Luminarium (20 page)

“OK, honey, just relax, and imagine that on a long journey through strange lands, you’ve come upon a friend’s home, a place of health and hope: a garden terrace high above the crashing Bruinen river, gossamer and dew and silvery mist all twinkling in the pale yellow sun.”

Drowsily, his eyes still all but closed, Fred wondered about this unfamiliar river, thinking perhaps it was a river in Japan, since this was where Reiki had come from. Reiki’s invention, or “discovery,” as he’d learned online over the weekend, was attributed to an early-twentieth-century Japanese healer named Mikao Usui, who went to a mountaintop to meditate for twenty-one days, and then was struck in the forehead by a ball of light that descended from the stars. The light knocked him out of his body and showed him symbols afloat in prismatic bubbles, granting him the long-sought ability to heal others without draining his own energy. Before his death twelve years later, he trained sixteen Reiki masters (his chief disciple, according to one account, later ended his life by willing three major blood vessels to burst rather than joining the Imperial Army). The only non-Japanese person among them was a Hawaiian woman, Hawayo Takata, who brought Reiki to the West, training twenty-two Reiki masters before her death in 1980, a number which had since grown into the thousands.

“The day warms,” his mother continued, “and on the porch of a perfect house looking out over the leaping river to the far mountains, you sip a golden draught cool as a waterfall. Birds are singing, and the fragrance of herbs and sweet turf rises as you breathe.”

Cracking his eyes some more, Fred saw a page of looseleaf hovering in her hands, translucent under the ceiling light, and through which he could see the outlines of her handwriting from top to bottom. Wanting to be able to say he’d given it his all, he closed his eyes again and put his fledgling picturization skills to use, imagining the scene. It was surprisingly easy to do. For a moment, he thought he was recalling a place he’d already been; there seemed something so familiar about it. At the same time, he was observing the process of his own mind imagining the place, and wondering how it could do both those things at once, and telling himself not to get distracted, and getting distracted nonetheless. He wondered whether Dot, whose toasty hands he could feel sliding into position over his belly, had been led to Reiki by some kind of ailment like his mother—who’d been told it could help control her tremors (and believed that it had done so)—and if this might be the explanation for her elfin thinness.

“Gradually,” Holly read, “as the westering sun sinks and the thin purple sky goes dark, stars clear the mists and wheel from the East. Here swings the net of Remmirath, here the fire-jeweled Borgil. And here, over the shadowed world’s edge sails
Menelvagor
, with his bright belt and diamond sword.”

Fred was marveling at the night sky, teeming and animate with stars. He was picturing those stars coalescing into the pattern of a man with a glittering sword. He was wondering what the deal was with these foreign-sounding names. They didn’t sound at all Japanese. Kind of Celtic, maybe.

“Menelvagor beckons you, and suddenly you’re rising into the sky. You can fly. The truth is you always could. You always had that power. You just never knew you did, and now you do.” She read with a rapt intonation Fred dimly recognized, with a pang of nostalgia, from three decades ago, when she’d read him and George stories before bedtime.

And Menelvagor again, Fred was thinking. And he was flying into that star-filled night, reliving that sensation of floating up out of his body—the elation, the release of it.

“Below you is now spread out the entire valley of Rivendell,” she read, “the houses and trees lit with globes of faerie fire.”

And he was thinking now that, yes, his crazy mother was talking about
The Lord of the Rings
. And he was mortified for her, and for her insane friends too. He must have been remembering these passages subconsciously from childhood, which in turn had led him to start thinking of the vegan chick on his left as
elfin.
But at the same time, right alongside the inward cringing, he was still going along with it, picturing the aerial view of Rivendell by night, and the scene his mother continued to relate of this man made of stars who held his starry hands over Fred, erasing his negative patterns of anger and sadness, filling him instead with healing and divine connection, and how Fred had but to behold it, discern the energy’s hue, and it would be his for now and always, nothing more to do….

“You can open
your eyes,” Holly whispered.

He did so, finding everyone else’s open and on him, sparkling with accomplishment.

