She pressed “interactive mode” on the remote to bring up more menus on the 24/7 TechNews channel. The streaming ticker tapes to each side of the screen said it all, even in the absence of audio.
“When are those fools going to realize we’re the ones funding that station?” Stan spoke so his lips barely moved, like a ventriloquist. “And the whole point is to get them to pre-ejaculate. Worth all the men in black put together.”
“What they need is a faerie godmother.”
“Well, it takes a whole lot of time to procure one of those. Even the Buddha had to undergo rigorous training over many years.”
“Go back to playing dead, lover. You’re cramping my style.” Lorena flicked off the TV. Tossed the remote. And resumed the ride of a lifetime.
***
“What’s going on in Berkeley?” Mort gazed at his Oakland Tribune, the pages spread wide.
Santini studied his partner, his blockish build looking like an anime sketch, with the lines crudely drawn in to save on budget, just enough to denote hulking brute, and the rest left to the audience’s imagination.
It was their customary ritual to start their day in the kitchen at Santini’s home before hitting the office, where they would be deluged by the prior night’s muggings and murders, only to end up feeling more like coroners than detectives. Sharing a few laughs over the absurdities of life seemed like a much better way to embrace the new sunrise.
Mort said, paraphrasing the article before him, “Some Indian kid and his entourage injected themselves with the mold growing in his pet hamster cage in hopes of boosting their intelligence. All three of them found dead on the floor.”
Santini spat his coffee all over the floor, he laughed so hard.
Mort, on reflecting a moment longer, joined in the inappropriate chuckling. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.”
“We should be proud for not being so stupid.”
“Hey, I feel their pain. I’ve been sitting the same sergeant’s exam for the last fifteen years. I don’t think they even bother to update it for me, anymore, which just strikes them as unnecessarily cruel.”
Mort turned his attention to the facing page. “Says here, a shoe salesman at The Walk Shop on Vine in Berkeley, with the highest sales in the country, reputedly the happiest man alive, jumped off the clock tower on the UC campus. Interviewers who spoke to him when he was breaking all those sales records said he could crack jokes faster than Louis C.K., and convince you to mortgage your house to buy another pair of shoes you’d never consider wearing. Some called him Mesmer. His coworkers were convinced he was on something.”
Santini mused, “With us, it’s crack-heads, with them, it’s smart drugs and brain-boosting technologies that would probably be deemed this side of the Oakland/Berkeley city-line unethical to try on rats.”
Mort flipped the page of the tribune. “Griswald Cunningham was found dead in his loft, surrounded by brain-wave machines, one aimed at his head while he slept. When they got to him, his brain matter had been completely liquefied.” He folded up his paper, and sipped his coffee. “Damn shame we aren’t smart enough to investigate crimes in the Land of Oz. Beats the hell out of the same old same old in the dreary Kansas flats over here.”
“You say that now.”
“Yeah, I guess excitement is for the young. My biggest thrill is a pair of heart paddles. Used during sex, incidentally.”
Santini guffawed, spitting the last of his coffee on the floor. “See, this is why I need a dog,” he said, eying the growing puddle of coffee spittle on the floor.
“The damn thing’ll be manic depressive in a week. You can’t feed a dog all that caffeine.”
“I don’t see why we aren’t entitled to our own experiments this side of the Oz-Kansas line.”
Santini grabbed his felt hat, a prop that made him feel like a character from a Sam Spade novel. He figured he had the detective skills to match, and no more. The fedora covered the bald stripe running down the center of his head from too much sun that left him picking scabs off his pate from mutated cells caring little for UV rays. “I guess we better get on with surviving all that monotony,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.
Mort, donning his own fedora, sharing the same affinity for noir films from the forties, quipped, “Five dollars says we don’t have one murder today anyone even cares to investigate.”
“I guess that explains why our game isn’t exactly up to standards, anymore.”
Santini and Mort hoofed it towards the Oakland Police Department’s Eastmont Precinct to which they had been recently reassigned. Located in a renovated mall, it was spacious, modern, with curving lines, plenty of windows, the kind of place a corporate exec would be happy to call home. It made both Santini and Mort particularly anxious, and invited distinct feelings of obsolescence they could keep repressed fairly well—away from the building. One more reason for a bracer before embarking on a journey to their own take on Oz in a beaten down area of East Oakland.
“You think if we picked up a Berkeley paper there might be even more reports of suspicious student suicides?” Mort asked.
“Why?”
“I derive a strange sense of satisfaction reading about the deaths of brainiacs. It’s unforgivable, I know, but highly therapeutic.”
Santini scrunched up his face. “It’s the ones who don’t off themselves, I worry about—and what the fallout might be around them.”
