Luminarium (65 page)

A digital camera is placed into the hands of no one. And a picture is snapped of a bowl-haircutted Asian boy in an MIT shirt, with a sly smile and a possessive arm around a buxom, bucktoothed blond girl. They stand in front a photograph of a smashed fire truck mounted on the iron fence.

Others are photographing other photographs on the fence, of smokeblackened faces, of a fallen fuselage. Nearby, a young woman clutches the fence and cries, her face red and twisted with agony. A second woman comforts her. A third photographs the first and second.

Still others fit their lenses between the chinks and photograph what lies beyond, and others personalize the fence with private meanings—photocopied photographs of loved ones, Scotch-taped poems in children’s handwriting, balloons with pictures of more superheroes—Superman, The Incredible Hulk, The Thing.

Others hold up signs. One burly, mustachioed man brandishes a yellow placard bearing the words: B
USH
D
ID
IT. Another hollers that it was an inside job. Men in crisp, black I
NVESTIGATE 9/11
T-shirts shout that it was a conspiracy. Another two men hold between them a banner reading: W
HEN THE
L
EFT
C
ALLS FOR
P
EACE
, W
HAT
T
HEY
M
EAN
I
S
S
URRENDER
. Another placard calls for the end of the Iraq War. Another for impeachment.

Passersby get sucked into the arguments, listening and then participating. Small crowds cluster around the disputes, perpetuating interest, everyone eager to be a part of it. A black man in a bizarre military-dress uniform studded with gold-cross emblems adds his own explications—with the aid of a megaphone—to the noise in the air on the rim of the pit: “It’s not about whether you’re black, white, brown, red, or yellow,” he shouts. “It’s not about whether you’re Christian, Muslim, or Hindu. It’s about coming together and expressing your feelings.” With that, he hands off the megaphone to his listeners: A long-haired, balding man who shouts that religion is the problem. An old woman who cries and says something incomprehensible.

Every few yards stands a man holding up a Bible. One holds his shut in the air, reciting a verse from memory, not quite loud enough to be heard. Another mutely holds his open to a certain page, as if the mere presence of that microscopic text were doing all the work necessary. For all the crowd clustered around the others, no one pays these men the slightest heed.

Meanwhile, a string quartet plays something classical and somber, and off in another gap in the crowd, a butoh dancer turns slowly, a long, white swath of muslin trailing from her hand. Across the street, in each of the second-story plate-glass windows of the Millenium Hilton, dressedup couples lunch from starched white tablecloths, pausing every so often to stare out over the crowd below and the gaping hole beyond.

The crowd is mostly young bodies exuding sexual excitement and the pleasure of being around other bodies doing the same. Teenagers who were just children five years earlier hold hands, caress each other’s backs. Children who weren’t yet born five years ago sit perched on their fathers’ shoulders. A dozen clean-scrubbed youths in Southern Baptist University sweatshirts take turns standing on a broad marble promontory abutting the steps to an office building across the street, snapping pictures of the iconic cross-shaped crossbeam and a giant American flag. At the top of the steps, in a loose circle, stands a smaller group, eyes closed, palms in the air.

A pulse from these free-floating heart cells. But no, it’s not the Reiki group. Or rather, not
that
Reiki group. It’s an altogether new one. There’s a new dwarf—a thick-hewed bodybuilder, six foot four at least, his skybound fingers tense as talons. And a new elf, Indian or possibly American Indian, her straight black hair in a headband, her wrists gently crossed above her forehead. And a black Strider, his dangling, beaded cornrows slowly waving in time with his lifted hands, like tree limbs in a breeze.

