Introduction

Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a burgeoning New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in the summer of 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George has fallen into a coma, control of the company has been wrenched away by a military contracting conglomerate, and Fred has moved back in with his parents. Broke and alone, he's led by an attractive woman, Mira, into a neurological study promising to give him "peak" experiences and a newfound spiritual outlook on life. As the study progresses, lines between the subject and the experimenter blur, and reality becomes increasingly porous. Meanwhile, Fred finds himself caught up in what seems at first a cruel prank: a series of bizarre emails and texts that purport to be from his comatose brother.

Moving between the research hospitals of Manhattan, the streets of a meticulously planned Florida city, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the uncanny, immersive worlds of urban disaster simulation;  threading through military listserv geek-speak, Hindu cosmology, the maxims of outmoded self-help books and the latest neuroscientific breakthroughs, Luminarium is a brilliant examination of the way we live now, a novel that's as much about the role technology and spirituality play in shaping our reality as it is about the undying bond between brothers, and the redemptive possibilities of love.

"Luminarium is dizzyingly smart and provocative, exploring as it does the state of the present, of technology, of what is real and what is ephemeral. But the thing that separates Luminarium from other books that discuss avatars, virtual reality and the like is that Alex Shakar is committed throughout with trying, relentlessly, to flat-out explain the meaning of life. This book is funny, and soulful, and very sad, but so intellectually invigorating that you'll want to read it twice." ? Dave Eggers

"This fascinating, hilarious novel, though set in the past, is the story of the future: technology has outlapped us, reality is blinking on and off like a bad wireless connection,  the ones we love are nearby in one sense, but far away in another. Yet at the book's galloping heart, it's the story of what one man is willing to go through to find?in our crowded, second-rate space'something like faith. This novel is sharp, original, and full of energy?obviously the work of a brilliant mind.? ? Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

Picture yourself stepping into a small, cuboid room. In the center

squats an old recliner, upholstered in black vinyl. To the chair’s back

is affixed a jointed metal arm, possibly on loan from a desk lamp. At

the end of the arm, where the bulb and shade would have gone, hangs

instead a sparkly gold motorcycle helmet, a vintage, visorless number

with a chin strap.

“It’s safer than it looks,” the woman standing beside you says, with an

edge of humor. Her eyes and hair verge on black, her skin on white. Her

voice has a hoarseness you might associate with loud bars and lack of

sleep, but other things about her—from her black skirt and blouse to her

low, neatly fastened ponytail—suggest alarm clocks and early-morning

jogs. Her name is Mira, short on the i. Mira Egghart.

Safe isn’t the first word that comes to mind. A dozen or so symmetrical

holes have been bored into the helmet’s shell, and from each of these

holes protrudes a small metal cylinder, and from the top of each cylinder

sprouts blue and red wires, forming a kind of venous net over the hemisphere.

That first word might be demented. Or menacing. The thing has

the look of some backroom torture apparatus, slapped together from

junk on hand with the aid of a covert operative’s field manual.

“Have a seat,” says Mira Egghart.

Maybe you’re thinking better of it. This could be your last opportunity

to blurt apologies and flee. But just suppose that things haven’t been

going well for you lately. Assume, for the sake of argument, that in fact

things have been going very, very badly. I hesitate to say how badly. Let’s

say you founded a company that has more or less been stolen from you,

and now you’re just about broke. Broke and alone. Having split with

your fiancé months before. And that these circumstances barely even

register because someone very close to you has been losing a battle with

cancer. Or has slipped into a coma. Perhaps this person is your business

partner. Your best friend. Your brother. Your identical twin. Let’s go for

broke and say all of it, all the above, and that the thought of being back

out on the busy midday sidewalk—among all those people with places

to go and lives to lead—is enough to make the air turn viscous in your

lungs. Allow for the possibility, too, that—God help you—you’re already

a little bit into this Mira Egghart.

Presto. You’re Fred Brounian.

Or who he was then.

Fred Brounian sank lower in the chair than he’d anticipated. The

springs were worn. A tear in the vinyl ran along the inner wall of one

of the arms, bleeding yellow foam. He was facing the door, and next to

it, a rectangular window set into the wall, which he only then noticed.

