Luminarium (5 page)

Standing here all day’s always an option
, Inner George chided, mirthful and bright.

He headed north, up Broadway, a well-trod route between the office and hospital, as he had more time these days than money for train fare. Eyeing his frayed, fuzzy, checkered shoes (George’s, actually—a joke purchase his brother had made in the Czech Republic on a meandering post-divorce vision quest), Fred began to feel the summer air gusting around the loose threads, to feel the dry heat of the sidewalk as if he were barefoot. Then he felt, it seemed, what the sidewalk felt, the pressure of soles, the tectonic thrum of a passing bus.

It lasted a second or two, after which he couldn’t make it happen it again, not with the sidewalk, anyway; yet walking by Grace Church on the corner of 10th and glancing as he often did at the ornate wooden doors, for an instant he thought he was experiencing their weary bulk, their frozen bodybuilder strain, their indifference to the streets around them careening through time. Hard to tell. That timeless pull may just have been the usual flexion of memory. Back to 1988, a night in his and George’s last month of high school when they’d wound up here after wandering all over town.

George had gotten into Caltech that day with a scholarship offer. Fred’s own future was less certain. While George had excelled in school, Fred’s accomplishments were mostly in the park outside the school: he could play a mean game of Hacky Sack, an even meaner game of hearts, and any number of variations on the 1-4-5 chord progression. It had always been something of a mystery to Fred how all those differences between the two of them had sprouted from the common root. They’d started out the same, identical bodies, identical brains. As infants, they sucked each other’s thumbs. As pubescents, fantasizing about an older girl they liked, they masturbated each other’s newfound erections. They completed each other’s sentences, had a trick where if they happened to say the same thing at the same moment, they’d stop, grin, then continue their thoughts, saying the exact same thing again, and again, and again. They could go on for minutes on end like this. They’d follow each other into convenience stores, the second one coming in a minute behind, making all the same moves, picking up the same items, putting them back, striking the same pose for the security monitor, buying the same kind of chocolate bar, just to rattle the guy behind the counter.

Their divergence seemed to begin from nothing, or almost nothing. Fred had gotten a little scar on his chin from falling in the tub, and George would point at it and call him a mutated scarhead. George had chipped a front tooth, and Fred would tell him it made him look like the village idiot. When they were really angry at each other, they’d punish each other by putting themselves in danger—Fred sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the roof, relishing George’s anguish; George stealing away from home, Fred back in their bedroom sobbing so uncontrollably he hyperventilated and blacked out. Afterward, they’d compare notes, hungry for each other’s experiences—George creeping to the roof edge while Fred held him for safety.

Their experimentations with difference continued in the virtual realities of the day, specializing in different Dungeons & Dragons characters, different videogames—George’s mage to Fred’s fighter, George’s Centipede to Fred’s Missile Command. The research inched forward with the accumulation of more or less arbitrary identifiers—the colors of their sneakers, lists of favorite baseball players. At some point, a threshold they weren’t fully aware of crossing, they stopped having to make the differences up. They acquired their own friends, and girlfriends. George’s crowd was more studious; Fred’s more streetwise. They picked up their own musical tastes and political views (generally speaking, Fred had the former, George the latter, but they argued about them nevertheless). And now, nearing graduation, here they were, with their very own separate futures about to sweep them three thousand miles apart. They found themselves a little stricken at the prospect, a little amazed they’d let the experiment get so far out of hand.

They hadn’t planned on staying out all night. They’d only wanted some pizza. But George wanted to go to the Original Ray’s, because why bother with any place but the very source, and Fred kept lobbying for the Famous Ray’s, because they must have been the famous one for a reason, so they ended up just wandering around with empty stomachs, their conversation moving from their possible pizzas to their possible futures, and how those futures might again one day converge. Perhaps because it was an interest they’d shared longer than most, they got to talking about the computer games they’d programmed on a series of rudimentary home systems, ones that came in kits and had to be soldered together, ones with tape decks as storage media and barely enough memory to make a starfield, much less fill it with blocky, antennae-scissoring aliens. They talked about the growing sophistication of personal computers, and of computer games, and how these things had been growing up right alongside them.

