Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  She leaned forward. “I know this is difficult. But try to put aside the question of whether you were up there in some objective, provable way. Just close your eyes, and tell me how it felt.”

  He clenched his fists. It seemed a pointless exercise. But there was a strange urgency in her tone, and in her look, and anyway, a part of him longed to sink back into the memory. He let his eyes close, tried to coax the corded muscles in his chest into admitting a full breath. He floated in the dark.

  “Like … nothing at all,” he said. “That one ripple of fear, then nothing.” “I see a smile, I think,” she said. “So it was a good nothing?”

  “No. Not good.”

  “No?”

  “The best nothing imaginable.”

  He opened his eyes. She was smiling, too.

  Her expression changed, became tinged with concern.

  “Now you seem sad,” she said. “Why?”

  No oneness. Though her smile had been lovely, had made her face so surprisingly soft. He leaned his head back on the chair.

  “Coming back down didn’t feel so hot,” he said.

  “What did it feel like?”

  His flesh recoiled anew. He wondered how he could communicate it. “Like I’d been squashed.” He held out an upturned palm, then brought his other palm down on it with a hard slap. “Splattered like a bug.”

  Her face changed again, her eyes going unfocused. A reaction beyond empathetic pain. She looked a bit like she was going to be sick.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  She glanced off, blinking.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  He’d upset her, he thought. “I didn’t mean to sound pissed off about it.”

  “No. You didn’t do anything.” She cleared a few fallen strands of hair from her face. “Just let me catch up on my note-taking.” Eyes retreating, she began to type.

  He regretted his ingratitude, suspicion, frustration. She must really want her lunatic contraption to do some good, he decided.

  “Late night last night?” he asked.

  She looked up. “How did you know?”

  “I’m psychic.”

  A duel of raised eyebrows ensued.

  He pointed at the to-go cup on her desk. “That much caffeine this late in the day usually signifies a late night.” Inner George counseled him against mentioning the increased hoarseness of her voice, and the slight, glossy shadows under her eyes.

  “Who needs sleep, right?” he added, instead. More or less a personal mantra for him these days.

  “I get mine in the day, mostly,” she said.

  “A day sleeper? That I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  She opened her mouth as if to reply, then, with a droll look, checked herself. “Let’s keep this focused on you, shall we? Last week, we didn’t get to talk about the sleeplessness and nightmares you mentioned on the forms. Has the visualization CD helped you get to sleep at all?”

  “A little.” It hadn’t at all. But it made being awake somewhat more bearable.

  “I’m glad. And your dreams?”

  Last night, in the hour or two of sleep he’d gotten, he’d dreamt he’d been sealed in the wall of his and George’s childhood bedroom. Worse than sealed—merged in it, molecules hopelessly scrambled. He’d been practicing a new magic trick of some kind, an attempt to pass through walls, it must have been. On the wall’s other side, from the living room, he could hear Holly and Vartan talking and walking around in there, wondering where he’d gotten to. He related all this to her, not going into the suffocation, the straining, panic, remorse.

  “Sounds awful,” she said, nevertheless.

  “I have a lot of dreams where I can’t move.”

  “Sleep paralysis.”

  “There’s a name for that?”

  She nodded.

  “Then sometimes I think I’ve managed to tear myself awake, but it’s only into some other dream.”

  “False awakenings,” she said.

  “You know a lot about bad dreams.”

  For a moment, she just looked at him without saying anything.

  “Not just bad ones.”

  She returned to her typing. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself up out of his body. One more impossible desire for the collection.

  “Mira,” he said, his eyes still closed.

  “Yes, Fred?” he heard her say.

  “If you keep peeling away the ignorance, do you really believe there’ll be any faith to be found underneath?”

  He looked, and found her eyes keen on his own.

  “I do,” she said. “And if you can find it, it will help you learn to be alone. And to feel that you’re never alone.”

  Inwardly, he scrutinized her words, turning them this way and that—alone, feeling never alone. Was she talking about a kind of insight, or yet more self-delusion?

  She set the laptop on her desk. Then she stood, switched off the lamp beside him, and seconds later appeared in the nightlight below.

  “You’re lucky, you know,” she said.

  “Lucky?” His throat ached with constriction. “Why?”

  She draped the blanket over him, confiding with a whisper:

  “Many of our subjects can’t even get off the ground.”

  Whether or not Fred had actually left his body, he was now more conscious of being encased in it all the same. His lungs and bowels felt like over-squeezed sponges. His head felt clamped in an invisible vise. A faint, electric irritation lingered in his nerve endings. The act of shuffling his feet along the sidewalk, making all those muscles clutch and loosen over and over, while not technically difficult, was more work than it should have been, as though the city had been rolled up, shipped, and unfurled onto the surface of some larger, higher-gravity planet while he’d been under the helmet, imagining he was hovering above it. He kept replaying those split seconds of derangement, hoping for some scrap of proof he might have missed. That galaxy poster had seemed so close he thought he could recall the texture of the paper, like seeing into the subatomic foment of space itself. But he could have imagined this. What about seeing himself in the chair? He couldn’t quite recover the details. The attempt itself might have been changing them. Perhaps there had been something a little off about the shading of his face—almost computer-animated, as if he’d been looking down from a tactical view at an avatar of himself. Though that seemingly unreal cast could just have been the dim red light, in which case, it could have been real. Or at least realistic.

