Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I went after him again. He tried the same side step, but I anticipated it and met him at the spot. I lowered my head into his belly, felt him cough up the air in his lungs. The crowd grumbled, but as far as I was concerned the fact that no one had outlined rules meant that there were none. This wasn’t a boxing match, it was a street fight.

  But though Ajax was winded, I couldn’t press any advantage. He was too big. I tried to wrap him up and pin him against the wall, but my arms weren’t long enough to circumscribe his girth. Then I put my forearms against his hips and tried to push him backwards, but the physics wouldn’t cooperate, and as I shoved at him in vain he sucked air and landed kidney and rabbit punches with impunity.

  The third shot to the back of the skull dazzled me, and when I felt his arm wrap under mine to hold me in place I knew he’d recovered from the head butt to his belly, and I knew I was in trouble, and so, in desperation, I bit the loose flesh where his hip met his upper thigh.

  Ajax moaned and let go of my arm. He stumbled back against the concrete barrier, looking down at his shorts to check for blood. I realized I had maybe five seconds before he got over his shock, and then it wouldn’t be enough for him to simply win—he would want to levy punishment, to break parts of me, to make sure I had a limp or detached retina or some such physical reminder of him for the rest of my life.

  I squared up, drew back, and threw a mighty kick at his balls, but too slow, too slow. He sidestepped once more, shockingly nimble for such a huge man. My foot caught nothing but air, and I ended up on the ground. The crowd rewarded my effort with a jeer, and as Ajax shuffle-stepped forward with murder in his eyes, it occurred to me, inanely, that with feet like those he could have been a good heavyweight prizefighter, instead of a two-bit thug on this two-bit island.

  I clambered up just in time to meet his right cross again. The feeling was not unlike being hit in the side of the head with a good-sized chunk of feldspar. I went down and now Ajax had no interest in showboating. He set on me with kicks to the gut and ribs, cursing me in Spanish. Blood smeared my vision. I tried to regain my feet as the crowd, sensing the endgame, began screaming in earnest. If Ajax had been on my now-blind right side that would have been it, but I could still see out of my left eye, and managed to time a kick well enough to trap his size-14 boxing shoe in my hands. He was badly overextended, and went down easily with a strong upward thrust on his heel.

  A groan of disappointment from those assembled, followed by a sudden hush. Ajax, breathless again from the impact with the turf, now lay prone and momentarily helpless, like a huge June bug stuck on its back. I straddled his chest, thought about hitting him in the throat, considered the possibility that this could kill him, then slammed an elbow into his face instead. He sputtered and raised his hands between us, weak, vain warding. I hit him again, and the bridge of his nose zagged half an inch off center.

  A crushed Medalla can bounced off the back of my head. Then, between my shoulder blades, I was stung by what felt like a D battery. This last provided enough of a distraction for Ajax to gather himself and flip me over. Both of us were exhausted, and his heaving mass pinned me so tight against the turf that I could feel individual blades of plastic grass abrading my back.

  And he was truly, truly angry now. He and I were the same in that regard: fatigue could not mitigate our gall. He propped himself up on one elbow and dropped a fist into my face over and over. Where his tired muscles failed to provide force, gravity compensated. Somehow my teeth were spared, but most every other feature north of my throat wound up some degree of mangled.

  I’d never given up in a fight before. That’s what had landed me here—the caballeros didn’t want to deal with my tenacity any longer. I had what real fighters call heart. And real fighters talk about heart all the time—who has it, who doesn’t, how it’s more important than a snappy jab or solid footwork or good cardio. Heart. If a fighter takes a genuine beating, if he gives up in, say, round 2, and just sort of hangs on for the rest of the match, absorbing shot after shot and refusing to fight back in earnest, as though he deserves to be punished for some transgression he knows he’s committed but cannot admit to, they say the other guy took his heart. The fighter himself will say this. He took my heart, he’ll say, usually from the humiliating comfort of a slightly inclined hospital bed. The discussion will not touch on physical fatigue, or painful calcium deposits in the hands that hindered his punching, or a slight cold that made breathing through his nostrils difficult and necessitated opening his mouth, thereby leaving him vulnerable to a knockout punch. The conversation will start and end with that all-important intangible: heart. He just took the heart right out of me, the fighter will say, sounding awed, as though the other man had not just handed him a sound beating, but performed a genuine miracle for which there would never be a satisfying explanation.

  And this is what Ajax did that night. Whatever heart Emma had left me with, Ajax beat it out of me there on the Astroturf. If I’d been able to stand, or speak, I would have thanked him and shaken his hand. He’d earned my gratitude. He’d done more to shape me, in just under ten minutes, than my own father had in thirty years, and I owed him a tremendous, unpayable debt. I consider myself in his debt to this day, although his share of the book from the fight must have been pretty substantial, judging by the money I saw exchanging hands in the crowd as I lay there and choked on my own blood.

