Luminarium (66 page)

“Mr. Brounian,” the older one announces, “I’m Detective Nelson and this is Detective Sullivan. Your parents said we could have a word.”

The same flecked green eyes. The same hammered cheekbones.

“Cousins,” Nelson explains.

“We get that look a lot,” Sullivan chimes in with a grin. “I bet you’re sure used to that look.”

“We’re very sorry about your brother,” says Nelson.

“Truly.” Sullivan puts a hand over his heart.

“We know you’re not in peak condition right now, but we just wanted to drop in and say hello.”

“We’re incorrigibly social,” Sullivan says.

“Mr. Brounian, someone calling himself the Avenging Angel has been stalking executives at a company down in Florida I believe you’ve had dealings with.”

Sullivan’s head lists right and left: “Emails, faxes, text messages. At work, at home.”

“Nothing exactly threatening,” Nelson says.

“Cute stuff. Philosophical.” Sullivan strokes his chin. “About the afterlife.”

“Maybe no bad intentions. But can you understand how repeated mentions of the afterlife might be misinterpreted?”

They wait.

“Is that a smile?” Sullivan says.

“Did I say something funny, Mr. Brounian?”

“Maybe it was your intonation, Nelly.”

“About a week ago, Mr. Brounian, they suggested you might be someone worth talking to.”

Sullivan half smiles, blinks rapidly. “They said you had a little
episode
down there?”

“End of last week, their personal bank accounts started dropping,” Nelson says. “Turns out this Avenging Angel posted their names, addresses, and socials on some hacker message board.”

“Look at that, Nelly,” Sullivan says. “His smile grew.”

“I know I didn’t say anything funny that time.”

“I’m telling you. It’s that deadpan delivery.” Sullivan leans in, a hand cupping the side of his mouth. “I keep telling my partner he should do stand-up.”

“To be honest,” Nelson says, “we didn’t have anything on you.”

Sullivan slices the air. “Zilch.”

“Until you nearly blew yourself up with that big-ass computer.”

“Janitor happened to mention it was from your office?”

“Some twisted shit down there, in your secret hideout.”

“Hey, Nelly.” Sullivan rests his chin on an index finger. “What color cape you think the Avenging Angel would wear?”

“Well, Sully.” Nelson folds his arms. “I’d probably go with white.”

Sullivan leans in. “My partner’s a real fashion bug.”

“OK, Mr. Brounian. Have yourself a speedy recovery.”

“Oh, and did we mention you’re under arrest?”

“Missed your arraignment. That’ll serve for now.”

“Still smiling, eh? You’re a tough cookie, Mr. Avenger.”

“What did the big, bad Avenger steal?” Nelson mutters. “Pair of tweezers, was it?”

Sullivan frowns, scrunches his eyes. “I hate that.
Pair
of tweezers. Sounds like two of ’em.”

“’Cause there are two of ’em,” Nelson says, annoyed. “Two tweezing thingamabobs.”

“But they’re joined. It’s a single tool. What if you only had two pantlegs and no crotch? You’d be marching in the Gay Pride Parade.”

Nelson raises a finger, suddenly animated. “But what if it was all joined, and you only had one big pantleg?” He wags the finger at Sullivan. “Then you’d be marching in a skirt.”

Sullivan laughs, a nasal clucking. Nelson joins in with dry, throaty barks. They stop.

“Mr. Brounian, what’s with the teary eyes all the sudden?”

Sullivan, flummoxed, turns to Nelson. “And just when you made the first joke of your life.”

Guy,
above. Hair
falling free around his shoulders. A single palm out, slowly moving, testing the air.

“Your aura has changed, my friend.”

He nods, and walks off.

Manfred’s sunspotted head looms into view.

“That
Guy
guy’s kinda nutty, huh?”

His craggy, windswept sea cliff of a face leans in close.

“I went over to the golf course. Me and some Holy Land pals are working on the owner. Talked about a fund drive, kicked around some rebuilding ideas. Bigger than before. Spotlights. Said he might not sic the cops on us.”

He looks right, looks left.

“So’d you figure out mu yet?”

Fred takes a breath, and gives his answer.

Manfred regards him, eyes aqueous and bright.

“OK. What about this one: A guy named Yunmen once asked, ‘If the world is vast and wide, why do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of a bell?’ So he’s saying: Hey monk, if you’re so free, why the hell do you go on sitting there, sweating it out, day after day, tied up like a human pretzel?”

