A Dr. TooToo Medvalli Story
By Oskar Rausch
Part I: The Merger
The press release was three sentences long.
Effective immediately, all U.S. healthcare delivery organizations — public, private, religious, academic, and tribal — have been consolidated into a single national entity: UnitedPeacePartnersAscensionKaiserHealth (UPPAKH). All physicians, nurses, and ancillary staff will retain their roles under a unified contract structure. We thank you for your continued service.
Dr. TooToo Medvalli, MD, FACG, read it three times. The grammar was correct. The logic was sound. The implications were, by his calculation, the end of medicine as a profession capable of being practiced by humans.
He was sitting in his kitchen in Ypsilanti when the email landed. Kai, his German Shepherd, was asleep at his feet, twitching in the way working dogs twitched when they dreamed of doing the only thing they’d been bred for and weren’t allowed to do anymore.
TooToo understood the feeling.
He opened the attached PDF: the Unified Provider Compliance Manual, Volume I of XIV. He read forty-three pages. He noted that the word “patient” appeared eleven times. The word “documentation” appeared 387 times. The word “compliance” appeared 612 times. The word “physician” appeared zero times. The preferred term was “Clinical Documentation Resource (CDR).”
He closed the PDF.
He opened his laptop.
He typed his resignation.
It was four words long: “I will not comply.”
He signed it Dr. TooToo Medvalli, MD, FACG, and then, after a moment’s consideration, he added a third credential he had earned in 1997 and never once used: First-degree black belt, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Gracie Lineage.
He looked at Kai.
“We need a new business plan,” he said.
Kai thumped his tail, twice. This was, by TooToo’s internal scoring system, an enthusiastic endorsement.
Part II: The Silverback
The thing TooToo did not put in his resignation letter, the thing he did not mention to Kai, the thing he had not in fact mentioned aloud to any human being in the four years since it happened, was that he had already, technically, retired from one career before he retired from medicine.
He had retired from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
He had not chosen to.
The gym had been on Carpenter Road in Ann Arbor — a Gracie-lineage academy, small, serious, full of men who took the art the way TooToo took everything, which was to say humorlessly and at full intensity. TooToo had trained there for nineteen years. He had earned his black belt in 1997 under an instructor who had earned his under a Gracie. The lineage, by TooToo’s reckoning, was clean.
And then, in the summer of his fifty-fourth year, a new student had walked in.
The new student was twenty-six. He was six-foot-four. He had been a Division I wrestler. He had a neck that did not so much connect his head to his shoulders as continue them. His name, improbably, was Chad. TooToo had attempted to find this surprising and had failed; the world, he had come to understand, was full of Chads who were exactly as Chad-shaped as their names suggested.
Chad worked his way up the food chain of the gym with the methodical, inexorable progress of a glacier. He tapped the blue belts in week one. He tapped the purple belts in week two. He tapped the brown belts in month two. By month three he was rolling with the black belts, and by month four he had tapped all of them except TooToo, who had simply, quietly, begun scheduling his open mats at times he knew Chad would not be there.
TooToo was not afraid of Chad. TooToo was, in his own assessment, “operationally averse to Chad.” He had calculated their physical asymmetry — height, weight, reach, age, hip mobility, recovery time, cortisol levels at baseline — and concluded that any roll between them had an 87% probability of ending in his own submission and a 100% probability of ending in his own next-day soreness.
Eventually, however, the schedule logic broke down, and they rolled.
It lasted ninety seconds.
Chad passed TooToo’s guard like a man stepping over a low fence. He established side control. He transitioned to mount. He cross-faced TooToo with a forearm that smelled like new gym gear and creatine. He took TooToo’s back. He sunk the rear naked choke, and TooToo, his vision graying, tapped.
This, in itself, was not the problem.
The problem was what Chad did next.
Chad stood up. Chad looked down at TooToo, who was still on his hands and knees on the mat trying to remember which direction was up. And Chad said, loudly enough for the entire gym to hear:
“You’re done, old man.”
TooToo, who had spent his entire professional life around men who said things in committee meetings that were technically not insulting but functionally devastating, recognized the tone immediately. It was the tone of a younger primate informing an older primate that the older primate’s tenure at the top of the troop had concluded.
TooToo had read about this.
In 2003, between his internal medicine residency and his gastroenterology fellowship, TooToo had developed an unusual interest in primate ethology. He had read Frans de Waal. He had read Jane Goodall. He had read three separate ethnographies of mountain gorilla troops. He understood, in clinical detail, what happened when a younger silverback challenged an older one. The older silverback would, if he was wise, leave the troop. He would live the remainder of his life on the periphery, foraging alone, maintaining a dignified distance, and avoiding eye contact with the new alpha.
TooToo went home.
He did not return to the gym.
He cancelled his membership by email. His instructor — a fifth-degree black belt who had once driven TooToo to the airport after a tournament — replied with a single line: “Sorry to see you go, brother. The door is always open.”
The door was not always open. The door was, in fact, occupied by Chad.
TooToo, sitting in his kitchen in Ypsilanti, opened a new document on his laptop and titled it: On Beta Dignity: A Marxist Framework for the Defeated Silverback. He wrote 14,000 words in one sitting. He never showed the document to anyone. But he saved it, and he reread it, and from that day forward, in his private internal monologue, he had stopped thinking of himself as a black belt and had started thinking of himself by a different title.
Master Beta.
He thought it was a clever piece of self-deprecation that fused the language of martial arts (Master) with the language of primate ethology (Beta) into a single honorific that acknowledged his place in the hierarchy of the natural world while preserving a kernel of professional dignity.
He did not realize, and would not realize for an embarrassingly long time, what “Master Beta” sounded like said aloud at conversational speed.
Part III: The Invention
TooToo did not believe in retirement. Retirement was, in his estimation, the slow optimization of a human being toward zero throughput. He needed a project. He needed a system. He needed a thing that other humans would pay him to do, that involved no electronic health records, no Mobile Heartbeat app, no green dots indicating availability, and no administrators with Brioni suits and moisturizer.
He made a list of criteria.
- No hospital affiliation.
- No credentialing committee.
- Physical, not digital.
- Marxist-compatible (i.e., labor-owned).
- Capable of being practiced in a gi kimono, which TooToo found dignified and unflattering in equal measure, traits he valued in clothing.
The list, when assembled, pointed in exactly one direction: a martial arts dojo.
But the existing martial arts were saturated markets. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu had thousands of gyms in every metropolitan area — and besides, returning to BJJ was, for reasons of silverback ethology, foreclosed. Krav Maga had cornered the “anxious dad” demographic. Muay Thai had the cardio crossover. TooToo, applying the same market-segmentation logic that had once made him decide gastroenterology was an undervalued specialty (he was wrong about this, in retrospect, but the logic had been sound), reasoned that he needed a new martial art.
