by Alex Shakar
“Thank you for being so patient, Fred. Now that you’ve answered my questions, I’ll try to answer yours.”
She turned her head to one side, and pointed at the upper back portion of her skull. Her eyeball swiveled to the corner to regard him as she spoke.
“The parietal lobes are located about here in the brain. Their main job is to orient you in space. In order to do this, they’ve got to know where you end and everything else begins.” She faced him again. “It may sound like an easy job, but it’s not. To do it, the lobes require a constant supply of impulses from the senses. What monks can sometimes do through meditation, and what we’ve done here through the application of electromagnetic signals, is to block that stream of sense data from entering the region. The lobes continue looking for the self-boundaries, but with no information coming in, they can’t find them. And so you perceive a porous, expanded, possibly even a limitless sense of self.”
She watched him, gauging his reaction.
“Does that answer your question?”
Was there mockery in the words? He couldn’t quite tell. There was a flatness to her tone. But her look was dead serious.
He smirked, the way he couldn’t help doing when he was embarrassed. He felt like a child. He wanted to throw a tantrum. An absurd reaction, he knew. He’d walked into a laboratory and had his head stuck in a helmet full of solenoids. What kind of explanation had he been expecting?
Maybe just not so precise an explanation. Maybe he’d been expecting her to say that they didn’t know how it worked, just that it did. Thus leaving at least a shred of the mystery in place.
“So what’s the point of giving me this experience at all? What could it possibly mean to me, now that you’ve explained that it’s a trick?”
Jerked around as he felt, he was even now trying to will back that illusory connection with her.
“We’re not out to trick you, Fred,” she said softly. “Quite the opposite. We need you to know how everything works here.”
“And why is that?”
She sat forward an inch.
“Because we believe that the emotional power of the experiences and their rational explanations will counterbalance each other. And that over time, you’ll learn to weave both into a larger tapestry.”
With his fingertips, he explored the bunched threads of the chair arm, searching for an opening, a way to envelop them. Her tapestry image was beguiling—clearly, she’d prepared it in advance. Turning it over in his mind, though, he found the flip side not so picturesque.
“So you’re saying that I’ll end up tricking myself? And you’re so confident I’ll weave myself this rosy fantasy tapestry that you don’t even mind telling me in advance?”
Her voice rose, if slightly, for the first time in the interview, and there was a new fierceness in her look. “It’s not fantasy we’re hoping you’ll find. Not at all. It’s a more informed kind of faith.” He got the feeling she almost thought better of it, but then, with a breathy self-defiance, she added, “I think of it as a faith without ignorance.”
For a while, neither of them spoke. He looked off, toward the bookshelf, into that miniature kitschy skyline, pickled in its brine.
“Would you like to continue, Fred?” she asked, her tone even again.
His eyes wandered to the black briefcase on her desk. His own was in the hall closet. She hadn’t so much as glanced at it while showing him where he should stow his things upon arriving for his sessions.
What say you, George?
No answer. Inner George was as torn as he was.
Lest his voice crack, he didn’t speak, simply nodded, at which point Mira Egghart got up, placed her computer next to the briefcase, and came over and switched off the lamp. A moment later, she appeared crouched at his feet, having just plugged a nightlight in the shape of a fat little star into the wall.
“Before you leave,” she said, the little star setting her knees and face aglow, “I’m going to give you a visualization exercise, a little story with some images. Just lean back in the chair, make yourself comfortable, and close your eyes.”
“Is this hypnosis?” He’d let the woman magnetize his brain with barely a second thought, yet this new prospect made him unaccountably wary. “There’s a lot of stigma attached to that word.” She stood, the light now playing on the nylon gloss of her legs. “How deeply you allow yourself to be affected by the story is entirely up to you. I’m going to record the visualization on a CD as I tell it to you now, and I’d like you to play it for yourself every night this week before you go to sleep. In a week, at your next appointment, I’ll make you another.”
She picked up a knitted blanket from the end table, and after he leaned back, she floated it over him.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked.
In the dim light, her pale complexion glowed eerily, her eyes stared dark and fathomless.
“What if I fall asleep?” he asked, with an anxious tremor.
