Luminarium (54 page)

He recalled how suddenly ill she’d looked that day when he’d described this for her, smacking down one hand on the other. With an upwelling of sadness, he said, “Not nearly so much.”

“Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “We’ll see if we can recalibrate some of that.”

“Mira, why didn’t you take Lionel’s last name?”

After a few steps, she shrugged. “I didn’t like it.”

“It was worse than Egghart?”

She pursed her lips, then banked a shoulder into him, knocking him off course. The gesture felt to him as intimate as those kisses the other night, made him feel almost as light.

They were almost to the door of the Neural Science Building.

“So what is it with you and Bush, anyway?” Fred asked. “I mean, aside from what it is with everyone and Bush?”

“I don’t know.” Mira slid her hands into her pockets. “I did meet him, though.”

“You did?”

“There were a lot of functions we widows got invited to. I mostly hung out in the bathrooms. I was looking for one when Lionel’s boss’s widow took me over and introduced me.”

“What did you say?”

“Me? Nothing. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Something stupid like that. What do you say to a president?”

“And what did
he
say?”

She turned to face him, her black-lined eyes more narrowed than usual, her lips in a leer. “
We’re gonna git ’em for ya.
” Then she winked.

“Really?” Fred laughed. “He winked?”

Mira was walking again. “I don’t know. It could have been a blink. He’s so squinty.”

She was squinting as she said it, not Bush-like, but Mira-like. Fred let the comparison go unmade. “So what did you say to that?”

“I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’” With deliberation, but without force, she kicked a paper coffee cup to the curb. “And I meant it.”

They stopped at the entrance.

“So that was it?” he asked.

“That was it.” She smiled. “The emperor of the world went on gladhanding. I finally found that bathroom, and threw up in a toilet.”

Mira led the
way in, presenting her ID to the droop-faced security guard, who, in the manner of all security guards these days, eyed Fred with suspicion. In the elevator, Fred watched her watch the numbered lights change, wondering if there was any combination of words and actions which might result in the two of them kissing before the doors slid open.

The doors slid open.

She unlocked the office suite, switching on lights as she led him down the narrow corridor. At the doorway to the little control room, Fred stopped.

“Can I have a peek behind the wizard’s curtain?” he asked.

“Very well.” She ushered him in ahead of her. He sat down in her father’s chair, she sat in hers, peeling off her jacket. Through the window in front of them, the recliner’s black vinyl and the helmet’s sparkly finish shone in the dim light coming through from their side.

“So why haven’t you ever tried it?” Fred asked.

“I told you. Scientific objectivity.”

“But what’s the real reason?”

She folded her arms, that third hand, the ghostly blue one, right between the other two.

“I suppose you think I’m chicken?” she said.

“No. I think you’re a control freak.”

Mira rotated her chair away from him. “Who cares what you think? Do
you
have a neuropsychology degree?”

“Do you?”

“I’m working on it.” She woke up her computer. “The helmet software’s on yours, by the way.”

“So what’s on yours? Or do you just surf the Internet in here?”

“I could, if you’d prefer.” With a doubleclick, she called up a window with a few rows of graph lines. “Or I could monitor your vitals and make sure you’re alive.”

“Aha.”

Fred woke Craig Egghart’s machine. Mira wheeled over and pointed to a folder on his screen:

luminarium

Fred opened it. Aside from the application itself, there were a few subfolders. He clicked open the first,
consilia
, and opened up a few of its files—scanned-in sketches and electrical diagrams for the various hardware components.

“Just his plans,” she said.

Fred closed it, moved on to the next subfolder,
effusio.
Five filenames appeared:

delectatio.cwv

excrucio.cwv

timor.cwv

ira.cwv

voluptas.cwv

“Older stuff,” she said. “Basic emotions.”

“Do they work?”

“Sure. Those are a snap.”

“
Excrucio
,” he muttered. “That can’t feel good.”

“You had a bit of that as part of the last one.”

He put it together: that moment of reaching out for the jar of gel. “Right. How could I forget my own electrocution?” He pointed at the second-to-last file. “
Voluptas.
Is that what I think it is?”

They were sitting close to each another, now, their shoulders almost touching.

“If you think it’s arousal,” she said, her voice a bit thick.

He thought of that bee-strung bow and lotus-tipped arrow.

“I’ve got to build me one of these things.”

She eyed him through slit lids. Then shoved him, sending their chairs rolling apart.

He opened the next subfolder,
recuso.

“Reject pile,” she said.

It had only one file:

vacuus

“What’s that?”

“It means ‘void.’”

“Void?”

It sounded like a reject indeed, Fred thought. The very name made his insides shiver.

“My dad tried to test it on himself and had to abort after less than a minute. He said he thought it was going to eat his soul.” She smirked. “I’d never heard him say ‘soul’ before.”

There was one subfolder left:
spiritus.
Fred opened it:

complexo.cwv

subterlabor.cwv

ianus.cwv

aperio.cwv

“Are these them?”

“Yep,” she whispered.

Here it was, then, he thought. His spiritual odyssey, encoded as easily as a few songs on an iPod.

“Which one am I getting today?”

Mira’s finger moved down to the last.

“What’s it do?” he asked.

“You want the explanation now?” she said. “Beforehand?”

“I’d rather know what I’m in for, this time.”

She paused. “I suppose we’ve pretty much demolished the protocol anyway, at this point. All right.” She swiveled to face him. “This one puts the others together, kind of. And adds a few things.”

She pointed at a spot an inch above her hairline.

“Cingulate cortex. It tags information—your thoughts, imaginings, sensations, all your experience—as being either real or unreal. We’ll play around with this, so that by the end, you’ll feel yourself to be perceiving a deeply important truth.”

