Luminarium (4 page)

“Some. Especially in the brain stem. People have come back from that. Not often, I know. But it’s happened.”

He couldn’t blame her, this time, for busying herself with half a minute’s typing. He looked around the little office some more. His guess was she hadn’t been here long. A few large textbooks—neuroethology, neurotheology (he wondered briefly if one of these was a typo, and if so, which), neuropsychology—on the bookshelf. Van Gogh’s starry night above her bulky metal desk.

“Does George have a wife, children?” she asked, before looking up.

“No children. He got divorced two years ago.”

“Before the lymphoma was diagnosed?”

Fred nodded.

“And you?” Mira checked her screen. “You broke off a wedding engagement recently?”

The same terrain, along just about the same route, had been traversed with the therapist. Was Mira Egghart a therapist? Or was she simply here to observe?

“We split up a few months ago.”

With the therapist, he’d gone on to describe breaking up with his fiancé as the second biggest mistake of his life. He didn’t bother elaborating this time. Mira was giving him another of her discerning looks, or maybe he was just imagining it. The parallel between George’s love life and his own was a sore spot.

“After George got sick?”

“Yes. That probably played a part.”

“Are you seeing anyone now?”

He entertained the idea of turning her question into a joke, or a proposition, but then—imagining her hearing the same jokes from every bestubbled emotional charity case from every hospital cafeteria across the city—thought better of it. He shook his head.

“I suppose you don’t have much energy for dating at this point,” she said.

He gave her points for the wry tone, the warmth in her eyes.

“Being broke and living with my parents doesn’t help much either,” he said.

Looking down at her typing fingers, she almost smiled, with him or at him, he couldn’t say.

“So let’s talk about your parents for a second. Are they religious?”

“My mother’s started doing Reiki. It’s a … Japanese … energy … healing kind of thing.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. Have you ever tried doing it?”

“No. Not for her lack of offering.”

“So why haven’t you?”

“I don’t know if I should be encouraging her.”

Mira didn’t betray a judgment, about his mother or about him. “Did you grow up with any religious training or spiritual practices?”

“None.”

“Any kind of transformative life experiences you’d classify as spiritual?” “You mean like visions?”

“Like anything.”

“I’ve never seen the Virgin in my cornflakes, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her. “Last subject, occupation. You wrote that you and George started a company together. Some kind of computer company, was it?”

“Software design and consulting.”

“And you wrote that you lost it? I’m afraid I know even less about business than I do about computers. How does one lose a company?”

The biggest mistake. He grinned miserably, glanced at the ceiling.

Go ahead.
Inner George.
I didn’t patent it.

“It’s like losing a sock,” Fred said. “Only more lawyers are involved.”

She didn’t smile, not even out of politeness. Instead, to his surprise, her face went sad.

“George’s joke?” she asked.

Stunned, he blinked. “How’d you know?”

“I’m psychic.”

They stared at each other.

Finally, she smiled.

“That was a joke, too, Fred.”

And then it was happening again—the expansion—happening right here: he and Mira afloat in the same balloon, one organism with two bodies, two goofy grins. Merging with a La-Z-Boy had not come close to preparing him for this. It was like he’d known her forever, or twice that long. Like everything he’d ever felt a lack of was here, right in front of him. Yet almost before he’d realized it was happening, it was gone, gone so fast he might have concluded it had never happened at all, but for the confusion and the longing in its wake. The atmospheric pressure in the room had suddenly doubled, and gravity had done the same, pressing him into the chair. He wanted to tell her about the experience. He wanted it back. It seemed impossible to him that she hadn’t felt it too. But she was already closing her laptop, moving on.

“Thank you for being so patient, Fred. Now that you’ve answered my questions, I’ll try to answer yours.”

She turned her head to one side, and pointed at the upper back portion of her skull. Her eyeball swiveled to the corner to regard him as she spoke.

“The parietal lobes are located about here in the brain. Their main job is to orient you in space. In order to do this, they’ve got to know where you end and everything else begins.” She faced him again. “It may sound like an easy job, but it’s not. To do it, the lobes require a constant supply of impulses from the senses. What monks can sometimes do through meditation, and what we’ve done here through the application of electromagnetic signals, is to block that stream of sense data from entering the region. The lobes continue looking for the self-boundaries, but with no information coming in, they can’t find them. And so you perceive a porous, expanded, possibly even a limitless sense of self.”

She watched him, gauging his reaction.

“Does that answer your question?”

Was there mockery in the words? He couldn’t quite tell. There was a flatness to her tone. But her look was dead serious.

He smirked, the way he couldn’t help doing when he was embarrassed. He felt like a child. He wanted to throw a tantrum. An absurd reaction, he knew. He’d walked into a laboratory and had his head stuck in a helmet full of solenoids. What kind of explanation had he been expecting?

Maybe just not so precise an explanation. Maybe he’d been expecting her to say that they didn’t know how it worked, just that it did. Thus leaving at least a shred of the mystery in place.

“So what’s the point of giving me this experience at all? What could it possibly mean to me, now that you’ve explained that it’s a trick?”

Jerked around as he felt, he was even now trying to will back that illusory connection with her.

“We’re not out to trick you, Fred,” she said softly. “Quite the opposite. We need you to know how everything works here.”

“And why is that?”

She sat forward an inch.

“Because we believe that the emotional power of the experiences and their rational explanations will counterbalance each other. And that over time, you’ll learn to weave both into a larger tapestry.”

