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

by Dean C. Moore

  “You talk as if it’s synonymous with life.”

  “No, son. Life is the fire.”

  Saverly smiled empathetically, shared a rueful patch of silence with him to help both of them detox from all the intellectualism, then bowed and wished him a good day, as he let Manny out of the room.

  Well, the next few weeks should be interesting, Manny thought.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jim looked up from the domino game he was playing with Manny as Saverly breezed by. “Okay, doc, let’s have it: One of your famous Zen koans.”

  “He does Zen koans?” Manny chuckled.

  Jim explained, “You have to be a Zen master before you can become a psychologist. It’s a prerequisite. Unless, of course, you’re more messed up than anyone else. That’s a backdoor approach.”

  Saverly smiled and said, “A philosopher asked Buddha: `Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me truth?'

  “The Buddha kept silence.

  “The philosopher bowed and thanked the Buddha, saying: `With your loving kindness I have cleared away my delusions and entered the true path.'

  “After the philosopher had gone, Ananda asked the Buddha what he had attained.

  “The Buddha replied, `A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.'”

  “Translation, Doc?” Jim said.

  Saverly replied:

  “To tread the sharp edge of a sword

  To run on smooth-frozen ice,

  One needs no footsteps to follow.

  Walk over the cliffs with hands free.”

  Saverly bowed and departed. Saverly wore his Chinese-culture affectation of the polite bow the way a salesman wears a suit; the two just seemed to go together.

  After the stunned silence had dissipated, Manny and Jim laughed their asses off. The two returned their attention to the domino game, laid down a couple more pieces. No doubt there was an ominous dimension to Saverly’s Zen koans, a clue pertaining to round one of the game, Manny thought, as he drifted off. Possibly, events to unfold later would put the words into bold relief; for now, he had no clue what they meant. Then again… the horse running at the shadow of the whip could be translated to mean: pay close attention to what was going on around him. He hardly needed any coaxing there.

  The point of running on ice not requiring footsteps to follow could refer to there being no body of knowledge and learning that was going to get him where he needed to go; the more important tools were spontaneity, and staying in the moment, using his full presence of mind not to slip on the thin ice he was running on. Hmm. Good clues indeed. Assuming he was any good at the whole Zen koan thing.

  Jim, as friends go, was down to earth, straight to the point, real, not phony, just the way Manny liked them. They were a dying breed. Jim slipped his latest domino into place. He’d taken the pot the last three times, which struck Manny as distinctly unfriendly. “What do you make of nurse Atterman?” Jim asked.

  They had a good surveyor’s angle on the psych ward’s rec room and could evaluate most everyone from this distance with impunity. Manny figured some habits die hard. Where else was a detective to situate himself on being committed? Manny had been going over their fellow inmates’ and the staff’s every move with the eyes of a hawk and the talons to match.

  Atterman, out and about for her morning constitutional, checked mouths for patients determined to cheek their meds as if her life depended on it. “My guess is those meds means she doesn’t have to get too close to anyone in here,” Manny said.

  “Yeah, the frozen expression the Thorazine leaves on their faces is like the masks they wear in Noh drama,” Jim conceded, shifting a tile. “Then there’s the shuffling gate. She prefers the zombies to the real people, no doubt about it.”

  “Less emotionally taxing for her.”

  “Doesn’t that creep you out?” Jim slid another tile into place. “Creeps me out, and I get to leave this place come five o’clock.”

  “I lost count of all the things that creep me out around here.”

  “Really? It’s not that bad.”

  Remember, it’s a scenario, Manny. He’s probably befriending you to catch you with your guard down. Giving personal information—didn’t Saverly suggest you swear that off as rule one of survival? Nah, you were best buds with this guy since before the subject of scenarios came up. He could be a plant. Maybe that was the point all along, earn his trust, and then betray him, so Manny knew better than to drop his guard ever again. That was just too paranoid even for him.

  “You ever notice that most of these people have four or five misdiagnoses before anyone gets them pegged correctly?” Manny said. “Assuming they’re not just on to the latest misdiagnosis. I guess that’s what comes of refusing to take more than two minutes with a patient. It’s like Jiffy Lube around here, in and out before the tires stop spinning, at least for the doctors. No wonder it’s a revolving door for the patients.”

  “Except for Saverly,” Jim added, a little too leadingly, Manny thought.

  “Yeah, they don’t make them like that anymore.”

  Jim cupped his hands and blew against them to warm them. “Keep in mind some of these people have four and five diagnosis at one time, not in sequence, because they’re that screwed up.”

  “I think it’s more like the doctors don’t have a clue. How could they? You know anyone deeply you just spend a couple minutes with a couple times a month?” Manny rejected the latest tile from his pile the way he rejected the entire system. “You try to solve everything with medications, moreover, you just replace one entrenched behavior with another. Big surprise when the new behavior isn’t any more adaptive.”

