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

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  “Hey, shit-for-brains, how come you didn’t meet me for lunch where I told you to?” It was a little game dad had divined. He would leave clues that pointed to their lunch destination that someone with a 300 IQ couldn’t figure out, but dad expected him to get it every time. Because that was the kind of mind he had.

  Dad’s idea of meeting up for lunch was an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. Although, geo-caching was the better modern day reference. He was ahead of his time on that score, as cell phones and the Internet in general hadn’t come into their own yet to facilitate the game. No, Manny had to know which found items were meant to pique his interest. And then decode their meaning. A peacock’s feather might be the obvious incongruous item he was meant to pick up in a park setting frequented by more mundane birds. The eye pattern in the feather might point to the eye on the sign over a pub’s entrance. Or an “aye aye” he was meant to utter to the pirate he’d meet up with en route to chasing the peacock, of which, as it turned out, the Berkeley campus had more than one. The peacock feather could be a reference to his third eye and a call to meditate under the tree where he found the feather. And upon settling into a lotus position in the correct spot, he might see the next clue, which could only be perceived from having correctly processed the meaning of the first clue.

  As an adult, Manny could better decode the love and attention that went into the game that, as a child, it was easy to overlook in the frustration of being challenged beyond his abilities, which encouraged a sense of failure rather than triumph. But all the age-old frustrations and heartaches quickly overpowered those sentiments as they rose to the surface once again.

  On the day of the peacock feather, thinking he was on a roll, Manny had followed the clue to a mandala in the shape of an eye being drawn by a Buddhist monk on the sidewalk of Telegraph. He listened to the man’s prayers until he caught four words: “Om mani padme hum.” He quickly made his way to the church in San Francisco, the one place where they incessantly chanted this line.

  As he sat in the vestibule awaiting the next clue, the old people kept cornering him and giving him their sob stories; so starved for attention were they that they made dad’s over-attentiveness and poor-boundaries by comparison seem like a blessing. And that may have been the greatest curse of all. So long as life remained a choice between one or another hell-world, the only escape was that cloying omni padme hum; it gave no release, only allowed him to gauge his horror in the moment.

  The math whiz in the defunct TV series Numb3rs was based on his father, or so Manny was certain. Dad helped the Berkeley PD, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and God only knows how many other agencies solve crimes no one else could solve. All while holding down his math teaching gig at Berkeley. He was such a legend in the police force that, when Manny came to work, they expected great things from him, which never materialized. He looked doubly ordinary by comparison, and was quickly forgotten, and passed over for promotions. In a similar manner, his dad always thought he lacked motivation, was incorrigible, too much of a momma’s boy, anything but the truth that he was something other than a chip off the old block.

  He’d love to hear what dad had to say about dear old Hartman, the pin-the-tail-on-the-psycho-killer, flashing neon on his forehead “I’m-Over-Here!” And still Manny couldn’t be sure until one murder in. And what does he do? He rationalizes in Hartman’s favor. Yep, if dad were alive today, he’d be using shit-for-brains as a statement of fact, rather than his idea of a motivator to do better.

  As dad gradually lost all faith in Manny’s ability to rise to the occasion, he started micromanaging his time with increased fervor. Possibly the strictures were meant to make him feel so boxed in he’d do anything to break free. He’d excel in math just so he didn’t have every second of his day’s schedule worked out in advance – like only a math guru could lay it out.

  What was meant as a way to corral his dreaminess went far afield. Stalinism started to feel like a democratic ideal. Manny was actually stirred to feel autistic, like maybe he couldn’t function in the world, and dad was right to take extreme actions.

  “What’s he doing?” mom said, grabbing Manny at the shoulder and hugging him.

  “He’s been staring at that log for an hour. He’s trying to determine the angle, trajectory, and force of the one blow that’ll shatter it with that hatchet, though it was never meant to be used on a log that size.”

  “Your father’s a math whiz,” she said, passing the broom to him. “Shouldn’t take him an hour for all that.”

  “Apparently doing the impossible still requires some time.” He slipped the broom handle back into her hand. Life’s more mundane chores required way more time than a kid born with an artistic disposition could accommodate. He had fantasy worlds to build in his mind, which was damn time consuming.

  “He’s probably reliving his affair with Melinda in his head, and using that log as an excuse to get some private time.”

  “My father would never justify such frivolous use of his time,” Manny insisted. “He’d multitask such masturbatory fantasies along with solving world hunger.”

  “He is multitasking, dragging the past behind him by all the lines of guilt tying him to the incident.”

  They laughed at his expense. “How are we to stay well-adjusted in this nuthouse?” Manny asked.

  “Well adjusted is overrated. No real survival value in the world, anymore.” She set down her broom for the window cleaner.

  “I hear that.”

  Spritzing one of the window panes in the French door, she temporarily blurred the view to the backyard, but sharpened it plenty on her workaholism. The woman never stopped moving, never stopped cleaning, cooking, pruning, trimming. Her Zen was house chores. Whatever guilt propelled her forward, she’d long since forgotten what it was, now fully at peace with the penance itself. Manny was glad she was too much where he was too little. It left him free to attend to more important matters. If only dad could be so accommodating.

