Nine Kinds of Naked (38 page)

“Look at this.” Diablo swiveled the monitor around so that Elizabeth could see a digital clock displaying hours, minutes,
seconds, and milliseconds racing along. “At midnight Eastern Standard Time tonight, ten million dancers around the world will tune in to a two-hour streaming audio webcast of the tightest rhythms this planet has ever felt, handpicked by the best deejays. When that commences, we'll have ten million dancers.” He turned the first monitor back around and swiveled another monitor toward her, displaying a counter that was already well over a million and adding steadily more. Tapping the screen, he continued. “Assuming we meet our goal, ten million dancers across the world will dance, to the same rhythm, at the same moment. I've even corrected for the slight delay in transmitting the signal across multiple time zones. Fail-safe mirror servers set up on every continent channeling nonlocalized data. You could blow this room up and stomp on the wreckage and it wouldn't change a thing. I've left absolutely nothing to chance, which is not to say that I don't respect chance, because I most certainly do. That's what this is all about, after all, the dance of chance.”

Elizabeth was authentically impressed. “There's a dance party in Jackson Square tonight? Why haven't I heard about this before now?”

“Because it's a secret, of course. This is strictly word-of-mouth marketing, and what I have discovered is that mystique is the best possible marketing strategy. Everybody wants to believe they're in on something secret, that they're part of the real deal. That's why I created m2. Besides, you know how it goes. You hear about it when you hear about it, as the flow flies. Anyway, you're obviously hearing about it right now, and straight from the donkey's mouth, no less.”

Diablo grinned, Elizabeth smiled, Zippy purred, and Special Agent J. J. Speed snarled.

 

102
I
N A GROCERY STORE
across the river in Algiers, just around the corner from her house, Diana was cheerfully selecting a few avocados while wearing a clown suit. She was on her way home from her first birthday party gig, her latest notion of how she might transition out of pole dancing and yet still retain a career in performance. She enjoyed clowning and she was feeling very hopeful that this could be her exit strategy. Children are so much more innocent and uplifting than sexually repressed men and the occasional mullet lesbian.

Satisfied with her selection and anticipating her guacamole, she was walking toward the cashier enjoying the attention her costume was garnering when the power sighed off. Lights flickering out, compressors rattling into silence, fans whumping into motionlessness, and a collective “hey-whoa-hoohoo!” from every shopper slowing to a halt, as if they too were connected to the fuse box.

Chuckles and wonder ensued for several moments, abruptly interrupted by the shattering of one of the plate glass windows at the front of the store as an airborne train of a couple dozen shopping carts came gangbusting in, clearing the checkout registers entirely and crash-landing down the frozen foods aisle, eliciting scatters and screams all around. Except for Diana, that is, who, perhaps feeling obligated by the character implied by her clown costume, started laughing instead.

Embarrassed by her own inexplicable laughter, Diana exited the store immediately, unintentionally shoplifting the
avocados in her haste to leave. To her surprise, the parking lot appeared well-ordered, and it was not at all clear to her what had caused such chaos. Puzzled by the weirdness but unable to get ahold of herself, she continued cracking up as she made her way around the corner to her house, and she surely would have looked like a perfect fool had she not been wearing a clown suit, which deflected all such judgment into a passing appreciation of her apparent commitment to her performance art.

It was not until she had entered her house, deposited the avocados on her kitchen counter, and made her way up to her bedroom closet that her laughter fizzled. There, where her entire wardrobe was supposed to be, was simply nothing. Her carefully chosen assemblage of trendy attire, including her entire collection of sexy club wear, everything was gone, with not even a sock or a thong dangling behind.

Stunned, and realizing that she owned not a stitch of clothing except for the clown suit on her back, Diana plopped helplessly onto her bed. She gazed curiously out the wide-open window for a few minutes, having no idea what to do next. When she did finally turn back toward her room, she was greeted by the image of a clown watching her from the far side of her bedroom mirror, and there was nothing left for her to do but laugh.

