Luminarium (12 page)

Fred’s own belongings—what few he’d kept from the Zeckendorf—were now stowed, along with George’s, in cardboard boxes in the walk-in closet that had formerly doubled as Sam’s bedroom. Fred had allowed three dresser drawers to be cleared out on his behalf, but otherwise had insisted no special accommodations be made for him, less out of consideration for his parents than for his own sanity; he wanted no signs of this arrangement being anything but temporary.

Out in the living room, he could hear the TV, one of those opinionating blowhard shows Mel was now producing. He glanced again at the clock. Just after eleven. Still the whole night to get through. His dreams, which these last few months had been all about being locked in someplace or otherwise going nowhere (running lost through endless corridors, lying pinned by phantom weights), were always the most disturbing and paralyzing here in this bedroom. Rather than come home from the office, he wished he’d just gone to the hospital for the night—sometimes he could snatch a little paralysis-free sleep in the lobby’s chairs; though recently, the security guards had begun giving him the homeless treatment, rousing him whenever he closed his eyes. And anyhow, with the Reiki group over there, he’d have only felt guilty, fouling their auric fields with his gloomster vibes.

For a seamlessly grafted segment of the dream, he now recalled, she hadn’t even been Mel, but Jill. It was bad enough dreaming of his own romantic failures. Now he was dreaming of George’s too.

Grabbing his laptop off the floor, for the dozenth time tonight he checked his email. Still nothing. What did those time stamps mean? Was something going to happen next Tuesday at five? What could happen? Should have confronted Sam. Seen if he knew anything, or had any ideas who might be behind it. But Fred had been stopped by anger—at Sam; at the sender, whoever it was; at the fact that he, Fred, was thinking about these asinine messages at all.

He vowed to ignore them, and cast around for something else to occupy him. He needed to make a résumé. His programming skills were obsolesced—computer languages changed by the year, by the month even—but maybe he could find something in project management here in the city and not have to move to Florida. Management positions were increasingly scarce, though; the market was choked with thirtysomething de facto managers and their defunct coding skills. And the salaries on offer would no doubt be considerably lower, and he was strapped as it was to pay George’s bills. And even if he could pull himself together enough to come off well in an interview, he doubted many would want the baggage that hiring an ex-CEO refugee from a hostile takeover with a brother in the hospital would bring. He knew
he
wouldn’t have hired himself.

His briefcase sat open on the floor, and in it lay the CD that Mira Egghart had made of her visualization exercise, on which she’d written “Week One” in surprisingly playful, loopy purple letters. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going back for any more sessions, pretty sure he’d had enough of merging with old women and birthday girls. Knowing his luck, if he kept it up he’d probably merge with a dog and get arrested for crapping on the sidewalk, merge with a window washer and wipe his way off a ledge. He should probably count his blessings the old loon had only shoplifted and hadn’t held up a liquor store. And that he hadn’t mangled the little girl’s fingers when he’d slammed the door of the box, or made her sick by over-spinning it, hellbent on outrunning the impossible, unspeakable joy she’d opened up in him.

As for merging with one’s experimenter, he was more than pretty sure that this was the worst idea of all. Every time that vertiginous moment in her office, when Mira Egghart had seemed closer to him than his own skin, replayed itself in his mind, he had to force himself to remember that it wasn’t real, that it was just a helmet-induced brain glitch. He reminded himself of her endless typing, her clinically scrubbed nods. And the way she’d dropped that bombshell of a scientific explanation and then asked—mockingly, he was almost sure of it now—if that had answered his question. And that mythical tapestry of reason and faith she’d spoken of. Could such a thing ever be? Could he even know for sure this was what the study was actually about?

No, he told himself. He’d be an idiot to go back.

Even so, he couldn’t see much harm in continuing to listen to her CD. He found it calming. He didn’t know why, exactly. Indeed, the little story she told—of a whole city coming unmoored and floating off—made him uneasy if he thought too hard about it afterward, though her halfhoarse, half-whispery voice close in his ear softened the edges. And any new stratagem to help get him through these nights was welcome.

