Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  Fred said OK, and waited while his father toked up.

  Sighing smoke, Vartan looked over. “There’s nothing sadder than old people still crazy for magic.”

  The mustache ticked, just enough to show who he was really talking about. Neither of them could look at the other for long. Vartan turned the ignition and the radio came on. They listened to a story about a JFK passenger in an Arabic script T-shirt being told he couldn’t fly.

  “I think we’ll make it,” Vartan said, taking a last quick hit. They were in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn—the nursing home was two blocks from the apartment—but in the interest of time, were headed straight to LaGuardia. “You got everything you need in that carry-on bag?”

  Fred nodded.

  “You got some good shoes to wear?”

  He nodded again, though his dress shoes had holes in them and he couldn’t afford new ones, and anyway, he was probably too superstitious at this point to stop wearing George’s checkered shoes. His brother had gotten not only the shoes, but an entire checkered outfit on that trip two years back, as a kind of tribute, after all his belongings were stolen at knifepoint and some Czech dot-com burnouts he’d hooked up with had taken up a collection for him. Fred still had on his cell phone, texted to him by a gracious stranger, a picture of George in a checkered cap, a checkered shirt, a pair of checkered pants, hiked up to display checkered socks, and the shoes.

  “I put your mail in the side pocket.”

  “Thanks,” Fred said, wishing his father hadn’t been so thoughtful, not particularly eager to breast the latest wave of bills and collection notices. They listened to a story about a marine prison guard forcing Saddam Hussein to watch the South Park movie over and over and over again.

  “When’s your tweezer arraignment?” Vartan asked, apparently reminded by Saddam’s ordeal.

  “Monday morning.”

  “You’re not a flight risk, are you? I’d like to get my fifty bucks back.”

  “Don’t worry. Justice will be served.”

  They listened, uneasily, to a story about a male nurse in jail for murdering dozens of his helpless patients with lethal injections. The man was now donating a kidney to help the brother of a former girlfriend.

  “Your mom and I will be there,” Vartan said, preempting Fred’s question. “OK. Let’s roll.”

  At a stoned crawl, they pulled out of the nursing home’s service entrance and Fred watched the greenery in planters and the co-ops that once had been tenements inch by. Before the show, he’d spent as much time as he could in Manhattan, with George. He’d pointed out to the nurses the colorlessness of his brother’s urine and asked them to check his osmolality and electrolytes. He’d read to George a paper by an Oxford philosophy professor who argued that, according to the principle of mediocrity, it was far more probable this particular human experience was just a collection of algorithms being crunched in some gargantuan simulation software than actual flesh-and-blood people in an actual place; followed, skipping over the parts where the equations got too dense, by a paper by an astrophysicist who claimed that according to the math, the universe had never been created to begin with. Finally, without specificity, he’d described the upcoming trip to George as being for business, trying to sound neither upset, which he was, nor excited, which, guiltily, he was a little bit too.

  Vartan’s cell phone rang. He batted aside his cape and jacket and extracted it from the leather holster clipped to his cummerbund.

  “Yeah, we’re headed to the airport,” Vartan said after a moment. “We just did a show. At the hospital where they were born. Remember it?”

  The show hadn’t in fact been at the hospital, which they were passing now, but the nursing home down the block. Possibly Vartan had just become confused—happily, if not willfully so. He reached over and began moving Fred’s head around, as if examining it for lice. “He’s got gray hairs now. You believe that?”

  “Gray hairs?” Fred heard the brassy edge of Manny’s voice boom through the tiny speaker.

  Vartan released Fred’s head, shaking his own sadly. “George’s has grown back in, and it’s still all dark.”

  Manny said something quieter.

  “Yeah. Yeah, well. So what do you want?” He listened, turned to Fred. “Manny wants you to get him an acting job with the military.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “He wants to direct,” Vartan conveyed.

