Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  The phone rang, magnetizing Sam’s hand to the receiver, the receiver to his ear, his other hand yanking down his headset just in time to avoid a collision. From the number of times he said hello, Fred could tell it was yet another conference call, probably a couple Armation guys and at least one HomSec liaison, judging from Sam’s hyperclipped tone and jargonizing. Occasionally when talking alone with him, Fred could still hear traces of the sweet side of the former Sam—vacillating, self-doubting, occasionally grimly humorous; but around the Armation execs and their military- and security-minded clients, Sam was fully one of them, manifesting that paradoxical martial ideal to which they all aspired: the commanding servant, the magisterial cog. He went on in this tone, punching out polite but firm requests for fire and smoke data, sounding more as if he were speaking from an underground bunker in an undisclosed location than from a fifthfloor Tribeca office.

  Indeed, the office itself had taken on an increasingly bunker-like feel over the years. It used to have five large windows, but when their backing dried up, and before the Armation money came in, they’d been forced to cut a deal with the landlord, who’d proceeded to wall four of the windows off to create an expanded office space for the hedge fund down the hall—which was rolling in cash and wanted nothing but the cream, windowed offices with downtown views to inspire their hedging—leaving Urth, Inc. one small window alcove and a large, dim back area. The remaining window’s sunny exposure had eased the pain somewhat, at least until a few months ago when Sam, whose desk happened to be in front of it, had declared the light was making it harder to see movements on his screen and covered the view with posterboard.

  Through the meager desk-lamp pools, Fred made his way over to his desk. The newly gore-enhanced battle test was over, though everyone’s eyeballs were still abuzz with adrenaline as they murmured into their headsets, conducting their post-game analysis, from which would be compiled lists of debugging and upgrading assignments for the Florida team, so that at the next scheduled runthrough the whole process might be repeated. At one end of the red plush couch (its upholstery a holdover from more carefree days) a blanket and pillow lay in a heap—evidence that someone, probably Sam, had spent the night. Fred nodded to Conrad (who acknowledged him fleetingly with his eyes while saying something into his voice-over IP headset), and Jesse (who, with his glasses filled with monitor light, gave the impression of not seeing him), and a few of the younger, reed-thin versions of Sam, headset-wearing and fuzzily facial-haired (who nodded back warily). They all no doubt knew Fred had gotten the axe. His very presence here was probably making waves of weirdness, guilt, and discomfort for all. He told himself he didn’t care, that like some vengeful ghost, he’d go on haunting the office, and with a little luck, all their dreams as well.

  Inward bluster notwithstanding, he stopped trying to make eye contact and more or less tiptoed across the room, nearly bumping into a new workstation, the little office’s tenth, that had been plunked down in his weeklong absence, along with a twentysomething kid with a mop of curly hair and a face too pink and fresh for the surroundings. Fred wondered if all of them, even this new recruit he vaguely remembered signing off on, had consented without so much as a grumble to be packed up and shipped off to Orlando along with the hardware.

  To make room for the new kid, George’s former desk, long since pressed back into service, had continued its glacial migration from his old corner toward the art department; and Fred’s six-foot-long, six-foot-high blue vintage 1993 Cray Y-MP supercomputer had been pushed, by some almost unthinkable group effort which had left a trail of gouge-lines across the hardwood floor, four feet farther into his own workspace. There were only about twenty inches of air now between the Cray and his desk, requiring Fred to climb over the arm of his chair and then slide himself at various counterintuitive angles down to a seated position. As a jokey birthday gift for Fred, for little more than shipping costs, George had bought the Cray off eBay, where he’d found it being auctioned by a fashion-trend-forecasting firm that had finally gone belly-up in the summer of ’00. He’d kept hinting to Fred at the size of the gift, leading him to think it was a car, or even a boat. When it had arrived, in parts, in a series of wooden crates wheeled off the freight elevator, George had stuck a ribbon onto the nearest one, patted Fred on the shoulder, wished him luck, and gone home to celebrate his own birthday with his wife. It had taken Fred and George a week of late nights to assemble it. To at least attempt to simulate typical mainframe clean- and cold-room conditions, they’d duct-taped a pleated air filter over its intake vent, then duct-taped a floor fan to the filter. Once they’d done all this, however, they couldn’t find any real use for the thing. They’d programmed it to speak in tongues through a voice synthesizer at an office party once; otherwise, it had just sat here, unplugged and collecting dust. Sam wanted it gone, but Fred couldn’t bring himself to part with it, for sentimental reasons, though, too, the thing now seemed to be his last remaining business asset. Its new location, he understood, was a not-so-subtle escalation of Sam’s ultimatum to use it or lose it.

