I was eager to see what the Georgia police had turned up. The feeling I got as I came outside was from a different type of expectation, however. Behind me, I could hear the sounds of people preparing to leave the building. But that awareness was a distant one, muted by another sensation that was washing over me.
I felt a tightness on the skin. A visceral type of cognition that I had experienced before. But this was stronger, more immediate: the certainty of something out there, just beyond the threshold of consciousness.
It was the experience of
haragei
.
I moved downward like a man in a dream, one step at a time, feeling the stone surface with my feet while my whole attention was directed outward into the street.
Where something lurked.
There were pedestrians scattered up and down the block. I heard the murmur of traffic from Seventh Avenue. A car door slammed. They were the usual sights and sounds of a city night. But around the Dharma Center there was a shimmering sense of expectant tension.
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Stark and some other people came out. He looked uneasily at me. We hadn’t spoken since the incident. A group of students was right behind him. Then Stark saw me, rooted to the pavement, and left the others on the stairs.
“What?” he asked quietly. At least Stark had the good sense to know something was up. It was the most genuine I had ever heard him. But I pushed the thought away and focused on the here and now. I held up a hand. Shook my head.
Other people began to crowd the entrance. As they did so, I heard the rubbery whisper of car tires. I looked up the block and a dark sedan, lights off, was slowly drifting our way.
There was laughter and good-natured conversation from people leaving the building. I was having a hard time concentrating.
I thought suddenly of the lama’s vision—dark valleys where danger lurked.
“Get them back in,” I told Stark. He was looking up the block, trying to see what I did. “Move,” I hissed.
Stark jumped up the steps. I caught a look of bewilderment from one woman before she disappeared inside with the others.
Stark and Andy came back out and stood with me. They may not have been too bright, but they were willing.
Somewhere close by, a car engine whined into life. The noise sent a jet of alarm through me, an innocuous sound made sinister by my sense of fear. That darkened sedan was still rolling. As it approached, the driver’s window whirred down. You got a glimpse of a pale face and dark shadows for eyes, looking us over. Andy’s hand began to move toward his jacket.
“Don’t!” I grunted.
The snout of a shotgun rode up over the door and toward us. I edged away from the two other men, hoping to space the target area out and reduce the impact of the blast. I was sure it was coming.
I could hear another car approaching down the block, but my attention was elsewhere, riveted to the shotgun’s muzzle, which swayed back and forth, tracking each of us, like a snake seeking a victim. Most people aim a bit too high when they shoot. The rule is that you dive down and to your left. The movement can possibly take the shot off target and away from the left side of your body and the heart.
Then again, that little technique is predicated on the assumption that you’re faster than a speeding bullet.
I knew Andy had the almost uncontrollable urge to go for what I was sure was his gun, but was also petrified he’d be the first one to be shot. I was not sure what Stark was thinking.
The man with the shotgun said something, loud and quick, and then the gun went off. I was down and rolling while my eyes were still blinded by the flash. I heard the whoop of a siren, a squeal of tires, and then a series of shots followed, handguns and shotgun mixed up. I could hear the sound of tinkling glass, a shout from my brother, and tires squealing as a car tore away.
Stark and Andy had thrown themselves down and were now slowly getting up. Micky and Art were crouched down behind the doors of their sedan. Its front grill was chewed up and leaked steam. Art was working the radio and you could hear distant sirens. To one side of us, a parked car had been mangled by the shotgun pellets as well. Its alarm system had been triggered and the horn bleated rhythmically into the night, like a wounded animal.
There had been a great deal of different noises compressed into a few seconds and my brain was trying to process things. I was still muddled with the flash and bang of the guns. I brushed myself off and took stock. Stark’s face was pale even under the tan, and his mouth hung open. It didn’t do good things for his jawline. Andy stood shakily, staring at the sidewalk.
By this time Micky was standing in the street, pistol up and facing the car as it sped away from him down the block. He was still hoping for a good target. “Shit!” he yelled, and the gun came down as the car sped around a corner.
