The Entropy of Bones Read online

  I walked out to see Narayana and Marko smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Marko looked relieved until he saw the bloody cue ball in my hand. Narayana didn’t even bother to take his eyes off his cell phone until I got close enough for him to hear my labored breathing. Then he got upset.

  “I don’t train dogs.”

  What? I asked, totally confused.

  “Dogs pant. Warriors breathe. You pant like dog.”

  They almost raped me!

  “Panting help you stop that? Crying? No. Only three things help surviving: strong, smart, quick. All need breathing. Learn to control your breath.”

  No one’s trying to rape me now, so fuck your . . . I think what happened was Narayana swept my legs out from under me, and while I was falling, he collapsed the antenna of his flip phone on my solar plexus. I came to with Narayana on top of me, his extremely sharp nails scraping the sides of my trachea gently.

  “You fuck my nothing. You want to train with me? This is training. You want to spar? Tournaments? Go someplace else. Here? Me? This is where it starts. Respect for me, serious injury for your enemies. You don’t want? I take you home; you never speak again to me about training. But you want to train? You show respect.”

  “Raj, I’m gonna have to take One-ball Willy to the hospital,” Marko said as he exited the bar I hadn’t seen him enter. “For the love of . . . Raj, if you’ve got to kill her, can you do it someplace else?”

  Narayana stood up like he just finished tying his shoe and threw a bundle of fifties to Marko. I stood, checked myself for injuries, and got in his car. He pushed me over from the passenger side and made me drive. I was about to tell him I didn’t have a license, then realized he didn’t care.

  I knew I’d be on his deck early the next morning, ready for whatever training he had for me that day. I knew I’d do whatever he told me, handle any challenge he put my way. Because I knew that whatever Narayana Raj was preparing me for, it was far more important than high school.

  The Green brothers kept up a push/pull relationship with me. I’m sure Dale went back and told his brother and nephew about my freak-out and subsequent amnesia. He saw that it was real, my forgetting, but with only a minute or two behind me, my slightly labored breathing, and my earlier calm, he couldn’t figure out if I was insane or not.

  I wondered if, minus Dale’s presence, I’d have remembered anything about that night at all. I remembered being tense and the ebbing of a tide of anger. But if Dale hadn’t come down the galley with guns drawn, I doubt I’d have evidence for the unknown event.

  I became . . . irritated. I couldn’t shake my sense of frustration and violation. Well, that’s almost true. The Green brothers and Shotgun had me come back to the farm for a month or so just to make sure if there was any retribution I’d be on hand. If it was charity or genuine concern, I couldn’t tell. But I didn’t care. I got to sit on the nymph rock again. It gave me the sense of connectedness that surpassed senses, frustration, and irritation about the event hole in my memory and the Narayana-shaped hole in my life. It wasn’t like my missing elements disappeared when I sat on that rock, rather it just placed it all in context of the lives and deaths of everything on the Green brothers’ property and beyond. I felt small; my problems smaller.

  After five weeks, Roderick gave me $30,000 and gently asked if the family could have some solo time. We both knew he couldn’t keep me away by force. Lucky for him, the request hurt enough for me to disappear.

  They didn’t have my number. I didn’t have a phone. All I had was the Mansai. I gave my mom $10,000 for no other reason than I could, and went back to practicing my katas and training.

  I watched fall turn into another winter then spring again doing nothing more than exercise, downloading the newer transmissions of jungle, drum and bass, and dubstep, and training. I’d made a commitment to never go back to the emotional spot I was in when Narayana . . . left. That required not just physical discipline, but mental as well. Being able to handle anything coming at me wasn’t enough. I had to be able to see what was coming. That meant being around people.

  One thing about growing up mute, you get used to listening, observing. My habit was to take the ferry from Sausalito to Fisherman’s Wharf and imagine takedowns and defenses on everyone on the boat. Sometimes for fun, I’d steal a wallet or two, then return them. I’d watch for folks who trained in some art of another. You can tell, and it’s not by muscle mass or gear. Gym rats with flaming skulls on their shirts and tons of attitude only needed a two-finger strike to the throat to go down hard. The ones that really trained would never let you get that close. Their gait is different. They have a confidence, a situational awareness that can’t be aped. The little polite Greek guy on the ferry, the one that took the tickets and the riders’ attitudes with the same civil disinterest, he trained. Probably most of his life if his balance was any indication. I only saw him in action once.

  I sat upstairs, outside on the back end of the 120-person ferry. Tourists dominated my section mostly and the Greek had to tell everyone to hold on and to keep their snot-nosed ankle biters in line. But one of the children was loose and a German tourist was drunk with a bottle in his hand. The ship rolled a bit, like he had been warning, and the kid found his head in the tourist’s ass. Everyone but the Greek and I were laughing. The German lost his balance and was about to go overboard. In his panic, the German reached out and grabbed the kid. I stood to go help but the Greek was already there. His right hand struck the German’s wrist right at a nerve cluster causing him to release the kid. The Greek sidestepped the kid and slipped his left hand under the neck of the German and pulled him into a seat before his feet left the deck. It could have been a choke; the Greek could have been a lot harsher about saving the man’s life. But he was relaxed, calm, like he’d done it a thousand times before. The German got mad. He threw the bottle he’d been holding at the Greek. The Greek caught it, took a swig, and walked away.

  The Greek was practiced and trained. Narayana had trained me in a different way. If it was me, the German would have been in a wheelchair practicing how to speak again with only three teeth.

  Assessing threats from tourists at places like Fisherman’s Wharf and the ferry made me realize no one was interested in hurting me. So instead I’d walk, listen, eat, and watch. At first I enjoyed it all—the subtleties of a mother tying her kid’s shoe, a brother lifting his drunk sibling’s face out of a garbage can, a crew of high school girls only two years younger than me running to grab a bus. It all looked clean and healthy. Stable.

  Then I’d catch a look at my hands or my feet or my clothes. My uniform was sweat pants, black zip-up hoodie, skintight Gore-Tex gloves, and black and silver running shoes when I wasn’t barefoot. Body fat was such a distant memory I thought anorexics were fat. I looked like death in training. My mother would now only leave food and prayer at the ship, like I was some dangerous animal. Narayana never taught me how to be depressed. But he did teach me to dance.

  Chapter Three: Combat Dancing

  Sophomore year I started combat training. Freshman year was all about conditioning and observation. Narayana did things like make me take salsa lessons to learn how to work in tandem with another body. Then he’d say something like “What I train is the opposite of salsa.” He had me kayak from Sausalito to San Francisco and then had me do 300 push-ups in under five minutes. If I slowed or started crying because of the pain, he’d ask how I was helping myself with all that noise. And of course, more dive bars with horny old men so trained to fail it was hard for them to do anything else. After the fifth one, I think it was in Ukiah, the captain started timing me. I knew I was doing better in his eyes when he stopped leaving the bar. Raj no longer knew the owners of the bars, and occasionally he’d fight by my side. It was in those moments that I realized how much I still had to learn. Say what he wanted about salsa, Captain Narayana Raj danced though those bars like he was choreographing a broken bone ballet, causing strokes with a stroke, cuts with right crosses and he
morrhages with heel strikes.

  Early sophomore fall, after Narayana spent the summer making me train like a striker but would only put me in soccer clubs and games if they let me play goalie, I got the first sense that I was on a timetable. I sat at a singular wooden table at an Indonesian restaurant on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, laughing at the lost hipsters that strolled by.

  “You have eighty-nine percent blockage rate,” he said after sipping from a large bowl of fish head soup.

  I’ll work harder, I said half in jest. Word around was that former World Cup strikers were trying to find me to take their shots.

  “The time for that is past,” the captain said regretfully. He was on his sixth beer. Quickly his tone turned to its testing resonance. “I make you goalie. Why?”

  To get me used to getting in harm’s way. Same with the bar fights. He’d never told me. He never told me anything. The Raj took it on faith that I could put things together.

  “That’s the aggressive side of what I teach you. The tiger part. Now you know, the tiger tries to eat you . . .”

  Break as many teeth as I can before he devours me. I smiled, remembering a story he told me about a boy in an Indian nature preserve who broke every hard calcium pocket out of a Bengal tiger’s mouth using nothing but a stick while protecting a sick elephant. I didn’t know shit about Narayana’s past but I knew that boy was him.

  “But there’s another way. Who can beat the tiger?” I didn’t even bother trying to answer. “The cobra. Quick strikes, evades. Every blow brings death. Entropy prevails.” He finished his soup with a loud slurp then got to work on the fish head. I kept my head in my chicken skewers and steamed rice until he spoke again. “Tomorrow I show you how to stop the memory of bones.”

  By six a.m. that Sunday I had cleaned my house, his deck, made my mother breakfast, run my fifteen miles with that damn gallon water vest strapped to my chest, and gone though every kata-choreographed movement he’d ever taught me. They weren’t for fighting, he told me. No one finishes anyone with a kata in a fight. They were to teach your body its options.

  It took another twenty minutes of deep breathing to calm myself, which was about how long it took the captain to come on deck. The sun was threatening to make an appearance but the Bay’s fog was protesting. Seawater tried to take to the sky and ended up on my hoodie and the recently swept deck. Narayana emerged from below deck, oblivious to my cleaning efforts and the temperature. He carried with him a full human skeleton, bleached white, and propped up with a large wooden dowel attached to four wheels.

  As Narayana snapped the wheels into locked positions, he made his dismissive hand signal, which meant “calm down,” despite me not saying a word. I grabbed one of the plastic chairs and watched.

  Where’d you find a skeleton? I asked.

  “I made it,” he said almost sadly. I believed him. “Want to feel? Real human bones.” I shook my head and waited. He wore his Ice Cube shirt. When he stretched his arms over his head, his shirt barely moved. His sweats were so big I couldn’t imagine his little toothpick legs in them. But they did carry him to the other side of the ship after he made sure I was paying attention.

  Then the captain started to dance. That’s the only thing I can call it. It looked like Balinese stage dancing, complete with low bending pauses, noncombative finger posturing, and facial gesticulations. I almost laughed. But the form looked perfect. He moved even closer to the skeleton, dancing and facing it first, then me, then backwards, then off the deck, and finally back to the skeleton all in perfect time with his dance. He faced it in a low squat, his legs twisted beneath him. For the length of one exhalation he was still. But just as the first ray of authentic sunlight fought its way through the early morning bay fog, Raj struck, twisted, and stood. He was so quick, it was only the feint of movement of the locked wheels that let me know the skeleton was being touched. The creak of the deck let me know he had twisted; the slack of the Ice Cube shirt alone betrayed the movement of his arms. I didn’t think it was possible to stand as quickly as he did, let alone strike out. I was astonished before he invited me to inspect the skeleton.

  Every bone, from toe to finger, either had a hole in it, a clear fracture, or an ugly splintered break. Every. Bone. Eye checking Raj’s fingers gave me nothing; they didn’t have bone residue on them. The obvious occurred to me: in all those bar brawls Narayana had been holding back. Even the skull had a three-inch-wide perfect hole in it; the missing piece caught below the shattered cheekbone rattled with the morning breeze making a sound that almost shook my calm.

  What about the spine? I whispered, inspecting the carcass, noticing the rigging and fishing line threaded where joint and gristle should be.

  “Pressure from tenth and twenty-sixth blows put tension on the spine. Hairline fracture first four vertebrae right side. Six and seven should be pulverized.”

  How? I was terrified and fascinated. I never before wanted to bow to him.

  “Sit.” And we did, letting the fragments of the skeleton fall to the deck as the ocean breeze saw fit.

  “In everything two spirits. Life, breathing, movements. Death, no breath, no movement. Always pulling and pushing against each other. There is a little death in everything. Not just skeletons. People, books, sounds, ideas. A little death. You find the death of memory, an idea. It does not exist anymore. Yeah?”

  No, I said honestly, so far past confused it physically hurt. He sighed hard, grabbed a beer and tried again.

