Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  Abruptly, almost a spasm, George shook his head. Then turned, and, as fast as if he were in perfect health, ran off in the snowy night.

  Visiting hours ended at ten, after which, not ready to go back to Brooklyn, Fred retraced what may or may not have been George’s route that night, zigzagging south and west, spending a noticeable percentage of his net worth on a vegetable-covered pizza slice on Second Avenue, trying not to think about the hydrogenated oils and preservatives and pesticides working their way into him. He passed by the Zeckendorf, of course, alert for short, vivacious blondes, and made the embarrassing mistake of nodding hello to the familiar-looking hefty man in the blue security jacket, who was just then clocking out for the day. The man didn’t nod back, just stared, eyes slitting. Fred was so tired by that point and the air was so humid and dense with the day’s particulates that he began to perceive a strange viscosity to the passing sights and lights, as though the streets of Manhattan had been sunk, Atlantis-like, to some deep ocean floor.

  Sam was still at the office when Fred got back, despite the lateness of the hour, alone in his lamp-lit alcove. He had his noise-canceling headphones on, a specially audio-engineered recording he’d bought called Metamusic, which supposedly synchronized the brain’s hemispheres and led to increased concentration, arpeggiating away. On his left screen, Little Sam was falling, in pixel-by-pixel slow motion, toward an even more pristine 34th Street, emptied of cars and people. On his right screen was a website with a photograph of an odd-looking structure, squatter than it was tall, tapered toward the top, and fronted with goldtinted plate-glass windows, like an office building that had swallowed a cathedral. The apex was in fact decorated with a burnished steel cross, and at the top of the page a logo gleamed in silvery letters across the pure blue sky:

  Sam was scrolling down a list of links on the sidebar as Fred approached. Seeing him in the lamp, Sam killed the window with a click.

  “What was that?” Fred asked.

  “Nothing. Surfing for porn.”

  “They’ve got porn in a place called Christworld?”

  Sam glanced back in his general direction, annoyed, then pulled down the headphones. “I’m researching congregations,” he mumbled.

  “What for?”

  “For me. For Florida.”

  “For you?”

  Fred had never heard Sam so much as talk about religion, or even summon the interest to listen to anyone else talk about religion. The times Fred and George had started arguing about the subject in Sam’s presence, both as teenagers at home and as adults here in the office, Sam’s eyes had gone dead and he’d wandered off, as if they’d started speaking in Swahili.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “For me. Why not for me?”

  “You want to be a Christian, now?”

  “It’s what people do, Fred.”

  “People do a lot of things, Sam.”

  “A lot of military people go to church. Even some of the tech guys do down there. It’s a cultural thing.”

  “I see,” Fred said flatly. “You’re going to join a church in order to network.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Sam measured out his words by the syllable. “It’s not just sermons anymore. These churches are whole complexes. They’ve got all kinds of activities. They’ve got smoothie bars.” “Oh, smoothies.” Fred nodded. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Adaption’s not such a bad thing. You should try it, sometime.”

  On the left screen, the impact finally began: Little Sam’s head opening up like the shell of an egg, blobs of violet, sprays of red, strands of purple, shards of white floating out of it in some dreamlike accompaniment to the sluice of synthesized horns from the headphones sitting around Sam’s neck. By the time the torso began to come apart, the head was a vast, dissipating cloud of color. The slow-motion explosion continued for two full minutes.

  “Far too many calculations,” Sam said, with a little difficulty at first, as though his throat were caked with sand. “We’ll have to simplify. Anyway, it’s more realism than we need, in this case. We want scary, a little shocking. Not outright traumatizing.”

  “Thoughtful of you,” Fred managed, feeling as if the cheese from the pizza he’d eaten had osmosed into his lungs.

  “Hey, speaking of thoughtful. Thanks for crashing our playtest.”

  This took Fred by surprise. “Sam, no, it wasn’t me.”

  “Didn’t you hear Jesse say we weren’t ready for jumpers?”

