Transmissions of the White Dragon

By Tolly Burkan

This novel is visionary fiction. While the plot is a gripping thriller, there is a subliminal message being transmitted to readers, which will make them more perceptive, and more effective, as human beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781098321321

Tolly Burkan

Tolly Burkan is known as the father of the international firewalking movement. As a result of his pioneering strategies, firewalking seminars are now offered on six continents, and have been taught to more than two million people During the 1970s, Tolly created innovative, cutting-edge methods for developing human potential and created the world's first firewalking class. In the 1980s, he founded the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, started working with large corporations, and began training instructors. The 1990s saw his firewalking.com transform his work into a mushrooming corporate trend. A renowned motivational speaker, Tolly Burkan has coached celebrities, including Andrew Weil, MD, Geraldo Rivera, and Anthony Robbins (who later went on to be the most well known firewalking instructor). In addition to authoring three books that are available in several languages, Tolly has been featured in thirty books, hundreds of magazines and newspapers, and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Book preview

Transmissions of the White Dragon

© 2007, 2020 by Tolly Burkan

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN: 9781098321321

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and places are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons,

living or dead, is coincidental.

Tolly’s Website: www.TollyBurkan.com

OTHER WORKS BY TOLLY BURKAN:

The Self-Empowerment Trilogy:

   Dying To Live

   Extreme Spirituality

   Let It Be Easy

Be There Now

It Can’t Be Put In A Book

Guiding Yourself Into A Spiritual Reality

How To Make Your Life Work or Why Aren’t You Happy?

Attain Any Goal — movie (available on YouTube)

Cosmic Melodrama — Stereo LP (available digitally online)

Acknowledgments

For their insights and suggestions, the author would like to express his gratitude and appreciation to Amber Rachel, Mark Bruce Rosin, Sarah Rogers Nesper, Jeph Solo, Timothy Bone and Barry Burkan.

Dedicated with love to my daughter

Amber Rachel

Table of Contents

1 Batman

2 The Week after the Night Before

3 Calculus

4 Tahoe

5 Cold Fusion

6 The White Dragon

7 The Afghan Connection

8 The Blizzard

9 Travis

10 The Fatman

11 Bread Pudding

12 Jay vs. The Fatman

13 The Explosion

14 The Big Surprise

15 The Phone Call

16 911

17 The Hospital

18 The Party

19 Jason’s Soul Mate

20 The Young Wizard

21 James Baxter, Attorney at Law

22 The Batcave

23 Valentine’s Day

24 A Race Against Time

25 The Meeting

26 Mick’s Gift to the World

27 Three-and-a-half Years Later

28 Nikola Tesla

29 The Secret Government

30 Star Wars

31 Heather

32 The Damning Photographs

33 Jay’s Confession

34 While Amy is Away

35 The Pictures Revisited

36 Jason in Jail

37 A Jury of his Peers

38 Judge Hawthorne

39 Tesla’s Secret Re-discovered

40 Jay goes to Hell

41 Living the Dream

1

Batman

Jason was seventeen years old when the idea occurred to him that he could earn more than the measly wage he was now making as a stock-boy in the grocery store where he had been working for almost 11 months.

So, in mid-December, he resigned from his job and ran an ad in the Sunday newspaper: Santa for hire. Xmas Eve appearance at your home. Treat your kids! $100 for 15 min.

It required a lot of padding to transform his lean, fit, athletic body into jolly old Claus, and massive amounts of latex and makeup, but he was now $800 richer.

Before New Year’s day, Jason had a plan to keep the good times rollin’.

Jason was a thinker. Besides having a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, Jason maintained straight As in high school and had a 4.35 GPA, since he took only Advanced Placement courses.

His dazzling smile, golden blond hair and riveting blue eyes were put together in a way that gave him the kind of good-looks that made him a magnet for girls. He had a rather humorous reputation in this department. He never asked any girls to go out with him. THEY asked him. His calendar was always full, but he never went out with any girl more than once. Consequently, just about every girl in the senior class had been out with Jason: the fat and ugly ones as well as the most stunningly gorgeous.

