Sorcerer's Apprentice Read online

  His sifu, a short, smooth-figured boy named Douglas Chan, who Evelyn figured couldn’t be over eighteen, sat like the Dalai Lama in their tiny kitchen as if he owned it, sipping her tea, which Rudolph laced with Korean ginseng. Her husband lit Chan’s cigarettes as if he were President Carter come to visit the common man. He recommended that Rudolph study T’ai Chi, “soft” fighting systems, ki, and something called Tao. He told him to study, as well, Newton’s three laws of physics and apply them to his own body during kumite. What she remembered most about Chan were his wrist braces, ornamental weapons that had three straps and, along the black leather, highly polished studs like those worn by Steve Reeves in a movie she’d seen about Hercules. In a voice she thought girlish, he spoke of eye gouges and groin-tearing techniques, exercises called the Delayed Touch of Death and Dim Mak, with the casualness she and Shelberdine talked about bargains at Thriftway. And then they suited up, the boyish Sifu, who looked like Maharaj-ji’s rougher brother, and her clumsy husband; they went out back, pushed aside the aluminum lawn furniture, and pommeled each other for half an hour. More precisely, her Rudolph was on the receiving end of hook kicks, spinning back fists faster than thought, and foot sweeps that left his body purpled for weeks. A sensible man would have known enough to drive to Swedish Hospital pronto. Rudolph, never known as a profound thinker, pushed on after Sifu Chan left, practicing his flying kicks by leaping to ground level from a four-foot hole he’d dug by their cyclone fence.

  Evelyn, nibbling a Van de Kamp’s pastry from Safeway—she was always nibbling, these days—watched from the kitchen window until twilight, then brought out the Ben-Gay, a cold beer, and rubbing alcohol on a tray. She figured he needed it. Instead, Rudolph, stretching under the far-reaching cedar in the backyard, politely refused, pushed the tray aside, and rubbed himself with Dit-Da-Jow, “iron-hitting wine,” which smelled like the open door of an opium factory on a hot summer day. Yet this ancient potion not only instantly healed his wounds (said Rudolph) but prevented arthritis as well. She was tempted to see if it healed brain damage by pouring it into Rudolph’s ears, but apparently he was doing something right. Dr. Guylee’s examination had been glowing; he said Rudolph’s muscle tone, whatever that was, was better. His cardiovascular system was healthier. His erections were outstanding—or upstanding—though lately he seemed to have no interest in sex. Evelyn, even she, saw in the crepuscular light changes in Rudolph’s upper body as he stretched: Muscles like globes of light rippled along his shoulders; larval currents moved on his belly. The language of his new, developing body eluded her. He was not always like this. After a cold shower and sleep his muscles shrank back a little. It was only after his workouts, his weight lifting, that his body expanded like baking bread, filling out in a way that obliterated the soft Rudolph-body she knew. This new flesh had the contours of the silhouetted figures on medical charts: the body as it must be in the mind of God. Glistening with perspiration, his muscles took on the properties of the free weights he pumped relentlessly. They were profoundly tragic, too, because their beauty was earthbound. It would vanish with the world. You are ugly, his new muscles said to Evelyn; old and ugly. His self-punishment made her feel sick. She was afraid of his hard, cold weights. She hated them. Yet she wanted them, too. They had a certain monastic beauty. She thought: He’s doing this to hurt me. She wondered: What was it like to be powerful? Was clever cynicism—even comedy—the by-product of bulging bellies, weak nerves, bad posture? Her only defense against the dumbbells that stood between them—she meant both his weights and his friends—was, as always, her acid southern tongue:

  “They’re all fairies, right?”

  Rudolph looked dreamily her way. These post-workout periods made him feel, he said, as if there were no interval between himself and what he saw. His face was vacant, his eyes—like smoke. In this afterglow (he said) he saw without judging. Without judgment, there were no distinctions. Without distinctions, there was no desire. Without desire…

  He smiled sideways at her. “Who?”

  “The people in your kwoon.” Evelyn crossed her arms. “I read somewhere that most body builders are homosexual.”

  He refused to answer her.

  “If they’re not gay, then maybe I should take lessons. It’s been good for you, right?” Her voice grew sharp. “I mean, isn’t that what you’re saying? That you and your friends are better’n everybody else?”

  Rudolph’s head dropped; he drew a long breath. Lately, his responses to her took the form of quietly clearing his lungs.

  “You should do what you have to, Evelyn. You don’t have to do what anybody else does.” He stood up, touched his toes, then brought his forehead straight down against his unbent knees, which was physically impossible, Evelyn would have said—and faintly obscene.

  It was a nightmare to watch him each evening after dinner. He walked around the house in his Everlast leg weights, tried push-ups on his fingertips and wrists, and, as she sat trying to watch “The Jeffersons,” stood in a ready stance before the flickering screen, throwing punches each time the scene, or shot, changed to improve his timing. It took the fun out of watching TV, him doing that—she preferred him falling asleep in his chair beside her, as he used to. But what truly frightened Evelyn was his “doing nothing.” Sitting in meditation, planted cross-legged in a full lotus on their front porch, with Mr. Miller blissfully curled on his lap, a Bodhisattva in the middle of houseplants she set out for the sun. Looking at him, you’d have thought he was dead. The whole thing smelled like self-hypnosis. He breathed too slowly, in Evelyn’s view—only three breaths per minute, he claimed. He wore his gi, splotchy with dried blood and sweat, his calloused hands on his knees, the forefingers on each tipped against his thumbs, his eyes screwed shut.

  During his eighth month at the kwoon, she stood watching him as he sat, wondering over the vivid changes in his body, the grim firmness where before there was jolly fat, the disquieting steadiness of his posture, where before Rudolph could not sit still in church for five minutes without fidgeting. Now he sat in zazen for forty-five minutes a day, fifteen when he awoke, fifteen (he said) at work in the mailroom during his lunch break, fifteen before going to bed. He called this withdrawal (how she hated his fancy language) similar to the necessary silences in music, “a stillness that prepared him for busyness and sound.” He’d never breathed before, he told her. Not once. Not clear to the floor of himself. Never breathed and emptied himself as he did now, picturing himself sitting on the bottom of Lake Washington: himself, Rudolph Lee Jackson, at the center of the universe; for if the universe was infinite, any point where he stood would be at its center—it would shift and move with him. (That saying, Evelyn knew, was minted in Douglas Chan’s mind. No Negro preacher worth the name would speak that way.) He told her that in zazen, at the bottom of the lake, he worked to discipline his mind and maintain one point of concentration; each thought, each feeling that overcame him he saw as a fragile bubble, which he could inspect passionlessly from all sides; then he let it float gently to the surface, and soon—as he slipped deeper into the vortices of himself, into the Void—even the image of himself on the lake floor vanished.

  Evelyn stifled a scream.

  Was she one of Rudolph’s bubbles, something to detach himself from? On the porch, Evelyn watched him narrowly, sitting in a rain-whitened chair, her chin on her left fist. She snapped the fingers on her right hand under his nose. Nothing. She knocked her knuckles lightly on his forehead. Nothing. (Faker, she thought.) For another five minutes he sat and breathed, sat and breathed, then opened his eyes slowly as if he’d slept as long as Rip Van Winkle. “It’s dark,” he said, stunned. When he began, it was twilight. Evelyn realized something new: He was not living time as she was, not even that anymore. Things, she saw, were slower for him; to him she must seem like a woman stuck in fast-forward. She asked:

  “What do you see when you go in there?”

  Rudolph rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Then why do you
do it? The world’s out here!”

  He seemed unable to say, as if the question were senseless. His eyes angled up, like a child’s, toward her face. “Nothing is peaceful sometimes. The emptiness is full. I’m not afraid of it now.”

  “You empty yourself?” she asked. “Of me, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Evelyn’s hand shot up to cover her face. She let fly with a whimper. Rudolph rose instantly—he sent Mr. Miller flying—then fell back hard on his buttocks; the lotus cut off blood to his lower body—which provided more to his brain, he claimed—and it always took him a few seconds before he could stand again. He reached up, pulled her hand down, and stroked it.

  “What’ve I done?”

  “That’s it,” sobbed Evelyn. “I don’t know what you’re doing.” She lifted the end of her bathrobe, blew her nose, then looked at him through streaming, unseeing eyes. “And you don’t either. I wish you’d never seen that movie. I’m sick of all your weights and workouts—sick of them, do you hear? Rudolph, I want you back the way you were: sick” No sooner than she said this Evelyn was sorry. But she’d done no harm. Rudolph, she saw, didn’t want anything; everything, Evelyn included, delighted him, but as far as Rudolph was concerned, it was all shadows in a phantom history. He was humbler now, more patient, but he’d lost touch with everything she knew was normal in people: weakness, fear, guilt, self-doubt, the very things that gave the world thickness and made people do things. She did want him to desire her. No, she didn’t. Not if it meant oral sex. Evelyn didn’t know, really, what she wanted anymore. She felt, suddenly, as if she might dissolve before his eyes. “Rudolph, if you’re ‘empty,’ like you say, you don’t know who—or what—is talking to you. If you said you were praying, I’d understand. It would be God talking to you. But this way…” She pounded her fist four, five times on her thigh. “It could be evil spirits, you know! There are evil spirits, Rudolph. It could be the Devil.”

  Rudolph thought for a second. His chest lowered after another long breath. “Evelyn, this is going to sound funny, but I don’t believe in the Devil.”

  Evelyn swallowed. It had come to that.

  “Or God—unless we are gods.”

  She could tell he was at pains to pick his words carefully, afraid he might offend. Since joining the kwoon and studying ways to kill, he seemed particularly careful to avoid her own most effective weapon: the wry, cutting remark, the put-down, the direct, ego-deflating slash. Oh, he was becoming a real saint. At times, it made her want to hit him.

  “Whatever is just is,” he said. “That’s all I know. Instead of worrying about whether it’s good or bad, God or the Devil, I just want to be quiet, work on myself, and interfere with things as little as possible. Evelyn,” he asked suddenly, “how can there be two things?” His brow wrinkled; he chewed his lip. “You think what I’m saying is evil, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s strange! Rudolph, you didn’t grow up in China,” she said. “They can’t breathe in China! I saw that today on the news. They burn soft coal, which gets into the air and turns into acid rain. They wear face masks over there, like the ones we bought when Mount St. Helens blew up. They all ride bicycles, for Christ’s sake! They want what we have.” Evelyn heard Rod Kenner step onto his screened porch, perhaps to listen from his rocker. She dropped her voice a little. “You grew up in Hodges, South Carolina, same as me, in a right and proper colored church. If you’d been to China, maybe I’d understand.”

  “I can only be what I’ve been?” This he asked softly, but his voice trembled. “Only what I was in Hodges?”

  “You can’t be Chinese.”

  “I don’t want to be Chinese!” The thought made Rudolph smile and shake his head. Because she did not understand, and because he was tired of talking, Rudolph stepped back a few feet from her, stretching again, always stretching. “I only want to be what I can be, which isn’t the greatest fighter in the world, only the fighter I can be. Lord knows, I’ll probably get creamed in the tournament this Saturday.” He added, before she could reply, “Doug asked me if I’d like to compete this weekend in full-contact matches with some people from the kwoon. I have to.” He opened the screen door. “I will.”

  “You’ll be killed—you know that, Rudolph.” She dug her fingernails into her bathrobe, and dug this into him: “You know, you never were very strong. Six months ago you couldn’t open a pickle jar for me.”

  He did not seem to hear her. “I bought a ticket for you.” He held the screen door open, waiting for her to come inside. “I’ll fight better if you’re there.”

