***
Inside the main festivities room, Fiona, dusty and scuffed up from her ordeal, crawled out from behind a panel in the wall. She found Danny hobbling on his splinted leg, sampling the hors d'oeuvres.
“Hey, knucklehead,” Fiona said, “why aren't you rushing to get the police?”
Danny turned to take her in. “We're locked in here, pretty tight, snuggle bunny.”
She saw the predator surface in his eyes. “Excuse me?”
“That psycho could come back at any moment, and we'd be dead. Don't think it's too unreasonable to catch a little nooky while we wait.”
He tackled her to the floor.
She could tell her long straight jet black hair was a turn on for him; the trigger that had compelled this chameleon to change colors. He sniffed it. “Let me get this straight, you're raping me?”
“How exactly did you get invited to this party for geniuses?”
He tore at her clothes. When he realized she wasn’t wearing panties, he stopped bothering with the apparel.
With his leg splint chafing her, she debated taking one of the metal rods and skewering him with it. But that seemed like too much of an engineering project.
She reached for the closest table leg and used his stabbing thrusts to shake it until something interesting fell off. The butcher knife landed point first into the floor. Upon grabbing it, she planted the blade into his back.
“What is this, a Psychos-R’-Us support group?” She pushed him off. “Why can't anyone just practice a little self-restraint?”
She screamed, “Is all this neediness really worth the stress! You know what, don't answer that.”
Danny slithered across the smooth hardwood floor. His motor coordination deteriorated, like a prehistoric fish with vestigial legs crawling out of the sea. After saturating the air with obscenities, his utterances grew indistinct.
Upon glancing around at the cutlery, and looking unsatisfied, Fiona pranced into the kitchen. She returned with a mallet.
“Knock, knock,” she said, tapping the mallet against an open palm. “You don’t mind if I test how this works, do you?” She smashed the tenderizer into his skull. The cranium splintered like frosting on a cake that was only posing as a formidable defense against the sweet insides. “Yeah, that works.”
Still, Danny refused to die or lie still. Fiona felt stricken. “I don’t know why I’m surprised you’re content to spend the rest of your life as a mindless worm.”
When he still refused to expire, she huffed, exasperated. “Taking constructive feedback from those around you is the quickest way to grow as a person. Die! Die! Die!” she screamed in sync with each swing of the mallet. Still he refused to succumb. She sighed. “There’s no talking to some people.” She put him out of her mind.
She picked up the receiver on the phone that dated back to the 1950s, replete with dial pad. The line was dead.
She followed the wire up the wall. The cables had been run after the house was built, when it was converted from gas to electric. The sheathing around the wires blended well with the woodwork, but it wasn’t invisible.
She traced the path until she found where the cords had been cut. Clearly, this was her day for embracing personal growth. She sat down on the floor and struggled to make sense of the jumble of strands.
FORTY-FIVE
Danny, realizing he was at death’s door, let his mind take him on a magical mystery tour. He didn’t have the energy to fight it. The reality he endured was paradoxical, a lifetime of change compressed into seconds, when his actual life had felt a good deal different, more like no amount of time could bring the least bit of change.
***
Danny was just eleven, peering up at Jasmine’s window. Jasmine was a whopping thirteen, with tits as ripe as plum tomatoes. It was two in the morning, and he should have been shielded by the dead of night. Instead he was betrayed by a full moon.
He climbed the trellis hammered to the side of the house with the idea of training the wisteria, currently in full bloom, all the way up the side of the Victorian home, painted in a very un-Victorian white-wash. By the time he was at Jasmine’s window, he smelled of the purple flowers so much, he feared for his manhood.
The window, cracked to let in the night-blooming scents and gentle breezes from the yard, was easy fodder in his hands. Well, maybe not easy; he worried about herniating himself at something besides pile-driving Jasmine’s pussy. He had to save his lower back for her, or risk being forgotten in the annals of Jasmine-dating history.
Huffing and puffing, a little giddy from the adrenaline spike after climbing the trellis and fighting to force the window open, he collapsed on top of the bedspread.
At first, the logistics of getting under the covers was too much for him. He kept trying to wheedle his way beneath the blankets while lying on top of them, until, exasperated, he jumped up, peeled back the bedclothes, and slipped under.
He plowed her pussy for a good minute or so before she started moaning in her sleep, and he had to cover her mouth to keep from waking her parents. When her eyes popped open a minute or so later, he had to clamp down tighter on her mouth and resist her fighting beneath him to get free, which just made his dick harder, what with all the extra squirming. Her insides felt wet and warm and gooey, like salt-water taffy. He tasted the taffy in his mouth when he kissed her. She tasted salty, but also a little sweet. He would find out later dad had plied her with brandy for her birthday, and he was experiencing what would be forever more associated with the sweet taste of love.
He came inside her and just kept right on going, still stiff as a board. Jasmine whispered, “I hate you, Danny,” and bit his ear and his face, and pulled at his hair, and scraped him with her fingernails on his face and back. “Get off me, get off me,” she protested feebly, making sure not to let her voice rise above a whisper. “I hate you. You’re no more than a rapist.” Danny felt himself come a second time. And still he kept going. He remembered drilling her until the sun came up and he heard the parents get up in the next room and walk about, and still he couldn’t stop.
