Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  That whole night with her made that much more sense to Fred, now. How she’d known she’d have to kick him out of the study one way or another. How she’d allowed herself, thanks to this and to her loneliness, to get drunk with him and take him home with her.

  “So I suppose I owe you an apology,” she went on, looking uncomfortable, her eyes starting to wander the room, “even though … what the hell is that?”

  She’d locked on the spot, high up on the wall opposite the foot of George’s bed, where now hung, upside down, the framed photograph of the leering Dan Gretta and the Bush brothers. Fred had mounted it yesterday, with some borrowed tacks from the cafeteria bulletin board.

  “Plunder,” he said.

  It took her a while to peel her eyes from the three suited men hanging there like vampire bats, as if worried so doing might allow them to launch from the frame and sink their gleaming incisors into her throat.

  “I don’t regret having been in your study, Mira. It’s changed me. It’s changing me still. For better or worse, I can’t say yet. I’m only sorry I can’t finish it.”

  He saw gratitude in her look. Then, a spark of mischief.

  “I can’t get you back in—officially. But if you want, I can sneak you in for the last session.”

  A laugh caught in his throat. “Really? You’d really do that for me?”

  “It’s not a favor,” she said, suddenly stern. “You’ve been warned. You’re basically my guinea pig.”

  “But you could never write me up.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “So thank you, then.”

  He wanted to reach for her hand, but stopped himself, vexingly unable to gauge their closeness or distance. He’d slept with her, but she’d never really slept with him. As if sensing the stifled impulse, that hand of hers rose from her lap to brush some loose hair behind her ear. He forced himself to look away. Even so, the faint whiff of her hair alone, in these sterile conditions, was a sensory overload, like stumbling upon a fog-filled orchard on the surface of Mars.

  “There’s a symposium happening on campus,” she said. “I’ve convinced my dad to go tonight. Part of my campaign to get him respectable again.”

  “Tonight it is.”

  “Eight o’clock. Meet me at the Washington Square Arch.”

  Getting up, she grabbed her briefcase, then lingered, eyeing Fred’s in the next chair over.

  “Pure coincidence,” he assured her.

  She nodded slowly, taking it in. “Not much of one, really,” she said, still uncertain.

  “No,” he agreed, “not much of one.”

  Fred couldn’t stay in the room with George any longer. He didn’t want Dr. Chia to find him there and start delivering the official scan results. He didn’t want to hear about that now. He wanted to be happy, to feel like his luck was turning. In part it was precisely because he was happy that he couldn’t stay in the room with George, with those fat, corrugated hoses snaking from George’s neck, and that long, bony face of his, into which, more and more, Fred found himself reading reproach. Something was about to change for Fred, Fred felt, to change for the good. He’d get to have that last helmet session after all, and who was to say he wasn’t destined to have it? And he’d get to see Mira again. And she’d get to know him, get to like him. It wasn’t impossible, was it? Maybe she’d want to sleep with him for real.

  He went down to the cafeteria. It wasn’t going to be easy to make the day go by. In search of something vaguely faith-inducing to ready him for the session, he navigated to Manfred’s website, a bare-bones affair, Manny’s simultaneous promise and disclaimer flashing near the top of the screen: GUARANTEED TO BRING ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT (IF YOU’RE READY)! Fred clicked on one of the digital shorts. It was called “The Pie-ning” and turned out to be a jumble of relentlessly intercut scenes involving two glassy-eyed Disney employees on their off-hours, a young couple in headless Goofy and Daisy Duck costumes. In one scene, they pantomimed dog-and-duck sex in some dingy motel room. In another, the Goofy guy sat in a diner, rapidly spooning an entire blueberry pie into his mouth. In a third, the Daisy girl ran, or at least quickly waddled, down a residential street, turning every so often to look behind her with wide eyes and a strange pout that seemed intended to denote fear of some offscreen pursuer. Mixed into all this were a bunch of shaky shots from the window of Manny’s van—of strip malls, phone lines, the sky, the thighs and inched-up shorts of female drivers moving in parallel below. Fred might as well have been watching it through a kaleidoscope, for all the comprehension, let alone enlightenment, he was attaining. A back-and-forth montage of the man’s face covered with blueberry filling and the woman lewdly presenting her feathered hindquarters was underway when a beeping made Fred jump in his seat.

  He found his cell phone. Nothing. At the next table, a resident sitting over two hot dogs and a pile of steaming sauerkraut flipped his phone open. Fred looked over those two “CALL GEORGE” texts on his own phone once more. Atlanta. Central Ohio. He ran a few Web searches, looking for tech companies—some rival to Armation, perhaps—based in both places. Coming up with nothing, he thought again about George’s mention of hooking up with programmers while in Europe after his divorce in 2004. Fred wished he had George’s cell phone, so he could look up his brother’s contacts, but George had disposed of it along with most of his other possessions. On the laptop, Fred spent a while looking over the handful of emails George had tossed off from Internet cafés over the course of that trip—hasty replies to Fred’s anxious queries, five lines tops, most less—which Fred, at his desk in the gloom of their office, had read again and again, trying to fill in the gaps of a life becoming more and more opaque to him. The dot-com burnouts were mentioned only in passing; George had spent most of that email relating the strange logic of a Finnish woman he’d met in a Budapest nightclub who he’d said looked like Jill, and who had told George she would have slept with him if he weren’t American, because American men were prudes and didn’t respect women who slept with men on the first night.

