trailbreaks
Gloria was waiting for me when I came out of my assignment room.
‘I heard you clocked Cori!’ she said, squeezing my forearm. ‘What happened?’
I shrugged, preoccupied with the Grid and everything. ‘Nothing much. She was acting like I was her punchbag, and I hit her.’
‘Well. . . good for you.’
‘Yeah, well, you're the only one who says so. Sensei told me off in front of the whole class. Big speech about bushido.’
Gloria giggled. ‘Bushido,’ she repeated, mocking a Japanese accent. ‘Bull-sheet-oh. I'll bet she was asking for it.’
I was fuming, though. It was all coming back to me. I said, ‘He made me go sit in the corner for half the class.’
She took a long look at me, and I realized I sounded incredibly bitchy. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Not really,' I said, and felt tears welling up in my eyes. ‘I'm not having a very good day.’
In fact, I felt dizzy and I had a headache. The taste of orchids was even stronger. I wasn't sure if it was all because of what had happened in the nex, or if I was just faint because I hadn't eaten since lunch yesterday. I felt pretty sorry for myself, though. ‘Who told you?’ I asked.
‘Bob Baroni called me and asked if I wanted to be on the demonstration team, and I said only if you were, too. That's when he told me.’
'I doubt I'll be allowed on the demonstration team after last night,’ I said. ‘You should do it, though. I bet it'll be fun.’
‘Not without you. Besides, I don't have time. All that extra training.’
I took a deep breath and let it out. ‘Thanks, Glow.’
‘Thanks, schmanks,’ she said. ‘Whatcha doing tonight?’
‘Lifting weights,’ I said. ‘Remember, the pact?’
'I thought you might want to go for a drink after work. Gunther's in a meeting in Paramus all day, so we could sneak out early.’
‘Uh ... maybe I better not.’
I could tell that Gloria was halfway between worried about me and hurt by my refusal, but she didn't ask me why I didn't want to go. I didn't want to tell her. I thought if I kept quiet about the fact that I couldn't eat, I could keep control. She said something about going to the Xerox room, but I wasn't really listening. I was worried about my debriefing with Gunther. After Gloria walked out, I decided to get it over with and dragged myself to Gunther's office, only to find him gone.
Stupid. Gloria only just said Gunther wasn't here. What was the matter with me?
I sat down at Gloria's desk for a minute. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. I needed to eat. I felt weak and tired.
Gloria kept a candy tray on her desk. It was full of snack-size Baby Ruths and Mounds bars. Normally I'd find these irresistible. But not with the orchids on my tongue. My stomach pitched. I was sure I'd feel a whole lot worse if I tried to eat any of them.
Then I remembered that I owed Gunther sponsorship money for his MS walkathon. I had said I would give him a dollar a mile and he had walked nine miles so I owed him nine bucks. Gunther is always doing stuff for charity or for kids or both.
He keeps the paperwork on his desk, next to his in-box underneath a photo-cube filled with pictures of his nieces and nephew and his bloodhound Andy Rooney. I picked up the envelope with the cash in it and slid a ten-dollar bill in, then put a check mark next to my name and returned the papers to their place.
Then I spotted my own name on a memo. It was the second page; I couldn't find the first page so I didn't know who it was to or what the date or topic was.
without doing a pyramid, search, which doesn't fit within the Ghent's budget. I enclose a brief list of test targets filtered from the most recent Karen Orbach transcript, with accompanying numeric accuracy ranks from 1-10 with 10 being a perfect hit.
I've never seen five tens before, and I think I'm safe in guessing that you haven't, either.
Trailbreak Granola Bars 10
Max Factor Mascara1 9
Radical Crunchies Snacks8 1
Swatch 10
Dune: the movie3 4
Charmin 10
Max Headroom4 3(?)
Pop Rocks 10
The Gap 10
1 Shape of product resembles torpedo, reflected in transcript.
8 We all know that this product bombed before it even hit the shelves. This was our control, and it worked: Orbach didn't even register it.
