“You’re funnier when you aren’t so whiny.”
“Pick one, just five dollars,” a naked alabaster-white man with shockingly red hair said, walking up to Robin. He was covered in little glass bowls suction cupped to his skin. Under each one he had trapped a terrarium full of crabs that had migrated from his crotch in favor of more fertile hunting grounds. The police would arrest him soon enough, possibly, if they weren’t too busy fishing higher up the food chain. He had great muscle tone and was strangely sexy for all of it, and his dazzling blue eyes sparkled, paradoxically the clearest, healthiest eyes Robin had ever gazed into. He swore he could see Poseidon himself bathing in his baby blues.
Robin handed the man a five dollar bill, but held out his hand insistently in a gesture to desist when “Spiderman” tried to retrieve his prize for him. “You keep them until they’re more grown up.”
“I’ll have to charge you interest.”
“Done,” Robin said, still holding out his hand defensively.
Terrarium Man rolled up the five dollar bill and tucked it behind his ear like a cigarette. He made his way down the avenue to the next potential customer.
“What profound cosmic message do you glean from him?” Drew asked provocatively.
“None. Absolutely none. But I can tell I’m not in the zone. Thanks to you.” Drew was running out of condescending smiles in her repertoire. “There it is,” Robin said, the synchronistic significance of the Terrarium Man suddenly hitting him like a bolt of lightning. “The instant we become attached to any idea about ourselves or the nature of reality, we’re as silly in the eyes of God as that man wearing his glass terrariums.”
“Okay, we’re getting you out of here. You’re starting to sound as loopy as the rest of the Telegraph regulars.”
“You think that’s why those people really died at Hartman’s hands? Hartman really wasn’t to blame at all. It was this age we live in, where the price of a mature democracy, an anything goes society, is this gaudy display of ostentatious personalities, like over-ripe fruit.
“Everyone has evolved along their own tangents just a little too long, resulting in this carnival of the soul that leaves us in a state of shock at one another’s presence. So completely mind-blown by one another are we that all that’s left are the primitive impulses of a malformed ID lashing out.
“The funhouse mirror distortions of real people haunt us to the point of violence as we fight and claw our way back to some common ground that actually allows us to share the human condition beyond what the funhouse mirror distortions have to offer.”
Robin sighed. “God, no wonder Plato said democracy bottoms out in totalitarianism; as a natural backlash.”
Drew actually softened, tethered her silver tongue, and took Robin by the arm. She seemed to recognize Robin was struggling to heal in the wake of the trauma he experienced in Hartman’s house that night, and from within this context, required more compassion. Robin gleaned all this from the hundred-eighty degree turnabout that had little else by way of rational explanation, recognizing for himself for the first time what was really going on with him.
Robin was growing more than a little scared the fallout from Hartman had extended further than he realized.
EIGHT
Drew and Robin took their seats on the third pew back from the front of Christ Church in North Berkeley, on Cedar, between Walnut and Oxford. If one was looking to ease back into Christianity after being burned by prior experiences with Christians, this was as good a place as any to do it. Priests in the congregation were forever tying in biblical teachings with those of well-known philosophers. Nothing was promulgated as take-it-or-leave it pedagogy, not open to question. Just the opposite; they were philosophical about everything. They seemed to recognize, in one of the intellectual bastions of the world, where many had already fled to Buddhism for just that reason, the chance to question everything, including how their psychologies filtered the presence of the divine percolating through them like so much black tea, that permitting such discussion was tantamount to winning them back. Pastors at Christ Church also invited engaging the spiritual dimension within oneself at many different levels, skilled at interacting with the most newbie of initiates to those who clearly qualified as sages and saints and should have been doing their own lecture circuit if they could justify the nod to egoism.
Robin came mostly for the quiet and serenity, preferring a Buddhist temple to such ends, but Christ Church was closer after taking a walk through Chapel Hill in North Berkeley. And it didn’t seem worth snubbing them, not with what his high heels and the cost of hammering them against hard pavement were doing to his body, forget his soul.
The congregation seemed more appropriate to the fifth rung of Dante’s Hell than to some nouveau take on Christianity. Two four-hundred-pound lesbians, evidently together for some time, sat beside them to the immediate right. Robin felt the pew crack as they sat in tandem. Maybe they would throw a little more in the basket for the trouble. In front were a couple Satanists. Maybe they were here in the role of hecklers. Two gay guys were making out in the first row with loud kissing, moaning, and heavy breathing that was adding a desperately needed draft to the otherwise still air of the church. There were three nudists scattered about, having no connection with one another beside a shared philosophy on how to engage life.
All the local color was unfairly situated on the right side of the church. Across the aisle, the graduate students and yuppies were clothed in fine pressed suits, holding down the fort on conventionality. They were trying their best not to stare at the oddities on the other side of the church, although Robin heard uncomfortable murmurings from those couples. No one caught the irony that most everyone had come paired up in this Noah’s Ark tribute to the Christianity of the future. Leastways, Robin was the only one smiling at the big picture.
