Luminarium (16 page)

Down the benches, a guy in thick glasses opened the
Post
, the cover showing the purported killer of a child beauty queen sitting in a firstclass cabin:

SNAKE
ON A
PLANE

“Sense, sense,” proclaimed the Rasta.

Fred lowered his eyes to the checkered shoes splayed before him, and picturized that when he looked up, he’d see Mira coming down the path, lunch bag in hand, eyes meeting his with not-unhappy surprise. Where else would she go for lunch, on a day like this? It was practically inevitable, no? He prayerized for this one small boon, this really not terribly difficult or overly miraculous event. Of prayerization—step two—the positive-thinking author, Pastor Norman Vincent Peale, had written that you were supposed to invoke the aid of God in plain, unadorned speech, to talk to Him in your head all the time, to go to Him with your problems as you would to an old friend—a powerful old friend—on whose help you knew you could rely. Perhaps if, like Peale, Fred had been the close friend of presidents (apparently the pastor had known both Eisenhower and Nixon, the latter of whom sent Peale to Vietnam to spur the troops on to victory with the aid of positive thinking) the strategy would have worked; but as it was, making giant effigies of the slackers he’d known just wasn’t doing it for Fred. The prospect of an even bigger George floating over him, like some doomed dirigible, only increased his anxiety. He settled for imagining God as something in between George and him, a kind of other version of himself—not because he considered himself any more omnipotent than his former coworkers, but because, logically speaking, it just seemed more self-confidence-inducing. Kind of like that scarcely imaginable future self for whom everything had worked out, only more so, and bigger. A divine twin, then, existing on some other plane of reality, or outside of reality altogether. Listening to his every thought. Listening to him dreaming Him up as if from nothing. Listening to him thinking that, come to think of it, he wasn’t exactly wowed by how the whole positive-thinking experiment in Vietnam had played out.

“Sense smoke,” he heard the Rasta say. “Smoke sense.”

Regressing to his usual, not-so-positive thinking, Fred wondered which was more unlikely—George waking up, waking up as something approaching his former self, without too much irreversible brain damage, paralysis, or other physical debility, able to fight off the lymphoma and fight his way through the massive amounts of physical and mental rehabilitation that would most likely be required; or George ever consenting to stand on a golf course with any Gibbon or Lipton or Gretta. In the early days, after George’s initial dubiousness about Armation, it had seemed like he might have been getting more sanguine about the partnership. The first phases of the virtual training environment were exclusively about dialogue, negotiation and peacekeeping, enabling soldiers to virtually interact with people playing the parts of villagers, merchants, tribal leaders. George saw humanitarian potential in the technology, how it could bridge cultural divides. Far from a shooter game, he liked to say, they were making a thinker, a feeler. This was how George would describe it in restaurants, at parties. At least until the shooting began.

After that, George took a slight step back in the company, and Fred took one forward, overseeing the design challenges of adapting Urth to its new needs, the move seeming as natural as if he were spelling George at the wheel on a road trip. Sam began stepping up too, on the technical end, he and Fred working more symbiotically together as they raced to meet the endless benchmarks and deadlines. Fred allowed himself to think that, with time, George would grow more involved again. But one night in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War, George called a meeting for the three of them, a sober analog to their founding night out at the bar five years before, this one taking place in an empty diner south of the office. George sat them in a corner and told them he had something to say. He wasn’t going to lecture them about the idiocy of the war, he said. He wanted to talk about something way weirder, and scarier: the Military-Entertainment Complex.

“We’re using videogames to recruit, to train, even fight,” George began. “Our simulations are becoming more realistic and immersive and violent. It’s desensitizing people. Not just to violence. But to reality itself.”

Fred squeezed his temples. Sam balled his fists on the table. They’d all been working nearly hundred-hour weeks converting satellite maps of likely battlefields to 3-D. They didn’t have time for George’s philosophizing. “I know,” George said. “You both think I’m nuts. But it’s even bigger than that. Things are really changing.” He scratched his head, further ruffling his unkempt hair. “Military contractors are building private armies. Media conglomerates are playing both sides against the middle. There are no reporters anymore, only pundits. Shouting their heads off. Everyone’s blogging. Forming cells. Arming themselves.” He looked from Sam to Fred. “Everyone’s decided at once that reality’s up for grabs. Everyone’s grabbing.”

Fred looked out the window, watched a Hummer back into a bicycle chained to a parking meter, crumpling the back wheel in half. Sam picked up his butter knife and fork and began slotting the one through the other, stabbing at his own knuckles. They both knew where this speech was headed.

“It’s time to bug out of this partnership,” George said, laying his hands on the tabletop. “We need to get back to our core values. I’ve got an idea for an even better way to realize them. We can keep making a world closer to home than the old Urth, more like the real one. Except players could find a whole other game embedded. A game of spiritual evolution.”

George went on, talking about how they needed to steer players toward constructive and nonaggressive behaviors. How rather than amassing and plundering and hoarding their resources, players could be rewarded for giving them away. How players could be compensated with new powers for the ones they were relinquishing. Rewarded with gradually increasing powers of perception. Allowed to see ever newer and brighter layers to the virtual reality. So that, over time, the old material existence would matter less and less. So that at the highest levels, Urth could be revealed as a place of pure energy. Or something like that. George was still working on this part, he confessed, the whole issue of how goodness was to be rewarded.

Sam, by that point, was using his knife and fork to saw his napkin in half. Fred was staring into the Formica, angry and sick. George must have known they’d be dead against dissolving the partnership, that they’d outvote him if it came to that. But he didn’t stop. He downed his coffee and delved into the financials, how they could outsource, to India, or Eastern Europe, how full of cheap programming labor the world now was.

