Luminarium (50 page)

In the end, he read none of this no-self stuff aloud, not wanting to give the bag of desiccating tissue on the bed any more of an excuse not to be George; though, what with the all-important CT scan coming any minute now, he was actually finding it preferable to think of George’s body as being absent of selfhood, at least for the moment. Maybe, Fred speculated with too much hope, it was all the meditation that allowed for this newfound distance. Maybe neither George nor he himself had to be here in anything but the flesh. The only way he could conceptualize the phrase “no self” was to think
not here
, to think it just possibly meant the real Fred was somewhere else, the real George too. He returned to the mu, joining his own attenuated outbreaths to the ventilator’s hush, doubting for the both of them, doubting hospital sounds, hospital smells, hospital bills, hospital rooms, until two doubtable orderlies arrived with a doubtable gurney, and gathered in their muscled arms the various bags and tubes and rolling machines and the featherweight bundle of George, and they were all wheeling off down the hall. On impulse, Fred began pushing the gurney faster and faster. The two orderlies looked at each other, then at Fred, then at each other—one’s greased, longish hair flipping about, the other’s gold tooth sparking in the fluorescence—and they decided what the hell and joined in, racing their doubtable freight at a speed which Fred knew the real George—picture him whipping along above, a balloon on a string—would enjoy.

The unintended upshot was that they reached their destination all the sooner. The orderlies pointed Fred toward one door and wheeled the gurney through another. Fred entered a darkened control room; through its window, he could see the attendants lifting the sagging body onto the scanner platform, and a nurse unhooking George’s ventilator. The nurse and the attendants then bugged out of the room as the nurse gave the go signal to a woman sitting with her back to Fred at the controls. The woman’s black hair flowed through a ponytail clip to brush the collar of her lab coat. Her sheer-stockinged legs recrossed at the ankles as she leaned forward. Her ringed fingers toggled the platform into motion. The scene was so oddly familiar that he had to resist the giddy urge to fully sync the synchronicity by stepping up and resting his arm around her shoulders, as they watched through the window their test subject’s head vanishing into the giant, laser-lit scanner ring.
None of this is real
, Fred averred. And if it wasn’t real, how could it even touch them? He wasn’t here, George wasn’t there in that cyclone of X-rays. On the computer screen, cross-sectional slices began to appear, and so what? A pea. An avocado. Expanding tranches of cauliflower. Nothing but produce. Of no consequence, he told himself, but all the same, the scan was getting too real, too vivid and totalizing. His brother’s skull complexifying like some kind of arthropod; tapering into the tubework of windpipe and tongue muscle and spine; then going supernova—dark hollows, flame gusts, bright, misshapen blobulations—as the Asian woman who was in no way Mira turned to Fred to ask if he was OK. He, Fred, was emitting a kind of hissing, gurgling noise, it seemed, his throat having sealed so tight there might as well have been no such thing as air at all.

After locking himself
in that same bathroom for another extended freak-out on the tiled floor, Fred washed his unsteady hands with Bacti-Stat and left the hospital. He started walking, of all places, to the Empire State Building. He made up reasons on the way. He told himself his mother might have changed her mind since blowing off Dot’s phone call yesterday. He asked himself if her group knew yet about George’s condition, and about the plans to let him die a week from today. He told himself they deserved to know, that they’d at least meant well all this time, at least had been trying to help George all these months. He considered the possibility, in the likely event his mother hadn’t shown, of asking them to look in on her. A few weeks ago, he would have been relieved to find her giving up this particular set of friends. But he worried, now, that she was worse off without them.

The stretch of 34th Street just before the entrance was empty of fire trucks, and full of scaffolding and smoke-belching buses, but was still enough like the virtual version to make him feel claustrophobic, as if the third dimension had been removed and all of this was trapped in a thin sheet of pixel light. Absurdly, before going in, he looked up for the window through which he’d jumped.

“—are those brown
ones slums—”

“—some great shopping down by—”

“—I wanna pretzel—”

“—signaling the mother ship—”

Standing here atop the city, Fred was still thinking about the playtest, about following that chemotherapy angel out into the all-too-accommodating blue. That fucking angel, of course, was why he was here. Not a reasonable reason. Just the will to connect the stars of his life into some meaningful or at least recognizable shape. Just the hope that it would look so right he could tell himself it was meant to be.