Behind the glass lay another room, smaller still than this one, just deep

enough to fit two office chairs at what must have been a shallow, shelflike

desk supporting the two flatscreen monitors whose backs he could

see. As he watched, a tall, thin, sixtyish man with a gray Roman haircut

floated into view, like a walleye in an aquarium. The man eyed Fred

impassively over the straight edges of a pair of half-frame reading glasses

slightly wider than his head. Then the man, too, lowered himself into a

chair, sinking behind the monitor and out of view.

“We’ll be watching over you the whole time,” Mira Egghart explained.

She crossed to the other side of the recliner, taking a plastic jar from a steel

serving trolley. “I’m going to stick some electrodes to you. They’re just to

record brain waves and vitals. I’ll have to apply a little gel for conductivity.”

She confronted him with a glistening dollop on her fingertip, and

proceeded to rub cool spots of the stuff onto his temples and the center

of his forehead. Silvery rings adorned at least three of her fingers, moving

too fast and close for him to get a good look. After gelling each point, she

reached down to the table for a poker-chip-sized white pad and stuck

it on. Her eyes avoided his as she worked, darting instead around the

various features of his cranium.

“Undo the top two buttons of your shirt, please.”

She counted down the ribs from his clavicle with a sticky fingertip,

dabbed more gel, and painted a tiny, wet spiral over his heart. Her hair

smelled like freshly opened apples and something ineffable—dry ice,

he thought—one of those dizzying alchemies of hair product research.

From the degree to which she was leaning over him (he counseled him-

self not to look down her blouse), and the slight squint in her eyes, he

thought she must be nearsighted. The wrinkles at the corners suggested

she was around his age, mid-thirties. Her nose, though not indelicate,

had a slight finlike curve to it, which taken in combination with those

dark, peering eyes, gave her the slightly comical look of an inquisitive

bird. He wondered how many condemned men, as they were being

strapped into electric chairs, had spent their last moments checking out

the ladies seated among the witnesses.

She reached up and pressed the helmet onto his head.

“The session will last twenty minutes. All you have to do is sit back

and relax. Let’s get you reclined. The lever’s on the right.”

He did as told, window swinging away, ceiling swinging into view.

Directly above, in the firmament of perforated tiles, a poster of a spiral

galaxy had been taped. Mira Egghart’s upside-down head, like a wayward

planetoid, floated into view.

“You probably won’t want to, but if you feel you need to stop, just

say the word—the helmet has a mic attached. Or if you can’t speak, just

wave. Please don’t handle the helmet yourself.”

If I can’t speak . . .

She left the room, switching off the light. The instant she did so the

air grew swampy and his skin prickled. These days, Fred didn’t like the

dark, nor any hint of confinement. He could turn his head only slightly in

the helmet, but by keeping his eyes trained down his face, he was able to

see Mira now standing in the control room. She leaned forward over the

desk, reaching up toward the top of the window, her blouse taut against

her breasts and lifting to reveal a glittering stud in her navel as her fingers

clasped the pull of a black shade. She brought it down in one quick

motion, after which, just above the window, a dim red bulb went on.

As best he could with his head immobilized, Fred looked around

the room:

Steel trolley.

Jar of gel.

Red bulb.

Blacked-out window.

Galaxy wheeling above.

Ten days prior, an email had popped into Fred Brounian’s inbox:

Subject: Help, Avatara

From: George Brounian

He was at his usual booth in the cafeteria of the old Tisch Hospital

building, worlds away from the NYU Medical Center’s ultramodern lobby

and newer additions. It was lunchtime, the stink of gravy unwholesome

in these antiseptic conditions. If the place were really working the way

it should, he always thought, those microbial mashed-potato mounds,

along with everyone scooping them into their mouths, would have been

sprayed with disinfectant and swept down some chute with a biohazard

sign on the door.

