by Alex Lang
“Not gonna happen, Mom,” he said.
But she knew as well as he did. If he really hadn’t cared about the microscopes, he’d have taken them with him to face all the deadbeat apartments and basher roommates, the late night wrestling matches and petty break-ins. He still cared, at least a little.
Later, he analyzed the job he’d performed on his nose in his mom’s bathroom mirror. Not bad for a med school dropout. He’d checked it for septal hematoma the night it happened. Not enough coagulation to divide the septum and the cartilage. He didn’t need medical training to know that-ideally, at least-broken noses healed themselves.
Broken careers didn’t.
***
Rolle inhaled the sparbar’s familiar smell of beer and ammonia. He took the bag of gear from his shoulder and sat it on the ground as he read the front chalkboard. Seven sparrers had signed up for his division. He’d drawn a bye in the first round. No serious beginning sparrer wanted to start in the semi-finals with a bye. It cut into vital exposure. More bouts meant more people saw you spar. But a bye put him closer to placing, closer to cash and a way out of Mom’s place. He searched the room. The same sparrers who had been at Glass Joe’s. The blonde. He took the bye.
Rolle killed time by stretching out and watching the first rounds. He also scanned the chalkboard to see if he could figure out the blonde’s name, but he knew everyone listed in his division. He didn’t understand until he saw her first match.
She’d upped a division.
Division Twos wore lighter padding, and everyone in it-Eyesore or not-had some kind of enhancement. Unless she’d done something really drastic in the last two weeks, she was freeballing against someone with a major advantage. And she beat him anyway.
His own match came quickly, against the big Korean called Pete. Rolle placed one bare foot against the cold mat and stepped into the ring. He slid his mouthpiece over his teeth, bit the plastic grooves that lined perfectly with his bottom molars. He’ll wait for me to do all the kicking, he thought, then come in strong later in the match.
When the center judge shouted “Go,” Pete cleared several feet between them and kicked Rolle in the ribs-a strike that would’ve fractured them were it not for the padding.
First point: Big Pete.
And Pete wasn’t just fast. He had more power and more finesse than Rolle, who particularly prided himself on the latter quality. He peered out into the crowd. The blonde was watching, arms crossed, face shadowed.
Time to ditch finesse.
At the next shout, Rolle didn’t even bother to block, walked directly into Pete’s kick, grabbed his leg, and tossed him on him ass. Pete had scored a second point, but now he’d start thinking.
They traded blows for two more points, with Rolle landing a two-point head kick and Pete scoring on a body punch. He knew Pete would come in close for the last point. Three-to-two. Pete just needed one punch to win.
Pete had speed and skill. Rolle had two years of medical training.
Rolle kicked. Pete blocked and moved in. An uppercut, Rolle thought. Here it comes.
Pete’s right fist dropped slightly, taut for the quick point, exposing his arm just below the shoulder. Rolle punched hard into the bicep, right in the musculocutaneous nerve. A no-point punch, but one that hurt like hell. Pete backed up for a split second, just long enough to take Rolle’s two-point roundhouse to his head.
He won the next two matches without any problem, and considered himself well on his way out of his mom’s house.
***
He celebrated by drinking with Soosie. Any good sparring scene needed an obligatory, semi-crooked promoter, someone who’d let you get severely damaged if it meant a higher turnout next week. That was Soosie. But she bought him a top-shelf scotch. And introduced him to Grace.
“You two know each other?” she said.
“Yeah, she broke my nose once.”
He and Grace had won their respective divisions. She’d had a few drinks and was more communicative than before.
“There’s good sparrers in Division Three,” she said. “Better defense and better technique because they need it. But Two’s got more sparrers, and more money to go around if you win.”
“More bouts too,” Rolle said.
“Well, true, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. You’d get bored sparring the same six Division Threes every week. So would the crowds.”
She had him there.
“The crowd is sparrers now,” Soosie said. “Look, if you’ve got some bright ideas about how to get more people to show up, tell me. I’m swinging and hitting nothing.”
Grace eyed Rolle cautiously, then launched in. “People want action-visceral excitement they can’t get on a video screen.”
He’d heard that line before. He knew what was coming.
“This has to appeal beyond just the regulars.” She meant Eyesores. Rolle could feel her thigh touching his under the table, compelling enough to make him shelve his standard rebuttal.
“So where’s your enormous cheering section tonight, Grace?” Soosie said. “Did they all leave without buying drinks?”
