But then the moment passed, and Robin relaxed.
***
Hardly an hour had ticked off from the start of the game when Manny slid the latest tile in place on the Scrabble board to form the word, "Desperado."
Jeannie and Adam studied the big picture layout of the board. The rest of Manny’s words spelled: "Murder;" "Mayhem;" "Psycho;" "Death;" "Payback." Adam and Jeannie exchanged looks.
“Okay then.” Adam smacked his hands together. “Who's up for a deep tissue massage?”
“You don't mind if your wife massages me?” Adam thought he detected a ring of indictment against him in Manny’s voice.
“No,” he said a little too quickly. He threw Jeannie the lotion.
Moments later, Manny was spread face down on the bed, naked, save for the ankle holster with the gun. Adam and Jeannie spied it between ogling one another and rubbing him down. He was doing one side of Manny. She was doing the other. They kept motioning to one another to reach for the gun, as they took turns losing their nerve.
***
Minutes following Jeannie and Adam’s massage, Manny enjoyed a spot of tea with the young couple. He sat naked on the dining chair – save for the gun in the holster.
“You think you're ready for some clothes?” Adam asked.
“Hell, no,” Manny declared. “This is liberating. I've never felt so free. Hartman was right about you two.” He flailed the tea cup in his hand as he talked. “It's like a place out of time around you. No tensions. No pretensions. Such immediacy. I've never felt so in the moment. Not a worry in the world. It's an escape is what it is.” Then the dawning: “An escape from reality.”
Manny got long in the face. Reached into his holster and...
…shot Jeannie and Adam dead.
He sheathed the gun, and sipped his tea.
“You're not with the program. Not at all.”
FIFTY-ONE
As Jeannie felt herself dying, she found it strange the scenes that flashed before her eyes, long since forgotten. Why these? And why was it that it took an NDE to help her find the distance on herself she couldn’t find in real life? Was that Hartman’s farewell gift? To guide her into the light one way or the other for fear of what time spent without movement along her developmental path could do to her? Knowing full well the inertial force of his own past habits and how much harder it was to overcome them the longer they persisted?
***
Jeannie sipped her coffee in back of the Café Mediterranean on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Two recent imports from India at a nearby table debated the ins and outs of the gaming software they were writing. She couldn’t understand a word of the computer language they were communicating in. She counted that as a plus, as it made it easier to tune them out in favor of the philosophical discussion on literature to the left of her ensuing between a college-aged couple.
“Did you finish Jorge Luis Borges’— what was it?”
“The Circular Ruins,” the girl’s boyfriend said. “Yes. I’m still trying to breathe.”
“I know! It was so amazing. The idea that we exist because someone somewhere is dreaming us. Forget about reincarnation. What if, out of our individual and collective yearnings—the things we wished we could be, the people we’d like to become—arose real flesh and blood human beings?”
The boyfriend nodded vigorously. “It’s so poetic.”
“It’s so real. It ties into the whole Jungian archetypes thing, that there are gods within us just looking for any chance to rise to the surface.” He gestured with his hands as if holding and shaking a box. “Or, the idea that there are strategies imprinted in the morphogenic fields—as Rupert Sheldrake would have it—by all those who came before us and perfected the various psychic tools with which we can make a success of life.”
Jeannie noticed how the girlfriend took her eyes off her partner to do her deep thinking and rummaging around in the back of her mind for the proper associations. As if to fully formulate the ideas in her mind and bring them into being without aborting them, or worrying about them being birthed into this world malformed, required she give them her undying devotion and undivided attention. Or, as if they were both sharing the same lover: the void in the center of their minds out of which the ideas emerged.
“That’s so Carol S. Pearson.” The boyfriend ran his finger erotically and suggestively around the rim of his coffee mug.
“And Joseph Campbell.”
“Yes!” the boyfriend shouted.
“But Borges takes it a step further. Each of us is born as an answer to a prayer made by others. That’s our ticket into this world. A prayer which can only be answered by being totally and utterly ourselves.”
“Makes ideas of reincarnation we inherited from the East pale by comparison. Or at least seem like an incomplete answer.” The boyfriend sipped his coffee, and grimaced at the bitterness before setting the mug down.
The two Indian men exchanging information cryptically in C++ flinched, evidently processing the bibliophiles’ conversation on another track of their minds. The English students picked up on their reaction, and, apparently, couldn’t care less, possibly figuring they were saving their souls by allowing them to overhear them.
But then the two Indian men grew defensive, raised their voices.
“Certainly gives new meaning to the idea that each of us has a life mission,” the female lit-lover said.
“That’s so Mark Thurston. Remember his Soul Purpose?”
