by Atticus Lish
He sensed a turbulence in the outer darkness coming this way. As it got closer, it became a person with red gloves taped to his hands. Behind him came a group of unshaven men in ball caps. One looked directly at Corey while speaking to this person, who nodded. The fighter took his sweats off and held his arms out. The bouncer frisked him, and a moment later he bounded up into the cage, opposite Corey.
Eddie banged the fence. “Hey, Corey! Hey! Listen up! I just heard, this guy’s a grappler. You’re gonna have to watch out with him.”
“What do you mean, watch out?”
“He’s a purple belt.”
“But what do I do differently?”
“Keep it standing!”
But Corey didn’t hear him, because someone else was yelling, “Give it everything you got! Don’t quit! Just do it!”
And the ref was shouting, “Blue fighter! Turn around!”
Corey turned around, and the bell rang.
The two young men went towards each other like two arachnids in a terrarium. Ochiottes caught him in a front guillotine choke while they were standing, jumped guard, pulling him down, and made him tap in under a minute.
The mechanics of it were: His opponent’s legs weren’t holding him and he thought he might get free. But then Abel kicked him off and figure-foured his arms around Corey’s head when they were on their knees, then rolled on his side taking Corey over with him. The ref moved in to watch. Corey tried to grab his opponent’s hands. But you can’t untie a knot behind your head unless you know how it’s tied. Abel caught him with his feet and pulled their bodies together, folding Corey in half, compressing his neck. Corey’s face turned the color of a raw steak. He tapped Abel’s arm. The ref lunged down and pulled Abel’s arm off Corey’s neck. Abel’s corner jumped up in celebration.
Abel’s corner ran in and hugged him. Corey went over to shake hands. Abel’s unshaven coach gestured that someone was behind him. Abel turned around, glanced at Corey, said, “Good fight,” and turned away.
The ref grabbed Corey by the wrist and dragged him to the center of the cage. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner.” The ref raised Abel’s hand and held Corey’s hand down, as if he was afraid Corey would try to take credit for a fight he hadn’t won. Corey went to the dressing room and found someone with scissors to cut his gloves off.
* * *
—
It was almost midnight when they left the arena. Corey hadn’t eaten anything. One of his teammates had had the foresight to get two slices of pizza and a hot dog to celebrate his victory before they closed the concession. Now all you could get was beer.
The fighters and the fans were dispersing. A crowd remained in the event room, drinking and talking, the music still playing: “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day…” But the carpeting was littered with ticket stubs and napkins. The garbages were full. The exit doors had been blocked open so that people felt encouraged to leave. Drinkers pissed with the restroom doors open so they could shout to their friends. In the cigarette-musty betting room, the horses were galloping on the TVs—bringing their front legs and back legs together like hands frenetically grabbing more life, grabbing more life. No one was watching any longer. The spotlight over the cage went off. The event staff started folding up metal chairs and stacking them in the back of the room. The rock music went off and left the room silent with just the clattering of the chairs.
People streamed from the casino’s half-moon lobby out into the night. Engines revved, headlights came on. You heard cars ripping away and laughter in the dark.
Bestway struck out for the hotel, carrying their gym bags. They argued about the way and got lost trying to circumnavigate the mall. Corey brought up the rear in silence. They walked back through the ankle-tickling grass on the side of Policy Road. Cold emanated from the countryside. The windows of roadside houses were as opaque as cataracts. A chittering echoed from the towering trees and deep weedy grass. There was a great three-dimensional space around them and it was full of insects.
When they got back to the Travelodge, one of Corey’s teammates threw his bag on a bed and said, “I won. I get the bed tonight!”
Corey went out to the snack machine. He bought a pack of Oreos and called his mother on his cell.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, Corey. How’re things?”
“They’re okay. I lost.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do better next time.”
“I know. I will. Are you okay?”
“About the same.”
“Is anyone there with you tonight?”
“No. Just me and my lonesome. I watched a science program I think you would have liked about the brain. They were talking about all the things the human mind can do. It was just magnificent. They had a pianist hooked up to a machine, and you could actually see the nerve impulses coming out in waves together with the music when he was playing. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw. They said he had trained from the time he was seven. His whole body had become the instrument. I thought, Corey’d love this, because he had your discipline.”
“I don’t feel very disciplined tonight.”
“It’s just one little night. You’ve got the whole rest of your life to be great. I’d give anything to be your age, Corey. I’d give anything not to be facing this.”
“Mom—”
“You asked me how I am, Corey. I’m sad. I’m sorry, I’m so sad.”
“Mom…” He kneeled in the parking lot, hunching himself over the phone. “Mom, it’s okay…It’s okay…It’s okay. I’ll be there soon.”
He wiped his eyes after getting off the phone and ate the Oreos. The trash can was in the motel office. He threw the wrapper out. The night clerk was out of sight. He went back to his room. He told Eddie he was thinking about going to the bus station and getting the next bus home right now.
“You can’t go there now. There’re no buses now.”
Corey lay down on a bedspread on the floor. “I’m taking the earliest bus tomorrow.”
