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

by Dean C. Moore

  Mini-Moe ascended along his own lifeline this time, no longer trusting Mini-Mike’s rope.

  Adam made muffled muttering sounds. They grew gradually more vexed, explaining their true raison d’etre. Mini-Moe was dangling off the wall again, helpless to claw his way out of the tangle of lines, caught like a fly in a spider’s web.

  Jeannie entered harshly, slamming the door wide, and sending Mini-Moe into the wall. Getting his head bashed did nothing for his rope-untangling prowess.

  She flopped down beside Adam on the floor and took over Mini-Moe’s remote. “Figured you’d never get up this wall without me,” Jeannie said.

  “Please tell me they cancelled.”

  “Caught in the rain,” Jeannie informed him matter-of-factly.

  Adam looked out the window at the sunny day. “I’m guessing they’re playing more adult games and are just loath to admit it.”

  “I think he’s trying to kill me,” Jeannie said, getting into character as Mini-Moe. “Just wait ‘til I get up here. We’ll see how well he flies!”

  “Dream on, you sorry excuse for a Coors can.” Mini-Mike released his hold on the overhead line, jumped down on Mini-Moe, drove his cleats into his belly again and again, taking advantage of Mini-Moe, trapped by the lines. Mini-Mike did a backwards somersault, then a forwards somersault, just so he could land even harder and drive the metal cleats even further into Mini-Moe.

  ***

  Recalling some of the high-times with Jeannie, Adam was glad he got a taste of a real childhood, even if it was a little late in the game, courtesy of Jeannie’s accommodating nature, and Hartman’s purple pill. And he got to bond with the old Adam, as well, the savant, felt more whole as a consequence. If only he could have been less attached to either role he might have lived an even fuller life. He supposed, in retrospect, that was just the kind of distance Hartman was trying to get him to have on himself. Maybe if he could have lived every moment of his life as a near-death experience, maybe then…

  FIFTY-THREE

  Fiona had spliced every wire. So far she’d accomplished nothing besides giving herself a few undeserved shocks in her attempts to call 9-1-1. Thanks to Hartman, more of those she didn’t need. She was running out of cord combinations.

  The rising tide of negative emotions built on fatigue and frustration, hyper-secretion of adrenaline hormones now crashing, panic, self-loathing, fear of failure… It all coalesced to open a door to her past. Recollections flooded in she had done well to repress all this time, and had put out of her mind entirely.

  ***

  “I want to be a high functioning lesbian, too, mommy.” Fiona was six years old, playing Scrabble with one of her two moms, Lucia Mably, a woman that for all practical purposes could have been classified as dowdy, but who refused to sink to that, crawling out of the low energy well that imprisoned her each day to spruce up enough to step out the door in a way that wouldn’t offend her public. In small town America, people took great offense if their neighbors didn’t toe the line with their well-manicured lawn, their freshly painted white picket fence, their Saturday afternoon car-washing, and, of course, the obligatory Sunday drive-in movie. And how she dressed was no less important.

  Everyone came to believe quite firmly without anyone ever actually talking about it that the drive-in was the center of gravity for the town, and without it, Sahola would just dissolve like a desert apparition. However, a couple of lesbians in a fire engine red 1967 Chevy Malibu convertible parked in the center of the drive-in for a matinee marathon pretty much guaranteed no one was watching the movie.

  Her parents were celebrities in the small Iowa town in which they lived, population 350, give or take a few intransient bums and stragglers, alcoholics and would-be alcoholics, who occasionally couldn’t afford the rents, and so dropped off the census to go live in the woods. As a consequence, wherever Fiona went, advice was free and plenty on how best to survive her dreadful situation. Being the daughter of two lesbians rated somewhere between leprosy and abject poverty in a very detailed ranking of fates worse than death.

  Historically speaking, Sahola was stuck somewhere in the fifties, which had escaped feminism, equal rights for all races, anti-ageism, and free-thinking in general. Except on the subject of her parents, which served to get the gears turning in many a mind that hadn’t bothered to grease the wheels in years.

