22
Ring
“Everything OK?” Mackenzie asked. She and Kaitlyn were sitting together for lunch, Sam having grabbed a sandwich and headed off to a table by herself.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Fine,” Kaitlyn said, offering Mackenzie a quick smile and almost immediately looking lost in thought again.
“How’d it go with Ammu?” Mackenzie tried to keep her voice casual. As her own session loomed closer, she was starting to feel a bit nervous herself, even though she never would have admitted it.
“Good, I think?” Kaitlyn replied, her voice somewhat distant. “Kinda strange. I’m not sure I’m really supposed to talk about it.”
Mackenzie frowned, her eyes narrowing dangerously.
“He didn’t get handsy with you, did he?”
“What? No!” Kaitlyn blurted out. “Oh my gosh, no! Ammu would never!” At the very idea of it, Kaitlyn started laughing.
“OK,” Mackenzie said, mollified. “Just checking. You’re acting like you saw a ghost or something.”
“No. No, I…” Kaitlyn grinned wryly. “I just have an overactive imagination sometimes.”
“But nothing bad happened?” Mackenzie almost winced just hearing herself ask. She wanted to believe she was only looking out for Kaitlyn, but she knew there was more to it than that. She liked Ammu, but he seemed mysterious somehow, in a way Mackenzie couldn’t quite put her finger on, and as far as she was concerned that made him unpredictable.
“No,” Kaitlyn said, smiling now. “Definitely nothing bad. But what happened with you guys while I was gone? Why’s Sam so upset?”
“Who knows?” Mackenzie said, shrugging. “Does she even need a reason? I don’t think she likes the idea of having to work with anybody else. Like she thinks we’re beneath her or something.”
Kaitlyn pursed her lips as though she were thinking about it, but in the end she didn’t comment either way, taking another bite of her sandwich instead. Continuing to eat in silence, they both watched as Ammu came into the main hall, walked directly up to Sam, spoke with her for a brief moment, and then led her out toward the new classroom, just the two of them. Alone.
• • •
“Oh, now this… this will not do at all,” Ammu said as they walked into the classroom together. He looked back and forth between the chairs and the whiteboard with obvious disapproval. “Is this how you were sitting all morning?”
“Yeah,” Sam acknowledged, shrugging. “So?”
“No, no. This… this is how disconnected we have become from the unconscious mind,” he said. “Look! The seating has been arranged so the chairs have their backs to the door. If you sit here, you have to turn all the way around to see anyone coming in.” He sat in one of the two center chairs and turned his neck and shoulders far enough to face the door, demonstrating.
“You see?” he asked, but Sam just shrugged again.
“The unconscious mind hates this arrangement,” Ammu declared. “It allows the unknown to approach from behind.”
He got back up and began pulling the chairs over to one side of the room, one by one.
“The unconscious mind, you know, is actually very, very old,” he said as he worked. “It is only recently in our evolutionary history that the rational human mind has become so advanced. The unconscious mind has been a part of us for much, much longer, protecting us by watching for threats, and helping us by scanning the environment for food and other opportunities to enhance our chance of survival.”
Once he had moved all the chairs out of the way, Ammu wheeled the whiteboard over to one side of the space, placing it with its back to the temporary partition that had been drawn across the room to section it off from the rest of the large conference space.
“As modern human beings,” he continued, “we train our rational minds from birth to filter out many messages from the unconscious mind. When we are asked as children to enter a dark basement, we become frightened. The unconscious mind is signaling us to be cautious. We must tell ourselves, ‘There is nothing to be scared of. It is just a basement.’
“We learn to ignore these signals so completely as adults that we can walk into our basements without any hesitation, but try to walk into someone else’s dark basement, and hopefully you will find yourself on alert all over again.”
“Why ‘hopefully’?” Sam asked. “Why would we want to be scared of imaginary monsters in somebody’s basement? Nothing personal, but that seems kind of stupid.” She continued to watch him as he set about rearranging the chairs to face the whiteboard in its new position. He paused for a moment and looked at her directly.
