Life was no longer a game for beginners. The new Renaissance required a capacity to reinvent themselves from one minute to the next. Any less technique, any weaker magic, and the present was no more than a quicksand pit, taking them down into alternate realities, past, present, and future, because they didn’t have the strength to hold on to this timeline, the courage and fortitude; they didn’t have the power of mind to face their demons, real, imagined, external, internal.
Maybe the game hadn’t truly changed; it was played the same in any era. Only in this hyper-feedback age, they couldn’t deny the nature of the game or how they were playing it. The added self-consciousness could then be used for accelerated growth, or accelerated decay, depending on the amount of self-love or self-hate one embodied. The verdict was still out as to which destiny awaited them.
But this was Drew’s day in the sun, not hers. They had flown halfway around the world so Robin could finish healing, only to find that if Drew was going to catch up with her, he now had to face a rival capable of fucking with his head and taking him out of the game permanently, who was no less daunting than Clay Hartman: his own mother. Queen of high drama as Hartman was philosopher king.
***
“Why do you think the Dunstans stood us up?” Lord Birmingham said. He sliced into his steak with a combination of stoic compunction and grim fortitude.
Drew pranced in, intent on taking up the seat opposite Lord Birmingham. “Because you’re an insufferable bore,” he said, pulling out his chair. “At least that’s what mama says.”
“Really now?” Lord Birmingham paused with the knife and fork.
“He’s going through that phase where nothing will satisfy him short of inciting a riot,” Lady Harding said. She laughed nervously, and glared daggers at him for refusing to play his part as rehearsed.
“Young men are to be seen, not heard,” Lady Birmingham scolded.
“I have plenty of proof to the contrary, I assure you, young man,” Lord Harding said. “We are quite the life of the party.”
“The last time you were here,” Drew said, “you talked about your wartime exploits as if we hadn’t all heard those stories a hundred times before and couldn’t recite them by heart.”
“I remember you laughing your ass off,” Lord Birmingham said.
“I was under orders to, lest I get my allowance revoked until I’m eighty. Under the circumstances I would have laughed at the carpet bombing of the grounds outside the window.”
“I see he takes his penchant for high drama from his mother,” Lady Birmingham said.
“Yes, he does.” Lady Harding said, gritting her teeth.
“The good news is,” Drew said reassuringly, addressing Lord Birmingham, “if you can’t remember having told the stories a hundred times before, you’re probably going senile. You promise to get quite interesting then. Talking to the lamp as if it were alive, and addressing long dead relatives as if they were in the room with you. Even my mother will be struggling to keep up.”
Even Lord Birmingham had to laugh. “He has a point there.” He set down his knife and fork and dabbed his chin with the cloth napkin in his lap. “What do you think, dear?”
The footman, coming to his mother’s rescue, had set a plate of food in front of Drew, and was spoon feeding him like an infant. He tried heroically to choke Drew on the steak, in hopes of shutting him up. The casual attempted murder of her son right before her eyes seemed to calm Lady Harding.
“Your military exploits are the talk of the town, dear,” Lady Birmingham reassured her husband. “The young man is just jealous he has nothing comparable to brag about, besides counting his skirmishes with his toy soldiers.”
“She has to humor you,” Drew said. “You’ve got all the money and political influence. She’s just a cheap whore in a fine dress, who has managed to cake on enough makeup that she can no longer see herself as she is.”
“Drew, go to your room. This silly game has gone on long enough. You’re not the dry wit you think you are.” Turning her attention to her guests, she said, “Polite society has been a strain on him. He’s wild and unpolished and proud of it. I fully expect to find him leading safaris down the Amazon in a few years, saving the last big blotches of the unknown from becoming civilized. Until then, we have to put up with any chance he gets to level his disdain at us.” Focusing her attention squarely on Drew, Lady Harding added, “You don’t have to fight it, dear, you just have to walk away. No one is forcing you to be a part of the civilized world. Go be a noble savage, if that pleases you. That’s one of the perks of being rich.”
