Sensei

by John Donohue

  It was after two A.M. before I saw Asa again. He looked old and remote. His face was a wall; only the eyes moved behind it. The sensei sat in a chair with his hands cupped in his lap, palms up. It’s the mudra hand gesture used for meditation in swordsmanship. But his mind was still on the platform, not in the dojo.

  I sat next to him and watched the ebb and flow of a station house at night. I didn’t look at Asa—among the Japanese, you don’t look directly at higher ranks in tense situations—although when he spoke his voice was so low that I had to resist the urge to look at him so I could read his lips.

  “He was waiting there,” the sensei murmured, as if picking up the thread of a conversation already underway. “In the dark. The note I received said he would be.” He took a long breath in. “I was not sure it would be so.

  “It was a narrow space.” His right hand stirred faintly in his lap, as if coming alive with the retelling. “Dark. Dirty. I said it was not a place . . . of honor.”

  What did he say, I wanted to ask. But I was afraid the sound of my voice would shatter the spell. Asa’s eyes weren’t focused on the room, but looked back into the trench.

  “He told me it was regrettable but could not be avoided.” A pause while the wheel of memory turned for Asa. “I told him I was there to accept his challenge. He seemed surprised. But he understood courtesy, that one. We bowed. It was a narrow place . . .” he said again, as if stuck on that detail.

  “I circled away from the stairs toward the wall. It was dark, but I could feel him watching me. By the wall, I could look out and the light around him made him a better target.” He smiled tightly. Heiho. “We drew our swords. His nukitsuke was strong, Professor.” It was the only indication I had that Asa was even aware of my presence. For him to classify Ronin’s sword drawing as strong told me volumes.

  “Then the policeman came. The big one. I do not believe he even saw me in the shadows. He came down the stairs so fast, he had little time. Just some words in the radio.” He took a breath to continue, then paused as if editing his thoughts, “The stairs were slippery. The platform too. I called out a warning to the policeman . . .”

  “The . . . man . . . he turned on the policeman. The gun went off.”Asa paused as if the memory of the shot punctuated his narrative. “I saw the rage in his eyes by the light from the gun’s flash. It was like the heat of a furnace, his anger.” He paused. “The old warriors must have known this feeling: ‘relentless as fire.’”It was a reference to an ancient samurai battle slogan.

  Asa sat forward with the tension, then subsided. “He struck kote,” the old man said simply. The wrist cut is one of the most common used in kendo. “He cut at the right hand. In the dark, it looked as if the policeman had a gun in it.” But Art was left handed.

  Asa continued. “The first shot came as the blade sliced down.” I could imagine the flash of gunfire and the glitter of the blade’s arc. “It froze the ronin for a moment.”And that fractional pause was probably why Art was clinging to life.

  “But he recovered. He was quick, that one.” He stopped again, caught in the vividness of his memory. “I began to move, but he had already crossed to the other side. I could not get a clear strike . . . It was irimi,” he said flatly. An entering technique that brings you to your attacker’s side for a counter. “He moved in,” Asa spat.

  “I am not sure what technique he used then,” he said apologetically, as if identifying the simple mechanics could change the ultimate outcome of that night.

  “But he took the pistol away from the big one. Close in.” Asa seemed to bring himself back into the room with an effort. “The rest you know.”

  We sat in the white noise of the station, in the time before dawn when the unconscious mind works hardest, and listened again to the memory sound of the shots, a string of muffled blasts that Ronin squeezed off, the pistol muzzle searching for Art’s side like an open mouth.

  I nodded. The rest I knew.

  Later that day, after the vigil at the ICU, I drove out to Micky’s. I had spoken to my brother in private only briefly since the night Art was wounded. He was monosyllabic and distant, on administrative leave until Internal Affairs had investigated the incident.

  Even as night approached, the sun hammered down on the Island, not letting up. Micky’s kids were in the pool, paddling around and playing with face masks and little plastic boats. They were subdued, but the cooling effect of the water had begun to revive them a bit. Dee was out there, a faint sheen of perspiration on her flushed face, trying to keep them quiet.

