by Rufi Thorpe
The rounds were only two minutes long, but the first round seemed to take forever. I was sweating like a sous chef. When the bell finally rang, I thought I might faint. Ray ran up to go see Bunny in her corner, but I was watching O’Day and her coaches. They were rubbing Vaseline on her face and talking to her the way you would as you put a dog down. The girl looked wild-eyed and slick with sweat, the skin of her chest and arms pale and covered in red blotches. I was so afraid Bunny would kill her that I actually said to Ray Lampert when he came back, “She’s not going to kill that girl, is she?”
Ray laughed. “I hope not!”
The second round went along much like the first, and Bunny was clearly having fun. She loved doing a kind of bait and switch where she would let down a hand and create an opening, and when O’Day would go for it, she would duck the blow, move in close, and then explode into an uppercut. O’Day fell on her ass after one of these uppercuts and the crowd started chanting Bunny’s name. They wanted her to finish it, to end the fight.
The bell rang.
“Three rounds,” Ray said. “She should wrap it up.” Bunny looked tired but radiant. She raised a fist at Ray while her trainer poured water into her mouth.
The third round was entirely different from the first two rounds. From the moment the bell rang, Bunny burst from her corner with a speed she had not displayed the whole match and she began a series of punches, all of them landing, that were so fast and beautifully syncopated that the other girl could not react properly or get away. If anything she looked like a movie being rewound, and then fast-forwarded, over and over. I saw the girl’s nose break and the spray of blood that smeared Bunny’s white gloves. The ref was dancing around them, and when O’Day turned her back to say she had had enough, the ref ended the fight.
I joined Ray as he rushed up to the ring, and we stood around while Bunny gave some brief on-cameras.
“I wanted to knock her out.” Bunny was panting as she spoke into the microphone. “But unfortunately she didn’t want any more.”
“Who’s the greatest?” the reporter asked, which struck me as a bizarre question. Ray let out a pleased laugh, then looked at his shoes, but I could tell he was listening for what she would say. I wondered if he had coached her on what to say. Or did all those hits to the head leave her uncoachable?
Bunny looked at him funny. “Me,” she said. “But I mean, I was the greatest before the fight also.”
“Oh god,” I said, because to me her answer seemed psychotic, evidence of delusions of grandeur, as embarrassing as a turd on the carpet.
“What?” Ray said to me. “You shocked? She’s literally the best in the world.”
“What?”
“She is literally the best female fighter in the world. At least right now. And after the next few fights we have lined up, everyone will know it.”
The man laughed. “Do you think O’Day knew what she was getting herself into tonight?” he asked.
“I always wonder what they think. They must not believe I am what I am,” Bunny said. The reporter laughed and slapped her on the shoulder.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll keep handing out the thrashings,” Bunny said with a rascal’s grin.
* * *
—
Ray and I did not stay for the main event, but trailed Bunny back to her dressing room. We waited on a black leather couch while the doctor checked Bunny over. I was shocked to see that she kept spitting blood into a white coffee cup. I had not seen the other girl hit her in the face, certainly not hard enough to loosen any teeth. The doctor was fussing over her ear.
“If you don’t want me to drain it now, just go in and get it drained tomorrow.”
Bunny grunted.
He felt up and down her ribs. He palpated her kidneys, felt around in her abdomen, though how he could feel anything through her Ninja Turtle abs was a mystery to me. “Let me see the hands,” he said, and Bunny gave him her hands, which were still wrapped, and he unraveled the gauze and tape as delicately as if her fingers were broken birds. I was watching, curious, then had to look away as I understood what I was seeing. Her knuckles were so swollen that the backs of her hands bulged, the skin pink as raw pork.
“Jesus,” I said.
“That’s probably fractured,” the doctor said, feeling for the bones in her hand through the swelling.
“I know,” Bunny said, “I felt it go.”
“But the bone’s still in place. Just a splint for now and then you can see in a couple days. Now, I saw you walk out of there, let’s talk about your left foot.”
“Are you thinking burgers?” Ray asked.
“Steaks,” Bunny said.
“Steaks!” Ray cried, delighted. He began consulting his phone, clearly looking for a good steak house nearby, but he kept raising and lowering the phone to his face, like trying to scan a difficult bar code at the grocery store. “I can’t fucking see,” he said. “Can you look at this please?” and he handed his phone to me.
I found us a decent steak house in midtown and Bunny took an icy shower then had various parts of her wrapped. She hurt so badly that Ray had to tie her shoes for her, zip and button her pants. She was slow and impassive as a zombie.
“You won,” I said. I guess I had expected her to be happy.
“Yeah,” she said. “Wasn’t much of a fight, though.”
“It was a great fight,” Ray said.
“There’s just no one really,” Bunny said. Her brow furrowed and she looked confused, but then I realized she was about to start crying. “There’s no one,” she said again.