Grace smarted. “Hey, I’m still trying to get a following. But it’ll happen, especially in Level Two.”
“And then what?” Rolle asked. “Move up again if your crowd plateaus? Those Level One roughnecks-they’re healed before they’ve even felt your punch. How’s that interesting? Look, you’re obviously a good sparrer, and you decided to take a risk for bigger money-good career
move and all-but long-term, that hurts the whole thing. It thins out the one division that anyone can relate to.”
“But,” said Soosie, “they’ve got to walk through the door first to see a match. Your idea doesn’t fill seats.”
He was losing. Looking dumb in front of Grace suddenly felt humiliating, but he wouldn’t quit.
“This stuff isn’t about people who can’t get hurt beating each other. When all this started …” He paused to shoot a glance at Grace, “… it was about people who’d been given a raw deal proving that they were tough. It’s not about points. It’s about overcoming. About willpower.”
Soosie scoffed. “People don’t pay to watch willpower.”
Grace left, unconvinced, twenty minutes later.
“You like her,” Soosie said.
“Nah.”
“Yeah, you do. And you hate that she’s right. We need more sparrers with her spirit. No sense in limiting them to spectators. You want to make money doing this someday, right? Well that’s how it’s going to happen. Remember, Rolle? Money. The green stuff.”
“Only for us. I don’t think that girl ever saw green money until a few weeks back.”
“How many times has someone held being an Eyesore against you? Tell me you’re not going to do the same thing to her.”
***
When he was twelve, Rolle tried to drink a Coca-Cola with his forehead. It happened while he was at a friend’s house watching TV, about a week after his mom put the ventilator into his room to clean the air. He thought he was bringing the can up to his mouth. He knew where his mouth was, and felt so certain of it that he spilled sticky cola down his face and front of his shirt. He could never quite explain it to anyone who wasn’t an Eyesore. Few Eyesores really understood how it worked. Some wire in the brain got crossed and up seemed down, left seemed right. At that moment, his forehead seemed indisputably to be his mouth.
A few more things like that happened. He got vertigo looking down a curb-from his perspective it seemed like a sheer mountainous cliff. After watching cartoons one afternoon, he tried to walk upside down, using his hands as feet. Then, he told mom. She took him to the doctor.
By then, Rolle already idolized doctors and aspired to be one someday. He felt special because the doctor talked to him in an actual office, a room with an oak desk and shelves filled with medical DVDs. He said flashing light caused it, and that sometimes things that didn’t look like they were flashing actually were-TVs, phones, A
TM windows. Rolle had been exposed to something-like a virus-that would stay with him probably into adulthood, that had no cure. It could be managed, though. It wouldn’t hurt him as long as he didn’t look at flashing things too long.
Then his ever-honest mother explained things. How the ventilator worked. How the disability could be an advantage. How he could study with books instead of monitors, find other interests instead of video games.
Around the country, other parents put “ventilators” in their kids’ rooms, releasing the fine mist of psychophysiological disruption on their children. But only the crazy parents-the ones who quietly broke health laws to keep their kids free from medical treatments that they saw as needless, the ones who wanted kids who’d read books instead of play vids, the ones who thought that making their kids pariahs would stimulate them intellectually. The crazy parents.
The ones like his mom.
Rolle knew the excuses most parents gave, and he respected his mom for never making them. They said they didn’t think the results would be permanent. They said they wanted to give their kids an edge during the developmental years to keep them from becoming couch potatoes. They knew the kids would struggle. Brilliance came from struggle. Some day, the kids would appreciate the temporary disadvantage in the long run. But it hadn’t been temporary.
Still, Rolle knew there were others-parents who were actually pleased with the outcome. They’d helped slow down an accelerating world, preserved libraries and paper money.
They forced society to accommodate for one more handicap. People hated them for that, no one more than their children.
Several years later, some of those kids whose parents wanted them to be future Da Vincis or Edisons took up karate, tae kwon do, or capoeira and started beating the living hell out of one another for fun, imitating the mixed martial arts fighters from televised bouts that their parents had rendered them incapable of watching. A scene was born.
***
“You always were a rebel, Rolle. Girls like that.”
“Sure. Twenty-five-year-old rebels who live with their mothers.”
Mom laughed. “So you didn’t ask her out because you’re staying here?”
“There are plenty of other reasons. She’s a little bit nuts.”
“Like attracts like.”
