She felt the age (was it Louis XIV?) brought out her femininity better than modernia, with its stark, stoic, streamlined Bauhaus-like minimalism.
Male Robin may have had zero attachment to the past, but female Robin found herself rather enchanted by it.
The artistic beauty of the bygone era better echoed the beauty of Mother Nature. It displayed a softer touch, a sense of flow, that seemed even better captured in the flow of her dress than in the starkly pressed lines of a suit. Unnatural beauty—such as Cubism, by contrast, and other modern-art architectural icons—was so streamlined, it emphasized concept over form, abstract idea over physical reality. How male.
Looking out her window at the graceful lines of the palace, she saw no such retreat into virtual reality from the real world, but a comfortable couched presence in space and time. So much so, she pressed open the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. She relaxed further and breathed more deeply.
Robin was happy to identify the cues to help the feminine arise in herself, already sensing a new imperative gestating within her. The male Robin was content to be seer and big-picture philosopher, stepping back from the chaos and mayhem of modern life to identify the underlying patterns. Female Robin clearly had more of a desire to go the other direction, get more rooted in the physical world, come back off the mountain top. And she was grateful that the royal-palace environment the male Robin would have dismissed outright as an intellectual outrage, was such a sensual enticement to such ends.
***
Drew took Robin for a walk in the gardens to clear her head. Strolling past the Michelangelo-inspired statues of naked men, she confessed, “I’m afraid I betrayed you again and again.”
Drew smiled. “You mean the Persian eunuchs. Prince Fidel’s way of saddling his wild stallions. All sons and brothers and cousins he’d have had to kill otherwise to ensure they didn’t threaten his reign. Don’t feel guilty. Those people are living blessed lives in their mind compared to their prior fates. The slightest show of displeasure and they would be back on the streets, starving, lucky to look like walking-skeletons instead of demi-gods, should Fidel choose the slow-road to retribution rather than the sure and swift one.”
“How is it you don’t mind?” Robin asked.
“What, servants finding new services to provide? I guess I’m used to niches multiplying around me as the landed gentry perfect the art of helplessness in order to ensure others have some sort of life. It’s all rather saintly of us.”
Robin laughed. “You’d think this was the nineteenth century, and alternatives don’t exist.”
“For some of us, alternatives really don’t exist,” Drew said, as if more imprisoned by his past than liberated by it. “Some of us crave simple, ritualized modes of relating, and a world frozen in time, as a way of exploring more fully who we are. Maybe it’ll help you to understand if you ask yourself, why does the mountain climber keep climbing the mountain, versus changing sports, after he summits?”
“I think what you mean is some people choose forgetfulness, the way Zen masters advocate mindfulness, as a recipe for life. Needing desperately to change, but afraid to. Their fears forever imprison them in a world without change, as it turns them to petrified versions of people who are truly alive.”
Drew snorted his laughter. “Some of us are held in place as much by love as by fear.” He flicked his cigarette into the woods. “I prefer your glass-half-full takes on the world.” His tone sounded harsh and cold, and he felt distant.
Something was bothering Drew, but Robin sensed now was not the time to ask. She had no doubt she would get more of the same, fantastic rationalizations. He was smoking regularly again, for one thing, a nasty habit from his youth. And he regarded the opulent gardens as if they were no more than a mirage in the desert, promising life but instead offering death.
SEVEN
“The strawberries have that off-season taste,” Lady Harding said, making a face. She wielded her fork about her pie and ice-cream.
“It’s okay to enjoy things as they are, mother. The sky will not fall in on you,” Drew implored. He sipped his wine and returned the glass to the table the way a judge calls quiet to a courtroom with his anvil. “If you keep insisting on perfection, you’ll never walk the Promised Land. You’ll just get more years wandering the desert of your soul.” To Robin, Drew’s tone sounded every bit as dry as that desert he was trying to save her from—dryer than the wine.
