Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  “Sure. Those are a snap.”

  “Excrucio,” he muttered. “That can’t feel good.”

  “You had a bit of that as part of the last one.”

  He put it together: that moment of reaching out for the jar of gel. “Right. How could I forget my own electrocution?” He pointed at the second-to-last file. “Voluptas. Is that what I think it is?”

  They were sitting close to each another, now, their shoulders almost touching.

  “If you think it’s arousal,” she said, her voice a bit thick.

  He thought of that bee-strung bow and lotus-tipped arrow.

  “I’ve got to build me one of these things.”

  She eyed him through slit lids. Then shoved him, sending their chairs rolling apart.

  He opened the next subfolder, recuso.

  “Reject pile,” she said.

  It had only one file:

  vacuus

  “What’s that?”

  “It means ‘void.’”

  “Void?”

  It sounded like a reject indeed, Fred thought. The very name made his insides shiver.

  “My dad tried to test it on himself and had to abort after less than a minute. He said he thought it was going to eat his soul.” She smirked. “I’d never heard him say ‘soul’ before.”

  There was one subfolder left: spiritus. Fred opened it:

  complexo.cwv

  subterlabor.cwv

  ianus.cwv

  aperio.cwv

  “Are these them?”

  “Yep,” she whispered.

  Here it was, then, he thought. His spiritual odyssey, encoded as easily as a few songs on an iPod.

  “Which one am I getting today?”

  Mira’s finger moved down to the last.

  “What’s it do?” he asked.

  “You want the explanation now?” she said. “Beforehand?”

  “I’d rather know what I’m in for, this time.”

  She paused. “I suppose we’ve pretty much demolished the protocol anyway, at this point. All right.” She swiveled to face him. “This one puts the others together, kind of. And adds a few things.”

  She pointed at a spot an inch above her hairline.

  “Cingulate cortex. It tags information—your thoughts, imaginings, sensations, all your experience—as being either real or unreal. We’ll play around with this, so that by the end, you’ll feel yourself to be perceiving a deeply important truth.”

  She aimed her index fingers toward each other, just in front of her ears.

  “Amygdala—your fight-or-flight response. Hypothalamus—your pleasure center. The two systems usually don’t go on at the same time, for obvious reasons. But sometimes, rarely, they can overlap, firing in quick succession, like in a crisis that gets suddenly resolved. The result is a hyperaroused emotional complex. Some call it rapture. Let’s see. What else?”

  She looked right, left, at her hands, still to either side of her head.

  “Oh. You had a tiny bit of this in the last one, but way more now.” She lowered one hand, with the other bringing a ragged fingernail to bear on the point between her eyebrows. “Corpus callosum. The only point connecting your brain’s hemispheres.”

  Her fingertip remained there, bisecting her eyes.

  “Parallel processors, to use your computer terminology. Your right parietal lobe specializing in sensory-based thought. Your left in critical and linguistic thought. Normally, they operate almost independently, your left perceiving your right as nothing more than a thin stream of data passing through this one narrow conduit.”

  She tapped the spot. He remembered the Hindu women on the bridge, their painted red bindis.

  “Except when a micro-seizure happens. It’s like a little storm, creating wider electrical connections. Giving your left a glimpse of that entire other sentience. Like another presence is suddenly in there with you. Familiar and strange at the same time.”

  “Another presence,” Fred repeated, feeling a chill.

  “Which, in a state of rapture …” Her finger drifted to the side, then pointed at the ceiling, as her lips bent into a sort of sad-clown smile. “… can appear divine.”

  Between him and the spiral galaxy, Mira leaned, two slick fingertips rubbing circles over his heart.

  “That’s good,” he said. “A little lower, please.”

  “Nice try.” She slapped the electrode onto his chest, reached for the helmet, and pushed it onto his head. “Oh, damn.”

  “What?”

  “I got some gel on these little copper wires. Hold on a sec.” Feeling under the trolley’s main level, she grabbed a tissue from the lower shelf, then, coming in close, tilted her face this way and that, squinting at a spot inches above his head.

