by Habash, Gabe
When I leave the mat, after Hargraves hugs me, I go and stand at the bottom of one of the stairs that leads up to the top of the arena. I look over the entire crowd because superstition is the belief in the causal nexus. I wait for her, or whoever it decides to be, to stand up.
A little girl leaves her row and starts walking down the stairs toward me. She wears pink Velcro shoes and a pink coat, and I watch her walk all the way down. When she gets to the bottom, she looks up at me and for a moment, only one moment, I promise, I believe she’s going to ask me for my shoes, but what she says is, “Excuse me.” I limp out of her way and as she walks past it all pours over my head like a pot of tar or honey, coating all my face’s front-facing holes and there is a time of no air, and I let it, because it’ll slide off eventually, it always does.
On my last day I don’t feel fevered or keyed up, I feel resigned to whatever decides to happen. It’s not that I don’t feel in control of myself, it’s that I don’t feel in control of anything else. That’s all done. I have the earrings, just in case. I could work the rigs, I could go to Japan, I could rush home to the lake before the ice melts and slip under the covers for good. It was not so long ago that I was a lost and distracted person, it took me so long to pull myself out of all that. I sit back, put my spine against the stairs. I could do any of it.
In the stairway where I’m sitting, Hargraves brings me Linus’s singlet. Mine is hanging by one strap like Tarzan.
“Did he win?”
“Third, yeah. See you out there, Florida.”
I take it off and put his on in the stairway. I cup my kneecap like a warm, filled mug.
A long time ago, I read about the subway in New York, which if I remember correctly lets you ride as far as you want on one fare. Think of that: taking the steps down to the underground tunnel below, riding trains forward and backwards again, transferring all over New York City, the greatest city in the world, hundreds of platforms and stations, thousands of people, seeing everything, for the price of one fare. Why would you ever get off?
I wish I could say I prepare for Veith, but I don’t. Guilt is just as valid an incentive as anger, or stubbornness, or delusion and stupidity, and they’re all my energy from time to time, coming and going as they see fit, letting themselves in and seeing themselves out. When I blink my eye, just the one Luecke elbowed, it’s like I can feel the stem back there throbbing, and all my thoughts vanish or disappear or go up in smoke or evaporate. Identity is curious and always getting misplaced, sometimes you have to hold it pretty hard to keep it from getting away. I was never once the most talented, not even close, but I always had my single-mindedness, foolish greedy dodo single-mindedness.
With my coat on, I gimp out into the arena. I walk like the old days, like the lovely old days in winter when I’d just shed my crutches and was feeling grateful and horny. I wear my coat as far as they let me, which is the edge of the mat. I like the mat and the circle, which is the defined space I can make perfect. I’ve spent all these years only trying to make the sport perfect for myself. I wanted the pressure. All I ever wanted was the chance and now that I have it I forget my knee, when you finally have the chance nothing’s surprising anymore and everything turns blank. I give my coat to Hargraves. Thousands of people I don’t know and will never meet are creating sound, and my desire is bigger than anyone else’s in the entire building.
And if they had taken me to the movie, sitting in the backseat, instead of leaving me at home to watch television and fall asleep on the couch? I’ve always wondered what would’ve changed, and now I know. It would’ve stopped any of this from happening. That’s all. And when you think about it like that, it’s not really very much, is it?
I bend back my head and look up. In the rafters, between the lights, I look for a black creature, an animal waiting to descend. But there is nothing. It has stopped following me. The truth is that enormous. There is either no menace left in Kenosha or it is coming from me, it’s coming from my mouth.
They’ve removed five of the mats so there’s only one black one in the middle. I spit on the outside of the circle.
Immediately the referee blows his whistle. He walks over to me. “Red, what the hell was that? You going to be trouble?”
“No, I’m all done, I just had something inside.”
An attendant boy is already at my feet disinfecting the spot and wiping it clean with a ragged old towel.
I’m brought into the center of the circle. That’s it. The whistle blows.
Bang-collars, changing levels, Russian ties, every time one of us moves, the other moves, too, and nothing happens, no one takes any offensive chances. The first period ends 0–0, and while we’re resetting, I hear a few boos. I get bottom for the second and after some back pressure, escape. Back steps, footwork, hand fighting, cautions, arm drags, starts and stops. At some point, I’ve lost my ideas and am just reacting automatically. Array, Array, Array, Array, Array, Array. I have too much respect for all this to throw it away on one cheap shot. The second period ends, and when I start the third on top, he gets out easily, just as I did last period. Hand control, head snapping, stalling warnings. The boos get louder. With twenty seconds left, he pulls hard on my neck but I slip it, and no one gets any closer than that. They start us in neutral for overtime, and more of the same happens. Halfway through the overtime, when we break for one moment and I back up far enough to see his face, I know he’s resigned himself to the second overtime, for what happens with the fucking disc. It might as well be a fifty-fifty flip that determines everything. It’s both the shit and the stars. We keep locking up and hand fighting only for the sake of doing it, alternating between who’s slightly more aggressive, but whenever one tries to push the other, it’s clear that the wall of strength you brush up against is too much, there is no more strategy.
They blow the whistle and more boos come out. The referee returns us to center.
