by Alex Shakar
“Don’t feel bad, chief. Everyone strikes out with her.” The porkpie guy again. “Chick’s one ice-cold rectal probe, if you ask me.” He wandered off once more.
Fred wondered if the asshole was right.
Miserable, but unwilling to lose the rest of his pride by slinking off immediately, he occupied himself for a while watching a fly. Graceless as a drunken party guest, having boorishly landed in his drink, it was now trying to save itself by paddling in counterclockwise circles against the inner edge. Craning his neck, he managed to locate Mira on the far side of the room, gathering glasses from the now empty booths. Meanwhile, the other bartender, a dude with two-inch-thick sideburns, was taking orders at the bar. The couple next to Fred had slunk off to whatever dorm lounge or broom closet awaited them. “Space Oddity” blared from the jukebox, the same old song that blared from it when he and George were in high school, a golden oldie even then. Sideburns punched red swizzle sticks into two ice-filled drinks, an image that took Fred back to a day in the chemo room when the vein in George’s right hand had started acting up and the male nurse—a guy who could have easily qualified to be Porkpie’s barhopping wingman—had stuck a second IV line in his left. “Lucky you, you get two,” the nurse had said as he’d jammed and slightly twisted the needle into George, causing Fred’s own veins to cower sympathetically from his skin.
George, though, had only grinned to himself, and a minute later repeated the line in the nurse’s deep Brooklyn accent, after which, he’d pointed out to Fred the various craters in the floor tile at their feet.
“You know what made those burn holes?” George asked.
When Fred said no, with an oddly fascinated look, George pointed to the stuff dripping into him.
Using a folded cocktail napkin, Fred airlifted the fly out of his booze and set it ashore on the waxy wood next to his balled-up prayerizer.com flyer; the insect began to stagger drunkenly in the same inch-wide circles it had been making in the drink.
And little did I know, that sorry night, he told his future listeners, that …
But he couldn’t even think of what. He must have laid his head down, because the next thing he knew he was watching the fly at fly level, looking into its red compound eye. Twenty-five trillion prayerizations so far, he estimated. More prayers than had been prayed by or for the combined total of every human in history.
He wasn’t sure how long his eyes were closed before he felt that liftoff sensation again. It wasn’t true, he kept telling himself. There was no such thing as a soul. There was no consciousness apart from these boozesoaked brain cells. He wasn’t floating up out of his body. The lie of the feeling that indeed he was doing just that made him angry again. But the anger soon dropped away, along with the other heavy parts of himself, into a sea of swerves and jags of color, which resolved, briefly, into the bar from above: Mugs of pale beer pouring into uptilted faces. Couples headed for the door. Mira, almost directly below, seen through the slow chopping blades of a ceiling fan. Leaning slightly on one hip. Fingers tucked in her back pockets. The howling chimp and grimacing Bush lookalikes rendered almost friendly-looking by the curvature of her breasts. Her strange moon of a face going soft and lost, as she gazed at some guy slumped over the bar, some guy with a sloppy smile, and hair that needed cutting, some guy down there who must have been him.
Relax, and breathe, at the count of
five
and imagine that the air filling your lungs is infused with a blissful, sweet, breathable gas. Last week, your breath made you feel comfortably heavy. This week, it can make you feel even more comfortably light. At the count of
four
as you inhale, you might begin to feel a tingling ease in your chest. You might begin to feel, with each soft inhalation, the lightness spreading a little bit more. Into the muscles of your back. Around your ribcage. Feel it lifting your internal organs, lifting the muscles of your neck and throat. At the count of
three
feel that sweet lightness easing into your jaw, lifting your tongue in your mouth, your eyes in their sockets, your sinuses, your whole face and scalp. As the blissful gas permeates your brain, your head might begin to feel so light it wants to rise like a helium balloon on a string. Before it does, at the count of
two
go ahead and breathe the lightness all the way through you, out your fingertips, down through your toes. Your whole body, light and tingling, lighter with each slow, blissful breath. Breathing, so light and free. Light as air. And lighter still, at the count of
one
… so light you’re starting to float. Floating up, just like the buildings around you, on this peaceful night when the whole city is coming free. You’re coming free too, now. Floating up from your comfy chair, up into the even comfier air. Floating up so full of bliss and peace, as you watch the rising rivets and cables, the parking meters and cabs, the manhole covers and the millions of shards of glass. Look through the widening windows as the bricks come free. Look, as you float up story by story, inside all those dissolving rooms. At the molding and drywall working loose. At all that electrical wiring rising from the windows like charmed snakes. At the lengths of pipe leaping from the walls like gleaming fish. The tiles and floorboards and light sockets, the aluminum ducts and doorknobs and toilets and sinks, all gently tumbling around you, end over end, up into the night, like a long, slow, waterfall in reverse.
