Luminarium (47 page)

And yet, it was at least a skill well within his competence. He might not be capable of sitting like a pretzel in an oven, puffing up all golden with faith and bliss. But
doubting?
If that was the game, couldn’t he win? Hadn’t he been training for it all his life?

Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …

The doubts came immediately. He didn’t have to go looking. He doubted meditation would do him any good, doubted he was doing anything at all. Every minute on the mu was a minute squandered. How much time did he have left to turn things around for himself? Why wasn’t he with George at the hospital? His brother might be dying this minute. How selfish could he get? Every mu-laden breath was like taking a million dollars and setting them on fire.

He did it for half an hour and collapsed, putting the pillow over his face and screaming. He lay there waiting for himself to do something else, something other than meditate or vegetate, to do any one of those infinite number of arguably more useful things he might do. He did none of them. He sat up and started again:

Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …

His nerves ached with frustration. His legs ached from the halflotus position. He doubted the aches. He doubted the very muscles and nerves. He thought of George, unable to move, unable to do anything but breathe (and now, not even that unassisted). Maybe this sitting here aching and unmoving was a taste of what George felt like. Maybe this was what Fred had been putting him through.

Just about always,
there was the urge to give up this accursed mu-ing and lie down, an urge which, as long as possible, had to be resisted. The minute he did, the sleeping bag’s soft lining would have him drifting back to the softness and heat of Mira when he’d caught her on the steps. And from there to the childlike delight he’d felt at those too-happy, too-intimate, postcoital kisses. To the sick, sinking feeling at their explanation. And the sorrowful sight of her balled up in that chair, in that room full of pictures.

He’d sat nearly
until dawn that first night, slept until late morning, then sat sweating and breathing through the day, unwilling to go to the hospital, unable, despite the imagined sound of the mu, to ever fully get that other sound, that cancerous, gurgling hiss, out of his ear. At the first sign of dusk, he took his water and urine jugs downstairs and found his parents already home from the hospital and back in their bathrobes. They were in the kitchen, fixing dinner, or rather, breakfast, the same meal Fred had spied them through the skylight eating earlier in the day, Vartan doing the eggs and hash browns by the stove, Holly buttering toast with a shaky hand—her tremors were back, looking worse now than they had in a long while.

Fred stood there holding his jugs behind him. There was nothing necessarily shameful about shuttling a half-gallon of one’s own urine past one’s aging, grieving parents, he was eager to remind himself; nevertheless, he left the jugs outside, and set the table the way it had been at the first breakfast, bringing out the salt and pepper, water and juice, and the mug of tea Holly had made, adding a setting for himself. He hadn’t noticed much of an effect from all the meditation when he’d been doing it, other than pain and intermittent bouts of creeping desperation, but now that he was back in the apartment, he was noticing perhaps a slight change, an intimate quality to the things around him, as though a layer of plastic wrap had been peeled away from it all. The smell of the orange juice was as bright and sharp as ground glass; its sunburst color, its soursweet taste, its coldness in his throat were almost too much to process. Vartan plated the eggs and potatoes with loud chops of the spatula, the terrycloth collar of his robe turned up like some spy-novel overcoat. From its pocket, he produced a handful of forks and knives and tossed them beside the plates. Holly, her hand trembling, set down the quaking plate of toast and gave it a shove so that it slid to the center of the table. There was something unconstrained, and faintly disdainful, about their movements.

The three of them sat down. Vartan studied his food. Holly sipped her tea, the mug barely making it to her lips. Fred chewed, the buttery, faintly sulfurous eggflesh springing in his mouth.

He asked how George was. Her tone too casual, Holly told him that every time the nurses tried unhooking George from the ventilator, that sound came back and his breathing started to fail. And a CT scan was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

Vartan picked up his battery-powered pepper mill, held it a full foot over his plate, and depressed the button overlong, watching, expressionless, as his eggs and cottage cheese turned gray.

Fred assured them he’d be there for the scan. They hadn’t asked about his relocation to the roof, hadn’t even seemed surprised, perhaps because it was always where he and George had gone as teenagers to get some space and sort things out. Nor had it seemed to matter to them that he hadn’t gone with them to the hospital today. They had cut back on their hours, too.

