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

by Dean C. Moore

  Spence marched through the wrought iron gate barring entry to his modest front yard. The property was hemmed in by a stone wall just thick enough for him to be drawn to, owing possibly to unresolved issues from a medieval lifetime. He eyed the twisting cobblestone path to the front door of his house, surrounded by ferns and tropical plants on both sides (none of which belonged here; California was a desert which no amount of grounds-watering could entirely conceal). And he thought: I can’t believe I never noticed any of this before. The left-over hormones from the road rage saturating his brain and maintaining the heightened awareness now paradoxically played against the dead-man-walking effect to make him feel curiously more alive and more lifeless than ever at the same time.

  His hairs standing on the back of his neck, he turned to see Victoria had bypassed the locked gate and stood on the stone wall.

  She launched herself at him like a banshee. How she had made it to the top of that wall was testament to the transformative power of adrenaline spikes.

  She kicked and screamed as she tackled him to the ground. She punched and gouged. It was all he could do to keep his hands up to his face to block the blows. He had all the lactic-acid buildup of someone coming off a marathon; he could barely move. His exhaustion was exacerbated by the dead-man-walking state that thoughts of living life without her had triggered.

  Finally, the storm receded. She rolled off him, calm as day, and onto her back, squishing the ground-hugging ivy.

  Staring at the sun in a way that made people go blind, she said, more farsighted than ever, “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you to grow a spine so you could lift me out of my own bogs. Like I deserve unconditional love. Like anyone does. Love without feedback is like a plant trying to grow without the sun to point it in the right direction.”

  Spence felt the lactic acid draining out of his body and leaching into the soil beneath him as if the hungry earth were happy for the sudden but brief downpour. Leave it to the bacteria in the peat moss to adapt faster to a dying planet in California than anywhere else. Why shouldn’t the lowest of lifeforms not too be ahead of the learning curve, like the rest of California’s progressive types? He wondered if his heightened state of awareness was going to wear off, or if it had accompanied this raised plateau in their relationship as one of the hinge pins securing it in place.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other for a while.” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. He wished he could cut out his tongue if only to silence whatever demon possessed him. “Give us a chance to reflect on what the new rules of engagement are. And see if it’s really possible to be around one another without pressing all of the same buttons all over again.”

  “I can’t believe this!” she shouted. “How can we learn new patterns of behavior except around one another, except by giving each other the feedback we need to cease and desist the second we slip into unconscious routines?”

  “Maybe part of me believes that, I don’t know. I just need time alone to lick my wounds. Otherwise, I’ll be taking all that anger over all the hurt out on you, and it’ll be two steps back instead of one step forward.”

  Victoria was silent, as if even she had to admit, that that was probably true.

  She peeled herself off the ground as if she were leaning into a forward roll. But she came to vertical, and held out her hand to him. When he grabbed it, she pulled him up with the strength of two men, shocking him. “So how did that feel?” she asked.

  Only it wasn’t her.

  The hair standing on Spence’s skin for the second time, he said, “Who are you?”

  “Robin Wakefield. Your psychic psychotherapist.”

  “That was you, and not Victoria?”

  “She’s dead, and so are you. I don’t know how to reach out to her, not sure I should. If she didn’t cross my path, it may be for a reason. There may be someone else better suited to getting through to her.”

  As soon as she said he was dead, and so was Victoria, dim recollections of the facts came back to him. The fact that he was once a philosophy student seemed a stretch in itself, considering how clueless he felt about life. But that he could have been locked up with his psycho philosophy professor Hartman in his own home, waiting his turn to be killed, only to find out he’d been moved to the front of the line… And Victoria… She had been his girlfriend in one stormy relationship that never settled; she endlessly berated him for suffocating her with his love, until, not able to take it any more, she ran out of the house, and headlong into traffic. But those events seemed like the bad dream. What he was living now seemed real by comparison, again throwing what Robin was saying into doubt.

  “If this feels more real,” she said, reading his mind, “it’s because you’re being truer to yourself and to one another. There’s less patterned behavior coming between the two of you. I’m afraid real life can feel like a dream when it’s lived so unconsciously. And the awakening, when it comes, can be quite jarring.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you revealing yourself now? Why not just let me think you had nothing to do with any of it?”

  “Because then you wouldn’t have anything to do with any of it. I need you to stay awake in the dream, so you can take increasing control of what happens, weaning yourself from your dependency on me to heal. I need you to be the architect of your own deliverance, crafting the scenes between the two of you which will set you both free. Maybe she’s watching. Maybe you’re saving her at the same time you’re saving yourself. Maybe that’s your job more so than it is mine.”

  He realized she was right, only it didn’t make any of the truth feel less bitter of a pill to swallow.

  When he finished staring at the ground and lifted his eyes, she was gone. He had never felt so alone, and yet so curiously at peace. Maybe this was why she had wanted he and Victoria to spend time apart, so they could get more comfortable in their own skins first, and not use one another to fill the emptiness inside them with maladjusted behavior, because feeling pain was preferable to feeling nothing.

  He was already starting to feel the character of the nothingness inside him change. Rising up from the void of his being was a sense of wellbeing, of peace, dare he say, even of joy.