  “It crashed before I hit the ground.”

  “The predictive modeling, Fred?” Sam tapped the Urth screen. “It was trying to get a head start on the pile of goop you were about to become.” Fred considered. The possibility made all too much sense. Maybe he really was at fault. Could the whole point of that encounter have been to make him look bad?

  But not the whole point, certainly. Not if those flashlights and masks going out had been a part of it.

  “What about all the object malfunctions?” Fred asked. “Are you blaming that on me, too?”

  “Don’t know what caused that,” Sam said. “Just too much going on, probably. We’ll be debugging round the clock.” He rubbed his temples. Then looked up at Fred. “What was the matter with you up there? And what were you thinking, running out of the office like that after you crashed us?”

  “I didn’t run.”

  “It doesn’t look good, Fred.”

  “I saw George.”

  Sam stared back at him, defensive perimeters going up. “So? And?”

  “In the playtest.”

  Sam blinked, repeatedly.

  “He was standing right next to you,” Fred said. “You really couldn’t see him?”

  The look Sam gave him next, he hadn’t observed on his little brother in a while. It took Fred a moment to register it as concern.

  “Have you been getting any sleep? Is that insomnia not getting better?” All Fred could do was laugh.

  “Seriously, Fred. You look pretty wiped out.”

  The next step was to unload the whole story on Sam, show him the proof, the emails and IMs still on Fred’s hard drive. But Fred found himself hesitating. He wasn’t so sure he wanted whoever was doing all this to be caught. At least not yet. Not before he knew why, what the point of it was. To hell with Erskine and Lipton and Gibbon, and Sam too. Once Fred was an employee again it might be his problem, but it wasn’t yet. Let them fix their own mess.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  Fred laughed again. “Nothing wrong with me.” He started walking away.

  “I took care of your flight and hotel arrangements for next week,” Sam said, suddenly solicitous. “You’re leaving Monday night, OK?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I emailed you some other info, too.”

  Fred wended through the ever-thickening desk maze. In the open metal cabinet, beside the mini-fridge and microwave and the hanging Lego Death Star, a bottle of champagne stood its hopeless ground, assailed from all sides by Sam’s lunchtime columns of soup and chili cans. Over the last few months, Sam had been stocking more and more of them, just for convenience, he’d said, though no doubt their potential usefulness in the event of a massive terror attack had occurred to him as well. As Fred clambered into the chair, wedged between the Cray and his desk, the mouse got joggled and the screens flickered on. His screensaver appeared, flipping and bouncing his name around a void:

  The same font they’d used for Christworld.

  Another synchronicity.

  Of no use whatsoever.

  He banished the screensaver, and went through a stack of emails from Sam, links he’d sent—press releases from the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, a couple newspaper articles on local business deals and partnerships and the burgeoning nightlife scene, reviews of slicklooking new restaurants and bars with pictures of giant steaks, snuggling couples, martinis on red- and blue-lit bartops. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lost in the sight of those martini glasses when another email appeared:
/>   Subject: A Pray for a Pray

  From: George Brounian

  You don’t believe in me, that’s OK,

  Hell, I’m an AWDBS/HAA.

  I don’t believe in my halo’s bling.

  I don’t believe in the gust of my wing.

  I can scarcely believe in you, old chum,

  Much less that the famed AVATARA will come.

  How fart-in-the-windlike, I hope you can see,

  Is a prayer from an astral loser like me.

  All I can do is to pray for a pray,

  That you’ll pray for me, for us, for a way,

  Pray for the means to end this Maya:

  Om Namah Shivaya

  Clicking on the link, Fred was brought to a photograph of a painted statue of Shiva the Destroyer, festooned with snakes and crowned with skulls, his overabundant hands clutching sword, trident, noose, and, by the hair, a cluster of severed heads. Underneath ran the caption: You Shall Ever Be a Victor.

