by Alex Shakar
“And I took the liberty of exorcising that little shoplifting demon,” Guy intoned, with a voice so sepulchrally reverberant it seemed to originate not from his voice box but from a trapdoor deep in the chambers of his sinuses.
Fred gave his mother a stare. Or tried to, but she was looking off, he couldn’t see where in the light.
“Ha. You really did learn some things in Africa,” said the buzzcut woman.
“Well,” Guy replied, “I admit to improvising a bit, not having any hyena bones at hand.”
The group laughed, except for Holly. She was just peering off into space, Fred was pretty sure. He contemplated sitting up, but were he to do so, he would have to decide which way to face and wouldn’t be able to see them all, so he continued to lie there with the light in his eyes.
“You’re attuned,” the owl-man told him. “Now you can do Reiki too.” The others—save Guy, who let his face betray no opinion on the matter—confirmed this news with energetic nods. Fred didn’t know which annoyed him more, being told he now had the power to wield some kind of nonexistent energy, or Guy’s apparent doubts that he had what it took to do so.
“Any time you feel like you need it,” Dot said, “or someone you know needs it, you can do it, now.”
They waited for Fred to say something.
“That’s … thanks.”
“You can try it out when we do George in a minute,” said the buzzcut woman.
At the mention, they all turned, Fred included, and looked. It was the first time in all these months, and in many years, for that matter—probably since that winter camping trip George had talked him into, lying side by side in a tent—that Fred had seen him from quite this angle. Then, George had been howling at the top of his lungs, in reply to whatever it was they’d just heard out there: coyote, wolf, or lone, disconsolate dog. Now, his face was glossy, like a wax statue, and every bit as still. Fred couldn’t even tell if his brother was breathing.
“It was cool standing between the two of you,” Dot said, a hand on George’s arm now. “I could feel George’s energy passing through me and into you.”
Fred could only imagine the joke George would have made at this juncture. In a perfect world, he would have seen the corner of George’s waxy mouth creeping upward.
“There was even more energy in the room than last week,” said the owl-man, pink fingers waving. “It was kind of wild.”
The others, Guy included, murmured their agreement.
“Word about George is spreading around here,” the owl-man went on. “In the elevator, I heard two nurses talking about him. And his miracle-working mother.”
Everyone looked at Holly. But if she heard, she gave no indication. It was true enough that word was spreading. Even some of the doctors now stopped to watch her. Many patients she worked on needed less pain medication. Some recovered from surgery faster than usual. Others simply became less anxious, more serene. The chronically ill patients she’d been seeing regularly were telling her that the treatments were getting stronger every time, which she unfailingly attributed to George. George was healing them, she’d tell them, not her. The other day a woman with MS had appeared in the doorway and asked Fred if she could just sit with him and George for a while, which she’d proceeded to do, closing her eyes, her hands palms-up on her thighs. She’d sat there for ten minutes, then thanked him quietly, tears brimming, and left.
“Is something wrong, Holly?” Dot asked. Holly had stepped over to George’s bed, and was clearing the hair from his forehead with her trembling fingertips.
“I had another one of those … things,” she said.
“Things?” said the owl-man.
The group exchanged looks.
“Another vision?” Guy asked, his voice softer than it had been earlier. Holly nodded. Fred sat up, to get a better look at her. She was still gazing down at George.
“When?” asked Dot.
“Just now. Just in that minute after I stopped reading, before we opened our eyes.”
“What was it?” said the owl-man. “What did you see?”
“It was just a flash. But I saw him over the city. Way high up.”
Spooked, Fred thought of his little kite trip over the ice cream truck. Though as she went on, none of the other details seemed to match.
“I thought he might be trying to get back down,” she said. “But there was this huge storm in his way.” She looked up from George, meeting their eyes. “A vortex of energy, closing in over the city.”
No one spoke. For a tense second, Fred wondered if even his mother’s crazy friends were thinking she’d lost it. But glancing around, he found them all nodding, more or less mirroring her, brows scrunching.