The priest wore khaki heavily-pocketed shorts, and a wrinkly short-sleeve white shirt with a thin untapering black tie down the middle. Both arms and legs were covered in tattoos. Robin tried to determine if his manufactured persona was meant as homage to both sides of the aisle at once, or if he was simply even giddier than the rest. From Drew’s expression, Robin figured she’d landed on the latter. She was still better at reading people than he was, so he saw no reason to question her judgment.
Breaking the silence, Robin said, “Hartman’s victims had to know they’d awakened forever changed after taking the purple pill. Why didn’t they freak out? Why didn’t they resist?”
Drew’s response was delayed as she clearly felt uncomfortable talking in church. “Some part of them was obviously eager to let go of the old personas. Most of this town accepts reincarnation as a given; probably just figured some doctor had saved them an extra trip.”
“Still, wouldn’t you feel violated? Wouldn’t you be pissed off someone had done this without your permission? Conversely, wouldn’t you be scared it might not last, and rush to find out if you had to keep taking the meds or not?”
Drew adjusted herself in her seat, tried to get comfortable, as she thought about it. “Maybe as part of the drug’s effect, the anxiety regulating mechanisms in the brain were dialed down.”
“Maybe,” Robin said. “Don’t suppose there’s any other explanation.”
“Why don’t you think, from their calmer states of mind, they weren’t at least able to tackle some of Hartman’s big picture questions?” the lesbian sitting closest to Robin asked, the one with the white streak slithering skunk-like through her hair. Robin realized enough details had already hit the newspapers that they were no longer the only ones absorbed in the debate.
“Excuse me?” Drew said defensively.
“It’s a good question.” Robin turned to the first lesbian. “Thank you.”
Drew advised, “Philosophical thinking requires you jump neural nets frequently, and string them together in different configurations in rapid succession to facilitate the many points of view you have to integrate. The drug worked in just the opposit
e manner, to lock in a new persona, and a singular way of coming at the world.”
“Still, it definitely suggests that if a chemical agent can function as a locking mechanism, one can just as easily serve as an unlocking one, freeing the inner philosopher.” That comment from the belfry came from one of the two gay guys in the front row. By now, it was clear to Robin and Drew that everyone in the church was listening in. Even the priest, busy lighting candles, slowed his ritual to extend his time on the floor before commencing services.
“Maybe the next generation of smart drugs,” Robin said.
“Could you speak up over there?” came a voice form the suit-and-tie section across the way.
Robin craned to address the left side of the church. “I was thinking that you’d need a smart drug to speed up neural processing to give you more space to think in less time.”
“It’s called adrenaline,” Drew said, sounding miffed at having their conversation go viral.
The other gay guy spoke up. “Agreed, but adrenaline favors linear thinking over branching tree logic and expansiveness in general. It wants you to find the quickest way through the maze, not every possible alternate route.”
Robin finally skipped a rock across the pool of silence in which steeped much speculation. “Maybe you need another drug that promotes fearlessness. Otherwise, you use all that extra processing time to generate more crippling worries, instead of thinking your way around hurdles.” As the congregation chewed on that one, the priest commenced ceremonies.
Robin continued his brainstorming uninterrupted. “Maybe outside of Zen mind you’d need so many neurochemicals so finely balanced it’ll take neuroscience another twenty years to approximate it, assuming it is possible. Don’t forget that you’re making ongoing corrections throughout the day in response to varying external stimuli, something no amount of smart drug cocktails can manage. You need a specific mind-field to sustain the constant adjustments. It’s Zen mind or nothing.”
“You realize I don’t believe in God,” Drew said, leaning into Robin. “I just throw the term around rhetorically as a matter of gaining leverage in my arguments with you.”
“I’m confident all paths—even the more torturous ones—eventually lead to God, as this congregation will happily attest.”
Drew grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I didn’t think Buddhists believed in a God.”
“I’m only selectively Buddhist.” Robin pulled his hand away. “Mostly when I’m not being Taoist, and Sufi.”
“Could we economize on the adjectives and just call you eclectic?”
The priest made a throat clearing sound to focus the congregation’s attention on him before beginning his ceremony.
NINE
The Bullmastiffs eagerly lapped up the drainage water pouring out the pipes from Hartman’s lab. Even with the master gone, the last of the effluent had yet to dry up. The trap was lined with moss and mildew. They had discovered the spout when Hartman grew sloppy, or perhaps just forgetful with putting out their water dishes. When he started forgetting to put out food as well, that required more creative workarounds.
By then the last of the dogs had smartened up from guzzling his cocktails mixed with the mold and other organisms that fed off it. They had learned to jump the fences at night to go on the prowl for food.
