Chapter Eleven
Clarity read the unfavorable employee report on her that Manglove had placed on the shelf of her room while she had been talking to Ambi, the cute recluse of Herbaline. Clarity was getting good appraisals in customer service relationship, sales work diligence, and general understanding of human relations, but Manglove had assigned below average assessments in course taking initiative, sales learning autonomy and knowledge, agreement with human resource policies, and ability to generate agreement with the customer. Clarity's position on the Ambi Mivel 'language disagreement' issue was beginning to undermine her position as a quality candidate of Herbaline. Clarity knew that it was the reason for being summoned in Ambi's room after she was finished reading her own report.
Coley Manglove led Clarity to the shelf laid out behind the bed of Ambi, showing several books, among them 'the Relational Eye', a book written by a lesser known social swindler named Charles Winweigh, describing the advantages of delegating sales work to a team of people needing money or work, and of pairing two single women 'sold' on living with a couple, what he termed as a relational Fourplay, a four-win situation for 'all members of the purportedly polyexclusive, polygamous, polyamory household' involved.
"A relational Fourplay, that's interesting," said Clarity, "I've never come across this type of relationship. I know of Polyamory, but never shared living with a group espousing those values."
"The Relational Eye is not only a book for us, it is a device we've built, which allows us to film every employee. It allows us to monitor your relational affinity with us, with Mattelson Stive and me, and of us two with you and Ivy, or of us two with you and your friend Lanai."
Clarity looked around. Counting Lanai, and the absent Stive, there were four people mentioned by Manglove, including her. Manglove was dismissing Ambi purportedly, leaving her unpaired.
"And Ambi, I mean us being here, the actual reason for exploring the antisale room is..."
"To show you that if you engage in language refusal consistently, you cannot gain acceptance into this relational group, into any relational group really, you're going to become asocial, alienated from human contact. If you're alienated socially, your work will suffer, your sales will drop, your life will become one big antisale speech."
Ambi nodded and kept reading No sales logo, annotating the interesting parts which talked about not giving in to corporations which intimidated or coaxed people into buying something they did not need to live comfortably. The voice and cute face of Ivy appeared on-screen, speaking to Manglove.
"Ambi hasn't picked up our sales booklet," said Ivy. Manglove turned to Ambi. The emotician disapproved of the book No Sales Logo.
"This is a language refusal book, the other books do not engage my free thinking," said Ambi.
Manglove reached for page fifty three of the Relational Eye. "I've been giving some thought to this over the last few days, while Ambi has been refusing to modify her language word cloud. She needs people around her to change the way she thinks. She needs to be in a relationship."
"Go ahead," said Clarity.
"It's a simple idea to put in place a Polyamory relationship. Four people, three women and one man, committed sexually and sentimentally, dividing daily tasks and sharing child rearing obligations, one child per woman, at most, and then, possibly one of the children given away to another household who wants children. With four parents and two children in the household, the work life is doable, there is no sense of overwork for women or the man, there are a lot more quality blocks of living time, a lot more money in the household, thirty thousand dollars on average times four adds up to one hundred twenty thousand dollars for the household every year. The family structure is sustainable, there is vesting in the money and adoption of the household members, so that anyone can leave after the relational cliff period of two or three years, there is more time for relational activity, good sex, and re-placement of the members is possible by finding members who begin to work at Herbaline, so there is some flexibility with the relationship. There is also the advantage of not coming tired from work, and engaging in partnership or collaborative work among all four members of the household, all of them working for Herbaline."
"As long as the women are attracted to each other sexually, it may work. Is the man optional, I mean can I re-place the man with a woman of my own choosing?" Asked Clarity. The face of Ivy appeared on-screen on the in-house television set of the facility, showing the words optional maid, written below. Lanai glanced at the message, intrigued.
"I guess you can replace the man of the household with a maid," said Lanai, "I'm not ashamed of saying I am, attracted to Ivy sexually. I think it can work, polyamorous with three women and a maid instead of a husband." Ivy smiled and said that she enjoyed being with Ambi and that she could be paired with her to live with Coley and Stive, as co-heads of Herbaline as a whole. Ambi was caressing the white quilt, sparsed with pale pink patterns, looking at Ivy several times. Coley unbuttoned her white emotician coat.
"Very few people within the Polyamory community understand this type of committed plural relationship arrangement. Mattelson Stive is not optional, he is part of this relationship arrangement, he is very good at managing this company and he is useful to the women in the plural household. Ivy is simply the maid in the relationship, she likes that role, and her personality shares all of the traits needed to be a happy maid and nothing else. She can be number four, counting you and Ivy, Clarity, if Ambi keeps refusing our official sales policy, or number five, if you and your friend join Stive and me."
