"That man's contemplation was about a direction in life, and your lesson was to see the underlying nature of an event—recognize your Minimal Chance as a direction to take—which happened right away." She snapped her fingers. "The panhandler made it clear that you need lessons concerning judgment, generosity, and appreciation. When you accept these, it'll change the way you are going as well." She looked behind her. "It was too perfect to have been administered by an average man."
"Generosity? I gave him almost half of my money," I protested.
"Half of your change," she corrected me, "and you did it to show yourself that you are generous, otherwise why keep the other half when you still have five dollars?"
"Prudence."
"You are a miser," she said crisply.
"Come off it. I spend as much on you as I do on myself, even if it’s not so smart in the moment."
"That's how you camouflage the underlying truth from yourself. You hold onto your last dollar like a pauper to a prayer, regardless that you have no immediate need for it; you camouflage your secret fear of poverty by equating angst with generosity."
"Did I ever hold out on you?" I said coolly, not bothering to unravel what she had said.
"You regularly decline to have a pastry with your coffee, or dessert after a meal." She chuckled. "You’ve perspired when I thought about ordering one, and you become trite because it adds to your split of the tab."
"Split?" I chuckled mirthlessly. "You might think about how we've been sharing costs for the past few weeks—which," I quickly added, holding up my hand, "is fine. I appreciate that you’ve done the same for me."
Jeanette’s expenses had shot up to cover her car insurance and son’s sporting goods/summer wardrobe needs, which I knew had tapped out her monthly household account. At the same time, my freelance work was flourishing, and I knew that she was in arrears with her power bill so I had causally offered to help. She politely refused, saying only that it would work out. I believed that she expected Josh to offer, which as far as I knew had not happened.
"You can't be afraid and appreciative at the same time," she replied, "and the momentum of pettiness undeterred leads to cruelty." She bit her lower lip, looking at me expectantly.
Missing the head’s up, I said, "You can't convince me that twenty bucks would change anyone's direction in life, other than getting two or three bottles."
"You claim that nothing changes for anyone you might help, because nothing in you changes from making contributions that aren't selflessly offered."
"Some people gushed with gratitude," I said lamely.
"If not a show for your benefit, they were gushing temporary relief from their fears, which is the other side of you helping them to keep your own fears at arm's length. When you're willing to explore this idea, as our friend back there did," she said, thumbing behind us, "you'll find your heart and stop being a miser with it as well."
Counting off rebuttal points on my fingers, I said, "I give money to strangers. I spend the bulk of what I have on us, I usually give most of the rest as a tip, and I’m a miser? What would I be if I gave the last dollar away—Saint Nick?"
"You'd be desperate, as long you're paying off your self-image."
"What does the amount or my motivation have to do with anything? The guy got a freebie," I said, frustrated.
"Hardly," she chortled. "You made him pay with a strip search followed by a meager offering, and now you’re trying to accuse him of a deception because I caught you in yours!" She laughed.
"What if there was another guy with him who obviously needed it more?" I said without purposeful focus.
"It depends. I’d probably split it."
"So how much you’d give, and to who isn’t an easy choice?"
"It’s whom, and my quandary would be about giving it in such a way that it would do no damage." She grimaced sympathetically; a thought struck her. "This is not a hypothetical is it? You’ve been caught in these circumstances, or you wouldn’t be defending yourself so adamantly." She drawled, "Ahaaaaww, I didn’t see that coming: it wasn’t a question of should you help, or how much, it was that you couldn’t do anything. You had to walk away because you understood the fourteen-year-old punk in Beirut might kill them for taking your money."
"Or let them starve," I said quietly.
"You did the right thing."
"Nothing?" I scoffed.
"In the grander view of behavioral evolution, that punk was safeguarding their lesson. I’ll explain…"
"You’ve got to be fucking kidding," I snarled.
"As you can clearly see," she said flatly, "I am doing neither. Circumstances dictated your course of action, and you listened to them. You were not responsible, nor were you meant to think you were; you were there as a witness. Besides," she punched me lightly on the arm, "need isn't necessarily obvious. Our panhandler friend took better care of himself than you do. You’re fighting me because you feel guilty. Let it go. None of this is personal."
"Uh huh," I said, rounding off the corner at the intersection.
