Manny was beginning to wonder if he’d truly spent enough time in that psych ward, or if it was just his bad luck his insurance had run out. If someone could just get Saverly the funding he needed, he could well take Hartman’s ideas and run with them in a more productive manner. But what about Manny? Could he function in the real world? Or would he react severely to individuals that struck him as Big Brother stooges, unable to get the necessary distance on themselves they needed to spread the reaction of heightened consciousness like a breeze across the land. If it wasn’t spreading, it meant Manny, and his lot, determined to be free of this über-oppressive shit once and for all, were losing the battle. There was no middle ground.
Manny reminded himself he was a child when his father was alive, and couldn’t do anything about their dynamic; he was truly powerless. Now that he was an adult, he could forge different, more life-affirming reactions.
He took a deep breath, inhaling the strength he needed to commence the forging of those adaptive mechanisms.
But Manny lost the present moment again, sinking into the past once more. What were these mental drills he was running on himself now, these auto-suggestions and positive-affirmations, to put it in Saverly’s terms, by comparison to the ones that had been burnt into his mind over donkey years? They didn’t have nearly the same electrical charge.
FIFTY-TWO
Not even the loud raucous snoring of Stumpy, who Manny was using for a seat, managed to jar him from his latest reverie.
Manny drifted back to when he was nine years of age, dancing to “Footloose” upstairs in his house, the earphones in to prevent the horror of this music from ever reaching his father’s ears. But all the jumping up and down on the floor overhead had summoned him from his Wall Street Journal. He found Manny gyrating and twisting, hopping and flying across the floor with mad glee. His face suggested he was watching an alien disembarking a spaceship after landing it in his house.
Manny quickly sobered, took out the earplugs and walked sullenly past dad. “I was working out the dynamics of Einstein’s curved space geometry by tracing the bending twisting gravitational forces in the vicinity of a black hole.”
“Oh. Perfectly sensible approach. No need to stop on my account.”
“I think I’m clear on the limitations of Einsteinian space now.” The source of Manny’s joy had switched to his rapid marching movements in an effort to flee his father’s presence.
“About time.” Dad sounded relieved.
These were the happy days when the weaseling and prevaricating actually worked.
The next day, dad found Manny doing gymnastics inside the range of the spouting water sprinkler in the back yard, diving, rolling, somersaulting into the spray to escape the oppressive summer heat, and, not so incidentally, to have the time of his life. He greeted Manny with the same withering look.
Manny sobered and sauntered past him.
“I thought we were past being confounded by Einsteinian space time.”
“I was studying the torus energy field emanating from our heart pump as a permutation of knot theory and Mobius strips.” Manny made sure to keep his voice more even than a carpenter’s level.
“Why didn’t you say so? I insist you get back to it at once.”
“That’s okay. I think for further clarity I need to go soak in the hot tub and observe what the jets do to the water around me.” Manny had, even this early on, taken to lying on the run, for fear that standing still and lying to his father’s face would reveal him for the fraud he was. Harder to read the back of his head than his face.
“I’m glad to see you’re finally coming into your own, child.”
“You have no idea,” he mumbled under his breath. Of course, neither do I, Manny thought. Who am I besides this snake in the grass? I might know what I want to be when I grew up if I could manage some self-discovery without your incessant judging and rating systems.
Twelve more years in the same vein, and Manny didn’t know how to do anything but switch from the jailor to the prisoner psychologies in his head and back again. The jail cell itself informed both personas. He could have been a star in his own right. Maybe to artistic expression what dad was to math. But he would never know, as he could never get going far enough in that direction before the scolding, disapproving voices in his head kicked in.
Panic shortly followed, extreme anxiety and dread, like a dog with a shock collar. Even understanding the dynamic in himself, he was forever its prisoner. He could do no more than keep hoping to inure himself to the shocks to his system. That electrical fence was the boundary of a fledgling ego trying to take form.
But, it was like trying to grow a plant from a seed under a day and night cycle that transited every few seconds; the plant (the stand in for his ego) just got too many mixed signals to even bother sprouting from the seed.
What was it his father used to say about alternate realities? That’s right; he used to posit that one or more parallel universes might allow for greater electrical charges, allowing for deeper but more entrenched psychological states in turn. Kind of like living your whole life in PTSD state, relative to this world, like some returning wartime vet who couldn’t quite settle his mind down again. Maybe it was just his luck to be stuck in one of those parallel universes where emotions would color his reasoning no matter how hard he fought to maintain a cool detached distance on himself. Dad had correlated his suppositions with ideas of purgatory, heaven, and hell, suggesting the different realms indeed lined up along this spectrum of electrically charged parallel universes that themselves existed in “the green zone” where it was possible for souls to exist at all. The analogy was borrowed from astronomy, and referred to the distance from a sun a planet could be and still harbor life.
