Nine Kinds of Naked

by Tony Vigorito

  Some kind of foolish prank, it was generally agreed.

  97 FORTUNATELY FOR Special Agent J. J. Speed, Wilhelmina had followed Diablo and Elizabeth into the studio that Diablo had referred to as “the eye of the storm,” and he was consequently able to sustain his stakeout. The eye of the storm was an immediately pleasing space for Elizabeth to enter, entirely sunlit with several chandelier crystals hanging by fishing line in front of every window, refracting hundreds of prismatic rainbows into a gently entrancing dance around the otherwise barren surfaces of the room. The floor was alone in being covered, flaunting an astonishingly ornate Oriental rug. Diablo called it his magic carpet, and his only prized possession.

  Off to the side of Diablo’s magic carpet were two desks set at a right angle to one another, crammed with top-end computer equipment. “What’s all this?” Elizabeth asked cheerfully, very much relaxed now that she was in this ostensible holy of holies and getting some answers.

  “This is my studio,” Diablo drolly stated, idly clicking a few keys and checking a couple of monitors. “Central command, you might call it. Headquarters. This is where m2 takes over the world.”

  “I knew it!” Elizabeth gushed, and Special Agent J. J. Speed echoed her.

  “You knew what?” Diablo asked, as a couple of strokes from his hand kick-started Wilhelmina’s engine, and outside and around the corner, Special Agent J. J. Speed cursed.

  “I knew you were Billy Pronto.”

  “I am no such person. In fact, I don’t believe there is such a person, although the past few minutes have certainly inspired my uncertainty.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that Billy Pronto is the gentleman jail guard who gave me that Bible you’re still hugging.”

  Elizabeth looked at the Bible she was still hugging. “Billy Pronto is a crusader,” she replied with calm certainty, “and I expect he wants his Bible back.”

  “Nope.” Diablo shook his head. “Like I said, I’m pretty sure Billy Pronto doesn’t actually exist, but don’t even try to ask me how he gave me the Bible. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “All right.” Elizabeth lounged down upon the luxurious rug, unintentionally sensuous as she laid the Bible aside and began stroking her hands across the woolen fibers of the rug. “Suppose you tell me what you’re talking about.”

  Surprising her with his agility, Diablo hopped into a sitting position on the rug in front of Elizabeth. “All right,” he agreed, licking his lips in spry enthusiasm. “I’ve never told anyone this before, and I’m only telling you because this is a very compelling synchronicity that we have happening here.”

  “There is nothing but synchronicity,” Elizabeth said again. “It is only our attention that tunes in and out of it.” Her rug stroking had attracted Zippy’s hand-fetishist attention, and Elizabeth was now petting her with both hands, ravishing her into a purring paroxysm of feline ecstasy. Elsewhere, an uncontainably pissed-off Special Agent J. J. Speed relieved his mounting frustration at this aggravation of his stakeout by growling “goddamnit to hell” every few seconds. He could barely make out what they were saying over Wilhelmina’s reverberations, and kept losing whole sentences.

  “That’s exactly right.” Diablo pointed at Elizabeth with genuine severity. “There is nothing but synchronicity, and that’s the only reason why I’m telling you anything at all. So listen up, buttercup, because you’re going to have to take me at my word if either of us is to have any hope of discovering what is going on. As far as I thought I knew, Billy Pronto—the guy who gave me that Bible—is a runaway jail guard, and I’ve never seen him costumed in any creative anachronism, crusader or otherwise. I first met him the day you were born, as a matter of fact, shortly before the tornado hit, and I thought he died that day, but then five years later I almost ran him down when he was hitchhiking.” Diablo sighed, having no idea how to explain the preposterousness of the predicament, or even how much of it was necessary to include. He attempted to wave the nonsense away as if it were a cloud of peppermint-farting mosquitoes, largely to no avail. “Anyway, ever since then, every time I drive my truck he’s along the road trying to hitch a ride, never changing out of his uniform, never aging a second, invisible to everybody else, always talking in the present tense, and always grinning like a goddamn maniac. That’s who gave me that Bible, not some crusader with a jackass. So,” Diablo concluded immensely, as if he had just presented an irrefutable argument. “Suppose you tell me what you’re talking about.”