I was two steps across before I noticed that Jeanette was still standing at the curb, looking at unstable skies; a light drizzle began to fall. Though the sun was visible, so the shower would be brief, I walked back to her and suggested that we stop at a local hotel lounge until the drizzle passed.
"I can’t afford it," Jeanette said, smiling apologetically.
"I’ve got it covered," I said, waving her objection aside as though striking at a fly circling my nose.
Jeanette gave me a peculiar look, as though a foul smell had wafted her way.
Chapter 47 - The Undercurrents of Fear
We stopped at a convenience store cash machine, where I withdrew the last of my cash. Offhandedly, I flashed the twenties her way and mentioned that we were good for a couple of glasses of wine and splitting an appetizer. Jeanette nodded in a preoccupied manner.
Half a block later, nearing the door to the lounge, she unexpectedly stretched her last two steps to get ahead of me, then she just stood there. I reached around her to open it.
"Thank you kind sir," she said in Victorian fashion.
"It pleases me to fulfill m'lady's expectations," I said as she walked by.
Jeanette tch-tched me, then headed toward our preferred table in the back tier, three steps up. With a confirming nod to Catherine’s raised brow, a familiar server who was dealing with another customer, I trailed behind her jaunty pace wondering what the hell I had done this time.
Catherine soon brought two glasses of red wine—maybe rain wine would be more accurate, because we went into Checkers only when the sky was bleak, which was enough for her to recall our preferences.
We exchanged belated pleasantries and comments on the capriciousness of Vancouver weather before Catherine reported the contents and price of the lunch special. After she left us to make our decisions, with fatalistic cheeriness I said, "Was my bow too shallow, or did I forget to spread my cape across the threshold?"
"You turned a courteous act into a power play."
"You scripted the play," I replied reasonably.
"The core of stalking is spontaneity. It doesn't matter if I contrive circumstances, because it doesn't change the nature of your response."
"Why go to the trouble of creating games, when you can just tell me what you’re trying to teach me?"
Sighing, she said, "People don't believe much of anything unless they are shown it. Even then, they have to agree with the procedure, and like you, they still don’t work at making it relevant to other circumstances." With a softening smile, she added, "You are caring and kind until someone offends your image so your loyalty and generosity come with conditions; we all give those away at some point. How often have you heard a diatribe followed by, 'I don't know where that came from' or, 'That wasn't like me?' "
"Often enough."
"Did you ever see a hand up their butt, forcing caustic words out of wooden lips?"
I chuckled at the imagery
"Irrefutable experiences followed by an assessment of how they apply to your entire life are the only way to turn those clues about your true nature into knowledge. Minutes ago," she nodded toward the street, "you limited your help to a stranger, which told me that you were feeding the camouflaged belief that you are superior, based on your judgment of his circumstances. That you did this with your assemblage point in an advantageous position, and me having just told you to pay attention to the nature of what’s happening, not what’s happening to you, tells me how damaged you really are. Your comment after opening the door was just as revealing."
"That I judged you—how?"
"I'm a woman."
I snorted at the implication.
"You interact differently with men, including the apparent maleness of representatives of Intent, than you do with me, Saa-ra, and Caroline—with less respect."
"I really don’t think I do that, at least not consciously," I said as if this mattered.
"You hide it in culturally acceptable ways, but words are deeds and yours are loaded with male attitude." She shifted the silver condiment container to one side, a symbolic gesture suggesting there was nothing standing in the way of her making a point, or me seeing it.
"We’ve discussed the concepts of momentum and continuity enough for you to know that you can’t logically think in one way and act in another." She cocked her head in a fait accompli gesture: the effects of momentum and continuity were no longer issues to me, not because I could read or dissect them well, but because my otherwise fucked-up world of random violence made more sense under their auspices.
"What words give me away?" I asked her quietly.
"You know full-well that it’s not just about you, but if we are going to create another shared assumption…" she shrugged.
"Go ahead."
"Most women in everyday circumstances use gentler words, such as ‘nonsensical’, whereas you would say ‘crap’, as if judging things gently with a club. You have been scared shitless, but never frightened to the core; you have been fucked over, but not betrayed; shit happens did not convey the hollowness of sudden destitution when all that you owned burned to the ground."
"I’m a bit more graphic than women," I shrugged.
"Your shallow, clipped, and callous judgments of specific events extend to other circumstances whether you mean them to or not. You know you can’t help but maintain the continuity—no one can—because the very nature of our perception, and so our sanity, is based on maintaining apparent continuity. The unintended consequence of that momentum takes you to the manifestation of those intentions while you’re focused elsewhere, and then you’re surprised at what you created."
"What was the clue I gave away at the door?"
"Expectations."
"I don’t…"
She raised her hand, and said, "Figure it out."
After a short moment, I said, "That I am a chauvinist or superior in general?"
"Both are excellent starts." Jeanette shifted in her seat, a sign that she was constructing a more comprehensive point.
I took a slow breath in anticipation of it being my last calm one for a while.
"The momentum of a nation made fearful enough to expend enormous resources in preparation for war focuses on all of the possible scenarios that could blossom into one. This makes war inevitable because you get what you focus on, which justifies the preparations. You can see how that continuity feeds on itself?"
"Yes."
"In the same way, constantly having to guard your own secrets from yourself means you will always find something to threaten them. If the threat is something basic, like someone wanting to get to know the real you, you increase your vigilance because your deepest secret is self-loathing. This creates the need for additional subterfuge to protect yourself from what you feel lurking in the shadows of your unrealized fears, but you can’t define what’s there because you never had to. You always ran away, or went to war with them."
"War with who—whom?"
"You created a momentum of conflict by elevating your defenses, from subtle satire through condescension and sarcasm, to bold-faced lying. By essentially attacking innocent circumstances, because the boogie man of truth has by this time become too difficult to conceal, your partners either leave, or you break up with them." She cocked her head.
"All I did was open the door," I said as Catherine came back for our order.
"And you are not pleased about it now that I'm presenting you with your reflection in the glass." Jeanette looked up. "The poached salmon, with two plates, please."
"Maybe I'm annoyed at your poor perception of me," I said, quelling the anger I felt at hearing her order without consulting me: that Jeanette knew I enjoyed salmon, but rarely bought it because it was expensive, didn’t calm me as much as my having the foresight to show her how much money I had. I could hardly pick up the menu and check the price; it would be close.
Leaning toward me, she said, "I told you that self-importance has to be dealt with head on; I'm orchestrating experiences that will show you to yourself in an infinitely safer way than your travels did. I'm not the enemy," she said, reaching over to tap me on the chest. "The enemy is always within."
"It’s comfortable there."
Leaning back and ignoring my comment, she said, "You felt awkward about our encounter with the panhandler, so I pricked your ego to put your defenses on full alert. Then I presented you with an opportunity to reconstruct your self-image so that you could see it for yourself."
"What should I be seeing?"
"You tried to gain control of a threat to your autonomy by presuming grandiose authority over an insignificant circumstance."
"Grandiose authority over a door?"
"You blithely assumed you could fulfill my expectations, which tells me that your sense of self-importance is the size of a free state!" Her grin complemented the breadth of her arm span.
"It was role-playing—an expression that suited the circumstance you created," I said scowling at her contrivance.
"I told you, prodding your calculated attitudes and fears to the surface is tough stuff. Stop acting like an average man, and I do mean acting; it’s getting old." She sipped her wine.
I did the same before saying, "What calculated attitudes?"
"Why did you both show and tell me what you could afford?"
"Prudence: it’s all I’ve got."
Jeanette looked away, failing to conceal a grin from which I caught on that this circumstance was by design; it always had been.
"I’m broke until my check comes in on Friday, which you couldn’t have appreciated when you ordered; what’s miserly about me spending everything?" I said reactively.
"What’s prudent about it?" she countered.
"Liking you affects my judgment," I said evenly.
She looked at me as if memorizing features for a police sketch artist. "You should make a habit of treating yourself well. You've been cheap for so long that you don't recognize the contradictions it creates."
"Such as?" I said, proving her correct.
"Feeling that you are spending unwisely and doing it anyway demonstrates two things: as an average person you are extracting recognition, while the Stalker in you knows you'll be fine, because you always have been. Speaking of which, it is Friday and your check is in." She withdrew her touch and added, "But thank you for letting me know where our accounts stand. By the way, remember this word… zipper."
