Nine Kinds of Naked (39 page)

 

106
W
ORKING AS A STRIPPER
, Elizabeth was accustomed to her own nudity. Nudity was merely the invisible costume by which she conned men out of their wallets. Although she wore little in the way of clothing, she buried her self beneath multiple layers of disguise, and displaying her body was simply the cleverest disguise of all. Her customers might ogle her body, but they were further from her soul than if she were wearing a Puritan's parka. To Elizabeth, her nudity revealed nothing at all.

In contrast to the garish confidence of nudity, however, there is something huddled and helpless about nakedness, a deprivation of all defense and disguise, a perfect innocence and an absolute vulnerability. Elizabeth could not have known that this was what she was about to manifest with her invocation of “We should get
naked
,” but naked is precisely the state in which she found herself two seconds after she suggested it to Diablo. There was scarcely a beat before the door crashed open as if kicked in by bandits, and before they could gasp a blast of wind had ripped the both of them stark naked, their clothes tripping all over each other in their haste out the door, which slammed so suddenly shut that it captured one of Diablo's red socks in the doorjamb.

Much to the peeve of Special Agent J. J. Speed, this rogue wind also stripped Wilhelmina of her collar.

 

107
A
MIDST THE JUBILATION
that erupted from the doomed ceramic mug's sudden salvation into a miraculous pile of laundry, Special Agent J. J. Speed turned up the collars of a nonexistent trenchcoat and slipped expertly away. He had turned two corners deep into a maze of alleys before he dared to look back, and he was relieved to see that no one had seen his exit. He was secondarily relieved that his earpiece was once again transmitting, although it soon became apparent that it was somehow transmitting the enthusiastic nonsense of the onlookers who were presently poking through the pile of clothing that had dropped from the sky, scavenging for the ceramic mug as if it were the goddamn Holy Grail.

Since nobody was saying anything about a cat, Special
Agent J. J. Speed was led to wonder where Wilhelmina was and how she'd gotten out of her collar. Puzzled, he slumped against the wall, his heart swelling with sadness as he felt suddenly abandoned not only by Wilhelmina but also by Diablo and Elizabeth. The last thing he'd heard was Elizabeth's enthusiastic suggestion that they get naked, and even though he was eavesdropping and really nothing more than a lurking voyeur to their encounter, Special Agent J. J. Speed felt entitled to his surveillance and couldn't help feeling like he'd just been kicked out of bed.

But hey, at least he had a present, and as he knelt down in the alley and gingerly unfastened the tape that secured the wrapping paper, anticipation overcame his sadness. Opening the top of the shoebox, he dug through the crumpled paper, seeking the treasure within, and at about the same time as the cat litter caught his nose, his fingernails caught the cat litter. Cursing loudly, he hurled the package instinctively away, little turds of cat poo spinning every which way like the shrapnel of shattered expectations.

Incensed and blaming everyone for every indignity that had befallen him, Special Agent J. J. Speed grabbed the Day-Glo orange Frisbee and popped a fresh toothpick in his mouth, spitting it out immediately as he realized he'd touched the toothpick with the same hand that had touched the cat litter. Arriving at resolution, he made a fast phone call to his Agency contact, reporting his suspicion that the Great White Spot was destabilizing and relaying everything he could remember about Diablo, Billy Pronto, Elizabeth, and m2, the worldwide conspiracy seeking to unleash chaos on the world. Then he
double-checked that his Luger was fully loaded, screwed a silencer into the barrel, and headed back in the direction of m2 headquarters.

 

108
“W
HOA.
” It was Diablo who spoke first, after the echo of the door-slamming commotion had passed and every last tousle of hair had relaxed—Zippy's notwithstanding, whose fur would be aflame at this disruption for the next several minutes. Turning toward Elizabeth, and avoiding glancing anywhere but her eyes, Diablo inquired incredulous, “How in the heck did you do
that?
”

Elizabeth was speechless, her mouth agape in shock and embarrassment, her knees automatically drawn up in front of her breasts, her feet crossed discreetly in front of her pink, not entirely believing what had just occurred. Eyes wide, she shook her head for several moments. “What was that?” was all she could say.

