Luminarium (41 page)

“That shit’s got BPA in it,” Fred said.

“It’s got what?”

“A carcinogenic preservative.”

Sam shrugged, slurped.

“Why don’t you let me see that for a minute?”

About time
, Inner George said.

For the first time that afternoon, Sam’s eyes, suspicious, met his full on. As they did, Fred reached for the soup with one hand and Sam’s neck with the other. Sam—with more strength than Fred had anticipated—pulled the soup hand down as Fred pulled it up, then reversed course and let the soup arm spring. A spume of tomatoey broth caught Fred in the face, as Sam ducked under his arm and away.

Fred advanced on him. Sam dropped the bowl and held up his fists, flexing those starter muscles of his.

“You want to know what else I arranged?” he shouted. “Not to have a warrant put out for your arrest. I asked them this just today, in fact. Repeatedly. They almost didn’t listen to me this time.”

Fred stopped. Sam glared over his fists.

“Do you have any idea how much that helmet is worth?”

Fred had to say something. His first impulse was denial. “Helmet?” he mumbled, lamely. “What helmet?”

“They have you on surveillance tape.”

Fred blinked, the soup stinging his eyes. He wiped his face and hair with his hands, sweeping off tomato globs and carrot discs.

“You owe me two dollars and fifty-nine cents for that soup, you fucktard,” Sam said.

With his shirtsleeve, Fred wiped the dribbles of broth from his neck.

“Oh. Plus the hotel overstay charge. And the minibar—a hundred fifty bucks’ worth of booze?”

Fred picked a kidney bean out of his collar. He hadn’t yet totally given up on the idea of a physical fight.

Sam’s eyes glowed, meanwhile. He was only getting started. “And what the hell was that shit about in Celebration? Calling yourself Freddo? Talking about adventure sports?
Hey Sam
,” he said, mimicking the agent’s chummy voice, “
that brother Freddo of yours, helluva daredevil.
Got some info for him about that raceboat I was telling him about.
” He shook his head. “That
raceboat
,” he repeated. “I’m going to have to live with these people. I’m going to have to talk about my nonexistent, thrill-seeking brother Freddo for the rest of my life.”

Fred stood stock-still, nothing left but to endure.

“Tell me you still have the space helmet,” Sam said. “Tell me it hasn’t been damaged.”

“It’s upstairs,” Fred managed, wishing he’d chucked the thing in a swamp.

Sam looked at the ceiling, his neck cracking. “Just leave it there. I’ll take it back to Florida with me next week.”

“I’ve come clean with you, Sam. Do the same for me.”

Sam traced the paths of various pipes with his eyes.

“Why didn’t they want me back at Urth?” Fred said. “Please don’t try to tell me you weren’t involved in that.”

Sam’s eyes followed a pipe down the back wall, to where it disappeared behind the boiler.

“Why, Sam? Did keeping nominal control over this … this little sliver of Armation mean that much to you?”

“It wasn’t about that,” he said faintly. “We just felt—”

“We?”

“Me, Jesse, Conrad.” He sighed. “Everyone.”

The strength left Fred’s legs. He resisted the urge to sit down the floor. “You had a meeting about me?”

“It wasn’t like that. We just started talking … after you left town. I’m sure you’re not aware of it, but the way you act around here you really stress people out.”

Fred put a hand out for the wall, which itself seemed to be slowly giving way.

“You just don’t like anything we’re doing now,” Sam went on, his voice rising. “You don’t even want to have to look at it. I’m the only one who can do it. I’m the only one of us left!”

His eyes darted to Fred, beseeching, then away.

“I wanted to think you were really back on board.” Sam was staring at the wall once more, his voice again monotone. “But then came the playtest, and the way you ran out of here, and that stuff about seeing George. I started worrying about you. And then came that so-called business idea, that praying computer of yours.”

He righted the soup bowl with his foot.