  Sahola was the Havana Cuba of the Midwest, down to the antique cars that everyone living there refused to get rid of in favor of those modern monstrosities that broke down all the time, and enslaved you to The Man. Vintage Packards dotted the streets along with roadsters blasting everything from Chuck Berry to Frank Sinatra. There was a man in his seventies who preferred operatic arias and who blared them from his car.

  “Why do you want to be a lesbian, darling?” Lucia said.

  “Not just any lesbian, a super sophisticated urbane lesbian!” Fiona corrected her.

  “Well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with setting your sights high.”

  “We’re priestesses,” Desdemona corrected Fiona, “more than we are lesbians. And this town is our congregation. Without us, they’d never come to learn of their prejudices, and the demons that feed on their ignorance.” Desdemona was Fiona’s other mom, crisp as a tart apple picked a little too early. She talked as she read her New York Times. She was the only one in town who subscribed to the paper.

  “They have TV,” Lucia said argumentatively.

  “For those then who can’t find enlightenment watching The Price is Right,” Desdemona said turning the page of her newspaper.

  “Is that why you practice such a lewd and lascivious lifestyle?” Fiona asked.

  “Who said that?” Desdemona queried, flipping the page in her newspaper. As far as Fiona knew, Desdemona was the only one in town who could multi-task. Her other mother didn’t have the energy for it, and no one else in town felt a need to manage their time that effectively.

  “Aunty Harriet,” Fiona confessed dejectedly, ashamed at herself for giving up yet another secret.

  “She’s your self-appointed aunty, sweetie,” Desdemona corrected her, “like she’s self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. Don’t mind what that silly woman says. It’s all on account of her constipation. She hasn’t shit in thirty years, not since she was fifty-five. And now it’s piled up to her neck, and is squeezing out her mouth. You tell her for me, we’re very sorry to hear about her condition, and that’s why we’re lending her the toilet plunger.”

  Fiona ran and grabbed the toilet plunger, reentered from the bathroom moments later. “Can I go rescue her now?”

  “After breakfast, dear,” Desdemona said. “It’s important you get some schooling first.”

  “Aunty Joanie says every time you school me, she has to spend months unlearning me from the practice of being a hellhound.”

  “Aunty Joanie has never stepped foot out of this town,” Desdemona balked. “How does she know what hell looks like?”

  “I think that’s enough schooling in sarcasm for one morning,” Lucia said. “Why don’t we learn how to apply makeup today?”

  “Oh can we, mom!” Fiona jumped up and down as if riding an imaginary pogo stick.

  “The child is six years old,” Desdemona said, while vigorously reading the latest article to catch her fancy.

  “She has my tired genes, Desdemona. If she doesn’t start applying makeup from now, they’ll think she died years ago and is just haunting this miserable town.”

  “Like these people would know the living from the dead.” Desdemona brought her paper to her face for closer inspection.

  “Everyone in town does remark how pale I look. Uncle Simon asked if I was an albino Somalian. What’s an albino Somalian?” Fiona asked.

  “Sort of an albino alligator without the scales, and a tail that wiggles a hell of a lot more,” Desdemona explained.

  “Oh,” Fiona said, managing to picture it.

  “Go get my makeup kit, dear,” Lucia said.
/>   Fiona rushed out of the room and up the stairs to grab Lucia’s makeup kit. But floating over the scene, disembodied as she was, merely drifting through her past, Fiona was able this time to catch the conversation downstairs between her two moms she missed as a child. A conversation overheard, apparently, but not fully processed by her child’s brain.

  “This whole paper is about the world wide web being invented this year,” Desdemona said, “and how it will allow anyone to be connected to anyone else no matter where in the world they are. Tell me that’s not the solution to surviving this dreary little town.”

