Girl in the Arena

by Lise Haines

  I’m a little short on words for my father’s murderer. There should be something I could say to make him realize he’s the most pathetic man on Earth, but I can’t find it just now.

  —What do you want me to sign? he asks, softening a little, as if I’ve been waiting for his autograph.

  His autograph, his blood, his baby, his life—Uber doesn’t know what I want, and I’m not saying. I know what I want, but it’s like my whole body is iced. My mouth filled with cold.

  His sex, his money, his interview, his aura—he doesn’t know.

  The cuts on his arms and legs have started to bleed again on his still-damp skin. His wet hair drips down his shoulders, down his chest. Tommy used to look almost weightless after a fight, luminous.

  Maybe Uber’s raking his fingers through his hair now to tame it, maybe it’s a nervous thing. Uber isn’t a bad-looking guy, but out of the arena he doesn’t seem very self-possessed.

  —Look, I… he starts to say.

  And then it seems like, well, like the way to get this weary soldier is by surprise.

  Caging happens when a woman rushes into a locker room and throws herself at a gladiator, slamming him for an imprint of his blood. She has to get him when he’s just come out of the arena all pumped and cut up, before his wounds are dressed. Some women imprint the blood on their clothes—that’s called shrouding. One woman got Tommy like that. He had taken a blow to his brow so the blood had poured freely that day. She got a clear impression of his face in the middle of her T-shirt.

  Other cagers hit the locker room with nothing on above their waists and if they succeed, if they get enough blood on their bare skin, that’s called contracting. A woman who contracts will go back up to the stadium and get swarmed by cameras. Some women get married in that state, with the blood on their skin, in their hair. Others, if they’re beautiful enough, get modeling contracts, invitations to appear on TV shows. Or they contract some kind of blood disease and die eventually.

  But I have all of my clothes on, my T-shirt back in place, and I just FLY at the man. I push through the air like I’m not moving at all. Suspended, really. Then I smack hard against his body, against his chest, his stomach so he’ll think I’m just there to cage him. I guess I hit him twice. Hitting, bouncing off, hitting again. Cars do that in accidents sometimes. They can hit the bumper and then the trunk.

  Somehow I get my legs around his waist, one arm around his neck. Twisting around, I try to wedge the bracelet off with my free hand but he makes a fist so I can’t get it off. We stick together because he’s so damp, my skin burns as I try to pull away. My hand around the bracelet, I feel the design etched into the metal. He won’t give it up. He thinks he has some of Tommy’s power now, but what he’s got is my fetish—my worry, my memory, loss—everything you can pour into metal.

  His free hand circles my back. Now he’s holding me as much as I’m holding him. Like a ride at a carnival, I’m trying to find the safety release because I’d rather sail into the air than stay on. I start pounding on Uber, pounding against the dumb muscles that won’t unlock. And then I do the stupidest thing. And not because I want to—it’s the last thing I want. But I’m crying.

  tommy.

  Tears sheet my face. My insides sting as if there are thin slices cut across my lungs, over my heart, a million small cuts. There are rules against a gladiator’s daughter crying: how, when, where. I’m breaking eleven of those rules. My head could be shaved for this, my tattoos erased—certainly the one with Tommy’s name—I could be exiled to some lowland that floods constantly, a place where the Red Cross never lands. And I just don’t care.

  Uber’s body slackens. And then, like he needs to be some kind of rescue man and pull a building off me, he guides me to a seat on one of the benches. I’m hyperventilating. As soon as my breath slows, I push him away.

  He goes to his locker and gets out a pair of glasses. His lenses are thick like jar bottoms. His eyes trapped in jars.

  —Jesus. You’re Tommy’s girl, he says, seeing me for the first time.

  Tommy always said you have to get curious about your opponent if you plan to beat him. So I study the way Uber moves. He brings me a wad of toilet paper to blow my nose. I notice the way he favors his left side when he walks. And when he holds out a cup of water, I see the big thing, that his right arm doesn’t extend fully. Probably a surgery that fell short.

  The way his hand shakes holding that cup of water, maybe he thinks I’m fragile or delicate. And that thought makes me laugh. I laugh so hard I drop the cup. It hits the lip of the bench and the water soaks his legs.

  —Don’t worry about it, he says, and sits down on the opposite bench about three feet away. He leans in toward me. And I wonder if that’s tenderness to a guy like him. He looks like he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. There’s something almost clumsy about him, really. He’s busy trying to keep his towel in place, adjusting it carefully. I see his ears redden. He has earlobes like Tommy has—like Tommy had—the unattached kind. But one of them is split in two. I guess someone yanked an earring out once.

  We both consider the blood on my T-shirt. He gets up and walks around behind me to see the back of my head, though I don’t make it easy the way I keep turning to make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy.

  —I could do something with that if you’d let me, he says, indicating the gash.

  —I’m okay.

  I notice that his second toes are longer than his big toes, and my grandmother, my mother’s mother, told me that’s a sign of stupidity. He has young feet, not callused or corned, but I finally take another look at the thing I’ve been trying to avoid, my bracelet. I point as if I’ve forgotten how to speak. His wrist is pretty raw from my work.

  He says, —Listen, I know this won’t help to hear, but…

  I cover my ears.

  He stops.

  I take my hands down.

  —It’s just that Tommy, I worshipped…

  I cover my ears again.

  He stops.

  Sometimes I think I’ve inherited the silence of gladiators because I can do silence for hours if I have to, though there are people I could talk with all night—it was like that with Tommy sometimes.

  I finally say, —I don’t care what you thought about Tommy. But the bracelet, that’s… my family’s.

  —I’m sorry. I should never have…

  He slides the bracelet off and holds it up to the fluorescent lights for a moment, like he’s got possession of something otherworldly and he’s trying to memorize all of its features before it shape-shifts. He starts to turn it around, to read the inscription.

  —I change, but I cannot die, he says, repeating the words.

  He puts it back on.

  —They said—the officials said—since it belonged to my opponent, I’m required to keep it on, at least through my next title match. It has to do with some new rule. The thing is, if I don’t, one guy said, they might add another year to my contract. As soon as I can take it off, I’ll be relieved to give it back to your family.

  —You’re the most pathetic man in the world.

  It doesn’t take much to wound the guy, from the look on his face. I ask if he has a lighter and he actually comes up with one, after he shuffles through his locker.

  I don’t look around, I just go back into the dark passageway. I’ll wait for a while, until the photographers clear out. Then I’ll make it up into the stadium again.

  —Wait! I hear him call after me, but I don’t wait.

  CHAPTER 8

  As I look around the stadium, the post-traumatic sky is almost navy blue now and the bodies are gone. Tommy always said Mass General is the best hospital in the country for stampede victims, so I imagine a lot of them are over there, crowding the halls on gurneys, some in surgery. There’s even a specialist for clown injuries. Tommy was pretty loyal to the clowns and made large donations to the hospital.

  The cleanup crew will come in the morning. All the power in the s
tadium is off for the night. The jumbo screens are down and the only light from the moon is caught in the nearly perfect ring of water bottles that surrounded Tommy. But his body’s gone. Maybe he’s risen from the dead. He’d do something like that—rise from the dead. It’s eerie that the bottles are still in place that way. Like one of those roadside memorials with family photos, stuffed animals, things no one wants to disturb.

  tommy.

  I slump down on a damp bench, kick some trash aside. I have to get home and take care of Allison and Thad but I’m seven ways to tired and need to lie down for a few minutes. Uber will leave by the GSA door, especially if he hopes to avoid the throng that can build at the gates, and no one hangs out in the stadium at night. I know because I’ve done that a couple times with my friend Mark. So I’m not too worried, but I get my knife out of my bag anyway and tuck it under my body, just in case, and then I let my thoughts drift.

  Some people think violence is nothing when you’re raised in Glad culture. They say we have no feelings, that we don’t value life. There was a comedian who said we collect death like fast-food toys—something we enjoy with a quick meal. Or something like that.