  “Worse, it must be like trying to think on a fifth of bourbon poured into your system every four hours,” Jim conceded. “I guess the whole situation is pretty screwed up.”

  “Fubar, no doubt about it.” Manny’s face brightened at the layout of the board. He was certain he was winning this time.

  “I win, again,” Jim said, after placing down the latest tile.

  Manny interrupted his sour face to ask, “Any of Hartman’s victims pay you a visit before they ended up dead?” Hartman was big news on the psychiatric circuit, so the subject needed no introduction.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jim exclaimed, shuffling the tiles. “Jeannie was a star attraction around here for quite some time. She’s a serial killer. At least she was before they pronounced her cured.”

  “I’ll have to apply myself to just how many people were discharged from here or slipped out to go do evil in the world. I guess that’s one way to shut this place down, or at least get some decent doctors who give a damn in here to give Saverly a hand.” Manny’s eyes roamed disapprovingly over the latest doctors to enter the unit and head straight for the charts, not even bothering to look the patients in the eyes.

  From the way Jim clenched, Manny realized his suggestion of seeking revenge was one thought he should have kept to himself—leastways until he made it out of here alive. Who knew how complicit Jim was in all of it? Saverly was right: friends were a threat to life and limb. How could he drop his guard like this? If he hadn’t been busy causing his own blood to boil, in fact, he’d have picked up on Jim’s reaction sooner.

  “That’s it for me,” Jim said. “Time to spread the love around. The other patients get jealous of me spending too much time with you, it’ll be a riot in here.” Manny found himself looking at an empty chair. He knew it was his comment about getting the hospital shut down that had chased Jim away. Now what? This was a safe space, right? The whole point of scenario games was that it was a sandbox to play in without consequences rippling out into the real world. Manny, you can’t be that naïve. One of these needle-wielding assholes gets it in for you, your life just got seriously complicated.

  He was starting to feel seriously screwed. Then he reminded himself his father’s reign of terror left him paranoid he was always doing something wrong. Moreover, he felt he was always on the verge of getting caught, because lia
rs are somehow more transparent than regular people. The thinking of a child had stayed with him. Maybe that was lesson one, let go of the paranoia, learn to gauge how safe he really was (or wasn’t) by reading people better, instead of going from scripted responses. And do that by forging a heart connection that could better inform his brain, instead of stringing more paranoid wiring throughout his head. Then again, wasn’t that Saverly’s point? In Big Brother land you can never drop your guard; you’re never safe from the guy looking to earn points and move up the ladder at your expense.

  Shit.

  ***

  Inside of half an hour of his little chat with Jim over dominos, every pair of staff eyes that came within range were locked on to him, and the mouths that went with those eyes were customarily only found on sharks. Yep, definitely a test in not showing your cards when “ally” could become “enemy” given a different context in the game of ever shifting contexts. Then again, maybe the lesson was in not letting his paranoia alienate him from the world. Maybe they were feeding into it to show him how comically absurd the idea was of using paranoia as any kind of psychic defense mechanism when all it did was distort reality.

  Or were they playing to his paranoia paradoxically to conceal their true intent to poison him or stab him in the back, or in some other fanciful way, get him out of the picture before he got the word out on them? Like the boy who cried wolf, if he came off as paranoid about everything, the one time he happened to be right, no one would listen.

  Figuring he’d exhaust himself, or not trust himself enough to act in the right manner in the one moment when acting correctly meant the difference between life and death, he fought to relax his mind.

  Saverly was right, knowing how this game was played wasn’t much of an asset.

  Shit… Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “He’s got to sleep sometime,” Nurse Fontanegro said to nurse Carmichael under her breath when she thought he was out of earshot. Then he realized, they didn’t speak in code. They wanted him to overhear them. The bitches were enjoying messing with his mind. “He” could refer to the other patient whose door they were standing in front of. Manny didn’t think so. Her tone carried too much menace. Manny decided, trust that detective’s radar he had honed by learning to read every subtle nuance of his father’s behavior in order to get out from under the suffocating blanket of his love.

  The point of the game was to sharpen his thinking and speed it up so that in a room of God-knows-how-many-people, all of which had to be defused at once, he could spontaneously cut through all the resistance with the magic words and deeds, the correct course of action. His mind always had to be running five times faster than everyone else’s, reading and assessing characters, sifting through their slightest mannerisms and facial expressions. And, what did Saverly say, it had to be fun, otherwise he’d exhaust himself by pushing against his own resistance. How could he do that while sleep-deprived? No, time to forge alliances, and fast, people who’d have his back when he needed to drop his guard. Lucky him, he didn’t think of this before alienating everyone on staff.

  He turned at the sound of footsteps coming up on him fast. The orderlies holding the leather restraints were big and beefy. They were the ones they called on the code blues. So much for waiting for him to exhaust himself with sleep deprivation.

