He canvassed the tent for Carmine. Anywhere else, she’d stick out like a sore thumb. Here, at the circus, looking for her was like looking for a needle in a stack of eyeballs—all too happy to look away to avoid getting stabbed in the eye. Most everyone winced when he asked about her, from the very first day he’d taken a fancy to her. She was deformed, a hunchback with a kind face. Maybe that’s why they didn’t like him asking around for her; they figured it couldn’t go well, and when he dumped her eventually for a more workable relationship, she’d be left to sweep up her own shattered psyche, the way she swept up after everyone else.
Drew had met her much like he’d met all the other women in his life: at one grand happening or another. His kind of people were always to be found at such things, people who couldn’t accept life on life’s terms and needed to compensate somehow. People for whom no amount of excitement was quite enough, so always it was off to the next big thing, hoping it’d be enough to rescue them from their perpetual ennui. They were ostensibly searching for something missing.
What they were really doing was hiding out from themselves, and from whatever it was in their lives they couldn’t face, that kept them forever stuck. No amount of earth-shattering events could jog them into waking consciousness to face their own demons. The whole point of these shocking world events they frequented was not to awaken the sleepwalker, which was just the story they told themselves, but to deepen the trance, extend it by any measure, put off the inevitable confrontation with the monster that had made them what they were, and had made the possibility of escaping themselves so unlikely.
He looked up to find Carmine sweeping the elephant poop into a pail. Seeing her body refuse to cooperate with her to carry out the smallest gesture, from sweeping the dung into the scooper, to lifting the scooper into the bucket, to picking up the bucket, made him want to cry. Her condition never triggered any such reaction in her. She wrung an inexplicable joy out of that body. He stood quietly, luxuriated in just loving her, afraid to spoil the moment by having her lavish attention on him, something he didn’t feel he’d earned.
Carmine said, “It’s very thoughtful of you, Gerty, to leave me this generous offering. I know it cost you dearly, the entire forest you had to mow down for it. And no one appreciates your labors.” The elephant roared as if enjoying Carmine’s flattery. “Why don’t you be a good girl and brush yourself down, so I don’t have to reach?”
Gerty grabbed the broom with her trunk, and brushed her back along the upper ridge, where Carmine couldn’t reach.
“You’re such a dear,” Carmine said.
Finished, the elephant handed the sweeper to Carmine to tackle the rest for her.
Carmine brushed up and down her flank as if painting the side of a barn. Gerty seemed to thoroughly enjoy the attention.
Finally, after Carmine had set the broom down to take a breather and assess the rest of her workload, which involved taking in the big picture, she chanced on Drew.
“Drew!” She sounded so excited Drew expected her to burst like a piñata and fling candied feelings at him. He knew she wanted to run and hug him but couldn’t from within that body, so he did the running for them.
“Where have you been?!” she asked, still riding the carousel as he flung her around in circles.
“Trying to find myself. Turns out I’m never as happy as when I’m with you and I lose myself altogether.”
She laughed as he set her down. “That’s not what Shrink Wrap says. He says you forget yourself with him all the time. That’s the secret to life, you know?” she said, picking up her pail. “That, and a little eucalyptus rub under the nose for the elephant dung,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Don’t tell Gerty, or she’ll get offended.”
“But it never lasts with Shrink Wrap. It never lasts with anyone else,” Drew said forlornly.
“Oh, you’re being silly.” Walking alongside Drew with her pail in one hand and the broom in another, waddling side to side, she said, “People get so caught up in playing themselves sometimes, they forget it’s just another character they’re doing. That’s where we come in.” Returning to her conspiratorial voice, she said, “We gotta shake ‘em up a bit.”
“I know that. So why do I keep forgetting?”
“Because you let yourself get sucked in. That’s the biggest mistake of all. You see, they want you to feel the hopelessness of their lives, and you, of course, you want to empathize. And then they want you to appreciate what a hero they are for enduring it all. They want to make enchanted castles and faeries and glow-in-the-dark creatures out of the pile of shit that’s their lives. Because if they’re so stuck on themselves, then there’s only one thing to do, glorify the hopelessness. Make that the very point of their existence, to give testimony to a life of shit like only they can. They expect to get sainthood out of it, they do. And they very well might, if there was any point to it. If they managed to do any good for anyone, most of all themselves. But that’s kind of hard when your every waking moment is spent rebuilding the jail cell you keep around yourself that separates you from everyone and everything else in life.”
“I suppose I know that, too.”
She laughed. “Come on. I’ll show you one more time how not just to speak the truth, but to live the truth.”
“You think it’ll take this time?”
“It will if you let the nothingness saturate you. The void, the Buddhist call it,” she said, laughing. “They’re real good with big words, those guys.”
“Better the devil you know.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s it in a nutshell. Takes a leap of faith to live the rest of your life in free-fall. That’s what it’s like to be in love with God. Can’t hold on to people, places, and things. The rest of us are just mistresses you cheat on God with, you know?”
“Robin, too?”
“Robin most of all. How is she, by the way?”
“Doing better at this enlightenment stuff than I am.”