“I know you saw the
Lord of the Rings
movies four times,” Holly said, hovering upside down at the top of his vision, not quite visible now in the overhead light. “So I used the book. I wanted to make it something just for you.”

“Only the first one, that many,” Fred mumbled, embarrassed no longer for anyone’s sake but his own.

“How do you feel?” Dot asked brightly.

He ran a hand over his head, the lingering impression of his mother’s fingertip still tickling his scalp. She’d drawn symbols on him, perhaps the ones from that chart hanging in his bedroom, and blown the hair at his crown, and patted her warm fingers into each of his hands. He looked from one expectant gaze to the next, unsure what he could possibly tell them. “More relaxed,” he offered.

“You were pulling so much energy,” said the big, buzzcut woman at his feet. The others nodded and murmured their agreement.

“You must have really needed it,” said Dot.

“Your trouble sleeping won’t be troubling you anymore,” the goateed, owl-faced man said. “You’ll see.”

“And I took the liberty of exorcising that little shoplifting demon,”
Guy
intoned, with a voice so sepulchrally reverberant it seemed to originate not from his voice box but from a trapdoor deep in the chambers of his sinuses.

Fred gave his mother a stare. Or tried to, but she was looking off, he couldn’t see where in the light.

“Ha. You really did learn some things in Africa,” said the buzzcut woman.

“Well,”
Guy
replied, “I admit to improvising a bit, not having any hyena bones at hand.”

The group laughed, except for Holly. She was just peering off into space, Fred was pretty sure. He contemplated sitting up, but were he to do so, he would have to decide which way to face and wouldn’t be able to see them all, so he continued to lie there with the light in his eyes.

“You’re attuned,” the owl-man told him. “Now you can do Reiki too.” The others—save
Guy
, who let his face betray no opinion on the matter—confirmed this news with energetic nods. Fred didn’t know which annoyed him more, being told he now had the power to wield some kind of nonexistent energy, or
Guy’s
apparent doubts that he had what it took to do so.

“Any time you feel like you need it,” Dot said, “or someone you know needs it, you can do it, now.”

They waited for Fred to say something.

“That’s … thanks.”

“You can try it out when we do George in a minute,” said the buzzcut woman.

At the mention, they all turned, Fred included, and looked. It was the first time in all these months, and in many years, for that matter—probably since that winter camping trip George had talked him into, lying side by side in a tent—that Fred had seen him from quite this angle. Then, George had been howling at the top of his lungs, in reply to whatever it was they’d just heard out there: coyote, wolf, or lone, disconsolate dog. Now, his face was glossy, like a wax statue, and every bit as still. Fred couldn’t even tell if his brother was breathing.

“It was cool standing between the two of you,” Dot said, a hand on George’s arm now. “I could feel George’s energy passing through me and into you.”

Fred could only imagine the joke George would have made at this juncture. In a perfect world, he would have seen the corner of George’s waxy mouth creeping upward.

“There was even more energy in the room than last week,” said the owl-man, pink fingers waving. “It was kind of wild.”

The others,
Guy
included, murmured their agreement.

“Word about George is spreading around here,” the owl-man went on. “In the elevator, I heard two nurses talking about him. And his miracle-working mother.”

Everyone looked at Holly. But if she heard, she gave no indication. It was true enough that word was spreading. Even some of the doctors now stopped to watch her. Many patients she worked on needed less pain medication. Some recovered from surgery faster than usual. Others simply became less anxious, more serene. The chronically ill patients she’d been seeing regularly were telling her that the treatments were getting stronger every time, which she unfailingly attributed to George. George was healing them, she’d tell them, not her. The other day a woman with MS had appeared in the doorway and asked Fred if she could just sit with him and George for a while, which she’d proceeded to do, closing her eyes, her hands palms-up on her thighs. She’d sat there for ten minutes, then thanked him quietly, tears brimming, and left.

“Is something wrong, Holly?” Dot asked. Holly had stepped over to George’s bed, and was clearing the hair from his forehead with her trembling fingertips.

“I had another one of those … things,” she said.

“Things?” said the owl-man.

The group exchanged looks.

“Another vision?”
Guy
asked, his voice softer than it had been earlier. Holly nodded. Fred sat up, to get a better look at her. She was still gazing down at George.