"Why?"
"You’re right. Forget it."
Chapter 48 - Deconstructing Personality
Without pause, she said, "We are going to discuss the construction of a personality, which will help to explain the techniques we’re going to use to take yours apart when we get to that part of your training."
"Other than going through doorways?" I jested weakly.
"Whatever I need," she replied. "Here we go: beliefs are not sacred or immutable, as if we are all-knowing at any given point in our lives. Their purpose is to create a particular approach—the one we require to service our personal development. I know this sounds paradoxical, but tearing them apart is not personal—making them personal is why it’s so difficult to change beliefs that are merely agreements with circumstances that we want to represent us. So far?"
"So good."
"What makes them personal is that we shape them through the three contributing mechanisms that form our self-image." She took a breath to line up her ducks. "Self-importance causes us to think we are the center of the Universe, so we are affronted at anything that challenges our majesty or perceived subservience. We cannot overcome these challenges because they are self-sustaining myths, so we fall into the warming arms of self-absorption where every comment is about us, and then self-indulgently grasp for the illusionary prizes our cultures create by aggrandizing useless things that we think better represent us. This process is energetically exhausting, because the prizes are ever changing. Taken together, the beliefs we have hardened through our self-image are, to us, immutable facts that we have defended since their inception; we will literally fight to the death for them."
"That’s clear—all of it."
"Good, hold onto it as a background landscape." She swallowed quickly, and carried on integrating previous points with her new lesson. "Everything the average person learns from the moment of their birth until the moment of their death touches on the three core perceptual agreements of humanity; root assumptions of physical existence, social and cultural conformation, and the personality we have concluded is who we are. This trio forms a broader harmony of consequences that is greater than the sum of its parts—a grand consensus as basic everyone agreeing that a tree is a tree, and as pervasive as all of using reason to assess our circumstances, without realizing this is how we have been conformed to perceive our world."
Her enunciation conformed to the Queen’s English. "Stalkers call this master accord the cognition of the average person, and from which the human personality can be objectively categorized." She paused.
"As in definitively listing the elements you’ve talked about? Sure."
"No, as in crushing those myriad elements into basic categories."
"Are you saying we’re more alike than we’d care to admit?"
"You might put it that way," she grinned guardedly. "From the perspective of the Stalker's cognition, there are only four personality types."
"Everyone falls into them?" I said, dubiously.
"There is a category of assistants and companions," Jeanette carried on, "which Stalkers call the perfect secretary. These people are gracious, efficient, and some of the nicest people you will ever meet. The fatal flaw in their personal development is that they are virtually useless without direction." She looked at me inquisitively.
"I’ll wait until you’re done."
She continued. "The opposite of the perfect secretary is the petty, devious, and egocentric person. Insecurity makes them envious, so they talk almost exclusively about themselves to be the center of attention. Their fatal flaw is that they will kill for power."
I nodded.
"The dreamer is the middle ground: they are mostly indifferent to outside events, and instead spend their energy creating the illusion that they have great things waiting for them. They also talk incessantly about things they don’t do anything about, which makes their fatal flaw neglect."
"Do you mean that literally, or in terms of personal growth?"
"I mean it literally and metaphorically," she said, tapping the tabletop. "If you can’t operate without direction, what’s to stop a devious person from using you to death—a person who talks but won’t intervene?" she said rhetorically.
"Point taken."
"The fourth personality," Jeanette said, "is what some seers call a Warrior. These people can accept events without judgment, then choose to act upon them or not. Either way, their choices are deliberate, and include following the dictates of impeccability; we will have to expand the meaning of both these terms." Jeanette gestured the point aside. "Go ahead, ask it."
"You are saying that we are not unique?"
"I am not saying that. Our uniqueness lies in the one-off arrangement of our energy construction, which constitutes our accumulated knowledge and undigested experience that allows for the endless variations of perception we find between our experiences and other’s versions of the same events."
"So I’m unique, and like everyone else at the same time?"
"You are like everyone else who is energetically encased in the modality of your time. This encasement includes your unique means of interpreting events, which underscores your assumption of autonomy."
"In English?"
"I’m saying your conclusions—your personality being one of these—are limited to the cognition of the average person."
"Artists create unique things all of the time."