We made statements to the NYPD. I tried to think coherently, but I just came up with images: the car and the face; a shotgun’s snout and the cold, dispassionate review of victims; the electric thrill of fear as the gun went off; the smell of spent shells and concrete dust.
I tried to focus on relevant things. The man with the shotgun sounded Asian to me. It could have been Han, but in the dim light I couldn’t tell. Yet his message had been very clear:
We want what’s ours.
I sighed. Don’t we all.
The night wore on back at the precinct house. “Here’s what I got for you,” Micky told me as he put down the phone.
“Well, actually I made the calls,” Art said. “Your brother wants to hog all the glory.”
“There’s glory?” I asked.
“Uh, no,” he admitted. “But crime-stopping is a thankless business. You gotta take what little joy you can get.”
“OK, we weren’t as close to the shooter as you guys,” Micky said. “Stark and his man Andy were not much help. The car windows were tinted and the shooter was hard to see.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I told him.
“Well, you weren’t much help either,” Micky protested. “From what you tell me, you were all too busy running for cover to notice much.”
“True,” I had to admit. “What about the car?”
My brother sighed. “Medium size, late model four-door sedan. Color could have been dark blue or green or black. Not much to go on, Connor.”
“The taillights didn’t look like a domestic model,” I offered.
“Locals turned up a midnight blue Honda Accord coupla hours after the shooting. It had been boosted earlier from a pay lot.”
“Well that’s something.”
Micky snickered at me. “Buddy boy, it’s the most frequently stolen car in America. Could have no connection to you whatsoever.”
But Art held up a hand. “It turned up on 11th Avenue.” He looked at me significantly. “The West Side,” he prompted. “Not too far from…”
“The Chinese Embassy,” I finished.
“The freakin’ Chinese again,” my brother said. “We’re running a test to see whether there’s any gunpowder residue.”
“How ‘bout the gun?”
“Well, it’s a shotgun,” he started.
“Wow,” I said, “you guys are really sharp.” He didn’t respond to my sarcasm, so I continued. “Can you get a make on the weapon?”
“Nah,” Micky said. “It chewed up the cars pretty good, but all you can tell is what size load the shooter used. You can’t do a ballistics match on a shotgun. We know that this is a pretty serious character though—he used 9mm pellets. Probably a combat shotgun.”
“Great.”
“Could be worse. Most of these things hold anywhere from five to nine rounds. If this guy really wanted you, there’d be nothing left but a grease spot on the pavement. Good thing we came along when he did. Probably scared him off.”
I digested that piece of information while Micky went on philosophically. “So the shooter could’ve used any number of different weapons. Benellis, Mossbergs…”
Art said, “Did you notice a magazine on the weapon? Look kinda like an assault rifle? Or was it just sort of the usual configuration?”
“Guys,” I said, “all I could see was that thing pointing at me. It looked as wide as a tunnel.”
“OK, OK. Just asking. We’re seeing some Saiga-12s on the street. Not many. They look like Kalashnikovs.”
“Look,” I said, “it was black and went boom.”
My brother sighed. He questioned me for a while longer, but all we came away with was a sense of nighttime and noise and the bright flash of the combat load.
In my sleep, I trained, jerking restlessly in the vividness of the dream.
As the day died, the earth’s breath grew cool and damp. Down in the hollow where the teahouse nestled, the light was blue. The small, rustic Japanese house was deserted. Just outside, water ran from a wide bamboo tube, falling into a stone basin. Small stones were arranged in the bottom to make the falling water gurgle. The blade of my sword was only a ghostly, shimmering silver presence as it sliced through arcs set down by masters long dead. A faint breeze rustled the top leaves of the surrounding trees, and it seemed like the murmuring of generations of teachers, watching me from a far place.
The sword of the samurai is a blade of razor sharpness and exquisite balance. The handle is wrapped in sharkskin and silk cords. The scabbard covered with a black lacquer so shiny as to faintly pick up the light from the emerging stars. Along the length of the blade, the wavy temper mark, or
hamon
seemed to glow.
