by Alex Shakar
A post-rainstorm smell.
A hot, shearing saw.
And he was out, things becoming a part of him—the chair, the helmet itself—no less strongly than the first time.
And yet, after all he’d been through since, something was lacking in the repetition; somehow it seemed like child’s play, a game of makebelieve. He was thinking about that earliest memory that had surfaced during the near-death session, that infant’s-eye view on the world, flying with George above the stairs in their father’s arms and all of it a part of Fred. That’s what it was like, this experience—infantile. Freeing, joyous, but also regressive, narcissistic, less about opening himself than opening everything else to him. He wondered if the urge to return to this state of innocent containment of everything was the very root of his and everyone’s problems, of the lifelong compulsion to consume and append and incorporate and be all and end all in a world ever more maddeningly beyond one’s grasp. Each subsequent session had been a little less selfcentered—stepping totally outside of his body in the second; outside the stream of his life in the third; and with the Presence, being given just a glimpse of a perspective outside the smallness of his own mind.
The Presence, which had been coming in and out since he’d gotten to the office, was back again, expanding with him. In the same way he was absorbing the office, he began letting himself be absorbed in the Presence, dissolving as he grew, surrendering as he conquered, a whole new thrill as, together, he and it absorbed the room. They encompassed the Prayerizer, sharing the exhilaration of all that racing energy within it, like they’d just enveloped a star. What would the Prayerizer’s higher self be, Fred wondered. He could almost picture it, the Big IT—crunching heroic quantities of data to preserve, amid all life’s proliferations and complexifications, an order, a divine, meaning-filled, infinite supersymmetry, making sure, if not that everyone’s prayers were answered, then that every deepest need was ultimately served.
And farther still they went, Fred and the Presence, encompassing now Fred’s desk, now the microwave, now the red plush couch on which Sam lay curled on his side under the Army blanket, peeping out from beneath it with those raw, red eyes. A towering wave of utter terror swept over Fred without actually making him afraid. The fear wasn’t his. It was Sam’s. Fred didn’t know how he knew this, didn’t understand the level of emotional intelligence he’d been lent, which took in all at once Sam’s expression, his tensed form beneath the blanket, each little cue Fred had been processing in some less than conscious way. The farther the expansion went—the walls becoming another skin, the posterboarded window a single closed eyelid—the smaller Sam seemed, curling into himself ever more tightly, now an armadillo, now a snail. The beer bottles smooth as fingernails. The courier slip, the food delivery box crisp and sylphic as a newborn thought:
“Sam,” Fred called out from deep within his bubble, the helmet braying his voice back into his ears. “When’s the last time you went outside?”
And knew the answer even as the smile, diffident yet proud, spread on Sam’s face.
“I stayed with the company.”
Sam turned and yanked his blanket overhead.
Drifting off, now. Forgetting why his sleeping bag feels part of him, a chrysalis, the half-shed skin of a snake. All that was a dream, a dream from which he awakens in a small, white, cuboid room. Behind a control room window stands a being of light, in a pristine, white lab coat. It’s the Presence. Its face pure brightness. Like a sun that doesn’t hurt the eyes. Like that light at the tunnel’s end.
The Presence escorts him through bright white corridors, into an elevator with a panel of buttons arranged in a spiral. With a finger of light, it presses the outermost. Fred can feel the compartment arcing around as well as pressing upward, in a vast spiral. Meanwhile, the Presence conveys it to him: an important mission is underway, a mission in which Fred has a role.
The doors open onto an observation deck. Below lies a circular, shadowy maze of a city. The roofs are all off to reveal the interiors, some of which he recognizes. He spots the dim loft room of his former office. He spots his parents’ apartment, with its colorful kitchen floor and ancient living room rug. He spots a miniature golf course, glowing an unnatural shade of green. Surrounding these interiors are endless twisting corridors and drab institutional rooms. And at the center of the city lies a central darkness, a gaping hole in which a funnel of gray clouds churn. And the city is ever so slowly spiraling into it, the innermost parts crumbling and plummeting over the rim.