As talismans against being thus expunged, the doctors and nurses

had their lab coats and scrubs and ID badges. Long-term visitors had

to improvise their defenses. At the table to his left, the woman with eyes

permanently blasted from crying had her stainless-steel knitting needles

and chain-link fences of pink and fuchsia yarn. The old guy in the threepiece

suit (the same one every day, with what looked like a chocolate

pudding stain on the vest) had his table-wide gauntlet of stock listings

(in search of the magic buy or sell that would pay his wife’s hospital bills,

Fred imagined). Fred himself, whenever he claimed a booth down here,

would swing open the barricades of his briefcase lid and laptop screen

with the authoritative air of a doctor sweeping the curtains around a sigmoidoscopy

patient. He, too, had his daily examinations to perform—

his tentative probes up the asshole of the cosmos, trying to figure out

what this unrelenting shitstorm showered down on him and his fellow

hapless sentients was all about, and whether there might be any effective

way to treat it.

On the day in question, six months to the day since George had been

wheeled through the ER doors, and three months, more or less, since a

team of IT workers had mercifully stuck a wireless router to the cafeteria

wall (visitors couldn’t websurf up in the wards), Fred had been reading

an online article by an MIT professor who claimed that the universe

was a giant quantum-mechanical computer, computing every possible

occurrence in parallel, spawning exponentially expanding infinitudes of

alternate realities at every moment—this particular reality being only

one decoherent history in this unfathomably vast multiverse of the possible.

He’d managed to find the hypothesis somewhat consoling, as it

seemed to imply that he had other twin brothers out there, an infinite

number of George Brounians, a portion of whom, by sheer statistical

necessity, wouldn’t be at this moment lying wrapped in tubes and wires

like some fly bound in spider silk, waiting to be eaten. He’d been half

entertaining the idea of leaning over to impart this happy news to the

knitting woman, when it struck him that there would also be an infinite

number of people whose parallel lives were more or less the same, and

an identical number whose lives were somehow worse. Picture an infinite

number of Fred Brounians, sitting in an infinite number of hospital

cafeterias, pawing an infinite number of five-day beards, contemplating

an infinite number of Fred Brounians, when in comes an email from

their comatose twin.

The body of the message was blank. The subject heading meant little

to him. Avatars—computer ones—were a regular part of their business.

There was also a mystical connotation, he was pretty sure, some kind

of god or apparition or something. Some of the less socially equipped

programmers in the office had been following an animated series called

“Avatar” on Nickelodeon. No other references immediately came to

mind. As for that final a, Fred didn’t know what it signified, though it

rounded out the word rather nicely. As for his brother’s name in the

sender heading, it might not have fazed him—after all, the message must

have been a server glitch, or a bit of viral marketing malware—were it

not for the word “help.” There were all too many reasons George could

need help at any given moment. One poorly propped pillow and his

air passage could be cut off. A little vomit or even postnasal drip could

asphyxiate him or slide down and infect his already damaged lungs.

Dozens of things needed to be done for him every day, and any lapse of

attention could result in his death. Not that Fred believed there could be

any connection between this email and a medical emergency. But there

he was, dazedly heading for the elevators.

He found George much the way he’d left him an hour ago, lips in that

leftward droop, head tilted to the same side.

He touched George’s shoulder. Spread open one of his eyes. Which

tracked nothing.

“Dude. You’ve got something to say to me, say it to my face. Hey.”

He tickled him. He knew the spot, of course, side of the ribs, a little to

the front. The slightest of flinches. Not even.

“Something happened?” asked a nurse, poised for a miracle.

He told her George had sent him an email. She thought this was funny.

He stayed with his brother for a while, doing the usual, massaging

George’s hands and feet to aid blood flow, smoothing the sheets to prevent

wrinkles from chafing his skin and giving him lesions, holding up

one end of a one-ended conversation, asking him what the deal was,

joking that next time he should have the courtesy to write more than a

subject line. Fred tried to keep it light around George, when he could. He

wanted the world to seem like a place his brother might care to revisit.

He was helping the nurse log roll George into a sling scale for the daily

weight check, when, with a jolt, he realized he’d left his laptop downstairs.

