Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  “Right,” she said, with a slow nod. “Of course you know where I live.”

  He was avoiding her eyes, looking up at the dark face of her building. A single light in a fifth-story window went off.

  “Hey,” he managed, sheepishly. “What kind of stalker would I be otherwise?” Then he stood there, wishing he’d found a less creepy reply.

  “True,” she said. As they stood there facing each other, it started happening again—that impossible light, even more impossible now, by night, on the darkened street, as though the moon itself had been lowered to the point where its pale expanse filled the sky from end to end, its milky light pouring down on them.

  “Mira. That brightness to everything from the session. It’s back.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, yes. Right now.”

  She stepped closer, those dark, myopic eyes squinting in the light. A foot away. Six inches. He was seeing it as he’d see it in the last minute of brainlife, for the last time. Whether death was the end or but a prelude, this moment would be irretrievable, unchangeable from here on. The light, he at last felt he understood, was a call to action—opportunities were fleeting, he had to lean in and kiss her … right now … without delay …

  “Your pupils look a little unevenly dilated,” she said, before he’d moved. “It should go away soon.” She stepped back. “Let me know, though, if it keeps bugging you.”

  Bathed in the now meaningless, illusory moonbeams, she turned toward her front steps. A panic seized him.

  “You inviting me up?” he asked, trying to make it sound casual.

  She shook her head solemnly.

  “You’ll need some help getting up those stairs, though,” he suggested.

  “I’m not relationship material.”

  She watched him, waited for the point to sink in.

  “Um … Can I use your bathroom?” he asked.

  “Now that’s just pathetic.”

  She made for the steps, and promptly tripped on the first. He grabbed her with both hands around the waist and arm, himself almost falling over. With her hip in his palm, the side of her breast against the backs of his fingers, the waves of heat coming off her, his whole body thrummed with a need so strong it ached. She went tense, closing her eyes. Her neck flushed. For a second he thought she might pull away, but instead she leaned into him for a few seconds, before finding her balance again.

  “You can use my bathroom,” she said.

  They got up the steps. The strange light was gone, but the heat was more compelling still. He could barely uncouple his hands from her and go back down to retrieve his bags once they reached the door.

  It was an old building. The entryway, at least, didn’t seem to have been renovated any time recently. Through the steam clouds of his endorphins, he saw her name on a mailbox, her father’s on another. He pointed to the latter.

  “Your dad won’t chase me out with a shotgun, will he?”

  “Not his style.” She opened the inner door. “He might come at you with a Tesla coil. Or a skull saw.”

  On the way up the narrow flights, she gave him a brief, whispered history of her occupancy, how she’d grown up here, how, a few years ago, the top-floor apartment had come on the market and her father had made the down payment for her.

  “We were going to fix it up,” she said, trailing off and leaving it at that.

  “You and your dad must be close,” Fred whispered.

  “It was a good deal.”

  “Is your mom—”

  “They divorced when I was twelve. She pretty much left us both, went off to find herself. She’s still looking. Hi, Dad,” she said, so casually Fred almost waved too, as he and Mira rounded the corner onto the fifth landing, to find an apartment door open and Craig Egghart standing in the frame. He was dressed in a threadbare bathrobe, looking from Mira to Fred, those seepy-dyed eyes of his large with anxiety, then narrowing to a squint, then popping wider than before.

  “But … isn’t he … isn’t he the one from the study?”

  It was the first time Fred had heard the man speak. He had the kind of mild voice that only went quieter with strain. The one from the study, Fred thought. No sooner had he begun to wonder why Egghart had worded it that way than Mira’s reply scuttled the whole issue.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  Fred and Mira’s father watched each other as the confusion shifted from Egghart back to Fred. Then Egghart looked at his daughter again, a warmer look, which only seemed to annoy her. She slipped past him, pulling Fred along, Fred wheeling his bag around Egghart’s feet. Egghart closed the door softly, as Fred and Mira rounded another bend and started up the next flight.

  “I had a feeling he wouldn’t be going to sleep tonight,” she whispered, more to herself than to Fred.

  They reached the top landing. She fumbled with her keys.

  “What did you mean back there?” Fred whispered.

  She looked up. “You didn’t really think you’d stay in the study after butting into my life like this, did you?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He felt like he’d been nightsticked in the gut. He half wanted to ask her why she hadn’t just told him to go away instead of hanging out with him all night. It seemed a betrayal not only of him but of her study, the study which so clearly meant everything to her. She was watching his expression, seemingly surprised at how hurt he was. She looked hurt herself, and guilty, and offended at the same time. She turned away, got the door open, stepping into the dark hallway beyond.

