Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  “For fuck’s sake, George,” Fred finally said. “Aren’t you just making the same mistake as everyone else? Thinking you can make the world the way you want it? Thinking reality’s up for grabs?”

  George’s look was stupefied, like Fred had just opened his mouth and drooled on the table.

  “It is up for grabs,” George said.

  Sweating already in their white polyester, Fred and Vartan hand-trucked the crate full of tricks into the ground-floor entrance of a Gramercy Park townhouse—which looked to be worth so much money Fred was amazed they’d let children inside the place, much less throw a party for them—through a corridor lined with pop art and smelling of varnish, and down some narrow stairs to a cavernous entertainment room in the finished basement. A leather couch and a semicircle of home theater chairs, so massive they looked to have been made for a family of ogres, sat under dimmed cones of canned lighting. To at least some degree, their apparent size was an optical illusion, produced by the smallness of the twenty or so kindergartners sprawling atop them and around them on the carpet. The giant projection screen at the front of the room was blank, but anime-style videogame sprites danced upon two smaller plasma screens to either side. Those children who weren’t playing or watching them were huddled around handheld game players. As Fred set up for the show, a wand slipped from his fingers, then a stuffed animal, his hands still stiff from the helmet session, as if he were marionetting them on strings. On the way here, passing an ice cream truck, its chimey jingle had begun twisting strangely and for a second he’d been up above it—far above—sailing over the crowd of kids and tourists on the broad steps of Union Square Park, over the sunbathers on the roof deck of the Zeckendorf, before coming back behind his eyes, opening them, wondering if, for a moment, he’d drifted to sleep. He wasn’t in any shape to be here, and could only hope Vartan’s showmanship would carry them. His father was in high spirits, possibly already high, spinning his bowtie in sage agreement with the hosts, a vaguely beatnik-looking elderly couple in stringy hair and tight slacks, who were going on about how they hated this room, how they wanted their grandson to have some old-fashioned, non-electric entertainment. They went and got the boy, coaxing him from his videogame. He was a pale, dark-haired kid, with hungry half-moon shadows under his eyes, clad in baggy jeans and one of those T-shirts depicting a pair of hands ripping away business attire to reveal a big red S on a bright yellow crest.

  Fred wiped his forehead, suddenly woozier. It might have been that trompe l’oeil on the kid’s shirt every bit as much as his name.

  “Say hello to the magicians, George,” the grandfather said.

  To Fred’s surprise, Vartan’s mustache was edging up into his cheeks, his eyes sleepily serene.

  The act began. Trying to stay focused and keep his stomach settled, Fred resolved not to look at the birthday boy, whose imploring, blackhole eyes and first name were more than Fred was ready to deal with at the moment. For the most part—save for a couple of ill-advised glances, each time finding those eyes huger and hungrier for his attention than the last—he was succeeding. Despite his disequilibrium and not-quitere-embodied reflexes, all was going normally enough. Then came the levitation trick.

  It started with Fred shutting his eyes, balling his fists, and making a constipated face, and Vartan, in response, wheeling his arms as he found himself rising six inches off the floor. Once he’d landed, Vartan retaliated by huffing and puffing and doing the same to Fred. Next, to weight himself down, Vartan grabbed hold of a Styrofoam anvil, clutching it to his chest. Fred strained all the harder and levitated him all the same. As Vartan got ready to levitate Fred again, Fred made a show of looking around, then locked eyes with the birthday boy and gestured him over.

  Overjoyed, the boy bounded into Fred’s arms. Quickly, so he wouldn’t have to look at him, Fred swept the kid up onto his back, his head to the right and a little behind Fred’s own, his humid breath on Fred’s ear. The kid was oddly light, lighter than George—Fred’s brother George—had been twenty-five years ago. Fred’s feet didn’t quite feel anchored to the floor. He reeled the gimmick, a spring-loaded, mirrored metal prop, down his pant leg and backed onto it with his heel, struggling against the feeling that he should be struggling more. It was too easy to keep his balance. He felt like he was dreaming. He must have closed his eyes. The next thing he knew, he was out again, up again, over his own head, seeing the waving kid on his back, and his own somnolent upturned face, and too strangely far beneath him, those checkered shoes, themselves hovering in the air.

