Ransom (8 page)

Ransom had tried to buy fourth-class passage in Penang, but the man at the ticket window on the dock told him there was no fourth class. “What class are those people riding?” Ransom asked, pointing to a Chinese family camped on a pile of bundles in the corner of the ticket office. “They're Chinese,” the man, a Malay, had said. “I
want the cheapest ticket you've got,” Ransom said. “I don't mind sleeping on deck.” The man said that fourth class was only Chinese. “You buy third class,” he said.

Ransom had come overland from the subcontinent, travelling like a fugitive in third- and fourth-class train cars. He sometimes feared he was being pursued; when he rested his head against the hard wooden benches and closed his eyes, he envisioned Pathan drug runners from the Hindu Kush brandishing long, curved knives and modified M-16s with prayer beads wrapped around the stocks; corrupt Pakistani police familiar with instruments of torture loomed up behind them. Much worse were the apparitions of Ian and Annette. Because he did not know what had happened to Ian, who simply disappeared in Afghanistan, Ransom was unable to imagine anything but the worst: various states of mutilation and dismemberment. Annette he had seen—lying peacefully in the dank, putrid room they had occupied for three weeks, waiting for Ian to come back across the border. Stumbling in the moonlight, Ransom had carried her up the hillside above Landi Kotal. There was no question of going to the police. Annette was past help, which may have been where she wanted to be. Ransom was where he didn't want to be, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a place without law. The authorities would have kept him in the country, subject to an investigation that would last as long as they thought they could squeeze out additional baksheesh. Ransom did what he had to do. But still.

He belonged on a ship like this: rusting, dirty, infested with rats. The rats seemed to be in command, confident of
their rights. The steward, the cabin boys, the waiters were silent and distracted. The brass fittings had turned brown and green with neglect. Crew members were occasionally seen in groups of two or three, smoking in some corner. They fell silent and dispersed at the sight of a passenger. Ransom spent much of his time on deck, looking out over the curved sea. It would have been better, he thought, if the earth had been flat, if you could arrive at the point where the known stopped and the unknown began, where you could finally say—this is the end, or the beginning. He vaguely imagined Japan as such a place, a strange island kingdom at the edge of the world, a personal frontier, a place of austere discipline which would cleanse and change him.

The waiter had cleared plates and replaced them with dishes of green Jell-O when the intercom began to click and buzz. “Attention. Attention all passengers. This is the captain speaking. The republic of South Vietnam is just coming into view over our port bow.”

The passengers drifted to the upper deck. Daylight was falling into the west over the stern. At first Ransom could see nothing but the crests of waves catching the last sun. Then someone called, “Look, there.”

A thin sliver of land was wedged between sky and sea. Within minutes the land was plainly visible, and above it, a random succession of dull yellow flashes.

“Lightning?” the schoolteacher said.

The hippie laughed.

The soft pink and gold illuminations were hypnotic. Ransom watched as the weird light grew brighter in the darkening sky. So that's it, Ransom thought. Later, when
the boat docked at Hong Kong, he would learn that what he had seen was the final battle for Saigon.

The passengers watched the flickering show of lights in silence. Ransom stayed at the rail until the peninsula had crossed over their stern and the light was little more than a dim, pulsing glow.

From a deep sleep Ransom woke into a sovereign state of anxiety. For a moment he held back on the edge of waking, with the notion of slowing the inevitable. Sunday morning, once the start of the Lord's day.

Ransom slipped on a pair of boxers, washed, shaved and rolled up the bed. He pulled back the doors to the terrace and stepped outside, where two sets of karate gi were hanging from the clothesline. The view from the terrace was the backsides of the houses on the next street, rigged out like galleons with TV antennae and clotheslines. Above the tiled rooftops, the sky was overcast. If it rained, practice would be cancelled.

