Luminarium (27 page)

The dream seemed funny to him now, and he told it almost like a joke. Yet far from laughing, Mira regarded him with a look so empathetic he almost started heading mushward again; then felt a twinge of bitterness. He didn’t want to be an object of pity. He stuck to the jokey tone, delivering, with a stiff smile, the closest thing the story had to a punch line: that he’d torn himself awake to find his jaws clenched so tightly they ached.

“Sleep bruxism,” she said.

He stared at her. “That has a name too?”

“That’s one fucked-up dream, hombre,” said some drunk guy in a porkpie hat. “Hey pretty lady, can I get a Jack and Coke?”

Fred waited while she took care of him.

“So what factors give some people stronger experiences than others?” Fred asked, when the guy was gone. If he was doomed to remain a guinea pig in her mind, he thought, he could at least savor being an extraordinary one.

She seemed to find the abstract phrasing acceptable. “We don’t know for sure. Part of it is probably that my father used his own brain signals to make the initial maps, so it’s a bit of a toss-up who’s wired up like he is. Hypnotic suggestibility also seems to be a factor. And generally, there seems to be a correlation between major life upheavals and experiences people describe as ‘spiritual.’”

“Meaning that there’s a divine reason for our suffering?”

Her mouth opened. She seemed to want to reply. She seemed to want to say yes, or at least maybe. But she said nothing, simply looked at him. “Or meaning suffering makes us more vulnerable to lapses in reason,” he surmised.

To his surprise, she matched his miserable smile with one of her own.

“LAST CALL!” came the shout of the other bartender from behind the wall of bottles. From the peripheral tables and booths, gangly youths rose like zombies from a cemetery, closing in. His time with her was probably up.

“So what’s it like, Mira?”

“What’s what like?”

“This faith without ignorance you preach.”

At first she didn’t say anything. “It’s a conversation for another time.”

“How about tomorrow? We could meet for coffee.”

He regretted it immediately. She seemed flustered for a second. But only a second.

“Fred, I’ll see you for your appointment on Monday.” One hundred percent professional again, braids and tattoo notwithstanding. “And you shouldn’t come here again. It’s not appropriate for us to have this kind of contact, OK?”

She waited, looking stern. He could think of nothing to do other than nod.

“Enjoy the weekend,” she said. “Keep listening to the CD.”

She walked off, disappearing around the bar. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t feel bad, chief. Everyone strikes out with her.” The porkpie guy again. “Chick’s one ice-cold rectal probe, if you ask me.” He wandered off once more.

Fred wondered if the asshole was right.

Miserable, but unwilling to lose the rest of his pride by slinking off immediately, he occupied himself for a while watching a fly. Graceless as a drunken party guest, having boorishly landed in his drink, it was now trying to save itself by paddling in counterclockwise circles against the inner edge. Craning his neck, he managed to locate Mira on the far side of the room, gathering glasses from the now empty booths. Meanwhile, the other bartender, a dude with two-inch-thick sideburns, was taking orders at the bar. The couple next to Fred had slunk off to whatever dorm lounge or broom closet awaited them. “Space Oddity” blared from the jukebox, the same old song that blared from it when he and George were in high school, a golden oldie even then. Sideburns punched red swizzle sticks into two ice-filled drinks, an image that took Fred back to a day in the chemo room when the vein in George’s right hand had started acting up and the male nurse—a guy who could have easily qualified to be Porkpie’s barhopping wingman—had stuck a second IV line in his left. “Lucky you, you get two,” the nurse had said as he’d jammed and slightly twisted the needle into George, causing Fred’s own veins to cower sympathetically from his skin.

George, though, had only grinned to himself, and a minute later repeated the line in the nurse’s deep Brooklyn accent, after which, he’d pointed out to Fred the various craters in the floor tile at their feet.

“You know what made those burn holes?” George asked.

When Fred said no, with an oddly fascinated look, George pointed to the stuff dripping into him.

Using a folded cocktail napkin, Fred airlifted the fly out of his booze and set it ashore on the waxy wood next to his balled-up
prayerizer.com
flyer; the insect began to stagger drunkenly in the same inch-wide circles it had been making in the drink.

And little did I know, that sorry night,
he told his future listeners,
that …

But he couldn’t even think of what. He must have laid his head down, because the next thing he knew he was watching the fly at fly level, looking into its red compound eye. Twenty-five trillion prayerizations so far, he estimated. More prayers than had been prayed by or for the combined total of every human in history.

