FICTION: The Intoxication of Sycophancy

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
-- Anais Nin

What Pluto's story suggests is that the need to undergo some ritual rite of passage or trial by fire is more than a social conceit in the male purview. Whether this disposition is cultural or biological is difficult to say. What seems apparent is that for those who have never been in harm's way there is an impulse to find something that provides a surrogate liminal event, some self perceived heroic act or acts that suggest they too have endured hardship and survived. From the evidence at hand, we might surmise that in Zeke Pluto's case, this ideational myth was constructed during his incarceration.

Chloe Satie appeared in the midst of great crisis for Pluto. At a time when his cynical idealism had evaporated to a faint wisp of hope, his trust in his mission had made it so that he could trust no one. As he became a public figure, the intoxication of sycophancy affected even the most objective members of his inner circle. For Pluto, their every opinion was never more than an attempted regurgitation of what he was thinking. His closest followers he kept at a distance, and his deepest emotional attachments were few: Zelda, the dead Savard, and perhaps someone we know nothing of. When Chloe arrived, Zeke was smitten in every way.

She had read Anxieties of Contentment as a manual for living, and saw its author as a new age messiah. The sense of absence that plagued Chloe's consciousness prior to her conversion revealed itself as a profound distraction. This dissonance expressed itself in two ways. First, there was her obsession with the future, with the vision of something different, an intuitive perspective from which she could see her life as having a continuity that was heretofore absent. Her desire was to pursue something she had never told anyone of, to dance; and firing these longings was her dream of dancing in New York and Paris. But her attempts to find a troupe were to no avail. It was as if her feet were too long, or one of her legs was shorter than the other. The dance companies passed her by without listening; they couldn't understand how she could equate dance and word. In misreading her movements they missed this connection. They laughed at her.

So she danced alone in her waterfront studio, late at night, at closing time, her silhouette fascinating and tantalizing the men leaving the disco below. Sometimes she would invite them up. Always they soothed her loneliness with understanding and sympathy. It was as if she could judge one's soul by observing purely physical characteristics. In the loft of the garret, in the moonlight under the skylight, they came together and created a temporary antidote for loneliness.

The second symptom of her distraction was those moments of happiness and security when she mistakenly believed that physical passion, the thrall, the lush kisses and close embrace, were love. In the moments that comprised these countless small epiphanies, when she surrendered to an ineffable swoon, as if having a fit, she hallucinated the visage of a savior, a man-child with the face of a boy, a face unknown to her until she saw Zeke Pluto.