Luminarium (29 page)

“Realism,” he repeated.

“Yes, for the near-death experience. The life review you experienced involved the stimulation of two different areas. The first was the reticular activating system, which is about the size of your little finger and located here, at the top of your brain stem.”

She turned her head to the side and pointed to the back, just above her hair clip. As her fingertip disappeared into her fastened-down hair, he couldn’t help picturing it in the braids, couldn’t help picturing, beneath that blouse sleeve, her bare arm, and the creepy, tattooed hand gripping it. Which was the real Mira, he wondered, the woman here, or the one in the bar? He supposed she had to look somewhat professional for her role in the study. On the other hand, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the tattoo and the braids and the belly ring were the disguise—they just didn’t seem right on her, seemed to have as little to do with her as some virtual avatar she piloted around—and that her true element was indeed here, in this stuffy little office, in these understated clothes, describing to him the functioning of his brain.

“The reticular activating system is involved in wakefulness, learning, and concentration. Usually it helps focus your attention on elements in the external world. But in conditions of sensory deprivation, or when mental images seem more noteworthy, it will focus you just as strongly on these. When the reticular activating system is overstimulated, it in turn overstimulates the surrounding cortical tissue, leading to hypervigilance and rapid thought.”

“So it made me think quickly and focus … inwardly.”

“Right. The second area was a broad cross section of your right temporal lobe.” She turned and circled her hand beside the right side of her head. “This area is thought to be involved in the storage and retrieval of sensory memory.”

“Which fired up the memories.”

“Precisely.” She’d moved to the edge of her office chair, close enough to Fred that he could see the brown in her eyes, which from any greater distance looked as black as space, and the quantum fuzz in the weave of her blouse collar. She and everything around her seemed to him just a bit too bright.

“And the tunnel?” he asked. “And the light?”

“Those were induced through a gradual flooding of the visual cortex with neural noise. We caused the cells of your vision processing area to fire randomly.”

She crumpled her hands into a single tight ball, and let it hover in the air. “Since there are more cells devoted to the center of your visual field, at first only enough of them start firing for you to see a light at the center. Then, as the noise increases, so do the ratio of activated cells”—she let her hands gradually uncurl to form a circle of thumbs and fingers—“and the light appears to spread outward. We all have a forward bias, which means we’re inclined to interpret ourselves as moving forward when presented with expanding images. And the light seemed brighter than any you’ve ever seen because, in a sense, it was. Probably more of your visual cortex cells were stimulated than they would be under any normal conditions. But it didn’t hurt your eyes because it wasn’t an actual light hitting your retina but a direct stimulation of the lightrecognition cells.”

He stared at the circle her hands had made, still strangely luminous. The silvery bands of varying widths on the fingers of one hand (her right, he finally remembered to confirm; her left fingers were bare) gleamed. On the cuticles of her right ring and pinky fingers, he noticed the fragmentary remains of a sky blue polish. When he died for real, he wondered if this would be among the moments he’d see replayed.

“Pretty clever of you guys,” he said. “But next time, maybe just electrocute me and get it over with.”

He wondered if, along with his own slightly aching head, when he died for real and remembered this, he’d feel the heat rising in Mira’s face and neck; if along with the ball of pain and anger expanding in the pit of his chest, he’d feel the stain of disappointment and confusion spreading in hers. He could walk out of this place today and devote the rest of his life to making the people around him feel good instead of bad, it occurred to him, so that in his final minute, he might reexperience from all their perspectives all the pleasure he’d created.

“Well,” she said, her voice deliberately even but thickening at the back of her throat, “in addition to that momentary feeling of shock, you’ve just had a fairly profound experience, haven’t you?”

“Profound. Sure.” He couldn’t stop himself. “Hey, next, why don’t you try sticking my brain in one of those hot dog rotisseries? I bet that would be profound.”

And this exemplary moment, too, would parade by in the end.

“I suppose it’s true,” she said, “that how profound you find these sessions is up to you. But you might consider the fact that without your being in any danger, we’ve allowed you to experience something like what you might feel happening to you at the moment of your death.” She let this resound, then went on more softly. “And now that you have some inkling of what dying might actually be like, you no longer have to be afraid of it. You know what’s going to happen. You’ll see your life flashing by in a whole new context. You’ll move through a tunnel and toward a bright light. The light will envelop you. You’ll meet a being, an angel, or even—”

“—or even you,” he said.

“I don’t follow,” she said slowly.

“It waved. You reached up for the shade. With the wing-like light of the computer monitors to either side. I was seeing you, somehow. And no offense. Maybe you mean well. But you’re no fucking angel.”

Her dark eyes wandered off; her pale face seemed to blanch even more. She looked—strangely—crushed, as if he’d just extinguished some last hope of her own. His first instinct was to ask for her forgiveness. But who was supposed to be helping who here? And anyway, she was already meeting his gaze, embarrassed at the weakness she’d shown, professionally cool again.

“That makes a certain kind of sense,” she admitted. “But it in no way—”

“—negates—” Fred mocked.

“—invalidates—” Inner George sunnily chimed.

“—
delegitimizes
,” Mira went on slowly, “what you experienced in that other place, or who it was that you saw.”

She waited. Fred said nothing.

“You called out to him,” she said. “You said, ‘What are you
doing
here?’ Don’t you remember that? It was George, wasn’t it?”

The mic on the helmet. Fred hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud.

