by Alex Shakar
“How’d you do that?”
“Do what?” He was feeling around in his pockets again, bringing out a bubble-blowing kit. “Oh well. Not a trick. But maybe it’ll keep you entertained.” He handed it to her, still feeling around.
Cautiously, as though expecting snakes to pop out of it, she unscrewed the top, looked in, took out the plastic loop, and, pursing her lips, blew a stream of bubbles.
He was rifling through his pockets with one hand, swatting distractedly at the bubbles with the other, giving them to her to hold onto—balls of transparent plastic—while the search continued.
He pretended to sneeze, and produced just in time a silk handkerchief from nowhere.
He gazed forlornly at his credit card, wondering aloud if there was any credit left on it. And sighed when, as if in response, it began floating weightless over his palm.
Mira beamed.
Voicing relief, he at last produced a pack of cards. Fanning them out, he told her to pick one. She reached, but the one she was about to pluck flew from the deck and around his body.
He caught the card, thrust it back among the others.
“Oh, never mind,” he mumbled, stuffing the deck away. “Sorry. Nothing’s working today.”
“No?” She laughed. “Not a single trick up those sleeves, then?”
Fred allowed himself to wonder if maybe they’d have time for a dinner and a movie before his arrest. If maybe she’d visit him in prison.
“Why don’t you tell me about what’s up that sleeve.” He gestured at her forearm. For a while, she and Fred both regarded it.
“I didn’t want to get out of bed, his last morning on Earth,” she said. “I’d been sleeping late, as usual, like the sloth that I am. Before he left for work, he tried to pull me out.” She lifted her arm to demonstrate, her hand locking around the air. “I tried to pull him back down. We both gave up.”
She traced with her chewed fingernail a sewn-up rip in the cuff of the sweatshirt.
“For the next few weeks,” she said, “I kept imagining I still felt his grip. Once, I even dreamt it. I was out on the street at night, and everything was rising up, the whole city coming apart. And there he was, pulling my arm, and I was floating too. We got up into space and then I woke up.” Her smile faded. “I kept hoping the dream would continue. That I’d find out where we were going, where the city was going. It felt unfinished.”
She began turning a white-gold band on her right ring finger around and around. She must have switched it to her right hand after losing Lionel, Fred thought.
“I told you something about lucid dreaming? It was something I’d read about in school. I started reading more. I taught myself how. It’s not difficult, when you’re driven to learn it. And then I dreamt about him all the time. I took us up to space again. We watched the city remake itself up there and fly away. Then we started going to other planets. He’s a sci-fi buff. I thought he’d like that.” She was smiling again. “We went to a planet with blue trees, a planet with moons on top of moons. They were so vivid. I found it was easier in the daytime. At night I couldn’t control things as well. They could turn into nightmares. Things could happen to him. So I got a bartending job. And I slept in the day. I’d pretty much dropped out of school by then, anyway.”
Her gaze wandered to the snow globe on the shelf, its plastic skyscrapers poking out of the murky, half-evaporated water within.
“At some point we got tired of schlepping around the galaxy, or I did, and we found the city again. It was off at the edge of the universe. It had put itself back the way it was, and built a bubble around itself. No people, no planet, just the city, everything safe and perfect. That’s where we started spending our time. Walking through the streets, hanging out in bars, parks, wherever. But more and more, we just stayed in our apartment.” A small, snorting laugh escaped her. “We cleaned the bathroom. We made the place so clean. And then I’d wake up to the usual wreck.”
She wrapped her arms around her shins.
“Then I started to forget his face. I’d see him for a second, but the next second I’d be alone. Or I’d see a body but no face. Then I couldn’t dream him at all. I don’t sleep much this time of year.”
Unfolding herself, Mira stretched her legs to the floor. For the first time, Fred could read the logo on her sweatshirt:
Gore
Lieberman
“Maybe I do need to rest, though,” she decided.
“That sounds like a good idea.”
She nodded. With a few languid blinks, her eyelids had drifted down. Fred watched her for a minute. There were two questions he’d been wanting to ask her all day. He was about to speak when her eyes popped open again.
