First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Today, we refer to that time as the Money Warp. Like a wrinkle in the fabric of space-time, this was a wrinkle in the fabric of the national economy. It was similar to the convulsions of the mid-’70s, when the price of oil rose almost a thousand percent, dislocating every market, the cost of every product, and twisting the tail of the dollar itself. Except, on a logarithmic scale, this warp was a hundred times worse.

  I wasn’t exactly with the smart money, having delayed until the morning after ratification to show up at my bank. And I only decided to go after the automatic tellers, those “magic money machines,” all went closed on us. However, I was smart enough to go down about half an hour before opening time—so I could join a line stretching around the corner and down the block.

  When I finally got inside, the managers were manning a single window. What remained in my personal account was something over $5,000, but these fellows were only offering ten cents on the dollar, take it or leave it. A man in a cream silk suit, three places ahead of me, had tried to counter this proposition with a small automatic he’d had tucked under his arm. And he was suddenly looking down four barrels of two shotguns, held by his friendly bankers.

  Outside on the street, adult men and women were standing like wide-eyed children, wondering how a law that was supposed to be so good for the country could hurt so much. Blink, blink.

  Truth was, it would take another two or three years for the economy of the United States and the rest of the world to absorb these shocks and settle into a pattern. The edges were hazy, the direction scattered, but the pay-as-you-go society we have now was then abuilding under the stimulus of a tax-free economy. The power of Enterprise was picking up the reins that Debt and Inflation had dropped. But the whole scenario would take time to shake out.

  For myself, suddenly pauperized and alone, a proven failure at almost anything I had tried, this was a good time to absent myself. It had long been in my mind to go back to studying karate, to pick up that last kata and to sharpen my skills, which admittedly had been getting rusty in the law library and in the Porsche-sushi-swingle world of San Francisco in the Nineties. So I grabbed my last $500 and the stub end of my credit to buy a one-way ticket to Japan, cabin class on a jumbo jet.

  The Master took his time about deciding. He left me standing in the sun on the edge of that clearing, the sweat dripping down my ribs under the Pendleton wool shirt. My feet, inside those Italian boots, were squishy with the heat and with fatigue.

  Old Turtle looked at me, seeing my entire life, my worth and my future, pass somewhere in the shivering pine boughs behind my head.

  “What can you pay me?” he asked at last.

  “Well, I have some money, not much of course. The thing I have most of is time, and I can give you all of it.”

  “You will pay with more than time.” He nodded, up and down, grimly, like an old turtle.

  “Surely, if that’s what you want …”

  “You can stay,” he said.

  “And will you teach me?”

  “You can stay.”

  So, under those conditions, I dismissed my Tourist Ministry translator and stayed. The rest of the day was some kind of Zen test.

  The Master went into the middle cottage and remained inside. I was left in the sandy center of the clearing below the edge of the stage. I tried to talk to the boy who was cleaning it, but he just shook his head. I walked around and pretended to study the framework underpinning the stage, the stonework of the cottages, the technique of their thatching. I walked the outside perimeter of the cottages, noting the location of paths leading presumably to outlying buildings. After that circuit, I tried to climb up on the stage, but the boy stopped me. So I took off my boots and socks and ran through a few katas in the sand. My muscles were stiff from traveling, the day was getting hot, and from that middle house I could feel the master’s eyes watching, judging me. I took off my sticky shirt and did one more half-hearted phrase from the fifth kata.

  Then I just stopped moving, sat down in the shade, and waited. The air cooled me. The sand slowly, slowly crunched aside under my buttocks and made a comfortable seat. The sound of water running into the pool below the spring soothed my ear. The dapple pattern of light and shade under the trees soothed my eyes. The sun walked around the edge of the clearing. The wind inspected the thatchwork of the cottages. The light did katas in the sand. Time cleared my head.

  I thought I was becoming wise.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, the boy came over and led me down the path to a tiny adjacent clearing with a latrine trench dug across it. I relieved myself clumsily, with him watching, and started back up the trail. The boy barked something. When I turned back, he was pantomiming with a shovel: fill trench, chop brush, dig new trench.

  “Have fun, fella,” I said and turned away.

  “Bark!” and he was thrusting the shovel at me. Then he stuck it in the ground between us, folded his arms across his chest, and mimicked the Master’s turtle smile.

  This was what he’d meant by “pay with more than time.” So Jay Corbin, the black belt who had already killed two men in battle and foiled a Shi’ite terrorist plot, the sparkling young lawyer who had prosecuted the Butcher of Boaco, the swingler from San Francisco, picked up a shovel from an illiterate Japanese peasant boy and dug latrines.

  Late in the afternoon, I went back to the circle of cottages. The Master was still invisible inside his house and there was no sign of dinner. As I was to learn later, he and his disciples followed the rule of the Buddhist orders, rarely eating after eleven in the morning. Now I know why they were all so thin.

  I spent the night curled in the sand behind one of the buildings. They seemed to be empty and the doors were only sliding paper screens, not even latched. I might have gone in and made myself at home, except the Master was still watching me, I felt, testing me. The sand was cold and the night air heavy with dew. I was wretched.