 

103
F
IFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER
, a backpacker with sun-bleached dreadlocks happened to wander past Diablo's truck. His scavenging eyes caught the glint of the expensively wrapped shoebox of Zippy's used cat litter lying in plain sight on the front seat, windows wide open. Scarcely breaking his
gait, he reached in and snatched it, guessing by its size that it was a new pair of shoes that would either fit him or trade nicely for a pair that did. “Groundscore,” he pronounced happily to himself, citing his finders-keepers justification for theft, even though his groundscore was on the seat of someone else's truck.

A few minutes later, jaunting along with his unopened present, the backpacker with sun-bleached dreadlocks stopped short when he came upon Special Agent J. J. Speed. “Hey man,” he drawled his words with the lazy timbre of overprivileged youth. “Don't I know you from somewhere?”

The kid with sun-bleached dreadlocks would never recognize Special Agent J. J. Speed from the shakedown in Mexico, for no sooner had he spoken these words than Special Agent J. J. Speed flew at him and smacked him thrice across the face with the Day-Glo orange Frisbee. “Get the fuck out of here!” Special Agent J. J. Speed yelled, and the backpacker with sun-bleached dreadlocks dropped his present and ran stumbling away, abandoning his groundscore to the maniac with the Frisbee.

Ignoring the groundscore initially, Special Agent J. J. Speed immediately returned to trying to decipher Elizabeth and Diablo's dialogue above Wilhelmina's purr. But after a minute of not making out a single word, his curiosity finally regarded the abandoned gift and he picked it up, guessed it was a new pair of shoes, and idly tucked it under his arm to examine later.

 

104
I
F
S
PECIAL
A
GENT
J. J. Speed had been able to hear anything above Wilhelmina's purring, he would have heard Diablo's continuing monologue.

“If my wild-eyed theory is sound,” Diablo monologued, “it seems like
something
ought to happen. If it doesn't, I'll keep making the dance bigger until it does, every full moon. Rome wasn't dismantled in a day, after all. Maybe I should be aiming for a hundred million dancers. Who knows?”

Elizabeth smiled wide.

“The thing to realize in any event,” Diablo went on, encouraged by her widening smile, “is that this world is only a projection of the human imagination. Nothing at all will happen until people really
want
something to happen. I'm just trying to provide the catalyst. Obviously, my hope is that it'll trigger transcendental chaos, the unified heartbeat of the human spirit, but that's a pie-in-the-sky Utopian scheme if ever there was one, isn't it?” Diablo paused. “I mean chaos in the holiest sense of the word, of course. Chaos as the vanguard of redemption, fractal chaos, chaos as the face of unfathomable order,
love
, ultimately. The most irrational, impulsive, and impractical emotion ever experienced, and also the most authentic expression of our humanity.

“And what our world is witnessing lately, the collapse of all order, structure, and predictability, this is precisely what is required for us to wake up to the truth of our own love for one a-lonely-other. I mean, did you know that people are the most tuned in to synchronicity right after near-death experiences or the death of a loved one or the end of a love relationship, or whenever the illusion of the control they imagined they had over their lives has been wrested from their fist? As you pointed out, the synchronicity is always there, they just didn't realize it because they imagined they were in control of their
lives, and therein lies the veil. I think that this is exactly what is occurring at the scale of the species. We're a half-dozen half-wits away from a species-wide near-death experience, and we're being forced to face the fact that
nobody
is in control of this juggernaut that's barreling down the shuddering tracks of history, not the Pentagon, not the corporations, not even Casey Jones. All I'm trying to do is immanentize that inevitable realization in a manner that's maybe more fun than death and destruction.

“The way I see it, it's really a birth we're going through, a phase transition, and I think there's every reason to think of Laughing Jim as the birth canal. After all, residing right here on the event horizon is a population living each day as if it were their last, and not with nihilism but with gnosis, doing their best to let go of the obsolete structures of mind that pushed us into this predicament in the first place. You know how they say that humans only use about ten percent of their mind's potential? Well, that's mostly nonsense, since the mind's capacity is infinite, and ten percent of infinity is basically nothing. But the point is that we tune a lot out, and since our mind mirrors existence, if we're only using ten percent of our mind, we're only perceiving ten percent of existence. That other ninety percent of mind? That's the realm of synchronicity, grace, and magic. Release control, expand the mind, and deepen existence beyond the clumsy and alienated ego and into synchronicity. Then you realize that there is a certain audacity in anxiety, in pretending to know enough about what's happening to worry about it. Myself, I think it's a beautiful crisis we're in, a cosmic drama of the highest order, and it's exactly the way birth always happens.
Birth doesn't have to be painful, you know. I mean, birth is a bloody screaming mess, yes, but ultimately it's ecstatic, and ecstasy only flips into agony to the extent that we resist it.” Diablo nodded, agreeing with himself.

