Luminarium

The story begins in New York in the summer of 2006, closing in on the fifth anniversary, which for me marks the beginning of the end of the post-9/11 period. The hero, Fred Brounian, is on the verge of losing everything. After 9/11, financial backing for his virtual world software company dried up, propelling him into a bad business agreement with a military contracting conglomerate. Now, his company has been swindled away from him. His fiancé has left him. He’s lost his swank high-rise apartment and has had to move in with his parents. His twin brother—his best friend and business partner—lies dying in a cancer-induced coma. And he’s being harassed by prank emails claiming to be from said comatose twin. These events, and loneliness and desperation, propel him into a neuroscientific study in which “peak” spiritual experiences are induced artificially by means of an electromagnetic helmet.

During the writing of Luminarium, I felt I was following the story’s needs and joys rather than imposing any will of my own; in retrospect, however, I can see that Fred’s story was in certain ways my own. While I wasn’t by any stretch a 9/11 “victim,” I too had been impacted by the event in certain ways. I think my experience, to a greater or lesser extent, accorded with that of a great many others, not only in New York but around the world, everywhere that anyone was feeling the repercussions of the changed world. I observed, at times with shell-shocked detachment, at other times with disgust, how everyone was scrambling to reposition themselves, to get out in front of the new order, to adapt, simply said, to cash in, with American flags or military entertainment software or 9/11 novels or whatever. I saw this in everyone from artists to pundits to businesspeople, this blind march to a tune beyond anyone’s control. I saw it in myself. Inevitably, my disgust became Fred’s own.

My questions became: How do we deal with a changed world, with a universe that one day seemed with us and the next seems to turn against us and oppose us at every turn? And to what extent are our beliefs—our inner narratives of victimhood, of divine contracts, of ideological rightness—themselves to blame for the sicknesses of the world? To what extent are our very selves our own?

The search for the answers to such questions ultimately becomes a spiritual one. For Fred, an experimental god helmet is the all-purpose tool for taking apart his experiences and building his existence anew. For me, there have been a few such tools, but the main one of the last few years has been Luminarium itself.