“For fuck’s sake, George,” Fred finally said. “Aren’t you just making the same mistake as everyone else? Thinking you can make the world the way you want it? Thinking reality’s up for grabs?”

George’s look was stupefied, like Fred had just opened his mouth and drooled on the table.

“It
is
up for grabs,” George said.

Sweating already in their white polyester, Fred and Vartan hand-
trucked the crate full of tricks into the ground-floor entrance of a Gramercy Park townhouse—which looked to be worth so much money Fred was amazed they’d let children inside the place, much less throw a party for them—through a corridor lined with pop art and smelling of varnish, and down some narrow stairs to a cavernous entertainment room in the finished basement. A leather couch and a semicircle of home theater chairs, so massive they looked to have been made for a family of ogres, sat under dimmed cones of canned lighting. To at least some degree, their apparent size was an optical illusion, produced by the smallness of the twenty or so kindergartners sprawling atop them and around them on the carpet. The giant projection screen at the front of the room was blank, but anime-style videogame sprites danced upon two smaller plasma screens to either side. Those children who weren’t playing or watching them were huddled around handheld game players. As Fred set up for the show, a wand slipped from his fingers, then a stuffed animal, his hands still stiff from the helmet session, as if he were marionetting them on strings. On the way here, passing an ice cream truck, its chimey jingle had begun twisting strangely and for a second he’d been up above it—far above—sailing over the crowd of kids and tourists on the broad steps of Union Square Park, over the sunbathers on the roof deck of the Zeckendorf, before coming back behind his eyes, opening them, wondering if, for a moment, he’d drifted to sleep. He wasn’t in any shape to be here, and could only hope Vartan’s showmanship would carry them. His father was in high spirits, possibly already high, spinning his bowtie in sage agreement with the hosts, a vaguely beatnik-looking elderly couple in stringy hair and tight slacks, who were going on about how they hated this room, how they wanted their grandson to have some old-fashioned, non-electric entertainment. They went and got the boy, coaxing him from his videogame. He was a pale, dark-haired kid, with hungry half-moon shadows under his eyes, clad in baggy jeans and one of those T-shirts depicting a pair of hands ripping away business attire to reveal a big red S on a bright yellow crest.

Fred wiped his forehead, suddenly woozier. It might have been that trompe l’oeil on the kid’s shirt every bit as much as his name.

“Say hello to the magicians, George,” the grandfather said.

To Fred’s surprise, Vartan’s mustache was edging up into his cheeks, his eyes sleepily serene.

The act began. Trying to stay focused and keep his stomach settled, Fred resolved not to look at the birthday boy, whose imploring, blackhole eyes and first name were more than Fred was ready to deal with at the moment. For the most part—save for a couple of ill-advised glances, each time finding those eyes huger and hungrier for his attention than the last—he was succeeding. Despite his disequilibrium and not-quitere-embodied reflexes, all was going normally enough. Then came the levitation trick.

It started with Fred shutting his eyes, balling his fists, and making a constipated face, and Vartan, in response, wheeling his arms as he found himself rising six inches off the floor. Once he’d landed, Vartan retaliated by huffing and puffing and doing the same to Fred. Next, to weight himself down, Vartan grabbed hold of a Styrofoam anvil, clutching it to his chest. Fred strained all the harder and levitated him all the same. As Vartan got ready to levitate Fred again, Fred made a show of looking around, then locked eyes with the birthday boy and gestured him over.

Overjoyed, the boy bounded into Fred’s arms. Quickly, so he wouldn’t have to look at him, Fred swept the kid up onto his back, his head to the right and a little behind Fred’s own, his humid breath on Fred’s ear. The kid was oddly light, lighter than George—Fred’s brother George—had been twenty-five years ago. Fred’s feet didn’t quite feel anchored to the floor. He reeled the gimmick, a spring-loaded, mirrored metal prop, down his pant leg and backed onto it with his heel, struggling against the feeling that he should be struggling more. It was too easy to keep his balance. He felt like he was dreaming. He must have closed his eyes. The next thing he knew, he was out again, up again, over his own head, seeing the waving kid on his back, and his own somnolent upturned face, and too strangely far beneath him, those checkered shoes, themselves hovering in the air.

“Fainting.” Vartan raised
an eyebrow. “Nice touch.”

Vartan reached under the chair for the vaporizer he’d built for himself—after George’s cancer had spread lungward and Holly’s and Fred’s complaints had grown more shrill—using a light bulb, a glass jar, a block of wood, and a rubber tube. Vartan and Fred were sitting at home in the living room, in their undershirts and jeans, their tuxes airing themselves on coathangers in front of the air conditioner.

Vartan switched on the bulb, waiting for the little tray of buds atop it to cook. “I wonder if we could work a whole bit around fainting. We could hypnotize each other with watches, that kind of thing.”

When Fred had come to, the birthday boy was back in the audience, the kids all laughing, and Vartan was behind Fred, arms wrapped around his torso. Fred had no recollection of putting the kid down, or of the final bit of the sequence being played out, which it must have done for Vartan not to have noticed anything amiss—Vartan coming over and picking Fred up to keep him from levitating him again, but Fred levitating both of them (really it was Vartan standing on the gimmick). Fred wasn’t sure at what point he’d gone limp, or how long he’d been hanging there in Vartan’s arms before hearing Vartan whistling in his ear. When he’d looked up at his father, Vartan had eyed him with grudging respect, like Fred had just pulled a fast one. Then Vartan had let go, and Fred had almost collapsed before finding his legs.

Bringing the rubber tube to his mouth, Vartan inhaled the mist from the jar. He’d originally started getting the pot for George, having heard from an actor friend that it eased the nausea of chemo. Vartan and George had eaten brownies together a few times, then George hadn’t wanted it anymore, and Vartan had.