The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four

by Randall Farmer

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to get him into trouble,” she said. Ying had been in America for most of her life and the accent so strong in her father was barely noticeable in her.

  “Tell me. What did he do?”

  “Just…,” she shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “He touched you and you didn’t like it,” I said. Ying was trivial to read.

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “But? Did you tell him to stop?” There was more to this one, but I couldn’t quite tell what.

  Ying looked away to the other side. “I’m sorry. Really.”

  I took her face in my hands. “Ying, just tell me. I won’t be mad.” I couldn’t be mad at Ying. Someone as beautiful and fragile as Ying demanded gentler treatment. Besides, she was mine.

  “He started to touch me,” she said, her heart-shaped face turning faintly red in my muscled hands, “he, he, he put his hands under my shirt. I told him ‘stop that’, but he said it would be fun. So,” and she stopped and took a deep breath, and then spoke fast “so I said that if he didn’t stop I would tell you and you would beat him to within an inch of his life. Then he stopped.”

  She took a deep breath, and looked at me with wide eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.

  I barely heard her because I laughed so hard I could barely stand up. “You said that?” I said, through gales of laughter.

  She nodded, eyes still wide, and a hint of a smile crept in.

  “Good for you, Ying. Good for you,” I said, leaning back against the side of the Cougar and chortling. The thought of innocent Ying facing down Greg was priceless. I would still have a conversation with Greg and reinforce my support for Ying’s actions, but Ying had handled the real problem on her own. Wonderfully.

  I turned away, and let us towards the Macy’s for another round of shopping. Greg and his interests would be tomorrow’s problem. I refused to worry about him today. Instead, I had fun watching Ying shop.

  Sky Teaches Meditation

  Sky smiled. He had given in and agreed to teach while waiting for the Mutie Mill politics to rumble through the Focus organization, even though he thought of himself more as a student of Zen Buddhism than a teacher.

  Ann, Bill, Eileen and Rick Huddleston were all sitting zazen under the basketball hoop while Sky gave out pointers. Quite a few Inferno members practiced Zen, though from Sky’s perspective, ‘practiced’ was perhaps too strong a word. ‘Examined’ fit better. Rick, the bodyguard crossdresser he had met first guarding Lori in her classroom, was the most accomplished. Bill still worked on breath following, not yet ready to meditate on a koan.

  The rest would get a koan today whether they wanted one or not.

  “Shuzan held out his short staff and said, ‘If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?’” Sky said, quoting a well-known koan, at least one familiar to him. Rick nodded and began to arrange himself in a half lotus position to meditate. Ann did the same, though reluctantly. Of the three essentials of zazen practice, faith, doubt and determination, Ann lacked the most in faith. Of doubt and determination she possessed plenty. Faith, not at all.

  Eileen sat and looked quizzically at Sky.

  “Why?” Eileen said. “Koans never make sense. Why not meditate on random words, instead?”

  “Why meditate at all?” Sky said. “What is your understanding of what you are doing?”

  “One works with a koan to exhaust one’s random thoughts and feelings, to set your mind free of them so you can see into your own nature,” Eileen said, reciting a section of a letter he wrote to their household a year ago.

  “True. Yet the koan has a real meaning as well. A koan illuminates a place in your mind where your illusions have become real. Many koans, many illusions removed.”

  Eileen shook her head. She sat in a full lotus position, unwilling to start meditating. “Your explanation makes no sense. Just like koans.”

  Koans aren’t supposed to fully make sense until one is enlightened. They didn’t fully make sense to Sky. What Eileen didn’t grasp was the fact she could learn things, use things, that didn’t make sense, at least in words.

  “Do you hear sounds, Eileen?” Sky said.

  “Of course.”

  “Are sounds real?”

  “Of course they are. You can record them on a tape recorder.”

  Sky shook his head. “All you are doing is duplicating the illusion. Your mind makes a sound real. Otherwise, sound is noise. Anything appearing in your senses or in your consciousness is an illusion, of no enduring reality.”