"They create unique interpretations of their perceptions." She waited for me to process the distinction.
"Meaning these interpretations are drawn from the same four core conclusions they think of as who they are?"
"You're getting it." She feigned a strained grin. "But my point goes deeper."
"It would. Shoot."
"If all of our assumptions have been shaped by the same fundamental forces, then so have our decisions."
"My decisions have been shaped by… okay, I see your point."
"I think not," she grimaced. "I’m saying that all of your so-called independent decisions are actually acquiesces to pre-existing assumptions drawn from the cognition of the average person."
"I have never made an independent decision?"
"Correct, no one can make a truly deliberate decision until they have left reason behind."
"That’s just bullshit," I smirked.
"So says your reason, which is what we’re trying to have you leave behind." Jeanette looked at me inquiringly. "Logically, if all that you think you know has been shaped by the same perceptions that have been hammered into everyone, what else can you conclude within that cognition?"
"Okay, let’s try what impeccability is about again. Maybe I’ll see your point from there."
Looking into my innocent eyes, Jeanette realized I had not grasped much of that concept in our Saturday classes, either. In a monotone, she said, "You have a difficult day ahead. Grasping the pervasive nature of your conformation is critical."
"Still..." I held my ground.
Shaking her head at whatever I was in for, she relented.
"To a reasoning mind, impeccability can look like ethics or morality, but it can fly in the face of both because it’s about the regulation of energy. In simple terms," she cocked her head to one side, indicating this was not a definitive explanation, "impeccability means doing the right thing for the right reason, which can include doing nothing as a proactive decision. Where it can get complicated," she grinned ruefully, "is that reason doesn’t apply to decisions based on the regulation of energy. Reason is inherently energy inefficient. More than that, impeccable choices have to take into consideration where you really are, so that you act in proportion to the arena. Otherwise the amount of energy employed will not be correct, and interfere with an otherwise appropriate influence."
"Let’s start with what you mean by it looking like ethics, then we’ll go to acting in proportion to the arena," I said evenly.
"Reason deals with the ‘because’ of an event you have interpreted in a particular way and subsequently decided you should respond in a way consistent with your interpretation. This maintains the continuity of thought through action, which always seems reasonable under the circumstance. It follows that there are many ethical standards—meaning no real standards that everyone can embrace as the most moral, or apparently beneficial to the most people."
"Understood."
"There are no variables affecting a Stalker’s motivation: they would say a circumstance beckoned them, and they responded with the most efficient use of their energy. This response could mirror your reasoned choice and look ethical, or it might confound you with its apparent irresponsibility."
"I’ll need an example of that, but what does acting in proportion to an arena mean—it sounds like a variable?"
Jeanette gave this a moment’s thought before, suddenly sporting a wide grin, she said, "Imagine that you are driving the third vehicle to arrive at a four way stop simultaneous to a fourth car on your right. You know the correct order in which to safely proceed, but what usually happens?"
Her pleasure came from knowing this circumstance was a pet peeve of mine: in casual conversation, I had used it to support my declaration that twenty-five percent of driving-age humanity was terminally stupid. Being generous with Murphy’s Law, I said that we are certain to encounter at least one of these people seventy-five percent of the time at four-way stops in most of Canada. The exceptions were in Halifax, where a cluster of identical signage was uniformly thought to mean, "Just go ahead when you can," and in Nanaimo, "Slow your truck, create the impression that you know what you’re doing, then go."
"Someone goes out of order, because they either don’t see how discretion and law can be in the same sentence, or they can’t figure out their left from their right. Then there’s the one who waves a car through ahead of their own rightful turn, because it adds to the confusion of who goes next."
"In what way?" she said.
"Did the waver give up his turn, thinking he should go next, or did he relegate himself to the last person to go through?"
Nodding, Jeanette said, "In the context of this arena, doing nothing is the impeccable choice."
"Going last?"
"Your reason says you are going last, but logically you are making the best decision you can make in a muddled circumstance." Into my puzzled expression, she said, "Your intention is to get from point A to point B. Does a fender-bender help you do that? No," she carried on. "So why not wave everyone through with a smile and a shrug, and achieve your goal without risk at the cost of thirty-seconds of doing nothing?"
"Doing the right-thing for the right reason is the most efficient use of energy?"