The next day Ax began to understand.
They had come for him at 6am. “Please, let us chain you,” they had said. So fucking politely. Ax had let himself be chained to the wall. The old man from the day before had entered the room, then. He smiled. A gentle smile.
“Good, I see you are ready. Are you ready?” he asked. The smile on his face was about the most peaceful smile Ax could ever remember seeing. Then they had put a blindfold on him. Now he could see nothing. He listened to the voice of the old man, and thought about Rainbow, wondered what Cookie was doing
“The training will be brutal. We will hurt you. A lot. But we want you to know why.
You will learn. We are going to blindfold you all the time, as you , well, can see. He laughed. But, we will hit you. Sometimes with fists, hands. Sometimes with sticks. Later, we may use iron bars. You will be hurt. Then we will remove the blindfold and your teaching will begin. Listen well to this teaching as it will, in the end, save you much pain. There is always someone bigger. There is always someone or something you fear. Know this. The only fear is inside of you. Without the mind, fear does not exist. If you are scared of being hurt, if you are scared of pain? Accept it all and you will know no fear. The ancient samurai welcomed death. They had no fear of it and so they became truly fearless. The worst that could happen was death and they had no fear of death. You must become like this. When you leave here you will either do so in a box, or you will leave free of fear.”
They had left then, all of them, leaving Ax chained to the wall.
His training was brutal, to say the very least. He was locked up twenty-two hours of every day. For two hours they let him loose. He could go anywhere, do anything, they told him. Because we will know where you are. Always. Even if you wanted to escape you couldn’t. Please don’t forget, you are here to learn. If you learn what we have to teach you, you will become almost invincible.
One day Zau had asked him, told him a question. “You know, I am sure, the internet videos of blocks, punches by “martial artists.” I think you know they are all, how you say, crap?” Ax had nearly laughed at Zau’s accent. “Yes, they are crep!”, he replied. “Very funny, I am sure,” said Zau. Never, ever block a punch with the opposite hand. So, if he throws a right? You take him to his left, your right. Got it?” Ax smiled, of course he “got it” That is when an unseen stick exploded in his stomach. “So, you are listening?” asked Zau. “Yes,” gasped Ax. “So, now, we start again, training. If he swings with his right, you take him to the left. If he swings with his left, you take him to the right. “ “But, how will I take him?” asked Ax. “That is what you will now learn,” said Zau. It is not just so. You “can” block him with your left, but you must always take time to the right. Likewise, if he throws a left, you can block him with your right, but you must take him to your left. Understand?” Ax nodded. “No, you do not yet understand. But you will.”
Ax had listened to the blah blah and rolled his eyes. That was before. Now there was the daily routine. He blocked left and right, took them to where they did not, could not go. But then, they came when he was asleep. Dragged him from his bed and chained him to the wall. Then they put on his blindfold beat him. Every day. No mercy. Later in the day the old man would come. Ax knew it was the old man not because they took off his blindfold and they would talk, no he knew it was the old man because he had learned to smell him. The old man talked most. He asked Ax questions. How did he feel,now? Did he understand? About the taking to the left, or right? The old man talked about pain, about intellectual freedom, politics, food, balance. And then came the blindfold, then torture, then free, then blindfold, then torture. And on it went. For how many days? Months? Ax had no idea. They talked about race, countries, quantum physics, light travelling through a vacuum. Eventually Ax no longer feared the next day. Rather, he began to look forward to talks with the old man. First came the blindfold, then the teaching. OK. They had been doing this so long now he knew, they were not trying to kill him. If they were trying to kill him he would be dead already. No. These guys were highly trained. They knew where to hit him without killing him. OK. No problem. The teaching was torture. But Ax began to function on instinct. The old man was fascinating. And now? Coming from the right? He took them to the left. Coming from the left? He took them to the right. He saw clearly now what he had never seen, so obvious, before. If you “block” a punch, say, from the right, with your right hand? The other guy, if he is quick enough, can get you with his left. It was all so simple. Now he knew how to block the right hand punch with his left. It was always on the outside, and he took the guy to his other side. Easy. Deadly.
The thing that Ax could not know is that later, in a different place, in a different time this very same method of torture would be used upon him. Calmly. Deadly. To hurt him.
Every day. The same. He had no idea if it was a fist, a stick, or even a block of iron. But it exploded into his stomach making him immediately puke up the last food he had inside. Then, his balls exploded, perhaps a plank of wood? A foot? Then, something broke his nose. He heard the crack and felt blood run down over his lips. And so it had continued for, how long, he had no idea. How many times had his nose been broken? Perhaps it was only a few minutes. It felt like forever. And he swore to himself, right there and then. If this was it? So fucking be it. No surrender. It was then that he realized that resistance was futile. Surrender was futile. There was no point. There were not going to stop when they had “achieved” their goal, because their goal had nothing to do with achievement. So Ax just gave in. He went back in years, back to his training. He did not give up. He just gave in. The pain in his balls was a dull, sickening, slow pain that made him sick. The pain in his nose was easy. It was the pain in his head, trying to understand the why that was the worst.
When it stopped he heard the door close. He was surrounded by total silence. Some time later the door had opened. Someone came in. He felt the blindfold being taken from his eyes. Felt his wrists being freed from the chains. He was helped gently to the cold ground. Someone wrapped a blanket around his damaged body. He could smell soup. It smelled like Miso? Small spoonfuls were fed to him. They were so gentle, so tender. He began to weep. Not for the pain. He had known pain before. He wept because they had total control. And they were being so fucking kind. And he wept for his memories. He wept for Cookie. He tried to lash out but a hand caught his arm and gently lowered it back to his side. “There is no need for violence, we are here to help you. Soon you will understand. We are finished here. You are one of the very, very few who have survived our training. You will discover, later, talents you did not know you had. We are here to bring such talents to the fore. You will understand later. Eat and sleep, now, child.”
And so he had cried into the soup as he tried to eat it. Cried like a small child. Why did they hurt him so? He cried again as he remembered Jade, and how they had hammered her. Without this training? What chance did she have? Where was Cookie now? What had he done? Why were they now so kind? Please, oh please, he sobbed.
When his soup was finished they wrapped him gently in linen and placed him on his bed, now replenished with cotton sheets. He fell asleep to the smell of herbs and oils, felt hands, female hands gently rub the oils deep into his body. Ax thought this must be what Jesus felt. He caught himself. He must be hallucinating, he thought. Then he fell over into a space that had been waiting for him for so long, and they put him on his bed, asleep before they caught his head and placed it gently onto the new pillow.
When he awoke he was in what looked to be some kind of temple. The second stage of his training was about to begin.
The monk-man spoke. Death has many forms, he said. Like life. You may die at any moment. And you may begin to truly live at any moment. What is the difference? Perception, he said. We are surrounded by nuclear waste, here, on this beautiful island. The islanders get sick. We don’t. Because we choose not to. Health, life, is all in the head. Change your head and you change your life. Change your life and you change your view of death. Real death is the tourists. Tourists come from Taiwan on small boats. They stay in the hotels around the island. They stay for two, three days and then they leave. They see nothing, understand nothing. We stay all the time. Don’t be scared of us. We are not going to hit you anymore. Not physically. But we are going to mess with your head. When we are finished you will know who you are. Because who you are does not exist. When we are finished with you you will become who you need to be at any given moment. Who are you, Alex?
Now, breath. You are on an island with twelve nuclear reactors. This island is built on a volcano. There is much seismic activity. It is pure madness. But mainland China needs the power. You could die at any moment. Do you choose to live? We will show you how.
The monastery , training, sitting, people standing over him, never knowing when he would be hit, he learned to feel their intention. At first he was always hit. By the end of the training he blocked everything.
The second part of the training was even worse than the first. Not because of the physical abuse - that was non-existent - it was the mental strain. Ax was put to meditation, for hours at a time. All he had to do was stay awake, attentive, aware of everything around him at all times. Ax came to love the quiet time sitting alone in the monastery. He imagined he could hear the plants, getting larger. He imagined he could hear insects talking to each other. He felt at peace for the first time in his life. He learned to feel the air, love, breathing through him. He now knew he loved Cookie. Just as he accepted that his life was not her life. Intention. He realized that he could, indeed, just as they said in the quantum physics lessons in his cell, create his own reality.
Then came the applied part. It was not spoken about. When he had first started they told him it would arrive when he was ready. Apparently he was now ready.
A man with a large, long stick stood in front of him. Ax was told to meditate. They also told him that at any time, purely random, the man with the stick would lash out at him. It was Ax’s job to be ready and to block the attack.
The man stood over Ax in a constant state of readiness, the stick raised ready to lash out. Sometimes it was ten minutes, other times it took a few hours before the stick would rush towards his head. If Ax was not fast enough he would be hit with a vicious blow to the head or arm or leg.
It was after a few months of this that he realized. He knew when the blow was coming. He had developed a sense of when the attacker was going to attack. His body had done it, naturally. As soon as the attack started Ax raised his arms or feet to block the attack. And he blocked it every time. The old man was standing in the corner, watching. It was that day that Ax was “released.” They took him to his cell, to his room and stuck a large needle in his arm. Five seconds later Ax was unconscious on the floor.
It was three days later when he awoke. In reality Ax had been with his masters for three months. Ax felt three years. It was three months. It had been a long and hard journey. One he did not even know , yet, that he had taken. He was in the forest. On a camp bed. A letter was in his hands. It was a short letter. “Boat at sundown,” it said. “You go the same way you came.”