Luminarium (38 page)

“Hey Freddy, how many hookers did you have up here?” Manny strode in, pointing to the ten or so miniature liquor bottles on the table. “Looks like they drank your whole minibar.”

“Just me,” Fred said, wooziness joining the dizziness as he remembered.

“So are you drunk, or hungover?”

Changing currents of gravity sat Fred back down on the bed.

“Both.”

“You want a cup of coffee?”

Fred felt at his stomach. “I don’t think so.”

“You want another drink?”

He focused on the question. “I believe so.”

Manny yanked open the refrigerator. “All that’s left is gin and tequila.”

“Latter, please.”

“You want that straight?”

Fred nodded. Manny rebounded the bottle off Fred’s chest, into Fred’s hands.

“I’d join you, but I’m a Buddhist. So what’s the occasion?”

Fred worked the cap off the squarish little bottle, deeming the matter beyond his present capacity to explain.

“Get canned?” Manny asked.

Not correct in a technical sense—he’d failed to get uncanned—but close enough. He drank, scowled, nodded, rubbed his eyes.

“Fred, fuck, you got canned. What are you gonna do now?”

What would it take, Fred wondered, to get this man out of his hotel room?

“But you can still land me a job, right?” Manny laughed, slapping the entertainment cabinet. “You can still put in a good word for me, can’t you?” He laughed again, and when Fred joined in with no more than a twitch of the lips, Manny walked over, spun around and sat down next to him, wrapping a long arm around his shoulders.

“Freddy. Freddy. Poor fuckin’ Georgy.” Manny’s eyes glinted with tears. “Hey, I got you this.”

He held the motorcycle jacket out, giving it and Fred’s shoulders a simultaneous shake.

Fred looked at him. “You think giving me your jacket’s going to cheer me up?”

“It’s not mine. Look.” Manny stood up and held the thing by either shoulder. “You think this could fit me?”

It did look small for Manfred.

“It’s Armani. Like an eight-hundred-dollar jacket, probably. Come on, try it on.” Manny pulled him to a standing position, began guiding his arms through the sleeves.

“What do you mean, ‘probably’?” Fred asked.

“I mean more or less.”

“What did you do, steal it?”

“I claimed it. At the lost and found, downstairs.” Having gotten the jacket onto Fred, Manny occupied himself slapping dust off its various planes. “Whenever I’m at a hotel, I ask them if anyone found a leather jacket or a watch three weeks back.”

“So you stole it,” Fred surmised. It was tight in the armpits and the sleeves were short.

“Buddhists don’t steal. It’s like an alm. And here I am giving it away, a minute later. Don’t be such a milquetoast. Zip it up.”

Fred fumbled with the zipper. His trouble, he realized, had to do with its being on the wrong side. “I think this is a women’s jacket.”

“What’s the difference? Looks good on you. Anyway, you don’t like it, you sell it. Donate it. It’s a tax write-off. Let’s go. I’m hungry.”

“Manny, I don’t think—”

“You’ll feel better outside. We’ll go somewhere downtown you can keep drinking. Hey. Our president. And his rascally brother.” Manny stepped around to the far side of the bed, approaching the desk. “And who’s that in the middle? Another brother? And what’s this?” He picked up the picture to get a look at the space helmet against which it was propped. “Wow. Looks like the genuine article.” In either hand, he held up the helmet, the picture, making them bob and dance above Fred. “Where’d you get this shit?”

Fred gripped his face, with the vague thought of peeling it off. “I stole it.”

On an evening
a month back, when no amount of suctioning seemed to be totally clearing George’s airway, hoping to distract him from the fetters of material existence for a while, Fred had read to him about holography, how illusions of spatial objects are re-created from frequency patterns stored on plates of glass; how the eyes are essentially frequencypattern recorders and the visual cortex is essentially a holographic projector; how every sense operates in similar fashion, detecting not definite features but only particular patterns out of what might be an infinite number; how, for all people know, beyond the parsings of their senses and measuring devices, the cosmos might exist not as matter at all, but a domain of pure frequency, a vast, resonating sea of waves.

Tonight, slumped in the passenger seat of Manfred’s van, gazing out the window at the jouncing lights and colors resolving into a spectral flume ride, a Hooters sign, or any other astronomically unlikely thing, Fred thought he could imagine phenomenal existence as nothing more than the scup and chop of that resonating sea. Which might have even been comforting, had he a boat, a life vest, a set of gills.

