Luminarium (28 page)

For all his weekend hours at the office, he hadn’t come close to Sam’s work schedule. When Fred arrived, no matter how early, Sam was already at his desk, and was still sitting there when Fred left. The only times his little brother got up were to do his pushups, or use the bathroom down the hall, or, very occasionally, to conference with an employee face to face (the preferred method being to just IM back and forth). Sam had his lunch delivered. He slept, most nights, Fred was pretty sure, on the red plush couch. Fred probably hadn’t scored many points by being around, as the few times Sam had walked by, Fred had been doing something other than company work, and the hum of the big blue mainframe was putting Sam’s brain on edge. Sam bitched about the power it was eating up and the heat it was giving off, and indeed, inches from its hull, Fred was sweating in his faintly vibrating seat. But, more out of obstinacy than any remaining hope for profit, Fred refused to shut it down, even though he hadn’t gotten a single prayer request other than the one he himself had made to the powers that be to DO something. He checked for new prayers every few minutes, after which he checked the prayerization count for his own prayer—sixty-five trillion some-odd by Saturday night, eighty-six trillion and change on Sunday—comforted for no good reason by the ever-rising figure, as if it were money piling up in some offshore account.

Way to pray.

He also blew some more precious time on Hindu mythology reading. It turned out that Parasurama, the sixth avatara of Vishnu, had wielded an axe, just as that chemotherapy angel avatar of George had been doing in the playtest; in fact, the very name
Parasurama
meant “axe-wielding Rama” in Sanskrit. Parasurama had received the axe, the legend went, after undertaking an arduous penance to please Shiva. He’d then used it to kill a greedy, thousand-armed king, and all the other corrupt warlords in the world. For these blood-soaked rampages, and for handing their territory over to the religious orders, he was known as a
Brahma-
Kshatriya
, a warrior saint. He was a secondary form of avatara, a minor incarnation, not quite a god, just a very, very angry man. And a very long-lived one, still alive today, according to the texts, and fated to remain so until the end of this age of darkness, the Kali Yuga, which Parasurama himself would help usher in by serving as martial guru to the tenth avatara, Kalki. When Kalki arrived, it was said, Parasurama would train him in the warrior arts necessary to defeat Kali. He would train Kalki in the necessary piety too, sending him off to pray to Shiva for victory, in answer to which Shiva would bequeath him a celestial, bird-like spirit helper, and a magical sword, to help him on his way.

So was Fred supposed to be Kalki, then? Was he being trained, or possibly recruited, for some act of sabotage against Armation? And if so, by whom? Was it someone close to George, close enough to have visited him in the hospital, to have seen him in a gown with those tubes in his nose? Before the coma, George had only been an inpatient once, for a few days when his immune system gave up entirely and he’d seemed to come down with a dozen colds and flus simultaneously. Though there were plenty of other times George had been there as an outpatient for tests; and he’d had that oxygen tank with him outside of the hospital, too, toward the end. The depiction could have been entirely guesswork, inference. Whether they’d actually seen George or not during that time, they’d gotten the shape and paleness of his bald head more or less right. And the irradiated thinness of his arms and legs. When Fred closed his eyes, he could still see that avatar, stepping out through that shattered window, axing away at the blank blue sky….

Shelves, boxes, shadows.

The small steel table, redly gleaming in the bulb’s dim light.

The plastic jar of electroconductive gel.

Its cap not quite screwed on right.

Straining his eyes downward, he reaches out to fix it. And a current sears up his arm. Like a grease fire. Spreading across his skin—all of it—from the webbing of his fingers and toes to the insides of his eyelids to the roof of his mouth. He can’t even shout: his lungs have collapsed; the inside of his throat burns. Something’s gone wrong with the helmet. He’s frozen and aflame.

And then he’s somewhere else, clutching the edge of a giant wooden stair. He’s climbed halfway up the staircase and he’s stuck now. Before he can start to cry, a hand closes around his torso. He’s lifted, tucked under a big, helping arm, looking at the other half of him, which stares back from where it’s tucked under his father’s other arm.

Then he and George are in a sandbox, the one in the neighborhood park with the cement dolphin. George is in a costume of some kind, blue pajamas and a small red cape, his arm outstretched. Fred’s own arm, reaching toward George’s, is clad in a blue sleeve, too, and their hands clutch the same red plastic shovel. They’ve been fighting over it and it snaps, sending them sprawling in opposite directions. It’s not their shovel, and they’ve broken it. All they can think to do is set it down in the sand and make it look like it’s back together again, but they can’t get rid of the sandy seam halfway down from the handle, and already an angry mother approaches.

Then they’re standing on the shore of a lake. Mom and Dad and Uncle Manny and a pregnant blond woman who must be Manny’s wife are sitting on a blanket by a tree. Between Fred and George stands Sam, like a squat little gourd. Simultaneously, Fred and George pull quarters out of each of Sam’s ears, as his eyes goggle left and right to convey his astonishment. The adults applaud.

Fred’s a teenager, skidding across three lanes in the van as George reaches to help him with the wheel and everyone else clutches the walls. He’s older, he and George sitting leaned against the front and back tires of Fred’s broke-down used car in Death Valley. He’s an adult, in a department store, catching his reflection in a mirror between two clothing racks—he’s wearing an unfamiliar shirt, blue with narrow red pinstripes, and for a second he wonders if he forgot having tried it on; his reflection looks shocked, then laughs; there’s no mirror; they’ve made the exact same mistake.

