Luminarium (19 page)

And anyway, he didn’t even know for sure that anything whatsoever would happen at five. The time stamp could have been simply a glitch or a fluke. Or could have had some other significance entirely.

“I’ll wait here with you,” he decided.

He watched the last couple minutes go by on his laptop screen.

5:00
PM
.

The sheet rose and fell.

The IV dripped.

“OK. Hold the fort, dude.”

He closed the laptop and strode into the hall and down the stairs. Arriving at the cafeteria, he fell into a booth and waited for the network connection. Nothing but another listserv message, time-stamped a few minutes ago:

Subject:
  BEACHFRONT MEC-AA???

From:
  
MECSERV

Brethren:

Global warming—major disaster? Not according to Major Disaster. As the ocean levels rise, the Orlando area could become beachfront property! Buy now (on high ground!) and watch your property values soar! Click to check out the Major’s
artistic renderings.

Tidings from the soon-to-be tide-kissed Promised Land,

GENERAL DISARRAY

You have to live a good clean life and bow to Mecca.

--Don Johnson

Finding himself more discouraged than relieved by the lack of contact, Fred sat watching cable news on the nearest TV monitor, a story about the liquid bomb suspects arriving in court.

Followed by a story about the 6 train being halted and cops examining everyone’s bottled drinks.

Followed by a piece on a Hitler-themed eatery in India.

He glanced at the laptop screen. A box had appeared in the corner.

George says: Dude, you there?

Fred’s blood jumped.

They’d used IMs as interoffice communication whenever one of them was too lazy to get up and walk over to another’s desk. Whoever was sending this had not only George’s email password but his IM sign-ins as well. And whoever it was was online right now. Fred typed:

who is this?

Then waited, hair in his fists. Ten seconds later:

who is. Got that much. End of response garbled. Karmic routing tables all screwed up. Dharmic protocol unreliable. Haywire prana corrupting the data. Keep your end in binary. 0=no/1=yes. OK?

Binary. Why, Fred wondered. He typed:

fuck off

Then waited again.

Did you reply? All that came through were harp sounds.
Warning! Celestial content filters notoriously square! Skyhigh latency on this crap-ass Astral ISP. We’ll be cut off soon. Must do this fast. 0/1, OK?

Fred was getting tired of this. He typed:

last chance douchebag

And waited.

Douchebag got through, go figure. Anyway, I’m locked in a kind of divine malware quarantine. the others h

The message seemed to have been cut off. Fred contemplated typing something to that effect, but before he resolved to do so, another appeared:

Damn aura’s fragging the signal. I’ll have to keep these shor

Despite himself, Fred smiled. It was a cute routine, though he was less amused than pissed off and uneasy, in the dark as he still was about the sender’s motives. The messages continued coming in steadily:

The others here tell me this is the Pretaloka, a limbo fo
for angels who don’t believe in angels, angels who d
don’t believe in themselves. I pace the streets. I
see my reflection in the windowpanes. The halo.
The wings. I don’t believe any of it. None of us do.
Our times move differently, yours and mine. When
our spheres intersect, I can attempt these contacts.
When out of joint, one of your minutes is a hundred
of my years. I’ve been here for millions. The one thi
ng that’s made it bearable, the one thing I believed
in, me and every other Angel Who Doesn’t Believe
She/He’s An Angel (AWDBS/HAA ) was the sac
red pact. But no more! The pact’s o’erthrown!
The only one who can save us, the old amon
g us say, is the tenth AVATARA.
But is he even real? I’d lay odds as lo
w as bounding over an ocean
shouldering a mountain
tucking in a city
and kissing it goodnight.
They say that an AWDBS/HAA
can still be of some limited use
guardian-wise, so tell me, as one d
uped, workaday drone to another:
are those bastards at Armation
still giving you the shaft???

Half a minute passed.

Then the other half.

Fred’s first thought was that the request for 0 or 1 meant the correspondence was somehow automated. But whoever was on the other end didn’t even seem to need a binary response, at least not to understand him. It could have meant, as the sender was suggesting, that the communications were passing through some kind of security filter and he wanted Fred’s replies to be as brief and undetectable as possible. Or it could have been simply part of the attempt to make him believe something along these lines. The reference to Armation made him even more suspicious. Could the message be a trap, dreamed up by some demented nerd in programming over there? A test to discover his true feelings about them? Did they want an unambiguous yes or no to have something incriminating? Fred replied:

you tell me

A few seconds passed.

