Luminarium (55 page)

A lab
, he thought, passing the little control room, peering within as he would the chamber of a dollhouse.
Inside a lab.

With the phrase came an echo of that cosmic laugh, not a physical sound so much as a psychic force. He couldn’t pursue the thought, couldn’t follow where it went.

He sat in the blue recliner. Mira sat opposite, and put a hand on his knee.

“Tell me about it?” she said in a small voice, leaning forward, peeking up into his eyes.

She’s a mouse, too
, he thought,
a mouse in a lab coat.

Instead of laughter or that mute force, the Presence, still with him, now communicated by other means, flashing images into Fred’s awareness, images from his own life: Mira from above the bar, braids slightly flapping as she reached for his glass / the cartoonish cap of the trolley driver in Celebration.

Meanwhile, in front of him, Mira’s mouse-like eyes went wide. A door had opened in the lobby.

“Mira?” her father called out.

“Oh God. I’ll never hear the end of this. Be quiet.”

She rushed out, shutting the light and slamming the door. Fred heard her strained laughter, overloud, her blurted question: “What are you doing here?” Followed by the sound of another door, murmurs from an adjacent room. The fat little baseboard star glowed.

Five-pointed
, he thought. And instantly, the Presence flashed more images to mind: the five fingers of his mother’s hand, trembling above his head / his own hand, holding the Swiss Army knife, prying those five elevator buttons from the panel.

Mira slid back in, flipped the light on, leaned close.

“He doesn’t know you’re here. I convinced him to go have dinner with me. Put everything back the way you found it. I still want to debrief you on your session. Meet me tomorrow night, same time and place.”

She killed the light again and was gone. A minute later, Fred heard the main door close. He still wasn’t alone. He felt as if the giant hand of the Presence, rather than the chair, were cradling him. The hand didn’t seem inclined to crush him. It held him gently, protectively. And he felt inclined, more and more, to nuzzle against its warmth.

Losing some of his fear, he left her office and wandered back down the hall. Stepping into the helmet room again, he traced the cylinders rising from the holes in the sparkly sphere, the bright copper strands rising out of those and into blue and red sheathes going every which way, before coalescing into a single twist-tied bundle. He wasn’t alone here, either. The Presence was still with him, looking over his shoulder, as fascinated by the device as he was. More than just fascinated. There was affection flowing from it, like a sun-warmed stream, through Fred and onto the machine, which, as if it had been washed, began to shine all the more in the dim light through the doorway. The affection wasn’t just for the helmet, Fred now began to feel, with a deepening sense of awe and gratitude, but for him, too. As if, for the moment, they were the Presence’s two favorite children, the helmet and he. Or its favorite toys. Beloved inventions that had presumed to transcend their clownish materials.

With fellow feeling, Fred continued tracing those wires, which ran along the jointed metal arm, then down the back of the chair, and finally into a thin steel box on the floor, about the size of a stereo component. An orange switch on the box was lit in the on position. From the doorway, not without a thrum of
voluptas
, he’d watched Mira bending at the hip to flip it on. So he now knelt and switched it off. The box was otherwise featureless, aside from a power cord and a data cord, which snaked from the back of it through a hole beneath the observation window—connecting to Egghart’s computer, no doubt. As Fred glanced up at the poster on the dark ceiling, the Presence gave him another image, one that felt like a loving gift: he found himself, for a long-lost moment, sitting with George on his top bunk, the two of them in their pajamas, charting new constellations among the brand-new star and moon stickers, brightly aglow. Not so big a coincidence, the stickers and this poster, Fred thought, but even so, his life felt suddenly smaller and self-contained, a tabletop puzzle whose pieces could be snapped into a single design.

