by Alex Shakar
For the rest of the group, it had been a seminal experience, but while the clients sometimes reported feeling better, Holly herself hadn’t been able to feel much of anything. She’d stopped going, and in the ensuing years had moved on in her usual way to other interests. Fred’s sense was that the group as a whole, prior to George’s illness and Holly’s renewed interest in Reiki, had been languishing, cutting back their meetings. Fred could imagine how Guy and the others might feel in looking back on those days, when it seemed they’d had a whole wounded city to heal, how they might miss it like some pristine, primeval island they’d visited once and assumed they’d never see again.
With some difficulty, Holly spread jelly on a slice of wheat toast, as Dot kept talking about how they hadn’t seen Holly at Grand Central Station, how they hoped everything was all right, how they hoped to see her tomorrow, but if not, they’d see her the next day for George’s weekly session. Holly brought ten palsied fingers before her eyes, watching them tremble before she rested her temples in them, muttering that she’d have to cancel that.
Vartan stood with his untouched plate.
“You’re not going to eat?” Fred asked.
“Not much appetite without the pot,” Vartan said.
“You’ve stopped smoking?”
Vartan’s mustache pincered, a momentary frown. “Too much effort. Filling the pipe. Smoking the pipe.”
“I’ll have to tell them I’m sick,” Holly went on to herself.
“You sure?” With measured, floating steps, Vartan walked to the kitchen. “We might wake up tomorrow and find them all standing around our bed.”
“I’ll tell them I’m on vacation,” she said. “I’ll say I’m going to Florida with Sam, to see his new condo.”
Sam, Fred had heard her mention earlier, was leaving town in three days.
Vartan stood by the garbage, staring at the pepper-fuzzed mounds on his plate. With a torque of his wrist, he dumped it sidelong, plate and all.
The dried sparrow turd floated in the black expanse—some distant, marooned galaxy at the end of time.
Dusk. He’d been sitting all day—his third, now—in timed stints. The clock showing another thirty minutes logged, the aches in his legs and back growing too insistent to shoot for forty-five, Fred took a break in the usual way he’d negotiated with himself, by walking in slow circles within the rooftop’s perimeter, making a game of making his steps as quiet as possible so as not to disturb his parents. Through the makeshift skylight, which, legend went, had been cut into the ceiling by Vartan and Manfred the year he and George were born, and which nowadays allowed in all manner of things—rainwater, dust, possibly asbestos, insects, and occasionally even light—Fred could see his father’s cloudy form, working in a sleeveless undershirt under the desk lamp, the bony points of his shoulders pivoting as he held a drill to a piece of curved metal; some new car project, perhaps. As for Holly, she was probably in bed, the light from their bedroom just going out as Fred passed.
To maintain his concentration, he tried to keep his eyes to the sparkling black of the roofing tar; but at some point, becoming dizzy and fearful of toppling to his death, he gave in and looked out at the shadow landscape of chimneys and skylights and mushroom-shaped vents of the rooftops, and the vacant nimbus of Manhattan beyond. The Towers had been the only visible buildings of the island from here, an unspoken part of the attraction of coming up here as kids: a promise, for him and George, of things to come. Perhaps humankind was powerless, or nearly so, in the face of the mind’s eagerness to make everything mean, to turn the world into a personal network of symbols.
And now the vacant nimbus itself was a message, a message of messagelessness. And Fred wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t seem like a hopeless one. Curiously, the more he let go up here, the more he tried to root out his delusions, the more urgently the world seemed to speak to him, the more intimate a mirror it became. He wasn’t sure whether his meditative ability was improving or whether it just was some kind of self-induced dementia, but he was feeling that lightness, that openness and immersion all the more. If there was an unreal quality to the night, it wasn’t like the dissociation after the panic attack, or the suffocating artificiality he’d felt during the playtest. It was more like the freedom of the helmet sessions, just a bit of distance, a space of possibility, a remove that somehow allowed for this new intimacy, like pulling back from an embrace to regard a lover’s face. Less real in one way, though in another, more so than before. He didn’t understand these paradoxical perceptions. He wasn’t sure they were worth all the hours he’d put in, or how they might possibly help him with even the smallest of his problems. He wasn’t entirely ready to trust them, or even say for sure he liked them.
If the aches and shooting pains were the Scylla of meditation, drowsiness was the Charybdis. No sooner would the pain recede than its absence would lull him off course, whirl him into reverie, spiral him ever closer to dream. At one point, late that night, he was talking to George, comparing notes on meditation, happy they now had this experience in common. George was talking about malas and white lights and the Ajna chakra (a pastiche of the few actual times he’d talked to Fred about the subject); Fred was telling George about hara breathing (having just read about it online during an afternoon break). The conversation felt so natural and real that when Fred snapped awake, he actually looked around the shadowy tent for his brother. Fred had been doubting Inner George, too, of course, doubting him whenever that voice popped into his head. He’d been telling himself he’d come up to the roof in order to face his aloneness squarely. But the truth probably was he felt closer to George up here than at his bedside.
