by PJ Manney
The civilized perfection of the Phoenix Club in DC, contrasted with the primal cave beneath, had its corollary here. On one hand, the camp was a rustic paradise, comfortably reminiscent of childhood memories. But underneath the fun and games ran a primal psychology deep and dark, almost sinister, and counter to the supposed gentility and sophistication of the participants. And the members’ repudiation of their enormous responsibilities, in exchange for the matchless power they held, disturbed him.
But maybe that’s how boys could be boys.
Dan and Justin swept Peter up as the audience flooded out and spread among the camp festivities. The Ecstasy fountain sat right in the center of the main party area. The bloodred juice that poured continually from its jets reminded him a little too queasily of the drugged goblet at his initiation. It was already surrounded six deep with men dipping glasses into the fountain’s bowl and wandering away. Justin grabbed Peter’s arm.
“No thanks, Justin! Not for me!”
“Come on! You don’t know what you’re missing!” He continued to pull Peter toward the fountain. A very tall man, about six foot nine and recognizable from interview shows as a famous author, grabbed his other arm with a smile and pulled Peter closer.
“You’ll experience things you’ve never imagined,” said the famous author.
Justin was next to the fountain, filling a glass. Peter struggled to shake them off. Suddenly, Dan was behind him, pulling.
“Justin! Mike! Let the poor guy be!” The four-hundred-pound man was stronger than he looked. Yanked from his captor’s grasp, Peter bounced off Dan’s stomach.
“Thanks!” gasped Peter.
“No worries. Justin’s great, but he’s a pushy bastard!” The two men forced their way upstream away from the fountain. “You’re a smart fella to avoid that thing. Follow me.” The big man waddled up to a bar and, shoving his way through the pack of thirsty men with his sheer girth, asked the beleaguered bartender for two unopened bottles of forty-year-old scotch and two glasses. He cracked a cap, poured two glasses, and handed a bottle and glass to Peter. Dan held up his own glass in a toast. “To the greatest mancation on earth!” Dan watched to make sure Peter drank.
So Peter took a sip. One little sip couldn’t hurt.
Then he took another. And another. Thus armed, Peter Bernhardt made his way amongst the natives.
An enormous bonfire in a clearing drew Peter as it had others. The men gathered were backlit, so Peter could not see their faces, but only heard their drunken voices. As he moved past, their darkened faces saw his well-lit features, then ignored him. One group compared their cloned champion racehorses. Another discussed their bid to buy the entire NFL—every team—although the Green Bay Packers still refused to cooperate. A third surrounded a man convincing his compatriots to move with him into sea-based communities immune from taxes, laws, or social mores and leave society to the schmucks!
And together they ignored him. Peter drank more scotch. Part of him felt like taking a slug at their self-satisfied faces. The other part understood that they just didn’t know him. That’s when the cogent part of his brain realized that his own hippocampus, which was laying down memories, and his cortex, which was processing information, were drunk. And the Hippo 2.0 and Cortex 2.0, doing the same, were sober. Two states of consciousness—one altered, one not—inhabited his mind at once.
Confused, he entered a torch-lit glen filled with younger members sharing joints, pipes, pills, and powder with amazing openness. One good-looking black man, about his own age, with shoulder-length dreads, a soul patch, and a Hendrix tee broke away from a group partaking of pills to stroll toward a log cabin with a sign above it, painted in the psychedelic lettering of the 60’s: “Magical Mystery Store.” Pop would have loved the name.
Grateful for an enclosed space to inhabit, Peter followed him in. It housed a pharmacopeia of illegal or simply questionable mind-altering substances, all labeled in glass-fronted rustic drawers, like a serve-yourself general store. And it was free.
The young man, who introduced himself as Andre, saw Peter wide-eyed at the display. “Need advice?” Peter hesitated. Andre offered, “No, really, I’m a biochemist. So what’ll it be?” He rummaged through the drawers. “A brother cooked up some primo acid. And I can highly recommend the E. Made it myself.” He pulled out a handful of MDMA for Peter to look at. “Love-up-o-rama. Add a little Viagra over there and you’ve got sextasy on a plate.”
“Uh, no thanks.”
