Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  He closed his eyes and allowed himself to slip into a meditative state from which he could retrieve insights blocked by hyperkinetic, panicked, rational thinking. Once his head cleared, a little voice told him to get up and walk around.

  Maintaining his trance state, he rose from his chair and strode out of his office. It wasn’t long before the high-strung cook found him.

  “How am I supposed to cook for everybody? They’re tearing up my kitchen!” Manuel gestured with a cold cut he’d yanked from the freezer. He took no note of the blood on his hands or his apron. But Saverly did. From the trance state he’d maintained, the connections were all too easy. He grabbed the meat out of Manuel’s hand, and unwrapped the white butcher paper. Inside was a human liver. “Dios Mio!” Manuel exclaimed, making the sign of the cross over himself. “I do not stock liver. No beef liver, no lamb liver, no chicken liver.”

  “Take me to where you pulled this.”

  Saverly followed Manuel to the walk-in freezer in the kitchen. Sure enough, they were tearing up the kitchen; just no one had thought to check the freezer. Or maybe they had, Saverly thought; they just didn’t think to check for a body cut into small pieces.

  At random, he pulled out neatly wrapped packages of meat, and unfolded the white butcher’s paper—where he found the rest of victim number one, Ginny Carlisle, orderly, her job to extract blood, nothing else. It took a lot of digging to identify her, as all the body parts with telltale signs had been packaged together and wedged in back of the bricks of frozen food. A finger with a wedding band was the first telltale sign, the pair of eyes whose eye color Saverly recognized were in the same package.

  He strolled out of the walk-in freezer, not the least cold, actually overheating, and sweating, to study the room full of machinery devoted to cutting up meat, taking no notice of the people turned to stone staring at the pieces of human spread out on the butcher block table.

  There was no patient access to his area, but no doubt her path here would be covered by the cameras, as more finger pointing at his own incompetence. He guessed he knew from the outset this was never about torturing her victims, so why keep them alive where they could reveal their positions? This was about torturing him and thumbing her nose at his alleged intellectual superiority.

  Saverly’s eyes returned to Manuel’s bloody apron. Still unshaken from the calm meditative state in which he kept himself, the next association he made was with the dramatic play of blood against white linen. With that thought lingering in his mind, he stepped out of the kitchen area, walking indiscriminately. When he noticed a maid shoving linens down a shoot, he made the connection his mind was trying to make earlier; just maybe his trance state wasn’t deep enough.

  He made his way to the linens-collection area, peeled white towels and sheets off the top layers of the baskets positioned at the bottom of the shoots. He ignored the bins with the colored smocks, and headed straight for the white-linen baskets, figuring the horror would be amplified if the blood played against white.

  Halfway down the second basket he found victim number two, the blood spilled shockingly, like poorly packed meat leaking out of the wrappers. At the bottom of the bin, body intact, was Serpico Dildranus, Greek import, barely spoke English. Saverly wasn’t sure if he was one of the illegals or not. The money their low wages saved him went to progressive therapies the cutting-edge facility he ran, a good fifty years ahead of the competition, could ill-afford otherwise.

  Saverly wondered if that was one of the things Jeannie was shaking her finger at, as so far, the two dead bodies belonged to the lowest paid employees. Maybe Jeannie felt he balanced the scales of progress a little too indelicately in favor of mitigating present shock—a state the new Renaissance men were the most vulnerable to—over ameliorating the less topic-specific suffering of the laggards. He knew it was in his nature to give preferential treatment among the lost causes to the romantics and idealists, closet or otherwise, to the builders of tomorrow, and leave the run-of-the-mill sufferers to fend for themselves.

  Perhaps Jeannie had attacked his prejudices because she had recognized them as a sore point for him, one of those dark secrets he kept from himself she could use to incapacitate him. But how could she have gotten inside his head so quickly? She had had the better part of a day to see who he marched in and out of his office; who got preferential treatment. Evidently, that was all the time she needed.

  When the fog of thought vaporized, in the clearing stood the horde that had followed him from the kitchen. There were no gasps this time; these were vultures looking to feed on their morbid curiosity.

  He didn’t find any more bodies. Within the next three hours everyone was accounted for. Even Jeannie was in the isolation room, snug and secure, and had not attempted another run at him, as if giving him time to recover between rounds, content to play by the rules if it extended the game.

  Jeannie came out of his head, and drifted ghostlike over to the earlier incarnation of herself locked in the isolation room. She watched herself slip a baggie full of OxyContin out of her ass, lodged high enough up to foil a finger search. She saw herself gulp a couple tablets from the bag, one of them a purple pill. She realized now that her behavior-change had occurred around the time she imbibed the mystery pill, thinking at the time she had merely scored a higher dose of the drug.

  ***

  “Ordinarily, I find failure to thrive to be the best teacher,” Saverly said, interviewing Jeannie in a straightjacket this time from inside her padded cell. “But in your case, the strategy is to get everyone else around you to fail to thrive, to subvert their coping mechanisms, so that you can justify your inability to fit right with life as the norm.”

  Jeannie smiled at him with the same vague sense of menace.

  ***

  Jeannie drifted back to her early childhood, looking for clues as to what made her the way she was.

  From her disembodied state, she witnessed mommy stirring feces into her porridge in the kitchen as punishment for rubbing up against Ricky in the backyard.

  Repeatedly, mommy would initiate a game of hide-and-seek with her, only to leave her locked in the closet or hope chest she’d used as a hiding place for days at a time.

  One day, mommy poisoned her puppy—after buying it and making sure to keep it around long enough for Jeannie to fall in love with it.

  She watched as mommy left all the glasses in the dirty dishwater to coax her to drink out of the orange juice jug directly, so she could spread her hand over the hot stove and scream at her about how much she deserved this.

  What she’d gotten out of all those experiences was the importance of plotting and scheming and manipulating others in order to squeeze joy out of life, and that the only true joy was in magnifying other’s misery. It wasn’t a consciously examined credo, just a deeply ingrained fact of her behavior absorbed as a child as part of the oedipal complex, as part of little girls growing up to emulate their mommies because that was the thing to do.

  The only thing Jeannie truly regretted through it all was that not one day of her life had been lived consciously, not as a serial killer, and not as a fun-loving college student who was admittedly more well-adjusted than anyone around her. It all just flowed naturally. Neither version of herself had ever experienced failure to thrive; both personalities were a resounding success in life. The real forces framing and shaping her life had thus never been examined. And so, in a very real way, she had never lived. Not one moment. The realization left her sad as she drifted towards the light.

  Why was it a person couldn’t have a near death experience without actually dying? Maybe that was the brilliance of Hartman’s pressure-cooker approach, to trigger just such a state ahead of time when it could actually do some good. Though clearly, his method needed some tweaking.

  ***

  As Jeannie came back into her body, her last thought was, maybe that’s why she recalled the scene at the Café Med, and others like it, having racked up twelve murders. Evidently the grim rea
per was karma, by any other name. She had struggled so hard to put that past behind her, too. She had done such a fine job of it. It just didn’t seem fair in retrospect. It shouldn’t be what she did. It should be how she atoned for it afterwards.

  But then, to be perfectly honest, the purple pill was doing the work for her. It was a cheat. And as it bought no heightened self-awareness, death was the only true liberation. Maybe she hadn’t earned that either.

  Weren’t the good supposed to die young? Maybe in a Renaissance age, the formula was reversed.

  The End Days formula did stipulate that, during Armageddon, Christ would return for his peeps. Maybe the Renaissance age was the return of the cosmic Christ, no longer embodied in one person, but in the spirit of the age itself.

  And those who couldn’t go along for the ride were graduating down a rung, to purgatory, maybe, or something even lower down the food chain, in a manner that would have pleased Dante.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Adam’s connection to Jeannie severed by a bullet to the chest, his connection to his past life was paradoxically strengthened. It came pouring in as if the hole in his heart had indeed opened up long ago.

  ***

  Adam’s eyes sailed over the computer’s many languages which converged on a universal argot the computer could speak at its most basic level of zeroes and ones. He took his red pen and circled the blocks of alternating numerals which indicated why the computer was crashing with this configuration of hardware and software. He would go like this for eight hours straight until his grandmother came to take him home. If she remembered, she would come to attend to him on breaks, too, see that he went to the bathroom, had something to eat. But she was getting old, and often forgot herself. Sometimes she would nap, and not awaken in time.

  People brought their pet dogs to work, so she saw no reason why he could not bring his grandmother.

  She had been late today, and he had peed himself.

  “There you are, my little darling.” She was eighty-five years, eleven months, three weeks, two days, seven hours, fifty-three minutes, and twenty four seconds old, and she walked with a hunched back and a cane. “I see we had a little accident. Not to worry. I have more of those myself, these days.”

  She said she loved him an average of forty-eight times a day, twenty-three times today so far. He wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by “love.”

  ***

  As Adam pulled out of his former self in his final seconds of life, his eyes watered. How much his grandmother had loved him. He was glad he finally realized.

  He understood much now, maybe not enough, but a lot. He understood that he’d incarnated in this life as a savant as a gift to his grandmother, out of a love that abided across lifetimes. She was ready to jump to the next plane; this life would assure her sainthood and her ascension. His self-sacrifice helped pay some karmic debt to her, he was sure, even if he still didn’t know all the details. He felt proud and happy to have given her the boost she needed to get where she was going.

  But still Adam was left mystified. Why had his life taken such crazy turns since then? Surely that couldn’t have been part of the deal. What was the lesson his higher self was trying to get him to absorb?

  Was it that the savage randomness with which their lives (not just his and Jeannie’s but all of Hartman’s students) were undone was even worse than what they had done to themselves?

  That their hard work on themselves was easily undone by well-meaning assholes?

  Was it that reincarnation, within this lifetime (thanks to the purple pill), like reincarnation over different lifetimes, really offered no salvation in and of itself? No guarantee the soul will ever grow or mature?

  Did the purple pill testify to the fact they needed to have patience with their unfolding process, they shouldn’t force it?

  Was the big spiritual lesson that without digging into individual psyches, and doing the hard work, there was no generic panacea that was going to work, no quick or easy fix?