Just 0/1, dude

WHOTHEFUCKAREYOU?

0/1!

you one of them?

For a few seconds, nothing. Then:

I’ll take that paranoia
as a 1!!! Initiating:
Operation Aveng
ing Angel!
Peace b
e unto
etc.

Fred lay on a commandeered gurney a few feet from George’s bed
while their mother and her group hovered over him, their eyes closed, hands outstretched. Dot, a pretty if perilously thin woman in a smocklike men’s shirt, stood to his right with her palms over his abdomen. Everything about her seemed thin, from her bones to the reddened skin of her eyelids to her long, flaxen hair, in the spill of which Fred discerned a couple of slender, intricate braids.

Next to her, resting his soft hands above and below Fred’s knee, stood an older man whose name he hadn’t caught. He had an owl-like face, a brushed, gray goatee draping three inches beneath his chin, and a bald pate looking pink and freshly laundered as the dress shirt he wore.

Across from the owl-faced man, holding her hands flat over Fred’s right shin, a solidly built older woman with a gray buzz cut and dangling earrings took in and released slow, stratospheric expanses of breath. She’d told Fred her name, but in the heat of introductions, he hadn’t remembered to remember this one either. Possibly Paula, or Pauline.

Guy
, with his chin raised and a few strands from his lustrous, ponytailed mane cascading over his shoulder, stood with his hands above Fred’s ribcage.

Leaning over the top of Fred’s head was his mother, her slightly trembling hands perched on his shoulders.

He closed his eyes. He’d been instructed to relax, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the instant-message exchange. It was one of those odious listserv dweebs, that much he’d decided. At least one. It was common knowledge that the ones who ran it were self-appointed vigilantes. They entrapped would-be hackers—bored, clueless teens, mostly—flattering and cajoling the kids into vandalizing minor government websites, at which point they turned in the poor, adenoidal misfits to the FBI. They did it to puff themselves up as patriots, and presumably for laughs. Their sting operations could be elaborately cruel. They’d pretend to be sexy, computer-savvy cyberterrorist babes, sending along phony pictures and sparking up one-sided romances, and would then post their mark’s declarations of love or sex-by-email attempts on community discussion boards for all to mock. Fred didn’t imagine any of them really cared about George’s condition; the motive could even have been dislike for George, or Fred, or both of them, or just for demented yuks. Whatever the motive, the harassment, Fred suspected, had only begun.

After the sender had signed off, Fred had gone up and checked on George, then come right back downstairs and—vexed at himself for paying the messages any more attention, but unable to let them be—done some more Hindu cosmology research. The astral plane, the Antarloka, much like the Catholic version of the afterlife, was divided into three parts, the lowest being the Narakaloka, the abode of demons, and the highest the Devaloka, the abode of the
devas
or angels. The Pretaloka, the middle realm, was said to be a world to all appearances like this one, an astral duplicate, populated by ghosts, confused souls still attached by a gossamer thread of energy to their lifeless bodies, refusing to let go. As for the tenth avatara, this seemed to be a reference to Kalki, the last of the ten avataras of Lord Vishnu, the preserver and protector of Creation. The first had come as a fish, the second as a tortoise, number three as a boar, then a man-lion and a dwarf, and from then on the avataras had come in human form. The fish avatara had incarnated to warn an Indian Noah figure named Vaivasvata Manu of an impending flood, and each subsequent avatara had performed some similar mission, coming to the world’s aid, reestablishing dharma in some way. The ninth avatara, in what historians believed to have been a kind of takeover bid on the part of Hinduism to engulf the competition, had been the Buddha. The tenth, named Kalki, was yet to come. When Kalki arrived, the prophecies went, he would sweep away the darkness, vanquish Kali—the demon of this Kali Yuga, or era—and usher in the Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth, a golden age in which a spiritualized humankind, awakened from its long, dark slumber of baser impulses, would allow goodness to reign supreme.