The good doctor pocketed the pills and pointed to another drawer, “Well, if pot’s your thing, this stuff’s got the highest level of THC I’ve ever smoked, with just the right amount of THCV. Real nice shit.” When Peter didn’t respond, he offered, “Hey, there’s harder shit, too. Crystal, crack, smack, but Dr. Andre could not recommend those. It would be unethical.” He said this with a straight face, until both guys started laughing.
By now, Peter had practice holding up his whisky bottle and glass. It was his cross against vampires. “I’m good for now. Not ready to shift gears.”
Andre nodded knowingly. “Old school is cool.”
Peter pointed the bottle at the psychedelically crazed Hendrix on Andre’s chest. It didn’t seem appropriate attire for Camp Week. “My main man, Jimi. Irony?”
“Fuck, yeah, brother! Gotta shake it up, ya know?” He fist-bumped Peter again. “You have fun, now. And when you need some fine-tuning, you find me. I’ll set you up right.” Andre headed out, but stopped. “You just a Jimi fan, or do you play?”
“I play.”
“Then get your ass over to the main lodge, man! There’s some serious jammin’ goin’. How often you get to play with a member of the Grateful Dead?”
Maybe a small part of camp was his kind of place.
On his way to the main lodge, he passed the red light district on the camp’s eastern edge, with men and women, some looking suspiciously young and dressed in diaphanous togas leaving little to the imagination. Beyond them were tiny, “single” cabins erected for each escort, like the one-room prostitute shacks of the Old West. There were hundreds of them.
A Crichton stood at a gate and asked as he passed, “Anything strike your fancy, sir?”
“Uh . . . thanks, but . . . Not really . . .”
“We have lots more to choose from! Every race and ethnicity imaginable, straight, gay, bears, crossdressers, trannies, BDSM, voyeurs, groups, exotics . . .”
“Exotics?”
“Dwarves, amputees, hermaphrodites . . .”
Peter was thankful animals and children were not part of the sales pitch. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The thought sickened him.
“Come on, sir! Indulge yourself. You deserve it. I promise you’ll have a great time!”
Peter’s sober self noticed a sense of pressure in the sales pitch’s vocal tone, facial expressions, and body stance. Like the Crichton had orders to get as many people into the shacks as possible.
Or was he imagining it?
That’s when Peter saw Dionysus, the worse for wear as befitted the hedonistic god. His leafy garland was cockeyed atop his golden hair and missing some grapes. The animal skin, tied hastily around his waist in a knot, scarcely covered his genitals and ass. He leaned languorously against a tree between a pair of “fair-girdled nymphs,” two barely toga-clad young men, delicate, dark, and exotic, like a pair of young princes from an ancient Indian or Persian painting, and their beauty befitted Dionysus. It made a mythic tableau right off a Greek urn.
Dreamily, his partner looked up from his charges and glimpsed Peter. Carter’s face shifted, betraying a yearning and sadness he had never exhibited before.
Its possessiveness disturbed Peter.
The princes caught their john’s change of mood and quickly led Dionysus away to a distant cabin. Peter wondered if either of them had ever screwed a god before.
He wasn’t sure if his implants or the place gave him the creeps. All he knew was reality wasn’t the same anymore. And he
didn’t like it. He hurried to the main lodge.
The Phoenix Club hijinks were indeed summer camp for big boys. But for all the freedom Dionysus bestowed, Peter wasn’t sure how free they were. While he couldn’t begrudge them mind-altering substances or sexual whims, were these freedom? Or simply the indulging of what society deemed vices? Maybe back when social pressures to conform were intense, like the Victorian period, drug consumption or sexual promiscuity might have been interpreted as a sense of freedom. But now? And among men of power and influence, for whom nothing was off-limits, with or without the club? It felt like one gigantic illusion, as much of a stage trick as Carter’s sunlight effect.
Looming in the woods, the lodge resembled a smaller version of Yosemite’s legendary Ahwahnee Hotel. Music could be heard inside. They were covering one of his favorite bands—R.E.M.—and doing a halfway decent job with “Welcome to the Occupation,” one of the rare songs that slayed the violent and avaricious twin dragons of American politics and imperialism.