  I came through the fence and around the house to the pool side.

  “Hey, Dee,” I said. She smiled wanly at me and the kids waved. We watched them splash around for a bit. “Mick around?”

  She looked at me. Dee looked beat too, but sunburn made her high cheekbones stand out with a type of false vitality. “Sort of,” she said. “He’s in the family room.” She picked up a glass and sucked at a straw and watched me walk up to the sliding doors.

  The room was dark. I put my face up to the screen and peered in. I glimpsed a suggestion of motion and heard the faint clink of ice cubes. The thunk of a glass being set down on a wooden table.

  “What.” His voice was raspy.

  I slid the screen over and stepped inside. Micky was holed up in the gloom like an animal in a cave. I pulled a chair over and sat down without saying anything. He got up and fumbled in the dark, set a glass down on the table in front of me, palmed some ice cubes in, and poured me a drink. In the dark it was hard to tell, but as I lifted the glass up I could smell the Irish whiskey.

  He settled back in the chair like an old man and tipped his glass at me in a toast.

  I swirled the glass around, making the cubes clink. I took a sip and watched him. “You been in here long?” I asked.

  “A while.” I listened to him carefully. You can only drink so much of this stuff before it hits you. But Micky was doing a good job getting his tongue around the words. He was stone-cold sober.

  “Got a plan?” I asked.

  He reached over and turned on a light. My brother’s eyes are a bluish gray and they seem to lighten or darken depending on the mood and his surroundings. At that moment, they were dark, like pieces of rock.

  “Course I do,” Micky said. ‘’I’m gonna squeeze your man Yamashita until he pops.”

  “What!”

  Micky took a hit of his drink. You could hear him inhale as he brought the glass to his lips. He squinted at me as the whiskey went down. “I told you there was something goin’ on with those Japs.” He says things like that just to get a rise out of me.

  “You got anything that proves it?” I demanded. “I mean, other than some hunch?”

  “My hunches pay off, buddy boy.”

  “Hey, Mick. Just because you’re comin’ up empty doesn’t mean that Yamashita or any of the other sensei are involved.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well you tell me how this fits together.” He sloshed some more whiskey into the glass. The lamp glowed through the green of the Jameson’s bottle, like luminescence from the bed of the ocean. “You got a major homicide here. One in LA and another in Phoenix. Same martial arts MO. Cryptic messages on the walls at the crime scenes. In Japanese. Also martial arts related. Then, last night, who gets a meet set up with the guy? Your teacher.” He glared at me.

  “Whattaya mean? It was Asa who got the note.”

  Micky gave me a hostile smirk. “You dope. Your teacher was scheduled to do the demo. The note was for him. Asa picked it up by mistake.”

  I thought for a minute. “OK, when you string things together like that, it sounds plausible,” I admitted. “But, look, we know that whoever’s doing this has some sort of martial arts fixation. I mean, the whole ‘Ronin’ thing . . . the theft of the bokken. Don’t you think it’s possible that Yamashita got singled out just because he’s a prominent martial arts sensei?”

  “You still working that celebr
ity stalker angle, Connor? It’s thin.”

  “No thinner than you trying to pin Yamashita for something he’s not involved in.”

  Micky looked hard at me. “You sure of that, Connor?”

  I thought of Yamashita. His silences and the sense you had of trying to pierce through a shield any time you looked at him. His unpredictable nature. The ways in which he made you feel both awe and fear, often simultaneously. I nodded.

  “I ‘d know Mick. He wouldn’t hide something like this from me. It’s too important.”

  “Everyone lies, Connor. Even your teacher.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Buddy boy,” my brother said, taking another drink, “don’t be fooled. You think he’s so special . . . “ The contempt in his voice was palpable.

  “Fuck you, Mick.”

  “Fuck you, Connor.” The height of brotherly debate.

  I waited. All I got was sullen silence. The cubes rattled as he drank. “Ahh, I don’t see how this is gonna help with anything,” I finally prompted. “You got anything else?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Any new leads?”