  Back on the phone, Fred looked once more at the picture of George in that checkered outfit on some cobbled street; George had gotten whoever had taken it to text it to Fred; and Fred now wondered if perhaps the sender had been one of his traveling companions, one of those programmers, maybe. Fred didn’t get many texts. Only a handful over the last couple of years. In fact, scrolling back through the record, he still had that blank message to which the picture had been attached. He dialed the number it had come from, readying himself for a confrontation with the cyberthug. But after a brief, awkward introduction, he ascertained that it was only an aging woman in Scotland, who dimly recalled being charmed enough by a rustic peasant on her continental holiday to snap a picture, after which she’d discovered he was an American and had offered to send along the image.

  Maybe he was wrong, Fred thought. Maybe George hadn’t been involved in these messages to him, or in this whole assault on Armation at all. Maybe that note with the angels was just an odd coincidence, like Mira’s husband’s old briefcase; maybe not even much of one—maybe Fred had misremembered what that musclebound nurse had said while driving the shunts into George’s veins. Or maybe someone else had been listening in on them. Or maybe George had repeated the phrase to someone at some point. Fred thought about how adamant Sam had been that George couldn’t have been a part of it. Sam’s insistence had been so unexpected, especially given the strain between him and George in recent years, that it made Fred feel guilty for jumping to the conclusion himself. Maybe it really was just a setup like he’d first thought.

  He started poking around the Web again, and discovered that there weren’t too many statuary stores listed in the metropolitan area. The angels could have been shipped from a distance, but he hadn’t seen any stamps or plastic sleeves with delivery slips on those boxes in Mira’s apartment. She might have thrown them out, or he might have been simply too drunk to find them. But it seemed worth a shot to start calling around. />
  It didn’t take him long to find a place in Jersey City that could order the two statues he described. It didn’t take much further digging, when the proprietor mentioned how odd it was that the same two had been ordered by someone last winter, to get the man to regale him with the story of this someone: A guy with dark circles under his eyes and a small oxygen tank. Who had come in and plunked down a wad of cash. Paying extra for the sculptures to be held for seven months and then delivered anonymously to an address that would come by fax. Which had in fact happened, at last, just a few days back.

  The more he knew, Fred felt, the less he understood. Every explanation just compounded his ignorance.

  Who are you, George? he thought. Who were you?

  It was getting harder and harder to hear Inner George. Some mental barrier was thickening, ever more soundproof. Though it seemed to be getting more and more conductive in other ways. He could still feel George out there, pressing against some membrane of the universe. Less a knowable person than a force of yearning, a desire so large it was almost by this point without an object.

  He was about to call Sam and break the news of George’s trip to the statuary store, when his phone rang in his hand.

  It was Vartan.

  “How’s George?” he asked.

  “Still on the machine. Still breathing.” Fred felt a twinge of guilt that he wasn’t up there in the room with him. “You and Mom coming in today?”

  “No.”

  The answer was brusque, ominously final. A mechanical whine came from the background. Some kind of tool. Maybe an electric screwdriver.

  “I booked one last birthday party,” Vartan said. “It’s tomorrow.”

  This, too, had a disturbing ring of finality. Though on the other hand, maybe it was good news. Wasn’t it about time his father stopped doing magic shows? He must still be off the weed, Fred thought. Fred was pretty sure he could hear this in Vartan’s voice—a low-level agitation, like he’d been scrubbing in the shower with sandpaper.

  “OK,” Fred said.

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Sure. I don’t mind.” To Fred’s surprise, he actually didn’t. He needed the money. And he thought it would do Vartan good, get him out of the house, give him some closure.

  “The solo act’s not too different,” Vartan said. “The tricks are mostly the same. Just a different story.”

  The noise had started up again. Vartan’s voice sounded crimped, probably from wedging the receiver between his shoulder and head.

  “The solo act?”

  “You can come get the van any time,” Vartan said, and hung up.

  The park, that late-summer evening, was like a bright little solar system: the younger, hotter bodies by the central fountain, boys flipping skateboards, girls flipping hair; the dimmer, middling ones—the addicts, the aging guitar players—held in perpetually hopeful orbit slightly farther out; the stray comets of tourists passing through on their straight paths from end to end; and lurking in the outer ring, the cold gas giants, the bored old gods—eternal chess players, and pushers, like Robert the dealer, on his bench-back perch a few yards off, perusing a ruffled copy of the Post and pulling out a promotional Spider-Man comic book insert. When at last Fred gave in and turned to check the Arch, he found Mira standing beneath it, in dark jeans and her black nylon jacket, loose braids blown by the breeze. The answer to his first prayerization, if fifteen days delayed. She kept looking every way but his as he approached, eyes fretful and sharp. He was almost next to her when she finally saw him.