Something new, it seems, is happening to all these inner twinklings and pulsings. It’s as if they’re freeing themselves into a dance all their own, not even disconnected thought or feeling anymore so much as forces in their own right, pure energy, hectic and harmonious by turns. Even the flashing pains from ankle, fingers, ribs, temple, the burning skin of the arms and legs and hands are all sparking and diffusing into it, as the Fredless body limps around the corner of the site; as it stops at a photograph, on the fence along the southern rim, of the old pair of towers, and an artist’s rendition of the bright single tower to come; as it’s jostled by a loping man with a luminous bald head and a pretzel back into motion, amid hundreds of other swinging legs and arms, up through an enclosed elevated walkway, and back down to the West Side Highway.

The cameras on this side of the site are bulkier, professional-grade, mounted on tripods. They’re aimed at doll-like reporters, with hair sprayed to a gloss and rouged cheeks, men and women alike. Off ahead, on a raised platform in a fenced-off area at the crater’s edge, the recitation of the three thousand names by surviving family members has ended, the last echoes of taps on a bugle have dissolved, and a choir has begun to sing. A few last reports are going out, while other news vans are lowering their dishes, their crews already packing up, photographers unscrewing lenses, technicians unweaving webs of bright electrical cables duct-taped to the ground. As the reporters finish, like statues magically restored to life, they stretch their necks, look around, drain bottled water into their mouths. A peppy blond reporter who looks a bit like Mel zips off her lipstick with a thumb-swipe, widens her eyes, and sighs.

There is no meaning anywhere, and the dance of energy has become a plosive, liquid radiance. It twirls with the vibrations of the choir and the satellite feeds, the rants, the prayers, the irrepressible pheromones, the sobs and guffaws and quiet chatter. Two strangely bright forms, one of a beefy old fireman, the other of an equally beefy security guard, hug by a revolving door. “Happy 9/11,” says the first to the second, with hearty pats on the back.

On the grassy slope outside the Marriott Financial Center, across the street from the fenced-in ceremony area, more beings of light, dozens, are sitting and spectating. They shine like gods and goddesses one moment, shimmer like ghosts the next. A big spirit man with an elephant pin on his shirt and a broken tooth chats up a spirit woman with a swanlike neck who busies herself with a Palm Pilot. Another spirit woman, her body incandescent as a sunrise, whispers into the ear of a spirit toddler pressing lit-up, Gummi-colored buttons on a toy cell phone.

Even the Fredless body gives off a little light, though it’s mostly just the glaring tuxedo jacket and strobing shoes. It ceases its limping and stands among the dazzle of the rest, to all appearances awed, though there is no one to be awed, no one to scratch an ostensibly dumbstruck head, no one to observe its fingers coming down glistening with blood. Nearby, a midriff-baring, lower-back-tattooed spirit leans into the broad chest of a spirit with a linen jacket draped wing-like over his shoulders, and points, bangles jangling on her wrist, down at the gate of the fenced-in area, from which the mourning family members are beginning to emerge, shining forms themselves, in jackets and ties and summer dresses.

From their midst comes a tallish, Roman-haired spirit, followed by a spirit with night-black hair and a glowing moon for a face. She stops in the middle of the street, lowers her sunglasses, her dark eyes locking on no one.

There’s no one to be surprised, no one to be dumbfounded, when, with a coy head tilt, she smiles
—smiles—
and waves. She walks over, the tall spirit behind her looking on with a faint, approving smile of his own.

“I had a dream about you last night,” she says.

Real or no, she seems happy, at ease, freed from some long spirit toil. She squints a little, even behind those shaded lenses, the brightness all around.

“We were in some spaceship together, floating back to Earth,” she says. “We’d thought we’d never see it again. But we’d found our way back. And all we wanted to do was land, so we could just go on a normal date.”

She grins, embarrassed, expectant.

When it came time to sunder those inner bonds to her yesterday, there’d been no one left to carry out the task. And now there’s no one left to feel any obligation to do so, to sunder any piece of this from any other. And all the vibrations, all the twinklings and pulsings, within and without, are resolving into an unearthly harmony, nothing anywhere but a single, living love. It resonates, for a spell, as if to its own possibility, then slips away as the tune keeps changing. The Fredless Fred’s energy is twining in a larger body, whose wheeling extremities are afire, whose brain is a heating protostar, whose heart is an as-yet-arrhythmic drumming of plasm. The body coils and flays, dancing order from or into bedlam, life from or into extinction.