Lord and Lady Birmingham rebounded with his mother’s contextualization of their little drama, looked less injured.
Coughing from the meat sticking in his throat, to the smug footman’s delight, Drew cleared his windpipe by doing the Heimlich on himself and hurtled the chunk of gristle into the footman’s eye. “I surrender!” Drew said, throwing his napkin down on the table. “I tried to save you from them, I truly did. Now they’ll stay instead of storming out, and I’ll have to rescue you later with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after they’ve drained the last life out of you.”
Lady Birmingham and Lord Birmingham laughed, applauded his exit. “He is damn funny,” Lady Birmingham said, “you have to give him that.”
“Yes, a pity to waste such wit on anything but high society,” Lady Harding said. “Maybe after he’s gotten his fill of life in the wilds, it’ll lose its allure, and he’ll rejoin us to continue to push social evolution into the next frontier.”
“We can only hope,” Lady Birmingham said. She enjoyed her chilled fork with the salad the waiter had just placed in front of her. “But he’ll be out years of practice, darling. You don’t just learn civility overnight. It has to be indoctrinated into you over the course of a lifetime.”
“Maybe that’s his niche, to play the fool. I no longer have it in me to fight it,” Lady Harding said with a melodramatic sigh, still in character as the entirely sympathetic friend. She finished scribbling a note for the footman. “His list of punishments.” The footman took the note and exited.
Lord and Lady Harding exchanged a self-satisfied look.
Drew, after listening to the exchange from the corridor, departed. He whistled and skipped down the grand hall, playing hopscotch with the hardwood floor inlays set in geometric patterns, mandalas within mandalas, from which it was easy to pull out the necessary squares for the game.
He ran headlong into the arms of the footman who he didn’t see in front of him until it was too late, his attention too focused on the squares beneath his feet. He took the note and read it: “Wonderful performance, child. I never knew you had it in you. Glad to see you can carry your own weight around here.”
Drew’s mood took an instant nosedive.
Young Robin materialized in the dream-space beside him. “You did wonderfully.”
“How is that standing up to her! I gave her just what she wanted. Evidently I’m still so intent on pleasing her, I can’t help myself. I’ve gone from playing the marionette to playing the puppet; no strings needed.”
Young Robin took advantage of the silence between them to empty her mind, hoping to invite the right words to say to pop into her head. “Maybe the win here,” she said, as Drew reached the end of his latest hopscotch run, “is realizing your mother’s penchant for theater is something you share with her. Maybe it’ll be easier to empathize with where she’s coming from now. Maybe she went too far, maybe she was too heavy-handed, but understanding where she’s coming from is a big part of forgiving her, and forgiving her is a big part of letting go.”
“Your positive spin on things is making me dizzy, not happy,” he said.
“Now you’re angry at yourself for not recognizing the truth sooner, for hating her all these years instead of loving her, and for not rescuing her from the quicksand pits of time taking her down.”
Drew took a tumble on the polished floors when his feet didn’t find purchase with hi
s latest round of hopscotch. He sobbed, using his scabbed knees as excuse.
“This is good,” Robin urged. “It means you’re not intellectualizing to block the emotions. You’re feeling them. You’re integrating the child you couldn’t own before. That’s psychic fuel you can use to blast you out of the deepest blackest holes of your own nature.”
“Just stop!” Drew wept.
Young Robin realized she was defaulting to intellectualizing for fear of not being able to offer sufficient solace. She crouched down behind Drew, hugged him, and rocked with him, embracing her own inner child for the first time, as well.
***
Drew came out of the hypnosis to see Grande Dame Ernestina Chadwick feeding her animals, the glowing wire-framed frog, alligator, reindeer, all as frozen in time as ever, and laughed. Robin took that as a good sign their hypnotic regression into his past for the purpose of remaking it had gone well. As added confirmation, Drew set aside the bong, no longer in need of its services.