“And I thought you wouldn’t like working under me,” he went on. “Armation wanted me in charge. I thought that maybe with a job in a different division, you’d be able to start fresh. I didn’t know they’d just send you to human resources. I only found out about that today. I’m sorry. I thought there’d be a real meeting.”

All those green lights inside Fred going red again. All that anger, unreleased, seeping back into the groundwater. The only sound in the room was that of water coursing through a pipe, the flushing of a toilet somewhere upstairs, probably. Sam turned and risked a look at him, his eyes immediately skitting a couple inches off to Fred’s right and staying there.

Fred walked out. On the first floor, he dunked his head in a janitorial slop sink, wiped the most visible of the vegetable matter off his shirt, and discovered, still perched on his right shoulder, a limp and glistening pasta conch. He mouthed it, his first meal in two days.

At the subway entrance, Fred froze, found himself incapable of heading
back to his parents’ apartment, and instead kept going, rolling his carry-on and briefcase behind him, soup-stained and hungover, his insides cold and hollow and vibrating like a bell from his two-day fast. Hospital visiting hours were over, but he kept heading vaguely in that direction for a while, east, and north, and east again, as around him a Friday night in the odds-beating, death-defying, nose-thumbing, glitterier-than-ever city unfolded. Ahead of him sauntered two college-age women, one with a cutoff shirt revealing one of those lower-back tattoos of blue wings he’d been seeing around—a weird place for wings, the ultimate merger of materialism and transcendence, as if all those sexy asses might flutter up like cherubs to the domes of Renaissance churches. He wondered if Mira had a lower-back tattoo, as yet unglimpsed, and if so, what it was. A helmet with radiance lines, maybe. A brain in a vat. What could be the symbol of that brand-new faith of hers? Some kind of higher geometrical form? A tesseract? A six-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold? Or in order to truly qualify as a faith without ignorance, did it have to renounce symbols entirely, stay pure of any shape or form whatsoever, beyond description of any kind?

Invisible, inarticulable, but somehow not nonexistent …

The tattoo flew across the street, and he couldn’t help but track it. He had no idea whether it was true, whether it was something his twin had actually done, but Fred could picture it clearly enough: George’s last summer on Earth, riding around in cabs, eyes glued to photoshoots and ice cream cones, eyes like Pavlov’s slavering dogs, eyes like flies, flitting among shitpiles. Had this world been designed for no other purpose than to present a person with a myriad of ultimately pointless things to seek and avoid, it surely couldn’t have been put together much more effectively. Had the mind been crafted for no other purpose than to seek or avoid them, it too was surely the state of the art. Though of course he knew this part wasn’t true in the slightest, he also pictured some trapped astral George wandering the Pretaloka streets, desiring despite the lack of anything to desire.

Which led Fred in turn to think of George’s apartment, the way George had emptied it out in his last conscious weeks. On the morning Fred had found him—lying atop his sheets with the oxygen tubes in his nose and his hands clasped one palm over the other, over his heart, snoozing unrousably away—practically nothing remained of his bedroom but the bed itself. Returning to the apartment a few days later for supplies Fred still hoped George might soon need, and in search of clues to his brother’s mental state in the time leading up to the coma, Fred confirmed what he’d been too distraught the last time to fully register: that George had gotten rid of just about everything he’d owned. Kitchen cupboards all but empty, garbage taken out, bathroom cleaned, the former metropolis of pill bottles gone from the medicine cabinet, the little keepsakes vanished from his desk.

His computer remained, an oversight Fred found curious, until a couple weeks later, when, out of loneliness and curiosity, he came back and turned it on, to discover George had wiped the hard drive. Perhaps George had told himself he was being helpful, removing things so the rest of them wouldn’t have to deal with them. Perhaps it was his attempt to convince himself he was ready to go. Had Fred believed George was actually ready, had Fred seen the slightest evidence of George finding any peace or resolution in that good, clear wall, maybe Fred wouldn’t have insisted on the life support that had stabilized him, wouldn’t have sold the company to pay for his ongoing care—steps Fred had known to be against his wishes. But Fred had no such evidence, no reason to believe George had found a single thing he’d been seeking—with the sole possible exception of a good night’s sleep.