Talking to Mom about Grace made it painfully clear to Rolle that he had nothing better to do, that he’d read every book there twice already, that every friend he’d ever had was back at college or had left for another town where the sparring was allegedly better. But she’d hit on something.
“You’re wrong,” Rolle said. “I never sparred to be a rebel.”
“I wasn’t talking about sparring.”
“What? Med school?!?”
“I wanted a fighter, but I took something away from you to make it happen. I made you …”
“Wait. Mom. You think I quit med school because I’m an Eyesore?”
She winced at the word.
“Mom, I quit because it was really stinking hard. It’s hard whether you take tests on paper or on a display screen. Those chumps even envied me-thought I got breaks that they didn’t get. Some of them dropped out too.”
“I always thought it was to spite me,” she said. After minutes of silence, she added “If preferring to clobber people for money over healing the sick is the worst thing you do to disappoint me, then you’ve let me off pretty light.”
Rolle shrugged. “Most sparrers I know would agree with you. But not me.”
“You forgive too easily.”
He thought of Soosie and Loudon. Of Grace. “A lot of sparrers I know would agree with that too. And they’d say that’s why I’m a pushover on the mats.”
He thought of every Eyesore sparer he’d encountered over the years. If he asked any of them “Why do we do this?” they’d say for thrills, for money, but always partly out of anger for what their parents had done to them. But it wasn’t spite. They were as wrong as his mother.
Sparring was a gorgeous, violent distraction. They had chosen the easiest lumps-the ones that came fast and left real bruises-over facing the long-haul ones that could be truly devastating. The shitty parents. The failed jobs. The wrecked relationships. Compared to that, a kick to the face was nothing.
“You’re no pushover,” she said.
“You’re not forgiven,” he said.
She smiled.
***
The Bellringer did things right. Clean, but not sterile. Bright, but not overbearing. People without retinal dysfunctions might not even know it was an Eyesore bar which, Rolle noted, probably made the likes of Soosie and Grace happy. The mat was permanent-an enormous, yellow square on a hardwood floor surrounded by thick blue ropes-but they only sparred on weekends, drew the biggest crowds, and paid the most money.
He’d asked Grace if she was coming. She’d actually brought some friends this time, who sat and ate sprouts while they watched her stretch. Soosie was there with them too.
A promoter delivered the bad news. No other Division Three sparrers had signed up. Apparently, Miss Grace had started a trend. Several names Rolle recognized from previous bouts were on the Division Two board. Would he forfeit? Or did he want to up a level tonight instead?
Rolle thought of his scuffle with the enhanced kid outside Glass Joe’s, of Grace’s previous successes. He could handle the tougher division-hell, he’d beaten half them already.
But he was about to contradict himself, to do something he’d criticized Grace for doing just a week earlier. It was one more punch to his pride than he could take.
He still said “Yes.”
Face the music now, he thought as he approached her. She was on the floor, mid-split, holding herself up by the tips of her fingers.
“Haven’t moved up to Division One yet?” he asked.
Grace smiled. “I thought I’d slum it out a while longer before I try that.”
“Looks like I’m slumming it too,” he said, “I upped tonight.”
She grinned wider, and he fell for her.
“Don’t make me break your nose again.” She winked.
He shrugged and smiled right back. “Half the people here have broken my nose, Grace. And they all lost to me next spar.”
“Sounds like a streak about to end,” she said.
“Only one way to find out.”
With that, Rolle moved to another corner and began to stretch. Even if Grace found his hypocrisy charming, he wasn’t comfortable with it. He didn’t want to spar Division Two.
Grace went up while he was still stretching. The other sparrer dwarfed her, a burly white kid with a red headband. He’d had some work done, too. At the word “Go,” she popped the guy in the chin for two. She put a fist in the air for the crowd, seemingly unaware that the redhead wanted her to make that kick, to get cocky. Rolle winced. Didn’t she realize he was pulling the same stunt she’d pulled on him the night they met?
Rolle stopped stretching and moved to the corner of the mats as the second round started, pushing past a few spectators clustered at the sides. Grace threw a combination this time, going for speed over power. Rolle felt the rush of air from each blow she delivered and heard the sharp crack of fabric from each of her kicks. But the big guy could block. Every kick she threw glanced off his forearms. He could swat her punches and still cover himself. They went for two minutes, up and down the mat, as she strained and he blocked. A ring of sweat formed on the back of her shirt. That’d look sexy as hell if she weren’t about to get killed, he thought.