He wasn’t sure how long his eyes were closed before he felt that liftoff sensation again. It wasn’t true, he kept telling himself. There was no such thing as a soul. There was no consciousness apart from these boozesoaked brain cells. He wasn’t floating up out of his body. The lie of the feeling that indeed he was doing just that made him angry again. But the anger soon dropped away, along with the other heavy parts of himself, into a sea of swerves and jags of color, which resolved, briefly, into the bar from above: Mugs of pale beer pouring into uptilted faces. Couples headed for the door. Mira, almost directly below, seen through the slow chopping blades of a ceiling fan. Leaning slightly on one hip. Fingers tucked in her back pockets. The howling chimp and grimacing Bush lookalikes rendered almost friendly-looking by the curvature of her breasts. Her strange moon of a face going soft and lost, as she gazed at some guy slumped over the bar, some guy with a sloppy smile, and hair that needed cutting, some guy down there who must have been him.

Relax, and breathe, at the count of

five

and imagine that the air filling your lungs is infused with a blissful, sweet, breathable gas. Last week, your breath made you feel comfortably heavy. This week, it can make you feel even more comfortably light. At the count of

four

as you inhale, you might begin to feel a tingling ease in your chest. You might begin to feel, with each soft inhalation, the lightness spreading a little bit more. Into the muscles of your back. Around your ribcage. Feel it lifting your internal organs, lifting the muscles of your neck and throat. At the count of

three

feel that sweet lightness easing into your jaw, lifting your tongue in your mouth, your eyes in their sockets, your sinuses, your whole face and scalp. As the blissful gas permeates your brain, your head might begin to feel so light it wants to rise like a helium balloon on a string. Before it does, at the count of

two

go ahead and breathe the lightness all the way through you, out your fingertips, down through your toes. Your whole body, light and tingling, lighter with each slow, blissful breath. Breathing, so light and free. Light as air. And lighter still, at the count of

one

… so light you’re starting to float. Floating up, just like the buildings around you, on this peaceful night when the whole city is coming free. You’re coming free too, now. Floating up from your comfy chair, up into the even comfier air. Floating up so full of bliss and peace, as you watch the rising rivets and cables, the parking meters and cabs, the manhole covers and the millions of shards of glass. Look through the widening windows as the bricks come free. Look, as you float up story by story, inside all those dissolving rooms. At the molding and drywall working loose. At all that electrical wiring rising from the windows like charmed snakes. At the lengths of pipe leaping from the walls like gleaming fish. The tiles and floorboards and light sockets, the aluminum ducts and doorknobs and toilets and sinks, all gently tumbling around you, end over end, up into the night, like a long, slow, waterfall in reverse.

You’re so high up now. Go ahead and look down. And see? Already, you’re over the tops of the buildings, themselves still coming loose and following you up. Even the streets are rippling, chunks coming free, exposing the tunnels, the sewer pipes, and subway cars all coming up, too.

You’re high above the planet, in a sea of the city’s parts.

And none of them weigh a thing.

And neither do you.

And maybe you’re wondering where it’s all going, and where you’re going, and maybe some things aren’t clear to you, but one thing can be clear, one thing you can know is true: that no harm can come to any of it, not to the city and not to you. Everything up here, going somewhere good. Everything up here, heading only where it should….

“So what’s on tap today?” Fred asked as Mira leaned over him, her
thumb ticking down his breastbone. “Do I get to part the Red Sea?”

He was trying for lightness, eager to send the message that her rejection of him in the bar the other night wasn’t at all on his mind. For her part, she was being carefully impersonal, looking everywhere but at his eyes as she leaned in, the buttons of her pear-green blouse coming within reach of his teeth. With a light pressure, like wiping a tiny peephole in a steamed window, she rubbed the gel over his heart.

“We’re still working on that.” She pressed an electrode to the spot. “But from what I hear, this one’s pretty good.”

Something nagged him about the statement. By the time he’d figured out what it was, she’d fitted the helmet onto him and was turning to leave.

“From what you hear? Haven’t you tried it?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly.

“Of course not?”

She turned to face him. “I need to maintain scientific objectivity.”

Her eyes widened just slightly, as though she were expecting to be challenged on the point. Before he could decide whether or not to do so, she spun away once more, walking to the door and switching off the light. Through the fish tank window, he watched her make her way past the first monitor and around the smoothed-forward hair of her father behind it. She reached up—a milky flash of hip between her blouse and skirt. Fred tried not to look for the belly stud, lest she cast a look his way and catch him. She didn’t.

Lost opportunity
, Inner George groused.

So here he was again.

The blackened window, a faint, narrow triangle of monitor light at the bottom corner where the shade had hitched on a printer cable.

The dim red bulb.

The gray shelves in the shadows.

He felt drowsy immediately, which may or may not have been a helmet effect. He’d slept even less over the weekend than usual, trying to spend more time at the office without cutting down his hospital hours. The U.S. Army was now calling for simulated swaths of northern Pakistan, and the mayor’s office, though the contract hadn’t been inked yet and the Empire State Building demo was still two weeks off, was already eager for more details about the next phase—the virtual nuking of Times Square. Beyond these generalities, however, the minutiae of Arabic text-to-speech sticking points and asphalt melting points had been washing over Fred unabsorbed. The more he tried to focus on any of it, the blurrier it went before his eyes.