The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  What did I remember of the event now? Not much—nearly naked men, small as mice from the nosebleeds, throwing their shining bodies into each other with abandon. There was that noble childish vision of clear good triumphing over clear evil. One of the wrestlers, the winner of the main event, was a man by the name of Lou Thesz. All these years later, I still remembered his name. I’d taken Gil to the arena knowing full well that the matches were staged. But on the bus ride back, when Gil lifted his cap in mock modesty and said, “See, I told you it was real,” I, Terrence J. Krill—Seaman Recruit Krill, for God’s sake—said, “Well, maybe Lou Thesz is legit. I’ll give you that. Maybe his match was real.”

  When I told the story to The Brow Beater, I didn’t mean it as a window into my biography but as a demonstration of what a great wrestler could accomplish, what he ought to send a fan out into the world feeling. A kind of magic trick, I said, and all that’s needed for the magic is one person in the ring who believes in the story he’s telling so completely as to create doubt among the doubters. One person with enough talent and charisma and conviction to make fiction more convincing than life.

  Only later—after the navy, after my years on the fishing boat—did I learn the specific techniques to get the magic trick to work. I couldn’t explain pain, but I learned to get mine across. I learned what to pay attention to in other matches: not the blood—which is where the average fan looks—but the eyes. In them I saw presence, real presence. Not the presence we talk about when we talk about star power, but that other, more elusive presence, that unwavering attention to being alive. I’d gone all over this country and told The Brow Beater what I’d found: the wrestling ring was the only place where two men could be present in that way together, where two men used their presence to take real care of each other. Real care. Out there we had each other’s literal breathing lives in our hands, and if we watched a wrestling match closely enough, we could spot a devoted focus in every slam, a tenderness in every hold. It’s like one of those modern paintings, I told him. From a distance you see violence. Up close you find love.

  The Brow Beater stopped me there. He said, “Had? You had a brother?”

  “I’m getting to that part,” I said, because I wasn’t telling only the story of my brother’s death but also the story of how my guilt over his death led me to my life in wrestling, and a story about guilt is a confession, and a confession can’t be rushed. So I told The Brow Beater how, after four years in the navy, I’d taken a job onboard a fishing vessel. The war was done—I’d come of age the day after the second bomb dropped in Japan—and my time in the service felt merely decorative. I’d come home from the navy with all the markings of a sailor except the ones that counted, the ones I might’ve gotten had I been born a little earlier or a little later. I came home in 1949 with nothing to do but drink and show off my tattoos, so I jumped back onto a boat as soon as I could, leaving Seattle one morning for the Alaskan coast. I was called a “seafood processor,” a fancy term for a deckhand. I lifted nets as big as trailers to identify and sort the different species. I ran the processing machinery, cleaning the guts and blood and slime from its rollers. I packed the pans, labeled and stacked product in the freezer hold. I backloaded supplies onto the vessel, I repaired nets, I scrubbed the head, I scraped the frozen blisters off my hands while taking the coldest shits I ever took, I watched the steam rise up between my thighs like the eight vaporous minutes of rest in my sixteen-hour workdays. For three months at a time, with no days off, I was out on that vessel with fish guts in my hair, all shine and silver scales, and the bosun took to calling me “Angel Hair.”

  Between contracts, I spent a miserable week onshore. I resented those breaks, staying with my parents and my kid brother as if I were a child, and if the law hadn’t forced a break between contracts, I’d have stayed on the ocean the rest of my life.

  Spending twelve out of every thirteen weeks on the water, I missed most of the major life events in my family. I was on the boat during the burglary that stole my mother’s favorite heirloom, a Saint Christopher medallion she’d planned to give her first grandson. I was on the boat during my father’s second heart scare. I was on the boat during Gil’s graduation from high school. When I got back on land, he told me he’d joined the army. This was in February 1950. “Anything I should know?” he asked, and I told him, “War’s over. We were born too late to matter.”

  Back on the boat, I couldn’t accompany my family to the docks in June, when the conflict started, when Gil shipped off to Korea. By December, he’d been killed, but because I was on the boat when it happened, I wouldn’t know until my contract was up in February 1951. His remains had already been sent back. I’d missed the funeral. My parents had been grieving for months by the time I heard the news, and Gil’s girlfriend, Joyce—who was like family to us—had already begun to digest the news in her own absurd and disturbing way. That left me alone to speed up my grief so that I could catch up with the rest of them, a process I figured might be easier on the road.

