11
As soon as she says it, the subtitle shows under Yewa’s face: “Can we play a game?” She notices my eyes bouncing up and down and tells me not to concern myself with the caption. “They’re for my records. To document the experiment so no one needs to take notes.”
The experiment. Me.
She asks how my sleep was, how was I feeling. Both questions and answers are properly registered on-screen. “You forgot to wear your mask to sleep. Must be feeling weak,” she says. “Have some candy, use your O2 now. That will make you feel better.”
Chocolate. I don’t get the West’s obsession with it, but somehow the brain likes it. At the simple mention of the word, I salivate. She takes a silent note as if she had heard that thought, asks about my dreams.
Dreams?
“Yep. It’s a good way to learn your brain’s lexicon. We registered the electric pulses already. Knowing what you remember will help us decode some images, feelings, ideas. For example, if you tell me you dreamt of a mountain, then an elephant, it helps ‘cause we can search for reports on other subjects and find neural patterns that will tell us how and where your brain codifies mountains and elephants into electric pulses. And it even unveils cognition patterns around concepts like big or small, moving or static, living or…anyway, I’m not here to bore you. Just know that: the more details, the better.”25
“Did they make you stay up all night monitoring me?” I ask. She seems confused. “The clothes,” I explain, “you’re still wearing the same.”
“Don’t worry about me. Do you remember any dreams?”
I do. A very vivid one.
“That’s normal,” she says.
“You know dreams, they’re confusing,” I tell her. “I’m watching TV somewhere. The news. The internet stopped again. Political parties, investment banks, e-commerce…all down. The stock market is unstable. I think this is unexpected, but don’t care much. Weirdly, I’m not in front of the TV. It’s more like I’m inside of it. Part of it. Then, it switches. To banks and power plants. I rate them. Efficiency, I think—how much effort it takes for something, I don’t know. There’s an explosion. Three, actually. Images of people screaming. Too much attention, I add to a file—too much distraction.”
“That’s so odd,” I say, as my eyes move up from my own captions and find hers squinted and distant. “Is it helping?”
“Yes, yes yes. You’re doing great,” Yewa replies with an unconvincing smile. “Keep going.”
The room is so small, it only takes me a few steps to get to the heavy bag. The camera tracks me and even zooms onto my face. “This is so fucked up….” I say, trying a few jabs. “It was as if I were living inside the internet. Actually, as if I were part of it.” I try to continue, but the memories are so sparse and confusing. I punch harder, kick a few times. “I think I sent a message to someone. About banks and power plants, getting their priority lowered. To use only as needed. Then, there’s a beep, a warning. A camera. A spy camera. There was a couple, they were eating, and I am trying to understand their reactions to the food. But wait—”
My hands drop slowly, and the bag is left swinging alone, uninterrupted. The chains holding it to the ceiling crackle their own tic-toc and that is the only sound in the room. On screen, the empty subtitles register my silence. “It was me on the spy camera. Jason and me. The computers were spying on us.”
From the other side of the screen, Yewa gives me a reassuring smile. “This is just your brain testing scenarios,” she says. “Pretty normal. Neuroscientists say dreaming is our natural virtual reality. A trick evolution designed so we can learn in safety. I don’t see anything worth worrying about.”
Nothing to worry about? I kick the bag so hard it almost hits the ceiling.
She tries to reassure me. Says my recollection of the images is remarkable. That we can accelerate the process by weeks, maybe even months, with this level of detail. “We never got that much from anybody before, she says, “So, how did you meet your boyfriend? Jason, right?”
In fighting, we call it changing levels. You throw a few jabs on the face as a distraction, then dive down to grab the legs. Or the other way around. “Is this part of the experiment?” I ask.
“Just curious,” she says.
I tell her the story about the day he went to the park, just like Mrs. Lee said he would. How he almost fought a few guys mocking our Tai Chi.
“That’s sweet,” she says.
No, it wasn’t. I need no boyfriend to save me. Given her constricted laugh, I guess she’d foreseen my response. But that wasn’t what he was trying to do though. “He said he was saving them. The dudes mocking us. He could tell I was getting pissed. He’s a fighter too, you know?”
From behind the glass, Yewa presses a button. “A fighter?” There were no subtitles this time.
“Kind of,” I say. “Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Grappling shit. But only at the gym—he doesn’t like to compete.” Still no subtitles. Interesting. I tell her he likes the self-development part, but hates the idea of someone wanting to hurt him. “He’s a Buddhist, you know?”
