Nine Kinds of Naked (26 page)

“Tonight?” Elizabeth's eyes went wide and grabbed the paper. They narrowed when she read the five words written upon it.

“Tonight,” Diana grinned. “And the evolution will not be televised.”

“The evolution will not be
supervised
,” Elizabeth replied. They both did a little dance as they cooed these words at one another. The “evolution” of which they spoke was the latest conspiracy to emerge from a secret society they had both joined. It was simple to join; the only requirement for joining was that you learn about its existence. As the mythos went, if you heard about it, you were obviously
in the flow
, and enhancing the flow was what this secret society was all about. In any event, the secret society called itself—without a breath of explanation—m2, and its motto and mode of invitation was “walk away.” There was no secret handshake, but the sign of mutual acknowledgment was to touch the side of your nose if you happened to pass a fellow m2 conspirator. This secret gesture reminded Elizabeth of the gang of grifters in her favorite movie
The Sting
, and this ensured her attention.

The leader of m2, the
heresiarch
, was someone named Billy Pronto, and his instructions, which were nothing like directives and more like vague suggestions, seemed to emerge out of nowhere at all, finding their way into pants pockets, inside restaurant menus, in bathroom stalls, and in the most random unexpected places. If you didn't find the instructions, or if they didn't find you, then that's the way the flow flies, and holding that attitude was the whole point. No one had any idea who Billy Pronto was, or where his directives came from—but that
only lent the conspiracy some serious cloak-and-dagger cred. As far as anyone knew, it was Billy Pronto's idea to launch the conspiracy in the first place. The mastermind gets to be as mysterious as he wants.

Perhaps they weren't guarding the Holy Grail or seeking to create a New World Order based on the control of international banking, but that didn't stop m2 from considering itself a secret society. Why let the Freemasons and the Knights Templar have all the backstage fun? Every secret society has to start somewhere, and the way they saw it, the more secret societies there are, then the more people are pulling strings, making things happen, and the more democratic all the chaos becomes. For that matter, as far as anybody knew, anyone who stepped up and took an ounce of initiative could be Billy Pronto and thus the mastermind of m2.

But Elizabeth suspected she knew who Billy Pronto really was. With Diana off to take a shower, Elizabeth looked again at the exhortation written on the crumpled paper. She had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to mean, but she knew that was the whole point, to compel you to take an active role in defining your life. M2 had a project, that was certain, and she sometimes suspected it was every bit as ambitious as anything cooked up by the Illuminati. For the first time, however, Elizabeth began to wonder if she even agreed with it.

The directive read, very simply: “Don't get involved. Get evolved.”

 

70
E
LIZABETH AND
D
IANA
had heard about and thereby joined m2 several weeks earlier, shortly after Elizabeth first
met Diablo out on Bourbon Street (though it was not he who told her about it). Diablo had been vending his seashell pipes off a table, and folks in town for Jazz Fest were buying them faster than he could make them. Of course, Diablo was not making them particularly fast. Mainly, he just enjoyed interacting with the people, “taking my pleasures as a subjectivity of the divine objectivity,” as he described it. He certainly did not need money. Roulette had given Diablo far more money than he knew what to do with. Money mainly facilitated an ease of movement through the world, unhassled by the mundane.

Elizabeth Wildhack had wandered by, and stopped to admire one of his seashell pipes. She commented on the beauty of the spiral on the side of the shell.

“Isn't that something?” Diablo agreed. “The golden spiral. You've heard of that, of course?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Should I have?”

Diablo—lately inclined to assume that everybody understood what he understood—was visibly stunned at Elizabeth's ignorance. “Yes, you should have,” he replied, a hint of annoyance making itself known. “Everyone
should
have heard of it. It's only the key to understanding the nature of the universe, fer chrissakes. But I guess that's esoteric knowledge in this culture, even when it's staring us in the face everywhere we look.”

Despite finding Diablo's manner abrasive, Elizabeth was intrigued. “So are you going to share this esoteric knowledge with me?”

Despite being aggravated at the pace of evolution, Diablo could nevertheless scarcely contain his fervor at any
opportunity to expose the secrets of sacred geometry. After all, were Diablo in ancient Greece, he would have been stoned to death for revealing the architecture of reality. But today, since no one really has a spare second to consider something as pointless as the nature of the universe, he was free to tell anyone at all. “On that shell, right,” Diablo pointed. “The beauty you see is not in the eye of the beholder. It's innate. The spiral is based on the golden mean, which is nature's formula for harmony and balance. Here,” Diablo picked up another seashell pipe, “look at this. The arc of the curve remains the same no matter how large the spiral becomes, see? And if we could look inside the shell, we'd see a series of chambers, each one successively bigger, but every one identical in its geometry and shape. Consequently, the shell remains perfectly balanced throughout its entire lifetime, no matter how big it gets. Its center of gravity never changes as it grows. And you'll see this same spiral everywhere. Ram's horns, sunflowers, pinecones, whirlpools, hurricanes, tornadoes, galaxies, you name it. They all approximate the golden mean. Have you seen the satellite photos of Laughing Jim? The hook echo forms a golden spiral.”

“What's a hook echo?”

“That's the reflection of precipitation wrapped around the mesocyclone, of course.”

Elizabeth nodded, finding his enthusiasm enchanting, if a shard arrogant. “So then, what is the golden mean, numerically?”

Diablo pursued his point, oblivious. “The hair whorl that grows out of the top of your head.” He twirled his finger
around his crown. “The golden spiral, of course. Commas and quotation marks, too. Golden spirals every one, at least in the traditional serif fonts inherited from more learned scribes.”