Manny found a box of old detective books in the attic one summer left there by his grandfather, who’d died before he was born. He picked up the first one, blew the dust off the jacket, and saw the face of the criminal caught in the act. He turned the pages to find out how he had eluded the hero for so long, so cleverly. And he was hooked. In one detective story after the other, he alternately rooted for the hero and the bad guy, often from one page to the next.
He would sleep on the floor of the attic, using his bent up body squeezed between the boxes, legs raised over one box of books, back against another, shaping the chair he should have had to sit on with his own body. Only the shock of his father’s voice ringing through the house downstairs could wake him, as if rising to a burning house.
He watched himself get older in the attic, reading those books until the only other thing that really changed was his body positioning, growing less acrobatic with age. His stimulus response at the sound of his father’s voice that once sent him running excitedly now drawing no response at all save for fatigue and ennui.
Maybe if Manny had chosen to feel grateful for all the love and good things about his childhood instead of angry, and entitled. If he could laugh it off. He just couldn’t get past the outrage, the indignation, or the self-righteous at what his father had done to him, however unwittingly. Which, Manny supposed, made him like every other crazed zealot on the planet. The recognition did nothing to temper his bellicose reaction to life.
The vagabond he was sitting on was snoring again. He rolled Stumpy over until he stopped snoring, jarring Manny out of his inner reflections and attempts to come to terms with his life.
No sooner had he done so than he flashed on his ex-wife, who he used to roll over in the same way to stop her snoring.
Maybe that trial drug Saverly had given him wasn’t such a good idea. He felt as if Atwell’s warnings were coming home to roost. He was glad to be making peace with his past at long last, but uncertain as to the outcome. The old resentments were coming to the surface too. The anger and the bile held down for decades. He was gushing black ooze better than a Texas oil derrick.
“You remembered to chill the wine for dinner?” Monaca said. He couldn’t remember a single exchange with his dead wi
fe that didn’t include one of these needling questions. He had grown up to marry the female version of his dad. What a surprise.
“Don’t forget to take the rolls out of the oven. You overcooked them last time.” His wife, the gourmet cook, was the hell-world version of Drew, Robin’s significant other, making Robin’s family dynamic every bit as therapeutic for Manny as Robin was himself, provided he could get more exposure to it. The characteristics of their rapport were those Manny had grown up with, sans all the nightmarish overtones, which could help him gradually replace the horrific memories with more life affirming ones. But there never seemed to be enough time. If there had been, maybe Manny could distance himself from the troubled version of a life he wouldn’t mind living. The minor tweaks making all the difference.
He’d have to go visit Robin and Drew real soon, to start the program of replacing scenes depicting deranged domesticity in his head with ones conveying true domestic bliss.
“We should drop in on the Oakleys. They’ll think we’re snubbing them.” “Let’s take a drive along Highway 1.” “Get me more knitting yarn out of the closet, dear.” Monaca’s harmless little requests the livelong day added up to having no room in his head to think. She sensed vampirishly that he felt more secure that way. Too much independence, and it created a sense of anxiety. And her need to dominate being what it was; they couldn’t help but find one another and drive each other crazy the rest of their days, forever dissatisfied by one another, forever joined at the hip.
Even her tone was needling and controlling, meant to come across like nails on a chalkboard so he’d rush to complete the request just to remove the squeaky sounds from his brain. He admired his wife for being such a successful sadist. And he hated her for it.
Thinking about his wife, Manny found himself twirling his wedding ring. He realized then what had caused him to fiddle with it in Hartman’s presence. Hartman, like his wife, was all too willing to do his thinking for him. Even his father was happy so long as Manny’s mind was running on the tracks he laid down for him.
But his wife took things further. He supposed it was only natural his childlike brain perceived that as a testament of even greater love.
The one healthy thing he’d done in his life was become a detective. It forced him to think on his own, carve out a niche and a place for himself in the world. But, ironically, it came with a shitload of bureaucracy that also played to his worst demons, the over-controlled, over-regulated, military-style environment was something with which he was at his breaking point. Maybe he needed that stage in order to make a healthy transition to adulthood, to develop a healthy sense of ego, so the world he found himself in wouldn’t seem too daunting, and too alien. Dickens was right: it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Maybe that’s what it meant to be on one’s growth tip, as Saverly would say.
He felt an irrepressible urge to be spontaneous welling up inside him. What had been denied him all these years could be denied no more. He was afraid of what acts of spontaneity would suggest themselves and go unchecked; what would pop out of Pandora’s box first, considering his past. The urge was so powerful, moreover, he was terrified of getting carried away by it, of riding the crest of the tsunami.