“The Promised Land is cultivated on insisting on nothing short of perfection, darling,” Lady Harding corrected him. She pressed her back against her chair, her signal for the dining crew to clear away the inelegant reminder of a life poorly lived. One of the aides swept the plate away so fast, Robin was sure it was a disappearing act he’d mastered as a stage magician.
“Great,” Drew said. “Now I have to spend the rest of the evening talking the chef out of committing hara-kiri.”
“I don’t know why. Seems the least he can do.” Lady Harding eyed the latest dessert placed before her for sampling with a wary eye.
“Everything is truly lovely,” Robin said, “truly.” She bit into her steak, which turned to liquid in her mouth without her teeth having to get involved. Robin was still riding the high of the morning bath and massage, which had cleared enough blockages to return blood flow to every region of her body, now glowing with life, as opposed to merely hanging on.
“The bath maid tells me, Robin,” Lady Harding said, “you have a mild case of scoliosis. You should employ strict countermeasures from now to avoid hell later on.”
“If you’re wondering what brought that on,” Drew said, “You made the mistake of being happy for five minutes.” He stabbed his steak with the fork, and savaged it with the knife, as if seeking revenge for having to rein in his cannibalistic desire to feast on his mother’s heart. “Around here happiness is a state which cannot long be endured. It invites disasters of the worst kind.”
“Don’t mind Drew,” Lady Harding said. “He over-analyzes everything; just his way of keeping life at bay.” She worked her apple pie with cinnamon and raisins as if life couldn’t be sweeter.
Drew sipped from his wine glass. “In clinical terms, what my mother’s got is called rapid-cycling manic-depression. In alcoholic terms, the emotional roller coaster is just the price you pay for screwing with the internal homeostatic mechanisms.”
“Enough, Drew!” Lady Harding threw down her fork with the clang of a church bell. “I didn’t raise you to speak your mind. Stop this vulgarity at once. You’d think you grew up a commoner.”
“Does anyone have news of the real world?” Robin asked.
Drew erupted in laughter. “Touché.”
Robin realized her faux pas. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Lady Harding waited impatiently for her wine glass to be refilled. “It’s all gone to hell,” Lady Harding said. “Just today there was talk in the papers of disbanding Parliament. They want to create… what was that word…?”
“Avatars, my lady,” the second footman said, helpfully.
“Yes, that’s right.” Lady Harding sounded relieved her increasing senescence had been successfully masked. “Can you imagine? They want to create fictional characters that embody certain traits, and then write software that keeps them slavishly loyal to those traits. That way, a constellation of characters can be created that play off one another better than the angels in the choirs of heaven. They want to take people out of the equation.”
Robin made a face to indicate she was pondering the matter. “I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it myself,” she said, finally, under her breath.
She found herself, in her feminine form, taking more time with her food, savoring the Robert’s Rules of Order regarding the proper forks to use and how to work in from the outermost cutlery, even if she had to be cued by “the help.” Grace meant more to her; eating had become ballet on a smaller stage.
She found she had additional mind-power fo
r these incidental things in ways male Robin did not. All aspects of EQ had seemed beyond his reach. Some of the neural networks in her mind were learning to integrate the interpersonal realm with the transpersonal realm courtesy of the female hormones, or possibly she was growing more neural networks under the drug’s influence.
The aromatic perfumes coming off her body were also helping ground her better in her body, and in space and time. Male Robin didn’t have much of a sense of smell. It contributed little to big picture understanding of the world, causing him to tune it out. However, it contributed much to interpersonal dynamics as Robin was coming to realize. There was a time when much of the subtleties of the dynamic between Drew and his mother would have escaped her. Thanks to her latest anchoring mechanisms, not so much. A mixed blessing at times like this.
Something else. The clenched muscles of Robin’s male body made it that much easier to wall out his emotions. The economy of movement and energy she could now use to lift her knife and fork, sans all that muscle tension and over-exertion, drove that insight. Even the “soft body” lining of fat on Robin’s male body did little to mitigate the emotional numbness; rather, it was just another layer of buffering on top of the armoring.