“I don’t know,” Fred whispers. “Why do you?”

“Damn. I don’t know either. Was hoping you could tell me.”

Manny rubs his chin.

“I’m getting my ass back to the monastery soon. When mu cracked open, I thought I’d reached the summit, but it’s just base camp, far as those monks are concerned. Last time I saw the Roshi, he beat me with a broom and called me a dust devil.” He looks off, a rare moment of anxiousness. “I didn’t think he knew that much English.”

At Manny’s side, Vartan and Holly appear. And to the other side,
Guy
and Dot.

“Visiting hours are up,” Vartan says. “Let’s give him a rest.”

Guy,
Dot, and Manny wave and say goodnight. Holly kisses Fred’s cheek and goes.

Vartan leans in close. “Kiddo,” he whispers. “Don’t worry. Whatever drugs you’ve been on, we’ll get you off.”

Firmly, Vartan grips Fred’s arm. His eyes crinkle, dauntless.

“The first few days are the toughest,” he says.

“Oh.” Holly steps back into view. “Something came for you, early this morning.” She holds up an envelope. “It looks like a telegram.”

As he lay
in the dark, the lightning pulses of the cardiac monitor beside him, Fred thought back on his first moments of consciousness, when he hadn’t known which of them he was. He’d been both. He’d been George, waking from a coma. He’d been Fred at the same time, wondering what he was doing there behind George’s eyes. Then Dr. Papan had started asking questions, one blink for yes, two for no, and the quantum suspension had begun to abate. Then Sam had called him Freddo, and everything had come flooding back.

Even now, though, he might have been both. That’s how he felt. Or he might have been neither. Both felt equally true. It didn’t so much matter to him who he was or wasn’t. He was aware. He was awareness itself.

Turning off the monitor, working the sensor clip off his finger, he eased himself out of bed and, in the light from under the doorway, slipped his bandaged feet and lotioned legs into his jeans and slid the tuxedo jacket over his hospital gown, smarting from the pain. One whole hand was a big, splinted bandage. The other, at least, had its fingers free. His scalp, those fingers determined, was partly shaved, and wrapped up tight enough to know its own pulse. He’d been told that the burns were mostly first and second degree. He’d sprained an ankle, broken a couple of fingers, fractured a rib, suffered a concussion. He felt like he’d been bagged up with a bee colony and booted off a cliff. Even so, it was nice, being in motion. Every stabbing inhalation, every flinching limp down the hall, felt like freedom.

His first stop was George’s old room. They hadn’t put someone in his brother’s place yet, so he went in and sat in his usual chair. For a while he stared at the empty bed, thinking about how George had transcended his uncontrollable illness, his coma, his unstoppable death, to play Fred and everyone else like puppets from beyond his existence. Fred wondered whether it had been George’s plan from the start to restore Urth to Armation in such a way that made Sam look like a hero, or whether George’s heart had softened somewhere along the way. Fred wondered whether that episode with the countdown, and George and himself joined under that malevolent hat, had been designed to punish him or, conversely, to forgive him, to grant him the opportunity to stand by George’s side to the very end. To prove he’d be loyal to George no matter the cost, prove it to Fred’s own conscience, so that he might then forgive himself.

He opened the envelope, the telegram his mother had left with him. Nothing but coordinates, a longitude and latitude, undisguised this time. Where was George leading him now? For a few minutes, Fred’s imagination roamed once more, until he was all but certain the answer was Central Florida, the Urth version thereof, where the Armation headquarters would appear before Fred’s avatar like some virtual Mount Doom—a pyramid with a flaming eye at the top, the command center of the Military-Entertainment Complex. And in it, he’d battle a twenty-foot-tall demon-robot Dan Gretta. And he’d hack into the demon-Gretta’s control panel with his Blade of Many Powers, short-circuit its innards of pulsing circuitry and brain tissue, then corkscrew and tweezer and screwdriver them into an upgrade that would bring about a golden age. And Little George would appear, transformed from a Gollum into an angel in earnest, hair restored, oxygen tubes gone, hospital gown swapped for flowing white robes. And before winging off into the blue, he’d leave Fred with the plans for that game he’d spoken of in the coffee shop, that game to end the games, that game of spiritual evolution, where you start out playing one way but soon discover a whole new way to play.

