine. The seconds between the flashing sky and the thunder are gone, a torrent of rain and pear blossom petals washes over me. Beneath my suit, the hair on my arms stands on end. The glass explodes in my hand and the universe turns white.
I’m blind.
I’m staring into the sun, so I look away.
A throng of people in black surround a casket being lowered into the ground. I’m wearing dark glasses but still squinting from the daylight and I’m thirsty, like I could drink all of the rain in the sky. Flowers cover the grave, morning glories in full bloom, their petals dipped in the darkening sky, washing their silken white tips in the blue evening. They feel like velvet ribbons between my fingers, like the ears of a delicate rodent.
Three crude pills in my palm. Gypsies. I made them from the morning glories in my garden. The daylight fades, leaving the heat stranded behind, and the symphony of crickets scores the encroaching dark. The first flicker of the first firefly is the signal to swallow my Gypsies.
Vertigo seizes my stomach. My face boils in anticipation of retching over my porch rail but the nausea snaps away, leaving me alone in the cloudless, moonless night full of stars and fireflies.
Switching off my porch light switches on the sky and I’m suddenly staring into the center of the galaxy. The stars are close enough to cup between my palms and they drift among the trees, shimmering from the silent singing of the bats, whose music hums against my skin. I spot one of their spastic silhouettes the second before it snatches a star out of my reach. The hazy supernova glows through the bat’s belly before it fades into a flapping black hole in the darkness and the singing begins again.
The fireflies are trailed by shimmering corkscrews of light. They spin webs among the trees as they move, their threads ending where singing bats snatch the spinners from midair.
One lands on my arm. Another lands on my chest, then another, the dots of light flaring brighter before they fly off, each tethered to me by a rope of frozen lightning, stretching and glowing longer and brighter. The crisscrossing ribbons of light left in their wake fuse into a luminous mesh, surrounding me.
My crying makes the lights brighter. I can’t stop and don’t want to. If every link in the chain of life is this beautiful, then I’ll die of beauty if I ever see the whole chain at once, joining the chain with my link in its place and the chain stretching from one end of eternity to the next. I’ll spend forever staring God in the eye with God staring back.
Beautiful, is all I can think. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A small eternity passes and still the word sounds distant and dry, incapable of matching its own meaning.
God’s own clock quicksand slows to an ice-whisper quiet. I follow the smell of morning glories, pear blossoms, wet summer grass, sweet lemon and electricity, everything in God’s chain braided into a single, warm breeze and the chain leads me to you. Your pale skin shines in the dark, and your hands leave dim tracers when you move, shrouding you in the cloudy embrace of your own ghost a hundred times over. Your hair is the color of thread spun from a flaming wheel.
Couples hold hands, children throw coins into fountains, street performers sing, juggle, twist balloons and walk on glass. Mimes mimic the unwitting, women braid hair and paint children’s faces. A shirtless young man wearing fatigues and a rigid, black mohawk, a crushed hat full of money at his feet, juggles torches, stopping to hold one aloft and spit a cloud of fire into the air. A hundred feet from him, a blond boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen, squirms and writhes his way from a straitjacket.
Between the fire-breather and the escape artist, you sit on the stone edge of a fountain, a paisley kerchief draped over a folding table no wider than a bar stool in front of you.
“Tell your fortune?”
“My fortune’s very good, right now. Thank you.”
You reach for my hand. Yours are dry and cracked, with long nails painted the color of dried blood, an old woman’s hands with a young woman’s face.
“You almost died when you were a boy. You were sitting beneath a tree when it was hit by lightning.”
You don’t know my name, but you know the exploding glass and pear-blossom-petal rain by the lines in my hand.
“How do you know that?”
You don’t answer. You run the tip of your blood-colored nail over my palm.
“They thought you might have heart trouble as you got older, but you’re fine.” You seat me beside you on the fountain. “You’re superstitious around trees, though. Loud noises startle you and you’re always thirsty. It never goes away.”
“And my future? Can you see that?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk. Not exactly. Tell me more.”
You squint, holding my palm up to the lights.
“Your parents were very religious. You lost one of them, one you were close to.”
“You’re slipping,” I say. “That’s vague.”
“It was your father. You were close to him and he died soon after your accident.”
*
Dad told me he could make the stars bleed. He set his tripod in our yard one summer night. We shared soda from a cooler and popcorn from an aluminum stew pot. The stars and the fireflies were our only light, the crickets and our breathing the only sound. Dad smelled like barbershop aftershave and developing fluid. He asked if I wanted to take a picture of my own and I did.
I clicked open the camera shutter and a white wire of light shot across the sky, crumbled into sparks and vanished. Will that be in the picture, I asked, and Dad said yes.
The lightning bugs blinked in the heat like constellations mirrored in rippling water. Could you take a picture of them, I asked. Dad said he’d help me take one myself.