They wended a long, convoluted trail from Hartman’s home, so they couldn’t be tracked back to their origins. Once over the city line and into Oakland, they dined on the brains of humans. More specifically, the brains of Moonies, a religious cult that had relocated there to flee the higher rents of Berkeley.
Psychically connected to Hartman, owing to a property of the drug in their system, or perhaps owing to what the bacteria had done to influence the drug’s digestion and uptake in their bodies, they had chosen their victims in kind. Like Hartman, they were highly intolerant of those who didn’t generate a lot of intellectual activity in their brains, activity from which the dogs could monitor and benefit. Since they could hardly eat those humans, the humans lower down the food chain seemed an obvious choice to satiate their cravings.
Religious types tended to let scriptures do their thinking for them, which made any of them fair game. But the Moonies had been targets of gang violence recently, and thus their disappearances were less likely to trail back to the pack.
This had gone on for months, sparking speculation of cult in-fighting that led to actual infighting, with the prejudiced police reticent to intercede, only too happy to see them kill one another off. The Oakland police weren’t nearly as tolerant of diversity as the Berkeley PD. That was no small factor in the dogs’ decision to make it their hunting grounds.
Thor was the only one of their group yet able to think thoughts this big. The leadership of the pack had hence fallen to him; the others sensed the amount of thought he could stuff in his head correlated rather well with their ongoing survival. He took the lead as they hopped the fence. He led them out in small units—tonight, as all nights—so others remained at all times to protect Hartman’s home. They had to consider their master might return at any time.
Thor, the master had named him. He rather liked the name. But the master was an absentee master, neglectful of his duties. He struck Thor as absent-minded, and self-involved. Still, he couldn’t deny his sense of loyalty to Hartman. It was written into his genes as part of the whole dog thing.
He barked at Brutus to get his attention. They could communicate psychically, and speak human when transmitting thoughts back and forth pretty well. English was a far superior communication system to the one they’d been born with. Still, they couldn’t exactly speak. The satisfaction from hearing himself howl, moreover, was another carryover from his genetic heritage.
The pack mentality that made Thor the obvious leader grated at his sense of justice. Still, he couldn’t argue he was a better fighter strategically and tactically, and smarter at both abstract and concrete thinking than the rest. And he had an eye for planning. Brutus, the strongest of them, was far more impulsive and needed to be constantly reined in. He was already preparing to jump the fence of the Moonie man’s property with no thought for the overhead cameras, which he hadn’t taken the time to spot. Ergo, Thor’s bark to chastise him, and alert him to await instructions.
Thor grabbed a heavy stick in his mouth and flicked it, knocked the camera out before it had time finish sweeping the yard and reveal their position. Once Brutus saw what he was up to, he settled down, in less of a huff, barked submissively out of newfound respect for the pack rankings.
To his credit, he helped Thor knock out the final two cameras, climbed onto the roof of the garage, and reached for the camera with his paw, as Thor went for the one over the back door with a trebuchet he improvised from a child’s seesaw left in the yard.
The doggie door in the back entrance to the house was too small to accommodate them. Brutus, refusing to grasp this, stuck his head through anyway. That alerted the dog inside, and the ensuing yapping all but gave them away. But Brutus bit off the Boxer’s head as the animal charged out with the same impulsiveness that had gotten them into this situation. Hartman’s elixirs had imbued them all with greater strength. Still, at times like this, it shocked even them. The Boxer, absent his head, ran about the yard under its own momentum before dropping to the ground to finish gushing blood.
Brutus slammed the back door with his body, knocking it down. Thor was about to send another warning bark to restrain him, but figured, finally, every unit needs someone to step on the landmine before the other soldiers that merit more concern.
By the time Thor made it inside, Brutus had the owner’s brain pan exposed, and waited submissively for the pack leader to take the first bite. Thor yanked the brain out and feasted on the right hemisphere, which he figured would better support his big picture thinking. He could thank Hartman’s meditations on hemispheric specialization for the idea, and his psychic connection to the man.
The left hemisphere would help Brutus with pro
blem solving; God knew, he could use all the help he could get.
The man’s brains would be divided parsimoniously amongst the pack to cut down on the number of homicides. They supplemented their diet with vegetables found in many gardens to protect their kidneys, dog food left out for other dogs, occasional raids on meat trucks. For an enterprising dog determined to eat an enriched diet, there were more options than one might at first realize.
The rest of the pack were currently serving as scouts, tracking the Moonies from their congregation hall back to their homes. They would also assess which homes were easiest to break into. Still, they would await Thor’s arrival before proceeding further. They weren’t half bad at assessing covert dangers posed by humans; but that also meant they were only half good. Their psychic connection would help them find one another. So far that hadn’t worked with Hartman. That either meant he was out of range, or too stressed out, thus blocking their connection. Perhaps he had sunken into one of his depressions. Thor had found out the hard way that such moodiness could cut him off from the rest of the pack.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 46
