In the meantime, he had to keep the self-professed guardians of tomorrow from leading them down a path that only purported to offer a better future that in reality was anything but.
That was the change in him that Veronica was looking for. The Adrian that could weather the storm of world-enders lashing out in pain, determined to make all those post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels a self-fulfilling prophecy. With their very own doomsday tech. They just didn’t get it. How could they? They were trying to see the world of the future with yesterday’s eyes. With minds far too small to take it in. Adrian had been no different.
His mistake was not in wallowing in a growing state of detachment from life. It was in not being detached enough, from his suffering, from theirs. Those Zen monks. Damn them if they didn’t figure out a few things ahead of the rest of them. Just Let Go.
As Adrian let the fever overtake him, the passion, the gentle rocking motion across the tidal surges of her breasts and thighs and the rest of her curves, he continued to let go of all the dead weight of all the yesterdays, the dreams unanswered, the frustrated yearnings, and the pain he carried for all those who could not carry it for themselves.
He let the fever take him into oblivion.
He knew instinctively there was no place else to go if he was ever to be reborn on the other side of it.
***
The next morning Veronica awoke to see him fastening his gun and pocketing his badge.
“Where you headed?” she asked.
“To Klepsky. There’s something I have to tell him. Something he’s not going to want to hear. Something that will likely trigger his own crisis around the subject of letting go.”
FORTY
Still sipping his coffee, Adrian joined Klepsky at the kitchen counter of his home, sat on the stool next to him. Klepsky had an 8” x 10” iPad in his hand. He was using it to surveil his apartment.
With a touch, he brought up a live camera feed of Biyu taking a piss in his upstairs bathroom—through her sterling silver chastity belt. Adrian chuckled. “Seriously, Klepsky? A man your age with those kinds of insecurities?”
“It’s the only way I can keep my twenty-one-year-old son from humping mommy ten times a day.”
Adrian sipped his unsweetened black coffee and gasped to clear the heat from his throat as much as from the revelation. “Certainly gives new meaning to that term ‘mummy porn’.”
“Ah, what did I expect? He’s a twenty-one-year-old, for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re either the most understanding surrogate father on earth or…”
“I look at it as on par with adopting traumatized greyhounds that have been bred for track racing. You have to spend the first few months just getting them to crawl out from under the sofa.” Klepsky tapped the screen again and brought up a picture of David, masturbating under the sheets in his bedroom.
“I guess fantasies of bopping mommy die hard,” Klepsky said bitterly.
“Maybe if mommy didn’t look closer to his age than yours.”
“She’s thirty-five!”
“And she doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.”
“I can’t help if Asians age slower than us. They have better skin for that sort of thing.”
“I could accuse you of sounding racist, but you’re a Neanderthal, which as labels go, I believe covers all that already.” Adrian set his mug down on the tile counter. Klepsky clicked over to a shot of Ed on his iPad.
Ed was shadow boxing with the boxing gloves on in front of a full-length mirror in his bedroom. Nothing else adorned his body except his boxing shorts, which were tent-poled by his hard-on.
Adrian furrowed his brow. “You’ve been sparring with him to give him some pointers on boxing? Or to have a willing punching bag for all your anger?”
“Both. Neither. I mean, not exactly. He’s been blackmailing me to beat him into a semi-unconscious state so he can pretend to be powerless to protect himself from my sodomizing him. If I don’t deliver he’ll deny me access to his genius.”
“Huh.” Adrian took another sip of his coffee. “That’s a relief. Staring at the mirror like that, I thought for a second he might be a narcissist. They’re the worst.”
“Tell me about it. Zero chance of recovery with that personality profile. But Ed… I don’t know. I might be able to find him a more age-appropriate boyfriend in time.”
“Until then? You plan on physically and sexually molesting your surrogate son?”
“When you put it like that, my behavior mod program sounds a lot less therapeutic for all parties than it is in practice.”
Klepsky sighed. “Go ahead, you can say it. I’m every bit the sick fuck they are and this family dynamic has zero chance.”
Adrian smiled ruefully. He could tell Klepsky needed him to throw him a bone. “You’re all adults. I guess you can play it any way you want. Maybe you have to play it a bunch of different ways until you exorcise all those demons to get it right.
“That’s the problem with a messed up world; there’s a lot of roleplay to do to make up for all the other people that should have been in your lives at the right time for the right reasons but just weren’t. Missing lovers, brothers, sisters, moms, best friends, worst enemies, predators, prey… hell, it’s easy to fantasize about being victimized and victimizing… anything’s better than being ignored and forgotten. Or having the tenderest parts of you just go unnoticed. And so, now you have to act it all out in your daily dramas… make up for lost time.
“So long as it’s theater therapy, I wouldn’t blame yourselves; I’d blame this sick world for not giving you more. When there aren’t doctors enough, I guess it’s Shakespeare to the rescue. If all the world’s meant to be a stage, then... And that’s what you’re doing. Playing a whole host of characters for one another to heal each other in so many ways. Sounds like the best kind of family to me.”
Adrian freshened his coffee with the pot on the counter. “And maybe you’re not just healing yourselves. You stop to think about that? Maybe you’re healing the whole world. You might just start a chain reaction. Maybe all those dysfunctional families out there, and who isn’t part of one, honestly, maybe you can teach them all how to get some distance on themselves no matter how hard it is, how impossible, if your behavior mod program takes, that is. Don’t do it for you, Klepsky, do it for them.”
Klepsky grunted half-heartedly. It was half a chuckle if not a whole one. A condition much improved over his earlier state. Of course, that was before the roller coaster hit the next crest and down he went again with his mood. His face fell faster than his words did.
Adrian sipped more coffee as a bracer.
“Jesus, Adrian, what if Ed and David were sexually abused as kids, so they expect that to get love they have to make their bodies available, either as victim, in Ed’s case, or as perp, in David’s case? Suddenly our off-color family is a little more than merely risqué; it’s grotesque.”
Adrian’s smile communicated empathy, distance, and condescension at the same time. “It’s the kids playing to your emotional neediness, Klepsky, yours and Biyu’s, not the other way around. You need someone to bully and dominate. I’m sure some of the reasons that’s so, you’ve guessed. I imagine others will surface and become clearer to you during your theater therapy. Only when all those reasons are known to you, will you truly be able to let go of a craving desire to satisfy that itch. As to Biyu, who knows how her life story led her to wanting to be bopped by a surrogate son? But she too will be a lot more likely to exorcise her demons in David’s arms and with the help of the ‘family therapy’. Unless you’re of a mind to get a Catholic priest to perform the exorcisms.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
They held each other in silence while Klepsky did his gut check to make sure Adrian was right. He flicked the edges of his mouth down at the end of it in a mock frown to indicate that Adrian’s thinking had passed the truth test. “Yeah, I guess they just want to be close to us and don’t care what it takes. This w
hole time I allowed myself the luxury of thinking the problem was with the kids, not the parents. They’ve become our sex therapists.”
Adrian smiled again, more ruefully this time. “That’s usually how it is with kids with out-of-it parents. The kids end up doing most of the parenting. That’s another safety net for you. They’ll get tired of parenting you eventually and leave you if you refuse to take this as anything but a growth opportunity. They may want love desperately, but not so much that they’re trapped in the same rigid patterns that they fled long ago swearing never to go back.”
Klepsky was nodding the whole time; this time he didn’t need to stew in silence to fit the rest of the pieces back into place. “You think they’ll cue us to move things along with our healing?”
“Most definitely. They’ll keep peeling the scabs off the old wounds until you have no choice but to heal or bleed out.” He smiled one of his condescending smiles. “You and I, we were something in our time. But they’re the next generation on line. Never forget that. If we knew all they were truly capable of, they’d embarrass us into early retirement.”
“Maybe that’s how we pay back the debt, huh, if they can manage to heal us, I mean? Help them grow into their full potential rather than risk showing us up too much.”
“Maybe you don’t have to wait until their healing of you takes. Maybe you can find ways to help them be more fully who they are now.”
“We’ll be sure to do that, I promise.”
“Hey, I’m not your Catholic priest you’re confessing to, Klepsky. It’s enough that you made that resolution in your heart.” Adrian rose from his stool. “Oh, and schedule some therapy sessions for all of you, individually and collectively. Maybe your bizarre family dynamic has all it needs to right itself eventually, but in case it doesn’t… wouldn’t hurt to get an outside opinion.”
Klepsky nodded. “More sage advice.”
“Until then, better you’re pressing one another’s buttons with those dark urges than the buttons of psychos out on the street, whose responses may be nothing less than lethal. Your love for one another will keep you safe.”
Klepsky just harrumphed in the affirmative this time, as if to convey, “Enough said.”
He cut to the camera shot of them at the kitchen counter. Glancing at his PDA, the other shoe finally dropped for Adrian. “Your family dynamic only comes together if you edit it together on your iPad?”
Klepsky sighed. “’Fraid so.”
“And now you’re watching the film on endless loop because you’re afraid of what’ll happen if you tell them what I told you about the future we’re stuck with, at least for now.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me.”
“I considered it. But it didn’t seem fair to predicate our relationship on a lie. And now you have the same concerns about your loved ones flying the coop as soon as they find out, jumping into that future ahead of you. Then you’re back to empty nest syndrome again.”
“I think you’ve gotten inside my head enough for one day, Adrian.”
Adrian gazed at the man who had been made hard as stone partly by genetics, partly by growing up in foster homes without a family of his own. He wasn’t surprised that Klepsky ascribed some mystical, alchemical magic to family dynamics for changing people. He had never had a choice but to become an even harder version of what he was just to survive, forever insulated from the change that loving relationships alone brought. Maybe he’d unconsciously sought out people every bit as damaged as him in Ed, David, and Biyu, or he’d never have been able to outlive the shame of being the black sheep in the ad hoc family. A revelation buffeted by his prior two failed marriages. He was tired leaving people more damaged than when he found them. Hell, they, Ed, Biyu, David, and Klepsky, could probably smell the trauma on one another. Adrian sighed, thinking of what Klepsky had just said. “Yeah, I guess I have.” Adrian finished the last of his coffee. He threw on his trench coat and his fedora.
Klepsky gave him a look in the made-over get up. “How can we exist in the same vintage noir movie and yet you take to the future so much better than me?”
“I have a greater appreciation of the surreal than you do.”
Klepsky grunted. “That you do,” he said, but then he gestured to his iPad, but that’s changing, huh?”
He stared at his new family pondering his lament: to tell or not to tell?
Adrian patted him on the shoulder.
***
Adrian exited to a chill air blowing in from the street. By the time he closed the door behind him the downstairs of Klepsky’s home felt a hundred degrees colder. Of course, part of the temperature drop might be because he’d finally come to a decision. And his body was already shutting down anticipating the worst.
“All right, people, get down here,” Klepsky announced on the house PA system, with a touch of his iPad. “And when you do, make sure you’re family-appropriate.” He hoped the kids would take that to mean, “Cover your hard-ons!”
The family filed downstairs one after the other and took up stools on the other side of the counter. From their expressions, they weren’t too keen on whatever other edicts he had to hand out, being as they had yet to recover from the last ones.
“It’s time I came clean,” Klepsky said. “I’ve been holding out on you. But you deserve the truth. There’s a future out there we don’t have to wait for. It’s happening now. But it’s only accessible to the top one percent. And, no, I’m not talking about the Machiavellian bastards who managed to vacuum up all the wealth of the ninety-nine percent of humanity into their grubby little hands. I mean the one percent of the smartest people on Earth. And last I checked, that includes you three. If you elect to join them you’ll be working with cutting edge science that I can’t give you access to now. And you’ll likely be relocating to Mars.”
“Mars?” Ed said.
“Mars?” David said.
“Mars?” Biyu said.
They glanced at one another and screamed in excitement.
“Oh my God!” Ed blurted.
“Where are my suitcases?” Biyu said in Mandarin, forgetting to speak in English. Ed seemed to understand her anyway, pointing to the nearest closet. She had already sprinted halfway there before Klepsky could get out an eye roll.
“Man, can you imagine how much cooler living in a sub-earth-gravity well will be?” David said to Ed.
“Please, it’ll extend our sexual prime by at least a decade.”
“We’ll all look like Michael Jackson without the facelifts and the skin bleaching, considering how much further Mars is from the sun.” David was talking every bit as excitedly as Ed for once.
Biyu was sprinting up the stairs screaming in Mandarin.
Ed chuckled, and then translated for David. “She’s screaming ‘Bingo!’ Over and over again. I think she means, ‘I won the lotto!’ which, of course, she did.”
“Hey, don’t laugh. She’ll probably assimilate to Mars faster than we will, being as she had to absorb one more culture than we did already,” David said.
Then the two kids looked at each other and shook their heads and said, “Nah!” in tandem, before bolting up the stairs.
“Don’t touch my GI Joe on Mars Dolls,” Ed shouted after David who was running a couple steps ahead of him. “Now that I can finally display them in their proper context.”
“Keep your hands off my good-for-any-planet condoms!” David shouted back.
Ed froze from taking two steps at a time in mid-stride. “They make those?”
“They’re special order. You have to belong to MSA, Mad Scientists of America.”
Ed resumed his stride, mumbling, “How can I not be a member of that?”
With everyone lost to preparations for disembarking the planet upstairs Klepsky was left to sulk. He finally broke down crying. Just quiet sobs. Nothing too unmanly. He wasn’t sure how long it took to get to that state. He’d lost track of time.
What seemed like an eternity later, the family strolled
downstairs and hugged him. “Did you really think we’d break up our happy little family?” Ed said.
“Ah, we got him good!” David high-fived Ed.
“Sweetheart,” Biyu said, kissing him on the forehead, “there are some things worth protecting even more than the future.”
FORTY-ONE
Back in his home again, Adrian regarded the scene unfolding outside his window with partial attentiveness. They were arresting his teen neighbor for jerking off to snuffer films. One of the feds was carrying a plastic baggy full of them. Probably because they wanted to get to the guy making the movies, or perhaps they had already trailed the teen to him and were arresting him at the same time. It really wasn’t his jurisdiction, but he frowned thinking of how many unrelated crimes were solved just by virtue of the FBI monitoring Adrian’s every move twenty-four-seven. What did it say about the world that his morning constitutionals turned up more criminals than his actual investigations?
Adrian panned to the TV newsfeed which showed several serial killers being arrested. Why? Because the curator of the golem exhibit at the Met had given Klepsky a list of names on his phone of people asking him very odd questions. Klepsky, ever thorough, after his junior futurists assured him there was no one pertaining to the FBI-FD among the names, had handed the list over to the proper branches of the FBI who could be bothered with this kind of thing. Run of the mill serial killers too were outside the FBI-FD’s jurisdiction. All the same, they went to Adrian’s earlier talking point, which, he decided, he’d keep to himself for now. They were too busy celebrating Tum’s capture at the FBI-FD, and the fact that his forced hibernation might have saved planet Earth all sorts of calamities squaring off against one genuinely pissed off uber-mind that had felt all too betrayed by humanity from step one.
Tum hadn’t left the world entirely unchanged, though. The insight that Adrian and Celine had shared back at the barn with the spiders, that the stronger digestive juices of ravens and spiders might have something to do with the creatures’ boosted longevity relative to the human golems… Well, she’d looked into that as promised. The result was a formulation that was currently aiding elderly people lying in hospitals for prolonged stays. Without it they would have long succumbed to the hospitals’ many super-bugs, which remained the primary threat against immune compromised patients. The breakthrough was being touted on the 6:30 PM news as well, in the final minutes of the NBC broadcast as part of their commitment to end on a positive note after dragging people’s minds through all the horrors of the world. The shock therapy of the first twenty-five minutes of the broadcast, much like shock therapy was used in hospitals to this day, was likely being applied for the same reasons, to help people forget all the evils that had been done to them all the other days of their lives.
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 35