  “There you are,” she said, as if he were late, though they both were early. Her jacket was unfastened. Beneath it, on a white T-shirt, in red letters:

  BULLSHIT

  “How many of those shirts do you have?” he asked.

  “As many as it takes.”

  She turned, and they began walking, not fast. She’d seemed impatient when looking around for him, but was now almost dawdling, as was Fred. They were almost like any other couple, he thought, out walking on a warm night. As much as he wanted this session, he was tempted to suggest to her they skip it and just go see a movie.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  She snorted. “I haven’t even showered today.”

  “Don’t worry. I think I’ve got you beat on that score.”

  She eyed the sidewalk. “It always gets tougher, this time of year.”

  For a moment, he didn’t know what to say. He asked if she’d gotten her father to the symposium. She said she’d walked him there and pushed him through the door. He wasn’t speaking tonight, but everyone wanted to hear the direction of his new research.

  “Which,” she added dryly, “he’s not entirely happy to be talking about.”

  “He must appreciate what you’ve done for him, though.”

  “Right. The other day, he was talking about developing the technology for the entertainment industry.”

  Fred laughed, uncomfortably. All too easy to picture.

  “So when you came back from the tunnel in the near-death session,” she said, reassuming her clinician’s tone, “was it like the out-of-body one before? Being in your body again, did you feel … ‘squashed like a bug?’”

  He recalled how suddenly ill she’d looked that day when he’d described this for her, smacking down one hand on the other. With an upwelling of sadness, he said, “Not nearly so much.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “We’ll see if we can recalibrate some of that.”

  “Mira, why didn’t you take Lionel’s last name?”

  After a few steps, she shrugged. “I didn’t like it.”

  “It was worse than Egghart?”

  She pursed her lips, then banked a shoulder into him, knocking him off course. The gesture felt to him as intimate as those kisses the other night, made him feel almost as light.

  They were almost to the door of the Neural Science Building.

  “So what is it with you and Bush, anyway?” Fred asked. “I mean, aside from what it is with everyone and Bush?”

  “I don’t know.” Mira slid her hands into her pockets. “I did meet him, though.”

  “You did?”

  “There were a lot of functions we widows got invited to. I mostly hung out in the bathrooms. I was looking for one when Lionel’s boss’s widow took me over and introduced me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Me? Nothing. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Something stupid like that. What do you say to a president?”

  “And what did he say?”

  She turned to face him, her black-lined eyes more narrowed than usual, her lips in a leer. “We’re gonna git ’em for ya.” Then she winked.

  “Really?” Fred laughed. “He winked?”

  Mira was walking again. “I don’t know. It could have been a blink. He’s so squinty.”

  She was squinting as she said it, not Bush-like, but Mira-like. Fred let the comparison go unmade. “So what did you say to that?”

  “I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’” With deliberation, but without force, she kicked a paper coffee cup to the curb. “And I meant it.”

  They stopped at the entrance.

  “So that was it?” he asked.

  “That was it.” She smiled. “The emperor of the world went on gladhanding. I finally found that bathroom, and threw up in a toilet.”

  Mira led the way in, presenting her ID to the droop-faced security guard, who, in the manner of all security guards these days, eyed Fred with suspicion. In the elevator, Fred watched her watch the numbered lights change, wondering if there was any combination of words and actions which might result in the two of them kissing before the doors slid open.

  The doors slid open.

  She unlocked the office suite, switching on lights as she led him down the narrow corridor. At the doorway to the little control room, Fred stopped.

  “Can I have a peek behind the wizard’s curtain?” he asked.

  “Very well.” She ushered him
in ahead of her. He sat down in her father’s chair, she sat in hers, peeling off her jacket. Through the window in front of them, the recliner’s black vinyl and the helmet’s sparkly finish shone in the dim light coming through from their side.

  “So why haven’t you ever tried it?” Fred asked.

  “I told you. Scientific objectivity.”

  “But what’s the real reason?”

  She folded her arms, that third hand, the ghostly blue one, right between the other two.

  “I suppose you think I’m chicken?” she said.

  “No. I think you’re a control freak.”

  Mira rotated her chair away from him. “Who cares what you think? Do you have a neuropsychology degree?”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m working on it.” She woke up her computer. “The helmet software’s on yours, by the way.”

  “So what’s on yours? Or do you just surf the Internet in here?”

  “I could, if you’d prefer.” With a doubleclick, she called up a window with a few rows of graph lines. “Or I could monitor your vitals and make sure you’re alive.”

  “Aha.”

  Fred woke Craig Egghart’s machine. Mira wheeled over and pointed to a folder on his screen:

  luminarium

  Fred opened it. Aside from the application itself, there were a few subfolders. He clicked open the first, consilia, and opened up a few of its files—scanned-in sketches and electrical diagrams for the various hardware components.

  “Just his plans,” she said.

  Fred closed it, moved on to the next subfolder, effusio. Five filenames appeared:

  delectatio.cwv

  excrucio.cwv

  timor.cwv

  ira.cwv

  voluptas.cwv

  “Older stuff,” she said. “Basic emotions.”

  “Do they work?”