3 Our software analysis interprets the transcript as showing awareness of the product coupled with rejection of it. Orbach refers to the book Dune but not the film.
4 Our software analysis indicates the introduction of a character called Dante, whom we believe may be Max. We don't take the low number as a predictor of failure. This is the only truly unknown quantity on our list, and although the number is initially low we believe hit potential exists.
Naturally, Bob, I'm in full agreement with you that our goal is to be 100% system-driven and that we can't rely on agents like Orbach indefinitely. But I'm a practical man and these numbers speak for themselves.
On the basis of Orbach's recent performance, I propose that she be escalated to Tier One. Simultaneously, we will analyze her performance and initiate software development to mimic it. Coupled with the low-risk, low-gain methods we have been using up until now, the deployment of Orbach could boost our numbers by as much as 71%. In light of the fact that Western Syndicates are talking to Hope Industries, our direct competitors, I suggest we take advantage of this opportunity to retain their contract and to move ahead of the pack.
I hope we can discuss this further at the meeting tomorrow. I will bring additional studies and graphs to back-up what I'm saying. Looking forward to seeing you then.
G.T. S.
GS/gl
A voice said, ‘I don't think it's a good idea to go in somebody's office when they're not there.’
I turned and stared at Priscilla, executive secretary to Vice President Bob Hagler, hardly believing my ears. She was standing there in a purple knit suit, black stockings and patent leather shoes, a goddess of corporate uptightness.
‘Oh, if s OK,’ I said, laughing and wanting to believe that she was joking, too. But I could feel my face burning with some kind of guilt — I wasn't really sure what kind. The memo was about me, so in a sense I had a right to read it. 'I was just putting in my money for the MS walkathon. It's cool.’
She inclined her head and gave it a little toss, body English for Come out of there at once, underling.
My response was automatic and I didn't really think about it until later. I hurried out of the room. I could feel my boobs bouncing up and down and my thighs swinging from side to side, I moved so fast.
'I hang out in Gunther's office all the time when he's not here,’ I said, trying to sound confident. ‘We're buddies.’
Priscilla looked at me like I was a roach. She closed the door behind me and locked it.
I tried to pretend that nothing had happened. I went back to my assignment room, but I wasn't ready to go on the nex. Instead, I went home.
While I was driving I had that feeling again. I call it the I Want a Cookie feeling, and I guess it grew out of my childhood nickname. I Want a Cookie is that babyish feeling you get. When things go wrong, you want a cookie to make you feel better. When things go right, you want a cookie to celebrate. When you're bored or flat, you want a cookie. When you're nervous. Tired. Sentimental. Watching TV. In a hurry. Killing time. In the car. You want a cookie and you have one, but instead of feeling better, instead of everything changing into happy cookieland, you just get fat and then you hate yourself, which of course calls for more cookies.
In this case I guess it was down to my conversation with Priscilla. I am one of those people who never knows what to say during a confrontation — or what should be a confrontation but in this case had been a non-confrontation thanks to me not knowing what to say. Usually, rather than get upset, I just pretend nothing's happening and wait for it to be over. Afterward, I think of several plausible responses on my part that would have ended with me feeling satisfied with myself, if only I'd had the presence of mind to speak up.
But it's always too late.
So I left work early, thinking about food. I stopped off at A&P to pick up a few things for dinner. Well, it started out as afew things but pretty soon I had a whole shopping cart full of goodies for Nebbie and me. This very cute guy got in line behind me with only a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Coors, so I let him go ahead.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and smiled briefly as he squeezed past me and my stuff. He was about six-two, lean, with fluffy brown hair and a strong jaw. He had blue eyes and a tan, which always looks good but looked especially good on him, and he was dressed like a construction worker right down to his boots. It's too bad they were the lace-up kind, because I love old-fashioned boots like from The Three Musketeers or medieval times, where the leather kind of comes up over the calf and then folds over. I wish they'd come back in style. He'd look so good in clothes like that. I started fantasizing that he was F'lar from Dragonflight and he was just about to go out and risk his life flying Thread on Monarth. I'd be Lessa: tiny, fierce, indomitable and beautiful — also risking my life on a daily basis despite F'lar's efforts to tame me.
