Luminarium (8 page)

Then his face hardened. “Getting real is the bullshit,” he declared. He considered further. “
You’re
the bullshit.”

“Any auditions lately?”
Fred asked, as a matter of principle.

Vartan fiddled with the volume. War in Lebanon. Sunny and cooler tomorrow. High of eighty-four.

“Nah, it’s hell out there,” he replied, as a matter of form. He made a little flutter of his fingers, signifying the dissipation of his career into thin air. “I should’ve gotten a nose job. Should’ve changed my name when I had the chance.”

It had been a very long time since Fred had heard Vartan bemoan his ethnic-ness (upon which he’d arguably built his early career); he was doing it now, no doubt, merely to elaborate the fiction that he was actively, or even passively, looking for work. In recent years, ethnic and nonethnic being somewhat less distinguishable or relevant in the grayhaired Vartan, he had been getting more parts than ever, playing non-ethnicity-specific cops and judges, lawyers and businessmen, innocent bystanders, relatives of the accused, and assorted well-meaning lunatics and senile people. He’d started rehearsals for a long-dreamed-of project, an off-Broadway production of
The Tempest
in which he was to play Prospero, when George was diagnosed.

“Changed it to what?” Fred asked, for the hell of it.

“Something American. Martin Brown. That would’ve been good.”

When the three of them were children, their father had often told George that he was named after George Washington, Sam that he was named after Uncle Sam, and Fred that he was named after Fred of the couple Fred and Ethel on
I Love Lucy
, this having been the single most American person Vartan could think of. Many a night, Fred had lain awake wondering how his life might have turned out had he not been saddled with the name of that dull-witted, bald old man.

A modified pickup truck full of scrap metal cut them off, jammed the brakes, and to salt the wound, sent a cigarette gyring out the window to burst into sparks on the windshield in front of Vartan’s eyes. The Vartan of old would have gone apeshit. The current one’s anger was nowhere, dropped down some deep hole. Barely a
sonofabitch
and a few disorganized blinks. His thumbs, at the F and U keys, rather than pressing, merely caressed.

“So what’ll you do, now that you’re being let go?” Vartan asked.

Fred didn’t move. Though every cell in his body flinched.

“Sam told you that?” he managed.

“Earlier today.” Vartan rubbed the back of his head. “I didn’t want to rattle you before the gig.”

They sat through a longish auto insurance commercial. A longish vocabulary-improvement-tape commercial came on.

“You should go talk to him,” Vartan added, laying a hand on the padded shoulder of Fred’s jacket. “Maybe he can help you figure out how to get back on board.”

“What makes you think he’d do that?”

“He’s your brother. Why wouldn’t he?”

“Because he’s Sam.”

“He’s surviving. You could learn something from him.”

“You think I’m going to crawl back to the people who stole our company and beg for a job?”

“Eat your shit, Fred. Live to eat your shit another day.”

The scrap truck sped into the left lane. In the Escalade ahead of it, a cartoon Batman leapt into action on a flatscreen TV. A pudgy kid watching it in the backseat huffed on an inhaler.

“Anyway,” Fred said, “they’re moving the office down to Orlando before long.”

Vartan smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “Later this month.”

“
This month?
”

“When’s the last time you went in to work? Go talk to Sam.”

“Why would I do that? Even if I could get my job back, I’m not about to leave George alone in that hospital bed.”

Vartan thought. “Could you find a job here?”

Fred thought. “Given time.”

Vartan glanced over. “Would you?”

They listened to George Bush talking up the liquid bomb plot, the news of which had just broken last Friday. Followed by a story about the singer Boy George reporting for his court-ordered community service, sweeping Manhattan streets for the Department of Sanitation. Fred fought down the urge to bring up going to the hospital again.

“If I did go to Florida,” he said, “you couldn’t go on doing these magic shows.”

A kind of laugh escaped Vartan, a short exhalation through his nose. “Sam says there’s plenty of acting work down in Florida for your company.”

“My company.”

“For their military simulations. Playing Afghan warlords. Iraqi sectarian leaders. Suicide bombers.” He sucked his teeth. But a moment later: “Don’t suppose they pay union wages.”

“Not on your life.”

Vartan nodded. He hadn’t been remotely serious, anyway. After George’s illness had begun last year, Vartan had dropped out of
The
Tempest
and the production had fallen apart; and soon after George fell into the coma, their father was back in his undershirt, making cards float out of a deck. Then he was sitting around the Edison Hotel diner, idly disappearing coins and creamers, when an actor friend asked him to do a nephew’s birthday party. Then Vartan was asking Fred how this or that sequence went. Next, they were rehearsing in the living room, both in their undershirts, making milkshakes in each other’s top hats, shredding each other’s newspapers and reconstituting their own. When Vartan had finally made it clear that he really was planning to revive the act, it was with an assurance that Fred didn’t need to join him, that he could just do a version of it on his own, but Fred had been dubious. Even hauling the equipment in and out of the van was probably too much for his father to handle alone.

A story about Governor George Pataki came on. Something about consolation or compensation, but it was too many Georges and Fred had already turned it off.

“Sam says—”

“Tell me, Dad, what else does Sam say?”

The eyebrow hoist. The thumb shrug. “He says we should all move down there. Before New York blows up.”