  “Fainting.” Vartan raised an eyebrow. “Nice touch.”

  Vartan reached under the chair for the vaporizer he’d built for himself—after George’s cancer had spread lungward and Holly’s and Fred’s complaints had grown more shrill—using a light bulb, a glass jar, a block of wood, and a rubber tube. Vartan and Fred were sitting at home in the living room, in their undershirts and jeans, their tuxes airing themselves on coathangers in front of the air conditioner.

  Vartan switched on the bulb, waiting for the little tray of buds atop it to cook. “I wonder if we could work a whole bit around fainting. We could hypnotize each other with watches, that kind of thing.”

  When Fred had come to, the birthday boy was back in the audience, the kids all laughing, and Vartan was behind Fred, arms wrapped around his torso. Fred had no recollection of putting the kid down, or of the final bit of the sequence being played out, which it must have done for Vartan not to have noticed anything amiss—Vartan coming over and picking Fred up to keep him from levitating him again, but Fred levitating both of them (really it was Vartan standing on the gimmick). Fred wasn’t sure at what point he’d gone limp, or how long he’d been hanging there in Vartan’s arms before hearing Vartan whistling in his ear. When he’d looked up at his father, Vartan had eyed him with grudging respect, like Fred had just pulled a fast one. Then Vartan had let go, and Fred had almost collapsed before finding his legs.

  Bringing the rubber tube to his mouth, Vartan inhaled the mist from the jar. He’d originally started getting the pot for George, having heard from an actor friend that it eased the nausea of chemo. Vartan and George had eaten brownies together a few times, then George hadn’t wanted it anymore, and Vartan had.

  “Is that stuff organic?” Fred asked.

  Clamp-lipped, his father shrugged his thumbs. Fred had read somewhere that street dealers were lacing it with roach poison these days, to give it more kick. Even so, he wished he could have had some. But the stuff made his nightmares, and his sleep paralysis, as Mira had called it, even worse.

  The vaporizer still on his lap, Vartan reached for the remote and switched on the TV. An Arab character actor, wild-eyed, strapped to a chair. Keifer Sutherland rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  “Arab’s the new Italian,” Vartan observed, before flipping to an opinion show, one that got even higher ratings than Mel’s, two men in suits talking about an Israeli woman whose heart was saved from mortar shrapnel by her silicone breast implants. “They’ll say she was saved by secular implants,” the guest cracked wise. “Saved by God Almighty,” the host thundered, sliding his little eyes to meet the camera.

  “Turn it,” Fred said.

  Vartan switched to How It’s Made, one of his stoned viewing preferences of late. They watched some shimmering liquid being piped into a mold, then a gold coin commercial.

  “You up for any parts?” Fred asked, knowing the answer.

  Another finger-flutter. Fred noticed Vartan was gazing off over the TV, at the bronze Shakespeare mask hanging on the brick wall.

  “Why’d you quit working on The Tempest, anyway?” Fred asked.

  Fred and Mel had gone to a reading of it, in those first, and just about last, days of rehearsal. George had been there too, on his own, in the back row; he’d been taking more sick days, and that night he’d looked tired and flushed. Perhaps George had already known what was wrong with him, or at least suspected; either way, it would be a few more days bef
ore he’d share the news. Fred still felt a chill whenever he recalled Vartan’s performance—no costumes, no set, no staging of any kind, just a bunch of actors with books, sitting in folding chairs. Yet, despite these handicaps, from Vartan’s very first scene, as he recounted the treachery that had sent him into exile, the room had become charged, and from then on the actors were living their lines. By the fifth act, when Vartan had invoked his spirit minions and vowed to abjure his magic, break his staff, and drown his book, he was no longer reading, the book was gone, the room was gone, actors and audience alike inscribed in the magic circle of his island paradise-hell. And when, in his epilogue, he’d asked everyone to release him with their applause, it was really he who was releasing them from his spell.

