Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  “That’s so…” But the “incredible” never came, despite it being written all over her face. Instead, perched on her lips was, “Gilda—the farm wench from the Sunrise Diner. What’s up? You couldn’t please me by being who you were, so you just ripped off these personalities from other people?”

  “It’s not like that,” Spence protested meekly, the old him resurfacing.

  “All this so you can spend even more time around me without wearing me out? Who are you outside of your obsession? Are you even a real person, or just a stack of borrowed neuroses and character traits that really don’t fit together?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Then show me something different!”

  Spence stormed to the sofa and planted himself there, arms crossed firmly, and pouted. He was mad as hell at her, but the truth was he didn’t know who he was outside of those things.

  Throwing his voice to the kitchen, he said, “I think we all have to settle for mismatched neuroses until we grow into real human beings, and we shouldn’t expect it to happen overnight. At least that’s what my psychiatrist says. And he’s Buddhist. So there!”

  “I was wrong about you being a romantic fool,” she shouted back from the kitchen, mouth half full with salad. “You’re just a fool!”

  “Oh, and he says boosting my anxiety is no way to get me to come out of my shell. I’ll likely just grow some whole new neurosis.”

  “I should be so lucky,” she mumbled.

  “I heard that!”

  “You need to give up women for God,” Victoria said, still eating.

  “I’ve heard not one convincing reason I should join the priesthood at this time.”

  “Only God has the patience!”

  “Stop talking with food in your craw. I’m the one who has to eradicate that mess.”

  “How could I forget? The ever-groveling worm. Well, come in here and grovel!” He heard her spill the salad bowl onto the floor. “Make sure the linoleum is licked clean by the time I get back. Make sure there’s no sign of you in the entire apartment. And then just throw yourself out with the rest of the excess baggage in my life.” She stormed out of the kitchen, grabbed her jersey. “I’m on a spiritual diet of no more fools!”

  “Maybe if you weren’t so in to yourself, I wouldn’t have to be all over you like a damn woodpecker hammering to get at what’s inside.”

  Victoria never said another word. She just exited the apartment, never to return. She stepped headlong into traffic, and was instantly run over. As her legacy, she left him convinced he’d driven her to it.

  He remembered thinking, the more he tried to get over himself for her, the more messed up in his head he got. He thought he’d exhaust himself trying so hard. But he never did.

  Maybe if he’d lived longer. Maybe if everyone weren’t in such a damn hurry for him to get over himself. God knew, he was nothing if not determined. And he had the support of friends. He would have found his way through the maze.

  God damn it, if Hartman had given him half a chance! If there had been just a little more patience and kindness in the world. A little less rush to get to the punch line as much as the finish line. One more person to believe in him. A few more folks to laugh over his own silliness, until, like soap bubbles, the laughs washed the grime off his soul.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Murray stepped back from the monitor featuring Spence's crushed skull. “He comes in here and tries that shit on me, I'll mount his head on the wall, use his feet for antlers!”

  With a deep breath, he capped the erupting volcano of emotions so he could focus on what needed doing. He picked up his cell phone. When he couldn’t get a dial tone, he tried texting the number Winona had scribbled on the card, hoping she was within range of a Bluetooth signal. He waited breathlessly for a response from the device. Seconds later he got back, “Message failed.” He threw the phone so hard it shattered, thinking only then he’d wasted using it as an explosive against Hartman’s face.

  The ever-thoughtful Winona had seen fit to stock the room with every brand of liquor known to man. He put his current blood alcohol level at about .25, damn near lethal for most people, still a bit subpar for him. But he hadn’t wanted to piss off Hartman by pushing it to where he was slurring his speech, or making his thinking foggy. Now that he needed to stay sharp to stay alive, he figured .25 was just about perfect. Lucky him.

  He canvassed the rooms looking for a weapon.

  He came up short.

  Regarding himself in the mirror, he realized he was still in drag. It dawned on him he could use the hairpins adorning his wig, drive them like ice picks into Hartman’s eyes. He yanked them out and tightened his fists around each one. “Punch, then jab, Murray, punch, then jab.” He aped the gestures. “Come to papa, you piece of shit.”

  Lorie collapsed on the sofa, watched her boyfriend pace like a caged tiger until it was just easier to stare at the monitor. Murray processed all this through his peripheral vision.

  “You saw him kill someone for not being able to rein in his compulsive behavior. But there you go, Sherlock, acting like a windup toy. Just kill us now and get it over with!”

  “By all means, distract him with the getting-over-yourself stuff, while I take these hairpins to his jugulars.”

  “We saw him slip out of the room through a hidden panel. That's what we should be looking for.”

  “You want to play Houdini, fine.” Murray clenched the hairpins tighter. “I'm playing to my strengths. He wants to be a ticking time bomb? Welcome to my world.”

  She buried her face in her hands, so when she parted them, it would be like pulling back the curtains on a whole new her, composed and collected. The calming gesture seemed as effective as settling a stomach ache with a punch to the gut. “I'm telling you, we better get some insight into ourselves, fast,” she said. “Because that's the only way out of here.”