The Presence tugs on Fred’s white satin cape, and with that glowing finger, directs his attention upward.
The black dome above is filled with icons: A golf club. A shot glass. A lightning bolt. And many more.
The dome is not yet bright enough, the Presence telepathizes, to accomplish the mission.
Fred asks what the mission is.
He’s led to understand: to awaken a dreamer.
Fred asks who the dreamer is. The Presence gestures to a mounted scenic viewer by the railing, through which Fred then peers: Down into the city maze. Into the innermost curl of the spiral, at a point mere yards away from where it tumbles into the vortex. Into a room edging inexorably, inch by inch, toward the brink. A hospital room, wherein, in bed on his back, head turned to one side, lies the little figure of George.
Fred turns to the icons. Some are luminous. Most are dim.
He asks the Presence if the mission is doomed.
The Presence hesitates. There is one icon, it suggests, that might spark them all at once.
Fred thinks: The Presence is grasping at straws. Which one, he asks. The Presence produces a calculator, punches keys, tilts its star-stuff head. Then shrugs and points skyward, but Fred can’t see the icon through the glare of the Presence’s effulgent finger. Whichever it is, though, he’s got a sick, sick feeling about it.
“Please,” he says. “Let’s think about this.”
But that too-bright finger is tapping the air—once, and once again.
Fred awoke with the heat of the Prayerizer’s vented air at his back. It was the first time he’d dreamt of George since the coma. If nothing else, that felt auspicious.
Sam was already up, wrapped in a towel, an overlooked, foamy shampoo slug hanging from his ear. He handed Fred another towel and the yellow hose, and Fred went into the hall and clambered into the waist-high, mold- and disinfectant-smelling slop sink in the janitor’s closet. The soap kept slipping from his hands in the darkness, forcing him to bend and reach down blindly, his knees hitting the sink’s lip, his ass hitting the clammy wall on the recoil. Even so, it felt good to get clean.
He sent out emails to the Reiki group and to Manfred, urging them to be there on Monday for George’s farewell, since he wasn’t sure that he himself wouldn’t be behind bars by then. A reply from Manfred came back immediately, saying he was planning on it, and urging Fred to check out his new digital short in the Zen Danish style, which he promised would enlighten the shit out of Fred.
In the slices of dawnlight from between the cardboard scales covering the window, Fred and Sam sat on the floor eating bowls of cereal. The modded Apollo helmet, with its solenoids and wires, watched them like a Medusa head from the folding chair. After breakfast, with extreme care, Fred put the amplifier, his laptop, and the helmet in George’s camping pack, lining them all with George’s sleeping bag. He slung the pack and Sam’s duffel over his back and picked up Vartan’s tools. Sam juggled a satchel and his plastic bin of personal effects. In the lobby, when Fred opened the front door, Sam froze, eyes going watery in the brightness. For a minute it looked as if he might faint. But at Fred’s urging, his brother took a step, then another, then they were walking to the van.
They drove most of the way to the airport in silence. It was one of those strange days with mottled clouds in every direction but clear skies directly above. Sam sat forward in his seat, vacuuming in the city, and for that matter, the world, which he hadn’t seen in months. Fred doubted the Presenc
e, feeling it encouraging him to do so now, encouraging him to use its unreality as a focusing lens to doubt everything else all the more earnestly. He doubted the sad, sunlit Brooklyn/Queens hinterlands stretching off from the expressway, that vast, dilapidated, analog circuitboard of brick faces, car washes, billboards, tar roofs, lots streaked with effluent, street after street of it, a proliferation no one could have ever mentally budgeted for or planned on. He doubted the airport loop, the lane-changing cabs, the missing panes high up in the ancient hangars. The doubt was so strong, so assured, this morning that every sight was a thing of solid light and nothing more.
Parked outside the dreamlike terminal, his brother turned to face him, as dreamlike as the rest, yet sharper, too, deeper, all the more real.
