Luminarium (62 page)

“Mira?”

Within, the recliner creaked for a second.

He eased the door open. She was in the recliner, not reclined, but balled up, her blue-jeaned knees drawn up against an oversized blue sweatshirt. Her head was leaned back, her eyes shut in that too-tight way. The skin beneath them was faintly purple. He was about to tell her he had the backup helmet system with him, safe and sound, but she spoke first:

“I had to cancel our appointment.” Her voice was weary, her eyes still closed. “Don’t you check your messages?”

He sat down in her task chair. “Misplaced my phone.”

Under the lamplight, it looked like she’d been sweating. Her forehead and temples faintly glistened. But the rest of her looked dry. It occurred to Fred he’d seen the light on down the hall. Down toward the helmet room.

“Is that gel? On your head?” he asked.

Mira put her face in her hands.

“You tried it?”

She didn’t answer. Probably, she was just waiting for him to go away.

“Who was monitoring your vital signs?”

“No one,” she muttered, wiping at the gel with a thumb. “I just wanted a record.”

Fred wanted to reprimand her, to tell her he would have helped, if she’d only asked. But she didn’t seem in the mood for lectures.

“Which session did you try?” he asked. But as soon as the question was out of his mouth, he knew. “The one you asked me about yesterday? The near-death experience?”

Her silence told him he was right. She’d chosen that session over the one with the divine Presence itself. He didn’t have to ask which angel she’d been hoping to see. In front of her face, her hands balled into fists. He thought she was about to scream. But then she was pressing her knuckles into her forehead, fighting her lips. They widened, unable to close. Then began to shudder. Then she was heaving.

“Mira, what happened? What did you see?”

She shook her head violently, gasping between sobs. He wheeled closer.

“Did you see … him?”

Her eyes opened, reddened and wild.

“I saw you! Why the
fuck
would I see you?”

She swiped the backs of her hands over her eyes, furious even at her tears. As she took deep breaths, he placed a hand on her shoulder, until she stilled, and stared at it there.

“I don’t understand, Mira.”

“It was just like this,” she said. “Except everything was bright. You were right in front of me. Your hand on my shoulder. You said Lionel was fine. That you saw him. That he sent his love. You said I needed to go back.” Her voice went high and hoarse. “I can’t even hallucinate him anymore. I can’t even picture his fucking face. All I can see is …
you
.”

Her lower lip protruded, ejecting this final word like a sip of sour milk.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” she said.

Then her eyes wandered downward.

“Jesus. What the fuck is up with that outfit? You look like God in some Hollywood feel-good movie.”

“My dad …” He looked away, tugging off the idiotic soaked bowtie and pocketing it. “I do magic shows, sometimes.”

It took her a moment to process this.

“Really?” she asked, reality stitching itself together again.

“Moving right along,” he mumbled. But when he looked back at her, she was still studying him, a trace of amusement creeping onto her flushed, tear-smeared face.

“
What?
” he said.

“I used to love magic shows when I was a kid.”

“I pity you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. Forget it.”

They sat in silence. She sniffled.

“Do a trick,” she said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t have any on me.”

“Oh.”

Mira wiped her eyes and nose with her overlong sleeve. Fred thought of the school photo of her on that wall of pictures: a round-faced five year-old, the death of the blond boy in the next frame, and every other disappointment large and small, as yet unimagined.

“Looks like you’re out of luck. No tricks. Just this thing.” He took a matchbook-sized aspirin case out of his jacket pocket and gave it a shake. “Only one aspirin left, at that.” He put a hand to the side of his head. “Man, those kids gave me a headache. I guess I’ll have to make this one tablet last.” Opening the case into his palm, he revealed an aspirin the size of a hockey puck.

“How’d you do that?”

“Do what?” He was feeling around in his pockets again, bringing out a bubble-blowing kit. “Oh well. Not a trick. But maybe it’ll keep you entertained.” He handed it to her, still feeling around.

Cautiously, as though expecting snakes to pop out of it, she unscrewed the top, looked in, took out the plastic loop, and, pursing her lips, blew a stream of bubbles.

He was rifling through his pockets with one hand, swatting distractedly at the bubbles with the other, giving them to her to hold onto—balls of transparent plastic—while the search continued.

He pretended to sneeze, and produced just in time a silk handkerchief from nowhere.

He gazed forlornly at his credit card, wondering aloud if there was any credit left on it. And sighed when, as if in response, it began floating weightless over his palm.

Mira beamed.

Voicing relief, he at last produced a pack of cards. Fanning them out, he told her to pick one. She reached, but the one she was about to pluck flew from the deck and around his body.

He caught the card, thrust it back among the others.

“Oh, never mind,” he mumbled, stuffing the deck away. “Sorry. Nothing’s working today.”

“No?” She laughed. “Not a single trick up those sleeves, then?”

Fred allowed himself to wonder if maybe they’d have time for a dinner and a movie before his arrest. If maybe she’d visit him in prison.

“Why don’t you tell me about what’s up
that
sleeve.” He gestured at her forearm. For a while, she and Fred both regarded it.

“I didn’t want to get out of bed, his last morning on Earth,” she said. “I’d been sleeping late, as usual, like the sloth that I am. Before he left for work, he tried to pull me out.” She lifted her arm to demonstrate, her hand locking around the air. “I tried to pull him back down. We both gave up.”

She traced with her chewed fingernail a sewn-up rip in the cuff of the sweatshirt.

“For the next few weeks,” she said, “I kept imagining I still felt his grip. Once, I even dreamt it. I was out on the street at night, and everything was rising up, the whole city coming apart. And there he was, pulling my arm, and I was floating too. We got up into space and then I woke up.” Her smile faded. “I kept hoping the dream would continue. That I’d find out where we were going, where the city was going. It felt unfinished.”

