Luminarium (59 page)

“Sorry I won’t be there, Monday.” A dreamlike knot on Sam’s dreamlike brow. “Sorry I wasn’t there for the last seven months.”

“You were just being loyal.” Fred’s dream hand on Sam’s dream shoulder. “Good luck saving Urth.”

“Good luck with … that,” Sam said, with a look back at the camping pack.

As Fred watched the peculiar, one-of-a-kind shape of Sam heading into the terminal, it struck him that a life would be too painful if it were real, that the pain would overwhelm it, would overwhelm everything. But since it wasn’t—since, if not in some cosmic way, then just in the ordinary way, every last reality was ever-transmogrifying and fading away—maybe it could be borne; maybe in that sense, it didn’t weigh a thing.

Back in the city, Fred parked the van in the hospital lot, and carried the box through the entrance. Not only could he glimpse the other side of that coin, he thought, he could take it and flip it once and for all. And live here perpetually, on the flip side of the universe, a place where there was a thing called a brain, a clump of noodles busy with things called chemistry and electricity, matter and energy, where there was a thing called science, which—if not untrue, if not inconsistent, if not even fallible—was irrelevant. Here on the flip side, the material universe was but an epiphenomenon, the manifestation of an altogether different order. How thickheaded it had been of him, all these months, to try to lock down God with scientific lingo. It was like trying to terrace-farm Space Mountain. Like flicking a Zippo inside the sun.

Passing through the ultramodern lobby to the antiquated interior, boarding the rattletrap elevator, he allowed himself the hope he’d be granted a sign—that George had gotten what he needed. George wouldn’t have to wake up, the feat Holly had dreamt of, the feat Fred himself had just dreamt that the Presence, and maybe all the angels in creation, were working to achieve. George wouldn’t have to come back to life. One faint squeeze of Fred’s finger would suffice at this point, would be the last little nudge Fred felt he himself needed to take up residence here on the flip side, to end the wandering and build his city walls, to know that all this strife had been for a purpose, bringing him, as it had, to the helmet, the helmet to George, them both to the Presence, which, in this new land, would be every bit as present as they.

Coming through the door to George’s room, Fred stopped. There was something on George’s head already. It looked like a blue shower cap, but was acrawl with wires and brightly colored electrodes. By his bedside, in front of a cart with a monitor, sat a technician with a wan, ruddy face and a long chin. The man looked from George to the colored dots on the screen, from the screen to Fred, from Fred to George and back.

“What are you doing?” Fred asked.

“The doctor wanted a test.”

“And?”

“You should talk to Dr. Papan.”

“Tell me.”

The technician sucked in his lips, as if to hide them. “I turned this brain upside down and shook it for twenty minutes.”

A twitch of a smile, then another, as if in apology for the first.

“I’m very sorry. The body’s alive. But up here … all gone.”

It was something
about wasps, and figs, but there were other creatures involved as well: bats, green pigeons, monkeys, and elephants. And the fig tree itself. The wasp eggs hatched in the figs. The tree protected the wasp eggs in a kind of sap. The wasps grew up in the figs, mated, burrowed out, spread the tree’s pollen. The other creatures spread the tree’s seeds. It was vastly more complicated than that—there were microscopic flowers, parasitical wasps that ate the fig wasps, ants that ate the parasitical wasps, seed bugs swarming beneath the tree, microscopic roundworms eating the wasps alive from within. It was important, Fred felt, that he cognize the narrative in its entirety. Because it was nature, the truth of things. And because it was also, somehow, in a way he maddeningly couldn’t quite put his finger on, about him, Fred himself, or was at least being shown to him for a reason—how could it not have been, for here he was witnessing it. But he couldn’t keep it all straight. He was diverted again and again by the insistent fact of his own watching of it. The fact of his existence, demanding explanation. Sitting in something called a booth, in something called a cafeteria, watching something called a television.

It wasn’t quite habit that had brought him down here. He’d intended to leave the building, but, like some tethered ghost, found himself unable. Reaching his usual table, he’d opened his laptop—again, not automatically, but because he assumed he was about to cry and figured he could use the thing to hide behind. But so far he hadn’t cried. He’d just sat, watching the nature documentary on the mounted TV, the sound too low to really hear.

