She’d worry about the rightness of tapping the obelisk later. For now, it was a way to keep up with the Renaissance types as their powers continued to dial up ahead of hers. The stakes were too high not to take advantage of the tool. Without some way to access more power she was at risk of losing not just the Renaissance figures she was determined to guide through their birth pains to higher consciousness, but the planet itself.
FORTY-NINE
Ardel materialized at Robin’s side, taking form from a ghostly apparition until he was solid enough to the touch. She was lost to her astral traveling. “Be careful of leaving yourself wide open like that, precious.” He brushed back her hair.
His gut wound picked this moment to make its presence felt; he winced, and doubled over. “Personally, I never saw the point of astral traveling. Strikes me as the poor man’s ticket to the universe. Still, I suppose you have to start somewhere.”
He spied the bowl of water on a stand, limped over to it, caught sight of himself in the round mirror poised above it. God, Ardel, he thought. And they say doing what you love is your best chance at staying young and beautiful. Fewer stress lines. He laughed. His handsome face, etched by a five o’clock shadow, looked weathered several notches past world-weary.
The sound of footsteps. Someone was approaching. “I guess this bowl of water and this rag isn’t going to cut it, no matter how you look at it.”
He gradually disappeared, becoming increasingly incorporeal until there was just the ghost again, and finally, he was gone.
***
“How long’s she been like that?” Drew said. He regarded Robin sprawled on the bed, face down.
“Weeks,” said the tall footman, standing starchily upright like a lightning rod ready to catch the next bolt of his master’s ire.
“Where the hell have I been all that time?” Drew said.
“No one seems to know, sir.”
Drew’s cell phone vibrated against his leg. He pulled it out to find Maya’s name prominently displayed. Evidently, he’d been with one of the women he relied on to rejuvenate him enough to get back in the ring with Robin. Drawing on one more illicit affair in a manner both reprehensible and laudable. He shut the phone off without answering it and stowed it in his pocket.
The bottle of Bacardi in the footman’s hands. The tray held tantalizingly at eye level. He rubbed his temples as he thought better of it.
“What’s your name again?” Drew said.
The footman coughed, “Aart, Sir.”
“Sorry.”
Drew was ashamed his immense faculty for people, places, and things, distilled from the rest of his political acumen, was actually failing him, a good sign of what he’d been doing the last few weeks, even if the truth was shielded behind the convenient blackout state.
“Not at all, sir.” Aart bowed and excused himself.
Drew strode over to the bed, parallel parked his backside alongside Robin’s ribcage, and turned her over. He shook her. “Robin, whatever trance you’re in, that’s enough self-indulgence for one lifetime.”
Robin opened her eyes in a half-hearted attempt to rise to consciousness.
Drew fetched a rag, dipped it in a bowl of water, the kind set on a table from before anyone thought of putting running water inside houses, and returned to her. He wiped her eyes of film, brushed his hand across her face to rid it of mascara. “Best we cover up all signs of the crime,” Drew quipped, afraid the joke was largely lost on her.
“I’ve found a way to reach out to the other Renaissance types, the first of our kind,” Robin said, though her bleary, unfocused eyes that couldn’t have been taking Drew in particularly well. That meant she may as well have been confessing to a man in black. She really needed to learn to curtail her tell-all nature if she planned to live a full and uninterrupted life.
“You mean you found a way to boost your powers,” Drew said, the way a psychologist restates what his patient relays to him, and stays emotionally neutral and empty inside, to invite his patient to spill.
“The obelisk.”
Drew found himself breathing deeply reflexively in an effort to steel himself. No one knew exactly what that obelisk out in the Iranian desert was up to, least of all Robin, even if she had been the first to psychically determine how to take advantage of it.
“If I send them unconditional love,” she said, “I can jolt them, help them get some distance on themselves. To come up for air long enough, at least, to see the path not taken that would be wise to take. The path refused because their behaviors are becoming too addictive, even with respect to their missions from God.”
“You’re speaking of distance healing,” Drew said, ostensibly restating for clarity, but truly to help the idea sink in past his own denial. He supposed this was just another part of her recovery, her determination to peel back the onion layer by layer, so she could see more past her own blinders and conditioning.
But there was still the ugly specter of ego-driven consciousness here. And the chance she might be off the wagon with her determination to build a better mind for herself in the wake of the mind-shattering Hartman encounter, one sufficiently pliable as to be genuinely shockproof. As in: this was just the latest way to take the reins on the entire world, to singlehandedly guide “the massive shift in global consciousness into the next higher integral state”—her words, not his. As if it weren’t enough to trust the other Renaissance men and women to do their part. Drew needed more information to know which side of the coin Robin had landed on, so he decided he would ask her. “You mind elaborating?”
She grabbed his arm and downloaded the astral traveling journey she’d taken straight into his mind.
Drew’s eyes flew open. My God, her psychic abilities had spiked!