“What did it look like, this vortex?” asked the owl-man.
“It was just … all these spinning clouds,” Holly said. “Dark and light, really out of control. It seemed dangerous. And so big. And he was so small up there. He had his hands out. Like he was trying to do Reiki on it.” “It sounds heroic of him,” Dot offered, holding George’s forearm and looking back and forth between him and Holly.
“It’s funny, though.” Holly cocked her head. “I thought a vortex was a good thing, a healing thing.”
“Maybe it could be,” said the buzzcut woman, “if he could heal it.” The owl-man fingered his beard, professorial. “Was it a yin or yang vortex?”
Holly looked uncertain.
“Was it upflow, or outflow?” he elucidated.
“I don’t know. It was every which way, lashing out, grabbing in. It was just … a crazy whirl.”
Fred rubbed his head, feeling like he was in a scene from Ghostbusters. “What does it mean?” Holly asked, looking first at George, then at the ceiling. “What’s going on up there?”
“Maybe he’s warning us to avoid air travel,” the owl-man said.
“Exploding drinks,” exclaimed the buzzcut woman, “exploding shoes.” “We’ll have to fly naked,” Dot said.
“Even then,” said the owl-man, “they’ll figure out a way to spontaneously combust.”
“Things certainly seem out of whack to me,” Dot said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rogue vortex roaming around out there.”
“A storm of ignorance,” Guy said with a world-weary nod. “Ignorance and delusion.”
Holly, the buzzcut woman, the owl-man, and Dot all nodded as well, as if Guy had just said something incalculably wise. For his part, Fred rubbed his head again, wondering just what a man who’d worn a goat’s gallbladder on his head could mean when he talked about ignorance.
“So what’s the delusion?” Fred asked, an edge in his voice.
Guy met his gaze, sort of, his eyes half-lidded, unimpressed by Fred or anything. “Four thousand religions. Two hundred nations. Six billion people. All defending what doesn’t exist.”
“And what doesn’t exist?”
“The world as they see it.”
“And how do you see it?” Fred pressed. Maybe it was just Guy’s assurance that got to him. Not to mention that “shoplifting demon” remark. The whole day, Fred thought, had been a bit much for him. First those listserv jokers using George and him for their games, and now this cabal of Renaissance-fair witches and warlocks doing the same.
“Right now,” Guy said, looking into him, through him, with a faint, sad amusement, “it appears Consciousness has the whimsical inclination to take the form of man, who, missing his brother, steals from supermarkets and wishes he were in Middle Earth.”
“Oh, stop it, Guy,” Dot said, with a helpless smile.
Fred found himself wondering which of them would win in a fistfight. Guy was in better shape, no question. His aura was self-cleaning. His cerebrospinal fluid, from cranium to sacrum, had the run of his back. His chakras spun out energy like the oiled gears of a luxury sedan. But negativity, at least, was squarely in Fred’s own corner.
“So what makes Reiki different from those three thousand nine hundred ninety-nine other religions?” F
red asked.
“Reiki,” Holly said, sounding serious, “is not a religion.”
Emphatic nods all around. The point seemed important to them.
“How do you figure?” Fred asked.
The group exchanged glances, suppressing smiles.
Finally, Guy sniffed, and with a look down his nose, delivered the coup de grâce: “We don’t have tax-exempt status.”
The others laughed. Fred offered the floor tiles a smarting grin, determined to be a good sport.
“You’re probably sick of hearing stuff like this,” Dot said, sidling up to Fred. “But George had the same kinds of questions.”
Fred looked at her. “He did?”
Guy closed his eyes, opened them, blinked, his face impassive once more. “He had strong energy even then.”
“Shall we resume?” said the owl-man, after a silence.
Holly guided Fred into place at George’s feet. “You can learn all the techniques and positions later,” she said, as the others gathered around the sides of George’s bed. “For now, just hold out your hands, close your eyes, make your mind very quiet and peaceful, and it’ll happen.”