If it was gone, there’d be no affording another. He darted into the

hall, slalomed around gurneys, jumped down flights of stairs, reaching

the cafeteria just in time to see someone making off with it, with his

whole briefcase—a woman in a dark blouse and slacks and pulled-back

hair, heading for the exit. He was charging at her, about to call out, when

he got a line of sight on his table, and saw his own briefcase and laptop

just as he’d left them.

The woman, meanwhile, set down that other briefcase on a booth

wall, popped open its gold clasps, and extracted, with silver-ringed fingers,

a sheet of sky-blue paper and a roll of tape. He wondered—briefly,

nonsensically, he was tired—if the briefcase might be George’s, if the

woman might know him. Women never carried these big, boxy kinds,

and George, too, owned one of them; George had bought Fred and

himself a matching pair, their monogrammed initials the only difference,

ten years ago, when they’d started their company. The style had

been outdated even then, but that was the point—George had hoped

the old-school captain-of-industry look would help them feel more

CEOish. Returning to his table, Fred continued watching the woman.

She approached the bulletin board slowly, yet once there, attacked with

swift rips and fingerstrokes of the tape, then stepped back to regard her

handiwork, a little wide-eyed—proud, if still overwhelmed by the enormity

of what she’d done. Then she blinked, and spun, one hand shutting

the briefcase, the other pulling it after her out the door.

The old man licked his finger, and, with such slowness as might stop

time itself, turned a page of newsprint.

The knitting needles click-click-clicked.

After staring at the mysterious email a while, peering into the empty

pane where the message should have been, Fred looked up avatara on

a couple of reference sites. A Sanskrit word, literally meaning “descent,”

referring to incarnations of Hindu gods. Or, more generally, the descent

of the divine into the form of an individual. The avataras were innumerable,

legend went. Whenever there was imbalance, injustice, or discord,

they would appear to set things right.

The coincidence of the email’s arrival on this half-year anniversary

made him wonder if it was a prank of some kind. Probably not. Who

could have been ghoulish enough to send it? Whoever it was might

have known George, though. Avatara was the kind of word he would

have loved using, though Fred had never heard him use this one specifically.

George had been into such stuff—mudras and bandhas, siddhis

and miracles, an inner world he could care about, Fred imagined, precisely

because it was in no way existent, in no way subject to any law or

whim other than George’s own. Not that George ever found any answers

that really worked for him, or did so for long. Perhaps because his twin

tended toward idealism, Fred had become more specialized in doubt. It

didn’t exactly translate into practicality as often as he would have liked;

yet until recently, he’d prided himself on not being the type to sit around

thinking about God’s great plan for him, or even to sit around researching

the possibility that the universe was a giant quantum-mechanical computer.

Or to nearly tackle some woman for carrying George’s briefcase

(still calling it that—George’s briefcase—in his mind). Or to daydream

about avataras—what would they look like?—descending to hospital cafeterias

from the pure blue sky.

He’d been gazing off at that square of sky-blue paper for several minutes.

At last he walked to the bulletin board. His first reaction was to laugh,

silently. Not so much a laugh as an imagined laugh. His own, or George’s.

They had the same laugh, and these days, even in the simulations in his

head, it wasn’t always easy to tell them apart. Sometimes the solution was

for the laugh to replicate and divide, so that it was both of them, virtual

George and virtual Fred, sharing a laugh at this so-called study.

Do you feel . . .

Your life is without purpose?

Your days are without meaning?

There’s something about existence you’re just not getting?

Are you . . .

Agnostic??

Scientific study

George’s laugh was delighted at what seemed to be a developing

theme of the day. Fred’s own was just grimly amused. The word agnostic

made him suspicious. Some kind of Scientology pitch, probably. But no,

his Inner George was saying, look at that.

The smaller print at the bottom: Department of Neural Science,

New York University. Followed by a Web address. The pedigree made

Fred curious. He returned to his laptop and typed in the URL. A page

appeared, dense with text:

Among the healthful psychological qualities associated with individuals who

describe themselves as having experienced a “spiritual awakening” are:

• A sense of well-being and connectedness in the world.

• A sense of “being in the moment.”

• A sense of union with a “higher” force.

• A sense of calm detachment from everyday difficulties.