“You’ll have to stand guard by the door next time, Vart,” Holly said.

Vartan nodded vaguely.

“Why?” Fred asked.

He could tell she didn’t really want to talk about this, either. She bunched her bathrobe tighter around her neck, despite the summer heat. It was her goose-down robe—a long-ago Christmas gift she usually reserved for winter.

“Those patients keep wandering in, wanting Reiki,” she said. “I had to sit there with my hands tucked under my armpits, talking about how tired I was, until they finally took the hint and left.”

It wasn’t just embarrassment about having to hide her tremors. She sounded disgusted, with the patients, with herself. Fred wondered if she’d stopped even doing Reiki on George.

“Manny wants to come up,” Vartan announced.

“Oh God no.” Holly aimed a trembling fork at her eggs, inadvertently sawing them. “What, does he want to film it?”

She and Vartan, to Fred’s surprise, shared a smile. The joke made him smile as well, though neither of them was looking his way.

“He doesn’t think he’s staying here,” she said, “does he?”

Vartan palpated his beard, almost as thick as his mustache now. “Knowing him, he probably does.”

“
Hey
,” she said, doing a reasonably good impression, bobbling her head, flinging out her arms. “
Where can I get a baked ziti around here?
”

“Try a restaurant,” Vartan said, playing his part. His beard had ticked to one side, but there was something missing behind his eyes.

“He actually found one! A frozen baked-ziti dinner in our freezer! Do you remember that?”

Holly’s pale face shone. The puffy skin beneath her eyes had the bluish hue of bruised meat. She and Vartan were both smiling, or almost, as they relived this scene with Manfred from before Fred’s and George’s birth, and Fred felt himself to be just outside their circle. When Holly brought her tea to her lips, her hand shook so much that globules of liquid hopped over the rim and onto her plate, and without drawing attention to the act, or even seeming to notice, Vartan reached into his robe pocket, brought forth a straw, and dropped it into her mug.

The phone started ringing, over at the desk. Neither of them moved.

“Should I get that?” Fred said.

His parents regarded their plates. They probably thought it was the hospital.

The machine picked up. It was Dot, the elf, sounding effervescent as usual. She said they were planning a Street Reiki session at the Empire State Building tomorrow at five.

“They’re doing it as a group now,” Holly exclaimed, in the same faintly overwhelmed and mocking tone she’d employed to talk about Manny. “They want to do all the landmarks.”

“You’re their high priestess,” Vartan observed.

Holly shook her head, as if she’d never had anything to do with the lot of them. “They say it feels like the old days at the relief tent.”

Holly had gotten her first Reiki attunement in late August of 2001, just in time, as it turned out, for her to join the group in one of the relief tents for 9/11 recovery workers that had been erected outside the medical examiner’s office, right down the block from the NYU Medical Center. The tent, divided down the middle by a flap, was half church, with an altar and a priest and a few rows of folding chairs, and half something else—wellness and alternative healing center: a space filled with massage tables and chairs, and staffed, variably, with Swedish and deep tissue and Shiatsu masseurs, reflexologists, Jin Shin Do and therapeutic touch practitioners, Barbara Brennan aura healers, Kabbalah healers, and Reiki healers. When the motorcades would roll in from the main site and the Staten Island landfill, the healers and the priests, along with workers from the cafeteria tent and fire commissioner’s tent and the other tents down the block, would all step out and stand at attention until the body parts were taken from the ambulances and deposited in the morgue. Afterward, people would begin to trickle into the healing center, occasionally family members who had been called in to identify remains, though for the most part the recovery workers themselves. Those firemen, cops, and medical examiners, of course, had had no idea what Reiki was—they’d lie down on the tables expecting some type of massage—though, apparently, most hadn’t been disappointed. After an eight-hour shift digging through wreckage, digging through the flesh, more than muscle relaxation, what they needed may well have been the charged warmth of a pair of hands, hovering yet abundantly near, just sensuous enough to recall them to the blessings of the living, just nonphysical enough to suggest the workings of a higher law.