“Somehow I doubt it. Two more incorrigible people I never met. Oh, you talk a good game…” She set down the pail and broom, tired of struggling with both. “In the end, you’re both determined to make it a lot harder than it is.”
“Prove it.”
They had made it to the periphery of the tent, divided into stations, and were within sight of Vanessa’s booth. Carmine pointed at Vanessa, The Bearded Lady, tossing plates and screaming. “Take a deep breath,” Carmine said, “and find your calm happy place. If you expect to steer her there, best you arrive first.”
He let her get ahead of him, regarded her arthritic walk; it always made him cry. He supposed that was because it made him feel impotent to help her. She would probably give him a good lecture if she knew, which would include that word “incorrigibility” again. And maybe the word “forgetfulness,” like forgetting all the good lessons she’d taught him for the hundredth time.
Sometimes, he felt he specialized in forgetting. For the Russian mystic Gurdjieff it was always about re-membering, putting all the Humpty Dumpty pieces of himself back together, so the part wasn’t trying to do the job of the whole. For Drew, there were only the parts of himself, each one caught up in a different relationship with another woman.
After Carmine found a perch for herself, Drew adjusted his blocking relative to her and Vanessa, as if playing to an audience.
“What is it, Vanessa?” Drew asked.
“What is it always?! He left me for a woman of superficial beauty. Men are all pigs.”
“So, shave the beard,” Drew suggested.
Vanessa froze and hit him with the mock-horror face, as if she’d just been asked to strangle her own baby. “Why, so I can join you in pig-land, where superficial people live to sacrifice anything of value in themselves to the god of pettiness, of cultural prejudices?”
“That, or go it alone, Vanessa,” Drew advised. “If you’re going to let people twist you this way and that, best you be very flexible. If not, best you not need anybody. You enjoy eve
rybody, but not need anybody.”
Carmine shook her head and whittled away at a miniature unicorn out of wood she’d pulled out of her dress pocket, along with a small pocket knife. “The blind leading the blind,” she mumbled.
Vanessa turned to Carmine. “How is it he sounds so enlightened and is still such an asshole?”
“I imagine he can’t stand to be one-sided,” Carmine said, without looking up from her whittling.
A bubble of air formed around the three of them. There wasn’t any oxygen in it. And then Vanessa broke out laughing. She gave Drew a big kiss. “You really are one of us.” And she just as quickly went back to getting ready for her big performance.
Carmine set the wooden unicorn down on Vanessa’s vanity. Vanessa smiled openly. “It’s lovely. The most precious thing I’ve ever seen.” She kissed Drew on the cheek as if he was the one who’d left it.
As Drew and Carmine walked off, he mentioned to her, “I thought you said you’d show me.”
“I did.”
“Showed me what?”
“If you’d let me sit there and whittle, unaffected by all her carrying on, she would have stopped carrying on eventually. She would have gotten the same distance on herself that I had. But you had to go intercede. Instead of one person lost to the drama of the moment, I had two. That left me with little to do but say the right thing to burst the new bubble you created over the old one big enough for the both of you.
“You were so busy being right, you ended up retraumatizing her. Was the point to show off how enlightened and above it all you were, or was the point to actually help her?”
Drew sighed. “Why do I need to keep showing off?”
“Because the only validation you got as a child was when you were showing off. And you’re still looking for your mama’s approval.”
Drew harrumphed at the same old message. “You’re right. I’ll never grow up, will I? I’ll stay stuck at twelve-years-old or whatever it is, forever.”
“Knowledge and wisdom won’t get you where you’re going. Neither will technique,” Carmine said. She gazed up at the flying trapeze artists. They completed an aerial double somersault—as the man caught the woman—without missing a beat. “There’s a reason the Buddhists reduce everything to ‘try a little kindness.’ It’s the only thing that melts away the sins. Otherwise, they keep piling up. And all the Zen sayings in the world are just kindling for a fire whose flame has no heat.”
He grunted. And when he took his eyes off the overhead trapeze artists, Carmine was gone. As if she’d never been there. He didn’t understand how she could elude him with such ease.
He was combing the circus grounds once again for her, when he felt Robin call him out of his head and out of the past.
***
Robin severed the psychic link with Drew’s mind, smiled warmly at him. “I think your girlfriends are lovely people. I’m grateful for the chance to meet them.”
Drew sighed. “I don’t think you’re supposed to react that way. I think you’re supposed to throw a tantrum, threaten to leave me, act hurt and betrayed, something a little more understandable.”
“I think Seriana is right about you. You gain distance on yourself through your role play with these different women. That way, you can go into your past and heal it, refashion it the way you want, more convincingly.”
“I should be trying to do that with you.”
“You are. You’re just fast-tracking the process, so it doesn’t take you another hundred lifetimes to heal, living those lifetimes out in parallel as you are. Seriana definitely has your number.”
“I still think you should be furious. It’s awful of me.”
“I’m actually very grateful. You seem to be a better magnet for these Renaissance types than I am. Through you, I can expand the circle of minds I’m able to reach out to psychically. I can go beyond my own blinders and prejudices and what I’m able to attract with my own limited personality.”