Perhaps it was that virtual plunge, or that ensuing dream of the swirling vortex, or, more likely, the waking on the edge of the roof in Brooklyn that was making him so uneasy he couldn’t look down at the hairline streets, couldn’t even look up at the clouds, had to shut his eyes, wanting to leave, wanting never to have come. But his eyes were now shut. His hands were already above him, clutching the bars. Nothing to do but let go, uncurl his fingers.

“—there goes another—”

“—peh-foh-mance aht—”

“—repent, you seen-ers, heh heh—”

“Reiki Reiki Reiki,” Fred whispered, feeling like an idiot.

Some time later,
a light hand on his shoulder brought him back to the thousand reflected suns, deeper and redder now, on the East Side cityscape. The hand, Fred found, belonged to Gandalf. The others were there too, their faces peaceful and amused.

“Didn’t think he’d come out of that one,” Gandalf joked to the others, lifting his wide-set, manicured gray brows.

“Glad you could make it!” said the elf, with a winsome smile and two bashful blinks of her thyroidal green eyes.

Strider steered Fred and the rest of them with his nose, turning and leading the way up the ramp and inside. The wizard guided Fred by the elbow and the dwarf took up the rear. They made their way around a barricaded area where insulation foam and foil vents draped like guts from the open ceiling, a hopeful sign on the wall saying
We’re Renovating!
Excuse Our Mess!
The group was comparing notes about how wild the energy was up here today, how you could just feel it lashing around, how almost scary it had been at first. Gandalf asked Fred if he’d felt it, and Fred nodded, feeling, this time, that he was only half lying, those first moments after he’d shut his eyes beginning to replay—the voices, the buffeting wind, the superfluous daylight flash of a camera that may or may not have been aimed at him, the stomach-lifting sense that he was walking a plank, blindfolded over a sea storm. All the scuttled things he’d wanted to say to George had suddenly sprung back to mind, and they were nothing but questions, angry and wounded. Who were George’s friends, his coconspirators? Who was spying on Fred, sending him these messages, sabotaging Urth? And why, what was in it for them? And what did they want from him? And what had George wanted from him, back when he’d helped plan whatever it was his coconspirators were doing now? Had he wanted blood? Revenge for Fred’s selling out the company? Hadn’t he understood Fred had been trying to save it? Hadn’t he seen everything Fred had been doing for him after he’d gotten sick, battling the health care system, dragging him to the hospital, cleaning up his vomit and bloody phlegm? Couldn’t he see everything Fred was still doing for him? Couldn’t he? The questions kept floating past, though softer, and ever less rational—was George in that failing body? out there in the aether? and what did he want now? and what could Fred do?—until at last, Fred was down so deep that the only question left was one of such oozing, squidlike dimensions he couldn’t catch hold of it, couldn’t fit thought or words to it. Just a brooding, pulsing question mark in the dark.

“But the energy got smoother,” the dwarf was saying.

“It sure did,” said the wizard. “It felt so calm and warm toward the end.”

Fred couldn’t entirely dispute this, either. At least he himself had grown calmer. Too tired to fight anymore, warmed and cooled by turns as the air around him stirred and stilled, blood draining from his hands with an electric tingle, he’d drifted slowly into a lethargy verging on bliss, that state of doubting even his doubts, no up, no down, just sheer possibility …

“Imagine having it be stable,” said the elf. “So it could be that healing all the time.”

… during which, he’d begun to feel a warmth on his palms … as if George’s own were pressed against them, through the mesh of that other world …

“It will be stable,” Strider assured them all, with an authority he wore as easily as his white tunic shirt and wooden-beaded necklace, “once we can tune it to the frequency of the planet.”

What
, Fred thought,
in the hell am I doing here?

They merged with a stream of tourists headed down a cramped stairwell wormy with pipes and dangling wires along the low ceilings of the landings. Another of those dazed, meaningless moments of déjà vu, this time recalling the endless stream of computer-controlled evacuees. Fred sniffed the air for smoke. At least the lights were on.