Holly and the others held out their hands and closed their eyes. Lest one of them cheat and look and catch him just standing here like an ingrate, Fred lifted his own hands, though he could bring himself neither to shut his eyes nor to look at his ostensible patient below. Instead, he looked at the rest of their blissed-out, drowsing faces, wondering if George had ever succeeded in feeling this energy of theirs. What was it he was supposed to do again? Picture Menelvagor the Star Man or something? Rivendell. The Lord of the Rings. The embarrassment made his flesh heat up anew. It was true, he’d gone to see the first installment more than once when it had come out at the end of 2001. He and Sam had gone together its first day out, and then again a couple weeks later, and a third time the following month. George, to their surprise and faint bafflement, had passed on every occasion. Indeed, their excursions had amused George greatly—a chink in the armor of Sam’s siege-mentality work ethic and Fred’s hardening dogma of hardheaded realism, through which, respectively, George would tweak the two of them for years afterward. The afternoon escapes were a little addiction that Fred and Sam—and a whole bunch of others, judging from those continually packed matinees—couldn’t quite shake. Bin Laden had his vision of a caliphate, Bush his nightly prayers for the End Times. The rest of them had Gandalf the Grey, and those peaceable hobbits fighting back against the forces of digitally animated darkness. For Fred and Sam, the seeming parallels to their own peaceable band of programmers fighting the virtual war, with the wizardry of Armation at their back, had been pretty impossible to resist. Which, George insisted, was precisely the problem. Everyone all over the world, every militia member and secret agent and madrassa teacher and West Bank settler, he said, was seeing it and identifying themselves with the good guys, and their enemies with the bad guys. Fred demanded substantiating evidence about those moviegoing West Bank settlers, then defended the movie, saying that its real message was that there was good and evil in everyone.
“Right,” George said, “and that unchecked, mechanized, imperial power is bad. And that Western materialism has gone too far. And that we’re destroying the environment. And that we need to reconnect with the spirit, the heart, the imagination, and Mother Earth.”
Fred was confused by the tinge of mockery. The list sounded like everything George himself was about.
“And kumbaya, and give peace a chance. And let’s have some kickass fight scenes while we’re at it.”
Fred was already nodding strenuously when he divined the criticism. George was full of shit, Fred decided. George loved fight scenes. But he proved to be at least consistently full of shit, keeping his distance as the two Lord of the Rings sequels came and went; as the uncannily titled Two Towers loomed; as the king returned; as the hobbits saved their world and went back to their peaceable lives. While back on Earth, and Urth, the wars stretched on through the murky twilight, no telling hobbits from orcs, liberators from torturers, patriots from profiteers, adults the world over eyeballing children’s stories as the world went to hell.
Make your mind peaceful, Holly had said. Behold the energy. Discern its hue.
Blue-white, Fred decided, finally shutting his eyes. He could feel a tingling, possibly. And a slight sense of porousness all over his skin. Nothing real, exactly, but not exactly fake either. No sooner had he reconciled himself to the daunting thought of entering his brother’s spiritual airspace than he felt a welling of sadness, but also an ease, as if he’d been on a long hike with a heavy pack and had suddenly allowed himself to flop down onto the grass. It was nothing real, just drowsiness, but Fred was soon feeling like he was being lifted again, like those rare instances in which he woke up in a dream in a good way rather than a paralyzing one, to feel the ground falling out from under him, to feel himself flying in darkness. Maybe it was happening again. Maybe any moment now, he’d leave his body, see them all from above—the gruff-faced buzzcut woman, the bearded owl-man, the spindrift elfin woman, the long-haired, benostriled man, his mother, himself—their hands outstretched in an oval over George. Maybe he’d float up higher still, like he did last time. Over the hospital, over the whole island. Maybe he’d see the vortex, and George floating above it. And he’d grab George by his astral arm. And ferry him back down.
The rustle of movement opened his eyes. There George lay, droopmouthed, waxen as ever.
“Well, Holly, maybe you’ve got two of them,” said the wizard, stroking his beard.
