Luminarium (61 page)

Fred had slipped out of consciousness the moment he’d laid down his head, his mind simply refusing to process an emotion which, upon opening his eyes, upon cutting through the cruelly happy fog of that dream, upon examining his clenched fists, he finally understood to be hatred. He wanted to go up to his room and slap George awake, just so he could punch his tracheostomy until he gagged and died.

I hate you
, he told Inner George. The evil shit didn’t answer him. It was hard to remember the last time he had. He was hiding from Fred, thought Fred, along with that two-faced Presence, which had now become an Absence, a suction at the bottom of things.

Fred himself was almost gagging. The air was thick with the smell of lunch food—he must have been out cold for hours—and wafting, it seemed to him, in strange gusts. Every table was now full, white coats or haggard patients and their families. The clamor of voices and dishes went loud and faint. No one else noticed the wind in the room, even as it whistled and eddied around them. No one else was choking, or blinking with stung eyes. No one noticed themselves disappearing in its bitter billows.

Flushed and unsteady and just plain sick of the place, Fred slid his computer back into the camping pack and made his way down the hall and out into the lobby.

“Brownie-Anne,” a voice rang out.

“No. Brew-nian,” said another.

Fred’s heart sledgehammered. The two men—one compact in an olive blazer, with a gray skullcap of hair; the other bigger in a black windbreaker, with hair the color of french fry oil—were standing at the front desk, their backs to him.

Almost had me
, Fred thought, addressing not the men but George, wherever the bastard was hiding. George, to whom he’d sacrificed everything. Everything but whatever last scrap of freedom Fred could now steal for himself. There was a magic show he needed to perform. And there was his date tonight, with the woman he loved. Not exactly a date, granted—a “debriefing,” she’d called it. Even so.

He slipped out the revolving door and past a parked maroon Impala with minimalist hubcaps—a car that shouted
police
so loud it couldn’t justly be called unmarked. The churning cloud was out here as well, nothing Fred could see, exactly, just an acid shimmer, a slow leach of some vital substance from everyone and everything. And a physical wind to match, the sky a blustery gray. He changed in the van, paid the garage fee with most of his remaining twenty-five dollars, the attendant blinking, not from the cloud but from the brightness of Fred’s tux. Fred had over an hour to kill before the show. He cut north and west, along a route designed to hit as much traffic as possible.

As he began passing through Times Square, the first raindrop struck his windshield, and the woozy gusts seemed almost like they might lift him from his seat. Hating him no less intensely, Fred was asking George if he remembered how the two of them used to get taken along on Vartan’s daily rounds around the square. The first stop had typically been an audition. Fred and George would sit in a waiting room with a bunch of men dressed like Vartan—the entire city might have been composed of such men—silently moving their lips as though in prayer. Next, to Actors’ Equity, where they’d sit in the lobby, in molded plastic chairs too high for their sneakers to touch the linoleum, as Vartan scanned the bulletin boards or filled out paperwork. Then it was usually off to the Actors Studio or the Ensemble Studio Theatre to pick up some script, and after that it was time for the marathon lunch session at the Edison Hotel coffee shop, the actors griping about the day’s slim pickings—a role as a murdered corpse in a photograph on a detective’s desk (“They told me, ‘Turn to the side and look dead’”), or as a throttled stool pigeon, having to use their own hands to choke themselves while reading out the lines. The three of them would crisscross the square repeatedly in the course of these errands, giving Fred and George the chance to view it again and again from every angle as they were pulled along in their father’s grip. Fred asked George if he could recall a Camel cigarette sign featuring a man in a captain’s hat, whose eerily effeminate, perfectly round mouth blew steady puffs of smoke; a giant green bottle of something called Champale pouring endlessly into a waiting glass, like those trick pitchers they used in their magic shows; those red neon signs for Live Nude Girls and those vaguely sinister XXXs. Fred’s primary feeling, traversing the square, had been one of knowing himself a child in a world for adults—a gritty, grimy, gladiatorial arena, where men like their dad battled for a rarefied niche up on those lighted marquees among the booze and cigarette ads, most perishing in the attempt on the canyon floor.

