Luminarium (52 page)

“You weren’t totally wrong with that Freddo idea,” Sam said. “People can adapt.” He made that strangulated grimace again, this time greeting the screen, shaking hands with the Christian girl hovering in the palmtree backdrop.

“
Sam Brounian
,” Sam croaked, and the ache in Fred’s throat redoubled, now from sorrow.

“
Nice to meet you.
”

“Sam,” Fred said.

Sam turned, his teeth still clenched.

“
’es?
” he said through them.

“About those troubles on Urth …”

Fred brought his
laptop and chair over and showed Sam the emails and the IM exchange about the Pretaloka and the angels who didn’t believe they were angels. He described the chemotherapy angel’s apparition in the playtest, and produced from his pocket the Swiss Army knife and from his briefcase the packing slip that had come with it. The websites he’d been sent to were no longer up, but he related what had transpired on them—the hints at a conspiracy, the seeming effort to get him involved. In the process of explaining how he was being spied on, he had to make an extended detour into the helmet study, and Mira, meeting the main road again with those angel statues in her apartment. Finally, he took out his cell phone and showed Sam the two texts.

In the early stages of his narrative, Fred felt, more than anything, a sickening guilt, like he was stamping out the last remaining ember of George’s trust. He’d taken away George’s company, uselessly prolonged his suffering, and now was tattling on his conspiracy, his revenge, the one thing he’d wanted to leave behind. But Fred just couldn’t see George taking pleasure in this. Maybe in the planning stages, shut away in his emptying apartment, in his dying body, exchanging clandestine emails with whoever else it was who had a grudge against Armation or something to gain from the sabotage, while George himself was losing everything there was to lose. But whoever was carrying this out wasn’t George; and to picture a George who could be happy with the way things were shaking out was to picture someone Fred didn’t know. He could see no possible good resulting from the sabotage, for Sam or anyone.

And Sam’s reaction, at least initially, reassured him he was making the right choice. No sooner had Sam gotten the broad outlines than he was scribbling notes, looking up website registries. Sam even seemed a little happy, grateful for the information, fired up by the prospect of uncovering the plot. Fred was a little happy, too, not to be alone any longer with this mystery. But when he started getting into the part about the card that had come with the angels, and how George himself must have been a part of the scheme, something changed for Sam, changed in a way Fred hadn’t anticipated. He began shaking his head, the amplitude so slight it looked more like a slow palsy than disagreement. Thinking Sam simply didn’t see his rationale, Fred kept going, revisiting the hints, the overall whimsy that seemed so much like George, the game-like elements, the fantastical narrative tying the whole thing together.

Sam saw it as clearly as he did, Fred could tell. But he just sat there, shaking his head.

“He wouldn’t do it,” Sam said, with that toneless emotionality.

“I’m sure it’s nothing personal, Sam. It’s Armation he hated. Not you.”

Sam just kept shaking his head, eyes locked on nothing.

They spent the
next few hours multiplying and dividing, converting the phone numbers to binary, to hexadecimal, comparing them with lines in the Urth code. Sam went on working fervidly, long after Fred’s brain lost its ability to number-crunch. Exhausted but still wanting to help, and unable to sleep anyway with Sam pacing around, scrawling notes and numbers across the blank white walls of his alcove, Fred went online. Several pages into the search results, he finally found a full version of the Kalki Purana, which he downloaded and read from start to finish. The mayhem began—or would begin, the thing was a prophecy—about halfway through, with Kalki the Avatara and his holy horde inclining to stop and decimate various secondary people, places, and things, including an entire city of Buddhists (worshippers of Vishnu’s previous incarnation, Fred noted, if he was keeping the story straight), for their lack of Hindu orthodoxy, before continuing on to butcher the demon Kali and the army he’d ride in on. Oddly, Kali himself would go down like a lightweight; the only real fight would be put up by his twin demon generals, Koka and Vikoka (cousins of Gog and Magog, perhaps), whose skulls, in a kind of gruesome prefiguration to the Three Stooges, Kalki would at last smash together. The twin demons was a curious detail, but for the most part Fred couldn’t fathom what had drawn George to the blood-drenched material—a military entertainment
par excellence
, it seemed to Fred. It was like a children’s book, only even more simpleminded, he thought, a children’s book written by a child, in the backward childhood of humanity.

Sam was still up. Fred could hear the hurled squeeze ball thudding against the wall. Monday night, he thought, or Tuesday morning, rather. Week Four of the study, going on without him. He was too exhausted even to be properly tired. There were too many questions, and no solutions in sight. He missed Mira. He missed her voice in his ear. He had no new visualization exercise to listen to, no new bedtime story to lull him to sleep. Pulling his laptop down off the desk and into the sleeping bag, he found the Christworld site, and set it to play the virtual Sermon on the Mount he’d seen Sam watching earlier. Once more, Fred watched the little seeds falling on the path, the stones, the thorns, the rich earth. After that wheat stalk labeled
PARABLE
, the action returned to Jesus, the crowd now dwindled to a handful of robed disciples. Then a closeup on one of them, his animated lips opening and closing. Fred had the sound off, but the disciple’s words appeared at the bottom of the screen:

Why do you speak to them in parables?

Back to the animated Jesus:

Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of
heaven. But to them it has not been given.

Why parables, Fred wondered, the screen’s brightness in the bedroll’s dark making his eyes tear. What was it about them? Was the capacity for parables itself at the center of it? Was literalism, then, one of those rootless seeds?

For a weightless, drifting moment, the venting heat from the Prayerizer was a parable. The glowing screen, the watching of it, the ache in his eyes, a parable. The blurry, virtual Jesus a parable. Jesus himself a parable—self-made, God-made, world-made, word-made.

