From Cape Town with Love by Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Blair Underwood

about the motion and music of percussion, so West African drumming filled his garage. With Cliff, once the music starts, the chitchat is over. The buddy thing went bye-bye, and we became teacher and student. I bowed, he nodded.
    He ran me through some of the moves he’d last worked me on. Cliff has more black belts than a clothing store, and like many genuine masters, from Ueshiba to Bruce Lee, he had created his own art, a stripped-down synthesis called WAR, an acronym standing for Within Arm’s Reach. It was designed for bodyguards, and its specialty is efficient dismemberment without exposing a cowering client to harm. Not a lot of spinning and circling in WAR: You fought as if you had been backed into a corner or pressed against a wall.
    It reminds me of Javanese Pentjak Silat Serak, one of Cliff’s areas of expertise, a beautiful movement system based on pure mathematics. And as in Silat, WAR’s blows are designed to disrupt balance rather than merely damage the body. When Cliff moves on you, it’s as if you had an invisible third leg you’d never known was there, and he knows how to kick it out. When you watch him do it to someone else, it looks like they’re just falling down for him. It looks fake. Until your butt bounces off the floor. The man is a genius, and swears that if I’d just be a little more serious, I’d have a major breakthrough in six months.
    Maybe I
would
keep coming to class this time. Maybe.
    I worked hard, breaking the forms into self-defense applications, improvising,moving to and against the music. But no matter how hard I tried, Cliff knew I wasn’t totally there.
    â€œWhat’s going on with you today, Hollywood?”
    I mopped sweat from my face. “Guru,” I told him, using his formal Indonesian title as a Silat instructor. He liked that more than
Sensei
(Japanese) or
Sifu
(Chinese), although he’d earned the right to both. “I feel pretty strong overall—but I saw some knife action a little while ago that kinda freaked me. I’m not sure I could have coped with it, and I hate feeling like that.”
    Cliff nodded, face as smooth and impassive as an Easter Island statue. He went to his shelf and brought back two black composition-plastic practice knives. He handed one to me and kept the other, twirling it around his fingers like an evil parlor trick.
    â€œWhat’d you see?” he said. “Show me.”
    I did my best to imitate the rapid-fire jabbing motion I’d witnessed in Langa. Watching, Cliff nodded slowly, his eyes sparking. “Where’d you see that?” he said.
    â€œSouth Africa.”
    â€œGuess so. Not Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino.” And he’d know. It isn’t just that Cliff has trained with the best, all over the world. It’s that he’s become the one the best come to, when they really want to train. “It sure the hell don’t look like anything I’ve seen. Show me more.”
    As I imitated the knife’s dance, Cliff improvised within my jabs, gently pushing my wrist right or left, up or down, as he deflected me. Cliff moves so well he sometimes seems to be in slow motion. I couldn’t get my knife near him, especially with an unfamiliar movement pattern.
    â€œFast as you?” he asked.
    â€œFaster.”
    His smile flattened a little. Playtime was over. “How much faster?”
    â€œTen percent, maybe.”
    â€œRhythm?”
    â€œBroken. Staccato. Maybe based on Jo’burg jazz. Reminded me of Max Roach on the drums, man.”
    â€œThis, my brother, is some deadly shit.”
    â€œTell me about it.” My breathing was already accelerated.
    â€œIf I were you, you see this thing again, I’d use furniture-fu.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œTossing lamps and chairs. You ever see this stuff again, don’t even think about fighting fair. You don’t wake up, you’re in for a dirt nap. You’re a primate: Use