“Oh,” she whispered, “I get it.”
“Get what?”
“What that look of yours meant. When I told you I saw you in my session.”
Her own look was full of marvel. He waited, not saying anything. He wanted her to be the one to say it.
“You thought it was your brother! You thought it was George, didn’t you?”
He felt his face freeze. He’d been about to break out in a smile.
A spooked little laugh escaped her. “Do you really think it could have been?”
Fred followed her gaze to the low ceiling tiles. When his eyes came down, hers were waiting. He forced that smile the rest of the way. The answer she wanted.
She smiled too, more genuinely than he did.
“Wow,” she said. “Wow.”
For a while, she looked thoughtful. Then, soon, sleepy again. Her eyes, once more, began to flutter.
“Hey, Mira.”
“Uh-huh?” she murmured.
As for his first question, regarding dinner and a movie, he didn’t bother. If she couldn’t tell why else she might have seen his face rather than Lionel’s, Fred knew her answer already.
“That reject session. Vacuus.” He took the folded blanket from a shelf above the nightlight and laid it over her. “What did that one do?”
“Don’t really remember.” A dreamy wave of her fingers. “Whole grab bag, I think. Direct brainstem interference. Mirror neuron patterning. GABA activation. Fusiform gyrus inhibition. Mu receptor stimulation.”
“What receptor?”
“Mu?” Her eyes were closed now. “Opioid receptor. It’s a Greek letter.”
That Absence was back, with its unreal wind, an almost audible hiss, like air from an airlock.
“Oh,” he said.
“Could you turn off the light?”
She rolled to one side, turning her back to him. For now, and, he assumed, for good.
After the onset of George’s coma, Fred had also read an article about how the conscious mind only becomes aware of its decisions a fraction of a second after they’re made. And one about how the sensation of a thinker or doer was a peculiarly organized feedback loop. And personal accounts from mystics of every tradition of having sailed over selfhood’s warped reflection like moons over moonlit puddles. On at least one issue, then, the actual investigators in the realms of spirituality and science seemed to be in lockstep agreement: the self is a conditioned reflex; a needy, greedy concatenation of impulses; a position, ultimately, of ignorance.
He shut Mira’s door gently behind him, and sat at the bare metal desk in the suite’s reception area. Picking them out from among the few remaining coins in his pocket, he laid out the five numbered elevator buttons from the Armation headquarters in a column, 1 at the bottom, 5 at the top. He studied them for a while, like a gypsy reading tea leaves, then opened the camping pack and regarded the solenoids and wires peeking out from the nest of the sleeping bag. In the last month, he’d gone from seeing God as a dream, to seeing the world as a dream, to glimpsing that he himself might be the dream. It seemed he’d failed as an avatara, failed to set anything right. But one battle remained, a taunt from the Vortex, an invitation to dive down its very center.
Vacuus.
Her father had said it was going t
o eat his soul ….
Maybe the plan was insanity. Maybe, as well, Fred thought, he’d never been about getting real. Maybe all his problems in life had stemmed only from an idealism even more hopeless than George’s—for if it was crazy to have faith in faith, how much crazier to have faith in doubt? And maybe it was the case that he’d sacrificed everything he’d had to the ghost of George, and that he was about to sacrifice everything he was to this other ghost of Truth.
But maybe not. Maybe, from the darkness of the magic hat, Truth itself—pure, shining, unobscured by this flailing virtual self—was just waiting to be pulled into the open.
In which case, this was it. Time to get real, for real. Or at least, as Manny would say, not not.
Though just in case there was an easier route to enlightenment, Fred took out his laptop, plugged into a coiled Ethernet cable by the desk, and went to kenshopictures.com. A new link blazed in the center of the page:
“HOLE IN NONE”
A NEW FILM BY MANFRED KENT IN THE ZEN DANISH STYLE
***WATCH IT NOW!!!***
Fred put on his headphones.
The film began with Fred in the too-short motorcycle jacket and a rumpled shirt and tie, riding the brightly lit peoplemover in the Universal Studios theme park.
