Free Ransom by Jay McInerney Page B

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 hehanded 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