Luminarium (13 page)

“What does it feel like, this energy stuff?”

She considered. “It’s different at different times. And different people feel it in different ways.”

“So how do you know it’s the same thing you’re all talking about? How do you know it’s real at all?”

His voice had risen. He regretted this, as well as the accusation in his tone. But she didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah. Sometimes we all sit around and ask ourselves if we’re crazy.” She thought, then added quietly, “But it is real. The more you do it, the more you know it.” Once more, she fixed on him that searching, appraising gaze. “You should come next week. We could give you an attunement, and you could see for yourself.”

An attunement. The term sounded comfortingly technical, as if they might simply replace a couple misfiring spark plugs and set him running good as new. He thought of Mira’s question, so value-neutral, nonjudgmental—why
hadn’t
he tried it?

“George’s energy was so strong tonight,” his mother said, a near whisper. “All of us felt it.”

“You did?”

She nodded. “Above his crown chakra, especially. And his throat chakra, too. I felt like he was getting ready.”

Part of Fred wanted to fall into her arms and cry. Part of him wanted to scream and shake her until she snapped out of it.

“Getting ready?” he asked.

“To come back to his body.” She smiled, her weary face luminous. “And
speak
.”

Five

… Just relax. Nothing to do now. Nothing to worry about. Nothing even to think about. For these next few minutes, just be free, as free and relaxed as you know you can be. As I count down from five to one, you may notice a feeling of deepening relaxation with each number, and with every word I say. And at the count of
                                                                                               
four
                                                                                                    without trying to change it, just focus on the gentle motion of your breath, flowing in and out. With four, you may notice your breath becoming slow and relaxed, and the rest of you also becoming slow and relaxed. Just imagine your breath seeping into every cell of your body as you breathe in, and seeping out as you breathe out: your whole body relaxing with every breath. So that when
       
three
             comes, when three is here, and it is here, you may have already become aware of how heavy your arms and legs have gotten. A heavy, drowsy, comfortable feeling in your arms and legs, so that the more you focus on your arms, your legs, the more relaxed they are, and it’s getting to the point where you can’t even lift them, they’re so heavy now. Go ahead and see for yourself how heavy they are. It’s funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to relax? And you can just let go now, even deeper, at the count of
       
two
             and notice this warm, drowsy heaviness spreading through you. Outward from your heart in rippling, relaxing waves. Rippling through the muscles of your back and abdomen, through your internal organs. Down through your hips and legs and feet and out through your toes. Out through your shoulders and arms and hands and fingertips. And up, in a great, warm wave, through your neck. Maybe you’re already thinking about how it will feel when it washes up into your head. Go ahead and let it, feel it ripple over your face, relaxing every little muscle—around your mouth, around your eyes, all the muscles of your scalp. Now let it seep deep into your brain….
                                                                          
one
                                                                               So deeply relaxed. Your mind too heavy for words. Let the words disappear. Only pictures, now. I want you to picture the city, late at night. No cars, no people, no noise. Just you, out on a quiet street. It could be any street you want, Broadway, or any one of the avenues, whatever you like. It’s just you there, you and a chair, a comfortable recliner, in the middle of the sidewalk. You’re comfortable and reclined, and looking up, you can see the buildings like tall cliffs reaching into the night sky, the long, dark canyon of them stretching in both directions.

There, look. A little white balloon, rising past the windows and up into the blackness.

And there, a sheet of newsprint rising up, caught in a breeze.

And one of those outdated, pink “While You Were Out” memos slips floating out an open window.

And it’s not just the breeze, is it? Because here come other things drifting out the windows. Here come chairs, and desks, and copiers, and bulletin boards, all as weightless as that first helium balloon. Here come phones and keyboards and monitors, twirling slowly by the wires that join them all together. Here come pens and pencils, and the windowpanes too, the millions of them, rising into a long, sparkling cloud, like a second Milky Way. Here come the filing cabinets floating out, and drawers from the cabinets, and papers from the drawers. There goes a city bus, its wheels still slowly turning as it passes through the cloud of papers. The whole city is rising, dancing free in the sky, and the freer it is, the more peaceful you can feel. Out come the bricks, now, joining the dance, streams of them pouring steadily upward. And the shelves from the stores. And the items from the shelves—jackets and sneakers, vitamins and magazines—falling away from you, falling slowly up.

Maybe you’re wondering: where are they going, all those pieces of the city?

Just think of it as a break, for now, a vacation. Just let all those things take their well-deserved rest, let them float and twinkle and rise. Just picture their freedom, from here in your chair, watching your city up in the air …

The red bulb.

The control room window, black shade drawn.

The black perforations in the white ceiling tiles, a night sky in reverse. The glossy galaxy, masking-taped to the tiles, creased from former folds. Must have come in a magazine.