  Was it that there are no universal answers, only expedient and strategic ones?

  That you get too many cooks in the kitchen (such as you have in an age of Renaissance men all tasked with kick-starting the failed global economy) and only God can sort out the mess?

  There was just no way of getting enough distance on one’s life to grasp the big picture, and that was the point, to surrender control to God, shift his focus to his intent to do well, and pray karma was an adequate comptroller?

  That there were no words of wisdom, no affirmations, no strategic moves empowering enough to dodge the need for political alliances to stay atop the quicksand, and even that was just a slower form of quicksand that took a little longer to kill him?

  That the game of life could only be played move by move, making the best use of information he had on hand, and truths and lies were of equal value on the gaming board if they motivated him to do what it took to grow on a spiritual level?

  And that even the smallest, most impulsive act rippled out to eternity, affected every facet of his life? So if it wasn’t undertaken via a connection to the Godhead second to none that alone could factor both wills into account and make the marriage work, all was lost? Pity such thoughts hadn’t guided Hartman’s hand.

  This last, most improbable proposition of all, because it was the most difficult tenet to live up to, paradoxically seemed the most correct, the most complete answer to the mystery of life.

  Still, he really couldn’t be sure. Maybe they were all right answers depending on the context. And context alone was key. And he should just use whichever adage he needed in that instant to keep going.

  As if his soul wouldn’t let him rest until he grasped the subtext of his life, he once again drifted back to the past.

  ***

  The Mini-Moe and Mini-Mike robots slugged it out on the coffee table. About twelve inches tall each, they must have felt like Roman gladiators. They were certainly every bit as brawny, if also slightly more boxy. The two metal and plastic behemoths were surrounded by the couch, the love seat, and the easy chair. Adam had peopled those with stacks of dolls and a clap track for the full coliseum effect.

  Mini-Moe and Mini-Mike made full use of the rectangular arena beneath their feet, nearly falling off the edges at times, only to be pulled by the other robot back from the abyss and thrown across the waxy shiny surface of the coffee table for a resounding beating.

  Jeannie paraded out with a dish of cookies for the guests expected to crash his party very soon. She gave him one of her “I’m dating a child” faces, which he dutifully ignored, as she set down the chocolate chip cookies. As soon as her back was turned, Mini-Moe turned one of the cookies into a flying discus hurtled forcefully at Mini-Mike, who was knocked clear to the sofa. He pried himself off the softer cloth dolls, and hurtled himself back into the arena.

  Adam kept his hands hidden beneath the coffee table the whole time, pretending to be an innocent bystander, and concealing the fact that his thumbs were working the joysticks on both robots.

  When Jeannie returned with the platter of brownies, Mini-Mike exacted his revenge, smashed a brownie in Mini-Moe’s face. Jeannie screamed, “Adam! Those are for our guests.”

  “At five hundred calories each, I just saved at least one of them from a diabetic coma. They can thank me later.”

  Jeannie returned to the kitchen stifling frustration. Mini-Mike took a hit that sent him sailing into the bed of brownies. He was suddenly quite grateful for their cushioning effect. He rebounded with an uppercut to the mid-section, which sent Mini-Moe wobbling over the plate of cookies. He found it hard to get his feet under him thanks to the shifting dough-discs beneath his feet. Mini-Mike took advantage, worked the perimeter of the plate, threw his punches to keep Mini-Moe off balance and dazed, as he danced like a butterfly, stung like a bee.

  Jeannie returned with the punch bowl in time for Mini-Mike to wallop Mini-Moe clear into the punch bowl. He sank to the bottom like a stone.

  �
��Take your toys in the bedroom. Now!”

  “Yes, mother,” Adam said.

  Mini-Moe crawled over the lip of the punch-bowl. He did a jig across the coffee table, shorting from the punch, until he flicked off the last of it.

  Adam jumped them off the coffee table and ran them ahead of him into the bedroom, where he politely slammed the door. He promptly cracked it open and talked through the slit. “Don’t see why you just can’t play with me!”

  Jeannie rolled her eyes. “How different that line plays when a child says the words.”

  ***

  Mini-Moe supported his lower back with his hands as he leaned back to appreciate the ascent before him, whistled. “Don’t know. Looks awfully steep.”

  “Ah, don’t lose your nerve now, you chicken shit,” Mini-Mike said, with help from Adam throwing his voice.

  Mini-Mike took the lead with the climbing axe and his boots fitted with metal cleats for the occasion of climbing the stucco bedroom wall. Every so many paces, he drove in a spike and spooled out more rope for his more timid partner coming up behind him.

  Mini-Moe lost his foothold and dangled helplessly on the line. Adam screamed like a banshee auditioning for the opera. He must have been getting carried away, as the cat started mewling out the window, begging for relief from his high-pitched whining. “Adam!” Jeannie’s voice thundered from the other side of the door. “You’ll crack my punch bowl! I have enough of a mess to clean up in here.” Seconds later, Mini-Moe was still falling to give Adam a chance to do a fade out on the scream. Finally, Adam tilted his head down to take in Mini-Moe, dangling helplessly on the line. He heard the phone ring in the other room.