  “We left Manhattan and the social sophisticates swooning over our latest books and insisting on making us the toast of the town because you couldn’t believe how inbred the scene was. These local yokels, drowning in the quicksand pits of their natures and threatened by intellectual oblivion, are as much our salvation as we are theirs. Any more conscious of human failings and there won’t be enough anti-depressives in all the world.” Lucia popped a couple from her bottle, having just reminded herself of her habit of over-relying on pharmaceuticals, which Fiona had never picked up on as a child.

  “I don’t know why you take those things. They don’t do any good. You sure he’s not running some placebo test on you?”

  “Maybe if we didn’t isolate ourselves so much,” Lucia said. “Might make me feel better to get out. Might get us liked a little better around here as well.” Lucia was crying and not really knowing why. Bravely refusing to get bent out of shape further by the fact, she wiped her eyes.

  “Fight your depression all you want. I embrace my bitterness. Five best-sellers and a Pulitzer later, my fans would be just as lost without it.”

  Lucia said, fanning herself, “Promise me we’ll go to the strawberry festival this week, if only for Fiona’s sake.”

  “A chance to make everyone miserable? Doesn’t sound like much of a concession to me.”

  “Don’t you dare.” Lucia breathed asthmatically.

  Fiona arrived with the makeup kit.

  ***

  “I wonder if we should have come. Doesn’t seem the best day for it,” Lucia said, examining the ominous cloud bank overhead.

  “That’s my Lucia, forever lacking the courage of her convictions,” Desdemona said as Lucia arrived with Fiona in tow. “If you want to cure your depression, you’ll follow through with one of your ideas one of these days.”

  “I can be resolute.” Lucia upped the tempo on her fanning.

  “The heroines in your novels make Hamlet look decisive!” Desdemona made a temporary hat for relief against the sun with a splayed copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

  Lucia flicked her fan closed, then open, then closed. “There’s no shame in taking time to consider alternative perspectives. Fools rush in.”

  “Why don’t you get us some cherry pie?” Desdemona said with a barely controlled smirk.

  At the pie table, Lucia quickly became overwhelmed. “I was thinking the apple might be better. Unless you think that’s nothing but silly programmed behavior. Maybe we should consider that lemon meringue pie that lovely gentleman just set down?”

  Lucia made a funny face. Fiona never liked it when Lucia got an attack of the indecisives, which was most of the time. Lucia’s parents, to hear her tell it, over-controlled her life, leaving her with the inability to make up her own mind, and crisis-like anxiety when it came to making the most trivial of decisions. It was the reason for her over-permissive approach to child-rearing. Fiona didn’t seem to mind, as she had a strong will of her own, and preferred experimenting before coming to any hard and fast conclusions about life. As a consequence, she made a better pairing with Lucia than Desdemona, whose cynical perspective wore on Fiona after a while.

  Fiona made the decision for them to go with the lemon meringue pie. They returned to Desdemona’s side with her slice in tow. “That man contributed our pie,” Fiona said pointing.

  “His wife is the town seamstress,” Desdemona said.

  “Oh.” Lucia’s tone indicated she hadn’t caught the relevancy yet.

  “We could ask her to give Fiona sewing lessons.” Desdemona cut into her pie with the fork.

  “I’m not sure I want the daughter of two world-renowned feminists learning how to sew. I feel like enough of a hypocrite, most days,” Lucia said. “Then again, she could stand to mend her own dresses as quickly as she tears them. Could bring out the tomboy in her to learn to tend to her own scrapes too. Teach self-reliance. Maybe it’s more feminist than anti-feminist, what do you think?”

  Even six year old Fiona could tell Desdemona was toying with Lucia, trying to compel her to get over her indecisiveness by calling attention to it. Fiona dragged Lucia away for some fresh air.

  “Get me a snow cone!” Desdemona yelled after them.

  Seconds later, Fiona and Lucia stared into the bank of snow cones with every color pattern in the world represented. Lucia was completely paralyzed. Fiona would have time grow up before Lucia made a decision. She chose for them. “They all taste the same, mom, more or less. I don’t think this one is worth having a heart attack over.”

