Luminarium (31 page)

She was looking around at nothing, at the air in front of her. He tried to imagine the lashing waves of that out-of-control vortex she was presumably feeling.

“I tried that,” she said. “It just doesn’t work the same.”

Reiki issues aside, he thought he could understand this. There wouldn’t have been the same fearful thrill, free-falling surrender. It was a leap of faith, out of the imagination and into the world. There was no way he could stop her. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to.

“So what’s the street feel like when it’s clear?” he asked.

Behind those shaded lenses, he could see her eyes sparkling with something, tears or triumph, or both.

“To me, it feels like a baby.” She smiled. “Sleeping in my arms.”

He looked off down Broadway, blinking, into the kaleidoscopic streams of sunglassed heads and yellow taxi hulls. By the time he looked back, she had brought her hands up, just in time for every single person on the roofdeck of a passing tourist bus to gawk at her, a few snapping pictures.

He shut his eyes, reached for the sky—this time, to his surprise, looking forward to it.

And it’s back again, the glare, stronger than ever. It rebounds off the
low white drop ceiling, blanches the dull red linoleum tacking to these checkered shoes. The community room is a glowing netherworld, a place of inversions, where excited children have been replaced by hostile seniors, or hostile to Fred, at any rate. He pulls an endless string of scarves from Vartan’s mouth, and a long-eared, leftward-listing man lasers Fred with blistery eyes. He glues Vartan’s feet to the floor, and a bag-jawed lady in thick glasses emits a rasping sigh. The audience murmurs with approval as Vartan glowers over Fred with his metal rings. They suck at their dentures as Fred maneuvers the rings over Vartan’s head and binds his arms. The only exception is today’s birthday boy, front and center, a radiant shrunken apple of a man who’s just turned a hundred. He smiles impartially and perpetually, a toothless, lipless smile, his eyes above it like unbuttoned buttons peeking through their wrinkled holes, a smile that would reassure Fred but for the nagging suspicion it might remain there unchanged were Fred and his father to stop pouring fake pitchers into newspaper cones and instead douse each other with gasoline and light a match.

Fred is supposed to be the one to go into the wooden box (they can’t very well crate up the centenarian), and Vartan is supposed to make him disappear, then feel remorseful; but Vartan changes the script. Responding to some new dramatic insight, Vartan’s movements have been becoming more hesitant, as if he’s discovered his bones to be made of shale. He’s playing an older man than he was previously; no less angry, if anything, more, but with a helpless, pathetic aspect to the rage. Instead of tricking and kicking Fred into the box, Vartan stops him with a palm, and begins lowering himself to hands and knees. He looks so frail Fred instinctively reaches out a hand to help, but, proud in his defeat, Vartan waves him away and crawls inside.

Fred spins and disappears his father, spins and fails to reappear him, worrying about Vartan in that tight, enclosed space designed for a child. The audience is picking up on Fred’s distress, nodding as if it’s about time, about time this no-good, disrespectful son—this son who very likely has not visited his old man in the old folks’ home nearly as often as he should—finally feels remorse. Then Fred is spinning again, the room whirling, those old faces and pastel bulletin board flyers for blood drives, bingo games, self-defense lessons warping and slipping around the hole where George should have been across from him like water around a rock. There’s no flash-powder bomb—which, after all, might have stopped a frail heart out there—but the room is so bright now that Fred almost thinks one must have gone off, as the door falls open, and Vartan, a white-haired, white-tuxed whiteness within the whiteness emerges. Slowly, dazedly, Vartan rises, blinking and looking about. They embrace, clinging to each other as if they’d just seen a roomful of ghosts, as the ghosts themselves watch them, touched, or perhaps just unsure if it’s over, until the birthday boy raises his parchment hands and issues a papery clap.

The two of
them sat in the van after loading it in silence.

“What the fuck was that?” Vartan muttered.

Though the brightness was gone, Fred’s dreamlike feeling that he was dead, or that everyone was dead, hadn’t entirely worn off.

“Weird show,” he agreed. “But seemed like it went OK.”

Really, it had gone better than OK. Once the audience had started clapping, it had become clear they’d been not only entertained but moved. Fred, too, had been moved, and a little disturbed, by his father’s performance—Vartan seemed to have discovered a whole new depth to the part. And moved or not, the birthday boy had seemed happy enough to receive his requisite stuffed toucan, clutching it a little obscenely to his blanketed lap and gazing up at Fred and Vartan with those tiny nutbrown eyes.

“Whole new market, maybe,” Fred added.

“They’re not supposed to root for the washed-up old man,” Vartan said. “That’s not the point.” He was strangely agitated, patting down his tux jacket, in search of his pipe. “Shoot me before it comes to parking me in one of those places, OK?”

Fred said OK, and waited while his father toked up.

Sighing smoke, Vartan looked over. “There’s nothing sadder than old people still crazy for magic.”

The mustache ticked, just enough to show who he was really talking about. Neither of them could look at the other for long. Vartan turned the ignition and the radio came on. They listened to a story about a JFK passenger in an Arabic script T-shirt being told he couldn’t fly.

“I think we’ll make it,” Vartan said, taking a last quick hit. They were in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn—the nursing home was two blocks from the apartment—but in the interest of time, were headed straight to LaGuardia. “You got everything you need in that carry-on bag?”

Fred nodded.

“You got some good shoes to wear?”

He nodded again, though his dress shoes had holes in them and he couldn’t afford new ones, and anyway, he was probably too superstitious at this point to stop wearing George’s checkered shoes. His brother had gotten not only the shoes, but an entire checkered outfit on that trip two years back, as a kind of tribute, after all his belongings were stolen at knifepoint and some Czech dot-com burnouts he’d hooked up with had taken up a collection for him. Fred still had on his cell phone, texted to him by a gracious stranger, a picture of George in a checkered cap, a checkered shirt, a pair of checkered pants, hiked up to display checkered socks, and the shoes.