  And the caballeros were good to their word. Not a single fight found me after that, for the rest of my time on the island.

  In twenty years Emma’s life will look like this: she lives outside San Francisco, clear across the fruited plains, on the flip side of the mountains’ majesty. Had a kid with Peter Cash. He’s in college now—the kid, not Peter Cash. She left politics and went into policy work on behalf of former professional football players, of all things. We won’t have talked for ages, but every year I’ll send her a birthday card with a longish letter folded inside. I’ll do this because I like to believe it makes her feel good, to know that at least one of the promises I made—to love her for the rest of my life—I actually followed through on.

  She rises in the morning and makes herself tea. Her hair is now mostly white. She puts it up in a loose bun, looks herself over in the mirror, presses her hands to her neck, turns this way and that, frowns, wonders, like the rest of us, where the time went. The mug of tea sits untouched on the back of the toilet tank, next to the sink, an ignored ritual. Peter Cash comes into the bathroom, showers while she plucks her eyebrows, shaves quickly at the sink while she showers. They move around the small space with the synchronicity of a water ballet, each of their bits of personal grooming timed perfectly to make room for the other’s. She brushes her teeth and puts in her earrings with NPR in the background, slings her work bag over her shoulder, says good-bye to Peter Cash. Some mornings she kisses him; most mornings she does not. He’s fine either way. She drives her car to the office without appearing to think too much about anything. Face stuck in a kindly neutral. Great and painful and passionate things roiling below, forever below, like the molten rock beneath Yellowstone. A walking manifestation of Hemingway’s iceberg, a cypher with eyes that startle you to attention one moment, break your heart the next when she turns them away from you. The eyes are the same. The eyes never change.

  I don’t know who brought my carcass to la emergencia. Presumably someone in the crowd took pity on me, or maybe the owner of the gallera realized how bad off I was and worried it’d be his ass if I died. Regardless, someone dropped me without ceremony or explanation on the pavement by the entrance to the clinic, and the next day I woke up to find the doctors making plans to transport me to the hospital on the main island.

  I pulled the IV out of my hand and hobbled out, glimpsed in passing lives suspended by the pain and debility of bodies prone to failure: door no. 1, a plump girl, fifteen maybe, face wan and vacant, a tube up her nose and, presumably, snaking d
own into her stomach; door no. 2, a fortyish woman alternately vomiting into a large emesis basin and moaning in a way and at a volume that I had a tough time thinking of as anything other than melodramatic; door no. 3, a quiet bloodbath—stabbing, looked like—the patient silent and still and the professionals in lab coats and pastel scrubs milling about with an alarming lack of urgency; door no. 4, a young towheaded boy enduring a spinal tap, the physician murmuring reassurances while himself appearing quite nervous, the boy screaming, his limbs held down on the bed by well-meaning adults I hoped he would grow old enough to hate.

  I stumbled through the rush of automatic doors, went down to the main road, and hitched a ride back to the casita.

  Charlotte, looking drawn and tired and very old from three days of drinking and worrying, fussed over me. I told her I was fine, that I just wanted to rest on the porch with a Medalla, and she was welcome to join me. We sat in silence as the afternoon sun blasted us. Sweat sprung up all over my body, stinging cuts and contusions. Charlotte wanted to caretake, but really the only thing to do was spare me painful hobbling trips to the refrigerator, and she retrieved beers for us both with great doting kindness until early evening.

  Roberto’s work truck pulled to the curb in front of the casita around seven. He removed his bulk from the cab and looked up at the porch, shielding his eyes against the slanting sun. I waved to him, and he came around and took the stairs.

  I am sorry for what they did to you, he said.

  What who did? Charlotte wanted to know.

  I did not ask them for this, Roberto said.

  I thought he might cry.

  Roberto, it’s fine, I told him. For God’s sake, man, I know it wasn’t you.

  Why did you go? he asked.

  I thought for a minute. It was a good question. I don’t know, I said. I guess I was intrigued. You know ‘intrigued’? Curious?

  Roberto, understanding now, nodded. Yes, I know curious. It killed el gato, my friend.

  I laughed, then grimaced at the pain.

  You should go home, Roberto said. To your woman. Go home and no come back.

  It’s no problem now, I said. There won’t be any more fighting.

  Fights will not be your problem, Roberto said, if you do not go back to her. You will have other problems.

  Which woman? Charlotte asked. Which woman is he talking about?

  Another theory I find appealing is that the Singularity could and likely will render the body, and therefore sex, and therefore by extension romantic love, as obsolete as a Walkman personal stereo.