Elizabeth masked her growing indignation with a polite smile. Once it seemed that Diablo had exhausted his examples, she posed her question again. “So, how do you define the golden mean numerically?”

“In fact,” Diablo ignored her question once again and pointed at her forehead, continuing with his vaunty exposition. “That backward number nine tattooed on your third eye looks like it approximates the golden spiral.”

This sudden detail interested Elizabeth more than the numerical definition of the golden mean. She touched her forehead automatically. “I'm certain that it does,” she replied, trying to sound certain. After an expectant pause, she asked, “Aren't you curious why it's tattooed backward?”

“I just assumed it was the same reason that
AMBULANCE
is printed backward on the front of ambulances, so that you can read it forward in your rearview mirror. I'm guessing that you like to look at your tattoo forward when you look in the mirror. Is there some other reason?”

“No.” Elizabeth's eyes sparkled as her pupils dilated. “But nobody's ever guessed that before.”

“What I'm curious about,” Diablo blithely continued, “is why number nine?”

Elizabeth had no ready answer prepared. Number nine was simply her favorite number, but this explanation seemed far too pedestrian for the present encounter. “Why do you think?” she parried.

Diablo smiled. “Well, to begin with, nine is the cabalistic number for the Holy Unspeakable Name of God. As the last single-digit number, nine represents the highest attainment in any endeavor, the zenith that cannot be surpassed, the ultimate limit. Or, if you don't believe in limits, it might be more useful to think of it as a mere boundary between the finite and the infinite. That's how numerologists conceive of it, since the product of any number multiplied by nine reduces back to nine, right? Eight times nine equals seventy-two; seven plus two equals nine. You can do that trick with
any
number times nine.” He paused. “I once hit the number nine twice consecutively while playing roulette, so I had cause to learn a bit about it. Shall I continue?”

“By all means,” Elizabeth replied, enthralled despite a nagging wish to be otherwise.

“Three times three, number nine is the triple trinity, thrice sacred, the supreme superlative. That's why we say things like on cloud nine, the whole nine yards, and dressed to the nines. Am I on the right track with any of this?”

“I wouldn't say you're on the wrong track,” Elizabeth bullshat and shifted the subject, “but I don't want to talk about this anymore. You still haven't told me how you define the golden mean numerically.”

“Oh that.” Diablo waved it off. “The golden mean is a proportion, 1 to 1.61803 ad infinitum. It's one of those irrational numbers.”

“What makes it irrational?” Elizabeth interrupted. Since women are so often cast as irrational, Elizabeth had grown reflexively defensive whenever the term emerged in conversation.

It was sort of an irrational habit of hers, as she was usually aware.

“There's no value judgment in calling it irrational,” Diablo replied, sensing her bristle. “Irrational numbers chase infinity. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, it's admirable. They've escaped from the rules of mathematics, the boundaries I was just talking about. Outlaw numbers. And the interesting thing about Phi—that's what ancient Greeks called the golden-mean ratio—the interesting thing about Phi is that it's derived entirely from the number one interacting with itself, which a friend of mine takes to be evidence that the number one is actually the
only
number, but that's another story entirely. Geometrically, we can say that the golden mean represents the only proportion by which the size and shape of the parts are defined by the size and shape of the whole, and vice versa. It's an expression of infinite self-similarity. Do you follow?”

“Of course.” Elizabeth nodded, truthful and tart. “Iterative unity.”

“Iterative unity,” Diablo repeated, impressed. “Here, let me show you something else.” He pulled a credit card out of his wallet and traced its shape on a piece of paper, sharpening the rounded corners. “See this rectangle? This is a golden rectangle. If you divide the length by the width, it's within one millimeter of the golden mean, 1.61803. It's the same with cereal boxes, books, cigarette packages, briefcases, televisions, and toasters. All approximate the golden rectangle. And that's not accidental, by the way. Psychologists have known since 1876 that people overwhelmingly prefer the golden rectangle when asked to
choose from a variety of rectangles. Innately beautiful, it's everyone's favorite rectangle, and so makes for brilliant packaging. In fact, the United Nations building is actually three golden rectangles stacked, to signify its mission of harmony, I suppose.”

“But what does the rectangle have to do with the spiral?”

“Right. Excellent question.” Diablo bent down and carefully drew in a few more lines on his diagram. “See here, what I have done is roughly divided each length by the golden mean, 1 to 1.61803. Basically, I just drew a proportional rectangle inside the original, using the width of the original as the length of the . . . iteration, and on and on. See, the size and shape of the parts are defined by the size and shape of the whole, and vice versa. Each small rectangle is a microcosm of the macrocosmic rectangle, a different size but geometrically identical. The golden mean is the only ratio by which that's possible. Now watch this. If I connect the corners of all the squares, we get the golden spiral.” Diablo nodded and leaned back, as if to provide Elizabeth space for explosive incredulity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth was incredulous, perhaps not explosive, but she wasn't about to give Diablo that satisfaction in any case. She merely nodded. “That is interesting.” She looked at the spiral on the seashell pipe in her hand. It would make a nice gift for Diana. “So how much?”

“Please.” Diablo folded his hands. “Those are free with good conversation.”

Elizabeth pulled out her wallet. “No, I'd like to help you support your art.” Elizabeth had been well-trained by the swarms of French Quarter artists vending their wares, music, performances, and mere presence. Most enforced a strict norm of payment just for glancing in their general direction.