  If not real.

  He’d never really believed those accounts he’d read, in the early days of George’s coma, of patients who’d awoken to recollect having floated above their bodies, witnessing the operating rooms, the doctors at work, the family members sitting around the bed. He’d never really believed his own daydreams, over the last few months, of George being up there, either. Of George trailing wherever Fred went, like a balloon on a string.

  Sharing it all, sights and sounds and mental impressions. As close as they’d been in the best of times—closer, even, now that George was always on call, wafting overhead, free as the summer day.

  Sorry you’re not real, he told Inner George.

  The least of my problems, Inner George assured him.

  Feeling drained and needing to sit down, and having time to kill before the magic show he’d have to do with Vartan later in the afternoon, he wandered east to Washington Square Park and found a free section of bench amid the lunching office escapees, summer school students, and sweating but determinedly leather-clad tourists. Sunny and breezy, a merciful eighty-two degrees. Crowds around the defunct fountain, cheering at a street performance. Vendors under the Arch, turnstiling in cash and out pretzels. For a couple years after 9/11, the Arch had been off-limits, caged by a chain-link fence, merely awaiting restoration; though at the time, one had gotten the feeling it was to protect it from terrorists, or perhaps to prevent the Arch itself (what with its Frenchified airs) from committing some treasonous a
ct. But the Arch, a couple years ago now, had gotten its facelift and was looking as young and fresh as the swarming youth around it, and this change had brought Fred a twinge of disappointment. He supposed he preferred dwelling on signs of the city’s rot and crumbling infrastructure to acknowledging its renewal, all the ways in which it was actually succeeding in getting younger and hipper and richer right in step with its residents. This latter phenomenon could make him feel doubly cheated out of his former life, make him feel like the attack had been merely a ruse, a mock fainting spell, to win the city sympathy and an allure of vulnerability, to make living here seem not just a luxury but an act of heroism, too, so that all those newly heroical investment bankers and hedge fund managers and trustafarians, and anyone else who had it all could now really have it all—the doormen and wraparound terraces and gourmet delis and the moral superiority. And who knew, maybe it really could all keep right on perpetuating itself, a city of ever more concentrated riches and hipness and sexiness and youth. Maybe it could all get so bone-meltingly gorgeous that every visiting fanatic with a suitcase bomb would go weakkneed and start worshiping the bronze bull, that the very rising oceans would peel back in awe. Or maybe, at any rate, it could last to witness its own perfect completion, every last arch and parapet in place, like some afternoon sandcastle, just in time for the end.

  Leaf shadows rippling on the paving stones.

  A sun-bleached Daily News cover page flapping in the breeze:

  3½ TEARY STARS

  FOR ‘WTC’

  … and a picture of Nicolas Cage in a fire helmet.

  Across the path, a throwback Rastafarian perching on the back of a bench called out to Fred like some mutant human-songbird hybrid.

  “Smoke,” he chirp-rasped. “Smoke, smoke.”

  According to The Power of Positive Thinking, which Fred had finally read over the weekend, people could realize their desires through a triune process of “picturizing,” “prayerizing,” and “actualizing,” terms every bit as reassuringly technical-sounding as the attunement he’d agreed—in a fit of open-mindedness, filial guilt, desperation, and rash curiosity following his mother’s announcement that George’s “power” was growing—to receive at the next Reiki meeting. To picturize was to create an image in one’s mind of the intended outcome, to see it as clearly and vividly as possible. Overnight in the armchair in his parents’ living room, unwilling to return to his bedroom after that dream of being trapped in the wall, he’d spent a sleepless interval trying to overwhelm his entrenchments of doubt with a barrage of arguably not absolutely impossible futures, among them one in which he and George and Sam found themselves standing on a Florida golf course with Lipton and Gibbon, and, sure, why not, the CEO, Dan Gretta, too. Fred had never met the man but he knew what he looked like from that picture in the lobby, so it hadn’t been hard to picture him, one arm out around George’s shoulders, another around Fred’s, his teeth lighting up at some joke George had just made, something about a congressman they’d just bought, perhaps.

  A woman in platform sandals walked by, pushing one of those doublewide urban assault strollers Fred had been seeing everywhere.

  Down the benches, a guy in thick glasses opened the Post, the cover showing the purported killer of a child beauty queen sitting in a firstclass cabin:

  SNAKE

  ON A

  PLANE

  “Sense, sense,” proclaimed the Rasta.