Since he never said no to a girl; it couldn’t be a boost to any girl’s ego if she was seen at a party with Jason Wagner… even though he did look a lot like a young Greek god. His quirky reputation was famous. If he had a fault, it was only this: hubris. Like everyone else, but even more so, he perceived Jason as a helluva great guy. Jay never tried to be humble; as he felt it was more important that he be honest.

Jason’s ad on December 28th read: Super Hero of your choice. Will appear at the stroke of midnight for your New Year’s Eve Y2K party. $500. Go for it!

He only got one response. But that’s all he needed.

On December 31, 1999, Jason spent the better part of the day constructing his Batman costume.

Using his imagination, and skills he acquired from Tae Kwon Do and years of gymnastics at school, Jason choreographed a short routine that he knew would entertain and draw some thunderous applause. He downloaded the Batman theme-song from the Internet and burned a CD he could play on the sound system at the party.

*  *  *

On January 1, 2000, Jason slept until after noon. The knocking on the door of his bedroom roused him… from one of the deepest sleeps of his young life.

Jay.

Jason heard his name, but was reluctant to leave his dream. He blinked his eyes open — then realized it was Y2K and the predicted doom of the planet had not materialized.

Jay.

It was Ryan, Jason’s younger brother by 16 months. They were a family of three, since the death of the kids’ father almost four years before. Jason and Ryan were exceptionally close now. Before their father had died in a fishing accident, the two boys were never close; they were constantly quarreling and competing with each other. Their sibling rivalry had kept them from ever being friends; but since 1996, they were tight — really tight. It’s amazing how quickly some children can mature following the loss of a parent.

You awake Bro’?

Yeah, come in.

Ryan was the same exact height as his older brother, six-foot even. If he worked out a bit, he would look almost like a twin. But at sixteen, Ryan was thinner than a string bean. Intellectually, he was not Jason’s equal; however, when it came to computers, Ryan was absolutely incredible. He was the geek that the school office was always calling to fix the high school’s system — after all the local professionals had only succeeded in making the original problem ten times worse.

How’d the party go, Jay?

It was pretty unbelievable, Rin. Jason called his younger brother by the name he had used from the time he was first learning to speak. I think I’ll need a couple of days to chill. It was really unbelievable.

Sweet. Tell me about it.

Well it was in a big banquet room at a golf club. The guy who hired me is a rich doctor, and he invited over 200 people. I guess I forgot to ask how many would be at the party. When I arrived in my street clothes at about 10:30 to check out everything and figure out how to play my Batman music on the sound system, I was sort of amazed at how many people were there. The doctor laughed when I told him I was going to play my music on the sound system. He’d hired a band for the party, and sure enough, he had already told them in advance that they would be expected to play Batman’s Theme Song. Jason shook his head, as if he himself was in disbelief while remembering what had happened the night before. Rin, they knew how to play Batman’s Theme Song!

Sweet, Ryan interrupted.

There was this big stage they had set up for the party. The band was on one side, and I had use of the other side of the stage. So I told them what I was going to do, where I was going to place my springboard, the amount of space I needed — and we planned out exactly how the music would work.

Right on. Ryan was enjoying the tale.

At midnight, these indoor fireworks went off. I’ve never seen anything like it. The band started playing ‘Bat-Man!’ and colored spotlights moved all around the stage. I entered with three handsprings, hit the springboard, and did a double flip. I had to stitch my cape with a thin thread so I wouldn’t get tangled in it when I made my entrance. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I broke the thread free and went into my black belt routine.

Dude! Ryan’s jaw was slack as he relished the images of his brother doing these familiar moves… in a Batman costume!

I finished with all those airborne stunts I do with the gymnastics team at football games, and ended with the modified helicopter kick that won me the trophy last year.

Whoa!

2

The Week after the Night Before

During the first seven days of the new Millennium, Jason received over a dozen phone calls from people who had seen him New Year’s Eve. Several people wanted Batman to appear at their child’s birthday party; one store manager wanted Batman at a new store-opening; a features editor at the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to interview him for a story; the rich doctor wanted to secure him for next New Year’s Eve; and a few people wanted to brainstorm ways his services could be employed for their various upcoming events.