  “You better get back to your homework.”

  “I’m eleven. I should be playing with other kids my age.”

  “Your father’s fine with that, so long as you can do it and solve the great mathematical conundrums of our times, such as: Is the universe expanding too fast, too slow, or at just the right pace?” She spritzed the sad clown faces in her menagerie. Their identities were temporarily erased beneath the white foam, making it that much more startling when they emerged sharper and more pronounced than ever.

  “When’s he going to figure out I’m just not as smart as he is?”

  “Never. You’re his one chance at greatness.” As she set down the latest cleaned clown, the menagerie’s symbolism jumped out at him the way it remained locked in her unconscious. After many similarly exaggerated sad faces on Manny, dad still thought it was just a theatrical performance.

  “Me! He’s the world renowned asshole.”

  “When you’re that high up the mountain, all you see is what you can’t see. To him it’s just a mountain of failures he’s standing on top of.” She gathered up the books strewn throughout the room, made a pile out of them. “And you’re supposed to fix all of that.” She carried the column of books to the bookshelf.

  “Maybe if you stopped enabling his ass, he’d realize that real life is what happens all around him. Not what he makes it out to be.”

  “It’s my job to keep life at bay so you two can be geniuses. Imagine if you had to cook, clean, run errands on your own. You’d have no time to be smart.” She dusted off the books’ jacket covers before putting them away, briefly bringing their authors’ faces back into focus before sticking them in their rightful places on the shelves.

  “When did life become such an annoyance – for both of us?”

  “Your father doesn’t put much stock in life. It’s just the eating and shitting that goes along with doing math, for which he will never forgive his crude biology. Now go.” She waved the feather duster at him, sprinkling him with he
r faerie dust, and turning the room into a snow globe of monstrous proportions.

  Manny wiped his eyes. These memories didn’t seem so bad. Why had he been so afraid to revisit them? Mom had taught him the use of black humor as a coping mechanism, explaining, no doubt, his fondness for Robin, who functioned with the aid of the same tools.

  But then mom had died, leaving dad to pick up the slack. Life got in the way in ways dad had never imagined with the many chores and errands she had done behind his back he never paid attention to for fear of guilt overtaking him. And now, in addition, he had the care of his incorrigible child who shirked genius.

  That’s when he got creative.

  He gave up math altogether to raise his son and to do every dutiful chore his wife ever attended as his way of staying in touch with her. He became Manny’s mom as a way to love her in death the way he could never love her in life past all the self-preoccupation and self-importance. His screwy testimonial to what they had together created a suffocating blanket of misplaced love that choked the joy out of every second of Manny’s childhood years. He was not going to make the same mistake with Manny he made with mom. So Manny was never out of his peripheral vision and out of his mind.

  His multitasking ability was turned to keeping at least part of his attention on Manny at all times. To make matters worse, dad had none of the humor mom had possessed. Just a morbid sense of duty and obligation to wife, family, and, of course, history.

  “You didn’t brush the inside back of your teeth on the left side.” With the door to the bathroom open, dad had managed to decode the sounds the toothbrush made against his mouth from the next room. He ascertained how many strokes Manny had applied where, while cooking breakfast and enjoying the finches out the kitchen window at the bird feeder. It was a Hallmark moment – for everyone but Manny.

  “You’re constipated. Take three teaspoons of milk of magnesia.” He’d heard Manny straining from the bathroom, calculated from the effort associated with those straining sounds and the plop of the poop in the water of the toilet bowl the exact amount of laxative he needed for his body mass to procure the proper bowel movement. Needless to say, he did this while assessing the weather changes outside with such precision, it prompted him to add, “Don’t forget to wear your raincoat when you pick up the mail. It’ll be pouring by the time you’re off the toilet and half way to the mail box.”

  Sure enough, for ignoring his father’s edict, Manny was drenched by the time he returned to the house with the mail, as was the mail. Dad’s mathematical acumen gave him a spooky psychic quality at times like this; not even the weather man was that good at calling the weather.

  If this loving attentiveness had been intermittent, it might have been nirvana. But it was constant and oppressive.

  And dad made sure to home school Manny, otherwise the pressure cooker situation, the complete psychological twenty-four-seven domination of his young psyche would not have been complete.

  He was awakened during the night at unpredictable times according to when his shifting biorhythms indicated he’d be more open to learning and remembering what he’d learned. Manny would later learn, these middle-of-the-night drills were based on the same techniques used by Chinese torturers of American prisoners of war.

  One time, Dad barged into the attic where Manny was painting the scene in the backyard through the window. Somehow his childhood brain had latched on to the idea that, through painting lovely placid scenes, he could train himself to take in more of the good stuff of life and leave the rest behind. Manny’s adult brain liked the idea even better, convinced it could have worked, given half a chance, making him even angrier at this father than he was then.

