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

by Dean C. Moore

  Drew laughed. “You’re making that last part up.”

  “When they realized they were talking to a schizophrenic, they very politely steered me towards the special Olympics committee, who, as it so happens, were conducting a fund raiser in front of Sather Gate.”

  “You couldn’t find a schizophrenic support group in Sproul Plaza? I’d hate to see you lose focus like that.” Drew turned off the flame beneath the wok, slowed her stirring with the big wooden spoon.

  “Ha-ha. Though someone did confuse me with Professor Lapis, who apparently is schizophrenic, and tried to get me to correct his physics paper.”

  “Did you?” Drew capped the wok with the lid.

  “I tried to cut off the heads of the snakes rising from the pages and snapping at my fingers with nothing more than a pencil eraser. I’m guessing he invented telepods and I just set us back another ten years on the subject.”

  “Well, the point is, you can enjoy my sautéed tofu salad thanks to your slavish work exorcising your demons, barring a remission.” She carried the wok to the dinner table where she set it down on its stand.

  Robin dug into the salad, with raisins and nuts interspersed in the broccoli and tofu. Heaven sent.

  ***

  After dinner, and the port in the storm of Drew’s calming demeanor, the schizophrenia returned, bringing gale force winds to Robin’s mind and threatening to uproot the last of his sanity. As if the trace components in the tofu salad had furnished the necessary ingredients so he could get back to the business at hand of over-secreting neurochemicals in entirely the wrong combinations, too much of this, too little of that. At least this is what Drew surmised. For evidence she had to go on: Try the fact that Robin was standing in the back yard, at the head of a trail that meandered through the Berkeley hills, and ultimately up through Tilden Park, aiming a gun at a college student. He screamed “Leave me alone!” before firing.

  Drew knew Robin couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. He relied on Manny in a clinch, who was fairly decent with a pistol. Though nothing like Drew. She had been going on fox hunts since childhood, and hunting deer before it was just unseemly to do such things on her family estate in England. And she hunted deer illicitly and illegally inside Tilden Park to this day, rationalizing that the deer drew mountain lions, which wandered into town where they threatened human populations. As far as she was concerned, she was just ahead of the learning curve, and they’d eventually give her a medal for protecting the public interest.

  Her robust, athletic frame—a matter of refusing to let down her father as a young girl by not being as able a sportsman as any boy—allowed her to hunt with a crossbow, as well. Nonetheless, she opted for a tranq rifle, pulling it from the gun rack in her hunting shed. She figured taking down Robin with that might be more conducive to a sustainable relationship.

  She grabbed a tranq dart and loaded the rifle. Now if she could just avoid adding to the terror of his demon-haunted mind by chasing after him and compelling him to look down the business end of a rifle.

  The trail was hard to follow in the evening light, but the sounds of screaming students hiking the trails wending toward Tilden proved better for markers than road flares.

  As she ran after Robin, she ruminated on what could have triggered his current state. The most logical choice was paranoid schizophrenia secondary to unexamined and prolonged depression, which often triggered schizoid features if the sense of guilt was strong enough. As a determined martyr, Drew had no doubt Robin’s guilt was strong enough. True, he was convinced the path to enlightenment was to subsume ever more DSM-IV psychological states onto himself for an increasingly well-rounded picture of the world. Even so, while he might one day be happy to trigger schizophrenia at will for whatever insights it lent him regarding the case, Drew doubted morphing into his current state was at all under his control.

  Drew, who questioned Robin’s curious campaign to make himself more “well-rounded,” recalled William James’s words from The Varieties of Religious Experience as her feet hit the trailhead. “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.”

  Drew wondered if her higher self was trying to blast past her resistance to the idea with this rather untimely revelation from William James. If so, Drew could easily counter with: The flipside of self-loathing is grandiosity. Suggesting why Robin, at some level, might be attempting to invite further mental deterioration – of epic proportions – to bolster his flagging ego.

  And why he might be sporting “evidence” of “the fruit of the vine.” This would make Robin’s spotty recovery to date equally suspect, most notably those moments when she seemed to wax truly philosophical, as if Drew was sitting across from Gandhi at the dinner table. Maybe he’d picked up these philosophical chestnuts from the books sitting around Drew’s library, or better yet, from his father who he had spent his early years consciously tuning out. Maybe his unconscious mind was nonetheless storing every word like only the unconscious mind could.

  Tomāto, tomăto, Drew. Just get down there before he kills anyone, and your trust fund goes up in smoke on attorney’s fees.

  ***

  Robin eyed the fire-breathing dragon overhead, laying siege to the forest, burning everything in sight, awaiting the inevitable.

  As the metal-scaled winged beast swooped down to get a better bead on his body, he ducked into the embrace of an old oak tree. He fought to catch his breath from all the running, and watched in horror as a phosphorescent world of glowing life forms darkened and turned to ash. His shelter soon joined the expanding expanse of nothingness.

  He shot the dragon and to his surprise, all its scales separated, revealing it to be hollow inside. The scales, upon landing, transformed the forest back into the magical glowing cornucopia of shapes and colors.