It sounded sort of nice, Fred supposed. Though he felt no closer to figuring out what the messages were about.

A sudden noise opened his eyes.
Guy
had just inhaled deep and quick, his long nostrils flaring as though sucking up some psychic toxin. The man proceeded to hold whatever it was in his lungs, rendering it inert with his inner power, before releasing it harmlessly back into the atmosphere.

The others now became more active as well. Dot swayed her head gently left and right. The owl-faced man’s eyebrows rose with the invisible tide of energy. Holly leaned forward, eclipsing the overhead fluorescence, her lips parted, her eyes focused beneath her lids like she was staring straight through them. It was a scary look to see on one’s own mother, a look of passion, power, deep involution. He wondered what it was she was seeing with those upturned eyes. He tried to imagine waves of relaxation flowing into his cells, like in the visualization CDs. Giving up, he imagined telling Mira what a waste of time her suggestion that he try Reiki had been. He imagined her chiding him, lecturing him about the proven benefits of the placebo effect, saying that all he had to do was believe, believe without ignorance, believe and not believe at once, or some other brain-straining impossibility.

Switching tack, allowing his eyes to close, he imagined telling Mel someday about all this over drinks, imagined her cracking up at his description of the ponytailed witch-doctor/Frenchman. He imagined demonstrating to her what it was like, putting his hands over her chest, imagined her pulling them closer.

He had to stop imagining, not wanting to run the risk of his mother and everyone else witnessing a stirring in his pants. It was an odd combination of comfort and discomfort, having all these hands hovering over him, all this attention on him. He’d never had this exact experience and his body didn’t quite know how to react. After the erection panic, he worried he’d pass gas, and then, more ridiculously, that he’d fall asleep and wet himself, the way it was rumored one would do were one’s hand to be dipped in warm water (though as kids, he and George had tried this on Sam, to no avail).

Yet despite these bodily anxieties, despite that unsettling IM exchange, despite the looming playtest tomorrow with all those Armation execs, and the financial worries, and the whole moving-to-Florida issue, and George languishing in the next bed over—despite these and every other vexing, perplexing, horrendous circumstance in Fred’s life, surrounded by this placid, well-intentioned cohort, he was aware of a growing cocoon-like sense of security. And before much longer, he began tumbling back down through the images of the last few days—Vartan with his two sets of glasses, all four lenses reflecting his electric hookah’s bulb; Holly lifting her hands to describe a funnel shape as she told him about that vortex energy rising from the desert; Sam’s Picassoed eyes in the lamp hood, shining with hurt. From there, Fred went on to see pieces of city life from his recent walks: a blond woman in a skirt suit on Fifth Avenue he’d for a dread-infused instant thought might be George’s ex, Jill, using as a mirror to apply her eyeliner the window of what she may or may not have known was the Museum of Sex; a well-groomed old woman who’d sat down at a nearby table of a coffee shop where Fred had been led in his wanderings, who’d asked him how those computers everyone in the place had on their laps and tables worked anyway, and whether there was paper inside them; the shock-terror-joy that ratcheted his heart that day in the park, when, after picturizing and prayerizing for Mira to appear, he’d looked up and almost thought he’d seen her, though it hadn’t been her at all, but a strung-out-looking older woman in a long leather coat and little round sunglasses, walking a bulldog whose front feet were shod in blue suede booties. And then he was seeing those literal pieces of the city, the glass and taxis and bricks of Mira’s visualizations, floating up into the urban night; and then he himself in the air and Mira down below, that brief, perplexing glimpse of her and the man with his arm around her, their faces slack with peace and wonder. And the apple and dry ice (or maybe baking soda?) smell of her hair, and the feel of her gelled fingertip over his heart. The recollections, like clouds, were beginning to shapeshift and take on momentum, carrying him through the murky border crossing of daydream and dream, his first soothing dream in recent memory, of a bed somewhere by a window with daylight slatting through the blinds, and Mira lying in it, fully clothed, whispering
there you are
in his ear, sounding pleased and relieved, as if she’d been expecting him, and a chime sounded. After the small eternity the tone took to decay into the silence around it, Holly began to softly speak: