Robin sat on the barstool facing the kitchen, taking it all in. Johnny alternatively juggled steaks in dual non-stick frying pans, and liquor bottles in order to procure mixed drinks for them, playing sushi bar chef and ace bartender in one. Robin smirked at his usual overkill. If he could just stop trying to impress her for one second… She had chaperoned him in enough lifetimes and alternate timelines with Phoenicia now to be privy to the lingering patterned behavior even if he wasn’t.
“Uh-oh. I feel another insufferable revelation from Robin Wakefield coming on. It’s all in the eye rolling.”
She grinned. “I’ll contain myself as long as I can.” Johnny in this timeline knew nothing of her; she knew everything about him. That had made it easy to fall in as his girlfriend. She was glad now for the opportunity, for her sake as much as his.
He laid the food out buffet-style along a long table set low to the ground, basically a felled tree about a foot in diameter, sliced in half, and aimed flat-surface up. Around that, he spread out a slip and slide on the floor.
They used their swim suits and the soapy watery surface to slide themselves to whatever delicacies on the table struck their fancy, then nibbled with no more than their fingers, and took no more than one bite from any one spot on the table. The dinner theater wasn’t complete, of course, without him sliding to catch up with her and twist around her in an erotic ballet of teasing foreplay. He taunted her with the food items, and she playfully rebuffed him while somehow goading him on at the same time. She had to admit, the whole experience was a good bit of fun, not worth interrupting with one of her ponderous revelations.
Later, as the last of the candlelight flickered out, he carried her over to his bed in a nook under a skylight, which covered the entire expanse of the bed, where they stared up at the stars. “You learn to sleep on your back this way,” he said.
Robin allowed herself to go with the flow, and sank deeper into a shared enchantment.
“What were you going to say earlier?” he asked, piercing the silence.
She hesitated, not wanting to spoil his fun. “You don’t have to dial up every moment to drug-like intensity. It got you killed in another life, thinking you could insulate yourself from mundane life simply by maintaining the drug haze.”
He bolted upright and flicked on the light by the bed. The shadows cast by the lamp played up his grimace.
“You were exactly as you are now, dated a girl only too happy to succumb to your adrenaline-junkie lifestyle and your suave seductions. Until, one day, making love at an outdoor concert as you made your way along a nature trail, you ran into a man with a dog at the end of a chain. You were pissed he’d taken the animal beyond the dog-approved areas, and as a result had stepped in his doggie’s doo-doo. Not what you were looking for in the middle of your back-to-Eden nature-fuck. You lit into him, and he lit into you. His dog bit off your balls before your girlfriend could react. She blew the dog and the dog owner away with the pistol in her purse. And then, rather than face a life of watching you pee through a tube, never to enjoy your manhood again, she put a bullet in your head.”
Johnny ran to the bathroom and heaved over the toilet.
Robin sat up in bed and talked to him through the open door. “It all could have been avoided if you’d used your savoir faire less as a shield, if you’d addressed the underlying fears meant to keep life at bay, rather than allow you to interact more nimbly with it.”
“Enough. God, I swear, you are the most difficult chick I’ve ever dated. I’m the one that’s too much. You’re supposed to be the non-entity that justifies my excesses, too little to my too much. It’s just the universe finding a balance.”
“You need a different kind of biophysics where you’re going.”
“Who says I’m going anywhere? You know why you’re with me? I think you just like being scared.” He picked her up and wrapped her legs around him, and pushed too hard against the part of the skylight that arched down to the ground, threatening to send them and their lovemaking through the window pane and splatter them on the street below.
She telekinetically flung him against the wall and suspended him there. “Funny, if I didn’t miss my guess, I’d say you were the one who enjoyed being scared.”
Johnny panted as he tried to get his mind around the latest turn of events. He tracked his eyes around his periphery as if he might see the energy field holding him up, thus making it more real somehow.
“Johnny, I need you to come up for air for five minutes.”
“Why?”
“So you can be all that you can be.”
He laughed. “What does that mean? I’ll turn into James Bond or something?”
“If you like. I can get you wherever you want to go if you’ll just let me. If you’ll just let yourself.”
“What if I don’t want to go anywhere? What if I just want to remain: carefree Johnny; happy-go-lucky Johnny; whimsical, spontaneous Johnny? What then?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not much on feeling stuck.”
“What are you saying? You’re going to force me to be something I don’t want to be? How does that work exactly? Brainwashing? Intimidation? I’m sorry, you just don’t strike me as the type.”
“When it comes to saving you from yourself, Johnny, I’m whatever I need to be.”
“Nietzschian morality, my favorite. You’re beyond good and evil, are you? Or maybe you’re more Machiavellian; the ends justify the means, do they? Well, screw you.”
“I see we’ve moved past talk. Very well then.”
“Glad we finally agree on something,” he whispered, leaning into her, as she stepped up to him. He breathed on her, invaded her personal space, dared her to resist his sexual allure. It had become his favorite game since she took to refusing his advances. It was nearly as titillating as bouncing her off his dick in a long chain of hurried orgasms aimed at letting off steam, which was his style with Phoenicia—back in her timeline.
Again, she telekinetically hurled him away from the wall, where she had him pinned, out the glass pane, and dangled him over the city street below. “You don’t have to stop enjoying adrenaline rushes, Johnny. They might even get better once you let go of the underlying fears and can embrace the lifestyle for the sheer joy.”
Johnny fought to regulate his breathing and his sense of panic, stared down at the city with no visible support.
“Maybe Superman is more your thing.” She allowed him to enjoy the sensation of flying over the city.
When she recalled him to the loft, she kept him levitated off the ground. “If you learn to see life’s obstacles as challenges meant just for you, as clues to what you need to do to take it to the next level, instead of something to push away from…” She levitated off the ground, and joined him for a midair; a slow, seductive dance. “Take me, for instance, and the challenges I represent. Maybe I’m just one more thing to react defensively against with your usual ploys, or maybe I’m the speed bump that makes you realize you’re asleep at the wheel.”
“All right. Show me how I can acquire your abilities, if only so I can show you what to make of yourself besides an insufferable bore.” He smiled amorously to soften the dig, and leaned into kiss her.
“That’s the spirit, realizing we’re all the just-in-time solution to one another’s—”
“Don’t.”
She held her tongue and allowed him to kiss her on the lips, the forehead, the cheeks, and eyes, and finally a prolonged French kiss. She used her saliva to supercharge him, to give him a taste of what it was like to have her abilities to use how he wanted.
He soon realized he could maneuver through the air on his own. “Hey, this is me doing this.”
“Until the drug in my saliva wears off. Learn what you can to help you climb the mountain next time on your own.”
He shot out of the hole she’d earlier made in the window. Robin telekinetically mended the glass, then watched him disappear over the city.
***
Johnny enj
oyed the giddying sensation of flight. It was the same intoxicating natural high he was used to giving himself, without any of the numbing sensation. He simultaneously felt more presence and more distance on himself than ever before.
He asked his Higher Self to guide him to where he needed to go. Prior to Robin infusing her essence into him, he wouldn’t have known what his Higher Self was.
After landing on a fire escape overlooking an alley, he watched as a kid—fourteen, fifteen, maybe—deliberately turned off the well-lit street to cycle through the ominous alley with its shifting shadows and spooky sounds. He whistled, and threw his weight around on the bike to amp up its creaking sounds in order to further entice out of the shadows the potential attackers he hoped might be lurking there.
The kid got what he wanted. He had to brake to avoid steering headlong into the ring of toughs that materialized from out of nowhere, only too happy to catch a fish willingly swimming into the net.
They pulled him off the bike and beat him mercilessly, tossed him from gang member to gang member.
Johnny telekinetically drifted down to their level. The toughs, eying him floating to the ground, didn’t react as expected. They laughed.
“God, it’s one of those guys who want to play superhero. Buys himself a pair of leotards and some trick wires and figures we’re going to act all scared.” Chief Asshole made haunting Halloween sounds in a mock effort to sound scared.
And then he signaled the others to charge.
Johnny telekinetically sent them flying into the walls of the alley just hard enough to knock them out.
He approached Bike Boy and helped him up.
After surveying the surroundings for a safe place to powwow, and spotting none, he flew him up to the roof of one of the buildings overlooking the alley so they could talk without further interruption from the local gang elements.
Johnny materialized some mirrors around them, so Bike Boy could admire his bruises. “Badges of honor, huh? At least that’s what you tell yourself.”
“Who are you?” Bike Boy struggled, determined to squirm out of his grip.
“I’m you, kid, just a little older, that’s all, chasing adrenaline rushes that can match the rush of my dad beating me at home, and keeping me in fight-or-flight state every second of my life, until normal life just can’t compete, and I crave what I despise.”
Bike Boy escalated his efforts to get away from him, this time, not out of fear, just unwillingness to hear any more of the truth. Johnny let him go, raised his voice when the kid stopped a good distance out. “Go ahead, run from the truth, turn your life into a broken record, and the years melt into one another without any real purpose or direction, short of maintaining the high. Until one day you wake up and you realize you could have turned those negatives into positives, could use the thirst for the same highs to steer you in a direction you were meant to go, so you can change the world. It’s not the high you crave that’s the problem; it’s not making it count for anything.”
Bike Boy ran away. His expression before he took off suggested Johnny’s words had left their mark, for all the defiance that was etched in his face. Maybe it was a mark that would be erased soon enough with a return to his patterned behavior. Maybe, without constant reinforcement, his intervention would have all the impact of wind blowing against the alley walls hoping to shape them into something else.
***
Johnny withdrew into himself, balled up against the short riser wall to the alley, and sobbed. How many years, how many lifetimes, given over to aimlessness, purposelessness, seeking, like Bike Boy, only the drug-like state, never to use the intensity within him to move mountains?
He had had to become like Robin Wakefield to see himself as she did. Perhaps she, too, was playing a role in order to see herself better in Johnny. Maybe she couldn’t let herself have fun because she knew all too well what being lost to the moment, without care of tomorrow, with no view of consequences, could do to her. He cried for both of them.