“What does he want to go home so badly for?” one of the guys asked. Another said, “Shut up. Let it go,” because Corey was the only one who had lost.
The next morning, Corey left before the others and caught the six a.m. bus back to Boston. At South Station, he transferred to the T and stared at the subway tunnel walls.
The T rose out of the tunnel. Now he was looking out over the water, the sun in his eyes and the shore going by. Then they sank into the concrete cut between the houses. He got off in Quincy and went to Grumpy White’s and ate a chicken parm, fries, a milkshake—near a thousand calories.
When he got home, it was noon. His mother had been alone all morning while he had been feeding himself. He put down his gym bag and made her lunch.
* * *
—
But once he had fought, it changed things at the gym. Scott the fireman tried to rough him up and, while not his equal, Corey was relaxed and unafraid of him and able to neutralize much of what he did. Furthermore, he didn’t tire.
The fireman flopped on his back and groaned.
“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked.
“This kid’s annoying me today. Nothing’s working on him.”
“He fought on Saturday.”
“I should have known.”
He decided he would get his gear, his game, his life in order. Rather than taking his mother’s protein powder, he bought Gaspari and Xtend at GMC and set them in his room with his board shorts, bag gloves, rash guard, jump rope, mouthpiece, kneepads, cup and hand wraps—all laid out so he could see them day and night. He’d learn to box you on the feet, using timing and angles, punch his way into the clinch, hit his favorite takedown, work his knee-slide pass, his Leo Vera, punch you from the top, ride you, hunt a choke, use leg-weave passing. His life wou
ld be devoted to solving body puzzles. He saw future contests in his dreams. If he lost position, he’d shrimp his hips away or Granby and recover guard and immediately go to mission control or the London and work between an omoplata and a triangle. He’d learn to ping-pong between positions, stay one step ahead of his opponent—to never get guillotined again. It suddenly seemed possible to do everything in life the way it should be done. Sometimes Eddie stopped him as he left the gym and shook his hand.
He bought his own gear. Did his laundry. In October, he turned seventeen. Balanced job, gym, mother—even school—for a little while at least—in the lull after his first fight.
* * *
—
The only signs Corey saw of Leonard during this period were his dirty rumpled clothes, bags of toiletries and jars of pickled garlic. The futon remained folded up. He almost dared to think his father had gone away. But one day, on his way to a Craigslist job in Milton, Corey smelled something in the air. He went into the kitchen. A great mass of Leonard’s dishes was drip-drying in the sink: pots, pans, plates, spoons, tongs, his green enamel skillet, his canary yellow butcher knife.
Corey checked the trash. He found onion skins. The window had been left open to the marsh. His father must have cooked, but he had washed his dishes.
He knows I’m fighting, Corey thought. He doesn’t want to play with me.
His eye fell on the dish soap, a 28-ounce bottle of Palmolive he had bought on sale at Stoppies only days before. It had been full this morning; it was almost empty now. He looked in the sink again. The dishes were covered in unrinsed soap foam. There were mountains of soap foam billowing out of the sink. It was so full of foam you couldn’t see the bottom.
He stared at Leonard’s message to him.
In Milton, he went to a woman’s basement and hooked up her dryer to the gas, a simple procedure, connecting the silver exhaust hose to the vent. She lived in a dark house and Corey thought that she was very strange.
In early November, Corey stayed home from school to take his mother to her clinic day at Longwood. It took a long time to get her to the car. He did up the buttons of her navy pea coat while she stood with her arms at her sides. A wind was blowing on the shore. She wore her sweatpants, white socks and white sneakers. Corey put her hat on her head—a knit hat with a pompom.
“Am I Santa?”
It started raining, wetting the black asphalt. He helped her into the hatchback and buckled her seatbelt while she stared out the window at the rain. Her hands in orthotic braces lay in her lap. She had orthotics on her feet. He put her walker in the trunk, the cold metal wet on his hands, and got behind the wheel.
They were due at Longwood at three o’clock. He drove them north along the shore. She sat next to him with her arms in her lap, bundled into her navy coat, the pompom bouncing on her head with the breaks in the road as the rain came down. The windshield wipers were sluicing the rain off the windshield. They were driving along the line of white houses and the gray ocean shore, heading north into the gray sky.
They drove up onto 93 and promptly hit traffic. It was already 2:40, and he was watching the time. At 2:47 they were getting off 93, driving down Huntington Ave. He braked for a red light and they waited, the stick in neutral, surrounded by idling city traffic. The wipers worked across the glass; his turn signal tick-tocked. At 2:52 they were turning south, past townhouses with limestone angels.
At 3:00, they reached the wide modern road flanked by towers like giant books standing on their ends. He turned into the Beth Israel driveway, paved in glazed brick. He waited for the machine to give him his ticket. The barrier went up and he drove down into the underground garage.
