by Neovictorian
~
James’ funeral back in Santa Maria is something of a cluster. The police keep the media a full hundred yards away from the perimeter of the small cemetery, but just seeing them circling round out there, like vultures, pisses me off. James’ Dad and Mom haven’t talked to each other for years and they’re awkward as hell. James hadn’t talked to his Mom since shortly after his “gap” year, when he tried to get her off the Abilify-Lamictal-Topamax-Ritalin-Ambien cocktail she was on, using the ReHume “Feedback Protocol” and she threw an iron at his head. In the car he had laughed about it and told me the Protocol had a 90 percent success rate, “But y’know, Cal, she’s always been in the other 10 percent of everything.”
She makes a show of doing the grieving mother collapsing to her knees sobbing uncontrollably thing when they lower the coffin. She’s wearing big dark glasses and I can’t make out any tears.
James’s Dad is drunk, but not too drunk to stand up, so that works out.
The Church of ReHumanism sends two reps down from Mendocino, a man and a woman in their late 20s or early 30s, both dressed in immaculate black funeral suits and $200 shades and both fit looking and attractive as hell. The stand like statues during the whole graveside service, but back at the reception they work the room like pros, chatting with James’ college friends, offering “methods” to “move through the grief patterns and into clear space.”
The woman approaches me at the bar, nursing my second Scotch.
“Hi, I’m Janet Seymour. And you’re Cal Adler.”
“Yep. But no extra credit for that, Janet. I imagine that you and Mr. Olympia there were well briefed before you showed up today,” I say.
“Your picture has been in the Bay Area papers and on the national news several times in the last four days,” she says evenly. She’s very pretty, in a blandish airbrushed perfect makeup way, too perfect except for a large mouth that shows one of her molars has been replaced with gold. It makes her at least interesting.
“Sure. I’ll give you this, you and your friend certainly have skills. How many of the twenty-somethings here have you got lined up for the ReHume Intake Party next Saturday night?”
“Three or four,” she says calmly. Her eyes are cold blue and they don’t blink. She wants me to know it’s going to take more than that to disturb her practiced equilibrium.
“How about you?” she asks. “Will you still be in town?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I answer brightly. “I’m going on a trip. But maybe you can clear up something for me, right now. Kind of our own little RIP.”
“You sound quite knowledgeable Cal. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have, right now.”
She sits down next to me and the bartender comes over.
“Wild Turkey 101, neat,” she tells him.
When he’s out of earshot she scans over her shoulder. Her partner isn’t in sight. Probably working the patio. She leans in until her lips are an inch from my right ear.
“I need to talk to you somewhere else later, somewhere private.” I slowly turn my head but she doesn’t move away. Her breath is peppermint and blueberry.
“What about, Janet?” She smiles with her eyes only and leans back in her chair.
“About what James may have told you. About the future, about what we can do for you,” she says softly.
“And by ‘we’ you mean ReHume? Or do you mean you and ReHume as a team, so to speak?”
Amusement slowly spreads across her face, but she sees the bartender coming and doesn’t say anything right away. He sets her glass in front of her.
“Thank you,” she says. Somehow, she already had a twenty in her hand, and she holds it out to him.
“Working funerals can be a bummer,” she says. When he’s out of earshot she turns back to me.
“Let’s say it’s me and ReHume, ‘as a team.’ Are you still interested?”
“I’m very interested in why you all are interested in what James may have told me. I’m fairly interested in you and ReHume ‘as a team.’ Is it a religion, a cult, or just a business?”
I pick my half-gone glass of Scotch, drain it, set it down on the bar, softly, and stand up.
“I’m at the Holiday Inn just down the road. I’m checking out tomorrow morning and leaving on a long trip. If you want to talk more, be there at eight tonight. Room 360.”
She picks up her glass, takes a sip, licks a drop of whisky off her upper lip.
“All right. But I’ve got to leave by ten or so.”
“That should be just enough time,” I say. “By the way, Chad’s back and he’s looking over here.” I turn toward the door and start walking.
“His name’s not Ch…” she starts to say but I’m already gone.
~
I come awake, fully this time. There’s a faint light filtering through the tent and the softest of sounds from the desert outside, a puff of wind and the whisper of something stirring the sandy soil, an animal; I’m probably just imagining that but I need to see so I slowly sit up, shedding the thin blanket I’ve used for a cover. It was too hot to stay in the sleeping bag when I went to bed, but now it’s cool, delicious, I can taste the desert plants in the air.
There’s another sound, the scratch of claw on rock, and I ease the flap of the tent open an inch, I don’t know what might be making the sound but I want to know, must know.
When I put my eye to the tiny opening there’s a coyote sitting on the rocks less than 15 feet away, facing me. I don’t know why I’m not surprised, startled, but it looks like it belongs here, there’s nothing wrong, nothing out of place and my heart doesn’t speed up even one beat per minute. Its fur is darker than I think it ought to be, and it’s not because there’s just the faint pre-dawn light reflecting out of its eyes, the eyes like golden balls, looking at me, knowing I’m looking at it. It doesn’t move and neither do I, I don’t even know if I’m breathing, then it slowly turns its head until it’s looking at me with just its left eye, stands and walks to my left and in a few steps it’s out of sight, those faintest of sounds all that’s left of it, and in a few seconds they fade to nothing and I’m still looking out the slit in the tent entrance, a few scrubby plants and dirt and rocks, Cima Dome scenery. The Mojave is hundreds of miles from where Phil Duke walked out into the desert for 67 days, but I wonder how far a coyote can travel in its lifetime?
I ease myself back down on my sleeping bag, and realize I’m still hard from the half-waking dream I was having when I heard the sound of the coyote, dreaming of the two hours I spent four days ago with Janet Seymour.
21. 8 years ago, Santa Maria, California April 27, 7:57 pm
There’s a double knock on the hotel room door, solid and confident. Rap-RAP. I had a strong suspicion ReHume Janet would be a few minutes early, and I’m ready for her.
I take a glance through the old-school peephole in the door and she’s stepped back a bit and is looking up instead of staring me in the eye, which I appreciate.
I open up and she has a look of mild amusement on, it looks like her natural state the way her face is settled in, no strain and no effort to turn up the corners of her mouth just that bit. She’s out of the funeral uniform and is wearing workout clothes, black soft pants like a second skin that end in the middle of her calves and a dark red long-sleeved top of the same material. The clothes make clear she’s fit and strong but there’s a hint of softness around her hips and belly that show she’s not a diet fanatic.
“How did I know you’d be three minutes early?” I ask.
“Because I’m a ReHumanist and we’re fanatical about punctuality, right? Is that something James told you?”
“Step in and we’ll talk about James.”
Instead of sitting down right away she walks around, scans the bland hotel room with an interested eye, stopping at the framed print on the wall above the bed.
“Did you wonder why they put this one over the beds and that one over the desk?
“The one over the bed i
s supposed to be calming, the one over the desk is supposed to be inspiring, or something like that,” I say. “Next you’re going to talk about the massive infrastructure and great scientific research that went into crafting these images precisely as they are now, to do what they’re designed to do, calming and inspiring.”
She smiles and nods. “Maybe, maybe…” The disagreement between her words and body language would be a tell on most people but I’m almost certain it’s by design. What were the exact words James had quoted: “A rigorous education program focused mainly mental techniques, memory methods, body language reading and eye movement analysis, reaction time… and maintenance of mental acuity in difficult conditions.”
She looks younger now than at the funeral, wearing a lot less makeup and her light brown hair loose. The small imperfections show around the eyes, freckles and a mole on her forehead make her look more a woman than the crafted made-up way she’d looked staring at space out over the casket. Instead of 30-32 I move her to maybe 28.
“Janet, if the psychology of design is so advanced, those millions spent on research and testing, so that a cheap hotel print can be the product of all that thought and effort…why? Why in the hell are most people so fucked up, in one way or another? Why can’t the genius social scientists subtly reprogram the population to some universal, decent level of happiness?”
She looks toward her left ear then back at me, and for an instant I wonder if she’s got some kind of advanced receiver, but she’s just accessing an auditory memory.
“Because social science is just a branch of the Order, and its purpose is to keep the mass fat, dumb and happy, so the Order can continue to be the Order.”
“The Big Order or the Real Order?”
She nods. “So James told you about the Two Orders. I’m not surprised. It’s not something secret—it’s in Heights. Of course, not in much detail.”
She looks me up and down, something like a prize animal. “You have a very good skeleton. Cal. It’s something Duke liked to say. He wrote that a doctor in the Lensman gives a little speech about how great a skeleton the hero and heroine have got. You can’t change the skeleton very much, no matter the fat that may cover it or the skin be tanned, sanded, nipped, tucked. Mostly it’s genetic.”
“It’s our ancestors expressing themselves in us, all their care and striving raising their children and their children surviving showing in our fitness. Except that in some ways the world we’re fitted for hardly exists right now.”
This time I do get a hint of reaction, her upper lip twitches and then she decides to smile to cover, and also because she’s delighted she can be surprised.
“I can see you know that hit home,” she says. “That’s hardly a secret, either. Or something that hadn’t been said many times. But you just quoted it straight from Duke’s “Noticing,” the essay that’s never been published.”
“Sure it hasn’t,” I say with a touch of sarcasm. “It’s bootlegged on the web. The church chases the copyright violations, and gets it taken down regularly. In the meantime, millions of people have read it. But they say Duke charged two grand a copy, with a non-disclosure agreement, knowing the forbidden fruit would be irresistible. Knowing it would get out and a select group of curious people would read it because they were told not to.”
“Very good. So James told you that too?”
“No. I looked it up a couple of days ago. He didn’t even mention “Noticing” as a piece of work. He just talked about Noticing. The skill, I guess you call it.”
“Yeah,” she breathes out. “Okay. Well, I was upfront with you about wanting to know what he said to you. And you seem willing—so what else? What else stood out, what else did you Notice?”
“That’s all I can talk about,” I tell her, with a hint of amusement. “The rest was just personal stuff, catching up. What you really want to know, I’m certain, is whether he asked me to join, become a member, start training?
“And the answer is, ‘no.’ I think he wanted to discuss it out in the meadows, camping, and ask me in a day or so. I’m sure he had a lot more to say. Then a dirty Muslim bastard put a bullet in his head.”
I don’t say it with force, and she doesn’t say anything at all, but I can feel us both thinking the same thing: If I could go back in time and take out al-Rachman, and save James, I’d do it in a second, even were I to die completing the mission. But we’re also both at a kind of peace, that that can never happen, and that the only thing is to live, to see what’s next.
“There’s something you deserve to know,” she says and hesitates; for all her training and hard shell she doesn’t feel comfortable just spitting it out.
“James told me quite a bit about you, Cal, in some detail. He thought you were a great man, destined for something that made a big impact. He took his time telling you about ReHume because he said the right time would come. And so it did”
She smiles, an easy, real smile that shows on her whole face.
“So I want to tell you more. I think, ReHume thinks, that you could have an even bigger impact with us. So I’ll tell you anything you want to know, answer any questions.”
“Alright,” I say. “First question: Were you fucking James?”
Her smiles gets brighter, if anything, until her face glows. “Yes,” she says simply.
“But it was more than that Cal, so much more. James and I were trying to get pregnant.”
“Wha—“ I stutter for an instant, surprised. Though why should I be really? A look at her and it makes the kind of sense that’s hard coded into the Universe.
“Has it worked?” I ask.
“No,” she says without sadness. “We’d been trying for two months. This was going to be the third.” She looks me in the eye. I stare her down. It’s a strange, electric moment, and in flash I see that whatever happens now, it’s one of those frames that you remember forever, until that last flash of your life and you try to see one last frame. And maybe this is the one.
“So you mean this week.”
“I mean today,” she says.
I feel almost drunk, a kind of drunk, though I haven’t had anything but water since the wake. Her face is softer now, there’s more white showing around her eyes, she’s placed her fists at the top of her hips and her generous breasts thrust out, the nipples denting the thin tight workout shirt. I look at her belly, the slight roundness of her and I’m getting hard, I imagine her belly bigger, rounder, a son or a daughter, and I make my choice, we’re in a magnetic field, I’m drawn to her and my feet make the two steps between us, she smiles a little, secret smile, and she raises her face to be kissed but I stop short, wink at her and step around her, she doesn’t move, doesn’t turn to look at me and I gather her hands in mine and bring them around behind, cinch them together with the circle of my thumb and forefinger. I slide my left hand over her hip and around to her belly, feeling the indent of her navel and I run my fingertips around it and then up and down, again and again and again and she makes a soft sound, like “aww” but it’s not any kind of word, and I work the fingertips over her right nipple, rubbery-firm, and pinch it, just hard enough to hold it at first, then I twist and squeeze harder and she’s panting and making a sound like a trapped animal, a low-pitched keening that I can feel through her back, vibrating my chest. I let go the nipple, move my fingertips toward the other.
“I’m not going to make this easy on you Janet, because I know what we both want,” I whisper, lips touching her ear.
“Oh God, please don’t,” she breathes, and I don’t.
22. 8 years ago, Cima Dome, Mojave Desert, California May 1, 5:57 am
“Making love” is a euphemism, “sex” is a cruelly deficient monosyllable, “fucking” is useful and descriptive but ultimately inadequate.
~
For two hours I possess Janet Seymour in the original meaning of the word, I trap and hold and tame her, occupy her, play her like an instrument. I eat of her and drink of her and make her and unmake her and m
ake her again, make her beg and cry and scream in agony and ecstasy but in the end she does something to me that is greater. She consumes me.
Intent is everything, Anna had shown me the joy in it, Karina had shown me the substance, the power, a very few others had shared their secrets with me, shown me a glimpse of the brightest and darkest in their soul, but always before it had been for me and for her, now there is a spark like no other, a third person who is nothing yet, not even potential yet, until that moment comes, looking into her eyes and it is pleasure sure, a pleasure like I’ve never known in its intensity, but it’s more than pleasure, the Alchemical Marriage where we become the one flesh, my Life pours into her and keeps coming, it doesn’t want to stop until every last possible drop is inside her and she consumes it all, easily, as she was born to do.
Afterward I lay on top of her for minutes, almost unconscious but conscious enough to rest some of the weight on my elbows and we say no words, my ear is between her breasts and I listen to her heartbeat slow, a little more each minute, until it’s normal and finally I become soft enough to naturally slip out of her and we lay side by side, my hand on her belly and hers on my chest, until we become our separate selves again.
I tell her that I’m going out of town, into “the country” for a while, I don’t really know how long but of course we’ll need to talk in a couple of months, about a lot of things. I’ll be thinking about what I’m going to do with ReHume, or not, what I’m going to do next, I don’t know if I’m going back to the NASA research job or do something different.
“If you get pregnant I’ll be back by August and start setting things up for us. I’ve got plenty of money and a little house in Santa Clara. We’ll figure out the arrangements then.”
We’re showered and cleansed and relaxed, rubbery both of us, sitting on the other bed we didn’t use, thighs touching, drinking ice water.