But Fred’s guess wasn’t even close. As it would turn out, logging into Urth from his mother’s computer two days later, he’d find nothing in Central Florida but a flat, gray plane. The coordinates in the telegram didn’t point there at all, but instead to New York, to what on Urth was just another expanse of gray, and what on a Google satellite map was a building in the Bronx Zoo, obscured by treetops and fuzzed by poor resolution.

Getting to the actual zoo took Fred a few more days. He had his tweezer arraignment and subsequent sentencing to community service to deal with. He had a long, apologetic letter to write to the miniature golf course owner. He had to be grilled by Nelson and Sullivan again, this time in a small room with peeling paint and a two-way mirror. He had job applications to send out; creditors to plead with; injuries which ceased feeling in any way like freedom, causing him to wonder whether his former clarity and perfect joy at being alive had mainly been the result of those massive painkillers.

But soon enough, he got there. And Mira did, too—their first real date, or close enough—her unfastened hair and bare-shouldered sundress catching the breeze. Using a GPS camera Sam had sent from Armation, Fred and Mira traced those coordinates to a point precisely at the south entrance to the Monkey House. They searched the walls for graffitied messages. They peered behind the potted trees, and under the trash can. They pried at the bricks of the walkway, hoping to find a loose one with some kind of clue hid beneath. Uncovering nothing whatsoever, they trekked through the exhibit, scrutinizing the shrivel-faced capuchins and tufty-eared squirrel monkeys, the fuzzy-headed pygmy marmosets and spacey-eyed Bolivian gray titis. And they walked back out, still mystified, and glanced up above the entrance, to find, gazing bemusedly down at them, a menagerie of bas-relief monkeys crouched within the granite pediment; and a proud, sculpted baboon perched atop the apex; and a single word engraved across the entablature:

MONKEYS

They stared at the word.

“That’s it?” she asked. “His parting message?”

“I guess it must be,” he conceded.

They kept staring, in a haze of gloom.

“What do we do now?” Fred finally said.

Mira leaned her head on his shoulder.

“I like giraffes,” she offered.

“Giraffes are awesome,” he agreed.

“And hippos,” she said. “And birds.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Toucans.”

“Toucans,” she said. “Totally.”

That night, Mira not quite ready to invite him into the bed she’d shared with her husband, they opted for the futon. And despite some initial fumbling around Fred’s bandages and burns and their lingering, mutual shyness, they began to devise a shared dialect of fingers, lips, and hips. And after, with his hundred trillion cells attuned to the universe, and Mira lying pressed against his back, her arm without the tattoo wrapped around his chest, he gazed at those sandstone angels, faintly aglow in the streetlight through the blinds. And they merged in his thoughts with that proud baboon statue atop the Monkey House. And he remembered having come across certain references in his Hindu mythology research over the last few weeks.

He took her hand and led her to her computer in the study. Together, they read about the monkey god, Hanuman. A divine hero, known for his loyalty, bravery, fortitude, and intelligence. Some, in fact, judged him the most powerful of all the gods. He was famed for his ability to overcome any obstacle—no problem, puzzle, or predicament he couldn’t work his way through. He’d soared over an ocean to fulfill one mission, uprooted and carried off a mountain to complete another. The monkey god’s only vulnerability, it was said, arose from a mild curse placed upon him, whereby he kept forgetting his own miraculous powers, and was unable to recall them until someone else took the trouble to remind him.

Bounding over an ocean …

Shouldering a mountain …

Though mysteriously, in all Fred’s subsequent reading, he would never come across a reference to Hanuman tucking in a city and kissing it goodnight.

But all of
that lay in a future so beyond Fred’s imagination and concern that it might as well have been some parallel world. Here and now, in the hospital room that was no longer George’s, that, tonight, wasn’t anyone’s, Fred stood up and took one last look around. The picture of Gretta and the Bush brothers still hung high on the wall. He let it hang, and switched off the overhead fluorescence. In the remaining wedge of illumination from the hall, a little red trash can with a biohazard symbol shone.

Leaning into the hip of his tired-looking mother, a balding boy in the elevator eyed Fred’s swathed, half-shaved head with a mixture of sympathy and fear, fingers rising to shield his own scalp. Perhaps as an excuse to stare, the boy asked what floor Fred was going to. And removing his hand from his pocket, Fred showed the boy his bandaged but otherwise empty palm, swiped it along the panel, made a fist, held it out, and rained elevator buttons into the boy’s open hands.