  “You sure it’s OK?” Fred asked, wishing, at some point in their association, it had behooved him to bring up her need of new contact lenses.

  “It’s fine.” She kept peering, blinking, dabbing with the tissue. “If it blows, we’ve got a spare.”

  “If it blows?”

  “Relax.” She flashed a grin. “You’re in good hands.”

  “Mira,” he said, just as she was turning to go.

  She stopped. “Yes?”

  “Kiss me for luck.”

  Her smile faded. He wasn’t smiling either. He’d said it like a command, in part just to overcome his own nerves.

  “Fred.” She began shaking her head.

  “Just this once,” he said, to preempt whatever speech she was about to give him. “Then send me off to God.”

  After an uncertain moment, she leaned down slowly. She merely pecked his lips, at first. Then, impulsively, she came in again for a longer kiss. Her lips were stiffer than they’d been the other night, and didn’t seem to quite know what to do. His own lips struggled in turn, now trying too hard, now not hard enough. Perhaps the wire-frizzed helmet and the odd angle they were at contributed to the awkwardness. Just at the moment he thought they were starting to find their fit, she pulled away.

  She didn’t look at him as she left the room, or as, behind the window, she reached up with a flash of belly and hips and brought down the shade.

  Red bulb popping on.

  Gray shelves.

  Gleaming cart.

  He told himself it was progress, their first real kiss, the start of something. He couldn’t escape, though, the misgiving that the kiss had been too strange for her, too foreign. Something she wouldn’t allow herself to repeat.

  Blacked-out glass.

  Ceiling grid.

  That high-pitched whir, intimate as a dentist’s drill.

  A pinching at his thigh. Reaching into his pocket. Feeling the five little round elevator buttons.

  Clutching them, as a spot of ticklish heat widens at the top of his head, as a slow drip from the spot splashes down onto his brain stem.

  As the drip becomes a stream, the stream a torrent.

  As the room clouds with static, with strobes, the colors of blood and light and heat.

  As every nerve in his neck and scalp lights up.

  As a pinhole of darkness appears in the center of the unraveling galaxy.

  And widens. It must be an optical illusion, the effect of continued staring, but he stays fixed on that swiveling-open black, half afraid if he looks away it won’t stop, half afraid it will. In the periphery, the red bulb brightens and looms, a blossoming sun. The shelves and table flatten out, recede into some lesser dimension. The ceiling tiles breathe, exhaling into the room, charging and warming the air. The room itself expands, walls swinging wide.

  He yanks his eyes away.

  Hot chair.

  Cramped helmet.

  Bulb small and dim.

  All the same. And not at all the same.

  He palpates the chair arm, squeezes the trolley leg. Solid as ever. Though for some reason he feels like he should be able to crumple it all in his fists. The room is no more real than a stage set, a painted backdrop.

  A ticklish,
milky current flows up and down his spine.

  Big deal, he thinks, to quell his fear. Another special effect.

  He stares up at the flat poster. The spiral has twisted shut again, like the mouth of a bag, cinching him into this place that’s no kind of place at all.

  Big deal, he thinks again, and laughs.

  Then jumps in his chair, as something bigger than the universe laughs with him.

  “Fred?” Mira whispered, leaning in.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at that poster before the red light had gone off and the fluorescents had come on. As she lifted the helmet and began peeling away the electrodes, he looked around, the walls oddly closer, the room smaller than he’d remembered. She pulled the lever and guided the chair back upright, then was in front of him, offering her hand, and he hesitated, some haywire spatial processing module of his brain fearing that, in standing, he might put his head through the ceiling. It didn’t happen, but he almost felt as if it had, following her down the too-small corridor. Almost as if the ceiling had been lifted off, as if he were a mouse that had clambered up atop the walls of its maze-world, blinking in the blurred light of the astronomically larger laboratory beyond.

  A lab, he thought, passing the little control room, peering within as he would the chamber of a dollhouse. Inside a lab.

  With the phrase came an echo of that cosmic laugh, not a physical sound so much as a psychic force. He couldn’t pursue the thought, couldn’t follow where it went.

  He sat in the blue recliner. Mira sat opposite, and put a hand on his knee.