“It was even stronger that time,” huffed the dwarf, her lower lip jutting.
“You know,” his mother said, eyeing him, then George, “for a minute there I felt like I was lifted off my feet.”
“Me too,” said the elf, her green eyes wide.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Strider allowed, with a look down his thinned nostrils. “For an amateur.”
34th Street never looked so good. Sidewalks sans so much as a gum stain. Identically trimmed, bright green shrubs in the planters. Store window mannequins clad in every color of the rainbow. No traffic, just the three fire trucks, two police cars, and an ambulance parked along the curb. No people other than Sam and Fred, standing by the curb in firefighter coats and helmets, facing each other.
“Well,” Sam said. “At least you’re showing a face.”
Though Fred himself couldn’t see it from his third-person, above-and-behind vantage, he knew his face to be out of date, not quite up to the ever-evolving standards of realism. A couple days ago Sam had asked him to come in and let Conrad take his picture for the update, but it had instantly slipped Fred’s mind.
“Sorry, Sam,” he muttered.
Little Sam’s head tilted skyward. “Nice day for an attack. Glad the weather held.” A small joke to show they were putting the issue behind them. Sam’s virtual lips moved lethargically, out of sync with his voice coming through on Fred’s headset. The speech detection code didn’t work so well when players mumbled.
“The street looks … clean,” Fred observed.
“Not quite realistic,” Sam agreed. “But we don’t want to make the mayor’s office uncomfortable.”
The mood around him, both in the office and on the screen, was nervous elation. Fred was kind of excited too, though he was taking pains not to clue Sam into this. The look and feel of the place had advanced so much, it was as if Fred had been gone not months but decades, and he couldn’t help but marvel at it. Though he was also sure to remind himself what he knew from repeated experience, that a few weeks from now, some new video card would come along, some new videogame would come out, and Urth, by comparison, would begin to feel like some rustbelt neighborhood whose time had come and gone.
Little Sam, meanwhile, continued swiveling this way and that on the sidewalk. “Time to go, everybody,” he called out. Behind him, down the street, two other avatars popped in, Jesse and Conrad, it looked like. Jesse was a cop tod
ay, his blond mop streaming from a tented blue cap; Conrad was the fire chief, a white helmet replacing the upper hemisphere of his Afro. Little Jesse saluted, and Little Conrad gave the “hold position” combat signal, a closed fist, conveniently resembling the Black Power salute. Three years back, George had mentioned that he’d run into Conrad at an Iraq War protest. The two of them, George had said, had been embarrassed to see each other.
“T minus two,” Conrad announced, his voice coming through the headset fuzzed with noise, a simulated walkie-talkie link—one of a list of new features Fred had on a crib sheet taped to his screen, this one engaged by holding down the Control and Shift keys.
“Where is everybody?” Sam said. “Get them in here.”
Jesse’s virtual mouth moved but Fred couldn’t hear him, at least not through the headset, as police were on a different channel. Across the office, though, Jesse could be heard hollering and clapping in the faces of the other programmers to get them to take out their earphones, put on their headsets, and log on. More avatars, reed-thin ones, for the most part, popped onscreen, and the chatter increased. There were to be about thirty participants today, ten here in New York and the rest in Orlando. As the appointed time drew near, most of the avatars rotated to face across the street, their heads angling upward. Fred looked as well. The Empire State Building, pristine and symmetrical, receded like a road straight into the sky.
“Is there a plane?” he asked.
“We haven’t gotten to that,” Sam said. “Just the fireworks.”
“Hey Fred,” Jesse said, having stepped with Conrad into speaking range, “way to have a cartoon face.”
“I’m old school, what can I say?”
“Well, don’t be self-conscious, God just made you different, is all.” Jesse walked off, back toward some other cops.
“The execs here yet?” Fred whispered to Sam, scanning the crowd, then peering around the Cray Y-MP still wedging him in against his desk, to see if anyone had overheard. He didn’t quite trust the new proximity hearing code, which allowed avatars standing close to each other to converse in relative privacy.