The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four (8 page)

Shopping with Ying
[Carol Hancock POV]

Ying and I pulled into the parking lot of Macy’s
Department Store in downtown Chicago in my Mercury Cougar.  Ying Tien was an
elegant young lady of sixteen years, composed, reserved, and a little bit shy. 
But she smiled at me.  We were going shopping.

I’ll admit I was making up reasons to go shopping with
Ying.  In theory, I did this to support one of my scams.  However, the real
reason we went shopping was that I liked to shop.

My scam?  Buy myself a gym and ditch Pete.  The main
funding for the gym would be Mr. Oldman.  Bedazzled Mr. Oldman and his ample
money supply were now all in my hands.  My prospective gym manager and front
man would be Greg Petroski, who I picked out of the crowd at Pete’s gym,
specifically for this purpose.  My twenty-three year old draft dodger wanted
nothing more in the world than to own a gym of his own.

Greg’s friends knew Ying Tien as Ying Chen, the daughter
of a wealthy Chinese businessman.  Ying and Greg dated, or at least pretended
to date.  In a month or so, Ying’s wealthy Chinese daddy would decide to invest
in Greg’s dream of a gym.  I would fund the gym myself out of Mr. Oldman’s
accounts, of course, after running the money through some complex bank
arrangements.  When I finished my scam, I would own the gym through Greg.  I also
planned to siphon off some of the equipment for my personal use, to give myself
a decent private gym at my own house.

To pull this off, though, Ying had to present a
convincing imitation of a wealthy young Chinese woman.  At this, she was
manifestly unqualified, in so many ways.  So we went shopping.  This would be
the third time in two weeks.

I understood enough about teenagers and fashion to know
what she should be wearing, and I used the clerks liberally for what I didn’t
know.  I bought her clothes and stockings and shoes and underwear and jewelry. 
I got her expensive soap to use and had her spend a good hour at the make-up
counter learning to do make-up properly.  I took her to a hair salon to have
her hair done.  My efforts took all day, and by the time we finished she presented
as a classy looking young woman.

It took Ying about an hour to catch the shopping spirit. 
She started out afraid and determined to hate me, but something about having a
dangerous man (man, damn it) protecting her and buying presents for her is hard
for a sixteen-year-old girl to resist.

The clerks held a different opinion.  They thought I was
her sugar daddy and they didn’t approve.  They also didn’t approve of a white
man with a yellow girl.  I ignored all their disapproval.

I, of course, loved it.  I enjoyed shopping and had
little opportunity to enjoy it since my transformation.  Shopping for myself
was business rather than pleasure, when I had to function under so many
disguises.  I found it difficult to take pleasure in dressing the over-muscled
thing that was my body.

Shopping for Ying was different.  She was young,
attractive and mine.  I loved to buy things for her.  I had plenty of money,
and what better use for money than to dress her up and make her smile?

“So is Greg behaving himself?”  I asked her as we got
out of the car in the Macy’s parking lot.

Ying turned away and didn’t answer.  Greg understood he
was supposed to be a perfect gentleman with Ying.  I made that clear.  However,
he seemed constitutionally unable to resist taking advantage of someone as
sweet and vulnerable as Ying.  He would cause problems if I didn’t keep an eye
on him, so I checked with Ying at every opportunity.  This wouldn’t be the
first time I needed to knock Greg back.

“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 from 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 15
^th
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.

Because of all that, Greg didn’t order most of the
equipment because he didn’t have a place to put it until the build-out finished.
 He didn’t start hiring because he didn’t know when the gym would open…except I
had told him to start hiring, and he had followed orders and hired a couple of
people, but they were supposed to start a week from Monday and what was he
going to do with them?  Also, Greg was positive there was some paperwork that
needed to be done with the IRS when you hired somebody, but he didn’t remember the
details.

Also, Greg didn’t understand much about bookkeeping.  He
did make sure he wrote everything down on pieces of paper.  These scraps were
around, somewhere.  He often forgot to write down the checks payable in the
check register, but he didn’t worry, because he was sure he could reconstruct them
if and when he needed.  He figured he would be able to work out how much money remained
in the account if I needed some exact numbers.

No problems, right?  Well, except for this other
contractor.  Greg had hired a guy to come in and paint.  Greg was sure he paid
the guy, but the guy insisted on more money, and Greg didn’t know what to do.  Also,
Greg suspected he might have wanted to wait on the painting until some of this
other work got done, because the walls were looking pretty messed up already.  Oh,
right, he hadn’t found a plumber yet, and he hadn’t found anyone to sell him some
lockers, and he suspected there might be a few other things he needed to do
that he hadn’t thought of yet.

Like, perhaps, advertising?  Oh, and phones.  Greg had
forgotten about phones.  Maybe the gym should get an ad in the yellow pages?  But
the yellow pages wouldn’t come out for months, so he wasn’t sure how people
would know the gym was open, except that he would tell a few friends of his,
and they might come.

Once Greg started, he just kept going and going and
going.  Every time I thought he had run out of problems, he came up with more.  As
he kept going, he seemed more relieved.  He finally confessed the sins
consuming him, and as he did, he dumped all his problems on me.

What the hell was I supposed to do with them?

I didn’t know any more about starting a gym than Greg
did.  Probably less.  I listened to this endless litany of disaster.  With
every new problem I felt like someone slowly buried me in mud.  I had
absolutely no idea how to fix the situation.

Greg finally ran down, and I left.  I took the checkbook
and the scraps of paper home with me.  Bobby and I spent the evening trying to
reconcile them and get some idea of what was going on and where the money went.

By morning, I was ready to curse the entire gym into
oblivion.

I went back to Greg the next morning, and we spent the
entire morning trying to organize the disaster.  We made a best guess on the
checking account.  Following Bobby’s suggestion, I called the bank and got the
balance from them, and found the balance was considerably off from our
estimates.  After a little Arm prompting, Greg remembered a couple more checks
he had written and we added those in as well.  By lunch, we had something we
both sort of believed.

After lunch I tried to cope with the contractor problem.
 I left a terse message with the contractor.  I was about to go visit him in
person when I had another idea, and decided to do a complete search of Greg’s
apartment.  The search took the rest of the day.  I turned up a couple of bank
statements under his bed and found the check to his painting contractor,
unsent, in a pile in the kitchen.  I made Greg send off the payment to the
painting contractor with a nice apology, and I set about balancing the
checkbook one more time.

At day’s end, I threw in the towel.  To do this right, I
would need to learn to run a gym, but learning to run a gym was an utter waste
of my time.  I needed someone who knew how to start up a gym.  Or, failing
that, someone who understood how to run a business.