jiu jitsu

I don’t even know what happened. One second he was lying there, a wheezy vegetable, and the next he was coming at me hard, his ragged-nailed hands grasping for my throat while he gurgled, “No hospital!”
A few months ago, I’d have gotten strangled right there.
But a few months ago, I hadn’t been training in hand-to-hand with Michael’s wife, Charity.
It takes several thousand repetitions of a motion to develop motor-memory pathways in the brain to the point where you can consider the motion a reflex. To that end, Charity, who was into jujitsu, had made me practice several different defenses a hundred times each, every day, for the past two months. She didn’t practice by just going through a motion slowly and gradually speeding up, either. She just came at me like she meant to disassemble me, and if I didn’t defend successfully it freaking hurt.
You learn fast in those circumstances—and one of the basic defenses she’d drilled into me had been against a simple front choke.
Both of my forearms snapped up, knocking the grasping hands away, even as I ducked my head and rolled my body to one side. He kept coming through the space where I’d been. His arm hit my face and sent my glasses spinning off me.
I fought down a decades-old panic as the world shifted from its usual shapes into sudden streaks and blurs of color.
Look. I wear some big, thick glasses. I’m not quite legally blind without them. I know, because after I gave my optometrist a very expensive bottle of whiskey, he told me so. But without them …
Without them, it’s pretty tough to get anything done. Or see anything more than an arm’s length away. Seriously. I’d once mistaken a dressmaker’s mannequin for my girlfriend. Reading was all but impossible without them. Reading.
My great nightmare is to be stuck somewhere without them, trapped, peering at the sea of fuzzy things that couldn’t possibly be identified. When I’d been a kid, the first thing the bullies did, always, was knock my glasses off. Always. It was like they’d all had a sixth sense or something.
Then they would start having fun with me. That wasn’t a delight, either, but it was the not knowing what was coming that made it all worse.
Inside, that kid started screaming and wailing, but there was no time to indulge him. I had a problem to solve—and the Carpenters had given me the tools I needed to solve it.
For instance, they’d taught me that once things are this close, you don’t really get a lot done with your eyes when it comes to fighting. It was all speed and reflex and knowing where the enemy was and what he was doing by feel. I was sloppy and it took me a second, but I managed to lock the bum’s arm out straight. I kept it moving, got my body to twist at the right angle to put pressure on the shoulder joint, and brought him flat onto his face on the sidewalk with enough force to send stars flying into his vision and stun him.
It didn’t stun him much. “No hospital!” he screamed, thrashing. I fought to control the fear that was running through me. He was operating with more strength than he should have been, but it didn’t matter. Physics is physics, and his arm was one long lever that I had control of. He might have been bigger and stronger than me, and the way we were positioned that didn’t matter in the least. He fought for a few more seconds and then the burst of frenzy began to peter out. “No hospital! No hospital.” He shuddered and began to weep. His voice became a plea, rendered flat with despair. “No hospital. Please, please. No hospital.”
Then he went limp and made slow, regular rasping sounds.


Brief Cases, Day One, Page 358-360