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

by Dean C. Moore

  Robin noted the big-picture philosopher king arising in him under pressure to resolve the crises presented to his ego by his current social situation. Once again, it was plunging headlong into his fears, facing them boldly, and not retreating that had summoned greatness in him to the surface. It was as if he could only find out what he was capable of under such duress. He had no idea what genie lay biding his time in the sealed bottle of his prejudices and programmed behaviors until someone, grating against him, rubbed the belly of the metaphorical lamp. In fact, he was starting to question who this simpleton was, whose role he acted so perfectly in everyday life. What the mask was meant to hide. He had never considered his day-to-day behavior before as a form of compensation for anything, as an answer to traumas hidden in his past, long since forgotten. But in lieu of recent events…

  Robin returned his mind to philosophizing about the present versus the past.

  The sexual bigotry realization meant one more point of retreat removed from Robin’s battle plan of how to contend with the future. At the time, he remembered dealing with the situation by losing himself in reading more body language and behavior refinements, seeing what he could tell of the two girls from what aspects of femininity they chose to project. Only now, thinking back on it, he wondered if he was setting up the premise for going with the whole sex change thing as an invitation to boost his detective skills.

  Alexia tore off her hiking shoes to attend to the blisters at the bottoms of her feet. She lanced them with a needle from her first aid kit, drained and bandaged them, then moved on to the next offending protrusion with clinical precision, devoid of emotions. She shaved callouses with her nail file, and trimmed toenails. She remained totally self-absorbed and shameless about the impact of these visuals on her audience. There was something male and female in equal measure in her actions.

  The realization associated with Alexia’s casual body language led him to the latest horror he had tucked away in his mind at the time: The yin-yang balanced human brain was both feminine and masculine, knew or cared little for sexuality outside of culturally imposed roles, and whatever imbalances could be attributed to testosterone or estrogen, whose behavior modifications were analogous to those found in animals living in nature – and not in modern civilization. Taking cues from such chemical messengers struck him as doubly absurd under the circumstances of beholding what a truly androgynous brain could offer humanity in the absence of such primitive, stuck-in-time affectations that had nothing to do with liberating consciousness, and everything to do with imprisoning it.

  One by one, Robin was being relieved of any rationale he could hide behind as to why sexual identity held any evolutionary value, how sexual preference could be advantageous or even desirable. Alexia was more attractive, more hypnotically mesmerizing, more alluring, more scintillating in her current androgynous body language and self-grooming than she could possibly have been hiding behind one or another sexually-branded role. The fact she could be alluring at all while biting her own toenails, spoke rather well as regards androgyny’s larger appeal to Robin’s higher faculties. What should have left him horrified and disgusted, left him instead entirely turned on. Worse, his hard-on spoke to some higher truth in him that his ego and his rational mind couldn’t slip past like some snake in the grass.

  In short, the undigested emotions Robin had failed to process at the time belonged entirely to the systematic dismantling of all his rationalizations as to why Drew should not change her sex to suit herself, and why Robin shouldn’t do the same.

  ***

  One fair morning, Drew was giving lessons to Robin in how to dress in a suit. Robin remembered the incident as traumatizing only in that Drew had to lecture Robin on how to play the part of a man.

  “Your suit jacket should fit well and give you a full range of motion, whether buttoned and unbuttoned.” Robin did a range of motion exercise to confirm. “You should be able to fit one finger between the collar of your shirt and your neck, but that’s all.” Robin tested the fit around his neck to confirm; yep, just one finger. “The shirt cuffs shouldn’t slide up when you stretch your arms. With a button-cuff shirt, the cuffs should break at the wrist.” Robin let his arms hang to check out the behavior of the cuffs. So far so good; but then Drew had ordered the suit for him. Robin was doing well at hiding just how rankled he felt, he thought, minimizing his mounting impatience.

  “For two-button jackets, button the top button only,” Drew coached. Robin nearly brushed Drew’s hand away with annoyance, but he was getting exhausted and falling further behind the pace of instruction. It was easier to let her pick up the slack.

  Drew did a quick check of Robin’s hands, his brows, and his ear and nose cavities to sign off on his personal grooming. Robin was actually starting to relax now that he felt like a kid again, and Drew was starting to feel more like dad.

  She stood back to admire her creation. “There. I think that graduates us from Suit Wearing 101. How does it feel to be more of a man?”

  “Ha-ha. How is it you can have the male part down better than me inside of a couple days? I’ve been at it my whole life.”

  “Attention to detail. You don’t let your consciousness penetrate too far into life, glossing over most everything. An inheritance from your father. Part of why you were attracted to police work and to me, I imagine, to help draw you out of old behaviors that are starting to wear like a cheap suit.”

  Robin knew she was right, and wasn’t sure if he hated himself or her more for it.

  ***

  “Fold up the parking brake,” Drew coached. Robin and Drew were taking out their XV-Yacht, sailed over ice by two sailors. As to be expected, Drew was doling out the directions. Robin sensed what she was up to right away, giving him those memories he should have had with his father, attempting to heal his past at the same time as she was trying to help him orient to her in the guise of a man. The strategy was inspired, in theory, but Robin felt a double dose of anxiety to go with the usual dose of watching her do her male thing. Maybe that was testament to the therapy working; he wasn’t sure.

