Luminarium (15 page)

The white Formica desk …

Bathed in the monitor light …

“Whose sketch pad was it?”

Mira looked at him askance.

“On the white desk, in the control room,” he went on. “The desk I couldn’t possibly have seen from chair level. Do you draw, Mira?”

“It’s a hobby of … Craig’s,” she said slowly. “Sometimes he sketches things.”

“With those flat drawing pencils, right?”

A current shot between them. She swallowed before she spoke.

“What was on the sketchpad, Fred?”

“
What was on it?
”

She looked like she might be holding her breath.

He tried to remember. “I don’t know.” He shut his eyes. “All I see …” He peeked at her. “It was blank. Wasn’t it?”

She looked away.

“I’m sorry, Fred,” she said tersely. “I didn’t mean to give you the feeling I was testing you.”

But she had been testing him. And he’d failed.

“But how could I—the sketchpad
was
there.”

She still wasn’t looking at him, embarrassed, it seemed to him, at her own disappointment.

“You’re thinking I could have seen it on the desk at some other time,” he said. “Like on my way past the control room from the hallway. Or through the window before I sat down in the chair.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “That’s more or less what I’m thinking. Or part of what I’m thinking.”

He tried to recall the minutes preceding the session. He’d followed her down that hallway, noticed a run in her stocking at the back of her left knee. They’d passed the control room door, which was open, wasn’t it? Yes, it probably was. Had he seen the sketchbook then? Maybe he had. And he’d stood there afterward in the hall exchanging that look with the man, Craig. The desk had certainly been in view then. Though the sketchbook had been closed by then, hadn’t it? But wait, had it been there at all by then? Already, Fred understood it would be impossible to know if the out-of-body experience had been real, that in all probability it hadn’t, and that even in the utterly unlikely event that it had, it might as well not have been, for all the good it would do him now.

She leaned forward. “I know this is difficult. But try to put aside the question of whether you were up there in some objective, provable way. Just close your eyes, and tell me how it felt.”

He clenched his fists. It seemed a pointless exercise. But there was a strange urgency in her tone, and in her look, and anyway, a part of him longed to sink back into the memory. He let his eyes close, tried to coax the corded muscles in his chest into admitting a full breath. He floated in the dark.

“Like … nothing at all,” he said. “That one ripple of fear, then nothing.” “I see a smile, I think,” she said. “So it was a good nothing?”

“No. Not good.”

“No?”

“The best nothing imaginable.”

He opened his eyes. She was smiling, too.

Her expression changed, became tinged with concern.

“Now you seem sad,” she said. “Why?”

No oneness. Though her smile had been lovely, had made her face so surprisingly soft. He leaned his head back on the chair.

“Coming back down didn’t feel so hot,” he said.

“What did it feel like?”

His flesh recoiled anew. He wondered how he could communicate it. “Like I’d been squashed.” He held out an upturned palm, then brought his other palm down on it with a hard slap. “Splattered like a bug.”

Her face changed again, her eyes going unfocused. A reaction beyond empathetic pain. She looked a bit like she was going to be sick.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

She glanced off, blinking.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He’d upset her, he thought. “I didn’t mean to sound pissed off about it.”

“No. You didn’t do anything.” She cleared a few fallen strands of hair from her face. “Just let me catch up on my note-taking.” Eyes retreating, she began to type.

He regretted his ingratitude, suspicion, frustration. She must really want her lunatic contraption to do some good, he decided.

“Late night last night?” he asked.

She looked up. “How did you know?”

“I’m psychic.”

A duel of raised eyebrows ensued.

He pointed at the to-go cup on her desk. “That much caffeine this late in the day usually signifies a late night.” Inner George counseled him against mentioning the increased hoarseness of her voice, and the slight, glossy shadows under her eyes.

“Who needs sleep, right?” he added, instead. More or less a personal mantra for him these days.

“I get mine in the day, mostly,” she said.

“A day sleeper? That I wouldn’t have guessed.”

She opened her mouth as if to reply, then, with a droll look, checked herself. “Let’s keep this focused on you, shall we? Last week, we didn’t get to talk about the sleeplessness and nightmares you mentioned on the forms. Has the visualization CD helped you get to sleep at all?”

“A little.” It hadn’t at all. But it made being awake somewhat more bearable.

“I’m glad. And your dreams?”

Last night, in the hour or two of sleep he’d gotten, he’d dreamt he’d been sealed in the wall of his and George’s childhood bedroom. Worse than sealed—merged in it, molecules hopelessly scrambled. He’d been practicing a new magic trick of some kind, an attempt to pass through walls, it must have been. On the wall’s other side, from the living room, he could hear Holly and Vartan talking and walking around in there, wondering where he’d gotten to. He related all this to her, not going into the suffocation, the straining, panic, remorse.

“Sounds awful,” she said, nevertheless.

“I have a lot of dreams where I can’t move.”

“Sleep paralysis.”

“There’s a name for that?”

She nodded.

“Then sometimes I think I’ve managed to tear myself awake, but it’s only into some other dream.”

“False awakenings,” she said.

“You know a lot about bad dreams.”

For a moment, she just looked at him without saying anything.

“Not just bad ones.”

She returned to her typing. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself up out of his body. One more impossible desire for the collection.

“Mira,” he said, his eyes still closed.

“Yes, Fred?” he heard her say.

“If you keep peeling away the ignorance, do you really believe there’ll be any faith to be found underneath?”

He looked, and found her eyes keen on his own.

“I do,” she said. “And if you can find it, it will help you learn to be alone. And to feel that you’re never alone.”