“Sorry I won’t be there, Monday.” A dreamlike knot on Sam’s dreamlike brow. “Sorry I wasn’t there for the last seven months.”
“You were just being loyal.” Fred’s dream hand on Sam’s dream shoulder. “Good luck saving Urth.”
“Good luck with … that,” Sam said, with a look back at the camping pack.
As Fred watched the peculiar, one-of-a-kind shape of Sam heading into the terminal, it struck him that a life would be too painful if it were real, that the pain would overwhelm it, would overwhelm everything. But since it wasn’t—since, if not in some cosmic way, then just in the ordinary way, every last reality was ever-transmogrifying and fading away—maybe it could be borne; maybe in that sense, it didn’t weigh a thing.
Back in the city, Fred parked the van in the hospital lot, and carried the box through the entrance. Not only could he glimpse the other side of that coin, he thought, he could take it and flip it once and for all. And live here perpetually, on the flip side of the universe, a place where there was a thing called a brain, a clump of noodles busy with things called chemistry and electricity, matter and energy, where there was a thing called science, which—if not untrue, if not inconsistent, if not even fallible—was irrelevant. Here on the flip side, the material universe was but an epiphenomenon, the manifestation of an altogether different order. How thickheaded it had been of him, all these months, to try to lock down God with scientific lingo. It was like trying to terrace-farm Space Mountain. Like flicking a Zippo inside the sun.
Passing through the ultramodern lobby to the antiquated interior, boarding the rattletrap elevator, he allowed himself the hope he’d be granted a sign—that George had gotten what he needed. George wouldn’t have to wake up, the feat Holly had dreamt of, the feat Fred himself had just dreamt that the Presence, and maybe all the angels in creation, were working to achieve. George wouldn’t have to come back to life. One faint squeeze of Fred’s finger would suffice at this point, would be the last little nudge Fred felt he himself needed to take up residence here on the flip side, to end the wandering and build his city walls, to know that all this strife had been for a purpose, bringing him, as it had, to the helmet, the helmet to George, them both to the Presence, which, in this new land, would be every bit as present as they.
Coming through the door to George’s room, Fred stopped. There was something on George’s head already. It looked like a blue shower cap, but was acrawl with wires and brightly colored electrodes. By his bedside, in front of a cart with a monitor, sat a technician with a wan, ruddy face and a long chin. The man looked from George to the colored dots on the screen, from the screen to Fred, from Fred to George and back.
“What are you doing?” Fred asked.
“The doctor wanted a test.”
“And?”
“You should talk to Dr. Papan.”
“Tell me.”
The technician sucked in his lips, as if to hide them. “I turned this brain upside down and shook it for twenty minutes.”
A twitch of a smile, then another, as if in apology for the first.
“I’m very sorry. The body’s alive. But up here … all gone.”
It was something about wasps, and figs, but there were other creatures involved as well: bats, green pigeons, monkeys, and elephants. And the fig tree itself. The wasp eggs hatched in the figs. The tree protected the wasp eggs in a kind of sap. The wasps grew up in the figs, mated, burrowed out, spread the tree’s pollen. The other creatures spread the tree’s seeds. It was vastly more complicated than that—there were microscopic flowers, parasitical wasps that ate the fig wasps, ants that ate the parasitical wasps, seed bugs swarming beneath the tree, microscopic roundworms eating the wasps alive from within. It was important, Fred felt, that he cognize the narrative in its entirety. Because it was nature, the truth of things. And because it was also, somehow, in a way he maddeningly couldn’t quite put his finger on, about him, Fred himself, or was at least being shown to him for a reason—how could it not have been, for here he was witnessing it. But he couldn’t keep it all straight. He was diverted again and again by the insistent fact of his own watching of it. The fact of his existence, demanding explanation. Sitting in something called a booth, in something called a cafeteria, watching something called a television.
