by Dao Strom
The way my mother’s superstitious aunt put it was this: the spirit of the man who was to be my father and the spirit of my mother’s unborn child (myself) had been at odds in another lifetime, and in order for the child to come into the world this time, the spirit of the man who was to be my father had to leave it. This assessment was made after my mother’s first husband was killed (albeit the marriage was brief), and the superstitious aunt never knew that he wasn’t my real father. But it didn’t matter. My mother blamed herself. Perhaps she blamed me as well, secretly.
The first form of war is obvious. Men and artillery and lost limbs, charred houses, fires—all the visible losses. The second form, I believe, is less talked about. It is the soul’s experience of war, the contract each soul must enter into regarding what kind of contact—or impact—their bodies will make in the environment of war; a concurrence with the particular circumstances of violence must occur somewhere deep inside each person, as victim or inflictor, whether the conscious mind ever grasps it or not. I imagine an invisible thread guiding every victim to his killer or killing agent, and vice versa. The third form is ongoing; it has more to do with what remains for those who survive.
But what do I really know of war? I know that in dream analysis you cannot take conflict for granted. You and the objects or persons you are at odds with in dreams are never separate entities. In this way your dream-enemies come not to frighten but to show you: an inner struggle, a piece of yourself you must still integrate.
This should be the proper role of anomie, I think.
I have read of archaeologists finding evidence that massive, meticulously plotted fires destroyed much of the ancient Chaco Canyon civilization’s expansive architecture in the high deserts of New Mexico. And the care and intent behind the fires show some decisive collective mind at work. The Chaco Canyon people had recognized their end to be forthcoming and had proceeded to break their civilization back down to the dirt from whence it had risen.
Something about this strikes me. Whether the end of a people comes as a grand elegy or as a consequence of all they have abused, lost, and ruined, the end does come. The trick seems to be in whether we will recognize it ahead of time and bow out gracefully or not. Perhaps clues—an event such as that famous plane that exploded while taking off from Danang in 1975, in plain view of the news cameras—must be given after we have disregarded the negative conditions of a situation long enough. In whatever fashion the end comes, somehow a marked population of people (be it family or nation) must knowingly or unknowingly join together in an acceptance of the fate of: dissolution. Home— whatever that is— will be extinguished or rearranged. And what remains afterward, the survivors, eventually they are scattered, too, like seeds, or sent out like scouts but bearing messages they’ve forgotten by the time they land and begin to roam amid other populations of people. They set up smaller, sadder camps of the old life, always with the same sense of something shattered and undistilled behind them. It is my belief that all survivors contain within them an understanding of the true ephemeral nature of location, but it is up to each to realize this as potent, or terrifying, or meaningless.
I had a dream the other night about my sister. She was pregnant and asking if I would take the child. She could not give up men and adventures, she was saying, for the responsibility of a child. I was willing to accept it but fearful that she might have a change of heart and that I might surrender myself to loving her child in the meantime. I was trying to find some way of explaining to her the commitment she must make toward her decision.
When the Gulf War struck I was seventeen. I was still a shoplifter. I had a headful of movies, was aspiring to write screenplays. I was pining over a boy. Later this boy joined the marines and perhaps got more in tune with national concerns, while I (years off, still) would continue to conjure up — at any mention of the phrase “current events” — certain pieces of clothing I wore in the eighth grade, the designer labels of which read: Current Threads.
May you please forgive me.
GUERRILLA
April was always talking incomprehensibly about weird things. Not that I didn’t see her point sometimes—she was just so desperate about it, about avoiding everything you might call “normal.” I agreed sometimes but I didn’t have to be dramatic about it.
For instance: I was there. She was not. She refused to participate because she thought putting on camouflage clothing was too “disturbing.” While to me it was just a little extra exercise and a chance to camp out and be away from Dad for a night. Heidi Ogden and I got to laugh at the boys on outings like these and tell stories in our sleeping bags. But all right, Sensei had also made us paint our faces green and told us to pretend we were in Iran. In my mind Iran was a small, flat, sandy-brown slab of land inhabited only by men in green uniforms, every one of them sporting a thick black mustache.