  Whenever Fred wanted to describe Manfred Kent to anyone who’d been watching TV in North America any time of day or night between the years of 1984 and 1990, all he usually had to do was remind them of a commercial for a money transfer service in which a miserable-looking couple is sitting facing the camera, and the husband is on the phone asking for money to be wired today, and the wife is nervously watching the husband, and behind them is standing a tall, silent, and motionless motorcycle cop in a helmet and sunglasses. It was one of those commercials that, thanks to some strange corporate whim, got aired over and over for season after season; and that finally, just when you were allowed to forget about it for a few weeks, mysteriously reappeared to bludgeon you with another heavy rotation. This was Manny—the motorcycle cop—in, if not his biggest, then at any rate his most profitable role. In real life he was anything but silent or still, constantly in motion, impossible to keep track of, always gaining or losing things, property, jobs, wives. He’d been a fixture in Fred and George’s childhood—whenever they saw the man, they knew they’d be in for a day out of the ordinary, following him around as he hit on women and pitched films he was dreaming up on the spot to anyone who looked well-off.

  He’d moved to L.A. in the mid-eighties, and the last time Fred had seen him was about a dozen years ago, on one of those aimless road trips. Fred had crashed at George’s sunny apartment complex in San Jose, hanging out in his ratty leather jacket by the pool while George went to work, winking at the women who thought he was George and otherwise causing difficulties, until George finally agreed to take a few days off. They drove down Highway 1 and Manny met them in Malibu and took them out to the property he’d recently purchased, a thin, twisting, two-acre strip of creased earth at the bottom of a steep gulch. In order to keep out the riffraff, the owners of the luxury estates adorning the surrounding hilltops had thought to buy the entire hills on which their homes were situated, down to the very feet of their slopes; but when it came to the cragged gulch bottom, they either supposed that no one would ever want it or perhaps believed that they themselves already owned it. Doubtless, though, they were now ruing their carelessness, for Manny, lacking the funds at present to build a house, had settled down there in a pup tent, with a pack of half-starved, “rescued” pound dogs to protect his belongings (a trunk full of clothes and, of course, the tent). His bathroom was a hole in the ground, which the dogs efficiently, if revoltingly, vied for the privilege of keeping clean. The hole had at first been entirely out in the open, but was now, in a neighborly response to the hilltop homeowners’ complaints to the local police, walled on three sides by beach towels tied to stakes, high enough to cover up the fine points of the act itself, but still low enough for Manny, as he squatted, to cheerfully wave hello to the neighbors gaping in horror from the decks and picture windows above. Manny offered Fred and George his tent, and himself lay under the stars by the opening, lecturing Fred about how he needed to be more like his brother and get his life in order, while, from either end of the gulch, the spooked dogs howled stereophonically in the darkness.

  Manny was in his fifties then, but still energetic enough to live in that gulch for three months, jogging a mile to the beach and back every day, until finally his neighbors, in grudging respect for his business acumen, chipped in and bought him out for a fourfold profit.

  “Manny says you can stay with him,” Vartan told Fred, the phone still at his ear.

  Fred quickly said he had a hotel. They settled on dinner.

  While George had never talked to Fred directly about his last ill-fated mission d
own to Armation, he’d filled him in on the aftermath, how he’d proceeded to get very, very drunk in a nearby barbecue restaurant, and then called Manfred, who’d come and driven him all over Florida, it seemed to George, pep-talking nonsense in his ear. George awoke the next day in Manny’s efficiency apartment, unfurnished save for a very old mattress and a chair. George had gotten the mattress. Manny had slept in his van.

  Vartan holstered the phone, turned to Fred. “He said if I want to act again, I could move down to Florida and he’d put me in one of his digital movies.”

  “He’s still making those movies?”

  “In the ‘Danish Style.’” Vartan shook his head.

  “What style is that, again?”

  “No idea.” Vartan unclipped his bowtie, clipped on his sunglasses as they idled at a light.

  “He was there, you know,” Vartan said, with a backward thumb.

  Manny, he meant. The hospital, he meant. Where they hadn’t just performed. There when Fred and George were born.

  “I remember that,” Fred said.

  “You remember that?”

  “You told me.”

  “He was staying with your mom and me,” Vartan said anyway. “After his first wife kicked him out.”

  Your favorite story, Inner George teased.