“Worse fates have been endured,” she replied.
Fred stepped out of the Psychology and Neural Science Building onto Washington Place, in the city of New York, on a mid-August Monday in the year of 2006, to the sight of a cloud on a digital taxi ad and a plume of exhaust as it pulled from the curb. The oneness was gone, but that phrase of Mira’s—“a faith without ignorance”—remained lodged like a splinter in his brain. His first thought was that it was simply a contradiction in terms, like a night without darkness, a sky without air. But wasn’t a foothold of reason in that sheer cliff of faith precisely what he himself had been trying to obtain through all his recent readings in science? Just last night, for example, beneath the thirty-year-old, faded glow-in-the-dark star stickers of his childhood bedroom, fleeing his nightmares via his laptop screen, through a chain of hyperlinks to the outer reaches of cyberspace, he’d been reading about the anthropic cosmological principle, how the universe was so finely tuned for life as to arouse suspicion: how, if there had been four extended dimensions instead of three, planets would have flown right into their suns; how, if the cosmic expansion rate were one part in a million billion less, the universe would have remained a sweltering 3,000° Celsius and collapsed back in on itself billions of years ago; how the chance of such cosmological constants having emerged at random was something on the order of every member of his high school class winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning in alphabetical order. If some greater force and purpose were at work in all this, he wondered, then why all the subterfuge? Why all the arbitrariness of quantum fluctuation and genetic mutation? Why the absurdity of brains that could simulate some sense of that greater life only when they misfired? What good was a truth that could be perceived only through delusion? How would one ever really know what the truth was, in such a system? How would one ever know from one moment to the next the right thing to do, the right way to go?
Which way? He stopped at the corner of Broadway, a woozy enervation setting in.
It had rained earlier, ozone mixing with exhaust and perfume and the smell of baking garbage, and a vengeful sun was now reclaiming the terrain, as were the pedestrians, veering around him with high-end shopping bags and candy-colored cell phones. The study, as it had turned out, was on the main NYU campus, twenty-seven blocks south and four avenues east of the Medical Center, but by the time he’d found this out, he was already sold on the idea of enrolling. He’d told himself that the study’s proximity to his Tribeca office would rob him of excuses and force him to start putting in more appearances. The terms of the sale of the company to Armation had guaranteed him a salary as an independent contractor for six months. These six months were almost up, and as he hadn’t been occupying his seat there much during this period (or for the six months preceding), he wasn’t as certain that his contract would be extended as he would have liked. If the axe did fall, George’s skinflint health plan having been drained and abandoned long ago, Fred might have nothing to pay the next hospital bill with but the fifty bucks a week from the he
lmet study; that and a similarly double-digit payout working the occasional birthday party magic show, which their father, through various displays of frailty and unspoken need, had dragooned Fred into. Fred’s parents didn’t know how dire the straits were—he’d been keeping this from them, their own retirement savings being modest at best—and he wasn’t about to ask their younger brother Sam to kick in, as Sam had been against George’s life support early on (cold-bloodedly, Fred had decided) and totally uninvolved in his care ever since.
He should go south, to the office. There was a teleconference with the Orlando team. He’d missed the last one. It hadn’t looked good.
Though it wasn’t for another three hours. He could drop in on George, just for a while.
Standing here all day’s always an option, Inner George chided, mirthful and bright.
He headed north, up Broadway, a well-trod route between the office and hospital, as he had more time these days than money for train fare. Eyeing his frayed, fuzzy, checkered shoes (George’s, actually—a joke purchase his brother had made in the Czech Republic on a meandering post-divorce vision quest), Fred began to feel the summer air gusting around the loose threads, to feel the dry heat of the sidewalk as if he were barefoot. Then he felt, it seemed, what the sidewalk felt, the pressure of soles, the tectonic thrum of a passing bus.
It lasted a second or two, after which he couldn’t make it happen it again, not with the sidewalk, anyway; yet walking by Grace Church on the corner of 10th and glancing as he often did at the ornate wooden doors, for an instant he thought he was experiencing their weary bulk, their frozen bodybuilder strain, their indifference to the streets around them careening through time. Hard to tell. That timeless pull may just have been the usual flexion of memory. Back to 1988, a night in his and George’s last month of high school when they’d wound up here after wandering all over town.