“I should have tried that a lot sooner,” Drew said. “You’re right, I feel much better, much stronger. Strong enough to face my family without folding like a cheap suit.”
“More to the point, you have a better coping mechanism the next time you’re on overload than the blackouts caused by the drugs.”
“My past doesn’t own me, anymore. I own it. Thanks, Robin.” The way Drew uttered those words sent a chill down Robin’s back. He sounded grimly determined to remake his entire past, one scene at a time.
“One caveat,” Robin said, cautiously, her words catered to the change in his thinking she was sensing. “You can’t force another life on yourself. That just adds insult to injury. Time is only a solvent in the presence of love. Only then can it wash away your sins. In the presence of force, or any other negative emotion, time is a fixative. You’ll just add more straws on the camel’s back until it breaks even sooner. You can’t go back in time playing samurai warrior, wielding your sword willy-nilly.”
Drew stood, shook out his legs. Reaching for his drink, he put it back down before bringing it to his lips. “Relax, Robin. I got this.”
His tone said it all. Robin’s fear remained that Drew would use the tools she’d given him to forge a far more powerful defensive fortification against life. Better than any psychotic, he might well build an imaginary world around him from which he would soon not be able to flee. He would, in short, act out her worst fears.
If Robin was prone to intellectualize her problems to absurd extremes, Drew was proving just as prone to psychosis as a form of theater therapy. With a light touch, their paths were bona fide gateways to heaven; with a heavy hand, gateways to hell.
SIXTY
Several days later and no Drew in sight, Robin decided to investigate in case her worst fears had come home to roost, that Drew’s “dream therapy” was turning out to be anything but. She was getting tired of Aart’s stalls, and the rest of the staff scurrying away from her every time she entered a room. That was usually a clear sign something was awry with Drew. They didn’t want to get in the middle.
Once again, she had to resort to the tracker to pinpoint his whereabouts.
As she stormed down the hall towards their bedroom, staff started materializing, suddenly keen on doing anything to forestall her arriving at that bedroom door. Evidently this was serious enough that it might derail her from her responsibilities as “light of the free world,” and the underground was having none of that. She had long suspected Toby wasn’t its only honorable household member.
Finished turning the bend from the adjoining hall and driving up to her, Toby said, “Might I offer you a ride in the roadster, mam? Really the only practical way to get around a house this size.”
“Nice try, Toby. But if you expect me to stay in the game, it’ll take more than this staff’s tireless efforts. Drew is a very big part of how I work my magic.”
“Of course, mam, just you’re coming along so well in your recovery; we’d hate to see you relapse now.”
Clearly, this was even more serious than she thought.
She picked up the pace.
Aart jumped in front of her next, holding out a bottle of champagne on a tray. “A bracer, mam. I strongly suggest one before stepping through that door.”
She steeled herself with a deep breath, and brushed him aside.
Robin opened the door on Drew to find him pacing the floor, stepping so as to put one foot in front of the other in order to stay within a narrow strip of floorboard. “Drew?” Nothing. She tugged at his arm. Nothing. He got to the end of the floorboard and turned back around like a gymnast on a beam.
She poured water over him from the bowl in the room meant for freshening up. Nothing. He’d left his body on autopilot while he was gone.
She flopped down at the edge of the bed and fretted.
Drew slipped in another sub-routine; he trudged to a dressing chair, set himself on it, and rocked back and forth. It was a possible indication that he’d switched dream-tracks in his mind, and the resultant wave of stress required a bodily adjustment.
It looked like nothing short of electroshock was going to roust Drew from his sleepwalking state.
So much for her efforts to help pull him out of this tailspin.
As it stood, she didn’t have the energy to fight him on this right now. The reality check would have to wait.
This time, when Aart entered with the champagne, she grabbed it, took a swig, and exited the room—bottle in hand.
