Deep State
Page 39
We are in Episode Four of Celebrity Pitfighter, a new reality show. The rules for Celebrity Pitfighter are that while everyone in the contest has to have been famous at some point in his life, no one can be an actual pitfighter. We are all brand spanking new to the martial arts. Jimmy and I have trained for exactly three weeks. The world is full of drunks lying under bar stools who could take us with one hand behind their backs.
For my three weeks of training I’ve had cameras following me around at Master Pak’s dojang, and in addition to the training I’ve been given little challenges, like learning to toss throwing stars at targets, or being made to hold a padded shield while famously large bruisers tried to kick in my rib cage, or trying to look impressed and competent and grateful when martial arts champions teach me their signature moves.
As with most reality shows, everything was scripted. I’d had to learn lines. The only parts of the show that weren’t scripted were the fights—and they were only unscripted so far as I knew.
None of my special training will be worth a damn when I’m rolling around in the cottage cheese. Because one of the other rules of Celebrity Pitfighter is that the contestants have to be given a surprise handicap just before the fight. In past episodes, fighters have had to fight while wearing handcuffs, had fifty-pound weights attached to their right ankles, or the two opponents had their left arms tied together by a six-foot piece of elastic.
Because having a pair of untrained lames pounding each other in the ring just isn’t enough fun. You just have to have that extra handicap in order to bring the humiliation to its peak. Because humiliation is what reality television is all about—if they can’t watch someone utterly destroyed on camera, rejected by his judges and his peers, face not merely lost but annihilated for all time, the audience won’t get their sadistic rocks off.
The witless fucks.
The referee calls Jimmy and me together. As he tells us he wants a clean fight Jimmy looks up at me and snarls. He’s wearing a green mouthpiece impressed with silver letters that read: Kill You. I sneer back.
Bring your worst, you half-assed gump.
We touch gloves and slosh back to our corners. Master Pak touches me and mutters in my ear.
“Look,” he says. “You’re still bigger than he is. Just beat the shit out of him.”
I almost laugh. It’s good advice.
I am bigger than Jimmy Blogjoy. I’m taller, I have five or six inches of reach on him, and I outweigh him by thirty pounds.
This shouldn’t be a fair fight at all. If I knew what I was doing, I’d rip his lungs out.
Master Pak stuffs the mouthpiece in my mouth, leaves the ring, and closes the mesh gate behind him. The audience is baying. It occurs to me that the whole game is set so that Jimmy will win.
“Have Makin train with the TKD guy.” I can hear the producer laughing as he says it. “Then put him in goop so he can’t kick.”
I wonder if the production staff has money riding on Jimmy.
The referee looks at me and asks me if I’m ready. I mumble through the mouthpiece that I am. Jimmy is also ready. The ref punches the air in front of him.
“Let’s rock the world!” he says.
Whoooooo. My heart is crashing in my chest. I can’t see anything outside the ring. Master Pak is shouting at me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.
The audience noise reaches a crescendo as I slosh forward a couple of steps, then pause to await developments. Jimmy is coming straight on, balled fists on guard, his eyes fixed on my face. I raise my guard. He keeps on. He gets in range and I jab him in the face.
Nothing happens. Jimmy keeps coming. I jab again and he throws a pair of wild punches that miss. I jab and try to maneuver.
The jabs aren’t working, even though I can feel them connect and feel the shock all the way to my shoulder. They’re supposed to stop Jimmy or rock him back on his heels, but he just absorbs the punch and keeps coming. So I kick Jimmy somewhere in his midsection.
This works, because Jimmy goes down. Except that I go down, too, because my support leg slips in the cottage cheese.
In wild panic I flounder to my feet, cold cheese chilling my torso. Jimmy’s already up, charging me, swinging wildly again. He’s actually growling. I jab, but there’s cottage cheese on my glove and the punch slips off him. He wraps his arm around me and smashes up under my chin with the top of his head. I see stars and the next thing I know I’m back in the cottage cheese with Jimmy on top of me.
He’s sitting on my chest raining punches down. I cover my face and try some of the techniques that Master Pak taught me to reverse someone on top of me, but the cheese is everywhere and we keep slipping. At least he isn’t hurting me much.
I wriggle and thrash and manage to slide a leg free from beneath his weight. I put my foot against his chest and push and he slides off me.
As I thrash to my feet blackness is swimming before my eyes. The fight’s just a few seconds long and already I’ve run out of steam.
Before I can quite come on guard Jimmy socks me on the side of the head. I see stars. I back up, trying to put distance between us, and come up against the chain-link wall. Jimmy clamps onto me again and tries to wrestle me into the cheese. It’s like fighting a rabid badger. My chest is heaving with the effort of staying on my feet.
In a rage I pound Jimmy uselessly in the body and the back of the head and try to break free, but the punches are too short to be effective, or I’m too out of breath—and then our legs get tangled and I fall into the goop again, twisting away from Jimmy, facedown. A tidal wave of cottage cheese surges across the ring. Suddenly Jimmy’s on my back. He snakes a forearm around my throat, but I grab his hand and manage to pull it away and save my windpipe. His feet—his “hooks” as they are called in Mixed Martial Arts—wrap around me and pull my thighs apart. I sprawl face-first into the cottage cheese, and Jimmy begins a flurry of angry punches to the back of my head. None of them are particularly damaging, but there are a lot of them.
I can’t see. I can’t breathe. Cottage cheese fills my mouth, my nostrils, my ears. Jimmy’s punches rock my world every half second. I try to push myself up from the floor of the ring, but I’m pushing up Jimmy’s weight as well as my own, and my hands keep slipping out from under me. My lungs are about to explode.
I’m drowning. The thought sends me into a spasm of activity. I wriggle, I slither, I manage to get out from under Jimmy long enough to catch a breath, but he grabs my head and shoves me under again. The bland, salty taste of cottage cheese fills my throat.
Surrender! I’ve got to surrender! I’m supposed to tap the mat as a signal that I give up, but the floor is covered by cottage cheese and no one can see the gesture when I try it. I begin to flail, clawing at the cottage cheese. My head is full of whirling stars. Pain erupts in my chest, as if my aorta has just exploded.
In the moment before I die, I think of the next day’s headline.
Has-been Drowns While Trying to Resurrect His Career. That’s what they’ll carve on my tombstone.
Then the bodybuilder referee pulls Jimmy off me, reaches his gloved hands under my armpits, and peels me out of the cottage cheese as if I were made of soggy cardboard.
Praise for This Is Not a Game
“This Is Not a Game is a tale every bit as engaging as one of the intrigues its characters might have dreamed up.”
—Bookpage
“Williams’ dialogue is razor-sharp, his plotting breakneck, his eye for trends keen and his empathy with his characters deep.”
—scifi.com
“The characters are realistic and absorbing, and the story deeply compelling.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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