“O.K., you both know how this works. I’m going to flip it. Whoever gets the up side gets to pick position.”
He has the disc in his hand. He flips it.
Red.
“Bottom,” I say.
“This period’s thirty seconds.”
I get down on my hands and knees. I feel him lean on my back. When I sense the start, I take in a very deep breath.
I push and turn. And as I’m breaking his hold, there’s one last moment where he tries to slip his arm under mine, but I slide away from it and push back to my knees, facing him, his hands free of me. The whistle blows.
I stand up and shut my eyes. A hand lifts my arm. I open my eyes and walk out. I find a door to the basement. The stairs are dark and the basement is full of intention and blankness, my head leans against a concrete wall and the mechanical drone that energizes the whole building blurs out everything. Winning is timeless, I never got tired of winning. How glad I am to be tired. This is real life. This is real. This is real. This is real. This is real.
I walk up to the stairs and head back to the arena. Hargraves hands me my coat. I zip it up all the way. I try to put the hood up but they take it off and lead me over to the pedestal. I climb to the highest spot and stand there. “That’s some limp there,” they say to me, handing me a big cardboard with the completed 133 bracket on it.
The chairman is not smiling, it seems to me he’s making a real effort to frown.
“Congratulations, Stephen.”
“You all act like you’ve never seen a champion before.”
“Well.”
“You’ve got to reach up a bit, I’m all the way on top here.”
I put my head down like the first step of a Victorian courtship ritual, and he hands me my trophy.
A few photos are taken. I’m paraphrasing.
Mr. and Mrs. Fink are gone, Aunt Lorraine is gone, Linus is gone, Mary Beth is gone, Mom and Dad are gone, Silas is gone, Shane is gone, Bird is gone. There’s only this.
Once again, from the pedestal, I look up at the rafters. The shadow has spre
ad to the size of the building.
And would you believe it? I sleep the whole drive back.
I get out of the van and walk on the main path, across the school.
I’ve waited most of my life to find out what this feeling is like. I knew it wouldn’t feel like winning any of those other matches, but I thought it might feel like the opposite of losing. But it’s not personal, I do not take this inside myself the way that I took years and years of falling short into myself, it does not untie those knots the way losing tied them. It’s only relief. It is absence. It’s pressure being taken away. The noise has stopped. It’s relief.
There are not many people out. It’s ten in the morning on a Sunday. Under the clock tower, there’s that situational atmosphere sound, which is particular to a place, which in Oregsburg is similar to the air just beginning to turn up the spiral of a large seashell. Or the sound of a heavy object, an immense object, dropping down the ocean and finally landing on the floor, and the final reverberations in the sand and rocks nearby that take minutes to quiet down before the object rests there for good and begins its erosion. But then again I’ve never been to the ocean.
Inside my bag, wrapped up in the singlet like a surprise parcel, is the trophy, a nice desk-clock size. I walk through the snow, between the posting board and the benches, think to maybe sit down and kill some time. Memories always appear as unfinished circles. I had never guessed that wanting one thing for so long, wanting it at the cost of everything else, I never would’ve guessed that finally getting my hands on it could not feel really any different than how it felt all along, how it didn’t push out the boredom and the terror in the rooms, in every room I’ve ever spent time in.
I think about going to the cafeteria or the student union, to wait until Petrusse opens up. My heart is going uncomfortably fast now, and I’m not sure why. Maybe there’s something on television. I think about walking around the library until I find something new to read, and sitting at one of the wood tables in the basement until I’ve finished the whole thing, in one sitting.
Closure and reason are impossible. Understanding, on the other hand, is the best you can hope for.
When I go back to McCloskey, there’s no one at the front desk. I walk through the lobby and take the stairs. When I get to my floor, I take my keys out but stop when I see my door’s open. There are wet footprints on the floor leading to my room. Then I go down the hallway, up to the doorway, and look inside.
In my room with the lights off and sitting on the bed there’s someone. Who stands up.
“Oh, there you are.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, PJ Mark, for your brilliance, gutsiness, and thoughtfulness.
Thank you, Chris Fischbach, for seeing something when no one else did.
Thank you, Caroline Casey, for your toughness and heart.
Thank you, Lizzie Davis, for your sharp insight.
Thank you, Marya Spence, for your perceptiveness.
Thank you, Ian Bonaparte, for keeping track of all the pieces.
Thank you, Mandy Medley, Carla Valadez, Nica Carrillo, Kellie Hultgren, Sheila Bayle, Timothy Otte, and Rob Keefe, for giving me a home and giving life to literature.
Thank you, Trevor Goodman, Jane Alison, Seth Satterlee, Lindsay Hill, George Boorujy, Ian McCutcheon, Jason Guder, and Mike Harvkey, for your friendship, teaching, and inspiration.
Thank you, Hanya Yanagihara, Garth Greenwell, and Dan Chaon, for being life-changing writers and generous readers.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for everything.
This book would not exist without you, Julie. So thank you for taking me with you, for making it all worth it, and for being the best surprise of my life.
About the Author
Gabe Habash is the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly. He holds an MFA from New York University and lives in New York.
@gabehabash
#StephenFlorida
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