  At least the blue metal wall at his back afforded him a bit more privacy, made it easier for him to pretend he was hard at work, preparing to shuck and jive for his job. He laid his arms on his desk, his head on his arms, and tried to engage in a kind of self-help exercise, or maybe just outright fantasy, he’d invented for himself, in which he took on the hazy, barely imaginable persona of some future self well out of all these problems—a self for whom everything had, somehow, worked out happily—and regaled some equally vague group of future listeners with the story of his travails. They could be friends, acquaintances, even total strangers, these future listeners, at a party or a bar or any other likely place. And there I was, his calmly smiling future self would say, so panicked about this Florida thing, so exhausted from those sleepless nights, so fried from all that helmet nonsense …

  And that was as far as he got before his mind started browning out and he was seeing the old woman’s hair whorls starting to spin, feeling himself and all of Broadway starting to warp and whip around her, seeing the spinning box with the little birthday girl inside, seeing the girl through the walls in the flashlight’s glow, her eyes like discs, the toucan cradled in her pink-sleeved arm. Then it was himself in there, or somewhere, without a flashlight, spinning in the dark.

  A ping from his computer pulled him awake. He looked at the screen, his head still on his arms.

  A message in his inbox. From the semi-secret industry listserv:

  Subject: NUKIN’ ODDS

  From: MECSERV

  Fellow MEC-AAns:

  See link below for current NUKETHREAT odds. FRESH INTEL from CIA OPERATIVE EXCALIBUR’S TURKMENI SOURCES has handicappers upgrading NYC, what with the upcoming 5th anniversary (and that’s wood, a coffin … er … *box* full of dreams, for all you thoughtful gift-givers!) to FRONTRUNNER STATUS at 3:2!

  D.C., L.A., Chicago, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, respectively.

  Want a longshot? Try your luck with KANSAS CITY—35:1!

  Be Ye Fruitful & Multiply in the

  *formidable*

  *forgettable*

  *untar-get-able*

  *stealthurb*

  of MEC-AA!

  CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

  Excalibur. All the CIA operatives went by fantasy names like this. Dragonfire, Captain America, Pegasus, Beowulf. Yet one more piece of corroborating evidence, if any more were required, that the whole national defense complex—from the remaining Bush-Cheney Vulcans for the historical moment still suction-padded to their posts, all the way down to Corporal Punishment grinning from some Orlando cubicle or basement rec room in the surrounding Military-Entertainment Complex Accommodation Area—couldn’t get a date in high school.

  He hit Delete. Bringing the previous message into view:

  Subject: Help, Avatara!

  From: George Brounian

  Idly, head still on his arm, he began mousing and clicking over the empty message pane, the closest he
could get to feeling the space with his fingertips. Something appeared:

  It looked like someone giving him the finger. That or redacted text. He sat up and kept playing with the mouse. The bars disappeared, smaller rectangles blinking in and out. He was highlighting words, words that seemed written in invisible ink.

  He opened the text-color panel. Sure enough, the text was white. He switched it to black:

  Cut off last time. Must kp messgs short.

  Lookng fr a more stable & secure channel.

  Time measrd in Kalpas hre (4.32B yrs.) fr crissakes.

  Who knows when we mght spk agin....