I worked hard, alone in a clearing by the hut. Balance. Breath. Technique. Focus. The trick is not just to learn them; the challenge is rather to meld yourself with the sword and to create an elegance worthy of the weapon, to demonstrate the deadly esthetic my master demanded.
When I finally stopped, the moon was high and I was covered in sweat. I rinsed off at the stone basin, and savored the feel of the icy water sluicing down my back. I felt the heft of the blade and the play of night air across my wet body.
I brewed some mint tea over a small charcoal brazier kept in the house for just that purpose. I sat then, sipping tea, watching the coals in the hibachi glow and grow covered with ash. I could hear the small sounds of the woods at night. The errant whine of the occasional mosquito as it flitted by my ear. I felt worn out and yearned for sleep.
I closed my eyes in my dream and when they opened, the sun was setting once again, and shadows grew in the hollow where the Japanese hut stood, while the treetops on the hill above were washed in light the color of blood. I was walking, sword in hand, toward a clearing to train. And my dad was there.
My dad. Alive again. And he was Dad as I remembered him when I was a kid; not the way he was at the end. My father had fought cancer every step of the way. It was a retrograde advance of the type he had learned with the Marines in Korea, and he gave up each inch of territory stubbornly, waiting for us all to adjust to the inevitability of defeat.
But here he was, crouched by the clearing, squinting at me, and I felt like laughing and crying at the same time.
Dad! You
’
re here!
I began joyfully, then came up short.
But you’re dead.
He smiled at me and nodded, like it was a mild form of a joke.
Isn’t that something?
I wanted to laugh: it was just like the Old Man to treat coming back from the dead with such understatement.
I reached out to touch him with a yearning pent up over the years. He held up a hand and I stopped. He pointed off, up the hill toward the line of trees on the hilltop, silently commanding my attention there.
The clearing there was still well lit, but on the edges where the trees and brush stood, shadows were growing larger and deeper. From within a dark clump of foliage, Changpa drifted into sight. He looked toward us and the sun glinted on his eye-glasses. He reached up and removed them, showing eyes without pupils. His lids slowly closed and a spot in the middle of his forehead began to glow. He drifted backwards, fading into the shadows, and the light from his forehead shrunk into a small point, all but swallowed by the black.
Suddenly, Yamashita was there, peering after the lama. He paused to look down the slope toward me. As he turned his back on the darkness, something unseen dragged him slowly backwards into the inky spot where the lama had gone. There were screams from the depths of the shadows then, and the small point of light was suddenly snuffed out.
I felt as if I should race to my teacher’s aid. But I also had an overpowering urge to be with my father. I began to weep with frustration, a small boy again, afraid of the dark and overwhelmed by the world.
I looked at my dad, seeking comfort, looking for direction, and asking a silent question. He smiled sadly at me, and the light around us began to fade until it was hard to see his face at all anymore. There was only the old, familiar sound of his voice.
Time to wake up now, Tiger.
I jerked into consciousness, wracked by sobs. They faded as I grew more and more awake, but the sheer emotional power of the dream didn’t leave me. Tiger. It was what he had called me when, as a pudgy child, I had wrestled with him on the living room floor. I hadn’t thought about that in years.
Dreams are things we shrug off, secure in the light of day and surrounded by the thousand things that both comfort and distract us. But when you strip away those distractions, life is revealed as more complex and more mysterious than you pretend. And then the messages in dreams linger, vivid and insistent.
In the half-light of dawn, birds began to call. I picked myself up, moving through the morning shadows, eager for light.
Summer came down on the city suddenly, like the drop of a hammer. Parked cars cooked under a white-hot sun. Blinding light winked off the chrome and you could feel the heat steaming off the pavement. Merchants on the avenue wisely huddled behind plate glass storefronts, watching me impassively as I waded through the heat waves toward the Dharma Center.
The air was alive with more than heat. The imminence of danger danced around me as well. It was a logical conclusion—after all, someone had shot at me last night. But there was still the lingering experience of haragei. There was deep certainty here that went way beyond the results we in the West expect from reasoning.