by Alex Shakar
He opened up a search engine and typed in her name. A few NYU links appeared at the top of the list.
Researching our crushes again, are we? Inner George jibed.
George had repeatedly let Fred have it about his penchant for conducting Web searches on women he was interested in, one of those modern behaviors that seemed, to Fred, completely natural, whereas in George’s view, Fred had been sucking all the mystery out of life.
She’s not my crush, he set Inner-George straight. She’s my fucking experimenter.
He found her listing on the NYU Center for Neural Science site, a headshot in the upper right corner. Her hair was longer in the photograph, her face years younger, rounder. More color in her cheeks. She was even smiling, albeit distractedly, looking somewhere off to the right of the frame, as if she weren’t thinking about getting her picture taken at all, but in her mind was already off to the next thing—registering for a university ID, buying her course packets. According to the accompanying text, she was a doctoral student in clinical neuropsychology. It worried him, somewhat, that she was only a student. Presumably, the other guy had a little more experience.
Curious now, Fred found the Neural Science faculty, and in a few more clicks found the face he was looking for: Dr. Craig Egghart, Full Professor of Neural Science and Psychology.
Egghart.
Her father?
Husband?
He opened a new window and arranged their pictures side by side. He thought he could possibly see a resemblance. The man’s eyes were closer together, and not as dark. Fred couldn’t really tell. He tried to recall that fleeting, disoriented glimpse of the man putting his arm around her. Paternal? Romantic?
Switching tactics, he did phone book searches on both of them, and was given different numbers but the same address: fairly far east, judging by the number, on East 7th Street. What did this tell him? Maybe she too was living with her parents. Could the two of them have that in common?
But she’d called him ‘Craig,’ Fred now remembered. Who would call their father by his first name? Unless she just hadn’t wanted Fred to know.
“Hey Vartan,” Fred said, trying it out.
Vartan looked up, a second pair of glasses propped on his nose over the first to magnify a sheaf of papers in his hands. “What, are you disowning me as your dad or something? I’m no longer mature enough for you?”
“Hey Dad,” Fred said, assailed by a new hope. “Is that a script in your hands?”
Vartan angled the papers toward him. They were rumpled, yellowed.
The top page was graph paper, with a pencil drawing. Fred had never seen it before, but knew instantly from the earnest pressure of the lines that it had been done by George, long, long ago. What it was a drawing of, though, he couldn’t say. Possibly a spaceship. It looked a little like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, a little like the IMAX projector’s arc lamp being assembled on the TV screen. Along the length of the thing were little radar dishes and coils and antennae.
“It’s a special wand George wanted, for the solo act he wanted to do,” Vartan said. “For months he was after me to build it.”
Fred remembered George sweating over outlines, looseleaf pages grayish with smudges and pink with nubbly eraser remains. For weeks after Fred and Vartan had quit the act, George had rehearsed on his own, pushing Fred out of the room so he wouldn’t steal his secrets. Until, finally, he let it drop, and never mentioned it again.
“I kept putting him off.” Vartan shook his head. “What a sonofabitch I was.”
He let Fred look at it a few seconds, until Fred didn’t want to look at it anymore. Then Vartan sat back, the sheaf on his lap. He turned the channel. Gandalf, banging his staff on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm.
“Leave it here,” Fred said.
The bridge collapsed. The Balrog fell.
An uncle? Fred thought. No. No doubt Craig was some kind of towering genius, and she was drawn to his outsized, prodigious brain. No doubt their courtship had involved much transcranial stimulation. Maybe they kept a stock of other, less civically-minded magnetic devices in their bedroom.
He didn’t want to think about it.
He thought about it anyway.
A flaming whip wound around Gandalf’s ankle.
Maybe that’s why she looked so tired, Inner George, ever helpful, suggested.
It wasn’t always possible, but Fred liked to be there for each of George’s three daily meals. George always got the same thing: a bag of beige goop manufactured by the Nestlé corporation. In the early days of his coma, he’d had to dine through a nasogastric tube, a treacherous undertaking—had the nurses gotten it wrong but once and slid the tube down the wrong passageway, the food would have filled his lungs so slowly that he could have drowned without anyone knowing. More than once Fred had dreamt about this happening—to himself. He’d feel the cold milky stuff sliding down the walls of his throat, its levels rising in the lobes, sealing the bronchioles and alveoli like some underground mine that had hit an aquifer.
The G-tube made things easier—the malt-smelling goop dripped from an IV pole straight through a hole in his abdomen. Without the swallow reflex, there wasn’t the same immediate satisfaction in watching George eat, but Fred was grateful for the increased safety, and thought it important to keep treating George’s meals as social occasions. Fred would take out the daily sandwich stuffed with alfalfa and vegetables and soybased meat substitute he’d made for himself in their parents’ kitchen and eat it by George’s side, hyper-conscious of the mastication of his own jaws and tongue, the peristaltic action of his esophagus, the warming and distension of his stomach, processes it seemed presumptuous and even a little insane to think of as belonging to himself in any way.