  He read over it a few times, mystified. He brought up the first message and performed the same procedure:

  Cloudbanks cloudwalled. Aethernet unhackable.

  This limbo is dull dull dull.

  Shock gave way to something darker. If nothing else was clear to him, he at least knew now that it was a prank, aimed at him, with full knowledge of George’s condition. What else could that dull limbo be but a reference to George’s coma? In which case, what? Was this some kind of campaign to guilt him into euthanizing his twin?

  And again, who could be behind it?

  Anyone, he realized. Any one of the hundreds of programmers he knew.

  He climbed on his chair and snuck a look over the top of the supercomputer around the office, trying to catch someone sneaking a look his way. Nobody was. The post-combat discussion was over, and the dozen employees had all gone back to work, leaned into their screens.

  Sitting back down, Fred arranged the two messages side by side, looking from one to the other. He hit Reply to the second, typed what/ who the fuck? and hit Send. He waited a minute, another. Nothing came back.

  Who knows when we mght spk agin?

  For the first time, he noticed the date and time stamp in the upper right corners of the messages:

  Sent: Tue 8/22/2006 5:00 PM

  The two stamps were identical, as though they’d both gone out at the same minute. And the time they indicated was neither ten days ago nor two hours ago, but six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-five minutes in the future.

  A light is on, and Fred’s lids are cracked just enough to foggily make out blond hair, the swell of a breast beneath the sheet: Melanie, her head and shoulders propped on pillows against the headboard, reading one of those ad-thick, perfume-scented magazines of hers. He can’t move, his body still asleep. Arms pinned beneath his weight. Nose buried in the pillow—he can barely breathe, is barely breathing, might suffocate. If he could only move a finger, then maybe the finger could move the hand, the hand the arm, and he could get this pillow away from his nose. Marshalling his will, he thinks he’s succeeding, that his hand is moving, only to realize he’s been dreaming the progress. If the dream pulls him under he might never get back, might fade to black and never even know. He focuses on breathing; if he can keep breathing louder, maybe he can gain control of his vocal cords and make a noise that she’ll hear and then wake him. It’s exhausting, but finally he’s doing it, moans the words wake me up, wake me up—he’s sure he does, he can feel them vibrating in his throat—but she ignores him. She won’t wake him. Why won’t she wake him?

  From sheer bodily strain, tearing himself awake.

  No Mel, just a vaguely Mel-shaped rumple of blanket.

  No perfumed magazine, just, on the nightstand under the lamp, a decades-old LED clock radio and his mother’s decades-old, used-bookstore copy of The Power of Positive Thinking.

  No headboard on this fold-out futon replacement for the bunk bed he and George had shared.

  No Zeckendorf Tower, or dream version thereof (everything in it, he now recalled, Mel’s breast included, had seemed slightly aglow). Just his childhood bedroom, if he could even call it that, the space having beenlong since converted first to a guest room where no guests ever stayed, and over the last year into a kind of new-age showroom. A massage table lay folded up against the brick wall. A boom box and a small stack of ambient music CDs occupied the top of the dresser. To the closet door were affixed charts of chakras, meridian lines, calligraphic Reiki symbols with their various functions listed beneath—the Cho Ku Rei, to generate Reiki power; the Sei He Ki, to treat emotional pain; the Hon Sha Ze Shô Nen, for healing from long distances; and the Dai Kô Myo, the great illuminating light. The corner shelf by the bed had become a shrine to jade Buddhas, polished stones, a photo of George smiling in a gown and rakishly tilted mortarboard, his arm around the shoulders of Fred in his cracked and tattered motorcycle jacket. On the other shelves, his and George’s old books mingled with personal-growth literature, tomes on shiatsu massage, channeling, reflexology.

  Fred’s own belongings—what few he’d kept from the Zeckendorf—were now stowed, along with George’s, in cardboard boxes in the walk-in closet that had formerly doubled as Sam’s bedroom. Fred had allowed three dresser drawers to be cleared out on his behalf, but otherwise had insisted no special accommodations be made for him, less out of consideration for his parents than for his own sanity; he wanted no signs of this arrangement being anything but temporary.

