“Does being a Focus mean enslaving people? Is that what being a Focus means to you?” Gail said, losing control over her righteous Rickenbach temper. “Screwing with people’s heads until they’re terrified of you? Torturing people until you’ve taken away their free will? Enslaving them? Because that’s not how I’m going to be a Focus. I wouldn’t do that to any human being and especially I won’t do that to people who depend on me.” Gail stood and shouted, now. She couldn’t make herself stop, and didn’t want to.
“I don’t know how the rest of you Focuses do things, but I’m sure as hell not going to enslave people. I hope there’s a better way of being a Focus, because I’m not taking yours. I don’t know what else you came here to say, but if it’s as worthless as what you’ve told me so far, I don’t want to hear any of it.”
Adkins cold eyes bored holes through Gail. “You’re a fool.” The Focus stood and let exasperation show on her face. Gail realized with a start that until then Adkins had kept her face blank. How had she read Focus Adkins’ mood earlier? Gail focused her attention on Adkins and realized that the other Focus’s voice hadn’t risen in anger or shown any emotion at all save what she wanted to show to Gail. Adkins hands stayed at her side, her body calm. Gail had expected Adkins to put her left hand on her hip and wag an index finger at her, the way her father would have done. She didn’t. She didn’t have to, to get her point across. “You’re too young and stupid to be a Focus.” To Gail, Adkins’ calm words felt like a shout. “You’ll find out what soft-headed leniency does for you. When you’ve screwed up your household so badly that you’re their slave, come talk to me again. If they’ll let you out of your closet. Maybe then you’ll be ready to listen to reason. Then perhaps you can learn something.” Adkins turned and walked out of the room, gathering her guards behind her.
She had no parting comments for Gail, no expression on her face at all – but her entire demeanor showed a cold disapproval. She had been there less than fifteen minutes and was gone again, leaving Gail with a worse headache than ever and the sinking realization she had been thrown into far deeper water than she ever imagined.
“Shit,” Gail said, slamming the chair against the table. She did the same to a second chair. The chair slamming didn’t do anything for either her headache or her temper.
Her metasense, in Adkins’ terminology, still sensed the Transform with the misfortune of having Adkins for a Focus. If Gail concentrated, she could metasense Adkins herself, now that she knew what to look for. However, when she looked for Adkins, everything blurred out, as if Gail was getting lost inside her own normally invisible glow.
She was so angry at the tyrannical, fascist, enslaving, supercilious bitch that she shook. She couldn’t do a damned thing about Adkins, but Gail vowed to herself that whatever happened, whatever problems she had with the people she supported, she would never, ever, use her Focus tricks to enslave them.
And, if Adkins had a problem with her decision, she could stick it up her tight little ass so far she choked on it.
Spoiled Milk
(7)
11:00 in the evening, and Gail cried, not a new thing. She had been crying a lot over the last several days. Two weeks had passed since she awoke from her transformation. She had long spent her initial reserve of juice. The six people now in her household weren’t even close to enough to keep her in sufficient juice.
Gail had learned to move juice. Juice flowed between her people, through her, but she had never thought moving juice would turn out to be so hard. Her never-ending headache throbbed whenever she tried to move the juice, and the flow slowed to nothing when she didn’t concentrate. Worse, when she didn’t pay attention, the juice flowed backwards into the damned juice buffer! Gail wasn’t doing it right. She knew she wasn’t doing it right, and she hurt people when she screwed up, but she didn’t have any idea how to move the juice any better. Her head hurt as if she held a hot poker every time she tried to move the juice. She often couldn’t summon up the energy to even try.
Being a Focus was hell. No end to the job, no relief ever. Nothing but the same enduring hell, minutes throbbing into hours throbbing into days.
She sobbed, curled in a tight ball in her room at the clinic and caught in a grinding depression, covers held tight over her head. Down the hall, she metasensed the glow of her people, curled up like her, trapped in a despair echoing hers.