They walked into the General Pleasure Area, a room in the facility purportedly built to apply one of the principles of Herbaline, the fact that pleasure was an avenue to super health, a state of perfect health sustained over long periods of time, nine years or so, without feeling colds or the flu. The emotional blueprint workbench showed an emotion scale indicator for Clarity labeled 'inclined to engage in full Polyamory' which marked openness of Clarity to engage in fully open bisexual relationship with other good looking feminine women. Coley turned to Clarity.
"Have you ever engaged in a bisexual encounter of the variations type?" Clarity gazed indifferently at the shelf behind the quilt and the bed of Ambi. The cover of a Penthouse Variations magazine appeared on-screen, replacing the face of Ivy.
"You mean of Penthouse variations type?"
"Yes," said Coley, without hesitation.
"Yes," said Clarity, "undoubtedly yes. I've gotten into a threesome before, with a guy and with her." She pointed to Lanai.
"With me, in fact," said Lanai, "it happened in Acapulco, and also when we fooled around in a Malibu nudist beach on a sunny day, during midday lunch break, when I was already working at the library. Clarity had the day off her job as teleoperator for Stevenson."
"How old were you at the time?" Asked Manglove, glancing at Lanai.
"Twenty three," said Lanai, "Clarity was twenty four, I remember because it happened before her twentififth birthday."
"One year makes a difference," said Manglove, "the chart says you're twenty five now, you're more mature."
The Malibu teleoperator declined to become a member of Manglove's polyexclusive relationship, which included four people, three women including her and Ivy, and Stive. Manglove got up from the bed and walked to the door, pressing a few characters on the panel opening the door of the General Pleasure Area. Some of the characters shown on the door panel came from the Buddhist philosophy, some of them were written in Sanskrit, some of them came from the Greek alphabet.
"You´ll have to work on our values triangle to leave this room, I think you're showing too much attachment to pleasure and to your own pleasure and independence, to be involved in a plural relationship." She used a television remote to turn on the screen, leaving the television set tuned to a channel labelled 'tantra geometry'.
"The exit password to leave the room comes from the sacred scriptures of tantra."
Coley pointed Clarity towards a book
placed on the left hand side of Ambi's shelf, titled the Principles of Tantra, a book written by John Woodroffe discussing the practicalities of Tantra Vipassana, a practical avenue for engaging in good sex.
"The key to leave the room is to invert a triangle." Coley left the room on her own, leaving Ambi, Lanai and Clarity inside. The television monitor flashed static, tuned to no particular channel.
Clarity stepped towards the simple, plain table, sensing that they could be stranded for hours inside the General Pleasure area. Laid out before the first page of the book on Tantra, was a piece of paper explaining an ancient formula to invert an upper pointing triangle, describing how the upper point of human potential could be reached by observing both spiritual and material aspects of a person, the other two sides of the triangle. There were no diagrams in the book and most of the text was written in Sanskrit, all illegible to Clarity. Again the triangle surfaced as an intriguing geometric shape.
"What does it mean to invert a triangle?" Asked Lanai.
"Possibly finding a different position of the triangle, mmm, not sure," said Clarity, "or a different kind of triangle."
Lanai walked towards the door entrance, observing the intricate patterns on the door panel, showing an etched mandala. The word mandala echoed as a yantra, and in tantra, was associated with a geometric canvass to express an abstract thought. A Yantra was a circle holding many small triangles inside.
An idea came into the mind of Clarity. She used the local television remote and pressed on a triangle shown in the remote. Static stopped flashing and a triangle appeared on-screen. She pressed on the ok center button of a 'move up and down' cursor and the triangle divided into two triangles. Using the cursor, she matched them both into a square to 'invert' the original shape. This 'inverted' the shape of the triangle, from unstable, into stable, for the square was more stable than the triangle geometrically. She heard the sound of a tumbler lifting locks on the exit door. Her idea was working. They were free from the pleasure area.
"A square is made of two triangles, it inverts the triangle, an unstable geometric shape, into a square, a stable relationship geometric arrangement." Clarity glanced at Ambi, who was reading her book.
"Are you leaving Ambi?"
"No, I want to finish No Sales Logo," said Ambi.
The door of the pleasure area opened and Clarity left the room with Lanai to get back into their quarters. Clarity pondered on the riddle presented by Coley, before getting back to sleep. In the same way they'd left the pleasure area, she sensed that it was possible to leave attachment to pleasure and to be free from it, while keeping all the benefits of pleasure. It probably was one of the meanings of Tantra. Understanding the Polyamory ways of Herbaline was not easy.