It was five o’clock Thursday afternoon. Jason was sitting at his desk doing calculus homework. He had a calc exam the next day. School had resumed and mundane life was again a part of Batman’s reality. But at least he wasn’t stacking shelves with boxes of Cheerios for $6.75 an hour. And yesterday, he added $1,300 to his bank account.

Jason’s cell phone chirped.

Hey, Jason answered. It was Ryan.

Heya Jay.

S’up Rin?

You going boarding with us this weekend?

The Wagners had a vacation home in Tahoe and both boys were avid snowboarders. Ryan, however, was truly the star in this arena. Whereas Jason excelled in Martial Arts and gymnastics, Ryan was a hot dog on the slopes. He wasn’t really a geek. It was just his eyeglasses, extreme skinniness, and computer expertise that perpetuated the myth. His attitude was actually more punk. He didn’t dress punk, but he hung with that crowd. On a skate or snowboard, his abilities were unrivaled.

Rin, this week is getting really crazy. I want to go, but I have this big test tomorrow, and there’s all this Batman stuff, and —

Jay! Dude, if you don’t go, it’s off. You gotta drive!

Right. OK, he easily consented. He loved boarding.

The boys’ mother had been talking about selling the Tahoe cabin ever since their dad died. Though Mick Wagner was making good money teaching at UC, he had no life insurance. As a 37-year-old man in perfect health, it had never occurred to him. He never imagined himself being killed in an accident. Their mom, Janet, had always been a housewife and had not worked since she was a teenager. Now, her present income came from cleaning houses. It was rather meager, but she enjoyed being self-employed. For the past three years, she supplemented her income with a line of credit linked to home equity loans on both houses. Understanding that she was rapidly depleting her greatest financial resource, Janet Wagner resolved to sell both houses, the Tahoe cabin first, and the Victorian after both boys graduated high school. Once the Tahoe cabin was sold, opportunities for snowboarding were going to be far less. Both boys knew that.

Sure, I’ll drive, Jason affirmed with resolve.

Woo-hoo. I’ll tell Travis. Awesome. Travis was Ryan’s best friend, and always accompanied him when he went boarding at Tahoe.

’K. Later. Jason clicked off his cell and checked the weather report for the weekend at Weather.com. Lookin’ good, he mused to himself. A smile crept across his lips as he fantasized boarding the expert slope at Heavenly Valley… in his Batman costume. I don’t think so, was the thought that sobered him and returned him to his calculus studies.

Jason inherited his father’s intellect. Mick Wagner had been a professor in the Physics Department. Many physics majors at CAL — of all the campuses in the vast University of California system, only UC Berkeley could be called CAL — were students who would someday be designing and building nuclear reactors all over the globe. Physics professors at CAL Berkeley were an elite group. Maybe it was because they inevitably had connections to the inner circles of The Government, whether they liked it or not, through the University’s ties with the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear labs. It was strange, Jason thought, that FBI and CIA agents visited the house after his father drowned. Of course, he still didn’t know that it wasn’t a fishing accident at all. Jason’s dad was out on the Bay doing work-related research. Oh yes, his death was indeed a tragic accident, but if it had been known that Mick was working, then there would have been millions of dollars in liability insurance money that the surviving Wagners would have been entitled to receive. But since that aspect of his work was top — TOP — secret, everyone believed Mick was fishing.

Ryan, in contrast to his older brother, had inherited most of his traits from his mother. Though the boys looked alike in their appearance, their brains were wired completely differently. Ryan was more spontaneous, never aced any math or science classes, and played video-games on his PC with incredible motor skills and eye-hand coordination. This is not meant to suggest that he wasn’t capable of straight As, he just wasn’t academically inclined, as his mother would say.

Jason was just getting back into the calc problem he was working on when the phone chirped again. He was about to consider letting it go to voice mail, but TTCD — teenage-telephone-compulsion-disorder — took over, and he clicked it on with an automatic reflex.

Hey.

Me again Jay, said Ryan.

Rin, let me do my homework.

Travis wants to know if Amy can come with us?

Amy was Travis’s older sister, and like Jason, a senior. Jason had been out with her once, but only once, of course. She was cute, but she wasn’t a very good boarder. Jason wasn’t particularly attracted to her, so he had to quickly consider whether this might confuse things — by sending some kind of wrong message to Amy. He figured that except for the ride up and back, he probably wouldn’t see too much of her, since they’d use different lifts. He knew she wouldn’t be on the same slopes that he’d be bombing. The way Heavenly was configured, there was slim chance of him seeing her at all actually.