Ray wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her out and down the hall. “Shhh…we just need to get you some food.” He turned to me and said, “She’s like this sometimes. All the adrenaline. She literally has no serotonin left in her little noggin.”
* * *
—
The restaurant was a yokel’s cheesy fantasy of a fancy New York steak house. Both Bunny and Ray liked it immediately, and I felt briefly proud of my choice. I knew them well, knew them still.
Bunny ordered two Long Island Iced Teas and a shrimp cocktail to start, Ray got a Seven & Seven, and I ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. “Can I put in more food now, though?” Bunny asked anxiously. The server, a pretty redhead who was probably an actress, said of course. “Then I’ll have the filet and can I also get the chicken breast, and can I also get a side of fries, and does it come with bread? Do you bring out bread?”
“Yes,” the server said, “we bring out a basket of bread.”
“Can you make sure they bring out two?” Bunny asked. Her right cheek was swelling, and the skin was stretched and glossy in the dim light of the steak house.
“Of course,” the waitress said.
“Or you can just put double the amount of rolls in a single basket,” Bunny said helpfully. “You’re really pretty.”
“Thank you,” the waitress said, backing away from the table, her check pad held tight.
“Well,” Ray said, “I’m just so proud of you, Bunny. That was an incredible fight. You’ve trained so hard. And now it’s over, and it’s done.”
“Shut up,” she said, and just looked at her swollen hands on the table.
“She doesn’t really mean that,” Ray said softly to me. “She can’t help it.”
“I said shut up!” she moaned.
Just then a busboy scurried over with a basket overflowing with rolls, and Bunny snatched one before he had even set it down.
“That’s good,” Ray said, “just eat.”
“Shut up,” she said with her mouth full.
So we didn’t speak, and we just ate rolls. I had the sense that Bunny was concentrating hard on just trying to keep it together in the restaurant. Our drinks came. Bunny downed the first Long Island in a few gu
lps and after that she visibly relaxed.
“You feeling better?” Ray asked.
“Not yet,” Bunny said, waving her hand at him as if to shoo him away. This was the first time I had seen her treat Ray badly in our whole lives, and to be honest I was enjoying it a tiny bit. She still didn’t like to look either of us in the eye, and she didn’t want us to talk either.
“Well, Michael,” Ray said, keeping his voice down in an effort not to upset Bunny, “so tell me what it is you do again? I mean, you’re getting a PhD, I remember that much, but what do you study?”
“I study evolutionary biology,” I said, “which is—”
“Boring?” Bunny asked. “You’re both fucking boring.”
Ray looked at me apologetically and pantomimed zipping his lips shut. Even I, who had only the most pop-culture understanding of head injuries, knew that concussions could cause belligerence and temper issues. It seemed so obvious to me that Bunny’s brain had been re-traumatized by the fight. Why had the doctor let her go? Why had he looked at her hands, at her feet, at her ribs, and not at this, this most obvious thing? We shouldn’t be at a steak house, we should be at the hospital.
But after the shrimp, which Ray and I did not attempt to share with her, and about halfway through the steak, which Ray had to cut up for her, her hands were so fractured and swollen, Bunny seemed to come around.
“Did you see my fight?” she asked me.
“Yes, I did. It was incredible.”
“Thank you. Who was O’Day training with again? Dad?”
“Dave McNair, or Mc-something?”
“I mean, I guess they really can’t train her not to be stupid, that was the thing that was most frustrating about it, how stupid she was. She just kept walking into it again and again. I don’t like that.”
“I know,” Ray said.
“Is it less of a challenge that way?” I asked.
“No, it’s like, I just, I don’t like them to feel like victims. And when they’re stupid like that. It just makes me feel like I’m slaughtering animals.” She drank the rest of her second Long Island.
“They’re not victims,” Ray said. “They’re fighters.”
“You’ve always hated fighting,” Bunny said to me.
I paused, a bite of salmon halfway to my mouth. “Yeah,” I said, wanting to go on and lie, to say something about how while I didn’t prefer to fight myself, I admired her for fighting. I couldn’t even think of a way of phrasing this. I worried I would gibber like a hostage to a gunman.
“I think,” Bunny said, suddenly laughing, “that you would prefer to never have to act at all. To just passively let things happen to you. Like, blah. Like, I’m just a crying statue of pure suffering, wah.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, flustered and wishing I had not drunk so much of my wine. I was such a lightweight that even a glass left me spinning. “Just because I don’t like to beat people up doesn’t mean I’m some passive crybaby.”
“Not a crybaby,” she said, “not a crybaby. But like…an artist that doesn’t make anything. You study yourself. You study life instead of living it. And everything you feel is like a fine wine and you sniff it and swish it around and in the end you barely fucking drink it.”
