“In one timing, Swagger,” said Doshu, whatever that meant.

“I-”

“No talk! One timing. One timing!”

What did one timing mean?

“Make shield of fists.”

“I-”

“Place body sideways.”

“Okay, but-”

“Keep shoulders level with opponent’s fists.”

“I’ll try if-”

“Keep rear leg open, Swagger.”

“Like this?”

“Keep stance same as opponent’s.”

He tried to do it all, and of course could do none of it. There was no end, no progress, no start, no finish, no lesson plan. Doshu gave him opaque orders, shouted commands to “Approach no-think!” as though he were ordering a trainee to drop and give him fifty. It went on, pointlessly, forever. Fourth day? Fifth? Afternoon of first? Who knew? He realized at a certain point the only way to deal with this wasn’t to think about it being “over.” Don’t think about it “ending.” It is not a thing of beginning and ending. Concentrate only on exactly what is before you. Do exactly what is stated. Do it, don’t think about it, analyze it, try to “learn” it. Just do the fucking thing, and do not place it in time or cause-effect, or this, then that. See it-this seemed to help-as shooting. You simply have to teach your body the way. The body knows the way, so that you don’t have to instruct it; it is on subconscious autopilot, there’s no particular sense of having “mastered” a thing, it’s just that all the work is connecting and the body is learning things without telling its owner.

Maybe he was getting it, sort of.

Swagger cleans the floor of the dojo on his hands and knees. With a soft wet cloth and a pail of warm water, he scrubs each and every square inch. He goes over the woodwork and reaches spots that have not been reached before. He gives himself to this work, taking pride in the perfection of it.

And in cleaning he came across a little corner where a few treasures of ego were on display: it was in what he knew to be the deity alcove, the spiritual heart of the dojo, where the truly supplicant went to worship.

What Swagger saw, beyond an indecipherable kanji banner and a few photos of elders who must have founded this particular style or school or way or whatever, were pictures from a past full of men and boys and, lately, girls. All were sweaty, all in triumph, all in gi and hakama, and Bob always recognized Doshu, and in some of the earlier ones he recognized his sponsor in this madness, Dr. Otowa, supremely cool and intelligent. In one Otowa and Doshu stood with a boy, who by the cast of his eyes and the wit in his mouth and the sternness in his forehead had to be a little Otowa, a son, with some silly trophy or something, all of them sweaty, all of them exhilarated. It was like a Little League photo from the ’70s, so far distant in time and place as to be all but unrecognizable, all of it however speaking of some unbroken line, father to son, going back through the generations.

You saw these photos all over Arkansas, though usually a dead deer or a baseball bat or a football was part of it, instead of a kendo shinai; it was the same, the father passing on what he knew, the boy, though distant, hungry for it.

“Swagger! Sword, now. Now!”

Doshu is a drill sergeant. He’s a yeller, a pressure cooker, a demander. But it’s so hard because it’s not progressive in a western sense; there’s no feeling of going from here to there. The edges of things are blended. Somewhere-the start is indistinct-he’d moved into kata, which was a series of moves with the sword, a kind of offensive syncopation so that the blade came out, flowed around the shoulders to a certain perfect position, then was cut with, the cut riding a rhythm, never just a brute expression of force. It seemed to have something to do with wave dynamics, a sense of harnessing a blast of energy that would rise from one hip, course through the body to the opposite shoulder, flow downward into the fists, which would then surge in opposing directions, bringing the blade through with an amazement of unwilled speed and force, all without trying. Doshu would swing lazily at him with his bokken and Bob would block it, feel it sliding off his own wooden blade, and see how to ride it down and open up a way to the man’s innards, then turn back and slip into another kata.

“Attack and abide in one,” Doshu said, “migi yokogiri,” and Bob delivered his side cut.

“By the false, the true is obtained,” he also said, “hidari kesagiri,” so that Bob tried to obtain the truth through a left-to-right diagonal.

He clarified by adding, “Beat the grass and scare up the snake, tsuki,” and Bob thrust, trying to scare up snakes.

Then to make it absolutely clear: “Use thought to approach no-thought; use attachment to be unattached.”

He then tried speed. A Swagger gift: fast, good hands.

He brought maximum speed to a horizontal stroke from the draw-nutisuke-and you’d have thought he’d blown his nose on a flag or something.

“No! No! Speed wrong. Speed bad. Speed sick, Swagger. No speed. No speed!”

It was not the only time the obscure little man seemed really agitated, but something about speed annoyed him deeply.

“Speed sick. Speed bad.”

He said it over and over.

Don’t think of speed, Bob cautioned himself. If you connect with speed, it’s all wrong. No, no, no. Slow, sure, smooth. Smooth is fast. Fast is not fast. Fast is slow. Smooth is fast. Be smooth.

“Moon in the cold stream like a mirror.” That was the strangest, yet it was what Doshu would always come back to. Opaque, cute even, some Asian cornball thing from an old TV show or other. It felt too self-consciously “mystic.”

He remembered Yoda from some Star Wars thing: “There is no try. Only do.” Something like that. Maybe he was some aged fool of a Luke Skywalker on a strange planet far from home, trying to master a little wizard’s poetry, which would only work if you believed it, yet he could not believe it at his heart, because he was a U.S. Marine and what he believed in was obedience to orders, obedience to traditions, never surrendering, and breaking the weapon down to clean it.

Yet he saw that was itself a form of Zen or bushido or whatever this little guy was selling. It wasn’t action, it was belief. You had to give yourself to it and trust it. You had to give up on the you part of you, because the more of you there was, the less belief there was and the more vulnerable you were.

Day and night flowed together. Bob never saw the sun, not after the first morning’s work outdoors. He slept in snatches, was pulled from unconsciousness, dragged to the dojo floor, and put through paces. Some children watched and laughed. They thought he was really supremely funny, big, tall, clumsy, gangly. Sometimes even Doshu smiled.

But it did seem a rhythm arrived somehow, sometime. The moves began to feel all right to him, possibly even good. The less he tried, the better he did. Maybe it was that he was so exhausted he didn’t care anymore. But he was learning smoothness.

Doshu stood across from him; the bokken flashed toward his face, and Bob was fast enough to parry and ride the sword down. He saw three next steps: he could rise off the pinned sword and go for a horizontal cut-migi yokogiri-that would take Doshu across the chest; he could pivot inward, getting so close to Doshu that Doshu was helpless, and drive backward for a penetrating strike to the chest, tsuki; or he could float backward, find a new stance, and look for another, larger opening.

While he was thinking, Doshu was cutting. Doshu had reversed, come out of the pressure of the upper blade, and stepping away, clipped him with two inches in the larynx. If the swords had been steel instead of wood, he’d be on the floor trying to hold the last of his seven pints of blood in his body, but he wouldn’t be fast enough.