George had gotten into Caltech that day with a scholarship offer. Fred’s own future was less certain. While George had excelled in school, Fred’s accomplishments were mostly in the park outside the school: he could play a mean game of Hacky Sack, an even meaner game of hearts, and any number of variations on the 1-4-5 chord progression. It had always been something of a mystery to Fred how all those differences between the two of them had sprouted from the common root. They’d started out the same, identical bodies, identical brains. As infants, they sucked each other’s thumbs. As pubescents, fantasizing about an older girl they liked, they masturbated each other’s newfound erections. They completed each other’s sentences, had a trick where if they happened to say the same thing at the same moment, they’d stop, grin, then continue their thoughts, saying the exact same thing again, and again, and again. They could go on for minutes on end like this. They’d follow each other into convenience stores, the second one coming in a minute behind, making all the same moves, picking up the same items, putting them back, striking the same pose for the security monitor, buying the same kind of chocolate bar, just to rattle the guy behind the counter.
Their divergence seemed to begin from nothing, or almost nothing. Fred had gotten a little scar on his chin from falling in the tub, and George would point at it and call him a mutated scarhead. George had chipped a front tooth, and Fred would tell him it made him look like the village idiot. When they were really angry at each other, they’d punish each other by putting themselves in danger—Fred sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the roof, relishing George’s anguish; George stealing away from home, Fred back in their bedroom sobbing so uncontrollably he hyperventilated and blacked out. Afterward, they’d compare notes, hungry for each other’s experiences—George creeping to the roof edge while Fred held him for safety.
Their experimentations with difference continued in the virtual realities of the day, specializing in different Dungeons & Dragons characters, different videogames—George’s mage to Fred’s fighter, George’s Centipede to Fred’s Missile Command. The research inched forward with the accumulation of more or less arbitrary identifiers—the colors of their sneakers, lists of favorite baseball players. At some point, a threshold they weren’t fully aware of crossing, they stopped having to make the differences up. They acquired their own friends, and girlfriends. George’s crowd was more studious; Fred’s more streetwise. They picked up their own musical tastes and political views (generally speaking, Fred had the former, George the latter, but they argued about them nevertheless). And now, nearing graduation, here they were, with their very own separate futures about to sweep them three thousand miles apart. They found themselves a little stricken at the prospect, a little amazed they’d let the experiment get so far out of hand.
They hadn’t planned on staying out all night. They’d only wanted some pizza. But George wanted to go to the Original Ray’s, because why bother with any place but the very source, and Fred kept lobbying for the Famous Ray’s, because they must have been the famous one for a reason, so they ended up just wandering around with empty stomachs, their conversation moving from their possible pizzas to their possible futures, and how those futures might again one day converge. Perhaps because it was an interest they’d shared longer than most, they got to talking about the computer games they’d programmed on a series of rudimentary home systems, ones that came in kits and had to be soldered together, ones with tape decks as storage media and barely enough memory to make a starfield, much less fill it with blocky, antennae-scissoring aliens. They talked about the growing sophistication of personal computers, and of computer games, and how these things had been growing up right alongside them.
“It would be great to make serious games,” George said, just before dawn. They were lying on the church steps, staring up into the pointy stone arch of the entrance.
The term “serious games,” now used to denote games with real-world applications, didn’t exist at the time. It sounded like just one more of George’s late-night impossible yearnings.
“What’s that supposed to mean?“ Fred asked, though instantly he was pretty sure he knew exactly what George meant by it, could already hear in his mind’s ear the ad-libbed soliloquy he was sure was on its way. Games that would change perceptions, soften hearts, expand minds. Escapist fantasies that would somehow also feed and clothe the multitudes. Fred was already plotting out the argument they’d have. For a while now, much the way Fred’s far more adjusted fellow park-loiterers were experimenting with increasingly hard drugs, Fred was journeying ever more deeply into the gray-clothed, asymmetrical-haircutted, tattered-Camus-paperback-toting realms of angst. He distrusted games and seriousness in just about equal measure. He waited for George to define his fanciful term aloud so he, Fred, could set about picking it to pieces.
