by Aura Xilonen
“No.”
“Can I help?”
Coach Truddy arrives after nine in the morning. He’s carrying a pair of boxing gloves under his arm and a large bowl of water. Ms. Webber takes the kids over to a corner of the gym where the blackboards are and starts teaching her English class. Naomi and the little squirts turn to look at us from time to time. Ms. Webber notices and raises her voice, and they immediately look back at the blackboard.
“Did you go running this morning?” Coach Truddy asks, dropping the gloves onto the wooden floor.
I nod.
“Well, at least you’re not lazy,” he says. “Let’s see.” He pulls a wrinkled sheet of paper from his sweatpants. He reads out loud: “Boxing is the world’s most challenging, difficult, and demanding sport. Mastering it requires consistency and discipline. Plus a great deal of perseverance to transcend the limits of human effort . . .”
“Coach Truddy,” I interrupt. “Have you ever trained anyone to box before?”
His pink cheeks flush even pinker. He’s sweating like a pig.
“You’re the first,” the giant says, and then, to make up for his lack of expertise, adds, “But I did some boxing when I was younger and I know a little about it.”
“How about not reading anymore and having me do some sparring instead?”
Coach Truddy crumples up the piece of paper and tucks it into his sweatsuit, bends over, and lies down heavily on the floor, faceup.
“You’re quite right, my boy. But first we’ve got to get you in shape. Do a hundred sit-ups like this.” He demonstrates with great difficulty. His breathing becomes oinkish. “When you go down, oof, and come up again, oof, exhale, oooof, hard.”
I lie down next to him and start counting.
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33”—I start to feel a little tickle in my abs—“34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43”—yeah, now it’s getting hard to sit up, feels like my stomach’s on fire—“44, 45, 46, 47, 48 . . .”
“Keep at it, son. Two more and you’re halfway there.”
“. . . 49, 50.” I collapse.
“Nobody said it was going to be easy. Now you’ve just got fifty left.”
When I finish, he has me do a hundred squats until my ass cheeks feel as fiery as a mandrill’s.
“. . . 98, 99, 100.” I’m sweating buckets, as if the seed of every river were boring through my forehead. I drink the water the coach holds out to me.
“Now give me ten push-ups. Like this, look: first you have to, oof, lower your whole chest, oof, oooof, until it almost touches the floor and then, ooooof, you push up again to, oooooof, work your biceps and triceps. Inhale, oooooof, at the top and exhale, uuuuuuh, at the bottom.”
“But Coach, you’re lowering your belly first.”
“Shut up and get to it.”
After another three sets of each exercise, the coach gets to his feet. My legs and arms are shaking. I don’t know if I can stand.
“Now let’s work on a little technique.” He picks up the gloves and instructs me, “Hold out your arms so I can put these on you.”
I hold out my arms, which are jellying all over the place. After twenty and a half push-ups, I’m beat. The coach puts the gloves on me and then lets go of them. They feel incredibly heavy, so heavy that I practically pitch forward onto my face.
“Don’t fall,” he says, grabbing me around the chest so I don’t hit the floor. “You have to get used to carrying that weight on you like it’s part of your own body.”
“What do I do now?” I say, my arms hanging at my sides.
“Raise your gloves and get in a boxing stance, like this.”
“I can’t,” I tell him.
“What do you mean, you can’t?! All right then . . .”—and he throws a flying punch at my head. I immediately block it with my left glove. “Wait, didn’t you say you couldn’t do it?”
He keeps lashing out at me right and left for me to dodge or block with my gloves.
The little kids start shrieking.
“Miss, they’re fighting.”
Ms. Webber raises her voice to its maximum volume.
“Coach Truddy, would you be so kind as to not interrupt the education of these children with your savageries?”
Coach Truddy lowers his fists and, already bright red, flushes even more deeply. He tries to calm down and regain his composure, though he’s still grating copious cheese-like shreds of sweat all over his body.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Webber.” He walks toward the bleachers and sits down. “We’re done for today,” he says as I, too, sit down. “We have to start slow or you could hurt yourself.” He draws a deep breath. “Mr. Shine told me they found some boxing equipment and a jump rope. Tomorrow I want you to jump rope for half an hour, all right? That’ll help you build up more speed and get a lot faster.”
I nod, my whole body dazed, while he takes off my gloves. He sets them down on one of the risers.
“Here, kid, take this so you never forget what I told you.” He takes the crumpled paper out of his pants pocket and holds it out to me.
He gets up and walks off, shuffling his feet. I feel a little bit sorry for the giant. He pushes open the Eliason doors and disappears. I look at the paper with shaking hands, then turn it over and over again and confirm, yes, to my surprise, that the paper is blank and there’s nothing written on it.
At two in the afternoon I go to the dining room with the other boys and girls who’ve just finished their classes with Ms. Webber. Naomi settles down next to me.
“How was the training?”
“What, didn’t you see it?”
“Occasionally.”
“Well, it was brutal.”
The cook comes up to us with a tray loaded with several plates with a scoop of rice and a chicken wing each.
“The coach told me you need to eat a lot of protein so you gain muscle mass, kidling, but we don’t have a lot of that here, so you’re going to have to eat what the rest of us eat, all right?”