  “Keep the side-stays loose in the beginning, later you can adjust them,” Drew suggested. “Figure out what direction the wind is coming from.” He followed her eyes to the streamer at the tip of the mast, put there to make it easier on Robin, official newbie. “Place yourself on the same side the wind comes in from.” Robin did as instructed. “Take the sheet in the hand you’re holding the side-stay and place the other hand on the tiller.” Once he attained that objective, she said, “Push the yacht forwards, fall off the wind a little, and let the wind help you to fill the sail and push the yacht.”

  Robin felt a rush of excitement as the wind caught the sail. Drew said, “Step up on the plank with one foot. Slide the other foot into the fuselage, and sit down.”

  Robin did as directed, repeated this step in his head verbally a few times as he had all the others, so he’d remember the next time out.

  Drew instructed, “Pull the sheet and tighten the sail, and steer towards the wind. Excellent.” Robin brightened at the praise – something he had never gotten from his father. He was gaining a newfound respect for theater therapy.

  Drew looked over the marks of the course she laid out for them across the ice. “Since we’ve been starting with the wind in from starboard side, you’ll want to tack when you are up two-thirds against the windward mark.”

  As she smoked a pipe, and brushed the ashes drifting down to her pants legs off her, Robin saw Drew, as she had been prior to commencing gender reassignment, straightening out her dress. The association brought tears to Robin’s eyes, which luckily the wind and cold made short work of.

  They had flown to this God-forsaken corner of the world to go ice sailing because Robin had once mentioned wanting to do it with his father, being irked that dad never put much stock in bonding with his son over athletic activities of any kind.

  So far, the surrogate father-son moments were doing a good job pushing out th
e past memories of Drew as a female that haunted Robin the rest of the time. But the smokescreen wasn’t a hundred percent.

  The extreme cold made Robin’s surface feel hard, as if the weather were conspiring to give him the tough outer shell he needed to emotionally get through this stage of his life.

  “Sheet almost full,” Drew observed. “When you feel that the yacht can’t sail any faster, loosen the sheet to catch the wind again.”

  Robin did a double take at Drew slipping her pipe into her smoker’s jacket, reminding him of the last time she tried to pin a broach to a dress, taking Robin out of the moment once again, to another moment from their past. He resurfaced in time to find the tear running down his cheek freezing in place about half way down, then flying off, hurtled like shrapnel against Drew’s eye. Drew was wearing tinted goggles, making it hard for Robin to tell how much of his personal drama was registering on her face.

  By the end of their day on the ice, Robin felt the sting of a deficient absentee father abate, to be replaced by the sting of a wife once loved, now lost. Only, she was strangely forever in view, thus ensuring her memory would never entirely fade.

  ***

  The evening following the ice-skating, Drew chopped wood behind the small, rustic cabin she’d purchased. Perhaps she figured this would be an annual ritual for them. Her shirt was off. She was a well-muscled man now, her tits obscured by a band that overlay them with fake male musculature. With an already more athletic build than Robin, he incurred the strange sense of watching yet another take on the idealized version of himself, or perhaps his father, in action. Robin found it hard to concentrate on what Drew was saying as a result. The pattern that had started out on the ice lake of her triggering unwanted associations was getting progressively worse.

  “You want to bring some more of those logs over for me?” Drew said. When she didn’t get a response from Robin, she must have figured what was up, and gave him a moment. Drew stacked what wood she’d chopped, and brought it to Robin, intending to hand the parcel over. Robin saw instead Drew walking toward him in her female guise with: a hamper of clothes; with a bag of groceries; with a fresh set of linens for their overnight guests in her arms; finally, carting out a bonsai for decorative placement on their dining table. With each step closer, her outfit changed and the background behind her changed as well, since she was coming at Robin from a different section of their home in the Berkeley hills. It was like watching Last Year at Marienbad, courtesy of Alain Resnais’ trick rotating camera shots.

  When Drew finally transferred the stack of wood to Robin’s hands, it came as a shock, the present moment seeming more like the dream. Robin thought perhaps he was developing a stress-related disorder he didn’t have the medical acumen to describe fully. Far less the presence of mind to note its symptoms. The revelation helped explain why Robin had free-associated to this memory from his current high stress state seated in the crawlspace of Hartman’s home.

  ***

  That night in the cabin, as Drew stared into the blaze of the large rough-hewn stone fireplace, Robin let his mind wander away from the crackles of the fire to the wind howling outside. For others, it may have carried ghostly implications, but for Robin it reminded him of Drew’s incessant aria-singing inside the shower at their Berkeley home. She had quite the trained operatic voice, thanks in part to that school Robin imagined she went to for the rich and famous.

