Luminarium (7 page)

“You OK?” Fred asked.

His father exhaled steadily through his nostrils. “Sure. That was fun,” he said, sounding convinced of it.

They sat there another minute, the feeble air-conditioning doing its best to cool them. Vartan took another hit. Fred slid his laptop from his briefcase, woke it up, and searched for an unencrypted wireless signal. A strong one popped up immediately. So much for the dot-com worker theory.

“What about you?” Vartan said. “You OK?”

“Me? Yeah, I’m OK.”

His father went on peering at him as if through a fog. Fred himself was still blinking from the flash bomb, his brain still iridescing like a soap bubble from having merged with the birthday girl’s bright little world of ignorance and possibility.

“You overdid it with that kid,” Vartan said. “Spinning her so many times. You looked like someone was chasing you.”

“I lost count. Got a little dizzy.”

Vartan’s stare was less anxious than abstractly contemplative. “Are you doing drugs?”

“Drugs?”

“Stealing to support a habit?”

“No, Dad.”

He wished he hadn’t had to call his father from the 13th Precinct house yesterday, but his credit card was maxed and the fifty-dollar station house bond had been forty more than he’d had on him.

“The tweezers weren’t for a roach clip? Or some other … paraphernalia?” “No, Dad.”

Vartan had asked him why tweezers on the drive home from the station last night as well, and not wanting to go into the whole issue of having donated his brain to science, Fred had told him he’d had a splinter and simply forgotten to pay. The explanation didn’t seem to have sufficed.

“Maybe you were just exploring new career options,” Vartan said.

“Right. Starting at the ground floor. I’ll work my way up. Shampoo. Razor blades.” Fred opened his email, to check if Sam or any of the Armation people had replied to an apology he’d sent earlier for missing the teleconference. He’d opted not to mention the arrest, citing only an unspecified emergency he hoped they would read as George-related.

“Sure,” Vartan said. “Those are pricey.”

“Antioxidants. Gingko biloba.”

“Not much of a health plan.”

“Condoms. Feminine hygiene products.”

Vartan scratched his pale head. “Do you need to pluck your hair? Is it some kind of sex thing?”

“No, Dad. It’s no kind of sex thing. Can we get the fuck out of here?” Vartan pocketed the pipe and pulled out. A similar farce had ensued in the station, when the cops refused to believe that the old lady and Fred didn’t know each other, and she’d started shouting that he was some kind of pervert, following her around the supermarket. The fact that he was refusing to look at anyone for fear of merging with them wasn’t helping matters. In a droll sort of way, as they mashed his fingers to a scanner and propped him against a wall for a digital mugshot, the cops peppered him with questions about his unnatural interests in personal grooming items and elderly women.

“Were you ever gonna talk to her? Ask her out on a date?” said one cop. “Nah. He’s the shy type,” said another.

“But he had those tweezers to remember their lovely outing.”

Then Fred looked up and, to his dismay, began merging with the wary-eyed picture of himself on the monitor. Then he asked to use the bathroom and started merging with the seatless, crusted-shit-bespattered metal toilet, as the cop peering through the window behind him, assuming Fred was too bashful to piss under observation, apologized:

“Just regulations. You’d be amazed how many guys try to kill themselves in there.”

The elaborate system of food-and-drink shelving between the front seats swayed as his father, going too slow, braked and steered them onto Route 3. Vartan had bought the van a couple months ago from a friend for a few hundred dollars, and since that time had transformed it, as was his habit, into a secondhand second home on wheels, equipping it with, among other upgrades, beaded seat covers, a paper towel holder on the back of the driver’s seat, an extra-long rearview mirror, matching trash receptacles on the insides of the doors. He’d installed high-decibel buzzers in the turn signals to keep himself from leaving them on by accident, and a radar sensor from a kit, which let him know his proximity to cars behind him while parallel parking. He’d even replicated a jokey Christmas gift George had perpetrated on a previous car, replacing the horn buttons on the steering wheel with two keys from an old computer keyboard, an F and a U, to allow Vartan’s thumbs a more evocative honking experience.