“Yes! That is the question! Why ‘hopefully’ indeed! If we spend so much of our lives learning to ignore the impulses of the unconscious mind, why would we want to hear them again? Yes! Good, Samantha!”
Sam knitted her eyebrows together in confusion. She was not used to adults praising her for calling them stupid.
“Because the unconscious mind is not stupid,” he explained. “In fact, it is highly intelligent in its own right, and in a very different way than the rational mind. When we can merge the two intentionally, learning to hear what our unconscious mind is telling us and filtering out only that which we decide to filter out, that is when we begin to reach our full potential.”
“There,” he proclaimed. “Much better. Now we can sit more comfortably.” He sat again in one of the two center chairs, and this time his left side was to the door instead of his back. When Sam sat down, purposefully leaving a chair between them, she realized that the door was now well within her peripheral vision. She didn’t like to admit it, not even to herself, but he was right. This position was more comfortable.
“So,” he said. “Samantha. I believe that the test has done precisely what it was designed to do. Your scores on the IAB indicate that your conscious and unconscious minds are, in fact, communicating to a significant degree, whether you realize it or not. It might take us some time to identify the pathway by which this is occurring most directly, but I do believe that such a pathway exists for you, and I remain dedicated to discovering it.”
He paused, as though waiting for some kind of reply.
What am I supposed to say to that? she thought to herself. Am I supposed to tell you I think you’re wasting your time? That I can’t have a very good pathway if everyone else instantly knew what theirs was and I have absolutely no idea? That even if you find it, I’m probably going to be so far behind in learning to use it that you’re going to send me home eventually anyway?
“OK,” was all she said.
“Good. I’m sure you spent some time last night thinking about hobbies and interests and the like. Did anything in particular occur to you?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “I do well in school. That’s the only thing I can think of that I’m good at, but that’s not unconscious. That’s a formula. I read the assignments. I do all the homework. I study before the tests, and I do well on them. That’s it. There’s nothing unusual about it. I’m just better at it than most people.”
“Anything people do that makes them stand out can be an indication of a deeper talent, Samantha. If you don’t have a particular subject that fascinates you or a particular hobby you find engaging, then perhaps you have noticed that you respond in certain situations to what people might call a ‘gut feeling’ rather than relying upon your intellect. Are you aware of making any decisions in your day-to-day life based on such an impulse?”
Sam could only think of two gut feelings she had ever had in her life, and they had both been completely and utterly worthless. This whole program is so stupid. I can’t believe I signed up for this—trapped all summer with this artsy-fartsy mumbo-jumbo about the unconscious mind and nothing to do for like a hundred miles in every direction and no Internet. What kind of a quack is this guy?
“What are you a professor of?” she asked out loud, ignoring his question.
“Pardon me?”
“Christina called you ‘Professor Mubarak.’ What are you a professor of?”
“I see,” Ammu said. “I hold PhDs in both archaeology and neuroscience.”
“That’s a strange combination,” Sam commented.
“It is,” Ammu agreed. He said nothing else, simply watching her, but he showed no sign of being even the least bit perturbed about either her question or her commentary. There was an aura of patience about him, a sense that he was merely taking in the world as it came, without any judgment whatsoever, that Sam found both disconcerting and compelling at the same time.
“I can only think of two gut feelings I’ve ever had. I mean ever,” she finally said.
“Go on,” Ammu said, his demeanor not changing in the slightest.
“My dad was going to let me out of school the day of the test, but I felt like I should take it, so I did. And then when the letter came from the ICIC, I felt like I should come here, so I did that, too. But then the feelings went away. The first one went away before I took the test, and the second one went away before I left to come here. So I’ve only had two gut feelings in my whole life, and as far as I can tell they were both wrong, so that seems pretty useless.”
“On the contrary,” Ammu said, his eyes bright with excitement, “I find it fascinating that you have had only two gut feelings and they both involved this program. I do not believe that to be a coincidence.”
“Just because your unconscious mind wants something to have meaning doesn’t mean it does,” Sam replied. “As a neuroscientist, you should know that.”