  Alien creatures never before seen, of unimaginable colors, stormed his retinas. A snail as big as a dog, with a strangely human face, smiled back at him. It approached in a riot of limegreen shades, and left a slithering trail behind. He petted his new friend. The nearby tree with a human face and sinuous female trunk, looked up at her “hairdo” – an Afro-like leafless thicket of branches. Unhappy with what she saw, she shook the birds and lingering leaves and nuts out of her “hair.” Done up in oranges and reds, as soon as her “hair” was just right, she was all purples and indigos. In truth, he had no words that could do justice to the actual colors.

  Robin resumed his run with mad glee.

  As he reached the crest of the next hill, he darted smack dab into a forest diva, and a very angelic one at that, her bow drawn. The tip of the arrow bore down on him, and Robin wondered why he was being shot at. He turned expecting to find an animal ready to leap on him were it not for his beautiful savior. But the arrow was meant for him.

  He buckled, eying his midsection in disbelief, the blood oozing out of the hole made by the arrowhead. As he lost consciousness, he couldn’t help feeling betrayed by a kindred spirit. Did she not recognize him as one of her own?

  ***

  Drew bent over Robin, and pulled out the tranq dart. “I’m guessing from the smile on your face, your sense of self-preservation hasn’t improved any.”

  She wrestled Robin onto her shoulder, and walked the limp body, draped over her like a sack of potatoes, back to the house.

  ***

  When Robin awoke in his bed, Drew was patting his forehead with a wet compress. “You’ve been feverish for hours. I’m running out of ways to cool you down. Next comes the bathtub full of ice.”

  The windows open, the breeze blew in, gently tossing the curtains. “We’ve really sold schizophrenia short,” Robin said, ignoring the placid scene. “The fire breathing dragon, I’m convinced, was my own rational mind, pestering my many altered states into submission, refusing to enjoy any of the magical mystery tour.” Clamping down on Drew’s hand, he said, “You can see why I had to kill him of
f?”

  “There’s no denying your logic.”

  Picking up on her sarcasm, Robin yanked Drew’s arm to shake her into a more receptive state. “Not just any logic. Transcendental logic.”

  “That much I got,” Drew said, freeing her hand to contend with sponging him off.

  “And the forest diva that shot me, that was you, wasn’t it? I felt so betrayed.” Robin pushed her away, averting his eyes. “It was as if I sensed you were there to help me but couldn’t help hurting me instead, because you, too, refused to watch me implode without interceding. Why can’t everyone just let me go entirely daffy?”

  “I think that boat’s already sailed.” Drew’s strokes with the sponge were long and massaging, calming, as well as cooling.

  Grunting, Robin thudded his head against the pillow in exasperation. “God, it’s hopeless. Nobody gets it. My own conscious mind doesn’t get it. Madness is so liberating!”

  Drew smirked condescendingly. “You and your poor man’s vacations. Seriously, it’s time to come back to us in the real world. I don’t care how right or wrong you are to indulge yourself, I can’t have you shooting at people.”

  “I was shooting at people? No shit. I’m further gone than I thought. That’s wonderful. Means I’m not faking it. I was so afraid I was stuck in masturbatory mode.”

  Drew patted Robin’s head with the compress, freshly squeezed and rewetted from her bowl of fresh cool water. “This heart of darkness exploration you want to take into your own mind… this determination to embrace your mental meltdown… I admire your courage. But the thing about those hell and back journeys is—forget what you see in the movies—most heroes don’t make it back.”

  “Try to see it from my perspective, Drew.”

  “I have. I get that your higher self may be directing this journey, not you, and for no better reason than showing up what a control freak you are. You’re determined to regain control of your fate by simply understanding it better, as if you can fix the world with a satisfying enough big picture view of how things should work. Maybe this is why you’re venturing into this land beyond understanding. Beyond reason. So you can learn to let go of all that.”

  “Wow. I didn’t see that. You’re absolutely right.”

  From the appreciative tone in Robin’s voice, Drew figured she hadn’t exactly hit the right note. Worse, she may have just sanctioned Robin’s insanity with her hypothesis.

  She dropped the sponge back into the bowl. Only when it had absorbed enough water did it sink to the bottom of the bowl, and drown. She ignored the symbolic parallel to Robin’s impending fate.

  It was no use beating a dead horse. She’d wait for him to be more receptive, when, after enough time spent in Oz, Kansas started to look good.

  For now, her pragmatism trumped Robin’s idealism. She dragged him into the bathtub and heaped bags of ice on top of him.

  As he lay there beneath the ice, boiling over, she thought, how the hell could Robin be faking this? There was steam coming up through the ice!

  The more rational explanation was that the lightning-like emotional discharges had migrated to the medulla oblongata in his brain, in charge of homeostatic regulation. This was a complete makeover, alright. Not just her psychology was being affected, but her physiology.

