Maybe I needed some music. I got out a record by Asia which I'd bought because it had a picture of this awesome green dragon on the cover. The music is a little too white-bread and stiff for my liking, but it had a few good songs on it, like ‘Sole Survivor.’ I put it on and synthesizer music filled my apartment, masking the hissing and popping of the steak, which I now removed from the grill pan and dumped on my plate. The corn was starting to look cool and puckered, sitting there in a pool of salty butter.
I sat there for forty-five minutes, wishing I could eat. But I couldn't.
I thought: I wonder if this is how an impotent man feels.
Well, I was supposed to train and I couldn't very well train on an empty stomach. Desperate measures were called for.
I went to the goodie cabinet and forced myself to eat a half-pound-size Cadbury bar. It overpowered the orchids and tasted pretty good, and I read some Crystal Singer at the same time, determined to feel better. When I was done with the candy I had a vague headache, but I kept reading.
Killashandra had a vague headache, too, but it turned out to be only her Milekey Transition, and totally worth it. So I ignored mine.
Then I threw up.
I couldn't believe it.
I'd read about dancers and actresses who made themselves sick so they wouldn't get fat. But that's not me. I didn't mind being fat. I didn't want to throw up. I wanted to eat food and keep it down. I liked being big. I wasn't sticking my fingers down my throat.
What was going on here?
And what was I going to do with all my emotions, if I couldn't put them in my mouth and eat them? That was what I wanted to know.
I went to the dojo. No one else was there yet, so I decided to practice on the water bag. I pretended I was Muhammad Ali training to fight George Foreman in Africa. I danced and whacked and dodged. The bag was heavy, but it was swinging and squealing on its chains. I was having a pretty good time.
Miss Cooper came out of the bathroom behind me. I saw her in the mirror and checked myself, sweating and puffing.
‘What are you doing?’ she laughed. ‘It sounds like a construction site in here.’
I laughed, then jabbed and hooked a few more times for good measure, imagining Gunther's smug face on the bag at my eye level. The bag jolted on its chains when I hit it.
‘Keep your shoulder down when you punch. And make sure you chamber the opposite hand. You're not standing square on. You should be punching center-line. And stay in a good stance. Keep your feet planted and your knees bent — you keep coming up on your toes. The objective is to have good form, not to just hit as hard as you can.’
I nodded, swallowing. Accepting. So much for my Ali impersonation. Dutifully I got in my front stance and I was still taking instruction from Miss Cooper — and not moving the bag an inch — when people started showing up and doing their stretching.
Cori Knight showed up. When I went to get my towel, she was sitting on the sidelines in her knee brace, watching the class.
‘Hi, how ya doin,’ I said, and she launched into her usual litany of I'm-overdue-on-my-credit-card-my-car's-on-the-blink-I-have-to-study-for-a-biochem-exam-I-twisted-my-knee-again-getting-out-of-the-shower moaning and groaning. That's how I knew she wasn't holding a grudge. Probably she thought me hitting her was just another layer in her cake of pain. Or else she liked being injured. She sure seemed to be having a better time sitting on the sidelines watching than she ever had in class. And she probably enjoyed getting to sit near the black belts’ section, flirting with Mr. Juarez while I sweated and fell on my butt.
Besides, because I am black I didn't think that she would want to be seen to be hating my guts. She's like that. Probably felt sorry for me. Probably thought I wished I had her skinny white butt, even though it looked like a piece of dead fish.
Gloria was there, too. We stretched and then started practicing our katas. Gloria's form is so pretty. You should see her do the sumo stances in Sei-enchin kata. They're deep and symmetrical, and she doesn't have to waddle to get from one to the other, she just flows. Her hands are graceful, too. I wish I could be like that.
Mr. Juarez took the warm-up and then told us that tonight the color belts would start learning breaking in preparation for the tournament and demonstration. Sensei came out of the office and started explaining all about focus and how, by focusing your ki, or spirit energy, you could direct your power into your hand and break a brick without hurting yourself. Then he asked Mr. Juarez to demonstrate punching through a brick that had been set up on special blocks. Whenever he wants to show us something hard, he asks either Miss Cooper or Mr. Juarez. He didn't ask Miss Cooper to break the brick because, he said, the ladies probably wouldn't want to practice breaking because of our nails. Miss Cooper gave a weak smile as if she'd heard it all before.
