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

by Dean C. Moore

  “How long, doc?” Lorie said.

  “A few weeks of sleeping with it on, and he should start to see a difference.”

  “Thank God for modern medicine,” Murray said.

  ***

  Two weeks later, it was time to see if the treatment was working. Lorie paid a complete stranger a couple hundred bucks. Explained his part well enough to qualify as his script coach. Promised another two hundred on delivery.

  She convinced Murray to pull the car over somewhere in the Mission District.

  Vince—let’s just call him Vince—got in his face with a bowie knife and started talking shit. “I’m going to peel you, boy, like a grape.” Vince was black and ghetto and played the part of the boogie man for anyone growing up in a largely white neighborhood to a tee. “What you looking at, boy? Close them eyes before I cuts them out.”

  Lorie couldn’t read Murray; his face remained expressionless. After two minutes of verbal abuse, Murray, just as calmly and unshaken as the day he was lobotomized, apparently, reached out with his hand, and ripped out Vince’s windpipe. Vince gurgled wide-eyed before crumpling to the floor.

  Lorie grunted. “So much for the miracle medical device.”

  “I don’t like how it makes me feel – all dead inside.” Murray sported his best zombie persona as he gazed into Vince’s dead eyes, as if to illustrate the point.

  “If you had no emotional response, why did you kill him?”

  “His breath stank, and he wouldn’t stop talking.” Murray gulped the last of his beer, and belched. He squeezed the spent beer can in his hands as if he took more joy in squeezing the life out of it than Vince.

  “Practical, as opposed to emotional. I suppose that’s an improvement. Maybe the helmet just needs tuning.”

  “I’m over it, I tell you.” Murray rolled up the window separating his world and Vince’s. “Too damn uncomfortable. Besides, I don’t drink like I used to.” He ran his hands over his face and hair repeatedly, as fast as he could, trying to invigorate himself.

  “You don’t need to, now that your liver is shot.” Lorie added, as arm-twistingly as she knew how, “What if it’s too soon and you revert back to what you were?”

  “Show a little faith.”

  ***

  Murray fished off the edge of the galvanized boat, regarding the bass jumping just beyond the reach of his rod and reel. Lorie slept with one eye closed and one leery eye on Murray. The sun was formidable, and sent rivulets of sweat down his face. His forehead opened like a Niagara before branching off into the tributaries below his chin that ultimately pooled at his navel.

  Murray, tired feeling the eye strain from staring at the water at a fixed depth below the surface, and the back pain from holding the same hunched-forward position too long, pulled out his gun and shot the fish. One by one, they floated to the surface.

  “Maybe if you saw frustration as a teacher,” Lorie said, “trying to impart to you patience, and an appreciation of irony. How can the virtues teach you anything except by their absence?”

  “I’ll soak on that.”

  Lorie sighed. “You’re like an Evelyn-Wood speed reader who refuses to see the gift of her dyslexia.”

  Lorie knew it was high time she stopped defining herself by the men in her life. But alongside Murray, she felt like the pinnacle of social evolution, waiting not just for him, but for the entire human race to catch up.

  ***

  “When are you going to dump that jerk?” Marinda, taking up a seat across from Lorie at the outdoor café, hadn’t wasted any time. She had just thrown her purse on the table. Her behind hadn’t even hit the wrought-iron chair when the line spilled out of her.

  “I already had this conversation with myself.” Lorie ordered a latte from the waiter, and pointed to the cappuccino on the menu for Marinda. He departed with a nod. “Helping one another to let go of our personal crap,” she said, “is a lifelong enterprise, whoever I’m dealing with. Better the devil I know than the one I don’t. At least I have a head start with Murray.”

  “As bullshit goes, that stuff you’re serving up is primo grade-A. Tell you what, why don’t you leave him for the girl who’s stuck where you were a month ago? And substitute someone who’s a little better at keeping pace with your unfolding? And if you wake up one day and find he can’t keep up, you move out of your little shell, and on to the next, more life-affirming relationship. Just because we all need saving, doesn’t mean you’re the right one for Murray. When you grew up and he didn’t, in fact, I’d argue you stopped being the right person for him.”

  Lorie unfolded her napkin and spread it over her lap. On the surface, she couldn’t refute Marinda’s logic. It was, in fact, why few people chose marriage and monogamy, anymore. The thinking was considerably more modern. And yet— And yet, what, Lorie? Why are you holding on? “Maybe I like the hard cases. Maybe anything less is beneath me. Maybe the Murrays of the world will spend a hundred lifetimes without liberation, awaiting someone like myself to come along. If you’re gifted in your field, it’s a social responsibility to do what only the gifted can do.”

  Marinda sipped at her cappuccino before the waiter could even set it down on the table. “Don’t worry, I’m saving just enough of this drink to throw in your face. Best chance I have of snapping you out of all the sleepwalking.”

  “All right, enough of your bullshit,” Lorie said, smiling. “Time to enjoy how the other half lives.” She thoroughly enjoyed the tales of Marinda’s exploits.

