by Alex Shakar
“And you?” Soul Patch said, not as gentle.
“Nothing,” Fred mumbled. “Just … water.”
Mira gave him a look. “Stalking sober nowadays?”
She was trying not to show it, but he saw disappointment in her eyes. She was drunk, he was sure, though he wasn’t sure how much so, never having seen her drunk before. He debated which would make him less appealing in her eyes, to watch like a teetotaler while she went on a bender, or to admit he had no money. Not that he was sure he could even stomach a drink at this point.
“I’m a little light,” he admitted.
“Light?” She didn’t get his meaning at first. Then she rolled her eyes, turned to Soul Patch. “Get him what I’m having.”
Soul Patch did so.
“You have no money, Fred? Can you really have no money?”
Her expression was at first just puzzled, and then so suddenly tender he was taken aback. Was it simply pity?
“How about you take the drinks out of the fifty bucks for my next session?”
She frowned. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought up the study. He worried she was about to tell him they shouldn’t be talking like this. He was amazed she hadn’t said it already. Instead, she remarked with a levity that seemed calculated, “I suppose the study hasn’t been doing wonders for you, if you’re still penniless and living with your parents.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s been a total bust. I’ve met you.”
Shaking her head, deflating a little, she began picking the label off her beer bottle. “A real stroke of luck for you.”
“Not to mention getting to feel at one with a La-Z-Boy, floating above my body, seeing—”
“An angel?” She’d turned back his way, a mirthful light in her eyes. The change was so sudden it took him a second to adjust course yet again.
“Maybe not until now,” he said.
“Nice,” she allowed.
“I like you when you’re drunk,” he said.
“Is that so?” she asked.
“Don’t get me wrong, I like you when you’re sober, too. But you’re easier to talk to now.”
She nodded, brow scrunched, scientific-like. “More down to your level?”
“That’s part of it, no doubt.”
“And what’s the rest?”
“You don’t tell me to go away.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?”
“Well … you don’t immediately tell me to go away.”
“That night here, when I fell asleep on the bar. I dreamt I’d floated up out of my body.” Fred was into his second round, drinking faster than Mira, and thanks to his empty stomach, catching up fast. The bar was more crowded now than when he’d walked in, and the two of them had to lean closer to hear each other. “I was up near the ceiling. I could see myself asleep down below.”
They looked up at the fans and the black aluminum tiles.
“You were standing in front of me,” he went on, “trying to decide whether to wake me up. You reached out, maybe to touch my shoulder. But instead, you picked up my glass.”
He watched her expression. The corners of her eyes tightened. Otherwise, she was still.
“What happened then?”
“I was still rising, about to go right through the ceiling. Who knows where I would’ve gone.” He’d barely thought about this last part, it had been so quick and dreamlike. He probably wouldn’t have mentioned it now, except that she’d asked. “But then I just focused on that tattooed hand of yours.” He looked at her shirtsleeve. “And it was suddenly my own. I was holding on to you.”
Her face fell open for a moment, her eyes searching his. For what, he wasn’t sure.
“And what then?” she asked.
“You dropped my glass in a plastic rack and walked off.”
Slowly, she turned back to her drinks. He didn’t bother asking if she’d really stood there looking at him like that. She didn’t bother telling him. He knew it wouldn’t have proved anything anyhow. They drank in silence for a minute, Mira peering off at the pinball lights like they were some too-complicated constellation, Fred recalling the dream he’d slipped into after the one of floating above the bar. Something about being locked out of his parents’ place, up on the roof. Peering down through the skylight. Looking for George.
“Have you ever tried controlling your dreams?” she asked.
“You can do that?”
She traced a line in the dew on her bottle. “It can be done,” she said after a while. “The tricky part is to ascertain that you’re dreaming.”
“And how do you do that?”
“Sometimes trying to jump can help. Or trying to turn on or off a light. The inner ear and retina aren’t so easy to trick. Once you realize you’re dreaming, you can take control. Psychologists call it lucid dreaming.” She was edging her fingernails around the label of the beer bottle, happily lost in the explanation. “Tibetan Buddhists call it dream yoga. They’ve got their own technique. They constantly ask themselves if they’re dreaming, all day long, so that they’ll continue to ask in their sleep and then catch themselves.”
“Will lucid dreaming be part of this new religion of yours?”
“This religion of mine?”
“Your faith without ignorance.”
In one pull, she had the beer label off. “It’s not a religion. Would you like to know what a religion is?”
She said this casually, ominously so.
“OK,” he said.
“In the beginning …” She smoothed the label flat on the bar. “… there were specialists.”
He smiled, trying to follow. “Specialists.”
“People who discovered they could earn a living off spiritual services. Your blessings, your protections, what have you.” She curled an edge of the label with her many-ringed fingers, rolled it into a tight stick, then picked it up and waved it, a little white wand. “Like other specialists—your blacksmiths, your masons—these spiritual service providers found it advantageous to form into guilds, which could standardize products and pricing, and allow them to control the spiritual marketplace more effectively.”
With the tip of the wand, she pushed her empty shot glass toward the inner edge of the bar.
