Luminarium (46 page)

five

and imagine a drop of blue water falling on your head. One drop. One spot. A refreshing coolness on your scalp. Imagine, now, that this is special water. Healing, purifying water. Even this single drop of it can leave you feeling so peaceful that at the count of

four

as you go ahead and imagine another drop, and another, you can feel the pores of your scalp opening wide, thirsting for more. Feel that coolness, that relaxation, spreading all across the top of your head. Feel it soaking into your skull. Feel the cool, healing peace seeping right into your brain. Drop by drop. So replenishing that at the count of

three

you can let go even more, and the more you let go, the more blue water comes pouring in. A trickle. A steady stream. Feel it filling the muscles and skin of your face and scalp, and coursing down your neck, and into your shoulders. So revitalizing that at the count of

two

you’re feeling so light, so new, that you can keep opening and opening, letting it gush down your arms to your fingertips, down your back and front, into every organ, even your lungs—this is special water, you can breathe it as easily as air. How good it feels, suffusing you from head to toe. So cooling. So healing. So rejuvenating that at the count of

one

your every cell is so relaxed it’s just floating in the blue water. Just floating, perfectly at ease. Just like it feels when you’re floating in space, above the Earth, with all the little bits of the city floating around you. It’s all up here, now, every last piece. The parking meters, the telephones, the water towers, the subway cars, the streetlights, the beams and bricks and millions of bits of glass: all here. And all moving, every part on its own, parts seeking other little parts, reorganizing. But not into that old thing you remember. Not that old city, but something wholly new. There goes the Statue of Liberty, sailing by, torch first, in a cloud of tiny Statue of Liberty souvenirs. There go a pack of mailboxes, scoop-mouthing a school of light bulbs. Look at those keyboard keys clinging like barnacles to chunks of concrete. Look at those street displays of sunglasses angling themselves like flowers to catch the sun’s rays. Look at that flock of pretzels weaving nests of glowing fiberoptic cable. Watch it all, the whole thing, this big, new ecosystem, this big, new creature of a trillion glittering parts. Watch it float off, to the distant stars and beyond. Wish it well, that dwindling sparkle in the black. And trust you’ll never need it back….

It was just possible to sit up straight in the tent, if he sat in the middle
with his head in the apex. It was well over ninety degrees inside, the sun-drenched blue fabric angling down around his head. Fred faced the open slat of the entrance, through which he could feel an occasional draft. Visible through the opening was a sparkling black wedge of roofing material, the aluminum gutter running along the roof’s back edge, and beyond that, the rustling leaves of a backyard tree refracting the sunlight in too many ways to track. The roof sloped downward from front to back, which helped his zazen posture (gleaned from a website): leaning slightly forward, propped on staggered pillows, legs in half lotus, George’s sleeping bag serving as a floor cushion.

It was a fancy kind of sleeping bag with a built-in air mattress, which Fred had spent hours researching. George had never gotten to use these gifts, either the bag or the tent, Fred was pretty sure. Fred himself had, though, once, on the second anniversary of his and Mel’s first date. They’d talked at first about going somewhere exotic, an African safari being their main idea. As the anniversary approached, they’d downgraded the ambition to going somewhere rustic and out of town for the weekend. But Fred begged off of even this plan, too wrapped up with work. Mel was disappointed with him, and when he told George this, George came to the rescue, hatching the scheme on the spot. Within the hour, Fred and George were setting up the tent in Fred’s living room, putting a few potted plants around the entrance, affixing some glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling, and setting an MP3 of nature sounds playing on the stereo. The night turned out to be a success, despite Fred and Mel tripping the building’s fire alarm trying to roast marshmallows over the gas range. The next day at the office, when he told George that all was well, his brother gave him a pitying look.

“Freddo,” he’d said with a sad shake of his head, “how are you ever going to get by without me when I’m gone?”

Years before George got sick. Just a joke. But even so, even then, it had given Fred a chill.

A sparrow flitted down in front of him, just long enough to fix him with an inky eye and deposit a glistening white turd.

Monday afternoon. Two full days now since Fred had been to the hospital. George’s breathing had failed shortly after making that all-toofamiliar sound, and, for the first time since those first days, the ventilator had to be brought in. At which point, Fred had locked himself in a bathroom and proceeded to have what he thought must have been a coronary, or a lung collapse, or a stroke, or all three simultaneously—chest pounding, no air, walls going dark, muscles too weak to hold him up. It occurred to him that he was in a hospital and thus had the option of seeking medical attention, but the thought of the additional bills and hassles for everyone surpassed even the fear of death, so he simply gave up and waited to die. A classic panic attack, an online diagnostic tool later helped him confirm. When he managed to get on his feet, he found Vartan and Holly in the hall with Drs. Papan and Chia, neurologist and oncologist, the first time Fred had seen the two men in one place. Now it was the doctors who seemed in denial, ordering more tests in the upcoming week, though they also took turns underscoring that Fred and his parents needed to be thinking about withdrawing the life support and switching to end-of-life treatment only.