  Hartman emerged through a sliding panel in the wall that locked behind him.

  Murray, going with his initial idea, jabbed at both eyes with the hairpins. Hartman grabbed his hands and squeezed until Murray dropped the long needles. Then he pushed him back. Murray reached for the pins on the floor before realizing how ridiculously he was behaving; he let them go.

  ***

  Robin, Manny, and Winona stopped before a big screen TV in the upstairs living room. Realizing they weren’t going to get to Hartman before he concluded his business with Murray, they studied what was on the monitor.

  Robin’s buttons were getting sorely pushed, having to see Murray made up like a woman and looking completely foolish. It just brought all his misgivings about his wife’s sex change to the surface, just when he needed to push those thoughts out of his mind. He took a deep breath and clenched his teeth.

  ***

  “Okay! Let's talk.” Murray held out his hand as if stopping traffic. “Believe it or not, I think very well from an overheated state. A lifetime of experience.”

  Hartman’s pupils contracted. “I'm listening.”

  “Nietzsche – didn't he take dry philosophical discourse and liven it up with a poetic temperament, marry it to an artistic soul? Didn't the marriage produce something greater?”

  “You're right. You do think better when you're overheated.”

  “So did Nietzsche! That's my point! Some of us need a little more fire down below, if you follow my meaning. Hell, the Latin temperament as a whole is over-boiling.”

  Murray paced and gesticulated more wildly with each lap. “Now, contrast that to the tepid, would-rather-kill-my-grandmother-than-pop-a-vein heritage of the typical WASP. No wonder the world's falling apart and you still can't get a rise out of them! They're genetically programmed to repress their emotions.”

  “The Puritans gave us a little more than that.” Hartman hadn’t thought to use the term WASP on himself in a while.

  “Yeah, workaholism. Best formula for a mindless existence I ever heard of! By the time you get home, you're too damned exhausted to
have a moment's self-reflection.” With more grand gestures, Murray said, “They worked in the fields into their nineties with the robust health of an Amish draft horse! A lot of good it did them. They died as empty-headed as the day they were born.”

  “Your future is looking brighter,” Hartman informed him. “And what about Lorie? It's the end of the line; let's not pretend I could dial up the pressure any more.”

  Lorie fought to restrain her crying. “I'm sorry. I only have a flair for fixing other people's messes! The bigger of a genius they are at screwing things up, the smarter I have to be at damage control.” Lunging at Hartman like a venomous cobra, and pointing, she said, “It may not be the lone wolf path to self-transcendence you're on, but trust me, I'm ten I.Q. points higher up the scale each year I spend with this clown. You want to go breaking up a team like that, go ahead.”

  “I'm not about being smarter, Lorie,” Hartman said. “I'm really not the elitist snob people make me out to be. I just want us all to live life with an ounce more self-awareness.” He put his hand supportively on her shoulder, squeezed. “That's how we really change. And I'm not sensing any willingness to gain any distance on yourself.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Murray blurted. “Give us a second, huh? Lorie, honey, I really need you to get with the program here.”

  “Tell you what,” Hartman said. “Lorie, you tell me how you'd fix that scene in the next room, and I'll let you go.”

  Murray noted how, paradoxically, she calmed down as she focused on Spence's murder scene. “The carpeting, the woodwork, the sheet-rock... You'll never scrub the blood out enough to get around a C.S.I. team,” she said. She let her mind race. “I'd set fire to the place. Just remember beforehand to remove his teeth, any metal in his bones that could make the skeleton identifiable. Any old metal detector will suffice for that.”

  She spoke with the cold-calculated feel of a professional, and it was creeping out Murray—Hartman too, Murray noted in his peripheral vision.

  “You talk like you've done this before,” Hartman said.

  “Of course, I've done this before!” she snapped. “Jekyll here becomes Hyde when he's blind drunk. Personally, I prefer Hyde to this simpering fool.”

  “I can't believe you'd admit such a thing,” Hartman said.

  “Can't you?” She turned to Hartman. “You're right. I'm sick of it. All of it. Our entire life is a broken record, and we couldn't change a damned thing about ourselves if you held us under water until we saw God.”

  “That's rather bleak, Lorie,” Hartman said. “Look at Murray. Five minutes ago, I didn't hold out hope for him, either. But people can surprise you.”

  “I'll say,” Murray said, staring at Lorie in disbelief. He picked up one of the hairpins and drove it up through her nose and into her brain.

  Hartman winced. “That was final.”

  “I wasn't sensing the kind of remorse that drives repentance,” Murray said. “Were you?”

  “No. Can't say that I was. But we really need to work on your hair-trigger temper.”

  Hartman stared into Murray’s eyes as if they were crystal balls that would tell him everything he needed to know. “Be sure not to displace onto others the ugliness you can’t face in yourself.”

  “I’ll soak on that.”