  “Ah, I don’t know,” Vartan now said, fingering his week-old beard. “The whole story just started seeming like bullshit.”

  His voice was flat, but his eyes were troubled, still looking, maybe in accusation, maybe in apology, at Shakespeare, who stared back with eyeless dispassion. Vartan looked off, reached for a bag of fun-size Milky Ways.

  “What about you,” he said gruffly. “How are things at the office? When’s your test?”

  “Test?”

  “The thing where you meet with the Florida people.”

  “The playtest. Not my test,” Fred said emphatically, though Vartan was more or less right. “It happens Thursday.”

  His father proffered the Milky Way bag. Fred waved it away, wary of unspecified artificial flavors, and queasy now with the thought of Thursday.

  “Reminds me,” Vartan said, “I should tip Manny off about that acting work down there for them.”

  Manny was Fred’s and George’s self-declared godfather, and one of the odder of Vartan’s oddball actor friends. Manny had moved to L.A. when Fred and George were kids, and more recently to Orlando, for the amusement park work, although the last Fred remembered hearing, Manny had shaved his head and packed himself off to a Zen monastery in Japan.

  “I thought he became a monk.”

  “He finished that,” Vartan said.

  “Finished?”

  “Yeah. He’s … whatchamacall …” Vartan waved his fingers. “Enlightened.” “What?” Fred stared at Vartan, waiting for more.

  There was no more.

  “How long was he there?”

  “I don’t know. Coupla months, I think.”

  “Manny attained enlightenment? In a couple of months?”

  “So he says. You know Manny.”

  Vartan changed the channel. A vintage car floating in the air. A pair of fair-haired boys—identical twins—grinning from the driver’s and passenger seats.

  “Not this,” said Fred, his hand on his stomach.

  Vartan flipped back to How It’s Made. The mold was being opened. Inside was a bowling ball. Reminding Fred of a night when Mel, in a heroic effort to distract him from George’s illness, had dragged him to a bachelor party she’d heard about for one of her cable show colleagues, an after-hours, topless bowling extravaganza. They’d sat for a while watching the strippers plunk down one gutterball after another. Fred had gotten drunk, called George, given him the play-by-play. He’d thought it would make George feel better, but it made him feel worse. George said he was tired and not to call him so late. Fred got drunker and started to cry. A fat guy with no shirt on flirted with Mel, and poured Fred another beer.

  He resisted telling Vartan to turn the channel again, instead opening his laptop and hovering his cursor over the folder of spreadsheet documents Sam had given him to study. For his test. He needed to get up to speed on all the innovations he’d been paying scant attention to over the last year, try to pull together a convincing impression of being back among the living for Gibbon or Lipton or any other execs he might run into. Only their avatars would be meeting face-to-face. He wouldn’t have to worry about body language, just keep control of his voice. Probably all that would be required of him would be an exchange of civilities. He’d been carefully picturizing the various conversational permutations for days. They might ask him what he thought of the new project, in which case, without sounding too interested, he’d bring up some ideas for the next phase. They might ask him straight out if he wanted back in, to which he’d reply, after a suitable pause, that he’d be open to discussing it. Or maybe they’d stick to small talk, using it to try to gauge how much resentment he still harbored, or how much desperation, or both, in which case, he’d simply keep calm and not press any issues. The important thing was to give the impression that he was ready to hear an offer but was at present weighing multiple prospects. Though there were no other prospects. Not so far. Nothing that wouldn’t set him back a decade in station and salary. He’d sent out a few feelers to old contacts, but all he’d gotten back were two condolence notes from people who knew George, requesting updates on his condition. Fred didn’t have the will to answer them.

  Doubtless, Doug Erskine, the simulations VP, would have his last conversation with Fred in mind. In those final days of Urth’s nominal independence, Fred had phoned everyone he could over there—your Gibbons, your Liptons, the various Armation lawyers who had been sending him letters, even Gretta the CEO, but never made it further than the receptionist with any of them. Part of the problem was that he hadn’t known (and still didn’t know) whose decision it had been to take their company over on such despotic terms. Their daily dealings were for the most part with the Armation programmers. Their lines of communication with upper management had always been kept indirect. When a contractual issue arose, it was inevitably some new person they’d never heard of who fielded it. Fred wanted to negotiate but didn’t have much leverage, let alone time to think about it, fighting, as he was, to save his brother.

