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

by Dean C. Moore

  “Like those depressed rock stars use?” Crispy realized he sounded incredulous.

  “Yeah, yeah. A black box he can wear on his waist and send little shocks to himself all day. Nothing too elaborate.”

  “He might go for that,” Crispy said, fighting to get aboard the train before it left the station. Cilantro wasn’t going to take forever explaining his higher reasoning, buffeted by ganja, to un-upgraded minds.

  Cilantro tossed a leg, enjoyed watching the shark doing its aerial ballet. “I wired him up this morning, man. Figured, why not take advantage of the indifference. Any murders you want committed, now’s your chance. He’ll do anything, I tell you.”

  “He didn’t go for the TM thing?” Crispy asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s pretty bad,” Crispy admitted. The picture was becoming clear, even for him. “Everyone goes for the TM thing. Sometimes with beer and pretzels. But never a flat no.”

  Cilantro tossed the last of the lamb legs. “What if the electroshock doesn’t work, man?”

  Crispy reflected a moment. “There’s always Zan.”

  ***

  So far, all of Crispy and Cilantro’s countermeasures had failed. It was Zan or nothing.

  Zan was a black Barbadian, muscular, sleek, who never wore anything but shorts and sandals. He rarely did much besides beat on conga drums all day and smoke ganja in monster-sized doobies. He set you up with a pair of conga drums and lured you into playing alongside him for hours, letting the rhythms overtake you.

  To Crispy’s surprise, Chad went along with this. Spent day and night at the Berkeley marina hammering on congas to keep the stunt-kite flyers happy, and smoking great pot.

  Zan took Chad for a drive on his motorbike along highway 1 after that. An all-day event, let the winding turns and ocean views work on him. Followed by an all-night bonfire on the beach near Humboldt. This was genuine relaxation, not that lobotomized shit Chad was evincing. A few days of this and most people were so recharged they’d take on Donald Trump for master-of-the-universe games.

  Chad was still flatlining emotionally.

  Zan handed him back to Cilantro and Crispy after their odyssey. “Are you sure it’s Chad? He could be a walk-in. Sometimes people die and they’re brought back, but the spirit that comes into the body belongs to someone else. A soul with unfinished business, usually.”

  “What unfinished business?” Crispy asked.

  Zan shrugged. “Could be an alien walk-in. May not be human in the slightest. Just getting the feel for being human.”

  They eyed Chad, who sucked on long strands of spaghetti while watching The Three Stooges without once being tempted to laugh, agreed this was the best explanation, and nodded.

  ***

  After Zan departed, Crispy and Cilantro interviewed the alien. Crispy drew pictures like in a game of Pictionary. “Is this your first time on our world?” Crispy showed him the picture of a space vessel crashing into Earth as a talentless five-year-old might draw it with crayons.

  Chad nodded, starting to think they might be right. He also felt obliged to not frustrate them too much, as this was against his philosophy of life of just taking things easy.

  Though, honestly, the picnic table Cilantro used for a dinner table, was occupying more of his attention, being as its hard bench was French kissing his hipbone. The airstream trailer parked on the beach with its seedy interiors was no match, moreover, for the ambiance outside. Chad would much rather commune with nature than with these two, but he let the thought go before it triggered frustration.

  “Do your people have antennae and big eyes, or are they more like Stewie on Family Guy?” Cilantro combed the hair out of his eyes in a virtual panic that it might cover the truth at a sensitive moment.

  “Stewie on Family Guy,” Chad said helpfully, pointing to the picture of the guy with the head of a football.

  “I told you, if you lived off world on one of the planets of greater gravity, the result would be a football shaped head,” Crispy said triumphantly.

  “I bet it gives him better depth perception and rad dreams,” Cilantro said, puzzling it out.

  Chad nodded, confirming their sagacity.

  “It’s just like teaching a kid how to walk,” Crispy said. “If we want him to grow up fast to catch up to where he was, we should take him to Wild Kingdom and Disneyland and Roller Coaster Village in the same week.”

  Chad nodded to indicate he felt they were definitely on a roll.

  ***

  After a week of immersion-therapy in fun parks, Cilantro and Crispy gave Chad the bad news in the parking lot of Wild Kingdom. “We’re not seeing any progress here, and it’s making us feel useless. Do you like feeling useless?” Crispy asked Cilantro, who shook his head. “So you understand why we have to move on. It’s really not healthy for anyone.”

  Chad nodded.

  “I told you he’d understand,” Cilantro said.

  “He just doesn’t give a shit, asshole.” Crispy’s voice crackled under the strain of disappointment.

  “Whatever. See ya, man,” Cilantro said. He and Crispy drove off in his 70s-era beat up yellow Pinto hatchback.

  Chad hiked to the street to catch a ride, and stuck his thumb out.

  ***

  Chad slipped the dollar bill into the vending machine, but the chips didn’t drop. He kicked it. He shook the machine. “A little help here?”

  Everyone in the deli was backing away from him and running out the door. Some were screaming. He glanced down at his chest and regarded the vest of explosives taped to him. “Yeah, about that… Told them it was a stupid idea.”

  He listened to the sirens approaching. Then stepped outside.

