Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  What are you doing for others?

  I wake up in the closet. My shirt is soaked through with sweat.

  I dump a bag of nuts into my mouth and walk out.

  In front of Petrusse, I don’t see him coming until it’s too late, Kryger kicks my crutch out from under me. It’s my fault, I should’ve been paying attention. A few of the other wrestlers are with him, it doesn’t matter who.

  “Fucking crippled-ass fancyboy, you’re never getting 133 back from me. You should go put a gun in your fucking mouth. Hey, Hoss, you hear what I said to him?”

  “I laughed,” the other says, “didn’t you hear me laugh?”

  He mashes my nose with the finger I dislocated, which will heal in time for his next match, which should be mine, in January. Everything in time. When I get cleared to wrestle again, I’m going to break his ribs and put him out for good. Logic must take care of itself. They’re laughing behind me. I pick up the crutch and keep going.

  There’s a note waiting under my door. I pick it up and lock myself inside. I try to see without opening it up, convinced it’s the Frogman, he was just biding his time.

  Stephen,

  Sorry I didn’t get to see you before I had to go. Look I know your going through some shit and are sad and don’t want to talk to anyone but it is only a knee tear. You will be back in no time and I know you will keep winning. I am your friend and I am telling you this.

  Did you talk to Mary Beth since the hospital? We were talking when you were unconscious and she told me she basically loves you. I made sure to remember the exact words and that is what she said. You should talk to her about this stuff she is really super fine and I don’t think she would lie about that.

  I will miss you but I’ll be back soon.

  Linus

  I go out into the hallway, but I have a surprise: Linus is lurking at the end of the hall.

  “Why are you avoiding me?”

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Did you eat the sandwich I got you?”

  “No.”

  “You are really bad with other people’s feelings.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I’m sorry, but also that I avoided you and didn’t want your sandwich.”

  “I expected you to apologize, but this is weird.” He looks at the paper crumpled in my fist. “When I wrote that note I was really upset but now I’m upset about something else, what you’re doing right now. I don’t like this. This is fucking weird. I don’t think I mean much of that note anymore.”

  “Then I’ll just throw it away.”

  “Did you ever think that wrestling was maybe mostly luck? That you can work hard and give yourself a really good chance to win, but it’s still mostly luck?”

  “You don’t know anything. You’re a goddamn kid.”

  “I’m glad I’m leaving. I need to get away from you.”

  “I’m glad you’re leaving, too.”

  He kicks my crutch out from under me and I need to use the wall to keep my balance up. The door slams very loudly in the hallway.

  I do what I intended to do before I was interrupted, which is drop the note down the trash chute. At the bottom, I hear the whirr of the compactor. I take my time getting down to the front entrance. I stand in the cold and watch the school thin out, watch as it gets darker and the males and females carry their bags away, drive off in their cars. They’re all leaving.

  Free of anyone who knows of my existence, I feel free to wander, to see what I can find by exploring at night.

  At least one-fourth of what I’m about to say is untrue.

  Just kidding.

  I start by crutching my night route. I do it very slowly, I suppose to make myself feel like old times but it doesn’t work. I hate the clicking sound the crutches make when they hit the ground, the predictable two-second space between clicks while my body swings forward and I reset them. I hate how at first I had to consciously keep my left leg curled up, but now it’s second nature to have it curled up. I hate my sore armpits, I hate how sweaty the handgrips get.

  I hear them before I see them, the six males barking up the path toward me. I stop right under a lightpost where they can see me and let them approach. They must be some of the last remaining students, having male fun on the empty campus. When they come up, I hold out my crutch and trip one of them.

  “Watch it, gimp.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What’d you say?” He comes up very close, close enough to smell the alcohol on his breath. “You got something to say?” He is the closest but the other five are circling around me. All this attention.

  “No, nothing to say.”

  “What the fuck did you say a second ago? You wanna say it again, gimp?” In his defense, he’s being very fair and patient with me.

  “No, I didn’t say anything.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Before he can turn away I ram the crutch up between his legs, hard. His knees buckle and he screams, and then my face is being hit and I’m being kicked in the neck and ribs and it probably would’ve gotten a lot worse if the fair-haired leader didn’t yell at everyone to stop. He comes over and kneels across my chest. “Hey, I’m not trying to fuck up no gimp.” One of the others says, “Just knock his teeth in and leave him, let’s get out of here.” And for the first time I look, really look, at the others, and I see Kyle Glanville standing there just before it hits my mouth and I taste sour. I get kicked in the head and in the void, which is red and not black as they’ll have you believe, I jump from thought to thought like they were all lily pads, from my commitment’s false bottom to the furl of Mary Beth’s eyebrows and when I am all done with that I come home to the night sky and my mouth’s blood and drool. I lie there for a while. I reach out my arm and check that all the straps on my brace are still intact. Then I turn my head and open my mouth and more blood falls out.

  Back in the closet.

  I’ve been wondering if there isn’t a differing value of life experience, whether there’s no such thing as case-by-case. Whether love is the same no matter what, suffering is the same no matter what, and the idea of “everyone’s different” is just a sentiment created to help explain the failure of people who don’t get to the standard.

  When I was a little kid I saw a boy in my class named Gary break his foot when he tried to show everyone on the playground how far he could punt a chunk of ice. I felt sympathy when two of the larger kids carried him away crying.

  I find out the full routes of the NDTA buses. There are two: the single route that comes through north-south (called the Black Line), and the single route that comes through east-west (called the White Line). I take one and then the other, and I find out that at the end of them the driver is supposed to ask you to pay a new fifty-cent fare before turning around and starting the route back over, but the driver will not ask for your money if you have an upsetting swollen face and spend your time leaning your forehead against your crutches, head pointed at the floor, he will just let you ride in the back row for as long as you want. People will not sit next to you until they have to. On the return ride, a father with a backpack sits with his red-haired son right behind me and lectures him about the importance of eye contact. I pretend to snore loudly to shorten the lesson.

  The library is empty, the cafeteria is empty, I eat yogurt mixed with fruit by myself, my floor on McCloskey is empty.

  Two of my teeth are loose. It’s the important ones in front.

  I find a crossword puzzle book someone’s left behind in the laundry room and immediately tell myself I’m going to complete the whole thing, that I’ll be really talented at crosswords by the time I’m done with the book, which has five hundred puzzles, each one harder than the last. I sit down right there between some baskets but quit after two.

  Nothing is the absence of consciousness, when oxygen stops bei
ng pumped into the brain. Most people would probably argue that there’s no such thing as nothing. But I, personally, would say there is. I’ve been heading toward it for some time now.

  It’s snowing again. It started when I wasn’t looking.

  It’s in the corner of my eye but whenever I try to get a look it runs away, and I feel like it’s always going to be there and I’m never going to know what it is.

  I hear the gentleman whose job it is to shovel snow off the paths scraping around outside. I put on my sweatshirt.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Do you know Masha?”

  “Who that is?”

  “Masha. Nice tall lady from Russia.”

  “No, not who that is.”

  I have this game I play where I go outside and lie down and wait as long as it takes for my body to get covered in snow. No one’s looking. I can do whatever I want.

  I don’t feel so good.

  At the student health center, a man I never see without a surgical mask is the one who takes out my stitches. Over his shoulder is a woman also wearing a mask. She hands him the tools and cotton balls. After they’re done, he asks how I’m doing. I say I’m O.K., and he says, are you sure? and I say yes. Then he asks me if I’d like to talk to someone, and I say yes.

  On my way out, I grab a pamphlet that says Am I Suffering From Depression? It’s twice as thick as the others on the rack and has a racially ambiguous girl looking out a rainy window on the front. In my room, I start on the quiz, but it starts to seem like they’re asking the same question in different words and so I stop after question twenty. The quiz is 150 questions long.

  For a long time afterwards on my bed, I stare at the scar on my knee, which looks like a flatworm. There are no noteworthy thoughts or conclusions during this time.

  I go to the training room for my first meeting with Fink, who makes it clear he doesn’t want to be there. I get up on the table and wait as he pretends to write something down in his green notebook. Either he started hating me first and I started hating him because I sensed that, or I started hating him first and he started hating me because I started hating him, our hatred wrapped up in each other, or our hating started separately, each deciding independently to hate the other.

  “Show me,” he says.

  I roll my pants up and show him my new flatworm.

  “Have you been getting enough magnesium? A deficiency can cause some pretty erratic behavior, and I know you’re susceptible to that.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Good, great, rest some more,” he says. “As for rehab, do what you feel is right.”

  “I will.”

  He points at my face with his pen. “I see you’ve had a busy couple days. Something happen?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Ah, ‘I fell down some stairs.’ Say no more. You don’t have to tell me, just doing my job as your trainer! So. Plans this holiday break? Family? It’s always good to spend the holidays with your family.”

  I think about how human conversation is mainly about what’s not spoken, what’s between the lines subtextually, and I think maybe we are setting some sort of record.

  “No, I’m going to stay here. Get better while everyone else is away.”

  “That’s good. It’s good to get better. I think it’s important for you to get better.” And then he puts his hand on my knee, sort of wraps it around the spot. He starts with a little pressure, but then his hand tightens. I stare at him and he looks back at me, squeezing harder and harder and though it hurts I don’t intend on ever giving him satisfaction, and at the same time I can feel a hot animal substance gathering behind my eyes.

  “Are you going to take your hand off my knee?”

  He removes his hand, puts the cap on his pen, and closes his notebook. “Yes, I think we’re all done here. Going to go home and see my family.”

  “What’d you write in that notebook?”

  “Merry Christmas, Florida.”

  He zips his coat and leaves me alone in the training room. With my leg stuck out on the table, I wait and listen to his snow boots squeak down the hallway, farther and farther, until the door opens and closes. I lift my poor ass off the table and open the drawer, study the organized medical supplies and liniments, full of Fink’s nasty fingerprints. On my way out, I pass by the door with the frosted window that says COACH OFFICE. It’s installed for Hargraves and the head coaches of the other sports, but Hargraves doesn’t ever use it. Through the window, on the worn desk, there’s a jar of Ben-Gay. This feels like some kind of test, but I go inside anyway. And just as I’m turning around, I hear a shifting sound and notice the dark lump up in the corner of the ceiling. The lights are off, but I can tell it’s a bat, and I eye it for a while to see if it moves, because I don’t want it flying down into my hair when I turn my back. I grab the Ben-Gay and shut the door.

  I do little test runs without the crutches, from one wall to the other in my room, then ramp up to laps around the floor. Eventually I do sit-ups, push-ups, stationary bike at the gym. The crutches go under the bed. I had forgotten what it feels like to get better. All around me I can feel everyone staying the same while I get better, a cloud lifting or just plain tuckering itself out.

  It says Ben-Gay will stop your neuralgia whatever that is so I rub that shit all over my left leg. Then, for Christmas, I buy a high-priced pillow. It’s a gift for myself.

  It’s hard to figure out when I’m ready or not ready for food because I don’t feel hungry. So I take guesses and force things down when it seems O.K.

  I go into the closet. For many hours, I meditate on failure.

  Every night, after locking my door, I can hear a muffled thump coming from what sounds like the bathroom. It always begins at one in the morning and always stops four minutes after it starts.

  The handle on the paper towel dispenser comes off and Masha has no interest in fixing it or notifying someone else, so there are no more paper towels.

  I take an unhelped walk down the main path in the afternoon, it’s snowing and no one else is around. I go to the center of campus, under the clock tower, and walk circles around it.

  One female trudges up to the Petrusse doors, tries them, then peers through the glass, and walks away.

  I open my desk drawers and take my textbooks, the three years’ worth I’ve been saving, and carry them to the bookstore. I sell them and use the money to buy a ratty copy of The Magic Mountain, then I go to the thrift shop next to the Pharmart and buy an old CB radio. I also buy a rubber Halloween gorilla mask that’s on clearance.

  I put the radio on the floor of my room. I listen. They’re mostly truckers passing by on 52 or 3, almost all of them make note of the snow. They all have the chains on their tires, and they point out stalled cars east of here and patches of black ice. The snow keeps coming down out my window, and I put my head down on the floor next to the radio and drift off. These puffs of air pass through my skull like dreams from fifty years ago. A conversation goes on in the room while I slip away, the same voices as before, the same old voices. Radio voices, phone voices. Am I dreaming that it is so quiet in the room that I can hear the soft pushing of the snow on the window, am I making it up that way out there something happens with the sunspots’ movement and down here the radio pitch switches? There are quiet breaths, a sudden faraway noise repeating, and it’s coming from the radio.

  The breaths stop and then a voice says, “I’m sorry, I’m very shy.”

  I sit up. The breaths come back.

  I look at the speaker holes, waiting for what’s going to come out to come out.

  “Please don’t get mad at me,” the voice says.

  I stare at the radio, the device that let this thing into my room.

  “I am going to go away if I don’t know you’re there. Please talk.”

  I pick up the handset. “Who is this?”

  “I have different names.”

  “Is one of them Frogman?” Breathing, t
hen something that sounds like lips smacking. “Aunt Lorraine?”

  “Be careful, if you frighten me I will go away. I told you I’m shy.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that,” I say.

  “That hurts my feelings. I was going to tell you something.”

  “What? What were you going to tell me?”

  “My feelings are hurt. Please say you’re sorry.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Please apologize.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

  “I think I’m going to tell you a secret. Can I trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you trust yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to know the secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I’m about to say has really happened!” There’s giggling through the radio.

  “What happened?”

  “I like the idea of going somewhere where no one knows who I am, coming into a little town where no one knows me, wearing nice clothes no one’s seen before, and I go down the street until I find a quiet house where the lights are on and through the window I can see the woman who lives there by herself, she is in the kitchen washing dishes, and I look at her through her window and can see what her head would look like without hair, and she can’t hear me as I enter her house through the back door and quietly come up to her because her house is very quiet and I don’t want to disturb that and I stand right behind her and she doesn’t know I’m right there, she doesn’t know what’s coming next. I reach down—”