  “Me and Manny were having an argument,” Vartan went on. “About acting. Theory. We cared a lot about that kind of shit. Whether you’re inside or outside the character, whether he’s you or you’re him. We could go on for hours. We were getting loud, and then your mom came out of the bedroom and said it was time to go. She had this look on her face.”

  Vartan pulled onto the expressway. Around his father, Fred saw the unnatural brightness returning, as if that skylight in the sky were opening up directly above the van, a light so strong it came through the roof, giving his father’s face a quartz-like luster. Fred felt a longing for it, for that other place, whatever it was, on the other side.

  “I sent Manny down to pull my car up in front of the house.” Vartan’s eyes misted. “Sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang hardtop, sapphire blue. Two-eighty-nine horsepower, four-valve, low-compression.”

  Fred tilted his head skyward against the window, looking for that bright white portal, the one they’d all see in the end, thanks to oxygen deprivation, and think they were headed somewhere good. It seemed the height of mercy, or the cruelest trick of all. Though either way, it was hard not to infer a crazy wisdom in the design.

  “So I get your mother down to the stoop, and Manny comes running up the street, saying the car wasn’t where I said. It was gone.” Vartan’s hand swiped the air. “Stolen. So we had to walk your mother to the hospital.”

  Fred knew, from the repeated tellings, the punch line was coming, but would have known anyway from the way his dad’s mustache was spreading.

  “The gods took my car,” Vartan said. “And gave me an extra son.”

  Fred had known this too, of course, that he’d come as a surprise. Vartan gestured with his hairy chin toward the Lower Manhattan skyline, scrolling by across the river on their left.

  “The Twin Towers opened for business that year,” he added, as though it meant something.

  Fred changed out of his tux in the back of the van, strapped his briefcase to his carry-on, and in full business-travel-warrior mode, clambered out, through the fumes and cabs and stacked baggage and into the third-world din of LaGuardia Airport. In the wake of the liquidbomb plot, the crowds were thicker and the delays more horrific than usual. One of the few on-time flights seemed to be his own, a mixed blessing, given the quarter-mile security-checkpoint line snaking off down a dank corridor behind the counters. The overall feeling was of a system under mounting strain. Fluorescent lights faltered, missing ceiling panels gaped like open sores, exposing the veins of pipes and wires; the skeletal metal gridwork. Meanwhile, beneath, the travelers waited, so ardently groomed by comparison: those deep indigo jeans, that form-fitting hoodie. It probably was time to get out of this city, Fred thought. If not this country. Follow the narcotic rush of capital to China. Seek social-democratic rehab in Northern Europe. Barring such ruthlessness, though, maybe there wasn’t too much more to be done than look one’s best, try to manifest the good life one had been led to expect, hope that one’s sheer belief in the system’s continuance would somehow keep it all rolling along.

  After a forty-minute wait in the security line, Fred sock-footed through the scanner with nary a beep. His belongings, however, were slow catching up. Two other agents behind the machine took their time squinting at the screen. When the bags finally trundled through, one of the men—a hefty guy with a face like wet meatloaf—walked alongside them, pointing at Fred with a stubby, latexed finger.

  “Yours?”

  Fred nodded.

  “Could you follow me, please?”

  A fourth agent involved himself, carrying the bags to a side table. Fred felt like a microbe swarmed by lymphocytes. The hefty one unzipped the carry-on, brought out Fred’s toiletry kit, unzipped that, took out his shaving cream, toothpaste, cough syrup, anti-nausea syrup, saline nasal spray, and mouthwash. Then pulled out the four-dollar enhanced water drink Fred had just bought, in a spree of financial optimism, before getting in line.

  “Sir?” the man said. “What planet you been on lately?”

  Fred checked his watch. Five minutes to boarding. “Go ahead and toss them.”

  The agent considered for a moment, his moist lower lip unfurling like a party blower, then shrugged and swept the items into a bin. Fred made to leave, but the agent wasn’t done, unzipping an outer pocket, this time producing a small, taped-up cardboard box Fred had never seen before.

  “You know what’s in here?”

  Fred shook his head, too stunned to reply. The agent flipped the box around: Fred’s name and address, printed on the front. The agent pointed to it.

