Luminarium (56 page)

Whole self-help careers could be spun from these paired maxims. On the opposite bench, a Hasidic Jew snapped open the
Daily News
:

NO PAIN,
NO GAIN

Fred was inclined to take this too as a personal message, a promise of divine accounting, a just reward for his ordeals in the offing. It seemed too life-affirming a phrase to be nothing but the day’s decree from their president, eyes like buttons, defending tough tactics at secret prisons.

As the train pulled into his station, the Hasid folded over to the special series that week:

9/11

The

forgotten

victims

… and a picture of a fireman sitting slumped, hands glued to his knees, helmet weighing down his head. Fred’s throat went dry, as it did in his paralyzed dreams.

But then the doors opened, no need to lean or hold, and he followed the commuters, their cheekbones lit by joggling phone screens as they climbed to the street. On the opposite corner, kids from the projects, children of the children who had jumped and fistfought him and George on that very spot, loitered outside what was now an organic market, out past the edge of their dwindling turf. It had become the very neighborhood he and George, as children, had always dreamt of growing up in, full of kids with first names like Jackson and Erikson, whose parents called out to them from book-filled parlors and leathery car interiors. Fred and George had imagined buying their parents an apartment, maybe a whole building, in a neighborhood like this, with an extra apartment that Fred and George and Sam could stay in whenever they needed to, whenever they needed a rest from the jet-setting, globetrotting lives they’d surely lead. That neighborhood of their dreams had turned out to be this very place, except that it was their parents who were the out-evolved underclass, the gentrificational missing link, clinging to their rent-controlled apartment with their hirsute fingers and prehensile toes.

Fred stood in the cramped kitchen, with its cracked and greasespotted ceiling and the torn up linoleum floor that Holly had sponged daubs of red and green and yellow paint onto a few years back. Fred could barely believe the place still existed, that it hadn’t been consumed in some nuclear firestorm, or at the very least been bejeweled and digitized and taken over by some feckless trillionaire. The sight of it was somehow overwhelming, as though he’d been away a thousand years, as though it were not an actual place anymore but a museum, not even an actual museum but a kind of museum in thoughtspace, or possibly a shrine. The memory flashes had for the most part dissipated, but in the ensuing calm, the Presence was, if anything, more present than before, helping him see just slightly further into things, a fraction of a millimeter deeper into their surfaces, bringing out a strange new vibrancy.

Two days or more of dishes in the sink, the mess sorrowfully beautiful in the Presence’s light. He resolved to do them before he left.

Carefully, he set his briefcase on the dining table. Over in the living room, half a dozen cardboard boxes sat stacked on the rug. Closer by, against the brick wall on the far side of the dining room, Vartan sat at his desk under the hanging lamp, beard and hair afloat on his blanched and luminous head.

“So what’s going on?” Vartan said. It sounded like an accusation.

Fred approached, awed by the sight of his father. The lamp could have been a halo. Vartan’s face an etching made of light. There was nothing exactly supernatural about the illumination; the lamp explained it all. But there seemed to be another kind of radiance as well, something coming from within Vartan, something that shone through him, that made the dry furrows of his brow all the more skin-like, those dark eyes behind his glasses all the more gelatinous, improbably material. Fred didn’t know whether he was seeing in his father an angel, or, in fact, a human, for the very first time.

Fred might not have been able to stop staring, had his eyes not been diverted by the box in front of Vartan on the desk. It was white, slightly larger than a shoebox, sealed in what looked like shrinkwrap. On the side, in black ink, the word “MagicCo” was printed in stylized letters, with the two
c
’s forming a kind of hypnotic whirlwind.

“Are you going to tell me about it?” Vartan said. His tone was somber. Fred had been too busy staring at Vartan to realize Vartan been staring right back.

“About what?”

“Why are the cops after you, Fred?”

“What?”

Vartan flipped a business card from the desk edge, caught it, and handed it to him between two fingers.
Detective Bruce Nelson
, it read. There was a phone number, a city seal, no other information.

