The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Today, Corey’s name was called within minutes of Shay’s arrival. They went to the front of the courtroom. Corey stood next to his new attorney. The judge wanted time to consider the case. They agreed on a date with the prosecutor, and Shay led the way out. He walked fast, hauling his briefcase, one shoulder before the other, as if he were lugging a bag of hockey equipment to the rink.

  Outside on the steps, Corey asked where he’d gone to college.

  “I went to Suffolk.”

  “Is law school hard?”

  “Pretty hard. I didn’t sleep for two months.” Shay had worked his way through school, at the paint department at Lowe’s and tending bar in the city near the Wang Center.

  “I hear bartenders do well with girls.”

  “There’s some truth to that. Some girls do like a bartender,” the lawyer said. “So, the judge just continued the case. That means you’re going to be back here on the eighth…”

  “You’re not that much older than me,” Corey interrupted.

  “Ten years.”

  “It just seems like you got a really good start in life.”

  “Not that good. My family lost our house when I was ten. I wanted to play hockey, but I had to work. We didn’t have groceries until me and my brothers started buying them. It sucked.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Dorchester.”

  “We used to live on Washington Street. Was there a lot of shady shit?”

  “My best friend robbed a liquor store.”

  “But you got out of there. You showed a lot of discipline.”

  “When things are tough, you confront them. Maybe it’s where I’m from, but I’ve always been that way.”

  “I don’t want to be in this situation, here in court. I never want you to have to see me again—professionally—as much as I like you! I want to just get to work and make something of myself.”

  “You’re all right, Corey. I’ll tell that to the DA. This is what we’re telling them: This was a first offense, you’ve learned your lesson, and you need to be at home taking care of your mom.”

  “But it’s true!” Corey insisted. “We don’t have to make it up.”

  Shay was just waiting for him to finish talking. He said, “See you later, buddy.” He stuck out his hand at Corey and Corey shook it. He went home.

  At home, he thought of the courtroom. It was airy and white-walled. The high windows let in the winter sky. You saw treetops, rooftops, snow. The furnishings—the judge’s podium, the corral, the wooden pews where people waited to be called, the massive tables for the prosecutor and the defendant with fat lathed columnar legs—were in good repair, made of blond wood. He had almost enjoyed court, the atmosphere of civilization—tradition, common sense, the slight flavor of scholarship, of college in the background. He admired Shay.

  * * *

  —

  After court, he drove to the academy. The sky above the highway looked like the Arctic Ocean seen from underneath by a diver looking for a gap in the ice. When he arrived, he found the parking lot full of trucks. Inside, the gym was hot. He unzipped his coat—his work coat, covered in dust, a nail hole in the sleeve. Training was in full swing: twenty students paired up on the mat, grappling silently, seized in suspended animation, I-push-you-pull, cancelling each other out, moving slowly with one limb, trying to solve a leverage puzzle. A focus of concentration like a library. The sound of breathing. Occasionally, a scramble would break out and two guys would roll around each other and wind up in a new position, one man now pinning the other. The bottom player’s stomach rising up and down in his rash guard, breathing, gathering strength. Hoping to defend, but in a worse position. The beginning of a slow relentless end, unless he escaped. They squeezed each other and sweat poured out of their black rash guards like sponges.

  Eddie was going around from one set of trainees to the next, giving instruction. He saw Corey and didn’t speak to him. “Make sure you stay tight. Take away all the air,” he told one of his students, a burly, pockmarked guy with the bruised-looking eyes of a person of Mediterranean ancestry, who looked as if he had been jolted by an unforgettable vision of evil.

  Corey waited till the end of class and went over to shake Eddie’s hand.

  “You take a break?”

  “I should have called. I’m sorry. I had some stuff going on.”

  “You back now?”

  “Not exactly. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Eddie didn’t give him a private audience. Corey found it hard to discuss his personal situation with others listening. He said he had “some legal shit.” Eddie didn’t look impressed.

  “Thanks for understanding,” Corey said.

  Eddie turned away in the middle of their final handshake to talk to someone else.

  Corey hung around a few minutes longer watching the guys roll, then got back in his car and drove away.

  “It’s over for me,” he told Joan when he was back in Quincy. “This is my fight now—” looking at Gloria in her wheelchair.

  “Hanging up your guns.”

  “There’s no time for it. You can’t do it halfway. If you’re not training every day and you go in there and meet somebody who is, something bad is going to happen.”

  “I guess that’s how it is for you. For me, it was different. I didn’t have a cage. You couldn’t tell when it was gonna jump off. I had to be ready all the time.”

  “You can’t be your best like that.”

  “No, you can’t. I fought a girl when I had the flu. Congestion. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “She jump you?”

  “She called me out. I said, ‘Bitch, I ain’t afraid a you!’ I was scared out my damn mind. She was big.”

  “What was she mad about?”

  “Her boyfriend was talking to me. She called me a chink. I said, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna—a-chew!’ I sneezed my ass off. I lost. But I gave her a bloody nose. If I get in a fight, I always try to make ’em bleed.”

  * * *

  —

  In the mornings, he got up at four to go to a new assignment, in South Boston—on the harbor. He set up his mother’s coffee, Robitussin, L-Threonine, orange juice and protein. It would precipitate and be clumped on the surface of the juice by the time she drank it. He put it in the fridge, turned off the kitchen light, took his tool belt, sandwich, a book to read on his break, and left. Through the wall of his mother’s bedroom, he heard the thump of Joan’s heel in the tub as she was showering. He hurried to the hatchback and drove into the city. Soon, before he was fully awake—and before the sun was up—he was standing in a bare white room that smelled like plaster, under a blazing fluorescent light. A supervisor was telling him to take a portable drill and install a mirror in the restroom down the hall of what was to be an office.

  In the afternoons, he enjoyed the great reward of construction work: the early liberation that goes with the early start—and he drove home with his time sheet signed and saw his mother. The now-empty glass, rimed by a silt of protein, waited on her wheelchair’s tray top. He set it in the kitchen sink. She was listening to NPR on her laptop, wearing a loose South Asian dress.

  On Super Bowl Sunday, he saw Molly at the Half Door. She had a sort-of boyfriend with her, another large individual like her shot-putter from the year before. Corey watched the big game with them. The Patriots won. He told her about his fight. She knew that he had quit school and was working. When he headed home, a homeless drunk guy camping out in the Bank of America ATM across from Acapulcos raised his hand from the floor and gave him the thumb’s-up.

  22

  Between Us

  Court wasn’t as pleasant when Corey returned to it in March. His father was there with a lawyer, a balding, goatlike, oilily smiling man in a brown suit. Leonard was wearing his trademark fedora and a brand-new pair of tinted s
unglasses. He pushed through the waist-high swinging gate and took a seat in the wooden pew behind the assistant district attorney and watched her with his arms folded and an air of vindication. His smiling advocate gave papers to the clerk, who gave them to the judge. Shay went up to see what was going on. Shortly, Corey learned that his father was accusing him of threatening him with a knife.

  If the judge believed the accusation, this could significantly change the way she handled Corey’s case. He was old enough for her to treat him as an adult. The ADA stood up and said she was extremely concerned that the defendant was a violent person. She cited the cage fighting. There was a discussion of sending Corey to a court-appointed psychologist to evaluate how troubled he was. The judge continued the case again—this time until April. Shay said, “Thank you, Your Honor,” and led Corey out.

  “They’re lying,” Corey said. “I never went after him with a knife.”

  At home, his mother started getting phone calls. He knew they were from Leonard. His mother revealed that Leonard had said something ugly to her. She wouldn’t say what, but for days afterward she seemed to sink inside herself. Corey started answering her phone. The next time Leonard called, he cursed the man. Joan egged him on. The phone kept ringing all night as if the caller enjoyed being called a piece of shit. But once, Corey heard someone else’s voice, as if Leonard had gotten a confederate to call for him.

  At the April court date, Shay was angry. “Did you make a harassing phone call to your father?”

  “No.”

  “Because he’s got a recording of you threatening him.”

  The ADA was calling the tape disturbing. The court was renewing Corey’s restraining order. He wasn’t allowed to talk to Leonard at all under any circumstances ever again.

  Shay told Corey to wait outside the courtroom. Leonard and his attorney were lurking in the hall. Corey moved away from them. He put his earbuds in and tried to lose himself in music. He nodded to the beat, hooked his thumbs in his pockets, drummed his fingers on his legs. He risked a glance down the hall. His father and his lawyer were laughing at him, imitating him, bobbing their heads up and down.

  I’m going to get back to the gym, and I’m going to kill him, he thought.

  Shay came back. Fortunately, the judge wasn’t going to listen to the recordings. Shay was vexed with Corey and seemed to have lost faith in his judgment and character.

  A week went by after court. Leonard kept calling. “Corey, put your mother on.” Corey would hang up. He did this five times one night. Leonard said, “Corey, you’re going to be sorry. Put your mother on the phone or I’m going to have the police over there so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  He held the phone to his mother’s ear.

  “What do you want, Leonard?” Gloria asked.

  Leonard said he wanted an apology for having his glasses smashed.

  Corey took the phone away from Gloria and told Leonard to go fuck himself and hit the End button.

  The phone rang again immediately and Joan answered it.

  “Don’t yell at me,” she said. Leonard could be heard threatening her with legal action.

  Gloria told Joan to let her talk to him. Joan put the phone against Gloria’s ear.

  “Leonard, can we calm down?” Gloria said. “I’m asking you as a mother. Please. I know you’re angry, but he’s angry too. I understand you lost your glasses. He’ll pay for them, Leonard. Give him a chance. I know they weren’t cheap. Well, I’m a party to this too. I’m sorry, but I’ve got my hands full. Can you do this for me? Is that too much to ask? Are you so full of hate? Is that all there is, this shit between us?”

  Leonard began to seethe. He told her, “You never would have given me the time of day if you hadn’t been a fucked-up person yourself. Death would be better for both of us.”

  Corey and Joan could hear these outrages.