He spent eleven days designing it.
He called it Cu-Clitsu.
The name, he explained later to anyone who would listen, was a portmanteau honoring two opposing principles in combat: the cu, the closed and defensive lower posture (borrowed from a Mandarin character he had misremembered from a college elective), and the clitsu, an invented word that he believed sounded vaguely Japanese and therefore lent the discipline credibility. The fact that the name, said aloud in a North American accent, was vulgar and unfortunate did not occur to TooToo for approximately fourteen months, and even when it was pointed out to him by a horrified Korean-American student, he did not change it, because the LLC had already been filed and the logo printed on 200 gi kimonos.
“The name has equity,” he said. “Equity in branding is non-negotiable.”
The student left and never returned. TooToo logged this as a “non-aligned attrition event” in his spreadsheet, which he maintained personally, in OpenOffice, because he refused to pay for Microsoft.
Part IV: The Dojo
He rented a 2,400-square-foot former tanning salon on a strip mall between a vape shop and a place that sold mattresses to people who did not appear to need mattresses.
The sign read:
CU-CLITSU ACADEMY The Gentle Art of Final Submission Dr. TooToo Medvalli, Sensei (NOT A MEDICAL PROVIDER. THIS IS A MARTIAL ARTS ESTABLISHMENT. DO NOT ASK ME TO REFILL YOUR LISINOPRIL.)
The last line had been added after the third week, during which sixteen separate elderly residents of the surrounding apartment complexes had wandered in asking for prescriptions, blood pressure checks, and, in one memorable case, a vasectomy reversal.
Inside, the dojo was austere. TooToo had insisted on tatami mats, which he had imported from Japan at considerable expense, because the foam interlocking puzzle mats favored by lesser martial arts establishments offended him aesthetically and structurally. The walls were white. There was a single calligraphy scroll, which TooToo had commissioned from a calligrapher on Etsy who he later discovered was an art student in Tulsa. It read, in flowing kanji:
“FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS SUBMISSION.”
He believed this was a clever fusion of Marx and martial philosophy. Most students assumed it said something about honor.
Kai had a designated mat in the corner, on which he watched every class with the alert disinterest of a senior consultant evaluating residents. Students learned, within their first session, that Kai’s tail position was a more reliable indicator of TooToo’s mood than TooToo’s face.
When the academy opened and the first students arrived, they assumed, reasonably, that “Master Beta” was a respectful invented honorific in keeping with the rest of TooToo’s idiosyncratic terminology. They addressed him by it without hesitation. TooToo accepted the title with grave satisfaction. He had them call him Master Beta in opening ceremony. He had them call him Master Beta in closing ceremony. He printed it on the academy’s letterhead.
The students figured it out, on average, by their third class.
No one told TooToo.
It was, by silent and unanimous agreement among the students of the Cu-Clitsu Academy, the funniest thing any of them had ever been a part of, and the preservation of TooToo’s ignorance was a sacred duty none of them would violate. When new students arrived, they were taken aside and told, in low and serious tones: “You call him Master Beta. You say it slow. You say it clear. You never, ever, mention what it sounds like. Do you understand?”
They understood.
Part V: The Curriculum
Cu-Clitsu, as TooToo designed it, had three belts: white, black, and transcendent black. There were no intermediate ranks, because TooToo found the multi-belt system of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to be a “psychological retention scheme designed to maximize gym revenue at the expense of authentic skill assessment.” Either you could do Cu-Clitsu, or you could not. The middle ground was, in his words, “data-poor.”
The original curriculum consisted of twelve techniques. Eleven of them were straightforwardly adapted from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — the closed guard, the triangle choke, the kimura, the rear naked choke. TooToo had renamed them in a vaguely militant register he thought sounded revolutionary. The closed guard became “the embrace of the dispossessed.” The kimura became “the wrenching of the bourgeois shoulder.” The rear naked choke became “the silent expropriation.”
The twelfth technique was Cu-Clitsu’s signature move, the one for which the academy would eventually become regionally famous, and which would, six years later, be banned from competitive grappling federations across three states.
TooToo called it: The Final Submission.
It worked as follows.
The practitioner, having established dominant top position on the opponent, would slide his right hand down to the opponent’s hip, locate the waistband of the opponent’s gi pants, secure a deep four-finger grip, and — in a single, explosive, downward-and-outward motion that TooToo had personally calibrated to require 47 to 52 pounds of force depending on gi fabric weight — rip the opponent’s gi pants completely off.
The opponent, finding himself or herself suddenly bottomless on the tatami in front of God and the rest of the class, would experience what TooToo described in his instructional manual as “an immediate and overwhelming psychosocial catastrophe of such magnitude that continued combat becomes psychologically untenable.”
The opponent would then tap.
But not on the mat.
On their own ass.
This was non-negotiable. TooToo had written it into the academy’s bylaws.
Article VII, Section 3: The Final Submission is only valid when the defeated party acknowledges defeat by tapping, three times, audibly, on their own posterior. Tapping the mat, the opponent, or any other surface does not constitute valid submission. The tap on one’s own ass is the formal recognition that the opponent has not merely defeated you, but has, in a deeper sense, made an ass of you. This is the philosophical core of Cu-Clitsu.
TooToo considered this passage the finest piece of writing he had ever produced. He had it framed and hung over the dojo’s front door.
The same general principle, in TooToo’s design, governed every other submission in the academy. The mat tap — the universal language of capitulation in every grappling art on earth — had been abolished entirely at the Cu-Clitsu Academy on the grounds that it was, in TooToo’s words, “evasive of the embodied truth of defeat.” A man who taps the mat is, philosophically speaking, blaming the mat. A man who smacks his own ass is locating the defeat in its proper anatomical seat.
He codified this in the section immediately following.
Article VII, Section 4: For all submission engagements not governed by Section 3, the defeated party shall acknowledge defeat by delivering a single audible smack to his or her own posterior with the free hand. The smack must be loud enough to be heard across the mat by the sensei. Quiet smacks, glancing smacks, and any contact with the mat, the opponent, the gi, or any other surface shall not be recognized as valid submission. In cases where the defeated party’s hands are both immobilized — as commonly occurs in the silent expropriation, the wrenching of the bourgeois shoulder, and the deeper variations of the embrace of the dispossessed — the defeated party shall instead call out, audibly and at full volume, the name of the sensei: “TooToo!” Submission shall be considered effective upon the first such call.
The verbal alternative — the word “TooToo!” shouted by a grown adult, often in a posture of profound physical compromise, often into the tatami, often muffled and slightly damp — was an unintended source of comedy that TooToo did not appreciate but, by the time he understood the dynamic, had become a beloved feature of the academy’s culture. He had considered, briefly, replacing the call with a more dignified alternative — “Yield” had been on the shortlist, as had “Beta” — but he had concluded, after polling the inaugural class, that his name was already established as the verbal submission marker in his students’ procedural memory, and that changing it now would constitute “ritual disruption with no compensating philosophical gain.”