“You tell me,” Diablo replied boisterously. “Your powers are beyond my comprehension.”

Stridently avoiding any eye contact in order to maintain one last domain of privacy, Elizabeth looked around nervously, trying to remember what she had been thinking and feeling, trying to fathom what to do or how to get out of this circumstance, and trying to understand why she was feeling so goddamn awkward. She
owned
her nudity. It was hers to manipulate, her ultimate con, and this was her idea in the first place. What was with this bashfulness, and why couldn't she conjure her confidence?

Sensing her unease as well as his own, Diablo momentarily
considered getting up to check if some towels or bathrobes remained in the bathroom. But that seemed less gallant than cowardly, defying as it did the obvious synchronicity. Ultimately, he decided to simply hold center instead, giving her whatever time she required to get her thing together. He sat cross-legged and patient, wondering in self-conscious stupidity if his chest was too hairy and contemplating the luxury of a loincloth to cloak his cock and balls. A washcloth would have done the trick very nicely, and he was mighty tempted, but then Elizabeth relaxed.

It was simple, ultimately. Elizabeth remembered a supposedly samurai equation Diana had once told her: S = P × R, suffering equals pain times resistance, and that consequently when you drop your resistance to zero it reduces your suffering to zero as well. According to Diana, the samurai practiced this as a technique for withstanding torture. Well here, her only pain was this ridiculous feeling of awkwardness, which had only to do with her resisting the fact that she had been unmasked, she had been caught without her presentations properly in place, her hubris had been humbled, her frailty in the face of existence had been revealed even to her self. In a moment of acceptance (and a moment is all it ever requires), she simply released any resistance to the entire circumstance: Her dream, her day, her attraction, her apparent wind sorcery, and finally her very own nakedness—her unprotected, unguarded self, the loss of all pretense, the unmasking of her soul.

“I'm naked,” she said at last, her voice timbring with innocence as she relaxed her knees into a cross-legged position and opened her arms to her knees, unfurling her breasts as if they
were the wings of angels. Her eyes met with Diablo's, and his smile became hers.

“You're not just naked,” he grinned. “You're nine kinds of naked.”

 

109
S
PECIAL
A
GENT
J. J. Speed had no idea how long it would take for the Agency to react to his report, or even if they would react at all. Till then, he determined, the future of civilization lay in his hands. Only he could stop this Billy Pronto madman from unleashing chaos.

If Special Agent J. J. Speed were honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that he really had no idea what was going on—not just in this situation but in life in general. After all, he was no happier now than he was when he was a priest. He was still doing what he thought he was supposed to be doing rather than what he wanted to be doing. The problem was that he had no idea what he wanted to be doing since he was never willing to face the discomfort of actually figuring it out. It was much easier to blame others than to examine himself. Consequently, he continued to adhere to the story he had concocted, no matter how unhappy it made him or how ridiculously it began to unravel.

So, as he made his way back toward m2 headquarters, Special Agent J. J. Speed continued to pretend that he had some idea of what was going on, remaining suitably surreptitious in his gait, skulking sideways against the walls, scanning for any sign of the crowd of fools who had harassed him into error. Calculating that Diablo and Elizabeth would probably be naked by now, he savored the thought of bursting in on them,
taking advantage of their vulnerability, frightening the literal fuck out of them, and seizing immediate control of the situation. Rapping his knuckles against the Day-Glo orange Frisbee, he sneered in self-congratulatory glee. This plot was already thwarted. They just didn't know it yet.

Sure, he had grown bored with his gig shaking down drug users in Central America, but he missed the power trip. Nothing distracted him more from his own sense of powerlessness than holding power over someone else. He knew he was going to enjoy this. Hopefully, this Diablo character would try to give him some shit. An ounce of sass and I'll pistol-whip his ass, he thought. Hell, I'll pistol-whip him regardless, maybe pimp-slap that big-breasted bitch, too. I'm in control.