  “Dick and I have been seeing each other for nearly a year now,” she said, “and not one sign of the honeymoon ending. We make each other laugh and cry on cue like a pair of ventriloquists.”

  “All right, you. I want specifics. Tons of specifics.”

  Marinda laughed. “No one but teens deserve to be this in love. Technically, I shouldn’t be able to do it. But the constant attentiveness, the forgetting ourselves in one another, the joy we take in delighting each other… It’s like one sustained hypnotic state, the same fever and delirium of youth. Only, this time—”. She recovered from her reveries after a bit, breathed heavily. “It feels like less of an oasis in the desert.” She sipped her ice-coffee with relish. “I enjoy every flower, every blade of grass, every burnt piece of toast with the same intensity. It bleeds over into everything. I can endure even Professor Mandilor’s prattle, his dusty personality, because he’s surrounded in the same halo. He’s positively endearing to me in ways that would have caused me to yawn before.”

  She traced her finger around the rim of her glass as she might her lover’s lips. “Everything’s a gift, you know, even when Dick’s not there. And there’s none of the old teenage insecurities that things aren’t going to last, that at any minute my lover is going to leave me and I’ll cease to hold his interest. Hell, I’ve endured that with every relationship. But we’re so right for one another, so accepting of one another’s every flaw. We understand the work it takes to sustain this state, the hundred and one things that can ruin it if we let it, and we’re just two old pros that refuse to let it happen.

  “We’ll stay in this state forever because we get that life at full intensity, life lived from this altered state, is what it’s all about. What artists get from doing their work and priests get from communing with their God, we give to one another, and grow stronger from it. You believe me, don’t you? You see how life can be?”

  Lorie wiped her eyes. She did indeed believe her. She had no doubt Marinda could sustain such a state on her own, and that she could just as easily attract another lover made of entirely the same stuff. And Lorie would even credit that this was something other than matching neuroses. Graduate students in love had a right to an easy and fulfilling, even a God-intoxicated life that formerly only saints and sages might hope to access. Lorie realized she, too, could be part of this elite, this one percent.

  But she realized, even more amazingly, that, in her own way, Lorie already had what Marinda enjoyed. For all Murray’s efforts to make
her life miserable, she was forever in that quiet space, that unflappable state that threw a halo around everything. She and Marinda had found one another because they were two peas in a pod. The only difference between them was that Lorie didn’t need her soulmate to reflect on the surface what he was deep down below. She could latch on to that no matter what fleeting insecurities and self-destructive thoughts were parading across his mind. And she felt, if anything, more secure on account of it, more unreachable, less fragile, less other-determined.

  She was everything she proclaimed to be, a master healer, saving souls others could never reach, and not being taken down in the process. Few others might survive their to-hell-and-back journeys unscathed, but she knew she would. She knew it not because she had espoused as much until it had become a mantra, but because, sitting in Marinda’s presence, feeling the truth of who Marinda was, she understood her path in ways that no amount of affirmations could ever have conveyed.

  Lorie’s periodic visits with Marinda proved to her she wasn’t a queen of rationalization; she wasn’t lying to herself; she was everything she knew herself to be. And so she relaxed even more completely into her café latte and her chitchat and her laughter over her best friend’s trysts; their cavorting across Europe and their fueling one another’s romanticism with countries and backdrops, candlelight dinners, all-night vigils, starry desert nights, and an endless retinue of activities that the most professional and practiced of lovers knew they were well-advised to indulge in.

  All the same, she couldn’t stop the tears running down her cheeks as she listened to Marinda’s story. Tears of joy, of course; they had to be.

  ***

  Lorie walked in on Murray composing a piece on the Yamaha player piano. The instrument—indistinguishable on the surface from a concert grand—recorded his improvisations on the fly and played them back for him note for note, if desired. He intermittently gazed up at the painting before the piano, keyed off it, used it to inform his melody. The painting of a woman was no less possessing, done in a pastiche fashion, part of the 3D-art movement that was part painting, part collage.

  Lorie tap-tapped her high heels across the studio floor, admired the collection of Kandinsky-like female portraits. Murray’s style was brutish and violent on the surface, but, he managed to reveal tenderness and vulnerability in his women, intelligence and sophistication, found nuances in them that added to their complexity and contributed to their haunting effect. These women wore their souls on their sleeves the way some wore their hearts. The more you looked at them, the more they grew on you, the more personality facets seemed to come to the fore, as if staring at a hologram.

  No one painted women as sensitively, as revealingly as Murray. When he was like this, in the zone, he could open Lorie’s eyes to worlds invisible to her, make her feel that what she took for deep meaningful human interaction was in fact some cheap veneer she just couldn’t see past because the lighting was all wrong.

  “What do you think of the piece?” Murray asked, continuing to play. “I’m composing one for each painting to help the women speak their minds to their voyeurs.”

  “I think your women speak rather well for themselves, already.”

  “Perhaps.” Murray made sounds with the individual piano keys like ice tinkling in a glass of bourbon. “Think of it as an exercise in semiotics. The colors, the play of light and shadows, the textures of the canvas convey their own messages. The music interpenetrates that space, adds, subtracts, complexifies, both clarifies and obscures. By enticing the viewer to linger in the space longer before moving on to the next painting, the women have time reveal more of themselves.”