You’re so high up now. Go ahead and look down. And see? Already, you’re over the tops of the buildings, themselves still coming loose and following you up. Even the streets are rippling, chunks coming free, exposing the tunnels, the sewer pipes, and subway cars all coming up, too.
You’re high above the planet, in a sea of the city’s parts.
And none of them weigh a thing.
And neither do you.
And maybe you’re wondering where it’s all going, and where you’re going, and maybe some things aren’t clear to you, but one thing can be clear, one thing you can know is true: that no harm can come to any of it, not to the city and not to you. Everything up here, going somewhere good. Everything up here, heading only where it should….
“So what’s on tap today?” Fred asked as Mira leaned over him, her thumb ticking down his breastbone. “Do I get to part the Red Sea?”
He was trying for lightness, eager to send the message that her rejection of him in the bar the other night wasn’t at all on his mind. For her part, she was being carefully impersonal, looking everywhere but at his eyes as she leaned in, the buttons of her pear-green blouse coming within reach of his teeth. With a light pressure, like wiping a tiny peephole in a steamed window, she rubbed the gel over his heart.
“We’re still working on that.” She pressed an electrode to the spot. “But from what I hear, this one’s pretty good.”
Something nagged him about the statement. By the time he’d figured out what it was, she’d fitted the helmet onto him and was turning to leave.
“From what you hear? Haven’t you tried it?”
“Of course not,” she said quickly.
“Of course not?”
She turned to face him. “I need to maintain scientific objectivity.”
Her eyes widened just slightly, as though she were expecting to be challenged on the point. Before he could decide whether or not to do so, she spun away once more, walking to the door and switching off the light. Through the fish tank window, he watched her make her way past the first monitor and around the smoothed-forward hair of her father behind it. She reached up—a milky flash of hip between her blouse and skirt. Fred tried not to look for the belly stud, lest she cast a look his way and catch him. She didn’t.
Lost opportunity, Inner George groused.
So here he was again.
The blackened window, a faint, narrow triangle of monitor light at the bottom corner where the shade had hitched on a printer cable.
The dim red bulb.
The gray shelves in the shadows.
H
e felt drowsy immediately, which may or may not have been a helmet effect. He’d slept even less over the weekend than usual, trying to spend more time at the office without cutting down his hospital hours. The U.S. Army was now calling for simulated swaths of northern Pakistan, and the mayor’s office, though the contract hadn’t been inked yet and the Empire State Building demo was still two weeks off, was already eager for more details about the next phase—the virtual nuking of Times Square. Beyond these generalities, however, the minutiae of Arabic text-to-speech sticking points and asphalt melting points had been washing over Fred unabsorbed. The more he tried to focus on any of it, the blurrier it went before his eyes.
For all his weekend hours at the office, he hadn’t come close to Sam’s work schedule. When Fred arrived, no matter how early, Sam was already at his desk, and was still sitting there when Fred left. The only times his little brother got up were to do his pushups, or use the bathroom down the hall, or, very occasionally, to conference with an employee face to face (the preferred method being to just IM back and forth). Sam had his lunch delivered. He slept, most nights, Fred was pretty sure, on the red plush couch. Fred probably hadn’t scored many points by being around, as the few times Sam had walked by, Fred had been doing something other than company work, and the hum of the big blue mainframe was putting Sam’s brain on edge. Sam bitched about the power it was eating up and the heat it was giving off, and indeed, inches from its hull, Fred was sweating in his faintly vibrating seat. But, more out of obstinacy than any remaining hope for profit, Fred refused to shut it down, even though he hadn’t gotten a single prayer request other than the one he himself had made to the powers that be to DO something. He checked for new prayers every few minutes, after which he checked the prayerization count for his own prayer—sixty-five trillion some-odd by Saturday night, eighty-six trillion and change on Sunday—comforted for no good reason by the ever-rising figure, as if it were money piling up in some offshore account.
Way to pray.
He also blew some more precious time on Hindu mythology reading. It turned out that Parasurama, the sixth avatara of Vishnu, had wielded an axe, just as that chemotherapy angel avatar of George had been doing in the playtest; in fact, the very name Parasurama meant “axe-wielding Rama” in Sanskrit. Parasurama had received the axe, the legend went, after undertaking an arduous penance to please Shiva. He’d then used it to kill a greedy, thousand-armed king, and all the other corrupt warlords in the world. For these blood-soaked rampages, and for handing their territory over to the religious orders, he was known as a Brahma-Kshatriya, a warrior saint. He was a secondary form of avatara, a minor incarnation, not quite a god, just a very, very angry man. And a very long-lived one, still alive today, according to the texts, and fated to remain so until the end of this age of darkness, the Kali Yuga, which Parasurama himself would help usher in by serving as martial guru to the tenth avatara, Kalki. When Kalki arrived, it was said, Parasurama would train him in the warrior arts necessary to defeat Kali. He would train Kalki in the necessary piety too, sending him off to pray to Shiva for victory, in answer to which Shiva would bequeath him a celestial, bird-like spirit helper, and a magical sword, to help him on his way.
So was Fred supposed to be Kalki, then? Was he being trained, or possibly recruited, for some act of sabotage against Armation? And if so, by whom? Was it someone close to George, close enough to have visited him in the hospital, to have seen him in a gown with those tubes in his nose? Before the coma, George had only been an inpatient once, for a few days when his immune system gave up entirely and he’d seemed to come down with a dozen colds and flus simultaneously. Though there were plenty of other times George had been there as an outpatient for tests; and he’d had that oxygen tank with him outside of the hospital, too, toward the end. The depiction could have been entirely guesswork, inference. Whether they’d actually seen George or not during that time, they’d gotten the shape and paleness of his bald head more or less right. And the irradiated thinness of his arms and legs. When Fred closed his eyes, he could still see that avatar, stepping out through that shattered window, axing away at the blank blue sky….
Shelves, boxes, shadows.
The small steel table, redly gleaming in the bulb’s dim light.
The plastic jar of electroconductive gel.
Its cap not quite screwed on right.
Straining his eyes downward, he reaches out to fix it. And a current sears up his arm. Like a grease fire. Spreading across his skin—all of it—from the webbing of his fingers and toes to the insides of his eyelids to the roof of his mouth. He can’t even shout: his lungs have collapsed; the inside of his throat burns. Something’s gone wrong with the helmet. He’s frozen and aflame.
And then he’s somewhere else, clutching the edge of a giant wooden stair. He’s climbed halfway up the staircase and he’s stuck now. Before he can start to cry, a hand closes around his torso. He’s lifted, tucked under a big, helping arm, looking at the other half of him, which stares back from where it’s tucked under his father’s other arm.
Then he and George are in a sandbox, the one in the neighborhood park with the cement dolphin. George is in a costume of some kind, blue pajamas and a small red cape, his arm outstretched. Fred’s own arm, reaching toward George’s, is clad in a blue sleeve, too, and their hands clutch the same red plastic shovel. They’ve been fighting over it and it snaps, sending them sprawling in opposite directions. It’s not their shovel, and they’ve broken it. All they can think to do is set it down in the sand and make it look like it’s back together again, but they can’t get rid of the sandy seam halfway down from the handle, and already an angry mother approaches.
