got your old days right here, homey. Now let me catch some Zs.” I fold my arms, lean my head against the window again, and close my eyes.
It’s twenty minutes later now and I can tell that I’m not going to sleep. The earlier nap took the edge off, but the thought of another day-nightmare adds a dash of trepidation about sleeping, at least during the day.
For a couple weeks after the incident, I had lots of middle-of- the-night nightmares, terrible ones where I woke up shouting and sweating like a pig. Those fun times are sporadic now, at least the nighttime dreams. Recently, I started having them during the day when I take the occasional nap and sometimes even when I’m awake.
I hear the flight attendant ask Bobby if he wants anything to drink. He orders a water for himself and one for me too. Thoughtful kid, polite, has a zest for life, a passion for the martial arts, and he’s funny. I like to think I had some of those things when I was sixteen. Actually, I think I still do, though I did have a brief struggle with the zest for life thing recently. Meeting my father and Mai helped get it back.
My passion for the martial arts has always been there through the ol’ thick and thin. It was there when my mom got killed in a traffic accident, and when I got divorced. The divorce I didn’t take hard because the marriage shouldn’t have happened anyway. It lasted only a few months. I was young and stupid and so was she.
Mom’s death was hard. The police chaplain and my dear friend Mark, who is also my lieutenant, came to my house and broke the news to me. When they left, I went out into my garage and began hitting the heavy bag, harder and harder until I was pummeling it like a man insane, which I was right then. After I don’t know how long, I went into the house and slept all afternoon.
When I got up, I went out onto my patio and began throwing combinations, doubles, triples, sometimes throwing ten shots in one all-out burst. I punched the regret that I felt for not telling my mother that I loved her the last time we spoke. I punched the lonely life she must have had without a partner. I punched my father for abandoning her. And I punched God for giving her such a violent, painful death. My rage was irrational, most of it, but it made sense to my insane mind at the time.
All I did for two days was sleep, train, and eat a little. After forty-eight hours, give or take, I had lost seven pounds, sprained my wrist, and my neck and back were so tight that I walked around like Robo Cop for three days. Inside, though, I felt better. The anger was gone, the blaming was gone, and the guilt was mostly gone. Thanks to the martial arts, I was able to begin mourning and dealing with the funeral.
My martial arts were there after my shootings. Training like a madman helped to burn away my crazy thoughts, to cool the adrenaline that boiled for days, to ease my fear, to push back the questions, such as what if I was forced to kill again? What if my hesitation caused the death of another innocent? Was my soul forever blackened? My near heart-stopping workouts did as much for me as my visits to Doc Kari, the department-mandated police psychologist.
I was already at my limit when out of nowhere my, as it turns out, not-so-dead father appears in my life. Coincidence of coincidences, or maybe not, he’s a martial artist. Actually, comparing Samuel’s martial arts skill to mine is like comparing Luciano Pavarotti’s pristine voice to mine when I do an Oh solo mio in the shower. Samuel’s ability is… what? Beyond comprehension? For sure. Mind bending? Oh yeah, definitely. On top of that, he says that compared to his teacher, Shen Lang Rui, he’s just a beginner. While I can’t begin to imagine how that’s even possible, I guess I’ll find out when Samuel introduces me to his venerable master.
Samuel. Dad? No, calling him dad is just too awkward. He is my father, I’m convinced of that, but calling him pops, dad, or whatever is, well, my mouth stops working when I try. It’s just too hard for me to go from thinking my father was killed before I was born to suddenly saying, “Hey, Dad, wanna toss the pigskin around?”
What an entry he made. I got sucker punched to the sidewalk in front of a coffee joint and like a white knight wearing red sneakers, Samuel kicked the guy’s ass. And, somehow, he hauled my unconscious self across the street to a park bench, waited patiently for me to wake up, and bought me a coffee.
Then there’s Mai, incredible, outrageously gorgeous, and without peer, Mai. For a couple of awkward days, I thought she was my half sister. After all, Samuel referred to her as his daughter, and since he said I was his son… Well, it caused me all kinds of confusion, since I was overwhelmingly attracted to her. Gratefully discovering that we were not related by blood, I got the breath knocked out of me when I found out that she was experiencing the same attraction to me. And then the world went really crazy and “kapow,” I’m part of some high-octane kung-fu movie fighting off attackers from every direction.
The plane bumps hard a couple of times.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re passing through some turbulence. The captain has turned on the seatbelt signs. Please return to your seats and remain there with your seatbelt fastened until the captain turns off the seatbelt sign. Thank you.”
I’m still belted in so I can keep faking sleep. I’m not a white-knuckle flier, but the thought of problems twenty miles above a shark-infested ocean, or however far it is, doesn’t do much for my already shredded nervous system.
My body and mind had been running on fight or flight fuel for six weeks, and my dukkha was not finished with me yet. Four nights ago, I was preparing for bed when the sound of the doorbell ignited my fight or flight. Any other time, I would have answered the door with gun in hand, but my service weapon was lying in the bottom drawer of an old dresser, and I wasn’t about to get it—ever. Since my survival skills were still mostly intact, I peeked through a side window before opening the door.
It was Mark, standing on my porch with his overcoat collar up against the steady rain, his face glaring at me. My friend and boss has an incredible pair of thick eyebrows that crowd together just above his nose when he is angry, which isn’t often. That’s where they were that night, though his face looked more disappointed and hurt. This was not good.
I thought about not opening the door and pretending that I wasn’t home. The old hide-under-the-blanket-from-the-monster sounded like an excellent plan.
“Mark, come on in,” I said, opening the door. He brushed by me without speaking, without looking at me. I shivered, but not from the cold air rushing in. He knows, I thought. God help me, he knows. But he didn’t know all of it.
I closed the door, but not before I had a fleeting thought of charging out into the night and running as fast as I could down the dark street, and off the edge of the earth.
When I turned, Mark was standing with his back to me, his head moving from one side of the room to the other, as if it were his first time in my home, not the two hundredth, or so.
“Mark?” I whispered, not wanting him to respond, not wanting him to turn around to show me his disappointed face.
His shoulders seemed to sag in his long, gray overcoat as if carrying them hunched too long. He slipped out of it and draped it over his arm. He still hadn’t turned to face me when I heard him inhale deeply and exhale a long, pained breath.
“Damn you, Sam.”
I stared at the back of his graying head and thought again about bolting out the door.
He turned around. The lines in his fifty-six-year-old face seemed deeper than when I saw him four days ago, his eyes glistening. “Damn you, Sam,” he said, just louder than a whisper. My heart was beating so hard it hurt. “I figured it out.”