She began turning a white-gold band on her right ring finger around and around. She must have switched it to her right hand after losing Lionel, Fred thought.

“I told you something about lucid dreaming? It was something I’d read about in school. I started reading more. I taught myself how. It’s not difficult, when you’re driven to learn it. And then I dreamt about him all the time. I took us up to space again. We watched the city remake itself up there and fly away. Then we started going to other planets. He’s a sci-fi buff. I thought he’d like that.” She was smiling again. “We went to a planet with blue trees, a planet with moons on top of moons. They were so vivid. I found it was easier in the daytime. At night I couldn’t control things as well. They could turn into nightmares. Things could happen to him. So I got a bartending job. And I slept in the day. I’d pretty much dropped out of school by then, anyway.”

Her gaze wandered to the snow globe on the shelf, its plastic skyscrapers poking out of the murky, half-evaporated water within.

“At some point we got tired of schlepping around the galaxy, or I did, and we found the city again. It was off at the edge of the universe. It had put itself back the way it was, and built a bubble around itself. No people, no planet, just the city, everything safe and perfect. That’s where we started spending our time. Walking through the streets, hanging out in bars, parks, wherever. But more and more, we just stayed in our apartment.” A small, snorting laugh escaped her. “We cleaned the bathroom. We made the place so clean. And then I’d wake up to the usual wreck.”

She wrapped her arms around her shins.

“Then I started to forget his face. I’d see him for a second, but the next second I’d be alone. Or I’d see a body but no face. Then I couldn’t dream him at all. I don’t sleep much this time of year.”

Unfolding herself, Mira stretched her legs to the floor. For the first time, Fred could read the logo on her sweatshirt:

Gore
Lieberman

“Maybe I do need to rest, though,” she decided.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

She nodded. With a few languid blinks, her eyelids had drifted down. Fred watched her for a minute. There were two questions he’d been wanting to ask her all day. He was about to speak when her eyes popped open again.

“Oh,” she whispered, “I get it.”

“Get what?”

“What that look of yours meant. When I told you I saw you in my session.”

Her own look was full of marvel. He waited, not saying anything. He wanted her to be the one to say it.

“You thought it was your brother! You thought it was George, didn’t you?”

He felt his face freeze. He’d been about to break out in a smile.

A spooked little laugh escaped her. “Do you really think it could have been?”

Fred followed her gaze to the low ceiling tiles. When his eyes came down, hers were waiting. He forced that smile the rest of the way. The answer she wanted.

She smiled too, more genuinely than he did.

“Wow,” she said. “
Wow
.”

For a while, she looked thoughtful. Then, soon, sleepy again. Her eyes, once more, began to flutter.

“Hey, Mira.”

“Uh-huh?” she murmured.

As for his first question, regarding dinner and a movie, he didn’t bother. If she couldn’t tell why else she might have seen his face rather than Lionel’s, Fred knew her answer already.

“That reject session.
Vacuus
.” He took the folded blanket from a shelf above the nightlight and laid it over her. “What did that one do?”

“Don’t really remember.” A dreamy wave of her fingers. “Whole grab bag, I think. Direct brainstem interference. Mirror neuron patterning. GABA activation. Fusiform gyrus inhibition. Mu receptor stimulation.”

“What receptor?”

“Mu?” Her eyes were closed now. “Opioid receptor. It’s a Greek letter.”

That Absence was back, with its unreal wind, an almost audible hiss, like air from an airlock.

“Oh,” he said.

“Could you turn off the light?”

She rolled to one side, turning her back to him. For now, and, he assumed, for good.

After the onset
of George’s coma, Fred had also read an article about how the conscious mind only becomes aware of its decisions a fraction of a second after they’re made. And one about how the sensation of a thinker or doer was a peculiarly organized feedback loop. And personal accounts from mystics of every tradition of having sailed over selfhood’s warped reflection like moons over moonlit puddles. On at least one issue, then, the actual investigators in the realms of spirituality and science seemed to be in lockstep agreement: the self is a conditioned reflex; a needy, greedy concatenation of impulses; a position, ultimately, of ignorance.

He shut Mira’s door gently behind him, and sat at the bare metal desk in the suite’s reception area. Picking them out from among the few remaining coins in his pocket, he laid out the five numbered elevator buttons from the Armation headquarters in a column, 1 at the bottom, 5 at the top. He studied them for a while, like a gypsy reading tea leaves, then opened the camping pack and regarded the solenoids and wires peeking out from the nest of the sleeping bag. In the last month, he’d gone from seeing God as a dream, to seeing the world as a dream, to glimpsing that he himself might be the dream. It seemed he’d failed as an avatara, failed to set anything right. But one battle remained, a taunt from the Vortex, an invitation to dive down its very center.

Vacuus.

Her father had said it was going to eat his soul ….

Maybe the plan was insanity. Maybe, as well, Fred thought, he’d never been about getting real. Maybe all his problems in life had stemmed only from an idealism even more hopeless than George’s—for if it was crazy to have faith in faith, how much crazier to have faith in doubt? And maybe it was the case that he’d sacrificed everything he’d had to the ghost of George, and that he was about to sacrifice everything he was to this other ghost of Truth.

But maybe not. Maybe, from the darkness of the magic hat, Truth itself—pure, shining, unobscured by this flailing virtual self—was just waiting to be pulled into the open.

In which case, this was it. Time to get real, for real. Or at least, as Manny would say, not
not
.

Though just in case there was an easier route to enlightenment, Fred took out his laptop, plugged into a coiled Ethernet cable by the desk, and went to
kenshopictures.com
. A new link blazed in the center of the page: