Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  While running zigzags between the islands of shrubbery around Skiffington, avoiding the authorities, I have time to reflect on my choices. I touch the spot of the kick. My hands are wet from the rain and mud and blood. When I think I see a patrol car through the fog, I dart off the road into a field, kicking the chins of the furrows, a potato field with no potatoes to speak of, fields like dead overturned horses. I find a particularly nice hole and kneel down so no one can see me.

  On the ground in the neighboring furrow, there’s a closed foam container. It contains a large portion of sweet-and-sour pork, only a few bites taken. For the first time in a long time, I feel hungry, childishly, uncontrollably hungry. I dig the plastic fork out of the rice and begin eating. I swallow it down, all of it, I push it in without any breaks. None of this extracurricular activity that happens outside of the mat will be recorded. I close my mouth and run my tongue around inside, tasting the last bits of pork and sauce that didn’t make it down to my stomach yet. I lick the container. The permanent record will contain only numbers, wins and losses, time of match, and decision. Everything else will remain unknown. I stick my finger down my throat and throw it up, all of it, bent over with my hands on my knees. It takes a few minutes to get it all back out.

  Am I who I said I was? Am I a wrestler? If I jump off the top of the capitol building and my spirit escapes, does my spirit upon entering another body turn again into a wrestler? Does it resume all this? Or is the link so weak that wrestling ends along with the body? Does the entire feeling end just like that? This center inside me, encoded with tilts and cradles, could go up in smoke at any moment without a body willing to do its dirty work. You grow up fearing what you don’t understand, but by the time you’re older, it becomes far more complicated than that. The difference between children and adults is: adults have lots of problems and the young have one big problem.

  After kicking the girders and making sure the mother possum is out running her errands, I relieve myself on her nest.

  I would trade my family and Linus and Mary Beth and all the kid friends I had growing up that I can’t remember anymore for a championship in Kenosha. I would trade slightly less for the chance to wrestle until my body quit on me.

  For the first time in a long time, I admit to myself, out loud as if to another person, that I let Mary Beth go. Without an idea of what Birmingham looks like, it remains a hazy optimistic cloud that contains her laugh and a bunch of strangers listening, which raises my jealousy all the way up, jealousy for people I can’t even picture. Once or twice already, I’ve taken out maps of the northern U.S. states and calculated with a ruler the distance to Birmingham. It looks like about a sixteen-hour drive.

  The next morning, first thing, I head up the stairs with the CB, to the door that leads onto the roof, which is locked. There’s a little electrical box on the adjoining wall, and resting on top is where I find the key. It’s still basically night. Empty alcohol bottles are piled and stacked in elaborate ways around the roof, so many that the more recent ones seem to be in honor of the older ones, a hidden museum that’s always been right above me. I go to the edge and lean over to make sure no one’s goofing around down there, then I drop the radio sixty or seventy feet below, which isn’t enough to destroy it to full symbolic satisfaction but it’s good enough. Then I walk back downstairs and sleep for a while.

  I can’t believe I used to be scared of dying. What a relief that will be.

  Was last night New Year’s? Practice is starting back up in two days if that’s true.

  I open my desk drawer and reach inside, taking out a handful of sundry pamphlets. Alcoholism: The Family Disease, Why Am I Always Hungry?, What You Should Know If You’re Arrested. A few long hairs are tangled around the pamphlets, and they belong to Mary Beth. I put it all back in the drawer and close it shut.

  What I’d really like is to see if Mary Beth’s left anything in her room, to get a more exact idea of my emotional location by standing in her empty room, then sitting down in the center to know what I’m up against in the long run. But I don’t have access to Mooney, so I go to the second-best option, which is looking in Linus’s room for an object to rekindle my fraternal feeling for him, a photograph, his Neosporin tube, anything. I’m feeling forgiving. I can’t tell if I miss him or not, so I don’t know whether to feel guilty. And it doesn’t matter anyway because his door is locked, of course it’s locked.

  I take the stairs down to the lobby, and I’m on my way out the door when someone yells.

  “Hey!”

  I turn around. It’s the male front-desk attendant.

  “You’re Stephen Florida, right?”

  He tells me they have a package for me that is taking up too much room. He leads me behind the desk and points to a tremendous box. I carry it up the stairs, banging into walls on the turns. It weighs practically nothing. There’s no return address, just my name, Stephen Florida. I cut the tape with a pen. Inside are thousands of peanuts. If the Frogman has sent this, I concede it’s a pretty funny joke and so I plunge my hand in there, I’m going to get what’s coming to me as fast as I can. But all I get are more peanuts, which in the box ecosystem function as water, my hand going through them, peanuts spilling onto my carpet, the mess I’m making, I’m up to my shoulder in it, and that’s when my hand gets ahold of the paper. An envelope. I open it up, take the white card out.

  The “monk” seen pensively walking the dunes in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (left, in oil-on-canvas reprint) is actually no monk at all! He is Noel Friedrich, the bastard agnosic brother of Caspar. Friedrich often took his younger brother Noel out for air along the cliffs at Rügen between 1804 and 1808, until Noel himself died in the very same deep depicted in the painting, drowned when he mistook the waters for the town square. It is thought that The Monk by the Sea is the most personal of Friedrich’s paintings for this reason.

  I rub the knob on the rear of my head. On the back of the card is Mary Beth’s address and a phone number. I fold it up and put it inside my shoe.

  Early on, maybe when we were going to Silas’s hill, I think she knew that I didn’t want to talk about myself, about the past, and so these long stretches of not talking would take place, time in which we would’ve been shoring up the basics of myself, but it was nicer just to have the quiet.

  First thing in the morning, I sit at my desk in my boxers and my skin turns very cold as I write a letter to Mary Beth, a whole page of paper. When I’m getting dressed, I feel another set of things to say come up, and so I sit back down, open the letter, and write a second page to her, front and back, then I put them in an envelope and seal it up. On my way across campus, I mail it.

  I head to the training room for my second meeting with Fink. I wait for fifteen minutes before it becomes clear he’s not coming.

  On the posting board under the clock tower, there’s a police sketch of someone who looks nothing like me.

  I take the White Line west, and I’m the only one who gets off at my stop. As I walk across the parking lot to the swimming club, I realize for some reason that I am clenching my asshole very tight.

  I climb up on the lane-eight diving block and gracelessly leap off because I haven’t been swimming in ten years. I wash the goat mud off until I am clean again. I swim the pool back and forth forty times. Wrestling. I’m going to wrestle again soon. The exhaustion that comes over me is nothing like what I’ve been feeling lately, it’s earned and honest and not perversely soiled. I push harder to bring it on quicker, to have it more. I get out of the pool and find the trash can, and though a flavor hint of the sweet-and-sour pork comes into my mouth when I burp, there’s nothing in there to vomit up.

  On the bus back to Oregsburg, there’s a book on the seat in front of me, a paperback mystery with a yellow cover. It’s set in an Italian seaside town, and the first clue is a dead man with a petunia pinned to his chest. But then I recognize that I don’t care who the killer is, that finding out seems like an outstanding effort, so
I put the book back. And then sleep comes down on me like an elevator and I’m at the bottom of the shaft.

  One day I told myself I’d wake up and see my normal face in the bathroom mirror, all healed. That day is today.

  It’s only been one night but I can’t help it, I’ve been checking every few hours if she’s sent a letter. This morning I ask and when the male goes back to check the stacks of sorted incoming mail, he comes back with a single envelope.

  But it’s not from her. It’s from the office for the Harriet Howard Leadership Scholarship, informing me that my presentation time is set for the first week of March, right before Kenosha, which at the moment feels far away but only because so much will be decided by then. In real life, March is not far away at all.

  The trip to the gym in the morning, still way before sunrise, is an irrationally sentimental experience that I extend by walking very slowly.

  Fink lounges on the bleachers, picking his teeth with his car keys. The next thing I notice, though I don’t mean to, is that Linus is missing. Everyone else is here. I stand off to the side, pace around the outside of the gym away from them so they don’t talk to me, and wait until Hargraves comes in, which is last. He blows his whistle and they start jogging. I go up to Hargraves.

  “All right, good to see you, Florida. How’s the knee?”

  “It’s doing really a lot better. I’m ahead of schedule. I think I could do some drills, some live-gos.”

  “Great to hear, Florida,” he says. “I talked to Fink about this, he thinks—and I agree with him—that you should take it easy. It’s only natural that you already feel ready to get back in there. But we don’t want to make it worse.”

  “You talked to Fink about this? What did he say?”

  “We think you should bike this week. Next week we’ll see, take it from there.”

  “Bike?”

  “The first thing that goes is the endurance. Have to keep that up.”

  “But I have been. I can run. I can at least do the bleachers.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s hard as hell, son. But you don’t want to damage what’s trying to get better.”

  I walk away and he shouts, “You’ve still got time!” or something like that.

  They stretch and I bike. Lee and Whiting take half to the weight room for legs. The rest stay. They do reaction drills and I bike. They do bridges and wall arches and cross bars, they do situations and I bike. At different points during practice, one of them will glance in my direction, trying to see what I’m thinking by my face. “Explode on the whistle! Explode on the whistle! Explode on the whistle!” Hargraves yells until the meaning gets knocked out of it, until it sounds like a different language. During live-gos, Kryger locks up Simon and then hits a cement mixer, whipping Simon’s neck. “Who’s gonna be the bully today, huh?” Hargraves yells. “Ass dragging doesn’t happen anymore. This is January. Ass dragging is some fucking December shit.” Simon keeps getting up and trying again, but he’s too eager, Kryger keeps putting him down, whipping his neck, more and more aggressively. Two minutes in, Kryger whips Simon so hard that Simon yelps. From across the gym, Fink looks up from the mat, right at me. He smiles. These are unique challenges that are being given to me! I remember Fink’s smile. I remember Kryger’s taunts. I snip them like newspaper photos to save for later.

  A bunch of whistles blow and everyone quits and sits down while Hargraves talks. He tells a story about the man in the glass, everyone is quiet except the swishing my wheels make. “I notice some of you are a little bit slow today. That’s O.K. You’ve been away for a little bit. But we’re gonna keep taking it to you, it’s gonna keep ramping up the next two months. You knew we were gonna be hard on you. This is what you signed up for.” Then he lets them go. I wait for fifteen minutes in the empty gym so I don’t have to speak with any of them in the locker room. There’s a puddle of myself underneath me.

  I grab my towel from my locker and walk straight to the showers. Only Carpenter and Nate are in there. They ask questions immediately. I rub suds into my ears and face and try to listen to the crackle of the water against the tile rather than their voices.

  “How’s the knee, Florida?”

  “Feeling good.”

  “You gonna be back before regionals?”

  “Feeling good about it.”

  “They got you on the bike?”

  “Bike, yeah.”

  And then they talk to each other about the girls they fucked over Christmas, and for a moment I wonder if I’m a different species. For maybe the hundredth time since I received the box of peanuts, I think about Mary Beth, who’s the only reason any of this is palatable. They talk about the Rose Bowl, wanting to have kids, a person called Jack Careowhack, their fears about getting jobs after college, shoplifting Schlitz six packs and balloons, using the balloons for whippets, pot. I shut off the water and get out.

  I sit on the bench in front of my locker with the towel over my head.

  “Man, I’m fucking going places, bro.”

  “Shut the fuck up, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah? Watch me. I’m going to graduate school. Health science. Start calling me Doctor.”