  “You?”

  “Yes. Sorry. My father put my mail in there. I didn’t think—”

  “You know what it is, now?”

  Fred leaned in, reading the return address: Macy’s.

  The guy rattled the box. “You mind?” He peeled the tape and removed a smaller gift box, and a card:

  Compliments. Lord Shiva.

  “You know this Lord guy?”

  “Birthday coming up,” Fred said.

  The agent kept eyeing him, first like a potential threat, then like a prize idiot. He opened the box:

  A Swiss Army knife.

  After another twenty minutes of checking the knife-laden bag at the counter, talking his way around the line and back through security, Fred arrived panting at the gate to discover his flight was now two and a half hours delayed. He set up camp on the concourse carpet by a wall socket and searched the gift card and packing slip for clues. The card had no other words but what the agent had read. The slip listed Lord Shiva as the purchaser, with a return address from the same fictional town as the website, this time in Pennsylvania. He called up Macy’s. The knife had been purchased online a few days ago with a gift card. Beyond this, they could not, or would not, tell him anything.

  He hadn’t had a chance to examine the thing closely. He didn’t know whether or not it was precisely the same model he’d gotten George for his birthday six years ago, but it looked pretty similar. George had carried the multitool around with him everywhere, using it for everything from hard drive installation to beer-bottle opening, until he’d finally lost it, or given it away, or thrown it out, as he had most of his belongings toward the end. If sending this new one to Fred was an attempt to gain his trust, to make him think that the sender had had George’s trust, it wasn’t a very convincing one. Anyone who’d known George at all might have known about the thing. And why seek to gain Fred’s trust in the first place, he wondered. For what purpose?

  Fred couldn’t help turning over in his mind something George had said just a week before he’d slipped out of consciousness. Fred had shown up unannounced to find George sitting in ful
l lotus, oxygen tubes in his nose, facing the wall of his living room. The wall was bare, the TV and cable box and Xbox and DVR and the shelves they’d stood on gone.

  “I’ll get higher-end stuff when I recover,” George said, indicating the space where the entertainment center had been. His tone was bright, but too thin, his throat caving in around the words. He’d developed a scary new sound in the last couple weeks, clearing his throat all the way at the base, almost like he was gagging. He did it again now: “Kghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrk.” His oxygen tank sat next to him on the rug where the coffee table had been, for the moment unused. “Kghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrk. I just needed a good, clear wall, you know?”

  Fred told him to get his shoes on. Told him it was time to go.

  “Go where?” George had returned his attention to that good, clear wall, his eyes glassy.

  Fred told him that he was through with George running down the clock on his next round of treatments. He had made an appointment for that morning and George was going. Fred practically bellowed this. He wanted to sound like fate itself, no possibility of denial.

  “You know, Fred, you really need to make some friends. I can’t be your entire social life. Kghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrk.”

  Fred told him again to get ready, his imperious tone already quavering.

  George’s attention drifted down to his hands, nested in his lap. “One more week,” he bargained.

  Fred was almost outside of his skin by now from the shock, the possibility that he might not get his brother out. “Please don’t tell me you think staring at a wall is going to heal you.”

  George looked up at him with a thin smile and an unearthly light in his eyes, as though he might dissolve the chaos of those bits of bone and teeth and eyeball, those bits of skin and liver and gonad and pulsing heart, with nothing but his measured outbreaths:

  “Maybe I’m not in this for healing.”

  Fred had been assigned a middle seat. One half of an elderly couple sat to either side of him, the woman apparently having insisted on the aisle and the man the window. For the flight’s duration, they proceeded to bicker across Fred about the way their grandchildren were being raised, a fugue-like, circling debate, every so often switching sides to give each of them the pleasure of both attacking and defending their daughter-in-law and son. Briefly, Fred peeked at the rest of the mail, which he’d transferred to his briefcase—a $9,500 hospital bill, an overdraft notice, a cutoff letter from his credit card company, a $400 shoplifting fine assessed by the supermarket chain—before bonneting his head in an airplane blanket, a lone red thread trembling before his eyes.