New students were warned in advance, before their first roll, by Dr. Janet Kowalczyk:
“When the choke comes in and you can’t reach your ass — you call him out. Yell the name. Don’t be shy. It is how he knows you are alive.”
Visitors to the strip mall on any given evening, walking past the academy on their way to the vape shop or the mattress place, would frequently hear, drifting out into the parking lot through the propped-open back door:
“TooToo!” “…TooToo!” (smack) “TooToo! — TooToo! — TOOTOO!” (double smack — disqualified — reset)
The vape shop next door had, after the first three months, stopped asking what was going on. The mattress place had developed a theory, which they did not share with TooToo, that the academy was a kind of religious order. They were, in a sense that neither party would have articulated, not entirely wrong.
Part VI: The Students
The Cu-Clitsu Academy attracted, in its first six months, a clientele TooToo had not anticipated but came to appreciate.
There was Brent, a former hospital CFO who had been laid off in the UPPAKH consolidation and was now, in his words, “exploring his physicality.” Brent showed up in lululemon. TooToo gave him a gi. Brent paid in cash. Brent had a great deal of unprocessed rage. Brent took to Cu-Clitsu like a man who had been waiting his entire life to be allowed to rip someone’s pants off.
It was Brent, by the way, who had figured out the Master Beta thing first. He had been on his way home from his third class, in his car, when he replayed the closing ceremony in his head — Thank you, Master Beta. Domo, Master Beta. Master Beta, Master Beta, Master Beta — and the thirty-six repetitions of the phrase in his memory finally collapsed into the obvious phonetic conclusion. Brent had to pull over. Brent laughed for eleven minutes in the parking lot of a Meijer. Brent told no one for two days, until Dr. Janet Kowalczyk arrived to her first class, at which point he took her aside and explained, and a sacred pact was born.
There was Dr. Janet Kowalczyk, a primary care physician who had also quit UPPAKH on principle and was now driving for DoorDash. Dr. Kowalczyk came to Cu-Clitsu twice a week and quietly, methodically, became extremely good at it. She had a particular gift for the Final Submission. TooToo, watching her execute it on Brent for the fourth Tuesday in a row, noted in his ledger: Kowalczyk J. — exceptional pants-removal kinematics. Potential instructor candidate.
There was a man who would only give his name as “Manolo,” who appeared to be in his late seventies, who refused to wear a gi and instead trained in a Members Only jacket, and who, despite TooToo’s repeated insistence that this was against academy policy, was tolerated because he paid in advance for an entire year and never spoke during class.
There was a teenager named Devon whose mother had signed him up after Devon was suspended from school for, in TooToo’s later understanding, “energy-related concerns.” Devon turned out to be the most naturally gifted Cu-Clitsu practitioner TooToo had ever seen. Within four months, Devon could execute the Final Submission in 1.3 seconds from a standing clinch. TooToo gave him a black belt, the first he had ever awarded, and Devon’s mother cried, and TooToo did not know what to do with this, so he gave Kai a treat and looked at the ceiling.
Part VII: The Reckoning
Dr. Marcus Sogmawi had been TooToo’s CMO at the Medical Factory Without a Name, back before the UPPAKH merger, back when there were still separate hospital systems and separate cruelties. Sogmawi was the man who had once strapped TooToo to a chair and forced the Mobile Heartbeat app onto his phone. Sogmawi was the man who, after the UPPAKH consolidation, had been promoted to Regional Vice President of Provider Compliance, Great Lakes Sector, a role for which he was paid $1.4 million annually and which required him to do nothing he could clearly articulate when asked.
Sogmawi walked into the Cu-Clitsu Academy on a Tuesday in October.
He was wearing the suit.
The Brioni.
The moisturizer.
The eyebrows.
TooToo, who had been demonstrating “the wrenching of the bourgeois shoulder” on Brent, was at that moment finishing the lock. Brent — both hands immobilized by the technique, no posterior available to smack — was yelling, audibly and at full volume, the only word the doctrine left him: “TooToo! TooToo! TooToo!” Sogmawi, who had not been warned about Article VII, Section 4, would later report that the first thing he heard upon entering the dojo was a grown man screaming his old colleague’s name into a tatami mat, and that this had, even before the demonstration of the Final Submission, begun a process of psychological recalibration that he had not been prepared for.
TooToo released the lock. Brent collapsed forward, breathing hard, and smacked his own ass once for good measure, which the doctrine did not require but which TooToo silently approved of. Kai stood up. The entire class, which had developed a remarkable group-sensory awareness of TooToo’s emotional states, went silent.
TooToo looked up.
“TooToo,” Sogmawi said.
“Dr. Sogmawi.”
“I heard you were teaching.”
“I am.”
“I came to take a class.”
TooToo studied him. He calculated the man’s weight, his probable cardiovascular fitness (poor), his shoulder mobility (limited by years of desk work and what TooToo suspected were cortisone injections), and his psychological readiness for what was about to happen (zero).
“Classes are sixty dollars,” TooToo said.
Sogmawi handed him three twenties.
“Get a gi from the rack,” TooToo said.
Sogmawi got a gi from the rack. It was a size too small. TooToo did not mention this. Sogmawi changed in the back room. Sogmawi emerged in the gi, looking like a man who had been dressed by people who did not like him.
“Today,” TooToo announced to the class, “we will be demonstrating the Final Submission. Dr. Sogmawi has graciously volunteered to be the demonstration partner.”
Sogmawi had not graciously volunteered. Sogmawi had no idea what the Final Submission was. Sogmawi, who had only ever heard the name “Cu-Clitsu” said aloud in a North American accent, now realized for the first time what the name sounded like, and a small, alarmed look passed across his moisturized face.
It was, TooToo would reflect later, the most honest expression he had ever seen on Sogmawi.
They knelt on the mat.
They bowed.
They engaged.
It lasted four seconds.
TooToo passed Sogmawi’s guard, established side control, transitioned to mount, slid his right hand to the waistband of Sogmawi’s too-small gi pants, secured a deep four-finger grip, and — in a single, explosive, downward-and-outward motion calibrated to 49 pounds of force — executed the Final Submission with what Dr. Janet Kowalczyk would later describe, in the academy’s internal newsletter, as “the surgical precision of a man who had spent thirty years performing colonoscopies on bureaucrats.”
Dr. Marcus Sogmawi, Regional Vice President of Provider Compliance, Great Lakes Sector, lay bottomless on the tatami mat of the Cu-Clitsu Academy, in front of God, Brent, Dr. Janet Kowalczyk, Manolo, Devon, and Kai.
There was a long silence.
TooToo waited.
Sogmawi’s hand moved, slowly, with the resignation of a man who had finally understood that documentation could not save him, that the green dot was meaningless, that the Brioni suit had been a costume, that the moisturizer had been a lie, and that the medical career he had abandoned for the windowless rooms of administration could not now be re-summoned.
He tapped.
Once, twice, three times.
On his own ass.
The sound, audible across the tatami, was — TooToo noted later — exactly correct. Crisp. Three clean strikes. Textbook submission.
TooToo stood. He extended a hand to help Sogmawi up.
Sogmawi took it.
“You used to be a doctor,” TooToo said quietly, as he helped him to his feet. “Now you’re a loser in a gi that doesn’t fit.”
Sogmawi nodded. He didn’t speak. He gathered his pants. He went into the back room. He changed. He left.
He came back the next Tuesday.
And the Tuesday after that.
Part VIII: The Expanded Curriculum
Within his first year of operation, TooToo had expanded the Cu-Clitsu curriculum from twelve techniques to fourteen, adding two drills he considered foundational to the development of what he called “embodied combat readiness.” Both drills were, in TooToo’s assessment, philosophically superior to anything offered in conventional Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies. Both drills were also, in the assessment of every student who took them, deeply and unforgettably weird.
Drill #13: The Mount Accumulation Round
In conventional grappling, achieving the mount position — sitting astride a supine opponent — is a high-value but uncommon occurrence in any given round. TooToo had calculated, after watching three hundred hours of competition footage, that the average black belt achieved a clean mount in 11% of rounds, with a mean dwell time of 14 seconds.
These numbers, TooToo concluded, were insufficient. The mount was the most dominant ground position in grappling. Therefore, mount achievement needed to be drilled to volume.
He designed the Mount Accumulation Round.
In this drill, a single student stood in the center of the mat and was attacked, in rotation, by every other student in the class, one at a time, in sixty-second rounds. The objective of the central student was to establish mount on each successive attacker as many times as possible within the round. The objective of the attackers was simple: do not get mounted.
TooToo called this drill “Mount Accumulation.”
The students, watching it from the sidelines on the first day TooToo introduced it, called it something else.
The drill, viewed from across the dojo, consisted of a single person rapidly, methodically, and repeatedly climbing on top of a series of other people. The visual rhythm of it — mount, reset, mount, reset, mount, reset — was, in Brent’s later phrasing, “the most uncomfortable thing I have ever willingly paid sixty dollars to do.”
By the second week, the students had a private name for the drill, which they used only when TooToo was not in the room.
They called it the Humping Drill.
TooToo, when he eventually overheard this nickname, frowned for forty seconds, and then said: “Mount Accumulation more precisely describes the biomechanical objective.”
The students nodded.
They continued calling it the Humping Drill.
Drill #14: The Vulnerable Anatomical Strike Rotation
This drill was simpler.
Two students faced one another in seiza, the formal kneeling position. At TooToo’s command, they would, in alternating turns, deliver a single flick — index finger snapped from the thumb, the standard physics-textbook flick — to the opponent’s testicles. The drill continued until one student tapped.
TooToo called this drill “the Vulnerable Anatomical Strike Rotation” in his written curriculum.
He called it, in spoken class, “the nut flick.”
He had concluded, after extensive consideration, that the testicles were the single most underutilized target in modern grappling. The Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts prohibited strikes to the groin. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitions prohibited strikes to the groin. Wrestling prohibited strikes to the groin. This, to TooToo, was a market inefficiency.
“Real violence,” he explained to the inaugural class, “does not have a ruleset. Real violence has anatomy. We will train for anatomy.”
The drill was painful. The drill was humiliating. The drill was, the students unanimously concluded, ethically dubious. But the drill was, undeniably, effective at producing a generation of Cu-Clitsu practitioners who were exceptionally skilled at flicking testicles and exceptionally vigilant about protecting their own.
Dr. Janet Kowalczyk, who did not have testicles, was exempt from the receiving portion of the drill. She participated only in the delivering portion. She maintained, by the end of her first year, an undefeated record across forty-seven rotations.
Part IX: The Doubter
In the academy’s fourteenth month, a new student arrived who would, by his presence alone, force TooToo to articulate the philosophical core of Cu-Clitsu in a way he had not previously been required to.
His name was Tyler. He was twenty-one. He was a senior at Eastern Michigan University, majoring in something called “Sports Management,” which TooToo did not understand to be a real academic discipline but had decided not to investigate further. Tyler had trained in Krav Maga for two years and had come to Cu-Clitsu because his Krav Maga instructor had retired and the next nearest Krav Maga gym was forty minutes away.
Tyler had a Krav Maga problem, which was that he believed himself to be a person who knew about self-defense.
In his third class, during the Vulnerable Anatomical Strike Rotation, Tyler raised his hand.
“Master Beta,” Tyler said. (He said it slow. He said it clear. Brent, on the sidelines, looked at the ceiling.)
“Yes, Tyler.”
“I have a question about the practicality of this technique.”
TooToo turned to face him fully. Kai, in the corner, lifted his head. The rest of the class, sensing the shift in atmospheric pressure, became very still.
“Proceed.”
“It’s just,” Tyler said, “in a real self-defense situation? Like, on the street? I don’t see how you could ever, like, actually flick somebody in the nuts. Like, you’d have to get really close. And they’d see it coming. And, like, in Krav Maga, we trained palm strikes and elbow strikes and knee strikes to the groin, which are way more powerful and have more reach. The flick, like, it doesn’t have enough force to actually incapacitate. It’s just kind of annoying.”
There was a long silence.
TooToo stepped onto the center of the mat. He gestured for Tyler to stand.
“Tyler,” TooToo said. “Walk with me through a scenario.”
“Okay.”
“You are a college student. You are walking across the Eastern Michigan University campus. It is ten forty-seven at night. You have just left the library. You are crossing the quad. The lighting is poor — the campus has retrofitted to LED, but the bulb above the south walkway has been out for six days. You are walking alone. You are wearing — what are you wearing tonight, Tyler?”
“Uh. Like. A hoodie?”
“You are wearing a hoodie. You are wearing jeans. You are wearing Adidas Sambas, because you are twenty-one years old in 2026 and that is what you wear. You have your backpack on both shoulders, which is correct for postural reasons but tactically suboptimal because it limits your shoulder mobility.”
“Okay.”
“A man approaches you. He is taller than you. He is heavier than you. He is, by your own visual assessment, a Chad.”
Brent, on the sidelines, made a sound.
“The Chad approaches you with intent. He asks you for your wallet. He has one hand in his jacket pocket. You cannot see whether he is armed. The street is empty. The library is two hundred meters behind you. Your phone is in your hoodie pocket. The nearest blue-light emergency station is forty meters to your left, but the Chad is positioned between you and the station.”