He felt closer to him here, in fact, than he had in a long time. There had been moments, sitting by George’s bed over the last few months, when Fred had entertained the strange, irrational notion that the coma had been a kind of slow-onset condition, gradually taking his twin away from him for years, freezing George up, and freezing Fred and the rest of humanity out. He’d imagined it first creeping into George when they’d lost their financial backing, its first symptom an aloof passivity, progressing through the years of the Armation partnership. He’d imagined it starting to deaden his brother’s nerves on the night in the office when George had sat slumped on the floor, spinning his ring, saying his marriage was over, missing Jill already but refusing to go and patch things up, believing she was better off without him. Fred had pictured the coma starting to lock down George’s muscles on the nights just after his cancer diagnosis, his mobility reduced to the twitches of his fingers on the keyboard as he played one computer game after another. How anyone who’d just received such news could kill his possibly scant remaining time in this manner was beyond Fred’s comprehension.
Fred stuck around those nights, researching lymphoma treatments, keeping an eye on him. George played each game for a few hours, then chucked the disc in the trash. It took Fred a while to understand that George was making a diagnosis of his own, of the industry to which he’d pledged his existence. On the night George finally ran out of games, he walked to the couch, lay down, and with a light, if listless, touch, delivered his findings. The first-person shooters were visions of the end state of civilization, a perfect nihilism wherein every last object was there to be weaponized. The massively multiplayer roleplaying games were a form of mass psychosis, individualism gone berserk—thousands of players, all running around following the exact same storyline in parallel, each pretending to be the chosen one, the sole savior of the world. The metaverses, the virtual worlds that had beaten Urth to market, were the reification of the hypermaterialist in the postmaterial, platforms for the endless manipulation, accrual, possession, and maintenance of a whole new world of virtual objects—designer clothes and sports cars and hairstyles and fizzy, rainbow-colored cocktails one couldn’t even taste. The runaway real estate boom had spread to unreal estate, George noted, people speculating on choice virtual acreage, buying up virtual islands and beachfront parcels
. He should have guessed this was what would happen, he said with a dry laugh. Should have known that all people would want was to be make-believe playboy moguls. Going to make-believe raves full of make-believe beautiful people. Meanwhile, in meatspace, sitting in their undershirts, drinking a Schlitz.
“When you get down to it,” George said, sleepily, even his lips barely moving, “it’s all military entertainment.”
And so, mu. The thought of mu. The thought of the sound of mu. The action of thinking of the sound of mu. Meaning no. Not even no. Negation. Not even negation. Just mu. Not even mu….
Boring into the syllable, Fred’s mouth begins to smile of its own accord; tears—from going so long without blinking—begin running down his cheeks. The openness, the possibility returning. The feeling of being on the verge of discovery. Keep pressing. The mu like a sustained frequency. The funny thing is, the more he doubts, the more present George feels to him, as if George were pressing back from the other side of everything existent, believing the falsity of this cosmos between the two of them as Fred doubts its truth. It can all break right open, shatter like crystal. I can do it, Fred thinks. Can get real, really real, realer than real. Can doubt death into life eternal. Can doubt doubt right into faith. A faith without ignorance. Without flaw or vulnerability of any kind. A faith so complete even doubt is included….
Or something like that….
But where did it go, that openness … ?
Mu but the dumb and ordinary night….
Mu but the tent flap in the breeze….
Mu but the mocking cell phone, urine jug, LED glow 12:34….
He has the answer, or almost, anyway. He’s merely a player in some vast computer game made real, or almost real, the name of the game writ on the glass storefronts, in the silvery letters of some alien script whose meaning he can somehow understand—something like Enlusionment, or Delightenment, a word that’s neither of these but has the same sickening inversions. Grafted to his back, poking through his white tuxedo jacket: a pair of giant wire-and-taffeta wings. Bolted to the back of his bald scalp: a brass halo. He’s looking for George in the maze of too-narrow streets, looking for him behind those storefront windows, amid the displays of mannequins, some missing limbs, others half melted. Headless mannequins. Naked mannequins in piles. It goes on like this, street after twilit street. He loses count and cognizance, remembers nothing but a blur of faceless, egg-shaped heads, until, rounding a corner, stepping over mannequins spilled out onto the street, male and female forms in suits and skirtsuits, their ceramic watches and tinfoil earrings glinting in the low light, the street maze ends in a narrow ledge, beyond which lies a cloudy vortex, spiraling below.
He sees something crest then dip back into the churning clouds, finlike, possibly the edge of a white wing. Maybe it’s George. Or maybe it’s a trap—how could these fake wings possibly keep Fred aloft if he follows? A ragged edge of cloud sweeps past, engulfing him, airy-white for a whimsical moment, but soon gray-black, the opposite of space—a choking sandstorm.
Gasping himself awake—
Dawn over Brooklyn—
Teetering in midair—
Sidewalk three stories down.
Fred was lying on his front, his hands formed into a pillow, his cheek resting on his knuckles, and all of him so close to the roof’s front edge that one elbow draped into the air.
He froze, eyeing the front steps thirty feet beneath, the spikes of the iron fences, the colored lozenges of cars.
Then inched away.