  “The first arm. There is memory of it in every arm, yes? How the arm is supposed to be?”

  Like Adam and Eve’s first arm? The Raj flicked his bottle top at my eye so quickly I almost didn’t catch it in time. What do you want? What the hell is the first arm?

  “Listen, girl.” His voice went tiger. “You want salvation? Listen to Adam and Eve. What I show, teach . . . is different path. No salvation, only preparation for war against the Gods. You want it? Bury Adam and Eve.”

  I gave him a bow he could never see. I was never a church kid anyway.

  “There is body and there is idea, concept of memory, of body. There is Chabi, you, here now. Stubborn, strong, cold in the morning air. But there is idea of Chabi in her mother’s head, yeah?”

  Ok, I said playing slowly with the bottle top.

  “If I stop the idea of Chabi in her mother’s head, is there still Chabi?”

  I wanted to say yes. There was my voiceless Voice, my inability to make sound congeal with my skill at making my “concepts,” “ideas” known. Whatever it was, I knew it to be more powerful than any physical voice. I trembled at the idea of my Voice being stopped, being locked into myself and non-communicative again, and I trembled. I knew the real answer.

  Chabi, the daughter, yes. But me, the person, the flesh and bones is still alive, yes?

  “Yes, but less so than before,” Raj said, stretching his arms high above his head. “And enough less, no Chabi as daughter, no Chabi as student, no Chabi as fighter, then there is no Chabi, yes? Timing, it’s always timing. If I stop your mother’s idea of you before you are born, no you? Maybe another child, but not a Chabi, yes?”

  Enough people forget about me, I can’t function, get it? If Mom never thinks to have a daughter, I don’t exist, ok. So what? You can’t make your opponent forget they have bones.

  “No! Too hard for you. Just make skeleton forget first.”

  Ok, I said, understanding nothing. How?

  “Entropy.” I got up from my chair and walked to the bow to look over the dock waters. Small ducks sat calmly on the waves that carried them out from the Bay. I could sooner fathom what they dreamed about than I could decipher what Narayana was talking about. What the hell is entropy, Captain?

  Narayana drank a little more of his beer until the bottle was half empty. With a flick of his wrist he sent it flying four feet above him with such force and at such an angle that no liquid escaped it. He stood and caught it with a finesse that kept the beer still.


  “When explosion happens, energy pushes. When push is over, entropy grows. The pauses, points, stress area, the descent of all things. This is entropy.” Before I could comment, he spun the bottle in the air again. Only he didn’t catch it as it lost speed and the beer sprayed everywhere. I barely caught it before it hit the deck.

  “Find entropy of bones, then you strike the skeleton like me.”

  Ok, I said, trying not to ask again simply how. Instead I went to particulars. The dance. How does that fit in?

  “You take the life, the energy you have? You put that to the entropy of bones? Bones have no chance. Physical form, especially human bodies, are bad at making new balances between entropy and energy. Memory, the function of the bone, is the first to fail. You want entropy? First you find your life sounds.”

  Chapter Four: The Little Kid

  It took a few hours for me to find the type of club that played my music, but late one April night well after dinner hour, I made my way to a Moroccan restaurant off of Shotwell Avenue in S.F.’s Mission district. I’d caught sight of a flyer advertising the realest in dubstep and grime to be found in San Francisco at this address. With no guidance from Mom, I bought a pair of jeans that lied to the world about the presence of my ass and a deep red faux-satin shirt. The woman at the mall downtown didn’t understand why I wanted a trench coat to go with the get-up any more than she could understand why I wouldn’t want new shoes. She said since I had so little, it was important to show it off as much as possible. I tipped her for the advice anyway.

  When I walked into the makeshift Moroccan club at 11:45, a DJ was making some U.K. vocalist stutter behind world-shattering beats and the world was good. It was less than eighty people, all three to fifteen years older than me. None of them trained, a few want-to-be fighters posing as partiers. With the tables cleared, the small stage set up with red and blue lights, and a sound system too big for the space, the little club seemed efficient in its purpose. This was a scene for those who eschewed the scene. This was a club for those who liked music.