by Sean Platt
AMIT tried to focus. It was difficult. He was watching Woo’s right hand as they stood face-to-face, trying to parry and dodge his fingers’ small jabs. Woo’s objective in the drill was to touch Amit’s robe. Woo said that if a person could touch you, he could find a way to hurt you. It was the first touch that mattered, because it broached your spiritual perimeter.
Pretend you are surrounded by a great bubble, and never allow anyone inside that bubble without your express invitation. A man’s space is his own, and once another breaches it, he has you by the soul.
“You are angry.” Woo held his unflinching eyes to Amit.
He watched the silver-white head in his peripheral vision, his half-focus on the man’s darting fingers. Woo would try to jab, and Amit would retreat or block. It was normally a simple drill — one he had mastered as a child. But Woo was no longer pulling his jabs. He tried his best, and if Woo could touch him, their agreement was that Amit would need to hold a heavy book over his head for three hours. Simple, but extraordinarily painful.
“Of course, I’m angry.” Amit tried to compose his face — to wear a neutral expression — but his head was filled with a heavy red fog. The world was starting to spin. He was doing his breathing exercises, but they were not helping.
“So use it. Don’t be used by it.”
“What is the difference?”
Woo’s left fist slammed into Amit’s kidney. He collapsed onto his knees, holding his side, groaning.
“That is the difference.”
“I am supposed to be watching your right hand!” Amit realized he had yelled. He tried harder to calm himself. It was not easy; in addition to being angry, he was now in pain, and enraged over his sensei’s audacity in launching a sucker punch.
Woo knelt beside Amit in the grass. The younger man was curled into a comma, his knees drawn high, hand at his side, face blushing red.
“What were you supposed to be doing when your mother was killed?”
“I was 6!”
“You haven’t answered my question. Where were you, when she was being slaughtered? Were you napping? Pissing in your pants like a baby?”
Amit lashed out at Woo, aiming for his eyes. His fingers were hooks. Woo easily dodged back, simultaneously extending a foot from his kneeling posture and ramming a toe into the back of Amit’s neck.
“Stop hitting me!”
“Is it making you angry?”
Amit rolled hard to the side, then stuck out an elbow. His rolling momentum tossed him up onto it, his side off the ground, and at the same moment he shoved with his legs and tossed himself backward. A half second later, he was up on his feet.
“You are going to fight me?” Woo sounded amused.
“If you fight me, I will fight you back.”
The red fog was in Amit’s eyes as if the world had bled. His ears were filled with white noise, his face was twisted in rage. He ran through a seconds-long mental check, telling his muscles to firm and stand ready. He was a weapon. He’d been trained as a weapon. He needed only a target, and his mind zoomed in on the closest one. Woo wanted him merciless? Fine. He could do that.
“I am not fighting you. I am embarrassing you. I am showing your weakness.”
“I am not weak.”
In one smooth motion, Woo swept the grass with his hand, picked up a small stone, and hurled it at Amit’s head. A shadow monk didn’t throw a stone like a person. Amit’s honed mind watched the rock spin in a spiral; saw the subtle changes in its trajectory. If he let it strike, it would hit with the force of a dulled spear.
Amit stooped to let the stone fly over his head, then reached up to pluck it from the air. Before he could, his foot was swept out from under him. Woo sat on his chest. The sensei had knocked him down, and pinned Amit’s right leg beneath him. His left leg, relative to where Woo sat, was useless. He could punch Woo with his right hand, but it stopped mattering when the older man moved forward to put his knee against Amit’s windpipe. The knee tipped his chin back, and Amit felt like his neck might snap. He tried rolling his shoulders to relieve the pressure, but Woo’s weight held them firm.
“I would argue that you are indeed weak.”
“Get off me!” Amit croaked.
“Is that how you would escape a real attacker? You would yell at me?”
“You’re cheating!”