“Samantha—” Ammu started, his voice gentle, but just then Christina and the other students started filing in for their afternoon class.
“Just because your conscious mind believes there is no connection, does not mean that is true either,” he finished, smiling kindly. “To be continued, hmm?”
But Sam said nothing, staring at him coldly as he got up to leave, and when the other students sat down, eying her warily, they left the seat next to her empty.
• • •
When Mackenzie arrived at the exercise room, she was eager to size up the competition. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the young black man with the handsome smile, mischievous eyes, and well-muscled body who stood in the center of a Muay Thai ring that had not been there before. He stared back at her with an expression that suggested he was equally surprised to find himself facing a leggy, blond teenage girl.
“Ah, good! I see you have already met,” Ammu said, walking in behind Mackenzie.
“Not exactly,” Mackenzie replied.
“Staff Sergeant Kyle Miller, at your service,” the young man said smoothly, looking back and forth between Mackenzie and Ammu as though he were not yet sure which of them he was supposed to be addressing.
“I am Professor Amr Mubarak,” Ammu said, smiling warmly, “but you may call me ‘Ammu.’ And this is our young protégée, Miss Mackenzie Gray.”
“Sir,” he said, nodding at Ammu, and then, “Miss Gray,” nodding at Mackenzie in turn.
“It’s OK,” Mackenzie said. “I’m a military brat. You can call me ‘Gray’ if you want. I’m used to it.”
“All right, Gray,” he replied easily. “And you can call me ‘Staff Sergeant.’” He said it with a hint of a smirk, and Mackenzie grinned at him wryly, rolling her eyes.
“As I am sure you have surmised, Mackenzie, Staff Sergeant Miller is to be your sparring partner this afternoon. Remember, the point of the exercise is not to assess your skill in martial arts, but rather to identify the way in which you may be using your unconscious mind to your advantage in the ring. So do not try to showcase your talent by doing anything unusual on my account. Simply do what you would normally do.”
“Got it,” Mackenzie said.
“Staff Sergeant Miller,” Ammu continued, turning his attention to the young man, “while you are engaged in sparring this afternoon, I would like you to watch for anything that might seem unusual about Mackenzie’s fighting style. I am not a martial arts expert, so I am counting on you to notice and draw my attention to her particular nuances.”
“Roger that,” he said, nodding once for emphasis.
Mackenzie unzipped her sweatshirt, revealing a sleeveless black sports top underneath. She wore no jewelry, but she had a colorful, woven armband tied around each of her upper arms. She donned the sparring mask and gloves that had been provided, while her opponent did the same, and then she climbed over the top of the ropes and into the ring.
“When you are ready,” Ammu said.
“Do you mind?” Mackenzie asked the staff sergeant.
“By all means.” He gestured to her broadly with one hand, granting her the permission she sought.
Mackenzie placed her right hand on the top rope and began to walk around the perimeter of the ring, keeping her hand on the rope at all times and bowing silently for a few moments in each corner. When she had completed the circle, she started into a series of ritual, dancelike movements. Miller did not join her, and Ammu looked to him for an explanation.
“It’s an ancient practice,” he explained. “All traditional Muay Thai fights begin with a blessing of the ring, followed by the wai kru ram muay. That’s what she’s doing now. It honors the fighter’s school and teacher, and it centers the fighter and bring blessings to her, as well as protecting her against negative energies. Or so they say. The armbands you see her wearing—her prajioud—those honor her connection to her family.”
“Fascinating!” Ammu exclaimed. “And why do you not do the same?”
“To be perfectly honest, Doc, I’m used to a more western approach,” Miller answered, looking a bit embarrassed. “I don’t have a wai kru ram muay of my own. Each one is specific to its school, its teacher, and to the fighter himself or herself. To perform it badly is a great dishonor. Since I didn’t come up in the tradition, I don’t do it. Most western fighters don’t, at least the ones I know.”
“I see,” Ammu said, watching Mackenzie with a renewed intensity, clearly intrigued by what she was doing.
The dance continued for several minutes before finally coming to an end. Mackenzie walked calmly up to Miller, bowed—an acknowledgment which he returned in kind—and touched her gloved fists to his.