The room was a mess, littered with clothes Gail didn’t have the energy to pick up. She hadn’t possessed enough initiative to change out of her nightgown in two days. The dirty dishes of her last meal stood piled on the nightstand. The window was wide open, and cool spring air blew through, driving the temperature inside the room into the 50s. Without the window, she thought it too stifling in her room to breathe.
Gail found no glamour in being a Focus. Instead, being a Focus was an eternal, unending grinding of pain, hunger, and black, driving despair, endless throbbing drudgery extending forward into eternity. How did Focuses stand it? Why weren’t Focus suicides common?
Van had done as he promised, and checked up on Dr. Mendell. Mendell hadn’t lied, but he hadn’t told them everything, not even all of the basics. The big omission was how careful Gail needed to be about maintaining juice levels in her first month as a Focus. Until a Focus had three triads, it was easy for a Focus to slip and turn her people into Psychos or Monsters. That is, kill them. According to Van’s med school acquaintances, accidental deaths happened fairly often with new Focuses, which was why the authorities required them to stay in a Clinic until the household was large enough to be stable.
Gail didn’t even want to think about the obvious implication: if she wanted, she could kill any one of her Transforms at any time. The responsibility of having her hand on the sword of Damocles over all of her household was petrifying. She couldn’t cope.
Her father had been back again, organizing and arranging, Gail had no idea what. She no longer had the energy to fight him. She dreamed, sometimes, that maybe if she could bang her head against the wall hard enough, she could manage to knock herself out and get rid of the endless headache.
Sometimes, in her worst moments, she thought about ending it all. Sometimes, the peace of oblivion seemed so tempting. She had told Dr. Mendell about her desires, and he said this was normal, the low juice was causing her depression, and her depression would ease after she added more people to her household.
He worried about the headaches, though. He said that Focuses were uniformly healthy, so the pain must all be in her mind.
In her mind. Hah! She had a headache. Of course the pain was in her mind.
The doctor tried to get her to relax, told her to quit worrying, that everything would be all right. That didn’t work. He talked about bringing in a psychiatrist, to try to figure out what might help Gail. Her father categorically forbade that. He refused to let his daughter into the hands of some headshrinker.
Her father suggested bedrest, with absolutely no visitors or disturbances, and he somehow got Dr. Mendell to agree. Her father even tried to forbid Van, but Gail had thrown such a piss-kicker Rickenbach fit the doctor overruled him. The only exceptions, besides Van, were the two women and one man they brought in to be tagged and made part of her household. She wanted Kurt and Sylvie with her. She needed their comfort, but they hadn’t been by, and Van artfully dodged every question she asked about why.
Forbidden to do anything but lie around in bed and think about all the ills dragging her down, she moped. She couldn’t read, watch television, or even play cards for more than a few minutes at a time. Van stayed with her some of the time, but she drove him crazy in this condition, so he found excuses to be somewhere else.
She tried to find out what had happened to the newspaper article she had been working on before she transformed, but wasn’t able to elicit anything better than a “There, there, don’t worry about anything. Everything will be all right.” From her mother. She was so tired of her mother’s saccharine sweetness she could just spit. Her father, she d
idn’t even want to think about.
Monotony. Misery. Nothing but pain. The world conspired to leave Gail alone, so very alone. She lay on the bed in the dark, and cried. Sometimes the tears were the only thing left in her, besides the aching misery and the bleak depression. She wondered if eventually she would cry all her tears away, and leave herself empty. Hollow inside, nothing more than a shell for her father and the other people to fill, an echo of what they expected her to be. She wondered if this had happened to Focus Adkins, and if this had turned her evil. Maybe she had cried herself hollow, and the darkness came and filled her up. Maybe this happened to all Focuses. Maybe they were all Monsters, just like the preachers said.
Someone knocked on her door. She ignored the knock.
A few seconds later, the knock came again. Then, pounding.
No one was supposed to disturb her behind her locked door. Van, her parents, and the medical staff all had keys. Everyone else was supposed to leave her alone.
However, her father had gone back to the dealership in Flint, her mother had returned to the hotel, and the clinic only carried a couple of medical people on duty at this late hour.