He parked and jumped out and opened the trunk and unfolded his mother’s walker, unbuckled her seatbelt and let her lift her legs out by herself, “under her own steam,” as she put it. When her legs were out, he lifted under her woolly arms and helped her stand. He put her thin weak hands on the walker. They felt like two thin fillets. She couldn’t squeeze him back. He stepped out of her way and let her push the walker forward. She took a high slow step, the toe of her sneaker pointing down, and set her foot on the concrete floor. A ventilator roared. The garage smelled like diesel fumes. She took a step with her other leg, another high slow step.
He closed their car door and checked by feel that it was locked. He didn’t take his eyes off her while she was moving. If he had to look away, he kept his hand on her back to feel her balance. He was ready to catch her under the arms if she fell. In wrestling, this was called the cow catcher. He could never be farther away from her than the time it would take him to catch her before she hit the ground.
She pushed her walker forward and began taking another step. He followed behind her, not touching her, but waiting and ready. She had fifty feet to go to the elevators. He checked the time. They were going to be late.
They took the elevator to the neurology department. Medical personnel in white coats and blue scrubs got off at an intermediate floor and hurried away, holding their clipboards to their bosoms like schoolgirls holding schoolbooks. The doors closed, and Corey saw his and his mother’s reflections in the polished metal: his mother, now shorter than he was, her spine humped, leaning on the four-legged walker.
The neurology clinic smelled like antiseptic and human beings. Corey went to the counter to check them in.
“You could call next time,” a scheduling nurse told him, a plump woman with bangles and painted-on eyebrows. “I’ll have to tell the doctor to come back.”
“I’m sorry,” Corey said. “It’s not my mom’s fault. I hit traffic in the rain.”
The waiting room had a plate glass wall that looked out at the gray sky. They were on a high floor and there was cottony fog swirling around the top of a neighboring office tower, so it was almost like they were in the mountains with the clouds.
His mother took a seat to wait. The sealed room was hot and stuffy. Corey took her hat off and began unbuttoning her coat. The banks of seats faced each other.
Across the room from Gloria, there was a woman lying in a wheelchair, a massive mechanical contraption. Complex supports held up each of her limbs. Her deformed neck twisted sideways like a vine. Her head resembled an orange at the end of the vine, and the headrest had to be off-center and out of true to support her. Long bolts stuck out from the headrest like torture devices that screwed into her head.
“I wish I’d brought a book for you,” Corey said.
“Can you show me something on your phone?”
“Of course. What do you want to see?”
“Show me anything.”
He went through his pictures. “Here. Look at this. This is a mandala.”
It showed the Tibetan universe, a central mountain peak surrounded by the continents with uncountably many worlds bubbling into existence all around them like fish eggs foaming in the sea, teeming with black- and red-skinned gods and demons in gold finery with elephant trunks and tusks, white-skinned maidens, and various hells. In the upper world, farmers worked and prayed with their families by the river shores for healthy crops and healthy children. In the hells, scowling priests tore victims’ legs apart and disemboweled them. The Buddha sat above the mountain peak, enthroned on a cloud in Suyama Paradise. His hair looked like the overlapping leaves of an artichoke. His cone-shaped head rose to a point, which ended in a jewel of flame. His soft earlobes hung down like dewdrops. His cheeks were soft and hairless, as if plumped with estrogen, and he levitated on his lotus cloud at the center of the cosmos but outside it—smiling, sexless, all-powerful and calm.
His mother looked at the image on his smartphone. Come on, Gloria! she thought. Breathe! She raised her aquiline face, her narrow nose and jaw, and closed her eyes, as if she were basking in a joyous sunlight coming from the clinic’s ceiling and hearing beautiful music.
The nurse with bangles called Gloria, and sh
e went in to see the doctor. He reviewed her progress and told her it was time to go down to the basement.
There was a workshop in the basement that looked like a lost-and-found for canes and crutches. Women who were both therapists and mechanics were waiting for them. Corey saw a box full of foam rubber, sheets of different thicknesses and densities. The therapist-mechanics had a workbench, plastic templates, a T-square, compass, cutting tools—shears, matte knives; and a wheelchair seat supported on a horizontal axle, whose height could be adjusted. They asked Corey to help his mother sit in the chair, then began to make adjustments to her height. They slipped a sheet of foam rubber behind her spine and asked where she felt the most pressure on her skin. They added inserts to the foam. It was like building up a contour map: concentric islands. They did the same beneath her backside. Finally, they arrived at this solution: a piece of stiff white Styrofoam with oblongs cut out for each of her hip bones and foam rubber artfully cut to fit inside the oblongs.
All the pieces would have to be glued together to fabricate a custom cushion for Gloria’s body. They would install it in Gloria’s wheelchair and ship it to her at home.
“They’re gonna make this just for you, Mom,” Corey said.
One of the women was the physical therapist who had given Gloria her dumbbells. She wore olive cargo pants with the ankle ties untied and had a winter tan, as if she’d spent a month out west hiking. Squatting, she put a wheel on the mock-up wheelchair with a socket set.
Corey asked if she was a cyclist.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Do you need any help with that?”
She answered by putting her wrench back in its case and spinning the wheel—it gave out a fast, well-oiled ticking against the bearings—and asking Gloria if she liked the angle she was sitting at.