The next thing Danny remembered was being dragged into the cop car and the sirens blaring as the vehicle raced toward the precinct with him in the back seat. Still hard, he came for the umpteenth time in the back seat of the car.
***
The officer whose desk Danny was handcuffed to was at least two hundred years old. He sweated profusely. He saw Danny’s eyes bugging out and he said, “Don’t mind me. I’ve been having the same heart-attack for thirty years.” He slipped some nitro tablets under his tongue. “If I fall over on you, here’s the phone; call the firehouse, have them use the jaws of death to pry you out from under me.”
He shook his head as he went over the report on Danny. “You know, I had a little boy just your age in here the other day. Oh, yeah, caught doing the same exact thing as you. Do you know what happened to him? His dick fell off. Yep, rotted right off with gangrene. He has to pee through a straw now.”
“You’re making that up,” Danny protested, feeling his penis.
“That’s not the least of it. He tells me now the kids at school all pick on him. They wait to get him alone and they drill the tight little hole where his dick used to be to get in practice for the girls.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Danny realized he was perspiring and his breathing was off, way off.
“You gotta be tested, you know?” the cop said. “In case any of those pussy viruses went to your head. See Louie over there? That’s what happened to him.”
Danny craned to see the man he was pointing at. He was catching flies out of the air and eating them, looking happy as a lark.
“You’re so full of shit,” Danny said, scared to death, and believing every last word. The guy had a solemn church face and tone just like Father Friendly, from Catholic catechism class mom kept forcing him to go to on Sundays.
Movinus Anthwerp, this fire-and-brimstone preacher that roamed college campuses, was in Berkeley for a c
ouple of weeks preaching at Cal Berkeley. He’d been arrested for disturbing the peace. The cop handed Danny over to him next, saying he might get off easier on charges if he helped the boy to see the future he was facing. Movinus nodded too zealously for Danny’s tastes. They were both escorted into an adjoining room, handcuffed to the steel desk besides one another, and left alone.
“Hey, enough of this shit! Let me out of here!” Danny shouted at deaf ears. But with the door locked on them, any sounds coming from the outer office were silenced better than at a church confessional.
Movinus wasted no time. “You’ll never sleep another night in your life, boy. You know why? Because the devil will preview for you coming attractions in hell. He’s got a room he’s readying for you now. Where he’ll burn you until your skin bubbles off, and lizards with raspy tongues will forever feed on your exposed flesh. He’ll suck out your eyeballs and through them make you see what it’s like to travel down his body and out his asshole.”
“Save it, preacher. I done plenty of things way worse than this, and I sleep just fine.”
“But you were flying under his radar before. Now he’s got you dead in his sights. Wait till it burns to piss. That’s how he likes to tease you about burning alive for all eternity in his fire pits.” Danny had felt a burning whenever he peed for some months now, and wondered what it was about. He gulped.
“There’s still hope, boy. I was dying of AIDS before I started preaching. See this pale skin, these sunken eyes, these lesions?” He coughed in a sickly manner. “Well, I’m doing good compared to what I was. They gave me two weeks to live two months ago. But so long as I preach the Lord’s word, the disease doesn’t progress to my brain.”
“If you ask me, it’s racing through your head like a wildfire.”
He squeezed Danny’s forearm in a vice-grip. “Impertinence just takes you down faster, boy. Mark my words, there’s only one way out. Now quick, I think we have a couple minutes before they come back.”
Movinus pulled his pants down, bent him over the chair, and raped him. Danny screamed and squirmed, but no one in the adjoining office came. That’s when he decided that was all sex was about, power and domination and bleeding off the anxiety that came at you out of nowhere, like it came at him every night at home, every day, long after the boogie men who had climbed on top his mother had gone. Most everything triggered that anxiety after a while. Maybe his brain was trying to detach the dread from its one true source because he couldn’t face the idea of being powerless to rescue his mother from the evil men who beat her and slapped her around.
Sometimes the johns left without paying so they woke up to a mommy bleeding mascara into her granola under a waterfall of tears. Through it all, she insisted she was a health nut and granola was going to ensure she lived forever. Though Danny couldn’t see why she wanted to; she was starting to look like hell from all the liquor she drank, which apparently, the granola was not enough to offset.
The details of his mother’s face had since faded; all he vividly recalled of her now was her long, straight, jet-black hair.
When the authorities eventually found out what his mom was up to, Danny was carted away to a social worker employed at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare, and he became his project. Dr. Sebastian Drake was very big on high-tech interventions doing what twenty-four-seven, around-the-clock people monitoring could never achieve.
He picked up on Danny’s latest tic straight off, the tendency to be distracted. He called it ADHD, and decided that it was the best thing for Danny, what with all the horrors he’d lived through. So he fixed him up with his own apartment, and plenty of computer monitors so he could be in twenty-seven chat rooms at once, simultaneously play seven or more videogames, all while playing computer solitaire with himself and watching reruns on TV.
Dr. Drake got him five cell phones, three regular land-line phones, and an apartment with a view to the city streets below where people hung out at the cafés. Danny didn’t think much of Dr. Drake’s campaign to productively channel his ADHD, but he couldn’t deny he felt calmer than at any other time of his life, except when he was being raped or raping someone else.
Dr. Drake enrolled him in a general studies curriculum at Cal, figuring the different subjects would serve his ADHD better than a concentration in any one field. While that project didn’t exactly pan out, Danny discovered a newfound love for philosophy. As it turned out, most philosophers of old had a healthy dose of ADHD, starting with talking about how best to procure the ideal politician and ending with a discussion of the seven heavens and how our souls connected with the ethers, or some such shit.
By now, Danny was embracing his ADHD, increasingly conscious of when his mind was wandering and in what situations, and what the triggers were. Dr. Drake said this was an important step in his recovery, and soon he might not need the ADHD at all to cover up for anything, he could just use it in a positive light. He could turn negatives into positives by taking what was initially a Band-Aid for pain too great to face, and use it as an integrating mechanism for interdisciplinary studies, his suggestion for the kind of philosopher Danny should be.
That’s when Danny ran into Hartman, philosopher king, whose approach was interdisciplinary in the extreme. Drake was the one that put him on to Hartman saying they were definitely birds of a feather.
That final tip from Dr. Drake may have been a spiritual lesson on not leaning too much on any source outside himself for guidance.
Danny realized that, by transferring his ADHD to philosophy, specifically to a doctor of philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS), he was replacing the Band-Aid of a defective mechanism with heavy-duty duct tape. Über-rationalization, carried out now in n-dimensions as opposed to one or two, was now his weapon of choice against boogie men who would come at him in the dead of night. And while Dr. Drake would say this took him one step closer to a cure, to Danny, it never felt like that. It seemed like ever-better distraction from the truth.
Still, Danny couldn’t help feeling grateful for knowing Hartman in the early days, when he was at the top of his game, before he started obsessing about his own obsolescence, the hopelessness of salvaging souls in this era. Danny, he might say, was Hartman’s first disciple. He’d taken every class the guy ever taught over the last three years, even if he was late arriving for this semester’s class. Hartman was single-handedly responsible for Danny not putting a bullet to his head. Hartman could make ADHD look like the keys to heaven’s gate, and IDS as the crowning achievement of an ADHD-inspired genius.
Hartman would unwittingly break out in Latin in the middle of a lecture. He’d weave in religious philosophy from a dozen or more traditions. After showing the interconnections between Christ’s teachings and Buddha’s, he’d stir in about twenty seven saints into the discussion.
"Ante adipiscing aliis prius debetis amorem vitae et pacem in conscientia tua. Lorem interius est quaerere et enutries pacis servare quicquid per dies caseload tua est. (“Before you can help others, you must first bring peace and a deep love of life into your own consciousness. The key is to find and nourish an inner peacefulness, and maintain it through the day no matter how much your life spins out of control.”)
"Memoriam et Psychotherapy sunt inseparabilis. Simul, ostendunt nobis operari cum ira, in quod spirans et ambulans meditatio est utile in multis condicionibus quam directe exprimens ira.” (“Mindfulness and Psychotherapy are inseparable. Together, they show us how to work with anger and other toxic emotions. Breathing and walking meditation is more beneficial than directly expressing these feelings.”)
Danny hoped he was getting the Latin right after all this time. A lot of what Hartman had said was seared into his head, imprinted there thanks to the near perfect recall associated with idolization-hormones and endorphins. But Latin was nearly as unconquerable a beast for Danny as Hartman himself.
In retrospect, Danny supposed Hartman was less of a hypocrite and more someone who had found his way and then lost it again. Who’
d come down from the mountain on a journey long enough to lose sight of the memory of the burning bush in favor of the weight of the tablets he was carrying. In the same way Chogyam Trungpa, after penning some of the most magnificent thoughts on spiritual materialism and the other hurdles on the path to enlightenment, would die prematurely from alcoholism. Danny reminded himself that, for however many fireflies danced in the air, the night always won out. It was the beginning and the end. And the flickering lights of genius, while scintillating, were mere phantasmagoria.
***
Danny recalled Hartman segueing seamlessly from the mathematics of knot theory to a discussion of how these and other spatiotemporal forces impinged on thought in ways that made Derrida’s linguistic-derived deconstruction look like child’s play. He would end by tying in a discussion of toroid energy fields emanating from the heart chakra to the Thich Naht Hanh teachings espoused earlier on how mindfulness broadened compassion, turning ideas over on one another like so much manure in his mind.
“Knot theory is extendible into higher dimensions...” After warming the audience up, Hartman demonstrated mathematically how there was no straight line path to spiritual truth.
Connecting up knot theory with Cantor sets and fractal geometry math, Hartman showed how the soul’s journey through time, and through each moment of our day twisted into labyrinthine patterns of necessity; in order to build the cathedral of God in our hearts. Heaven on Earth could only be described spatiotemporally by such sublimely grand figures, whose symmetries extended into n-dimensions.
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