Luminarium (37 page)

“Which position is that?”

“Which—? I’m the former CEO of Urth, Inc. I’m here to see about going back to work as head of that department.”

She turned to her computer. Her moist, red fingers tapped a few sticky-looking keys. “I see no advertised positions in Virtual Training Environments.”

Fred forced the rebelling muscles of his face into a smile. “I don’t think it would be advertised. This is obviously some kind of mistake. I think I’m supposed to be talking to Doug Erskine?”

“Mr. Brounian,” she said, her voice flatlining. “I received word that you would be coming to see me, and that we should figure out what positions you might be qualified for.”

“Who did you receive word
from
?”

Her eyes dimmed. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

He sat there, brain-tasered. Even Inner George was stunned to silence. Those mucosal fingers reached for his laptop, turning it toward her. She scanned his résumé, taking her time, alternately nodding and clucking as she glanced back and forth between it and her own monitor. His skill set qualified him for two positions, she told him: an analyst for simulation markets, responsibilities including online data collection and coordinating with the senior analysts; and a senior implementation officer for foreign software licenses, responsibilities including testing and debugging foreign-language interfaces. When he managed to stutter that those were pretty low-level, she looked again.

“We do also have a certified project manager position in foreign-language interfaces. I suppose you could argue you’ve managed projects—”

“Of course I’ve managed projects,” he nearly shouted. “I was a CEO.”

She waited, overlong, until it was clear that he’d interrupted her. “But unless you’ve received official training and certification from an accredited agency, you don’t meet the minimum requirements.”

“Excuse me.” He pointed to his laptop. “Can I have that back?”

“I’ll need a copy of that résumé.”

“You bet.”

“And there are forms—”

But he was already moving, back out the door, down the hallway, catching an elevator door just as it closed. Two men in suits eyed his orange badge.

“Going up?” one of them asked uncertainly.

Fred nodded, turned to face the doors to hide his expression from them, but there it was, reflected in the burnished metal, glowering, sphincter-lipped. When the doors opened on five, he strode up to yet another front desk, locking eyes with yet another receptionist, a younger version of the one a floor below.

“I’m here to see …” His voice was trembling.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know who I’m here to see.”

They stared at each other. Then he was in motion again, down a hallway lined with doors, as the woman called out after him. He didn’t know who was where; at this point, he was simply looking for anyone he recognized. He careened from side to side of the hall, opening door after door, finding behind them empty desks or unfamiliar faces, frantic and reeling, like he was living out one of his desperate, going-nowhere dreams.

Then, at the hallway’s end, the last door opened onto a room larger than the rest. A corner office. Lined with tinted windows. In front of which, behind the all but bare expanse of a very large, gold-fluted, cherry-wood desk, sat Dan Gretta.

Fred recognized him instantly from the picture he’d seen, though at first he couldn’t quite believe it. Gretta, apparently, was doing nothing at all—he had no visitors, wasn’t on the phone, the computer in the corner was off; he was just sitting at his vast, empty desk with a sunny expression on his face, which, upon seeing Fred, after a moment of indecision, broadened to display his perfect, white dentition.

“Hey,” Gretta said, with an easy wave, like Fred was an old chum. “Come on in, pull up a chair.”

With a queasy surge, Fred walked into the room and sat. His arms and legs were still shaking after that mad race down the hall. As best he could, he marshaled his mental forces.

“Mr. Gretta. My name is Fred Brounian. Until recently, I was the co-CEO, along with my brother George, of Urth, Incorporated.”

The receptionist, along with a still beefier security guard than the one downstairs, appeared in the doorway. Fred thought he was done for, but Gretta waved them away.

“It’s all right. We’re talking. No worries.” He seemed to mean it. “Close the door, it’s fine.”

With evident reluctance, they did as told.

“We ate you kids for dinner,” Gretta said, his grin not diminishing in the slightest. “That right?”