I stared at him, but I tried not to be obvious. I hasten to add that I would have let him go first even if he was the ugliest person I'd ever seen. I was just being courteous, and I wouldn't want anybody to be standing behind me with two items, seething that they were stuck behind some big fat moose buying half the store. But as I looked at him I could feel him pulling my eyes like a magnet. I followed him out of the store and watched him get in his pickup. There was a German Shepherd in the front seat, too. It licked his face when he got in.
I got in my own car and told myself to forget the guy in the store. If I really think about it, I guess one reason I was so frustrated with Priscilla's bitchiness had to do with the people I'm working with in the nex. Flying with Gossamer is one thing: I mean, OK, she's not emotionally bonded with me. In fact, she doesn't even have emotions that I know of, she isn't sentient, and I don't get to ride her like a dragon. Fair enough. But flying with Gossamer is still the most exciting thing I've ever done, and I love it. On the other hand, being down there with people like Serge and her team, fighting a war over this planet that everybody wants a piece of, wants to tear up, build roads on, steal its raw materials, and generally render tame and boring — that's not my idea of a good time. They're so ... base. There's nothing heroic about what they're doing that I can see. They aren't even nice, except maybe Lewis, and she has her nose buried in Ladies Home Journal half the time. I admit the golems are nasty and scary, but they're also somehow sad and nobody seems to see that. I don't even know whose side to be on. With Commander Galante I felt like I was working under a real leader. With Serge I just feel off-balance all the time. And frustrated.
When I'm frustrated, I eat. And eat. I put food in my stomach like a bricklayer trowels cement, brick by brick building my wall.
I put the car in gear. I decided to go home and have a really good meal. I'd feel better. I wasn't going to let them get to me. I know there's such a thing as good. I know there are real heroes out there. I just don't know how to find them.
The guy in the A&P might be hero material. I doubted it, though. Now that I did karate, I knew that you had to be a black belt before you were anything special. When I first saw the black belts, I knew I'd finally found my own people. I'd finally come home. They were a cut above. They were people of honor. They were special. And I'd do anything to be like them. Maybe then my real life could start to be as interesting as my life on the nex — and with me acting in it, not just watching.
I got home in plenty of time to iron my gi and get ready. I had my dinner all planned out. A sirloin steak, baked potato with sour cream and two or three ears of local Jersey corn on the cob, smothered in butter. I didn't worry about the pact with Gloria because I had, after all, been fasting since yesterday and I owed myself some calories. So I had also picked up a seven-layer cake for dessert, with a little tub of Haagen Dazs on the side. I normally don't cook on a Wednesday night, I just pick up a TV dinner or something, and it felt a little strange to go to all this trouble just for myself, but I needed something big and delicious after the day I'd had.
I figured what I'd do would be eat the main meal, digest for an hour, go to karate and then afterward I could come home and have my chocolate cake and curl up with Nebbie and a good book.
My stomach was growling away while the steak cooked, so I decided to eat the corn first. I spread butter on a piece of bread and then rubbed it over the corn. I threw plenty of salt on there, too. Then I picked up the corn-holders and brought the pale, gorgeous ear to my mouth.
For some reason, I paused. My mouth remained closed. I could smell the corn, and the steak cooking, and the butter. But I couldn't seem to take that final step. I couldn't bite into the food.
Strange. Annoying. I was really hungry. With all my will, I closed my eyes, opened my mouth, and put the ear of corn between my lips. The salt stung my lower lip where it was a little chapped. I tasted the butter. And I tasted the orchid flavor of the Grid. I started to take a bite and instead found that I'd put the ear back down.
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?