  Fred lowered his eyes to the checkered shoes splayed before him, and picturized that when he looked up, he’d see Mira coming down the path, lunch bag in hand, eyes meeting his with not-unhappy surprise. Where else would she go for lunch, on a day like this? It was practically inevitable, no? He prayerized for this one small boon, this really not terribly difficult or overly miraculous event. Of prayerization—step two—the positive-thinking author, Pastor Norman Vincent Peale, had written that you were supposed to invoke the aid of God in plain, unadorned speech, to talk to Him in your head all the time, to go to Him with your problems as you would to an old friend—a powerful old friend—on whose help you knew you could rely. Perhaps if, like Peale, Fred had been the close friend of presidents (apparently the pastor had known both Eisenhower and Nixon, the latter of whom sent Peale to Vietnam to spur the troops on to victory with the aid of positive thinking) the strategy would have worked; but as it was, making giant effigies of the slackers he’d known just wasn’t doing it for Fred. The prospect of an even bigger George floating over him, like some doomed dirigible, only increased his anxiety. He settled for imagining God as something in between George and him, a kind of other version of himself—not because he considered himself any more omnipotent than his former coworkers, but because, logically speaking, it just seemed more self-confidence-inducing. Kind of like that scarcely imaginable future self for whom everything had worked out, only more so, and bigger. A divine twin, then, existing on some other plane of reality, or outside of reality altogether. Listening to his every thought. Listening to him dreaming Him up as if from nothing. Listening to him thinking that, come to think of it, he wasn’t exactly wowed by how the whole positive-thinking experiment in Vietnam had played out.

  “Sense smoke,” he heard the Rasta say. “Smoke sense.”

  Regressing to his usual, not-so-positive thinking, Fred wondered which was more unlikely—George waking up, waking up as something approaching his former self, without too much irreversible brain damage, paralysis, or other physical debility, able to fight off the lymphoma and fight his way through the massive amounts of physical and mental rehabilitation that would most likely be required; or George ever consenting to stand on a golf course with any Gibbon or Lipton or Gretta. In the early days, after George’s initial dubiousness about Armation, it had seemed like he might have been getting more sanguine about the partnership. The first phases of the virtual training environment were exclusively about dialogue, negotiation and peacekeeping, enabling soldiers to virtually interact with people playing the parts of villagers, merchants, tribal leaders. George saw humanitarian potential in the technology, how it could bridge cultural divides. Far from a shooter game, he liked to say, they were making a thinker, a feeler. This was how George would describe it in restaurants, at parties. At least until the shooting began.

  After that, George took a slight step back in the company, and Fred took one forward, overseeing the design challenges of adapting Urth to its new needs, the move seeming as natural as if he were spelling George at the wheel on a road trip. Sam began stepping up too, on the technical end, he and Fred working more symbiotically together as they raced to meet the endless benchmarks and deadlines. Fred allowed himself to think that, with time, George would grow more involved again. But one night in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War, George called a meeting for the three of them, a sober analog to their founding night out at the bar five years before, this one taking place in an empty diner south of the office. George sat them in a corner and told them he had something to say. He wasn’t going to lecture them about the idiocy of the war, he said. He wanted to talk about something way weirder, and scarier: the Military-Entertainment Complex.

  “We’re using videogames to recruit, to train, even fight,” George began. “Our simulations are becoming more realistic and immersive and violent. It’s desensitizing people. Not just to violence. But to reality itself.”

  Fred squeezed his temples. Sam balled his fists on the table. They’d all been working nearly hundred-hour weeks converting satellite maps of likely battlefields to 3-D. They didn’t have time for George’s philosophizing. “I know,” George said. “You both think I’m nuts. But it’s even bigger than that. Things are really changing.” He scratched his head, further ruffling his unkempt hair. “Military contractors are building private armies. Media conglomerates are playing both sides against the middle. There are no reporters anymore, only pundits. Shouting their heads off. Everyone’s blogging. Forming cells. Arming themselves.” He looked from Sam to Fred. “Everyone’s decided at once
that reality’s up for grabs. Everyone’s grabbing.”

  Fred looked out the window, watched a Hummer back into a bicycle chained to a parking meter, crumpling the back wheel in half. Sam picked up his butter knife and fork and began slotting the one through the other, stabbing at his own knuckles. They both knew where this speech was headed.

  “It’s time to bug out of this partnership,” George said, laying his hands on the tabletop. “We need to get back to our core values. I’ve got an idea for an even better way to realize them. We can keep making a world closer to home than the old Urth, more like the real one. Except players could find a whole other game embedded. A game of spiritual evolution.”

  George went on, talking about how they needed to steer players toward constructive and nonaggressive behaviors. How rather than amassing and plundering and hoarding their resources, players could be rewarded for giving them away. How players could be compensated with new powers for the ones they were relinquishing. Rewarded with gradually increasing powers of perception. Allowed to see ever newer and brighter layers to the virtual reality. So that, over time, the old material existence would matter less and less. So that at the highest levels, Urth could be revealed as a place of pure energy. Or something like that. George was still working on this part, he confessed, the whole issue of how goodness was to be rewarded.

  Sam, by that point, was using his knife and fork to saw his napkin in half. Fred was staring into the Formica, angry and sick. George must have known they’d be dead against dissolving the partnership, that they’d outvote him if it came to that. But he didn’t stop. He downed his coffee and delved into the financials, how they could outsource, to India, or Eastern Europe, how full of cheap programming labor the world now was.