  What they don’t get is this: a Glad has an incredibly strong sense of reality. Dreaming is not, strictly speaking, what we hope for, what we encourage or need. And if you stop dreaming and get real, you have to accept the fact that violence is a part of life, part of nature. Ask any biologist. To a true Glad, the arena is the only fair fight.

  Two people sign up to test their skills and bravely take their consequences. We don’t consign slaves, we don’t shackle or bind anyone to fight unless he happens to be on death row when he arrives at the stadium, and even then, this guy has petitioned hard to fight, gone through several screenings. He’s free to drop out and return to prison up to the last minute. And though there was an idea floated by one congressman to have illegal aliens thrown into the arena, that guy is strictly a monster and was eventually knocked out of the club for molesting his young aides.

  I have my bones to pick with Caesar’s Inc., but no one has to sign their stupid contracts, especially not the multiple-year ones. But the deals are more than lucrative, or at least they seem more than lucrative, so people sign.

  Tommy always said it was our country’s stealth activities he couldn’t stand, the forces neatly stacked against a person where the concept of fair fight just doesn’t exist: the military game, corporate culture, divorce courts, insurance companies, the IRS, government wire taps.

  —You take a boy, eighteen, throw him into a war he doesn’t understand, in a country he’s never even read a book about, because some president has some good old friends and family members heavily invested in certain companies that have to move some products like aircraft or oil or hospital beds, now that’s nuts, Tommy would say.

  The thing is, I have been thinking about the loose chinks in the basic pro-Glad argument for some time now, which may have something to do with my being a bit of a dreamer, something Allison likes to harp on me about. And now that Tommy’s dead, the chinks are more like gaping holes. And though this is all that I’ve known—this culture—my mind stabs away at it until it just can’t stand.

  The first time Allison took me to a gladiator match I was five. Mouse, my second father, was on temporary disability from the arena then, so we made a day of it, stopping for a picnic at Walden Pond before heading over to the stadium. Mouse liked the deep water in the middle of the pond and the way people crowd near the shore to avoid it. He had a broad laugh, and was once a suspect in a big art heist but never served any time. This was, of course, before he found the Glad life.

  Allison reminded him several times that day to watch his ribs. She had him taped in white adhesive from his armpits to his swim trunks to help mend the broken ribs. There was no Thad then. Allison stretched out in the sand, bits of mica clinging to her legs, lighting up her skin. Mouse was the first one who taught me there’s only minimal gain in talking. I saw the way he studied Allison’s glow in a mute way. Then we packed up and headed over to the Romulus.

  I have a clear picture of the newly painted blue benches in the stadium that day, and how beautiful Allison looked with one of those thin magician’s scarves she likes to tie in her hair. She had me sit in our reserved box, where she crouched down in front of me and took my hands. Her straight skirt stretched tightly over her lap. Her nylons held her knees so they looked like small pale balloons.

  —Kitten, we’re going to see some funny things today. Men being… a little silly.

  She rubbed my knuckles with her thumbs as she spoke.

  —If we see anything that makes us a little sad or upset, we just have to make a game of it.

  I said I wanted to play a game. And she started over.

  —The men are going to look like they’re having a big fight. Your father is a famous fighter, so this is something we’re proud of.

  —He’s a gladiator, I said.

  —Yes, exactly, and we know that gladiators have weapons. Like… axes and knives and…

  —And clubs.

  Mouse had given me a boy’s plastic club and a matching sword and shield with spikes like small nipples. I had my own bludgeon made of balsa wood. Allison didn’t approve of this kind of thing for young ladies but there weren’t many women’s leagues then—an idea she would never take to. She had been newly widowed when she met Mouse, and she was eager to make a go of things with him, so certain standards were overlooked for a time to please him.

  —Yes, clubs too. Good girl. So nothing to be concerned about. And I brought your coloring book and crayons. And look, she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out my favorite stuffed animal. —I brought your dog and her pajamas if she gets tired.

