Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  And back to Eastern religion: Mahamaya, the power of illusion, ignorance seen not as a mere absence of knowledge but a force in its own right, a veil obscuring the self-illumined immensity. Lila, the concept of existence as a divine, all-encompassing game. Samsara, existence as a theme park of delusion. Which, according to a comment ascribed to the Dalai Lama, America had perfected.

  The morning sun had baked into Fred’s eyes, making the office seem darker than usual.

  Fred’s cantaloupe box was still sitting by the door where he’d left it. A shadowy pile of obsolesced computer parts slouched against the opposite wall, looking like a fat man who’d been trying to jog and was now bent over and struggling to catch his breath. An undulating light from a monitor played on the pile, giving it the illusion of breathing. The light came from Sam’s station around the corner.

  “Sam?”

  No answer.

  There remained the microwave, the mini-fridge, a stack of cans where the metal cabinet had been, the red couch, Fred’s own messy desk, and the still humming supercomputer. Otherwise, the office was bare. His coworkers’ desks, chairs, and hardware were gone. The shelves were gone, too, leaving long-forgotten expanses of drywall and floorboards to flicker uniformly in the monitor’s glow. He couldn’t step into the room at first. It felt like his bones had been shipped off with the rest.

  Around the corner, he found a folding table where Sam’s desk had been, and a folding chair where Sam’s Aeron had been. Sam himself was sitting where he always had, as if the furniture had been switched out from under him. A laptop took the place of Sam’s computer stack and dual monitor display. On the screen, Fred saw as he approached, was what appeared to be the interior of a computer-animated church—the angle from the pews, over the backs of avatar heads. An animated preacher stood at the pulpit, his poorly animated mouth opening and closing. As the preacher spoke, with a barely audible jabber in Sam’s headphones, the little church transformed into the grassy shore of a lake. The avatars in the pews were now dressed in peasant clothes. The pastor had morphed into Jesus, standing in a small, triangular boat moored to a dock, a shower of gold pouring onto him from above. From an upper quadrant, Jesus’ story expanded to transform the scene again—a farmer sowing seeds; a closeup on the luminous kernels flung from his hand in slow motion; one falling on a path and being gulped by a bird; another falling amid stones, sprouting only to wither; another amid thorns, which wrapped about the seedling in sinister fashion; the last dropping on a rich bed of earth and shooting into a tall plant. Cutaway to a vast, healthy crop, gleaming under the sun; transforming back into Jesus by the shore; then back to the pastor in the virtual church, holding a stalk of wheat, over which the word parable appeared in an arch of bright, gothic letters.

  “Sam,” Fred said again.

  Sam leapt in his seat. With his silver lamp shipped off, he had no warning system. He brought the headphones down from his ears.

  “So what’s that?”

  Already, Sam’s face was recomposed, a picture of indifference. “New thing on the Christworld site. Virtual ministry. Just … checking out the graphics.”

  On the screen, a virtual collection bucket began floating down the aisle, with a cross and the words CLICK TO DONATE painted on the side.

  “What’s with the pack?” Sam said. “Joining the Boy Scouts?”

  “I need to stay at your place. Until you sell it.”

  Sam hunched forward.

  “I could keep things neat,” Fred said through his teeth. “I could get out of the way when it has to be shown. I could help with anything you—”

  “It’s sold.”

  The service was over. Nothing left for Sam to stare at but the Christworld home page.

  “It is?” Fred said. “Already?”

  A desk fan on the table swept slowly back and forth.

  “How long till the new owners move in?” Fred pressed. “If I could—”

  “They’re in.”

  Sam’s eyes, still not meeting Fred’s, were hard, but a little frightened, too.

  “How could that be? Where are you staying?”

  For a couple seconds Sam didn’t respond. Then he inclined his head a centimeter toward the couch.

  “But where’s all your stuff?”

  Sam pointed to a Rubbermaid bin by his table. If Fred had seen it before, he’d thought nothing of it.

  “I’m starting fresh,” Sam said. “The move-in date’s Wednesday. That’s when I go.”

  “Why not just stay in a hotel down there? Or with Rad or Jess?”