“Is that’s why you like him?”
That makes me think. On our first date, at a wine bar that only played some sort of sexy Brazilian music, we somehow mostly talked about fighting. On our second, I asked him if he could teach me some stuff to improve my ground game. And he offered to show it to me. A real intention, I remember. So we go to my apartment. It’s not too long until I have him wrapped between my legs, as he teaches me about close guard. And that’s when I realized how handsome he was.
A wave of warmth washes over my face and I don’t know how to conceal it.
“Humm,” Yewa says, as she had heard every thought, even though I am pretty sure I didn’t say any of that. I catch her observing her little tablet again, then me. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“Tracking your neural activity. Whatever you’re remembering is really firing your entire brain.”
“Do we really need to do this?”
She bounces back and forth between me and her little screen and lets slip a hint of naughtiness. “Is he the one?” She asks. Despite how personal things were getting, she still managed to keep her cool—a mix of scientific-cold and friendly warmth. I get it now: we’re in a duel, that’s her game. So I refuse to answer. I refuse to think about it, even. (Like meditation, fighting teaches you to clear your mind on cue. So I do.)
Given her expression, the screen must have impressed her again. She tries another angle. “You say he’s a fighter. Did he ever teach you anything useful or that was all an excuse to hang out?”
It wasn’t an excuse. But he was on my guard and things got crazier and…Suddenly, we were kissing and spent the night having sex. The entire night. Shut up Yinyin, this woman can hear your thoughts, remember? “He taught me a lot of things,” I say. “To protect myself on the ground, to be patient, protect my position and look for an opportunity to finish the fight…” She keeps bouncing her gaze between me and the tablet seeming like she was catching every inch of my lies. “And to keep my hooks in too.”
“What?”
Damn, that’s why I stick with fighters. I explain the joke: when we spoon at night, he hooks his legs inside of mine, as if he was attacking my back. “An instinct, I guess.”
“And when did you know he was a keeper?”
Wow—she’s relentless. I tell her she would make a good fighter–probably the best compliment I can give to someone–but she seems more interested in what’s happening inside my brain. “You’re still recording everything, aren’t you?” I ask.
She nods—subtitles are off just to make me less self-aware. At least she’s honest.
“When I thought he was a keeper? Maybe when he brought up the i-Ching,” I tell her. “A Buddhist using a Daoist tradition, that was the most romantic thing I’ve ever had happened to me. You know, those two religions compete a little…”
“What did it say, the i-Ching? Do you remember?” She asks without skipping a beat.
Is she made of steel? “I do. Clearly,” I tell her. It was feng, the fullness before the emptying.
Our little rituals in China. I miss them sometimes. Kung fu, tea, some meditation, the Dao De Jing, and finally, the i-Ching…Shifu used to throw the i-Ching for me too.
The speakers play the clicking noise of a keyboard and a few letters materialize between us. “Feng. Is this the one?” she asks.26
Hexagram 55, unchanged:
Feng, fullness.
Thunder and lightning culminate as one.
A noble one decides legal proceedings and brings about punishment.
Do not mourn. A fitting sacrifice at noon.
What decisions must you take now?
Sacrifice. Mourning. Jason. At the hospital, he said he didn’t want to be around to see me die. Is that what the Dao was trying to tell me back then? About the decisions we must make? “Yes, it was that one.”
“I’m sorry,” Yewa says. “Didn’t want to upset you.” She presses a few keys again and takes a stiffer posture this time. “How about your students? Can you describe them to me?”
Not sure I want to, but she insists. Just so she can be able to map my emotions a bit more, she says. So I tell her about Mrs. Lee, my landlord and very first student. The woman who brought me to the hospital the day I tried to head-butt the planet to placate my pain. And Camara, who is an old soul in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl. Kira, a super smart mathematics Ph.D. candidate who loves flowers, always wanted to learn how to fight but had to wait until she left home—her parents thought martial arts were for boys only. Jen, an MBA student I am still trying to figure out. The twins Linds and Ash, two identical and annoyingly pretty baristas from a Starbucks nearby, the kind who make fish drown and geese fall from the sky.27 “They named themselves the Pink Warriors,” I say, while I laugh to myself.
“Why is it funny?”
“They have a long wait to go until they are worth being called warriors. But they are getting more comfortable with contact.”
