We don’t talk much after what happened the first Christmas we spent in apartment 404. Except for nights when he comes home with an action movie. He wakes me up and we watch all the greats—Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Bolo Yeung, Phillip Rhee, Jean-Claude van Damme.
Ray covers my eyes when there are naked women. He pauses the fight scenes and quizzes me on the best techniques. “There, did you see that?”
“He kicked the guy into the spears.”
“Before that.”
“It was a side kick.”
“Look at him chamber his knee.”
He’ll fiddle with the VCR till it pauses on the exact moment of van Damme holding his knee up to his chest before exploding it out sideways into a guy’s stomach. “The power is here.”
Ray stands up and moves the table so he can show me properly. He’ll stand in front of the TV on one foot with his knee chambered just like van Damme. He’s the Persian version of the Muscles from Brussels.
“From here,” he’ll say, “you punch out into a side kick, or you can rotate your hips and swing around into a lead-leg roundhouse.”
He extends his leg into a perfect side kick, then brings it back and does the roundhouse. He’s standing on one leg the whole time. One fist is at his chin, the other by his ear, the whole time.
“Or, if he comes in, you chamber, he flinches, you put down the knee, switch feet into a swing kick.”
He does the maneuver and swings his back foot right up to my temple. He stops a hair away. I don’t flinch.
It would ruin the movie if I flinch.
I know all the best kicks from thirty-seven rated-R movies.
The axe kick in Best of the Best.
The side kick in Enter the Dragon.
The 360 back kick in Best of the Best 2.
The roundhouse in King of the Kickboxers.
I’ve done each of them a hundred times. Actually, I’ve done the other guy. The one who telegraphs his punch and misses with his other arm down and leaves himself open. Ray whizzes the famous kicks right past my nose, so close it tickles.
By the time the movie’s over, I have to go back to bed because I have school in the morning. I have no idea where Ray goes. He’s usually not there in the morning.
Someday, I will be strong enough to break his jaw.
I don’t hate him, but it will be my job to fight him.
I will not miss.
* * *
THE MYTH ABOUT RAY—the one I heard in a whispered voice from my mom—is that he was one of sixteen kids in a part of Iran so far north that it bordered the Soviet Union. His mom died when he was five, and his father remarried a woman who had more kids.
The dad was a giant brown bear, they said. In the mornings he would scrabble out into the woods and return in the evening. No one questioned him. One day when Rahim was ten, he dropped something—a bowl or a cup, doesn’t matter—and broke it.
They say his dad stood up, grabbed Rahim by the hair, and dragged him across a lawn to the first tree on the forest’s edge.
He took off his belt.
He pushed Rahim up against the trunk.
He wrapped the belt around the trunk and Rahim, and tightened it.
He tore a long green branch from the boughs of the tree and whipped Rahim until he bled from his neck and arms and cheeks and ears.
Then he left.
Rahim was tied to the tree for two days. He stood there, unable to sleep or sit down. He cried out for a while but was afraid only the bear would answer. Only his new mother dared to help him. At night, she snuck out of the house with rags to wash his cuts, and gave him food and water.
That was how he knew she had accepted him, even though she wasn’t his mother. And that was how he knew his siblings weren’t ever going to help him.
After the two days, Ray knew he was alone. When he turned seventeen, his dad sent him to America to earn money.
When he arrived, he had no English, no place to stay, and less than twenty bucks.
But more than language, and more than money, and more than a house—he knew he needed an axe kick strong enough to cut down a bear.
He walked into a dojo in Oklahoma City run by an old Korean man named Master Moon. Years later, when I signed up at a school, Ray called it a toy gym, cause it was run by a guy named Kerry, and it was full of rich kids with brand-new head protectors on sale in the back.
Moon’s Gym was just a room off the highway with exposed cement beams and heavy bags held together with duct tape.
Ray said they would do so many roundhouse drills that all the skin on the ball of his pivot foot would rip off and the blood would start pooling on the carpet—at first the size of a quarter, then a plate.
They would stand in line, holding one knee up and Master Moon would attack their shins with bamboo rods until they passed out. Everybody in Moon’s Gym was a super stud. They weren’t afraid of anyone.
Master Moon was a sixth-degree black belt.
I know now that this part isn’t true, but I used to think Master Moon had the Death Touch—where he’d hit your chest with an open palm and the impact would burst your heart like a Gusher.
He was a knotted-up old Korean guy, and since Ray couldn’t pay any money, he made Ray a deal. Ray went to live at Master Moon’s house. In exchange for a room and tae kwon do training, Ray would clean the Moon family house and make their meals.
Mrs. Moon had a condition where she couldn’t work anymore, but she would rather die than eat some Iranian kid’s teenage cooking. So she would sit in the corner of their tiny kitchen and yell at him in Korean. Neither spoke English, so she’d say, “Cut the radishes,” in Korean and he’d say, “Pick up the knife?” in Farsi.
“Now cut the radishes,” in Korean.
“What should I do with the knife?” in Farsi.
“The radishes. Radishes.”
“Cut these?”
“No, long ways.”
“Like this?”
“No!”
Then she’d scream, and screaming is the same in Korean, Farsi, and English.
Until years passed and Ray finally knew how to make bulgogi, kimchi, bibimbop, mumallaengi—all the super serious Korean foods.
That’s how Ray became a third-degree black belt.
And how he got that bear-slaying uppercut that he only ever used on single moms.
* * *
IF YOU REALLY WANT to know the truth, it’s the forgetting that hurts most. Not the secret police trying to murder us. Not Brandon Goff shooting paper clips at my neck. Not Ray. Not everyone thinking I’m gross.
Those pains are pains that make me strong.
I imagine the more they bleed me, the more I become like jerked meat—a dried bull, a hard leather.
But no matter how hard I clench my fist, the memories pour out of it and disappear. When you kill a monster in Final Fantasy, it makes a sound like a groan and disintegrates into sand. None of them are strong enough to keep two grains together once they die.
You could imagine the Elemental Fiends clenching their toothy jaws—but even they just crumble.
That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.