  “Bathroom’s second door to the right.”

  She turned left and switched on a light, revealing a long, narrow kitchen with a Formica counter and yellowed white paint, and the living room beyond.

  Fred left his bags just inside the door and made his way down the hall. The first door to the right, somewhat ajar, revealed her bedroom—the light was off; he could make out part of a dresser, the usual womanly clutter of little cases and boxes atop it, and the edge of a bed, the sight of which sent another urgent pulse through him. He was still reeling from the blow of being kicked out of the study, still wondering what that last doozy of a session would have shown him. Yet on the other hand, what did it even matter? Hadn’t he been duped and mentally manipulated enough already? What was he really losing? Nothing real, nothing like the feel of Mira’s waist on the front steps, nothing like her hips swaying ahead of him up the flights of stairs.

  He was so crazed with lust that inhaling the scent of her shampoos and bodywashes and moisturizing soaps in her little blue-tiled bathroom was almost too much for him. He held his half-erect member, the urine passing through his hypersensitized urethra with something far closer to pleasure than pain. It had been months since he’d been with a woman, with Mel, in that Zeckendorf stairwell. It had gone well in the end, but the whole time he’d been plagued by thoughts of catheters and cancers, and nearly hadn’t gotten it up. His only worry now was the opposite, that he’d explode in his pants. He plunged his face in cold water, the effects of which were immediately counteracted by drying off in a towel infused with the scent of her flowers and fog. He stared at the floor tiles, trying to calm himself, but even those sensible, rectilinear shapes gyrated like a thousand dancing hips.

  Back out in the hall, he took a few steps before realizing he’d gone the wrong way. Another door to the right, this one closed. A second bedroom? A study? But no, not a study—her cluttered desk was to his left, through a set of French doors, crammed in alongside a dining table, itself stacked with books and papers. The light was out in this room, but beyond it, through an identical set of doors on the other end, the living room light now shone. He could see a front window; and two chest-high, opened crates; and a splay of packing material. As he watched, through the doubled grids of the two sets of panes, Mira stepped slowly into the tableau, stopping between the crates and staring, with that misted, wonder-filled expression of hers, at something in the corner out of view. She turned her head, toward the other corn
er, more or less Fred’s way, then saw him and jumped with fright. Once she realized it was him, she shut her eyes for a second, after which he mouthed an apology, but he doubted she could really see his features through the panes with him standing the dark. Rather than open the doors, he made his way back around through the kitchen. A futon couch, some overstuffed bookshelves, and a couple of vintage, silver-bulbed, space-age lamps came into view. Only when he stepped into the living room could he see the objects of her gaze.

  In either corner, one in front of a potted plant, the other flanking a cabinet with a small television, stood a sandstone angel, each about three-quarters the size of a living person. The first knelt on a sandstone cloud, leaning forward, his forearms crossed over his chest, his hands holding the opposite sleeves of his robes, his eyes trained downward, as if to an Earth below. The other sat on one knee, with closed eyes and an enigmatic smile, hands up in prayer at a broad and bare chest, wings draped like a cape down his back.

  “They’re pretty,” she said. “Especially the Asiatic one.”

  It was true, the smiling one had slightly Asiatic features, and was more exotically adorned, with bangles around his muscular upper arms, and a snake wrapped loosely about his neck, its diamond-shaped head rising like a scarf in a breeze.

  “They must have been expensive,” she said, still looking at them, leaning on one hip. “Quite a statement, from a man who can’t afford drinks.”

  Air gathered in Fred’s open mouth.

  “So why two of them?” she asked. When, again, he didn’t respond, she went on, “They do seem to belong together, though. East and West.”

  She turned to him, wanting to see if she was close to the mark. Fred forced a vague nod.

  “You can stay here tonight, if you need a break from your parents,” she said. “The couch folds out. There are some sheets and a pillow in there.” She pointed to a wooden storage chest doubling as a coffee table as she brushed past him into the kitchen. “It’s late. Go ahead and make your bed.”