“It would be great to make serious games,” George said, just before dawn. They were lying on the church steps, staring up into the pointy stone arch of the entrance.

The term “serious games,” now used to denote games with real-world applications, didn’t exist at the time. It sounded like just one more of George’s late-night impossible yearnings.

“What’s that supposed to mean?“ Fred asked, though instantly he was pretty sure he knew exactly what George meant by it, could already hear in his mind’s ear the ad-libbed soliloquy he was sure was on its way. Games that would change perceptions, soften hearts, expand minds. Escapist fantasies that would somehow also feed and clothe the multitudes. Fred was already plotting out the argument they’d have. For a while now, much the way Fred’s far more adjusted fellow park-loiterers were experimenting with increasingly hard drugs, Fred was journeying ever more deeply into the gray-clothed, asymmetrical-haircutted, tattered-Camus-paperback-toting realms of angst. He distrusted games and seriousness in just about equal measure. He waited for George to define his fanciful term aloud so he, Fred, could set about picking it to pieces.

But after some silent thought, George’s reply was as serene as Fred’s had been cross.

“I don’t know yet.”

He’d stopped there, in front of the church, trying to will the oneness, but the city was the city and he was him, which might have gone on depressing him if it weren’t for the small old woman who passed by, her hair a silver thicket of bobby-pinned whorls, pulling him in like a riptide.

He trailed her. He could barely help it. With each hobbled step she took, her brittle skeleton reverberated in the roots of his teeth. Heedless youth tripped past her in both directions, looking everywhere but ahead of them through their giant, insectile sunglasses. That pin-curled head would turn to track them, and no sooner had Fred glimpsed a hint of her blue eyeshadow than he felt his own head turning as well, to see what she saw,
how
she saw—the bared and tattooed skin, the flesh-tunnel earrings, the omnipresent earbuds and dangling wires—the alienness of it all, flashing around them like some scrambled dream.

They went a block, and another. He felt the drag and clomp of her big, beige trenchcoat and shapeless white sneakers. His own shoulder sank under the strap of her no-frills canvas bag, the kind given out by magazines and book-of-the-month clubs. It was like shadowing his own old age, but it wasn’t frightening, was actually a comfort, having those perfect, packed pin curls clearing his path. They were like a shared secret, a secret weapon, a hive of wormholes that could suck in the universe, chew through time and all its indignities. The two of them against the world, he thought, as they crossed 13th, closing in on Union Square, the two of them against the pylons and the scaffolding and the phoneless phone booths and the fourteen-theater multiplex and the Virgin Megastore and the dozen or so kids—bubble-lipped, stiff-haired, lavishly bepimpled—loitering outside it, a couple of them smoking, a couple others snapping gum. The kids’ eyes settled first on Pincurls, then on the strange man taking mincing steps five feet behind her. He didn’t care, pretended not to notice them, pretended, as he sensed she was doing, that they weren’t even here, that the Virgin Megastore had never been dreamt of, much less built. The two of them against it all, he thought, as she turned right on 14th, to reveal, to his sudden horror, that she was beyond heavily made up. A razor slash of dark lipstick. A spatulate cheekbone caked with rouge. Bright blue mascara around a wide, shocked, and wrathful eye.

She looked like a deranged clown-whore. What was more, the connection was gone. It must have been the shock.

He kept following her, feeling rudderless. He tried to merge with other people, more attractive people, to no avail. Meanwhile, Pincurls turned north at Fourth Avenue, to stare—or glare, it seemed to him—with those boiled and refrozen eyes of hers at the red-bricked, pyramidtopped Zeckendorf Towers complex.