The lot was small. Treeless. A clearing carved into a mountainside. The mountain’s insides: gray hard rock. An old mining quarry halfway between our town and Lake Tahoe. We were at the moment pretending to look for Sadaam Hussein’s boy-lackey, the strategic plans-bearer, who was hiding somewhere in the vicinity of this one lot of the quarry. This would’ve made Sensei our Sadaam, as he was the one in charge of hiding the plans-bearer. We looked in the windows of and underneath all the cars in the lot. We climbed over all the mud-crusted machinery, even peered into gears and lifted hoods to search inside old engines. Three piles of serpentine rocks—frosty-blue pyramids—were the only other places to search in this landscape of scraped gray ground. And a Dumpster. We leaned over and rifled with bare arms through trash. A thousand aluminum cans. Newspapers. Small rusting metal objects. We walked sinking to our ankles, our knees, in the gravelly rocks, up and down the mountains of serpentine. All this I knew April would not care she was missing.
Finally we gave up.
Sensei climbed atop the middle pile of rock. The smallest. He squatted. Lifted a Pepsi can, held it up for us to see how the bottom had been sliced off to make a funnel for air. Then he removed rocks by the handful until there was a hole. He reached down, grabbed hold, pulled. Contours of muscle slid beneath his skin like gears. Our sensei, David Ogden, was everything you might think of when you thought of perfection in California: he was six-foot-four, blond, with deep-set, electric-blue eyes in a chiseled face, and when he walked, he glided. Now, at the end of his arm, a boy rose out of the pile of rocks that fell away like a stone flower opening. Grinning, triumphant as a fool, Jeremy Todd—Sensei’s star student—emerged with his hair and face caked in a fine layer of blue dust.
Sensei had a way of not speaking. He reached his hand to his own belt. He wore camouflage khaki parachute pants and a black mesh tank top. His skin was the color of wet sand, his spiky crewcut hair a shade or two lighter than his skin. He unfolded then folded closed his black-handled knife, stood. His glowing eyes swept over us with a steady, questioning look as if to be sure we’d all gotten the message, the lesson here: leave no soda can unturned? Or was it: be resourceful, or hiding places are everywhere you don't expect them to be? He would probably fashion another famous Japanese-Okinawan Koden-Kan karate axiom out of this for us later, in typical David Ogden style (he had taught us how to say “don’t mention it” in Japanese— doitashimasihte —by pointing out it sounded like “don’t touch my moustache”). Sensei’s boots crunched against the blue rocks as he descended the pile. Jeremy yelled “Geronimo!” and leaped, crashed, down the rocks. A mini-avalanche followed. The other boys gathered around, wanting to know what it was like to be buried and breathe through a Pepsi can. Heidi and I agreed we didn’t care.
Then it was time for lunch. We collected our lunch bags from Sensei’s van and sat at the picnic bench above the quarry, as if we were just another class on a field trip to the old silver and gold and rock mines.
Heidi and I were practicing walking on our hands. We were back at the dojo with all the other kids late Sunday afternoon, waiting in the parking lot for our rides home. We ha
d washed our faces, we were back in our normal clothes. Jeremy Todd was of course outwalking us both. He could walk on his hands the whole length of the parking lot, stop, turn around, and come back. He walked with his legs curled like a scorpion’s tail, toes pointed. His body was rigid. When he needed to catch his balance he bent or unbent a knee. Slowly. He was always steady and we hated him for it.
Heidi was Sensei’s oldest daughter. She was thirteen, milky-skinned, with flat brown hair, skinny. They lived at the dojo, Sensei and his three daughters, in small loft rooms built close to the rafters. The ceilings of their rooms slanted sharply. Heidi’s posters all hung at a slant. They were living there now because their mom had left them six months ago and the house they’d been living in before had belonged to her family. My mom had also left about six months ago, a little more, though that was because she had died. Had passed away. However people wanted to say it. They didn’t need to be gentle with me.