  “This is what bugs me about Zen, Sky. Nonsense like this.”

  “My explanation sounds like nonsense because we communicate in words, in sound. In illusions. We cannot communicate reality. Zen Buddhism is a way of personally experiencing buddhahood, not of learning about buddhahood. You can’t learn anything of this nature without experience. When I am talking to you, Eileen, who is it that hears what I speak?”

  “I do.”

  “Where is the ‘I’?”

  “Inside me.”

  “You cannot point to an ‘I’, though. Conscious, unconscious, internal, external, …you can look all you want, but you can’t find the ‘I’. Your desire for truth gets in your way, Eileen. Truth is an explanation, but your goal is not an explanation, nor understanding. Those are processes. You want to become a state, not gain an explanation.” Become enlightened. If someone could put enlightenment into words, one would be able to read about enlightenment and become enlightened. Since that was clearly not the case, experience was necessary. Sky remembered his struggles, round and round and round. Experience was necessary.

  Eileen shook her head, frustrated, and closed her eyes. “Perhaps today I’ll just breathe.”

  Later, Ann walked with Sky, circling the obstacle course. “Why is meditation different for Transforms, Sky?” she asked. “Compared to non-Transforms. I understand the metacampus makes things different for Major Transforms, but why is this different for me?”

  “I don’t know,” Sky said. “I’m not the person I was before I transformed, either. I didn’t expect things to be the same, though.”

  “There’s more mind, or something. More of the illusory.”

  Sky shrugged. “Well, consider learning through Zen as a way of seeing your own nature. All Transforms have more nature, more mind, to examine.”

  These overly analytical discussions troubled Sky. He found a lot of Zen ‘examination’ in Inferno, but for many, including Lori, they examined Zen without examining the Buddhism. This was a common complaint about the Zen practice in the Western world. The Buddhist precepts were necessary, Sky thought, to prepare the body and soul for the practice of Zen. Some of the precepts were open to interpretation, such as the meaning of chastity. Once you understood your own nature, sex became essentially immaterial. One needed to rid oneself of lust, one of Sky’s eternal struggles. Other precepts allowed less interpretation, such as the prohibition about eating animals, killing, and trading in animal flesh. Yet, he had students here, such as Lori, who discarded those as well.

  “Things can’t be so simple,” Ann said.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with simple?”

  “The problem is more complex.”

  “Too much thinking, Ann,” Sky said. “Thoughts are words, words are illusions, illusions hide one’s Buddha nature from oneself. The answers are simple, too simple to be spoken. They must be experienced.”

  “The original emptiness. The great silence,” Ann said. “I’ve been there, but the great silence scares me.”

  “That’s where faith comes in, faith in yourself,” Sky said. “You exist even without words.”

  Ann nodded. “That’s the problem. Without words, I’m not me.”

  Sky didn’t know what to say. He let the bustle around him and the nagging feeling of panic flow through him and away f
rom him. “Are you ‘you’ when your juice level changes? When your juice levels get so low you have difficulty thinking?”

  “Yes. No. Dammit,” Ann said, and stopped walking. “Sky, that’s a horrible question. How can you say such a thing? I’m me, no matter what.” Sky sensed Ann’s distress increase. Her muscle tension, her heart rate, all showed stress. She understood the true answer but denied it to herself. Did Ann have problems with the effects the juice had on her? Would acknowledging her juice level altered who she was represent a weakness she couldn’t afford to admit?

  “If you find this hard to think about, take this as a sign this is then something you do need to think about and ponder,” Sky said. “Meditate on this quandary when you meditate next. Juice changes everything. You know this intellectually, much more than I do, because of your studies. Perhaps you have to fully experience this, not just understand it.”