“No problem,” I tell her. “When in Rome, you’ve gotta poop what you eat, cooo, cooo, cooo.” I flap my sore arms like a chicken.
The kids around me and Mrs. Merche laugh at my outburst.
“Check this guy out—he makes them laugh,” says the cook, smiling.
“They’re afraid of him, but I think they like him,” Naomi says.
The kids drop their glum eyes to the table and prop their elbows there like scraps of meat.
“And what about you, squirt—why are you sticking to this chimp like glue? Stay away from him—you don’t want to fall in love and make things worse.”
Naomi lets out a childish laugh, just like that, smooth, level, no furrows to blunt its innocence.
“You say the funniest things, Mrs. Merche! I’m going to study hard to be a great lawyer and defend every individual’s human rights, and nothing’s more important than that.”
“My goodness. That’s wonderful, sweetie. Study hard so you can fight the bad guys. But forewarned is forearmed, Little Ms. Lawyer.” She guffaws and moves off to keep passing out plates to the other kids.
* * *
[“And how did you meet your missus, boss?”
“What does that matter, you esoteric prick! That’s between the two of us and nobody else!”
“Is it embarrassing?”
“Yes.”]
I take out a dusty chair and sit in the middle of the room. I need to figure out where to start in cleaning up the fucking pigsty. I close my eyes to think for a minute.
“Don’t go to sleep,” says Naomi at my elbow.
I know, yes, I’m pooped.
I can’t move without my eyelashes hurting.
I ache worse from the workout than if I’d been thrashed b
y a million policemen lined up Indian file. I hadn’t realized I had muscles under my muscles. Even my teeth hurt. But no pain, no gain.
“Oh, my mandrill ass,” I complain as I stand up from the chair so I don’t pass out from exhaustion.
“Where should we start?” I ask Naomi, my thoughts jumbled from fatigue, holding a broom in one hand and a couple of buckets with rags in the other.
“We should choose a name first, right? This morning I was thinking we could call it the Liberty and Nature Library. What do you think? Liberty because of L for Liborio and Nature because of N for my name. We can hide our own names in the name of the library—isn’t that great?”
“Or we can call it the We’ll Fix It Up Later Library,” I say, my eyes near to bursting with the strain of keeping them open.
“That name’s no good, silly. But for now we could start by dusting off those books that are dumped over there in the back of that bookcase.”
“These?” I pull them out of the sediment of centuries spent gathering lint, dust, and ancient cobwebs. “It’s only four books!”
“That’s the best way to start!” Naomi is practically hopping in her seat. “Just think, some libraries in the world probably started with even fewer books, maybe one or not even that—maybe there was one that started out with no books at all!” She laughs again, euphoric, her eyes full of delight and hope, showing her missing teeth. All the innocence of the air must be sneaking into her through the gaps.
It never rains, and when it rains everything shakes. Not a quaking of the fucking earth but of the sky. I didn’t hear anything at first, not thunder or lightning, or even the fertile rain when it started to fall.
Once Naomi and I finished cleaning the whole room and dusting the shelves so we could set up our library’s four books, corralling all the boxes in the back of the room, and hanging the instruments on some screws that were poking out of the wall, I went straight to my room and, without even having dinner, flopped onto the bed, like that, like a human smoothie that’s dumped all its bones.
Deep in my dreams, I heard the voice of . . . Aireen?
“At least have some pan dulce.”
I started chewing with my eyes closed until I finished it and then, boom, I was already on the other side, weightless, without any dreams that might disturb my rest; like that, empty, playing tricks on my subconscious so it would leave me alone.
And it did, because I didn’t dream about anything.
A megalithic clap of thunder wakes me up, and I hear the water falling outside like a swarm of fucking broken glass. My ears are alert but I can’t move, as if I’ve been buried alive and an intravenous catalepsy has robbed me of my will. I can’t even shout. My voice has been abducted by a phantasmagorical opiape, a morbid acquiescence. I turn my head toward the fluorescent blue clock and feel thousands of little cramps in my muscle fibers, as if microscopic devils were pricking me with their tails and tridents.
The clock flashes 4:38.
In a few minutes I’ll have to get up to start my second day of training, and I’m so dead tired, it feels as if my muscles are my own coffin. Why do we have to sacrifice in order to move forward in space? Why does my body hurt so much, as if a supernova has imploded inside my bones?
The clock grinds 4:49.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Chingafuck.
I wriggle on the bed. I stick out one foot and then the other, wincing with pain. Outside, the rain falls granitically. What if I stay here under the covers? I could give it all up, quit. After all, nobody can force me to get up and walk!
The clock wriggles too: 4:56.
Fuck.
No pain, no gain.
Does that go for love, too?
5:01.
Fuck.
I get moving, like I don’t care about any of it, and leap out of bed. My muscles shriek, go numb; they shackle all my bones like bars made of invisible thread. The pain is strong, really strong, but my thirst is even stronger.
I get dressed and go out.
Outside the rain has soaked the chickens. I carry a wooden board that was in the library room up to the roof and arrange it so they can shelter themselves under it and not catch a cold or coryza or what the hell ever.