The other boys were practicing their Defensive Arts reactions. Toby and Jonathan Sandusky and Kenny Davis and some of the younger boys were all in a line, jerking back their heads, groaning, grimacing, doubling over and collapsing, in unison, crumbling down and sprawling themselves out on the asphalt. Then they sprang back up. Toby called out another number—“Number Eight!”—and it started all over again. Number Eight ended with a long-side thrust, and the boys would always compete to see who could fly backward the farthest in what were their wishful ways of overreacting—I thought—to that kick. Sensei had recently required us to memorize not only each Defensive Art Numbers One through Twenty but the reactions to each as well, without a partner. His theory was that if we could perform the reactions alone, we would also better understand the techniques involved.
Kenny Davis had flung himself backward into the path of a car pulling into the lot. The car honked and tires squealed as the mother inside slammed on her brakes.
“Oh, shit,” gasped Kenny, picking himself up and scrambling aside. “Man, did I just land on my ass!” he crowed, laughing.
“Hey, now, watch your language around here,” said Jeremy Todd, always trying to be Sensei, who was a righteous Christian and against cussing. Jeremy was still upside down and red-faced.
The mother stuck her head out the car window and yelled, “Phillip! Are you crazy!” and Kenny whipped around, pointed to himself, said, “Who, me?” There was no Phillip among us. Sometimes it felt as if the mothers didn’t pay much attention to who we all were. Kenny had wispy fair blond hair and a soft face. He was the sweetest boy in class and his father was the Georgetown sheriff.
The mother, Mrs. Whalen, climbed out of her car. Her hair was red and curly and she wore tight pants. Since Sensei’s divorce, it seemed a lot of mothers were coming around now in tight pants. But maybe I just thought this because I still half believed the rumors I’d heard from older students, about affairs Sensei had had with students’ mothers even before his wife was out of the picture. These were just rumors, though, and we kids had been told a number of times by some mothers to stop repeating them.
“Hi, girls,” said Mrs. Whalen to Heidi and me. “Are you girls showing these boys something or what?” She winked. Then she disappeared inside the dojo to look for her sons, the Whalen twins. Casey, the fat one, was ten, and only kicked high when Sensei was watching him. The other one, Robert, was thinner and shy and almost cute for a ten-year-old. Sometimes, to test our reflexes, Sensei would throw tennis balls at us at unexpected moments in the middle of class, and you were supposed to either duck or block. Casey, the fat one, was one of those always getting beaned.
But, as Sensei put it: Pain only lasts four seconds, the rest is in your mind.
Sensei lately was living part of the time in L.A., part of the time up here. He was trying to break into Hollywood as a martial arts action-picture actor, in hopes of making money for the dojo. The dojo needed it, now that his wife had left the business. Sensei also had plans to produce his own karate adventure movie for kids and wanted us, his own students, to star in it. This was another reason we were perfecting our reactions—to hone our acting skills. We were all crossing our fingers we’d get to do the movie. I knew well enough to be skeptical of his Hollywood stories but still couldn’t help being reeled in whenever Sensei came around telling them, smiling and sure of himself, as he always was. He waltzed back into the dojo every two weeks or so in shiny new shirts, silver sunglasses, sun-bleached hair, teeth practically glowing. He was beautiful. He was awesome. He must be rich by now, we would think (though most of the parents thought otherwise of Sensei’s new style and would voice their opinions—once Sensei had left again for L.A). Most recently, Sensei had gotten a bit part as a villain in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. He told us he could’ve had a bigger part, but he looked too much like Jean-Claude himself—and the producers were afraid that would confuse audiences. Sensei also did a stint as a performer in the Miami Vice show at the Universal Studios Theme Park, and at a party once he’d run into Don Johnson in the flesh and discovered—as if this was all the proof we needed to have the myth of Hollywood penetrated for us—that he was actually taller than Don.