  From the other end of the apartment came the sounds of a door closing and water running. Fred had been frozen as stiff as the statues, and now forced himself to approach them, warily, as if they might blow up. Sifting through the packing materials, he found no slips or other documentation. Strings were hung round statues’ necks, small printed tags, according to which the one on the cloud was a cast of an intercessory angel from an Italian cathedral, the barechested one a cast of a Hindu deva from the Changu Narayana temple in Nepal. Then, next to the TV, sitting on an opened envelope, he spotted a white card, blank but for three typeset lines:

  SOMETIMES EVEN ANGELS NEED AN ANGEL

  LUCKY YOU

  YOU GET TWO

  He knelt before the second statue, staring at close range at that knowing smile; one moment it seemed a little menacing, the next, serene.

  George’s private smile. That Brooklyn accent. You get two.

  He was drunk. He was dizzy. It made no sense. But George was here, right here in these statues. George had been in on this. To what end, and with who else, Fred still couldn’t say. For now, it just felt like a benediction, like his brother had poked his head from a cloud and winked.

  Distantly, the sound of the bathroom door opening reached his ears. Lest she think he was snooping, he hurried back and pulled out the futon, found the sheets and pillow, and began making the bed. The light went off. Dim in the streetlight through the blinds, Mira stood in the kitchen doorway, her hair undone, in a long T-shirt and bare legs, clutching a pillow to her chest. She tossed it down beside the one Fred had just laid out, revealing, in the process, the front of her shirt:

  WARMONGER

  Fred started laughing. He couldn’t stop.

  “Shut up and move over,” she commanded.

  The first time they made love, the only thing that kept Fred from coming immediately was his surprise at Mira’s tenderness. She kissed him so gently, held him so tightly. It was almost too intimate, too much love to be bestowed on someone she barely knew. She nuzzled his neck, planted a dotted line of kisses down his chest and stomach, held his cock in both hands, alternately sucking and kissing. She squirmed and rolled beneath his touch, and guided him in, and gasped, and yelped, and covered his face and neck with more little kisses. He felt he didn’t deserve it, but he wanted to deserve it, and made his own caresses as familiar and attentive as hers. Afterward, she stayed wrapped around him, an arm and a leg locking him down, planting rapidfire pecks on his cheek that made him giggle. Amazed at his good fortune, he couldn’t stop his fingertips from riding back and forth along a gullied road that wended from her broad cheek to the lookout point at the side of her breast to the hilltop of her hip. The caresses went on wordlessly until they were at it again. From time to time he looked up at the pale outlines of those sandstone angels, feeling that reality had become a dream, a lucid dream that he’d woken up inside and was now, to his joy and relief, able to steer toward every hope. It was all possible. Mira could love him. The world could be anything. George could be here in spirit, here and everywhere.

  And Mira asleep: her arms around him, her breasts pressed to his back, swelling and receding like waves with her breath. He imagined him and her beyond the universe, lounging on the coils of a thousandheaded snake. His life was a shit heap, his future totally unworkable. But right here in this instant, with Mira’s warmth at his back, he felt more complete than ever before, than he had even on the day in that sunny conference room overlooking the city when George’s angel investor had given them their company.

  And slipping into a dream. Mira—or maybe it’s partly Jill again—pressed close against his white cape, her bare arms out below his, he and she together like a Hindu deity. And with her lips so near they touch his ear, she whispers, Look, they’re back, and the night sky is scattered not with stars, but—like some disordered computer desktop—with icons: There’s a sparkly helmet icon. A hand icon. Mouse ears. And many more. A few shine brightly, give off a kind of radiance. Most are dim. Her lips tickle as she reminds him that these are his superpowers, his divine attributes. She’s been pointing and double-clicking the air with her finger, trying to get all these applications lit at once. The last one she tried was a set of wings, which began to glow, though simultaneously across the sky, a hand lost its radiance. Before that, she’d tried a shot glass, which hadn’t gone bright itself, though a nearby space helmet icon had.

  Now she’s pointing at a new icon. He can’t quite make it out—its shape is hidden by her hand. But whatever it is, he has a bad, bad feeling about it.

  Please, he says. Not that one.

  She just laughs. And beyond her hand, the icon’s edges jiggle, doubleclicked, as she whispers one last, carefree word:

  Next.