A new old man sat in the previous old man’s spot, this one in a widecollared plaid blazer, making his rheumy-eyed way through the
Post
:

$6 MILLION

SCRATCH N’ WIN

GAME CARD

INSIDE TODAY

AIR

SICK

And a subheading saying 70 percent of the WTC recovery workers were deathly ill. The
Daily News
, abandoned on a nearby table, added its own muted outrage:

KICKOFF!

SUPER NFL PREVIEW

THE SHAME OF 9/11

NO DOUBT

NOW

On the other TV across the room, a 9/11 retrospective segment played on NY1, as if anyone could possibly need a refresher: the sequential gouts of brimstone; the first mythic giant falling for the zillionth time; the sick feeling of the future being ripped away; that awful interval before the other’s collapse.

Fred looked away. There was a new tear-blasted woman here today as well, sitting in the corner with nothing but a paper-cupped cappuccino, too new to have figured out the necessity of knitting needles or a book or some other prop to hide behind. When Fred looked back at the screen, the ash cloud was rolling up Broadway, engulfing the runners in sulfur, asbestos, radionuclides, diphenylpropane, hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and dibenzodioxins and dibenzofurans, phthalates and pesticides, leaded and unleaded paint, mineral wool and fiberglass, plastic and cellulose, rubber and silicon. Bits of phones and faxes and computers. Bits of floor and ceiling tile, carpets and cubicle walls, file cabinets and files. Bits of Mira’s husband. At the office, George had shown up caked in all of it. Fred had walked him down the hall to the bathroom and George had stood before the mirror, a human plaster statue, whispering hoarsely, “Holy fuck,” half coughing, half laughing in disbelief. It could have been any of those substances Fred had later spent weeks researching that had done George in. Or it could have been the smoke Fred had blown in his face. Or it could have been the office microwave, or the EM tori of a dozen office computers. Or it could have been the torus of the universe itself, whipping through him with its dark light, its X-rays and gamma rays, retuning George’s DNA antennae, switching around As and Ts, Gs and Cs, and powering up his mitochondrial energy coils to churn out mutant copies and spread them through his electronrich lung-batteries. It could have been men, could have been God, could have been both or neither.

Fred closed his eyes, just for a moment, but all he had to do was blink to be confronted afresh with the image of the EEG net snug around George’s head. In one blink, Fred would see in that preemptive, wirewigged piece of headgear divine mockery, the cruelest prank yet. In the next blink, he’d see divine love, as much need for a God helmet in the world as for a head on top of a head, the real Presence already there, already welcoming George. In still the next blink, Fred would see nothing but the snarled wires themselves, the two accounts canceling each other out, the Presence itself nowhere, not even a memory. And up on the nearer screen, the little wasp was nearing its journey’s end, straining to cram itself in through a tiny doorway in the fig’s surface, a slot so thin that as the wasp pushed its way through, its abdomen swelled like a balloon and popped.

Then a shot of the fig’s illuminated interior, the dying wasp scrambling to plant its eggs and pollinate the fig before the roundworms finished eating it from within.

Then a shot of the dead wasp, upside down on the fig floor.

For the briefest interval, Fred stopped thinking, as though his mind, too, had swelled and popped. The world utterly complete without him.

The old man paged over to the funnies.

The teary woman shredded her empty cup.

On the far screen, the pageant rolled on—Bush straddling the rubble, bearded marines in Afghani hats, video postcards from Osama, Saddam’s shoe-slapped statue, “Mission Accomplished,” thumbs-up chick on the ass pyramid, exploding Humvees, lines at the airport. Fred was back with his dust-coated brother before the mirror, feeling as though two balled-up swaths of felt had been stuffed down his own lungs. George might have already been one of those sandstone angels. He’d seemed less real than that, even—a 3D avatar, a holograph wavering in the air.