  Karma-Chameleon was becoming a true shapeshifter.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Robin shook Dr. Wakefield’s hand. He was a prim and proper English gentleman who had relocated from Suffolk England when the grant money on his project ran out. As to what project he was working on exactly, he refused to say. “Sorry, that’s classified. I’m sure the men in black have my office bugged to this day.”

  Robin smiled politely. “I’m here because I’m experiencing PTSD from a recent trauma. I’ve been subject to schizophrenic episodes, gut-wrenching depression, anxiety arising out of nowhere, hypo-mania, all out mania, and catatonia, in no particular order, and you’ll forgive me if I left one or two things out as my list-memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  Dr. Wakefield nodded, looking if anything, a bit bored. “Well, it’s all par for the course. I can recommend some medication to alleviate the symptoms. With some tweaking and follow up visits, in conjunction with one-on-one talk-therapy and group therapy, I’m confident we can extinguish all sequela from your trauma.”

  Robin was a little taken aback that Wakefield refused to even ask about the nature of the trauma, and was content to treat the symptoms. Irked, he was still strangely assuaged by the English accent and stalwart barricaded demeanor, through which he couldn’t imagine the slightest neurotic impulse could slip.

  “I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Robin said. “I want to make things worse, not better. I want to invite further mental meltdown.”

  Dr. Wakefield paused, his face pensive. Finally, he said, “Better that than subjecting yourself to the ordeal of recovery piecemeal, never knowing if there was one more thing still waiting to bubble to the surface? Well, the theory has merit, intellectually speaking. But psychologically speaking, there’s nothing in the literature that would support that.”

  “No, I want to invite this situation upon myself as a steady state, so I can learn to live in the eye of the tornado. That way, I can enjoy whatever insights these deranged perspectives on the world have to offer, without being overly attached to any one of them.”

  Wakefield just sat there staring at him, as if trying to determine the true nature of the madman before him. He said, “Well, of course, it’s argued that normal waking consciousness consists of fleeting episodes of all these psychological aberrations, but we’re usually quite unconscious of them. And perhaps if we put them under a magnifying glass we’d find the many voices in our heads forge a holistic whole that lends our thinking a well-rounded outlook. But without the rational mind at the helm—”.

  “I want to amplify and magnify those fleeting psychological aberrations, dwell in them, and I want to be fully conscious of it all the while. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  Robin witnessed cracks forming in Wakefield’s demeanor. His face was one freeze-frame after another of comically exaggerated expressions suggesting both his flabbergasted amazement, and fear of being in a locked room with someone a good deal more unstable than he had imagined. His hand kept creeping to his drawer; Robin wondered if he might have a gun tucked away. The idea of someone inviting chaos upon their mind instead of the neat mental order to which he steadfastly clung was also clearly challenging his raison d’etre in ways he was less then open to, and had never encountered.

  Robin should probably have known when to quit, but his ability to read others, while better, still wasn’t exactly where it needed to be.

  Moments later, Robin found himself being hurled out of Wakefield’s room, and falling to the floor outside his office. He was impressed by the fact that Wakefield’s sixty-year-old, six-foot-four frame hadn’t lost any of its vitality. Wakefield told his secretary, “Have security escort this madman out of here. I specialize in people who want to get well, not those who want to turn their breakdowns into fantasies for their own entertainment.”

  Robin gulped. He stood, dusted himself off, and approached the secretary’s desk. “Maybe you can recommend another doctor?” She smiled plastically as she pressed the buzzer under her desk. “I hear they’re doing wonderful things with helmets and magnetic fields,” he said. “I can don one to become far more schizophrenic than I actually am.” The secretary kept squeezing the buzzer until the blood blanched out of her finger. “I’m not married to a high-tech solution, you understand,” Robin explained, “but so little has been done with psychopharmacology that addresses my situation, you know, of turning man into superman.” The secretary nodded absently, the fake smile on her face faltering, despite her fear of disturbing the madman within arm’s reach of her head.

  Five more doctors’ visits ended more or less the same way.

  Robin was getting ready to reconsider his approach, when he just gave up. He was
on his own with his unique project.

  FORTY-NINE

  Drew dropped the steak into the frying pan, fearing the worst. Somehow, she just knew the sound of the sizzle wouldn’t be enough to drown Robin out. He was stuck in depressive mode, and Drew had begun to contemplate striking a pressure point in the back of Robin’s neck to use as an off button.

  The fact that he kept picking dinner time – which was their time – to fall apart in front of her was making Drew question her own coping methods.

  Their designer life together was supposed to insulate them from all this shit; it was supposed to be an impenetrable force field against potshots fired from any and all attackers. No amount of tidying up the picture around him, redeploying the scatter pillows, dimming the lights, rearranging the flowers, repositioning the bonsai plants, was sufficient to restore the impenetrable barrier sealing out noxious mental states. She knew, because she’d tried all of that in the last ten minutes alone. She was starting to wonder if her own sense of mental health stemmed from her psychotically constructed alternate reality she was content to live within, even if she couldn’t sell anyone else on the idea.