Luminarium (63 page)

“HOLE IN NONE”
A NEW FILM BY MANFRED KENT IN THE ZEN DANISH STYLE
***WATCH IT NOW!!!***

Fred put on his headphones.

The film began with Fred in the too-short motorcycle jacket and a rumpled shirt and tie, riding the brightly lit peoplemover in the Universal Studios theme park.

“Who would watch it?” Fred asked the camera, bleary eyes blinking. He vaguely remembered having said this.

An extended tit-and-ass montage ensued, ending with the synchronized jounce of zoomed-in boobs at Margaritaville.

Next, he was seeing himself staggering through a garden at night, now wearing a suit that wasn’t his. It was George’s suit. It was George’s haircut, too, if wildly mussed.

It was George. From not too long ago. Last summer, Fred thought. George’s final trip to Florida, just after his diagnosis. This must have been the night out with Manny, after George hadn’t been able to go through with his blackmail plan. George stopped, swaying in place. He, too, was drunk. The camera panned through the garden toward what he was looking at: a sculpture of an angel.

Fred again. In the space helmet, in a shaky pool of portable camera light, climbing a chainlink fence. Watching this, Fred’s stomach fashioned a noose from his esophagus and kicked out the diaphragm beneath. Manfred had been with him. And here was the incriminating evidence, freely downloadable to all the world.

George again. The camera was high up, almost directly above him, this time. George deliberated, then reached out and gripped the slope before him, thick with weird shrubs. He began climbing. Off to his left, as the camera swung and righted itself, a sheer stone cliff face, or maybe a wall.

Back to Fred. They were inside now, Fred brandishing the club with both hands, the pigmy city all around.

To George, halfway up the steep slope, starting to wheeze, a wild grimace on his face. His hand slipped and he almost slid back into the darkness. Offscreen, Manfred’s gruff, close-miked laugh.

“Come on, kid,” Manny bellowed.

“I told you I have cancer, you old fuck,” George shouted, slurring the words.

To Fred, on a green. He wound up, nearly toppled from the space helmet’s weight, righted himself, swung. The camera tracked the ball as it rolled up and down the arc of the Brooklyn Bridge, plunking into the hole at City Hall.

To George, nearly at the top of the slope. The camera pulled back for a long shot of the shadowy scenery behind him: a crenellated wall, a Roman temple, pale in the darkness.

To Fred. A new challenge. He swung. The ball rolled up the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, off the roof, and plummeted to Fifth Avenue straight down an open manhole.

George, one hand over the edge. The other. Clambering up and standing. Atop the mount. The gardens and pools and walking paths of the Holy Land spread out below. Off beyond the high wall, an empty parking lot aglow under sodium lights, cars whizzing by on I-4. And George peering out at it all. Stunned by the sight, his head, his whole upper body tilting to the side.

This must have been that moment, Fred thought. The second summit. Infinite Pretalokas. No heaven to be found.

But a few seconds later, George grinned. Then he was laughing, a loud, open laugh, up at the night. It had been years since Fred had seen him so happy. What was he thinking? What was he seeing? How could seeing nothing but limbos make him happy?

Could this also be, Fred wondered, when George’s plan began taking shape? The messages? The sabotage? The haunting of all of them after he was gone?

But his laugh seemed too joyous for revenge, too free.

Why was George free? Fred didn’t understand. He didn’t get any of this.

Now a long shot, from under the arm of the Statue of Liberty, of Fred, a bulbous-headed monster, facing the Towers down.

“Go on,” Manny shouts, close by. “You’re swinging nothing but aces, baby!”

The shot closes in. Fred’s helmet swivels to face the ball. Swivels to the Towers again. The club goes up. Stays up. He’s marching down the green.

“Oh fuck,” Manny says.

Fred spins full circle, bright club wheeling. New York goes kaleidoscopic as Manny starts to run.

You can relax all on your own by now. It’s gotten so easy you barely need me here, barely need me to tell you anything. All you have to hear is

five

and the gates are open. Pretty cool, huh? All you have to hear is

four

and here come those soothing waves of relaxation rolling through you. Go ahead. Splash. Feel them everywhere at once. Torso! Hips! Arms and legs! Neck and head! All I have to say is

three

and—splash—through your fingers and toes, through the tips of your hair, even, your whole body sighing with the pleasure of it. All I have to say is

two

and—splash—waves soaking your brain, like water into a sponge, your mind so relaxed that even this picture of your brain like a sponge is going soft at the edges now. Going gentle and fuzzy and dark. So that at the count of

one

you’re just floating in dark, dark space. City gone. People gone. Just the Earth and the moon, the sun and the stars, and you. Just you and the universe. Maybe you never thought you could be so alone. Yet here you are, so relaxed, and everything is fine. And now you’re going to do something more amazing still. It’s time to let the universe go.

Zoom. Earth going one way. Sun another. Off goes the moon. The zillion stars, like a zillion little candles. Blow them out.

Nothing to grasp. And nothing to do.

No time. No space. So where, so when, are you?

From Mira’s lab that Wednesday night, Fred returned to his former
office. The detectives weren’t waiting for him, but even if they never showed up here, the hedge fund would be breaking down the walls over the weekend. He couldn’t go back to his parents’ apartment, or to the hospital. He’d be picked up from either sooner or later, and in any case he needed seclusion.