Then they’re standing on the shore of a lake. Mom and Dad and Uncle Manny and a pregnant blond woman who must be Manny’s wife are sitting on a blanket by a tree. Between Fred and George stands Sam, like a squat little gourd. Simultaneously, Fred and George pull quarters out of each of Sam’s ears, as his eyes goggle left and right to convey his astonishment. The adults applaud.
Fred’s a teenager, skidding across three lanes in the van as George reaches to help him with the wheel and everyone else clutches the walls. He’s older, he and George sitting leaned against the front and back tires of Fred’s broke-down used car in Death Valley. He’s an adult, in a department store, catching his reflection in a mirror between two clothing racks—he’s wearing an unfamiliar shirt, blue with narrow red pinstripes, and for a second he wonders if he forgot having tried it on; his reflection looks shocked, then laughs; there’s no mirror; they’ve made the exact same mistake.
No more than strobe flashes, yet each memory, like a gemstone or fractal, presents an endlessly receding depth. He can feel the reassuring warmth of his father’s ribcage. He can see every wavelike crest and dip in the sand around the shovel. And it seems, even more strangely, that he can feel not only his feelings but those of the people around him, from all sides, lapping through him like echoes in a canyon. Here’s the shovel-owning mother’s surge of guilty pleasure as she yells at the two of them. Here’s Sam’s pride at being part of the act. Here are five takes on the same odd synthesis of trapped terror and freedom, even Holly witnessing her own scream as much as producing it as the van skids around to the shoulder, coming to a stop facing the wrong way. The only person there’s no difference with is George, whose feelings are already a part of him.
He must have been electrocuted, must be dead, because there’s a strange brightness, brighter in every scene, as though a skylight—in the ceilings, in the skies themselves—were opening up over each one. Then he’s seeing the light directly, flying toward it through a spiraling mist. It’s the brightest thing he’s ever seen, though it doesn’t at all hurt his eyes. Does he have eyes?
The light grows. He might be halfway there when another brightness comes into view at the bottom of his field of vision—a tall, slender, human form, radiance spreading from either side. It raises a hand. And even more quickly than Fred has come, he’s
flung backward, back through the void, slammed into that mummy, that papier-mâché doll, that clod of wet, living cloth, within which he once again has to find his way with sickly tendrils of thought.
Back behind the eyes. Light seeping under cracked lids.
He lifts them. There’s Mira, in her blue diorama behind the glass, her body arching toward him, a raised hand holding the cord of the shade. She freezes, seeing him seeing her. Then, deciding not to acknowledge him, she continues lowering the shade. As she vanishes, behind her, at the level of her skirt in the bluish space of the control room, for an instant Fred makes out her father in a chair near the back of the room, gazing at him with curiosity. Then the shade is down.
Fred’s right arm—still rigid over the steel table—the lid still clutched in his fingers.
The jar on its side—silvery-red gobs half seeped onto the tabletop, like brains from an opened head.
“You electrocuted me,” Fred said, the moment he sat down.
Mira had been about to speak, her face eager. She took a moment to recalibrate.
“I assure you, Fred. You weren’t electrocuted.”
“You sure about that assurance?” It was partly anger he was feeling, partly sheer physical agitation. His nerves were still jumping under his skin, as were the muscles of his arm. He was only half sure he wasn’t about to jump up and punch a wall.
“You felt a buzzing or burning sensation?” she asked.
“‘Sensation?’ Sure, the ‘sensation’ of being tossed in a deep fryer.”
“I’m sorry you felt pain, Fred. It’s usually …” She stopped, adjusted course. “It wasn’t meant to be so severe. The sensation”—she fielded his daggering look—“or pain, was induced by stimulating your sensorimotor cortex. If it’s any consolation, you can rest assured that it didn’t harm you.”
He knew she was telling him the truth. He’d already figured this much out. But he asked anyway: