USA. A woman named Brittany whispered that she was going to "release my tension," and I prepared, in that moment, to tell her nothing. I had heard of a place where, for a price, a person will press upon your body until you break. I did not know why a man would pay for this. But a warrior does not refuse a trial simply because he does not understand it. So I went. To learn what I was made of. The room was dark. Too dark. There was smoke, but it smelled of flowers, not fire. Somewhere, a whale was singing. A single whale, very sad, very far away. I did not ask about the whale. A man does not question another house's music. Brittany entered, soft-voiced, calm as still water, and said the words that began everything. "Go ahead and undress to your comfort level, and lie face down under the sheet. I'll knock before I come in." She would knock. She was giving me time to prepare my spirit. I undressed to my comfort level, which for a warrior is fully armored, but I had no armor, so I lay down as I was. Then I saw it. The table had a hole. A single round hole, where the face goes. I understood immediately. This was so that, when the pain became unbearable, I could scream directly into the floor, and no one would hear, and my honor would remain intact. A merciful design. I placed my face into the hole of screaming and waited. She knocked. I called out that I was ready. I was ready to die. She began at the shoulders. And here is where I must be honest. It did not hurt. It felt... good. This was the trap. The enemy begins gently, to lull you, before the true assault. I braced for the moment it would turn. I waited for the pain. I welcomed it in advance. "Wow, you are holding so much tension up here," she said, pressing into my shoulder. She had found something. A weakness. My tension, hidden in my shoulder, where I had stored it for eight hundred years. And she had found it in ninety seconds. This was no ordinary woman. This was an interrogator of the highest rank, and my tension was the secret she had come to extract. I resolved to give her nothing. Let her press. Let her search. The location of my tension would die with me. "You can just relax," she said. "Let it go." A trick, obviously. "Let it go" — let down my guard, release the secret, surrender the very tension she sought. The oldest move in the book. I would not fall for it. I relaxed nothing. I held my tension with the grip of a man holding a rope over a cliff. She pressed harder. I held harder. We were locked in silent combat, she and I, and the whale sang on, mourning, perhaps, for one of us. Twenty minutes passed this way. Her, searching. Me, defending. The whale, grieving. Then she pressed one spot beside my spine, and without my permission, my body made a sound. A long, low, shameful sound of pure relief. The secret had escaped. My tension, released, into her hands. I had broken. After eight hundred years, a woman named Brittany broke me in twenty-two minutes, with her thumbs, beside a singing whale. "There it goes," she said, gently. "Good." She was not gloating. She said it kindly. The mark of a true master is that she does not celebrate the defeat of a worthy foe. She simply notes it, and moves to the next shoulder. At the end she said, "take your time getting up, drink lots of water," and left me alone in the dark with the whale. I lay there, hollow, defeated, and more relaxed than I have been in my entire life. The two feelings, it turns out, are the same feeling. So tell me, America. When a soft-voiced woman lays you over a hole in a table, finds the secret you have guarded for centuries, and presses it out of you with her thumbs while a whale weeps... did I lose? Or is being defeated, sometimes, the prize you paid for? I tipped her everything. You do not haggle with the one who found your tension. I return next week. I intend to lose again.