Luminarium (3 page)

Even with these reflections, he’d never have returned to that website were it not for those other reasons, harder to explain, even to himself: Because if George were the one sitting here, he—George—would have done it in a heartbeat. And because a sizeable part of Fred wished it
were
George here instead of him, felt it should have been. And because, clicking on the link and filling out the questionnaire, Fred was able to feel what George would have felt—a peculiar, tense electricity in his chest and limbs, as though the study’s purported electromagnetic signals were already coursing up through the keyboard. Like the onset of panic but without the nausea. Like the opening hole of despair but more like hunger. A sensation so long unfelt he couldn’t straightaway place it as hope.

Ten minutes had passed, and if there was one thing Fred was now sure
of, it was that this fright wig of a helmet didn’t do a damned thing. It felt just like any other helmet—padded, close, and hot. He couldn’t feel anything resembling a current, couldn’t hear anything but, possibly, the slightest hum, coming from somewhere behind the chair. From beyond the room came other faint noises: footfall on the floor above; a distant siren’s wail, trailing off so gradually it seemed never to fully end. The shade was still down, the observation window black. What was the use of having an observation window, if all they did was drop a shade over it when the experiment began?

The
experiment.

That word had never been used, of course. “Study” had so much more reassuring a resonance, to the studied and studiers alike. But what was it they were really studying here? The whole deal must be a sham of some kind, he decided, one of those power-of-suggestion-type experiments, an elaborate sugar pill administered to see whether the patient might be suggestible enough to effect his own spiritual transformation. He berated himself for not trusting his instincts and bolting the moment he’d seen the suite’s tiny reception area, little more than a widened hallway beyond a door off the elevator bank, into which a coat rack and a couple of classroom chairs and a metal desk had been crammed. The desk had nothing on it—not even a phone—and no one had been sitting behind it. But he hadn’t been able to face the obvious. Sure. The quirkily hot science nerd chick with the vaguely erotic gel rubdown, the bespectacled wizard in the control room, the seven-page questionnaire and three-page liability waiver—all verisimilitude enhancers, avenues of suggestion-delivery. This gaudy piece of junk on his head—nothing but a stage prop. Fifteen minutes now, it must be, and nothing. Who knew, maybe they didn’t even expect him to imagine any experience here; maybe they were testing something else altogether, like how long a person might submit to sitting here like some mental defective in a Burger King crown, waiting for his divine purpose to be revealed.

How dare they.

How dare they take advantage of desperate, unhappy people like this. He was a second away from ripping the piece of crap off his head, leaping out the chair.

Then what?

How about picking up the trolley and driving it through the goddamned window?

Then what?

Where to then? The coma ward? The office of his ex-company? His parents’ apartment?

The lava cooled in the pit of his chest. Expanding his lungs around that congealed lump seemed more effort than it was worth. What was the point? So sad it was funny, even, imagining he could shuffle in here slope-shouldered, head under a cloud, and stride back out transfigured, head poking above said cloud, bathed in epiphany. Funny/sad/ maddening. The combination was exhausting, and before he knew it he was drowsy, drifting off, half in pain, half in pleasure, to a sound in the room he hadn’t noticed before: a faint and, now that he was attuned to it, almost painfully high-pitched tone. Sometimes, lying in bed late at night, he’d hear small, insistent noises like this burrowing into his ear. This tone, though, wasn’t a single note but an interval, possibly a major seventh. There was a smell in the air, too, like wet earth and ozone, and the sound was broadening and flattening out, sounding first like applause. Then like escaping steam.

Then like a shearing of machine parts—a hot little saw burning from the front to the back of his skull.

And here he goes, seeping out into the room.

No difference between his sweating palms and the sweating vinyl of the chair. Between the compacted springs within the chair and the tensing and relaxing of his muscles.

The helmet pulsating within him like a second scalp. The charge of its net of wires his own hair tousling in a breeze. The chair beneath him an internal pressure, the frame and stuffing the weight of his own bones and innards. Air and time alike circulating within him. The high electric whine: within him. Like a voice. Like a pulse. Like a single, continuous thought, a focused point of attention expanding, carrying him outward in all directions. The galaxy approaching, as if he might contain it all, every last thing everywhere, but for the fear, rising up like an arm to pull him back.

Maybe he moans, or maybe it’s the electric sound, sliding down again to a low hum and ratcheting like the sealing of a vault, as, with a nauseating snap, the world presses in:

Hot vinyl crawling beneath his palms.

Helmet crimping his skull.

Reddened galaxy glaring down at him—blindly—like the muscled socket of an eye.

“So,” Mira said. “How did it feel in there?”

She sat nearby in an office chair, a notebook computer balanced on her stockinged knees. Fred was noticing, in the light from the standing lamp beside him, the faint outlines of contact lenses in those dark eyes of hers.

She was examining him as well.

“Fred?”

“Yes. It felt …” He laughed. He shook his head.

“Why did you just laugh?”

“It’s just hard to find the words. I’m feeling a little …”

“Disoriented?”

“Spacey, yeah.”

“That will go away soon.”