“Oh. I apologize. You are indeed pursuing an effective strategy, accusing me of cheating.” Something cold and unseen pressed against Amit’s throat. It dragged across his skin and was gone. Woo climbed off and Amit looked up to see him sliding a small knife back under his sash, running his finger along the dull edge he’d used, ironically, to make his point.
“Congratulations. I, as your attacker, have slit your throat. But you have achieved a moral victory in pointing out my inherent lack of fairness.”
Amit backed away, coming to rest against a large rock in the outer garden. A circle of mixed-gender, blue-robed monks mediated across the green. Farther on, a lone pilgrim walked a stone path with his hands laced before him. He looked over, trying to avoid his sensei’s gaze, and saw something small and silver tinkle into his draped lap. Amit looked down at his mother’s locket, then up to find Woo slowly shaking his head.
“You are too easy, Amit. Rafi did not steal your locket. I did.”
“Rafi didn’t steal it? But I thought … ”
“You thought nothing. That is the problem. Rafi was your simplest target. I could have set you against him and had you snap his neck as he slept. And I have no doubt you might try, which is why I conveniently showed up for your training as soon as you’d discovered it. But you couldn’t set it aside, could you? You allowed another’s actions to dictate your state.”
“If Rafi did not deserve to have his neck broken for taking the locket, he deserved it for many other things. Not just for what he has done to me, but for what he has done to others.”
“So, you are a crusader for justice,” said Woo. “You are taking the role of the enforcer, who will do what is right.”
“You do not approve?”
Woo lowered himself and sat cross-legged in the grass.
“On the contrary. A good monk is able to rise above himself to see what is true and right, and act accordingly. You must always look for what interests the greater good, even if that path is difficult or studded with stones you do not wish to surmount. But ‘following the greater good’ is not what you do. You, Amit, are selfish, and think only of yourself. You think of how you have been wronged, and you react rather than respond. A person hands you an insult, and you rub it into your wounds like salt. Because of this, your training is useless. I hear this constantly from the abbot. He wants you to leave the order, as he has every day since your arrival. He says you do not learn.”
“I learn plenty!”
Woo shook his head. “You can wield even the heaviest swords in our arsenal and throw weapons with a precision I have never seen. When we spar, when you are engaged, I cannot get a strike past you. Someday soon, you will be able to respond well enough to land strikes of your own. Others — and I can see this myself — have reported that you have a curious way of pre-guessing them. They will feint with a fist and strike with a foot, or feint with a sweep and slash with a dagger. But you are not fooled. You will move to block the true attack almost before your opponent has launched it. Some shadow monks claim you read minds; they can get nothing past you. But it is all useless, because your abilities are a complicated series of armaments that deactivate with a single key. Just like your whore mother.”
Amit felt hot blood streak into his hands, which struck of their own accord. He started to rise, but Woo’s open palm smacked his face sideways.
“Or perhaps it’s deactivated with a password,” Woo amended.
Amit looked down at the silver locket, closed in his palm. His grip was too tight, as if he thought he could crush it into his skin, to take it inside his body.
“You are lethal and unstoppable when calm. When your ire is raised,
you are as simple to defeat as the child you are. It is an unforgivable weakness. I understand why the abbot wishes you gone. Your anger causes fights and disharmony. Your instability makes your skills useless. You have been here for nine years, Amit. What is the abbot to think? What kind of a monk will you make? What does this say about our brotherhood, if we allow someone so undisciplined to pollute our family? A monk’s life is about control. We can slow our heartbeats enough for a Western physician to think us dead, breathe almost imperceptibly even to a person setting a hand on our chests. We can slow our metabolisms and grow fat. We can speed them to thin. We can crush nuts with a finger and thumb. Yet nothing matters if you cannot summon control.
“I have control.” Amit heard his petulance and hated it. “But when Rafi … ”
“Stop right there. You’ve given Rafi his control. And he does control you, Amit — just not in the passive way you seem to believe. As does Suni. As do I, for that matter. We do not control you by enforcing our will upon you. We control you because you allow it. Because you invite it.”
Amit sidestepped the trap.
