Part III, Chapterlets 2 & 3

2.
In the first month of 1970, despite the warnings of her doctors and the urgings of what passed for friends and perhaps to some degree because of the somewhat distressing vogue of backroom abortions permeating the circles she moved through, Marianna Destry, last daughter and sole heiress of the Tulsa Destries gave birth to a seven pound, 4 ounce boychild whom, in a sort of falling gasp, she named after the one thing that seemed to have most eluded her during the long string of events leading to the child’s conception and construction and, as a by-product, the destruction of self that the baby’s difficult birth signaled and that she could feel surging up infinitely within her, both a void and a ground for her slow fadeout due to her hemorrhaging.
Reason Destry survived his mother’s fate, inheriting a large amount of money at the tender age of one hour and sixteen minutes, the principal of which he was protected from in any way diminishing by a large system of trusts and legal barriers to access which girded and upheld the swollen vastnesses of his real, mineral, and monetary rights and properties. This large, invisible structure spun fine webs out from his fortune that established and protected his absurd rights over the rights of more mature relatives of the Dallas branch and generated servants and caretakers, lawyers and stockbrokers, trustees and legal guardians that ushered him from infancy into adulthood with surprisingly little graft or deception.
This meant that, at the age of thirty five, on a warm autumn night of the year 2000 CE, Reason had managed, by the observance of a strict laissez-faire principle of economy, to increase his holdings at a rate which could only be accurately described by a rather strict application of logistic growth formulae, arithmetic no longer being adequate to encompass his worth or the rate at which that worth tended toward infinity. He had no need for gainful employment, and yet idleness weighed on his days, infecting his thought, and his need for activity was like the hot sun on his shoulders, casting long shadows that narrowed toward him sharply, maliciously as he sat in his garden while the oaks changed. That night, inspired in some way, he thought, by a cold wind that suddenly closed the page he was contemplating in the faded red book in his lap, Reason decided would do two things: find a job, and find a wife.

3.
Reason had, as a very young man, decided to live his life according to the only precept that his mother had given him, which was buried in the structure of his name. In honor of this decision, he managed not to become a wastrel or a profligate member of the elite stratum of society through which he moved. Catholic private schools, the decadent oubliettes where the disinterested amongst the Tulsa rich let their children go to “figure things out for themselves,” became distasteful to Reason quite before he was out of primary school. He sought private tutors for an isolated education, and, to the surprise of his caretakers, was in truth running his immediate household with precision and rationality by the age of twelve, devoting the bulk of his time to one on one study and leaving the management of his more abstract estate to those better equipped to deal with it by inclination as well as by training. Basic mathematics were not beyond his capabilities, but the overt presence of accountants in his life led him to see that he would never have a practical need for it, barring betrayal. His capacity for delegation was breathtaking.
Perhaps owing to the influence of those years of primary school, Reason’s choice of tutors had a classical tendency from the very beginning. He was taught Latin and Greek at first, but found little or no interest in the learning of languages it seemed to him were long dead. Translations being, then, more than acceptable to be moving forward, Reason was able to quickly absorb the Loeb library and move on. At fifteen, an unsettlingly informative encounter with a dusty history of the Ottoman Empire left him curious as to what else might be out there to learn that was not readily or easily visible in the Western Canon. He hired a small, humorous man with graying hair and a PhD in Western Philosophy who had defected from the University of Beijing in 1983 and was making a living as a proofreader for various Chinese restaurants and tailors in Tulsa. Michael Chang, a man of Chinese birth and parentage, had liberal leanings—something as difficult for Reason to define as it was to find, even amongst the educated in Oklahoma—and was extremely well-read in several languages, including five contemporary, non-romance languages, and three dead ones. In short, he was just what Reason was looking for.
Their relationship was odd. Chang insisted on being called Michael, and he refused to teach Reason anything unless Reason consented to learn everything. Contractual obligation being a concept with which Reason was familiar, he agreed in bona fide. This meant that, surprisingly, Reason found himself studying an alien calligraphy, an alien poetry, an alien system of thought, and undergoing a strenuous program in calisthenics at the same time. His teacher insisted that this ridiculous hopping and flailing be referred to as the Technique of Force on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and on the weekends, however, Reason was sharply reprimanded for not using the term the Force of Technique for the same exercises. Reason’s initial doubts about the usefulness of these classes when compared to their readings of Li Po, Lao Tze, or Confucius, melted away at the same time as the chubbiness that had clung to his face and body from his infancy. He came to realize the movements as the stylized extension of his thought in space and time and began in earnest to relish the hours spent in personal contemplation of sets of motions he now understood as forms.
On Reason’s eighteenth birthday in January of 1988, Michael assisted him in arriving at the extremely difficult understanding that what Reason had now mastered by dint of physical and mental training for eight hours a day, every day, for three years was at its heart a practical system of physical defense and not a ritual of dance or physico-mental expression as he had been indirectly led to believe. Michael did this mostly by attempting to hit and kick Reason about the face, head, and torso in earnest for the better part of an hour while Reason’s body executed—with greater speed, precision, and force than he had known he was capable of exhibiting—the stances and forms that it had had drilled into its very muscle fibers.
At the end of this demonstration, Reason was forced to admit that, once these motions had been re-described, it was easy to see them as divided into distinct modes of attack and defense and not just a method of being towards your partner in motion. The implications of this redescription staggered Reason. Not only was the change difficult to come to terms with, so was the ease with which Michael had overturned an entire system of thought. Also at the end of this demonstration, Michael gave Reason his birthday present, a little book bound in red cloth, and printed on creamy, seventy pound paper with the strange title Book of the Five Rings. To the book was tied a folded paper note. The note said:

This is both my resignation and the proof copy of my latest published translation from the Japanese. Let me know if there are any punctuation problems or typos. It’s due back at the printer next week. To this point, I have been the needle, pulling you after me. It is past time for me to set your considerable weight aside. I have carried you far enough. Now, walk, you fat, lazy guai lo.

When Reason looked up from reading it, Michael was gone. Reason had the faint, preposterous notion that somehow his shadow had stayed behind. The space of their training room was all angles and planes. He looked at the little mirror on the wall. Reason walked to the master suite, tossed the book in his secretary drawer and got in the shower. He didn’t mind the sting of the hot water pelting his face beyond noticing it. When he got out, he sat on his bed and called in his major domo with the little black button on his night stand. He gave Lucas instructions that would help him to prepare the household for a trip to Japan while he toweled dry his hair.