Usually Fred had trouble remembering things like this, but at the moment, he could see it as clearly as if it were superimposed on what was here in front of him three decades later: Toddlers squealing their delight atop the shoulders of camera-toting dads. Planet Hollywood proudly wheelchair accessible, a smiling hostess holding open the door for a woman with a bent spine in a sporty red mobility scooter, its model name—“Celebrity”—glistening in suave silver letters. Flesh aplenty but nary an X amid the dreaming screens, the megaplexes, the shopping centers, the Madame Tussauds wax museum and laser-tag arcades and Disney and World Wrestling Federation flagship stores. The existential poles had been switched, and Fred was now an adult in a land for children, and he didn’t know what it meant.

What do
you
think it means, George, you cockroach?

No answer.

And somehow, in this land for children, it wasn’t out of place that outside the Army recruiting center, dress-uniformed soldiers were letting passing families sight through a bipod-mounted machine gun.

Rain spattered the
windshield in gobs by the time Fred was piloting the magic van through the Upper West Side. The Absence was getting stronger, the unreal wind one moment too thick to breathe, the next too thin, as he pulled into the garage of the red-brick West End Towers and hand-trucked the magic crate to the elevators. A bit like the Zeckendorf, he remarked to George, though the coward was still hiding from him. If he could only go back in time, Fred thought, and kill George as he slept in their bunkbed. Fred’s stomach lifted as the elevator slowed. He was shown into a penthouse entertainment room—cream-colored walls, a cream couch and stuffed chairs, a cream throw rug, and a corner view of near-horizontal rain battering the complex’s other red tower and sweeping across the city below.

The children were just now arriving from school, one or two minded by mothers but most by immigrant caretakers. The adults gathered in the open kitchen area, where the hostess, a slender blonde, late forties, with a regal Roman nose and soft blue eyes, was charting the children’s food allergies on a refrigerator whiteboard as her Latina cook looked on. The little ones, meanwhile, set to playing with their handheld games and plasma-screen videogames, their trading cards and action figures and various other toys pulled from pockets and trunks and shelves; one girl with rectilinear bangs blowing balloons, another in pigtails competing with bubblegum as bright and pink as her bubble cheeks. Fred set up in the midst of them, remarking to George, nowhere to be seen, how odd a thing it was to see so much happiness in a world on the brink; then telling him to fuck off, and die more painfully next time.

Now the mother was ushering two little forms toward Fred, the cloudwind picking up around the pair, making them hard to see at first. Fred watched the mother speaking to him. He saw her thin lips purse and then spread across her teeth, her tongue touch the roof of her mouth, her lips spread wider still. Did he hear the word or just read it in those motions?

twins

He made them out, just then. A boy and a girl. Big, rosy slabs of cheek boxing their smiles, messy brown hair, and that was about all he saw of them before the wind in his eyes was making everything blurry and he had to look away.

Sly of our old dad, eh George? Twins. For your long-lost solo act.

That snake wasn’t answering. The wind was closing in, buffeting Fred from all directions. He started the show, tearing the plastic wrap from the box, and pulling out the MagicCo wand. There was barely even a handle, so pocked and nozzled and festooned it was with lenses and radar-like dishes and fan-blade protrusions. Vartan had succeeded in making it look comical. But, whether intentionally, or whether it was just Vartan being Vartan, the thing was also disturbing, monstrously elaborate, especially when Fred turned on the switch and the lights began to flash and the dishes and blades began to whirl. It could have been from these children’s dystopian future, he quipped to George, wishing he’d taken the sensible precaution of umbillically throttling him in the womb. It could have been the superbeing, the one that as adults this audience of his would labor to create, the one they’d hope would be a god to save them from the collective decisions of their forebears but would only be some panoptical corporation with an ego—the Big Inc. And what was the deal with this wind, he was asking his AWOL brother, which seemed to be blowing around inside him now.
And what did you mean, what did
you fucking mean, that the cancer was you?