FIFTEEN
“I mean to better myself,” Murray said. He cowered before Hartman, feigning remorse with all the heartfelt passion he could muster, the way a guilty man awaiting judgment professes to be a changed person in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
“You’re a drunk, loud-mouthed, foul-tempered, belligerent asshole, whose intolerance of others exceeds even my limits,” Hartman said. “And that’s just going from your behavior in class. You have no redeeming qualities I can find. Worse, you have zero insights into why you are the way you are. How do you expect to change when you can’t even explain your own actions?”
Murray squirmed in his chair. The Noh drama mask his face had turned into conveyed his stupefaction at being talked to in such a way. His guard had been foolishly left down, leaving him feeling mauled. He burped Bacardi before he could get his vocal apparatus fully under control. His profuse sweating gave even louder testimony to his inebriated state, not to mention his stubble and unkempt clothes.
Hartman gazed at Spence at the top of the auditorium trying to sneak out before the spotlight was cast on him. “You could run to the dean with your complaints before fathoming the true nature of this exercise.” He figured he’d motivate them to hang in there with the idea the lesson might one day be over. “But I’m one Nobel up on him, and my reputation will open more doors for you than you can close on me.”
Spence’s clenched jaw caused his cheeks to bulge. Hartman swore he heard Spence grinding his teeth as he wormed his way back into his seat. But that was the chance cracking of the vertebrae in his spinal column courtesy of his stored tension.
He neglected to mention his Nobel in chemistry was for constructing cocktails that were ostensibly now being used to better subjugate humans worldwide. The drugs granted a limited escape from genetic predestination but, without further refinements—going on in his absence—the results were unpredictable. They granted an instant personality makeover while holding on to clear thinking, something conventional drugs couldn’t do. There was no guarantee what personality a person would end up with, whether it was serviceable to society, sociopathic, or simply fifty I.Q. points lower. That left few applications, all menacing, and of a military nature. The stabbing irony was his every effort to liberate Man had instead benefitted The Man. Hence, his putting an end to sharing his breakthroughs.
Arriving before his world philosophy class at Cal Berkeley, Hartman hadn’t wasted any time with the tongue lashings. Was that all that was left of him after all these years? The endless hissing of a spitting mamba? If Victor Frankl was right,
inability to find meaning in life was the only true death. And dismay over the inability to make a difference in the world was reason enough to lose it.
Hartman said, “Murray, can you give me a reason why the human race benefits from keeping you alive a moment longer? Why wouldn’t it be better on everybody to have one less person to compete with for precious resources?”
“I’m one more chance at procuring a human being worth preserving, even if it’s a work in progress,” he croaked, finally.
“And what makes you think you’ll have any luck?”
“Screw you, asshole!” Murray erupted. “At least I can dredge up something inside myself besides bile!”
Unshaken, Hartman said, “Yes, the hot-blooded Latin temperament which you extol so vehemently. As if riding the roller coaster of your emotions is all you need to feel alive. Another one who thinks the drugs his body secretes are necessarily superior to an artificially drug-induced state. Never do you stop to think the point of any drug haze is to satisfy the unconscious urge to crawl back into the womb and into a similarly amorphous world of warm, fuzzy, pre-sentient sensations.”
In all fairness to himself, he first attempted reason with his students. Maybe cracking the tough shells of their resistance with a sledge hammer would liberate the nuts inside. If only he could keep them off balance long enough. Make them feel like total failures in order to push them to thrive – at least in his world. Then they’d start questioning everything about themselves they took for granted.
But it was hard to get a rise out of these kids. Between the ones inured to abuse of any kind from growing up in busted homes, and the ones raised on Berkeley’s tolerance for any and all lifestyles, including the crazies… Well, they were a better example of corporate management types with their unflappable demeanors than the more mercurial personalities Berkeley was also known for, none of whom frequented his classes, save Murray. Hartman could sooner raise the dead than raise the consciousness level in this room.
“What about you, Jeannie? Working in a psych ward to pay your way through Berkeley… What reason do you have to give your patients to claw their way back to sanity, when clear thinking is so underrated by even the people in this room contemplating a philosophy degree? If you’re immune to higher consciousness, what chances have they? What motivation?”
Jeannie leaned forward in her chair. “Are we immune to it? It’s one thing to step back from your life on occasion to assess what’s going wrong, apply the necessary course correction. Another thing to keep muddying the waters just because you want to keep asking questions like some nagging child.” Her tone lacked the effrontery of her words. This was just casual dinnertime conversation for her, better suited to a glass of wine.
“So, consciousness for you is a room accent to go with the sofa like a perfectly chosen scatter pillow?” Hartman said. “And what about you, Chad? What does being more self-aware mean to you?”
Chad’s response was delayed; he first had to overcome the gravity well of his boredom with booster rockets of attentiveness, but they were simply not up to the task. The mock smirk helped him stall while he dredged his brain for a response.
At last, Chad said, “I don’t get the stimulus response to thinking big thoughts that you do, doc. I find just as much enjoyment, if not more, from sailing a boat, having sex, and eating gourmet Chinese food.”
Hartman felt his clenching neck muscles chafe against his collar. “So, thinking is only valuable in so much as it’s pleasurable, and really no better than any number of artificial stimulants you can take for the mind?”
Chad shrugged. “Enough said.”
“What about your peers putting their blood and sweat on the line for the People’s Movement?” Hartman asked.
Chad slouched further. “Whatever the state of affairs, an aristocratic age like the one we’re slipping back into, or a more egalitarian era, folks will always be more like you than me, not happy unless they can find a reason to complain. Until you can escape that truth, does history really matter?”
The man with all the right answers, and none of the right questions, Hartman thought, both flabbergasted by Chad and underwhelmed at the same time.
“Adam, what about you?”
Adam kick-started his brain for fear of further riling the old man. “This whole being smart thing, I remember once upon a time… but I gave it up in favor of the simple life. Now I just live for laughs and to get through the day.”
Hartman held his tongue before he bit it off, not being able to coordinate his mouth further for any more haranguing, having been going at it for over an hour. He gazed down at his notes ostensibly to find his place, but really just to retreat to his corner for a bit. He was losing this fight, like all the others.
A few more rounds of verbal fencing with his students, and Hartman gave up. Under stress, they simply had different automatic behaviors than the ones used when not stressed, just as ingrained and just as unconscious. Murray could be provoked into blowing his lid. Adam would always stare with a vacant look and an inability to formulate a comeback. Jeannie had a few clever things to say, meant to titillate the philosopher in him, but that amounted to no more than crowd control and the schmoozing of someone good at defusing difficult situations. Chad, the brightest of the lot, mouthed profundities about the nature of life faster than Hartman could spit them out, and none of it meant anything to him. No amount of insights into life could generate the least heartfelt response. He had all the emotional attachment to his own existence of a confirmed sociopath.
It was all just too much for Hartman, on today of all days, a week before his retirement. If the week had been exceptional instead of merely typical of the last thirty years… Spouting genius before the crowds was strictly a masturbatory fantasy. Not once had he succeeded at inseminating the egg of genius in someone else. He was one step closer to becoming one of those crazies who walked the streets of Berkeley, and he knew it, surrendering to madness rather than face his failures, far less the truth of the human condition.
SIXTEEN
Hartman felt muscle fibers tearing in his right leg, a teasing warning of what would happen next if he kept grinding out reps on the weight machine. The entire muscle group was poised to fail.
He roared like a frustrated lion, and jumped off the apparatus. He gave himself an injection of his proprietary drug cocktail, cursing all the while.
Widening his focus to the rest of the gym-cum-lab, he found it hard to believe just how elaborate his countermeasures had grown in recent years. Now in his sixties, he fell apart faster than he could repair himself. Not good.
After doing some quick sit-ups to keep his cardio in the zone and to expedite the drug’s dissemination, Hartman bounced back on the leg device. He cautiously pushed out the first rep, the second. His confidence rose with each new exertion.
The notch marked “2,” where the pin was currently inserted, referred to two thousand pounds. His superhuman abilities were a result of his breakthroughs in supplements and human physiology, which he shared with no one. For discretion’s sake, the weights dangled on metal strands beneath the floor, and were undetectable even upon closer examination. If someone happened to find their way into the room uninvited, they would only think the machine was broken.
As Hartman wrestled with his mortality, he better appreciated being a man out of time. It’d take the state of the art in medicine and countless other fields twenty years to catch up with him.
That roller coaster of self-congratulatory emotions didn’t have far to climb before facing a drop. By the third side-to-side rotation to tackle his obliques on the ab machine, he felt muscle fibers snapping before the nearly thousand-pound resistance.
Hartman affixed a pad with micro-fine needles on the underside, roughly a hundred per square inch, to the affected area. The electrical current transmitted through the pinpricks, not to mention his patented drug secretions, would hasten healing in the area. All the same, he let out a cry of pain and exasperation.
If he rerouted more mental energy to human physiology, he had no doubt he could conquer the challenges of boosting both his smarts and longevity. But Renaissance man that he was, the many disciplines which informed his thinking remained subservient to philosophy. In a very real way, mixing ingredients in a beaker was just too beneath him, even with the high stakes, for him to justify giving the discipline more time. Nonetheless, Hartman sighed at the hyperbolic reasoning that led him down the road he’d taken.
These days, he maintained his exercise regimen because being able to discharge his energy in violent super-human outbursts made him a sturdier lightning rod for his intense emotions. Hartman bore down on the bowling ball—one of many he kept like weights on a rack—as he emitted a bellow that vibrated the windows. His nostrils flaring, he crushed the bowling ball in his bare hands; his way of exercising his forearms and finger muscles. He instantly felt better.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 11