Fred yanked his laptop from the backpack. He brought up an Urth window, and logged in. He appeared in his last location, more or less, not falling or frozen, but just standing on 34th Street, the reconstituted Empire State Building to one side, the flattened studio-set façade of storefronts to the other, the 2D map stretching out east and west. He was still wearing a fire helmet, still too small for his cartoon head. He scrolled around Little Fred and saw he was also still wearing the air mask. It looked uncomfortable, so he took it off, hearing the moment he did the sound—all-too-familiar from all those wargaming man-hours—of a grenade pin being pulled. Remembering the sabotage going on, Fred managed to chuck it away before it exploded, though when it did, it merely splashed, like pool water around some porcine bellyflopper. He brought up the navigation panel, took out his cell phone, typed the
CALL GEORGE
numbers into the longitude and latitude entry boxes, and teleported downtown. Nothing here. Just the 2D plane, the Empire State Building off in the distance. He was about to give up and close the program when he noticed a sparkling dot on the ground about thirty feet off. As he approached, it grew a few pixels, but no more, until he was practically standing atop it. Only then did its shape become clear: a key.

When Fred picked
it up, around him, the street outside his office suddenly appeared. It was crudely rendered, not up to Urth’s current standards—part photographic backdrop, part quick-and-dirty animation. Unlike the actual street, several of the buildings here were not quite complete, presenting exposed girders, half-laid brickwork, open holes awaiting windows, through which bare studs could be glimpsed. At work inside, wielding hammers, out on the scaffolding with trowels, and up on the beams with rivet guns were a score of angels, wings protruding from flannel shirts, yellow hard hats atop golden haloes. As Fred watched, a special-effects ripple spread overhead, and as it passed, the workers’ tools transformed, a jackhammer blasting one angel off like a rocket, a paintbrush in another angel’s hand erasing rather than coloring a wall. Fred slowly turned in place. Another wave passed, and another, turning arc welders to bubble blowers, tape measures to jump ropes, sending a streetlight sack-racing off to freedom. The waves passed every thirty seconds, and seemed to emanate from an upper floor of his office building.

He passed through the front door into a rough facsimile of his lobby, the dimensions and colors more or less right. An elevator opened as he approached. He walked in, experiencing a phantom downward pull as the lighted numbers rose, his anticipation and apprehension rising with them. In the hallway, there were no doors other than the one to his former company. He clicked it open.

He could barely make out an office in the chaos that confronted him. Neon-blue waves rolled across the ceiling, bursting into froth as they hit the wall. Out of this same wall, strange, inverted trees, with leaves suckering to the walls like roots, and roots spreading out like branches grew sideways into the air. As he cleared the maze of foliage, Fred saw that the area where his station should have been was empty, save for cobwebs, mold, and dust. Sam’s alcove housed only a tumbleweed, tumbling around in some micro-weather breeze. The window wasn’t papered over, and afforded a view Fred had almost forgotten, a view Sam had only wanted to forget, of sunlit buildings to the south and west. The only difference was that where first there had been the towers, and then just the empty air, two new towers stood. They weren’t as high, and weren’t quite identical, though both were darkish and malevolent looking, and bristling with spires. Orthanc and Barad-dûr, he recognized, from
The Lord
of the Rings
. These, too, were still under construction, minute, wingèd forms hammering at the flanks.

He turned and wended his way through a curving passage of gravitydefying desks and chairs and other floating objects—the red couch, the microwave and mini-fridge, the Lego Death Star. The backs of a dozen crammed-together monitors of varying sizes blocked from view George’s little area in the back corner. It wasn’t until Fred was practically inside it that Angel-George himself was revealed, his back to Fred, cross-legged on a meditation cushion afloat in midair, wings draping to the floor. Above the oxygen tank that was strapped between the avatar’s wings could be seen the back of a too-thin neck, and a grayish, hairless little head. An inch above that floated a halo, and atop that a very tall, very strange-looking top hat, of burnished silver, opaquely reflective, with round brims at both bottom and top.

“My Precious! You made it!” George’s voice erupted from the speakers of Fred’s computer, causing Fred’s heart to lurch, and a nurse, passing with a tray heaped with scramble eggs, to turn and stare. As Fred dug through his briefcase for his headphones, the floating cushion spun George about. His eyes were huge now, and his face around them had shrunk, skin withered and drawn, the oxygen line cutting deep below the ridgelines of his cheekbones. Fred managed to get the headphones plugged in before George spoke again.