Fred found the cassette tape Vartan had told him would be there, the bubble-cheeked bubble children staring as he held it aloft, finding the obsolesced thing every bit as silly and baroque as the wand. The storm was all around. He wasn’t sure where he himself ended and it began. In the periphery of his vision, as he turned, he could see the cloud-wind encircling the twins in the front row, their heads leaned into each other, gooey smiles on their faces; could see it levitating them an inch or two off the rug. He slotted the cassette into the boombox, worrying, at first, that the deck had finally busted—nothing but squeaks and static. Then the slide whistles kicked in, redoubling the wind and noise in his head, and the room was spinning, and his father hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t thought to mention who the salesman was. But Fred should have guessed.

“Congratulations, Mmmmmmm-agician, on your purchase of the all-new, de-luxe Mmmmmmm-agicCo wand …”

Adenoidal, bright and hammy. Fred was rising up over the lip of the winding storm, staring down the void within.

“… the wand that makes magic so easy you’ll be wowing crowds in no time!”

His twin was gone. Not in hiding. Just gone. That voice on the tape belonged to no one at all.

“Let’s get you started with a few easy card tricks.”

And another voice, too, belonged to no one. Another voice in his head. Talking to an imaginary twin. Talking to phantom future listeners, even as it understood that this story would never be told. That there would be no one to tell it. That an unreal world wasn’t even the beginning. Because there was no one in this white tuxedo. No one waving this ludicrous wand. No one teetering over these checkered shoes, clutching this ruffled shirt, vomiting, to the children’s delight, into this bright white top hat.

Eight
PM
found
Fred waiting under the Arch, getting rained on, the park empty, the sky already dark. Somehow, he’d gotten through the magic show without further incident. The skit George had designed twentythree years ago had turned out to be so good that even an existential freakout couldn’t ruin it. By the time it was over, the strange sensations had passed—the wind, the wooziness, that sudden, absolute conviction of his own nonexistence. Fred had then packed up the van and driven off into the rain again, and taken the small risk of parking it back in the hospital lot. Then he’d texted Vartan the van’s location; left the birthday party check in a cupholder; and on the way out of the garage, to keep the police from tracing his whereabouts, dropped his phone in the trash. It wasn’t until he was on the subway, spending the last two dollars on his transit card, that he took in the staring eyes around him and realized he’d forgotten to change out of the tux.

It was soaked now, the summer storm showing no signs of abating, and Mira was nowhere in sight. A police cruiser approached, headlights right on Fred as it breasted the rain down Fifth Avenue. He tried to look inconspicuous. If an APB had by now gone out for a Caucasian male in a white tuxedo, and a white cape, and checkered shoes, and a bright blue camping pack, perhaps, he thought, based on his insouciant lean against the monument, they’d decide he didn’t quite fit the bill.

The lightbar popped on, grill lights flashing in tandem. The squad car banked, then headed up Washington Place.

It wasn’t until 8:15 that he began to consider the possibility that Mira had stood him up. It wasn’t until 8:30 that he began to admit it.

He pictured her father opening his cabinet doors, glancing at the bottom shelf. Doing a double take.

Probably they’d called the cops on him too, by now. Probably she’d forgotten all about the plan to meet him, or simply assumed there’d be no way in hell he himself would be showing up.

He had no other place to go, no other purpose left to him. He waited another ten minutes, then trudged in his too-tight jacket, soaked and slipping pants, and water-filled shoes up the block. On the off chance Mira, or her father, or even the police, might be in there, he stepped out of the rain and into the cramped lobby of the Neural Science Building. The droop-faced security guard screwed his eyes at Fred’s approach. Fred wondered what he’d done to a security guard in a previous life that the lot of them should be so inclined against him.

“Mira Egghart?” the guard said, with a lift of his thin-man jowls.

He must have recognized Fred from last night. Fred’s heart gave a single thump. He nodded.

“She’s up there. Didn’t say anything about visitors tonight.”

“I have an appointment,” Fred said, not quite daring to hope.

The guard looked back and forth from Fred’s face to his attire a few times. “All right.”

He went back to his newspaper. Fred squish-shoed to the elevator.

The reception area of the suite was dark. A light came from down the hall. Mira’s office door was open a crack. The floor lamp was lit. He went over and knocked.