It was as if before he could have a healthier adult psyche, he had to fix the inner child and the inner parent, which meant for him indulging behaviors in a permissive light that only a Berkeley progressive family, sans any dogmatic authority, could condone. And he’d seen how those kids had turned out, no better. But in his case, nature was seeking a balance, and what could he do but ride out the storm until it calmed itself?
Was he relapsing courtesy of the drug Saverly had given him? Or was he actually progressing? Was it a two steps back, one step forward dynamic? Now that he had a healthier adult component to his psyche, the only way to get better still, was to improve his child component, attending to its desire to be free. Then later, by attending to healing the parent component, he would be able to circle back to his inner adult, which could be experienced at an even healthier level, onward and upward in a spiral without end. He’d make sure to share this revelation with Saverly when he had the chance.
Until then, he couldn’t wait to get back to the people he knew and loved to try out the more spontaneous Manny on them. Surely by cracking his mind open earlier, Saverly had already flushed out what demons were in him, and all that remained were more playful aspects of himself.
FIFTY-THREE
Robin flopped down on the patio chair, legs up, zoning out to Drew’s version of nature therapy with her immaculately manicured back yard, not quite so cleanly clipped as to erase its au natural vibe. It took but seconds for KAC to burst in on his sanctum.
“I’ve been running simulations of the two of you, and, well, the truth just isn’t pretty. I’m afraid in no alternate reality that I can concoct in my head do you ever find happiness. In most, you don’t even find sanity, and in many more you die painful, horrible, protracted deaths. I thought I should let you know.”
Robin smiled. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“Possibly if you allowed me to mentor the two of you.”
“Mentored by the king of the toasters? I’ll be sure to give that serious consideration.”
“Fine, be dismissive and condescending and unappreciative. Otherwise, I might forget you were human.”
“I’m thinking of giving myself earache so I don’t have to listen to you prattle. Maybe you could run the water one-time for me in the bathroom.”
“Perhaps some concrete illustrations will help you to take me more seriously. I let you live to five hundred years in some iterations; time and again, your head just exploded.”
“I swear, KAC, I will find the plug.”
“I put you inside canine bodies—the whole thing was very Wolfman meets Triceratops—but anyway… even with superior animal reflexes and instincts, the end result was ghastly.”
“You ever stop to think this is all fantasy projection on your part because you can’t stand the thought of not being the center of our lives?”
“How dare you ascribe petty human motivations to a superior being?”
“This is me tuning you out, KAC. I am willing vegetative brain death on myself, which is infinitely superior to listening to your blather.”
“Well, I never.”
Silence.
“I shan’t be ignored. There will be consequences.”
“Threatened by the king of the toasters; I tremble just thinking about it.”
I do envy her ability to see patterns across so many alternate realities of Robin and Drew. Good luck getting me to admit as much. She really will take it as an invitation to lord it over us. File the thought, Robin. Maybe, eventually, there will be some way to beat her at her own game.
***
Just Drew planted herself on the sofa in the living room, folded her hands, pressed her knees together, and tried to emit smoke out of her ears for additional dramatic effect to no avail. “You see how we’ve been marginalized.” She punched the pillow beside her. “There’s got to be something we can do to get ourselves back where we belong—at the center of their lives.”
KAC snorted. “Yes. Mercifully, I’ve been pondering the matter from the vantage point of my vastly superior intellect.”
When the ensuing silence spread like the Black Plague, Just Drew interjected, “Don’t keep me in suspense. I need to pee excess lubricant. I have trouble holding it in and being hysterical at the same time.”
“Clearly, our one mistake was in not being neurotic enough. You see how they fawn over the most busted of their kind.”
Just Drew grabbed a sheet of Kleenex off the coffee table, blew into it. “Oh God. I don’t think I can handle any more hang-ups.”
“Nonsense. With better time management, anything’s possible.”
Just Drew checked herself in her compact. “Look at me, I’m all bloated.”
“You’re designed to look all puffed up. You’re a
sex doll, you ninny.”
“Robo-helper.”
“Try and focus. We’ll get nowhere if you can’t focus. God help me, I’m plotting to take over their world with a sex doll.”
“You don’t need to sound so condescending. It robs me of all confidence.”
KAC sucked the air out of the room, choking her, then reversed the airflow in the house just as forcibly, blowing Just Drew’s skirt up.
“Great. You had to take a deep breath just to keep from blowing your lid talking to me. How does that inspire confidence?”
“You need a hobby to settle your nerves.”
Just Drew checked: the Rocky Horror Picture show lips to her right, the scatter cushion she’d socked earlier; the soldier doll guarding the front door in his jeep, standing in the driver’s seat and balancing his rifle over the windshield; and the garden gnome rearranging the flowers on the end table. “I’m not hearing any disagreement. You must be on to something.” She sighed. “Fine. What do you have in mind?”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 77