• A decrease in negative emotions such as anger and fear.

• An increase in positive emotions such as compassion and love.

By reproducing the “peak” experiences commonly associated with spiritual

awakening, this study hopes to help participants change their long-term

cognitive patterns, leading to enhanced self-efficacy and quality of life. It

should be stressed that these sessions will not involve religious indoctrination

of any kind.

The treatment, the site went on to state, involved visualization exercises

as well as subjecting the brain to mild but complex electromagnetic

impulses, the effects of which were not thought to be harmful or

permanent. Possible short-term side effects included nausea, dizziness,

and disorientation. No known long-term side effects, but as with any

new area of research, risks could not be ruled out. Those selected would

be paid fifty dollars for each of four weekly hour-long appointments,

and some follow-up interviews over the ensuing months. At the bottom

of the page were links to articles about other studies: one finding that

church attendees had stronger immune systems, while those without a

spiritual practice suffered the stress equivalent of forty years of smoking;

another concluding that people of faith exercised more.

I’m not really thinking about this, am I?

I believe you are, Freddo.

He closed the browser window, determined not to be. But staring

into the blue light of his screen, he began reconstructing the woman’s

face. And that doppelganger briefcase sailing out of the room. Fifty bucks

for an hour’s work, he thought. He was here at the hospital all the time

anyway. If the study were here, too . . .

Even with these reflections, he’d never have returned to that website

were it not for those other reasons, harder to explain, even to himself:

Because if George were the one sitting here, he—George—would have

done it in a heartbeat. And because a sizeable part of Fred wished it

were George here instead of him, felt it should have been. And because,

clicking on the link and filling out the questionnaire, Fred was able to

feel what George would have felt—a peculiar, tense electricity in his

chest and limbs, as though the study’s purported electromagnetic signals

were already coursing up through the keyboard. Like the onset of

panic but without the nausea. Like the opening hole of despair but more

like hunger. A sensation so long unfelt he couldn’t straightaway place it

as hope.

Ten minutes had passed, and if there was one thing Fred was now sure

of, it was that this fright wig of a helmet didn’t do a damned thing. It

felt just like any other helmet—padded, close, and hot. He couldn’t feel

anything resembling a current, couldn’t hear anything but, possibly, the

slightest hum, coming from somewhere behind the chair. From beyond

the room came other faint noises: footfall on the floor above; a distant

siren’s wail, trailing off so gradually it seemed never to fully end. The

shade was still down, the observation window black. What was the use

of having an observation window, if all they did was drop a shade over it

when the experiment began?

The experiment.

That word had never been used, of course. “Study” had so much more

reassuring a resonance, to the studied and studiers alike. But what was

it they were really studying here? The whole deal must be a sham of

some kind, he decided, one of those power-of-suggestion-type experiments,

an elaborate sugar pill administered to see whether the patient

might be suggestible enough to effect his own spiritual transformation.

He berated himself for not trusting his instincts and bolting the

moment he’d seen the suite’s tiny reception area, little more than a widened

hallway beyond a door off the elevator bank, into which a coat rack

and a couple of classroom chairs and a metal desk had been crammed.

The desk had nothing on it—not even a phone—and no one had been

sitting behind it. But he hadn’t been able to face the obvious. Sure. The

quirkily hot science nerd chick with the vaguely erotic gel rubdown, the

bespectacled wizard in the control room, the seven-page questionnaire

and three-page liability waiver—all verisimilitude enhancers, avenues

of suggestion-delivery. This gaudy piece of junk on his head—nothing

but a stage prop. Fifteen minutes now, it must be, and nothing. Who

knew, maybe they didn’t even expect him to imagine any experience

here; maybe they were testing something else altogether, like how long

a person might submit to sitting here like some mental defective in a

Burger King crown, waiting for his divine purpose to be revealed.

How dare they.

How dare they take advantage of desperate, unhappy people like

this. He was a second away from ripping the piece of crap off his head,

leaping out the chair.

Then what?

How about picking up the aluminum trolley and driving it through

the goddamned window?

Then what?