But a parable meaning what? And what about the figurative impulse, for that matter—this urge to fill it all up with personal meaning, remake the world in our image, God in our image? Where did this rolling seed wind up?

It was all he could do to briefly blink the screen back into focus:

Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears …

Animated eyes popping open. A closeup on a wiggling ear.

Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn …

A hand on a heart. Jesus radiating light, arms outstretched.

So that I should heal them.

Not literalism. Not figuration.

It was all a wavering wash of color, then simply light, thrumming on his lids. Then he was floating off into glowing, spiraling blue clouds, the laptop’s electromagnetic torus, the tori of his beating heart and questing brain, both getting swept up into the larger torus of the Prayerizer, and onward into ever greater tori after that. He was looking for George, as always. But afloat in the widening spiral’s central black, he found only a little, blocky, pixel man, waving his lo-res arms, kicking side to side with his nubby legs, with every spastic motion whipping up more and more whirlwinds of useless light. Looking up at Fred and seeing himself discovered, the pixel man threw up his nub-hands and skittered away, taking the light show with him, leaving in his wake something as surprising as it was pleasurable: an expanse of total stillness and peace.

Fred didn’t wake up until close to noon. Too late, with the building
now populated, to take a shower in the slop sink, but then he hadn’t been especially looking forward to that bleak initiation anyhow. Sam was on the couch, having fallen asleep half sitting up, one foot still on the floor. Fred ate a bowl of Sam’s cereal, washed his underarms in the bathroom, and a few minutes later was outside, wincing in the daylight, wielding the mu like a machete through the urban phantasm. Doubting the celebrity tourists on West Broadway. Doubting the Neural Science Building, which he couldn’t help passing by. Doubting he’d see Mira but looking for her anyway. Dreading the day ahead—the prospect of having to face George, having to sit and watch him be slowly converted into cancer cells, having nothing to offer him but small talk—and doubting the dreading, doubting the despair, doubting even the moments of meditative openness, and the fresh smell of the dyed flowers outside the deli, and the pleasure in the sunlight, and the legions of zestfully slouching kids on the steps of Union Square, and the hope for new beginnings despite it all.

Cutting east and passing the Zeckendorf, he was startled and unnerved by the actual sight of Mel on the opposite sidewalk. Her sun-gold hair was longer and more curled than it used to be. Her compact little body, with its tanned limbs and abundant curves, was on display in a T-shirt and short denim skirt, a little cloth purse on a strap gently spanking her ass with each step she took. She hadn’t been on his mind at all lately, he realized. Nevertheless, and though it would have been disastrous, he probably would have gone up to her in these checkered shoes and sleptin clothes, and either begged for a second chance, or barring that, begged her just to let him pretend with her for a minute that they were still dating, that the millennium was still new. But before he could unstick himself from the pavement, she reached back and intertwined her fingers with those of the guy walking beside and slightly behind her, a tallish, thinnish, dark-haired guy who, had Fred not been demonstrably over here alone and not over there clasping her hand, he might have mistaken for himself, might have wondered where he’d gotten the money to buy those groovy sandals and guayabera shirt and two-tone shades. Mel and the guy who wasn’t Fred said hello to Fred’s nemesis, the security guard outside the supermarket, everyone all smiles, and kept floating along, neither they nor the guard looking Fred’s way.

And Fred continued east, feeling like a ghost, observing his hazed reflections in the store windows, the suit-sale hawker with the sandwichboard wings, the black woman with the blond, ring-braided halo, wondering if the one trapped in the Pretaloka wasn’t George, but him.

Stepping into the
room, Fred was stopped by the sight of Mira. Sitting in one of the molded chairs against the wall. Her back erect, her hands in her lap. Her gaze on George, unblinking.

“My bad,” she said, her voice as stiff as the rest of her.

“No biggie,” Fred mumbled, after a moment.

She was the professional version of herself today, blouse and skirt and fastened ponytail, except her eyeliner was a bit thicker, the way she kept it when she bartended. Perhaps an attempt to distract from the darkness beneath her eyes. It seemed she hadn’t been sleeping much, either.

“You
were
stalking me, though.” Her words came out forcefully. Then her lips set again and she was as still as before.

“Somewhat,” he said. “But I didn’t know about your husband.”

She turned and scanned his face. After ten seconds or so, her shoulders relaxed a bit He sat beside her. They watched George, amid the tubes, the wires, the LED lights, the breathing machine. It was just about time for George’s shave. His hair was getting shaggy, too. That or his face was shrinking.

“You never should have been in the study in the first place,” she said without looking Fred’s way. “I was only supposed to pick people who weren’t in crisis. Mild depression at most. Moderately to highly functioning. No one too vulnerable, too at risk of instability. That’s the only way we could get funding.”

They sat. Two laughing attendants wheeled a gurney and rattling IV pole by in the hall.

“But your application, when I read it, I just thought … it would be good to have one person like you. Someone it could really make a difference for. Someone really going through something. A spiritual emergency.” She looked down at her hands. “I thought that way I could prove what the helmet could do.”

The breathing machine breathed. The sound of rubber soles and rubber wheels passed by the doorway.
A spiritual emergency.
The term seemed to suggest both crisis and metamorphosis, the emergence of some bright new state of being.

“My father went through the cases last week,” she said. “We had an argument about you. Not that those statues you sent me wouldn’t have disqualified you anyway.”

That whole night with her made that much more sense to Fred, now. How she’d known she’d have to kick him out of the study one way or another. How she’d allowed herself, thanks to this and to her loneliness, to get drunk with him and take him home with her.