“You’re proud of them, aren’t you?”
“Is that what the machine is telling you?”
She gives me one of those reluctant smiles you let slip when you get caught cheating. I can relate to that. Not a people person myself, either.
That’s when the flash hits. Brighter than any of the lab’s fluorescent lights. Brighter than anything.
We are in class now, me in the front, the ladies following. Around us, curious looks of all kinds. My weight shifts, arms follow—one extends forward, hand like a blade, the other rises back, in a gentle hook. The legs push forward in a slow, long and deliberate stretch. The Single Whip, I say. Somewhere behind me, that causes a moan. Of the erotic type. Mrs. Lee, of course.
“What brings peace in life?” I ask the class behind me.
“Friendship,” responds Linds.
“Independence,” says Jen.
“Weed!” tries Mrs. Lee. “And good granola, of course!”
“Balance,” I respond. “Yin, yang. Being unmovable like a mountain, fluid like a stream.” I drop my stance and proceed with the form, at the pace of an old, wise turtle. Right Heel Kick, Ride the Tiger to the Mountain…they think the names of Tai Chi positions are cute.
“Yang is our aggressive energy,” I explain. “The kind Westerner life is already so full of.”
Turn, Left Heel Kick. A group of frat boys mimics us at a distance. “Ignore the assholes. I’ll beat them later. Stay with me, girls. Lower your right leg, move your entire body onto it and arch your hand up from below, to the other side. Snake Creeps Down. Good. Now raise the knee into a rooster pose and stand on Single Leg.” I hold that position and adjust my elbow an inch inward. “Today I want you to channel your…softness. Your yin. Relax your external shell and let your qi…flow. Gentle and constant…a shadow that can’t be caught.”
A peek behind. They aren’t doing that bad. Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, Fan Through the Back. “Surrender the hardness of the body to the faintness of the spirit. Because there…is…no…body.”
Mrs. Lee moans once more. “This is so sexy,” she says. Others laugh and I shush them quiet. Had they known my mind never stops screaming…Where was I? “Uh…keep going. Be present. For the Dao knows no past…or future.”
Flash!
As the lights recede, I freeze. Did Yewa’s signals capture this? Is she going to think I’m crazy? But we aren’t at the White Room. Everything is flat and of either a vibrant green or blue, now. Made of glass, or metal…or light? Four creatures stand in front of me. Cubes attached to cubes of different sizes and luminosities. Little faces, big eyes. They extend their hands and the light blinds me again.
Back to California, to Tai Chi. Have they noticed my absence? And wait, if this is a memory, did I just jump to another memory or I had that lapse while I was there? My head spins, I grip my toes on the floor. In the corner of my eye, a pretty guy now seems to be having an altercation with the frat boys.
“What was I saying? No past, no future. Just the…”
Another flash. I remember wondering if I was drinking too much coffee. No, that would have made me poop. I am in a large green prairie now, made of the same glossy colors, the same flat surface. Life seems calm, quiet and very geometric. I linger over a sharp-edged fence stretching to infinity. A video game? Why would I be inside a video game?! That stupid geek world game…Mindcrack or something. Yes! The same game Simon showed me in the Lab. What am I doing here? Breathe, Yinyin. Wait! Breathe what? I pull the air into my lungs—nothing. My heart halts for a second. Where’s the air? My sight spins, the world darkens. But then my hand is pulled. The creatures. Like cubic people, but longer arms and…tails! Monkeys! They look at me, unphased, and somehow that calms me down. The blue one says hello without moving its mouth and I have no idea what’s going on. He points ahead, and we march to the gate, me and the ape. There are pigs too. Pink and square. Millions of them. Up on the hills, along the horizon, and all the way to the little wooden gate. “They are locked up, aren’t they?” I think but don’t say. The Monkey nods. Unaware of the danger, I open the gate. “Go, little fellas. Enjoy your fake life!”
The stampede almost runs over my head. I feel my hand crushed. My leg smashed, my shoulder cracking. It’s so much pain, I squeeze my spirit out of my own head and then I am floating a few feet above myself. I can see the pigs running over my body, until they are all gone and only the little monkey remains. “Now you are free too,” I hear myself telling him. “No more raising pigs, you don’t need them, you know? You never did.” He tilts his head, confused. Or amused. Can’t tell. I dive back into my own sight. Around us, more apes get close and sit, contemplating our every move as if we were a totem. Gods, even. Then, from afar, as if coming from the clouds, I glance into my own eyes. Dive inside of them. Through the darkness of my pupils and deep inside my brain. This must be a dream. From above, I see Berkeley, the park. Pathetic human versions of dogs chase their flying toys. Among them, a group of slow-moving creatures seems to be practicing Tai Chi. Myself, my students. I am trying to hide the flashes. But I tumble instead.