  “How I joined the wrestling business is a whole other story,” I told The Brow Beater. “But now you’ve got the why.”

  He palmed the top of my head, and we drove quietly like that for a while. From that point on, I knew he wouldn’t quit.

  Back in the camper shell of the truck, Fuji and I slept until the meters started running again. It was early Wednesday morning in Hollywood, but I was on pace to arrive at Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow a whole day early. In my shirt pocket, I found an old business card, thin as lace with age and yellow with grease. Raul had untacked it from a bulletin board in the kitchen at The Gutshot. English Language Lessons from Valantin, it read. When he handed it to me, Raul had said, “If you find Longtin, tell him I said what’s up.” Of course, I’d said, but already I knew I was searching for someone else.

  6

  Batumi, Soviet Georgia, 1974

  Mina herself admitted it: the dice really did roll differently when hers was the hand that threw them. They rolled her way more often than not—more often, certainly, than they did for Ruben. The two of them had spent the entire smack of their youth competing with each other in tournaments regional and national, and Mina almost always won. It came as no surprise, then, when Tigran—tasked with choosing a student to represent Soviet Armenia for the world tournament in Paris—announced that he would be taking, for the first time in the tournament’s history, a girl.

  Leading up to the trip to Paris, Tigran appointed her old rival to be Mina’s sparring partner. The gig had been sold to Ruben as iron sharpening iron, but ten daily hours lurched over the losing side of a backgammon board had him feeling aggrieved and blunted. Several sessions in, he escaped one night to the city square and complained to Avo.

  Just earlier, as the sun was setting, Avo had overheard a group of girls making plans to see the new Russian film showing in the theater, The Duel. Avo didn’t particularly want to watch the movie—he’d never even heard of the book it was adapted from—but one of the girls involved in the plan was Mina. When Ruben found him, Avo was hiding from the rain under the lip of the bureau building, peering around its corner to keep an eye on the theater at the other side of the square. The night had just begun, and so had the movie. Maybe, Avo thought, a seat near Mina was still available.

  Ruben clapped his hands together without a break in his venting. He had seemed larger in Avo’s split attention, but now that Avo was looking at him against the long wall of the bureau office, Ruben appeared much smaller. On the wall beside him stretched an enormous poster, mostly washed out in the rain. It used to say: “We Grow Under the Sun of Our Country,” but now cried, “row Under . . . try.”

  “Then again,” Ruben continued, “maybe I’ll surprise myself. Maybe when she wins in Paris, I’ll feel proud, like I really helped, like I genuinely am part owner of the trophy.”

  A pause in the rain lured pigeons from their hideouts. Soon they were everywhere, one enormous and indistinguishable flapping about the square, and t
he statue of Sergey Kirov was drenched with creamy shit. His bronze helmet of hair had gone white, as if aging in an instant, just like that, under a feathered flash of bird flight. Now the moon broke free from the clouds, and the rain seemed to be finished for the night, and a crew of men arrived with a hose to blast the statue clean. Across the square, the cinema doors opened, and Avo pictured Mina inside, chewing a string of dates and walnuts.

  “I suppose I’ll know soon enough,” Ruben said. “They leave for Paris in just a few weeks. Maybe if she wins, it won’t be all that bad. Maybe she’ll stay in Paris and never come back.”

  They’d abandoned the bureau office for the fountain, where Avo threw one boot onto the ledge. He hadn’t considered the possibility that Mina might stay abroad. “I hope not,” he said. “I’m just starting to get to know her.” When Ruben chose not to respond, Avo lifted the conversation back to its feet. “Tigran and Mina—just the two of them are going?”

  “Just the two of them,” Ruben said, and he explained how each country, including each republic in the Soviet Union, got two representatives: a teacher and a junior player.

  Avo looked again to the theater, but he could hear the injury in Ruben’s self-esteem. He reminded Ruben how the Ministry of Education had courted him, how he was set to do great things, regardless of one stupid backgammon tournament.

  “This isn’t about backgammon,” Ruben said, and then pointed at the men hosing down the statue of Kirov. “You see them? That’s us. That’s Armenia. Empire after empire after empire, and who are we? What do we do? We blast shit off Russian heroes.”

