The Glittering World Read Online Free PDF Page A

treetops. He saw himself through a multitude of eyes, all watching from the woods.
    His curiosity swelled, then turned to fear, then excitement, rapid pulsations that bled together until one emotion was indistinguishable from the next. His very being cried out in surrender, and he hungered to be disassembled into nothingness, his heart pounding so hard he thought his chest would burst. And all the while the whine and burring of insects, the call of predatory night birds, and the screech of the fiddle in one long and discordant stroke, the final note of a song that refused to end.
    A hand grasped his shoulder, and quickly withdrew. “Hey,” Gabe said. How did he get so close? “Are you okay?”
    “What?” He shook his head. “Oh yeah. I was just . . . Nothing.”Blue glanced back over his shoulder at the trees. Nothingness , he thought. Surrender. Communion. “Admiring the scenery.”
    “Nice.” Gabe nodded sagely. “Maureen smoked you up, didn’t she?”
    “What? No.”
    “She said she was going to bring by some sticky stuff, so I just figured. Hey, how long have you been out here? We haven’t seen you for hours.”
    “Hours?” Blue looked down. Between his fingers he held a charred cigarette butt, the stub burned down to the filter. He flicked it into the trees, and instantly regretted the trespass. “Has it been that long?”
    “It’s four in the morning. Elisa’s complaining about her feet. She sent me to find you.”
    “Okay. Let’s go.” He mussed Gabe’s hair somewhere between rough and tender, a bid for normalcy if nothing else, and Gabe ducked away from him. See? Everything is fine.
    They walked across the lawn. Elisa, heels in hand, put an arm around Blue and the other around Gabe. The three schlemiel-schlimazeled to Jason, who stood with his arms crossed, shaking his head in mock disapproval. Elisa slapped him hard on the ass, and Jason howled as he threw his own arm around Blue. The four returned in a slanting box step to the house on the hill.
    Once Jason and Gabe shambled upstairs to bed, Blue and Elisa retreated outside for one last gasp of night air, and for Blue one more glass of wine. “Man, am I beat,” he said as they planted themselves on the porch swing. He glanced down the hill, toward the trees at the border of the lawn. “I thought I saw . . . Jesus, I don’t know what. It was like I could see outsidemy body. Like I was watching myself through the woods, but from a hundred different eyes. Something.” He rubbed his face and waited, but no response was forthcoming. “Fuck. Maybe I was having a flashback.”
    He thought he heard her laugh under her breath, but once he leaned in he could make out the sound of anguish as she choked back tears. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, are you okay?” She didn’t answer, only rested her chin against the heels of her wrists. “What’s the matter?”
    After a while she said, “Do you ever think you’ve made the wrong choices in life?”
    “All the time. Why?”
    “I don’t know.” Elisa’s face was cast in darkness, only a slight suggestion of her features visible in the moonlight. “Never mind. I’m fine, really. Just ignore me, okay?”
    “If you say so.”
    He listened to the wind rustle the leaves, to the solitary warble of an unknown bird darting across the tree canopy. Awesome Elisa. More than a decade gone since they met as teenagers in front of the Limelight, where they split a tab of E and danced the night away on a catwalk, looking down at the world below. He saw inside Elisa that night, right to her soul. Not by the yellow glow from the moon but beneath a scorching spotlight, its gels rotating red, green, red. The throb of music from the speakers, clean sweat, the chemical smell of dry ice: he had never wanted that blurry carnival of wasted youth to end. Then he awoke from its poppy-petaled spell, only to find himself cold and alone on the dirty bathroom floor of his midtwenties, wondering how he’d managed to