The place was his lost Eden. It boasted a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a video library, yoga classes, roof decks, and also (at least as he remembered it in the last and, to his mind, greatest years of the second millennium) happened to be crammed with fashion models—in short, it was either revolting or deeply alluring, depending on the state of one’s finances, physique, and possibly, to a lesser extent, political convictions. In the late ’90s, by no means rich but for the first time in his life possessed of any money to speak of, he’d discovered himself allured. This was after George had returned from Silicon Valley, flush with connections, a meeting with angel investors all lined up; practically all George and Sam and he had needed to do was print up business cards, and the three of them were slipping into the tech boom dream. Fred rented two apartments consecutively at the Zeckendorf—the first alone, the second and larger one with Melanie, his girlfriend at the time and soon-to-be fiancé. To this day, she was living large there, riding the new boom now, the war boom, with her cable news job. The building was along his usual office-to-hospital route, but even when it was out of his way, he sometimes walked by. His chances of spotting Mel coming in or out were next to none—she’d be at work, surely. The last time she’d agreed to see him for coffee, she’d held his hand and told him they needed to get on with their lives, and it would be better for both of them if they didn’t have contact. Then he’d walked her to her door. Then he’d asked to come in, and she’d said no. Then they’d had sex in a stairwell. Then she’d told him not to call her again. He hadn’t. But he couldn’t stop orbiting the place.

Back at sidewalk level, he spotted Pincurls sliding through the automatic doors of the supermarket on the ground floor of the complex.
No way
, he thought. No way he’d follow her. He’d wasted enough time already. He needed to get to the hospital, or to forget about the hospital, go straight to the office, prepare for that teleconference—it would help his cause to impress them all today. But watching that haircloud float off beyond the glass doors, he couldn’t let it go.

She was headed for the pharmacy aisle. The hope that he’d run into Mel / the fear that she’d be with the new boyfriend he’d heard about—both intensified. Passing the frozen foods aisle, with a gut-lifting inevitability he turned to look, and there she was, frozen with shock at the sight of him.

“Fred?” she said, after a year or so.

It took him a bewildering amount of time to process the fact that it wasn’t Mel at all. It was Jill, George’s ex. Both had wavy blond hair, but the resemblance ended there. Jill was taller and slimmer; even her face was taller and slimmer—her cheekbones higher, her nose thinly fluted. The two looked nothing alike, actually. Maybe he’d been too busy noticing other things: The diamond sparkling from the second to last of those fingers curled, at the level of her loins, around the handle of the red shopping basket. Her rounded belly bulging the ribbed cotton fabric of a shirt dotted with little printed butterflies.

He nodded, witnessed her involuntary little frown. He was Fred, not George. She’d known it, but knowing didn’t stop the wanting. Even Fred had this reaction sometimes, looking in the mirror. They braced themselves for a conversation.

“Do you still live around here?” she asked.

“No. Do you live around here now?” he asked.

“No. Lamaze class.” A weak smile. “Just picking up a snack before hopping on the train.”

They stared mutely at the contents of her basket: A pint of ice cream. A jar of salsa. Fred’s stomach gaped despite him—lunch wasn’t in his current budget; anyhow, since his brother’s diagnosis, he’d been living in terror of chemical additives, which put most of the foods he liked off limits.

“I don’t mix them together … yet,” she said. “I do eat the salsa straight out of the jar.”

“Right. Congratulations, on the …” He pointed in the general direction of her belly.

“Thanks.”

He’d known about that. And her engagement. Knowing it hadn’t prepared him for the proof.

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy.”

“Ah. My condolences, then.”

Inner George fed him the line. He was all too aware of an ingratiating impulse to reenact George for her.

“Yes,” she said, relaxing a little into a broad theatricality of her own. “Another man in the world. What can you do?”

“Well, there are always operations for that kind of thing.”

Her smile decayed.

“I meant—I meant a sex change,” he said, but the joke had already gone sour, and even the emendation sounded bad. There was an edge in his voice he couldn’t quite control.

“Oh. Of course,” she said, on guard.

They stood there. He reminded himself that George had barely allowed her to see him after the diagnosis, that they’d already been divorced by then. That it wasn’t necessarily unreasonable of her to think she was allowed to stand here with a diamond and a fetus and a basket of snacks. “So how is he?” she asked.

“He’s … no changes recently.”

She was saying that Fred’s mother was keeping her posted by email. She was apologizing for not visiting George, saying she worried what the shock would do, trailing off, that diamond-ringed hand resting on her belly. He was staring at it, her belly, feeling he was afloat, curled up snug inside it. It was happening again. He yanked his gaze to the floor.