"First," Tomas said, when they were standing in a ragged crescent with their shoes off and their socks various and their courage audibly ticking, "the floor."
He taught them the floor. He taught them that it was closer than they feared and kinder than they expected; that a fall was not an event but a direction; that you breathe out the way you would sigh at good news, because a held breath is a held body, and a held body breaks. He taught them to sit, and then to lie, and then to roll the way a barrel rolls — without edges — one shoulder, one hip, never the head, never the pride. He taught them standing last of all, because standing, he said, was the advanced part: the hips under you like a table under a cup, the hands quiet, the weight listening downward. "Your hands will lie to you," he said. "Mine lie to me. Watch the hips — yours, and anyone's who is teaching you. The hips have never once lied in the history of the world."
He said it all in the same unhurried voice, walking among them, stopping a shoulder here with two fingers, moving a foot there by the width of a coin, and the room began to make the sound he had waited a month to hear again: the sound of adults being bad at something in public, and laughing, and not leaving.
Halfway through the falling practice, Denise the nurse froze.
She was on her knees on the crash mat, midway through the roll Tomas had walked her through twice, and something in her simply declined to continue — her hands flat, her breath stopped, her face suddenly and privately furious, the way people are furious at their own bodies in front of witnesses. The room, with the instinct rooms have, began to look away in order to help.
"Stay there," Tomas said mildly, and sat down on the mat beside her, cross-legged, at her level, as if the two of them were waiting for a bus. "That's information. Not failure — information. Your body has an opinion and it has voted. We don't outvote it in this class; we adjourn and ask it again in a minute." He had her breathe out once, all the way, like a sigh at good news. Then he rolled the roll himself, at half her size and twice her slowness, wrong on purpose in three places, and named each wrongness as he passed it, and Denise laughed — a short, surprised, night-shift laugh — and rolled after him on the next breath without deciding to.
Colin Marsh came at twenty past the hour.
He did not announce himself. He stood in the open doorway in his training clothes with his arms folded, a large man made larger by the frame, and he watched — and Tomas saw Paul see him, and saw Paul's shoulders go up toward his ears the way shoulders do in the presence of a black belt, and watched Marsh see it too. There was a silence the length of one breath.
Then Marsh unfolded his arms, came in, and — without asking Tomas, and without a word to the room — picked up the far end of the crash mat that Tomas had been meaning to drag to the wall for the falling practice, and carried his half of it like a man carrying a door for somebody, and set it down, and nodded at Tomas once, on the level, instructor to instructor. "Carry on," he said gruffly, to the crescent in general, and to Paul, whose shoulders had come down an inch: "First month's the worst. It gets ordinary. That's the good part." He was gone before the hour was half over, and the door stayed open behind him, and the room was somehow larger for his having been in it and left properly.
Kenji Sato came at the three-quarter mark and stayed along the back wall by the photograph frames, where the light was worst and the view was best, with his training notebook under one arm. He watched the way water watches a stone. Twice he wrote something down. He did not speak until the class was bowing off, and then he crossed the mats and asked Tomas — in the tone of a man submitting a paper for review