“Elbows to body only, OK?” he asked.
“Sure,” she agreed. “Wouldn’t want to mess up that pretty-boy face of yours.”
“Nice of you to notice!” he quipped back.
They took a step away from each other and raised their gloves, beginning to circle. Mackenzie had been nervous about the idea of Ammu watching her, but the ritual of the wai kru ram muay helped her focus. She forgot about Ammu entirely as she watched her opponent, learning who he was and how he moved. Nothing existed outside the ring, and here, within it, she was in her element.
She waited for him to take an experimental jab, and she blocked it easily. He jabbed at her again, faster this time, and she took the blow to her midsection on purpose. She tightened her stomach muscles and turned slightly to the side so it would be no more than a glancing blow, using the force of her own twist to slam her knee into his gut. He spun away at the last second, sparing himself the full brunt of its force, and he danced backward a few steps, raising an appraising eyebrow at the move.
He closed again, this time aiming two quick blows at her center mass. But Mackenzie could tell he was pulling his punches, not wanting to hurt her, and she used it to her advantage. Instead of dodging or blocking the hits, she took them straight on and surprised him by throwing a right jab as fast and hard as she could at his jaw. He took the blow and danced back again, shaking it off, but it would have been a solid point in her favor if there had been a referee watching.
“Enjoy it, Gray. I won’t underestimate you again,” he said, his eyes locking onto hers with a new intensity. Closer, she thought, grinning at him slyly. Closer… there! She winked at him and simultaneously slammed her right knee into his left side. She would have scored on that one too, but he outweighed her by too many pounds—the blow didn’t throw his balance despite landing squarely where she had intended it.
Miller laughed, but he was watching her like a hawk now.
“I bet that one usually works,” he acknowledged.
“Wouldn’t know,” she answered. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever used it on.”
“Sure, I am.” He laughed again, and she took advantage of the moment to fly at him with a flurry of knees, fists, and elbows, grinning wickedly all the while. He continued to dance away, letting her spend her energy on the attack while dodging the worst of it.
“Oh, you don’t like that, do you?” he said, taunting her now. “You want me to just stand there and let you hit me. Well, I’m smarter than that, Gray. If you want to hit me, I’m going to make you work for it.”
Her blows moved even faster in reply, and she could feel the energy between them changing now. He stopped trying to speak, focusing more intensely on the fight, and he dodged several blows before countering with a fast knee to her left side. She took it on purpose and threw another punch at his face. She was rewarded with another grunt from her opponent, but the knee had taken its toll, making her grimace in pain before she could mask it.
Miller didn’t say a word. She knew she had hurt him, too; the only question was how much. They continued to trade blows, Mackenzie only taking his hits when she knew she could connect her own, but as the seconds ticked by, he was slowly gaining the advantage. With his extra height and reach and weight, his blows were hurting her more than hers were hurting him. She couldn’t win this way, but she could make sure he didn’t walk away from it easily, and she flew at him with a renewed vigor that had him dancing away again.
“Time!” he called. “Hey, easy. Time out!”
Mackenzie came to a halt and flashed him a mischievous grin.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her tone all innocence and sunshine. “Had enough already? We were just getting started.”
“Doc,” he said, ignoring her jibe, “I think I have something for you.”
“Yes? Yes! Good!” Ammu said. “What did you see?” It was the first time Mackenzie had heard him sound even remotely troubled. He had obviously not expected their sparring to be so violent.
“Well, first of all, this wouldn’t be considered a fair fight. She’s very skilled—that much is clear—but I outweigh her by a good bit.”
“Yeah, about that,” Mackenzie interjected, trying not to grimace at the bruising she had taken to her left side. “Maybe cut back on the protein bars, huh?”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
They climbed out of the ring as he continued.
“Look, the point is she’d be winning if she were up against someone her own size. She hasn’t taken a single blow she didn’t want to, OK? Every time I connect, it’s because she knows she can hit me back harder. The only problem she’s facing is that harder is proportional here. The fraction of the punch she takes is still harder than what she can throw back.”
