FIFTY-NINE
Robin found Drew on one of the castle’s downstairs stone patios courtesy of his implant and the tracking device he had given her with which to lock on to it. He had figured, without having been born in a bastille, she’d never evolve the necessary aptitudes to find her way in or out on her own, far less find her way to him. She had chuckled at the time, but was now quietly grateful for the gesture, even if she still couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of it. They could have attached staff to her twenty-four-seven, but Drew was hard to read of late, and he was the master of the house, or one of them, and they were afraid to bring him together with Robin when Drew wanted to be alone. The GPS system saved everyone a lot of anxiety in a time when everyone was more afraid of losing their jobs than losing their minds to worry.
Sprawled on a patio lounge chair, Drew regarded his mother dancing some ten yards from him, illuminated in the tail-end of evening’s light by the glow of her ever-present fireflies. She was entertaining “the animals.” The gleaming lights of the Christmas wire-sculptures shaped as a giant frog, a life-size reindeer, an adult alligator, and giant bunny rabbit, revealed they were all looking up at her, entranced. She clicked her imaginary clackers together as if a Spanish flamenco dancer, and traced the track of her imaginary partner’s fallen sombrero with her high-heels. She looked, in short, both ecstatic, and crazy, and strangely sane and healthier than most, all at the same time.
If anything, Ernestina struck Robin as slightly more subdued than most of the TV yoga instructors she’d wind down to just before bed. No doubt the help had set out the Christmas decorations for her a tad early (this was the height of summer), figuring her mind was already lost to an eternal present, a land without clocks, calendars, or Mayan fatalistic end-of-world temporal mandalas.
To numb the pain of his grandmother being in the grip of her dementia, presumably, Drew sucked on the working end of a giant bong. The smoke, which Robin now imbibed second hand, was stronger than the sinsemilla she had been exposed to in her youth by her pot-loving father. Maybe this was hashish, or just whatever passed for pot, these days; new, upgraded, more potent. Perhaps it had been hybridized to procure more specific highs in an effort by all those pot growers, who had grown more numerous than lawyers, to find a niche for themselves with less competition.
“I’ve known you to drink, gamble, whore, smoke, and crash cars into trees to justify upgrading to this year’s model,” Robin said, “but never to use pot.”
“Around my family, I refuse to have standards of any kind. Limiting my coping mechanisms could prove deadly.” His eyes remained locked on grand mama, suggesting the singed psyche he was looking to ablate with his latest ploys.
Robin eyed the old crone and broke out laughing despite herself. “Come on. This isn’t funny to you? I think she’s a riot. Glass half-full, Drew... You’ll live longer.”
Drew took another long pull off his bong, ignoring her, or maybe factoring her into the equation as the latest irritant, thus justifying holding the smoke trapped in his lungs that much longer.
Robin said, “I can’t believe you can be so good at helping people trapped in the mazes of their own minds find their way to freedom, while you remain forever lost inside your head.”
“Self-pity is a learned behavior like everything else,” Drew replied. “Work at it long enough, and only Pavlov will be able to undo the conditioning.” He took another hit. “I assure you I’m fully aware of how ridiculous I’m being. But when your own mind conditionally responds to life with pain and grief, manufactured synthetic highs becomes the next best thing to self-love.”
“What happened to just getting over yourself?”
Drew laughed. “I leave the quests for the holy grail to you. The two of us is just nature striking a balance.”
Robin pondered Drew’s fortress psychology, the extreme measures he’d taken to get around it, seeking out illicit affairs in order to role-play someone else, to be free of himself for just a time, only to end up back here, as if none of it were doing the least bit of good. The fact that even with his girlfriends, he wasn’t all that different than he was with her, suggested just how hard it was for him to get distance on himself.
The sad truth was, she’d ignored Drew, his health, and the health of their relationship, to play rescuer to the Renaissance figures. And now the supports she relied on for her own renewal were no longer in place, which explained, at least in part, why she was losing the race, and coming up to speed behind the Renaissance types, and not ahead of them. She realized her own compulsiveness needed to be addressed as part of the overall solution, but as always, that could wait. First Drew, then her.
Robin ran her finger through her hair in an effort to curl it as she ironically tried to make her thinking go farther and straighter than usual. “Try this little exercise with me…”
“Oh no, no theater therapy on the back patio. My mother couldn’t stand anyone pulling focus.”
“We have a window of opportunity here, now that you’re too stoned out of your mind to fight me tooth and nail.”
“A Harding is never too stoned out of their mind to fight tooth and nail. That’s usually when we get going.”
“Humor me then, let me think I can live the same purposeful life as you, determined to do yourself in with such conviction. That, or you can keep drifting into oblivion in an effort to crawl back into your mother’s womb as the best solution.”
“Is this one of those exercises where I can pretend to be cooperating while I continue to get high?”
“Yes.”
“The peace accord negotiated, we may now proceed.”
Robin shook her head, a smirk stuck to her face.
“Close your eyes, and let the sound of my voice hypnotize you.”
“Save your time. You could stick needles through my cheeks and I would feel no pain.”