Robin wondered what that meant in terms of the electrical discharges coursing through her mind in the wake of the Hartman incident. If it meant she hadn’t hit bottom yet, and if the extended emotional range would also amplify her psychic, intuitive abilities.
She was also going beyond sexist generalities and stereotypes regarding what it meant to be a woman versus what it meant to be a man. Robin was finding out what it meant to her to be a woman, better articulating the unique dynamics of her soul.
Lady Harding pressed on with her horror story as Robin returned to real time, stepping out of the hyperspace of hypomania. “All government and business affairs will be attended over the Internet in accordance with game theory,” Lady Harding explained, “playing these avatars off one another. They gain and lose power based on the votes accrued from the online gamers, and as a measure of how well the individual avatars have improved the lot of the little guy.”
Lacking sufficient strength on her own to face this turn of events, Lady Harding drank her wine as a bracer. She said, “It’s not government, it’s Sim City. The world has gone completely mad, I tell you.” She exhaled forcibly, as if it was the only way to flush the demon from her body.
“And you say I’m a drama queen for predicting tragedy around the corner,” Lady Harding said. Her eyes met everyone else’s at the table to communicate, Take that. “As you can see, history is a drama queen second to none.”
Drew continued his dyspeptic translation of his mother’s every histrionic outburst for Robin’s sake. “In every household of addicts, there is at least one drama queen, whose job it is to point out all the hateful outcomes that will be inescapable precisely because the addict refuses to consider consequences. It’s all part of the checks and balances.”
His mother was on too much of a roll to notice the digs anymore, done in by the drama of the moment. “Maybe you’d like to hear about page two happenings in The Sun. I assure you, page one was just there to numb you to even more bitter realities to follow, so you had any chance of surviving them.”
Robin smiled despite herself. Say what you want about Lady Harding, she was one hell of a floor show. Determined not to let the conversation lag or the drama bleed out of the moment, she delivered well-timed precision blows dropped over the nine course meal.
“You know all of London is sinking, right?” Lady Harding said, with the advent of the latest course. She was working backwards from dessert to her main course, as everyone else was working their way, more traditionally, to sweeter pleasures. Not that she’d made it past the dessert courses, yet. “I assure you, Venice has nothing on us.” She spooned tangerine sherbet from its crystal chalice as if convinced her bellicose nature alone was able to add the necessary accents needed to bring out its flavor.
“It takes armies and billions of dollars a year to keep the entire city from dissolving like so many sand castles at the beach,” Lady Harding explained. “Now comes technology to the rescue. Starting Monday, all human labor will be replaced with robotic dredgers and pumpers and scaffolding builders, and earth movers and water suckers.
“Not one human in the mix.” She roamed her eyes around the table to make sure this point had sunken in. “What’s their rationale for decommissioning the human race like a pair of old shoes? It will save more money than all the lotteries and gambling casinos in one year could generate. And they will do the job with greater precision, without which, we are told, those grand edifices will not last another decade.
“So there you have it, justified, rationalized, canonized, fully sanctioned: human obsolescence. I hope they don’t think we can hire any more maids to cover the slack.” She sat back to indicate it was time for the next course. The nine course meal clearly marked the nine rungs of Dante’s hell Lady Harding’s twisted imagination gave access to, one after the other, after she got sufficiently fired up. The dishes were meant to provide the necessary sustenance and fortitude to make it to the next level.
“I always wondered what attracted Drew to me,” Robin said. “It’s coming into focus now.”
“Stop it,” Drew smirked. “You’re not that bad.”
“Just because I refuse to give up hope?”
Drew chuckled. “Maybe that is the one handhold I needed.”
“There was a time when I railed against blind optimists,” Lady Harding confessed. “Softening in my old age, I concede that lying to themselves is the best those with weaker constitutions can do if they expect to carry on.” Having reframed Robin’s rude remark into a context that was more acceptable, she returned her attention to her plate.
