Redemption

by Dufour, Danny

  He heard her laugh over the phone. He adored hearing that laugh and he adored that woman. They met some months ago in class at the university. Chandra was white, tan-skinned and tiny. He noticed her the moment he saw her. She had been sitting beside him and she smiled at him. They had been inseparable ever since. She was a part-time student, aesthetician by profession. He had fallen in love with her from the beginning. She had been for him a deliverance, because she had given him a sense of life. Every day, he stood stronger with her.

  “Hmmm. That’s interesting. Maybe you’ll get a surprise when you come to see me tonight if you’re good,” she said sensually.

  “What’ll the surprise be?”

  “You’ll see tonight,” she said in a seductive tone.

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Of course, what a question! And you?”

  “ Yes. ‘Til tonight, then, for your surprise. See you later, alligator!”

  She hung up the handset and he asked himself how he would hold out until tonight. She made him happy. She had been discreet on her past. He knew little about her and he hadn’t asked many questions. He understood that she didn’t want to mention certain details. He told himself that she would give them to him in time. Time had fixed things for him, so that must be true for her also.

  * * *

  “You can go, Danny, have a good evening,” said Sammy with a wave of his hand.

  “You sure you don’t want help with the tables?” Danny asked.

  “No, no. I’ll do them tomorrow.”

  “Ok, Sammy, good night.”

  Danny had worked as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant the Red Lotus for several months part-time. It let him pay for his university courses in translation. Sammy was himself Chinese and he was the owner of the restaurant. The rest of the staff was Chinese, but Sammy hired him anyway. Everyone was friendly with him and they worked hard when the restaurant was open. Both servers and cooks were busy with their tasks, because there were plenty of clients. Sammy had put him to the test for several weeks and he was very satisfied with him. He liked him well and he found him hardworking. But more than that, he found Danny serious and reserved, a quality he appreciated. Danny was always the first to leave the building. Sammy told him that he could leave and he, tired and happy to go see Chandra, never asked questions. That which intrigued him was when he had found a trap door on the kitchen floor. He had tried to lift it to see where it could lead, but Sammy had held up his hand and cried,

  “No, no! You can’t go there. There’s rats. Don’t ever open the trap, they could spew out and spread the plague! Don’t ever go down there!”

  “Ok, ok, I get it!! How could there be that many rats?”

  “It’s an old building, we have a recurring problem. I’m trying to fix it soon. Don’t worry about it.”

  The trap door intrigued him more than ever, but Sammy’s reaction all the more. The rats in the building, that made no sense. The restaurant was impeccable and he had never seen vermin in all his time working here. Never would Sammy have tolerated rats under the kitchen. No, it was something else, but he hadn’t tried to return. He found it equally curious that he has always left first. Why Sammy and the others stayed when the restaurant closed. He had decided that night to find answers. He left as usual and Sammy closed and locked the main entrance after he had left. However, there was a back door that was always closed and that lead into the kitchen. Danny had taken care to leave it open before leaving.

  He waited twenty minutes, hidden in the shadows of the building’s exterior. He decided to enter through the back. Still ajar, he entered through the door. He inspected the kitchen: empty. He surveyed the restaurant: no-one. By all appearances, they hadn’t left the restaurant, because he had stayed on the scene the whole time and saw no-one leave. He returned to the trap door and tugged at it; it gave way to a staircase of a dozen steps. He could hear voices below. They were definitely there. Danny thought of closing the door and leaving as though he’d found nothing, but he couldn’t do it. He began to descend quietly and when he made it down, he realized where he was. It was a relatively vast concrete basement. Several blue neon lights hung from the walls and candles burned here and here. He could see a photo on a wall with a little altar fitted with a vase of incense. All his work colleagues were there in the middle of practicing kung fu. They had no similarity to the people he thought he knew, that is, reserved in their waiter’s uniforms. Most were nude to the waist. Some among them were covered in tattoos. The first to see him was a cook.

  “Danny! What are you doing here!”

  Sammy turned, surprised to see him on the staircase.

  “Danny! How did you get here! You can’t stay here, it’s a private assembly. Just leave!” he said forcefully.

  “Why do I have to leave? I’m as much a part of the restaurant as anyone else.”

  “Listen, we practice, let’s say, a family style, and we train among the Chinese, and only the Chinese, to guard our tradition...and you are not Chinese!”

  “Sammy, come on, try me.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Danny”

  “Come on Sammy,” said a practitioner in the group. “After all, he is practically more Chinese than several among us. He’s taken pains to get here.”

  “ Ok, ok! Fair enough!” said Sammy. “Let’s go, get down here and join me!”

  Danny was delighted. By all evidence, he had fallen on a secret school. After all these months, he had never thought that a restaurant employee could practice kung fu. It was a big art, he had to admit. He had been mystified and they had kept the secret absolutely the whole time, he who had practiced kung-fu for several years.