I liked working in the red glow of Dad’s darkroom. He’d converted our storm cellar into a photo lab with safety lights and storage for his emulsions and fixers. The darkroom was our lone surviving father-and-son project. The last thing we’d built together, before that, was a radio from a spool of copper wire and a crystal. I thought we’d need tubes and a bulky wooden housing but dad said no, the signals are everywhere, you just need to listen. The remnants of that project lay in a box beside a stack of magazines, collecting dust. The signals are everywhere. I can almost hear his voice.
We worked together, Dad transferring the prints between pans while I rinsed and clipped them to the drying line. The stars shone brighter in his pictures than in life. Dad took long exposures of the sky, and the stars bled in perfect arcs that made me dizzy, as though Dad had photographed the very spinning of the earth. I found my picture, marked by the white slash and hazy burst where the comet had vanished.
The firefly pictures had trails that quivered like an old person’s handwriting and, wherever they had stayed in one spot for more than a second, bright stains leaked onto the film like car headlights in a heavy rain. The trails stopped and started midair wherever the bugs had blinked off for a moment. I lost myself under the red lights, following the erratic path of a single firefly through its glowing labyrinth, the electric spiderweb twisted in a fun house mirror.
I’d forgotten about that.
“I’ve stepped into that picture,” I said. “What do I owe you???
?
“Whatever you feel your memory is worth.” Trails streak from your necklace, from the children running with glow sticks around the fountain.
I empty my pockets into your cigar box.
“Are you here tomorrow?”
“Maybe.”
“I thought you could tell the future.”
“Would you still come looking for me, even if you weren’t certain I’d be here?”
“Yes. I would.”
“Then look for me tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find me.”
A dog jumps from the fountain and the children squeal. Beneath a streetlight, he shakes himself dry in a furious, spastic blast of water. The explosion of drops lit from above looks like the birth of the universe, like a hundred million fireflies hatched in the same half second and blown from the nest, fully grown. A man laughs uncontrollably, wiping the pinpoint flames from his glasses, brushing them from his blond hair, and they cascade to the sidewalk like a shower of welding sparks. The sight leaves me weak.
The man puts his glasses on and I wonder, does he know he’s been kissed by the beginning of the universe.
“That’s Otto,” you said.
Hello, Otto.
“And I’m Eric.” I give you my hand one more time.
“Lovely meeting you, Eric.” The silver wires of your bracelets throw splinters of light into the air when you take my hand.
“I’m Desiree.”
Your whisper brushes my ear. I wrap my arms around you, but you’re gone. Your fingers slip from around my heart, your ghost fades from my bed.
After my heart has bloomed to the size of the universe and all the love from the big bang to the last whisper has been cycloning through my chest for what feels like days on end, the world is one giant prison when the storm dies, at last. The galaxies shrink back to the lump of muscle behind my ribs, the sniper’s target just to the left of my spine. The sleepless night and following day weigh down like a leaden, gray forever. It feels like dying.
I thought I missed you, Desiree. I had no idea how much.
six
THE WRONG MOVE WILL SPLIT MY SKIN DOWN THE CENTER OF MY BODY. It will fall away in sheets like brittle, peeling paint. My eyes scrape their sockets and I hear sounds like a shrieking chalkboard when I blink. I lie motionless, but feel motion sick.
A sting to my inner thigh. I fling the sheets away and jump to my feet. The room spins. I think it’s in my head, then I think not. I close my eyes and it’s worse. Faster, faster. Ground impact will blow out the windows, collapse the ceiling and scatter my shattered bones and furniture like God flinging a handful of dice. I brace myself but the spinning slows. I hold my balance against the wall, scratching the fresh welt on my leg.
On hands and knees at bug level for the second time. Either I missed this one or it’s new, or whatever infested Jack’s room has hitchhiked on his dumpster-salvaged wardrobe and shat its eggs into my carpet and sheets. Smaller than my thumb and the color of its own shadow, it disappears into the mottled carpet beside the lamp cord like the splatter fragment of an old stain. Anslinger’s black-bag men had planted it in plain sight.
It senses movement and bolts for the corner. I trap it beneath the empty jar and slide the queen of hearts beneath it. It looks like a smooth, black stone flailing in vain at the invisible wall.
Cuts and burns scar the desk. They’re the handiwork of the desperate and industrious armed with razors, spoons, glass pipes and butane lighters. In the drawer, they’ve left behind a rubber band, two thumbtacks, a dried-out ballpoint pen with no cap, a few paperclips and a dull razorblade. I pull the jar away and the specimen runs for the edge, but I flip it onto its back with the queen of hearts. In spite of my hangover, my hands are steady and I pin it through the center with a straightened paperclip on my first try.
Its antennae hum, black filaments longer than its entire body, a signal for help or a last-ditch attempt to relay its gathered data back to the colony. I tap them at the base with the razorblade, severing the connection.
Across town, the detective’s monitor cuts to a bug’s-eye view of the big bang, and the blowtorch hiss of static.
Fuck you, Anslinger.