“Plainclothes guy. Came by asking where you were.”

Fred looked around, as though the detective might still be lurking in a corner. His eyes stopped on his briefcase on the table.

“When?” he asked.

“Hour ago.”

No, Fred thought. It couldn’t be that, then. And odds were it wasn’t about his antics at the Armation headquarters, either. Sam had told them they’d be getting their helmet back. Which seemed to leave two possibilities: It was about Fred’s drunken, all-but-blacked-out rampage on that miniature golf course. Or it was about the conspiracy and the sabotage of Urth.

“You aren’t part of a whole shoplifting ring, are you?”

“Oh, shit,” Fred said, suddenly remembering. “My arraignment was yesterday. I totally forgot.”

“You think I’m an idiot?” Vartan said, without raising his voice. “Detectives don’t come around about tweezer thefts.”

“No, I know. It’s just … look, I don’t know what it’s about. But I’m not in any trouble, Dad. Really.”

He wasn’t sure whether his father believed him or not. But Vartan let it pass. He placed both hands on the box, and pushed it forward.

“At the start of the act, you open it up,” he said. “There’s a big, hightech wand inside.”

“You built it?” Fred said. “That wand George drew?”

“There’s a cassette in the box, too. You pop it in the boombox. You’ll hear a friendly guide”—Vartan’s mustache ticked with pride just a bit—“who will talk you through the whole act, demonstrating everything the wand can do. Except the wand keeps malfunctioning. So all the tricks go wrong. It’s a funny act. Here’s a list of the tricks.” He slid a sheet of scrap paper forward, with his penciled handwriting. “You know them all already. It’s just a different sequence.”

Amid the pile of tools and tins of screws and scraps of metal and plastic on the desk, Fred noticed cannibalized pieces of Vartan’s electric hookah—a section of the rubber hose, the empty light socket affixed to the wooden board, a melted section of the glass jar.

“You don’t want to do the show yourself?” he asked.

Thoughtful, Vartan took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“You know,” he said, “when I was working on that Shakespeare play last year, one day I thought I understood it. And the next, it just seemed like bullshit.”

He stared through the lenses in his hand.

“The guy able to raise his kid like that on that island,” he went on. “Control everything. Concoct this whole fantasy that everyone gets tricked into learning from. This scheme that makes everything right.”

Vartan tapped the box between the two of them, which shone in its plastic wrap under the lamplight. It looked pretty professionally done, could have passed for an actual product one would buy in a store.

“I don’t know what gets fixed with this, kiddo,” he said, shrugging a thumb. “But it’s all the magic I got.”

His mustache and the hair on his cheek shifted to the side. Not quite a smile, but at least an effort in that direction, and suddenly that love from the other side of existence, from the other side of Fred’s brain, or of Fred’s heart, was welling over the dam.

A heavy thud of something falling or being dropped came from Fred’s bedroom.

“All the show stuff’s in the van,” Vartan was saying, ignoring the noise, placing the keys on the desk in front of Fred. “Your tux, too.”

“I need to borrow your drill, and some other tools.” Fred was more sure of his plan now than when he’d first conceived it.

“Why? Gonna crack a safe?”

“I’m helping fix up Sam’s condo for the new buyers.”

There were so many facets to this lie that it was almost a world of its own, a parallel Fred branching off in some alternate universe.

“He found buyers?” Vartan brightened a bit. “Bet he made some money.”

“No doubt,” said Fred.

“I told the cop you were staying over there. I gave him the address.” Vartan studied him again. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

Fred summoned a weak smile. “Sure.”

Another thud from the bedroom.

“What’s Mom doing in there?” he asked.

Vartan’s head sank on his shoulders as he turned and regarded the boxes in the living room.

“Redecorating,” he said.

Walking to the
living room, Fred lifted a flap and peeked into one of the boxes. Topping the stacks of books was one with exercises to increase one’s optimism, another with exercises to increase one’s luck, another on channeling spirit guides.