***
Iona gazed up from her sketchpad at the crack of thunder and the flash of lightning, hypnotized briefly by the subsequent downpour. But there was no rhythm to the raindrops; more like white noise on the radio. Good thing she had thought to climb in the car at the last drizzle. The poor cop tried to stay in character with his metal detector, for the sake of keeping her under surveillance. Soon, he would submit to forces greater than himself, as she had, with respect to her own compulsiveness. He would leave Iona to mastermind her next heist under one fewer set of prying eyes.
She returned her attention to the diagram projected onto her drawing, invisible thanks to the ruse, unless anyone was devious enough to think to scan the paper along more than one band of the electromagnetic spectrum. It took but a moment to get lost in her work again.
The radio flicked on. “Ask him,” the female voice said.
“What the hell?” Iona mumbled.
“Ask him.”
Iona’s eyes rose to the cop fighting to keep the metal detector steady in his shivering hands.
“You feel it, don’t you?” spat the voice on the radio. “There’s something there; some connection. Trust your intuition. Ask him.”
Iona felt bathed in a warm energy that percolated from inside her, as if her insides had become a mineral spring. It was the kind of feeling she had after taking a glass of brandy, only without the accompanying fuzziness. Is this what unconditional love feels like? Did the body literally react with improved circulation to every part of itself, the heart suddenly able to reach oxygen and life-starved cells, barely hanging on at the lower energy state? It didn’t take her long to extrapolate that, by conditioning the body gradually to accept more and more of this self-love each day, and by basking in it, she might be able to turn this material body into a light filled body, a Christ-body, something she had only read about once, a tantalizing notion she had had plenty of time to forget about without knowing how to apply it. Until now.
For the first time in her life, she felt free of performance anxiety, free of the need to do anything or prove anything, free of her own perfectionism, even of her drive to get over herself which, in this light, seemed every bit as compulsive. As if she’d lost her way, strayed fro
m doing something soul nurturing by following in the wake of her destiny, to doing something soul sucking. The clarity of mind was stunning, as was the ability to align her will with the flashes of insight, devoid as it was of the usual resistances to her own higher dictates.
She flicked the car’s headlights at the cop, rolled down her window, and shouted, “Climb in here before you catch your death of cold.” The cop hesitated only briefly before he charged the car. He jumped in, rolled up the window, and shivered.
Still afraid to look at her, he just kept glaring at the rain, wondering when it was going to let up, if it would be in time to not say or do something to blow his cover. He shouldn’t wear his mind on his sleeve like that, she thought. Iona smiled, flattered that she unsettled him so much that even his training wasn’t much good to him. Apparently, this attraction between them that her guardian angel had been talking about wasn’t one-sided.
“You can look at me. You won’t break,” she said.
“I’m thinking the sparks between us could very well ignite the gas tank. And then where would we be? In an even worse predicament. So you see, it’s imminently practical I keep my eyes forward.”
She bit her lip. “So you have been stalking me.”
Dead silence. As if he were afraid he’d already blown it. “Not exactly.”
She decided she would give him an out, hoping to reduce his anxiety level enough so he could function better. “So you started looking for gold, but then your eyes alit on me, and you decided you’d found a far more valuable treasure.”
He smiled. “Something like that. Of course, I couldn’t look directly at you without showing my hand. So, the fact you look so beautiful is still largely in my imagination. I think I’ll keep it there for a while, if you don’t mind. I couldn’t stand the pain of being wrong after such a long courtship. I feel like a man, blinded by some dreadful accident, who has fallen in love with his nurse.”
“Wow, you have been out in the rain a long time.”
He smiled. “You don’t have to be such a smartass; spoils the illusion.”
“You want a woman who isn’t cheeky or quick-witted?”
“Not exactly.”
“You want her to be obedient and subservient?”
“Only when she wears her French maid outfit, and perhaps that leather ditty I got her.”
She grinned and put her eyes back on her drawing. This was already going too well, and where could it go from here? Nowhere. There was no room in her life for romance, far less a nice guy. Just the titillating types like Cliff and Piper who flirted well but ultimately promised something they really couldn’t deliver. And, of course, the Elmos of the world, easily manipulated. Boy toys, all of them, no more.
She said, “I’m afraid I couldn’t make this relationship work unless you were okay with me being gone for long periods of time. Even day to day, it’s important that you keep long hours and are largely unavailable. And, of course, my secret life is my own business.”
He thought about that, the pain evident in his body language, his uncomfortable shifting in his seat. His tightening up registered in the changes against the springs behind her back, as the seat running from one side of the car to the other attempted to deflect the shockwave. The 1960s Chevy hadn’t exactly been refurbished. Even if it had, the coils in the seat would be just that much more responsive, that much more willing to transmit his subtlest change of emotions.
“I could do that,” he said finally. That must have cost him dearly, she mused. Had he really thought it through? It would mean lying to his superiors about where she was going; it would mean covering for her, even without knowing exactly what she was doing. Suspecting all the while she was up to no good, but not truly understanding what. With her apartment bugged, and much of the city grid devoted to keeping twenty-four-seven tabs on her—among its other surveillance duties—he’d have to be cautious about what he said, and an imaginative liar, with good people skills.
