Luminarium (58 page)

“I think you’re both fucking nuts.”

As Sam painstakingly
measured out and marked points on the space helmet, Fred laid out the tools, thinking about one of the first pieces he’d read to George in the hospital, the speculative writings of a quantum physicist. How two correlated particles affecting each other at a distance might actually be just two different three-dimensional projections of the same six-dimensional particle, like two videotapes of the same fish shot from the front and side of its tank. How what you perceive as movement might just be the unfolding of patterned information in this higher dimension. How from a still higher perspective, not only all inanimate matter but all the patternings of life might be thoroughly intertwined, unfolding from it and refolding back into it continually: plants forming from seeds-sun-water-soil-air; systems marrying systems giving birth to systems; brain enfolding mind and mind in turn enfolding brain / body / the entire material universe, in a meta-system whose ultimate ground is neither mind nor matter but an actuality beyond both, a single totality, all of it and all beings changing as they are changed, enfolding one another in a creative and generative embrace.

Tightening the router bit on the end of the drill, he wondered how things might look from a higher order in which faith and doubt were reconciled, in which God and no God, even, were one in the same. In which it wouldn’t be any kind of contradiction whatsoever that the only true place for God to be was nowhere—to all outward appearances false, by all objective measurements absent, real only to the extent one could, through some arduous test, some ingenious stratagem, stretch a portal to that nowhere and see Him eye to eye. Now George would get a glimpse through that doorway before he jumped. And if in the end, Fred thought, there was no door, was not even a nowhere, then at least, for George’s sake, this flat old world would have striven to appear better than it was.

On the floor between Fred and Sam, the helmet’s white dome shone in the lamplight, the lines and the dozen spots Sam had drawn on it giving it the look of a ladybug’s shell.

“Careful about the angle,” Sam said, his eyes a scalded red from the drink, the confession, the work on the helmet, the effort to sober up. “Stop every centimeter or so and let me check it.”

The helmet was pretty well hardened, even against Vartan’s diamondtipped bit, but once through the outer layer, the rest was easy. Working slowly, the two of them checking and double-checking, the drilling took an hour. Fred could have borrowed his father’s glue gun as well, but he didn’t want to scuff up the solenoids—he’d done his best to conceal the device’s absence, placing a thick book from Egghart’s shelf in the bubblewrap under the folders at the bottom of the locker; he thought there was a pretty good chance he could return it tomorrow night, when he met Mira again, without her or her father knowing it had been gone. Anyway, the fit was snug enough that securing them wasn’t much of a problem, even in the three holes he and Sam had made in the faceplate. Some tape and a bit of wedged toilet paper was all it took. They set the amplifier next to Fred’s laptop on the cantaloupe box, and the helmet on Sam’s folding chair. They plugged the cable from the back of the device into the laptop, and the power cord into a strip. Fred switched the power on and brought up the software.

“You want to try it?” he asked Sam.

“Fuck no,” Sam said, and staggered off to the couch.

The thing had to be tested by someone. Fred picked up the helmet, sat down, and fit it over his head. Could this be the first time? He supposed he’d had other things on his mind. Still, it seemed funny he’d never had the impulse to try it on. Indeed, he found it comfortably padded, so well fitting as to feel completely natural and familiar, like it had been made to order. His breath fogged the faceplate. He decided to try Week One. It was the least cognitively disruptive, and he wanted to be functional in the morning. He navigated to the first file in the
spiritus
folder:
complexo.
He assumed the files were in order, but to be sure, tried
complexo
in an online Latin-English dictionary, which returned: “encompass.” That had to be it.

Running it was easy as opening a spreadsheet.

A high-pitched sound.

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 Presence, 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.