“Okay.”
“Tyler. In this scenario. With your training. What is your move?”
Tyler thought about it.
“Palm strike to the nose. Then knee to the groin. Then I run.”
TooToo nodded slowly.
“And what is the distance between you and the Chad when you initiate the palm strike?”
“Like, three feet.”
“Three feet. And what is the Chad’s reaction time, given that he is also aware that you might attempt a self-defense maneuver, because he has approached you with hostile intent and is therefore in a state of heightened vigilance?”
“I don’t know. Fast.”
“Fast. And if the Chad’s right hand is, as you have stipulated, in his jacket pocket — what is in that pocket?”
“A knife, maybe. Or a gun.”
“A knife or a gun. Tyler. You have just told me, in your scenario, that you will close to three feet of a man who may have a knife or a gun, and you will attempt to strike his face with your palm. This is a decision tree with seventeen branches, and fourteen of them end with you in an ambulance.”
Tyler said nothing.
“Now,” TooToo said. “Consider the alternative.”
He raised his right index finger. He cocked it against his thumb. He held it up for the class to see.
“The Chad approaches. He asks for your wallet. You appear to comply. You reach toward your pocket — but as you do, you step forward, not back, into the Chad’s personal space. He does not expect this. Humans expect prey to flee. You are not fleeing. You are closing distance. The Chad’s processing speed slows by two hundred milliseconds while his prefrontal cortex attempts to reconcile your unexpected behavior with his predatory script. In that two-hundred-millisecond window — Tyler, what is the most unexpected, most disorienting, most fundamentally identity-disrupting thing you can do to a hostile male stranger?”
Tyler stared.
“Flick his nuts?”
“Flick his nuts.”
“But — Master Beta — even if it works, like, it just kind of hurts him a little. It doesn’t put him down.”
“Tyler.” TooToo lowered his finger. “You are misunderstanding the technique because you are thinking like a Krav Maga student. You are thinking the goal is to incapacitate the attacker. The goal is not to incapacitate the attacker. The goal is to break the social contract of violence.”
He let that sit.
“When a Chad approaches a college student in a dark quad, there is an implicit script. The Chad threatens. The student complies, or flees, or fights. These are the three branches the Chad has prepared for. The Chad has not prepared for being flicked in the testicles. The flick is too small to register as a serious attack. The flick is too intimate to register as a normal defensive maneuver. The flick exists in a psychological category for which the Chad has no script.”
TooToo paused.
“The Chad does not feel pain. The Chad feels confusion. He looks down. His brain attempts to reconcile what has just happened. Did this person just flick me in the testicles? Why? Is this a joke? Is this real? Am I being recorded? In the four to six seconds of cognitive dissociation that follow, you are no longer in front of him. You are forty meters to the left, at the blue-light station. The Chad is still looking down.”
He turned to the class.
“This is the principle. This is why we train the nut flick. We do not train it for force. We train it for category violation. The Final Submission works on the same principle. The mount accumulation works on the same principle. Every technique in this academy is designed not to defeat the opponent’s body but to defeat the opponent’s script.”
He turned back to Tyler.
“Krav Maga teaches you to win a fight. Cu-Clitsu teaches you that fights are stories the attacker is telling himself, and the fastest way to end a fight is to make the story unrecoverable.”
Tyler was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s actually… kind of brilliant?”
“It is brilliant,” TooToo said. “I have written 14,000 words on it.”
He turned and walked back to the front of the mat. Kai, in the corner, lowered his head.
“Continue the rotation.”
The class continued the rotation. Tyler flicked. Tyler was flicked. Tyler smacked his own ass — too quietly the first time, was made to do it again, smacked it correctly the second time — re-engaged, and flicked again. By the end of class he had been flicked seventeen times and had smacked his own ass seventeen times and had flicked his partners sixteen times, and as he walked out to the parking lot in the cold October air, he was, he would later admit to his roommate, deeply confused about whether he had just received the worst or the best martial arts instruction of his life.
The next Tuesday, he came back.
He always came back.
Part X: The Field Test
It happened nineteen days after the doubter scene.
Tyler was walking across the Eastern Michigan University quad. It was ten fifty-three at night. He had just left the library. He was wearing a hoodie. He was wearing jeans. He was wearing Adidas Sambas. The bulb above the south walkway had been out for now twenty-five days because the campus facilities ticket was, like everything, downstream of a documentation backlog.
The street was empty.
The blue-light station was forty meters to his left.
A man stepped out from behind the bronze statue of the university’s founder.
He was taller than Tyler. He was heavier than Tyler. He had one hand in his jacket pocket. He asked for Tyler’s wallet.
Tyler stopped walking.
A great calm descended upon Tyler. He had, in the nineteen days since the doubter scene, replayed TooToo’s parable approximately six hundred times. He had visualized the scenario in the shower, in lecture, on the elliptical at the campus rec center, falling asleep at night. He had developed, over those nineteen days, a deep and unshakable certainty that this exact moment would come, and that when it did, he would not flee, and he would not comply, and he would not do anything Krav Maga had taught him.
He would do Cu-Clitsu.
He would do it correctly.
What followed, the officers who reviewed the body camera footage would later agree, was not something any of them had been trained to interpret.
Tyler did not run.
Tyler dropped his backpack.
Tyler executed a forward shoulder roll — a movement he had not been formally taught at the academy but which he had seen on a YouTube video about aikido and which he believed lent the proceedings a sense of ceremonial gravity — and came up in seiza, the formal kneeling position, in the middle of the quad, on the wet October grass.
The assailant stopped moving.
The assailant’s hand came halfway out of his jacket pocket and then went back in.
Tyler bowed, from the waist, deeply.
“I accept your challenge,” Tyler said.
The assailant said: “What?”
“Sir,” Tyler said, “before we engage, the rules of Cu-Clitsu require mutual anatomical accessibility. I must respectfully request that you remove your jeans.”
There was a silence on the quad of a quality that Eastern Michigan University had not previously hosted.
“Are you on something?” the assailant said.
“I am training. I have been training for fourteen weeks. Please remove your jeans, sir.”
“I’m not — I’m trying to rob you.”
“I understand. I am offering you the opportunity to do so under fair conditions. Fight like a man!”
The assailant looked around the quad. He was looking, the officers would later determine, for any other human being who could confirm that this was actually happening. He found none. He looked back at Tyler, who was still kneeling, who was still bowed forward, who was waiting.
“I’m leaving,” the assailant said.
He turned to walk away.
This, Tyler would later explain to the officers, was the trigger.