Back in the control room, about to shut down the computers, he noticed Egghart’s sketchpad in a shelving bin beneath the table. It was almost too much for Fred, paging through the helmeted faces Egghart had drawn: An older man with a complicated wrinkle of concentration on his brow. A woman with dark-shaded skin, a nose stud, and dreamy, parted lips. A man with frown lines etched all the way down to his jaw. All with closed eyes, the kind of closed eyes that looked to be focused beneath the lids, lifted slightly in their sockets, like Fred’s mother’s while doing Reiki. His fellow adventurers, he thought. And he felt that love from the Presence streaming down onto them, making them shine like heroes. Blinking back tears, he turned the page and found a drawing of Mira, her profile, looking off, probably through the control room window. Her father, Fred thought, had managed to capture both her analytical intelligence and childlike wonderment. His throat was aching. The love from beyond was now mixed, and enriched, he actually felt, with a kind of sorrow, a sorrow for Mira’s sorrow, for everyone’s. For his. His throat started to clutch itself and he was bawling, a hollow knocking sound, like a rock skipping down the walls of a bottomless crevasse. He wanted nothing more, no other objective, than to love this way himself. So sorry he was for this lifetime of doubt. So grateful at the possibility of everything being different now, different and so much easier.

He turned one more page and saw what he should have by now expected, but he’d been so full of these other things he wasn’t prepared at all.

It was himself. His jaw slack, his eyes all but shut, small and boyish under that sci-fi headgear. Of course, this must have been the page Mira had grilled him about, following the out-of-body session, the page he’d told her was blank.

Blank.

That’s what he’d seen, and it wasn’t what had been there. He’d gotten it wrong. Because he hadn’t been up in the air, looking down on her and her father; he’d been right there in the chair, right where the man had drawn him.

Mira had explained it all that day, every component, every nuance of the illusion. Just as she had today, in advance, no less. Explained that this Presence was just the other half of his brain. Just these two little lobes in here, clasping and cupping, warming each other in the cold. How soon, he wondered, before the inner lightning stopped, before the other lobe went dark again, and this phantasmal higher self folded back into nothing?

Not quite yet, it seemed, for the little ripples of sadness he’d sent out were coming back a tidal wave, like God’s own sorrow for Fred, a teary ocean, in which all Fred could do was tumble.

He tossed the
sketchpad on the table, left the computers on, and wandered back down the corridor, letting himself into the suite’s little bathroom, the velvety sound of his piss on the water making his skin tingle, the toilet flush flashing to mind the smoky vortex / Pincurls bobbing up Broadway / the homeless man sucking down a cloud of inhaler mist. Pieces of the great puzzle, or just an overexcited, overexposed right-brain image dump.

Then, turning to the sink, with a jolt, he saw George—in tears, stunned at the sight of Fred in turn—through the window of an adjoining bathroom. George blinked in confusion, recognizing himself to be but a reflection, trapped in some other universe even less real than Fred’s. It was a dirty trick, Fred thought, played on both lobes alike by that fried spatial processor. Regardless, he couldn’t help lingering in the magic, reading the wish in George’s eyes, the wish to be here, here with this unreal Presence for which he’d searched so diligently for so many years but never seemed to find. No doubt George would be making better use of it, Fred thought, than he was.

Back out in the reception area, feeling no particular compunction to leave, he eyed the last door he hadn’t been through. Egghart’s office, he assumed. He opened the door. Why not? He was a mouse with the keys to the maze. Switching on the light, he saw metal shelves stacked with books and manuals, and a worktable covered with screws, wires, silicon chips, and electrical diagrams. The unreal Presence was still beckoning with images: Vartan in the lamplight, drilling into metal / George taking the first blockish avatar for a run across the undeveloped green Urth. What would mankind’s busy building look like from a divine perspective, Fred wondered. Would all these objects of ours, too, someday snap together into a single, all-purpose Thing?