So he took George’s pack and bedroll down to the boiler room.

Dried, orange-brown soup still streaked the floor. Not a regular stop on the janitor’s rounds. It seemed possible that no one would come in all summer—maybe not even until mid-fall, to turn on the furnace. In three trips, using the freight elevator and a dolly from the trash room, he moved the mini-fridge, the microwave, the couch cushions, and the cantaloupe box, which he’d filled with Sam’s remaining canned goods and the shower hose.

The only remaining task was to put the Prayerizer, still humming away in his corner of the space, out of its misery. He couldn’t bear to do this without hooking it up to his laptop and checking its prayer list one last time.

There were over five hundred of them. Prayers to have the world healed and prayers to have it done away with in holy ways. Prayers for marriages to be mended, loves requited. Prayers for cancer remissions, for peaceful passings. A prayer for a perfect 1600 on the SAT of one Ken Hwang. More prayers for Fred’s death. And all the way at the bottom, the very first: Fred’s plea to Whomsoever might be listening to for fuck’s sake DO something. All told, the supercomputer had cycled through these REM statements over 303 trillion times.

He yanked the plug, feeling—ridiculously, he knew—like he was cutting throats in church. Within its metal carapace, the internal fans slowed to a stop. He walked out, then turned. The overgrown thing seemed so forlorn in the empty office that he couldn’t close the door on it.

So he took the Prayerizer with him. Using the screwdrivers in his Swiss Army knife, he spent the next hours breaking it down into its movable pieces, carting them down to the boiler room, and reassembling them. It only just fit in the cramped space, its backside pressed at an angle against the boiler, its left rear corner wedged between two water heaters, its right rear corner mashing the pipes along the cobwebbed cinderblock wall. There was no Internet connection down here, but it could keep reciting what prayers it knew.

He realized there wasn’t enough floor space left for the sleeping bag. He set the microwave on the mini-fridge next to the mainframe’s floor fan, used them as stairs, and unrolled the bag atop the giant computer. What with the water heaters and the fifteen billion prayers per minute, it was hot in the two feet of airspace at the top of the room, but the basement was otherwise cool, and by wedging Sam’s desk fan into the pipes that ran along the ceiling directly overhead, Fred kept the air circulating well enough. For a while, he lay there on his side, testing out the berth, staring into the room’s single bare bulb a few feet off. Before long, he became conscious of a slow tapping sound, and a spreading heat on his leg. Hot water was dripping from one of the insulated pipes above him. He tied Sam’s towel around the leak.

At last, it was time to set up the God helmet. The circular blue tops of the two water heaters in the corner by Fred’s head served as his night tables. He placed the helmet itself on a red plush end cushion atop one of the heaters, and the amplifier box and his laptop on a second cushion atop the other. The power cords from the laptop and amplifier and Sam’s desk fan ran in a taut, ugly tangle to a surge protector perched on a pipe halfway down the wall, into which the fridge and microwave and floor fan were also plugged. The surge protector’s own plug ran to an extension cord, which in turn snaked across the floor to the room’s only socket in the corner by the door.

It was early Thursday morning by the time everything was set up. Lying on his back, Fred reached over and brought the laptop on top of him, reached over again and switched on the amplifier. Then took hold of the space helmet, and put it on.

The dusty pipes.

The water-stained cinderblocks.

Breath clouding the faceplate.

His reflected eyes.

Straining to lift his head, making out the laptop’s screen.

Cursoring to the
vacuus
file.

Taking a breath.

Double-clicking …

The deep-space suction
is almost immediate.

Everything inside is pressed to the surface. Until there’s no interior at all. Only the flesh, only the skin. Then not even that, from all body to no body. Nothing but the sight of those fearful, reflected eyes. And a horrible pressure. And, clutching the airlock door, fighting the suction and wind, a single, screaming thought: to pull the cable from the laptop and end this.

But who’s here to hear the thought?

Who’s here to think it?

The
vacuus
session
was repeated several times that day, and several more in the three days following. In between, there was eating, and sleeping, and post-working-hours trips to the bathroom, and a lot of sitting on the floor, on a couple of staggered cushions, lotus-legged, staring at the wall. The sessions themselves shook up all the contents and popped the cap. The sitting allowed what remained to slowly fizz and dissipate.

From Freddom to Freedom.
The thought bubbled up, and floated off.

The surface thoughts were the first layer to come free. They didn’t disperse altogether, but increasingly, in the minutes following the sessions, they became discontinuous enough to allow for a kind of sliding beneath them, and beneath them lay the first, euphoric glimpses of clarity. Looking around, the cluttered little room could be seen anew, from the moist grime along the sides of the green metal doorframe to the orange and green half-cantaloupe printed on the cardboard box. It was all a kind of fantastic, habitable artwork, so luscious that memories of those swank Zerkendorf apartments seemed sterile in comparison. Though it seemed what mattered wasn’t the environment at all, per se, so much as the depth to which it could be dwelt in, moment by moment. Concepts of failure, poverty, squalor, could be watched like gray weather until the sky cleared once more. Concepts of success, security, luxury—these, too, were pale ghosts compared to the specific, brimming spoonfuls of minestrone soup; the playful burble of pissing into a two-liter Coke bottle salvaged from the trash room; even the vivid aches and shooting pains of folded legs in meditation.