Luminarium (25 page)

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Authors: Alex Shakar

BOOK: Luminarium
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You don’t believe in me, that’s OK,
Hell, I’m an AWDBS/HAA.
I don’t believe in my halo’s bling.
I don’t believe in the gust of my wing.
I can scarcely believe in you, old chum,
Much less that the famed AVATARA will come.
How fart-in-the-windlike, I hope you can see,
Is a prayer from an astral loser like me.
All I can do is to pray for a pray,
That you’ll pray for me, for us, for a way,
Pray for the means to end this Maya:
Om Namah Shivaya

Clicking on the link, Fred was brought to a photograph of a painted statue of Shiva the Destroyer, festooned with snakes and crowned with skulls, his overabundant hands clutching sword, trident, noose, and, by the hair, a cluster of severed heads. Underneath ran the caption:
You
Shall Ever Be a Victor.

Fred stared at the image for a while, looking in vain for clues, and feeling uneasy. Then he did a whois search on the page’s domain name—
www.avatara.us
—only to find that it was registered to one Lord Shiva, residing on Mt. Kailasa Street in the nonexistent town of Karanaloka, NJ.

Then, for a while, he banged his head back against the mainframe’s hull, listening to the sound it made—a hollow, distant thunder.

It’s not small, George is saying, mock-modestly, at a zinc-hued
downtown restaurant with a line out the door. All right, if you must know, it’s huge.

It’s the summer of 2000, their thirtieth birthday is near, and George has been hinting for days at the size and formidableness of the gift he’s gotten Fred. Jill and Mel lean in, shouting out their guesses. A TV. A massage chair. George smirks, widens the space between his hands. Not wanting to be too outdone, Fred has bought George a complete set of camping gear: an ultralight dome tent, a sleeping bag, an over-designed backpack, and a Swiss Army knife that does everything but build you a house. But the way George is going on about this, Fred wonders if it’s not too late to get him more.

A car, Jill says, gripping George’s hand. The two have just moved in together. In a few months, George will propose.

A waiter with zinc-framed glasses brings a round of martinis on a zinc tray. Fred’s been ordering martinis lately—they seem to him like something a CEO would drink.

A boat, Mel guesses, adding that one of her meatbags is always talking about his boat, trying to get the bubblehead to go for a ride on it. These terms, which Fred explains are standard news-producer lingo for the male and female anchorpeople, cause George and Jill to crumple with laughter. Mel is an assistant producer of so-called human interest stories (another odd term, considering they’re mainly about domesticated animals) for the eleven o’clock news. Fred spun the wheel and met her through an online-dating site, though before asking her on their first date, he’d made sure to run her name through three Internet search engines, perusing her résumé, a few college newspaper columns, a family reunion website with pictures of her, George, all the while, telling him to give it a rest for God’s sake. They’ve been dating for a month, and this is the first time the four of them are out as a group. He’s warmed to see everyone having fun.

The poor bubblehead, Jill says.

The bubblehead’s a bitch, Mel hisses, to more laughter. As Fred hoped she would, she launches into her story of how the bubblehead asked her to go fetch her a Perrier, like she was a mere intern or something, and how, in revenge, she succeeded in placing a golf-ball-sized piece of lint in the bubblehead’s hair just before she went on the air. It’s a funny story, and Mel savors the telling, detailing how she nursed the piece of lint for days, feeding it with pocket scrapings and keeping it in a coin purse. She’s flirty, earthy, unrepentantly material, things that Fred isn’t but that he approves of and wants to be. She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy. Maybe a small voice in him says they aren’t right for each other, but why shouldn’t they be, and hasn’t that voice messed him up enough already? Watching her mimic the careful assembly of her lintball, it strikes him he’s in love with her. She and Jill start laughing so hard all attention in the room gravitates their way. Glancing over, he finds George’s eyes already on his, teary, just as his own must be. George understands, the look says. His brother feels it too, this newfound love expanding, encompassing not just their women but the whole room, city, cosmos, ever more of which seem made for them, tailored to perfection.

Or maybe, he’d later think, it was just that one brief moment that fit so well. Though even it, in time, would look threadbare. Those gorgeous women in hysterics. Those young, twin, martini-drinking CEOs. Flush with gourmet food, fancy drinks, the facile pleasure of playing and winning. A transient circumstance. A conditioned love. The one vanishing with the other.

He closed the
windows on his desktop, Shiva, martinis, emails fading to blue.