  Lucia took one of her many pills for anxiety, and accepted the snow cone from the vender, still more comfortable with other people making her decisions for her. Some feminist, Fiona thought.

  Licking her snow cone, Fiona said, “About this high-functioning feminist thing, mom. How can you be high functioning if you can’t make up your mind about anything? And how can you be feminist if you prefer to let other people make your decisions for you?”

  “The greatest philosophers in the world are exactly the same way, Fiona. The trick is to turn indecision into genius.”

  “Well then, why don’t you?” Fiona stuck out her tongue and wagged it to keep it from freezing up.

  “Too many anti-anxiety pills clouds judgment nearly as much as too few. I suppose until we can face the pain we carry around inside us from our past, digest it, we’re not much good to anybody.”

  “Well then? Why don’t you?”

  “This is a conversation for when you’re more grown up, Fiona. Adults, sometimes, they forget how to be free in the way of children. They forget how to make imaginary worlds and live in them in ways that can heal them. They forget a lot of things. It’s all about remembering the long forgotten past. There was a spiritual master named Gurdjieff who described it as re-membering. Putting all the different shattered pieces of ourselves back together into one whole. Only by surrounding the broken parts with enough love and understanding can they be annealed back into the greater whole.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I don’t know, honey. Perhaps, another equally shattering experience that unlocks the door of forgetfulness. But the best way of all is to shockproof the mind against any and all hazards with mindfulness, and not allow any new emotional charges to build up that need catastrophic releasing. I’m afraid it’s easier said than done. Most of us fail miserably at it. But I hear meditation helps.”

  “What’s meditation?”

  “You know how our thoughts take on a life of their own sometimes? Well, meditation is a way to get the genie back in the bottle. We use it to identify less with the thoughts and more with the part of us that is simply observing.”

  “Hmm. You’re not very good at that.”

  Lucia laughed. “No, I suppose not.”

  Just then Trevor Bartlet came running up to Fiona and grabbed her hand. “Hi, wanna play with me?” he asked. He was a very handsome peach-faced eight year old boy with riotous red hair. His freckles recalled some of Desdemona’s favorite pointillist paintings.

  “Sure!” Fiona said. They ran off together to play without so much as another word.

  That day, Fiona, with her painted face, had every boy ages six to twelve hitting on her. And each time one of them dragged her off it was into a magical mystery world so alien and so foreign to the one she grew up in at home. It would be years later before she realized that she suffered from a
lack of imagination, something in Lucia’s depressive genes passed on to her. So as other kids were play-acting in magical worlds of their own creation to heal themselves, as Lucia explained, Fiona was dependent on the marketing prowess of her made-up face to lure boys who could sweep her up in their arms and do the imagining for her.

  Only, as the boys got older, their dream worlds got drearier, and darker. And Fiona found herself in need of protection from their twisted imaginings which ended up costing her, making her feel used, like a blanket fallen off the back of a truck and blown into the wilds. The blanket became little more than a shelter for all kinds of wild animals who gave no thought to the shelter itself as being anything more than expedient. It was in those later years that Fiona began to lean more on the habits of mind absorbed from Desdemona, as her loyalties shifted.

  ***

  Baxter Bravely had them on the run. The enemy dove into a roadside ditch. But the cover wasn’t going to do them any good, not with the kind of artillery Baxter had at his disposal. “Fire the twelve-pound howitzer!” He added conspiratorially, “Best field piece for ranges under four hundred yards.”

  Fiona aimed the weapon and fired. Baxter handled the sounds of the explosions himself, different for each weapon. He factored in for distance, and lent the howitzer the aura of thunder striking directly overhead. His father was a Civil War buff, so Baxter had grown up with battle scenes on the brain. They weren’t exactly Fiona’s thing, but a half hour in Baxter’s presence, and she could see the bloody, wounded soldiers traipsing off in cinematic clarity that usually only cable TV gave to her.