The head remains intact until I can find out what it’s seen and heard, though I may have punctured its microprocessor. I peel its wings from beneath as it struggles. I can scarcely imagine the electric insect invective it’s hurling at me from its dying, foul bug mouth. I disassemble it leg by leg, wing by wing. I break its shell into its core components, bisect its head and cross section its body four times but have nothing to show for my work. Nothing shorts, nothing sparks and nothing smokes. No resistors or transistors. No crystals, diodes, coils or microchips, only moist entrails. Whoever made this is good, so they were smart enough to make others.
Umbrella Men wave down buses and speak into pay phones. They fold newspapers and hold radios to their ears. Anslinger is tracking me. Anslinger wants to send me back to jail. Anslinger isn’t interested in me, he wants Desiree. He wants my Desiree. He’s looking for the Glass Stripper. All or none of the above. I ditch one scenario in favor of another between footsteps. I check reflections in shop windows and bus shelters. Some kid bends to tie his shoe. Left foot means, We’ve been made, pull back. Right foot means, Go, to the rooftop sniper with the laser dot firefly humming on the back of my head, awaiting his signal to pull the trigger and turn off the universe.
The sign says FORD’S. Floodlights illuminate BEER-POOL-SATELLITE TV on the outside wall. Inside, the carpet might be gray, green or black. The scant light is of scant help in determining anything. Stains on the pool table, maybe beer, maybe blood. A jukebox with “Out of Order” taped over the glass. The bartender’s shirt has “Lou” embroidered onto the chest.
“I guess you’re Lou.”
He’s wiping a glass with a gray towel, staring at my face like he’s just scraped me off his shoe.
“Have I been here before?”
“If you don’t know, then it’s time to quit,” he says. “What can I get you?”
I don’t know.
“The usual.”
Stock cars race through a haze of electric snow on the silent television mounted above the bar. Pool balls crack against each other on the beer-and-blood stained table behind me. Lou remains inert, determined to wipe the reflections off the glass with that gray towel. My hands shake. Something lands on my face and I slap my cheek, expecting a splattered bug on my fingers. Nothing but the shine of sweat, more running down my temples and neck. I pull a ten from my pocket, so Lou serves me instead of tossing me out.
“Jack and Coke,” he says. “Good beginner’s drink.”
Other customers have red and black coasters beneath their drinks. Lou sets my glass down on the bare wood, the glass hits with a cracking noise like a fast pool shot. He resumes polishing with the soiled towel.
“There a pay phone here?”
Lou responds with a jut of his chin. Toward the back. A sign points down a small hallway, RESTROOMS AND PHONE.
Anslinger’s direct line dumps me to his machine.
“Call off your tail. I’m doing the best I can, but stop following me. And stop bugging my room.” Before hanging up, I pause and add, “Please.”
Someone behind me says, “You’ve looked better, Eric.”
I strain to picture this man. I remember his clothes, khaki trousers and a peach golf shirt, but not his face. He’s with a boy dressed in a shirt stained like a shop rag and a blue windbreaker a size too large. Scabs like playground injuries stipple the bridge of his runny nose, his hair is matted as though he’d fallen asleep in the dirt. He stares at his fingers, silently moving his lips. Not a boy, but a year or two within my age. I saw him earlier, tying his shoe on the sidewalk.
The unmemorable man touches the boy gently on the back as he passes me on his way to the men’s room.
“Have we met?”
“You don’t recognize me?” he asks.
I strain to move the blood through my head,
so the heat and light will coax a memory out of hiding. The bar lights surge and the jaws of an electric dog clamp onto my back ribs. I see storm clouds and smell pear blossoms for a heartbeat before my knees turn to wax.
On my back. Turning over but my legs won’t move. My arms tingle and burn like they’re asleep. Need to watch for the shattered lemonade glass. Trying to crane my neck. All I can see are the man’s shoes and shins. Spit hangs from my lips. I can’t keep from drooling, and the shoes look expensive so I need to be careful.
“How about now?” he says.
The tingling in my arms rages with a second surge from the dog’s teeth. I hear a thunderclap and feel the first drops of hot rain on my face before I collapse again onto wet grass, the chrome leg of the pinball machine the only thing in my field of view. I smell summer, dirt, popcorn from the bar, the stench from the toilets, stale smoke, pear blossoms, lemonade, smoking bark, my own cooked and blistered skin, then nothing.
seven
GRASS STABS MY NOSTRILS AND EYES AS RAIN SLIDES DOWN MY CHEEKS. THE drops climb through my hair and ears, foraging beneath my collar. It’s not raining. Beetles swarm from the dirt and pick me apart, scrambling for the precious patches of thin skin, fighting for the wet tissue inside my mouth and beneath my bandages. Antenna codes rebound from drone to drone in the space of a wing flutter until the machine-forged workers deep down catch the signal. The six-legged drill bits burrow up through the dirt to pick my cartilage clean with surgical steel mandibles until nothing’s left but my brittle bones for the hot rain to hammer into the mud. You say my name, your voice muffled with static. Flash. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. Thunder. Wiggle your toes. I don’t have any. Other people have toes, I have shoes. Wiggle your shoelaces. Nothing. I can’t run from the legions of whoever or whatever are charging through the splintered door I can’t see. Open your eyes.