Beneath the terrace was Kaji's garden, an immaculate plot with stones and dwarf trees that gave the illusion of major landscape. Presiding over the ornamental puddle was a ceramic tanuki, an animal that the Japanese loved inordinately and that seemed to Ransom a bear-racoon hybrid. The buds of the cherry tree were swollen and showing pink, the tortured yellow branches of the trained pine tipped with a new green. As he looked down, a ferret darted from underneath the house with a piece of paper in its mouth and dashed across the pebbles to the water; it
rose on its hind legs to examine the tanuki and test the air. Ransom whistled. The ferret looked up at him, then bolted underneath the fence, leaving the paper behind. Ransom tried to remember if a ferret was a good or bad omen. In Japan, everything was some kind of omen.

The first to arrive, Ransom changed into his gi and began to sweep the parking lot. They only trained inside during rainy season, when there was space reserved for them in the gym. The sensei had no use for padded mats and controlled temperature. Asphalt toughened the soles of the feet and gave you an incentive to stay on them. The winter had been cold and they had often practiced with snow on the ground. The biggest problem in winter was your toes; you couldn't feel them until you jammed one, and then it was like a dentist's drill hitting a nerve. The sensei had a shiatsu method of unjamming toes which involved yanking on them. In November Ransom had broken the middle toe on his left foot. He still taped the toe and favored right kicks. The doctor told him to lay off karate for two months. The sensei told him to tape it and forget about it.

He hoped he would have time to finish sweeping the lot before anyone arrived. He liked having the morning to himself. It would get violent and sweaty soon enough.

Ransom learned how to sweep when he started with the dojo. His first lessons were in bowing and sweeping. Ransom had been desperate to join. The sensei had not been eager to take on a foreign disciple. There were dojos that catered to gaijin but his wasn't one of them. He did not believe gaijin had the stuff. His reluctance convinced Ransom that he had found the right teacher.

Every night for a week Ransom watched them practice. He had not noticed the fighting so much as the grace of movement. The best of the students gave the impression of quadruped balance and intimacy with the ground. They conveyed an extraordinary sense of self-possession. For months Ransom had drifted across landscapes in a fevered daze, oblivious to almost everything but his own pain and guilt. The dojo with its strange incantations and white uniforms seemed to him a sacramental place, an intersection of body and spirit, where power and danger and will were ritualized in such a way that a man could learn to understand them. Ransom had lost his bearings spiritually, and he wanted to reclaim himself.

Finally Ransom approached the sensei with a speech he had worked up out of the dictionary. It was the only time Ransom would see him entirely at a loss. Later the sensei told Ransom that he would have gotten rid of him if he had known how. The sensei's English and Ransom's Japanese were equally poor; the sensei struggled to explain in Japanese that he was not equipped to handle a foreigner. His was a small dojo. The gaijin-san would feel more at home elsewhere. The sensei repeated this, speaking very slowly, and then retreated into the gym with his clothes under his arm. Ransom was back the next night, and the night after that. The third night, after practice, the sensei gave him a piece of paper with what turned out to be an address, written in both Japanese and painstaking roman characters. He pointed to his white suit, then to the piece of paper.

Ransom was waiting the next night in his crisp new gi, short in the arms and legs. When the sensei arrived he
handed Ransom a broom. Ransom began to sweep the lot. The sensei stepped in several times to correct his technique. Ransom wasn't sure what to make of it. After the seated meditation, the sensei took him off into a corner of the lot. Through Suzuki, a college student who spoke more English than anyone else in the dojo, the sensei explained that bowing was the first skill to be mastered in karate. Suzuki demonstrated the proper bow. It looked simple enough—the all-purpose bob that Ransom had been seeing since he first arrived in the country. The sensei took Ransom over to the post wrapped in hemp. Ransom had seen the others punching it, but the sensei wanted him to practice bowing to it. He spent the next hour doing so, while the others leaped and kicked. The sensei came over several times to watch, shaking his head each time and demonstrating once more. Ransom watched and tried to determine what was different and crucial in the sensei's bow. He wondered if there was an exact angle of inclination, if the thing was codified that far; Ryder told him months later that department stores had machines designed to train their employees to bow correctly. Ransom concentrated on putting as much sincerity and humility into it as he could. After an hour his lower back was aching and his store of sincerity exhausted.

After a closing round of seated meditation, the sensei handed him the broom. Wondering why this was necessary after practice, Ransom swept the lot again from one end to the other.