The Indian men talked louder still, as evidently the young couple’s sage advice was still coming through to them loud and clear. They were blocking out the bibliophiles’ conversation quite effectively now, and barring Jeannie’s access to them. It was all just too reminiscent of her parents cackling incessantly and leaving no room inside Jeannie’s head for her own thoughts. The caterwauling of the two East Indians went on as long as she could stand it.
Her patience having run its course, Jeannie stood, took the butter knife she was using on her bagel, and stabbed it through the eye of the darker skinned of the two Indian men. The force required to penetrate his brain with the blunted end of the knife was formidable, but her rage was up to the task.
The man’s partner was still too frozen in shock to react, giving Jeannie time to retrieve the knife and drive it into his neck, severing his jugular.
Jeannie was carried away by two policemen who had the indecency to be sitting behind her, unnoticed until now. Come to think of it, she had overheard their talk about being worn down from wrestling with the People’s Movement protestors day in and day out, the sense of inner conflict it created in them, apparently both sympathizers with the college students. She hadn’t fully processed what they were saying because the literature students were so engaging. She regretted that now. Otherwise, she would have taken care of them first, to give herself a better window of time and a wider theater of operations.
Adrenaline fogged Jeannie’s brain and numbed her senses as she struggled vehemently against her captors. Her strength, evidenced in the murders, had carried over to wrestling with the cops, as it took both of them to contain her.
The last thing Jeannie remembered hearing from the two bibliophiles was: “Great, we won’t be able to get a seat in this place for weeks. As if this bistro isn’t fashionable enough, already. They’ll be lining up for the dinner theater.”
“That’s callous,” the female said.
“We’re literature majors.” The boyfriend sipped his coffee. “Like life could ever rise to the occasion with anything but unworthy distractions.”
“Point taken.”
“Didn’t Borges write a short story about this?” the boyfriend continued to warm his hands on his coffee mug.
“He had to. The guy could expose the profound underbelly of life in under three pages, what took even Plato entire books.”
Boyfriend sighed. “I suppose this is the legacy of a global civilization of people unable to process their emotions. We feel so violated by life that
we shut down emotionally to protect ourselves, over-intellectualize everything in feeble attempts to make sense of it all, and then, not at all surprisingly, we go postal.”
“You think the old world order was any better? With the soul-killing grind of a status quo which locked everyone into fixed roles? Who could stand the emotional frustration of that without numbing out?”
“We have to use the hyper-intellectualized space to steer ourselves back to a place of gentleness and loving kindness and forgiveness.” Talking over Jeannie’s screaming at the top of her lungs, he added, “I suppose there’s a lot of trial and error with that. Sharing best practices is probably a good idea.”
“That’s a long comeback trail. Generations of damaged people hurting the hell out of one another, because hurting is all they know how to do...”
Boyfriend gulped his hot coffee. “We shouldn’t be so quick to put our own crap on everyone else.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
The lit-lovers took their eyes off the scene of the massacre, returned to their discussion of Borges, as Jeannie tried all she could do to reach them to rip their throats out.
One of the cops, tired of struggling with Jeannie, conked her over the head. She blacked out.
***
“I want to talk about your losing it at the Café Med the other day,” Saverly said. He’d taken up a chair opposite Jeannie in front of his desk to eliminate any barrier between himself and the patient, refusing to hide behind formality and to avail himself of traditional distancing therapeutic techniques. He even toyed with his clipboard as if it were little more than a multipurpose convenience tray. It currently supported cookies he’d grabbed off the celebrity brunch selection laid out to the back of the office, enticing her.
Saverly had a beguiling manner, a way of putting people at ease, a truckload of charm, and so much more going for him—all at his disposal for getting patients to open up to him in ways they would never to another therapist. He was the perfect foil for her and she was delighted to be here, hoping to have finally met her match, the Moriarty to her Sherlock.
“You sure that’s what you want to talk about, doc?” she said, with just enough menace in her tone to sober him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve let me roam about in gen-pop for two days now, content that four or five pairs of eyes on me at any time, and no one further than a few arm lengths away was enough to keep everyone safe from me.”
Saverly gulped, but otherwise showed no tensing in his body language, displaying cool under pressure rather well, she thought.
“You want to cue me as to how many times you’ve gotten over on me?” He was playing to her ego; she liked that. It was definitely her biggest vulnerability. She couldn’t help bragging, even now, when it served little purpose besides riling him.
“You have five staff unaccounted for, doc. If I were you, I’d put your concerns about me on the back burner.”
Saverly gestured for Andy and Artemis on the other side of the window to come inside. They were Titan-sized bookends perfectly suited for preventing the world from falling off axis. “Please take Jeannie to solitary, and watch yourselves. She can be quite deadly. You’re free to inflict bodily harm to protect yourselves. The standard patient protocols don’t apply here.”