Fred didn’t see that apartment again until two months later, when he went back to clean it out. He’d expected trouble with the management company about breaking the lease, but they were all too happy to return the deposit. Responding to market pressures after 9/11, the management had reduced everyone’s rent across the board. Many had left, regardless. For those who had stuck it out, rents had been inching up incrementally. But George’s newest neighbors—bankers—were paying far more; compared to the current streak, Fred’s and George’s dot-com bubble of yore had been like amateur hour; leave it to the financiers to show them what virtual reality really was, making money from money and cutting out the product altogether. Through a neighbor’s doorway, left open by a cleaning lady taking out the trash, Mel’s bombasticator ranted on a plasma screen roughly the size of the wall—something about egghead scientists wanting to bring back “supposedly” twenty-seven-thousand-year-old woolly mammoths from their frozen sperm—as Fred hauled out the furnishings George had been too physically weak to toss out himself. There was almost nothing of any sentimental value to keep. No journals or yearbooks or photographs. Only the briefcase, some not-too-old clothing, the camping gear, and a few other things George probably thought could be put to some no-nonsense, impersonal use.

Thinking back now on his brother’s motivations for all this jettisoning of his identity, Fred couldn’t help but wonder if there had been anger in the gesture, too, if it had been just one more form of withdrawal from them all, or from Fred himself. What had George been in it for, if it hadn’t been for healing? Revenge? Against Armation? Against Fred? At the thought, Fred was underwater again, his lungs filling with brine. If it turned out George had actually been involved somehow in the planning of these assaults on the shred a life Fred had left, Fred didn’t know what he’d do. It was awful enough, even without the possibility of George’s involvement, to wonder what it meant that these people had known about Mira Egghart, that they knew now about Fred’s burgeoning infatuation with her; and to wonder what humiliations, based on this knowledge, they might subject him to next.

Before long, having
given up pretending to himself that he had no destination in mind, Fred was walking alongside a night-shadowed Tompkins Square Park, carry-on wheels rattling away behind him, the neon glow and muffled subwoof of Mira’s bar approaching. He just wanted to see if she was working, to peek through the small side window and watch her pour a drink or two. And to get a glimpse of those squinty, opaline eyes; that curved nose; those full lips she seemed almost embarrassed to possess, always trying to flatten them away. And to see if her hair was in braids again, and whether she was working up a sweat, and whether she was gazing at any other drunk, sleeping loser the way he’d seen (or hallucinated) her from above, gazing at him.

Past the twinkling of an antediluvian pinball machine near the window, the woman he sighted behind the bar was younger and meaner looking than Mira, with penciled-in eyebrows and a forties-style perm. She faced his way but didn’t see him, her slightly crossed eyes intent instead on a polished fingernail, the edge of which she was scraping at with the edge of another. He kept watching her, doubting her, feeling like he’d stumbled into the wrong universe, that in the one where he should have been, Mira was there—right there—staring straight back at him.

With a start, he saw that she was. Not behind the bar, but on a stool at the rounded end of it. Lips bunched to one side. Eyes fixed on his.

She didn’t look angry. Maybe not exactly happy to see him, but not angry, either. She held up a hand and moved it right and left in a slow, sardonic wave. He made a little gesture in turn, pointing to himself, pointing to the stool next to hers. She gave a fatalistic shrug and returned her attention to where it must have been before she’d spotted him—her bottle of beer and the empty shot glass beside it, which, presently, the bartender, a guy with a soul patch the size of a mouse, replenished with tequila. As Fred came in, she turned to stare at the bags rolling in behind him. He swung them around and parked them before sitting down beside her.

“Business trip,” he said.