Ammu looked to Mackenzie, but she only shrugged. It was certainly no fault of hers that a grown man in top physical condition outmatched her in strength and body mass, but that didn’t mean she wanted to say it out loud.
“I fought her on my own terms, matching my upper body strength against hers, where I knew I could win eventually. I had to. Because she knew everything I was going to do even as I did it.”
He paused, giving Ammu a moment to let his words sink in while he locked eyes with Mackenzie again, this time with a level of respect he had not shown her before.
“If she were my size, or if I were her size for that matter, she would have beaten me soundly. She just… she just knew everything I was going to do.”
“Fascinating!” Ammu exclaimed, his worry forgotten in his excitement. “Mackenzie, when you are fighting, are you aware of what Sergeant Miller is saying?”
“Staff Sergeant,” she corrected him automatically, making Miller crack a grin. “And yes, sorry. I always know. I mean, not ahead of time. Like, I don’t have any idea how the whole fight is going to play out. But in the moment, sure. I know where each punch or knee or elbow or kick is going to land.”
“Doc, if I might suggest an experiment?” Miller offered.
“Yes? What sort of experiment?”
“I’d like to get back in the ring and see how things go if Mackenzie stops trying to hit me back and just tries to avoid getting hit.”
“No!” Mackenzie said, more loudly than she had intended. “Look, no, OK? I don’t get in the ring to dance. I get in the ring to fight. I’m not going to run away like a damn rabbit.”
Ammu considered her quietly for a moment, while Miller just shrugged.
“Hey, it’s your party. I’m not trying to crash it. I just wanted to see. I’m not sure I could hit you at all if you were only trying to dodge me, and I’ve never run into anyone I could say that about before. I just wanted to know if it was true.”
He said this last bit sounding a little embarrassed, and Mackenzie found herself relenting. He didn’t think she was scared to get hit. He just wanted to see if she was as good as he thought she was. Maybe she should give him the chance to find out…
“OK,” she said, changing her mind. “Sure. Let’s try it.”
“Yeah?” Miller said, his face lighting up.
“Yeah,” she repeated, climbing back into the ring. “I didn’t knock out your hearing, did I? I know you took a couple solid blows to the head there.”
Miller gave her a withering look and followed her. They came together in the center of the ring, bowed, tapped gloves, backed away a step, and entered a fighting stance.
This time, Mackenzie forced herself to adopt a defensive state of mind, anticipating his blows and dodging them without returning the hits. Miller started with two quick jabs that she avoided easily, blocking the first and sidestepping the second. His next blow was a knee to her ribs. She had to step away to avoid it, but she blocked the next punch while spinning back into his personal space, seeing easily where she could have elbowed him in the face if she had wanted to.
She grinned at him and backed up a step, allowing him to disengage and start again.
This time he came at her faster, in a flurry of fists and knees and elbows, but now it felt as though everything were happening in slow motion. She was already moving away from each blow in the very moment he began to throw it. Effortlessly. Mackenzie saw them all, each in turn, the inertia of one flowing smoothly into another, always limited by the ways in which the human body can move.
She stopped taking any steps away from him at all, blocking each new blow as it came until finally, unable to help herself, she caught a punch neatly under her arm, locked his elbow into a submission hold, and forced him down to the mat where she lay on top of him for a moment, her right shoulder driving into his chest, her face mere inches from his own, before she finally moved to let him up, both of them breathing heavily from the speed of their exertions.
As Miller stood up, he stared at her in awe.
“How did you learn to do that?” he asked, his chest rising and falling dramatically with each breath. “I’ve never seen anything like it! Can you teach me?”
“That,” Ammu interjected quietly, “is our ultimate goal, Staff Sergeant Miller.”
Mackenzie only smiled.
• • •
“So, this morning we were talking about teamwork.”
Christina was standing near the blackboard in its new orientation, with her side to the door, the students of the ICIC arrayed in the chairs in front of her. She turned toward the board and underlined the last thing she had written down: ‘BIGGER - LIKE MAGIC.’
