He examined the film on the handkerchief, possibly with an eye toward tweaking his neurochemistry with his elixirs.
“For what it's worth,” Manny said, “I think you're right about all of it.”
Hartman relaxed, dismissed the warning signs embedded in the handkerchief, which only he could read. “Really? I didn't think you did consciousness.”
“It's not a forte, I grant you.” Manny said, less flippantly, “You accused me of playing the bloodhound, sniffing out every ugly truth but the one I couldn’t face. Guess what epiphany I was avoiding? Do I look like a Big Brother stooge to you? I can’t stand for the instructions on a microwave to tell me what to do.”
Hartman chuckled. “Domineering father?”
“Who the domineering wife alone could cause me to forget.” Manny sat up with audible strain.
He sighed. “But I still gotta take you in, doc. Crucify you in the media. Lock you away. It's all in the book. The Big Brother bible. On how to handle sickos who deviate from The Path To Nowhere. Only—”.
“Only, you're not much on playing games you can't win,” Hartman said, finishing the thought for him. “And you're starting to realize if the rules of the game don't change, doesn't matter how many of me you bring in, the hydra will always grow more heads.”
“Something like that.” Manny played with the bullets in his palm as if they were Chinese meditation balls.
“You could choose to help me.”
“And why would I exchange one hopeless task for another?”
“I'll make you a deal. I don't kill any more students, you let me expand the army of angels to reclaim Hell for Heaven.” Hartman appeared to be scrutinizing Manny for signs he was getting through to him. “I can't do it alone, Manny. None of us can. But maybe if we start singing in two-part harmony, our voices will carry further. The reaction will spread.”
“I doubt I’d be of much use to you, doc.”
“You’re much more a man of the world than I. Those who can't do teach, remember? All I'm good for is building your army for you.”
Manny settled into a new rhythm with his breathing. From the black sheep in the family, to the chosen one. Not bad.
“It's a holy war from here on out,” Hartman said. “I'll be damned if I figured you'd be the first person to grasp that.”
“What makes you think you can stop killing?”
“We separated the chaff from the wheat,” Hartman said, sounding relieved. “If I can't get through to those who remain, I'm not much of a teacher. And it's probably time to stop blaming everyone else. I promise the next person I shoot will be myself.”
“You got a deal, doc.”
“Seriously?” Hartman studied him. “You're not just playing along?”
“I don't like feeling hopeless. And you're right: none of us can do this alone. It's time to forge alliances. As to raising an army for a holy war... I wouldn't have put it in those terms before tonight, but they're as good as any. Probably more truthful. Thanks for placing me on the path, doc.”
“Don't mention it. Our students are our greatest teachers. You exemplify scripture: The Last Shall Be First.”
Manny’s temerity climbed faster than mercury in a thermometer.
He wondered about the charity for him Hartman couldn’t show the rest of his students. But then Manny wasn’t afraid of violence, and he’d seen the real world, wasn’t just grappling with it in a theoretical sense. Maybe it was just a sixth sense Hartman had about Manny. After a lifetime of being squeezed by real pressures Hartman attempted to manufacture artificially in his classroom in order to induce more rapid change, his time had come.
“You think the others would have come around if you gave them enough time?”
“Can't say for sure,” Hartman said. “Admittedly, I'm just a recruiter in this man's army, probably not the best general. But you don't take back Hell without laying siege every once in a while.”
He lit a cigarette. “I make mistakes. One thing for certain, we don’t have another couple hundred years to raise our army of angels.”
Manny snorted. He pulled himself to his feet. “I'm starting to like you, doc.”
“I'm an acquired taste.” He handed Manny back the two guns, and proceeded to let him out of the room. Unlike Winona, who had a feel for these walk-in puzzle boxes, Hartman fumbled when his memory faltered. But it came back to him, and he had the door open in no time.
FORTY
The instant Manny was out the door, Robin embraced him. As Manny was getting the life choked out of him, he spied the slugs Winona had dug out of Robin’s Kevlar vest. They were strewn in the mixed nuts bowl set on a table against the wall in the grand hall. Chad’s brains, set in a punch bowl on a bed of ice, looked ironically like a pâté awaiting an eager gourmand.
The unadorned giant hallway, looking like all the others, added one more note of disorientation after the anchor points of the closed suite they’d just been trapped in.
“What's gotten into you?” Manny asked Robin.
“I gave him some of my hormone pills,” Winona replied. “At my age, femininity is no less manufactured, trust me.”