He swam ever deeper into her pain, into the memories of the broken people, one after the other, she’d gone after—and he saw the pattern. The entire human race was trying to shake off their addiction to self-destructive behaviors indulged in over a lifetime but never examined—as part of that shift into Renaissance-era consciousness. It gave new meaning to “those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.” About the one positive thing—the fact that everyone seemed equally guilty—made it impossible to do any finger-pointing or brush off the matter as not really their problem. He suddenly appreciated Robin’s thankless job as The Bringer of Truth—awakening others from their sleepwalking who just wanted to fight her, insisting they were already awake.
And he appreciated even more her latest insight: don’t waste the rest of his life turning over every rock from the past. Borrowing from quantum theory, she realized intuitively that, the more he dwelled on his past, the more it shapeshifted into something else. It remained alive; was inexhaustible; and the habit of looking back to get to the root of things would become just another addiction.
The fact that, in the final analysis, we must all work from a certain degree of uncertainty, must choose to overcome patterned behavior without knowing all the causes, was meant to be freeing. The over-determination that compounded with ever-more probing into life’s secrets was there simply to tease the brain to grow smarter. Piaget was right with his developmental theory, just wrong that it stopped at adulthood.
It went on forever.
TWELVE
“This is soooooo frustrating!” Cliff threw his hands up. “Did we or did we not go to great pains so we couldn’t walk down any avenue in the world without being mobbed by police?”
“On the bright side, I’ve never seen Paris before. It’s quite lovely.” The broad avenues and how well laid out everything looked stole Piper’s breath away.
Cliff made a beeline for the police car ahead of them.
He grabbed a fellow tourist and held up his video camera for him at the police car. “Now, hold it steady right there.” He then stepped into the camera frame and knocked at the policeman’s window.
When the cop rolled down the glass, he shot the policeman at the wheel, and his partner on the other side, dead.
“Yes! Yes!” the teen with the camera shouted.
“Oh my God! That was so incredible!” his girlfriend exclaimed. Shock, delight, horror, and fear fought each other frantically for center stage of her mind—communicated in flashing pulses of color rushing to her cheeks; uneven breathing; and staccato, jerky movements.
Piper could tell the couple was already uploading to You Tube from the fevered finger-pressing on the cell’s virtual keypad. “It’s nice we can still make little kids happy,” he said. He grabbed Cliff’s arm. “Now come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Like hell. They’re going to make me beg for attention like this, the least they can let me do is shoot my way through an entire wall of cops.”
Piper sighed, then leaned against the car alongside him. “It’s like you said, they’re just too busy chasing down all the crazies. Did it ever occur to you that, despite our best efforts, we just don’t rate?”
“Bite your tongue before I cut it off.”
“I’m just saying it’s vaguely possible there are monsters out there that make us look tame.”
“Not possible. Trust me. I’m a connoisseur of these things.”
Piper hoped they were being sarcastic and self-deprecating to get some distance; to remind themselves they were still the good guys, and all this “acting out” was really for a higher purpose—to graduate their minds up to where they could be polished enough to chase after the world’s worst predators. But increasingly it felt more like poor impulse control. Lack of any ability to subordinate their fears and emotions to higher reason was a better formula for mediocrity and birth into the minor leagues of petty criminals as opposed to the big leagues.
Cliff breathed against the backseat window, the
n drew two hanged men with his fingers against the foggy backdrop.
Piper smacked his hands together and then breathed into them to warm them. When that didn’t work, he lit up a cigarette, took a puff, and offered it to Cliff. It was damn cold in Paris for the middle of the day. He figured the cigarette would help warm both of them up. Cliff took a drag, but more to calm his nerves. He gave no indication of feeling the cold.
“You have to admit, we’re acting a little crazy,” Piper said, taking the cigarette back from him. They shared the same cigarettes, drank out of the same coffee cups. They shared everything, and Piper loved it that way.
“Don’t you start with your psychobabble.”
“I can’t help thinking of what Robin Wakefield said. All evil in the world proceeds from fear and unexamined emotions. So what is it we fear?”
Cliff scrunched up his face in what appeared to be an earnest effort to ponder the point. “Anonymity.”
“And what unexamined emotions do you have around it?”
“Rage.” Cliff took the cigarette back from him, sucked on it, and exhaled what looked to be dragon’s breath between the steam from the cold coming out his lungs and the smoke.
“So, all we have to do is deal with that, and we’re golden.”
“I just did.” Cliff gestured to the two dead cops in the car. “I’m in touch with my emotions. I know how to act therapeutically.” He glanced up at the two teens still filming. “What the hell? Go on, get out of here.” The two kids ran off. “Great, they’re going to think we’re a couple of fags because you had to pick now to get all in touch with your feelings.”
“What’s with all the homophobia, speaking of unprocessed feelings?” Piper grabbed the cigarette back from him, noticed the sparkling caramel color on the butt end. “What kind of lipstick is that?”
“It’s chapstick, you dick.”
“Yeah, the kind with glossy flakes in it.” Piper checked Cliff’s lips. “Looks great on you. I’m sure it’s some manly effort to catch the sunlight in order to make yourself an easier target.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 184