***
A few hours later, Robin ran into Drew on the patio. Aart, supporting a bottle of champagne for him on a tray, explained that he was cheering the soccer match between different factions of Ermies’ roughneck rogues. The hooligans were split into the “winners,” or the ones boasting the greatest sales to the Harding staff, despite entrenched staff resistance, and the “losers,” comprised of those with the lowest sales figures. The losers, determined to shake their label, were giving no quarter.
“Glad to see you up and about,” Robin said. Drew showed no sign of acknowledging her presence. Every four years, when the Olympics rolled around, he became quite the sports fan. The rest of the time, he couldn’t be bothered. And soccer was never his thing. So this level of absorption struck Robin as extreme. Curious, she decided to step into his mind. She seemed to be in the zone these days for that type of thing. What’s more, it remained possible they had never fully disengaged from one another after their last dream journey together, both remaining in an auto-suggestive state relative to one another.
As soon as she was linked with Drew’s mind, she saw what he saw. And she realized the problem was a lot worse than she had imagined. “Christ, Drew, talk about power-dreaming.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Ermies’ sales-warriors had been transformed into fantasy-creatures as ugly and as brutish as had ever arisen from the underworld; big, hairy, with eyeteeth that descended like curved Arabian daggers. They tore at one another as if they had learned to walk upright only so they could tackle one another better, with limbs as thick as Robin’s waist that tapered into vicious talons. They sank their canines into one another, and used their powerful necks and jaws to send their opponents flying with a whipping motion.
If the experience wasn’t entirely immersive, it was because Drew’s unupgraded mind couldn’t process the wide field of view in real time. So what Robin saw instead were snatches. They came into focus out of the blur, as if cut in to an action sequence on film; close-ups, medium-shots, long-shots. The “film” moved in a staccato fashion through the gates of Drew’s mind, freeze-framing, or running for half a second before cutting away, as his mind struggled to keep the illusion of vivid recollection sustained despite overloading the processing speeds of his neuronal webs. Robin imagined this was what it was like for all unupgraded humans to dream, only the illusion of continuity was shattered now that his mind was too weary to hide the truth from both of them.
“You can’t sustain
waking consciousness anymore, can you?” Robin said. “You’ve run yourself down with your power dreaming. You’re so determined to bury your past under one big heap of new recollections that now you’re trapped in this netherworld.”
“One man’s prison is another man’s salvation.”
“Say one thing for you, you’re precocious. I appreciate you saving me the slow, sure descent into hell over the next few months.”
Lady Harding stepped out onto the patio, wearing a peacock-like parade outfit the size of a Mardi Gras float, the kind it would take a retinue of people to help her support. She bowed and waved to her adoring fans, interpreted the jeers on the athletic fields as roars of approval. “Silly, woman,” Drew said. “If she could only see herself as I do.”
As her footmen stepped out onto the patio to attend Lady Harding, they inflated, like giant air-filled balloons, and floated nearby. They descended on cue like the dirigibles they now were to serve her drinks and snacks.
Robin thought, This could be therapeutic, if he was trying to get some distance on himself and these silly people. If he could laugh at them, maybe they would get under his skin less. Even so, her gut told her there was just a little too much contempt etched into their portrayals for Drew to be doing himself or them much good.
She had tried goading Drew, with the aid of power-dreaming, to face his demons, fight his urges to flee, and instead find ways to befriend them. She had even suggested he lie to himself instead of telling himself the truth, reimagining his past the way he would like it to have gone, as a way of freeing himself from the hold the past had on him.
She just had one trick left up her sleeve and she was loath to play it. But this downward spiral couldn’t continue. Any further into full-blown psychosis and she’d be out of her league, and would have to hand him over to institutional authorities. It was one thing, moreover, when they had each other’s cooperation to go fishing around in one another’s minds to see what they could pull out, something else altogether when that visitor’s pass had been revoked. He was becoming increasingly inured to her meddling.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 171