  After the case managers at George’s HMO had declared he was beyond saving and eligible only for “palliative care,” Fred had convinced him to go out of network. Fred had taken over all the medical research and paperwork, and once George’s finances were drained, without his knowledge, Fred took over the payments as well. He wanted George to undergo more aggressive rounds of chemo and radiation, along with an allogeneic stem cell transplant, for which, naturally, he himself would serve as the donor. The one thing Armation’s nuisance-fee of a buyout offer had going for it was its timeliness, as the proceeds would allow Fred, at least for a while, to keep paying the hospital bills.

  He thought he’d established decent relations with one or two of the execs, but George had been less diplomatic over the last couple years, his provocations tending toward the absurd. One day he’d knocked out a little Tetris-like stacking game, which, in place of colored blocks, utilized descending little naked Iraqi prisoners in various contorted poses; another time, he’d made a Whac-A-Mole-type Web applet, with a snickering Dubya hurling down fire and brimstone on two headdresswearing giants meant to be Gog and Magog. A week after his diagnosis, without warning anyone in either office, George jumped a plane to Orlando, hoping to convince Armation to license the code back to him so he could start a new Urth of his own. Upon his return, Fred overheard him regale Jesse and Conrad with a lark-like account of the day, though it must have ranked among the worst of his life. Picture George Brounian lurking in the lobby trying to get someone to let him in, getting past security with a temporary ID salvaged from a trash can, badgering receptionists, sneaking and scrambling down hallways in search of a Lipton, an Erskine, a Gretta, finding none of them, ending up, toward day’s end, in the empty office of an executive he’d never heard of, calling old friends he’d met on his trips abroad from the guy’s phone, rifling through his drawers and rearranging his files out of spite, finally getting discovered and marched out of the building by security guards.

  So while Fred had at least made an effort to get along with the Armation brass, he suspected he and George blurred together in their minds, and in any event, by the bitter end, Fred wasn’t exactly diplomat material himself. When he finally reached Erskine, unglued from all the voicemail monologues and con
frontations with secretaries, Fred was barely coherent. The conversation started out cordially enough; Erskine even remembered to inquire about his brother’s health, to which Fred replied that George was hanging in there. But Erskine quickly insisted he’d had nothing to do with the buyout offer, then blindsided Fred by playing the victim, crying out that he wasn’t going to let his projects be disrupted by their spurious ownership claims on Urth any longer, at which point, Fred could think of no other reply than the single word “Murderer” and the act of returning the phone to the receiver. It came out barely audible, a timorous half whisper, yet nevertheless loud enough for everyone in their deathly silent office to overhear, all having stopped what they were doing as word spread that the long-awaited “negotiation” was finally taking place.

  The work folder sat on Fred’s laptop screen, unopened.

  On How It’s Made they were building an IMAX projector.

  Vartan sucked more vapor out of his jar.

  Only a few hours left, Fred told himself, until he could put a pillow over his head and listen to Mira’s Week Two CD on the earphones, and picture the unmoored city tumbling gently up. He found the imagery calming, yet on a rational level, still didn’t get what was supposed to be therapeutic about it. It seemed, in fact, when he thought about it, disconcertingly like a slow-motion explosion, what with the glass breaking, the bricks coming out, and all that. And where were all the people in that disarticulating city? Was it supposed to mean something that there weren’t any? Maybe it was about being alone, and feeling never alone, another on-the-face-of-it impossible goal she’d set for him. Mulling all this over, he began wondering who she was, anyway, this Mira Egghart, this woman he knew next to nothing about but nonetheless was letting wire up his cranium every week and whisper in his ear every night. This woman who, meanwhile, knew pretty much everything there was to know about him.