In the van, Holly sat rigidly, one fist clutched in the other. Vartan, for the first time in months, stabbed the F and U keys with his thumb when a student driver ahead of them stopped at a yellow light—it was pretty clear he hadn’t taken the opportunity to toke up before bringing the van around. Nobody spoke on the ride home, but their thoughts, Fred knew, were running in parallel. For the past seven months, as George increasingly seemed to be beating the cancer, they’d been willing him back. But that sound had changed everything, their whole conception of what was going on inside of him. For George to regain consciousness now, with an end-stage cancer, and have to confront death all over again, would be the worst thing imaginable. Vartan parked the van. No one got out.

“We’ve got to get this over with,” Vartan said, his voice hollow.

Fred was remembering the way his father had brought the flashlight into position over George’s eye. A fluid motion, with a slight flick of the wrist at the last moment; the way, in the magic shows, that he cast spells with his star-tipped wand.

“Next weekend,” Vartan said.

From the backseat, Fred watched Holly’s fists tightening. They already knew what to tell the nurses, in the event George started breathing on his own again. That he was in pain and needed a morphine drip. This was the code, disclosed to them through family friends who had friends who were doctors or nurses.
In pain. Needs morphine.
Everyone would know what it meant, and no one would stand in the way.

“A week from Monday,” Holly said, her tone severe enough to cut off any argument.

“A good day for a hanging,” Vartan somberly agreed.

Once inside, Fred’s parents went straight to bed, without a look his way. He wanted to do the same, but no sooner was he standing in that bedroom than the air was gone again and the walls were pressing in. He took the tent and sleeping bag from the closet and hauled them, along with his laptop, the alarm clock, some extension cords, some food, and a plastic jug of water, into the hall, up the ladder, and out the hatch. On his first trip back down, he added the pillows and a second half-gallon jug, this one empty, for urine, to minimize the necessity of future trips. Then he climbed into the tent, sat on a pillow, and proceeded to take stock of his existence.

In front of him on the sleeping bag, he’d placed his cell phone, which hadn’t sounded again since that second time in the hospital. Two text messages, the same exasperating instruction to “
CALL GEORGE
,” but each followed by a different phone number—neither one in service, as it turned out, when Fred dialed them. The numbers listed in the messages probably weren’t the ones from which the calls had originated, which the cell phone only listed as “unknown.” The first of the out-of-service numbers had a 404 area code, the second a 740. Atlanta and central Ohio, he determined on his laptop, places that had no particular significance to him, nor any connection to George that he could fathom. There didn’t seem to be any obvious commonalities or patterns or mathematical relationships within or between the two numbers, but in truth he couldn’t even make his mind focus on them in any coherent way. The strange thing was, now that he had cause to suspect George himself had been a part of this conspiracy, Fred was even less sure he wanted to know about it. The other night, he’d been drunk enough, and hopeful enough, to read good intentions into that angel gift to Mira. Then again, there’d been a certain darkness in that reference, on the card, to the twin jams of the needle from the nurse. He didn’t want to believe this, didn’t want to believe that those statues might have been just one more attempt to fuck with his head. But how could he know? George’s conspirators would probably be in touch again, anyway, Fred thought, if he didn’t respond. The fact that his phone could assault him with another beep again at any moment certainly wasn’t making him feel any more inclined to play along from his end. He wouldn’t have the service much longer—his credit card had shut down before the automatic payment could go through; he hoped the phone would get cut off sooner rather than later.

In any event, the cyberstalking was the least of his problems. It barely registered amid the shock of George’s decline. Beyond losing George, which Fred still couldn’t get his mind around after all these months, there was his parents’ disillusionment, and his own culpability in the whole situation. The one noble thing he had thought he’d done in his adult life was to fight and fight for George’s survival, to sacrifice everything he had for it. But even this had been little more than selfishness—to make amends, to feel good about himself, to be a hero—and all it had done was prolong everyone’s suffering, George’s included. This whole long interlude had been for nothing, for no purpose whatsoever. It wasn’t merely the futility, it was the utter meaninglessness of all this waiting and pain that sickened and confounded him.

Then there were all those other dead-ends, all those other little decorative filigrees in the mandala of unsmooth moves that was his life—his lost career, his Florida crime spree, getting the boot from Mira’s study, and from her bed. Maybe he was just in a pit so deep he couldn’t stop digging. But what else could he do? The one tool he had left was a shovel, that idiot mantra, Manfred’s maddening mu.

The Mumonkan, the
primary collection of Zen koans and commentaries, which he’d accessed online later that first night on the roof, read like a book of puzzles, full of unanswerable questions, questions that weren’t even questions, yet which the practitioner was expected to answer. The compiler, the monk Mumon, had appended a commentary to each koan. In his remarks on the first, “Joshu’s Mu,” Mumon said that when one passed through this barrier, all illusions and delusions would be shattered, internal and external would unite, and one would perceive There was more along these lines, talk of explosive conversions, of intertwining one’s eyebrows with the patriarchs’, of astonishing the heavens and shaking the earth, of commanding perfect freedom. It was a hard sell, and Fred was leery of it. Didn’t he have enough puzzles in his life already? He was leery as well of that stupefying instruction on how to proceed, how, in reciting the mu in one’s mind, one was supposed to summon a spirit of tremendous and all-pervading doubt, just as Manfred had said. How, Fred asked himself, was one supposed to find faith through doubting? He’d been doubting all his life. Where had it ever gotten him?