“I can’t stay with you.”

“No ‘stay with.’ Sickness. Sickness of ego. No win, no lose. You must fight in one mind.”

One mind. Now what the fuck did that mean?

“Concentrate but no concentrate. See but no see. Win but no win.”

What language was this?

“Stop,” the man said after a bit. “You like girls?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Remember best time with girl?”

“Well, yeah.”

“What?”

“Come on. I can’t tell you that.”

“When?”

“Oh, ’ninety-three. I hadn’t been no good for a long time. Hadn’t been with a decent woman in a long time. Got in a bad scrape and was on the run, and I made it to the house of a woman who’d been married to my spotter in Vietnam. In some way, I’d fallen in love with her picture first. She was what I lost when I lost him. It fucked up my head. So anyway, had no place to go and I went to her and it’s been okay ever since. She saved my life. And the sex part-well, hell, it don’t get no better.”

“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and cut him hard in the throat.

“Ach! Hey,” Bob shouted.

“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and whapped him hard with the blade in the right shoulder.

“No!” Bob said. “It’s too goddamn private. It ain’t for this. I can’t think of sex. It’s wrong.”

“You fool. No Japanese. Think of-think of smooth.”

Smooth?

What was smooth?

“I don’t-”

“No! Think of smooth!”

And what came to mind when “smooth” was ordered? He thought of the scythe. He thought of his solitude on the high arroyo, the long spring and early summer months, the old blade in his hand, the suppleness through his torso, the way he could only keep it going three hours the first day and by the end, when he was damn near finished, he could go fifteen, sixteen hours at a whack, thinking nothing of it. He thought of the small, tough desert scrub, the way that old blade, nothing a samurai would look at twice, would just smooth through it. Sending stalks and leaves aflying in a spray, with that oddly satisfying whipping sound as it rent the air.

Somehow he found something private and his own, and using it, he blocked the next cut, stepped inside it, and cut Doshu hard across the wrists, knowing that he’d purposely missed the wrist guard by a hair so that the blow really hurt the little bastard like hell.

Think of the scythe!

He wasn’t sure when it stopped, he wasn’t sure when he rested, but somehow he found himself outside in the dark, rolling carpets.

“Roll tight. Not tight enough! Roll tighter.”

What the fuck did this have to do with anything?

“Why are-”

“No why, fool! No why! Do! Do well, do right, do as Doshu say, do, do, do!”

And so he did. He rolled the thatchy carpet squares into tight rolls, pinned them, got twine around them, and tied them tight. The absurd image of tying off an elephant’s penis came to him, and when he smiled, Doshu hit him hard with the switch.

“No goddamn joke, gaijin.”

Finally, he got them secured. It took a while to get the feel of it, but finally he could do it fast enough, and when all the carpets were rolled, he’d accumulated quite a pile, maybe seventy-five or eighty.

“Now soak!”

“What?”

“Soak, goddamn! Soak!”

What this turned out to mean was loading the carpet rolls into a trough, then going to the hose and filling the trough to the brim. It was dark. What day was it? He thought it was the third day, though maybe it was the fourth day or maybe just the second. Who knew? Who knew when this little bastard was shutting up? Who knew when it would stop-

“You sleep now. Till dawn. Two hours. Then we cut.”

“Cut?”

“Yes, no bullshit, sword is cut. No cut, no sword. We cut, cut well, cut hard, or I kick you out, you hopeless gaijin, goddamn you to hell.”

Three hours later, slightly refreshed but still groggy as hell, he found himself in the back courtyard. Doshu had directed him to load five of the soaked, rolled carpets on five heavy wooden bases, each with a vertical rod from which sprang a spike. The carpets sank on the spike and stood upright, like little soldiers.

“Tameshigiri.”

“Okay,” said Bob.

“You watch, then do.”

The old fellow took the sword, bowed to it, withdrew it from its saya. Then he turned, faced the array of five carpet rolls on five spikes.

“Ai!” he shouted, and with a speed that Swagger almost could not follow he flashed through the formation, coiling and uncoiling, the blade whispering at warptime, just a sliver of light, a flash of shadow, a sense of willed disturbance in the cosmos, and in what had to be less than one second, he had precisely cut each carpet roll at about a 47.5-degree angle, talk about your “smooth,” and stood still.

“You do. Tameshigiri. Test cutting. Must cut real. Pretend all bullshit. Do it. Do it now.”

Bob bowed to the little god in his sword, not because he believed there was a little god in there but because not bowing would be one thing more to be yelled at for, unsheathed, and approached the closest rolled carpet.

“Jodan-kamae,” yelled the man, meaning on high, and being right-handed, Bob found that position, one leg slightly ahead of the other, almost a batting stance but not quite as his hands were far apart on the hilt of the weapon and he was thinking of killing.

“Ai!” he shouted, and brought the sword down hard at 45 degrees against the bundled material. With a vibratory clatter, the sword twisted in his hand and seemed stuck about a half inch in the bundle.

“No, no, no,” screamed the little man. “Angle all wrong, much stupidity. Angle of edge be same as angle of blade or you get bullshit like that. I told you. Do what I say.”

Bob readdressed his carpeted opponent, tried to shake his brain free of thought and not feel like an idiot in a bathrobe with a long knife cutting up carpets, but instead like a ferocious samurai warrior about to dispatch an enemy.

The sword seemed to move on its own; his mind was blank to results and he thought for a second he’d missed completely it was so smooth, but then with the lazy grace of the totally dead, the top half of the carpet roll fell off to hit the ground.

“Again!”

And again, and again, and again.

Somewhere in there, he progressed to two-cut sequences, cutting one way, reversing smoothly by the gyroscopic guidance in his elbows from the center of his shoulders, then coming back through it. He seemed to be getting it, feeling the power in his hands, making subtle corrections in the stroke, cutting not with arms but with the “center of his body,” that is, with the whole weight of the body behind it; there was weird satisfaction in watching the carpeting fall helpless before his blade.

“Not good,” said Doshu. “Is maybe okay. But no time to make good. Now you can cut a little, so tomorrow we teach you to fight.”

“Floating feeling in thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack and the last two fingers tight. When you take up sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. No fixedness. Hand alive. I no like fixedness in swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand.”

Yeah, sure, easy for you to say, thought Bob, and Doshu raised his own sword smoothly and with elegant grace and rhythm, a snake coiling to strike, a swan rising, his muscles in perfect syncopation.

Bob tried to model on him, feeling his body fight him, feeling ridiculous, a barefoot Fred Astaire with a pretend sword in a gymnasium.

“No! No, again, no thought. No thought. Too much thought.”

What does that mean?

He tried to concentrate but thought, See, it would be easier if he broke it down, one, two, three, then four, five, six, and I could practice each one and-

He pinched off the spurt of frustration and tried to feel the move, the slow rotation of hips, the uprising of the arms, that goddamned “floating feeling in thumb and forefinger,” and somehow it was just a little better.