Manny stopped at a light just up the street from the hotel, a way Fred hadn’t gone before. At the corner was a New York-themed miniature golf course, the fiberglass metropolis bunched around curving, greencarpeted streets. The jaunty, cartoon angles of the buildings notwithstanding, the place had a Camp X-Ray vibe, thanks to the chainlink fence around it, and the klieg lights overhead, which, reflecting off the artificial turf, bathed the subway cars and taxicabs and Broadway marquees in a sallow hue. Off in the corner—Fred couldn’t help but look for them—stood World Trade Center One and Two: obsolesced, one more shabby tribute, as evidenced by a bouquet of waxy plastic flowers resting at their base. A shorts-wearing father hunched around his son, guiding the boy’s arms, their expressions conscientiously solemn as they banked their ball up a slope around the plaza fountain and back down toward the Towers. Fred failed to catch whether the ball made it between them and into the cup. The whole course was already receding in the sideview.

“We’ll drive by where I’m working now.” Manfred steered onto the Interstate. “Holy Land Experience. You heard of it?”

Fred reached into the pocket of the ill-fitting motorcycle jacket for the remaining gin bottle he’d taken on the way out of the room. “Is that like Christworld?”

“Christworld? Not at all. That’s a megachurch. Holy Land’s an amusement park. Not with rides, really. A lot of models and replicas and wax dummies, and some shows—that’s what I do. I started out playing the old Jew who makes animal sacrifices to Yahweh. They’ve got this big smoke machine and lights that go with it. Last week I snagged the Centurion gig. Big step up. Normally they got this twentysomething surfergod playing him, but that little lamb went rogue and left for Hollywood. Tipped me off beforehand, so there I was, the part already memorized. Here it goes on the left. You can see the Mount over in the corner.”

Fred registered very little—the tops of a score or so of palm trees behind a crenellated wall.

“Only problem is, you know, it’s a musical-theater act, so I have to sing,” Manny added, and then, without warning, began doing so, though it sounded more like ordinary shouting: “I know, Jesus, I know who you arrrrrrrre! Oh Lord Jesus, show me your … mmmmmmmmheart!” He coughed. “Fuck, hurt my throat, got to preserve the instrument.” He reached down and grabbed a thermos from the drink tray, unscrewing it and taking a sip. “Drinking this honey-lemon shit by the gallon.”

Fred swigged the gin. To the extent he could be happy about anything at the moment, he was no longer regretting having Manny and his ceaseless stream of mind-numbing blather at hand. Fearing the man might now stop talking to preserve his singing voice, Fred searched for a question.

“So what do they think of your being a Buddhist over there?”

“Yeah, that’s the other problem. Once they realize they can’t convert me, I’m probably getting the boot. Bad as it is over at the Holy Land, it’s better than Disney World, being a Goofy or a Mickey. They spy on you over there. They’ve got a system of informants. Everybody there’s miserable and on Xanax. Bad scene.”

Manny fell silent. They listened to a story about Lockheed Martin winning a NASA spaceship contract.

“Consider this,” Manny said. “Judeo-Christian-Muslim, all these religions coming out of the Middle East, spreading east and west for all those centuries. But now the West, the most godless consumerists are finding religion in the East. It’s the yin and yang, opposites becoming one. So now what, will the East and West rejuvenate the Middle? Will the Mideast and Midwest blow us all up before that can happen?” He laughed. “Answer me, Freddy. What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know,” Fred muttered.

“Right answer. You’re a sage already. A worthy godson. Your dad named you after me, you know.”

Fred at first thought Manfred was joking. But then he wasn’t sure. “He did?”

“What? You didn’t fuckin’ know that? I said, Hey, Vart, you got two of the little monsters, you can name at least one after me, can’t you?”

Manny turned, gave him a watery look appended by a cankered smile. “I was gunning for firstborn,” he added in a confidential tone. “No offense.” He turned back to the road. “So here we are.”

They were veering off an exit. No large buildings in sight.

“I thought we were going downtown.”

“Yeah, no, not the real one. There’s a better one here.”