Far below, now, the little moon spirit asks a question of the clownishly attired no one, but from here, all that registers is her rising intonation as things get even brighter.

Oxygen deprivation
, a brainbit twinkles.

Last minute of brainlife
, twinkles another.

And the moon spirit lets out a barely heard shout, as the pixel-small avatar beside her is finally down.

Darkness. A warmth.
Then a light.

A flashlight to one side.

Two trembling palms to the other.

Mom and Dad, leaning in.

A steady chirp.

Smell of antiseptic.

Two shadows in the fluorescence. A woman. And an older man, arm around her, hand on the ball of her shoulder.

Ten palms.

Five towering forms in the light: goateed/buzzcut/ponytailed/translucent-eared.

Mom overhead, upside down, eyes closed.

“Hey, nurse. It’s
time for a sponge bath. No, not his. Mine. Wait. I’m a filmmaker. Hey. Take my card!”

Manfred cranes his head around, two fingers in his fishing vest.

Vartan hoists an eyebrow. “The third time you’ve woken him up, Manny.”

“This guy’s a famous actor,” Manfred calls out, pointing to Vartan. “Did you know that?” He turns back, grin crooked. “Your dad’s gonna act again.”

Vartan tilts his shaggy head. A mouth hole forms in his beard. Manfred cuts him off:

“
The Tempest.
I’ll be Gonzo, the old counselor. I’ve got a whole new take for the island.”

Vartan’s mouth flattens, vanishes in the surrounding hair.

“Get this.” Manny’s giant octopus hands, framing: “
Atlantis.
”

“It’s Sam,” Holly
says, pressing a cell phone close.

“Hey, Freddo.”

Freddo …

“You don’t have to talk. They say you’re on some massive painkillers. I can do the talking.”

The sound of a sliding door.

“So let’s see. I’m sitting here on my deck. My
deck.
I can hardly believe it. On a … what’s it called? Oh yeah. A
deck chair.
One of those kinds with the reclinable backs. With an iced tea, no less. What else? Some kind of bugs are chirping. I thought the noise must have been a power station at first.” The sound of clinking cubes. “Ask me how’s my new office.”

The sound of the drink glugging down his throat.

“Office,” he answers himself, his tone a shade darker. “That’s a good one. A ‘corner cubicle,’ the personnel guy called it.”

The sound of calling birds.

“
Urrr …
”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “I was getting to that. I fixed it. With a whole lot of help from You Know Who.”

“
Whaaa?
”

“I turned on my phone when the plane landed and there was a text from George. Saying to check my email. He sent me everything, where all the malware was and how to quarantine it. I had the place up and running again in twenty minutes. They think I’m a genius now. Talk about pressure.”

“Y’OK, Fred?” Holly whispers.

“Think he needs Dr. Papan?” Vartan asks, out of view.

“Demo went well today,” Sam says. “We’ll see. What else? Oh.” His tone flattens a bit. “I put off those lunch dates. I don’t know why. Maybe I just need some time.”

Cicadas in the background.

“Did check out Christworld,” he adds. “The flag corps and the mimes were all right … I guess.”

He sighs.

“The smoothies taste like ass.”

“
Hhheh
.”

“He went this
morning,” Mom says, sitting by the bedside, leaning in close. “Before any of us even got here. And then you showed up not too long after.”

She looks puzzled, like she hasn’t a clue what any of it means.

“Dr. Chia said it was baffling that George survived so long.”

She holds out a hand, regarding it in the light like something she’s never quite seen before, her fingers fairly steady.

“He asked me to do Reiki on his tennis elbow.”

Two men. One
silver-haired and ruddy-faced in a blazer, the other greasy blond, his face a raucous party of freckles.