The man’s tone and overall demeanor were so unencumbered, Fred couldn’t resist smiling a little himself. “That’s … one way of describing it.”

“So what brings you here today?”

“I came to get my old job back. I mean, helping run the Urth projects.”

“Not quite my department,” Gretta said.

“I realize that. I was told … I was under the impression there would be a meeting. But then I was sent to human resources, and all they had to offer me were entry-level positions in other departments.”

Gretta nodded, slow and sage-like. “Fred—you said Fred, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fred, as one CEO to another, it sounds like they’re giving you the old sluff-off.”

“Yes. It seemed that way to me as well.”

They sat there for a moment, happily in agreement. Fred thought he could just possibly work for a man like this.

Gretta’s eyes crinkled. “Hey, you the one with the twin?”

“That’s right.”

“Somebody mentioned you two.”

Fred tried to read his expression, looking for some clue as to the context in which he and George had been discussed. He couldn’t tell. Gretta’s whole suntanned face had furrowed, deep in thought. He looked back up at Fred.

“You two ever share a chick?” he asked. “Swap her on the sly? Pretend to be each other?”

“No,” Fred said.

“Ah,” Gretta said, his top teeth showing, “that’s what I’d do, if I had another one of me.”

Fred nodded for a while, at a loss.

“I’d have one of me make the money, run the company,” Gretta went on, “and the other of me produce porno movies, throw naked pool parties, bed a new girl every night. Except every now and then, the two mes could switch off.”

“He’s dying of cancer,” Fred said at last.

“Ouch.” A smarting look. Gretta glanced off, out the side window, at the green landscape speckled with corporate offices, then back at him. “Listen, would you like some advice?”

Fred had been anticipating the word “help” rather than “advice,” and was already nodding.

“D’ya ever read self-help books?” Gretta asked.

For a moment, Fred wasn’t sure he’d heard the question right. “Occasionally,” he said.

“I don’t. Never felt the need. But my wife, she’s got a whole shelf of ’em. The other day I was peeking in this one. It had a big foldout chart in the middle. In one column there’s a list of illnesses. In the other, there are feelings.” He held up one hand, then the other, like two pans of a scale. “The idea is that the feelings cause the illnesses. You know what feeling was next to cancer?”

Fred dug his nails into his palm, sensing that the dream he still felt himself to be in was tilting back toward nightmare.

“Resentment,” Gretta said, with a somber nod.

“So …” Fred worked through the logic. “You’re saying
you
gave him cancer?”

“What?” Gretta’s upper lip hitched over an incisor. “No, listen. That chart’s probably a bunch of bullshit. But why take the risk, right? When you lose in business, you got to learn to let go.” He smiled. “That’s what I mean.”

“I see.” Fred stared at him.

“Let go, Fred.” Gretta lowered his head, looked up at him through his silver eyebrows. “Before you lose even more.”

In the hallway,
the receptionist passed Fred with an evil eye on her way back to her boss’s office. The executive lobby was a slightly more overstuffed version of the one on the floor below, with the addition of a tinted glass door, beyond which lay a small sundeck heavily fortified with concrete balustrades and a canvas awning. Both lobby and deck were unoccupied.

He couldn’t bring himself to call an elevator. His legs simply wouldn’t move in that direction, or, for that matter, now that he’d stopped in the middle of the lobby, in any way at all. He was staring at the framed picture on the wall of Gretta with Jeb and Dubya to either side, their arms around each other’s backs, all three grinning down at him.

For a vivid interval Fred was released into action, taking the picture off the wall, stepping out the door to the deck, and flinging it, without force, without thought, over the balustrade.

It disappeared. Made no sound.

Then he was at a loss again. He stood gazing down at that monotonous jet of water spouting from its shallow pool.

