Read Tengu for Free Online Page B

is an odd place. Stately buildings and ivy, wrought iron fences, and libraries fragrant with the smell of old books. Young people scurry to and from class, fresh, energetic, and naive. But in the long halls and narrow offices, those who work there fester in the dark like overeducated viral agents. Wet-eyed professors with obscure, irrelevant specialties and inferiority complexes browbeat students. Administrators, buffeted by faculty contempt and general inefficiency, sink into venal scheming. Any college campus is a circus, complete with color, entertainment, and the occasional glimpse of something really amazing. At Dorian University, the circus had a large number of clowns and a truly impressive freak show.
    I’m bitter, of course. I had worked there as an adjunct for years, the lone specialist in East Asia teaching for a History Department that uncovered the past while vigorously trying to hide its own inadequacies. The individual members of the department had not aged well. They were choleric, flushed with self-importance, and obsessed with the onset of hypertension and other scary hints of mortality. It was possible that the spring of intellectual inquiry had, at one time, flowed in the History Department. I had only known it as the academic equivalent of a salt pan.
    A friend had managed to get me an administrative position with the new Asian Studies Institute at Dorian, but it hadn’t lasted long. The faculty weren’t crazy about me. I worked dutifully at my desk all day, Monday through Friday. But my years with Yamashita have changed me. I used to think of myself as an academic pursuing a research interest in the Asian martial arts. I have come to realize instead that I am a martial artist with an advanced degree. It provided me with a sense of distance from my colleagues at Dorian. I couldn’t share the university-wide fascination with minutia and self-importance. The dojo has taught me that there are more vital things in the world than convoluted social science fads or the latest campus vendetta. People there found me utterly incomprehensible. And, ultimately, the mad dictator who was Dorian’s president decided to sacrifice me in some administrative gambit I still wasn’t too clear about. Not that it mattered. I was back to part-time teaching, cobbling together a living in a way that was depressingly familiar.
    All of which helped to explain why I was late for Micky’s party. Long Island, where we both grew up and he still lived, was the Land of the Car. Those condemned to the netherworld of mass transit did not fare well. On that fish-shaped island, three railroad spines stretch from New York City to points east, but they are designed like pistons to ram huge numbers of commuters into and out of Manhattan during the workweek, nothing more. It makes other complex forms of travel difficult.
    But I persevered. I got off the train and stood for a moment on the raised platform, looking down on suburbia. The South Shore of Long Island is flat. You can look out into the hazy distance and see row after row of rooftops, their shingles glittering through the trees. Water towers pop up at intervals in the landscape, pale blue towers standing watch over strip malls and playgrounds. I walked down the concrete steps and into the streets of Micky’s neighborhood.
    It was familiar territory. We had grown up in a place much like this one: ranches and cape cods and split level homes lined up like so many dominoes in the developments that scrolled out along the flat, swampy terrain. Belts of scrubby woods separated the neighborhoods. Occasional shallow reservoirs that caught the runoff from the blacktopped streets were set like muddy blue jewels along the railroad line that linked the towns to Manhattan. As you rode the train east out of the city, the flash of green and blue in the window—patches of trees and water—lasted longer and longer as you traveled east through Nassau County. It created the illusion that the area