  “I agree. Pigeons should have Armenian heroes to shit on.”

  “Joke all you want, but I have news. You know that man I’ve been in touch with in Beirut?”

  “What?” Avo said.

  “This man—he saw the letter from the Ministry, my scores, and one of Mina’s uncles knows him through this international Armenian association they both belong to. They’re basically a group of history buffs. Her uncle put him in touch with me last year.”

  “Last year? When were you going to tell me about this?”

  “I thought I did. Maybe you were looking around, distracted, while I was telling you.”

  Avo wiped his brow. He said, “So who is this guy?”

  “In the letters he’s written to me, he calls himself Hagop Hagopian. I’ve read about him in newspapers, and they say he goes by other names, too. He’s only twenty-three, apparently, even though I feel there’s a much wider gap than five years between us. He’s as worldly and knowledgeable as anyone Old Yergat’s age, because he’s been a soldier and a revolutionary in Iraq and in Lebanon, and now he’s leading a new organization. Reparations. He says he’s impressed by me and wants to meet me. He wants to meet us.”

  “Us?”

  “I told him about you, too, about your skills.”

  “How big and strong I am, right, so I can be a bodyguard?”

  “I told him how easy people feel around you, how impossible it is to dislike you.”

  Avo palmed Ruben’s head and pushed him gently away. “Ah, yes. That’s what the Turks have been waiting for: charm.”

  “Joke, joke, joke, but here’s my real news. Hagopian can’t travel here—the Soviets would detain him. So he asked if we could meet outside the USSR.”

  “Which we can’t.”

  “Unless we’re in Paris in a few weeks,” Ruben said, “which is where I told him to find us.”

  “But we’re not going to Paris,” Avo said. “Tigran and Mina are going to Paris.”

  This time Ruben was the one to check the theater. “Now,” he said, “you understand our problem.”

  The next day, after long hours of losing to Mina, Ruben was packing his backgammon set, getting ready to walk home. Tigran followed him outside, chasing him down with his lapels up and a hand on his cap. They stopped in the shadow of a tall, sickly shrub. “Serious boy,” Tigran said, breathing hard, “grave boy. You’ve been humble, you’ve been good.” A man in his sixties, Tigran smelled like dried figs and Russian cigarettes. He lit one now and pulled Ruben close. As he spoke, he held the smoke inside. “Tomorrow I’m taking my wife and kids and grandchildren on a vacation. There’s a beautiful beach I know of on the Black Sea. We’ll eat, talk, have a little taste of arak—you’re old enough now, yeah?—and swim. I take my family every year. Tomorrow you and Mina will join us, and we’ll have a celebration for what you’ve done for her talents and what she’ll do for our country in Paris. Any other decade, serious boy, and you would have easily been my pupil at the games. She’s simply a wonder, and you’ve helped harness her gift. Better than even I could. Bravo, Ruben-jan. Bravo.”

  That last word sounded to Ruben like the name of his brother, and before he realized he was speaking, he heard himself ask Tigran if Avo could join them at the Black Sea, too.

  “The big one?” Tigran laughed. “We’ll have to strap him to the roof of one of the cars.”

  “If there’s no room for him,” Ruben said, “there’s no room for me.”

  “All right, serious boy, all right,” Tigran said, offering a cigarette to Ruben. “We’ll make room.”

  How many cigarettes did Ruben smoke on the drive to the Black Sea, folded onto Avo’s lap beside four young children in the backseat of a boxy Trabant? “Like a ventriloquist and his dummy,” said Avo, making the kids laugh, and Ruben ashed his cigarette on top of a little boy’s head.

  For four hundred kilometers to the coastal town outside Batumi—nine hours for the three-car cavalcade—Avo wished he had Mina in his lap rather than Ruben. Ruben was about the same size as Mina, but Avo couldn’t get himself to pretend. She was traveling comfortably in the front seat of one of the other cars, the one driven by Tigran. Once in a while, whenever Ruben rolled the window down for air, Avo threw his hand out and made a stupid finger-stretching motion as far from the car as he could reach. Fingers stretching and waving like crab legs leaving their shell. Maybe Mina would notice.

