Luminarium (34 page)

“I do a little cliff diving.” Fred felt he was diving this minute, jumping the sinking ship of his identity, hammering this life raft of Freddohood from driftwood as he fell.

Christine nodded, about to speak.

“Spelunking,” he added, cutting her off.

Christine mock-pouted, as though he were making fun of her, though in truth he didn’t have much idea what he was doing. He felt like he was sleeptalking. A man in a banana-cream dress shirt with a puff of coiffed gray hair stepped from a door behind the desk.

“Mr. Brounian, I presume.”

“Freddohhh,” he lowed, getting into it. “Please.”

“Freddo, then. Phil. Phil Jeffries. Glad to meet you.”

“Likewise, Phil.”

Their hands shook firmly.

“I hope the wait wasn’t too unbearable, having to talk to my daughter and all.”

Freddo glanced between them, taking in their matching broad foreheads. “Not at all, Phil. You sure you don’t have some other business you need to wrap up? I could wait.”

Phil raised his little bauble of a chin to the center of his fleshy face, and regarded him, slyly admiring. “I’m sure you could, Freddo.”

“He was asking about adventure sports,” Christine said.

“Adventure sports, eh? Oh, sure,” Phil said. “We’ve got all kinds of stuff. Parasailing. Ballooning. This is the land of fun. Have to say, though, a little crappie fishing in Lake Butler is excitement enough for me.”

Freddo held up his hands. “Please, Phil, we’re in mixed company, here.”

Christine giggled. Phil guffawed, his round head pinkening.

“Well, Freddo, it’s sure nice of you to come down and take care of business for your brother.”

Christine stood up and walked to the printer. Somehow, Freddo managed to take in her languid hip-leaning pose without breaking connection with her father’s eyes.

“It’s no big deal. It’s looking like I’ll be moving down to the area too.”

Fred was amazed how happy he was to hear Freddo say this.

“Great,” Phil practically shouted. “Bet you’re excited to get the hell out of Gotham. We moved from New Jersey, Hackensack, a couple years before 9/11, thank God. More New Yorkers coming down here every year, by the thousands, a real exodus. From the Bay Area, too. It’s the new Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley rolled into one.”

“Can’t be bad for your line of work.”

“No, sir, it isn’t,” Phil agreed. “But the main perk is just getting to live here.” As Christine returned with the condo listings, Phil dropped an arm around her, his hand cupping her shoulder. “We love it here, don’t we?”

“We do,” she said.

“You do, do you?” Freddo said, a strange, giddy tension building in his chest as the two of them gazed at him. Phil nodded.

“We really do.”

“Sam. There you are.”

Fred had been reaching only his voicemail for hours.

“Busy day,” Sam said after a moment. “All kinds of bugs have been popping up since that playtest. Whole bunch of data got corrupted today. We had to turn off gravity for an hour.”

On Fred’s laptop screen, trees popped into being on a grassy hill, accompanied by flashes of light and ascending runs of chimes.

“What’s that sound?” Sam asked.

“The Creation video,” Fred said. “On the Christworld website.”

More silence on Sam’s end. On Fred’s screen, to the sound of a gong, a blazing sun blossomed, shimmering from nothing in the middle of the sky. Then night wheeled around, and to the accompaniment of synthesized harp strings, a moon and stars were painted onto the darkness. The laptop cast the hotel room’s only light; Fred had been pointing and clicking around the Christworld site since before nightfall. He’d watched a lock-jawed but otherwise friendly-seeming pastor give a sermon on a theme he called “simplexity,” the art of staying true to a seemingly fantastical two-thousand-year-old story in an increasingly complex modern-day world. He’d taken a virtual tour of the church grounds, seen the smoothie bar of legend; and a day care center with a plastic slide and biblical scenes painted on the walls; and a massive multimedia auditorium, the stage crowned by a giant projection screen.