From his bedroom came a sudden clatter. He peered around the doorway.

“Mom?”

Holly was standing in the far corner, wearing her white down robe and, over it, the black motorcycle jacket Manny had given Fred, bundled up in the stuffy room on this summer night like it was the middle of winter. She turned to face him holding an open shoebox. Behind her, the little corner altar shelf was clear of everything but dust.

“I was hoping to have this done before you came back.” She edged around the futon, on which sat another box of books.

“Aren’t you too hot in that jacket?” Fred said.

“It tricks the tremors a little, even though they’re not from the cold.” Holly regarded her hands. “They’re dumb that way.”

Stopping a few feet from him at the nightstand, she picked up the vortex rock and dropped it in a box with the crystals and jade Buddha and a little polished stone with one of those Reiki symbols etched into it—a lightning bolt shooting sideways into a spiral.

“The room’s all yours, now,” she said, with an attempt at breeziness. She wouldn’t look Fred’s way. For his part, Fred couldn’t look away from her. The Presence wouldn’t have let him if he tried. More even than with Vartan, there was something shining through her, shining through the dull mud color of her eyes and the puffy, tired-looking skin surrounding them, those whorls of muscular habit that hitched one lid slightly higher than the other. Shining through every color-treated hair on her head and pore of her skin and each of the small, worn fingers of her quavering hands. Fred wished she could have seen herself like he was seeing her now. And he wasn’t just seeing. With Holly, the luminance was something Fred could even feel. It flowed from her in silken waves. It made Fred’s every cell tingle.
Is this the energy she’s been speaking to me of all
this time?
he wondered.
Is this what it feels like?

He wanted to tell her what he was seeing, what he was feeling. But then he remembered the helmet, the explanations, the cingulate cortex, the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the corpus callosum. And he lost the resolve to speak.

His mother had stopped near him only momentarily, and was leaving with the box. He reached into it and pulled out the vortex rock, feeling a cloudy charge rise up his arm. She studied it in his hand, her face utterly impassive.

“Maybe you can use it as a paperweight.”

She left. The shelves were empty, save for a few of George’s and his old books. The chakra and Reiki symbol charts had been stripped from the closet door. The room wasn’t radiating that shabby brilliance like the others in the apartment. No longer hers, no longer George’s, or Fred’s. Just a room. A box of nothing.

The Presence, to Fred’s surprise, was aching, as lonely there as him.

He piloted the old magic van to Manhattan, still not alone, though the
Presence was stepping back a bit, becoming more of a kind of background radiation, shimmering everywhere just out of view. Finding a parking spot good until 7
AM
, Fred disembarked, tool bag and drill case in one hand and briefcase in the other. A white SUV idled with its high beams lit a few doors down from his office building, and he froze, wondering if it was the police, and if he’d already been spotted. He was prepared to call the number on the card and meet the consequences, whatever they were, after tomorrow morning, but not before. The vehicle had chrome wheels, didn’t look like anything a detective would inhabit. He crossed in front of the lights, slipped through the lobby, and into the elevator.

The hallway was empty. From the office, he could hear the pulse of a bass line. Cracking the door, he saw only darkness, then Sam, who lay sprawled on the floor in a mottled splay of laptop light, wearing nothing but black surfer shorts. An MP3 mix of Tampa Jook music, which Jesse and Conrad had gotten the office hooked on a few weeks ago, raunched and ranted from the laptop’s speakers. By Sam’s bare feet was a Fresh-Direct box, empty and knocked on its side, and another, smaller box, its cover obscured by a same-day courier slip. A bag of kettle chips sat by his head, along with the champagne bottle which for months had been sitting among the soup cans, and a six-pack of St. Pauli Girl, in which five bottles remained, though all five had been de-capped, and presumably, drained. The sixth, half full, stood on the floor off to his side, loosely cradled in his outstretched hand.