“Who would watch it?” Fred asked the camera, bleary eyes blinking. He vaguely remembered having said this.
An extended tit-and-ass montage ensued, ending with the synchronized jounce of zoomed-in boobs at Margaritaville.
Next, he was seeing himself staggering through a garden at night, now wearing a suit that wasn’t his. It was George’s suit. It was George’s haircut, too, if wildly mussed.
It was George. From not too long ago. Last summer, Fred thought. George’s final trip to Florida, just after his diagnosis. This must have been the night out with Manny, after George hadn’t been able to go through with his blackmail plan. George stopped, swaying in place. He, too, was drunk. The camera panned through the garden toward what he was looking at: a sculpture of an angel.
Fred again. In the space helmet, in a shaky pool of portable camera light, climbing a chainlink fence. Watching this, Fred’s stomach fashioned a noose from his esophagus and kicked out the diaphragm beneath. Manfred had been with him. And here was the incriminating evidence, freely downloadable to all the world.
George again. The camera was high up, almost directly above him, this time. George deliberated, then reached out and gripped the slope before him, thick with weird shrubs. He began climbing. Off to his left, as the camera swung and righted itself, a sheer stone cliff face, or maybe a wall.
Back to Fred. They were inside now, Fred brandishing the club with both hands, the pigmy city all around.
To George, halfway up the steep slope, starting to wheeze, a wild grimace on his face. His hand slipped and he almost slid back into the darkness. Offscreen, Manfred’s gruff, close-miked laugh.
“Come on, kid,” Manny bellowed.
“I told you I have cancer, you old fuck,” George shouted, slurring the words.
To Fred, on a green. He wound up, nearly toppled from the space helmet’s weight, righted himself, swung. The camera tracked the ball as it rolled up and down the arc of the Brooklyn Bridge, plunking into the hole at City Hall.
To George, nearly at the top of the slope. The camera pulled back for a long shot of the shadowy scenery behind him: a crenellated wall, a Roman temple, pale in the darkness.
To Fred. A new challenge. He swung. The ball rolled up the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, off the roof, and plummeted to Fifth Avenue straight down an open manhole.
George, one hand over the edge. The other. Clambering up and standing. Atop the mount. The gardens and pools and walking paths of the Holy Land spread out below. Off beyond the high wall, an empty parking lot aglow under sodium lights, cars whizzing by on I-4. And George peering out at it all. Stunned by the sight, his head, his whole upper body tilting to the side.
This must have been that moment, Fred thought. The second summit. Infinite Pretalokas. No heaven to be found.
But a few seconds later, George grinned. Then he was laughing, a loud, open laugh, up at the night. It had been years since Fred had seen him so happy. What was he thinking? What was he seeing? How could seeing nothing but limbos make him happy?
Could this also be, Fred wondered, when George’s plan began taking shape? The messages? The sabotage? The haunting of all of them after he was gone?
But his laugh seemed too joyous for revenge, too free.
Why was George free? Fred didn’t understand. He didn’t get any of this.
Now a long shot, from under the arm of the Statue of Liberty, of Fred, a bulbous-headed monster, facing the Towers down.
“Go on,” Manny shouts, close by. “You’re swinging nothing but aces, baby!”
The shot closes in. Fred’s helmet swivels to face the ball. Swivels to the Towers again. The club goes up. Stays up. He’s marching down the green.
“Oh fuck,” Manny says.
Fred spins full circle, bright club wheeling. New York goes kaleidoscopic as Manny starts to run.
You can relax all on your own by now. It’s gotten so easy you barely need me here, barely need me to tell you anything. All you have to hear is
five
and the gates are open. Pretty cool, huh? All you have to hear is
four
and here come those soothing waves of relaxation rolling through you. Go ahead. Splash. Feel them everywhere at once. Torso! Hips! Arms and legs! Neck and head! All I have to say is
three
and—splash—through your fingers and toes, through the tips of your hair, even, your whole body sighing with the pleasure of it. All I have to say is
two
and—splash—waves soaking your brain, like water into a sponge, your mind so relaxed that even this picture of your brain like a sponge is going soft at the edges now. Going gentle and fuzzy and dark. So that at the count of
one
you’re just floating in dark, dark space. City gone. People gone. Just the Earth and the moon, the sun and the stars, and you. Just you and the universe. Maybe you never thought you could be so alone. Yet here you are, so relaxed, and everything is fine. And now you’re going to do something more amazing still. It’s time to let the universe go.