Maybe there were people here who felt the way he did. He was desperate to join them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Hungover and sleep deprived, members had the opportunity to attend a series of seminars throughout the week, led by Phoenicians on subjects like US foreign and domestic policy, the economy, business opportunities, cultural trends, and high-tech developments. But the best-attended presentation was given by Peter Bernhardt in the amphitheater late the second afternoon, where his fellow brothers would witness a club first: a cyborg sales pitch.
With almost all two thousand members in attendance, Peter gazed out at everybody who was anybody. All at once. What the hell was he doing here? It should have been Carter doing the selling, not him.
Carter stood off to the side, watching the crowd to relay the identity of questioners and their question’s subtext to a tiny earbud in Peter’s right ear. It was important that any government health regulators be identified so Peter could concentrate his arguments on them. Carter had already pointed out FDA chairman James Clement. Peter concentrated on the slender bald man’s pate.
Peter took a deep breath and spoke as clearly as he could. “The degenerative cognitive diseases that destroy memory and intellect—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia—have had a sharp rise in incidence worldwide. By 2050, one in eighty-five people will have Alzheimer’s—that’s over one hundred million people. Beyond the excruciating emotional toll on patients and their families, there is another toll as well. Memory lost is wisdom lost, which is value lost, which is money lost, both personally to the victim and economically to society. Over ten million Americans suffer from neurological diseases, which cost this country over five hundred billion dollars a year to treat. The five and a half million Alzheimer’s sufferers alone cost two hundred billion dollars a year. And while there are many drugs on the market and in the research pipeline for memory enhancement or to arrest diseases like Alzheimer’s, what I’m about to show you is far beyond simple pharmacological enhancement, which can only improve memory up to twenty percent, or at best, arrest the disease midstep. Instead, this is memory restored. And amplified.”
The large telescreen erected behind him displayed colorful diagrams of the Hippo 2.0 and Cortex 2.0. He walked the audience through the technology’s basics and screened a scene of a patient, whose face was obscured by surgical drapes, but whose brain was exposed through the hole bored into the skull.
“Just in case you were wondering . . . Yes. That’s my brain.” Gasps and exclamations erupted on cue.
“And no. I don’t have Alzheimer’s. But I might eventually. My father has it. Because of a mysterious hesitancy by the FDA to continue our research,” which Peter said looking directly at the FDA’s Clement, “we’ve had only one patient on the combination of the Hippo 2.0 and the Cortex 2.0 and I think we can count that as a success. I am that patient.” He pulled the Cortex 2.0 processor from his back pocket and held it up in his hand.
“I wanted to prove that this therapy is safe and works. There are things I know as a conscious, healthy, intelligent person that I couldn’t ask my patients to describe. Communication with an advanced Alzheimer’s patient is very limited, especially patients whose families are desperate enough to submit them to experimental brain surgery. And I needed to know . . . what was it like before, versus after? While I could only surmise the inner world of my pre-op patients, I knew my pre-op mental state.
“So I stand here, to show you what the Hippo 2.0 and Cortex 2.0 can do. If you remember Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, The 39 Steps, you might have an idea what it’s like to have a set of these implanted. You remember everything. You can’t help it. It’s not obsessive or compulsive. It just is. And it’s beyond an end to misplaced car keys or forgotten anniversaries. I’ll remember each and every thing about my day today. Even if my brain doesn’t think it’s important, the Cortex 2.0 will capture it, because my own brain might have been mistaken the first time.” He noticed a man ducking behind another in the back. He pointed at him. “If you’re hiding from me, well, there’s no magic. I can’t intuit you or see through walls or read your mind or see you in the past or the future. You’re safe from Mr. Memory.
“But for those with cognitive degeneration so severe they can’t remember their own names or the names of their loved ones without this,” pointing up at the screen with one hand and tapping his head with the other, “this is life itself. We are the sum total of all our experiences, our lessons, our successes, our failures, our loves, our hates, from birth to death. And if those memories disappear, what then? Who are we?
“So let’s get started. I’d like to go down the first three rows here, so we’re not here all day.” Peter walked up to the man on the end. “Hi. Please tell me your name and your occupation and then hand the mike to the person next to you, who will do the same, until we complete these three rows. That’ll be about two hundred fifty people.” He handed the man a wireless mike.