  “Tell me about it?” she said in a small voice, leaning forward, peeking up into his eyes.

  She’s a mouse, too, he thought, a mouse in a lab coat.

  Instead of laughter or that mute force, the Presence, still with him, now communicated by other means, flashing images into Fred’s awareness, images from his own life: Mira from above the bar, braids slightly flapping as she reached for his glass / the cartoonish cap of the trolley driver in Celebration.

  Meanwhile, in front of him, Mira’s mouse-like eyes went wide. A door had opened in the lobby.

  “Mira?” her father called out.

  “Oh God. I’ll never hear the end of this. Be quiet.”

  She rushed out, shutting the light and slamming the door. Fred heard her strained laughter, overloud, her blurted question: “What are you doing here?” Followed by the sound of another door, murmurs from an adjacent room. The fat little baseboard star glowed.

  Five-pointed, he thought. And instantly, the Presence flashed more images to mind: the five fingers of his mother’s hand, trembling above his head / his own hand, holding the Swiss Army knife, prying those five elevator buttons from the panel.

  Mira slid back in, flipped the light on, leaned close.

  “He doesn’t know you’re here. I convinced him to go have dinner with me. Put everything back the way you found it. I still want to debrief you on your session. Meet me tomorrow night, same time and place.”

  She killed the light again and was gone. A minute later, Fred heard the main door close. He still wasn’t alone. He felt as if the giant hand of the Presence, rather than the chair, were cradling him. The hand didn’t seem inclined to crush him. It held him gently, protectively. And he felt inclined, more and more, to nuzzle against its warmth.

  Losing some of his fear, he left her office and wandered back down the hall. Stepping into the helmet room again, he traced the cylinders rising from the holes in the sparkly sphere, the bright copper strands rising out of those and into blue and red sheathes going every which way, before coalescing into a single twist-tied bundle. He wasn’t alone here, either. The Presence was still with him, looking over his shoulder, as fascinated by the device as he was. More than just fascinated. There was affection flowing from it, like a sun-warmed stream, through Fred and onto the machine, which, as if it had been washed, began to shine all the more in the dim light through the doorway. The affection wasn’t just for the helmet, Fred now began to feel, with a deepening sense of awe and gratitude, but for him, too. As if, for the moment, they were the Presence’s two favorite children, the helmet and he. Or its favorite toys. Beloved inventions that had presumed to transcend their clownish materials.

  With fellow feeling, Fred continued tracing those wires, which ran along the jointed metal arm, then down the back of the chair, and finally into a thin steel box on the floor, about the size of a stereo component. An orange switch on the box was lit in the on position. From the doorway, not without a thrum of voluptas, he’d watched Mira bending at the hip to flip it on. So he now knelt and switched it off. The box was otherwise featureless, aside from a power cord and a data cord, which snaked from the back of it through a hole beneath the observation window—connecting to Egghart’s computer, no doubt. As Fred glanced up at the poster on the dark ceiling, the Presence gave him another image, one that felt like a loving gift: he found himself, for a long-lost moment, sitting with George on his top bunk, the two of them in their pajamas, charting new constellations among the brand-new star and moon stickers, brightly aglow. Not so big a coincidence, the stickers and this poster, Fred thought, but even so, his life felt suddenly smaller and self-contained, a tabletop puzzle whose pieces could be snapped into a single design.

  Back in the control room, about to shut down the computers, he noticed Egghart’s sketchpad in a shelving bin beneath the table. It was almost too much for Fred, paging through the helmeted faces Egghart had drawn: An older man with a complicated wrinkle of concentration on his brow. A woman with dark-shaded skin, a nose stud, and dreamy, parted lips. A man with frown lines etched all the way down to his jaw. All with closed eyes, the kind of closed eyes that looked to be focused beneath the lids, lifted slightly in their sockets, like Fred’s mother’s while doing Reiki. His fellow adventurers, he thought. And he felt that love from the Presence streaming down onto them, making them shine like heroes. Blinking back tears, he turned the page and found a drawing of Mira, her profile, looking off, probably through the control room window. Her father, Fred thought, had managed to capture both her analytical intelligence and childlike wonderment. His throat was aching. The love from beyond was now mixed, and enriched, he actually felt, with a kind of sorrow, a sorrow for Mira’s sorrow, for everyone’s. For his. His throat started to clutch itself and he was bawling, a hollow knocking sound, like a rock skipping down the walls of a bottomless crevasse. He wanted nothing more, no other objective, than to love this way himself. So sorry he was for this lifetime of doubt. So grateful at the possibility of everything being different now, different and so much easier.