“Gail! Are you in there?” Kurt. He wasn’t supposed to be bothering her. Nobody stopped him, though. “Gail, do you have any idea what you’re doing to everyone?” Kurt said, shouting through the door. “Sylvie’s been a wreck for days. She can’t even stop crying. Answer me, Gail!”
Gail didn’t answer. She knew the effect she was having. She could goddamned see her Transforms through her metasense. She couldn’t get them out of her head if she tried. She would stop the agony and depression if she could. She didn’t know how. Guilt made her cry harder.
“God dammit, Gail!” Kurt rattled the knob angrily, but the lock was good, and the door didn’t open. He gave up after a few seconds, and slammed his hand against the door. The door rattled loudly against the frame.
“Yeah, come on in there! You’re hurting people!” Gail didn’t recognize the voice. Male, angry, probably the spouse of one of the other women in her household.
A third and a fourth voice added to the chorus, now all of them pounding on the door. Gail burrowed deeper into her blankets and the slow seeping tears began coming in giant, wrenching sobs. Oh, damn, how could she deal with this? Everyone hated her, and everything was her fault.
The nurse came finally and told them to leave Gail alone. Nurse Sourpuss, night shift specialist, laid into them with the same supercilious disapproval she always gave Gail. The men told her to go away, and when Nurse Sourpuss didn’t, one of them called her a bitch, loud enough for Gail to hear. Well, that threw the gasoline on the burning fire, as shouts and threats and likely even lawsuits began to fly. Gail laughed at the yawning chasm of death and the hilarity of life, but didn’t stop sobbing. For the first time ever, she appreciated the French philosopher Sartre.
Eventually she heard Van’s quiet voice, too soft to understand any words. Some of the men shouted at him, and Van responded, but he never shouted back. They shouted some more, but slowly, over the course of several minutes, the voices all came down. There was a long, low conversation, as the men murmured outside her door. Slowly the hallway quieted. Van’s voice faded into the distance. Kurt’s angry voice took longer to fade.
Gail sobbed and hoped that the door would hold. She couldn’t understand the exact words, but she didn’t care. The pounding had stopped, a little relief of a relative sort. She huddled tight under her blanket and let the wrenching storm of tears drift back into the long slow rain shower of misery.
Eventually, Gail heard the turn of the key in the lock. Van came in. Gail cringed inside, waiting for recriminations. She knew she did a terrible job as a Focus. Certainly, Van came as a messenger from those men outside her door.
He didn’t say anything, though. He just came in and sat down. After a few minutes, Gail smelled the acrid scent of a joint.
“Want some?”
Gail thought for a long moment. Van simply toked quietly on his joint. Eventually, Gail pulled the blanket back from over her head.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was low, and a little bit hoarse.
Van came over and handed the joint to her. Gail took a toke, a good one, and she began to unwind, the relaxation starting at her toes. She took another. Van snagged the wooden chair with his foot, and pulled it over by the bed. He sat down next to her, and they traded the joint back and forth.
“What did you say to them?” Gail said, later.
Van shrugged and carefully rolled another joint.
“I asked them if they thought they were doing any good by pounding on the door,” he said.
“What did they say?”
Van shrugged again, and didn’t answer. Eventually, he lit the fresh joint and passed it over to Gail.
“According to that doctor, this is the worst. You’ll start to feel better soon.”
Gail took another toke. “This is pretty bad.”
Van nodded, and didn’t say anything more. They sat for a long time in a companionable silence. Eventually, in the distance, Gail metasensed the other Transforms starting to unwind, and get up out of their beds, as the easing of her own misery let the juice flow more easily to them.
They remained in misery, though, just like hers, everyone suffering from low juice. Things were at least better than before.
She and Van stayed there for two hours in the darkness, and said almost nothing. After the first hour, Gail felt the relaxed glow of the pot fade from her. No further joints would bring it back, but she stayed smoking in the darkness anyway, just for the peace that came with it.