“All right,” Vartan said, drumrolling his fingers on the wheel. “So you wanted tweezers. People want worse things in life.”

The truth was Fred didn’t know why he’d taken the tweezers. The little implement had seemed somehow magical, the sword in the stone, destined only for him—probably just another merging effect coming on. Anyway, he certainly hadn’t needed an eyelash curler.

“I saw Jill there,” he muttered. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Jill …” Vartan blinked. “How’d she look?”

Fred searched for the least descriptive word that would apply. “Fine,” he said, and realized that one said it all.

Vartan sniffed, worked his pinky in his ear, then reached for the radio and turned on WINS. The newscaster was saying something about doctors separating conjoined twins in Utah, and Vartan’s hand froze over the button, no doubt reminded, as was Fred, of the time he and George had gone trick-or-treating as conjoined twins one Halloween. Vartan had been working on a B horror flick that fall, and the makeup artist had done Fred and George up to look like they were joined at the head. They’d staggered around the small New England town where the film was based, collecting candy and watching people try to puzzle out where exactly the costume ended and reality began. The funny thing was how easy it had been for the two of them to walk leaned into each other like that. So natural that, for a while after they’d pulled free of the fleshtoned, suctioning goop, it was hard to walk upright on their own.

Having forgotten all about the computer in his lap, Fred now noticed that a message had come in when they were still in range of the wireless signal:

Subject:
  Help, Avatara!

From:
  
George Brounian

Again, no text other than the subject line. The same subject line.

Or was it?

Fred checked his saved messages. The exclamation point was new.

“Can we stop by the hospital?” Fred asked, half in panic, half in ridiculous hope, the image of George sitting up in bed and chuckling to himself as he thumbed the email into a doctor’s borrowed BlackBerry flashing to mind.

“Hey. Kiddo. You were there all morning.”

Vartan had been there too, for an hour or so before the show.

“Maybe just to check in.” Email or no, the nurses never swabbed the inside of George’s mouth enough. Just thinking about how dry it got made Fred’s tongue stick to his throat.

“I was going to drop you at the office,” Vartan coaxed, “remember? Besides, your mother’s there. Her cult’s coming later. George’ll have all the company he can deal with.”

Fred had forgotten. Once a week, Holly and her Reiki group met in the ward to give George a healing. Unclipping his bowtie and tossing it in a cupholder, Vartan went on complaining about how she was going off the deep end, and Fred went on staring at that email, at that exclamation point. It could still be some new strain of spam or malware, he supposed. But two different messages. There seemed more intention in it now—more malice. Who could cook this up? One of those moral midgets at the parent company?

Vartan, meanwhile, was giving Fred notes: how he should explore the moment when the egg materialized in his mouth, how George used to have this thing where he just stood there with his mouth puckered, looking around; how he was over-milking the moment when he cracked the egg in Vartan’s top hat, how George used to make it look almost unconscious, like his attention was completely somewhere else.

Prior to a few weeks ago when they’d started up again, it had been twenty-three years since Fred had last done the act with Vartan—with him and George. George had conceived of it three years before that, in 1980, the year Pac-Man appeared in the pizza parlor, the Empire struck back, and President Carter lost to an old actor with shellacked hair and a big-shouldered suit. Fred and George were ten, and Vartan’s acting career was at a frightening low, all the more unsettling after a relative high just a couple years before, when he’d landed a small but memorable part as an Italian-American priest who quits the priesthood. Thanks to that movie, which would go on to become a classic, Vartan had become a recognizable figure in their Brooklyn neighborhood, and by association, Fred and George had experienced a certain local celebrity too. They’d been used to the extra attention that came with being twins, but this was a whole new level: bullies transformed themselves into protectors; teachers offered the two of them better parts in the school plays (on the assumption, presumably, that their genetic thespian birthright needed nurturing); and when their dad showed up to watch, he’d be mobbed for autographs.