  He turned one more page and saw what he should have by now expected, but he’d been so full of these other things he wasn’t prepared at all.

  It was himself. His jaw slack, his eyes all but shut, small and boyish under that sci-fi headgear. Of course, this must have been the page Mira had grilled him about, following the out-of-body session, the page he’d told her was blank.

  Blank.

  That’s what he’d seen, and it wasn’t what had been there. He’d gotten it wrong. Because he hadn’t been up in the air, looking down on her and her father; he’d been right there in the chair, right where the man had drawn him.

  Mira had explained it all that day, every component, every nuance of the illusion. Just as she had today, in advance, no less. Explained that this Presence was just the other half of his brain. Just these two little lobes in here, clasping and cupping, warming each other in the cold. How soon, he wondered, before the inner lightning stopped, before the other lobe went dark again, and this phantasmal higher self folded back into nothing?

  Not quite yet, it seemed, for the little ripples of sadness he’d sent out were coming back a tidal wave, like God’s own sorrow for Fred, a teary ocean, in which all Fred could do was tumble.

  He tossed the sketchpad on the table, left the computers on, and wandered back down the corridor, letting himself into the suite’s little bathro
om, the velvety sound of his piss on the water making his skin tingle, the toilet flush flashing to mind the smoky vortex / Pincurls bobbing up Broadway / the homeless man sucking down a cloud of inhaler mist. Pieces of the great puzzle, or just an overexcited, overexposed right-brain image dump.

  Then, turning to the sink, with a jolt, he saw George—in tears, stunned at the sight of Fred in turn—through the window of an adjoining bathroom. George blinked in confusion, recognizing himself to be but a reflection, trapped in some other universe even less real than Fred’s. It was a dirty trick, Fred thought, played on both lobes alike by that fried spatial processor. Regardless, he couldn’t help lingering in the magic, reading the wish in George’s eyes, the wish to be here, here with this unreal Presence for which he’d searched so diligently for so many years but never seemed to find. No doubt George would be making better use of it, Fred thought, than he was.

  Back out in the reception area, feeling no particular compunction to leave, he eyed the last door he hadn’t been through. Egghart’s office, he assumed. He opened the door. Why not? He was a mouse with the keys to the maze. Switching on the light, he saw metal shelves stacked with books and manuals, and a worktable covered with screws, wires, silicon chips, and electrical diagrams. The unreal Presence was still beckoning with images: Vartan in the lamplight, drilling into metal / George taking the first blockish avatar for a run across the undeveloped green Urth. What would mankind’s busy building look like from a divine perspective, Fred wondered. Would all these objects of ours, too, someday snap together into a single, all-purpose Thing?

  Stepping in, he was surprised by the office’s size and layout. It was bigger than Mira’s, and had the only windows in the suite, a northerly view, which should have been familiar but wasn’t, or wasn’t quite: Buildings of every height and width and era jostling and angling for the night air. Stonework of every description, cornices and balustrades and decorative patterns of amphoras and laurel leaves and seashells, half erased by weather or shoddy repairs or air-conditioner installations. Walls and roofs bristling with pigeon baffles, pipework, grillwork, vents and ducts, tottering old water towers. High-rises hived to bursting with their million-dollar niches, flatscreens and canned lighting, overbright, as if in the midst of a power surge. A system sumptuously on the edge. Fred reminded himself it was the other half of his brain—fearful, impressionable, overwhelmed—that was showing things to him this way. Though he couldn’t help imagining the view, too, as a kind of divine warning, or alternately, boast—the utter implausibility of the city’s moment-bymoment continuation as the Presence’s very point of pride.