“How’s your mom?” the buzzcut woman asked him.

He wondered again if they’d heard yet about George. It didn’t seem they had.

“Not so well,” he began, then hesitated, it occurring to him that his mother probably didn’t want them to know. He went on anyhow. “Her tremors are giving her some trouble.”

A sober nod from Rudolf. “She’s giving so much of herself.”

“She really is,” said Dot, “to George, to all those patients in the hospital.”

“To the whole city,” the buzzcut woman declared.

“I hope she’s getting some rest and recharging,” Rudolf said.

Recharging, Fred thought. Like a Reiki battery. He told them she was. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the return of her tremors hadn’t the least bit shaken their faith, either in her Reiki powers or in Reiki power generally. The next thing to do was tell them about George, but he kept quiet as they wound their way through the souvenir gauntlet and from there down a too-small elevator slathered with bumpy gray paint. Perhaps it was true that a renovation was underway. He wanted to believe it. Though even aflame, the virtual version had seemed sturdier.

In the dim lobby, they passed the building’s Art Deco self-portrait over the marble tiles, where, in the simulation, Little Sam and Little Len had tended to the roasting soon-to-be corpse. Fred’s present meatspace companions, he saw when he looked up, were headed somewhere it took his eyes a moment to register—through a glass door, into a coffee shop. The place hadn’t been there at all in the simulation, for which reason the group’s passage into it seemed almost magical, as if they were traversing a mirror into some bright little wonderland.

“Come have a cuppa,” said the wizard, from the doorway. Fred had already spent half his last fifty bucks from the helmet study, after the 10 percent cut to the check-cashing place, and the twenty-dollar admission fee to the observation deck. He was about to beg off, when, with a twirling wave of the hand, the little man added the magic words: “My treat!”

Fred didn’t fully trust his ability to socialize with them, but followed anyway, grateful for the opportunity to sit, still feeling obligated to tell them about George, and on some level still hoping he might find that pattern in the stars, some reason to believe he’d been led here for a reason.

Cups in hand, they sat around a little white table by an orange wall, the only customers.

“So do you think the energy’s still clear up there?” Gandalf asked. “Or have all those morons gone and messed it up already?”

They laughed.

“It’s true,” said the dwarf. “I walk by a place I balanced the day before and it’s all barmy and out of whack again.”

“We need more Reiki people!” said Dot. “We need reinforcements!”

“They’re coming,”
Guy
said calmly, gazing down the length of his nose at his tea.

“They are?” Fred couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“You’re here,” he observed, “are you not?”

More than the words, it was the droll look
Guy
gave him, like Fred was nothing more than some imp
Guy
had summoned from the mist to do his bidding, that made Fred want to tell him what he thought of his argument. But
Guy’s
wife was already elaborating:

“People come up and ask me what I’m doing all the time. Some of them give me email addresses so we can let them know where we’re meeting.”

“Not all of them like it,” Gandalf said with a chuckle. “This musclehead up there shook me around. When I opened my eyes, he said, ‘Keep those Devil rays to yourself!’”

“For heaven’s sake,” said Dot.

“Spirituality is a key,”
Guy
said. “You can use it to lock yourself
in
, too, if that’s what you want.”

The others nodded for a hallowed moment at this supposed wisdom.

“It raises an interesting question, though,” said Gandalf, swirling his frozen coffee slush. “What if someone doesn’t want your help? What if they don’t want to be healed? Do we have the right to send them energy?”

“It can only do good,” huffed the dwarf. “That’s a fundamental principle.”

“But what if people don’t want good?” said Gandalf.

“The energy only goes where it’s needed,” the dwarf insisted.

“But we direct it.” Gandalf balled his little pink hands on the table. “That’s our role, isn’t it? If the energy only goes where it’s needed to begin with, what’s the point in channeling it?”

Fred perked up. Wasn’t this that squid-like question of his, the one he hadn’t been able to haul up? Wasn’t this at least a piece of it?

“What good are we?” Fred blurted, overloud. “What are we
for
?”