Manny swung them through a gate of the Universal Studios theme park, and onto a featureless service road outside a park wall. Streetlights illuminated the van’s interior every few seconds. The vehicle was even older than Vartan’s, possibly by half a dozen years, and in far worse shape. Tan vinyl upholstery hung in shreds from the door panels. The glove compartment was missing, as were the window cranks, a pair of small vise grips taking their place. The interior was clean, however, and the equipment in back—what looked like a pair of set lights and a director’s chair—lay folded and held fast to the wall by straps. Manny noticed Fred looking in back.

“You want to be in a movie?”

“Absolutely n—”

“I’ll put you in one. I’ve got a whole new angle after the monastery. Kensho Pictures. Website and everything. Every flick guaranteed to bring on sudden enlightenment.” Manny held up a qualifying finger. “If
you’re ready.
I’ll find a way to use that space helmet, too. That’s a great costume piece. You steal it before or after they canned you?”

“After.”

“I’ll get a shot of you in it. It’ll make a great scene–… for something. I’ll hash out the story later.”

As Fred raised his arm to finish off the gin, the stiffness and creaking of the motorcycle jacket pulled Fred back to his young adulthood, his subsequent achievements falling away like they’d never been. He laid even odds on the possibility that when they got back to the hotel, the police would be there waiting. Lipton, Erskine, Gibbon, that smug sonofabitch Gretta—he might as well swear revenge on a dream, on a daydream in the Military-Entertainment Complex’s riotous, conglomerated brain. Descending in that elevator, he had felt himself morphing into a meatspace version of that running-amok chemotherapy angel. If he’d had an axe he would have been chopping at the walls, but all he’d had was his little Blade of Many Powers, and all he’d had time to do with it was to use the first tool he pulled open to pry out the elevator buttons of all five floors.

On the ground floor, the security guard’s eyes burning his back as he exited the main doors, Fred rebuked himself for his timidity up there—tossing those items into the hedges hadn’t been enough; some sycophantic employee would discover the helmet out there and just come toadying back up with it and all would be forgotten, all trace of Fred’s existence—
of George’s
—cleanly excised; and no one here would ever again have cause to be troubled by the memory of them—
of George
. It was too horrible, and so, when Fred saw the guard busy with other visitors through the glass, he walked around the side of the building and stuck the stupid things under his arms. In plain view of all those darkened windows, he then trudged back to the minivan, and, at a speed he hoped would be seen as leisurely, peeled out of the lot.

He hadn’t been worried about repercussions at the time. In that state of jangling indignation, he’d thought he could see the results of his act with utter clarity—how the executives up there, after everything they’d stolen from him and George, would think it best to let the matter drop, relieved to have gotten off so easy; yet how, nevertheless, word would circulate internally, becoming part of the corporate mythology, ensuring that every new employee would hear of Armation’s theft of Urth, and the former CEO’s revenge. Pathetic, maybe, as legends went. But at least there’d be something.

It didn’t take long after that, though, for Fred to consider the possibility his on-the-fly analysis might not have been entirely spot-on, and upon reaching his hotel room, he proceeded to take the only remaining course of action imaginable, namely, draining the minibar, and waiting—either for his cell phone to ring or for the police to show up and take him away.

The van plunged into a multilevel parking structure, and Manfred steered them up some ramps. The ripped upholstery flapped on the doors as they disembarked. Fred’s door wouldn’t quite close. He pushed on it, staggered, nearly fell over. The garage spun. Manfred stepped around and, by lifting it slightly, forced the door into place.

“Got it at a police auction. They took it apart looking for drugs. Didn’t quite get it all back together.”

When Manny had said “downtown,” Fred had been envisioning a gloomy, empty dive on a dead-end street, a venue a bit more conducive to dissolving into a pool of despair than a heavily populated theme park. With little choice now, he followed his godfather into an enclosed skyway and onto a peoplemover, synth-inflected pop music pulsing from the speakers above.

“Matter of fact…” Manny leaned against the moving handrail as the track trundled them along, and producing from a fishing-vest pocket a small video camera. “This might make a good scene too. You never know.” He flipped it open at chest level, peering down at the screen as one might a poker hand, the lens aimed at Fred.

“What’s my motivation?” Fred grumbled, increasingly uncomfortable.

“Your choice.” Manny nodded. “If I could go back in time, I would have recorded my whole life.”