Luminarium (67 page)

Then the doors opened on the ground floor, and Fred headed down the corridor, through the passageway from the old building to the new. The night watchman nodded to Fred as he crossed the lobby, and Fred nodded back. He was trying to piece together the strange patches of the last few days: The boiler room sojourn. The walk to Ground Zero after that. He kept coming to the last moment he could recall before waking up in the hospital bed. Not really a moment, not really a part of time at all, but a point at which all that too-bright light had given way to an infinite, lustrous black. It wasn’t right to say he’d been in it. He’d been it. Not even nothing. The dream abated. The Big Inky.

Heading out the revolving door, the lit-up city, to his eyes, seemed so suspiciously like the one he was made for, he had to stop and wonder if he’d really woken up at all, if he weren’t just in some bed, dreaming some coma dream. Or if, in fact, he’d never returned from that nowhere/ nowhen/nohow at all. Or if, in truth, he’d ever issued from it to start.

Though if he hasn’t left it, I’m sorry to break it to you, but reason dictates that all his ghosts and angels—all we inner voices, loving presences, and phantom listeners—haven’t left it either.

So perhaps, for the sake of argument, the lot of us would do best to assume that the void can’t stay void for long. That its hunger for adventure is as hopeless as ours. That its loneliness is even more so. And that thus, time and again, with a sally of doubt, the Dreamer’s the Dreamer, and we’re us, brushing eyebrows with it, and back we go.

Let’s picture our return together, believing as we doubt, doubting as we believe:

One.

Let’s bring back the stars. Scatter them into place with a single toss.

      
Two.

Let’s bring back the Earth, the sun. Plunge our hands into the folds of spacetime and pull them out.

           
Three.

Let’s bring back the city—if not forever, at least for now. Just whistle and here it gallops, a glittering creature of armor and lights. Just point and watch its trillion parts stream down to their spot on the globe.

                 
Four.

Now it’s our turn. Down we dive as the land rolls into sunlight.

Down we fly over the cut-crystal island.

Dodging the spear point of the Empire State Building.

Slaloming between the pyramid tops of the Zeckendorf.

Swooping over the broad steps of Union Square.

Lower still through the Broadway canyon.

Through a maze of buildings, to the sudden absence of buildings.

And a bandstand, and news trucks, and a crowd.

And Fred’s kneeling, night-haired, moon-faced love.

And his own closed eyes. An inch away. A centimeter. He can make it from here.

Now let’s pull back up, about a hundred stories or so, staying focused on the furor below:

The ring of memorial mourners, hawkers, gawkers, spinners.

The raw red wound around which they gyre, clockwise, counterclockwise.

The crazy whirl. The void within.

There’s our mission.

Awake our twin.