Sensei had learned quite a few telling things in Hollywood, he warned us: one, that nothing wins admiration, or at least curiosity, better than self-assured indifference. He had found, for instance, that he received more call-backs when he told casting agencies he lived “up north.” (I pictured him saying this, handsome and casual and exuding that laid-back mountain-man charisma, while sitting on the edge of some pretty secretary’s desk.) Since going to Hollywood, Sensei had also begun to speak about God’s Army—and he meant us. Everything he was doing in L.A. he was really doing for us, he said. L.A. was full of ways and people he disliked, but he would keep at it down there, he said, to keep the dojo going. Last month he bought a Camaro Z-28. My father hated Camaros. Called such vehicles white trash low-life ambition.
These were the men in my life.
Lately something was changing with me. I was finding questions now, holes in Sensei’s logic and rules. I couldn’t see the relevance anymore in maintaining head-hip-knee alignment, or pulling back your fists between every punch. What impact would that make on the rest of my life? I wanted to ask Sensei, but of course I never would—he would’ve taken it as impertinence. At practice now I often felt annoyed and unmotivated and awkward. My breasts got sore whenever I was pushed against or punched; I worried incessantly about bloodstains if I was on my period. It was unfair, I thought, that boys never had to think about these things, and Heidi didn’t either, yet. My sisr ter, meanwhile, was unsympathetic, saying I should just quit if I didn’t like the dojo—it was what she had done several months back (though she’d told Sensei she wanted to devote more time to schoolwork, so she had not actually made a complete break). But it wasn’t as simple as that for me. There was another feeling I’d been having. I felt nostalgic for my youth. At the same time I knew this was absurd. I was only fourteen years old.
“Where is my sister?” I said suddenly, to no one listening. “I wish she would get here like before tomorrow.” My sister was my ride. She was seventeen. She could be ruthless; sometimes she left me waiting for hours.
“Girls,” said our father over the automatic bread-maker that night, “did you remember to water the horses this evening?”
“Yes,” I lied, and my sister pretended she hadn’t heard him. April sat on the couch reading a book called The Fountainhead. “They still had water from yesterday,” I said. He looked fixedly at me as if to shake me and I stared back at him, unshaken.
“Or are you two running around after boys all afternoon and neglecting the animals?”
“Beth’s the one with a boyfriend, not me,” said April, from the couch. She was referring to Donny Silver, my sort-of boyfriend, who hadn’t called me once in the past two weeks. This didn’t bother me; we’d gone through spells like this before in the six months since I’d met him. And truthfully, I wanted to break up with him. I just couldn’t find the courage to
say so to his face. April enjoyed antagonizing me about that.
“Hardly, April,” I said, vehemently.
My father seemed not to be listening to us as he pulled the fresh loaf out of the bread-maker. He usually didn’t listen if it sounded like we were arguing. The loaf steamed, whole and rubbery-looking. There used to be a time—it seemed long ago—my father baked bread for us in the real oven, back before it had broken. He still hadn’t fixed it, and we used the toaster oven for everything lately. The point being, all those things he had once led us to believe we should resist, all those dubious, unnecessary modern appliances—now it seemed we owned just as many as everyone else did. I blamed the 1984 Olympics. Because that was when my father had decided being televisionless was no longer bearable, what with the Russians boycotting and Mary Lou Retton and oh, to see the strength of the swimmers. He had climbed onto the roof and begun to erect an antenna. It had to be a tall one for us to get any reception in the depths of the ravine where our house sat.
“Fresh whole wheat bread!” he announced. With his bare hands he pushed the hot loaf across the counter, muttering, “Ow! ow!” and wringing his hands. In my head I vowed not to eat a bite of it, because I was still irked at him for his comment about neglecting the animals to run around after boys. He stood the loaf on its end on the cutting board, placed his hands on his hips. “Now I let it cool,” he said to no one directly. “And before I go to bed, I place a damp rag over it to keep in the moisture. Your mother never did this. She never used fresh bread when she made your sandwiches, did she?”