She aimed her index fingers toward each other, just in front of her ears.

“Amygdala—your fight-or-flight response. Hypothalamus—your pleasure center. The two systems usually don’t go on at the same time, for obvious reasons. But sometimes, rarely, they can overlap, firing in quick succession, like in a crisis that gets suddenly resolved. The result is a hyperaroused emotional complex. Some call it rapture. Let’s see. What else?”

She looked right, left, at her hands, still to either side of her head.

“Oh. You had a tiny bit of this in the last one, but way more now.” She lowered one hand, with the other bringing a ragged fingernail to bear on the point between her eyebrows. “Corpus callosum. The only point connecting your brain’s hemispheres.”

Her fingertip remained there, bisecting her eyes.

“Parallel processors, to use your computer terminology. Your right parietal lobe specializing in sensory-based thought. Your left in critical and linguistic thought. Normally, they operate almost independently, your left perceiving your right as nothing more than a thin stream of data passing through this one narrow conduit.”

She tapped the spot. He remembered the Hindu women on the bridge, their painted red bindis.

“
Except
when a micro-seizure happens. It’s like a little storm, creating wider electrical connections. Giving your left a glimpse of that entire other sentience. Like another presence is suddenly in there with you. Familiar and strange at the same time.”

“Another presence,” Fred repeated, feeling a chill.

“Which, in a state of rapture …” Her finger drifted to the side, then pointed at the ceiling, as her lips bent into a sort of sad-clown smile. “… can appear divine.”

Between him and
the spiral galaxy, Mira leaned, two slick fingertips rubbing circles over his heart.

“That’s good,” he said. “A little lower, please.”

“Nice try.” She slapped the electrode onto his chest, reached for the helmet, and pushed it onto his head. “Oh, damn.”

“What?”

“I got some gel on these little copper wires. Hold on a sec.” Feeling under the trolley’s main level, she grabbed a tissue from the lower shelf, then, coming in close, tilted her face this way and that, squinting at a spot inches above his head.

“You sure it’s OK?” Fred asked, wishing, at some point in their association, it had behooved him to bring up her need of new contact lenses.

“It’s fine.” She kept peering, blinking, dabbing with the tissue. “If it blows, we’ve got a spare.”

“If it blows?”

“Relax.” She flashed a grin. “You’re in good hands.”

“Mira,” he said, just as she was turning to go.

She stopped. “Yes?”

“Kiss me for luck.”

Her smile faded. He wasn’t smiling either. He’d said it like a command, in part just to overcome his own nerves.

“Fred.” She began shaking her head.

“Just this once,” he said, to preempt whatever speech she was about to give him. “Then send me off to God.”

After an uncertain moment, she leaned down slowly. She merely pecked his lips, at first. Then, impulsively, she came in again for a longer kiss. Her lips were stiffer than they’d been the other night, and didn’t seem to quite know what to do. His own lips struggled in turn, now trying too hard, now not hard enough. Perhaps the wire-frizzed helmet and the odd angle they were at contributed to the awkwardness. Just at the moment he thought they were starting to find their fit, she pulled away.

She didn’t look at him as she left the room, or as, behind the window, she reached up with a flash of belly and hips and brought down the shade.

Red bulb popping on.

Gray shelves.

Gleaming cart.

He told himself it was progress, their first real kiss, the start of something. He couldn’t escape, though, the misgiving that the kiss had been too strange for her, too foreign. Something she wouldn’t allow herself to repeat.

Blacked-out glass.

Ceiling grid.

That high-pitched whir, intimate as a dentist’s drill.

A pinching at his thigh. Reaching into his pocket. Feeling the five little round elevator buttons.

Clutching them, as a spot of ticklish heat widens at the top of his head, as a slow drip from the spot splashes down onto his brain stem.

As the drip becomes a stream, the stream a torrent.

As the room clouds with static, with strobes, the colors of blood and light and heat.

As every nerve in his neck and scalp lights up.

As a pinhole of darkness appears in the center of the unraveling galaxy.

And widens. It must be an optical illusion, the effect of continued staring, but he stays fixed on that swiveling-open black, half afraid if he looks away it won’t stop, half afraid it will. In the periphery, the red bulb brightens and looms, a blossoming sun. The shelves and table flatten out, recede into some lesser dimension. The ceiling tiles breathe, exhaling into the room, charging and warming the air. The room itself expands, walls swinging wide.

He yanks his eyes away.

Hot chair.

Cramped helmet.

Bulb small and dim.

All the same. And not at all the same.

He palpates the chair arm, squeezes the trolley leg. Solid as ever. Though for some reason he feels like he should be able to crumple it all in his fists. The room is no more real than a stage set, a painted backdrop.

A ticklish, milky current flows up and down his spine.

Big deal, he thinks, to quell his fear. Another special effect.

He stares up at the flat poster. The spiral has twisted shut again, like the mouth of a bag, cinching him into this place that’s no kind of place at all.

Big deal, he thinks again, and laughs.

Then jumps in his chair, as something bigger than the universe laughs with him.

“Fred?” Mira whispered, leaning in.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at that poster before the red light had gone off and the fluorescents had come on. As she lifted the helmet and began peeling away the electrodes, he looked around, the walls oddly closer, the room smaller than he’d remembered. She pulled the lever and guided the chair back upright, then was in front of him, offering her hand, and he hesitated, some haywire spatial processing module of his brain fearing that, in standing, he might put his head through the ceiling. It didn’t happen, but he almost felt as if it had, following her down the too-small corridor. Almost as if the ceiling had been lifted off, as if he were a mouse that had clambered up atop the walls of its maze-world, blinking in the blurred light of the astronomically larger laboratory beyond.