With his fingertips, he explored the bunched threads of the chair arm, searching for an opening, a way to envelop them. Her tapestry image was beguiling—clearly, she’d prepared it in advance. Turning it over in his mind, though, he found the flip side not so picturesque.

“So you’re saying that I’ll end up tricking myself? And you’re so confident I’ll weave myself this rosy fantasy tapestry that you don’t even mind telling me in advance?”

Her voice rose, if slightly, for the first time in the interview, and there was a new fierceness in her look. “It’s not fantasy we’re hoping you’ll find. Not at all. It’s a more informed kind of faith.” He got the feeling she almost thought better of it, but then, with a breathy self-defiance, she added, “I think of it as a faith without ignorance.”

For a while, neither of them spoke. He looked off, toward the bookshelf, into that miniature kitschy skyline, pickled in its brine.

“Would you like to continue, Fred?” she asked, her tone even again.

His eyes wandered to the black briefcase on her desk. His own was in the hall closet. She hadn’t so much as glanced at it while showing him where he should stow his things upon arriving for his sessions.

What say you, George?

No answer. Inner George was as torn as he was.

Lest his voice crack, he didn’t speak, simply nodded, at which point Mira Egghart got up, placed her computer next to the briefcase, and came over and switched off the lamp. A moment later, she appeared crouched at his feet, having just plugged a nightlight in the shape of a fat little star into the wall.

“Before you leave,” she said, the little star setting her knees and face aglow, “I’m going to give you a visualization exercise, a little story with some images. Just lean back in the chair, make yourself comfortable, and close your eyes.”

“Is this hypnosis?” He’d let the woman magnetize his brain with barely a second thought, yet this new prospect made him unaccountably wary. “There’s a lot of stigma attached to that word.” She stood, the light now playing on the nylon gloss of her legs. “How deeply you allow yourself to be affected by the story is entirely up to you. I’m going to record the visualization on a CD as I tell it to you now, and I’d like you to play it for yourself every night this week before you go to sleep. In a week, at your next appointment, I’ll make you another.”

She picked up a knitted blanket from the end table, and after he leaned back, she floated it over him.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked.

In the dim light, her pale complexion glowed eerily, her eyes stared dark and fathomless.

“What if I fall asleep?” he asked, with an anxious tremor.

“Worse fates have been endured,” she replied.

Fred stepped out of the Psychology and Neural Science Building onto
Washington Place, in the city of New York, on a mid-August Monday in the year of 2006, to the sight of a cloud on a digital taxi ad and a plume of exhaust as it pulled from the curb. The oneness was gone, but that phrase of Mira’s—“a faith without ignorance”—remained lodged like a splinter in his brain. His first thought was that it was simply a contradiction in terms, like a night without darkness, a sky without air. But wasn’t a foothold of reason in that sheer cliff of faith precisely what he himself had been trying to obtain through all his recent readings in science? Just last night, for example, beneath the thirty-year-old, faded glow-in-the-dark star stickers of his childhood bedroom, fleeing his nightmares via his laptop screen, through a chain of hyperlinks to the outer reaches of cyberspace, he’d been reading about the anthropic cosmological principle, how the universe was so finely tuned for life as to arouse suspicion: how, if there had been four extended dimensions instead of three, planets would have flown right into their suns; how, if the cosmic expansion rate were one part in a million billion less, the universe would have remained a sweltering 3,000° Celsius and collapsed back in on itself billions of years ago; how the chance of such cosmological constants having emerged at random was something on the order of every member of his high school class winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning in alphabetical order. If some greater force and purpose were at work in all this, he wondered, then why all the subterfuge? Why all the arbitrariness of quantum fluctuation and genetic mutation? Why the absurdity of brains that could simulate some sense of that greater life only when they misfired? What good was a truth that could be perceived only through delusion? How would one ever really know what the truth was, in such a system? How would one ever know from one moment to the next the right thing to do, the right way to go?

Which way?
He stopped at the corner of Broadway, a woozy enervation setting in.

It had rained earlier, ozone mixing with exhaust and perfume and the smell of baking garbage, and a vengeful sun was now reclaiming the terrain, as were the pedestrians, veering around him with high-end shopping bags and candy-colored cell phones. The study, as it had turned out, was on the main NYU campus, twenty-seven blocks south and four avenues east of the Medical Center, but by the time he’d found this out, he was already sold on the idea of enrolling. He’d told himself that the study’s proximity to his Tribeca office would rob him of excuses and force him to start putting in more appearances. The terms of the sale of the company to Armation had guaranteed him a salary as an independent contractor for six months. These six months were almost up, and as he hadn’t been occupying his seat there much during this period (or for the six months preceding), he wasn’t as certain that his contract would be extended as he would have liked. If the axe did fall, George’s skinflint health plan having been drained and abandoned long ago, Fred might have nothing to pay the next hospital bill with but the fifty bucks a week from the helmet study; that and a similarly double-digit payout working the occasional birthday party magic show, which their father, through various displays of frailty and unspoken need, had dragooned Fred into. Fred’s parents didn’t know how dire the straits were—he’d been keeping this from them, their own retirement savings being modest at best—and he wasn’t about to ask their younger brother Sam to kick in, as Sam had been against George’s life support early on (cold-bloodedly, Fred had decided) and totally uninvolved in his care ever since.

He should go south, to the office. There was a teleconference with the Orlando team. He’d missed the last one. It hadn’t looked good.

Though it wasn’t for another three hours. He could drop in on George, just for a while.