Jeannie snorted. “And me thinking you were such a charmer. What, don’t want to grill me some more? All sorts of clues you’re denying yourself that could save their lives,” she said, as the two men carted her towards the door. Saverly wasn’t biting. He knew she’d just toy with him from here, and he wasn’t about to get anything but red herrings. So she was right about him; he was definitely the right psychologist for her. They were going to have such fun together.
Jeannie watched Saverly go through his moves from an out-of-body vantage point she lacked at the time, suddenly even more impressed by him. If they could have just had more time to play.
Saverly buzzed in Carmichael and Fontanegro. He wanted to sic his plotters and schemers on finding her victims; they were the best match for Jeannie. But he knew in his heart of hearts they were out of their league, and much of this rescue effort was going to fall on him.
“Jeannie may have imprisoned some of our staff, who are even now fighting for their lives.”
“Dear God. How is that even possible?” Carmichael said. “We’ve had her under twenty-four-seven supervision.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Saverly said. “Put Jim on the cameras to see what he can get off the feeds.”
“We need to call in the police,” Fontanegro said.
“Can’t do that. Can’t afford the scandal. Admissions are already down in this beaten-to-death economy.”
Carmichael and Fontanegro nodded and gave him no further lip on the subject, surprisingly. “Go on. I have things to do at my end,” Saverly said.
They left. Saverly collapsed on his chair, contemplating his next move.
“Moses!” Saverly summoned him into the office by way of the intercom. “I want you to rewire your kitchen robots to play a game of hide-n-seek, and ferret out anyone stuck in a closet, trapped in an overhead compartment like an air-conditioning duct, stuffed beneath subflooring. Can it be done?”
“Technically, no. But that’s just because they want you to buy more specialized robots for every little function. The chips can be overridden so the robots can do a lot more than they were designed for. I’ll have to redirect some of their scanning functions meant to assess food status to function more like tracking beacons. I can’t promise anything, but—”.
Moses didn’t need any more motivation to mess with his toys. Stephanie, their in-house alarmist, already had everyone up in arms over the missing staff, by suggesting they follow the stench of dying and rotting bodies, her imagination making an impossible situation even worse, as only she could. Moses left to attend to his assignment.
Saverly buzzed Lawrence in next. Lawrence was part of the goon squad, kept around to be big and black and hugely intimidating to the largely aging white patient population. “Some of the police officers have their trained German shepherds here for patient visits as part of pet day.”
“Say no more,” Lawrence said. “I’ll get some of the boys. We’ll make some excuse to get the dogs away from them, and we’ll set them to work.”
Saverly nodded, thankful for not having to expend any more energy spelling everything out. He brought in the chief of maintenance next, who had the floor plans for the hospital, and knew every nook and cranny about as well as anybody, save the janitors and maids, who he buzzed in to the same conference.
He set them all to going through the place as if they had something to hide themselves, some out of the way place they might go for a smoke break while on the clock. Some place they might stash supplies so it was there when they needed it even after supplies had allegedly run out. Doors they never opened and compartments they never went into because they were afraid of adding any more to their cleaning detail. All the rooms, cubbyholes, drawers, compartments, they spent much of their conscious energy putting out of their minds.
They nodded nervously, erupted excitedly in Spanish, Latvian, Creole, Seminole, and patois, and sped on their way as if their jobs depended on it.
***
Microwave Man, one of Moses’s robots, scanned behind closed doors with a sweeping infra-red beam. Occasionally he unearthed a rat, which he stuck in his microwave belly, set to “high.”
CB, short for Cleaning Boy, part of Microwave Man’s search team, worked alongside him, using more arduous techniques. He utilized his numerous tensile arms and attachments, meant to get in and out of tight corners, to rip open locked doors, yank out whatever humans were on the other side, invert them, torture them into position, so his scanner could match their countenances with the faces in memory he was searching for, before releasing them, quite a bit more traumatized than they were before. “Sorry, but you’re not the one,” he kept repeating just before tossing them
hard enough to land broken and mangled.
ER1, short for Emergency Room 1, and ER 2 followed in CB’s wake, fixing the broken humans. They were supposed to be along to mend the wounded Jeannie had left in her wake, but by the time they caught up with the intended victims, they’d likely be out of supplies, Microwave Man thought.
Alas, robots, himself included, were a bit dim-witted. Maybe with the next generation on line…
***
Having leaned on his staff as much as he could, it was left to Saverly to do the rest. He had to get inside Jeannie’s mind, knowing full well she would have gotten into his head and anticipated his every move, making most everything he’d done up to this moment likely useless. He had no patient file on her, and today was their first sit-down visit together. No matter, he knew the psychological profile of a high functioning psychopath like the back of his hand. For years, facilities from all over the world had been sending him the geniuses too smart for anyone else. If anything, Jeannie’s psych profile was a lucky break.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 37
