Nine Kinds of Naked (37 page)

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 nothing 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
E
LSEWHERE 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
B
ACK 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
A
T 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
A
S 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.

“So what I'm saying is this: Synchronicity is this very same phenomenon writ large, the macrocosmic reflection of the microcosm, right? And tuning into it is tuning into the impulse that animates. Basically, each of us taps out our own rhythm, clumsy and alienated and confused, until we fall into sync with the universe around us, and then presto! Divine timing. Everything cascades into place, every grief-stricken mishap makes perfect sense, and life
sparkles
with good fortune.”

“I know
exactly
what you're talking about.” Elizabeth nodded along, reflecting upon her day.

“Of course you do! It couldn't possibly be any other way, which is the only reason I'm telling you about any of this. With Project Free Time, what I'm trying to do is replicate this petri dish phenomenon at
our
level of existence. I want to hit that critical mass where each heart cell falls into perfect synchrony with every other heart cell, but I want to see it happen right here, on this plane of existence, between the hearts of billions, each individual heart falling into perfect synchronicity with every other heart.

“Because ultimately, moments of synchronicity only hint at the possibility of a
momentum
of synchronicity, a sustained way of life, uncalculated chaos falling into perfect synchrony, an
elevation of human consciousness beyond any illusion of control, where life is perceived as the gratuitous grace that it is, where every individual is enacting their deepest spontaneity and consequently experiencing exactly what they need to experience from every individual around them, and all of it happening simultaneously.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth granted. “But you never said how you were going to tune everyone in to the same heartbeat.”

Diablo gestured toward his computer gear. “Music, of course.” Then he gestured between them. “And dance. Mathematicians brag that theirs is the only universal language, but mathematics is actually only a representation of the one language that never needs to be taught to be understood, and that is music.” Diablo got up and checked the information on one of his monitors. “The cool thing is, I could not have conceived of this, let alone pulled it off, at any other point in human history. That's what makes it so perfectly synchronistic. It's an idea that is
exactly
on time.” Diablo paused. “This is unprecedented. There will be
thousands
of ecstatic dance jams across the planet tonight, and each event has its own reason for existing aside from Project Free Time. That's important, because the idea here is not to McDonaldize the music, but rather to give each local event—including our own throwdown in Jackson Square tonight—the opportunity to plug in to the rhythm of the planet for a period of time, just to see what happens. And once it goes global, every venue will be linked via live video feeds randomly projecting onto the walls of every other venue.