The gentleman cleared his throat and spoke softly. “My name is . . . uh . . . Michael Fischler. I’m . . . uh . . . CFO of an . . . um . . . engineering company.”
A guy from the back yelled, “Engineering company my ass. It’s Bechtel, for Christ’s sake!”
The audience hooted as Mr. Fischler blushed and passed the mike.
And so it went. Man by man, until the first three rows were completed. The last man handed the mike to Carter.
“I will now repeat the audience’s statements verbatim,” said Peter, “and if I make a mistake, I’m sure you’ll all let me know, won’t you?” More hooting commenced.
And he did. One by one, but quickly, rattling them off machine-gun-like. All two hundred sixty-eight members.
After the inevitable wolf whistles and applause, he said, “Now all this proves is I’m a self-made idiot savant. The Phoenix Club’s own Rain Man.” Everyone laughed. “And other than making me as seamless at introductions as my illustrious partner over there,” he pointed to Carter, who gave a little wave to the audience, the majority of which clapped or yelled his name in return, “it’s a cheap parlor trick. Repetition of information is not enough. What intelligence requires, especially for the cognitively impaired, is synthesis. The ability to take the raw data you’re given, find patterns, and make sense out of it. Here’s the real trick.” Carter rolled out a whiteboard to the center of the stage. “Mike, since you’re a CFO, I’m assuming you’re good with numbers, and you can check my work afterward and see if I’m right.” Mike nodded.
“Of the two hundred and sixty-eight men I just met, the following data becomes apparent: there are eight Johns, seven Jameses, Roberts, and Williams, six Michaels and Davids, five each of Richard, Charles, Joseph, Thomas, Christopher, Alex, and Steve.” He wrote the names and numbers quickly on the board. “Four each of Daniel, Peter, Paul, Mark, Don, George, Ken, Ed. Three each for Brian, Ronald, Anthony, Kevin, Larry. Two of Jason, Matthew, Gary, Tim, Jose, Jeff, Frank, Scott, Eric, Andrew, Ray, Greg, Josh, Jerry,
Dennis, Walter, Patrick, Phil.” He stopped writing. “Then there’s only one Harold, Doug, Henry, Carl, Arthur, Ryan, Roger, Joe, Juan, Jack, Al, Justin, Terry, Gerald, Keith, Sam, Ralph, Nicholas, Roy, Ben, Ming, Brandon, Adam, Harry, Fred, Wayne, Billy, Louis, Jeremy, Aaron, Randy, Howard, Eugene, Carlos, Russell, Victor, Martin, Ernest, Todd, Craig, Alan, Sean, Clarence, Nathaniel, Antonio, Rodney, Manuel, Marvin, Vincent, Zachary, Mario, Leroy, Francis, Theo, Cliff, Miguel, Oscar, Dusty, Pedro, Damien, Marcelus, Wolfgang, Jedidiah, Samudragupta, and who could forget Tinsulaananda!” He rattled these last off so quickly, he had to catch his breath. “Based on your own occupation descriptions, fifty-eight of you are in industry, seventy-five are professionals, meaning medical doctors or lawyers, sixty-two are in finance, forty-nine of you are academics, fifty-three are in government, forty-six are in the media and . . . well, thirty-eight of you are lobbyists, and I’m not sure what category that goes in.”
A voice yelled from the audience, “Lobbyists don’t have a category. They have a species; they evolved from leeches.” The audience laughed, lobbyists loudest of all.
“This is the first step in the synthesis of large amounts of raw data. Computers do this all the time, but now I can. The next step in synthesis would be surmising the meaning behind the data, which a computer can’t do alone. Do certain names confer higher status in social orders? And if I get some sleep, this little analysis will be much, much better. When I dream, I see patterns emerge that I never would have otherwise, because the two cortexes compare notes.
“Now I told you at the opening that the Cortex 2.0 is still a work in progress, because we haven’t completely broken the brain’s codes. But we will. Within the year, I hope. So what does that mean? Very soon, you’ll be able to read my thoughts.”