After lunch, he and George would typically get back to business, the business of finding out just what the hell they were doing here. Fred had been including George in his cybergalactic research expeditions into the nature of existence. Last night Fred had copied off the Web a few articles on a subject he thought George would like, and which had been on Fred’s mind lately: coincidence, those uncanny, momentary convergences in life, like thinking about his briefcase being stolen and then seeing a woman walking away with one much like it, or like hearing three stories in a row about Georges on the radio while his father was bringing up the idea of him leaving George in the hospital and leaving town. Granted, there had been a million other things on the radio that day that had nothing to do with him. Granted, seeing a woman one didn’t know whose utterly average-looking briefcase looked similar to one’s own probably didn’t even qualify as a coincidence at all.
But such little moments were eating at Fred in a way they hadn’t before, and so he proceeded to read to George about these so-called synchronicities, simultaneous twinned occurrences, how a beetle flying into the examination room while a patient relates a dream about a scarab, was, according to Carl Jung, not mere chance, but the dual manifestation of a single collective unconscious, a single realm of archetypal meanings, symbolizing, in this case, rebirth. He went on to read resounding dismissals of the idea from the scientific community—statisticians coming at it with the Law of Very Large Numbers, according to which a small percentage of the innumerable events that occur every instant of a person’s life inevitably appear to mirror other such events; neurologists and evolutionary biologists explaining how the human brain is hardwired to pick seeming patterns out of random noise; psychiatrists labeling the phenomenon “apophenia,” the ability of the mind to find meaning and significance where there isn’t any. Only a few freewheeling physicists had come to Jung’s defense, in the scientific community at least, conjecturing that synchronicities were instances of quantum nonlocality, or evidence of an unseen order or interdimensional connectedness of all information, material and otherwise. Though, even among freewheeling physicists, such views were on the fringe.
Fred paused, giving the unseen order a chance to fly an insect into the room. Or to give some other indication o
f what George might be dreaming.
Nothing moved, save for the slight rise and fall of the bedsheet over his chest. It was strange, how the only place where Fred didn’t hear George in his head—commenting, laughing, agreeing or disagreeing with his thoughts—was here in the room with him. Here, there was only silence. “Give me an image, George,” said Fred. “I’ll close my eyes, OK?”
Darkness.
Into which came the sound of a burbling brook.
Fred opened his eyes.
George’s urine, trickling through the Foley catheter into the output bag. “Good one,” said Fred.
It was a lot to hope for, he supposed. George hadn’t been all that much more forthcoming about his state of mind even back when he’d been conscious; and he’d been ever less so toward the end. Not that George hadn’t talked, hadn’t made every effort to keep up his end of the conversation, or at least hold the rest of them to the task of keeping up theirs, when Fred and Sam and Holly and Vartan had all come for their group visits. George had requested they come together, saying he hadn’t been able to sleep much lately and didn’t have the energy to see them all separately. They mostly wandered around, looking for any housework that might conceivably be in need of doing. There wasn’t much. What food and other necessities they didn’t bring, George had delivered, and if he didn’t have the strength to carry the bags deeper into the apartment, he’d leave all the nonperishables just inside the door, going to fetch the odd can or bottle whenever the need arose. The four of them would do his laundry, get the items to their proper drawers and shelves. Meanwhile, George would sit in an armchair by the window, running his fingers over the miniscule hairs growing back on the sheen of his scalp, looking out at the view, fast becoming unaffordable, of the Hudson and downtown Newark (the backup city, as they’d come to call it around the office). Or he’d lie on the couch, oxygen tubes in his nose, fingers resting on the tank beside him, wheezing and clearing his throat and steering the topics away from his health, or from him in general, and toward the rest of them. How were Mom’s Reiki meetings going, he wanted to know, and was she still taking dance classes, and why wasn’t she, and she really should start again immediately. And was Dad auditioning for anything, and why wasn’t he? And how was that malignant tumor of the Military-Entertainment Complex formerly known as Urth progressing, he’d ask Fred and Sam, to which Sam would inevitably get his hackles up and Fred would have to shut him down, after which George would make peace by pressing them about their love lives. He’d ask about Mel, and Fred would say they were trying to work things out, and George would act pleased to hear it; he’d ask Sam why he wasn’t dating, and Sam would say he had bigger priorities right now, and George would urge him to get his ass out of his Aeron and to a party or something. Whenever the conversational arrow spun back his way, he’d fill the space with vacuous anecdotes gleaned from his window viewing—scuffles among pigeons, couples, drunks—stories he was probably stockpiling just for these occasions.
All in all, his performance was noble, selfless, unassailable, and, for Fred at least, utterly maddening. They had the buyout and George’s further treatments to discuss, but George wouldn’t allow either conversation to take place. Perhaps he’d figured out Fred’s plans to use the money from the one to pay for the other, though, having anticipated such a moment, Fred had been carefully lying to him about their financial situation, telling him he’d finally talked the insurer into covering George’s out-of-network care. George hadn’t shot down the idea of another round of treatments outright—no doubt he knew Fred would give him no peace. Rather, he’d just kept putting Fred off, saying he needed a few more days to recover from the last round, needed some time to himself, hoped Fred would understand.