  Fred stared at the image for a while, looking in vain for clues, and feeling uneasy. Then he did a whois search on the page’s domain name—www.avatara.us—only to find that it was registered to one Lord Shiva, residing on Mt. Kailasa Street in the nonexistent town of Karanaloka, NJ.

  Then, for a while, he banged his head back against the mainframe’s hull, listening to the sound it made—a hollow, distant thunder.

  It’s not small, George is saying, mock-modestly, at a zinc-hued downtown restaurant with a line out the door. All right, if you must know, it’s huge.

  It’s the summer of 2000, their thirtieth birthday is near, and George has been hinting for days at the size and formidableness of the gift he’s gotten Fred. Jill and Mel lean in, shouting out their guesses. A TV. A massage chair. George smirks, widens the space between his hands. Not wanting to be too outdone, Fred has bought George a complete set of camping gear: an ultralight dome tent, a sleeping bag, an over-designed backpack, and a Swiss Army knife that does everything but build you a house. But the way George is going on about this, Fred wonders if it’s not too late to get him more.

  A car, Jill says, gripping George’s hand. The two have just moved in together. In a few months, George will propose.

  A waiter with zinc-framed glasses brings a round of martinis on a zinc tray. Fred’s been ordering martinis lately—they seem to him like something a CEO would drink.

  A boat, Mel guesses, adding that one of her meatbags is always talking about his boat, trying to get the bubblehead to go for a ride on it. These terms, which Fred explains are standard news-producer lingo for the male and female anchorpeople, cause George and Jill to crumple with laughter. Mel is an assistant producer of so-called human interest stories (another odd term, considering they’re mainly about domesticated animals) for the eleven o’clock news. Fred spun the wheel and met her through an online-dating site, though before asking her on their first date, he’d made sure to run her name through three Internet search engines, perusing her résumé, a few college newspaper columns, a family reunion website with pictures of her, George, all the while, telling him to give it a rest for God’s sake. They’ve been dating for a month, and this is the first time the four of them are out as a group. He’s warmed to see everyone having fun.

  The poor bubblehead, Jill says.

  The bubblehead’s a bitch, Mel hisses, to more laughter. As Fred hoped she would, she launches into her story of how the bubblehead asked her to go fetch her a Perrier, like she was a mere intern or something, and how, in revenge, she succeeded in placing a golf-ball-sized piece of lint in the bubblehead’s hair just before she went on the air. It’s a funny story, and Mel savors the telling, detailing how she nursed the piece of lint for days, feeding it with pocket scrapings and keeping it in a coin purse. She’s flirty, earthy, unrepentantly material, things that Fred isn’t but that he approves of and wants to be. She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy. Maybe a small voice in him says they aren’t right for each other, but why shouldn’t they be, and hasn’t that voice messed him up enough already? Watching her mimic the careful assembly of her lintball, it strikes him he’s in love with her. She and Jill start laughing so hard all attention in the room gravitates their way. Glancing over, he finds George’s eyes already on his, teary, just as his own must be. George understands, the look says. His brother feels it too, this newfound love expanding, encompassing not just their women but the whole room, city, cosmos, ever more of which seem made for them, tailored to perfection.

  Or maybe, he’d later think, it was just that one brief moment that fit so well. Though even it, in time, would look threadbare. Those gorgeous women in hysterics. Those young, twin, martini-drinking CEOs. Flush with gourmet food, fancy drinks, the facile pleasure of playing and winning. A transient circumstance. A conditioned love. The one vanishing with the other.

  He closed the windows on his desktop, Shiva, martinis, emails fading to blue.

  He opened a DarkBASIC window, and typed:

  rem

  A REM statement was just a programming aside, a note to oneself. That was how he’d meant it at first. But looking it over, he realized it could be a prayer—a note to his own programmer, as it were. He added two words:

  do

  rem

  loop

  And set his little golem running. Nothing visible happened, but the computer’s circuitry was now continually cycling through his silent prayer.

