Eye of the Storm

Women on the Verge

From "Eye of the Storm"
From Women on the Verge

By BK Loren

I lived in a city in the Southwestern desert. There was a college nearby, and I enjoyed walking my dog on campus in the late evening. That evening, it was cool, a rare thing in a place where the night heat usually swells against your windows and hugs you body uncomfortably. I lived on Central Avenue, the main road in the most urban part of town. In contrast to the neon lights that buzzed, and the strip joints that bellowed bass music and smoke every time a patron entered, the college campus was quiet. It seemed safe. Nightly, I walked my dog through the brouhaha of the city to the college campus, where the noise fell away. My dog and I usually strolled to a duck pond where she, an Australian shepherd, gently herded the ducks back into the water if they strayed too far onto land. Infrequently, I saw a few students carrying books on their way home from the library. Otherwise, I was completely alone.

That evening, the sun had set, and the adobe buildings, their soft curves, their tanned color, took on an almost human quality. In the unusually cool air, everything seemed forgiving. So I was unprepared for what happened next.

On my way back from the pond, I walked through an outdoor corridor, and my dog ran ahead of me. I was a bit worried for her as she ran, because she had just been spayed and her stitches still held the skin of her tummy together. The shadows of the pillars in the corridor crossed the concrete in front of me like a maze, and I watched my dog run, and I watched, as if in slow motion, a large, black boot shooting out sharply from one of the shadows and landing a violent kick squarely on my dog's abdomen. My dog yelped. The kick lifted her a few feet off the ground. She curled into a ball.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I yelled.

In seconds, I was face to face with a young man, well-built, about twenty. His head was shaved. He wore Lee jeans tucked into knee-high Doc Marten boots; he wore a white T-shirt and suspenders. His five or six friends were dressed just as he was. Their forearms were tattooed with black swastikas and crosses.

"What did you say?" he said.

"I said, 'What the fuck are you doing?'" I replied.

His eyes lit. His buddies circled around me, and he delivered a violent and sickening threat: "I'm gonna rape your ass," he said.

I looked directly at him. I did not back away or move. I said, without yelling, "Would that make you feel like a big man. You kicked a helpless dog. Now you're going to rape a woman. That's a sorry idea of courage."

He stared at me. His friends waited. I waited. He was clearly the leader. I gathered in my head every technique Sifu had ever taught me, and every technique I had learned from other instructors since I left him. I saw every movement, saw myself executing the movement calmly, without obstruction. The other guys closed in a little. But the leader did not move. I stared at him, and in a split second, I saw him -- small, weak, angry, in pain. For a moment I felt compassion. And suddenly, his shoulders sank slightly, almost imperceptibly. But I saw the movement, and I knew what it meant. I took a deep breath, unlocked my eyes from his gaze, and walked through the closing circle of young men to my dog. I checked her stitches. She was fine, so I leashed her and continued on my way home.

As I left, I heard his voice. "I'm gonna rape your ass," he called from a distance. His rage echoed through the corridors, but it did not sound like a threat this time; it sounded like a cry of utter pain and powerlessness. I kept walking, tending to my dog.

On my way home, I understood why Sifu sometimes asked us to stand in one place for a n hour. The stance in which we stood was not a comfortable one; it was a low stance, designed to sink ch'i to the lower abdomen. An hour is a long time. It's sixty minutes, or thirty-six hundred seconds. During the five-minute face-off I had with the six young men that night, I could have sworn an hour had passed.

As I walked home, I remembered standing in the kwoon. I remembered the pain that set in to my legs at about the fifteenth second. If I ignored the pain, it grew stronger. If I recognized it, I became more aware of my legs as my legs. After the pain went away, I still had fifty-nine minutes to deal with the thoughts that came into my mind. The first thought was always I'm getting out of here. But my legs decided to stay. I stood. It usually took about fifty minutes for my entire life, every mistake I'd ever made, every great achievement I'd attained, to pass before my eyes. Ten minutes remained. My body had quit hurting. I'd quit mulling over everything that made me feel like a piece of crap, and everything that made me feel like a god, and then I was left with ten minutes to be exactly who I was. In those ten minutes, my life became my life.

BK LOREN lives in Colorado and is currently at work on a collection of essays.