  “No. No hotels. No staying with Conrad or Jesse. It’s a clean transition.” He seemed to consider whether or not to say more. Then he turned to his computer, his voice still monotone but his movements eager. “I fly out first thing. Arrive late morning. A day off work. Leisurely. Setting up the home front. Furniture comes in the afternoon.” He clicked open photos—a modish white sofa, a matching armchair, a paisely-shaped coffee table, a couple of bright area rugs, bedroom and dining room and deck furniture, barstools. The stuff had a Jetsons vibe. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a cutaway Sims house, Fred thought, or a Second Life bachelor pad.

  “First grocery delivery arrives at three PM. And by the end of the day…” With a flourish, Sam opened a photo of a glossy, black convertible. “… my new car gets delivered.”

  Sam allowed him to appreciate the sports car in silence. Fred could barely believe Sam had the gall to show it to him, what with all the money Fred had been spending to keep George alive.

  “I’ll tool around in it awhile …” Sam mousepadded his cursor in lazy figure eights. “… get some dinner downtown….”

  Incapacitated with jealousy, Fred imagined him swinging past the realtor’s office, waving to Christine.

  “Then the rest of the week, I’ll nine-to-five it”—Sam stretched his arms—“maybe nine-to-four, tying up the last loose ends for the demo. It’s all set for next Monday.”

  Next Monday, Fred thought. He wondered if their parents had told Sam about the plans to let George go. He was willing to bet they had, that the news hadn’t affected Sam at all.

  “Nothing left to deal with but those object-effect bugs,” Sam went on. “Thought we’d wiped them out three times already. But yesterday, Little Len put on his air mask and dropped dead. Turned out the gas file data got corrupted and he was inhaling mustard gas from the Iraq sims.”

  Fred had a feeling the sabotage was only beginning. To Sam, though, it seemed barely worth thinking about. He clicked all the windows closed. They gazed at the backlit palm trees and beach on the desktop.

  “New York?” Sam brought a finger to his open lips, feigning befuddlement. “What’s that? Never heard of it. Oh, yeah. It’s that virtual emergency response environment that’ll make me rich.”

  Fred looked around the office, not ready to believe that Sam’s New York apartment was already gone. If the new owners were already there, as he’d claimed, he must have been living here for at least a couple weeks.

  “I guess that couch is comfortable enough,” Fred said.

  “It serves.”

  “You’ve got your fridge here, your microwave.”

  “Yep.”

  On the table next to the laptop, Lara Croft gazed up smolderingly from the August issue of Game Developer magazine, beside which lay a few unopened credit card offers.

  “You’ve already been getting most of your mail delivered here, anyway, I suppose.”

  “More efficient that way.”

  A stack of neatly folded black T-shirts peeked through the open zipper of a duffle bag on the floor.

  “You get your laundry picked up and delivered here, too?”

  “They even fold my underwear.”

  “I guess you can brush your teeth and shave in the bathroom down the hall?”

  “Can and do.”

  “So what about showering? Do you have a gym membership or something?”

  A sneaky hint of a smile appeared
at the corner of Sam’s mouth. He reached under the table into a cardboard box and brought out a coiled length of yellow hose, ending in a rubber showerhead. He held it up, his smirk half nervous, half proud.

  An uncertain laugh stalled in Fred’s throat. “You … but where … ?” He thought for a moment. “That big slop sink in the janitor’s closet, out in the hall?”

  Sam touched a fingertip to his nose.

  “That filthy sink with the mop in it all the time?”

  “It’s not filthy,” Sam snapped. “I keep it clean.”

  The answer disturbed Fred. At first he didn’t know why. Then he realized it was the tense Sam was using. The permanent present.

  “You … keep it clean.”

  “It’s not hard,” Sam said, defensive. “Some disinfectant now and then.”

  “Sam.” Fred felt that queasy, dreamlike undertow pulling at him again. “How long have you been living here?”

  Sam began slowly turning away. “A while.”

  “How long is ‘a while?’” Fred pivoted to keep Sam’s face in view. “Three weeks?”

  That little smile stretched.

  “A month?”

  And stretched some more.

  “Two? More?”

  Fixedly, Sam stared at the posterboard over the window. “I’ve been here a while, all right?” he said through his unmoving, upturned lips.

  “But … why?”