  At a bend in the road, a sign in multiple languages welcomed them to the SSR of Georgia. Ruben patted the back of Avo’s hand as if they’d accomplished something grand. And maybe, Avo thought, they had. Technically, they were still in the Soviet Union, but the wind stealing their ash out the window seemed to move differently. For the first time, they’d left their country, and the strange wind swirled.

  The Black Sea was a peaceful teal stripe along the horizon, but by the time they unpacked the cars and set up camp at the lake, there was no stopping the mosquitoes. They seemed to lurch from the endless water like spores. Ruben swatted the back of his neck, cursing, and within an hour, Avo’s swollen ankles looked like kneecaps. The children cried and batted one another, running around the campsite as Tigran took a seat in front of the fire his adult son, Dev, was building. All anyone could talk about was the odd conflation of the twilight beauty of the sea and the brutal ubiquity of the bloodsuckers.

  Then Mina came out from her tent in a yellow one-piece bathing suit to rest her feet. She was sitting on a flipped bucket, stretching her legs along the tips of the tall grass between her and the fire. The bottoms of her feet were glowing. She said, “What are you all complaining about? I haven’t been bitten a single time.”

  “Her luck continues,” Tigran said, lifting his cup. “Let the Parisians hear the mosquitoes buzzing: We are not worthy of Mina’s blood!”

  Later, after they’d gone to their tent, Ruben fumed. He and Avo were sharing the tent with three little boys, Tigran’s grandsons, who had either fallen fast asleep or mastered the art of pretending. “The bugs aren’t worthy of her blood?” Ruben whisper-screamed. “Maybe they’ve smartened up to the poison in it, I should’ve said. Or maybe, like I’ve been saying all this time, she’s just the luckiest person who ever lived. I swear, Avo. The way everyone lavishes her with praise for something she has no control over. Nothing real—not skill, not intelligence—but luck. Luck! I really can’t take this anymore.”

  Avo
whispered back, “It’s not only luck, though, is it? She’s skilled, too. She had to understand and learn those proofs. I couldn’t have done that.”

  “Well, I could, and I did. I memorized them, too. But she wins. She has luck on her side, and I don’t.”

  Avo pictured Mina’s feet hanging over the campfire, the way her toes glowed orange, how the veins in the top of her feet bulged when she rolled her ankles this way and that to crack them. All those little veins threading her together. Avo had never been a great student. He’d taken anatomy and, aside from an athlete’s fixation on the names of muscles and tendons, remembered very little. But he did recall that the blood in the brain was somehow different than the blood circulating through the rest of the body. This was why infections of the brain were so rare. But Mina’s feet over the fire seemed to burn the edges of that fact away, and he began to imagine that the blood flowing in her feet was the same that pumped through her brain, which was to say her self, and everything that made her Mina lived in that blood: the way she cradled her chin with the cup of her thumb, the curious squish of her eyes when she waved to him from across the city square, the heavy stomp to her walk, the made-up word dakalash, meaning adorable, which she’d used to describe everything from the way the dice fell to the way Avo’s eyebrow had breached the gap he’d been born with to become one. Everything that made her Mina was a product of the blood in her brain. And for a moment, annoyed with Ruben and unburdened by the strict facts he’d learned in school, Avo let himself attribute Mina’s personhood to those feet over that fire, and he wanted to touch them so badly that he almost whimpered.

  Ruben was asleep. Avo parted the opening of the tent and crawled out to the dark shore like evolution in reverse. Including his, four tents lined the beach. Not tents, really, but cotton sheets strung up on poles and wires. Which was hers? He couldn’t risk waking the others. Couldn’t go rip apart the sheets of every tent looking for her. Maybe he should’ve watched Mina go to bed instead of following Ruben to their tent. He glided across the sand to the tent nearest to his. On his toes, he was just tall enough to crane over the top of the cotton walls and peer down through the gaps in the makeshift ceiling. The first tent belonged to Tigran and his wife, who were lying on a dark blanket. They were sleeping peacefully, but there was something inherently menacing about the sight of an old couple asleep on the ground. A pair of bodies in the sand—the image felt familiar, even though Avo had never seen it. In fact, the image haunted him badly enough that he made a promise to himself: if he didn’t find Mina in the next tent he checked, he would end his quest and crawl back to bed.