’K.

Tight! was all Ryan responded before clicking off.

Jason chuckled as he recalled some of the weird stories he had heard about Amy and snowboarding. She either had bad luck or she just was not a good boarder. Last year she even broke her collar bone. Her excuse was funny, but true. Apparently an older woman on skis had dropped her pants to pee behind some trees, when she suddenly lost her balance and started down the intermediate slope backward, with her pants down, screaming at the top of her lungs. Amy was so startled by the sight of this bare-assed woman sailing past her backward and out of control, that she herself wound up slamming into a tree. The bare-bottomed woman eventually fell, broke a leg, and the ski patrol had to rescue both of them and load them into an ambulance.

Jason had been sufficiently interrupted that his calculus studies were now suffering.

Better check my e-mail, he thought.

Slogging through the spam, Jason searched for a handle he recognized. No mail. Bummer. Jason loved getting e-mail… of course! He was a teenager. Without admitting to himself that he was disappointed, he randomly opened a piece of spam.

"Create the world you dream with every

choice you make."

— Stephen C. Paul

He didn’t recognize the sender, but liked the one-line message, and printed it out. Then he deleted everything from his in-box, including the many, many Clinton-Lewinsky jokes.

3

Calculus

Thursday evening found Jay exhausted. Exhilarated too, but exhausted nonetheless. He set his PC on random-play and began listening to the 900 songs he pirated using Napster, picked up his calc book with every intention of studying, but his mind kept wandering.

Jay tried to sort through his feelings, looking for the reason he couldn’t concentrate on the calculus problems. At first he wasn’t willing to dig beneath the surface, but all of a sudden, the truth behind his agitation became clear: he was missing his father. He realized that if a magic genie was able to grant him one wish, he’d wish that Mick had not been killed. Memories of his deceased father soon filled his mind, and homework was forgotten.

Jason reached underneath the Lazy-Boy he was sitting in, grasped a box, and slid it from beneath the recliner. The box contained a ouija board. Ryan had given it to him for Christmas, and that same day, he had slipped it under the massive chair without yet having tried it. He removed the ouija from the box and decided he would use it to attempt speaking with his father. A part of him thought that the whole process was silly; but another part of him truly hoped that the mysterious board might provide a portal to another world.

Dad, I miss you so much, the boy whispered. He placed the board on his lap and put the pointer in the middle. Can you hear me Dad? Jason whispered, with barely a sound emerging from his lips. He lightly touched the pointer and waited for it to move. Nothing happened. Can you hear me Dad? he repeated, but no more audibly than the first time. The pointer still did not move.

After several more attempts, with no results, Jay was in conflict whether to continue trying or to give up. Dad, can you hear me? The pointer stirred. It moved toward the word YES. Instead of rejoicing, Jay said to himself, I want it to move so badly, I’m sure I’m probably just doing it myself. He re-boxed the ouija board and slid it back under the Lazy-Boy. Returning to his calculus studies, Jason tried to dismiss all thoughts about the ouija board. But it wasn’t easy.

*  *  *

His mother woke him at ten. Jay. Jay. Honey, why don’t you go sleep in your bed and turn off the music.

Jason awoke with a start. What the — ? He quickly glanced at the digital alarm on the night table. I don’t believe I did this, he anguished. I REALLY need to study for that test tomorrow.

Janet saw her son’s drooping eyelids and, as a mother, she knew that he REALLY needed to go to sleep. But she was wise and held her arguments to herself. All she said was, Well, Sweetie, you could always wake up early and study tomorrow morning.

Janet Wagner was a tender and loving parent. She used few words, but she was eloquent and articulate. Her words were often like jewels. Their quantity was replaced with quality. She was the source of the boys’ good looks. Whereas Mick’s good-looks would be called rugged, Janet was a definite hottie. She was presently 36, and being only 19 years older than Jason, he often heard the guys at school talk about how cute she was. But though she was a real looker, Janet was the epitome of conservatism. Her father