“When?” asked Dot.

“Just now. Just in that minute after I stopped reading, before we opened our eyes.”

“What was it?” said the owl-man. “What did you see?”

“It was just a flash. But I saw him over the city. Way high up.”

Spooked, Fred thought of his little kite trip over the ice cream truck. Though as she went on, none of the other details seemed to match.

“I thought he might be trying to get back down,” she said. “But there was this huge storm in his way.” She looked up from George, meeting their eyes. “A vortex of energy, closing in over the city.”

No one spoke. For a tense second, Fred wondered if even his mother’s crazy friends were thinking she’d lost it. But glancing around, he found them all nodding, more or less mirroring her, brows scrunching.

“What did it look like, this vortex?” asked the owl-man.

“It was just … all these spinning clouds,” Holly said. “Dark and light, really out of control. It seemed dangerous. And so big. And he was so small up there. He had his hands out. Like he was trying to do Reiki on it.” “It sounds heroic of him,” Dot offered, holding George’s forearm and looking back and forth between him and Holly.

“It’s funny, though.” Holly cocked her head. “I thought a vortex was a good thing, a healing thing.”

“Maybe it could be,” said the buzzcut woman, “if
he
could heal
it
.” The owl-man fingered his beard, professorial. “Was it a yin or yang vortex?”

Holly looked uncertain.

“Was it upflow, or outflow?” he elucidated.

“I don’t know. It was every which way, lashing out, grabbing in. It was just … a crazy whirl.”

Fred rubbed his head, feeling like he was in a scene from
Ghostbusters
. “What does it mean?” Holly asked, looking first at George, then at the ceiling. “What’s going on up there?”

“Maybe he’s warning us to avoid air travel,” the owl-man said.

“Exploding drinks,” exclaimed the buzzcut woman, “exploding shoes.” “We’ll have to fly naked,” Dot said.

“Even then,” said the owl-man, “they’ll figure out a way to spontaneously combust.”

“Things certainly seem out of whack to me,” Dot said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rogue vortex roaming around out there.”

“A storm of ignorance,”
Guy
said with a world-weary nod. “Ignorance and delusion.”

Holly, the buzzcut woman, the owl-man, and Dot all nodded as well, as if
Guy
had just said something incalculably wise. For his part, Fred rubbed his head again, wondering just what a man who’d worn a goat’s gallbladder on his head could mean when he talked about ignorance.

“So what’s the delusion?” Fred asked, an edge in his voice.

Guy
met his gaze, sort of, his eyes half-lidded, unimpressed by Fred or anything. “Four thousand religions. Two hundred nations. Six billion people. All defending what doesn’t exist.”

“And what doesn’t exist?”

“The world as they see it.”

“And how do
you
see it?” Fred pressed. Maybe it was just
Guy’s
assurance that got to him. Not to mention that “shoplifting demon” remark. The whole day, Fred thought, had been a bit much for him. First those listserv jokers using George and him for their games, and now this cabal of Renaissance-fair witches and warlocks doing the same.

“Right now,”
Guy
said, looking into him, through him, with a faint, sad amusement, “it appears Consciousness has the whimsical inclination to take the form of man, who, missing his brother, steals from supermarkets and wishes he were in Middle Earth.”

“Oh, stop it,
Guy
,” Dot said, with a helpless smile.

Fred found himself wondering which of them would win in a fistfight.
Guy
was in better shape, no question. His aura was self-cleaning. His cerebrospinal fluid, from cranium to sacrum, had the run of his back. His chakras spun out energy like the oiled gears of a luxury sedan. But negativity, at least, was squarely in Fred’s own corner.

“So what makes Reiki different from those three thousand nine hundred ninety-nine other religions?” Fred asked.

“Reiki,” Holly said, sounding serious, “is
not
a religion.”

Emphatic nods all around. The point seemed important to them.

“How do you figure?” Fred asked.

The group exchanged glances, suppressing smiles.

Finally,
Guy
sniffed, and with a look down his nose, delivered the coup de grâce: “We don’t have tax-exempt status.”