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

by Dean C. Moore

  He wiped his eyes. “I can’t go on like this. It’s like walking through mud.”

  “What is?” She kept her eyes on the impressive take down of the bison by the lion. He was barely focused on her, still too full of himself to see past the curtain of tears in his eyes, and so, she felt comfortable, would never notice her distraction.

  “I can feel my blood boiling.” He scraped at his skin as if to peel it away, impotently splashed water on himself. “My head feels as if it will erupt like some volcano.” He scraped his hands up each side of his head. “You see my wrists? I did that to relieve the pressure. That’s all. And still it’s not enough.”

  “Just a lot of psychosomatic symptoms to excuse the fact you have zero impulse control. This way it’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”

  “That’s such bullshit.” He slashed at his wrists with the razors some more. “It’s working,” he said. He studied his wrists up close as they dripped blood. “I feel better the more the blood leaks out. Maybe we should just buy some leeches and keep them as pets, you know? Get medieval on my ass. Save on razors.”

  “And the blackouts, what causes them? Just more psychosomatic nonsense. More get-out-of-jail-free cards you give yourself so you can keep going round and round that game you love to play.”

  “Bite me.” He wiped his eyes, replacing the tears with blood. “You’re such a heartless bitch.”

  “You’re missing it.” Her eyes focused on the TV like a laser pointer. “A pride of seven lions are taking down an elephant that’s way too big for any of them. Nature is so amazing.”

  “And what about human nature? I can’t believe you’re multitasking as I’m bleeding to death.”

  “You’re not bleeding to death, you histrionic bastard. If you really wanted to kill yourself you’d slash your arms lengthwise. This is all theater of the absurd so your audience can wail and carry on and feel all the horror you should damn well be feeling yourself for what you’ve done.”

  “Have it your way.” He took the razor and slit his forearm lengthwise, first the left, then the right.

  “Great. Now I have to interrupt my nature special to rush your ass to the hospital. Now who’s the insensitive bastard? The point of life is to learn something, Murray? Are we learning yet?”

  “What the hell is up with this headache?!” Murray reached for a bottle. He rushed a handful of aspirin into his mouth, saw a purple pill in the mix, and the whole conglomeration was down his throat before he had time think much of it. He was growing foggy from the blood loss.

  “Great, take blood thinners to facilitate your bleeding out. Achieve with stupidity what you couldn’t manage with genuine intent. We’re getting your ass into therapy. It’s time I had some back up.” She wrapped his arms with adhesive medical tape from the medicine cabinet, and assisted him out of the tub. He didn’t fight her.

  ***

  Lorie looked around the circle, counting heads. There were eight of them, not including herself. Chip, the instructor, was a pasty-faced, mysophobic man, who wiped down surfaces and laid down sterile napkins before touching anything, from the snack table and coffee cups and coffee machine to the chair he was currently sitting in, now that everyone was good and sugared up. The sweets were about the last thing any of these mercurial personalities needed. “Why don’t you start us off, Madeline?” Chip said.

  “Hi, I’m Madeline, and I have borderline personality disorder, BPO for short. I cut myself about three times a week, but the doctor says the cuts are getting more superficial, and that’s good. I’ve been hospitalized seven times for hurting myself. My doctor says it’s because I have abandonment issues, and that’s why I push people away with my behaviors. If I sense someone might be pulling back, I overcompensate and destroy any chance of a relationship so I can feel a sense of control, as opposed to that out-of-control feeling I had as a child when my parents abandoned me.”

  “And how has that insight into yourself helped you?” Chip asked. He gloved up so he could hold the hands of those to either side of him in the circle. He had evidently trained the others to do the same, because they reached out to one another in turn.

  “I still can’t entirely stop myself from doing what I do, but when I realize I’m doing it, I go up and I apologize to the person.”

  “You find that helps?” Chip asked.

  “No, not really. People get tired of my outbursts and, after a while, don’t much care what’s causing them.”

  “But that’s good feedback, right? So you don’t get too comfortable with where you are in your growth, and so you keep working on yourself,” Chip said.

  “That’s right,” Madeline said feebly, sounding not entirely convinced she was ever going to get any better than she was now.

  “And what about you, Murray?” Chip asked.

  “This is all bullshit. You’re fooling yourselves, thinking you can change the way you are. You should just go out and get someone like I did to help hold you together. Matching neuroses is the path to happiness. I just found myself a control freak, and now we’re both living happily ever after.”

  Lorie snorted.

  “The fact that Lorie brought you here,” Chad said, “suggests to me, Murray, that’s hardly the case. In fact, to hear her tell it, you’ll be on your own soon enough if you don’t start heading down the self-improvement trail.”

  “So what?” Murray folded his arms. “I’ll go out and find another control freak.” His tone suggested he was trying to convince himself as much as the group.

  “Don’t you see how that robs her of her humanity?” Chip said. “All she is to you is a set of matching neuroses. Nothing about her matters, so long as the diagnoses pair up. And what about you, don’t you want to be loved for something besides your innate slashing ability? Your labile behaviors? Your talent for pushing people away? Don’t you want to know who you are when you take away those things?”