Clips and poles bobbled in his shaking hands as he struck the tent with everything still inside it and hauled it all back down to the apartment. Clearly, he couldn’t stay on the roof. Next time he might sleepwalk from the tent right off the roof. How many sleep disorders could one man accumulate? Nor could he stand another night in the apartment, with the nightmares and the walls of that bedroom closing in and the suspicion that his hapless presence was growing burdensome to his parents, that they would prefer for now not to be reminded of either George or himself. Moving quietly so as not to wake them, he broke down the tent in his bedroom. The lid of the urine jug hadn’t been screwed on right—it had leaked onto the sleeping bag, which he stuffed anyway into George’s camping backpack, along with George’s canteen, socks and underwear, and some bread, cheese, and apples he found in the refrigerator. Into his briefcase he put his laptop, the last helmet-study check, and, after a moment’s hesitation, a couple of his mother’s self-help books. He scribbled a note to his parents and left.
His plan was to try to stay in Sam’s Lower East Side apartment until it was sold. Sam wouldn’t be there, at least not after tomorrow. As favors went, it wasn’t a very big one; still, it would kill Fred to have to ask, after what Sam had done to him.
With his credit card maxed, his account overdrawn, and four dollars on his transit card, even given the new fifty-dollar helmet-study infusion, subway fare seemed too great an extravagance. So he hiked it, from Cobble Hill through Brooklyn Heights and up the narrow stone passageway to the bridge. He caught himself checking for swirling clouds as he climbed the steps, for that alien dream-script graffitied on the walls, some sign it was all a malevolent computer game.
Holonoia, he thought.
Dimly, he sensed somewhere Inner George’s approval of the word.
The city, as he emerged onto the walkway, was at any rate perfect, and utterly benign: arches, webwork cables, river breeze. Glass fronts of downtown lighting up at the cresting sun. Wooden slats beneath his feet, water flashing in the gaps. He knew what that dream meant, more or less: the mangled mannequins were his guilt over militarizing George’s virtual world; that cloudy vortex was just a vicious feedback loop of dreams, from Holly’s to Fred’s own. Sprinkle in a few choice images from the cyberstalking campaign being waged against him and bake until done. All so straightforward he was embarrassed at his simplemindedness. And yet, again, that nerve-tingling notion: What if it wasn’t his dream at all? But George’s?
Trapped in that Pretaloka. That world between worlds, where nothing was quite right.
Looking for a way back home. Looking for me, thought Fred.
What would George want, now? For Fred to help him die? But why had he held on so long? What if he was still looking for something? What if he just wasn’t finished?
Maybe that last thing George wanted was to do Fred in, Fred thought. Or, more to the point, maybe it was what Fred himself wanted. Why else would he have crept out to the edge of the roof?
It was that damned mu.
No self, no problem.
The self was the self, he told himself. No great discovery beneath. The world was the world was the world, he was thinking, was the world was the world was the world, as, halfway across the bridge, an Indian kid proffered him a camera, then ran back to his family. Boys with sideparted, glossy dark hair. Girls with saris and bindis. Parents in back. A half-dozen toothy smiles against the gap-toothed downtown skyline.
The digital image shimmered in the viewscreen. The city around the camera shimmered as well. Fred depressed the button, feeling no click, but hearing the sampled sounds of a shutter and winding reels.
Another Monday morning was underway as Fred reached the other shore. From a park bench outside City Hall, a homeless guy with a baseball cap on top of another baseball cap held Fred’s gaze as he brought an asthma inhaler to his mouth and took seven quick pumps, following that up two seconds later with another seven pumps, then holding the dense, white, curling cloud of fourteen times the recommended dosage in his open mouth like cigarette smoke before sucking it down.
On Murray Street, Fred passed a public library just as a security guard was unlocking the door. He probably had some time to kill, and wasn’t relishing the possibility of having to wait for Sam in that light-deprived office. So he went in, and waited as the guard shoved an arm into George’s backpack, eyeing Fred in an unfriendly way while feeling up Fred’s books, cheese, apple, underwear, then freezing, no doubt having e
ncountered the wet spot on the sleeping bag, his upper lip recoiling as he pulled free his blue-jacketed arm. The place was a low-ceilinged box, with a pale green linoleum floor and long rows of stark fluorescent lighting; it reminded Fred of the police station where he’d been held after stealing the tweezers. He found a table and took out his laptop.
He could have checked the want ads online, or brushed up on his Java. Instead, thinking of the vortex dream, and that Indian family on the bridge, he read more about Hindu cosmology, how the gods of the pantheon were energies, which, when worshipped as individuals in opposition to each other and not as components of the greater whole, would exploit the ignorant worshippers like cattle to further their particular ends.
He switched to complexity theory: How new sets of desires and aversions emerged at each new stratum of complexity, from enzymes to cells, from organisms to organizations—cities, religions, corporations, military-politico-economic complexes. How the larger systems harvested competition as well as cooperation among their parts—white blood cells competing for prey, factions of neurons warring for the electrical impulses that allowed for their particular brand of thoughts, employees fighting for positions, companies for market share, ideologies for adherents.