  “Why not? Why are you making such a big deal out of it?”

  “Why not?”

  Sam eyed the ceiling. “I miscalculated slightly. I thought the Urth consolidation would happen faster. The real estate market was at a certain place. There was no reason to wait. Who knows what could have happened between then and now. Some new attack, and it wouldn’t have been worth a thing.” He turned to Fred, with a frenetic gleam. “You wouldn’t believe how much I got for it. People are nuts. I read an article the other day. They’re still building skyscrapers. There’s a boom in skyscraper building, in cities all over the world. They’re building them even higher. It’s like a race, who can spend the most money to live in the most doomed places on the planet.”

  He couldn’t meet Fred’s eyes for long. He faced those palm trees again, working the tensed muscles of his jaw loose with side-to-side motions. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s more convenient, staying here.”

  Fred pictured his little brother walking out into the hall, naked, late at night when no one was around, clambering into the sink in the janitor’s closet, and holding that yellow hose up over his head.

  “This is more convenient?” Fred grabbed the hose and shook it. “This is more convenient than just going home for the night?”’

  “Sure.”

  Fred was actually beginning to pity him when he caught himself. It probably was more convenient for Sam. What did he care? He had his nest egg, his condo, his sports car, his fake little town to go settle in when all the dealing got done. His whole life in New York was dead to him anyway.

  “You’re a homeless person,” Fred said. “I should report you to the building manager.”

  “Speak for yourself, Freddo.” Sam drew out the name. “I’m just in transition.”

  “—is that east or west—”

  “—I’m for pizza—”

  “—Mommy, is he craaaazy—”

  “—look it ze hahnd people—”

  Fred arrived just as they began. Through the plate glass of the defunct concession area, he saw Guy/Strider at the southeast corner of the observation deck, going into action, forming himself slowly into a stark human Y, like some deadly serious Bauhaus version of a cheerleader, his pompomless palms angled out toward Brooklyn. Then, to the southwest, his wife, the elf, looked around with an excited, self-humoring grimace, as though she were about to do something crazy and wonderful like take a bounding backflip to the tip of the spire. She turned to face the far towers of Newark, and in one quick motion closed her eyes, raised her arms straight up, tilted back her head, and stuck out her chest like a triumphant gymnast. Fred headed down the ramp, breasted the picturesnapping crowd counterclockwise around the deck, and spotted, facing the fulgurant plasm of Times Square, the one he called the dwarf, though in physiological terms, she was tall as well as broad, her fuzzed, gray head cresting above the tourists, her arms in a stylized U shape, like a caryatid or bearer of some outsized Grecian urn. In the last corner, Queensward, was posted the pink-faced wizard, elbows forward and palms flat up, as though straining against a lowering trash compactor. Fred’s mother, as he had expected, wasn’t here.

  He slid past Gandalf, walked halfway to Strider’s corner, and slipped through the tourists to face, through the wrought-iron barrier, the gorgeous pop-up cityscape—like the toothed, sparkling cavity of one of Holly’s energy crystals. He located first the sunset mirror of the UN, then a few degrees rightward, the smaller slab of the Medical Center. He breathed, using the air in his lungs to keep down his stomach.

  Before coming here, he’d been at the hospital all afternoon. George’s pallor, his waxen softness, his overall smallness, had stunned Fred anew. A slowly deflating balloon, George had seemed, kept from flattening out entirely only by the ventilator’s continuous huffing into his lungs. Fred had massaged the stringy, mushy remnants of George’s muscles, swabbed his papery nostrils and ears and the parched cavern of his mouth, fighting the feeling it wasn’t George at all but only some spare suit of flesh grown from a vat down in the subbasements; and the still stranger feeling that even he—Fred himself—wasn’t quite there in the room.