  “I know that you practiced martial arts for years, but don’t deceive yourself: this school isn’t neither traditional nor orthodox. I teach Pak Mei, also called the Boxing of the White Eyebrow. Our style is secret… like our school. You are in a school of the shadows of a sort, the dark side of Chinese martial arts! It’s not a philosophy for everyone and our style is complex. Only some people have the capacity to master this art. Our style has a bad reputation, I could say. It had long since been forbidden and banned in China. Today it’s passed down in secret by adepts like us. It has a reputation for being an efficient and ruthless art. For that which has the possibility of learning this system and mastering it, no doubt that his person will be the most dreadful. “Who is that?” Danny asked, pointing to the photo on the wall.

  “The monk Pak Mei himself. They say he was traitor to the Shaolin temple for having killed several other monks in perfecting his style. Maybe it’s the reason for the bad reputation…”

  “In what is your style unique?” he asked, a little perplexed.

  “The answer is simple: it attacks the vital organs. First you must learn to hit with the Phoenix fist.”

  Sammy demonstrated. He closed his fist, letting the principal joint of his index finger jut out.

  “Interesting,” said Danny.

  “You hit with the joint. The impact of your hit must be contained in the bulk of the joint. This will have a piercing effect on your enemy and of causing him internal damage, in short, at the level of his organs and vital points. The attacks could scratch like a tiger, with a normal fist or the Panther fist. The attacks could also be ferocious and violent like that of a tiger. The movements, as agile and supple as those of a leopard.

  Sammy showed him the sacks of rice installed for hitting.

  “We train ourselves to have iron palms. Hitting the sack with your joints, your fingers and palms, the hands become as hard as steel after a time. The impact of a sole hit on your enemies will devastate them. We salute with the left closed, the right palm over the fist. The greatest secret of our style is that which we call the ging, the scared force. It defines itself as an explosive force generated by rapid contraction of the muscles the same type of contraction as when a person is suddenly frightened. And it’s with that same jolt that your enemy is hit. See for yourself
!”

  The practitioners began their exercises again. Danny watched them and realized the ferocity and power of the style. The movements were rapid, powerful, aggressive. The practitioners moved together and he felt the walls and the floor vibrate. He couldn’t do anything but agree with Sammy. The experience that he had in martial arts was so that from the naked eye, he had deflected the force of the blows given by those in front of him. A single hit was sufficient to cause death.

  “ How can I put it, it’s something like… magic,” said Danny.

  Sammy winked at him, followed by a salute in exhaling with force as a means of welcoming Danny. It was then that he began his training in the obscure, secret and mystical world of Pak Mei.

  * * *

  The jet of hot water of the shower was like a massage to Danny. He stayed under the jet with Chandra enlaced with him. He breathed deeply the humid, hot air that pressed into him in the shower. He felt Chandra’s hot body, her breasts pushing against him. He would stay like that eternally if he could. She looked at him with her brown eyes and said with a smile:

  “I forgot to bring towels.”

  He kissed her slowly while the water continued to pour over them in millions of droplets.

  “Ok, I understand… I’m going to look for them, stay here!”

  She laughed and gave him a spank when he left the shower. He went to find two towels and he hooked his fingertip on the panel of the closet, which made him bleed. He opened the medicine cabinet and looked for a dressing. In pressing down the bottles of the cabinet, a sachet containing white powder fell in the sink. Curious, he examined the texture. The powder was beige and granular. Opening it, a light odour of ether seeped out. He knew then that the powder was cocaine. Incredulous, he replaced the sachet where he’d found it. How was it that Chandra had drugs in her apartment? He was incapable of believing that she could be taking it. This would have come up. He returned to the shower and she took his heck.

  “You took long enough.”

  “I cut myself on your closet,” he said.

  “Oops.”

  “I love your shower. It’s big.”

  “So it must be that you come and take so many at my house,” she said in embracing him.

  He enlaced himself around her hips. He couldn’t erase the image of the white powder from his head.

  * * *

  “Can you explain this to me?” Danny demanded in pointing to the bag of white powder that he had taken care to place on the table so that she would see it when she entered the room.

  “What do you want me to say, I don’t understand!” Chandra retorted.

  “Well… these drugs… why do you have them in your cabinet?”

  “You’re going through my things now!? And more, it’s not drugs, its medicine I have, because…”

  “Please stop, I opened the bag… it’s cocaine. Why do you take that crap!?”

  “I… I don’t take it often. When things aren’t going well, it helps me… forget.”

  “You put that shit up your nose… you believe it helps you? You don’t help anything Chandra, you’re not solving your problems!”

  “You can’t understand!” she retorted angrily with eyes full of tears.

  “So, tell me...because you are right, I don’t understand,” he said advancing on her, sitting on the sofa. She cried and she looked at the floor. She avoided his look.

  “You think I’m proud of it? I’m… I’m ashamed, but I’m not capable of forgetting my past, Danny. I’ve made a lot of progress, but there are moments when you could say my heart’s about to explode. I take it when I can’t endure the pain… I haven’t taken it in two weeks. You help me a lot, you know… I’m going to stop all this, don’t worry.”

  “When will that happen exactly? You know that you can tell me everything, we’re going to find a solution together,” he said, taking her hand.

  “Listen, I know… but I want to do it myself. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I’m going to get help. I don’t want to get you mixed into this, please. I must myself learn to forget my past and live in the present.”