  With the dawn, a line of men came into the clearing. Their ages were anywhere between twenty and fifty. All were dressed simply: loose pants and shirts, thonged sandals on their feet, an occasional headband. They clustered briefly on the sandy area, and I could see them kicking off their sandals and pulling karate belts—all black—from their pockets. Then they mounted the stage and stood in even lines.

  I was struck most by the negatives. They had no fancy uniforms, no patches, badges, or stripes of rank. They wore no padding, no neoprene-foam body armor, no Ace bandages. They didn’t roughhouse or tease one another but were quiet and respectful, like a troop of veteran infantry.

  From the house where he had retired the afternoon before, the Master stepped forward. He was dressed as before, except now he wore a uniform belt—a red one.

  “Hajime,” called one of the front-row students when he saw Matsu.

  The Master walked across the sand slowly, casually, then he leapt onto the stage in one standing bound. No running steps, no swinging arms, just a straight levitation of about four and a half feet. He landed without a sound. Any lingering doubts I might have entertained about this old man vanished with that one catlike movement.

  And what was I doing at this time, the foreign visitor who could “stay”? I was standing in the gap between two cottages, still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and feeling like a ball of dirty laundry.

  Sensei Matsu blinked once in my direction and said, just loudly enough to carry across the clearing, “Hajime.”

  That was the call to attention and I was losing a mountain of face by making the teacher take special notice of me.

  I pulled off my boots, sprinted across the sand, and scrambled up on the stage, taking a place at the back of the left-hand line. As far from the front position of rank and prestige as I could get. I didn’t have a belt to wear, except the wide leather one in the loops of my jeans.

  The next hour was calisthenics and basic exercises: straight punches, kicks, arm blocks, two-, three-, and five-move combos. All cadences were called by the Master, who stood off to one
side and watched the front row. I knew most of these moves from my first days at Kan’s in Monterey. The unfamiliar combos I picked up by watching the man next to me. All monkey pattern. We practiced twist punches until the muscles in my forearms knotted and my wrist bones stuck out sideways.

  The Master’s critical attention never got farther back than the third row, and I didn’t know whether to be insulted or relieved. It had been about ten years since I had performed these beginning exercises—or at least done them this fast in group drill. I was stiff and slow and awkward. Just like a white belt.

  However, in this school there were no white belts. At Kan’s school in the shopping center, we had always known where we stood: White belts advanced to yellow, yellow to green, green to brown, brown to black, each rank bringing the student more prestige. And black belt was very big time for us. None of us at Kan’s paused to consider that the black belt itself is ranked into ten degrees of which, among the masters, the first degree signifies a raw beginner, barely able to control his art. None of us ever stayed that long. Here, in the clearing at Hakusan, everyone was a black belt with years of experience. A society of equals, with some more equal than others. As a first-degree myself, I felt very green.

  After a too-short break, the class went on to group katas. Each man moved through the routines in place, the whole formation moving back and forth like a school of fish turning and flashing in the sun. I could follow them through the twelve katas, then dropped out on the thirteenth, the one I had come to learn.

  After two hours of group exercise, the morning finished with kumite, or sparring. The students knelt along the edges of the stage; the Master pointed to two at random; they rose, bowed, went through a flurry of almost-touching-but-not-quite kicks and punches; the Master pointed at the winner; they sat down. Each fight took about eight seconds. When my turn came, I went into my foot position or “stance,” put my hands up on guard, absorbed three feather-touch blows, and sat down the loser. The whole process was very dry and formal, with no anger or pride, nothing like a real fight.

  Those first twenty-four hours in the mountain dojo set my pattern for the days to follow: work out in the early morning with the students who came up the trail; eat a midday meal of rice, which I learned to cook for them all, with chicken or fish or some other light meat that they brought as a present to the school; then do physical labor under the direction of the boy, Suru. He seemed to be the school janitor, or Takusan Matsu’s nephew perhaps, because I never saw him work out with the class.

  Suru showed me one of the cottages I could live in. Unlike the other neat houses in the clearing, it was a wreck. The thatching of the roof had rotted, letting in the rain to melt the paper partitions and curl the plank floors. I was to make it whole again.

  He showed me how to thatch, by doing the least part of each operation. There are about fifteen steps—cutting the reeds at a tiny pond about three miles away, spreading them to dry in the sun, clearing the old straw from the framework of the roof, repairing or replacing rotted stringers, binding the new reeds into sheaves, anchoring the tops to the stringers, tying down the splayed ends, shaping the eaves—and these steps are repeated endlessly. The job took me almost a month, and that was at the beginning of the rainy season. But the work was satisfying: Each night, I had a few more square feet of protected space to lie down in, and it was all by my own labor.

  When the roof was done, Suru brought sanding blocks and showed me how to work the floor. In another three weeks, I had created a surface as smooth and white as a lady’s skin. I expected that he would show me how to make the paper screens next, but those were brought up by the students one morning. They moved around the tiny cottage, laughing and friendly, asking what arrangement of rooms I wanted, trying the different-size screens here and there, then nailing down the tracks for them.