  Greg’s Gym

  [Carol Hancock POV]

  I reluctantly left Bobby sated on the bed. Magical as those moments were, I needed to come to earth again and tend to my responsibilities. I spent the early evening with Indy and Luke, my two crooks, going over all the various robberies we had conducted and trying to spot and clean up problems, patterns, and style issues. We spent the rest of the time casing out several businesses for future opportunities. My money problems were getting critical. I had just bought an RPG launcher to attach to my M-16, and my purchase blew through the last of my cash reserves. The launcher sat out on my workbench in the factory, glaring at me, unfinished.

  I made it to Pete’s gym at 10:15, late enough for the last straggler to have left. The building was a run-down office building of dirty red brick, six blocks outside of the El, and five stories tall. In addition to the gym, the building also held a couple of low life lawyers, a commercial real estate firm, a dentist, a collection agency on the top floor and a small time sweepstakes magazine company on the floor below that, the latter filled with an army of tired looking women who spent all day stuffing envelopes.

  The dentist stuck in my mind. Whenever I came by during the day, I would hear his drill, struggling, straining, and never quite managing to achieve the speeds of a more modern dental implement. The drill would start low and slow, and then pick up speed, like a jet working up to take off. Just when the drill sounded almost ready to take off, it would slow again, tired, and gasping for breath. It would grind slowly, resting, until regaining enough energy to start again the eternal struggle for takeoff.

  The building was silent at night and the stars twinkled with an icy clarity in the cloudless sky. The temperature was down into the twenties already and falling fast, and the blackened slush at the edges of the road had turned to ice again.

  The entrance to Pete’s gym was off to the side, not the main entrance to the building’s tiny lobby. Icy steps led down from the sidewalk to the sunken door. I slipped quietly inside with my key.

  Pete’s gym was a boxer’s gym. A boxing ring filled the center of the gym, with a couple of benches around it, and punching bags of several sorts off to the side. Weights and exercise benches circled the edge of the gym, dumbbells and barbells and big iron plates. Squat racks and rowing machines and a stationary bicycle lay in between. The gym smelled of chalk and old sweat. I warmed up on the rowing machine and did some stretches.

  Next, I spent ten minutes in a lotus position on the floor, meditating and summoning up my will, visualizing my success doing my exercises. A Zielinski trick, but the damn thing worked. Over the next three and a half hours, I proceeded to force my body to the very end of its limits. Pumping, pushing, straining, working myself to shivering exhaustion on one exercise, going from one station to the next, before coming back to the first and exhausting myself again. Terror drove me past limits I hadn’t exceeded in months. Three and a half hours. When I finished, I could barely move. Every muscle trembled, and merely walking to the shower was a challenge.

  I caught sight of myself in the mirrors as I passed, even more like a cartoon parody of a bodybuilder than before. I didn’t want to think about weighing myself.

  Bah. I needed muscle work like this more often, or I would develop muscle problems.

  I needed my own gym.

  Motivated, the next day I looked into Greg’s progress on the new gym. My gym. I went into the situation happy and anticipatory, because if everything went according to schedule, the gym would be opening in two weeks.

  I opened the back door, expecting construction workers. No workers. Pallets of drywall, unhung, though. An unfinished wiring job. An untiled shower area missing some essential plumbing. No gym equipment, either.

  My anticipatory mood vanished, replaced by dark anger. I hunted down Greg and found him in his apartment, eating breakfast in front of the television. The plate of cold pizza tumbled to the floor as he stood, shocked by the slam of the door as I entered.

  “What the fuck is going on with the gym?”

  “Ma’am, I can explain,” Greg said, and stammered out an attempted explanation. The gym equipment was on back order. The contractors continuously screwed up. He hadn’t hired the people he needed to run the place.

  By then I was flipping a dagger from one hand to the next, barely holding in my murderous urges. I demanded the financial records, but all he had were some handwritten scraps of paper with a few numbers on them. “Ma’am, I don’t know,” he said, answering one of my questions on finances. “I’m not sure how much money we have left.”

  I cracked my shoulder joints with a quick twist of my arms and leaned forward with a snarl. Greg turned pale and ran for the door, pee running down his pants. Too much predator, I guessed.