  All the usual things he might have said to George had gone into hiding. With the vague idea of finding something uplifting or otherwise appropriate to read aloud, Fred sat there paging through the self-help books he’d taken from their mother’s shelf: Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle—newer titles than the others, but aging fast, even The Power of Now looking yellowed and worn. At some point in its recent history, the whole cultural project of self-help seemed to have hit a wall, after which had come the tacit acknowledgment that this selfsame self everyone had been scrambling to pump up with self-worth and self-esteem was itself the problem, that one’s efforts were better spent paring it down, pruning it away. He wondered if this represented a slow-motion rebellion in the commerce-laden New Age temples; or an evolution, carrying the movement into a deeper phase; or if, in the end, it would just be incorporated as one more layer in the pyramid scheme of controlling everything with one’s crazy thoughts. Either way, part of him approved of the message, or of part of the message, of the call to let some air out of everyone’s ballooning egos, if for no reason other than as a general health and safety measure. But the rest of him didn’t get the rest of it at all. Why grow selves to begin with, if only to eradicate them? Wasn’t this world, this universe, one’s own biology doing a good enough job of it anyhow?

  In the end, he read none of this no-self stuff aloud, not wanting to give the bag of desiccating tissue on the bed any more of an excuse not to be George; though, what with the all-important CT scan coming any minute now, he was actually finding it preferable to think of George’s body as being absent of selfhood, at least for the moment. Maybe, Fred speculated with too much hope, it was all the meditation that allowed for this newfound distance. Maybe neither George nor he himself had to be here in anything but the flesh. The only way he could conceptualize the phrase “no self” was to think not here, to think it just possibly meant the real Fred was somewhere else, the real George too. He returned to the mu, joining his own attenuated outbreaths to the ventilator’s hush, doubting for the both of them, doubting hospital sounds, hospital smells, hospital bills, hospital rooms, until two doubtable orderlies arrived with a doubtable gurney, and gathered in their muscled arms the various bags and tubes and rolling machines and the featherweight bundle of George, and they were all wheeling off down the hall. On impulse, Fred began pushing the gurney faster and faster. The two orderlies looked at each other, then at Fred, then at each other—one’s greased,
longish hair flipping about, the other’s gold tooth sparking in the fluorescence—and they decided what the hell and joined in, racing their doubtable freight at a speed which Fred knew the real George—picture him whipping along above, a balloon on a string—would enjoy.

  The unintended upshot was that they reached their destination all the sooner. The orderlies pointed Fred toward one door and wheeled the gurney through another. Fred entered a darkened control room; through its window, he could see the attendants lifting the sagging body onto the scanner platform, and a nurse unhooking George’s ventilator. The nurse and the attendants then bugged out of the room as the nurse gave the go signal to a woman sitting with her back to Fred at the controls. The woman’s black hair flowed through a ponytail clip to brush the collar of her lab coat. Her sheer-stockinged legs recrossed at the ankles as she leaned forward. Her ringed fingers toggled the platform into motion. The scene was so oddly familiar that he had to resist the giddy urge to fully sync the synchronicity by stepping up and resting his arm around her shoulders, as they watched through the window their test subject’s head vanishing into the giant, laser-lit scanner ring. None of this is real, Fred averred. And if it wasn’t real, how could it even touch them? He wasn’t here, George wasn’t there in that cyclone of X-rays. On the computer screen, cross-sectional slices began to appear, and so what? A pea. An avocado. Expanding tranches of cauliflower. Nothing but produce. Of no consequence, he told himself, but all the same, the scan was getting too real, too vivid and totalizing. His brother’s skull complexifying like some kind of arthropod; tapering into the tubework of windpipe and tongue muscle and spine; then going supernova—dark hollows, flame gusts, bright, misshapen blobulations—as the Asian woman who was in no way Mira turned to Fred to ask if he was OK. He, Fred, was emitting a kind of hissing, gurgling noise, it seemed, his throat having sealed so tight there might as well have been no such thing as air at all.

  After locking himself in that same bathroom for another extended freak-out on the tiled floor, Fred washed his unsteady hands with Bacti-Stat and left the hospital. He started walking, of all places, to the Empire State Building. He made up reasons on the way. He told himself his mother might have changed her mind since blowing off Dot’s phone call yesterday. He asked himself if her group knew yet about George’s condition, and about the plans to let him die a week from today. He told himself they deserved to know, that they’d at least meant well all this time, at least had been trying to help George all these months. He considered the possibility, in the likely event his mother hadn’t shown, of asking them to look in on her. A few weeks ago, he would have been relieved to find her giving up this particular set of friends. But he worried, now, that she was worse off without them.