Butt on the grass. The Pink Warriors run around me like coked-up squirrels. “Water! Give her some water!” one says. “I have green tea,” cries another. “Would kombucha work?” I have no idea what just happened, what I have just seen or why. Just know I can’t talk about the flashes. No one wants a crazy person who has visions of being in a video game driving their brains through a moving meditation session. Is that what is happening? Am I going crazy? Is that what I get for having challenged Shifu? Or for joining this sick brain experiment? It can’t be, the experiment…it hasn’t happened yet.
“I am fine!” I say, picking the least damaging of the reasons I could think. “Got distracted by the names of the positions, lost balance, that’s all.”
“Are you sure?” asks a skinny dude out of nowhere. A nerd. No, a hipster with pointy ears. Is there a name for that creature in between? He wears a scarf around his neck and a Mandela shirt. “You Ok?” He sounds soft, gentle and…familiar?
“Did the headache…” he starts to ask, and I tell him no. There’s a certain authority in the way he speaks. It’s him! Jason! I try to grab reality back. What is going on?
“Oh, how are you doing Doctor…Sonderup?” Says Mrs. Lee. With all the pauses I needed to understand the coup that was taking place. The girls look at me and burst into a naughty giggle. Mrs. Lee winks, “Maybe it’s her internal temperature going up?” He blushes, checks my pulse. A touch so soft I feel soft too. His look is so kind and gentle I feel kind too and…no, I don’t. I attempt to stand. Lightheaded, dizzy, but I am getting up. No. Someone presses my shoulder down and I fall back on my butt.
“Her name is Claudia,” says Ash, forcefully.
He nods, “I remember.” Jason offers to help me stand, his hand and eyes glued to the images painted in my arms. The same ones he noticed before. He must have really liked them. He touches the bold Tigress, standing fiercely on her back paws as she is hemmed in by a swarm of bees. Then the black monkey observing the fight. Then the mountains observing them all and the clouds ignoring everything because they had somewhere else to go. He marvels at my tattoo, enchanted to the point of forgetting to help me get up.
Then I’m back. The lab, the White Room. Yewa stares at me with her computer eyes. “Is everything Ok?” I ask her.
“Why?” she asks back, as if there hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary. Not to her eyes, nor to her monitors. Though for me, there had. It certainly has. My mind feels mushy, my muscles tired. “I need a break,” I say.
“Of course,” she says. “Have some oxygen.”
She’s right. The moment the air flows, I feel better. Behind my closed eyelids, I think of Jason, Mrs. Lee, the Pink Warriors. What are they doing? Then I hear a bell and sit up. It doesn’t come from the door—rather, from the other side of the room—the dining table against the wall. How long have I been out? Time is weird in this place. A small, square window opens on the wall and a little white box slips in. I peek at the camera over the dead TV monitor, then the screen turns on again. Yewa is back. “Ready for some motor skills tests?”
25. Neuroscientist and Berkeley professor Jack Gallant is conducting fascinating studies in this field. His team uses computer models to decode movie trailer images from a brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). (See “Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies” by Shinji Nishimoto Current Biology Journal, September 22, 2011)
26. A curiosity: When I got to this point in the story I used an online i-Ching to get a response I could use as inspiration. Feng was the response I got. It seemed like a perfect match to what I was planning to write next. Very reassuring.
27. Being an immigrant myself, I am highly aware of how unique local idioms can be. Expressions that were normal to me in Brazil sound hilarious to my friends from other parts of the world. Others that are natural for Americans always make me chuckle. I wanted to bring some of them to this story, being aware that overusing them would kill the authenticity of it (I am not Chinese, after all), but not having any would also feel very fake, because translating our home idioms is a natural part of the process of being a transplanted citizen. This expression, beautiful enough to make fish drown in the water and geese fall from the sky” seemed like a good one to include here. It is the equivalent to the American “drop dead gorgeous”—close enough to be understood, strange enough to be received with a smile.