  Stopping it, he added a counter to let him know how many prayers had been accomplished at the end of each minute, and set it running again.

  37703481 appeared after the first minute.

  75406964 after the second.

  The number’s sheer size gave him a slight feeling of accomplishment. Way to pray, dude, said Inner George. Sarcastically or no, Fred couldn’t quite say.

  He pulled himself under the desk, crawled amid the wires, located the dust-caked plug of George’s “huge” birthday gift to him, the Cray. A few months ago, he’d scanned its hard drives, in the desperate hope that George had left some other unfinished party gag on it Fred might savor for a while, but its vast number of silicon chips were so many clean slates. Climbing back to his seat, he networked over to the Cray and rewrote the program in C:

  He set it running. A minute later, a new number popped onto the screen:

  15047383901

  He himself was still doing nothing. But four hundred times as fast.

  “You guys heard about the Prayerizer?”

  The couple Fred addressed were engaged in a marathon make-out session, leaned up against the bar between his stool and the next. Retracting their tongues, they turned toward him, lips gluey and loose, heads still touching at the temples as though magnetized. If either of them were twenty-one, it could only be by a few days.

  “Wha?” said the guy.

  “The Prayerizer,” said Fred.

  They kept staring at him, their mouths slack, their eyes slack, the glistening tongues inside their open mouths slack. He pulled a flyer from the briefcase wedged between his chest and the bar and slid it toward them. It was a photo he’d taken, from a low angle, of the gargantuan blue mainframe, the hull of which he’d hastily pasted with faith clip art (that Shiva image from his mystery mailer, a crucifix, a crescent, a six-pointed star, a happy Buddha).

  “So how often would you say you pray?” Fred went on. “Not like a formal prayer, necessarily, just sort of hoping something goes your way. On average, let’s say. Once a day? Once a week?”

  The girl seemed about to laugh, or perhaps vomit. Before she could do either, the guy pawed her jaw back and reaffixed his mouth to hers.

  They’d won the first round, Fred conceded, annoying him more than he had them. He ended up staring at the flyer himself, straining to renew the sense of possibility the idea had given him in the shower that morning. It didn’t rank with the wheel or the lightbulb, or a virtual world, for that matter, as inspiration
s went. He was aware of this. But it had been easy enough to implement—a few hours of programming, a registered domain name, a couple hundred of these flyers cranked out on the office printer—and he’d been in business. One never knew with Internet phenomena, he was telling himself; with enough hits, he might be able to sell some ads and use the money to keep his brother sleeping in style while he looked for work, or maybe even to fertilize some other fast-money ventures, so that before long he’d have a company again.

  He’d chosen the Lower East Side to start putting up his flyers, out of more or less fond memories, or maybe just repetition compulsion, having in his late teens postered the area for a short-lived band called The Smells, in which he’d played, mainly, keytar. He’d gotten a few thumbs-up, back then, some nods from other scruffy kids putting up flyers of their own, even a lingering look from a girl or two. This time around, he was meeting with less positive reinforcement. The only person who asked him directly about the flyers was a homeless man with an enormously inflamed right eyeball, who then wanted to talk about a Chinese conspiracy involving computer chips in the brain and flying dragons. Loitering on a corner and surreptitiously watching reactions to a construction wall he’d saturated with ten or so of his flyers, he spied one pair of rolled eyes, one weary shake of the head, and other than that, glazed indifference. He began circling back around to blocks he’d covered two hours before, to find some of his flyers already papered over with others, or worse, simply torn down, four taped corners remaining.

  He started walking more, postering less. At some point late in the afternoon, he saw he was on 7th Street and, remembering Mira’s address, began idly searching for the building. He wasn’t far from it and it didn’t take long to get there—a six-story row house in need of some brickwork. He risked a look up at a few windows as he passed, a sweeping glance that couldn’t take in much. He was too worried he’d find her face in one of them, or Craig Egghart’s, catching him in the act.