Mounting the stairs leading up to m2 headquarters, he pulled out his Luger and switched off the safety. Pausing momentarily outside the door, he admired how cool his pistol looked with a silencer extending the barrel. Satisfied that he looked the part, he was just about to kick the door open when a barnyard bouquet assaulted his nose, immediately followed by what sounded like a braying jackass. Wrinkling his nose at the stench of manure and cringing his ears at the donkey blat, Special Agent J. J. Speed looked down, and no words of warning could have prepared him for the startle of discovering, saddled upon a donkey and grinning, a virtual twin to himself, twenty-five years younger and a portrait of his prime, identical right down to the concave dent in his chest, which was perfectly apparent since this perverted twin was as naked as Lady Godiva.

 

110
“N
INE KINDS OF NAKED
,” Elizabeth repeated Diablo's observation, enjoying its play upon her lips. She immediately understood his meaning, recalling that nine represents the ultimate limit, the supreme superlative, that which cannot be surpassed. And it was true, she could not possibly have been more naked to the world, deprived of all defense, stripped of all pretense, and it had little to do with her state of undress and everything to do with her state of absolute acceptance. “
You're
nine kinds of naked,” she returned the compliment.

“It's true.” Diablo nodded, examining his arms. “I am undressed to the nines, you might say, and the wool has not only been pulled away from my body, but also away from my eyes.”

“Mmm,” Elizabeth replied, wondering at the undiscovered sensuality of vulnerability. “And what do your naked eyes see?”

“My naked eyes see the naked truth,” Diablo began. “And the naked truth is that life is an adventure in the imagination of God, Providence at play, and to the extent that we release control, we experience grace. It is not a coincidence that the more you accept the flow of life, the more that life will flow through you. And that the minute you close your heart, the instant you presume to protect yourself from hurt or heartache, or the moment you try to control the insecurity of life with routine and structure, you have already lost exactly that which you are trying to protect. Your heart goes hard, your life goes stagnant, and Spirit will burn you with a thousand sufferings until you sit in your sacred fire and wake up to the naked truth that you are not in control of your life. This is the truth that is so fretfully foreign to common sense. You are a temporarily
stable matrix of energetic probabilities, a spiritual synapse in the mind of God, and that's all. This is no more your life than it is mine. It's an experience to behold, but never to hold.” Diablo paused, seeking summation, feeling foolish in his nakedness, another hairy monkey squawking all the answers. “Anyway, the trick is simply this: No matter what happens, keep your heart open. Wide open. The heart is made of love, and love is indestructible, and only the arrogance of ego would presume that it requires protection. To open your heart is to reduce your ego, and this is the only magic that is ever required to experience the naked truth.”

“And the nekkid truth,” Elizabeth interrupted, feeling randy, “is that synchronicity is all that
ever
happens.”

Diablo nodded exactly. “
Everything
is happening all around us always just waiting for us to notice. That's the only difference between Eden and Earth. It wasn't that our bodies were naked in Eden.” He gestured unnecessarily between the two of them. “It's that our
eyes
were naked, as innocent and trusting as a child's, and it was all just good until we stumbled and allowed the teeth-baring intensity of this adventure into death to freak us out into believing that we had to get control of this beast. Can you imagine the vanity of that, the notion that we, mites on the eyelash of a gasping gnat, could somehow control this phenomenon? Well, we did, and the rest is obviously history, and you see where that has gotten us in a hurry. What did James Joyce say?
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Well, don't look now, but humanity is waking up faster than we can pull our pants up, and every effort to control it is only making the jolt that much more alarming, individually and collectively.”

“Don't you think you're painting with broad strokes?” Elizabeth interrupted. “You're glossing over the meat-hook economic realities that keep people doing what they're doing. I mean, I know that synchronicity is the deeper reality, and I totally agree that this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago, but that's also a little escapist. I don't want to deflate your enthusiasm, Mister Mastermind, but don't you find this creeping totalitarianism around the world a little frightening? I mean, I
love
your rap, but do you really think a few million people dancing at the same time will derail Armageddon?”