  Murray grunted dismissively. After a long pause, when he realized he was still expected to say something, he said, “This morning I woke up and didn’t feel like hurting myself.” The entire group cheered. “I blame it on that purple pill that got mixed in to my aspirin. If I can just find out what it is, I can keep taking it, and that’s that. Problem solved.” The cheers morphed into groans.

  “I think we all know, Murray,” Chip said, “that meds are just a partial answer. We still have to do much of the work ourselves.

  “Have you heard the theory of the three brains?” He paused not so much awaiting an answer as for emphasis. “We are born with a reptilian brain, the most primitive part of ourselves, but also the fastest moving, a mammalian brain, more evolved, emotional, still fairly fast moving, but not particularly rational. And overlain above these two brains, growing up around them, is our modern brain, rational, but slow moving, slow to intercede.

  “So if we are to ever change our behaviors, we have to interrupt the kneejerk reflexes to our fears and emotions that has us rushing to act, and give the higher brain a chance to intercede with rationales, alternatives, allow it to push away the fight-or-flight impulses we’re having and replace those with more adaptive responses.

  “That’s where cognitive therapy and rational-emotive therapy comes in. We can equip that higher brain with really good tools to boost its effectiveness still further. But step one is cutting the chord to the fear-driven and emotional-angst driven brains in turn, so that the higher brain can engage and lend us more appropriate behaviors.”

  The guy sitting next to Chip took his gloves off as he started to overheat, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He squeezed Chip’s forearm to show support for his profound lecture, violating Chip’s rule banning skin-on-skin contact.

  Chip jumped out of the chair, ripped savagely at this Clorox wipes bottle, and padded himself down until the stain of humanity was gone. The rest of the group stifled their smirks.

  After catching himself, Chip sank back into his chair. “Maybe this is as good a time as any to break
up into practice groups, so we can see what we can do to overcome someone pressing our buttons. I’ll be walking around to keep an eye on everyone. Practice makes perfect, people. Month after month. Year after year. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you don’t have the patience of a saint, you’re not qualified to live life. That’s all there is to it. May as well throw in the towel from now.”

  Lorie thought about it, took a deep breath. She was starting to like Chip. At the very least, he affirmed her own prejudices, which meant he couldn’t be all bad. Respite-care for herself, meditation, yoga, a good book, lots of time-outs from Murray in myriad forms for the moments when none of the other options worked: that would be her formula for success and hanging in there for the duration with Murray.

  And what other choice did she have? Did any of them have? Anyone, spend enough time with them, and it boiled down to the same thing. Maybe less dramatic acts of self-destruction replaced the more overt ones of the Murrays of the world. Lots of little eccentricities in place of a few big ones. Did it really matter? Who wasn’t a complete chore to deal with day in and day out?

  Ignoring all the superficial shit at the surface, the anxieties that blanketed us like acne on a teen’s face, was part of the healing, moreover. If we didn’t look past that in one another, we would never see the truth of who each of us were, and we could never redirect one another’s attention to the God inside. Getting too caught up in surface ephemera just empowered the demons life unleashed on us, instead of encouraging them to leave.

  She resolved then and there Murray was no better or no worse a trial than anyone else she might settle down with. All that mattered was what Chip said, employing better tools to help each other strip away the tarnish. She was majoring in psychology, that was already one very big step in lending herself those tools.

  She questioned everything she thought and did with regards to Murray, to extricate secondary agendas, hidden motivations, and lies she was telling herself. Each day she got better at that, she took her game to the next level, and dragged Murray along to more exalted heights. So long as his intent was to get over himself, that was good enough. If she ever sensed him slacking in determination, this too she could circumvent by pointing his attention to the consequences of his actions, the increased pain rather than pleasure he was inviting on himself, the secondary gains which were poor trade-ins on true joy, until she shook him free of his complacency.

  In the end, even refusal to get over himself wasn’t much of an obstacle—just another false barrier erected by ego to throw off the unsuspecting, the uninitiated, the unaccomplished.

  That just left the questions surrounding the purple pill.

  Had it really taken the edge off Murray? Some miracle drug a big pharmaceutical firm was testing? Would it change everything about him or just curtail the self-harming behaviors? Murray had only mentioned a mitigated desire to slash himself. Even muting his personality down to moody and bullying from the wild borderline extremes, just a ten percent reduction in truly violent outbursts could qualify as a miracle cure.

  Would the purple pill wear off in time? Maybe it didn’t work for everyone; maybe some people developed a natural immunity.

  ***

  “What went on here?” Lorie couldn’t imagine what picture her face painted, even surrounded by all the mirrors.

  Murray rubbed his hands together. “The last thing I remember, someone was calling me a fat Freddie and people were laughing.”

  Lorie examined the aerobics mat and wall-to-wall mirrors on the second floor of the gym, and wondered what she was going to do about the scene. Bodies lay decapitated—others, bloodied and crushed, eight, maybe more. “We need to teach you how to deal with stress better.”

  “You think?”