“We said that sometimes, given the right circumstances, a team can become greater than the mere sum of its parts, able to accomplish things together that they could never accomplish alone. This afternoon, I’d like to focus on the conditions that can bring this about. What is needed to bring such a team together? Anyone?”
Sam sat closest to the door, frowning, her shoulders slouched low in her chair, her arms crossed defiantly in front of her chest, the seat next to her standing empty. No one said a thing.
“Daniel?” Christina finally asked after several painful moments of silence. “You mentioned this morning that a band can be this kind of team. What makes a band become something bigger than just a handful of musicians?”
Daniel shrugged, embarrassed to be the center of attention, but Christina smiled and waited, not ready to let him off the hook so easily.
“Well, they all have to know the music,” Daniel offered.
“Good!” Christina exclaimed, obviously trying to sound encouraging. “What else?” She flipped the whiteboard over and drew a vertical line right down the middle of the new, clean side. On the left, she wrote: ‘Know the Music.’
“They have to be decent musicians,” Daniel said, warming up to the topic a little. “They can’t just know the music, really. They have to be able to play it well.”
“Excellent,” Christina agreed, nodding, and she wrote ‘Good Musicians’ underneath ‘Know the Music.’
“They have to play in the same key,” Daniel said, more hesitantly now, “and with the same timing. But that’s kind of obvious, I guess.”
“No, no. That’s very good,” Christina said, writing these below the first two items on her list. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know… they have to kind of… synch. You know? It’s more than just timing. They have to be in the same groove, vibing the music together. They have to… like… feel it. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense,” Christina confirmed. “People who study teamwork have a name for it. They call it ‘synergy.’
“People have observed this phenomenon in many different kinds of teams, working under very different circumstances. A team of soldiers might start moving as a unit without any discernible signals between them, or a corporate team might start building on each other’s ideas to come up with a whole new product design, or an advertising team might offer up a suggestion for a new slogan and somehow everyone knows immediately that this is the right slogan for the campaign.
“Although there does not seem to be any specific formula for creating a synergistic team, experts agree that certain factors are necessary for it to exist, and believe it or not, you have hit on several of them already with your band example.”
Christina beamed at Daniel and turned back to the whiteboard. Next to ‘Know the Music,’ she wrote ‘Expertise’ on the right side of the board. Across from ‘Good Musicians,’ she wrote ‘Proficiency.’ For ‘Key’ and ‘Meter,’ she wrote ‘Place’ and ‘Time.’ Then, on the left side, she wrote ‘Vibe/Groove,’ and on the right side, she wrote ‘Synergy.’
“For a synergistic team to form,” she said, “the team must co-exist in space and time. This does not have to be literal. Teams can work together in virtual space, for example, and can contribute to a process at different times, but studies have shown that synergy appears much more consistently when a team is located together in the same physical space, collaborating simultaneously.”
As long as they all have their own expertise, Sam thought bitterly. As long as they’re all at least marginally proficient and not pathetic losers who don’t know what they’re doing on the team in the first place.
Sketch leaned forward and turned to stare straight at her. Sam had no way of knowing that out of the corner of his eye, Sketch had noticed a sudden change in the flames that zipped around her, or that he had seen them start to slow down, changing gradually from their usual white to a deep, indigo blue. All she knew was that he was staring at her, silently accusing her of not belonging there at all.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded. “You’re not really a team with Rush, either, you know. There’s no magical synergy there. He totally carries you on that stupid video game, and he only plays with you because he feels sorry for you.”
“Samantha!” Christina exclaimed, even as Rush growled out, “What the hell is your problem?”
“Oh, please,” Sam snapped back. “What are you going to do? Ground me from summer school? Are you going to take away my phone, too—the phone that doesn’t even work here? Wait, I know, you’re going to tell me I can’t go out, right? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s nowhere to go! I’ll tell you what, I’m going to go ground myself to my room and pack my bags. Let me know when you’re ready to do me the favor of kicking me out, OK? Thanks.”
With that, Sam got up and stalked out of the room. Just as she had expected, not one person went running after her.