It wasn’t quite habit that had brought him down here. He’d intended to leave the building, but, like some tethered ghost, found himself unable. Reaching his usual table, he’d opened his laptop—again, not automatically, but because he assumed he was about to cry and figured he could use the thing to hide behind. But so far he hadn’t cried. He’d just sat, watching the nature documentary on the mounted TV, the sound too low to really hear.
A new old man sat in the previous old man’s spot, this one in a widecollared plaid blazer, making his rheumy-eyed way through the Post:
$6 MILLION
SCRATCH N’ WIN
GAME CARD
INSIDE TODAY
AIR
SICK
And a subheading saying 70 percent of the WTC recovery workers were deathly ill. The Daily News, abandoned on a nearby table, added its own muted outrage:
KICKOFF!
SUPER NFL PREVIEW
THE SHAME OF 9/11
NO DOUBT
NOW
On the other TV across the room, a 9/11 retrospective segment played on NY1, as if anyone could possibly need a refresher: the sequential gouts of brimstone; the first mythic giant falling for the zillionth time; the sick feeling of the future being ripped away; that awful interval before the other’s collapse.
Fred looked away. There was a new tear-blasted woman here today as well, sitting in the corner with nothing but a paper-cupped cappuccino, too new to have figured out the necessity of knitting needles or a book or some other prop to hide behind. When Fred looked back at the screen, the ash cloud was rolling up Broadway, engulfing the runners in sulfur, asbestos, radionuclides, diphenylpropane, hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and dibenzodioxins and dibenzofurans, phthalates and pesticides, leaded and unleaded paint, mineral wool and fiberglass, plastic and cellulose, rubber and silicon. Bits of phones and faxes and computers. Bits of floor and ceiling tile, carpets and cubicle walls, file cabinets and files. Bits of Mira’s husband. At the office, George had shown up caked in all of it. Fred had walked him down the hall to the bathroom and George had stood before the mirror, a human plaster statue, whispering hoarsely, “Holy fuck,” half coughing, half laughing in disbelief. It could have been any of those substances Fred had later spent weeks researching that had done George in. Or it could have been the smoke Fred had blown in his face. Or it could have been the office microwave, or the EM tori of a dozen office computers. Or it could have been the torus of the universe itself, whipping through him with its dark light, its X-rays and gamma rays, retuning George’s DNA antennae, switching around As and Ts, Gs and Cs, and powering up his mitochondrial energy coils to churn out mutant copies and spread them through his electronrich lung-batteries. It could have been men, could have been God, could have been both or neither.
Fred closed his eyes, just for a moment, but all he had to do was blink to be confronted afresh with the image of the EEG net snug around George’s head. In one
blink, Fred would see in that preemptive, wirewigged piece of headgear divine mockery, the cruelest prank yet. In the next blink, he’d see divine love, as much need for a God helmet in the world as for a head on top of a head, the real Presence already there, already welcoming George. In still the next blink, Fred would see nothing but the snarled wires themselves, the two accounts canceling each other out, the Presence itself nowhere, not even a memory. And up on the nearer screen, the little wasp was nearing its journey’s end, straining to cram itself in through a tiny doorway in the fig’s surface, a slot so thin that as the wasp pushed its way through, its abdomen swelled like a balloon and popped.
Then a shot of the fig’s illuminated interior, the dying wasp scrambling to plant its eggs and pollinate the fig before the roundworms finished eating it from within.
Then a shot of the dead wasp, upside down on the fig floor.
For the briefest interval, Fred stopped thinking, as though his mind, too, had swelled and popped. The world utterly complete without him.
The old man paged over to the funnies.
The teary woman shredded her empty cup.
On the far screen, the pageant rolled on—Bush straddling the rubble, bearded marines in Afghani hats, video postcards from Osama, Saddam’s shoe-slapped statue, “Mission Accomplished,” thumbs-up chick on the ass pyramid, exploding Humvees, lines at the airport. Fred was back with his dust-coated brother before the mirror, feeling as though two balled-up swaths of felt had been stuffed down his own lungs. George might have already been one of those sandstone angels. He’d seemed less real than that, even—a 3D avatar, a holograph wavering in the air.