Zoom. Earth going one way. Sun another. Off goes the moon. The zillion stars, like a zillion little candles. Blow them out.
Nothing to grasp. And nothing to do.
No time. No space. So where, so when, are you?
From Mira’s lab that Wednesday night, Fred returned to his former office. The detectives weren’t waiting for him, but even if they never showed up here, the hedge fund would be breaking down the walls over the weekend. He couldn’t go back to his parents’ apartment, or to the hospital. He’d be picked up from either sooner or later, and in any case he needed seclusion.
So he took George’s pack and bedroll down to the boiler room.
Dried, orange-brown soup still streaked the floor. Not a regular stop on the janitor’s rounds. It seemed possible that no one would come in all summer—maybe not even until mid-fall, to turn on the furnace. In three trips, using the freight elevator and a dolly from the trash room, he moved the mini-fridge, the microwave, the couch cushions, and the cantaloupe box, which he’d filled with Sam’s remaining canned goods and the shower hose.
The only remaining task was to put the Prayerizer, still humming away in his corner of the space, out of its misery. He couldn’t bear to do this without hooking it up to his laptop and checking its prayer list one last time.
There were over five hundred of them. Prayers to have the world healed and prayers to have it done away with in holy ways. Prayers for marriages to be mended, loves requited. Prayers for cancer remissions, for peaceful passings. A prayer for a perfect 1600 on the SAT of one Ken Hwang. More prayers for Fred’s death. And all the way at the bottom, the very first: Fred’s plea to Whomsoever might
be listening to for fuck’s sake DO something. All told, the supercomputer had cycled through these REM statements over 303 trillion times.
He yanked the plug, feeling—ridiculously, he knew—like he was cutting throats in church. Within its metal carapace, the internal fans slowed to a stop. He walked out, then turned. The overgrown thing seemed so forlorn in the empty office that he couldn’t close the door on it.
So he took the Prayerizer with him. Using the screwdrivers in his Swiss Army knife, he spent the next hours breaking it down into its movable pieces, carting them down to the boiler room, and reassembling them. It only just fit in the cramped space, its backside pressed at an angle against the boiler, its left rear corner wedged between two water heaters, its right rear corner mashing the pipes along the cobwebbed cinderblock wall. There was no Internet connection down here, but it could keep reciting what prayers it knew.
He realized there wasn’t enough floor space left for the sleeping bag. He set the microwave on the mini-fridge next to the mainframe’s floor fan, used them as stairs, and unrolled the bag atop the giant computer. What with the water heaters and the fifteen billion prayers per minute, it was hot in the two feet of airspace at the top of the room, but the basement was otherwise cool, and by wedging Sam’s desk fan into the pipes that ran along the ceiling directly overhead, Fred kept the air circulating well enough. For a while, he lay there on his side, testing out the berth, staring into the room’s single bare bulb a few feet off. Before long, he became conscious of a slow tapping sound, and a spreading heat on his leg. Hot water was dripping from one of the insulated pipes above him. He tied Sam’s towel around the leak.
At last, it was time to set up the God helmet. The circular blue tops of the two water heaters in the corner by Fred’s head served as his night tables. He placed the helmet itself on a red plush end cushion atop one of the heaters, and the amplifier box and his laptop on a second cushion atop the other. The power cords from the laptop and amplifier and Sam’s desk fan ran in a taut, ugly tangle to a surge protector perched on a pipe halfway down the wall, into which the fridge and microwave and floor fan were also plugged. The surge protector’s own plug ran to an extension cord, which in turn snaked across the floor to the room’s only socket in the corner by the door.