(8)
Gail’s father stalked the halls like Captain Ahab on the Pequod, organization and perfect order his great white whale. People moved around Gail, scudding clouds beyond her control. Dr. Mendell came into her room with a couple of orderlies, in a flurry of energy and activity. A month, and he still hadn’t learned to knock.
“Time to go, Gail,” he said, as if he cajoled a small child. Her father appeared behind Dr. Mendell, pushing a wheelchair. Gail grimaced and turned her head away. They had dressed her earlier in the morning and left her lying on the bed. She hadn’t moved since.
Dr. Mendell sighed, and gestured at the orderlies. The two of them moved to her bedside. They started to lift her erect. When they finally manhandled her out of the bed and into an upright position, Gail gave up and stood under her own power.
“That’s the way,” Dr. Mendell said, his eyes twinkling.
“Shut the hell up,” Gail said. He was too loud, the lights were too bright, and she wished the world would go away and leave her alone.
Like a piece of furniture, or a children’s doll, the orderlies put her coat on her and inched her toward the door. With no will to resist, she let them lead her, with tiny steps and dragging feet. She sat in the proffered wheelchair and steamed. Baggage. They should have just thrown her into a laundry cart. Once out of her room, Gail covered her eyes to block out the bright light. She wanted to cover her ears as well.
A cart rattled down the hall ahead of her, loaded with suitcases and duffle bags stuffed with clothes, toiletries, books, and all the other necessities that had piled up over a long month’s stay in the clinic. People bustled up and down the hall, calling instructions to each other and passing information. Nurses and orderlies supported the Transforms, helping them to walk despite the grinding misery of bad juice counts.
Gail’s household was up to nine, two triads and three extra women. She didn’t remember the names of any of them right now, except that one woman lived with her husband in a small house on ten acres in the townships south of Ann Arbor. Gail had no idea who had decided their destination, or when, but that’s where they were going.
Even Van had nearly lost patience with her.
Her headache pounded in her temples. The constant pain wore on her, draining her of what little energy remained. A month as a Focus, and the headache never let up. She hadn’t worried about anyt
hing beyond simply enduring the day for three solid weeks.
Nothing the brochures or doctors said had been true, except that Focuses with small households had low juice. The juice wouldn’t move in a proper fashion. Even when the juice did move, it seeped back into Gail’s juice buffer like water into a sponge as soon as she stopped concentrating. All her people were in agony because of her and she couldn’t do anything to stop their pain. Every night she could barely sleep, plagued by terrifying nightmares she remembered far too easily when awake.
The bustle came to a sudden stop as the orderly wheeled Gail down the Clinic corridor. Heads turned in the crowded hallway, as everyone turned to look at Gail. A Transform woman Gail knew only by the shape of her juice flinched away from Gail, and tears began streaming down her face. Across the hall from her, a normal woman escorting her Transform husband clutched her two children to her, protectively. All along the hall, people pulled backwards and away from her, faces pale.
Gail covered her face, unable to take the opprobrium. Hiding her eyes didn’t help, because as she passed her people, she heard them gasping, or sniffling, or hissing. Or stepping back. The silence surrounded Gail as they led her down the hall and to the elevator. She peeked through her fingers at the large entrance lobby, with its cracked tile floor and masonry walls needing repainting. No sound now. Everyone on the staff who wasn’t helping waited, quiet, in the lobby. Looking at her. Wondering.
The omnipresent ill eased up the farther she got from her room. When Gail left the clinic, she found she could take her hand from over her eyes, her light sensitivity gone.
Outside, a leaden sky threatened a cold spring rain it would likely never deliver. Cars filled the parking lot out front, in a haphazard u-shape with no respect for the designated parking spots. At the head of the line was a flatbed trailer attached to the back of Gail’s father’s Ford.
“I see they’ve got my place reserved for me,” Gail said, seeing the flatbed trailer. She was luggage, excess baggage, nothing more than an ineffective juice-moving device. Enslaving her would be best for everyone. Her father would find a way to manage…and make a profit doing so.
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Page 5