Always (23 page)

“That’s right,” he said. Then, more strongly, “That’s right. And, anyhow, our people need these jobs. The industry’s in a bad place with Vancouver siphoning off business. We can’t . . . But, hoo boy, you didn’t come here to listen to me. What can I do for you?”

“We should start planning our strategy for OSHA and EPA. Let’s begin with payroll and benefits. How’s health insurance?”

It turned out that his people had major medical but both co-pay and deductible were very high, and the company’s secondary insurer was making a fuss about covering the difference.

We talked about that for a while. He began to look a little less harried.

“I took a long look at your payroll and I don’t see any information on the young person I noticed the other day. Even if he’s an unofficial intern, we need some paperwork.”

“Bri’s not an intern. He’s Finkel’s son. Bri Junior.”

“I thought his son was dying.”

“His other son.”

I mulled that. “How old is he?”

“Bri? Fifteen—no sixteen now.”

“Unless he sits around reading comics all day, get some paperwork going and formalize some kind of payment. Figure out what would make OSHA happy. And how old’s his friend?”

“Mackie? Oh, he’s twenty at least.”

We talked for another hour. When I stood to leave, his tension was no less but it was focused. He had a plan. “We can keep it together,” he said. “It’ll work.”

Back on the set, I wandered over to the craft-services table. The woman behind the counter was standing around looking bored.

“Kick around?”

“Nope. Taking a break.”

“Know where she went?”

“Nope. For a walk or something. Said they’d be back in”—she looked at her watch—“I guess about forty-five minutes from now.”

They.

“Hey, want some coffee?”

“No. Thank you.”

“That’s what everyone says these days.”

I COULD GO
talk to the
Times
reporter. I could go to the police and use my mother’s name. I could forget letting Corning soften herself up in a fear marinade and go find her. But if anyone gave me information I didn’t know where it might lead me, and yesterday, on the hill, I had found myself breathless. There might be other shortcomings I wouldn’t notice until I leaned on them and found them wanting.

GOOD DO JOS
are often found in bad neighborhoods. Seattle Aikikai was on Aurora alongside Korean massage parlors, a gun shop, and several love motels.

The dojo smelled deeply familiar: chalk, sweat, the white vinegar used to keep the canvas mat clean and bleached. One young woman and five men were stretching on the smaller mat. They were friendly enough. A heavyset Chinese-American introduced himself as Mike. The woman said her name was Petra and that if I didn’t have a
gi,
I could see if any of the ones hanging in the women’s changing room would fit. The changing room was tiny, with flimsy walls and a crooked shower stall no doubt installed by a hapless volunteer. The pleasantly amateur feel reminded me of my first martial arts classes in England. I hung my dress on a hanger and contemplated the
gi
s. None of them would ever see bright white again, but one tunic was reasonably clean. The cleanest trousers were too small, and the white belt stiff and difficult to tie.

There were covert glances when I came out to stretch, but it was considered impolite to ask questions or appear to be interested in another’s level of training. Aikido is built on Taoist principles; competition is frowned upon.

When the bell chimed twice, we moved to the large mat and knelt in a line along the long side. Despite the supposed lack of competition, it was traditional to line up according to rank; as the newcomer, untested, I politely took the low-rank spot on the right. Mike took the left-hand position. The sensei, full of his own dignity, descended magisterially from upstairs,
hakama
s, the bloused trousers of
dan
rank, swishing like a long skirt. The students exuded awe; I guessed he was very high-ranking, sixth or seventh
dan.
He was in his early forties, and his hands were reddish around the knuckles. His hair was very dark brown, and crinkly, and his forehead crinkled to match when he saw the newcomer in the ill-fitting
gi
in his dojo, but the ceremony had begun and there would be no talking until after the final bow.

We all bowed to the
kamiza
in the center of the long wall, then he turned and we bowed to him and said in unison,
“O-ne-gai-shimasu.”
Please practice with me.