There was something about these fountains that depressed the hell out of him, he decided. Depressed him to his bones, to his marrow, in that way that all botched, halfhearted, half-assed attempts at beauty depressed him, being paradoxically more painful to see than no beauty at all. He didn’t understand how this world could fall so far short of the one in which, deep down, they all knew they should be living. He didn’t understand how their lives themselves could fall so far short of what they might have been. There was so much potential standing here on the balcony, so very much more lying in that hospital room. His own failure Fred could almost accept, but George’s he just couldn’t fathom. He couldn’t understand a universe that would simply waste all the energy George might have brought to it. His brother was like some giant cloud of stardust that had never coalesced into a star. More lusterless matter, in a cosmos starved for light.

He went back inside, and made a slow circuit of the lobby, taking his time now, examining the other photographs on the wall. There was a picture of a couple of jet fighters, for which Armation had probably done some minor systems. There was another one of a large, irregularly shaped flight-simulator compartment, through whose open door airplane controls could be seen. And a screen shot of a virtual Iraqi checkpoint Fred’s team had done, in which three American soldier avatars were talking with a brown-skinned avatar near a halted car.

At the very moment his gaze fell upon the Apollo space helmet perched on its marble stand, a sun ray sliced through the deck doorway to light up the helmet’s bulbous faceplate. Faintly, he could see his own refection there, his whole body suspended, afloat in the light.

He reached for it, watching those ten reflected fingers envelop the world.

A ringing phone woke him. Picking up, he had only the shallowest of
notions where he was.

“Freddy. Little Freddy. It’s Manny. What room are you?”

Either the volume of the phone was too high or the volume of Manfred was too high. Fred laid the receiver on a pillow. What room was he?
Was he a room?

“Room,” he said. There was indeed a room, a dark one. A standing lamp. A fine frame of twilight around the curtains.

“Room. Number.”

“I don’t know,” Fred said.

“You don’t know?”

He just wanted the interrogation to stop. “Don’t know.”

“All right bye.”

“Bye.” By the time Fred said it, Manny was already gone.

He closed his eyes, wanting to change the end of the dream he’d been having, in which he was looking for George in a dream version of their office, in the middle of which sprawled an elaborate model for a whole city they were planning—crystalline, holographic, mirror-bright. A city so flawless in its design that the smallest part reflected the whole, that anywhere you would go in it, you would be everywhere at once. A city they’d have liked to believe they were made for. Except that outside the office window, their own city was lost in a haze of billows and orange radiation. And George was out there, somewhere. And from the glass stared Fred’s own ghostly reflection: his face framed by a white bowtie and white top hat, his eyes fogged, his mouth twisted in a gagging rictus. Then and there, he was watching himself die.

Banging commenced at the door. It took him a moment to correlate the banging with the phone call, another to remember what Manfred was doing here, where “here” was, and why he wanted in.
Dinner.
Fred had forgotten all about it. Had he remembered, he would have canceled. Or, barring that possibility, changed hotels.

“Fred! What’s up? You got a chick in there?” Again, the banging.

He rolled off the bed, dizzy as he’d been in his dream. His head ached, chest ached, whole body ached. He was still in his fancy shirt and tie, and slacks, and socks, and even the checkered shoes, which got tangled in the sheets and blankets and sent him face-first to the carpet.

“You being raped?” Manny shouted. “Should I call a cop?”

Fred got to his feet and opened the door.

“Holy shit,” Manny said, the hallway light shining in from behind him. “You do have gray hairs. You’re an old man, Little Freddy. So what the hell does that make me?”

Manfred looked older too. A colony of liver spots had settled in the furrowed terrain of his forehead; hammocks of skin hung slack from his jawbones. But he was just as tall and broad-shouldered, and the fishing vest and light gray sweatsuit he wore, not to mention the black leather motorcycle jacket clutched in one hand, gave him an air of continued hardiness. What appeared to be a herpes sore at one corner of his mouth served double duty, testifying to his perishability and manly vigor at once. Still in the doorway, he peered around the room.