  She wiped her eyes from Murray’s spittle; he spilled words like he spilled blood. “Well, the good news is you’re learning to externalize your anger; you’re no longer directing it at yourself. I know it doesn’t look like that now, but therapeutically speaking, this is improvement.”

  She sat Murray down and practiced Lamaze breathing with him. The vacant eyes of the severed heads staring up at him from the floor didn’t seem to bother him. He was losing himself to the breathing. Say one thing for him, he was a creature of the here and now, with an ability to lose himself in the moment usually only found in Zen masters. “That’s it,” she coached. “In. Out. Four seconds in. One second out. Push it out hard. Belly breaths. Relax that tummy. Now crush it to the back of your spine. Big abdominal compression.”

  She eyed the aerobics instructor missing her limbs, a dumb smile on her face, like a capsized mannequin that hadn’t survived the Macy’s-flower-day-sale crush. Murray had picked a slice of mirror off the wall to do his handiwork. Workman’s gloves had protected his hands, available thanks to the construction worker who left his tool belt, gloves, work shoes and coveralls on the floor against the wall. The stereo’s booming music, which she had turned down on entering the room, had cloaked the screaming.

  As to why no one had made it out alive to alert the others, it appeared they’d chosen to stay and fight instead, confident they could overwhelm him; they beat on him with whatever was at hand. Dumbbells, step-ups, and wooden yoga blocks were scattered about, some of the victims still clinging to them. If Lorie had been here, she would have told them that Murray in a fugue was not someone who could be stopped with much less than a bullet to the brain.

  Luckily, it was five in the morning on a Saturday. Nothing but the recalcitrant health fanatics at this hour, all sticking to their theme areas and hitting the equipment hard. No one would stray except to the locker rooms for a quick shower before heading out the door to work.

  She led Murray in a side-to-side stretch, bent him over his left leg. His legs were split in a dancer’s wide-second position.

  Yawning, Murray got up and hit the espresso machine in the corner of the dance studio. Gazing at the field of bodies, he said, “You know there had to be one chronically late with his taxes, right? Another one, probable child abuser, scum bag. One still living with his eighty-year-old mother. Kill any ten people, and eight of them will qualify as social work. That’s just the way it is.

  “Now, as for that other twenty percent – I’m genuinely sorry. I’ll have to make amends somehow. I could give fifty bucks to Green Stamps,” he said. He brought the coffee mug to his lips, took a sip. “They still do Green Stamps? Well, Save the Whales then, that’s hardly the point. God, I feel like shit about that twenty percent. But how am I to know, you know, unless I interview everyone ahead of time?”

  “We should leave,” Lorie said.

  “What about the guy at the front desk?”

  “He’s your problem.”

  “Oh no. I’m a pacifist unless provoked. He didn’t do anything to me.”

  “He’s gay. He was checking out your ass.”

  “That’s different. Still, maybe if you can get him to hit on me. It’s not like I can just trigger these things at will.”

  She sighed. “Never mind.” She flicked her hair out of her eyes. “You’re like a mass murderer who still needs toilet training.”

  ***

  Lorie kissed the front desk guy, overwhelming his defenses with shock and pleasure. Maybe she’d been wrong about the gay thing.

  In the middle of nibbling on his neck, she severed his carotid artery by clamping down with her teeth, and pulling back savagely. She cupped her hand over his mouth to stifle the scream, and held it there until the blood loss triggered unconsciousness. Her tight embrace, meant to keep him from squirming away from her, had the pleasing effect of conveying intimacy when he needed it most in his final seconds.

  Murray twisted up his face. “Ghastly. Simply ghastly.” His eyes rolled back in his head. He was going into shock. He wouldn’t remember her intervention. He wouldn’t recall any of her efforts to cover for him. If he did, the memories would raise questions his subconscious was unwilling to answer. Just so he didn’t faint on her. That
would be damn inconvenient in the middle of their getaway. Yep. There he went.

  The gym kept a wheel chair folded up behind the counter for emergencies. She scooted it under Murray as he fell. Their exit wouldn’t be slowed significantly.

  She fixed the computer in the lobby so it didn’t show them coming in, and the DVRs backing up the security cameras before pushing Murray out the door.

  ***

  Lorie explained the situation to the doctor. “When he gets mad, he escalates into a fugue, doesn’t remember anything, and he’s violent.”

  “We have a new procedure,” Dr. Clemens explained. He was old enough to consider “new” anything that happened less than fifty years ago. So Lorie had to give him points for staying abreast of changes in his profession. His wild eyebrows and equally-out-of-control scalp hair subtracted from his air of authority, imparting addleness instead. But right now, Lorie was willing to take lessons from the devil on sainthood. “This breakthrough device promises to be more effective than any drug. A helmet he wears as he sleeps.

  “The EM field encourages neural webs to find new ways to hook up with one another. The idea is: any entrenched behavior will fade away once the brain is given the access to alternate perspectives granted by hooking up one neural web to another.

  “There are different forms of this therapy going around. I subscribe to this version because it’s the least invasive. And it has the additional advantage of encouraging neuronal growth inter-web, not just intra-web. I’m thinking the two together are good for a fifty-point IQ boost, minimum.”