  “Tell him you can’t talk to him!” Corey pleaded.

  “This is bullshit,” Joan said. She took the phone and told Leonard, “She’s not alone here. We can all hear you.” She ended the phone call and turned the phone off.

  * * *

  —

  An April night. Corey was driving north along the oceanfront. Dark sky. Gray beach. Street lights. Then Dorchester. He was on 93 without a plan. It had rained and the car was wet. He went through the glowing amber tunnel and came out in Boston, and then the hatchback was flying by the CITGO sign in Kenmore Square and the Doubletree Hotel at the entrance to the Mass Pike.

  He crossed the river and found a place to stop. Once again, he was just outside MIT. He didn’t know why he was here. As he sat in his car on Memorial Drive, the spotlights above him shining on the high granite walls of the university’s Olympian buildings through the trees, which were just beginning to bloom, Corey took his cell phone and dialed Adrian, with whom he hadn’t talked all winter. The river reflected the moonlight. He didn’t expect Adrian to pick up, but he did.

  Corey said he was nearby and at loose ends. Adrian invited him to his dorm.

  He waited downstairs in the lobby. His friend came down to meet him. Adrian appeared from the stairwell, his hair sticking up, his forehead studded with red pimples, his extraordinary muscular torso exploding through the thin tight fabric of a yellow-stained undershirt.

  He greeted Corey with a revelation: He’d been upstairs studying so intensely for so long that he’d gone into an altered mental state.

  “It was like I didn’t know where I was! My mind got in this groove. I could see all these equations in my head and how each one was related to every other one in this giant network, and it’s like my brain could convert these complex things into each other in the blinking of an eye—it was so incredible.”

  This had been going on for, like, fifteen hours straight, Adrian said. He hadn’t wanted it to end, but he needed a study break. He’d almost been in danger of not feeding his muscles.

  They went to the dining hall, which was in a white rotunda. A cashier was waiting at a register. A kitchen worker was replacing empty pans in the steam table. It was ten of nine and there was no one there, but they were still serving.

  Adrian went to get food. Corey took a seat at a table in the seating area. He stretched his legs out and leaned back. The ceiling was very high. It looked like an eggshell with soft hidden lights glowing inside it. A trio of college women paid the cashier and came his way, carrying their trays, salads, waters, smartphones, wallets, keys. He straightened up and pulled his legs in and made a gesture that meant “there’s room here.” They went past him and sat by the tall black window, which was starred with amber lights.

  Adrian got back from the food line. His tray was piled with baked chicken. Corey watched him eat.

  “Is it weird I’m here? We haven’t talked in a while, I know. Maybe things were a little tense the last we spoke. You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on.”

  Adrian was tearing the skin off his chicken and eating just the meat. “Yes, I remember the last time we talked. I sensed all this oral aggression coming out of you. It was like your limbic system was firing overtime.”

  It wasn’t his limbic system, Corey said. He described the continuing state of warfare with his father. Everything had blown apart. He’d dropped out of school.

  His friend laughed. “I’m not crazy, you’re the one that’s crazy!”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “So how have you been, Mister Studying-eighteen-hours-at-a-stretch-without-leaving-the-room-and-never-washing-my-shirt?”

  Adrian said everything was fine in his life; everything was working efficiently. “Let’s see: I’ve been studying general relativity; I’ve been lifting—that’s going well; I’m actually bench-pressing more; and, let’s see, what else? Chemistry is going well. I’m taking math; math is going well; I ju
st learned a new way to take the gradient; I’m becoming more efficient. And, let’s see, I haven’t seen my mother in…one, two, three, four—like six weeks. That’s good. And as far as making friends and getting along with people, MIT is really great. There are a lot of really cool people here. They’re really down-to-earth. If you don’t understand something, they’ll take the time to explain it. They’re into ideas.”

  “And how’s the girl situation? Is that going well?”

  “I think I’ve solved the problem of women.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  He gave a very complex answer, which went over Corey’s head, but, on further questioning, it boiled down to his having discovered a place where women would do anything for money.

  “What place is that?”

  Adrian wouldn’t say.

  “What’s it called?”

  He couldn’t remember.

  “Where is it?”

  A long way away.

  “How do you get there?”

  It wasn’t easy.

  “Then how’d you find it?”

  He’d gotten lucky. “You’d be so jealous,” he told Corey.

  “I don’t think I’m jealous, I’m just not going to believe you unless you tell me where it is.”

  Adrian said it was too hard to describe. He actually didn’t know because he hadn’t gone there on his own; he’d been driven by a person with a car.

  What person?

  Someone. A person. Someone Corey didn’t need to know.

  A girl? Had Adrian met an older woman?

  No. A person who was really wonderful. Someone with incredible abilities, who used their mind to solve problems.

  Was it a man or a woman?

  A man, said Adrian. Yes. A man who understood women. He knew everything about them. He knew how to talk to them. “He gets them to do things you wouldn’t believe. He knows exactly what to say. He told this one girl she had nice eyes and—boom!—she let him feel her tits. I’ve learned more about women from hanging around him than you can believe. You’d really love him.”