“I put your mail in the side pocket.”

“Thanks,” Fred said, wishing his father hadn’t been so thoughtful, not particularly eager to breast the latest wave of bills and collection notices. They listened to a story about a marine prison guard forcing Saddam Hussein to watch the
South Park
movie over and over and over again.

“When’s your tweezer arraignment?” Vartan asked, apparently reminded by Saddam’s ordeal.

“Monday morning.”

“You’re not a flight risk, are you? I’d like to get my fifty bucks back.”

“Don’t worry. Justice will be served.”

They listened, uneasily, to a story about a male nurse in jail for murdering dozens of his helpless patients with lethal injections. The man was now donating a kidney to help the brother of a former girlfriend.

“Your mom and I will be there,” Vartan said, preempting Fred’s question. “OK. Let’s roll.”

At a stoned crawl, they pulled out of the nursing home’s service entrance and Fred watched the greenery in planters and the co-ops that once had been tenements inch by. Before the show, he’d spent as much time as he could in Manhattan, with George. He’d pointed out to the nurses the colorlessness of his brother’s urine and asked them to check his osmolality and electrolytes. He’d read to George a paper by an Oxford philosophy professor who argued that, according to the principle of mediocrity, it was far more probable this particular human experience was just a collection of algorithms being crunched in some gargantuan simulation software than actual flesh-and-blood people in an actual place; followed, skipping over the parts where the equations got too dense, by a paper by an astrophysicist who claimed that according to the math, the universe had never been created to begin with. Finally, without specificity, he’d described the upcoming trip to George as being for business, trying to sound neither upset, which he was, nor excited, which, guiltily, he was a little bit too.

Vartan’s cell phone rang. He batted aside his cape and jacket and extracted it from the leather holster clipped to his cummerbund.

“Yeah, we’re headed to the airport,” Vartan said after a moment. “We just did a show. At the hospital where they were born. Remember it?”

The show hadn’t in fact been at the hospital, which they were passing now, but the nursing home down the block. Possibly Vartan had just become confused—happily, if not willfully so. He reached over and began moving Fred’s head around, as if examining it for lice. “He’s got gray hairs now. You believe that?”

“Gray hairs?” Fred heard the brassy edge of Manny’s voice boom through the tiny speaker.

Vartan released Fred’s head, shaking his own sadly. “George’s has grown back in, and it’s still all dark.”

Manny said something quieter.

“Yeah. Yeah, well. So what do you want?” He listened, turned to Fred. “Manny wants you to get him an acting job with the military.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“He wants to direct,” Vartan conveyed.

Whenever Fred wanted to describe Manfred Kent to anyone who’d been watching TV in North America any time of day or night between the years of 1984 and 1990, all he usually had to do was remind them of a commercial for a money transfer service in which a miserable-looking couple is sitting facing the camera, and the husband is on the phone asking for money to be wired
today
, and the wife is nervously watching the husband, and behind them is standing a tall, silent, and motionless motorcycle cop in a helmet and sunglasses. It was one of those commercials that, thanks to some strange corporate whim, got aired over and over for season after season; and that finally, just when you were allowed to forget about it for a few weeks, mysteriously reappeared to bludgeon you with another heavy rotation. This was Manny—the motorcycle cop—in, if not his biggest, then at any rate his most profitable role. In real life he was anything but silent or still, constantly in motion, impossible to keep track of, always gaining or losing things, property, jobs, wives. He’d been a fixture in Fred and George’s childhood—whenever they saw the man, they knew they’d be in for a day out of the ordinary, following him around as he hit on women and pitched films he was dreaming up on the spot to anyone who looked well-off.

He’d moved to L.A. in the mid-eighties, and the last time Fred had seen him was about a dozen years ago, on one of those aimless road trips. Fred had crashed at George’s sunny apartment complex in San Jose, hanging out in his ratty leather jacket by the pool while George went to work, winking at the women who thought he was George and otherwise causing difficulties, until George finally agreed to take a few days off. They drove down Highway 1 and Manny met them in Malibu and took them out to the property he’d recently purchased, a thin, twisting, two-acre strip of creased earth at the bottom of a steep gulch. In order to keep out the riffraff, the owners of the luxury estates adorning the surrounding hilltops had thought to buy the entire hills on which their homes were situated, down to the very feet of their slopes; but when it came to the cragged gulch bottom, they either supposed that no one would ever want it or perhaps believed that they themselves already owned it. Doubtless, though, they were now ruing their carelessness, for Manny, lacking the funds at present to build a house, had settled down there in a pup tent, with a pack of half-starved, “rescued” pound dogs to protect his belongings (a trunk full of clothes and, of course, the tent). His bathroom was a hole in the ground, which the dogs efficiently, if revoltingly, vied for the privilege of keeping clean. The hole had at first been entirely out in the open, but was now, in a neighborly response to the hilltop homeowners’ complaints to the local police, walled on three sides by beach towels tied to stakes, high enough to cover up the fine points of the act itself, but still low enough for Manny, as he squatted, to cheerfully wave hello to the neighbors gaping in horror from the decks and picture windows above. Manny offered Fred and George his tent, and himself lay under the stars by the opening, lecturing Fred about how he needed to be more like his brother and get his life in order, while, from either end of the gulch, the spooked dogs howled stereophonically in the darkness.

Manny was in his fifties then, but still energetic enough to live in that gulch for three months, jogging a mile to the beach and back every day, until finally his neighbors, in grudging respect for his business acumen, chipped in and bought him out for a fourfold profit.

“Manny says you can stay with him,” Vartan told Fred, the phone still at his ear.