He moved through what was obviously an unvarying set of warm-ups, which began with loose shoulder swinging, moved on to spine stretching, wrist working and blending exercise, and ended with
shikko,
a kind of duck-walking on the knees, and finally roll-outs, forward and back. Everyone moved easily, and I guessed none had been studying less than a year. Serious students.

We knelt in our line again, and the sensei motioned Mike onto the mat as his attacker, or
uke.
They stood in
hanmi,
though Mike began with right foot forward rather than left and had to change. Probably left-handed.

“Shomenuchi,”
the sensei said, and Mike stepped forward smoothly with a right-hand knife-hand chop at the sensei’s forehead.

In karate or judo, the
nage
would block solidly, meeting strength with strength, the muscle-sheathed arm bones clashing like swords. If you were good, if you struck at the right angle and speed, your opponent was already off balance and in pain by the time you punched out his floating ribs, if you were a
karateka,
or took him crashing to the mat, if you were a
judoka.
It was a wasteful way to work, with so much effort expended in negating one force with another.

When Mike’s hand came down, there was no bone-on-bone shock, no meeting of force at all. The sensei stepped out of the way, an easy turn at the hip and glide back and out, and laid the side of his right hand on the
uke
’s right wrist, the left hand behind his right elbow, then was behind the
uke,
guiding him, helpless in a stiff arm bar, along his original path, facedown to the mat, where he was pinned. It was like watching a leaf get sucked into a whirlpool.

A young man made a late entrance and hurried through his bow and rushed into the men’s changing room.

“Shomenuchi ude osae,”
the sensei said, describing the technique, and Mike slapped the mat twice, and the sensei let him up. He demonstrated twice more, slowly, and then once at full speed. The final time, Mike slapped the mat in earnest, and when he stood, he was sweating.

The newcomer came out to the mat, still tying his belt, but instead of kneeling he waited for me to move down a space. When in Rome.

Sensei gestured us to our feet. The others paired off instantly, which left me with New Boy. He bowed at me sulkily, and assumed
hanmi,
waiting. I dutifully stepped into
shomenuchi.

He was rushed, and clumsy, and if I’d been a beginner he might have sprained my shoulder, but he was uncertain enough that my arm was not fully extended, and he moved stiffly, using muscle rather than technique, and I could control him without appearing to and go down without injury. He frowned. He knew something wasn’t exactly right, but had no idea what.

Part of the noncompetitive ethos of aikido is to help and guide each other: the
uke
helps the
nage
with the technique; the
nage
ensures that the
uke
goes down without injury. The greater the disparity in skill, the greater the responsibility. A ninth
dan
should be able to take down a rank beginner with speed, grace, and precision, without anyone getting a bruise. He should be able to help the beginner do the same to him.

The woman who had taught me aikido in Atlanta, Bonnie, had talked about sensing
ki,
and blending energies. She showed me an exercise called the unbending arm. We faced each other, and she asked me to hold my right arm out straight and make a fist. Then she turned it palm up and laid my right forearm on her shoulder. “Don’t let me bend it,” she said, and interlaced her hands, and began to press down at the elbow. I gritted my teeth and locked my arm. “You’re strong,” she said, but after three or four seconds, my arm bent. She smiled cheerfully. “Want to see if you can make me bend my arm?” So we exchanged positions, and I pulled on her elbow, and nothing happened. She looked bored, even pretended to yawn while I grunted and exerted more and more pressure. “You look like you’re going to burst something,” she said. So I asked her what the trick was. “Trick? It’s not a trick. Here, put your arm back up.” I did. “Now bend it a little. And spread your fingers wide. Relax, relax your shoulders and neck and back. Root your feet to the earth.” The earth was covered in concrete foundation, steel I-beam construction and bamboo flooring, but I didn’t comment. “Now feel the energy coming up from the earth and through you and down your arm. Stay relaxed, keep your fingers open. Channel your
ki
through your fingers. It’s pouring out of you in a stream of light.” And my arm didn’t bend, and it took absolutely no effort. And I didn’t understand it at all.