He opened a DarkBASIC window, and typed:

rem

A REM statement was just a programming aside, a note to oneself. That was how he’d meant it at first. But looking it over, he realized it could be a prayer—a note to his own programmer, as it were. He added two words:

do
rem
loop

And set his little golem running. Nothing visible happened, but the computer’s circuitry was now continually cycling through his silent prayer.

Stopping it, he added a counter to let him know how many prayers had been accomplished at the end of each minute, and set it running again.

37703481 appeared after the first minute.

75406964 after the second.

The number’s sheer size gave him a slight feeling of accomplishment.
Way to pray, dude,
said Inner George. Sarcastically or no, Fred couldn’t quite say.

He pulled himself under the desk, crawled amid the wires, located the dust-caked plug of George’s “huge” birthday gift to him, the Cray. A few months ago, he’d scanned its hard drives, in the desperate hope that George had left some other unfinished party gag on it Fred might savor for a while, but its vast number of silicon chips were so many clean slates. Climbing back to his seat, he networked over to the Cray and rewrote the program in C:

He set it running. A minute later, a new number popped onto the screen:

15047383901

He himself was still doing nothing. But four hundred times as fast.

“You guys heard about the Prayerizer?”

The couple Fred addressed were engaged in a marathon make-out session, leaned up against the bar between his stool and the next. Retracting their tongues, they turned toward him, lips gluey and loose, heads still touching at the temples as though magnetized. If either of them were twenty-one, it could only be by a few days.

“Wha?” said the guy.

“The Prayerizer,” said Fred.

They kept staring at him, their mouths slack, their eyes slack, the glistening tongues inside their open mouths slack. He pulled a flyer from the briefcase wedged between his chest and the bar and slid it toward them. It was a photo he’d taken, from a low angle, of the gargantuan blue mainframe, the hull of which he’d hastily pasted with faith clip art (that Shiva image from his mystery mailer, a crucifix, a crescent, a six-pointed star, a happy Buddha).

“So how often would you say you pray?” Fred went on. “Not like a formal prayer, necessarily, just sort of hoping something goes your way. On average, let’s say. Once a day? Once a week?”

The girl seemed about to laugh, or perhaps vomit. Before she could do either, the guy pawed her jaw back and reaffixed his mouth to hers.

They’d won the first round, Fred conceded, annoying him more than he had them. He ended up staring at the flyer himself, straining to renew the sense of possibility the idea had given him in the shower that morning. It didn’t rank with the wheel or the lightbulb, or a virtual world, for that matter, as inspirations went. He was aware of this. But it had been easy enough to implement—a few hours of programming, a registered domain name, a couple hundred of these flyers cranked out on the office printer—and he’d been in business. One never knew with Internet phenomena, he was telling himself; with enough hits, he might be able to sell some ads and use the money to keep his brother sleeping in style while he looked for work, or maybe even to fertilize some other fast-money ventures, so that before long he’d have a company again.

He’d chosen the Lower East Side to start putting up his flyers, out of more or less fond memories, or maybe just repetition compulsion, having in his late teens postered the area for a short-lived band called The Smells, in which he’d played, mainly, keytar. He’d gotten a few thumbs-up, back then, some nods from other scruffy kids putting up flyers of their own, even a lingering look from a girl or two. This time around, he was meeting with less positive reinforcement. The only person who asked him directly about the flyers was a homeless man with an enormously inflamed right eyeball, who then wanted to talk about a Chinese conspiracy involving computer chips in the brain and flying dragons. Loitering on a corner and surreptitiously watching reactions to a construction wall he’d saturated with ten or so of his flyers, he spied one pair of rolled eyes, one weary shake of the head, and other than that, glazed indifference. He began circling back around to blocks he’d covered two hours before, to find some of his flyers already papered over with others, or worse, simply torn down, four taped corners remaining.

He started walking more, postering less. At some point late in the afternoon, he saw he was on 7th Street and, remembering Mira’s address, began idly searching for the building. He wasn’t far from it and it didn’t take long to get there—a six-story row house in need of some brickwork. He risked a look up at a few windows as he passed, a sweeping glance that couldn’t take in much. He was too worried he’d find her face in one of them, or Craig Egghart’s, catching him in the act.

He kept going after that, all the way east to the public housing by the river, then turned around and walked back. It was in no way unnatural, he posited, that he should walk back along the same route he’d taken. He’d pass her house just once more. Take a slower look, see if he could spot a cat, a bird, a painting, something that seemed like it might be hers.

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