“I’m still not entirely convinced that’s such a good idea.”
“The good news is, they’re no pushovers. They won’t have any trouble telling me to mind my own business if I overstep my bounds.”
“What did you make of Maya?” Drew asked, trying to keep the expectancy out of his voice.
“You won’t get far with that one without my help.”
“Great, now I need you to patch up my illicit affairs for me,” Drew said, ashamed and hopeful at the same time. One of those Zen paradoxes, he thought cheekily.
“It’s no coincidence Maya is surrounded by a lot of drones like a queen bee. She uses the power of her mind, extended by the magnetic fields, to stifle the individuality out of her own people, and she’s not the least cognizant of it. The more she feeds off the energy fields, the harder it is to reach her, as she can overturn any resistance by throwing more power of mind at the task. And that includes winning an argument.”
“Having not even met you yet, she was very upset she wouldn’t win any arguments with you.”
“Yes, she has made genetic modifications to her people she wouldn’t have been comfortable making before, courtesy of those talks we have in the future. She is so determined to turn the clock back, return the biosphere to a pristine state, she can’t accept the need for genetic engineering just to keep it going. You can see how little ground I made so far—in these talks I’ve yet to have.”
“And Seriana?”
“With any luck, this is her final life on this plane. It was supposed to be her final life three lifetimes ago. She has mastered everything there is to master at this level. But she rather enjoys mastery. So what was once transcendent has now become enslaving. Another tough nut to crack. You’ll need my help with her, too.”
“And Carmine?”
“You realize she’s a ghost?”
“Come again?”
“That’s where you got your nickname, the Ghost Whisperer. She has ascended this plane herself but, like me, she just can’t seem to stop herself from saving people. I haven’t decided yet if serving as a guardian angel is just her way of working off residual karma before moving on, or if she needs nudging, too. She’s healthier than the other two. Which is kind of strange, being as she’s dead. Ghosts don’t usually hang around unless they have major unsettled business.”
“Just peachy.” Drew wasn’t even entirely sure why he was so mad. He just was.
He took a deep breath and tried to reach for the question in back of his mind he’d meant to ask earlier, which seemed all but lost from consciousness now. Finally, it bobbed up to the surface. “The power the obelisk lends to you—how does it feel relative to the vortex energy undergirding the Harding Estate, and relative to the mind-ray being beamed at you by Mother?”
“Dry and impartial. It will empower anyone with the technical knowhow to tap it.”
Lovely, Drew thought. It empowered Robin’s incorrigible nature, ensured she didn’t have to get over herself to continue to gain in psychic power; the way it was meant to be. That meant she could now be a growing threat to humanity—a much bigger one than the people she was seeking to empower.
Drew said, “You finally have the power you need then to go after your Renaissance types.”
“No. Something’s still blocking me.”
Drew thought, Let’s hope she’s referring to her own conscience.
“All the power in the world won’t move you beyond a certain point, if you aren’t willing to let go of whatever psychological baggage is holding you back, is that it?” Drew reined in his excitement for fear of goading her to find a workaround.
“So it appears.”
“Why so long in the face? You live to get over yourself.”
“If only you could see what I see. The Renaissance figures are powering up ahead of me, with no one to serve in a coaching capacity. If I don’t find a way to get on the playing field soon, all those dictators building biological weapons in their basements, all the assassins walking around with dirty-nukes in their
suitcases, are going to seem like child’s play.”
FIFTY-THREE
Felicia’s eyes flicked open. She grabbed the handrail by the side of the bed. “Where am I?”
“Easy there, Miss Winthrop. You’ve been in an accident,” said Dr. Feldman.
Felicia didn’t have time to play twenty questions with this guy. Obviously he was trying to mute the shock by spoon-feeding her information instead of giving her the whole data dump at once. She yanked herself to an upright position using the bed rails and grabbed the clipboard out of his hands. “I’ve been in a coma three days.”
“You’re lucky to be alive. The ice pick through your brain bisected the left and right hemispheres perfectly, leaving minimal brain damage.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it. I angled my head to avoid the spike taking a more detrimental course.”
“That’s impossible, you know that,” the doctor said, patting her arm. “That’s just your brain making up a story you can live with. Entirely understandable under the circumstances.”
She flipped through the chart on the clipboard, scanned for the important details, ignored everything else. “I see I have an artificial heart now.”
“Yes, I’m afraid the real one failed during surgery, and I’d come too far to give up. Your enlarged heart was secondary to the rheumatic fever you experienced as a child.”
“That’s the first time someone accused me of having a big heart.”
“An artificial heart doesn’t respond as well as a real heart. You’ll have to get used to a more muted emotional range.”
“Not a problem,” she said with a flat affect the doctor found disturbing, going from his grimace. He probably thought she was in denial.
He supportively held her hand. “The bursts of energy you had before won’t be there for you. When your fight-or-flight response kicks in, you won’t be able to leap tall fences and outrun speeding trains like you used to.” He evidently enjoyed using levity to get his grave patients to lighten up over their even graver situations.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 166