“Where was I?” Lady Harding said. The brandy—she had switched to the brandy from the wine with a hand gesture that Robin had somehow missed in this land of subtle cues and proliferating feedback loops—dammed the bridges in her mind with the sediment of the River Thames.
“We were discussing the weather, and lighter subjects, mother,” Drew said, “having fully exhausted ourselves on gloom and doom.”
“Nonsense. One should never have to run from life; that’s for cowards and commoners without the stoutness of royal blood running through their veins.” She burped, inelegantly, covering her mouth with the cloth handkerchief. “All the same, I suppose in the interest of polite company, the weather is a suitable enough subject.” She set down the napkin. “They’re expecting a tornado to set down right atop our heads tonight.”
Drew and Robin burst out laughing.
“Proof you can get to heaven by way of hell,” Drew said. He dunked his lit cigarette into the glass of wine, and drank the balance anyway. Robin took from the gesture that, despite all his defenses, he’d inherited the tendency to punish himself for what little blessings came his way, as if he just wasn’t worthy.
Robin, not formerly attuned to this facet of Drew’s psychology, wondered how many such clues she’d missed into his real nature. It might even explain a little more about his sex change; talk about throwing a wrench into the workings of their relationship. Maybe things had been going too well between them for him not to sabotage it. In this new light, the idea was certainly worth considering.
For that matter, maybe Drew’s escalating anxiety wasn’t on account of old wounds reopening upon exposure to his mother, but on account of their settling into a new groove. Now that she, too, had undergone a sex change, he was left to wonder what to do next to screw things up beyond any chance of repair, in order to return to him a sense of control regarding bad things happening in his life, a sense of control his mother had robbed him of. If Robin left him on her own accord, that would make him feel powerless to affect his dire fate, all fate being dire according to how his brain was wired.
EIGHT
It’d taken Drew all of a few days of being back home to fall in with his rat pack, a
nd pick up exactly where he’d left off as if he’d never left.
“Are we playing cards, or are we playing with ourselves?” Chester blurted. “I didn’t bring lube.”
“The guy’s got the patience of a humping Chihuahua,” Waverly said, still fussing over what card he was going to put down.
“Christ, the last time you made a decision, Margaret Thatcher was parading her manliness around parliament,” Chester rebutted.
Drew and Dominic cackled their asses off. “It has been a while,” Dominic said as gently as he could. When that didn’t prompt Waverly to release a card, he added, “You always lose, anyway.”
“And yet curiously his money never runs out,” Chester said. “So what’s he got to be so hesitant over?”
“Drew, you’re the psychologist,” Dominic said. “Help us out here.”
Drew outed his cigarette in the ashtray. “Waverly can’t smell my pussy, anymore. Like taking a pacifier out of a baby’s mouth”
“Oh, that’s really civil,” Waverly crowed. Shuffling the cards in his hand, he said, “Wouldn’t kill you to spritz with eau de pussy, as a consolation.”
Dominic was shaking the table, he was laughing so hard.
Robin entered the room to fanfare. “Thank God,” Dominic exclaimed. “Maybe now Waverly can finally play a card.”
Waverly dropped the card to applause around the table, and a standing ovation, as he took in Robin zealously.
The group cheered Waverly and Robin both.
***
Robin counted the empty liquor bottles; the boys had been hitting the booze pretty hard. She coughed at the smoke in the room, and she regarded the piles of money on the table. Factoring in the gambling, that was three addictions she observed in progress, and counting. Apparently, the boys’ idea of chasing after more fun was to multitask their vices. She knew the type well. “The happy drunk” was the toughest customer. Nothing but fun and good times. The life of the party; everyone wanted to be around them. So long as the booze kept flowing, and they were free to indulge their addictions, you couldn’t find better people on God’s green Earth. As soon as the drugs stopped, they were gone.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 89