“Right.”

Vartan’s mustache spread. “All cities are doomed, he says.”

“Right.”

As they neared the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, the Manhattan skyline came into view. Palled by haze, it seemed to take on a shaky transparency, like a slide-show image from some never-to-be-repeated holiday vacation, the projector a relic, the vacationers themselves dead and gone.

Picture it, George instructs, in a noisy East Village bar, over pints at a
dark booth with a sticky table. Their own world. On the Internet.

Fred and Sam try. It’s the summer of 1997.

“You mean, like, with graphics?” Sam says.

Not just a world, a utopia, any number of them, George is saying. He makes a magician’s hand-sweep over the beers, a faded friendship bracelet sliding on his forearm. He’s just in from California, radiates sun and sea spray, his skin burnished, his hair a shade lighter than Fred’s, even a bit wavy. Players could strike out on their own or form larger groups, he’s saying, and everything in one’s borders would be customizable—flora and fauna, tech levels, forms of government, the very laws of physics. Sam rubs his smudged pint glass with a Handi Wipe. Fred turns his cigarette on the ashtray rim, sharpening the ember.

A purer existence, George goes on. The avatars wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty, wouldn’t freeze or get heatstroke, couldn’t be injured or killed. Postmaterial life, he proclaims with a smile. George himself could exemplify “Postmaterial life” right now, Fred thinks, with his yoga, macrobiotic food, loose linen shirt, crazy-bright future. George sits back in the wooden booth, hands behind his head, lounging as if on some beach chair, oblivious to the smoke, the college mob, the Jersey girls at the bar eyeing him—not Fred, not even glancing back and forth between them, Fred observes, torn in the usual way between envy and amazed pride. Weird how Fred’s always been the slacker, at least from the world’s point of view, but somehow George has always been the freer one. Chasing his goals with the grace and absolute devotion of a dog leaping at Frisbees. Whereas Fred, wanting to get real but never quite figuring out what real is, has been so leery of every rainbow he can barely follow them a step. From high school, he floundered from part-time programming gigs to community college stints, interspersed with desperate, footloose jaunts across the country. For the last three years, thanks more to the rising tide of dot-commism than his résumé, he’s been treading water in a low-level position overseeing tweaks to an algorithm designed to predict profitable tech stocks—a dull job, and he suspects the product is working so far only because the NASDAQ is only going up. Sam is in roughly the same occupational hamster wheel as Fred is, slogging away as a system administrator for a stripling city government website; he may be a harder worker than Fred is, but he’s intense and exudes stress and hasn’t risen far.

As for George, after rocketing out of college near the top of his class, he’s done well for himself out West, if maybe not quite so well as the family expected. He was highly paid for his programming and design work at three different game companies, but didn’t stay at any of them long enough to get vested, never finding a project he felt was worthwhile. Anyway, the era is throwing off twentysomething billionaires like sparks from a forge; it’s too much for George to sit at a desk working on someone else’s dream. Because here, finally, is his own. And just think how evolutionary it could be, he’s saying, how the avatars’ immaterial nature could rub off on players over time, temper their baser desires, coax their mindsets up the pyramid steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs all the way up to beauty, truth, self-actualization.

As if pulled by the same string, Sam lifts his glass to his lips as Fred lifts his cigarette. To be sure, George’s vision is starry-eyed. Yet in the nineties, at least for those residing in the valleys and alleys of silicon under the expanding bubble of the boom, it isn’t all that hard to imagine that even the real world is headed this way, that science and peace and the increase of wealth and trade are all ineluctably leading humanity to a not-too-distant future in which every basic human need will be met. In techie circles, bodily immortality itself isn’t thought to be out of the question, even in their own lifetimes. There’s talk of minds uploaded to storage banks, spare bodies hanging like so many suits in a closet. No shortage of resources, no enslavement to the dictates of the body, violence itself a vestigial act without meaning or consequence. Along what new lines will such a culture organize itself? This question, George is saying, is what will make their virtual world at once a recreational activity and something else, an edutainment, a training ground for the next inevitable phase of human evolution, for the postmaterial lives they’ll soon be living for real.

“Urth.” George spells out the word, raises his glass. “Say it with me.”

Fred and Sam exchange a glance, the enormity of what George is offering them—rescue from their stalled little lives—beginning to break through their furtive reserve. In a minute, Fred will be saying it with him, and Sam will too. Before much longer, they’ll be saying it again in a boardroom full of suits and a staggering view of, among the thousands of other buildings sprawled below, the little brown box that will soon house their sunny, lofty office. And, poof, George and Fred will be co-CEOs, Sam a CTO. And Fred will find himself giving in to life, blossoming in a way he’d given up hoping was possible. The dreaded pursuit of success, he’ll find, is only a problem for those still clamoring at the gates. For those who’ve made it in, who are exactly where they want to be, there’s no war, no work—just magic.

But that future is still a few seconds off. For now, he lets George squirm—pint glass hovering in the air, smile getting nervous at the edges—and savors the obvious: George needs him, too.

When Fred finally relents and raises his glass, George cuts him off:

“You’re not going to smoke in the office, are you?”

As it will happen, he’ll kick cigarettes within weeks. Though his response for now: what will seem in memory a never-ending smoke plume, blown in his twin brother’s face.