Morning
Soul Searching, Vunak is Accosted by an Agent of Cruel Eternity
‘Over hydrated?’ hissed the inner indictment as he paced quickly to the boys room down the high school hallway, hoping he did not stain his red sweats with even a drop from his weary bladder.
‘Never even imagined pissing myself when I walked a high school hall. Did any of us, ever?’ he mused as the squeak of his own training shoes competed with the clatter of rattan and the squeak of sneakers back down the hall in the gymnasium.
Finally, the bathroom entrance yawned, welcoming in sterile conformity. Entering he saw his form in the mirror, not filling out the red sweats or wind breaker as he—no, IT, the body that failed its fading master—once had.
‘At least I’m not fat!’ he glared in the mirror before passing to the urinal.
No feet showed under the stalls to the left. He was the first customer. Moments later, everything seemed to be in working order, one of his greatest fears put to rest for another day. Stepping before the sink he noted that his thighs seemed really thin in the sweats.
‘I should have worn a loose pair to cover those chicken legs!’
“Should doesn’t live here,” he growled in the mirror. “We are what we do, and you, yes, YOU, get out there and show them the real Vu!”
He unzipped his red windbreaker and wrapped it around his waist like a hillbilly kilt to cover those too thin thighs and warm up the aching hips. The biceps did not belly out a they once had. The skin was wax paper thin.
‘Bruce never had to suffer this indignity,’ he sulked in the mirror reflectively cohabiting this dark morning of the soul with his battered ego.
‘They were talking sparring out there, the big man and the muscle head. The FMA creeps are farming the self defense people with feeder drills. The JKD junkies only want to roll and hit mitts.’
The self-trainer, the self-product of discipline, the shreds remaining of a life of calculation and risk that threaded together the mistakes and outtakes that he might be remembered for if he did not reinvent himself here, now, actively haunted him to his drawn face. To be the only instructor of note to take it on the chin, the bold stamp, the crucible to forge a renewed brand, welled up within and waxed with renewed confidence.
‘WE spar,’ he agreed, reaching over the sink for the soap pump and water, fixing his own eyes in the mirror.
“You need to spar—bring in the young lions, Paul. You, are, Paul Vunak!”
From his high, lonely, inner cliff of self-imposed inspiration, now yawned before him the critical rear view mirror of Age, regarding the shrunken man in the mirror with his own narrowed visage, ‘The hair, really!’
He grunted that down, and, with his faith in doing—OF DOING, of BEING—returned, shut off the water and turned to the paper towel dispenser, glad, in an odd way, that these, in this bathroom, at least had not been changed out for those noisy hand blowers. As he reached for the paper towels, he heard a voice from the last stall on the left, a voice that should not have been there, “Be like water.”
“What?” he turned to look over his left shoulder to see a pair of bare feet, the ankles appearing just below a tight yellow jump suit.
The toilet flushed.
‘Really! Some JKD tweaker is stalking me?’
‘There was no one there. Am I dead? Did I have a heart attack…’
The stall door opened inward, and outward walked a man out of myth, a man gone now these fifty years.
“Bruce?” Paul asked in a hollow tone, without a note suggesting a shred of confidence that he yet retained his sanity.
‘Do, not, lose it!’
The man stalked towards him with extreme arrogance, walking like a great two-legged cat, grinning with the confidence of youth tinged with the mastery of the situation.
Paul looked away into the mirror, seeking a bearing, hoping that he would see only himself there, hoping deeply that he had not just now, totally lost his shit in a high school boys room, attending a seminar that was not going to pay enough to cover his plane fare.
“Get it together, Paul,” he grated his teeth in the mirror, only to see that yellow-suited icon of martial arts innovation and movie magnification some to stand, facing him, his active left hand twitching before the sink top as if it held something being drawn from the sleeve.
“This is not real,” he asserted, turning to face the phantom before him. “Are you an hallucination, or some ghost come to torment me?”
The man smiled more softly and opened his right hand, slowly extending it to cup Paul’s left shoulder in a fatherly way, pointedly incongruent with their vast age disparity.
The hand was real, felt real on Paul’s shoulder, who could not help but quip, “The Ghost of Kung Fu Past? Have I done something wrong?”
“Paul,” soothed the voice of the youthful master, easing from the man built like a springboard for action appearing in his prime as he had in his last movie, even wearing the yellow jump suit he branded with his perfect lightweight form.
‘I’m glad I already pissed,’ Paul shook inside as the hand soothed him, “At this time in particular, for we have but another minute, you must trust me. Be like water, My Friend.”
“But you’re dead! So, I must be dead. Where are you taking me?”
“Paul, I did not die, certainly not of the drug overdose I was accused of, or of overheating from having sweat glands removed, or of an allergy to, what, aspirin?”
The man retracted his hand and wagged his finger, “No, no, no. Round-eyed David takes my part in the TV series I pitched—and yes the fame came in its own way. Let me put it to you this way, a man came to me out of Time—TIME—a, man long dead, a man older than Yip Man, and said, ‘Breathe some of this and be one with the Universe.’”
With those words the flesh and bone man who looked and sounded precisely as Bruce Lee had in his last movie, opened his left hand to produce a glass vile filled with a fine, white powder, and slid two straws out of his sleeve and into his right hand, a red one for himself and a blue one, which he handed to Paul between his thumb and forefinger.
Paul numbly took the blue straw and looked on in dread, in the mirror, and directly at his mesmerist, as Bruce Lee poured out a line of coke on the boys room sink counter top.
“You want me, an old man, to snort a line of coke and go back out there and teach, spar?”
“No, Paul, VU-NAK,” soothed Bruce, “I want you to breath stardust, to wax young again under the Twins Suns of Scorpio, to train the gladiators of Antares!”
He snapped his left fingers and the white powder turned all the colors of the rainbow, there glinting like stardust with voids of opal flecking the rainbow and once white grains twinkling like silver stars.
Bruce then keyed his straw and winked, “Paul, you have ten seconds to decide; to wax young again, to experience all the vigor of youth, even to wear your arrogant blond rooster hair! I have been watching you, Paul.”
The door to the gymnasium could be heard shutting, footfalls gathering this way.
Bruce then shrugged his shoulders and bent to the rainbow line of powder with his straw, “I must go in any case. I wanted you. But, I suppose it shall be Aldo Nadi, to endlessly bore me with point control!”
With that Bruce ‘breathed’ rather than snorted, half the line, and took on a cosmic outline, as if his human form were a window into some vibrant expanse of stellar space.
The footfalls fell closer, and, on what felt like the instinct to survive, Paul Vunak bent to that line of star dust, straw to nostril, careful not to unseemly like snort, but rather breathed; and the grains of the rainbow leaped joyfully—a bit too hungrily perhaps—like Fate’s own soul-gathering bees, transforming him into something like water, if water might streak across Eternity as light.