In Cu-Clitsu doctrine, a refusal to engage by a hostile party who has initiated contact constitutes what TooToo termed “asymmetric script abandonment” — the attacker attempts to leave the situation while the defender remains in a posture of formal engagement. Doctrine prescribed a single response: the defender must close distance and impose terminal submission.
Tyler stood up.
He covered the distance to the assailant in three strides.
He established side-clinch.
He passed to side-control standing — a transition the academy had never formally drilled in a vertical context but which Tyler intuited under pressure.
He slid his right hand down to the waistband of the assailant’s jeans, secured a deep four-finger grip, and — in a single, explosive, downward-and-outward motion that TooToo would later, watching the body cam footage, estimate at 54 pounds of force, slightly excessive but appropriate to the heavier denim of street pants versus standard gi fabric — executed the Final Submission.
The assailant’s jeans came off in one pull.
The assailant froze.
The assailant looked down.
The assailant’s brain attempted to reconcile what had just happened.
He was on the quad. He was in his underwear. His pants were in the grass eight feet away. A college student was kneeling in front of him, again, having returned to seiza. The college student was looking up at him with what could only be described as patience.
“Sir,” Tyler said. “Please kneel.”
The assailant — and this is the part that, when Brent later watched the body cam footage at the academy’s Tuesday social, made him laugh so hard he had to be given water — the assailant knelt.
He knelt because his entire psychological framework for “what is happening to me right now” had collapsed, and the only available script was the script being offered by the very calm young man in front of him, who appeared to know what came next.
Tyler bowed.
The assailant, after a long pause, bowed back.
Tyler raised his right index finger. He cocked it against his thumb.
He flicked.
The flick connected, through the assailant’s underwear, with what TooToo’s curriculum precisely termed the Vulnerable Anatomical Convergence.
The assailant made a sound.
Tyler paused, three seconds, as the rotation required.
He flicked again.
He paused.
He flicked again.
By the fourth flick, the assailant had begun to cry. Not from pain — the flicks, by force, were minor. He was crying from a deeper place. He was crying, the police psychologist would later note in his report, from “a fundamental disorientation regarding the nature of his own ongoing life experience.”
By the seventh flick, the campus police arrived.
The body cam footage, which would eventually be subpoenaed by the Detroit Free Press under FOIA and would form the basis of the headline that turned the Cu-Clitsu Academy from a regional curiosity into a national one, captured the following scene:
Two officers, badges visible, weapons holstered, illuminated by the bouncing beams of their flashlights, rounding the corner of the library at a brisk walk. Their flashlights converging on the quad. The footage steady, then pausing, then dropping a foot as the lead officer — Officer Patricia Holzhauer, eleven years on the force — physically stopped walking.
What the flashlights illuminate:
A college student, in a hoodie, in seiza, on wet grass, flicking — methodically, with perfect three-second intervals — the underwear-clad testicles of a pantless adult male who is kneeling in front of him, sobbing softly, and not attempting to leave.
Officer Holzhauer’s microphone captures her saying, very quietly:
”…the fuck.”
Then, louder:
“SIR. STEP AWAY FROM THE GENTLEMAN.”
Tyler froze, his right hand still cocked for the eighth flick. He turned his head, slowly, toward the officers. He bowed, still kneeling. He stood. He placed his hands behind his back, palms outward, in the posture TooToo had drilled the academy in as “non-threatening compliance presentation.”
“Officer,” Tyler said. “I am performing a defensive Cu-Clitsu protocol on a hostile assailant.”
There was a silence.
“You’re performing a what.”
“Cu-Clitsu.”
Officer Holzhauer’s body cam catches her partner, Officer Greg Mendel, leaning over and whispering: “Did he just say what I think he said?”
Officer Holzhauer’s response, also audible: “Greg, I do not know what is happening right now.”
“Could you say that again, slower?” she said to Tyler.
“Coo,” Tyler said. “Clit. Soo.”
“Sir, are you under the influence of any substances tonight?”
“No, ma’am. I am a brown belt candidate at the Cu-Clitsu Academy on Carpenter Road. This man” — he gestured at the pantless, kneeling, crying assailant — “approached me with the apparent intent to rob me. I engaged the standard defensive protocol. The protocol is now ninety percent complete. May I finish the rotation?”
“NO,” said Officer Holzhauer. “No, you may not finish the rotation. Step away from the gentleman. Sir — the other sir — please stand up. Get your pants. Please get your pants, sir. Sir, why are you crying.”
The pantless man, through tears: “I don’t know what just happened.”
“Did this young man assault you?”
”…I don’t know.”
“Sir, did you intend to rob this young man?”
”…I don’t know.”
Officer Holzhauer turned slowly to look at Tyler. Tyler met her eyes with the still composure of a man who had, against all probability, executed the technique exactly as it had been taught.
She keyed her radio.
“Dispatch. This is Holzhauer. I’m going to need a supervisor at the EMU quad. And, uh. Maybe a psych consult. For both of them.”
Tyler was taken to the campus police station for what the officers — who could not, in good faith, charge him with assault, because the alleged victim could not articulate what had happened or whether he had been the aggressor — termed a “voluntary interview.”
He was allowed one phone call.
He scrolled to the top of his contacts, which were arranged alphabetically, and which placed at the very top, before “Aaron – Roommate” and “Amazon Customer Service,” a single entry under the letter M:
Master Beta — EMERGENCY
He pressed call.
TooToo answered on the second ring.
“Yes.”
“Master Beta. It’s Tyler.”
There was a pause.
“You used the technique.”
“How did you —”
“Why else would you be calling at this hour. Are you injured.”
“No, Master Beta.”
“Are you in custody.”
“I’m at the campus police station. They said it’s a voluntary interview.”
“On my way.”
The phone clicked.
Forty-six minutes later, Dr. TooToo Medvalli walked into the lobby of the Eastern Michigan University campus police station. He was wearing his calligraphy-embroidered black gi, because he had been in the middle of the academy’s Tuesday evening solo drilling session when Tyler called and had not bothered to change. He had Kai on a leash, because he had not bothered to drop the dog at home. Kai, a working dog with twelve years of training and an impeccable sense of context, walked into the police station with the composed disinterest of a senior officer attending an unfortunate situation.
Officer Holzhauer, at the front desk, looked up.
She did not speak for several seconds.
“Are you,” she finally said, “the sensei.”
“I am the Master Beta,” TooToo said.
”…Could you say that again, slower?”
“I am the Master Beta.”
Officer Holzhauer’s mouth moved silently. She turned to her monitor. She turned back.
“Right. Yeah. Okay. He’s in interview room two.”
What was said in interview room two has never been disclosed, because Tyler did not record it and TooToo, on principle, did not own a smartphone capable of recording. But forty minutes after TooToo entered the room, the door opened, and Tyler walked out with TooToo behind him, and behind them came Officer Holzhauer, who had the expression of a woman who had been forced, against her will, to update her model of reality.