“But unlike your iron pikes and stone walls, your spiritual products are of less verifiable quality and consistency. And so even with their guilds, the specialists were getting undersold by unlicensed competitors. Word gets out the witch lady down the street is giving the same iffy results for half the price, and you’re hard-pressed to prove you’re the better choice. So the spiritual guilds turned to political lobbying, coercion, and brand identities.”
Her lullaby tone was at odds with the clinical fixedness of her eyes on the glass.
“With political lobbying, religious coalitions could build state-sanctioned monopolies to increase their membership and influence. With coercion—your ostracism, your threats of damnation, your torture and killing and the like—they could make defection to other religions costly. And with infallible holy books to brand their identity, they could differentiate themselves from all those intuitive alternative types that kept creeping out of the woodwork.”
She traced a slender, wavering vein along the wood of the bartop with the tip of the wand, then gestured with it again.
“The mystical impulse is a problem for religions. They rely on it to kindle demand, and to overcome the logical contradictions in their doctrines. But mystics are all about bypassing the middlemen specialists altogether. And local charismatics can form splinter groups and pull followers away. So, typically, religions will denounce, excommunicate, or just plain execute the mystics in their ranks, and every so often canonize a few safely dead ones from the past.”
She downed the last of her beer, and with a flourish, dropped the wand into the empty bottle.
“And that’s the story of religion.”
Her squinty gaze, off at the liquor shelf, was imperious.
Finishing his own bee
r, feeling it paint the empty walls of his insides, Fred thought of his mother and her friends denying that Reiki was a religion, of Manfred’s little speech about the Middle East and the Middle West blowing up the world. Would they all agree with what Mira seemed to be saying—that the faith without ignorance ultimately meant a faith without religion?
“Is there another side to that coin?” he asked.
The squint softened. Her face went a little slack. “The other side is that religions are the fruit of thousands of years of experimental wisdom. That they’re the records of those few people in history who managed to see through this life so deeply and completely that they found the way to God.”
She stared at the four empty vessels in front of them, as though not quite sure how they’d gotten that way. Her hair was coming loose from her clip, curling under her jaw. He wanted to brush it aside.
“The other side is that X-ray vision itself.” Her squint returned, as if she herself was employing that vision, peering into the skeletons of the drinkers around them. “And one day, we’ll all be able to have it, without signing over our intellects, or being pressed into gangs. Or molested by priests.” She inclined her chin his way, looked at him sidewise with a flat little smile. “Or martyred by mullahs.”
Then her expression changed again, her smile going bright and grateful as she turned to Penciled Eyebrows, who was now replacing their rounds.
“So that’s really why your dad invented that helmet?” he asked.
“My father’s as atheistic as they come. I think he expected everyone to close down their churches when he published his first article on the research. He wanted to use it to deprogram the faithful. A few of his atheist colleagues cheered him on, but most of the others didn’t like the bad press and began to think he was a crank. And the alumni donors wanted to run him out of town. And of course, he couldn’t get a dime of funding.”
Drunk though she was, he was surprised, a little unsettled, even, that she was telling this to a test subject.
“Using the helmet to actually help encourage belief,” she went on, “an informed belief, a belief rendered harmless to others through a solid understanding of its neurological basis, an understanding that your inner reality is just for you, and for the rest of the world it’s false, or might as well be…” She brushed her fingernails against her blouse. “That stuff was my idea.”
The self-mocking bragging gesture notwithstanding, he could tell she really was proud of the study. Indeed, even as it occurred to him that he was more of a guinea pig than he’d imagined, he was proud of her too.
“I’m surprised your dad agreed to it.”
“We got the funding,” she said, with that deliberate lightness. “And if the results go his way rather than mine, I’m sure he’ll be happy to write it up that way, too.”
Again, he wondered why she was telling him this. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know it. On the other hand, he appreciated her honesty. Perhaps, he thought, it showed a faith in him, a faith in her project, in that very ideal of a faith uncompromisingly without ignorance.
She turned back to the bartop, tilted her head this way and that, a loose strand of hair arcing past her eyes.
“Besides,” she said, “I think he would’ve agreed to get his head shaved and wear a cassock if it got me back to school.”
“You dropped out?”
This, too, seemed odd to him. Nothing about her added up at all. His surprise, as much as her admission, seemed to sadden her.
“I was out for a few years,” she said. “I’m just starting up again.”
“What were you doing?”
She used her fresh bottle to indicate Penciled Eyebrows, Soul Patch. “Slinging drinks, mainly. And sleeping. I did a lot of that.”
“And controlling your dreams?”
Her bottle froze in the air. “I’m going to shut up now. And you’re going to talk.”
“Just one more question. OK?”
She considered. “Maybe.”
“Taking this … mystical journey, all on our own,” he said, “couldn’t we get lost? I mean, really lost?”
“We meaning you?” she said, with an amused look.
“Right,” he muttered. She’d never tried the helmet, he just now recalled. “We meaning me.”
“Well, if you do,” she said, holding up her shot, “maybe at least you won’t be ignorant enough to drag down the rest of us.”