  “Are you trying to sell me on the idea, or sell yourself?”

  “Both, I suppose.” His improvised composition unfolded unblemished despite splitting his attention with their conversation.

  “The critics will eat you alive. Say you’re over-controlling your viewer’s response, compensating for failures in the painting—”.

  “What’s an art showing without a little controversy? Let them have their fun.”

  This was why she covered up his little indiscretions, and continued to sculpt and mold him with her singular gift for human psychology. A Picasso, a Rembrandt was worth the loss of a few minor souls—mere shadows in his presence, dark, malformed things when compared to his greatness. Away from her, he’d be in jail, and his expressiveness greatly diminished; the loss to the world immeasurable. She wasn’t justifying his horrific actions; just weighing the implications of them inside her own calculus, making painful decisions based on tradeoffs like anyone alive today who realized nothing worthwhile came without great sacrifice.

  She took a second to make sure math was all she was doing in her head, as opposed to lying to herself to avoid dealing with her own irrepressible urges. In the end, she just refused to believe herself capable of the latter. She was the most self-aware person she knew.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Murray’s posture, sitting hunched over on the bed, with his forearms on his knees, exposed the slash marks etched just north of his wrists. After all his exertion and sweating, they were no longer covered by makeup. The prior attempts at suicide might have been incidental in light of recent findings, but it was enough to prompt Robin to reach for his cell phone.

  “I think you should take a look at this,” Robin said. His eyes remained affixed to his cell.

  “More interesting than what’s on the big screen?” Manny said, spying Lorie prostrate on the floor, a hairpin skewering her brain.

  Reading his phone’s display, Robin said, “This spells out exactly what Hartman’s Nobel in chemistry was for.”

  “Looks like the Three Stooges got past the redacted government files on him.”

  “His breakthrough had to do with personality makeovers.”

  “As in—”.

  “As in Murray used to be suicidal. Long history of it.”

  “And now he’s homicidal. You can’t argue it’s an improvement.”

  Robin looked up from the 4 x 5 display. “You imagine Hartman experimented with all these kids, hoping to turn them into free thinkers?” It was the first time Manny had taken his eyes off the 50” monitor. “You fancy that’s what this is really all about,” Robin said, “erasing the visible signs of his failures? Maybe not initially, but after something about the party drove him over the edge?”

  “If so, I’ll take the sickness over the cure. You downloaded the files on all the principles?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, keep reading. I’m curious who did and did not make his list of guinea pigs. And I want before-and-after pictures on all of them.” Manny crossed his hands as his face went blank.

  It suddenly dawned on Manny, “If your theory about Hartman experimenting on his students is true, how come we’re not seeing people popping pills?”

  “Maybe Hartman’s drug is once and done. Maybe it rewrites the genetic code.”

  “How did he get it into them without any of them knowing?” Manny said.

  “Everyone takes medication for something at one time or another.” Robin watched Winona pop a red capsule from her hormone-pill collection. She had been silent all this time, brooding over the implications of her theater-therapy experiment, perhaps, or the even darker revelations regarding her intended husband-to-be.

  “I guess that’s tacit support for Drew’s idea of being all she can be with her sex change,” Manny said. “Apparently, biochemistry is all important when it comes to our thinking.”

  Robin winced. “I like to think that whatever our genetics or hormonal imbalances, we’re quite capable of growing into anything we desire.”

  “Tell that to Hartman.”

  Robin said, “You’ll recall his earlier sermon about striking a covenant with God, so the hero will gain what assistance he needs along the way, no matter how impossible the quest.”

  “Maybe his mind is crowded with so many good ideas, he forgets his prior revelations.”

&nbs
p; “Or maybe one of his students is the breakthrough he’s been looking for,” Robin mused out loud. “With his blinders on, he just fails to see it. Hell, maybe they all are. Maybe, if each one of those pills is a roll of the dice, you just keep rolling till you get what you want. Maybe Hartman just gave up too soon.”

  “Wishful thinking.”

  “Think about it.” Robin relaxed the arm holding the cell. “A pill a day and you can awake each morning as somebody different. Who could control a population of shapeshifters, moreover—for those inclined to Big Brother paranoia? Just so there’s some memory of what came before, you get to be well-rounded over time, if not at any one time.”

  “If I can get your voice inside his head, I’ll be on my way.” Manny added as an afterthought, “Anybody he didn’t experiment on?”

  Robin scratched the back of his head. “Fiona, of course. But she was never really one of his students. Danny Sparks, possibly; he joined the class late.”

  “Lorie!” Winona mumbled, suddenly realizing what the mental block she had with her was about. Maybe the higher mental energy of the others made them easier to read for a budding psychic. Maybe the extra distance the pill gave them on themselves gave Winona more room to move around inside their heads even if it didn’t leave them nearly enough.

  “Come again?” Manny said.

  “Nothing.” Winona kept her eyes down, pretended to be in shock.