But he didn’t want to listen to it until his parents were asleep, the chances of disruption minimized, which wouldn’t be for a while now.

Instead, he let his eyes fall shut again, risking paralysis for the chance of finding that old bed, of waking up in it to a sun over a skyline, and Mel’s golden hair and skin and radiant heat like the sun itself rolling atop him. Though this time, all that came to mind when he tried to picture that swell of a breast were the faint freckles he’d never quite seen before, late one night toward the end, limelighted by the pulse of a charging laptop on the nightstand as she lay waiting for him in the dark. He’d reached across the bed, his hand cupping the mass, cushiony at the surface, cottage-cheesy beneath. Then, with the pads of three fingers, beginning to lightly prod counterclockwise, as the pamphlet in the oncology waiting room recommended, in a narrowing spiral around the nipple … Her voice rippling with dread: “Are you giving me a—”

… before darting off like a jellyfish in the murk.

A soft knock
at the door.

“Fred? Can I check my email?”

He sat up, leaning his back against the wall. “Sure, Mom.”

She peeked in, the reading glasses she’d been using more lately low on her nose. “I’m not waking you, am I?”

“No worries there.”

Taking a seat at the computer table, she regarded him with a quiet, searching wonder, as if he were some famous work of art she’d been hearing about all her life but had never until now seen. She gave him that look a lot, these days. Maybe it came from gazing at George’s sleeping, unrevealing face, day after day.

“Vart said the show went well,” she offered.

“He said that?”

She glanced at the ceiling. “His actual words were, ‘Everyone survived.’” “Now that I’m a convicted felon, I suppose that’s a concern.”

“I didn’t realize shoplifting was a felony these days.”

“It’s a class-A misdemeanor.”

The maximum punishment, Fred was startled to learn in his online research, was a year in prison. Which would certainly solve his housing situation. The most likely outcome, though, was something called an “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which meant that if he could steer clear of criminal activity for six months, the charges would be dropped.

“And I guess I’m not convicted yet,” he went on, “if you want to get technical. But ‘alleged misdemeanorer’ doesn’t got the same ring to it, you know?”

“Oh, it sounds a lot better to me.”

She’d looked worried, though not overly so, when Vartan had brought him home from the police station the night before. Her smile was sorrowful, but there was a trust in it too, a faith in him, which, like her faith in everything else lately, seemed to him quite possibly unmerited.

“There’s probably a reason it happened you can’t see yet,” she said. “Maybe you’ll need those tweezers for something down the road.”

Briefly, he envisioned himself killing a terrorist, a very cooperative one, with a well-aimed tweezer-slam to the eyeball. He didn’t bother informing her they hadn’t even let him keep the lousy thing.

“So how’d the, um … session go?” he asked, while they were on the subject of her magical thinking.

“It went well,” she said softly, “really well.”

He waited for some indication of what this meant. Had there been any change? Had George moved or something? Cracked an eyelid?

“Oh yeah?” Fred prompted, the enthusiasm too thin, the challenge beneath too plain. He could read the pained calculation in her eyes, and was sure she could read it in his—he readying himself, out of a sense of duty to her, to stand in her path; she, out of a sense of duty to George, and to that strange new path itself, stepping swiftly around Fred.

Her smile broadened. “Oh, and on the subway ride home,
Guy
told us all about his trip to South Africa. He was studying with a
sangoma
, a Zulu shaman. They initiated him by bathing him in the blood of a goat.” With her head tilted up to keep the glasses on her nose, the reading lenses now magnified her eyes. Her face shone with a kind of creeped-out amazement. “
Guy
actually drank the blood, too, and did this ritual dance, and went into a trance. Then he was possessed by a Zulu ancestor.”

Fred had to admire her deftness in changing the subject.
Guy
—pronounced by Holly, and presumably by
Guy
himself, the French way—lived on the next block, with his wife, Dot. Dot was a graphic designer, Fred thought he remembered his mom telling him; as for
Guy,
Fred didn’t recall her mentioning an occupation other than the energy work. Fred had once run into him and Holly on the sidewalk.
Guy
looked to be around his age, wore a ponytail, might have been an inch or two taller than him, or maybe just had better posture. If
Guy
had any trace of a French accent, Fred hadn’t been able to detect it.