  Even then, I knew it was important to get to work dressing my dog Lucy, that if I didn’t Allison would keep talking and rubbing my knuckles and making me nervous. I sensed her fragility the way I knew her scent in a room she had vacated hours earlier. Allison straightened up and sat next to me on the bench and said, —If one of them loses an arm or a leg, we just say too bad or poor man.

  —Poor man, I said.

  —Sometimes I look at the big screens and it makes it a little less… real. And you know, when I cut up poultry for dinner… she said, starting on a new tack.

  And that’s how Allison began her lesson about making associations, about ways to detach and get through rotten experience. A man loses a hand in the arena. It hits the sand and that’s a chicken wing dropped into flour.

  I don’t have any memory of seeing the fight that day. In fact, I don’t remember what it was like to see the fights before the age of nine or ten, and by that point matches were something we attended regularly, like church.

  My family was heavily filmed. So Allison taught me how to look and what my face should and shouldn’t give away to the cameras, as if she were designing a will and the public was one of her beneficiaries. And sometimes we experienced a personal loss and those were the dark times when Allison seemed to disappear entirely, as if she had only been an overlay on a screen. Someone would go to the grocery store and buy us canned goods to last a month, or they’d arrive with casseroles and other soggy dishes, and we wouldn’t leave the house for anything.

  If I have a girl someday, Allison has often told me, I will be expected to bring her to the amphitheater for the first time when she’s five. It’s four for a boy. A couple of weeks ago, I stopped hedging and just said, —That’s never going to happen.

  Watching her face fall, I might as well have said: Thad’s run away or The house is on fire.

  *

  I wake with a start. Allison says I’m such a sound sleeper I’ll make it all the way through Armageddon in a deep slumber. But some random brain synapse lets me know I’m about to roll off the bench in the amphitheater. It’s the middle of the night and there’s a stadium blanket covering me, and a towel under my sore head. I can feel the official GSA embroidery at one corner of the blanket, so I figure
this has to be Uber’s.

  I’m relieved to see he’s not around, though it’s a little creepy being alone in the stadium this late. When I sit up, I feel like I’ve been in a hard fight. The arm I was sleeping on is basically dead, my hips numb.

  Sucking the last juice out of the phone, I call Allison.

  —Are you all right? she asks, her voice raspy and urgent and I know she’s been crying and chain smoking all night. I explain about falling asleep but not about caging—she’d go insane if she knew I had shrouded Uber. I’d go insane if I let myself. She wants me to crash at Mark’s so I’m not out in the middle of the night any more than I have to be.

  —How’s Thad? I ask.

  —He ate a big dinner.

  —Did he say anything on the way home?

  —I don’t know. Probably, yes. He said something. It doesn’t matter right now, does it? she asks.

  That’s how I know Thad has made a new prediction that Allison is worried about.

  —Tell him I’ll be home in the morning and that I miss him.

  I explain that Uber wouldn’t give me the bracelet back, that there’s this new rule and as far as he knows, it’s our family’s bracelet. Of course she and I know, but neither of us wants to say, that technically I’m supposed to be his fiancée now—if he wants to pursue it or if Caesar’s Inc. finds out.

  I tell her to go back to sleep.

  —I can’t sleep.

  —Drink some of that tea.

  —If it worked I would.

  I tell her she’s going to be all right, that we’re all going to be all right. The way Tommy would have said it.

  The phone goes dead. I hoist myself up and grab the knife I tucked away and slip it back into my bag. Then I make my way down the stairs, and go past the covered concessions and locked vendor booths. I wind my way out of the turnstile.

  The streets are jammed, the lights blue, and some people double take when they see me but they don’t ask for autographs. I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and up around my head and make my way toward the subway. This used to be a neo-Glad neighborhood, so there are plenty of leftover gladiator sports bars. Then all the rich folks moved in because they thought that was a cool thing to do and now a lot of the Glads can’t afford to live in the area. So it’s strictly pseudo culture and I can’t wait to get out of here.