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Date Posted: 19:54:00 03/26/10 Fri
Author: Nell
Author Host/IP: 201-211-228-130.genericrev.cantv.net / 201.211.228.130
Subject: Living the Normal Life 6
In reply to: Nell 's message, "Living the Normal Life 1" on 10:24:27 03/24/10 Wed

*******

Michael carefully dropped his armload of wood, then let the memories pushing painfully at his consciousness overwhelm him. Behind his closed eyelids he saw a kaleidoscope of images of Nikita, her eyes burning in anger, anguish or sadness as she told him in one of a thousand ways that she didn’t know him, that she couldn’t reach him, that she didn’t even want to try.

No matter that they had somehow managed to put those early days of their relationship behind them. No matter that despite the secret schemes and power plays, despite the tremendous price lying to and manipulating each other, all in the name of some non-existent greater good, had exacted from each of them, they did come to know each other, heart and soul, body and mind. No matter that in time, Nikita had known him as no one else ever had or ever could.

In Marie’s voice he heard again all the things he had sworn he would never intentionally do to another human being. He heard her anguish, her disappointment, her silence-fueled insecurities and fears. And he knew it was because of him, what he had done and what he had chosen not to do. The self-disgust he had lived with for so many years in Section – and had thought safely diffused in Minnesota – proved to only have been in hiding and ready to strike as soon as he gave it a chance, rose up and nearly choked him.

Michael had also heard in Marie’s despondent voice the end of their relationship. He was certain, now, that in time Marie would leave him of her own accord, even if she had not reached such a conclusion herself yet.

That this was just as he had planned was unexpectedly bitter fruit.

It also made the time he had left with Marie seem as precious as it would be fleeting.

Michael had liked Marie from the first, now he knew just how much he liked her, how much he had liked spending time with her as an adult, as a woman, as a lover, after years of going without that kind of companionship. He recognized how much he would miss her company when he no longer had it.

For he had heard his future in Marie’s hurt. He would not seek out another relationship, casual or not after this one was over. He knew now that there was no way to have the kind of relationship he wanted, and that any person worth spending time with was owed, if he had to constantly shield his lover from the truth of who and what he had been and what that meant about who he was now.

Unfortunately the pool of women with whom he could have that sort of completely truthful relationship was limited to one, and she might as well be living on the moon for all she was accessible by him.

Michael leaned over to recover his armload of wood, and decided that Adam’s sensibilities be damned, Marie could sleep in his bed tonight if she had a mind to.


************

In trying to make more nights to spend with Marie before time ran out on him, Michael implicitly urged Adam to seek out sleepover invitations, agreeing even to Adam spending more time with Jake. At first, things seemed to be working out better. Adam seemed pleased to be allowed more time with his friends and Marie was definitely pleased to be seeing more of Michael, and Michael, savoring what he knew was coming to an end, was pleased to be seeing more of Marie.

The tentative peace was shattered at three o’clock in on a Sunday morning at the beginning of May. For the first time in seven years, the beeping ring of Michael’s cell phone brought him awake instantly in the middle of the night, heart pounding and adrenaline surging.

Bolting upright, he plucked his cell phone from Marie’s bedside table. Flicking it open, he said, “Hello?”

And heard Adam’s drawling voice on the other end of the line. “Hey da-ad! Anything -- up?”

This was followed by a slightly hysterical chortle.

Terror was replaced by a fury so blinding Michael literally saw red behind his eyelids, even in Marie’s dark bedroom. “I will be there in twenty-five minutes. Do not make me come inside to get you.”

Closing his cell phone, he swept his legs out from under the tangled duvet, pausing only when he felt Marie’s hand on his arm. “Mike? Qu'arrive il?”

“Adam.” Michael stood and started dressing. “Being foolish. I’m going to get him now.” Sitting down on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks and boots, he said over his shoulder, “I’ll call you later.”

Driving through the dark and nearly empty city streets, Michael recalled a fellow tradesman once talking about raising children, saying that as babies you wanted to drown them, but by puberty you only wanted to beat them senseless. Michael had been flabbergasted at the time that any parent, much less one he had respected because of the man’s three pleasant and responsible children, should harbor such thoughts, much less admit them aloud. He had never once wanted to kill Adam when he was small, no matter how horribly he was behaving. True, lately, he had considered smacking him upside the head, hard, a few times, but tonight, tonight, he understood the sentiment completely. The thought of beating Adam black and blue, along with the thought of Jake Littman dead at his feet, was immensely satisfying.

It suddenly occurred to him, as well, that he had beaten trainees into submission, respect, and obedience for years – all in the guise of martial arts training, of course, but he had beaten them all the same. Even Nikita. As in turn, had he been beaten, first in prison and then later in Section.

He knew he wouldn’t beat Adam, tonight, or any time of course. But as to what he would do, he had no idea. Rage had gotten him up and out of Marie’s so fast he hadn’t yet focused on coming up with a suitable response.

The first white-hot heat of anger faded by the time he was halfway across the city. As his temper cooled, Michael was able to acknowledge that his fury had derived mostly from terror of the past reaching out to take Adam from him, rather than from the obnoxiously silly comment that Adam had actually made. As much as he wished that Adam recognized that such a call would inevitably trigger Michael’s memories of the past, Adam was still only thirteen and, mostly, still a boy who would not think of that possibility.

But he was on his way to get Adam anyway, so Michael did what he often did when he was stumped by a discipline problem – he asked himself what Roberta Wirth, had she been sober and attentive, ought to have done for Nikita in a similar situation.

The instant Adam slunk into the SUV on a cloud of distinctive odors, a bittersweet mingling of tobacco, beer and marijuana, Michael jettisoned his hazy plan for a gentle but firm father/son chat. Tossing aside any notion of what Bobbie Wirth ought or ought not to have done, Michael decided to do exactly what he had done when he was in charge of Nikita’s training and she had indulged in foolish adolescent behavior.

Pulling away from the curb, Michael headed directly for the dojo.



************


As Michael swung the SUV onto a major artery heading away from their house, Adam cried “Dad?! Where’re we going?”

“The dojo. I have keys.”

There was an incredulous pause, then, in the careful accents of someone pointing out the obvious to clearly insane and possibly dangerous person, Adam said, “It’s the middle of the night!”

“Sensei suggested I work your techniques with you, tell him if I think you’re ready for the Sho Dan tests. If you have enough energy to be making rude phone calls at this hour, we can make better use of the time.”

Adam said nothing for so long Michael began to wonder if he was going to a react at all, when he heard Adam’s tentative, “Um, Dad…?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really sorry.” Adam’s voice grew firmer, sounding like the verbal equivalent of squaring his shoulders. “I know I shouldn’t’ve done it. I’ll apologize to Marie tomorrow, honest.”

“Yes,” was all Michael said, and he kept driving toward the dojo.

As they pulled into the parking lot, Adam cleared his throat and tried again, sounding warier by the second. “Uh, Dad, I’m really tired…I don’t think I’ll be able to do a good job right now.”

“What did you and Jake do tonight?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw Adam bite his lip and look down at his tightly fisted fingers, but Adam didn’t reply to his question, so Michael parked the car and prepared to get out.

“We just hung out.” Adam’s tone was a peculiar mixture of anxious plea and sullen defensiveness.

Michael could remember hearing that same self-pitying whine all too frequently from Nikita during her first year of training. It annoyed him just as much now as it had then. “Doing what?”

When he received no answer, Michael got out and slammed his door, walked around to Adam’s side of the SUV, opened the passenger door and stood waiting for Adam to move. After a moment in which he wouldn’t look Michael in the eye, Adam slipped out of his seat, making as wide a berth around his father as possible, and followed Michael into the dojo.

Once inside, Michael headed directly for the locker room, turning on the lights as he went, Adam trailing after him.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

Now that he could see him clearly, Michael looked Adam over carefully and saw that his son was tired, probably even as tired as he claimed to be. His dark eyes were large and dull in his pale face, and exhaustion was pulling all the childish softness out of his skin, revealing more clearly than ever the shape of his jaw and the arch of his cheekbones, a living echo of his mother. The out of the ordinary situation also brought home to Michael just how much Adam had grown over the school year – he was at least three inches taller than he had been last fall, maybe four. Like most of his friends, Adam had the doughy in-transition-from-child-to-youth look, despite being so wiry, but tonight Michael thought that chrysalis was more transparent than ever, and he could see more of the shape of the man to come.

Michael could also see lurking in the shadows of Adam’s eyes the fear and guilt Adam was trying so hard to hide from his father, and from himself. Michael was determined to capitalize on that opening and make as dramatic an impression as he could about the limits of teen experimentation that he was willing to tolerate.

“I…I, um…” Adam faltered under Michael’s unwavering gaze, dropping his eyes to the floor and shifting restlessly from one foot to another.

“Adam.” After a long beat in which Adam wouldn’t look at him, Michael offered what reassurance he could. “You know all these techniques. We won’t be doing anything differently than if you were working with your class.”

Adam’s head shot up and he flung his arms in the air, a flash of defiance in his abrupt, “Yeah, but my class doesn’t work out at four in the morning!”

Glad to hear a spark of life, Michael merely nodded and said, “you might have thought more about the time an hour ago. Get changed.”

After staring angrily at Michael, Adam turned to his locker and began changing his clothes, sharing his feeling of being ill used by muttering barely audible obscenities and repeatedly banging the locker door and otherwise making as much noise as possible as he stripped off his street clothes and changed into his workout wear.

Michael ignored all the extraneous activity and quickly changed his own clothes, finishing long before Adam and waiting quietly at the door to the dojo proper for his now sullenly angry son to join him.

Certain that a lengthy period of reflection would be utterly wasted on Adam right now, Michael allowed them only a very perfunctory period of meditating in front of the traditional shine before rising to his feet and beginning a series of warm up stretching and breathing exercises.

When Adam made no move to join him, Michael barked the command to start, and Adam drug himself upright and began half-heartedly following Michael’s lead. After an extremely cursory warm up, especially on Adam’s part, Michael stepped to the middle of the mat and called the first technique, taking attacking role, and waiting for Adam to assume the receiving role. The instant Adam was in position Michael slowly ‘attacked’ Adam from the front, giving Adam time to take the required stance and prepare to offer the proper defense, in this case a strike followed by a hold.

Adam’s first strike was extremely lame, so lame that even though Michael was fully prepared to recoil against the strike and into the hold, the only way Michael could recoil in the correct direction was by launching himself that way. Michael knew that Adam was more than skilled enough to know that he was not performing the technique correctly, and was fully alive to Adam’s half-angry, half-embarrassed disgust that Michael was doing so much of the work himself.

Further aggravating Adam, Michael refused to give the ‘slap’ of concession, which indicated that the technique was successfully holding the attacker, until long after it was obvious that Adam wasn’t even truly holding him, much less inflicting any pain from the incorrectly applied nerve pinch.

When the time came to switch roles, after Adam had performed the first technique, listlessly, four times, frontward and backward, right and left, Michael watched Adam’s glare go from sullen to full alert as Michael prepared to receive Adam’s attacks. With each attack, Michael hit Adam, more than hard enough to sting though not to enough to injure him, before pulling him into a painfully tight hold, pinching the nerve with the accuracy of long practice.

By the time Michael released Adam from his fourth hold, Adam was bristling with fury, his cheeks pink and his eyes sparking enough vengeful ki that Michael should’ve dropped to the mat from that alone, had Michael believed in the psychic power of ki, which he did not.

Through the second technique, the third, the fourth, even into the fifth, Adam’s anger lent his moves force and determination, but random focus and accuracy. During these techniques, Michael declined to be held, pined or thrown unless Adam performed the maneuver correctly – something that Adam was too unfocused to achieve with consistency – and instead, as was central to the art of Aikido, used Adam’s momentum send him to the mat in Michael’s place.

After the final pin of the fifth set of techniques Adam banged the mat in a furious slap, rolling up and onto his feet almost before Michael had fully released him, spinning to face Michael and snarling, “You’re not being fair!”

Michael, long familiar with the power of silence, stared quietly at Adam until Adam dropped his eyes and sighed bitterly, curling his full lips into tired pout.

“What did you and Jake do tonight?”

Adam’s eyes flew open in surprise, angrily denying the accusation Michael hadn’t made. “Nothing!”

Michael called the name of the next technique, a series of throws, and assumed the attack stance.

Adam stared at him for a long minute, then dropped his head and seemed to shrink in on himself. Shrugging tiredly, he said, “we met up with some of the guys. One of them had some beer and we shared it.”

Michael nodded in approval, and hidden relief. Once the subject starts talking, the interrogation is almost over.

The story was easy enough to guess – some other boys from school had come over to Jake’s, where they had shared beer, cigarettes and a joint or two. As a means of entertaining themselves, they had started on a long series of prank calls, ending abruptly with Adam’s call to Michael – though Michael was certain that he had not heard the full extent of either the amounts of intoxicating or illegal substances consumed, or the number and level of obscenity of the calls. But, question by question, Michael pried out enough details to leave Adam red-eared with shame and embarrassment, though whether Adam was more ashamed of his behavior or simply having been caught and having to recount it, Michael wasn’t able to decide.

Once Adam fell silent, Michael said, “I see. What should I do now?”

“I dunno.”

“You may not stay at Jake’s house in the future…”

Adam interrupted, “ever?”

“Ever. You can have Jake over to our house during the day; you may not go to his. No more overnights with him at all. In addition, for the next month – you’re grounded.”

“Daad!”

“Under what circumstances may you drink alcohol?”

Adam sighed heavily, and then dutifully repeated the rule he had known for years. “When I’m with you or twenty-one.”

“Smoke tobacco or marijuana?”

“Never.”

“Make obnoxious phone calls in the middle of the night?”

Adam rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and then snorted self-consciously. “Never.”

Michael nodded then stepped toward the middle of the mat. “Begin again with the first technique.”

“Now?” Adam’s surprise was palpable.

“Now. Once you’ve shown me that you can pass the tests,” Michael paused and smiled cheerfully at Adam, “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

After a minute of staring at Michael in exaggerated incredulity, Adam shook his head, sighed, nodded in resignation, and moved into position to receive the first attack.

********

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