“Where would you rather live, Sam?” he asked. “In a universe where everything has been created just for you? Or in one where you’re completely accidental, just a side effect of some larger system that has nothing to do with you, where you’re struggling just to hang on?”

After a pause, Sam apparently decided it most expedient to play along. “The former,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Absolutely. With you one hundred percent.”

“Um. OK.” Sam sounded impatient.

“But what if you could live in a universe that somehow balanced the planned and the unplanned, the intended and accidental? You never know quite how everything fits together, but somehow, it does. You never know quite whether you belong, or where you fit into it all, but somehow, you do.”

A close-miked gust from Sam’s nose. “Sounds like a better game, I suppose.”

“What if that’s New York, Sam?”

Fred was mainly playing devil’s advocate at this point. He hadn’t felt either like things fit together or like he had a place in that town for a long time. On the screen, a lightning bolt zapped a man into existence, Caucasian and clean-shaven, his genitals obscured by the branch of a tree. The naked actor looked around, confused, excited. Then looked up in gratitude. Then down at his ribcage, amazed, and tracked with his eyes a shimmering mist expanding from it into the air beside him.

“There’s something to be said for planning, though,” Fred conceded. “After we checked out your condo, your realtor showed me a little place I might rent.”

A top-floor one-bedroom, with a fresh coat of paint and a sunny terrace. It had a rotted plank or two—the sight, in the immaculate surroundings, had brought on a brief surge of unease—but Phil the realtor had assured him that the wood would be replaced. The apartment was right downtown, just down the block from Phil’s office. Fred could stroll past it every day, he thought, and wave to the gorgeous Christine on his way to that diner by the lake. He and her father had talked numbers for a bit, after which, in the sporadically reappearing mysterious brightness, Fred had powered open the sunroof of his minivan and spent the day driving, back through the strip malls of Kissimmee and the low-rent carnivals; up and down the streets of downtown Orlando, bristling with construction cranes and buildings so new and sparkly they seemed clad in shrinkwrap; down to Ave Maria, the spanking-new Catholic-themed town founded by the Dominos Pizza baron; through a few of the area’s other master-planned communities, rainbow-hued Main Streets and neon-green parks sweeping by. With the exception of Cassadaga, the Spiritualist Church-owned swamp town of mediums and psychics (where the theme itself seemed to forgive the dilapidation), there was not a pothole or flaking paint job to be seen in any of them. Finally getting back to the hotel, he’d sprawled out on the bed, propped himself on a few overstuffed pillows, and continued his self-guided tour online.

“We’d be just a two-minute trolley ride from each other,” he added, as, on his screen, the mist coalesced into a cream-skinned Eve, exchanging chaste, eye-level greetings with her man from behind two well-placed branches.

“Yeah,” Sam said, his voice flat, barely audible. “The agent told me.”

“What’s wrong? Worried I’ll lower the property values?”

“No. No.” Sam’s voice trailed off. Fred wondered if he was multitasking. “I’m just … surprised you took to the town so quickly.”

“Me too. There’s some kind of soporific allergen in the air. Maybe it’s muddying my thinking.”

Sam said nothing.

“And the receptionist was pretty hot,” Fred admitted. “That might have factored in.”

Though that bright, weightless instant when Phil had put his arm around Christine might have factored in more. Thinking back on them now, the two scenes didn’t really seem so uncannily similar: a father and daughter, a hand cupping a shoulder. That was the extent of the synchronicity; in a thousand other ways, they were two different events entirely. But standing there in that office, in that gleam that might have just been his screwed-up brain or the ramped up sun of the Sunshine State, but might too have been something more, the image had seemed momentous, a sign he’d be crazy to ignore: Two father-daughter teams intent on transforming his life. One with a bizarre contraption in a cramped little room, in a doomed-and-not-even-knowing-it metropolis, offering a complicated, possibly untenable accord between doubt and faith; the other with a sunny apartment on a powerwashed street, in a brand-new town, offering a straightforward new life fresh out of the box.