  “Yeah? You’re gonna write your dissertation?”

  “Dissertation on that sideways vagina.”

  I stare into the fuzzy pink cotton, inhaling my own hot air while the locker room clears out around me. Lockers slam, zippers go up, laughing, burping. I’m afraid things are going to get worse before they get better. Ignorance changes into fear. Fear turns into distrust, then violence, which changes into dirt and then dread and then a disease of the mouth and then hydrogen and then stars and then a chemical accident and then brightness.

  I take the towel off my head. The locker room is empty, all the lockers are shut. A fly buzzes around, bumping against walls and the lockers. Historically, the salt smell of a locker room creates nervousness in people who are bad at their sport, but in the talented it creates nothing, no feeling, it’s part of your job. I used to feel the first and now I feel the second. On the chalkboard, Hargraves wrote:

  WAYS TO BREAK YOUR OPPONENT

  1. Set a fast physical pace.

  2. Hustle back to the center.

  3. Attack immediately after a takedown.

  4. Release him and attack immediately.

  5. Continue to wrestle in all situations.

  6. Don’t let his actions positive or negative faze you.

  I go to the bathroom. Sherman’s in there, a towel around his waist, combing his hair very carefully in the mirror. “Greetings.”

  I go to the sink next to Sherman and put my mouth under the faucet. He’s still parting his hair, one strand at a time. He’s doing a pretty good job.

  “How long you been doing that?” I say.

  “While,” he says. “How’s the knee?”

  “Feeling good.”

  “You talked to Linus at all?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Thought you were friends.” He finishes and heads around the corner into the empty locker room, where he goes to his bag, three down from my locker.

  “We are,” I say. “What happened?”

  He grabs a deodorant stick, looks at me as he wipes. “Oh right, you weren’t there. Fink told us before practice.” He puts his shirt on, pulling the head hole extra wide so his hair fits through without touching. “Linus’s grandma died. He’s gonna be back in a couple of days. Maybe a week.” He starts rolling his socks on. His toenails are long, which somehow contradicts his neat hair. “She went in with sudden chest pains and was gone by the next morning.” I don’t say anything, but get dressed at my locker. “Can’t believe you didn’t talk to him.” I’m looking down at my feet, tying the laces of my left shoe, but can tell he’s staring at me from the corner of my eye. “What were you up to for the break?” He’s still staring, the same way the rest of them were staring when I was on the bike. “What’s up with you, why are you being so fucking weird ab
out everything? Don’t you ever think about what you look like to other people?” I don’t answer. “Hello? You’re like a big fucking grump.” I take my shoe, the right one, and get up and begin hitting Sherman with it. “What the fuck?” he yells, but I keep smacking him in the head with it, messing up his arranged hair. “What the fuck?” he keeps saying, and it takes him fifteen seconds of me not stopping to realize he needs to get out, which he does, grabbing his bag and shielding himself, leaving me alone in the locker room, which I guess is what I wanted all along. I grab my backpack from the bottom of my locker. Underneath, there’s a snapped wishbone and a note that says Happy Holidays.

  I register for spring classes. I’m taking Nonfiction Film, Unusual Disorders, Geography I, and Introduction to Jazz. On my way out, Ms. Rutledge hands me an envelope with my fall grades.

  Before going home, I sit on a concrete bench and watch students walk by the posting board. Most of them just glance at the police sketch in passing, until an honest-faced male stops in his tracks and stares. Then he looks over at me, then back at the sketch, and once more at me, like I’m a horse in a dog costume. We’re at least twenty feet apart. “Hello!” I say, and he puts his head down and leaves.

  I open the envelope. Drawing (B), Basic News Writing (C+), What Is Nothing? (C+), Meteorology (C-).

  Back in McCloskey, I stare at Mary Beth’s phone number and after a long time work up the nerve to call, but Brandon’s using the phone, so I head back inside. I pluck out each of the hairs that grows on my shoulders.