“Are you really trying?” I said, and she said she was. Later that day, I found Frank King, my first APD partner, six-feet-three and two hundred thirty pounds, and put my arm on his shoulder and said, “Bend it,” and he couldn’t.

I didn’t believe in
ki,
or the energy from the earth, or light shooting out of my fingertips, but the fact was, when I relaxed and thought about energy flowing smooth and liquid through my arms, my arm didn’t bend.

I wrestled with the idea for a week, and I told Bonnie the idea of
ki
was nonsense, and she shrugged and said, “What does it matter?” and after a while, it didn’t. I could feel when I got into the zone and became fluid and unbendable. And then one night Frank and I were called to a fire. The firefighters were already there, herding people back, unspooling their hose, locking down the connection, but just as the water began to stiffen and bulge through the flattened canvas, a chunk of burning roof pinwheeled in orange flame onto the lead hose man, and he’d gone down. The hose whipped and snapped like a dying moray eel and snaked itself ten yards across the pavement, leaping and spraying the crowd before I got to the hydrant and cut the water supply. When another firefighter took the nozzle and shouted, “I’m good!” I opened the hydrant again, and watched the hose turn into a live thing, and something I couldn’t articulate clicked in my brain.

In one of those strange coincidences, when I got home, too wired to sleep, I turned on the Discovery Channel and saw a program about crocodiles. “This twenty-two-foot croc can run more than twenty miles an hour,” the narrator said in an Australian accent, “but when you take a look at its spinal structure, that doesn’t seem possible. Researchers at the University of Melbourne tell us that the key to this incredible strength and flexibility is hydraulics.” And they showed two geeky-looking academics draping an empty hose over two saw horses fifteen feet apart, turning on the water, and watching the hose transform from a limp tube to an arcing, stiff sausage. They hung weights from it; it didn’t bend.

Hydraulics. It wasn’t the bone and ligaments and tendons that made an arm strong, it was the blood pumping through the vascular system, the plasma in the cells of sclera and muscle.

New Boy didn’t yet know this. Directing him, from my position as an
uke,
was a little like trying to direct a high-pressure hose from the hydrant end instead of the nozzle.

Then it was my turn as
nage.
It would have been very easy to breathe in two long gushes and take him down in a perfect moving spiral, pin him helpless to the mat, nod unemotionally when he slapped, let him up, do it all again. But he wouldn’t learn anything, and neither would I. And so the first time, I took control very gently, like sliding my palm under a tap runoff and tilting it so it was almost, but not quite, perpendicular and the water landed an inch to the right of the drain. For a moment, he tried to fight. He tried to draw his wrist up, but my palm on his elbow was firm and I guided him kindly to the mat.

He slapped, and leapt up, rubbing his shoulder, and then looked confused when it didn’t hurt. But the sensei had seen it, and came over.

“Everything okay here? Jim?”

Jim looked at me, then nodded slowly.

“Continue,” the sensei said, and watched while I assumed
hanmi,
and Jim came at me, and I took him down, just as before. The sensei nodded, and gestured for us to swap roles, and I attacked Jim. I used my body to guide his hands and he took me down with the same puzzled look as before.

The sensei motioned Jim away, said, “Watch,” assumed
hanmi,
and nodded for me to attack.

We barely touched each other, but we felt each other’s strength clearly, and it was the difference between the exuberant rushing together of two mountain streams and the vast movement of ocean currents—the Kuroshio gliding past the North Atlantic Drift, separated by the continent of North America. I went down, and slapped, and stood.

He bowed with a thoughtful look.

When we sat again for the next demonstration, it wasn’t in rank order. I sat between Petra and an older man with red cheeks and grizzled hair, and the sensei held his wrists out behind him for a man with a tense face and long, black hair to take in
ushiro tekubitori.
The student flinched, even as he grabbed the wrists, and the sensei stepped backwards into
tenchi nage.
The student was already up on the balls of his feet, longing to go down so that he wouldn’t have to anticipate it anymore. Sensei threw him; the student rolled out well enough for me to guess he was perhaps
yonkyu
rank and to wonder why he would keep studying if he were so afraid.