It was strange, from his desk in Tribeca, apart from George’s cancer, the Military-Entertainment Complex had been starting to seem like the biggest, most out-of-control proliferation in Fred’s life. George’s dim view of the new Urth had been seeping into Fred like a neurotoxin, locking up his mind and body alike, so that he could barely even stay at his desk without feeling he was dying. But either George needed more time and medical care to recover, in which case Fred needed this job, or he wasn’t going to recover, in which case, maybe Fred wanted it. Maybe he wanted it either way. From a rectilinear office in a well-groomed industrial park, from the sun-dappled bosom of the Military-Entertainment Complex Accommodation Area, some new Fred, thought Fred, might look out the window and never see anything but simplexity itself.

“Anyway,” Fred said. “I just called to make sure you got my message about the condo.”

“Yeah. Lawyer’s closing tomorrow. Thanks for checking it out.”

“Forget it, Sam.” Fred stopped the Creation movie and started another, this one starting with a crane shot of a cheering crowd sitting in stands by the shore of a lake, to the accompaniment of an instrumental rock ballad. “Listen, thanks for getting me this interview. I know I haven’t been easy to deal with.”

Fred ran a hand around the smooth skin of his neck, front and back. He’d stopped at a mini-mall barbershop, and had gotten the old barber to give him a shave along with the haircut, with a hot, wet towel and a lather brush, no less.

“You know,” he went on, “maybe Mom and Dad really could come here one day.”

After a crowd shot came a view from the shore into the lake, waist deep in the shallows of which stood three figures: two young men, and between them, a middle-aged woman in a sleeveless, Harley Davidson T-shirt. Her sun-dried face looked a little fearful, a little excited. She looked like a person who’d seen some hard times.

“Fred,” Sam said.

“Yeah?”

“Why did the realtor keep calling you Freddo?”

The two men leaned the woman backward. The lake drank her in a gulp.

After hanging up,
Fred found a porn site and fondled himself, luxuriantly, for the first time in months not having to worry about his parents in the other room. The image of the Foley catheter splaying his brother’s glans, which had made him impotent with Mel for months and could still sometimes stop him dead, only gave him a twinge for a second or two. Images of Mel disrobing, silhouetted by the cityscape in their old bedroom—before her human interest segments took on a worldhistorical significance (canine 9/11 rescue workers, post-9/11 asthmatic cats) and that cable job and giant, wall-mounted flatscreen TV took over their bedroom—only saddened him a few seconds more. As the bouncing fake breasts on the video download looked about as soft and inviting as two frozen water balloons, he rolled away, trying to imagine the pants and moans to be those of the real estate secretary, stripped of all but her black pumps and that little gold cross. Before long, though, the clip had ended, the real estate secretary had dissolved as well, and it was Mira he was seeing. Riding him in the helmet chair. Smelling of apples and sweat and smoke machine mist. Their chests sticky with electroconductive gel. Her lips at his ear, whispering, between gasps, some scientific explanation involving pheromones and vascular engorgement.

He’d planned, when this was through, to sleep, and make sure he was fully rested for the interview. But it wasn’t even nine o’clock, and as drowsy as he’d been earlier, he wasn’t at all tired. He killed some more time websurfing. Link by link, he navigated away from Christworld, until he was reading about the French Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, a planet-wide sentience evolving from the Earth’s biological and technological networks into a single, unified mind, heart, and soul.

And from there, to postings on futurist discussion boards about the Singularity—the point at which a computer network would become self-aware and proceed to evolve itself at lightning speed into an entity capable of mental and technological feats that humans couldn’t even conceive.

And from there, to a thread about the Omega Point theory, how humanity would die out but its machine-superbeing offspring, no longer bound by atmospheres or even planets, would gain control over physical forces and reengineer the universe into a self-catalyzing complex system—a biosphere or a giant, living computer, the difference being, at such a stage, purely semantic. One posting suggested that this future superbeing might crack the code of time and come back to upload the minds of every living being, perhaps at the moments of their deaths, thereby preserving them.