No charges were filed.
The alleged assailant — whose name was never released, and who had a prior for petty theft — declined to press charges. He declined, also, to give a statement to the press. He declined to ever return to the EMU campus. He declined, in fact, to ever again attempt to mug anyone, and would eventually, three years later, become a moderately successful sales representative for a flooring company in Toledo.
In the parking lot of the police station, under the orange wash of a sodium-vapor streetlight that the EMU facilities team had not yet retrofitted, Tyler and TooToo stood with Kai between them.
“Master Beta,” Tyler said. “I have one question.”
“Proceed.”
“Was — was that right? Did I do it right?”
TooToo considered the question. He looked at Tyler. He looked at the streetlight. He looked at Kai, who had sat down on the asphalt and was watching a moth.
“You did not need to remove the jeans,” TooToo said. “The flick can be administered through standard denim. The drill we practice in the academy uses gi pants because gi pants are part of formal training attire, not because denim is impermeable. You added a step the doctrine does not require.”
“Oh.”
“However.”
TooToo turned to face him fully.
“You added a step that demonstrated formal commitment to the philosophical seriousness of the engagement. You refused to engage under unfair conditions. You insisted that the attacker meet you on equal anatomical terms. This is a deepening of the doctrine I had not previously articulated. I will be adding it to the curriculum.”
Tyler’s eyes filled.
“Also: you should not have dropped into seiza on wet grass. You will get a urinary tract infection. The tatami is a controlled surface for reasons of hygiene as well as kinetics. Next time, remain standing until tatami-equivalent footing is available.”
“Yes, Master Beta.”
“Also: the bow at the beginning was excessive. A nod is sufficient when the opponent has not yet acknowledged a formal match.”
“Yes, Master Beta.”
“Tyler.”
“Yes, Master Beta?”
TooToo placed one hand on Tyler’s shoulder. The gesture was so unfamiliar to him — physical contact initiated for emotional purposes — that he had to consciously instruct his hand to perform it, like a man operating a piece of unfamiliar machinery from a manual.
“The technique performed exactly as designed.”
Tyler began to cry.
Kai, on the asphalt, stopped watching the moth and looked up.
TooToo, who did not understand why his student was crying but had learned, over the past fourteen months of running a martial arts academy, that emotional displays of this kind were typically followed by gratitude and did not require him to do anything except wait, waited.
Eventually Tyler stopped crying.
They walked to their cars.
Part XI: The Diagnosis
The question came in the second year of the academy, on a Thursday in March, from a student who had been training for eleven months. Her name was Priya. She was twenty-eight. She had a PhD in clinical psychology and had taken up Cu-Clitsu, by her own report, because her therapist had recommended a physical hobby and she had selected, from the available local options, the most interesting one. Priya was thoughtful. Priya asked good questions. Priya had been waiting, TooToo would realize later, for the right moment to ask the question she actually wanted to ask.
The moment came at the end of class, after the bow to Kai’s urn, in the empty dojo, while TooToo was wiping down the mats and Priya was the last student left in the changing area.
“Master Beta,” she said. (Slow. Clear. The pact unbroken.)
“Yes, Priya.”
“Can I ask you a clinical question?”
“You may ask.”
“Why did you build a martial art whose entire structure is about the controlled, ritualized humiliation of one party by another, with the humiliated party formally requesting the humiliation, performing a public bodily acknowledgment of it, and then immediately returning for more?”
TooToo stopped wiping the mat.
He stood up, slowly.
He looked at Priya.
He looked at the calligraphy scroll. He looked at Kai’s urn. He looked at the framed Article VII, Section 3. He looked at the rack of gi kimonos with the academy’s logo printed on the breast.
He sat down on the mat.
He did not speak for almost a full minute.
Then he said, in the flat analytical register he used for diagnoses: “I have been asked this question before. The previous times, the asker was angry, or sarcastic, or attempting to provoke me. You are not. You are asking it sincerely.”
“Yes.”
“Then I will answer it sincerely.”
He folded his hands in his lap. He looked at the wall, not at her, because the answer was easier to assemble in the absence of an interlocutor’s eyes.
“I spent thirty-one years in academic medicine,” he began.
He had been a medical student, then an intern, then a resident, then a chief resident, then a fellow, then an attending, then an associate professor with a sub-specialty appointment in gastroenterology at a Big Ten university. He had taught fourteen incoming residency classes. He had served as program director for six of them. He had not noticed, until very recently — until this moment, possibly, until Priya had asked her question — what kind of structure he had spent three decades operating inside.
The dynamic in a teaching hospital, viewed from outside, would be unrecognizable as legitimate work to almost any other industry. The residents arrived at 4 a.m. The residents pre-rounded for two hours. The residents presented their patients to the chief resident, who, having been a resident himself sixteen months ago, took particular pleasure in identifying every gap, every miscalculation, every imperfectly-cited reference. The residents then re-presented to the attending, who took further pleasure — different in flavor, more sophisticated, fully matured — in finding errors that the chief resident had missed. The attending would lean back in his chair. The attending would steeple his fingers. The attending would say, in the cultivated tone of a man who has waited his entire career for this exact opportunity:
“Take me through your reasoning again, Doctor.”
And the resident would take him through the reasoning again, and the reasoning would not survive scrutiny, and the resident’s voice would become smaller, and the resident’s face would flush, and the attending’s eyes would light up.
“This is the part I want to be precise about,” TooToo said to Priya. “Because I was on both sides of this for three decades, and I have only recently understood, in retrospect, the quality of the light.”
The look in the professor’s eyes, when the resident’s reasoning collapsed, was not warm. It was not curious. It was not pedagogical. It was, TooToo said, searing. It was gleeful. It was the look of a man who had been waiting all morning for this exact moment, who would be telling this story at the residency program directors’ dinner that night, who would be using the resident’s name with affection but in the tone of a man describing a fish he had landed.
And the resident, on the receiving end of that look, would say — was required to say, ritually, doctrinally, before the morning was over — “Thank you, Dr. Henderson. May I take one more patient?”
And Dr. Henderson would assign three more patients, and the resident, who had not slept in twenty-six hours, would say:
“Thank you.”
The whole exchange, TooToo had finally come to understand, was a scene. It had blocking. It had a script. It had a recurring cast. It had emotional beats that were, for the senior party, deeply satisfying, and for the junior party, formative in ways that were not entirely about clinical education. The residents, in their third or fourth year, after they had survived enough of these encounters, would begin to inflict identical scenes on the residents below them. They would not see themselves doing this. They would describe it, in their own minds, as teaching. They would describe the eyes-lighting-up moment as helping.