Elizabeth could only beam by way of answer. Despite his penchant for talking circles around her, she was madly in love with his mind. She maintained her eye contact with him, yielding to the impulse she'd been resisting since the day they met, and she allowed herself to ebulliate with unanticipated abandon. Leaning slightly forward, she unhesitatingly stated exactly what she wanted. “We should get
naked
,” she gushed, an instant before the door crashed open.

 

105
T
O ANYONE WHO
happened to pass him on the street, Special Agent J. J. Speed looked exactly like an unhinged lunatic: stained shirt, bruised face, gift under his left arm, left hand grasping severely at his left ear, muttering curses every few seconds, and occasionally swinging a Day-Glo orange Frisbee about in explosive bursts of agitation. Nevertheless, and despite his Frisbee-whipping of the first person who interrupted his stakeout, a gradually growing circle of onlookers began accumulating around him, granting a safe distance but whispering fascination as they discreetly pointed at the apparent madman.

Special Agent J. J. Speed was vaguely aware of the attention he was gathering, though he could hardly be bothered by it. His mission was to save the world, goddamnit, and he was breaking this case wide open, conspirators, masterminds, worldwide plots, secret societies, drug-dealing children,
everything he had ever dreamed of defeating was there on the far side of Wilhelmina's purr. Indeed, his attention was so occupied in struggling to decipher the broken pieces of conversation that surfaced despite Wilhelmina's interference that it was all he could do to try to scowl the gawkers away.

But fascination is not easily disgruntled by grump or snarl, and the whispers of this gaggle of spectators had grown into a rolling murmur by the time one bold soul stepped forward and demanded, “Where did you get that Frisbee?”

Special Agent J. J. Speed impatiently waved him off with the Frisbee, turning his back to emphasize his absolute dismissal. This did not have its intended effect, and conversation grew all the more around him. If he could barely hear before, now he couldn't catch a random stray syllable. Exasperated, he took a step in the direction of moving on, but stopped when a woman complimented his shirt.

“That's an amazing shirt,” she said. “It looks
exactly
like Laughing Jim.” This observation succeeded in diverting Special Agent J. J. Speed's attention entirely away from his stakeout. He looked down at his still wet shirt, holding it away from his torso to gain a better vantage point, and was surprised to discover that the mocha latte splotch had stained his shirt in a perfect, spiraling whorl, nicely shaded in various hues of brown, indeed, a near perfect photographic negative representation of the Great White Spot as viewed via satellite. Unfortunately, this response only encouraged the collected curious to assault him with further questions:

“Is that the Frisbee from Laughing Jim?”

“Did you know it's gone?”

“Who's the present for?”

“Is it your birthday?”

“Aren't you one of those cultists?”

“What happened to your face?”

This barrage, combined with Wilhelmina purring into his earpiece and Diablo's garbled secret plot, proved altogether too much for Special Agent J. J. Speed's patience. Forgetting himself entirely, there was a long moment of slow-motion lucidity as Elizabeth's voice broke clear from the auditory melee, gushing into his earpiece that “We should get
naked
,” just before it all went to static and he found himself drawing his leg back and kicking the empty ceramic mug off its saucer like a football off its tee, sailing it satisfyingly over the heads of the assembled who arced their necks in holy-cow anticipation of its smash and shatter against a nearby brick wall only to observe it intersect instead with an inexplicably airborne tangle of clothing cartwheeling out of the alleyway, thumping into it like a baseball into a mitt and dropping intact to the pavement, at which point the crowd erupted into cheers.