Sweets for the Sweet Read online

Sweets for the Sweet

 

  By S. Michael Choi

  Copyright 2012, S. Michael Choi.

  Cover photograph CC Attribution, Steve Snodgrass.

  Reiki had arrived for the Portland Poet’s Collective, the green one, the young one, the one that was composed of twenty-one year old girls and honorary bears and certain subjective locations in the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. From the ferry boats that navigated various sounds and inlets of the northern west coast of the U.S., alert passengers could occasionally see body-painted girls—absolutely still--who stared directly back as their insolent unclothed breasts pointed out into the chill October air. Nobody said anything. Nobody was motivated to do so.

  The arrival of Reiki, the ancient ninja Japanese technique of curing wounds through mere proximity of two open palms, settled once and for all the argument that had been raging since New Haven days, since Bar Harbor days, since days of all the East Coast leisure destinations that had been once owned, then controlled by the forebears of the PPC. (Or rather, two and a half daughters of the PPC were from this background, Abigail and Lacey, with Kirsten Maddy a next door neighbor who comprised the honorary one-half.) This argument was: are pirates or ninjas cooler? Apparently antecedents of this argument dated back to an even earlier generation, wherein the uncles and aunts of Abigail and Lacey themselves disputed this question fervently in moving wooden-paneled station wagons and underway motor cruisers on the Chesapeake. Loyalties, once divided, tended to stick, and Lake Kennebec cabins still divided themselves at mealtimes along this question. But although pirates could be glorified in blockbuster Hollywood movies, and the pirate faction sported eyepatches, dramatic fake beards and loud greetings, here finally the ninja camp had acquired an actual practice, whose dramatic and public displays assured the ultimate and lasting upper hand and spelt the end of the divide. There were even defections.

  PPC, once a core of the two-and-a-half girls, then surrounded by additional entrants from Burning Man, from SXSW, from Yale theatre, from Black Mountain, from Burlington, retained its character as a predominately female, predominately ecological group of wood runners and glade dwellers who lived outside Portland. But whereas Laura Spencer root chairs (a fortuitous discovery, an invasive species growing around a carefully-placed boulder) took eighteen months to grow, reiki could be ramped up or down in production effortlessly, depending on the needs of the solar calendar or the especial ups and downs of the labor market surrounding various music and culture festivals on the West Coast. If Kirsten Maddy was off on one of her Seattle Intelligencer gigs or if Abigail and Lacey were given exorbitant offers for feminist summer camps in the Cascades, then clients making their way to the designated forest locations in Beacon Rock or Mount Hood would find only an apologetic scrawl on a birchwood bark sheaf. If, on the other hand, seven or nine girls found themselves with little or nothing to do on an especially wet autumn, blue-painted girls might even be spotted in downtown Portland, putting up flyers or giving brief demonstrations of their craft.

  Finally, Abigail had decreed, one tea-drinking episode forgotten seasons ago, that excess capital was to be stored as non-reactive metal. The price of some of these had quadrupled or more in intervening years.

  “I think it’s time for us to expand what we are doing,” commented Lacey, another rainy autumn day. Wet drops were tumbling from the sky, landing on foliage, and dripping largely away to oblique angles or side paths. Most of the girls did not even notice a drizzle.

  “How so,” wondered Abigail.

  “Well, we’ve been doing very well with distance sessions even while the patient is still in hospital or even at her office. Why can’t we do mass sessions, even with the East Coast or Chicago? We can maybe use the Internet and heal through the actual network.”

  Abigail gave a little frown. She had never liked computers.

  “I think it disturbs the purpose of our ecological caretaking, if we send out healing through ley lines we haven’t yet charted, to territories we don’t personally know. Possibly we’d be doing the right thing, but what there was some local anomaly in Nebraska, and our healing actually harmed an aura? Then we’d be personally responsible.”

  Lacey frowned. She had always been the youngest sister. “If Earth Mother has given us the strength and the mission to caretake her least gifted children, then we deny the growth of our full potential if we shy away from maximum output. It’s not even Desertia we should confine ourselves to.”