The next night was the same. While the others followed their secret choreography, Ransom stood in the dunce
corner bowing to his post. The sensei came around twice to measure his progress but offered no comment. Ransom's back ached so severely the next day that he could hardly get out of bed. He walked to the public bath hunched over like the old country women he saw sometimes at the bus stops, women who spent their lives bent doubled over in rice fields.

At the end of the third night he was convinced he was being systematically humiliated. The sensei hadn't wanted him in the dojo to begin with. When he came around to watch, Ransom was too stiff to bow fluidly, and the proper mix of humility and sincerity was out of the question.

Practice finished, he was changing into his street clothes when the sensei held out the broom. Ransom continued buttoning his shirt and didn't look up. When he got to the second-to-last button he saw there were three buttonholes left. The sensei saw, too. He held out the broom. Ransom rebuttoned and tucked in his shirt, then took the broom and snapped it in half over his knee. He laid the two halves down at the sensei's feet and was out in the street before he realized he had left his shoes behind.

The shoes were sitting beside the door of the gym when he arrived the next night, under a folded-paperbag tent. Ransom was fifteen minutes early. He had brought a new broom. The sensei arrived as he was beginning to sweep. Ransom continued sweeping. The sensei walked over to the post and began punching. Ransom laid down the broom and approached him. The sensei changed hands and hit the post fifty times before turning to look at Ransom. Ransom drew himself up, clenched his fists at
his side and bent deeply from the waist. He kept his head down.

Okay
, the sensei said.
Good
.

Ransom had finished sweeping when Udo arrived. He walked like a sumo wrestler, with a semicircular swing of his legs, looking like he was carrying something between them. Udo had been a body builder before he joined the dojo and the hypertrophied pectorals and thighs that had won two Mr. Kyoto titles were no help with karate. He could bench-press two hundred kilos, but his punches were slow and ineffective.

Initially, Udo had refused to acknowledge Ransom's existence. The sensei forced him to do so by letting a match between them run on much too long. Udo went down three times. After the second knockdown there was blood all over the front of Udo's gi. Ransom had no heart to go on, but he knew better than to question the sensei's tactics. The next day Udo began to ask Ransom for pointers. Later, when Ransom had carburetor trouble with his bike, Udo brought him down to the service station where he worked, showed him all the features of the three-bay garage with hydraulic lifts, showed Ransom off to his friends and refused payment for the rebuild of the carburetor. Since then they had been out fishing a few times.

Ito arrived wearing his gi, as if he had no civilian life. He bowed to Ransom and to Udo and then began jogging around the lot. It still might rain, Ransom thought. Udo watched Ito circle the lot, then began running himself. He was scared to death of Ito.

The sensei was in a buoyant mood, smiling owlishly.
Ransom bowed. The sensei nodded and asked if he thought it was going to rain. Ransom felt that it wasn't his meteorological intuition which was being checked, but his enthusiasm. Did Ransom want it to rain? seemed to be the question. Or maybe he was just paranoid.

When the sensei knelt down on the asphalt, the twelve of them fell into line according to rank—the sensei, Ito and then Ransom. Yamada was absent. Ransom had less seniority than others down the line but unlike most Japanese institutions the dojo was a meritocracy. The sensei didn't award belts—Ito's being the legendary exception—but the hierarchy was clear. Practicing seven days a week, at the dojo and on his own, Ransom had moved up through the ranks.

Kneeling seiza, butt resting on his heels, eyes closed, Ransom tried to drain himself of everything but will. To do this it helped to find an image. He pictured a box and held the image still while he filled it with the junk of his quotidian concerns: the broken English of student essays, Marilyn's problem, the bald rear tire on his Honda. Last of all he deposited his fear of injury. Then he tipped the box, slowly spilling its contents out into a void. When the box was empty he was clean. The box hovered in front of him, bare and luminous.

The sensei clapped his hands and it was time to begin. Jumping to his feet, Ransom felt ready for anything. Ito led the stretching and calisthenics, the others facing him in two lines. Ransom concentrated on duplicating his every move. With years of scrupulous imitation he might gain possession of the discipline.