  The police jumped out their cars, pointed firearms at him while holding out their hands in paradoxically placating gestures. They hung back behind the doors of their police vehicles, a safe perimeter away, while asking him to walk slowly toward them.

  Bomb guys in padded suits approached and disarmed him.

  ***

  “Okay, one more time,” detective Drummond said. They’d been sweating Chad in the interrogation room for over three hours hoping to get him to crack, and getting frustrated at prompting no reaction.

  “I told you,” Chad said calmly. “Some goons captured me and threw me into a van and strapped me to the bomb.”

  “You didn’t fight back?”

  “Why?” Chad replied, genuinely clueless.

  “So you support their cause?”

  “No.” Chad was emphatically clear on this point.

  “You’re a coward?” Detective Drummond’s tone and face indicated cowardice ranked higher than leprosy in fates worse than death.

  “That would imply fear,” Chad explained. “I’m more apathetic than anything. My friends think it could be a medical condition, or that I could be an alien.”

  “What do you think?” Detective Drummond bit into a stick of gum. He’d been talking with his face so pressed up against Chad, he had to be getting tired of breathing the stink of his own breath coming back on him.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Chad said sincerely.

  “Clearly.” Drummond ran his fingers through his greasy hair.

  ***

  They sweated him another two hours in the interrogation room. After which, detective Drummond asked, “So what do you think about blacks and Jews?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand the question,” Chad replied.

  “You hate them, right? Think they’re to blame for the down economy.”

  “Why would I think that?” Chad asked.

  Drummond was perspiring heavily. “No, I get you. It’s obviously the fat cats on Wall Street who are to blame.”

  “Isn’t blaming the rich for being rich kind of like blaming the poor for being poor?” Chad hoped Drummond would finally be able to follow his reasoning. He didn’t appear to be the brightest of bulbs.

  “So you advocate personal responsibility?”

  “I
advocate not advocating anything,” Chad said. “I’m passionate about being dispassionate.”

  “So it is a philosophy. You have an agenda.”

  “It’s more of an energy thing, and not being able to justify the energy needed for passion,” Chad explained. Any other cop would have picked up as much from his slouching posture and his monotone, Chad was sure of it. This guy was thick.

  “You can take a pill for that.” Drummond wiped the bald stripe running down the center of his pate with his handkerchief. Then he smeared his face with it, the rimming hair line and bushy eyebrows no longer enough to catch the run off.

  He kept course-correcting himself away from the hat rack and mirror on the wall which was positioned a little high for him, anything that reminded him of his diminutive stature at the very moment he needed to stand as large and as intimidating as possible. He wore his suit a size smaller to make it look as if his unathletic body was in fact muscular and bulging beneath the seams. It mostly restricted his range of motion, and made his movements seem jerky and unnatural, while fooling no one, Chad thought. Drummond’s seams gave unexpectedly, hinting of violent moods that couldn’t long be contained, but also suggesting that was because of his inability to marshal himself as an outright extension of his own incompetence.

  “Maybe you should try some Prozac,” Drummond suggested.

  “Why?”

  “You okay with being dead inside?” Drummond said, still trying fervently to get a rise out of him.

  “It doesn’t feel that way to me.”

  “Tell me something you care about and I’ll let you out of here,” Drummond coached, not sounding like he meant a word of it.

  “You seem so tormented.”

  Drummond lost it, picked Chad up and pounded on him until his partner came into the room and pulled him off.

  “He didn’t mean that,” Good Cop said, straightening Chad up. Good Cop had been chosen by Drummond to make him look athletic and studly by comparison, and clearly dominant in every way. He was the sapling falsely reassuring the falling redwood that he’d hold it up another hundred years. Meanwhile, his squeaky voice suggested his vocal cords weren’t up to the task of pushing air. Maybe Drummond was thinking that would work to his benefit, as Chad wasn’t the least bit shaken. Maybe the idea was that the fear Good Cop could in no way keep Drummond off him would invite more open disclosure. Instead, what he got was…

  “It’s fine,” Chad said, unemotionally. “I think I might be a healer. Everyone around me long enough gets cured of something.”

  ***

  Chad made the mistake of letting his hair grow out. With the loose curly locks pouring down his neck like a panic-stricken waterfall determined to resist gravity and double back on itself, he was a sight for sore eyes. His good looks gave him an angelic sheen on the worst of mornings, but with the hair grown out, it was just too much for most people to resist staring and finding excuses to come close to him. This quirky product of fate combined with his circumspect indifference to procure the perfect image of the prophet.

  It wasn’t long before his flock declared him the second coming and came prepared with scripted questions, the answers to which, they were hoping would set the rest of their lives back on course. He seldom walked anywhere without an entourage forming around him like color crystalizing in water by way of some invisible chemical reaction.

  Jeremiah, one of the long-term devout, read from his sheet, tape-recorder in hand. That way he could later transcribe the responses verbatim for all those who would come after the prophet had passed on. “What are we to do in the face of temptation, master?”

  Chad, determined as ever to chase them away, reached for the most nonsensical answer he could think of. “Temptation is the gateway to the only true God.”

  “Do you advocate hedonism then?”