  As Drew turned the logs in the fire with the tongs, Robin got thrown back to a log rolling game they played together as part of a fund-raising benefit she was hosting. The artificial plastic logs were crammed into the Olympic-size swimming pool in back of the Long’s estate (as in Long’s Drugstores, once rampant throughout California), offered up as part of the charitable enterprise. Drew and Robin laughed their asses off trying to keep balance on the flotilla of logs, only to fall, and have to climb back on soaking wet, and push each other off as the game became increasingly competitive. Spectators, betting on the sidelines, got their champagne glasses refilled if they bet on the right person that round. Losers had to content themselves with stretching out their last refill. Under the intense summer sun, the increasingly dehydrated boozed-up guests were soon falling into the pool of their own accord.

  “Everything you do, every moment you make, takes me back to—”.

  “When I was a woman,” Drew said, turning a log in the fireplace. She set the tongs down. “You’re grieving the loss of someone you loved fiercely, Robin. It’s only natural. For what it’s worth, depression is the last stage before acceptance.”

  “You think that’s what these flashbacks are, signs of depression? I’m thinking denial is more like it.”

  Drew smiled ruefully. “Your body language says different.”

  “I never thought of myself as a sexual bigot before. The only thing that’s changed about you is the plumbing. And I’m acting as if you’re dead. It’s unconscionable. I will override my sexual programming if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Drew looked more thunderstruck than appeased.

  ***

  Robin had forgotten making any such promise to Drew until now. His programmed impulses and yearnings, his scripted behavior overtook his mind as rapidly as the insight had popped to the surface, like a great whale breaching.

  He was suddenly strangely grateful for the hyperbaric-chamber pressures Hartman was able to achieve that allowed Robin to make connections in his head that otherwise failed.

  FORTY-NINE

  Hearing nothing but merriment from the other side of the crawlspace inside Jeannie and Adam’s suite, Robin convinced himself he was only taking advantage of the reprieve, but he realized he couldn’t stay in the moment if he wanted to.

  Once again the swirling waters of remembrance sucked him down.

  ***

  Young Robin must have been nine or ten, setting the dinner table for the first time, and taking great delight in placing the cutlery on the table just so. He lined up the knife, fork, and spoon in parallel, and just the right distance to the right and left of the plates, and made sure to space the plates just the right distance apart. He ran sorties to the kitchen drawer to substitute brands of knife he felt complemented the forks better, before changing his mind.

  His father had watched this ballet for some time, throwing his eyes over the top of his newspaper, wondering what might be going on. Finally, he said, “You aren’t turning out to be anal retentive, are you? Because anal retentive isn’t good.”

  Folding up his paper, his father took his seat at the table. Watching Robin correct the trajectory of a couple knives that had veered off course with his jingling of the table, he added, “Obsessive compulsive is even worse.”

  Robin wondered, in recalling the dinner table scene, if he might have an innate impulse towards perfectionism, or detail-oriented work that was squelched in his childhood. Or maybe that was an emerging artistic impulse he was watching being nipped in the bud. He strained to recall how the moment had made him feel at the time, when he saw himself erupt at the table. “Must you overthink everything!”

  His father stared at him speechless. “Well, color me suitably chastised. I suppose you have the right not to have my head up your ass every second of the day. Your mother was suffocating like that, and I don’t wish to extend her bad habits into the future. Just goes to show you, mindfulness is the way. How easily we pick up bad habits from one another in its absence.”

  “Dad, could you stop being profound for five minutes?”

  “Sorry, kid, not in the genes. Not that I’m pushing genetic predetermination, which I find highly offensive.” He returned his attention to his New York Times. “They keep touting that cell phone a guy invented earlier this year. That’ll never go anywhere.”

  “You said that about Microsoft Windows, MS-DOS, the CD-ROM, and the hepatitis B-vaccine.”

  “In a world where justice reigned, I would have been right, too. Eat your supper.” His father said, snapping his paper.

  “You forgot
to cook anything.”

  “Why did you set the table then?” Dad sounded betrayed for being led on.

  “It’s an effort to modify your behavior through guilt.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.” He returned to his newspaper. Robin twisted his face up the way he did biting into a lime, and grabbed an apple from the hanging fruit basket.

  ***

  They were perched on Muir Beach. Young Robin was maybe eleven years old at the time. Rubbing suntan oil over himself, Robin’s father complained, “This is really a no-win situation. The oil keeps the sun off me but the sand gets wedged in it and I sandpaper myself to death every time I twitch a muscle. And I think those are sand fleas trapped in the oil with nowhere to go but down, straight into my bloodstream and into my brain.”

  Robin turned sunny side up. “Why don’t you try that mindlessness you advocate so much?”

  “That’s mindfulness, and watch your manners. What am I doing out here, anyway, all the way at the end of God’s creation?”

  “Why is it people who live in the East Bay talk about San Francisco as if it’s on the other side of the world?”

  “Because it is.” Dad sicced the oil on his scalp like it was a dandruff remedy. “You can’t draw a line far enough that connects the hell of a black ghetto to faerie land, where all it takes to fly is a limp wrist.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Besides, they’re no better. You’ll never catch those San Francisco snobs in Berkeley. Treat us like we have cancer.” His eyes went to the woman in the bikini getting comfortable beside them. “Will you look at her? Not even a book to read? She’ll sun five hours to a side like a human pork chop and go home in a state of nirvana.”