  I barely repressed the urge to chase him down. If I went after him now, this angry, I would kill him.

  Instead, I went home to fuck Bobby into oblivion, before returning to Pete’s gym and working off my mad. I needed to figure out what to do. When I got home again, I went to my office, sat down, and thought.

  The problem was obvious once I spent some time thinking. Greg didn’t have the first idea about how to start up a gym. He was young and full of confidence, but he just didn’t know enough about business. I assumed that since he worked in a gym, he would be able to start one himself. I left him alone and he fell on his face.

  Greg certainly knew about the problems a long time ago. He must have been too frightened to come to me and tell me how badly he had screwed up. He shouldn’t be able to keep secrets from me. I could read him perfectly well. I should have caught the fact that he was covering something this big. I thought back to our last several conversations.

  And, oh, the signs had been there. He had been nervous. He had told me that he was worried about the location being ready. He said staffing was going slow. He even said he thought some of the equipment we got through Mr. Oldman’s connections might be a bit late.

  I had snapped at him, told him he damn well better fix the problems, and that if the gym didn’t open by February 15th I would make hamburger out of his ass. He told me ‘yes, ma’am, the gym will be ready.’ He didn’t believe his own words, but I let it ride.

  I had given him a job he couldn’t handle and ignored all the warning signs until the problem blew up. Yes, Greg screwed up, but it was my fault.

  With a sinking horror in the pit of my stomach, I realized this wasn’t the first time I had made this particular mistake. Bobby, too, had given me signs before he got sick, and I had ignored those, too. I hadn’t wanted them to be true, and in a muddled mess of non-logic, had acted as if ignoring the problem would make it go away.

  Sloppy shit like that would kill me. It had nearly killed Bobby already. My mistake wasn’t some minor problem. Greg’s gym and Bobby’s health were already more warning than I had any right to. The next time I missed evidence of a problem, I would likely next find out by way of an FBI bullet exploding through my brain.

  ‘Pay attention,’ Keaton had said. I had learned to pay attention to her lessons, learned to pay attention to my new nature
as an Arm, and more than anything else, learned to pay attention to her because pain came from the dark caverns of hell whenever I didn’t.

  It wasn’t enough. I had to pay attention to everything. To Bobby, to Greg, to all my people. To my environment, to the news, the weather, the normals. The local Transforms, Keaton still, Zielinksi and his research. Everything. As a normal, such a thought was ludicrous, but I was an Arm now, and the world wouldn’t care whether such a thing was possible before I died.

  A problem, except as an Arm, I thought I had a chance to come close. I processed more information now, processed it better, and was perfectly capable of comprehension far beyond normal humanity when I wanted to. Now, I understood, I had been too cautious, too tied to my old assumptions. I needed to pay attention, to everything, and face the reality honestly, without my ego, my wants, my expectations, interfering. Impossible, except I remembered Bobby’s hot body as I found him near death, those long days waiting, not knowing if he would live or die. My fault, my chance to do better. I let the pain sear me, burn into my heart and soul, brand me with the knowledge of my need. Watch, notice everything, face the truth without flinching.

  I would do better because I had to.

  I went out hunting and found Greg hiding at a local bar, drinking his way to oblivion so he wouldn’t feel it when I gutted him. I snagged him just before closing time, dragged him by the ear back to his apartment, sobered him up with a few doses of bowel-loosening Arm predator, and started going over the problems.

  The avalanche of doom started with the contractor problems. The contractor hadn’t finished the electric wiring because of some problem with a city permit. Greg didn’t understand the problem; when he called City Hall he got nowhere. The contractor refused to work without the permit. Greg tried to lean on the contractor to get the permit himself, but the contractor refused, saying it wasn’t his kind of permit and some other contractor should provide the permit.

  Greg had gotten mad and yelled at the contractor, and now the contractor wasn’t returning Greg’s calls. Greg didn’t know what to do, because the contractor had already been paid half of the money and hadn’t even done a quarter of the work before he quit working due to this permit issue.