It took Mr. Juarez a couple of tries, but in the end he did it. Everyone clapped. We were to start practicing on boards. There were some half-inch thick sheets of white pine, and we were to strike them with the grain. There was a lot of talk about what part of the hand to use, how to gather your ki ahead of time, how to drop your weight, where to focus, and so on. I listened avidly.
When Gloria and I came to take our turns, Mr. Juarez said, ‘Now, ladies, you don't have to do this if you don't want to.’
‘Good,’ said Gloria. ‘I don't want to.’
Mr. Juarez nodded to her, she bowed to him and went to the back of the line.
‘How about you, Miss Orbach?’
‘I'll give it a try,’ I said. Instantly Miss Cooper was by my side.
‘Come on, you can do it,’ she said. ‘Just line up your hand in the chamber. Make sure you drop your right knee as you come down. Look at a spot about two inches below the board, focus your energy, and . . . punch!’
Whack!
My hand bounced off the board, knuckles skinned.
‘That's OK, that's OK, it's a good first try,' said Mr. Juarez. Miss Cooper led me away and told me not to worry.
‘A lot of it is psychological,' she said. ‘You're afraid of hurting your hand, so you pull back instinctively. You have to learn to punch through that point.’
Gloria, listening, offered, ‘Yeah, that's what they told me when I was having Scottie, they said to push through the pain and you know what? It hurt worse and I had about a million stitches and bled like a pig.’
Miss Cooper smiled thinly. ‘Stick around for a little extra training tonight, Cookie,’ she told me. ‘I'll help you.’
So I stuck around after Gloria and the others went to Tony's for pizza. Troy was hanging around the heavy bag with some of the brown and black belts; they were challenging each other how many different ways they could break a brick. (‘Do it with your head, man, I saw that on ESPN once and it was awesome’.) Troy saw me standing there and came over.
‘Hey, I saw you hit that piece of wood. You could punch harder than that. How come you wimped out?’
I like Troy. He's a cute guy but he doesn't intimidate me like most cute guys, he has the kind of energy of a guy you can actually talk to and he doesn't make you feel like a fat slob. He has a girlfriend and a couple of little kids; they're in the kids’ class and that's how he got interested in training.
‘I didn't wimp out,’ I said out of the side of my mouth. ‘Miss Cooper was correcting my form. I was afraid of doing it wrong.’
‘Nah, you can't do it wrong,’ Troy said. ‘You afraid you're gonna hurt your hand? C'mere, let's try an experiment.’
He set up a couple of cinder blocks to make a platform and stuck a brick across them. Then he went out into the alley, tiptoeing around barefoot by the garbage cans and whooping, ‘Ooh! Ee! Ah! A rat just ran across my foot!’ so that I had to crack up. He came back with an old phone book and laid it across the brick.
‘Here. Now you got some nice padding. You just got to get used to hitting something hard.’
I looked at my skinned knuckles. ‘I don't know .. .’
‘Come on, Cookie, don't be a
chickenshit.’
'I am not.’
‘Let's see you hit it, then.’
So I hit it. It still hurt, but not as much.
‘You call that hitting? My girlfriend hits her face harder than that when she putting on makeup.’
So I hit it again. Harder.
‘Come on, is that the best you can do?’
I hit it again. And again. Finally, Troy said, ‘Here, lemme in there.’
He tore off some of the pages of the phone book.
‘Enough already, Troy’
‘Come on, you big moose.’
‘What did you call me?’
‘Hit it.’
'I'll hit you in a minute.’ I hit it. He tore off more pages.
‘Again. Mooo!’
I hit it again. Really hard. My hand was killing me.
‘Come on, bitch.’
We were drawing a crowd, and the other men were laughing uneasily at what Troy was saying to me. I could feel my face getting hot and my heart pounding.