But after some silent thought, George’s reply was as serene as Fred’s had been cross.
“I don’t know yet.”
He’d stopped there, in front of the church, trying to will the oneness, but the city was the city and he was him, which might have gone on depressing him if it weren’t for the small old woman who passed by, her hair a silver thicket of bobby-pinned whorls, pulling him in like a riptide.
He trailed her. He could barely help it. With each hobbled step she took, her brittle skeleton reverberated in the roots of his teeth. Heedless youth tripped past her in both directions, looking everywhere but ahead of them through their giant, insectile sunglasses. That pin-curled head would turn to track them, and no sooner had Fred glimpsed a hint of her blue eyeshadow than he felt his own head turning as well, to see what she saw, how she saw—the bared and tattooed skin, the flesh-tunnel earrings, the omnipresent earbuds and dangling wires—the alienness of it all, flashing around them like some scrambled dream.
They went a block, and another. He felt the drag and clomp of her big, beige trenchcoat and shapeless white sneakers. His own shoulder sank under the strap of her no-frills canvas bag, the kind given out by magazines and book-of-the-month clubs. It was like shadowing his own old age, but it wasn’t frightening, was actually a comfo
rt, having those perfect, packed pin curls clearing his path. They were like a shared secret, a secret weapon, a hive of wormholes that could suck in the universe, chew through time and all its indignities. The two of them against the world, he thought, as they crossed 13th, closing in on Union Square, the two of them against the pylons and the scaffolding and the phoneless phone booths and the fourteen-theater multiplex and the Virgin Megastore and the dozen or so kids—bubble-lipped, stiff-haired, lavishly bepimpled—loitering outside it, a couple of them smoking, a couple others snapping gum. The kids’ eyes settled first on Pincurls, then on the strange man taking mincing steps five feet behind her. He didn’t care, pretended not to notice them, pretended, as he sensed she was doing, that they weren’t even here, that the Virgin Megastore had never been dreamt of, much less built. The two of them against it all, he thought, as she turned right on 14th, to reveal, to his sudden horror, that she was beyond heavily made up. A razor slash of dark lipstick. A spatulate cheekbone caked with rouge. Bright blue mascara around a wide, shocked, and wrathful eye.
She looked like a deranged clown-whore. What was more, the connection was gone. It must have been the shock.
He kept following her, feeling rudderless. He tried to merge with other people, more attractive people, to no avail. Meanwhile, Pincurls turned north at Fourth Avenue, to stare—or glare, it seemed to him—with those boiled and refrozen eyes of hers at the red-bricked, pyramidtopped Zeckendorf Towers complex.
The place was his lost Eden. It boasted a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a video library, yoga classes, roof decks, and also (at least as he remembered it in the last and, to his mind, greatest years of the second millennium) happened to be crammed with fashion models—in short, it was either revolting or deeply alluring, depending on the state of one’s finances, physique, and possibly, to a lesser extent, political convictions. In the late ’90s, by no means rich but for the first time in his life possessed of any money to speak of, he’d discovered himself allured. This was after George had returned from Silicon Valley, flush with connections, a meeting with angel investors all lined up; practically all George and Sam and he had needed to do was print up business cards, and the three of them were slipping into the tech boom dream. Fred rented two apartments consecutively at the Zeckendorf—the first alone, the second and larger one with Melanie, his girlfriend at the time and soon-to-be fiancé. To this day, she was living large there, riding the new boom now, the war boom, with her cable news job. The building was along his usual office-to-hospital route, but even when it was out of his way, he sometimes walked by. His chances of spotting Mel coming in or out were next to none—she’d be at work, surely. The last time she’d agreed to see him for coffee, she’d held his hand and told him they needed to get on with their lives, and it would be better for both of them if they didn’t have contact. Then he’d walked her to her door. Then he’d asked to come in, and she’d said no. Then they’d had sex in a stairwell. Then she’d told him not to call her again. He hadn’t. But he couldn’t stop orbiting the place.