Now their dad was spending most of his days at home, in his undershirt, repairing appliances, retiling the bathroom, waiting for his agent to call. Things were tense. The movie royalties were drying up, and the only other money coming in was from his mom’s sporadic part-time cashier and secretarial jobs, which, having been a professional ballerina as a teenager before eloping with Vartan, she was too miserable doing to ever hold for long. Vartan would come home from his failed auditions and, after looking around like a cornered wolf, would start shouting about the mess the little apartment was always in. He and Holly would fight. He would storm out of the apartment. She would disappear into their bedroom.

One such night, to distract Sam from the tears pooling in his eyes, George started stringing magic tricks into a story. He’d always taken it upon himself to be Sam’s protector—as children, he and Sam were nearly as close, in their own way, as he and Fred were. Sam trailed George around the apartment and the neighborhood, and George not only put up with it but encouraged it, happy to have a young disciple (whereas Fred and Sam were as likely as not to push each other aside). At first, it was George and Fred who were the dueling magicians, oneupping each other for Sam’s viewing pleasure. Then George’s ambitions evolved, and he had the three of them preparing a show for Mom and Dad, with George and Fred in the leads and Sam as their harried apprentice. George’s plan came off as well as they’d hoped: a few nights later, there were Vartan and Holly, together on the couch, arguments on hold, cheering them on. Fred thought this would be the end of it, but then George pulled Vartan into the act, gave him a few directions, and their father started hamming it up with them, improvising a whole new routine. Then George was talking costumes with Mom. The goal, now, was a performance for Sam’s upcoming seventh birthday party. And no sooner had this been accomplished than George was spreading the word at school, and Sam’s friends were asking their parents if the Brounians could perform at their parties too.

By the time George and Fred pitched the act to their parents as a business enterprise, requests were already trickling in. Fred had already designed the phone book ads and reorganized the skits and come up with a list of new tricks and props they’d need for a bigger and better show. Vartan refused to even talk about it at first, but broke as he was, he couldn’t hold out for long. He took to disguising his appearance, with a fake nose larger still than his own and a drooping, glue-on goatee, to combat the indignity of being recognized by the children’s parents as the guy from the movie.

By no means was this a happy time for their dad, but with the empty hours filled by the construction of tricks and the driving and the performances themselves, Vartan began shouting somewhat less. He and Holly started reconciling. Within a year, he was finding roles again, playing more Italians (though he was Armenian)—from minor mob henchman to a man who reminisces over his mama’s cooking, then holds up a jar of spaghetti sauce and exalts, “That’s Italian!” Holly, meanwhile, quit her last part-time job to begin what, aside from raising the three of them, Fred sometimes thought of as her life’s true work: her inner odyssey of personal discovery.

By 1983, the moonwalk was something people did on tile floors, the Jedi was returning, Star Wars was a dream of national defense, and Vartan was finally spending more time emoting in front of cameras than in front of five-year-olds. The tuxes were left on their hangers for longer and longer stretches, and this was a relief not just for Vartan, but for Fred as well. While Fred had enjoyed the attention, and the birthday cake, the act was mainly a reminder of an era he wanted to forget. Shaking fake treasure from his top hat as George caught it in his and Dad stared with simulated envy, Fred would think ahead to how Vartan would remain in the van after getting home, to smoke cigarettes and stare out the windshield; to how up in the kitchen they’d find Mom in one of her homemade housedresses, paused for who knew how long in the midst of folding laundry, gazing out the back window. Fred would look into the spectating kids’ unformed little faces, and feel like he was peddling a lie. About, if nothing else, what his family was, all the magic it didn’t actually have.

George, Fred knew, felt differently. He was hatching ever bigger plans for the act: a theater piece, a TV special. Wearing his little white top hat, he started pitching these ideas to Vartan one night in the living room, dancing around, playing all the parts, and after a couple minutes, Vartan glanced up from his script.

“I’m trying to focus.” He whip-snapped the pages. “Go play somewhere else.”

For a while after that, George tried to cajole Fred into continuing the act on their own. Up on the rooftop, the venue for most of their serious discussions, Fred finally spoke his mind on the subject.

“Magic is bullshit,” he said. “People need to just get real.”

For a moment, though George was nowhere near the roof’s edge, from his expression, it looked as if he were falling, falling away into the distant, sun-drenched rooftops.