  They tackled him to the ground and one of the nurses injected him in his arm. Nurse Atterman. From her determined, no nonsense expression, Manny figured she was off the list of candidates for winning over. That kind of resoluteness didn’t respond to rhetoric. He’d seen the look enough times in his father’s eyes to know. She proceeded to shove some pills into his mouth, then checked under his tongue and all around to make sure he didn’t cheek any of them.

  They finished binding his arms and legs and carried him off as Manny lost consciousness.

  ***

  Manny awoke with a throbbing headache and ringing in his ears. The restraints had been removed. He sat up to regard his feet, and they were swollen. He’d been previously privy to one too many blood thinners administered in here to know exactly what was going on. His heart was working too hard to pump blood that flowed like water. He was bleeding internally, hence the headache from too much blood seeping into the crawlspaces of his mind where he could use the room to think.

  So much for this game being safe.

  Maybe Saverly didn’t know. Maybe this campaign was being conducted by one of his underlings. He neglected to factor in the fact that, in the reporting hierarchy, information was power.

  Maybe Saverly wasn’t enough of a master of the game himself to understand the necessity of having spies everywhere to ensure more information was at his disposal at any one time than at anyone else’s, giving him degrees of navigational freedom come decision making time his adversaries lacked.

  Nice way too kill him; all too easy to make it look accidental. They could even find a patsy nurse to administer the med who they had been meaning to get rid of for not being loyal enough to this or that political alliance, kill two birds with one stone.

  God, Manny, you’re better at this game than you thought. Thank living under the oppressive regime of dear old dad for that.

  Only, fighting the combined brain trust of whichever political alliance had him in his crosshairs was a daunting prospect. He was quickly finding out how a network of mediocre minds, having eyes everywhere, trumped one über-genius like Saverly any day. They had enough aberrant perspectives and unexpected aptitudes between them that even a Renaissance man would be sucking wind trying to keep up. Furthermore, they could distribute information processing and key decision-making across time and space of a twenty-four-seven workday, while any one person would have to sleep at least eight of those hours. Stepping outside the isolation room, and seeing the shift change and debrief in progress helped drive that revelation home.

  His opposition could compartmentalize problems for further analysis based on whichever of them had a hard on for that aspect of the investigation, long after an über-genius would have bored with the matter and moved on. Fontanegro passed a hand over her monitor, with his file displaying prominently, with an attention for detail usually limited to corporate accountants.

  In an age when no amount of genius seemed enough, Manny should have found the concept of a network trumping lone wolf geniuses strangely comforting. But again, context was everything.

  What’s more, Manny was no über-thinker, and his adversaries weren’t all-that mediocre prior to networking with one another.

  Think Manny, think. They’re as much in your world now as you’re in theirs.

  He had to get to Saverly, the one person he could trust. He in turn could give him names of staff who might not lose sight of the game.

  Christ, talk about great idea, lousy execution. Hartman had the right idea for upgrading his students’ minds in a compressed timeframe. If only he’d thought of scenario games. If only he’d accessed the power of what a group mind could do over what he could do alone. If only instead of giving his students five minutes to get over themselves inside a locked room before he crushed their heads like cantaloupes he gave them a couple months in here. Manny had to get out, if only to help Hartman tweak his methods.

  Manny looked up at the monitor near the ceiling showing Occupy Oakland’s peaceful protesters being put down with smoke grenades and billy clubs. And it occurred to Manny that Hartman may have paid an even bigger price for being a man out of time than he paid for not better thinking through his mind-remodeling agenda. Maybe he would find success now that the ninety-nine percent had been subject to sustained pressure long enough that the mass psyche was ready to make the tectonic shift in consciousness towards a freer, higher energy state. One too high energy for further subjugation.

  But without scenario games to develop strategic responses under sustained-pressure, beyond merely acting out, the process risked going the way of any other revolution in history. Past the halcyon giddy days of wide open prospects, a new world order would
solidify in place with a new leadership team speaking the language of the latest cult to take form out of the chaos of political prospects. But other than the superficial change in choice of words, the underlying psychology of keeping one’s fellow man under one’s thumb would hardly have changed.

  And who of the ninety-nine percent would be any the wiser, when naïveté just played into the adversaries’ hands, when idealism was so quickly encapsulated in the words of despots who could afford to act quite differently off-camera? Duplicity and role play favored the Big Brother types who’d been doing it all their lives. The ones more in touch with their real feelings, who fed off the truth, upchucked a diet full of lies, just had none of the right stuff for even separating the good guys from the bad guys.

  How many of the ninety-nine percent, with their grand intentions, and their words of wisdom, their enlightened philosophies, were equipped to deal with the demons in their own minds that would be set free on the world the instant they were handed power? What were Lord Acton’s words? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? The one literary phrase from Manny’s childhood that had managed to lodge in his brain. No doubt because father, who had translated his absolute genius into absolute power, gave testament to that fact every day of his life.