  I had a home, my first since the breakup in San Francisco. Then, after all my work, it was time to cover the latrine again and dig a new one. Suru showed me where.

  When the rains came, he oiled the wooden practice stage to protect it. We rigged an army- surplus parachute in the trees to cover it like a tent and went on with the lessons.

  It took the Master two months to work his way back to the last row of the class, back to me. All he did was look at my feet and shake his head.

  That afternoon after the meal, and as the other students were leaving, one of them came up to me. He was from the third row, a man in his forties with a receding hairline and a crewcut. He bowed once to me and said, stiffly, “Foot ex-ur-cise-ah?”

  This phrase turned out to be the only English he knew, and I suspected the Master had taught him to say it this morning, as a way of introduction.

  I bowed in return and the man, Shizuka, led me back to the stage. There he demonstrated a complicated pattern of steps—no punches or kicks, just a flow of stances that square-danced around the platform. From the feet-parallel of the forward stance, to the reverse-tee of the crane, to the feet-at-right-angles of the straddle, to the feet-turned-in of the side stance, position followed position until Shizuka was back facing me.

  Then he gestured toward the open space: I was to repeat the pattern. Of course, I had spent more time admiring his grace than memorizing the steps in order, so I could only start out, falter after the first crane, and stop.

  Still smiling, he shook his head and proceeded again with the pattern, catching up to me and taking me through step and turn and step. Twice over he did this, then stood off to one side and watched. After I had made five complete run-throughs without losing my place, he began to criticize individual stances and misaligned feet. Shizuka did this silently by darting forward, slapping lightly at the knee, ankle, or instep that was out of place. If I did not understand what was wrong, he would demonstrate the correct posture, bouncing once in place to show how it was set.

  After three hours on the same pattern, I could dance it in my sleep. At one point I did drift off, and Shizuka was on me like a hawk. He gently cuffed the back of my head and held his own eyelids open with his fingers, grinning at me, telling me to stay awake.

  By sunset I was extremely tired, but my stances did not sag. Each position was read into the muscles and joints themselves, as the pieces of a truss bridge know its shape and support it. I no longer had to create tension or energy to hold a stance. My legs were the stance. My head, my shoulders, and my unused arms were lolling with fatigue, but my hips and legs were working like machines.

  I looked up at Shizuka and grinned.

  “It would be appropriate to give him a present.” The voice came from the ground, below the stage. It was the Master. “In return for his gift of teaching you.”

  “But … I have nothing to give.”

  “Ahhh. It is known to me that the roof of his house is aging and lets in the rain. He would fix it, but must also work to support his family. You are skilled at patching roofs. You may take tomorrow and the next day off to do his.”

  “Thank you, Sensei.”

  I stayed in the clearing at Hakusan nine months. Every day, we were immersed in karate training or in the simple actions and transactions of keeping our bodies alive. In that time, I wrote nothing, spent nothing, touched no machine more complicated than a hoe or a knife. I could talk in complete English sentences only with the Master, and he had little time to spend with me.

  He taught me almost nothing himself, the other students barely more. Yet I learned a great deal in those months. Karate is like that: It is the process of teaching yourself how to move in your own body, how to walk the earth on you own feet, how to dodge or defeat the blows life sends you. For every minute you spend learning a technique or absorbing a graceful movement from others, you spend an hour teaching it to yourself. What comes out of the mountains is not a deadly fighter, neither a great warrior nor a magician—just a man complete in the knowledge of himself.

  And that is the source of all skill and magic.

  I never sparred with the Master, although he sometimes watched m
e spar with other students.

  “Not so hard!” he called out one time. “You do kumite like a man who fights enemies.”

  “Isn’t that what karate is for?” I asked after the match was over. I was lying on my back and breathing hard, having been tripped, thrown, and brushed with five feather-touch punches. Meaning that I had lost.

  “Karate is for itself,” Matsu said.

  “Yes, of course. But what if you were attacked? Wouldn’t you use it to defend yourself?”

  “I would run away if I could.”

  “Suppose you couldn’t?”

  “Then I would not put myself in a place where I could be attacked and have no room to run.”

  “Well, what if you had to protect someone.” I was thinking of that night on Cannery Row with Alice Wycliffe and the boy I had killed, Emilio Lopez. Sensei Kan had been mad as hell and demoted me because of that fight. Would the Master give a different answer?

  He just shook his head. “You may think of a thousand reasons to fight. None of them is enough. I teach you to fight so that you may never have to. A man so formidable that he cannot be beaten has no one to contend with,” Matsu went on, in a rare mood. “Such a man has no enemies. He has nothing to defend. He is like light and air: When others punch at him, there is nothing to hit. To make war against him is useless. When they see that, they stop trying to fight, which is the beginning of peace.”

  I thought about Sybil Zahedi and her scar-faced lieutenant in the helicopter. They would have been amused by the “light and air” analogy. To them, I had just been a side of meat to barter for their cause. Arguments wouldn’t have stopped them, only bullets and finally the executioner’s sword.

  “And if they don’t stop?” I asked. “Don’t you finally have to kill them?”