  “Hey! I’m working on it,” he snapped.

  “You’re not working on anything but a hangover.” Micky made no response.

  “You gonna let this guy walk? After what he did to Art?” I demanded.

  “No one’s gettin’ away,” my brother said. He sounded like doom.

  “Then what?” I persisted.

  He waved his glass vaguely. “I got some things to work on.”

  Then Micky seemed to deflate a bit in the chair and he mumbled something at me.

  “What!” I demanded.

  Micky leaned forward and said something, but it was low and to himself.

  “No, “ I insisted.” What’d you say?”

  “Nothing,” my brother protested.

  I don’t know what I was madder at, the whole situation, Micky’s accusation of Yamashita, the fact I had to defend him, or the nagging doubt I felt. Something gave inside me. I stood up, reached down, and grabbed him by his lapels.

  “Tell me what you said, you dumb fuck!”

  I must have touched something raw and hurtful way down inside him. He jerked to his feet. I heard the bottle go over. I wasn’t expecting the sudden move and fell backward, tripping over a piece of furniture in the dim room. I sat sprawled on the floor as he stood swaying over me, furious.

  “Don’t push it, Connor! You and all that martial arts bullshit. I shoulda had myself more together, but I was too busy payin’ attention to you.”

  “Whadaya mean?”

  “You asshole! I never shoulda let you come along last night.”

  “Wha . . . “

  “Don’t you get it?” he yelled. “We had vests in the trunk! We had vests in the trunk and I forget to make Art put his on!”

  I thought for a minute that he was going to attack me. Then he retreated back into himself, collapsing into the chair. I looked at him in the silence and slowly got to my feet.

  Micky had the hard-edged fatalism of a cop. He knew, more often than not, that the worst thing that can happen usually does. You hear about the guilt of survivors. Old soldiers and anyone who works on the sharp end of things know about it. The feeling that you could have, should have done more, or something else, to stave off the disaster. It doesn’t matter whether someone is just wounded or blown away. Whatever the event, you still get the intimate revelation of your own mortality, the electric brush with death’s close passage. The secret joy that it wasn’t you whose number was up. All those feelings get mixed into an acid stew that can eat away at you, drop by drop, over days, or years, or a lifetime.

  In a sense, it’s not rational. In another sense, it’s totally understandable. At least that’s what I told myself. People crave certainty. And control. We spend our lives erecting coping mechanisms, little games we play to preserve the illusion of safety. The plain fact of the matter is that bad things happen. And when they do, all our efforts at staving them off are revealed as inadequate, delusional. The innocent finger-crossing of a child in the face of the killer’s bludgeon.

  I took a deep breath and tried again. “That’s crap and you know it. It’s not my fault. And it’s not your fault either, Mick.” He didn’t respond. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Ronin did.”

  My brother just grunted.

  I tried another tack. “You know Art doesn’t blame you.”

  Micky just sat there and I went on. “Do you think if your positions were reversed that Art would do what you’re doing? Blaming yourself? Feeling sorry for yourself? A guy like that?”

  Micky leaned toward me, his face ghosting into the shadow thrown by the lamp. “Don’t you tell me what kind of guy he is. I know.”

  “Yeah. Even last night . . .” In my mind’s eye I saw Art gasping in the dark as the EMTs worked on him. “He was trying to tell us something.”

  My brother took a deep breath and looked at me like he was both surprised and disappointed. “Connor, Art just had some fuckin’ nut job try to empty the whole clip of a 9-mm into him. You think he was together enough to send a message home?”

  Micky gave a harsh snort. “He was making noises, but they were just sound. Art’s brain was already shutting down, Connor. His body just hadn’t caught on.”

  I didn’t believe it, mostly because I couldn’t face it. I still held out hope. So did the surgeons; every day Art hung on was a good sign. Micky and I sat for a while longer, looking out into the yard where the night grew stronger with each passing minute. The kids’ voices drifted in, muted sounds from another world. It was probably what Lazarus heard. My brother sat there like a stone, deaf to the call.