But for those times when she had to disappear, and they couldn’t find her, he’d be worth his weight in gold. He could say he had never lost her, had shadowed her the whole time, only to find her crashed at her aunt’s in a small, rural town, off grid, or on a boat deep-sea fishing, also beyond the eyes of the cameras. Her bodysuit could fill in the blanks, based on whatever story he told them, show her moving through the grid to get to said aunt or said boat, once they dug a little further with “better” search algorithms, supplied, of course, by the suit. The instant they investigated her tampering with their datafeeds, the suit’s algorithms would change chameleon-like into something innocuous, something even more invisible.
She felt ashamed. Already, she was closing the window of opportunity her guardian angel had opened for her, bending him into something opportune, instead of finding a way to make the relationship work on its own merit, subject to no politics, or hidden agendas. Maybe that was the true nature of his discomfort. Perhaps he felt the same pain of having their budding love branded by such manipulativeness, subject to secondary gains as if the reward of their love weren’t enough. Could he remind her why she was really with him?
She pulled off the microphones hidden on his person, highlighted by her suit, dumped them in her coffee in the cup holder. “So, just how under my spell, are you?”
He turned to face her. “Entirely.”
She kissed him briefly.
“Why did you interrupt the kiss?”
“The cameras sweeping the area... There’s only a small window when not one of them has us covered.”
“It’s why you parked here. God, you’re good. I tried to do the trigonometry with the display on my metal detector, which needless to say isn’t an actual metal detector. But I couldn’t nail down the math.”
“You’re trying to describe parabolic arcs. You should have gone with analytic geometry or, better yet, calculus.”
“Aren’t you condescending? I mean that lovingly.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I deserved that. Careful with what you say next, they can lip-read off the cameras.”
The rain let up. He cracked the door open. “Find a window again, soon, please. One large enough to let me wander around lost inside you,” he said, his hands cupped over his mouth, as he pretended to cough politely. He shut the door, scampered off with his metal detector like a blind man with his cane. She supposed he was heading rather blindly into an uncertain future with her.
“Thanks,” she said to the voice on the radio. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Robin Wakefield.”
“You spoke through the radio because you figured it’d be a little less spooky than announcing yourself in my head straightaway?” When Robin didn’t answer, she said, “Suppose that was a rhetorical question.”
***
“Is that distortion caused by the curved glass of the window?” Santini asked. The carp, the size of a Mack Truck, swam by, attempted to take nibbles out of him.
“No,” Gretchen explained. “We’re pretty far down. The train isn’t exactly leak-proof, and the glass isn’t exactly pressurized for these depths, but then we aren’t exactly who we say we are, either.”
Santini laughed, looked just as concerned over the implications of their newfound superpowers. But there were clearly other things on his mind, too.
“It’s time to mend fences with him,” said the voice in her head. “He’s doing his best to hide it, but he’s hurt you’ve let recent events come between you. You stopped evolving your relationship. The last time you were really close, you were watching a movie at the Rialto.”
“Who is this?” Gretchen asked silently.
“Robin Wakefield.”
“You! You found a way inside my head. Remarkable.”
“I’ll spare you any ominous remarks regarding the path you’re on. Looks like you’ve already identified the dangers. Good luck, Gretchen. Go with God. Go as gods. Go with love. Go as love.” And with that the voice and the sense of a presence was gone. Gretchen
was left only with a glowing warmth percolating through her. It seemed to provide her the energy she needed to overcome her resistance to pursuing things further with Santini.
Gretchen pulled Santini aside. “I’m sorry I let our relationship stall. I’m sorry I let the Eternal steal my heart right from under your nose. We go back a long way. Things left unresolved even after however many lifetimes now. I don’t want that for us.”
“I don’t, either.” Santini spied Mort a half-car length away from them, playing sink the silver pellets in the holes in the baseball diamond under glass, a game of balance and concentration, and a well-earned invitation to mindlessness. “You’ve had a lot on your plate, in all fairness. Being the deep thinker in the group, and all. You deserve some slack for keeping us all from charging headlong off a cliff like a bunch of lemmings.”
“Thanks for that. But I don’t want to ride that train all the way to the end of the line any more than I want to ride this one.”
“What do you suggest?” Santini said cautiously. Suddenly the texture of the seat, coarse and woolen, was palpable through his wrinkle-free Dockers—an adieu to his bachelor’s lifestyle and his inability to justify the time spent over an ironing board. The coarse hairs of the seat’s fabric, like so many unfinished story-threads breaking off from still larger ones, all the while echoing one central unspoken theme, rattled him.
“We could try holding each other more,” Gretchen said, clutching the handle of her purse in her lap with both hands. “Let the wisdom of the heart usurp the wisdom of the mind for once.”
Santini was only too happy to comply. He clasped her hand as she let her head fall against his shoulder.
She eyed the equations in her purse, rescued from one of the fallen Renaissance men, whose true powers had yet to be released. And she closed the purse.
***
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 160