No more than strobe flashes, yet each memory, like a gemstone or fractal, presents an endlessly receding depth. He can feel the reassuring warmth of his father’s ribcage. He can see every wavelike crest and dip in the sand around the shovel. And it seems, even more strangely, that he can feel not only his feelings but those of the people around him, from all sides, lapping through him like echoes in a canyon. Here’s the shovel-owning mother’s surge of guilty pleasure as she yells at the two of them. Here’s Sam’s pride at being part of the act. Here are five takes on the same odd synthesis of trapped terror and freedom, even Holly witnessing her own scream as much as producing it as the van skids around to the shoulder, coming to a stop facing the wrong way. The only person there’s no difference with is George, whose feelings are already a part of him.

He must have been electrocuted, must be dead, because there’s a strange brightness, brighter in every scene, as though a skylight—in the ceilings, in the skies themselves—were opening up over each one. Then he’s seeing the light directly, flying toward it through a spiraling mist. It’s the brightest thing he’s ever seen, though it doesn’t at all hurt his eyes. Does he
have
eyes?

The light grows. He might be halfway there when another brightness comes into view at the bottom of his field of vision—a tall, slender, human form, radiance spreading from either side. It raises a hand. And even more quickly than Fred has come, he’s flung backward, back through the void, slammed into that mummy, that papier-mâché doll, that clod of wet, living cloth, within which he once again has to find his way with sickly tendrils of thought.

Back behind the eyes. Light seeping under cracked lids.

He lifts them. There’s Mira, in her blue diorama behind the glass, her body arching toward him, a raised hand holding the cord of the shade. She freezes, seeing him seeing her. Then, deciding not to acknowledge him, she continues lowering the shade. As she vanishes, behind her, at the level of her skirt in the bluish space of the control room, for an instant Fred makes out her father in a chair near the back of the room, gazing at him with curiosity. Then the shade is down.

Fred’s right arm—still rigid over the steel table—the lid still clutched in his fingers.

The jar on its side—silvery-red gobs half seeped onto the tabletop, like brains from an opened head.

“You electrocuted me,” Fred said, the moment he sat down.

Mira had been about to speak, her face eager. She took a moment to recalibrate.

“I assure you, Fred. You weren’t electrocuted.”

“You sure about that assurance?” It was partly anger he was feeling, partly sheer physical agitation. His nerves were still jumping under his skin, as were the muscles of his arm. He was only half sure he wasn’t about to jump up and punch a wall.

“You felt a buzzing or burning sensation?” she asked.

“‘Sensation?’ Sure, the ‘sensation’ of being tossed in a deep fryer.”

“I’m sorry you felt pain, Fred. It’s usually …” She stopped, adjusted course. “It wasn’t meant to be so severe. The sensation”—she fielded his daggering look—“or
pain,
was induced by stimulating your sensorimotor cortex. If it’s any consolation, you can rest assured that it didn’t harm you.”

He knew she was telling him the truth. He’d already figured this much out. But he asked anyway:

“So … my life signs … ?”

“You mean your heartbeat? Brainwaves? Everything stayed within a normal range. You didn’t die, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Her tone was softly chiding. Maybe she’d expected him to be relieved at the news. He leaned back in the chair and stared off at the snow globe across the room. The tension in his nerves was already draining away, but it didn’t make him feel better. He felt like he was wearing a rubber diving suit, looking through a face mask.

“So, aside from that initial discomfort …” Mira tilted her head, trying to make eye contact. “… was there anything else you experienced?”

He contemplated not saying a word more to her. “It was fucking incredible,” he muttered.

She brightened. “Was it?”

He didn’t want to tell her about it. All the same, he wanted to recount it just to lock it down, just so she would type the episode into her computer, give the thing at least that much reality.

“It started with memories,” he said. “In the first one I was a toddler. I could feel the baggy diapers I was wearing. I’ve never remembered anything that far back.”

He kept going, in as much detail as he could summon. He tried to describe the sensation of watching it all like that, living it and yet witnessing it too, that sober remove that had somehow made everything all the more immersive; and the wonder of being able to dip his toes into the ripples of the feelings of those around him, to feel all those feelings intersecting. Mira listened, and typed, her expression alert. He could see she was as puzzled by his bitter tone as she was mesmerized by his words. He told her about the tunnel, the light. About being flung back into his body.

“And …” she prompted, “was there anything else?”

How does she know?
he thought.
Did she choreograph that, too?
His mood darkened even more.

“What, you want to know about the angel?”

“The angel?” She almost laughed. “Yes, Fred. I certainly would like to know about that.”

“It seemed like it was made of light,” he said under his breath.

“Is that why you say it was an angel?”

“That and the wings.”

To his surprise, her eyes went slick.

“Did he—
he
, yes?”

Fred shrugged. She tried again.

“Did it say anything to you?”

“No. Just held up a hand.” He mimicked the gesture.

“Like a wave hello?”

Like a wave hello. Like a signal to halt. Like a stranded call for help. Like a wave goodbye. It could have been any of these things, had it actually happened.

“Did you say anything to him—to
it
?”

Fred shook his head.

She gave him another head tilt. “No? You didn’t?”

“No?”

“Did you recognize him?”

Him
again. Fred stared at her, suspicious.

“Forgive me, Fred,” she said. “I don’t mean to press you.”

“I guess you could say I did.”

She leaned forward. “And?”

“And now it’s time for the science lesson, right?”

Her face was incredulous, like he’d just moved into the nicest house in her neighborhood and the first thing he was doing was bulldozing it to pieces.

“All right.” She straightened in her chair, looking tired now, or maybe he was just now noticing the grayish shimmer beneath her eyes. Another large coffee cup stood beside her briefcase, which she cracked open, revealing a jumble of books and papers and the chaos of styling and organizing items usually found in a woman’s handbag. She slid the laptop inside, atop all the other stuff, and swiveled back to face him. “The shock sensation was administered to provide some realism for the experience that followed.”