  Murray could tell he was leaving Hartman with an unsettled feeling. Hartman’s mind froze up under the dilemma of what to do with him like film sticking in a projector. But he was making progress. And Hartman couldn’t afford to let his perfectionism taint his objective outlook when measuring his students’ growth. Apparently he had decided to let go of the turmoil; he relaxed back into real time. “Turn around now.”

  Murray turned his back to him. Hartman pressed the lever that let him out of the room. He locked the chamber behind him.

  Murray sighed relief, flopped down on the bed. He lit a cigarette, regarded Lorie’s corpse. “I can't believe you lived for the monster in me. What an absolute ghoul.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Caught up in the full throes of a NDE, Lorie’s mind reeled. She was looking to make sense of her life and her death. With her newfound detachment, she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw. Pity she was in no state to convey lessons learned.

  ***

  Lorie walked in on Murray zealously practicing his tennis stroke in front of the mirror. She panned her head to the grand piano collecting dust and frowned. “Since when do you play tennis?”

  “I love tennis.”

  “We’ve been together a year and not one mention of tennis, not ever.”

  “Our plate was full.”

  “Ah,” she said. “This is like the time you loved scuba diving and those curly cheese fries at Arby’s.”

  “Why do you have to be this way?”

  She sighed. “Fine, I’ll play along. First one to win two sets out of three buys dinner.”

  He plastered her face in wet smooches. “God, I love you. You’re the best girlfriend in the whole world. Have I told you that lately?”

  “Only five times since breakfast.”

  “Lucky you, I’m so forgetful.” He squeezed her upper arms.

  Murray tossed the apartment. In a tote bag fit for genuine tennis stars, he gathered up his workout paraphernalia replete with spare rackets, wrist and head bands, and petite bottles of Evian. “Let’s do this!” he said, and bulldozed a path to the front door.

  ***

  At tennis, Murray played as if he had no recognition of being more than fifty pounds overweight. The perspiration gushed from his insides in mock testimony to the fountain of youth. He dashed from one side of the court to another; he refused to admit he was outmatched, and reveled in every ball returned that should never have found the soft spot of his racket. He whooped it up as if he was winning the match because the next-to-impossible-to-return balls were what made him ecstatic, not the score, which he could hardly keep track of in his hypomanic state.

  When he lost, just barely, because Lorie had no intention of robbing him blind of his ecstasy, he hugged her, nearly squeezing her dry, kissed her on the forehead, and proclaimed, “Now, where do we get something to eat around here?”

  They ate at the Italian ice place. Lorie was determined to rehydrate him before he fell over dead with that dumb blissful look on his face. When she returned with the fourth serving, topped with cerulean fake dye, laced with canary yellow and magenta, the tennis loving Murray was no more. In his place was a bitter, angry peasant soul who possessed nothing and yearned for everything.

  “I think I twisted my ankle.” He groaned. “And I have fluid pooling in my knees. I turned eighty out there on that tennis court right before your eyes, and you just let it happen. They ought to mark you for a serial killer. Just how many times did you kill me on that court? I can barely reach to pick up this ice crush.” He took a drag on the straw and gagged, spit out the slush. “Great. Just add poisoning to the list.”

  She pursed his lips with her hand and gave him a mock makeup kiss.

  “You taste like potting soil,” he balked. He wiped his mouth. “Come on, let’s get out of here, before I tally any more reasons to drop you like yesterday’s news.”

  He threw money on the table for a tip as if they’d been waited on. But since he had no intention of cleaning up after himself like all the other guests, Lorie figured someone would benefit. The sun, baking him after an hour of sitting slurping Italian ice, was feeding his delirium.

  Lorie had precisely no reaction to any of his latest theatrics. She had already diagnosed Murray as a borderline personality, even if he refused treatment and clinical confirmation. And the fact he would cause a saint to murder him inside a week, just made him that much more dependent on her. She was practically giddy from her power over the human tugging at her leash.

  Her biggest worry right now was what this much sugar in his system might do. He had already slashed his wrists three times on her watch. And she was pretty worn out from the tennis; she had no intention of babysitting him thr
oughout the night. In fact, she drove him home, and went straight to bed. Let the bastard cut himself. It was just attention-seeking behavior. If he really meant to do himself harm, he’d learn to cut along the length of the forearm instead of crossways, like a real pro.

  She managed to catnap for a couple hours before his interminable sobbing in the bathroom woke her.

  She walked in to find him with a razor in his hands, bleeding out each wrist inside the bathtub. “You made me do it. You see me falling apart, and what do you do? You go to bed. What a callous bitch.”

  “Tell me all about it, sweetie.” She reached into the portable fridge at the edge of the bathtub and pulled out a bucket of Cashew Chicken. Using the fridge as a stool, she popped a Diet Pepsi and sipped it as she went to work on the Chinese with chopsticks. She had been through so many of these dying diatribes she was quite able to get through them without being the least put out. She pressed the remote on the TV hanging high in the corner of the bathroom—another accommodation to his mood swings—and set the channel to a nature special on BBC America. She muted the show, intent on using the visuals to pacify her throughout his waxing and waning sobs.