  I finished the whiskey and set the glass down next to him. As I got to the screen, I turned.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mick,” I said. I got nothing from him in response. “It doesn’t,” I prodded. Through the screen, I could see Dee toweling the kids off as they came out of the pool. The image was softened by the filtering of the screen door and the arrival of full darkness. The sheer normalcy of the scene pulled at me, but I looked back into the room one last time.

  “We’re going to have to get him, Mick. It’s personal now.” I said it softly hoping for a reply. Ice cubes tinkled softly. I went outside, closed the sliding screen door, and walked away.

  I went home and sat alone in my apartment.

  It was hot. The windows at both ends of the railroad-fiat-style houses that lined the block were wide open, worshipers praying for a breeze, waiting for a blessing. I sat down on the floor in the position known as seiza which is used for meditation in the dojo. I waited as well.

  The masters advocate letting all conscious thoughts bubble off in trying to attain what they call “no-mind” as a way to deal with the challenge of life. My thoughts churned, but they didn’t bubble off I waited for calm. For insight. For a plan.

  What I got were mental images of the platform. Of Art. Of Asa. Of my brother drinking in the dark.

  The apartment is the place where I sleep and write. I looked about it in a harsh, introspective state of mind. I had a corner where I do work on the computer. It was lined with books and papers. They were like bricks in a wall. It seemed to me that I used them for a variety of reasons.

  I studied history. Did I do it because the past was safe? A place you could observe without responsibility? You could argue about its interpretation, sure. But you never had to really act to shape the outcome.

  And what about Yamashita and his art? It was archaic, a step removed from things. I trained day after day in the choreography of a lost age, the urgent moves of battles lost or won a long time ago. I was a fighter who never fought, the disciple of a teacher who hid as much as he revealed.

  And now I was confronted, it seemed simultaneously, with all the things I had worked so hard to elude. Questions of trust. Of responsibility. Of life and death.

  And I could sit there, pretending to meditate. But deep
down I knew one thing with a subtle, yet sickening, certainty: I was afraid.

  From off the sea, a breeze stirred and moved the curtains. Out in the Narrows a ship’s horn sounded like the distant moan of a lost soul.

  I went to bed. The only insight I was left with was the one I had given Micky earlier: it was personal now.

  13. Oracle Bones

  Shamans chant in the dark to summon the dead. People have peered into the depths of caves for thousands of years, hoping the voice that sounded from the blackness could tell the future. It usually ends badly: what we want to hear most is almost always something we will regret learning.

  It had rained in the night. When I went for my jog by the Narrows that ran between Staten Island and Brooklyn, the morning sun made the blacktop of the pathway steam. The air was warm and thick with a rich mixture of dust and exhaust, saltwater, grass. The day was heating up and the moist air was thickening with particulate matter. It made the distant hulk of Staten Island look dreamy and indistinct. I pounded my way along, trying to think of nothing. Instead I thought of everything.

  I was none the wiser for the experience.

  There was a knock on the door. Dee stood there with her husband.

  “Is he sober, Dee?” I asked. She laughed and gestured at him.

  My brother looked miserable. He squinted at me. “What kind of fucking question is that?” Micky said.

  “A good one. Are you?”

  “Well,” he admitted, “I’m a little under the weather.”

  “Under the weather? That’s one way of putting it. Dad always used to say he had ‘the malaria.’”

  “I may have that too,” my brother admitted.

  “Ignore him,” Dee said. “He’s just being a baby.”

  After considerable back and forth, they trundled a box up the stairs into the apartment. It contained Micky’s copies of the Ronin case files. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to have them. It was against departmental regulations. But like most cops Micky figured that the ends justified the means.

  Finally, Micky sat huffing in a chair. Dee put a six-pack of Coke directly in front of him. Micky pulled a can off and held the cold aluminum to his forehead for a minute. Then he popped the tab. “We need to look at all this stuff, Connor. Think about some things.” He said it like there was some significance there for me, but I didn’t get it.