“What the hell are you doing with your time, anyway?” Fred asked him from the hallway, as Holly, Vartan, and Sam were off waiting for the elevator.
“Just trying to shut out negativity, dude.” George grinned and wiggled his eyebrows. And shut the door.
The sheet rose and fell.
The urine trickled.
“Time for your training,” Fred said, starting with George’s left ankle. Fred would work every joint in George’s body over the next half hour. The theory of arousal therapy was that, with the exercise, George’s brain, like an infant’s, would gradually relearn to control the body. Progress was frustratingly difficult to track: some days Fred would feel this or that muscle working in concert to complete the motions; other days he’d feel spasms or nothing at all. But over the months, it did seem like George was participating more. After the workout, Fred would bring out the box of toys from under the bed and stimulate George’s senses with ammonia, a feather, a spiny massage ball, watchful for levels of response; a second or two of eyeball tracking was better than mere pupil constriction; a flinch or nostril twitch could lift Fred’s mood for hours. He was particularly avid for such signs now, as Dr. Papan, the neurologist, had been hinting that the six-month mark would be a time to reassess. In the past, Fred had sought the man out at every opportunity, peppering him with questions about tests or experimental drugs or procedures he’d read about online; for the last two weeks, he’d been ducking away whenever he saw Papan’s tall, stooped form in the halls.
Fred kept talking as he moved around, working George’s limbs. Fred wasn’t a rambler by nature (at least not aloud), but couldn’t put out of his mind the handful of accounts of recovered coma patients who’d said they’d been aware all along. One case in particular haunted him, of a woman who’d heard doctors telling her family she was brain-dead and trying—fortunately, without success—to convince them to let her go. He’d been keeping George up to date on his adventures in the helmet study (in fact, George was his sole confidant in this matter), so now, with a reflexive glance at the ceiling, Fred told him about his out-ofbody experiences, about the freedom he’d felt. While not as immediately joyous as that of the first session, while in some respects feeling more like a loss, the second session had been in its own subtle way more enticing: a freedom not just from the boundaries of himself, but, at least while the experiences had lasted, from the whole conceptual framework of bodily mortality. He started telling George about the pain of reentry, too, but then, not wanting to sound discouraging, just in case George himself was up there right now contemplating a return, hastily amended that the feeling passed.
Then he told George about Mira and Craig, about the upcoming playtest (he remained mute about the possibility of his moving down to Florida), about the Reiki attunement that would happen right here in this room in a couple hours.
Finally, he brought up the mystery emailer. This was it, Tuesday the 22nd, just minutes from five o’clock. He was unsure whether it would be best to head downstairs to where he had Internet access or to remain here by George’s side. Fred’s main theory was that there would be another email contact, but a small part of him was also worried something might happen to George when the hour struck, that whoever it was might sneak in here and try to smother him or something. Admittedly, this latter possibility seemed unlikely. He wished he’d invested in a smartphone at some point over the last few years, which would have made it easier to pick up emails here in George’s room. More and more people were getting those things, and with his little flip-phone Fred was beginning to feel like a Cro-Magnon. But he’d begun feeling resistant to the imperative of keeping up with the times. Maybe that meant he was getting old, or giving in to getting old. In any case, a monthly data service charge was now a luxury beyond his budget.
And anyway, he didn’t even know for sure that anything whatsoever would happen at five. The time stamp could have been simply a glitch or a fluke. Or could have had some other significance entirely.
“I’ll wait here with you,” he decided.
He watched the last couple minutes go by on his laptop screen.
5:00 PM.
The sheet rose and fell.
The IV dripped.
“OK. Hold the fort, dude.”
He
closed the laptop and strode into the hall and down the stairs. Arriving at the cafeteria, he fell into a booth and waited for the network connection. Nothing but another listserv message, time-stamped a few minutes ago:
Subject: BEACHFRONT MEC-AA???
From: MECSERV
Brethren:
Global warming—major disaster? Not according to Major Disaster. As the ocean levels rise, the Orlando area could become beachfront property! Buy now (on high ground!) and watch your property values soar! Click to check out the Major’s artistic renderings.
Tidings from the soon-to-be tide-kissed Promised Land,
GENERAL DISARRAY
You have to live a good clean life and bow to Mecca.
--Don Johnson
Finding himself more discouraged than relieved by the lack of contact, Fred sat watching cable news on the nearest TV monitor, a story about the liquid bomb suspects arriving in court.
Followed by a story about the 6 train being halted and cops examining everyone’s bottled drinks.
Followed by a piece on a Hitler-themed eatery in India.
He glanced at the laptop screen. A box had appeared in the corner.
George says: Dude, you there?
Fred’s blood jumped.
They’d used IMs as interoffice communication whenever one of them was too lazy to get up and walk over to another’s desk. Whoever was sending this had not only George’s email password but his IM sign-ins as well. And whoever it was was online right now. Fred typed:
who is this?
Then waited, hair in his fists. Ten seconds later: