Andrew Klavan - The long way home

Maybe you're the bad guy.

The Truth You Live In quiet moments there were things that came back to me sometimes-things from my life before this nightmare started. I thought a lot about my karate teacher, for instance: Sensei Mike.

Sensei Mike was just about the coolest guy I ever met. He'd been in the army for a long time and had fought the Islamic extremists in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He even got a medal from the president of the United States because he once helped hold off an attack by a hundred bad guys with a.50-caliber gun mounted on an armored truck. He never talked about that, but I looked it up on the Internet and found out what happened. He'd been wounded in the fight and had to come home and have a piece of titanium put in his leg. He never talked about that either.

But he did talk about a lot of other things. About karate mostly, of course. How to fight-and how to avoid a fight if there was any possible way you could. How to control your emotions and your body. How to harness your fears and transform your nervousness into energy and focus. He talked a lot about focus, about paying attention-not just to karate but to everything, to the people you loved and the people who needed you, and just to everything you were trying to accomplish, to life in general.

"Here's the deal, chucklehead," he told me once. "God wants you to have a big, full, terrific life. And you can't have that kind of life unless you're paying attention."

I guess Mike was somewhere in his thirties. He was about my height, but with broader shoulders. He had this thick, black hair that he was very proud of. He always kept it neatly combed, even when he was working out. He had this big drooping mustache that he was proud of too. If you looked carefully, behind the mustache and into his eyes, you could usually see him smiling, as if he found everything kind of funny. After everything he'd been through, I don't think there was really very much in life that Mike took seriously. Only a few things. Only the things that really mattered.

Anyway, this one time, something happened in the dojo… Well, it all ended up in the dojo, but it started before that. It started that morning in history class with my teacher Mr. Sherman.

I had Mr. Sherman in history two years running. He was a trim, fit, youthful-looking guy, handsome in a sort of bland way with a friendly smile and intelligent eyes. I never thought he was a bad person or anything, but, to be honest, I did think he was kind of a doofus. My problem with him-the thing you could say sort of constituted his doofy-os-itude-was that he fancied himself some kind of big-time radical. He was always trying to get us to "question our assumptions." And look, there's nothing wrong with that as a general sort of thing. It's just that Mr. Sherman sort of took it to the Crazy Place, if you know what I mean.

See, Mr. Sherman's point of view was that nothing was really good or bad, it was just a matter of how you thought about it. Now that didn't make any sense to me, but I have to admit I sometimes found it hard to argue with him.

That's what happened this one morning in class. We'd been having a discussion about current events. Mr. Sherman was sitting on the edge of his desk, tossing one of the whiteboard markers in the air and catching it. "The problem with this country," he was saying, "is that too many people believe blindly in absolute morality, absolute truth. Our country was founded on absolutes: truths that are supposedly 'self-evident.' And because we believe our truths are absolute and self-evident, we're only too quick to hate other people and impose our truths on them. Absolutism is the meat of tyrants. Real morality is always changing. It depends on your situation and your cultural tradition."

Now there were so many things about this statement that I thought were false, they kind of got jammed up in my brain as they tried to get to my mouth. For one thing, there are a lot of countries in the world that hate other people and attack other countries without reason, or that try to force even their own citizens to believe things whether they want to or not. America never does that. But before I could even get to that point, I blurted out:

"Wait a minute. You're talking about the Declaration of Independence, right? The only truths it holds to be 'self-evident' are that all men are created equal. And that their Creator gave them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"Ah, I knew we'd hear from Charlie on this one," said Mr. Sherman, looking around at the rest of the class. "Charlie is a True Believer. I can always count on him to follow blindly along with the crowd. The All-American Zombie." He put his hands out in front of him like a zombie and let his mouth hang open. "Night of the Living Charlie."

This was another thing that always annoyed me about Mr. Sherman. When you argued with him, he didn't exactly use facts and logic. He just tried to make fun of you and change the subject and tangle you up with words so you looked bad or the class laughed at you and you got flustered and couldn't make your point. And another thing that annoyed me was that a lot of times it worked.

I glanced around at the rest of the students. They were all laughing at Mr. Sherman's zombie routine. Even Rick Donnelly, one of my best friends, was laughing over at his desk near the window. I knew Rick agreed with me about Mr. Sherman. He thought this was a great country and even wanted to go into politics when he grew up. But he was the kind of guy who never argued with teachers, who was always trying to please them and say what they wanted to hear so he would get good grades. Maybe that's how you get to be a politician.

"So what part of the Declaration don't you agree with?" I asked Mr. Sherman.

Sherman stopped waving his arms around. He smiled. "Ah, my zombielike friend, that's exactly the wrong question. The question is: What part of it can you prove to be true? Prove that we're created equal. We don't look equal to me."

"That's not what it means. It means that we're created with equal rights."

"Prove it, Charlie. You can't. It's just something Americans have come to believe, that's all. Other people believe other things. You can't even prove that we were created, that we have a Creator in the first place. It's just something you were told and so you believe it. Go on, Zombie Guy-prove it."

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn't think what to say. I didn't know exactly how you would prove something like that. Sherman made the class laugh at me again by opening his mouth and making stuttering sounds to imitate my confusion: "Uh, uh, uh!"

Then the bell rang. That was the end of class.

"All right, that's it," said Sherman, "unless you guys want to stay behind and listen to Charlie sing the national anthem."

That made everyone laugh again. And they were still laughing as they filed out of the room.

So I guess Sherman won that argument or at least got the last laugh. And yeah, it bothered me. I felt bad that the kids laughed, and I felt especially bad that I hadn't been able to come up with a good argument for what I was trying to say. It made me angry-because I knew I was right and he was wrong.

I guess I was still a little angry when I went to the dojo that afternoon for my karate lesson.

Here's what happened. There was this other kid, Peter Williams. He was taking a lesson that day too. Sensei Mike decided to have us do some kumite. Kumite is sparring without protective gear, without soft gloves and helmets and shin pads and everything. In kumite, you just dress in your gi-your karate outfit-and you use your bare hands and feet with your head and body unprotected.

So, of course, with kumite, you have to be extra careful. You strike with the open hand and not the fist, and you make sure to pull all your strikes and kicks so no one gets hurt. It's an exercise meant to teach you control-and also to teach you not to be afraid of getting hit from time to time.