o ff the hook, I can walk out self-righteous because she ain’t no
better than I am, she’s just the other side o f m y coin, m y
decrepitude, and it’s dominion she’s after, tormenting the
likes o f me. But she don’t get o ff on it so I keep m oving even
though I’m barely m oving and you reach a point where if you
shudder you feel the muscles move and a tremor is distance
covered; if you shake, the muscles move; and helplessly you
do shake. Sensei learned to count to a hundred in a school
pioneered by Stalin; she don’t allow for human flaws, which is
mental, as he would have agreed; she fixes defects in the mind
that are expressed as incapacities in the body; it’s right
thinking that makes the abdomen strong enough to shatter a
normal man’s fist should he deliver a punch at the top o f his
form; you can punch Sensei in the gut with everything you got
and she stands still, straight, tall, she don’t feel nothing in her
gut but the hitter is hurt. Push-ups is different because women
can’t do them, because all we get to do in life is carry our
breasts and shopping, and from childhood they make us stay
weak in the shoulders but we don’t even know it; and so
push-ups take forever to learn; and even the best students take
forever to learn them; to do one is an achievement, and you
burn with fury that they incapacitated you so much. Sensei can
do butterfly push-ups, a hundred or a hundred and fifty; it’s
push-ups but you do them on your fingertips instead o f using
your whole hand; your hands don’t hit the ground, only the
tops o f your fingers. I never seen anything like it in m y life. It’s
an unreal as flapping your wings and actually flying. Y et I seen
Sensei do it; a hundred times; she says she can do fifty more. I
can barely breathe thinking about what it would feel like to do
it or to be so strong or so agile or so fucking brave, because I’d
be afraid o f falling; o f breaking m y fingers; o f slipping; o f pain.
I love it; I live for her to do it; up and down, with the tips o f her
fingers taking all the weight o f her body going down, then
lifting her up. I can raise just the top half o f m y body, about
five times, which is pretty usual and she says that’s how to
build the muscles and we have to have patience to undo the
damage o f being made weak; and I see it ain’t just the penis
they nail you with, they pin you down at both ends, and all the
strength you could have in the upper part o f your body is
atrophied as if you was paralyzed your whole life; except you
w asn’t. I tell m yself that whatever I can take from him,
w hom ever, I can take for me; me; now; and when I get weak
and fall back to m y bad old w ays because I never had a me and
still don’t except by forcing m yself to think so I say I’m doing
it for her; this me is pretty tenuous but I can take anything for