  She spent the better part of that week at Shelberdine’s mornings and Reverend Merrill’s church evenings, rinsing her mouth with prayer, sitting most often alone in the front row so she would not have to hear Rudolph talking to himself from the musty basement as he pounded out bench presses, skipped rope for thirty minutes in the backyard, or shadowboxed in preparation for a fight made inevitable by his new muscles. She had married a fool, that was clear, and if he expected her to sit on a bench at the Kingdome while some equally stupid brute spilled the rest of his brains—probably not enough left now to fill a teaspoon—then he was wrong. How could he see the world as “perfect”?—That was his claim. There was poverty, unemployment, twenty-one children dying every minute, every day, every year from hunger and malnutrition, over twenty murdered in Atlanta; there were sixty thousand nuclear weapons in the world, which was dreadful, what with Seattle so close to Boeing; there were far-right Republicans in the White House: good reasons, Evelyn thought, to be “negative and life-denying,” as Rudolph would put it. It was almost sin to see harmony in an earthly hell, and in a fit of spleen she prayed God would dislocate his shoulder, do some minor damage to humble him, bring him home, and remind him that the body was vanity, a violation of every verse in the Bible. But Evelyn could not sustain her thoughts as long as he could. Not for more than a few seconds. Her mind never settled, never rested, and finally on Saturday morning, when she awoke on Shelberdine’s sofa, it would not stay away from the image of her Rudolph dead before hundreds of indifferent spectators, paramedics pounding on his chest, bursting his rib cage in an effort to keep him alive.

  From Shelberdine’s house she called a taxi and, in the steady rain that northwesterners love, arrived at the Kingdome by noon. It’s over already, Evelyn thought, walking the circular stairs to her seat, clamping shut her wet umbrella. She heard cheers, booing, an Asian voice with an accent over a microphone. The tournament began at ten, which was enough time for her white belt husband to be in the emergency ward at Harborview Hospital by now, but she had to see. At first, as she stepped down to her seat through the crowd, she could only hear—her mind grappled for the word, then remembered—kiais, or “spirit shouts,” from the great floor of the stadium, many shouts, for contests were progressing in three rings simultaneously. It felt like a circus. It smelled like a locker room. Here two children stood toe to toe until one landed a front kick that sent the other child flying fifteen feet. There two lean-muscled female black belts were interlocked in a delicate ballet, like dance or a chess game, of continual motion. They had a kind of sense, these women—she noticed it immediately—a feel for space and their place in it. (Evelyn hated them immediately.) And in the farthest circle she saw, or rather felt, Rudolph, the oldest thing on the deck, who, sparring in the adult division, was squared off with another white belt, not a boy who might hurt him—the other man was middle-aged, graying, maybe only a few years younger than Rudolph—but they were sparring just the same.

  Yet it was not truly him that Evelyn, sitting down, saw. Acoustics in the Kingdome whirlpooled the noise of the crowd, a rivering of voices that affected her, suddenly, like the pitch and roll of voices during service. It affected the way she watched Rudolph. She wondered: Who are these people? She caught her breath when, miscalculating his distance from his opponent, her husband stepped sideways into a roundhouse kick with lots of snap—she heard the cloth of his opponent’s gi crack like a gun
shot when he threw the technique. She leaned forward, gripping the huge purse on her lap when Rudolph recovered and retreated from the killing to the neutral zone, and then, in a wide stance, rethought strategy. This was not the man she’d slept with for twenty years. Not her hypochondriac Rudolph who had to rest and run cold water on his wrists after walking from the front stairs to the fence to pick up the Seattle Times. She did not know him, perhaps had never known him, and now she never would, for the man on the floor, the man splashed with sweat, rising on the ball of his rear foot for a flying kick—was he so foolish he still thought he could fly?—would outlive her; he’d stand healthy and strong and think of her in a bubble, one hand on her headstone, and it was all right, she thought, weeping uncontrollably, it was all right that Rudolph would return home after visiting her wet grave, clean out her bedroom, the pillboxes and paperback books, and throw open her windows to let her sour, rotting smell escape, then move a younger woman’s things onto the floor space darkened by her color television, her porcelain chamber pot, her antique sewing machine. And then Evelyn was on her feet, unsure why, but the crowd had stood suddenly to clap, and Evelyn clapped, too, though for an instant she pounded her gloved hands together instinctively until her vision cleared, the momentary flash of retinal blindness giving way to a frame of her husband, the postman, twenty feet off the ground in a perfect flying kick that floored his opponent and made a Japanese judge who looked like Odd job shout “ippon”—one point—and the fighting in the farthest ring, in herself, perhaps in all the world, was over.