  Out in the living room, he could hear the TV, one of those opinionating blowhard shows Mel was now producing. He glanced again at the clock. Just after eleven. Still the whole night to get through. His dreams, which these last few months had been all about being locked in someplace or otherwise going nowhere (running lost through endless corridors, lying pinned by phantom weights), were always the most disturbing and paralyzing here in this bedroom. Rather than come home from the office, he wished he’d just gone to the hospital for the night—sometimes he could snatch a little paralysis-free sleep in the lobby’s chairs; though recently, the security guards had begun giving him the homeless treatment, rousing him whenever he closed his eyes. And anyhow, with the Reiki group over there, he’d have only felt guilty, fouling their auric fields with his gloomster vibes.

  For a seamlessly grafted segment of the dream, he now recalled, she hadn’t even been Mel, but Jill. It was bad enough dreaming of his own romantic failures. Now he was dreaming of George’s too.

  Grabbing his laptop off the floor, for the dozenth time tonight he checked his email. Still nothing. What did those time stamps mean? Was something going to happen next Tuesday at five? What could happen? Should have confronted Sam. Seen if he knew anything, or had any ideas who might be behind it. But Fred had been stopped by anger—at Sam; at the sender, whoever it was; at the fact that he, Fred, was thinking about these asinine messages at all.

  He vowed to ignore them, and cast around for something else to occupy him. He needed to make a résumé. His programming skills were obsolesced—computer languages changed by the year, by the month even—but maybe he could find something in project management here in the city and not have to move to Florida. Management positions were increasingly scarce, though; the market was choked with thirtysomething de facto managers and their defunct coding skills. And the salaries on offer would no doubt be considerably lower, and he was strapped as it was to pay George’s bills. And even if he could pull himself together enough to come off well in an interview, he doubted many would want the baggage that hiring an ex-CEO refugee from a hostile takeover with a brother in the hospital would bring. He knew he wouldn’t have hired himself.

  His briefcase sat open on the floor, and in it lay the CD that Mira Egghart had made of her visualization exercise, on which she’d written “Week One” in surprisingly playful, loopy purple letters. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going back for any more sessions, pretty sure he’d had enough of merging with old women and birthday girls. Knowing his luck, if he kept it up he’d probably merge with a dog and get arrested for crapping on the sidewalk, merge with a window washer and wipe his way off a ledge. He should probably count his blessings the old loon had only shoplifted and hadn’t held up a liquor store. And that he hadn’t mangled the little girl’s fingers when he’d slammed the door of the box, or made her sick by over-spinning it, hellbent on ou
trunning the impossible, unspeakable joy she’d opened up in him.

  As for merging with one’s experimenter, he was more than pretty sure that this was the worst idea of all. Every time that vertiginous moment in her office, when Mira Egghart had seemed closer to him than his own skin, replayed itself in his mind, he had to force himself to remember that it wasn’t real, that it was just a helmet-induced brain glitch. He reminded himself of her endless typing, her clinically scrubbed nods. And the way she’d dropped that bombshell of a scientific explanation and then asked—mockingly, he was almost sure of it now—if that had answered his question. And that mythical tapestry of reason and faith she’d spoken of. Could such a thing ever be? Could he even know for sure this was what the study was actually about?

  No, he told himself. He’d be an idiot to go back.

  Even so, he couldn’t see much harm in continuing to listen to her CD. He found it calming. He didn’t know why, exactly. Indeed, the little story she told—of a whole city coming unmoored and floating off—made him uneasy if he thought too hard about it afterward, though her halfhoarse, half-whispery voice close in his ear softened the edges. And any new stratagem to help get him through these nights was welcome.

  But he didn’t want to listen to it until his parents were asleep, the chances of disruption minimized, which wouldn’t be for a while now.