  Elizabeth blinked. “You’re asking me to take you at your word? That might be the most unlikely explanation ever offered about anything.”

  Diablo shrugged. “Having a dream about a drug-dealing child who smokes you down with some kind of blood-boiling hash and then turns into a crusader who you imagine you see the following afternoon walking his pet donkey around town is hardly a more plausible scenario.” Diablo paused, then as an afterthought asked, “Was the donkey in the dream?”

  “Drug-dealing child?” Special Agent J. J. Speed repeated aghast, desperate to decipher their conversation. “Pet donkey?”

  “No,” Elizabeth replied, smirking in spite of her sulk. “But didn’t you say you had the same dream?”

  “I had a dream in which I smoked m2, but it was a jail guard who gave it to me, not some delinquent child.”

  “What happened when you smoked it?”

  Diablo confounded his expression. “The same thing that happened when you smoked it, of course. Every tooth in my mouth was kicked in, every bone in my body was broken, and every cell in my body was raped. I was utterly destroyed, supremely perished, and then I witnessed the blinding peace of divine consciousness. Basically, I fathomed hell and soared angelic, and then I woke up like I’ve never woken up before. I mean, there’s kicking awake, and there’s flying out of bed and landing nine feet across the room feeling like your skin just spun twice around your skeleton.” He leaned forward. “You do realize that thousands of people have had this dream, don’t you?”

  Elizabeth shook her head innocently, terrified by what she was hearing. “So what’s happening?”

  “The human imagination is stirring awake,” Diablo grinned reassuringly. “What else could a dream like that be? The imagination is nonlocal, accessible to all and possessed by none. This thing is manifesting across the collective unconscious. And there have always been shared dreamscapes, naturally, shared expressions of archetypal themes ranging from the foolish to the frightful. The showing-up-to-school-naked dream, the being-chased-by-men-in-black dream, right? But the m2 dream, this thing is obviously something else entirely. It’s not just an expression of the archetypes of human consciousness; it’s an activation of the archetypes of human consciousness. We’re dreaming ourselves awake and waking up to the dream of life. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. This is gnosis. That’s why synchronicity storms are getting more and more frequent. You’ve noticed this?”

  Elizabeth nodded vigorously, repeating the phrase “synchronicity storms” under her breath, followed by Special Agent J. J. Speed.

  “Of course you have.” He paused and gazed knowingly at her. “I’m preaching hallelujah to the amen choir, aren’t I?”

  Elizabeth smiled and continued nodding vigorously.

  “Well anyway, Billy Pronto—who I did not believe really existed until today—he once told me that synchronicity is what it feels like to remember the future. If that’s true, and I suspect it is, then this thing is only getting bigger as we get closer to it. I think it has every intention of finding its way into our waking life, and it’s no mere coincidence that Laughing Jim emerged just as the war in the Middle East got ten million degrees hotter. In fact, I don’t think it’s outside the range of possibility that Laughing Jim is a material manifestation of the collective unconscious, the pinch of the hourglass, the antidote to ennui. That would explain why meteorologists are so baffled by it, anyway.” Diablo paused. “You should know, by the way, that this thing cares noth
ing for the life of an individual. This thing would just as soon drive you mad as enlighten you.”

  “What is this thing?” Elizabeth asked.

  “This thing is the impulse,” Diablo replied cryptically, “and its only objective is the evolution of humanity.”

  98 ELSEWHERE IN the French Quarter, the door to a ho-hum Irish pub kicked open as if a cowboy villain were making his swaggering entrance, and a great gust of wind startled everyone inside. A jangle of commotion ensued as the doors to every refrigerator and cooler flew open, and momentarily the front door slammed shut and all was quiet once again. After some investigation, it was discovered that every bottle of beer—hundreds of them—had been uncapped, their caps flattened into little serrated disks and embedded all over the floors like ninja throwing stars. Further investigation revealed that every bottle of wine—excepting the Chilean varieties—had also been uncorked, though the scattered corks were not similarly weaponized. Conversely, every bottle in the bank of liquors remained sealed, though it was soon found that their caps were warped on so tightly that the strongest grips in the room found only fresh blisters.

  This might have been a bankrupting inventory loss for the proprietor, but fortunately for him, the blast of hyperionized air provided a rush of creative serotonin and he was thusly inspired to throw an impromptu pity party, free beer, free wine, donations accepted. Within half an hour his establishment was packed and raging, tip jars overflowing as the barfly witnesses showcased the bottle-cap ninja throwing stars and expounded and exaggerated this tale of wind and wonder, toasting every guzzle and sip with the Irish blessing engraved above the bar:

  MAY YOU BE ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD!

  99 BACK IN THE EYE of the storm studio, Elizabeth and Diablo agreed to disagree on the issue of Billy Pronto’s attire. The one fact that was intersubjectively indisputable was that somebody had given Diablo an heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible, and as Elizabeth began examining the Bible, she recollected that her father had once told her a story of how her mother had changed the family name to Wildhack by impressively forging all the necessary documents. Once he discovered this fraud after her death, he explained, he had chosen nevertheless to abide by Wildhack as the family surname as a means of honoring his wife and her mother, whom he loved very much. The original family surname, he told her, was Wilson.

  When she related this to Diablo, he was tentatively amazed, though he cautioned that Wilson is hardly a rare surname. By way of response, Elizabeth threw open the cover and started examining the genealogical information it had just occurred to her surely existed within the front matter. After some moments, she sat up, closed the heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible, and quietly announced, “This is my father’s Bible.”

  Diablo slid the Bible over to himself. “Let me see that,” he said, unavoidably curious about this artifact from Billy Pronto. After examining it for a minute, he pointed to the inside front page and read aloud the inscription, presumably from Elizabeth’s great-grandmother: “Cherish it.”

  “What?” Elizabeth leaned forward incredulous. “It says cherry shit?”

  “Not cherry shit,” Diablo said. “Cherish it.”

  100 AT THAT MOMENT in Normal, Illinois, Dave Wildhack had the crayons out, busily coloring the wall that he and Bridget Snapdragon had long ago decorated with the vision of a gnarled and mighty oak tree at the foreground of a wondrous glen. Dave was smiling, pleased with himself for finally undertaking this reparation against Georgeann’s whitewashing. Indeed, Dave was doing his best to re-create the scene exactly as it had been, and like any artist wrestling against the first half hour of inertia, he discovered that as soon as he got out of the way and let the art express itself, the image began to take shape exactly as he hoped it would.

  “Cherry shit,” Dave muttered under his breath, shaking his head as he added some final shadings into the surface of the oak and stepped back to regard it. To his dismay, no tangled orgy of dryads was apparent. Secretly even to himself, he had been hoping this would happen again as it did the first time he colored the wall with Bridget, but then he remembered that he had not yet colored in the silhouetted figure leaning against another tree looking up at the great oak. Picking up the black crayon, he leaned in to add this detail but hesitated, open to the suggestion whispered by his intuition that lavender was the color he was seeking. Digging through his box of sixty-four, he quickly found the lavender crayon but instead of drawing in a silhouette he drew a misty, veiled, willowy figure, definitely female, and certainly dancing.

  Immensely pleased with this inspiration, he continued to refine the faerie with various purples and pinks until satisfied that he was finished. Dusting off his hands unnecessarily, he walked to the far side of the kitchen to gain a fuller vantage of the scene. Still no orgy of dryads in the great oak, but what was that? He could have sworn he just saw the eyes of the faerie blink flirtatious, and in the next moment there could be no doubt as he heard Bridget Snapdragon’s voice, as clear as a wind chime in the countryside, whisper her last words to him once again and at last he understood and he laughed and he cried and his heart broke open surging with love and overflowing with peace and he signed both of their names to the wall and he never spoke of it again.