Where to then? The coma ward? The office of his ex-company? His

parents’ apartment?

The lava cooled in the pit of his chest. Expanding his lungs around

that congealed lump seemed more effort than it was worth. What was

the point? So sad it was funny, even, imagining he could shuffle in here

slope-shouldered, head under a cloud, and stride back out transfigured,

head poking above said cloud, bathed in epiphany. Funny/sad/

maddening. The combination was exhausting, and before he knew it

he was drowsy, drifting off, half in pain, half in pleasure, to a sound in

the room he hadn’t noticed before: a faint and, now that he was attuned

to it, almost painfully high-pitched tone. Sometimes, lying in bed late

at night, he’d hear small, insistent noises like this burrowing into his

ear. This tone, though, wasn’t a single note but an interval, possibly a

major seventh. There was a smell in the air, too, like wet earth and ozone,

and the sound was broadening and flattening out, sounding first like

applause. Then like escaping steam.

Then like a shearing of machine parts—a hot little saw burning from

the front to the back of his skull.

And here he goes, seeping out into the room.

No difference between his sweating palms and the sweating vinyl

of the chair. Between the compacted springs within the chair and the

tensing and relaxing of his muscles.

The helmet pulsating within him like a second scalp. The charge of

its net of wires his own hair tousling in a breeze. The chair beneath him

an internal pressure, the frame and stuffing the weight of his own bones

and innards. Air and time alike circulating within him. The high electric

whine: within him. Like a voice. Like a pulse. Like a single, continuous

thought, a focused point of attention expanding, carrying him outward

in all directions. The galaxy approaching, as if he might contain it all,

every last thing everywhere, but for the fear, rising up like an arm to pull

him back.

Maybe he moans, or maybe it’s the electric sound, sliding down again

to a low hum and ratcheting like the sealing of a vault, as, with a nauseating

snap, the world presses in:

Hot vinyl crawling beneath his palms.

Helmet crimping his skull.

Reddened galaxy glaring down at him—blindly—like the muscled

socket of an eye.

“So,” Mira said. “How did it feel in there?”

She sat nearby in an office chair, a notebook computer balanced on

her stockinged knees. Fred was noticing, in the light from the standing

lamp beside him, the faint outlines of contact lenses in those dark eyes

of hers.

She was examining him as well.

“Fred?”

“Yes. It felt . . .” He laughed. He shook his head.

“Why did you just laugh?”

“It’s just hard to find the words. I’m feeling a little . . .”

“Disoriented?”

“Spacey, yeah.”

“That will go away soon.”

He felt along his collarbones, the walls of his chest. “It felt like a jailbreak.”

“Oh? How so?”

As he attempted to describe the sensations he’d felt—the expansion,

the freedom, the envelopment of the chair and the air around him—she

began to type without breaking eye contact. Her typing was beyond fast,

more words, he was pretty sure, than he was managing to speak. She

seemed at once excited and intent on hiding her excitement behind a

veneer of objective inscrutability. It was hard to stay focused on what

he was saying. The soft clatter of keys made him hyperaware of being

a test subject. Yet, too, in a tactile kind of way, there was something

delightful about the sound. He could almost feel the little concave buttons

springing beneath his own fingertips, the electrical impulses zapping

through the circuitboard and the nerves of her arms. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. What do you think is the significance of the title?
2. Is this a 9/11 novel? A post-9/11 novel? A post-post 9/11 novel?
3. What do you think of synchronicities? Are they important in your own life?
4. On which side of the science-spirituality divide does Luminarium ultimately fall? Either? Both? Neither?
5. Do you agree with George’s statement that “it’s all military entertainment?” Was he talking only about computer games, or even more than that?
6. What do you think the epigraph means? Fred’s focus in the novel is about “getting real.” Do you think Fred’s understanding of “getting real” is different by the end of his journey?
7. Are Fred’s self-discoveries achieved with the help of the god helmet, or despite it?
8. Is George an angel, or not? Is Fred an avatara?
9. What do you make of the ending? The instruction in the final lines?
10. Would you use a god helmet like this one? If you could design your own, what would it do?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Alex Shakar's web site

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