  ***

  Spence eyed his flat, stripped bare of every last piece of furniture. He had even ripped up the carpeting in hopes of giving the void more character. Now “the nothingness” shimmered with the same phosphorescence as the wax on the hardwood floor, exposed in the absence of the faded white carpeting symbolic of his waning innocence.

  He’d taken a matted roller and applied texture to the stark walls, eliminating the scars of holes left by paintings that once hung there. The walls, painted a soft crème, maintained the minimalist motif.

  His one sellout to style was the kettle on the stove. His only other possessions were the clothes on his back and the stainless steel tea ball that floated in the water of the mug. Though he hadn’t graduated to tea yet. He was still living on hot water with squeezes of lemon.

  He had made his mind just as empty over the last few weeks, and had never felt happier. The blankness seemed to attract answers to questions, even if they took minutes or hours to arise out of the nothingness. Sometimes the answers arrived ahead of the questions.

  Q: Why did I let Victoria, the love of my life, dump all over me like that?

  A: (his voice): You knew she was right. (Robin Wakefield’s voice): No. You were so afraid of losing her, the insecurities pushed out any hope of love, which alone can keep you safe. Love, what’s more, wasn’t hers, or yours, to give. It was a field of energy you either allowed yourselves to bask in, or not, like easing into a hot tub, depending on your willingness to melt out of all the limiting self-concepts. Attachment to those self-concepts, precludes love, shutting the door to the one thing that can help you to let go. This is why kindness and forgiveness and self-forgetting precede love, open the door to it, so it will come in of its own accord, unforced and unbidden.”

  Spen
ce returned his attention to his empty flat, and sipped from his cup. He was doing this; he was staying awake enough to know how much of his own recovery he already owned, and how much was Robin Wakefield’s hand-holding. He decided then and there, death becomes him. He itched to escape the confines of the apartment, to broaden his sense of emptiness beyond its enclosures, to expand his awareness of all of life in sync with his self-forgetting.

  Robin materialized as a hologram standing before him. “Thanks for the chance to be your teacher. Crafting life lessons disciplines my mind as much as yours. Helps me embody the truths at a higher level. How much more I appreciate that our awareness of the All is commensurate with our self-forgetting. I still spend too much time being impressed with myself, and with how far I’ve come, to see too far past my own blinders.”

  When he rushed to embrace her, and ended by hugging only himself, she figured the symbolic gesture would be a fitting final lesson to end on. She finished dematerializing.

  Spence smiled warmly all the same. Her willingness to learn from him as much as he was learning from her made the whole apprenticeship thing less oppressive. He was still having trouble getting used to being tutored without the whip of Victoria’s recriminations cracking over his back. He wasn’t sure how much to trust the path he was on as a consequence, and had frequent panic attacks throughout the day that this was a dead end, that all this sitting in silence in a yoga posture he could never entirely stretch into, was no more than the flatulence of the self-possessed. In short, he was whipping himself over the decisions made regarding his own deliverance.

  Robin had reminded him that constant mindfulness was necessary to keep any path to deliverance from becoming another coffin, and that his fears therefore were not unwarranted. But dismantling the coffin also required him to be kind toward himself.

  He spent the rest of the day in unproductive silence, which seemed to have nothing to teach him, other than that he could let go of it needing to teach him something, and thus becoming one more form of attachment.

  As he did so, he was treated to a new round of insights.

  Revisiting the image of Victoria in Wonder-Woman mode standing atop the wall to his garden, free of the physical infirmity of her scoliosis, it finally dawned on Spence why she could never accept his love. She must have felt it was pity. Or that it was offered because it gave him leverage over her, elevated him to a virtual god who could easily pull away his fickle affections at any time and find a love object far easier to hold dear.

  As if to signify he was on the right track, he was allowed to see the world through Victoria’s eyes.

  ***

  Victoria was rehearsing her ballet number for the Special Olympics in a dance studio with a spacious barewood floor. Her scoliotic spine made her movements both awkward and jerky on the one hand, hauntingly sinuous on the other. She played the two poles off one another in a fine tension that informed her choreography with every step. Growing out of the dynamism was a compelling drama-dance hybrid well suited to the opera she was acting out with her partners, themselves infirmed.

  They gave their diva plenty of opportunity to dance alone, hypnotize them, until they felt confident to reach out to her. Each time they failed miserably to match her masterfulness, and fell to the ground in tears, she hugged them, whispered supportive words in their ears, got them dancing and moving again.

  The drama repeated with each of the students surrounding her in a circle; they hugged the ground until they felt the courage to rise and show their stuff.

  Spence cried for all the love she showed them that she could never show him. Never tiring of pulling them to their feet. How many times Spence had stumbled in their relationship when he would loved to have had her reach out to him. But then, he wasn’t one of them. He was an outsider, who couldn’t be trusted to be around through the ups and downs. Hers was an abandonment drama, while his was a pining romance for a love object he could never have. How perfectly suited they were to one another from the perspective of matching neuroses.

  He felt Victoria’s presence as his meditating on his love for her continued to work its healing on both of them. And then she was gone.