No need to water the garden now, just hope the roots don’t rot from all the water falling on them.
I pull the soaked punching bag, gloves, focus mitts, mask, mouthguard, jockstrap, cup, and jump rope off the clothesline. I take them downstairs and hang them to dry in the foyer. Then I open the front door of the shelter.
The rain keeps falling.
There’s nobody on the street, not a soul moving down any of the avenues, not a crack of dawn. The traffic lights change colors in streets empty of cars.
It’s raining hard, shattering the sky.
Wells Park is empty too. I don’t see the black woman’s shopping cart or anyone sleeping there on the sodden grass. There are no runners or athletes wearing out the gravel path with their footsteps. I’m alone, desertedly alone among the trees and flowers that are feeding off the storm clouds. Cold water is running down my body, discoloring my fingernails. My breath is steaming. Today is Thursday, and I think maybe Aireen might show up somewhere later on, maybe amid the foliage, walking Candy on a leash, and I’ll be able to look at her the way I did that first day I saw her. But that’s impossible. The air is making me dizzy. With the cold fumbling through my guts, I start running along the rocky path until my muscles either kill me or make me stronger.
* * *
[“If there were a fire, flood, or earthquake, which of these books would you save, Jefe?”
“There aren’t any floods here, you califragilistic prick, or earthquakes either.”
“What about fires?”
“As far as I can remember, there’s never been a fucking fire of any sort.”
“Well, if you had to go to a desert island, what book would you take with you?”
“Why would I go to a fucking desert island, you blockheaded louse? And why would I take a fucking book with me and not a hot broad?”
“I don’t know, Jefe, maybe because the banks are chasing you across heaven and earth like fucking pirates, looking to chop off your head.”
“Stop inventing complete nonsense and get to mopping.”]
“Good Lord! You’re going to make yourself sick, you nitwit,” Mrs. Merche tells me when she sees me go by the door. I’m a walking, dripping bowl of soup, unraveling rain on a wave-swept cliff. My body is literally giving off steam from under my arms, my chest, the back of my neck, my rump.
“What happened to the boxing equipment I left hanging up over there?” I ask as she hands me a shabby, threadbare towel so I can dry off.
“I put them next to the fireplace so they’d dry faster . . . I saw you covered up the chickens. Thank you very much—I was out like a light last night and didn’t hear a thing.”
“Do you know how to jump rope?” I ask out of the blue.
Mrs. Merche’s eyes light up.
“Oh boy, centuries ago, yeah.”
“Can you teach me?”
Mrs. Merche hesitates. She runs her fingers through her hair, which is shot through with gray and pulled back in a braid.
“But you can’t tell anybody, O.K.?”
“Nobody, I promise.”
* * *
[“I’ve got another fantastic story in my head that’ll sell millions in Hollywood,” says the Latinoid writer, who’s come into the store wanting to buy a book on cybernetic murder called Cyber Gang Bang written by a young Spanish woman, Jaira Droom, who just won the Medellín Fiction Prize. “Want to hear it?”
“No,” says Jefe categorically.
“What about you?” The pedantic praline has turned to me.
Jefe looks at me too and smiles mischievously.
“Oh, y
eah, he’s definitely interested.”]
“No, no, no. Pay attention. For every turn of the rope, you have to count off the syllables. Watch.” Mrs. Merche takes the jump rope again and starts jumping as she chants, ‘White shoe, blue shoe, tell me, how old are you? Five! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, out you go with a double-u.’ Your turn.”
I take the jump rope and start over.
“White shoe, blue shoe, tell me, how old are you? Five! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, out you go with a double-u.”
And finally, the million-and-fifth time, I make it through the entire song.
“Look,” says Naomi at breakfast. “I got two more books for our library.”
She puts them on the table, and I see that they’re coloring books. One is called Paint Your Rights, and the other, Bambi.
I’ve already read Bambi, so I pick up the other one and read it in the blink of an eye.
“That’s great, Naomi. They’re just what we were looking for.”
She smiles.
It hasn’t stopped raining all day. The clouds are still clustered up there, and the noise in the gym is deafening because of the tin roof. A few spots are leaking, and we put out buckets to keep water from pooling on the floor. We cover the piano with blue plastic tarps. Ms. Webber has had to take the kids to our library, where, with the help of Mr. Abacuc, Coach Truddy, and me, she’s set up a blackboard and the chairs.
“But what about the library?” Naomi asks Ms. Webber, clearly distressed.
“It’ll still be a library too, young lady,” Ms. Webber answers, looking at me from behind her cat’s-eye glasses.
Coach Truddy and I are the only ones in the gym now. He’s brought a drill and his toolbox so I can help him set up the speed bag, the punching bag, and the crazy bag, a ball that will be tied to the ceiling and floor with thick cords, all in the corner where Ms. Webber used to give classes.
I pass him items as he drills and screws.
“We have to get you checked out with a doctor to make sure you don’t have any heart or head problems so we can apply for a boxing license,” he says, settling the screwdriver against a screw and tightening the support for the speed bag. “Have you ever been to the doctor?”