“Christ, ease up on the dose, will ya?” Manny pried Robin off him.
“I might have miscalculated the first installment on that payment plan. Though I’m thinking it’s the relief of not going through his wife’s sex change absent you for moral support that’s got him in a real state. It’s a little early to blame all this on hormone imbalance.”
“I'm out of the business,” Robin said. “Sorry, but there it is. I admit I used to get a rise out of seeing guys' brains splattered all over the walls. You come home to a wife with a dick, and see if you don't need an outlet.”
“It's okay, Robin,” Manny said, giving him back his gun. “I think we all have a new calling as of five minutes ago.”
“No shit?” Robin said as Manny reloaded.
Manny spun the revolving cylinder on his gun. “Angels of the Lord.”
“Are we qualified for that?”
“The learning curve's steep. But we appear to be coming along nicely.” Manny shoved his hand into the mixed nuts bowl and scooped out a serving for himself.
“What did he say to turn you around?” Winona craned her head to more closely inspect the much taller Manny from her five-foot one-inch perspective.
Manny swallowed the chewed nuts, dusted his hands. “Inside of five minutes he endorsed me as God’s right hand man.”
“That's a step up in pay grade, all right,” Winona said.
“Suppose it went to my head,” Manny confessed. “All the same, listen to that man long enough and he’ll turn you around.”
“That's my Clay. He's right about one thing. You want to shorten the cooking time, you need to turn up the pressure.”
Manny embraced her. “Come on. He's not going to be around forever. We need to learn how to step into his shoes when he's gone.”
Robin registered concern on his face as he contemplated Manny. “Boss, are you sure about this? He did just kill several people.”
“The enemy of my enemy, my friend…” Manny said.
Robin regarded Manny as if he didn't recognize him. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Manny gestured to Winona to lead on. She took the first steps as they walked the hall in the direction of the banquet tables and refreshments.
***
Robin stared at his Android phone’s in-box. “Since we’ve been locked inside here: an ozone depleting cloud has stripped us of all protection from the sun; jellyfish are running rampant throughout the oceans driving all other sea life to extinction; and oh, yeah, massive crop failures have followed in the wake of the collapse of the honey bee population. I can’t tell for sure if this is a recap of the week, or just things from this morning.”
Manny said, “One mind-bender at a time, Robin. My mind just isn’t as shockproofed as I’d like it to be.”
Robin pocketed the cell phone. “We better hope the sec
ret to shockproofing it lies somewhere inside these walls. I’m not looking to become any more of a basket case.”
“You survived a wife changing sex on you. What are you complaining about?” Manny said.
“Survived it, eh? I’m thinking it, like Hartman, was just one more crank on the handle of the jack-in-the-box.”
Manny laughed. “Well, for the time being, we’re doing better than Hartman’s students. Just goes to show, genius isn’t everything.”
Robin thought, considering Manny’s recent religious conversion, he wasn’t sure either of them was doing any better than anyone else. “You think the secret to life lies in my in-box? I mean, the day I can open it and not have to reach for a pair of cardiac shock-paddles, I’d like to think I’ve arrived.”
Robin suspected Manny was already too lost to the crusade Hartman had sent him on to pay much attention, if he heard him at all. Otherwise, he would have checked with Robin to see if his phone was indeed picking up reception again. No matter, it wasn’t. Robin, as usual, was behind on his texts. Probably for the best. As Manny had just finished pointing out, how shockproofed was any of them? Certainly not enough to keep up with the nightly news.
For Winona’s part, she seemed just as lost in thought.
Questioning his own motives, he thought, maybe he had only opened his in-box in hopes of finding stories compelling enough to give him momentary respite from the horror he was living. That had turned out not to be the best idea. The wisdom of Manny’s “one horror at a time” approach was rapidly dawning on him.
He had to hope other survivors out there had fashioned a few solutions to mitigate the madness, techniques that, if shared, would give the rest of them time to develop the elasticity of mind to absorb any more.
***
Minutes later, Manny, high on life, still reeling from the Hartman-effect, felt he detected something in Winona’s demeanor destined to burst his bubble.
“I don't know, detectives. I think my honey's off his game. We need to steer him back on track before he kills off your angels, too. I think a minor adjustment is all we need. We take a left here.”
“The man knows what he's talking about,” Manny reassured her. “He just needs space to work.”
Winona course-corrected their threesome a couple more times before they arrived at the main festivities room. They were in time to see Hartman on the monitor enter Danny Sparks’s room.
