“She didn’t say anything,” he said, sounding as if he were recounting his escape from a German bunker. “Not even when we were done.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Not a word. She just took off her clothes and that was it. We had sex. And then she got up and left.”

  His face was shaped like a hit and run.

  “So what’s the matter?”

  Logically he knew there shouldn’t have been which is why he felt all the more embarrassed about assuming there was. It didn’t feel soft, delicate, and special like he had hoped it would. It didn’t feel like making love. And maybe that was why he cried half-way through - which, more than likely, was half the reason why she got up and left.

  “Nah, it was great,” he said, doing his best to sound like a chain-smoking cowboy.

  Both scientists ignored the man wriggling on the screen before them. The sound too was muted so they couldn’t hear him weeping.

  “I have to admit,” said Graham. “Had my first full night’s sleep in years.”

  His silence implied that Isaac should ask more.

  “You had sex too?”

  Isaac was just happy the attention was off him.

  “Ha!” said Graham, almost falling back off his chair. “That’s cute. I’m twenty-three years married. We don’t have sex; we argue and then eat curry. No, not sex – not that I wouldn’t mind – but no, I uh….”

  He quickly checked his surroundings, sure that nobody was spying.

  “I started a martial art,” he said.

  And though he knew he shouldn’t, still he had to tell.

  “Wu-Shun,” he said furtively as if he had just uttered the name of the shooter on the grassy knoll. “But I’m sworn from saying any more.”

  Were this a movie, he would have already said too much. There’d be an explosion and the room would fill up with noxious gas just as scores of federal agents swooped in through ceiling ducts and by holes, blasted through all of the surrounding walls. There’d be no chance for escape. Both scientists would be hog-tied and gagged, and escorted to a secret underground facility where they would never be heard of or seen again

  “That’s Ok,” said Isaac.

  Talking about fighting made him nervous, almost as much as a real fight.

  “Alright, you twisted my hand,” said Graham. “So basically throw out everything you know about karate. Here’s what they won’t tell you in any school – the real secret to winning any hand to hand combat – it’s all in the way that…”

  His excitement bordered on mania. Were there a trampoline in the room, he’d be doing somersaults and backflips by now. If either one of them had bothered to look at their screens for even just a second, they would have noticed The Participant’s heart tachycardiac. If they weren’t so caught up on sex and karate, they might have heard him scream.

  “I changed my mind,” shouted The Participant. “Let me out. I wanna go home.”

  His voice, though, ‘neath all that whirring and banging, was deaf even to himself. When the machine finally did stop, it was so quiet that he had no idea what to do. His ears rang and his thoughts of escape, though insoluble, had dissolved into a trillion itsy-wincey pieces that floated around his head leaving him mesmerized, astonished, and confused.

  He didn’t know how to speak. He didn’t think he could. For a man of letters, that was a strange thing. He just lay there petrified, like a punished child, having an instinct to protest but totally unsure how.

  A second later the enormous door opened. It did so suspiciously - suspiciously because it was done with the care of a thief or a neer-do-well. The Participant, trapped inside the damn machine, held his breath and stiffened every muscle in his body for it was the only thing that he had the liberty to do.

  “You must be XT-416,” said The Professor, slithering in beside him, pressing one of his hands on the man’s ankles before pulling tighter on the strap that tied his leg to the table. “In your file,” he said. “Under profession, you have written artist.”

  He smiled in a way that could unsettle a rattlesnake.

  “That’s right,” said The Participant. “I’m a writer.”

  He didn’t at all sound pleased or proud in any way.

  “Are you famous?” asked The Professor. “Have I heard of you?”

  It was a question he was often asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  For it was a question that he had no idea how to answer.

  “What do you write?”

  “Fiction.”

  The Professor gasped.

  “What a delight,” he said.

  The Participant had, for the moment at least, forgotten his ordeal. He didn’t struggle in his restraints nor did he feel like he was trapped inside one of his terrible stories anymore.

  “Never is man closer to God than when he is acting as one.”

  His face changed. His eyes looked hollow; like holes in the earth, bored to its very core. They were black and misshapen. They looked like the void that was often written about in biblical texts.

  “To create,” he said. “From nothing. From a formless void come light, and from light come man; and unto man, do what thou wilt.”

  Then he tip-toed around the side of the machine, peeking in through the gaps in the coil-like as a prowler would; peek through gaps in the blinds.

  “Of all the colours,” he said, his voice changing as swiftly as his demeanour. “Which is your favourite?”

  A question like that should have sounded pleasant.

  “I don’t know,” said The Participant.

  He could feel him there gawking and creeping about.

  “One would think you should know your favourite colour,” said The Professor. “What if it were to be the last thing you should ever see?”

  At this point, neither man had seen the other’s face. By his voice alone, though, The Professor sounded as if he were the type of scholar who lectured in zeppelin’s and spent his weekend atop of high horses, sicking bloody thirsty hounds onto vile and wicked vermin – at least that’s how The Participant felt.

  “What if you were confronted with all the colours in the spectrum and on your very last breath you were to look at the wrong one?”

  Then he pressed a button and the table exited the bore.

  “There you are,” he said, smiling.

  One that was shaped like a snake’s forked tongue.

  “Why do you look so scared?”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said The Participant. “I don’t need the money.”

  The latter was a lie. He was a writer; of course he needed money.

  “If you had the will to change your mind I might be more convinced to believe you,” said The Professor. “Do you believe in free will?”

  “Of course,” said The Participant. “I mean, yeah I suppose.”

  “You should not,” said The Professor.

  He made it sound as if, like pouring juice into his anus, the idea of free will were a fad that he should avoid altogether. The way he spoke, it was clear that this was not a debate.

  “As a matter of consciousness,” he continued. “You are no more able to change your mind than say, a fish is able to change the tide.”

  He was like a cat playing with its food.

  “I suspect that should offer you comfort somewhat, no?”

  There was nowhere for The Participant to look except into the madman’s eyes.

  “Please,” he said. “I want to leave. I don’t wanna die, not anymore. I’m not ready.”

  The Professor touched the side of the man’s face.

  “No-one ever is,” he said, “Even when one is.”

  Then he tapped on his broach as if it were a hint or a clue.

  “A proper ending,” he said, “Must come as a complete shock, but as such, as little surprise.”

  And then he pressed the tip of a syringe gently into The Participant’s vein.

  “You’re going to die now,” he said as he slowly pushed the liquid into The Participant’s vein. “This will sting a little bit. But no more than a light sunburn. Tell me,” he said. “Do you believe in God?”

  There was nothing inappropriate about the question except maybe, how it was asked. It came across as more of a threat than anything else.

  “I don’t know,” said The Participant, though he was leaning more towards a yes, now that his heart was starting to race.

  Truth was, he had never actually thought about God; no-one ever did, not until they were dangling from the edge of a cliff or looking down the business end of a shotgun. Now that he was about to die, though, the idea of a Heaven and angels and leprechauns and fairies seemed more than ideal. At the very least, it seemed like nothing to be ashamed of.

  “Should I?” he asked, his voice garnished in worry.

  The Professor smiled. It was an odd smile; troubling one would say.

  “It does not matter one way or the other,” he said, his voice peppered with reason.

  And then he removed himself from the room.

  Track 12 (Yellow)

  “Who are you?” shouted The Master, his hands clasped to his enormous belly like some hardened mountaineer.

  There was silence in the class as if each were conditioned to know that not every question should be answered; as if there were no answer, none that they would know in their pubescent wisdom. So they stood with mouths agape, waiting for said wisdom to be bestowed upon them.

  Graham, too, looked on with sheer wonder in his eyes. He didn’t dare assume he knew anything; not within these four walls. It was as if his kimono had been woven, stitch by stitch, from a single thread of cotton that had been toiled with bloodied hand from a single seed of humility. It stripped him of his ego, of his esteemed and higher self, and with it, dissolved him of the fears and anxieties that so often followed suit. Gone were the thoughts of getting older and, not only having to mourn his youth but also, having to surrender to the inexorable will of entropy.

  “You are not,” said The Master. “Just as I am not, too.”

  Were this a Hollywood movie, smoke would be billowing out from beneath him while packs of wolves howled in the valley below. There would be flashes of lightning and claps of thunder on the ends of his every syllable, and he would be levitating, like a God, above the very mountaintop from which he stood.

  “Am I my body?” he said. “Or am I somewhere inside of it. And if I am my body and it is inside this room, then am I also the room, the Earth, and the entire universe? Am I my thoughts and ideas, those which come unto me like the rising of a tide or the clouds that paint portraits in the sky? Am I a direction; left or right – a set of ideals, wrong or right? Am I good or bad, a God or a devil, or am I the canvas that is as much a work of art as it is the formless mess of a young child? Am I the version of me that I, like Hamlet, proclaim to be, or am I the version of me how others see me? Am I the hero or the villain? Am I the father or the son? Who am I if I am none of these things? Who am I if I am if I am all of them?”

  This would have been the point in the movie where hundreds of ninjas appeared out of the smoke, flipping and rolling around the screen like pert balls of spinifex.

  “The first rule of Wu-Shin is to accept that you are no more in control of yourself than your self is in control of the stars in the sky and the ocean of darkness that divides them.”

  It was like every movie Graham had watched as a boy except now he was the ninja, or at the very least, he was becoming one. He didn’t just listen to his master’s words; he absorbed them like a drop of rain on a droughty seed. Second, by second he could feel himself changing as if the person he had thought he was all these years were not a person at all, but instead, a poorly imagined thought.

  “I am a single point of consciousness,” continued The Master. “My focus is the tip of the brush and my will is the painter’s hand.”

  Then he struck the air a dozen times with his iron-like fists at a speed that would be absurd to even try to measure. Any man his size would have struggled to move at even one-fiftieth of his pace; but The Master wasn’t any other man, and his students who watched on in delirium were, like the calm before the storm, in awe of what they would one day become.

  “When we fight,” said The Master. “We pray to many gods. In the ring, in each corner, we pray to a single God to bless us. In one we pray to the God of Earth so that our bodies may be as strong as mountains, impervious to the will of man. In the next, we pray to the God of Fire so that our blood boils like magma that erupts from our crushing fists. In the third, we pray to the God of Water so that we are formless and move with grace and fluidity around any brutish obstacle. And finally, we pray to the God of Wind so that our lungs are always full and in war, we never tire.”

  Were this a movie, this would be the point where the camera turned to focus on our hero whose eyes were more magnificent than the sudden death of a thousand suns. The camera would slowly pan down to his hands which, like the birth of some gargantuan black hole, clenched into planet smashing fists.

  “If I told you my past,” he said. “Where I have come from, and what I have had to endure, I am certain that none of you would believe me – but it’s true.”

  He didn’t elaborate; he didn’t have to.

  “Have I killed a man?” he said, again, letting the silence speak for itself. “If I have, it was because I had already weathered every possible alternative. No warrior longs for death. He loathes it. He fights for love and peace and to one day have hands that just as easily foster life as they do, so swiftly take it away. It does not matter if I have or if I have not killed a dozen men; what does matter is what has kept me grounded all these years.”

  Though he looked incapable of any more than a second helping; that alone was part of his mystique. The whole class, though, followed his every word like scripture, baited to his mystical lure.

  “Footwork,” he said. “Today we focus on footwork,”

  A quiet awe swept the room.

  “If your fists are the noble nectareous fruit that swing from your long arboreous limbs,” said The Master, holding his clenched fists like swollen cantaloupes. “Then your feet are its bitter and humble roots. So then, what does this mean for the martial artist?”

  He wiggled his toes as if there was little sack of gold attached to his feet.

  Graham looked on like a child listening to their father explain the mysteries of the universe. Every word was the absolute truth and like the young child, the more he listened, the more he forgot about the world outside.

  “The footwork represents that which keeps us whole and humble as human beings so that we are not toppled over by the weight of our momentous spirit and our own best intentions.”

  And then he spun around in fantastic circles, seeming as if he was out of time with the music playing in the background, and out of touch with his own centre of balance as he heaved and hoed, like a bag full of lard in the open sea.

  Never, though, did he tip. Never did he fall.

  “Footwork” he shouted, prancing about to Mozart’s Violin Concerto N°3, but a version that sounded as if the orchestra were playing from inside of a wood chipper.

  His grace and style were undeniable; it was incomparable. Though the top half of his body sloshed about unevenly, his feet grasped themselves to the floor and each seemed to have their own mind, bending and turning so as to allow The Master’s body to jerk about inconceivably whilst still having perfect centre, perfect balance, and like a mongoose, always ready to strike.

  “I want to confuse my opponent, to lead him out of rhythm so that he is dizzy and incapable of sound judgement. Watch my feet,” he said, as his stubby little toes fluttered about. “Watch how they keep time with the music. But watch too how my body and arms act independent of one another, neither keeping the same rhythm. I strike with my feet first. Now follow me.”

  The rest of the class followed suit, zipping around the room like their master, each with the most splendiferous poise. The tops of their bodies slung about drunkenly as if evading a plethora of deadly strikes; while the lower half of their bodies shifted and turned with magnificent precision.

  “It is not enough to have feet,” he declared, his majesty seemingly unaffected by his obligation to orate. “You must plant yourself in them.”

  Graham stopped for a second to consider what that meant. Unlike the others, he couldn’t twirl and pivot while he talked or thought; it was one or the other. And whereas everyone else seemed to glide about with almost as much charm, Graham stumbled about as if legs were something he had only recently acquired, tripping over himself and anyone within reach. There was no splendour in how he carried himself and he, more than anyone else, knew this.

  “You are in your head, swinging about,” said The Master, lifting Graham back on his feet. “It is no wonder you have no balance. Your thoughts whoosh about and they are heavy and filled with rocks and dirt and mud. Am I right?”

  “It’s stuff at home,” said Graham. “And work is….”

  “I do not care,” said The Master. “And neither should you. Your work here will transcend to your personal life but only if you let go of your personal life. You cannot help it or anyone else if at first, you cannot help yourself.”

  Then he wiggled his toes as if each held its own specific meaning.

  “Footwork,” he said. “Represents family and loyal friendship; both of which are vital if one is to stay grounded, especially in a world where trees are named after their fruit. Here is your family. We are your brothers.”

  The whole class high—fived.

  “You are too much in your head. You must stop being you and just be. Let your consciousness sift down to your feet and root itself there. It is from the feet where you will fight, not from the head. Understand?”