‘I've had a really bad day, Troy, let's call it quits before you make me mad.’
‘Ooh, don't want to make the fat mama mad, do I?’ scoffed Troy. ‘She might break a nail or—’
Bam!
The brick fell on the floor in two pieces. A couple of thin sheets of telephone directory pages drifted to the floor. I gaped.
‘Ah-ha!’ shouted Troy. ‘I told you you could do it. You got to unleash the inner beast, girl!’
‘Just what is going on here?’ It was Miss Cooper. She walked in with her naginata and saw the scene.
‘Oh, uh, Miss Cooper, we was just playin’ around and — look, Cookie broke that all by herself!’
I looked sheepishly at the floor. My hand was bleeding.
‘I think you can all go now,' Miss Cooper said, and the guys all split, even Mr. Juarez who is also a black belt. Troy winked at me as he went around the corner.
‘You'd better put some ice on that hand,' she said to me. ‘What's going on here? Are you trying to prove something? You're only a purple belt. You shouldn't even be thinking about breaking a brick yet. If Shihan knew about this he'd have my head on a stick.’
I apologized.
‘All right,’ she said, kindly. 'I wanted to talk to you about the other night. What happened in sparring. I'm concerned that you don't seem to have the right idea about what we're doing. I know you would never want to hurt anybody, but—’
‘I wouldn't!’ I said. ‘I hate violence, I can't stand to see it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I can do the form OK in the kata, but when it gets to sparring I just lose it.’
‘That's why you have to have Bushido. You have to follow the code. You can't just go around hitting people. You have to have control over everything you do.’
‘Control,' I repeated. ‘OK, I'll keep trying. Control.’
Then we did a little light sparring. Miss Cooper would feed me techniques so that I could learn to deal with them without freaking out. She let me come in and hit her, too. ‘Good!’ she'd say, or ‘Too hard. Watch your left foot, I could sweep you there.’ At the end, she said, ‘Better. Much better. You have to have that kind of control. Otherwise you're too dangerous.’
Me, dangerous? What a thought.
Control. I'm going to have control.
But it wasn't control that broke the brick, was it?
referred pain
Next shift, Serge orders you to fly a wide patrol right over N-Ridge while her team goes after Gonzalez on foot.
‘We're getting real close to the mines and according to the Front, there's enough golems up here to fill Shea Stadium. I don't want no Halloween present from the Grid when I get up there, you know?’
Gossamer rises on a warm wave and banks sharply to avoid a high point in the Grid. You smell the flowers through Goss and try to identify the psychotropic signatures that come slithering through the atmosphere, falling harmlessly on Gossamer but probably not so harmlessly on any humans in this zone. You package up everything you can get on the chemicals and send this to Machine Front for analysis as a matter of routine.
Then you start looking for golems.
If they were smart — and it's difficult sometimes to know whether or not they are smart, because they operate according to Grid rationale, which is really no rationale at all — they would send some of their members away from the set that is supposed to be massing near the mine entrance to swarm around behind Serge's convoy and make sure it could never return to X. You're going to have to spot them, anticipate their plans, and keep Serge ahead of the game so she can find a way back without having to engage thousands more golems.
You head for the road to N-Ridge to see if your fears are founded on anything real. Well, real in a Grid sense. Because golems are like those flower sculptures you see in Asia made in the shape of people. From a distance it looks like a real person but when you come in close you see it's all gardenias or whatever. That's what the golems are. When they die, there's a lot of initial gore and they leave behind a mess, but then they pretty much evaporate into a cloud of Grid-pollen.They are only made real in a fleshly sense by human perception.
Humans feel they need to perceive things in terms of agents and they make a big separation between actor and acted-upon, subject and object. Humans organize, perceptually dividing the Grid into golems and apparently inert webbing, but MF cameras can't record golems. This invisibility-to-MF is a problem, because their non-corporeality doesn't stop golems from taking stuff apart and chucking it into the well. That's why robot planes wouldn't do any good in your job, although, through you, Gossamer's prosthetic eyes are able to record the existence of golems.