Stepping in, he was surprised by the office’s size and layout. It was bigger than Mira’s, and had the only windows in the suite, a northerly view, which should have been familiar but wasn’t, or wasn’t quite: Buildings of every height and width and era jostling and angling for the night air. Stonework of every description, cornices and balustrades and decorative patterns of amphoras and laurel leaves and seashells, half erased by weather or shoddy repairs or air-conditioner installations. Walls and roofs bristling with pigeon baffles, pipework, grillwork, vents and ducts, tottering old water towers. High-rises hived to bursting with their million-dollar niches, flatscreens and canned lighting, overbright, as if in the midst of a power surge. A system sumptuously on the edge. Fred reminded himself it was the other half of his brain—fearful, impressionable, overwhelmed—that was showing things to him this way. Though he couldn’t help imagining the view, too, as a kind of divine warning, or alternately, boast—the utter implausibility of the city’s moment-bymoment continuation as the Presence’s very point of pride.

In the distance, the Empire State Building strained above the tectonic shards of Midtown, its bygone citadel peak now floodlit, unevenly, thanks to a missing light, in memorial red, white, and blue. The Presence, more insistent than ever, kept riffing, flashing to Fred’s mind the virtual Empire State Building coming down / the bricks and glass and pulverized pavement wafting up into the night / the fractal explosion of color on the CT scan / the clouds of dust as his golf club smashed into the replicas / the little pixel man throwing off light / a tiny, broken rainbow over that moronically burbling fountain, the one he’d seen from the Armation terrace after tossing the space helmet over the balustrade, in that sun-dazed, shellshocked hiatus in time.

Then, it had been but a Military-Entertainment Complex he’d been lost in. Now it was a cosmos. From that empty suit, Gretta, behind his empty desk, to this empty Presence, Fred thought, in this bankrupt study. And it was almost tempting to try to combine the two emptinesses to make a whole, to lash two bullshits into a truth. After all, what other kind of faith was possible in this infinite pinwheel of bullshit wrapped in truth wrapped in bullshit, hopelessness wrapped in hope, vileness wrapped in beauty, lunacy wrapped in logic, loathing wrapped in empty, empty love ….

He turned to go, that Presence—that self-deluded Presence, he thought—trailing him like a lovebird on a leash. His hand on the light switch, taking one last look around Egghart’s neurotheological workshop, Fred noticed in the corner a double-doored metal cabinet, like the one that used to be in his office, which Sam had put to use as a pantry. Barely a coincidence at all. But excuse enough to stride boldly over and swing wide the doors. Nuts and bolts. Spools of wire. Voltmeters and ammeters and magnetometers. And at the very bottom, beneath a couple of stuffed manila folders, swathed in bubble wrap, the edge of a metal box, and a coil of red and blue wires.

Fred smiled. He saw the pattern—if of no grand design, he thought, then simply of his own. Even the Presence seemed grudgingly impressed, reaching into its trick pockets and showering him with a few more choice images: an animated lightning bolt zapping an animated Adam into being / the tiara-wearing birthday girl gleefully bonking him with his wand / his hand reaching into his parents’ refrigerator, fingers closing around a sparkling, plastic-wrapped wedge of cheese.

Fred waited on the Broadway-Lafayette subway platform, the Presence
still sharing his headspace, though it seemed less that he was of two minds than the world itself was of two realities: that of the late-leaving office workers and assorted teenagers, of thumbs a-prance on the glass of smartphones, of clean, pink ears hung with Bluetooth headsets and plugged with pearlescent plastic buds; and that of the corroding pillars, the urine stench, the greased-looking rat slipping under the third rail, the gum-blackened platform over which all those spotless, sporty, patent-leather, sneaker-shoe amalgams seemed to hover on sole-shaped beds of air.

An old behemoth of a train showed its bulldog face, rocking on the tracks as it braked. In the lab, Fred had first sensed the Presence as something like an experimenter, but here on the train, it was more like a conductor, shuttling him through the present, this frenzied tunnel of noise and light, toward his appointed destiny.

Do not lean on doors
, it instructed him.

Do not hold doors open.