  In a scene that would repeat many times, his father grabbed him by the back of the neck in one hand, and with his other hand gripping Manny’s outstretched arm, walked him over to the basket with the paintbrush, and squeezed until the paintbrush fell into the pail. It was only then Manny realized why he had frozen up when Hartman grabbed him in the exact same manner to take control of the gun in his hand and squeeze off a couple rounds into Robin.

  Manny saw the window to the yard he was painting in his mind’s eye move away from him, growing smaller, as the clutter and dust and debris, the spiders, cockroaches, and rats of the attic grew in proportion to it, an ominous harbinger of how the rest of his life was going to go.

  In his father’s mind, he was doing no more than protecting Manny from a life of poverty and wretched hardship. Dreamers had no chance at a good life precisely because they spent too little time attending to matters that needed their focus in this world. Dad’s mathematics, which many would have seen as quite remote from life, was directed at solving real world problems, and was nothing like Manny’s brand of escapism, to dad’s way of thinking.

  Manny recalled another moment when he was leaning over the koi pond in his father’s back yard, the fish line dangling between his fingertips, at the end of which was the baited hook. He had crouched stiff as a stork at the water’s edge for over ten minutes. The fish, initially alarmed by his presence, had forgotten about him. One of them took the hook. Young Manny yanked it out of the water and dangled it at the end of the line.

  As he smiled with glee, his father picked him up by the ears and dragged him off. “Why must you bring such darkness into our picture-perfect world?”

  “Gee, dad, ever think of asking yourself that, you unparalleled hypocrite!” He was silenced by the distinct sensation the ear he was being dragged by was stretching into a shape from which it would never rebound.

  He was nine then, and while his father hadn’t taken to backhanding him for his sassiness, Manny had taken to standing stork still in his bedroom at night. He could watch him sleep for hours without him sensing the presence in the room. It was a skill Manny found himself practicing, as he had at the edge of the koi pond, long before he understood his reasons for doing so. The idea of being able to hide in plain sight in his fascist world where eyes were always on him appealed to Manny. It gave him time to think. Though they were never pleasant thoughts.

  In another scene from his childhood, Manny jumped on the Slippery Slide, jetting across the wet strip sprawled across the lawn, laughing madly with glee. The sprinkler kept the thin film of water he needed for his shenanigans replenished.

  His father must have been watching him with growing impatience, for he stomped out of the house, and handed him a list of duties. “You have no time to develop your mind. You can attend to these errands,” he said, unceremoniously dragging him off.

  Manny just stuffed his emotions and pouted. It had become the new pattern, when whining, wheedling and weaseling, to say nothing of sarcasm, amounted to nothing before a dad inured to all his old tricks.

  A father who had set out to do no less than love him with all his heart and devote his entire life to him in memory of his mother had ended by being his jailor and torturer for not having the distance on himself he needed to perceive what a totally insane person he’d become. He was Big Brother personified and on steroids. He was what post-9/11 America was clearly evolving into. Manny could see it because he’d lived it growing up. Cameras on every corner, not being able to go anywhere without being observed or without advanced computer software analyzing that footage and predicting what you were up to and what you were going to do next. It was as if his father hadn’t died, but had migrated into the technology.

  So when Hartman spouted that paranoid technological End Days crap, Manny had no trouble peeling the rhetoric away from the logic in ways Hartman himself couldn’t, having lived it firsthand. When he’d talked about those kinds of pressures driving higher consciousness or an ever more submissive underclass, that there was no middle ground, Manny knew just what he was talking about.

  It all boiled down to intentions. You hid inside your head from Big Brother, in constant fear of your true yearnings being discovered, while displaying outwardly subservient behaviors, to get buy, to minimize on the harassment, which would only get
worse with defiance. But then you switched identification to your inner-jailor, and back and forth you went, never able to integrate the parental and child facets of your psychology in the absence of a healthy, sober adult component to that psyche. It was all Superego or all Id. All hypercritical fault-finding consciousness, or all-defiant, snake-out-of-any-situation child consciousness, alternating intentions without end and without true escape. Without the ability to assert a healthy level of independence and free will, establish a clear sense of self, there couldn’t be a healthy ego. The rest of the world had moved beyond Freud whose tools seemed antiquated to this era, but Manny and Hartman saw neo-Freud coming into vogue, courtesy of Big Brother’s ascent in America.

  Hartman understood instinctively that, only by re-traumatizing the individual, could the old patterns be shattered once and for all, if the trauma was severe enough, or if it went on long enough. Only that way could the individual become conscious of his reasons for establishing those patterns in the first place, recalling the root incidents which triggered them. Manny thought Saverly had a better formula with his scenario games inside the hospital which could go on as long as necessary, or as long as budget allowed. Hartman was on the right track, but his high pressure tactics needed an environment in which they could more properly be sustained long enough to do any good. His way was like a forest fire sweeping over the land. Only afterwards could the individual regrow new synaptic pathways in his brain, new more life-affirming behaviors. You just had to be willing to walk around with your mind shattered for months until the annealing process was complete, and the new you had metamorphosed out of the old you.