Inwardly, he scrutinized her words, turning them this way and that—
alone, feeling never alone.
Was she talking about a kind of insight, or yet more self-delusion?

She set the laptop on her desk. Then she stood, switched off the lamp beside him, and seconds later appeared in the nightlight below.

“You’re lucky, you know,” she said.

“Lucky?” His throat ached with constriction. “Why?”

She draped the blanket over him, confiding with a whisper:

“Many of our subjects can’t even get off the ground.”

Whether or not Fred had actually left his body, he was now more
conscious of being encased in it all the same. His lungs and bowels felt like over-squeezed sponges. His head felt clamped in an invisible vise. A faint, electric irritation lingered in his nerve endings. The act of shuffling his feet along the sidewalk, making all those muscles clutch and loosen over and over, while not technically difficult, was more work than it should have been, as though the city had been rolled up, shipped, and unfurled onto the surface of some larger, higher-gravity planet while he’d been under the helmet, imagining he was hovering above it. He kept replaying those split seconds of derangement, hoping for some scrap of proof he might have missed. That galaxy poster had seemed so close he thought he could recall the texture of the paper, like seeing into the subatomic foment of space itself. But he could have imagined this. What about seeing himself in the chair? He couldn’t quite recover the details. The attempt itself might have been changing them. Perhaps there had been something a little off about the shading of his face—almost computer-animated, as if he’d been looking down from a tactical view at an avatar of himself. Though that seemingly unreal cast could just have been the dim red light, in which case, it
could
have been real. Or at least realistic.

If not real.

He’d never really believed those accounts he’d read, in the early days of George’s coma, of patients who’d awoken to recollect having floated above their bodies, witnessing the operating rooms, the doctors at work, the family members sitting around the bed. He’d never really believed his own daydreams, over the last few months, of George being up there, either. Of George trailing wherever Fred went, like a balloon on a string.

Sharing it all, sights and sounds and mental impressions. As close as they’d been in the best of times—closer, even, now that George was always on call, wafting overhead, free as the summer day.

Sorry you’re not real
, he told Inner George.

The least of my problems
, Inner George assured him.

Feeling drained and needing to sit down, and having time to kill before the magic show he’d have to do with Vartan later in the afternoon, he wandered east to Washington Square Park and found a free section of bench amid the lunching office escapees, summer school students, and sweating but determinedly leather-clad tourists. Sunny and breezy, a merciful eighty-two degrees. Crowds around the defunct fountain, cheering at a street performance. Vendors under the Arch, turnstiling in cash and out pretzels. For a couple years after 9/11, the Arch had been off-limits, caged by a chain-link fence, merely awaiting restoration; though at the time, one had gotten the feeling it was to protect it from terrorists, or perhaps to prevent the Arch itself (what with its Frenchified airs) from committing some treasonous act. But the Arch, a couple years ago now, had gotten its facelift and was looking as young and fresh as the swarming youth around it, and this change had brought Fred a twinge of disappointment. He supposed he preferred dwelling on signs of the city’s rot and crumbling infrastructure to acknowledging its renewal, all the ways in which it was actually succeeding in getting younger and hipper and richer right in step with its residents. This latter phenomenon could make him feel doubly cheated out of his former life, make him feel like the attack had been merely a ruse, a mock fainting spell, to win the city sympathy and an allure of vulnerability, to make living here seem not just a luxury but an act of heroism, too, so that all those newly heroical investment bankers and hedge fund managers and trustafarians, and anyone else who had it all could now
really
have it all—the doormen and wraparound terraces and gourmet delis
and
the moral superiority. And who knew, maybe it really could all keep right on perpetuating itself, a city of ever more concentrated riches and hipness and sexiness and youth. Maybe it could all get so bone-meltingly gorgeous that every visiting fanatic with a suitcase bomb would go weakkneed and start worshiping the bronze bull, that the very rising oceans would peel back in awe. Or maybe, at any rate, it could last to witness its own perfect completion, every last arch and parapet in place, like some afternoon sandcastle, just in time for the end.

Leaf shadows rippling on the paving stones.

A sun-bleached
Daily News
cover page flapping in the breeze:

3½ TEARY STARS
FOR ‘WTC’

… and a picture of Nicolas Cage in a fire helmet.

Across the path, a throwback Rastafarian perching on the back of a bench called out to Fred like some mutant human-songbird hybrid.

“Smoke,” he chirp-rasped. “Smoke, smoke.”

According to
The Power of Positive Thinking
, which Fred had finally read over the weekend, people could realize their desires through a triune process of “picturizing,” “prayerizing,” and “actualizing,” terms every bit as reassuringly technical-sounding as the attunement he’d agreed—in a fit of open-mindedness, filial guilt, desperation, and rash curiosity following his mother’s announcement that George’s “power” was growing—to receive at the next Reiki meeting. To picturize was to create an image in one’s mind of the intended outcome, to see it as clearly and vividly as possible. Overnight in the armchair in his parents’ living room, unwilling to return to his bedroom after that dream of being trapped in the wall, he’d spent a sleepless interval trying to overwhelm his entrenchments of doubt with a barrage of arguably not absolutely impossible futures, among them one in which he and George and Sam found themselves standing on a Florida golf course with Lipton and Gibbon, and, sure, why not, the CEO, Dan Gretta, too. Fred had never met the man but he knew what he looked like from that picture in the lobby, so it hadn’t been hard to picture him, one arm out around George’s shoulders, another around Fred’s, his teeth lighting up at some joke George had just made, something about a congressman they’d just bought, perhaps.

A woman in platform sandals walked by, pushing one of those doublewide urban assault strollers Fred had been seeing everywhere.