Around us the entire restaurant seemed dark and shadowy, as if we were in a massive cave with many chambers. I tried to remember that she was not right in the head, that I shouldn’t take it personally, the things she said, but they were dangerously close to the truth and I could feel the muscles in my cheeks start involuntarily twitching.
“Like, on some level, don’t you think you let those boys beat you up?” Bunny said.
“What boys?” I asked, incredulous. “Jason and Tyler and them?”
“You could have run into the Rite Aid,” she said. “You could have screamed for help. The brewery was right there, someone would have heard.”
“But I didn’t understand what was happening until it was happening. I froze.”
“You choked,” she said. “I mean, isn’t that the same thing?” Her left eye was now almost completely swollen shut. She had eaten her filet and her chicken and all of the rolls.
“You know what I think we should do,” Ray said, “go back to the hotel and order a movie and just turn in and relax.”
“Ugh,” she said. “You’re so fucking obvious, all you are trying to do is control me. That’s all you ever try to do.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” he said.
“Everyone’s a victim,” Bunny said. “Everyone is just fucking helpless.”
Ray studied his watch. He seemed very tired. “I’m not trying to control you,” Ray said finally.
“But you’re gonna freak out,” she said.
“I’m not going to freak out,” he said.
She studied him for a moment. “Good. Then let’s order another drink.”
“I don’t think another drink will—”
“Control. Freak out,” she said.
“Fine, order the drink,” he said, and she did.
“I’m sorry I’m being so mean,” she said to me.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I said, though that wasn’t true at all. I felt panicky and unclean, like I was in an early Harmony Korine movie, and yet I couldn’t fully bring myself to blame her. As I always had, I found it much easier to blame Ray, who was encouraging her to do this to herself.
“Do you think everything means something?” Bunny said. I wasn’t sure if this was a continuation of her earlier complaint, or if we were going in some new, terrible direction. I was done pretending to eat my salmon. Its skin looked sad and ruined on my plate.
“Like, it seems like you think everything means something and if you could only understand everything then it would all be okay. It’s like thinking a map will change the size of the ocean. Do you have any gum? Dad?”
He handed her a piece of gum, then realized her fingers wouldn’t work well enough to unwrap it, so he took off the foil for her. He motioned to the waitress for the check. They were both chewing gum, I could smell the spearmint over the odor of the steaks. Someone in the dark of the restaurant was laughing. I couldn’t see him but it sounded like a big man was laughing.
“Even God can’t understand everything,” she said.
“I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything.”
“Some things he chooses not to understand,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked.
“That’s the whole point of hell, isn’t it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”
“Dear lord,” Ray said, and rolled his eyes.
“Like, this one.” She pointed at her father. “You would always ask me back in the day, ooh, what was his relationship with his mother like? That was what you thought would explain it. Like, if you knew why Ray Lampert was the way he was, then—what? Then what? What does understanding someone get you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“My mother was a fucking cunt,” Ray said.
“Where’s our hotel?” Bunny asked. “Is it near here?”
“It’s downtown,” Ray said. “We’ll take a cab.”
* * *
—
We said goodbye in the hallway without any fanfare, Bunny didn’t even look at me, just shuffled into her and Ray’s room saying, “Take off my fucking shoes, oh god, I need them off right this second,” and Ray scurried after her. I took a long, hot shower in my room and called Conor and tried and failed to explain to him what had happened.
“That’s such a tragedy,” he kept saying. Was that the name for what it was?
“I wish I could teleport and just be in our house. I know what things mean in our house.”
“Hotel rooms are terribl
e,” he said.
“They really are,” I said.
After we got off the phone, I turned off all the lights, but I couldn’t sleep. The air conditioner kept clicking on and off, on and off. You could have run, she said. You could have screamed. You could have done something, but you did nothing, you let it happen to you.
I tried to think about a paper I was writing, to think about how I wanted to frame the abstract, and perhaps I was half asleep already because I realized I was explaining the paper to Anthony of all people. He was sitting right there before me, eight months dead, a newly minted ghost wearing a white hotel-style robe. “Essentially, the perceived risk of predation can affect melanin production and thus feather coloration in the nuthatch.”
“Break it down for me,” Anthony said, smiling.
“I played predator calls constantly to baby birds and their feathers turned out funny.”
“A little more,” he said.
“Fear can change you. It can change you on a physical level. It’s not just feelings, it’s chemical cascades.”
“That’s right,” he said. And then I understood that he was going to give me a lot of money, it was like a prize that ghosts gave out to those who sincerely quested for knowledge, and he had been part of the selection committee even back when he was alive.
I became aware of a pounding on my door and I staggered through the dark, confused a little as to where I was. I wasn’t entirely aware I was in a hotel room and that there was probably a peephole, so I just opened the door.