“I want you to think back to an incident from your childhood, with your mother, one that left you traumatized. If that’s a Guinness world record collection of episodes, then I want you to open to page one and start there. And I want you to rewrite the episode the way it should have gone.”
“The-Truth-Shall-Set-Me-Free Robin Wakefield wants me to lie to myself as a path to freedom, in order to forge my own tunnel of love to the other side?”
“You said it; opposites attract. If the truth shall set me free, maybe lies are your path to freedom. It’s called narrative-remembering. It’s all the rage in literature. Julian Barnes, winner of the Man Booker award, says time is a solvent, not a fixative. We remake ourselves constantly by distorting our recollections. Only, with some of us, in a constant state of PTSD, the memories are too fixed. Time has become a fixative, and has ceased to be a solvent, dissolving us back into the divine ground from which all consciousness arises.”
“Enough with the theorizing, you’re going to put me to sleep. I’m sold. The whole point of power-dating, all along, was to build up enough reserves to support power-dreaming.” Drew set down the bong. “Still not sure I can do this on my own. My mother has a way of winning these exchanges, even in my dreams. Maybe if I imagined you there with me, we can tackle her together. Maybe you can forge a psychic connection with me, come inside my head.”
Robin hesitated, not sure if she should provide him the crutch; this was his battle, after all, and he had to win it. She decided finally it was no different than providing a beginning swimmer with a flotation device until he was confident enough to cast it aside. “Okay. One more thing—when you go back in time, try seeing yourself as a young boy to help give you some distance on your actual self.”
Robin had managed to hypnotize herself as well as Drew with her lilting words, and had joined him, just as Drew had imagined, via a psychic link, on the stage in his mind’s eye.
***
“There you are, darling. Saints be praised,” Lady Harding said excitedly. Speaking in a pressured manner, she acted out for ten-year-old Drew his assignment for the evening. “When the
Birminghams get here, I want you to enter with this butcher block in hand, set it down on the table, and start flinging the knives at your father’s chest. One after the other. Don’t dally. Then run out of the room as if you’re planning on running straight to China.”
“Why, mother?”
“Because, it’s the eighties, darling. And the world just hasn’t caught up with me yet. Spirit says give it thirty years or so, and I’ll be fighting to keep up. But for now, we have to find a way to survive these insufferable bores, elevate them, instill in them a viable humanity. Mother Nature needs our help, darling. God needs our help. I’m afraid, like the rest of us, He goes through dry spells. Pity anyone living through one of them. But that’s our fate. Now, will you help me?”
“Since you put it like that. Maybe we should discuss your taste for melodrama.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so precocious, darling. Really cramps my style.” She handed him the butcher knife. “Now practice flinging the knives at the chair hard enough to insure they seat decently. I can’t have them bouncing off your father.”
“You plan on him surviving this, right?”
“Heavens, yes. I’m years away from exhausting his trust fund.”
“You should consider getting someone to play my part. I feel my destiny lies elsewhere, mother.”
“All in good time, child. Until then, I’m afraid we’ll have to put your precociousness to good use.”
***
“A shame the Dunstans couldn’t be here,” Lord Birmingham intoned. He chewed on his steak as if it was going down just as hard as the idea of the Dunstans giving him the cold shoulder.
“They’re a petty people, dear,” Lady Birmingham said. “You probably failed to glance at his wife’s breasts after she took care to put them on display.” She separated her corn and potatoes as if she was rehearsing her inevitable stint in Yorkshire Psychiatric Hospital in advance. Breakdowns did run in the family, Lady Harding mused.
“What about you, Lady Harding,” Lord Birmingham asked. It wasn’t clear to Lady Harding if he kept his eyes glued to his plate to hide his shame, or if he’d reached the ripe old age now where coordinating, knife, fork, food, and mouth took more care, to make sure everything went down without choking him. “You seem to be suffering this slight better than the rest of us. You always abide others flaws so graciously.”
“I tell you how she abides it,” Lord Harding said, after washing down the two-inch thick slice of Angus beef, out of which he’d just taken a good bite, with a glass of red wine. “She sends them an anonymous letter with white powder, then phones to alert them of the fright she got watching the evening news of deadly strains of virus being mailed to politically prominent figures.”
Lord and Lady Birmingham laughed so hard they started to cough up their food. Both reached for the wine at the same time.
“I don’t phone personally,” Lady Harding said. “That would be too obvious.”
Drew marched into the room like a tin soldier, set the butcher block down on the table opposite his father. “Is it true, dad, you took away my allowance?”
“It’s time you learned the value of money, young man,” Lord Harding said.
“I bought this knife set for you as a peace offering, with the last of my savings.” Drew proceeded to bury one knife after another into Lord Harding’s chest.
His father, accustomed to his mother’s theatrics, held his pose as long as he could to let the horror on his face singe its way into Lord and Lady Birmingham’s eyes like smoke from a burning house. Then, an accomplished performer in his own right, he collapsed face down into his steak, which he liked bloody. So when Lord Birmingham rushed over to lift him up, his face was covered with blood. Although, in truth, that was just an unintended bonus.