  Fred awoke without a struggle, to twilit bookshelves and crates and sandstone angels, all afloat and atwirl from the booze still in his veins. Mira was gone, his throat was parched, his bladder full. Too comfortable, though, to immediately move, he reviewed the strange dream, then the events of the night, themselves almost as dreamlike, though here were the angels, here was her apartment, here was Fred himself, getting aroused again at the memory of Mira pressed against him. Just enough predawn light filtered through the slats to illuminate the titles on a couple of the bookshelves, one shelf filled with psychology, anthropology, sociology, neurology tomes, another containing more surprising finds—economics and business textbooks, old sci-fi novels. He began listening for clues to Mira’s whereabouts, for the sound of footsteps, or water in the bathroom. Hearing nothing, he sat up, and feeling a little vulnerable in the unfamiliar surroundings, he slipped on his jeans before wandering into the kitchen, finding a glass, and pouring himself some water from the tap. It reminded him of his parents’ kitchen—the apartment as a whole was just about as ancient and unrenovated. He felt comfortable here, safe from the howling winds of time. Between sips, he took in the surface of her refrigerator. On the freezer door was a magnetic grease board full of phone
numbers, mostly of what appeared to be takeout restaurants. On the lower door, no pictures or postcards, just a bunch of ad-bearing magnets holding up nothing but themselves, and one clip, from the plastic jaws of which hung a card with formal-looking script—an invitation to some kind of reception. Some other pages lay underneath it—directions, or other invitations.

  Continuing to the back of the apartment, he saw that the bathroom was unoccupied and stepped in, wondering as he urinated why she’d clung to him for so long, only to retreat to her own bed in the middle of the night. Maybe he’d been snoring. Maybe her bed was a lot more comfortable. Or maybe she’d sobered up enough to want to forget about everything she’d just done. Back out in the hall, with one finger, he pushed her bedroom door open an inch, then another. The bed was empty.

  He doubled back, thinking she might have returned to the futon while he’d been in the bathroom, but she hadn’t. Then he opened the French doors and walked through the room with the dining table and desk, also unoccupied.

  The only place left to look was the last door along the hall. It was shut, as it had been earlier. He opened it a crack: Gray light seeping around the edges of a curtain on the far wall. The nearest wall covered with photographs. He opened it more: The floor cluttered with cardboard boxes. A blue vinyl recliner in the corner. And Mira—a man’s blazer draped over her like a blanket—curled in the chair, asleep.

  The pictures ran not quite chronologically, but almost. At the top left corner of the wall were taped a few school photos, the first of a whole class of small, grinning children, the next two, individual portraits—one of a boy with combed, bright blond hair and green eyes, the other of a darkhaired little girl—both taken against the same mauve backdrop. More pictures of the boy followed, and one of the boy and girl together on the stage in a school play, against the backdrop of a candy-and-frosting cottage. Many years were missing after that, the next set of photos finding the boy’s hair a couple of shades dirtier, and his face and body elongated into young adulthood. The young man stood with a group of guys playing Hacky Sack. He lay sprawled on a half-destroyed couch in what might have been a messy college dorm room. On a prototypical grassy quadrangle, he held a college-aged Mira by his side, her hair long, her pose surprisingly theatrical, an over-the-shoulder look that aspired to convey mystery. In a library, from the same time period, the two sat next to each other, she surrounded by thick textbooks, he, dignified, perusing a Doctor Strange comic book. There followed a few photos of the young man in a cap and gown—alone, then with what must have been his parents and younger brother, then with Mira again, Mira coyly brushing aside her mortarboard tassel like a lock of hair. Another showed him leaning back on another couch somewhere, an electric guitar in his lap. Then came what seemed to be another few years’ gap, and the next photo found him with a fleshier face and shorter hair, standing in front of a pagoda and green hills; behind this picture, an airmail envelope was tacked. More pictures of them together followed. One was in Tompkins Square Park, he and Mira on a blanket, waving from a field of recumbent, scantily clad hipsters. One in her living room on the same futon she and Fred had just slept in, she in a sweatshirt, the man in a sweater and untucked shirt, that beat-up old briefcase that resembled Fred’s at his side. They looked to be late twenties. Then the man in yet another cap and gown. Then a score of wedding pictures, a garden wedding on an overcast day, the man in a beige linen suit (the jacket of which, Fred was fairly sure, Mira was now using as a blanket); Mira in a flowing, floralprint dress, and white flowers in her dark hair, looking so radiant Fred could barely force his eyes onward. He skipped to the lower right corner of the wall to a grainy, full-color printout on normal copy paper—an off-center and oddly angled picture of the man in a crisp, blue dress shirt, a newer, more stylish-looking briefcase propped beside him on the desk of a cubicle. The man looked at the camera with crossed arms and sleepy eyes and a sly smile, his head leaned to one side, allowing for a view behind him of a long, narrow window framing a darkening sky, and the lit-up, uppermost floors of one of the Twin Towers.