Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures)
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Authors: Jacques Antoine
Girl Fights Back
, by Jacques Antoine
Copyright 2011
Jacques Antoine
All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in a review.
To Roxie and Miki,
for taking the initiative
.
Girl Fights Back
a novel
by Jacques Antoine
Chapter 5: Getting out the Door
Chapter 6: If you can’t stand the heat
…
Chapter 10: A Meeting on the Road
Chapter 12: Students Everywhere
Chapter 14: Back to the Woods Again
Chapter 21: A Foot in the Door
It’s like a kid swinging a bat in
his first little league baseball game. He has no idea what to expect, when to
begin his swing, when to commit to it completely, not to mention where to swing
the bat. Sure, he’s probably already practiced swinging at balls with his dad
out on the local ball field or at a batting cage. He knows how to hold the
bat—dominant hand on top, knuckles of both hands lined up, bat off his
shoulder—maybe even how to step slightly into his swing, shift his weight
to his back foot, swivel his hips and then his shoulders.
But facing the opposing pitcher in
a real, live game; now that’s something completely different. That kid on the
mound is not trying to teach him how to hit the ball. He’s throwing as hard as
he can, trying to get him out. His throwing motion is different from his dad’s.
It’s really hard to see the ball until it’s almost too late. His eyes don’t
focus on the right things; they don’t look in the right directions. He doesn’t
know what to look for. He closes his eyes and swings. Here’s what it sounds
like in sequence: thud... swish. Thud (the ball hits the catcher’s mitt), then
swish (the bat cuts the empty air). Later, after a lot more experience in game
conditions, he learns how to train his eyes to look and his mind to attend to
the right things.
That’s how sparring always seemed
to her: just a matter of seeing, of knowing where to look and what to look for.
She saw the telltale signs of her opponent’s intentions almost as soon as he
had formed them, certainly as soon as he committed to them. This was her third
martial art. First was
aikido
, a
beautiful, meditative discipline. All round, soft movements, deflecting the
opponent, but also absorbing him, enfolding him in the subtle folds of her own
movements, a caress, a rebuff... almost a kindness. Soothing the opponent,
allowing him to expend his energy fruitlessly, turning him around, twisting him
in an unexpected way. Perhaps he sees his effort is going awry even as it’s
happening to him, but there’s nothing he can do about it. The surprise she saw
written across his face gave a supreme satisfaction, better than victory and
his admission of defeat. Tap.
Then came
Shotokan
karate. This too was meditative in its own way. But also
much more angular, lots of jagged edges for an opponent to stumble on. Here, it
wasn’t so much a matter of absorbing, deflecting and twisting away as of
slipping inside and attacking her opponent’s attack from within. It was a new
way of looking at her opponent. Now, instead of looking for clues to the
ultimate destination of the attack and then derailing it, she learned to
examine the beginnings of his movements. What did they betray? How did he make
himself vulnerable at the very moment of his attack?
She would strike him just as he
began to strike her, but more quickly. A reverse punch to the solar plexus, or
perhaps a sharp knuckle to the inside of his bicep before he could even
straighten out his arm, or even a quick jab to his armpit. Instead of
retreating from him she stepped forward to meet his punch. She was so close he
couldn’t even reach her with his long arms! She didn’t hit him as hard as he
wanted to hit her, but it was hard to breathe after she hit him. It was
infernally frustrating, and puzzling. How did she know? She always seemed to
know!
That’s the way it always was with
boys. They tended to be bigger and stronger, usually faster, too. But they were
fascinated by their strength and it distracted them from the truly important
lessons. They absorbed all the techniques designed to make them strong and
fast, they broke boards, they wore their knuckles raw punching the heavy bag.
But it was much harder for them to understand the importance of learning to
see, to look. Sensei would drone on interminably about becoming still inside,
breathing in and out, feeling everything—not just the sweat on your
opponents brow and the little jitter in his chest—feel that, too, of course,
but so much else in addition. Feel the stillness every blow interrupts. Feel
the return of the stillness afterwards. There was just no room in a boy’s soul
for this lesson. Not yet. Maybe later. But she learned it all.
The strength and speed techniques
fascinated her at first, too. She wanted to be strong. She preferred kicking.
She was so much more flexible than the boys; it gave her what seemed like an
advantage. Learning to punch was cool, too. But she could never punch as hard
as she could kick. So she practiced as much as she could, in between schoolwork
and housework. But even though she was better and sharper than the boys at
kicking, she wasn’t better enough. She got a lot of bruises when they got a
punch or a kick in. They were embarrassed to hit her, but she got hit. She
would block their punches, too, but it still hurt.
One day she was looking one of the
boys in the eye over her gloves. He tried to look her eyes away. He wanted her
to see his left foot twitch so she would move to block it, leaving him an
opening for a left jab. It had worked before against others, even her. It was a
good move. It was supposed to just graze her chin. He would follow with a quick
front kick to her left knee and then as she was falling to the mat he would finish
her with a right hook to the left side of her face and a ridge-hand to the
throat. He knew he had to be fast, because she was limber and could easily land
one of those sneaky kicks to the side of his head as he leaned in with that
first jab. That’s why he wanted her to commit to a downward block before
committing himself to that first jab.
But she saw something else this
time as she watched him. She was all electricity, waiting for a sign in his
muscles she could react to, anticipate. Her synapses were poised to fire, a
state of high dynamic tension flowing out to her extremities and back again to
her core. She could feel the pattern, in and out, resonant, surging like a tide
of electricity. Her eyes examined him, looking in his eyes, at his shoulders, his
throat, his mouth (the muscles of the jaw sometimes twitch just as someone
makes a decision). His nerves resonated with energy like hers, though not
perhaps in sync with her.
Then it dawned on her: what she
sought was not to be found in any of those places. There was something else,
some
place
else to look. Her
attention slipped past his eyes, behind them, to something vital flowing behind
his eyes. His
qi
(or
chi
). She could feel it. She knew
instantly what he meant to do. Not in so many words. But she knew, she felt
with absolute confidence that she would recognize exactly when he had decided
to make his move, and what direction it would go to and come from.
He flicked his eyes down, twitched
his leg and waited for her to block. She did and he leaned in with his jab.
Before he knew what had happened, she had stepped just inside his fist. He
grazed her ear as she punched him hard to the center of his chest. He thought
of kicking before she hit him again, but her left knee struck just above his
knee as he fell backwards. She hit his chest, throat and chin three more times
before he hit the floor. Jaws dropped around the room. Everyone in the dojo
stood staring. They all recognized at once that she had just made a quantum
leap in her sparring. They sensed it, even as it came to pass, even though they
had no idea what it really meant.
Sensei smiled, drew her aside and
said quietly so only she could hear, “You hit him too hard. It left you
overcommitted.”
“I know,” she said, and she did.
She understood perfectly. He didn’t mean she had made a tactical error. There
was no flaw in her technique. But she had overcommitted emotionally. In the
thrill of the moment of insight, she had allowed herself the satisfaction of
hitting him as hard as he had meant to hit her. But it left her out of balance
emotionally, no longer sensing the flow of
qi
in the room. She gave herself over to the boyish thrill of hitting hard and
fast, of triumphing. It took an extra instant to pull herself back, to collect
herself emotionally, to open herself again to the energy of the room. Soon, she
would learn to control even that reaction.
From that moment on, no one in the
dojo ever managed to score a point on her again. Not even Sensei. The weekly
sparring competitions took on a different flavor for the others. She cast a
shadow over every match. They all knew the winner might eventually have to face
her. And there was something unsettling about it, a peculiar mix of
embarrassment and frustration. Her ability to read them was uncanny. None of
them quite knew how she always came out the winner, how she beat them to their
own punch. She never retreated, no matter how ferociously they charged. She
never let their size or strength faze her. She never allowed them to make any
use of their apparent advantages.
She saw what they did not see, felt
what they did not feel, because she looked where they did not look. It was, in
fact, a new way of perceiving, of being in the world. It changed her whole
life. When her dad picked her up in the family car, he knew. It was obvious on
that first day. She walked like a tomboy, as usual. Her strong shoulders and
quick legs looked the same as always. But she held her head at a slightly
different angle. Her father noticed.
Her hands were stronger and coarser
than one might expect in a girl, but not as large as a boy’s. If a boy with a
crush on her—she was quite pretty in her way, though she seemed to have
little interest in exploring that side of herself—tried to hold her hand,
he might not notice how different her hands were, what they could do in the
dojo.
But she could tell from his hands
exactly what he was capable of, that and the look in his eyes. Physical
strength, fighting strength, is more evident in a boy’s hands than in his arms
or shoulders. That’s where she could see if he had been trained. But the eyes
really said it all. Where did he look, what did he notice? Was he capable of
pulling back from visual immediacy and attending to something beyond, behind,
to
qi
? It seemed to anyone else like
an almost unfocused gaze. She never saw it in any of the boys she met.
In fact, the only people she knew
who looked in that way were Sensei and her father. With Sensei, it felt almost
like a secret they shared, even though he spent plenty of time trying to get
his other students to look in that way, too. But none of them had been able to
follow him. Sensei understood. That was the way it always was. He offered his
wisdom to them openly, without reservation, but none of them knew how take
advantage of his most important lesson. In fact, she was only the third student
in forty years to understand. Three was a lot, as he figured it.
With her father she never talked
about it. He encouraged her interest in the martial arts. He celebrated her
successes. But he remained curiously distant from the concrete reality of it.
Yet she never doubted he looked in the same way she did, saw what she saw, held
his head at an odd angle. They shared that, even if they never spoke of it.
Finally, she took up
kung fu
. She had already mastered two
other martial arts, so there weren’t any technical challenges for her here. She
just wanted to learn how to think and sense in a new way.
Kung fu
turned out to be a bit of an amalgam of all sorts of other
arts, kind of an encyclopedic discipline. It did not pretend to any deep unity,
as if the ancient monks thought to themselves: “Any of these techniques can
lead to inner peace. Study them all or only some of them. But the point is not
the mastery of any of them. Rather, keep studying them until you find the way
past them.”