Infinity Dreams by Glen Hirshberg

Author:Glen Hirshberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2021-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

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It’s the way he’s sitting, which isn’t the way he sat then. Also that subtle lifting of his chin when he looks at her, that hint of I-already-know-ness she’d taken all afternoon for House smug even after she’d realized he wasn’t House. Mostly, though, it’s the specific blue of his eyes, which she’d swear hadn’t been that color when he came in the door. But now, at last, she knows. Sees.

How could she not have seen?

Because he wasn’t there. Not all the way.

Ridiculous, obviously, he’s been here the whole time. Except he hasn’t, not completely. Even now, it’s like he’s…loading. That’s the best she can come up with. There, tangible and touchable, but with elements still flickering into place. She can practically see and can definitely imagine her computer’s little color-wheel spinning over the Rev’s head as he slowly, slowly, takes shape. His own shape.

“It’s you,” she says, right as he slams both palms down on the table hard enough to ring the glass and also hurt his hands. He flings them out to his sides and shakes them, wincing.

“Waste of time. This whole goddamn day. He doesn’t know and couldn’t say if he did. Neither of you do. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. Look at you. Standing on the lip of the ocean, and proud of yourselves because you’ve found some sand.”

He leaps to his feet. Across the room, where he’s been sitting cross-legged under the wishing-tree clock, the Collector leaps up, too. He lurches forward, and the Rev moves in the other direction, toward the windows. When he whirls to come back, Normal does, too, faces the clock, takes a few steps that way. To Nadine, they’re like opposite ends of one of those kinetic motion ball sculptures, where the smacking of one sphere sets the sphere at the opposite end arcing into the air.

Actually, it’s more like they’re on a see-saw, one descending as the other rises. So that they never actually meet.

“It keeps happening. All around you.” The Rev waves his hands and rants and never stops moving. “Over and over, you’re gifted opportunities, and you waste them. A taste that drives men mad. A literal boatload of souls. A centuries-old bouqiniste stall full of nothing that drives people to their knees or to stab their friends in the face.”

“Neck,” Nadine murmurs, mesmerized by the motion but also the way the Rev waves his words in front of her, as though wiping clean a windscreen that has been fogged her whole life, only she didn’t know it. Thought the fog was the world, period. All of it that she (or anyone) would ever get to see.

“A pathetic, groveling loneliness that drives a man to hoard talismans—well, okay, that’s everyone, isn’t it, that’s just people—except this guy doesn’t just hoard them. He bathes in them. He creates a groveling-loneliness sauna in a fucking storage shed in the middle of nowhere, plunks himself down in a comfy chair, and just…”

Abruptly, the Rev halts in front of her, shoots out his hands and grabs her wrists.

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