“If I listen to you, I am being controlled.”
Woo slapped him again. Amit blinked, caught off guard.
”There is a difference between being taught and being controlled. You are free to turn your back on my teachings, and I encourage you to at least consider it. But in the end, I hope that you are smart enough to question, then turn back toward where I would steer you. Because what I say is best — not for me, but for you. Teaching is nourishment. You may turn away, but that would be unwise. By contrast, control is that slap — something I’m doing to you.”
“Which is what Rafi does to me, when he … ”
“Rafi can only do what you allow. Just as Rafi surrenders his own control — to you, who tempt him into violating the order of peace, control to the abbot, who infuriates all of the children … even control to Amala.”
“Amala?” Amit could see the girl in his mind: two years younger and always flinching back whenever he looked over at her, as if afraid of her shadow. Amala was strange, even among the other girls. Just as Woo had his hair in defiance of convention, Amala grew, shaped, and sometimes even painted her fingernails. She was an oddity — a non-presence at most.
“Yes, Amala,” said Woo.
“Amala couldn’t control anyone.”
“You are 15, correct?”
Amit nodded.
“Plenty old enough to know better, then.”
Amit blinked, unable to follow the discussion. As was often the case, Woo was speaking in circles, darting down blind conversational alleys to confuse him. Maybe even that was part of Woo’s control. His words themselves seemed to make little sense. Control was like the slap: something done to him. At the same time, Woo was arguing that Rafi (who apparently controlled Amit) had permission to do what he did. It was a contradiction. Amit could usually follow his teacher’s logic for a while, but ended up with a headache. It was a sly way to win debates — confuse your opponent with riddles until he surrenders in frustration.
“Do you understand?”
Amit felt like an idiot, with a burning need to save face.
“Yes,” he lied. “You are saying that I allow Rafi to do what he does. But the comparison does not follow, because I did not allow you to slap me.”
“Yes. You did. Same as you allow Rafi to insult you. Same as you allow him to raise your temper like a puppeteer at your strings. You are a trained monk. When you are centered, you should be impossible to sneak up on. Yet when you are not, you have no perimeter control whatsoever. You soil your training when your emotions are toyed with. Rafi pokes you because he knows you will react — the attention and twisted breed of respect he demands — and when you allow yourself to give that reaction, you give him control. And when you become confused by my arguments and cannot shake your anger, you give me control. It is all your fault, Amit. The same as it was your fault that you weren’t there when your whore mother’s throat was opened.”
Without thinking, Amit raised a hand. In slow motion, Woo’s forearm slapped into it, his large hand flattened for a third slap. In the same moment, Amit extended his right leg and speared Woo in the side, causing his sensei to flinch and pull back. The entire strike and counterstrike happened in the space of less than a second.
Woo rolled back into place, smiling.
“How did you do that? What did it feel like?”
“I saw you move. It was simple.”
“How simple?”
As they sat together on the grass, Amit realized that he felt perfectly calm, like the surface of a glassy pond. It was amazing, how subtle the switch was to flick. He could feel a peaceful almost-smile on his lips, and found that it felt better than his earlier scowl.
“Beyond simple. Obvious. I felt as if I took several cleansing breaths before striking you.”
“I did not allow you to strike me, Amit. I was prepared. That was impressive.”
“Didn’t you allow it?” said Amit, smirking.
Woo ignored the smirk. “Did I not make you angry?”
“I saw your taunt like an offering on a plate. I did not accept it.”
Woo nodded. “As it should be. Remember, Amit, your anger is like my teaching. You should not dismiss either. There is rage within you, and while the abbot would tell you to meditate until you rise above it, I will not. You must tame your anger. Make it a dangerous animal, able at a moment’s notice to attack on your command. Even the most vicious dog, if properly trained, should never attack its master.”
Amit nodded. Feeling serene, he could pick out the distant noises across the green as he sat in the grass. The breeze was warm, and felt soft on his skin.
“I am in charge,” he repeated.