He felt along his collarbones, the walls of his chest. “It felt like a jailbreak.” “Oh? How so?”

As he attempted to describe the sensations he’d felt—the expansion, the freedom, the envelopment of the chair and the air around him—she began to type without breaking eye contact. Her typing was beyond fast, more words, he was pretty sure, than he was managing to speak. She seemed at once excited and intent on hiding her excitement behind a veneer of objective inscrutability. It was hard to stay focused on what he was saying. The soft clatter of keys made him hyperaware of being a test subject. Yet, too, in a tactile kind of way, there was something delightful about the sound. He could almost feel the little concave buttons springing beneath his own fingertips, the electrical impulses zapping through the circuitboard and the nerves of her arms. helmet. To the contrary, there was a subtle pressure he was now sensing, exerted by all that wasn’t him—Mira, the keytaps, the four walls of her tiny office, the second recliner of the day she’d sat him down in (olderlooking than the last, though in better repair), a cloth-covered artifact from about the same era as that gold helmet, its course fabric woven from several shades of unnatural blue.

She kept typing after he’d finished. Adding her own commentary, maybe. As she did so, she bridged the awkward silence with a drawn-out nod. There was a hardness to the set of her features he hadn’t noticed in the low light of the helmet room.

“So if it was like a jailbreak,” she said when the typing stopped, “what would you say was the jail?”

There wasn’t a simple answer to this. The bars had been neither within nor without. He hadn’t even known they’d been there until they were down. He felt a need, a cell-deep hunger, to try the session again, see if he could go farther, contain the whole room, contain other people completely. What would that feel like? How much could he hold? How big could he get?

“What happened to me in there, anyway?” His question tumbled out with a sudden force, almost accusing.

“What do you feel happened to you?”

“But what
really
happened to me?” To the extent he’d been able to imagine what would happen here at all, he’d anticipated some kind of drugged-out, blissful high. What he’d just experienced seemed of another order.

“You’d like to know the technical aspects of the process?”

“Right,” he said. “Yes.”

She looked pleased, like he’d just bested a maze and won a piece of cheese.

“That’s good. Because I intend to explain it to you. It’s very important, for our purposes here, that you understand it. But let’s talk about what brought you here first. Is that all right?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, just started clicking around on her computer, calling up the relevant data. Now that his disorientation was on the wane, he was starting to decide that, actually, he didn’t much like this woman, didn’t much care for her condescension, her impeccable posture, the overall feeling she gave him that he was sitting slouched in a petri dish, looking up through a tube of microscope lenses into her giant, peeled eye. A few minutes ago, when he’d grabbed her forearm to steady himself upon getting up from the helmet chair, her eyes had popped like his hand was electrified, like he was some experimental slime monster that had breached the containment barriers. Or maybe his grip had just been too strong. As they ticked across what he assumed was his file on her screen, he noticed her contact lenses again. And still that squint. He contemplated telling her she needed a new prescription. It wasn’t a particularly confidence-instilling detail.

“From the application it sounds like it’s a pretty hard time for you right now.” She nodded again, giving him permission to be having a pretty hard time right now. “Can you tell me a little more about George? Is he still in a coma?”

“As of this morning,” he said, steeling himself.

“You wrote that he had lymphoma, and then lapsed into the coma. So the one caused the other?”

In the gunmetal bookcase on the wall opposite him, at the corner of a shelf with some stereo equipment and a stack of recordable CDs, a snow globe caught his eye, one of the few decorations in the room, a New York skyline of maybe twenty years ago submerged in brackish water.

“They said the cancer cells probably produced a hormone that caused his sodium levels to drop too low. Apparently it’s not uncommon. The coma resulted from that.”

“Are they still trying to treat the cancer?”

The room closed around him like a fist.

“They can’t. Or won’t, so long as he doesn’t wake up. He went through chemo and radiation when he was first diagnosed. Then it spread to his lungs. Then they told him he only had two or three months to live and he gave up treatment. That was seven months ago. The last six of which, he’s been in the coma.”

He knew what was coming next. He was resenting her before she even asked.

“Was there ever a discussion about just”—her voice was quieter now—“stopping treatment?”

“Early on, they didn’t want to put him on life support. My parents probably would have caved. But I insisted. After a couple weeks, he didn’t need the life support anymore. He’s been on his own power ever since.” He said it like a boast, like he felt no guilt whatsoever about what he’d committed to putting everyone, including George, through. On Fred’s first and last visit to a therapist a couple months back, when he’d made the mistake of relating these details in a less self-assured manner, the woman had assumed he was remorseful about his decision, and proceeded to offer her cloying reassurances that it was a mistake any loving relative could make. Mira’s reaction was in its own way worse: a look of sympathy stopping just short of approval. Before she could say anything, he went on:

“The doctors don’t know why he hasn’t died. They see no point in doing more tests, but the cancer must be in remission, seeing as he’s still … around.”

She closed her eyes, opened them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Fred, I’m merely asking. This isn’t
quite
my area of expertise.” The way she deployed that
quite
emphasized that in fact it was, broadly speaking, within her expertise. “But six months is a long time to be in a coma. Are there any signs of brain activity?”