  Without noticing it, the two sisters both casually half-glanced at Kirsten Maddy, who could be counted on to resolve irreconcilable differences.

  “Well guys,” said Kirsten Maddy, who wore glasses, “I think Toshio can decide. We can consult with him, and I’m sure he’d have things to say.”

  Toshio, the seventy-seven year old Zen master, however, could not resolve the difference. Senility had finally caught up, and he was astral-walking in Shizuoka, even as his physical body remained in Portland. In fact, it almost seem like his hand malevolently snatched at Lacey.

  “Did you see that,” commented Lacey, as the girls ate at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant on Alberta Street. “I almost thought he might be trying to attack me.”

  “Oh, you’re seeing things,” said Abigail. “Let’s go look at some horses while we’re in town.”

  Lacey was mollified and Toshio’s snatch was almost completely forgiven. In any case, his physical body went to join his spirit-walker, and he was seen again only once or twice and unreliably, with the temple he owned decaying and eventually bull-dozed. But the day itself there were sun dogs in the sky and an inverted rainbow; water in the city pipes ran briefly rusty for inexplicable reasons to be mirrored by especially red sunsets for a succession of days.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Dr. Mark Arima-Wells, PHP, MPH, M.D., pulled up to the white-stucco district headquarters of the CDC, District IV, Vancouver, Washington, in a gray-blue Zipcar. Parking the vehicle carefully at the designated spot, he pulled out the magnetic lock-card and tapped the vehicle returned. Somewhere, miles away, hard drives whirled, calculations were made, and more vehicles would be gently nudged to the local precincts in view of regular and predictable demand. The algorithms liked predictability: it was profitable.

  As Dr. Arima-Wells walked through the HVAC-filtered particulate-free air of the CDC offices, he rubbed the graduation ring on his left ring finger thoughtfully. For some time, he had been considering returning to car ownership, but the convenience of the time-share was unbeatable, and he found the variety of the unexpected vehicles he might be driving somewhat a counterbalance to the absolute predictability of his days. CRUNCH, the new data-mining software being tested in his office, for all its billions in development, of course returned only the same exact data patterns any five-year veteran in Public Health could explain. Obviously, exotic bird flu’s tended to arrive first in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or to a lesser degree, Seattle, and then work their way across the country. There were always strange and unusual strains being circulated, oftentimes very briefly, from areas with large ethnic neighborhoods. Contrary to this pattern, obesity might cluster in rural areas; specific genetic backgrounds were correlated with specific genetic diseases.

  “Oh, good morning Dr. Wells,” said Annie, the cheerful secretary.

  “Good morning, Annie. Feeling well?”

  “Yes, Doctor. Thank you.”

  Annie was of Scandinavian-German background. Merely by looking at her, Dr. Arima-Wells knew that she was susceptible to skin cancer and a slightly increased probability of leukemia, but the line that had to be drawn—daily—in his workplace was the conflict between which measures could be directly implemented and which required seven billion dollars of software to just
ify. Had he his way, Dr. Arima-Wells would simply install an quarantine around certain districts in western USA, but unfortunately the same politicians who funded the CDC also answered to charismatic leaders of some of those neighborhoods. Hence, Dr. Arima-Wells could never be quite fully Republican or Democrat. He always voted what the national mood was, and he almost always nailed the winner. It was one part of his authority.

  “Anything new, Annie?” Dr. Wells asked, as he began unpacking his suitcase.

  “Well actually there’s a huge printout of new numbers today,” said Annie. Her voice remained calm and detached.

  “Interesting. Well, I guess we have our work cut out.”

  CRUNCH, the data-mining software, tied to the supercomputers in Atlanta and the private sector contractors in Raleigh, North Carolina, was working like a charm. As usual, packet-sniffing and pixel-mining generated a far more granular picture of human activity than the primitive 1990s methodology of waiting for doctor’s reports to wind their way through County Health offices and then through State reporting bureaus. By directly examining non-personalized