No expansion. Maybe it wouldn’t happen today. He should probably be relieved if it didn’t, Fred told himself, but he knew he’d be disappointed. The spontaneous outbreaks of oneness had for the most part ended with the birthday girl, a day after the last session. For a day or two after that, he thought he sensed an episode coming on again a few times, but none did, and when they didn’t, he began to miss them. He wandered around the hospital, through the coma ward and its sleepers minded by nurses and machines, through the various other wards, getting out wherever the elevator doors happened to open, through Radiology, Endoscopy, Rehabilitative Services, trying to join with them, merge all those disparate pieces of suffering with his own, fit them all together like a puzzle to see what the whole picture meant or was any good for. And he sat by George, of course, trying to expand and contain him, but here the effort felt fruitless in a different way: expansion wasn’t the right tool. George was already a part of him. But a no-longerknowable part. Fred felt like the neurology patient he saw surrounded by doctors and residents the other day, a guy who could only sense one half of his body, the other hanging limp.

Fred wandered through Neurology more than once, the possibility of running into Mira in the back of his mind. He wanted to meet her on level ground, as it were, not as a test subject looking helplessly up at her from this or that recliner. He wanted to challenge her about this “faith without ignorance.” From her conviction, it had seemed like something personal, something she herself had come to possess. He wanted to know how, how she’d managed it, with all that scientific reason so evidently crammed into her brain.

And he wouldn’t have minded chewing her out about his arrest.

And seeing if he could make her smile again, too, just to reassure himself that the moment of impossible connection he’d felt with her after the last smile had been nothing more than a neuronal misfire.

But he hadn’t run into her, nor had he really expected to; he was pretty sure both she and the other guy, the older man behind the glass, were academics, with no reason to be in the hospital other than to post the occasional flyer and stock their experiments with desperate fish like him. For all his and Mira’s imagined conversating, in any event, when she’d sat him down in the chair ten minutes ago, they’d barely managed hellos. “How are you?” she’d asked, in a clipped sort of way, unbuttoning his shirt.

“OK,” he’d said, not knowing whether the question was clinical or friendly or just the usual formality. “How are you?”

She hadn’t answered for a moment, maybe considering how such a question from a test subject such as he should be dealt with. It was a hot day for a long-sleeved blouse. He could smell the not unpleasant scent of her sweat, jasmined with deodorant.

“OK,” she’d finally hazarded, swirling gel over his heart.

She’d pasted him with electrodes, pressed on the helmet. He’d idly watched the sway of her skirt as she left, then looked over to find the man behind the window giving him a stern look over his reading glasses. Ten minutes. Maybe twelve. Still no expansion. Maybe a lightheadedness, nothing more. He wondered if his desire for it was getting in the way, if it would only come when not watched for.

He tried to let his mind roam farther afield. He thought about those emails again, for the thousandth time in the last few days. Tomorrow was Tuesday the 22nd, the date on the messages. Would anything happen at 5:00
PM
tomorrow, and if so, what? Another message? Or something else? In his efforts to figure out what avataras might have to do with George, with either of them, he’d done some more research over the weekend. Among the prominent avataras in Hindu mythology, one—or rather, two—piqued his interest: a pair of identical twin avataras, Nara and Narayana. According to one site, Nara stood for the human, Narayana for the divine. Other sites told the story of Nara and Narayana doing battle with a power-seeking demigod named Sahasra Kavacha, so named because he was born protected by a thousand
kavachas
, or coats of armor. In order for just a single one of those coats to be broken, the attacker would have to fight him for a thousand years, and the moment it shattered, the attacker would die. The attacker’s only means of cheating death was to do penance for a thousand years. Since Nara and Narayana were twins—one-in-two—they were uniquely qualified to perform both of these feats at once. Nara attacked while Narayana prayed, and when, after a millennium, Nara broke a kavacha and died, Narayana’s long penance earned him the boon of getting Nara’s life back, whereupon Narayana would take his turn attacking and Nara would take his penancing, the two of them spelling each other down through the millennia. According to one site, they succeeded in killing Sahasra Kavacha; according to another, Sahasra Kavacha fled with his last coat of armor intact but a new era was ushered in regardless. There was a general concurrence that the kavachas, the coats of armor, symbolized layers of delusion.

Was any of this a reference to him and George? They’d always rejected the idea of twins being one-in-two, deriding those who would tell one of them something and expect the other to know it later, or befriend one of them and talk to the other in a familiar tone. In plenty of circumstances, they reacted in opposite ways. On a spontaneous dead-of-winter camping trip, upon finding a steep mountain trail covered with ice, George had insisted on clambering up it on all fours, while Fred had driven to the next level and waited for hours, wondering all the while if he’d be better off waiting at the bottom for George to slip and tumble back down. In similar fashion, a few years later, while Fred had gone up to the office roof to watch the smoking towers with an old Walkman radio and an all-but-useless cell phone (and while Sam, fearing looting riots, sarin gas, and all-out war, was busy making repeated trips from the office to the local deli in a filter mask, buying up all the canned goods they’d sell him), George, unbeknownst to him and Sam, was marching from his Battery Park apartment straight into the coming cataclysm.