  “Cherish it.”

  101 AS MUCH AS Billy Pronto harangued Diablo, Diablo took no pause in parroting Billy’s rap as if it were his own. And why not? As long as he believed that Billy Pronto was some other aspect of his personality, then Billy’s bons mots were well within the reach of his intellectual property. But as the years passed, and as Billy Pronto continued to insist that a split personality was not the truth of their situation, Diablo began to doubt this initial explanation. Not knowing what the hell to think but feeling gradually guilty for his plagiarism nevertheless, Diablo resolved his dilemma simply by attributing more and more of what he was creating in the world to Billy Pronto. It was in this way that Billy Pronto came to be known as the mastermind of m2.

  And so, after Elizabeth blew his mind by revealing that Billy Pronto had in fact given him her father’s Bible, Diablo decided to explain all of this to her. After all, Elizabeth had just demonstrated to him beyond any doubt that—however she managed to glimpse him and however she imagined him to be costumed—Billy Pronto had an existence outside of his mind. She had unwittingly provided the proof that he was not mad.

  “All of this,” Diablo gestured to the computer equipment and whatever it presumably implied. “All of it is only possible because Billy Pronto led me to some money years back.”

  “Roulette!” Elizabeth guessed, unconsciously touching her forehead tattoo as she recollected his story. “You won twice consecutively by betting on number nine. How did Billy Pronto lead you to that?”

  “I won more than twice,” Diablo replied, shaking his head in disbelief. “But I’m not even going to get into that right now. That was just the beginning, and obviously it has provided me with a great deal of free time.”

  “Free time,” Elizabeth cooed. “Imagine the concept.”

  “I have.” Diablo nodded. “That’s what I’m calling all of this, as a matter of fact, Project Free Time. Free time as an imperative statement, do you see what I mean? Free as an active verb rather than a passive adjective. Freeing time from the illusion of linearity and realizing that there is only one moment, or as Plato said, that ‘time is the moving image of eternity.’” At this, Diablo abruptly laughed the most authentic laugh Elizabeth had ever witnessed from him. In fact, Diablo was laughing with relief. He had spent so many years resisting the presence of Billy Pronto (implying as it did his apparent madness) that now, in accepting it, his aggravation was flipping into exhilaration. But you had to be there, and Special Agent J. J. Speed wasn’t, and from the garbled tin in his ears Diablo’s laughter sounded like the maniacal laughter of a madman bent on world destruction. “This is too much,” Diablo said, applauding Elizabeth. “You’re bona fide, baby! Bona fide!”

  Elizabeth
grinned broadly, not knowing exactly what he meant but finding it an enchanting compliment nevertheless. “I’m bona fide,” she repeated, resisting a goofy impulse to throw her arms gleefully around him. She settled for scratching Zippy behind her ears, and Zippy’s purr went deeper, and Special Agent J. J. Speed’s ire went higher.

  Diablo nodded long, regarding her for a few mysterious moments before continuing. “All righty, Aphrodite,” he clapped his hands, “have you ever heard of the mutual synchronization of coupled oscillators?” Naturally, Elizabeth shook her head no, and Diablo continued. “You’ve probably heard about the phenomenon, like when pendulums in a row of grandfather clocks fall into synchrony, or crickets fall into chorus, or fireflies fall into sync. Well, I once read that every cell in your heart has a pulse, and that your heartbeat is the sum of the pulse of every cell in your heart—well, not really the sum,” he corrected himself, “since it’s emergent and not merely additive, but you get the idea. Anyway, when individual heart cells are placed in a petri dish, each heart cell will pulsate to its own rhythm, at its own tempo. Some of them very rapid, some of them very slow, and of course everywhere in between. But,” he raised his index finger, “and this is where it gets really interesting, once a critical number of heart cells is reached, each and every one of the heart cells falls into perfect synchrony with one another. We don’t know how this happens, by the way, not with pendulums, not with heart cells, but this synchrony is what we experience as a heartbeat, and it’s obviously the pulse, the impulse, that animates us into life.