  “Ok, I can understand that. I love you and you’ll see, things are going to be better, but not if you keep taking this shit.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” She took the bag and with a jerk threw the contents in the toilet.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said, embracing her.

  “I love you, you know it. Hold on – I’m so sorry for all this,” she whispered, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  “It’ll all be fine, you’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The harsh winter was coming to an end. There had been tons of snow. Immense snow banks lined the bogged streets of the provincial capital. Danny continued his studies, his work at the Lotus and his training in Pak Mei. Sammy and the rest of the students were impressed with his abilities. He had begun to learn the principal forms of Pak Mei, such as Jik Bo Kuen, Sub Gee and Gau Bo Tui. The choreographies of movement that they practiced in solitude hid the movement patterns of Pak Mei. They practiced combat sessions between students as well to test their abilities. The combats were ferocious and with contact, but controlled for the needs of training. Danny had fingers and joints hard as steel after several months of training with the rice sacks.

  Sammy was impressed with Danny’s potential to explode. His capacity to free his energy into his hits was impressive. Sammy found that his movements were harsh and powerful, but they lacked perfect fluidity. He made use of a moment when Danny hurt himself in the stomach during a training to explain certain concepts. He had exhaled too wildly during a hit and the impact caused pain in his stomach. He had continued his exercise, but Sammy ordered him to stop for a spell to recover.

  “You have to leave time for the tissues and internal organs to reinforce.”

  “Don’t worry, Sammy, I just screwed up a bit. I forced it, but I’m fine.”

  “No, you're not! If you don’t leave time for your body, you could hurt yourself seriously, tear yourself inside and die. This art is of great power, but one must know how to use it adequately. The generated power could be more than your body can take.”

  “You’re saying I could kill myself?”

  “Yes, if you don’t listen to your body at moments like these. You know, certain styles could compare to a knife that one gives in the hand of a person. If you don’t pay attention, you could get cut. Certainly, that’ll hurt you, but it won’t kill you. Teaching Pak Mei, it’s like putting a grenade in the hands of a pupil. The margin of error is thin and the errors of manipulation for that which takes it could cost his life.”

  “Alright! Godammit... Sammy,” he said, sitting on the ground while the other pupils continued to practice with a ferocious intensity, hearing their massive exhales accompanying the hits. An austere ambiance reigned. The practitioners took a very serious attitude. The only motivation was survival, to dominate the enemy. Concentration and intensity overruled with the candles and neon blue lights filtering through the place where no light of day could enter. You’d think you were in a parallel universe.

  “Here, drink this concoction. This will help you recover and reinforce your insides. Your wound is there for two reasons. The first is the weakness of your body, and the second is the lack of fluidity in your movements. Certainly, your attacks are vicious, direct, explosive and rapid, but you must have calmness and fluidity throughout. Pak Mei is like a wave that swallows everything in its path. You must have ferocity, but also fluidity.”

  “But you’re contradicting yourself,” said Danny, frustrated. “How can a person be fast and powerful… and at the same time mild and fluid?”

  “Life is a contradiction, Danny, but you are going to find out, I’m sure of it. Your attacks must be all at the same time. The real sensation of the power of Pak Mei, you learn it with time and practice. Learning this art is not so much learning the techniques and movements, it’s learning a sensation. It is said that an instructor of Pak Mei will teach the techniq
ues, but it’s the dead that teach the essence and the power of the style. That's it, you are done for tonight.”

  “Fine.”

  Danny left the restaurant into the raging winter. The wind and the snow blew powerfully in the night. He blocked the wind with his hand, thinking about what Sammy had said. He could see the photo of the obscure monk named Pak Mei who watched behind the trails of incense that swirled around him. His way of fighting had changed. He was more solid in his positions, his hits were more powerful and destructive. His intention was determined and ferocious like those of a tiger. A change was surfacing in him, a power whose existence he’d ignored since it had invaded him those months ago. In his mind, He knew he was good, but not that good yet.

  * * *

  “She didn’t come to work this morning at the salon and she hasn’t answered the phone since yesterday,” said Katie.

  “Since yesterday… I talked to her yesterday morning before class and she told me that she was doing well,” he shouted with a note of worry in his voice.

  Actually, she hadn’t done well for several months. Danny could see Chandra wasting away before his eyes for weeks. It seemed to him like she was getting thinner. She was irritable and she distanced herself from him. He had serious doubts that she was using drugs again. She had denied the charges, resisting each time he tried to broach the subject on the pretext that she would see a psychologist again and that he was imagining things. She was only tired. His doubts were revealed to be exact when Katie, her best friend and co-worker, had called him to tell him that Chandra had lost consciousness at work and that the paramedics had rushed her to the hospital. Katie said that she had been pale when she came in that morning. She seemed overworked, a reaction that she had linked to exhaustion and stress. Danny had rushed to the hospital to see the doctor and he asked him:

  “How long has your girlfriend been taking cocaine?”

  “I… I thought she quit. She’s going to therapy. I know she took it months ago. We fought about it. So… it’s not because of stress, then, doctor?”