They sat in silence. His anger was gone for the moment, replaced by something harder to bear. Whether or not he’d actually died, he hadn’t entirely returned, didn’t entirely want to. He was still wandering around in those memories. The airlift from the stairs. The superhero costume, magic act, spinning van, stalled road trip. A feeling tone to all of it, a sadness he didn’t quite understand, almost like a pity for these hapless mortals. Though when he got to the scene in the department store, it didn’t fail to make him smile.

“Neither of us knew the other would be in that store,” he told her. “We’d both gone in on the spur of the moment, ducking in out of the rain. He’d had a falling out with his wife. I’d had one with my girlfriend. We were both just wandering around.”

She watched him for a while, her expression unreadable.

“What you and George had for all those years,” she said, sitting very still, “few people get to have, even for a day. Most people will never know a connection like that.” A hint of something, stridency, bitterness, had crept into her voice. “They’ll never know how alone they are.”

She kept staring at him, wanting to drive home the point. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes. He could still see on the backs of his lids the liquid light outline of the spiral, the blotch of light in the center, like an afterburn from looking at the sun. And floating below it, that bright form with its arm raised. George. Or Mira. Or just light. Or not even light. The smarting of a few overtaxed rods and cones.

“I’m sorry this one was so difficult,” he heard Mira say. He heard her get up.

“No,” he said. “This was your best one yet.”

By the time he opened his eyes, the lamp was off, and she was crouched by the baseboard, over the fat little glowing star.

“Just wait till next week,” she said.

Fred left the suite, the new CD Mira had given him in one hand, his
briefcase in the other, watching the linoleum floor drift beneath him like some speckled wasteland far below. When the elevator began its descent and his internal organs lifted, he closed his eyes, trying to see that figure of light just outside the bigger light, but by now, it had dispersed into the general background radiation.

A couple months ago, he’d spent an evening reading through dozens of firsthand accounts of near-death experiences: Fantastic out-of-body voyages to the end of the universe and beyond. Meetings with dead loved ones, angels, God Himself in varying forms—Jesus, Buddha, a gigantic pillar of light. Guided tours of the secret workings of Creation—oversouls, onenesses, consciousnesses on planetary and galactic scales, reincarnation, oceans of pure love. Mysterious, miraculous returns—hearts unexpectedly restarted, bleeding stanched, spontaneous cancer remissions. On most websites devoted to such accounts, there could be found a special subset: coma journeys. When he’d first heard his mother’s Reiki group using this brain-bendingly hopeful oxymoron, Fred had assumed it was their own invention, but in fact it was an established mytheme in the New Age cosmology. And of course it was these stories he was mainly looking for: Patients who’d awoken after hours or days or weeks, and reported having witnessed past lives in vivid detail. Who described being pulled back to wakefulness by nets of love. Who now viewed their precoma lives as nothing more than a dream, and the everyday captivations of the world as but a trifling game.

With each account, he’d felt himself trembling on the precipice of conversion, only to step back a minute later, for all the usual reasons. The similarities between the stories seemed on the one hand compelling, on the other, suspect, psychologically attributable to the experiencers’ prior expectations. The differences were even more maddening: some saw trapped souls and ghosts, whereas others said they were shown that there were no such things; some were taken to orchards, others to cities of God, and of these said cities, no two were the same. Why was there never any proof? Why the lack of verifiable, unimpeachable details in those past lives? How was one supposed to do this thing Mira had talked about, stand that two-sided coin on edge? It was a fork in the road, either/or, George with wings outside the light or Mira processed through a hypercharged visual cortex. What sort of gymnastic quantum superposition could allow one to go both ways at once?

And what if it had been George, somehow? Hovering between here and the beyond. Waving, or warning, or waiting for help.

Out on the sidewalk, Fred put away the CD and blinked in the brightness. The summer crowd was out in force, a living mass so dense it seemed at any moment a second-story layer of window-browsers might start swarming over the heads of the first. Maybe it was the lingering sense of distance from it all, the odd feeling he was reliving rather than living it, but whatever the cause, it took him a second or two to realize he was watching his own mother across the street, appearing and disappearing in the chinks of passersby as she made her way south.

He crossed and caught up to her. She was wearing her fade-tint sunglasses, gazing slightly downward into the swarm of arms and legs around her. When he said hello and she looked up, he wasn’t sure at first if she recognized him. Then she smiled.

“Fred. Where’d
you
come from?”

“Just … doing some errands. I’m on my way back to the office for a few minutes, and then I’m heading to the hospital.”

“I was just up there. Your dad’s there now.”

Her bangs were edging over the tops of her sunglasses, giving her a look of youthful rebellion.

“So where are you headed?” Fred asked as they started walking together.

“Oh … I just got off the train, and …” She hesitated for a moment, then added with resolve, “I’m doing some Reiki.”

“Oh yeah? Got a new client?” To Fred’s knowledge, she’d only been working on George and other patients in the hospital. He congratulated himself on how nonjudgmental he’d managed to sound.

“I guess you could say that.”

There was something of a private joke in her tone. He looked at her. “You guess?”

She took his arm gently. Her smile was almost pitying. “Fred, your crazy mom’s about to seem even crazier.”

“She is?”

“Do you remember that vision I had during your attunement?”

“The vortex,” he said. The word felt strange in his mouth. They entered a long tunnel of scaffolding, stretching along half the buildings of the block.

“I started feeling it.” She was staring ahead of them, into the crowd.

“What do you mean?”

“The other day, when I left the hospital, when I was out on the sidewalk,” she said, her voice getting quieter, a shade darker, too, “it was like a storm was curling around me.”