  “No, only attunement to the one true God. Only in agonizing over whether to give in to temptation or to resist it, can the true path be revealed. And only amidst such agony can the conduit to the one true God be maintained.” He was finding that he was indeed talking more and more like a prophet, which helped to disguise the mindless bullshit that spewed out of him. Then again, since he put no forethought into what he was saying, for all he knew, he could be spouting divine wisdom, which would be unfortunate, as he really wanted the fame to go away. He wished to influence no one. Influence, as a whole, went against everything he stood for, which was nothing at all.

  The heads in the throng surrounding him nodded sagely, as they committed this latest chestnut to memory, looked eager to put it into practice. Chad was indeed beginning to wonder if his latest words were a misstep. Judging from so many prior efforts to spew bullshit, and so many miscommunications, it was evident that people heard what they wanted to hear, and reinterpreted whatever the hell he said within their own thought-systems so they could go on believing whatever it was they wanted to believe. Which was fine by him, but it made it damn hard to lose the entourage.

  “How should old age be handled?” Jeremiah asked, reading down the list.

  “You may selflessly kill yourself so as not to be a burden to others. Or you may choose to be a burden so that others may learn selflessness and how to forget themselves through you. Either option is commendable. But it must be taken with resolution and conviction. Refusing to act through indecision is indecent.”

  Again heads in the crowd nodded. Chad was growing increasingly concerned that the real problem lay in his inability to be genuinely meaningless. Some part of him insisted it knew everything and could indeed give sage advice. Even in the role of imp, the imp too found ways to be impish while doling out reasonable advice. All of which was serving, he felt, to teach him the error of his ways.

  True liberation, including true liberation from mindless devotees who wanted to wreck their minds crashing against the shores of his own hardened incorrigibleness, meant plunging himself further into indifference, into refusing to have even profound thoughts about not thinking at all, and the reasons behind mindlessness. He was coming to accept that his following would persist so long as his determination to live a life of meaning existed, which was more proof that ego continued to rule his life even now.

  The desperate attempts to cut free of the meaning behind his meaninglessness continued unabated; Chad threw himself at the task with renewed abandon. He stopped, midstride, pulled his robes up, and defecated before Sather Gate. And then he continued walking as if nothing had happened. The shocked throng, seeing this, soon began emulating him, feeling more liberated and enlightened than ever.

  Chad was grappling mightily with this very human need to make meaning out of meaningless acts. Not to speak of a companion inability to be at home in chaos. He drove his mind into ever greater reaches of chaos to escape the chains of meaningfulness.

  He stopped and talked to Sather Gate itself. “Oh, great gate, will you tell me the meaning of life?” When the gate said nothing, he shrugged and moved on. He found others in his congregation did the same; they talked to the gate, and when they got no answer, they moved on. Soon their faces bore the good cheer of escape from sensibility. They felt truly liberated.

  Chad derided them. “To feel joy over mindlessness is to attempt to subsume mindlessness back into meaning, from which joy can be derived. You thus make the sacred profane. Better you have no prescribed reaction at all to your mindless acts, and merely sit with the aftermath until the ripple effect of emotions passes over you. Until all that is left is witness state.”

  And then the true horror of his situation descended upon him. Chad had become truly enlightened by foregoing any effort at meaning and at profundity. And this was too much to bear, for he sought not liberation, just nothing at all, just the void itself. Unlike the Sufi who reveled in their flavors of the divine, endless compassion, sage wisdom, cool expansiveness, sheer joy, Chad wanted none of the food colorings and flavorings. Just the bland tasteless void itself. Which, he supposed, made him more Buddhist than Sufi. Though he preferred to
believe the Buddhists were at no time as devout as he when it came to grappling with meaning.

  From that day forward, he cut his hair, changed his eye color with colored contacts, and disappeared into the mad morass of the Berkeley campus proper, just another faceless figure in the crowds.

  He supposed his was a middle path. Every extreme he’d taken to get over himself, just led to worse pitfalls for the mind and/or deeper stages of enlightenment, often both at the same time, neither of which he was ready for. Bland suited him, and bland was where he was going to stay.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Manny ripped open his shirt and pulled the slugs out of his Kevlar body armor. He wondered with rising alarm if Robin’s vest had also done its job. A groan from the other side of the door reassured him. Winona’s equally audible sigh of relief was the capper.

  “Since when did you start wearing a vest?” Manny asked, as Hartman underwent the same ritual of removing bullets from himself on the other side of the room.

  “Since the kids in schools all over the country developed a taste for mass murder. People are crazy these days.”

  “I see our survivor’s handbooks aren’t so different as all that,” Manny said, pulling out the last slug. He stared at Hartman, his brooding melancholia attached to a blank mind. Then, erupting out of the void: “It's just going to get worse, isn't it?”

  “You heard Chad and I talking? Does that sound like a formula for anything but going postal? Hell, the really amazing thing is how shockproofed the global Big Brother phenomenon has become.” Hartman wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief. “I mean, people come undone all the time. The terrorists and people who strap bombs to themselves are the least of it. You keep a lid on the media, and the Titanic will stay afloat, I don't care how many icebergs it hits.”