  Her coming and going at the right triggers became their new drama.

  He sensed Robin’s coming and going, as well, even when she didn’t make her presence felt in words. He could tell her entering and exiting the stage had to do with interrupting his backward slide along the slippery slope of consciousness caused by his self-flagellating. So he took her diminishing presence as a sign that he was recovering.

  Once again, he was grateful for being dead. He wasn’t sure how many years it would have taken to accomplish that which he was able to do in the course of a day. Then again, who knew how long he’d been here in ghost years? His sense of time was likely to be off. Who knew, in fact, how much time had transpired in Robin’s world?

  ***

  Robin smiled, passed her thumb over the wallet-size photo of Spence, before returning it to the altar space she’d set aside for the pictures of the fallen heroes. They had all, in one way or another, lived on past the thumbprints of greatness Hartman attempted to leave on their souls. Each had endured still greater trials in the land beyond time that she realized awaited them all come graduation day.

  She turned to see Drew spying on her, a wary smirk spreading across his face as fast as a raging wildfire. “Robin, promise me you’ll come up for air every once in a while.”

  “You know I will,” she managed for his benefit. Though she was concerned herself that saving souls was becoming more an addiction than an avocation.

  TWELVE

  “What are we doing here?” Cliff gestured impatiently. “If I wanted a European vacation, I’d have rented an RV.”

  Piper sat motionless. “You’re talking with your hands.”

  “We’re in Italy!” Cliff gestured even broader this time. “And answer the question.”

  Piper refused to rise to the bait of Cliff’s theatrics. “We’re profiling the conflict diamonds avenger, CDA for short.” He straddled the stem of the wine glass between his index and middle fingers, riding the rod like a whore on Friday night, the one telltale sign that Cliff was getting to him.

  “Really?”

  Piper studied the outdoor café nestled in the palazzo. He was getting that this was a common theme. Second only to Roman citizens’ love of statuary and palazzos, was their love of outdoor cafés.

  Cliff followed the trajectory of Piper’s eyes. His patience at an end, he stood up, walked across the outdoor café skirting the palazzo, pulled out his pistol, and shot the conflict diamonds avenger square between the eyes.

  Once Cliff returned to their table, he resumed his seat, and finished his coffee. “Tell you what; when we’re worried about taking on the other guy, like maybe they might be a match for us, let’s profile then.”

  “In broad daylight! In front of witnesses, cameras, and police within earshot!” Piper exclaimed. He scrutinized the expanding shockwave of screaming voices and stretched faces. The geriatric efforts of the older folks to flee the scene were reminiscent of fish flopping on the beach, a lot of flailing about to get nowhere.

  “I figured we could use the exercise,” Cliff said. Suddenly he was the deadpan one, and Piper was all theatrics. “Besides, if you want to learn something, this is the way. Not playing twinkle toes with some psycho.”

  Piper flushed red with anger. “Maybe we should discuss your family issues as a way to get in shape for profiling serial killers.”

  “Very funny. Can you do shtick and run at the same time? Those police coming at us with their billy clubs out aren’t about applying just the right pressure for the perfect neck and shoulder massages.”

  “I can do shtick dangling from a rope or squirming in an electric chair,” Piper said.

  “That’s good to know if it comes to that, as it’d be a hell of a time to sober up.”

  “Is it okay to run now?” Piper asked. “In case you’re wondering,
that question was both rhetorical and smart-assed.”

  “Hell, no. We need their batons and their guns.”

  “What about your gun?” Piper said. There was that theatricality in his voice again.

  Cliff threw his gun down on the table. Held his hands up demonstratively in surrender. Nonchalantly, he said, “We don’t want to make it too easy on ourselves.”

  “Between the cameras and the ballistics, we won’t be able to go anywhere now without worrying about someone trying to throw a net around us,” Piper complained.

  “Doesn’t pay to be the hunter without also being the hunted. Otherwise you forget how the other side thinks. As a profiler, you should appreciate that.”

  “You have no idea how much.” Piper held his hands up. As the coppers ran close enough to see their faces, Piper thought they needed a little more reassurance. He smiled warmly.

  Cliff grabbed the cop’s gun hand when he made the mistake of charging headlong at them too fast.

  He twisted the arm behind the policeman’s back, pivoted his body, and shot his sidekick coming up behind him square in the chest.

  He clubbed the cop he had in hand against the head with his own weapon, and relieved him of his baton. The guy folded to the ground as if the cloth holding the sandman together had been cut off at the knees.

  Piper was so turned on, he was rock hard. “Get the gun and club off the other guy,” Cliff said, his voice as unshaken as the stones lining the courtyard. “Save the club for your non-dominant hand, that way you won’t be tempted to use it when the gun would do even better.”

  Piper blindly followed Cliff’s instructions, still not really able to think on his own. Shock was good for settling the mind and for surrender, just not good for thinking fast. He admired Cliff’s calm under pressure enough to want to emulate it. He figured the best way to accelerate his learning curve was to go into chameleon mode, and, sensing almost psychically the emotional and mental wavelength Cliff was on, match it exactly.