For the rest of the group, it had been a seminal experience, but while the clients sometimes reported feeling better, Holly herself hadn’t been able to feel much of anything. She’d stopped going, and in the ensuing years had moved on in her usual way to other interests. Fred’s sense was that the group as a whole, prior to George’s illness and Holly’s renewed interest in Reiki, had been languishing, cutting back their meetings. Fred could imagine how
Guy
and the others might feel in looking back on those days, when it seemed they’d had a whole wounded city to heal, how they might miss it like some pristine, primeval island they’d visited once and assumed they’d never see again.

With some difficulty, Holly spread jelly on a slice of wheat toast, as Dot kept talking about how they hadn’t seen Holly at Grand Central Station, how they hoped everything was all right, how they hoped to see her tomorrow, but if not, they’d see her the next day for George’s weekly session. Holly brought ten palsied fingers before her eyes, watching them tremble before she rested her temples in them, muttering that she’d have to cancel that.

Vartan stood with his untouched plate.

“You’re not going to eat?” Fred asked.

“Not much appetite without the pot,” Vartan said.

“You’ve stopped smoking?”

Vartan’s mustache pincered, a momentary frown. “Too much effort. Filling the pipe. Smoking the pipe.”

“I’ll have to tell them I’m sick,” Holly went on to herself.

“You sure?” With measured, floating steps, Vartan walked to the kitchen. “We might wake up tomorrow and find them all standing around our bed.”

“I’ll tell them I’m on vacation,” she said. “I’ll say I’m going to Florida with Sam, to see his new condo.”

Sam, Fred had heard her mention earlier, was leaving town in three days.

Vartan stood by the garbage, staring at the pepper-fuzzed mounds on his plate. With a torque of his wrist, he dumped it sidelong, plate and all.

The dried sparrow
turd floated in the black expanse—some distant, marooned galaxy at the end of time.

Dusk. He’d been sitting all day—his third, now—in timed stints. The clock showing another thirty minutes logged, the aches in his legs and back growing too insistent to shoot for forty-five, Fred took a break in the usual way he’d negotiated with himself, by walking in slow circles within the rooftop’s perimeter, making a game of making his steps as quiet as possible so as not to disturb his parents. Through the makeshift skylight, which, legend went, had been cut into the ceiling by Vartan and Manfred the year he and George were born, and which nowadays allowed in all manner of things—rainwater, dust, possibly asbestos, insects, and occasionally even light—Fred could see his father’s cloudy form, working in a sleeveless undershirt under the desk lamp, the bony points of his shoulders pivoting as he held a drill to a piece of curved metal; some new car project, perhaps. As for Holly, she was probably in bed, the light from their bedroom just going out as Fred passed.

To maintain his concentration, he tried to keep his eyes to the sparkling black of the roofing tar; but at some point, becoming dizzy and fearful of toppling to his death, he gave in and looked out at the shadow landscape of chimneys and skylights and mushroom-shaped vents of the rooftops, and the vacant nimbus of Manhattan beyond. The Towers had been the only visible buildings of the island from here, an unspoken part of the attraction of coming up here as kids: a promise, for him and George, of things to come. Perhaps humankind was powerless, or nearly so, in the face of the mind’s eagerness to make everything mean, to turn the world into a personal network of symbols.

And now the vacant nimbus itself was a message, a message of messagelessness. And Fred wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t seem like a hopeless one. Curiously, the more he let go up here, the more he tried to root out his delusions, the more urgently the world seemed to speak to him, the more intimate a mirror it became. He wasn’t sure whether his meditative ability was improving or whether it just was some kind of self-induced dementia, but he was feeling that lightness, that openness and immersion all the more. If there was an unreal quality to the night, it wasn’t like the dissociation after the panic attack, or the suffocating artificiality he’d felt during the playtest. It was more like the freedom of the helmet sessions, just a bit of distance, a space of possibility, a remove that somehow allowed for this new intimacy, like pulling back from an embrace to regard a lover’s face. Less real in one way, though in another, more so than before. He didn’t understand these paradoxical perceptions. He wasn’t sure they were worth all the hours he’d put in, or how they might possibly help him with even the smallest of his problems. He wasn’t entirely ready to trust them, or even say for sure he liked them.