It was nearing closing time. The bar was emptying. Fred and Mira sat identically hunched, elbows on a patchwork of labels and coasters. Once again, “Space Oddity” was up on the jukebox. At the far end of the bar, Soul Patch leaned against the drink shelving, flipping through the channels on the mounted TV. He stopped on NY1, footage of jumpsuited, filtermasked workers installing a glass viewing barrier around a set of clothing store racks coated with toxic 9/11 dust; Fred had seen the story earlier in the hospital cafeteria—the racks had been preserved for the last five years, and were now being prepared for a fifth-anniversary exhibition. His skin began to prickle, the image of those golf course replicas gasping dust plumes as he chopped into them with the club flashing to mind. He took a drink, from his third or fourth round, which only made the prickling worse.
“Last year around this time,” he said, “I overheard a woman in the booth behind me at a diner telling her friend that her cat chose to die the week before 9/11, ‘because he didn’t want to be a part of all that tragedy.’”
Mira stared at him for a moment. An almost noiseless laugh escaped her.
“Everyone’s got to spread their own miserable little layer of meaning over it,” he said, feeling himself on a roll. “Like that baseball in Indiana the guy kept covering with coats of paint until it was the size of a weather balloon.”
More than once now, Mira had ordered him to keep talking, pretty much whenever Fred had tried to get her to talk. He didn’t really mind. Over the last few months, he’d grown used to monologuing to silent crowds of one. And he was warming to his subject.
“A hundred 9/11 movies. A thousand 9/11 novels. Ten thousand bloviating talking heads. Eight million self-declared victims. Everyone lost something.” He waved his bottle in the air. “Some value in their portfolio. A good night’s sleep. Their innocence.”
He glanced her way again. Her look was stern, like he’d just made fun of a cripple.
“And what did you lose, Fred?”
He put his palms on the bar, staring at the points where his thumbs and index fingers met.
“My innocence,” he finally declared.
A few seconds passed.
She laughed. “Man, are you wasted.”
The door was now locked, the remaining customers, except for the two of them, kicked out. Penciled Eyebrows wiped tables. Soul Patch mopped. Fred and Mira kept drinking, their shoulders leaned up against each other, in part to keep from falling over.
“Mr. Brounian,” Mira said. “Welcome to my study. If you could, please summarize for me what the hell’s the matter with you anyhow.”
“My problems all began when I slew my father and married my mother. Then my inner child ran amok. More recently, there was the early male menopause …”
As he spoke, she typed his responses into an invisible keyboard on the bartop. Just like in her office, she went on typing long after he’d trailed off.
“Doctor, do you mind my asking what it is you’re writing?”
“My report.”
“What does it say?”
“Mr. Brounian. Fred, if I may.”
“Call me Freddo.”
She laughed, breaking character. “Freddo?”
“It’s what all my good analysts call me.”
“All right, to resume then, it is my determination, Freddo, that you’re fucked up beyond hope of recovery.”
“Is that so?”
“My recommendation is for you to be removed from human society, remanded to the care of animals, reindoctrinated as a rhesus monkey. Possibly a dolphin.”
“I think I’m going to want a second opinion.”
“Certainly. You’re ugly, too.”
“Thanks, Groucho.”
“Any time. That’ll be five hundred bucks.”
More of her hair had freed itself from the clip, apple mist in the air. The point of contact between their upper arms was spreading an almost intolerable charge through his body—part desire, part fear. He was thinking about George’s Foley catheter and telling himself not to think about that. He was thinking about the exchange with his cyberstalker, the promise that Mira would fall for him, the possibility that it might actually be coming true, then wondering if it was a setup, if she was in on it, if the whole world was in on it, everyone but himself, then telling himself not to think about any of that either, not to give his persecutors that kind of power over him, not to let it freeze him up and sabotage everything.
“Have you ever noticed how proud people are to have them—opinions, I mean?” he plowed on. “It’s like being proud of one’s tapeworms, or pubic lice.”
“Would the analysand care to discuss his longstanding shame associated with his pubic lice?”
“Here’s an opinion,” he proclaimed, surprising himself with his own vehemence. “There should be a law limiting people to one opinion per lifetime. When that kid came up to you in nursery school and asked you what your favorite color was? And you suddenly felt you wouldn’t quite exist if you didn’t have an answer? And so you said, I don’t know, blue? That’s your opinion limit. You’re done. You’re free. No other opinions would ever be asked for or allowed of you.”
She leaned farther over the bar and caught his eyes. “Is that your favorite color? Blue?”
He shook his head. “What if it is?” he muttered.
As he watched, tears, inked with mascara, rolled from her eyes.
By the time the two of them were outside, the tears had been forgotten, at least, it seemed, by Mira. She’d brushed them away almost as soon as they’d come, dismissed Fred’s inquiries, and was laughing again, first at his inability to walk a straight line, and then at her own wobbling tightrope act down the sidewalk. Upon reaching her building, he made the mistake of stopping an instant before she did. He tried to cover it up by making it look like he’d stumbled. But her look told him she wasn’t buying it.