Woo nodded. “If you can learn that — to retain your rage but to hold it like a weapon, and never use it rashly, but always with forethought and logic — you will be formidable indeed.”
Chapter 13
PRESENT DAY
ALFERO’S SOLDIERS OPENED fire. He knew they’d shoot the windows first: human nature to aim for what’s easily seen. He slammed himself into the open space between the front and back seats as if trying to break it open. He felt the spot on the floor give and heard something crack under the carpet.
Amit had been testing the spot with his feet while talking to Jason Alfero, feeling the weakness imparted by the hydrofluoric acid he’d squirted on the metal belly when the family went to the mall. A nasty task. Not only had it scarred the parking lot and raised some questions, but he’d been fairly certain that the mixture would burn his face off. It ate through his gloves as he wrapped the frame in soaked cloths. But he’d suffered no burns, and the vehicle’s floor held together well enough until now. Amit wasn’t exactly skilled with automobiles, and he’d given himself a 50/50 chance on accidentally dissolving something essential, leaving the vehicle in pieces when Alfero drove to meet him.
Above him, Jason Alfero was shredded confetti. His corpse didn’t just bleed; it erupted like a ripe watermelon struck by a sledgehammer. Amit looked up as he crouched on the floor, now using his small knife to finish the job of cutting the Escalade’s carpet, and watched as the gangster’s head burst like a gourd. Something grayish-red landed on the seat where Amit had been sitting, steaming as if pulled from an oven.
Amit slammed his shoulder into the carpet’s weak spot.
He had to stay calm, and couldn’t afford to surrender control. He was in charge.
Perhaps five seconds had passed — an eternity when balled on the floor of a vehicle getting riddled with bullets. The windows had cracked and shattered in the first couple of seconds. Alfero (who hadn’t ducked; apparently, he’d made his peace with death after the ricin scare then again after meeting Amit) was dead in that same interval. The seats pocked and spit stuffing in the second and third seconds. Bullets had begun to rip through the vehicle’s sheet metal doors by the fourth. Amit, who’d lived without TV and movies from t
he time he’d joined the Sri until meeting Nisha, had binged during his last week in the hotel. While he continued slamming his body into the floor, his calmer mind took a moment to be amused by popular film, and how the cops always hid behind their car doors as if they weren’t as insubstantial to bullets as foil.
The gunmen had probably never riddled a car with bullets before — few people had, Amit reasoned — but he had to give them credit for not hesitating to ventilate their boss after he’d given permission. They wouldn’t stop firing until their guns were empty, but they’d only work their way toward the floorboards at the end. Of course, a person could ball up and hide. But there were a lot of bullets, and going for body shots — not to mention the shock and awe — was an obvious first step.
Amit had known that Alfero would come alone. Of course, he would; he’d think he could save his family. His hypochondriac mind (thank you, Doctor Altieri) would immediately decide he was poisoned and begin manufacturing symptoms — and because a hypochondriac mind always believed the worst, he’d assume that death was seconds away. Even if he knew the facts about ricin poisoning, he’d believe it was possible to die within the first hour. Who knew how much had been sprinkled on that pizza? And what would a man who believed himself dead do to gain the upper hand? He would make things quick, and take the poisoner with him.
He slammed his shoulder into the deck, now feeling the passage of bullets begin to riffle his robe. He had a moment to wonder if he hadn’t been thorough enough and was trapped, then the weakened metal gave out, and Amit spilled down, headfirst.
There was plenty of space beneath the massive SUV; it was one of the things he’d made sure of in the mall parking lot before committing himself. He was on his hands and knees but able to crawl sideways, toward the most leeward side relative to the bullets’ bi-directional hail. He didn’t surface from under the wheels, but waited until the bullets stopped, hoping they wouldn’t decide to shoot the tires for fun.
Gunfire ceased. One of the men called out, as if anyone still able to answer would. As if on cue, a lump of something plopped to the dirt by Amit’s leg. Part of Jason Alfero — possibly an ear.