“How do the cameras know when to engage?” Manny asked.
“Another of Adam's innovations,” Winona explained. “The cameras are keyed to a tracking device Hartman carries. Whenever he walks in a room, they activate.”
“So we could use one of the cameras to hunt him through the walls?” Robin said.
Manny turned, surprised. “Your ingenuity is skyrocketing.”
Robin reached for more female hormone tablets, in case Manny was right. Manny watched Robin check the bottles, apparently juggling reds, greens, and blues.
Winona also caught Robin in the act. “Careful with those pills, sugar. They demystify human psychology, as they mess something fierce with your own.”
Manny grabbed a big bowl of popcorn from the refreshments table the students had set up and planted himself before the monitor, kicked his feet up on the coffee table. He couldn’t remember the last time he was able to relax.
Winona watched the screen with more solicitude. Maybe it was just in her nature to worry, he thought.
FORTY-ONE
Hartman waited for Danny to return to consciousness. A jolt of pain up his leg did the trick. He cried out, “Kill me, doc!”
“Why?”
“Cause I ritualistically raped my sister for eleven years – from when she was nine!” He convulsed in agonizing sorrow, which exacerbated the pain shooting up his leg. His outcries spiked accordingly.
“I can't stop myself, doc. I need to be put down like a rabid dog.”
Hartman sighed. “I really don't care about your personal dramas. I just want to know if they're driving any revelations into the nature of life.”
“I blocked the awareness so I could keep doing it with impunity. If I acted like an animal, then I wasn't to blame. It was someone else's responsibility to stop me.”
“Now we're talking.” Hartman clapped his thighs in celebration.
“Every time I see a girl with long black-hair, I think it's her, and I have to have her all over again,” Danny confessed. “In a crowded city, that must be thirty times a day.”
Staring at the ceiling from his position on the floor, as if lying on a doctor's couch, Danny continued to crawl over the wall of his earlier resistance, now reduced to rubble. “The constant anxiety I feel without any clear source… It’s because I like feeling haunted. If I feel persecuted, then it's as if I'm doing penance. I'm settling the karmic debt so I can go do it again.”
“Genius. You saw that before I did.”
“Don't you want me to stop?” Danny sounded genuinely confused.
“Of course, I do. But not everyone can get enlightened reading Nietzsche, son. You're on a path. It's working for you. All I need to hear is it keeps driving higher consciousness that in turn leads to more life-affirming behaviors.”
“But that's it; I don't have any more revelations. If I keep doing the same thing over and over again, how can I?”
“Now you're scaring me, son.”
Danny gulped at the ominousness of Hartman’s words. His fear of things to come momentarily overrode the pain signals telegraphed to his brain; he stopped crying out in agony.
“Why don’t you channel the self-awareness you’ve earned more constructively?” Hartman suggested helpfully. “Maybe you could teach predator avoidance at the YMCA. Help the FBI with profiling.”
“I could do that.”
Hartman doubted Danny had managed to entirely convince even one of the voices in his own head. But he elected to take him at face value. Not like he was expecting the inner struggle to end overnight. Besides, who the hell wasn’t broken beyond repair? If he waited to find the ideal student, he’d be waiting until hell froze over. Unlike Chad, at least he was willing to struggle against his programming. “God's called you, son. He doesn't ask you to be perfect – just to change the world for the better in some small way.”
Hartman flicked the ashes from his cigarette. “Of course, He expects you to keep working on yourself, too. You can't stay a sinner forever. This is not absolution I'm handing out here.”
“I understand. I'll get better, I promise.”
“That's the spirit!” Hartman thundered. “Now, this is going to hurt a little.”
Hartman reached down and yanked his femur back into place, as Danny howled. In true triage fashion, Hartman made a splint for him with torn drapes and the stainless steel legs on the rather lavishly provisioned dining cart, as if it were Danny’s last supper that had been laid out for him.
Then, after leaving the door open for him, he disappeared into the walls.
FORTY-TWO
Enthralled, watching Danny and Hartman on the monitor in the main festivities room, Manny said, “That's so amazing how he does that. Forget all the philosophical bullshit. Navigating the labyrinths of twisted psychology to get to the Promised Land – that's his real calling.”
Robin scrutinized Manny, perturbed, and popped another couple pills, some greens this time. “You think that maybe Hartman isn't quite seeing the big picture?”
“Christ, he's the only one who sees it!”
“Sweetheart,” Winona said to Robin, “could you help me in the kitchen with the refreshments?”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 30