“Is that so,” he said. He wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking, namely that if it were George sitting here with her instead of him, George would have been keen to hear about
Guy’s
adventures. Were it Fred now in that coma, she and George could have stood over him in that hospital room doing their mumbo jumbo together, along with this goat-blood-quaffing Frenchman, whose name she uttered with the kind of unself-conscious enthusiasm, Fred couldn’t help but feel, that a mother might exhibit for a son.

“They were hiding a wooden idol, and
Guy
had to find it,” she said. “The ancestor made him speak in tongues and do flips. Then he ran into a hut and found the idol. He said he went right to it!”

“That’s … one hell of a tourist attraction.”

“In the graduation ceremony, he had to wear its gallbladder in his hair.” She laughed. “He showed it to us. The sacrificed goat’s gallbladder. He still has it.”

“He should have it taxidermied. Mount it over the mantel.”

“He’s going to have it made into a necklace.”

“Even better.”

Her look joined in the humor, almost complicit in the absurdity, except Fred got the distinct feeling that there was a larger absurdity she was seeing, an absurdity he himself was a part of.

He held up
The Power of Positive Thinking
, hoping to get a few points for trying. “So how is this book, anyway?”

“It’s really good. I thought you’d been reading it. You’ve had it out on the table there for two weeks.”

“No. Not yet.” He’d taken that particular one down from the shelf on the day he’d applied for the helmet study, in the hope that just having it in plain view would inspire him. It hadn’t occurred to him to actually read it—he’d assumed the title said it all. That gambit not quite having worked, he picked up a sliced-open, apple-sized stone with a sparkling black interior that had been sitting on the alarm clock. “This is a nice one.”

“It’s from a vortex.”

“A vortex?”

“There are a bunch of them around Sedona, Arizona. They say the energy there is so powerful it twists the juniper trees. They say you can feel it swirling up out of the ground.”

“Sure.” He turned the stone over, hunting for a price tag. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Her smile forgave him. Even so, she looked suddenly tired.

“You probably need to sleep,” she said. “I won’t be too long.”

She turned toward the computer, waiting in silence for it to wake up. The happy glow had faded from her face, replaced by the monitor’s pallid illumination. The miracle worker was gone and she was just his mother again, a small sixty-two-year-old woman with expressive eyes and faintly trembling fingers—an as yet mild case of a medical condition called essential tremor—hovering over the keys. He clutched the vortex rock, wanting to bash his skull open with it, out of guilt, out of anger, out of guilt about the anger. Why should he begrudge her any equanimity she could lay hold of under the circumstances? Yet it baffled him how she could spend an evening with George and come home looking like she’d been to a spa, like it was he who was healing her. For a couple weeks after George had broken the news to her just over a year ago, they’d worried she might not even survive the shock. Her tremors had grown so severe she could barely bring a fork to her mouth, could only drink through a straw. Her mind couldn’t track a conversation for more than a minute, and then she’d need to go lie down. At that point, the Reiki had just been one more hobby among others—journaling, dance classes, guitar lessons—her perennial, never-quite-fruitful attempt to find her purpose on Earth. But with George’s illness to motivate her, she soon went back and immersed herself in the training as never before, becoming what they called a Reiki master. And then one day, her eyes closed, her faithhealing hands held out over George, she’d had a vision, a mental image so real she’d taken it for prophecy, of George opening his eyes, right there in his hospital bed, and smiling at her.

Somehow, probably through the nurses, word of George’s continued survival had spread, and she now had patients all over the hospital asking for her help. She spent part of her time there these days making the rounds, beaming her energies to all and sundry. What did they feel, or imagine they felt, all those desperate people? Fred clenched the vortex rock tighter still. When it began to hurt, he released his grip and gazed at the indentations it had formed in his palm.

“How do you turn this thing on, anyway?”

Holly stopped typing and looked. He gave the rock a shake.

“It’s on already,” she said.