It's not long before you see a band of them moving like monkeys in the webbing. Gossamer's eyes can pick up motion through several layers of Grid, though detail eludes her. The golems are making for the ragged trail that Serge's Machine Front backup convoy has left, a wound in the Grid. You lock on to the golems and track them. Eventually you glimpse one clearly through a break in the Grid. It has been fully reconstructed, geared up in a custom battleskin complete with thermal regulator and water-purifier. Yet it is also unarmed, and a closer check reveals that it's bereft both of breathing filters and of communications equipment.
There's nothing surprising about this. Current Grid theory posits that the golems need to breathe the raw air so that they can read its scent-messages. You follow the golems until you are satisfied that they don't present an immediate threat to Serge; then you move on, making a wide sweep and scanning a fan-shaped area behind Serge's convoy. When you are satisfied nothing wicked is following them, you urge Gossamer faster and head for the logic mines on N-Ridge.
The grave balloon has gone its own way, the storm has cleared, and everything looks benign and pretty. You steel yourself, wondering what to expect. And again and again you glimpse something that looks like structure — but only when seen from the corner of your eye. When you try to look at it straight on, the apparent order disappears in the jumble and jump, only to return when you look away: on the periphery of your visual field, you are teased by impressions of castles and towers and bridges.
You turn Gossamer and head back, planning to survey a neat triangle around and between Serge and the mines. It's an area you know pretty well, so you have to double-check your coordinates when you see what it's looking like these days. Where before the Grid's open lattice had gradually evaporated into cloud, now there is a grayness. At first you think it's a burn scar; but no. Just as it was in the clearing you saw before the storm drove you away, this part of the Grid has been sucked dry of all activity. It's still there, it simply isn't alive anymore. It doesn't move, or glow. Instead of endlessly shifting branches, there are skeletal forms frozen in mid-writhe, like trees long battered by sea winds and contorted into shapes that suggest motion though they are still as death. This devastation stretches long and narrow like a road, beginning only a mile or so from the mine perimeter and reaching into the wilds of N-Ridge.
By contrast to the rest of the Grid, the stillness is shocking. Nothing moves. Nothing.
You fly over this 'road' for some time, scanning from side to side for clues as to its origin. And in the living Grid nearby, you pick up golems. A lot of them. They are heading in the same direction as you, parallel to the wasted Grid; but they are much slower and you soon pass them. You give Gossamer her head and she increases speed: she's following a scent-trail, and you can guess where it's going to lead even before Gossamer's eyes show you the very same shorn-off clearing that you were driven from before. This seems to be the end — or the beginning — of the dead zone.
What the heck has been happening here?
You start to pull pictures for Machine Front. Much of the well has been reduced to dust; but not all of it. There is something submerged in that dull gleam, though you can't see it very well from this height. Gossamer's eyes don't seem to work as well in the dead Grid. It's almost as though her eyes are adapted to see the order within randomly moving aspects of the live Grid, and she doesn't know how to decipher the fixed forms of the Grid in death. You have to strain to see through her eyes. And even the live Grid adjacent to the ruined area looks different. It looks more ordered — just as you noticed the first time you were here. And certainly, the dead, skeletal areas seem to have an almost mechanical—
SOS!!
Serge is calling you.
AMBUSHED. SURROUNDED. MAYBE 100 GOLEMS. WHICH WAY SHOULD WE BREAK?
She sends a position, but it's not within your sights at the moment. You send a question through MF.
ARE YOU NEAR DEAD AREA? GRAY THING?
NO. WHAT GRAY THING? SHOULD WE GO THERE?
NO! HOLD YOUR POSITION. ON MY WAY.
Then you hare off back over the live Grid, in the direction of her signal.
Gossamer is scanning with all her powers, but the only movement you pick up is that made by golems. A lot of them. Their movements are impressions of flickering shadow and light. suggested but not clearly articulated within the chaos of the Grid. Yet you can perceive a general pattern, like ants moving on a scent trail. They are coming from all directions, converging on a point.
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