Lord Birmingham felt for a pulse. “You’ve killed your father, you dreadful hateful little boy.”
“Thanks for confirming,” the young Drew replied. “I’d hate to think I’d fled the country for no good reason.” He ran out of the room as if he planned to make it to China by morning.
Lady Birmingham, who had held her composure all this time, finally broke. She screamed hysterically. Lady Harding adjusted her earplugs, pressed down on her ears shielded by her hairstyle in honor of the evening’s festivities; it was not usually worn this low.
She accepted Lord Birmingham’s solace when he came over to hug her, only then weeping herself, just loud enough to hear over her earplugs.
Later that night, after the guests were gone, she dictated her instructions to her footman. “Charles, don’t let me forget to mail them, saying I hope they enjoyed the dinner theater, and it was all a big joke. That way they can flap their mouths by way of free press, to push up my ratings with the royals. They’ll wonder why it went down so early in the evening. Best they don’t find out that was because of what insufferable bores they are, and I was only too happy to get rid of them. We’ll put the whole thing off on the boy’s poor sense of timing, say he was so eager to get his part right. He came in early, missed his cue.”
“Yes, mam.”
***
Robin walked in on Drew sobbing in his bedroom, flopped down at the edge of his bed. He looked up at her, and seemed to know who she was, even though this was the ten-year-old version of Robin, still in female form, to go with the ten-year-old Drew.
“Why are you crying?” Robin said. “She seems like a pretty cool mom.”
“I’m just part of her puppet theater. I have no reason for being except as a prop, a tool, a figment of her imagination. She’s so intent on being the talk of the elite social circles that she sacrifices me daily on the altar of her ego.”
“Maybe if you talked in a more child-appropriate manner, it would help the healing.”
“Sorry,” Drew said, finding his voice again. It was strange to be lucid dreaming together, both old and young versions of themselves present at the same time. Drew explained, wiping his eyes, “Think of getting stabbed in the heart over and over again. You feel like a zombie who can’t die, after a while, and you walk around like one.”
“That’s not how I see you.”
“That’s because I’m reborn again in my own fantasy worlds, where everything is dandy. One thing I learned from my mother, and that was the importance of setting the stage, and directing the drama.”
Robin realized she was getting to the roots of Drew’s present day designer living, understanding the psyche that had formed around these early traumas like a scab.
“Why don’t we do that scene over with your mom and Lord and Lady Birmingham? This time, don’t play the part she gave you, play what part you want. Let her squirm and complain and try and regain control of the scene, and show her she can end up with a better evening’s drama by letting you be yourself.”
“She’s the queen of the stage. She’s too hard to beat at her own game.”
“Only this is your dream world. You’re in charge here. This is a place where everything can be different; and things can go your way for a change.”
Drew dried his snivels. “I’ll try.”
***
“Remind me why we’re doing this again?” Young Drew said, finishing the round of hopscotch ahead of Young Robin, and waiting for her to take her turn. His resistance to facing down Lady Harding must have been great, because they were heading for the Dinner Scene, take two, with Lord and Lady Birmingham. It was evening, and suddenly they were outside the castle, and it was morning, courtesy of dreamtime and dream logic.
“If you don’t take control of your mind, someone else will,” Young Robin explained. “Today it’s Lady Harding. Tomorrow—who knows? Our adversaries are getting better all the time. I agreed to this vacation from life on the idea we would use it to take our game up a level. Otherwise, I have killers to catch, and Renaissance figures blending ever-new aptitudes and disciplines to bring the future crashing down on our heads.”
“I’ll be happier, if I do this, right? More here and now in our grown up adu
lt world? There’ll be fewer rabbit holes to step into, drawing me down into my past each time I take a stroll across the grass?” Drew’s speech was pressured.
“More than that, you’ll have the power of mind you need to bend reality to your will,” Young Robin assured him. “You won’t be reacting defensively to the world, anymore. Instead, you’ll use the extra psychic energy to shape your life into a true work of art.”
“I do that now.”
Young Robin argued, “Only, you live in your designer world the way a psychotic lives in his imaginary world. It’s the most impenetrable fortress you could possibly create, designed to keep life out, not welcome it in.”
“Fine, I’ll go deal with my bitch of a mother,” Young Drew said, more resigned than convinced. Young Robin realized she had just become another bully, like his mother, and this was him submitting in the same way. If so, what was about to go down would just be a play within a play, another moat thrown around his mind for protection.
God damn it, had she loved Drew this long, never having realized the extent of the psychological damage? Had Drew fooled her, too, with his designer living, and bon vivant nature? Had she succumbed to the spell as much as he?
If she was right, and lies mattered more than the truth, in his case, then intent was still all important. Did he really believe those lies so completely that he relaxed into them, accepted them as his truth? Or was he clinging to them fearfully, like a man afraid to let go for fear of drowning? So long as it was the latter, they were both in trouble.
This was no longer about boasting to their snobby friends of how self-actualized they were; it was about survival. Without rescuing more psychic energy from their pasts and their futures, in which they invested much fear, they wouldn’t have the presence of mind to survive the present.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 170