The structural resemblance to a particular genre of adult content was, TooToo said to Priya, who was sitting now on the mat across from him with her chin on her hand, not subtle. It was, in fact, exact. Strip away the white coats and the EHR and the patient on the gurney, and what remained was: a clothed authority figure deriving observable, searing pleasure from inflicting controlled, ritualized degradation upon a subordinate, while the subordinate, in turn, requested more.
It was, TooToo said, a porn scene without nudity. The OR was the set. The patient was the prop. The work product was the proof of consummation. The white coat was the costume.
He had been on both sides of this dynamic for thirty-one years.
He had been the resident saying “thank you, may I have another patient,” and he had been the attending whose eyes had lit up. He had not, at the time, identified his own eyes as lighting up. He had identified himself as teaching and maintaining standards and not letting the next generation get away with what we got away with. He had used those phrases, in committee meetings, with absolute conviction, for two decades.
He had, in retrospect, been having a great time.
“The Cu-Clitsu Academy,” TooToo said, “is the same dynamic. With the lying removed. The hierarchy is named. The submission is named. The humiliation is named. The pleasure I take in administering a demonstration on a man like Sogmawi is not different, in any psychological respect, from the pleasure my old mentor took in destroying me in the OR in 1993, while the scrub nurse silently re-counted the laps and the medical student pretended to look at the monitor. The only difference is that everyone in the dojo knows what is happening. The mentor in 1993 did not know, or knew and did not say, or said and called it teaching. I, in 2026, call it Cu-Clitsu, and the students smack their own asses, and Brent screams my name into the tatami, and everyone, in the end, signs up voluntarily.”
He paused.
“That is the answer to your question.”
Priya looked at him for a long moment.
“That’s a pretty good answer,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Have you written this down?”
“I wrote one sentence.”
“What was the sentence?”
TooToo did not normally share things he had written privately. The 14,000-word essay on beta dignity had been read by no one. The criterion list had been seen by no one. The single sentence in the back of his curriculum notebook had been seen by no one.
He told Priya the sentence.
“The dojo is the academic medical center, with the lying removed.”
Priya nodded slowly.
“You should write more.”
“I should not.”
“Why?”
TooToo considered.
“Because the value of the dojo, as I have come to understand it, is that it is the embodied form of a truth that loses its function when articulated. The residents in the OR did not need to be told what was happening. They needed to be inside it, in their bodies, repeatedly, until they understood. The students here are the same. The doctrine, the smacks, the rotations — these are not the message. These are the medium. To articulate the medium would be to dissolve it.”
Priya stood up. She bowed.
“Thank you, Master Beta.”
“You are welcome, Priya.”
She left.
TooToo finished wiping the mats.
He went home and did not write a single additional word about it for the rest of his life.
Epilogue
The Detroit Free Press article ran on the front page of the Metro section eleven days later, after a records request unsealed the body cam footage. The headline read:
“EMU STUDENT FOILS MUGGER WITH OBSCURE MARTIAL ART; POLICE, ALLEGED VICTIM EQUALLY UNABLE TO EXPLAIN”
The article quoted TooToo, who agreed to a single phone interview against the better judgment of his student-base, as follows:
“The technique is not designed to incapacitate. The technique is designed to render the attacker’s situation narratively unrecoverable. The flick is not the weapon. The category violation is the weapon.”
The reporter, in a parenthetical, noted: “Dr. Medvalli, who insisted on being referred to throughout the interview as ‘Master Beta,’ declined to elaborate on the etymology of the academy’s name.”
Within two weeks of the article’s publication, the Cu-Clitsu Academy on Carpenter Road had a waitlist of two hundred and fourteen students. TooToo did not raise prices. He did, however, order an additional shipment of tatami mats.
Tyler received his first stripe on the Tuesday after the article was published. He cried again. Kai watched.
The academy’s signage evolved over the following years, layering revisions like sediment until the front board read, in full:
CU-CLITSU ACADEMY The Gentle Art of Final Submission Dr. TooToo Medvalli, Sensei (Master Beta) (NOT A MEDICAL PROVIDER. THIS IS A MARTIAL ARTS ESTABLISHMENT. DO NOT ASK ME TO REFILL YOUR LISINOPRIL.) WALK-INS WELCOME. ADMINISTRATORS HALF-OFF. AS FEATURED IN THE DETROIT FREE PRESS.
The half-off discount for administrators was real. TooToo offered it because, as he explained to a reporter from the local alt-weekly whose profile was eventually killed by UPPAKH’s media affiliate, “the administrators need it the most, and they have the most to lose, which makes their final submission the most pedagogically valuable for the rest of the class.”
Dr. Marcus Sogmawi kept coming. He came every Tuesday. He came every Thursday. He came on Saturdays for open mat. By his eighteenth month, he had stopped wearing the Brioni anywhere — not to the dojo, not to the office, not anywhere. He had begun wearing flannel shirts and unironed khakis, which he bought from a Costco in Romulus and which fit him in a way the Brioni never had. In his twenty-fourth month, he resigned from UPPAKH. The resignation was four words long. He had borrowed the formula.
He and Dr. Janet Kowalczyk opened a small primary care clinic together on a side street in Ypsilanti. The clinic operated on a sliding scale. It accepted no insurance. It used paper charts. It had no app. It had a green plant in the waiting room that Janet remembered to water and a coffee maker that Sogmawi remembered to clean. The patients liked them both.
TooToo did not attend the opening, because TooToo did not attend openings, but he sent Kai with a card.
The card said: From each according to his ability.
Kai died in the spring of the academy’s third year. He was thirteen and a half. He died on his designated mat in the corner of the dojo, in his sleep, between the Tuesday evening fundamentals class and the Thursday morning conditioning class, in a position that suggested he had been comfortable. TooToo found him in the morning. TooToo did not teach class that day. He cancelled the week.
He had Kai cremated. The urn sits on a shelf above the calligraphy scroll. Every class begins and ends, now, with a bow to the urn.
On the wall next to the calligraphy, there is a small framed photograph.
It is a photo of Dr. Marcus Sogmawi, on the day he received his black belt, two and a half years after his first class. He is smiling. He is in a properly fitted gi. He is holding a paper chart.
Below the photograph, in TooToo’s careful handwriting, is the caption:
Patient zero. Recovered.
Devon won the inaugural Midwest Open in his weight class. Manolo never spoke. Brent eventually opened a satellite academy in Toledo and refused, on principle, to ever call TooToo anything other than Master Beta, said clearly and slowly, with full ceremonial weight, every time.
Tyler graduated from EMU with a degree in Sports Management and went to work, against all expectation, as a public defender’s investigator in Wayne County. He had decided, somewhere in the long quiet hours after the quad, that his real interest was not in incapacitating people but in giving them, when their lives had been narratively shattered, a script to kneel into.
He still trains. He has not yet earned his black belt. He is patient. He has time.
— Fin. —
Minimally invasive software 