  The fact that you don’t know what a Walkman personal stereo is only serves to illustrate my point, of course: after the Singularity, it’s likely that the sight of two people kissing on a sidewalk will seem as strange and anachronistic as a man going out into the world with a cassette player clipped to the waist of his pants.

  In any event, the point is that our bodies will be rendered obsolete through any of a number of potential processes. One such process is called mind uploading, in which what we think of as our selves can, if we choose, exist and function perpetually as software on a computer system. In a virtual-reality simulation, or something akin to one.

  The nearest current analog I can think of is the movie Tron, although the reality and circumstances of mind uploading, when it happens, will no doubt bear only the slightest resemblance to the film.

  Think of it: existing free of a physical body, and therefore free of its frailties, its requirements and desires. No disease, no death, no pain. No need to eat, or brush one’s teeth, or worry about body odor. And the macro-picture: overpopulation becomes effectively moot. Shortages of any kind of resource no longer a concern. I could go on, but you get the point, and the aspect of mind uploading that concerns us here is, as I said: without a body, there is no impetus for, and indeed no possibility of, sex.

  Because with Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals. I’ve told you a little about this, but you don’t yet understand the scope of it. I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood. On more than one occasion she stood before the bathroom mirror, fingers parsing her hair, and complained that I was leaving bald patches on her scalp. Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, and we couldn’t leave one another alone.

  But take away our bodies, make us both purely digital manifestations of our consciousness, and what happens? Uncertain. Maybe we live calmly together in an accelerated virtual reality, loving one another until the end of all existence, our brains operating at a speed that necessitates that the virtual sun rise and set 260 times in 24 hours in order for the day/night cycle to seem normal to us. Or maybe without the brutal clash of our bodies Emma and I lose interest in one another and spend forever comfortably productive, cultivating endless stores of knowledge and attendant deduction, making connections of logic and cognition we never would have otherwise, because although we wouldn’t be any smarter than our former selves we would think much faster, and therefore could understand things we never would have had the time to glean understanding of before. Like maybe why we were compelled to punch and claw, to bare our teeth at each other, why our lusts were never satisfied until someone was bleeding.

  Although as a novelist I could have spent most of my days darning socks or playing solitaire and no one would have noticed or cared, I did occasionally have an obligation that required I be somewhere at a certain time on a certain date, and also that I be capable of standing for at least an hour and speaking in complete sentences. One of these obligations surfaced not long after Ajax beat the heart out of me. A small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania had asked me to read, the invitation coming many months before, when it had seemed like a much better idea. Now I wanted nothing to do with it, but being my father’s son I packed a decent pair of pants and a pressed shirt in my garment bag, got on the Cessna that took me to the mainland, boarded a much larger plane for a flight to Philly, then took the train west through hills and valleys where people sat mourning the loss of steel and wondering what came next.

  The reading was well attended, and I didn’t shake too badly, and the audience seemed to appreciate the material from the novel I was working on about Emma, though neither they nor I had any idea what a phenomenon that novel would become. In the front row sat a willowy redheaded undergrad, quiet but attentive, achingly beautiful. Beautiful and sexy in equal measure, and you understand that the two aren’t necessarily synonymous. Skin like 2 percent milk, this girl. When the reading broke up I thought about her a little bit over a beer—her features, fragile as a Fabergé egg, and her black leggings, and those boots, and the way she listened and gazed as though not just taking in the words but sort of calmly absorbing something essential about me. Somehow this quiet watchful girl found the hotel where the school put me up, and she had the front desk page me just after one in the morning. I came downstairs, perplexed and with a head full of whiskey, and found her in the lobby, arms crossed over her chest, collarbones standing out above the scooped neck of her blouse. Now all her calm watchfulness had abandoned her, and there was something desperate on her face.

  And I said, Hi.

  Do you remember me? she asked.

  From the reading, I said.

  Yes.

  There was a long pause, during which I considered that she might be drunk.

  I said to her, Is there something that you want?

  She was trying to smile, trying to appear cheerful, but still just looking desperate in a way that made me feel bad, even though I wasn’t responsible for her desperation. She shrugged at my question, more out of frustration than perplexity, and looked away quickly as her eyes began to shimmer.

  It seemed
like maybe I should put a hand on her shoulder, but I didn’t want to commit to that.

  Finally she looked at me, and she was genuinely close to tears, and she said: I don’t know what I want. Her voice broke a little, as she said this.

  Later, after she stopped crying and I shook her hand and sent her home, I had another glass of whiskey in my room as regret flowed through me: regret that she was so sad and vulnerable, regret that, even if my mind hadn’t been on someone else, and even if the willowy redhead had not been so young and sad and vulnerable, I still could not have given her what she thought she wanted from me.

  That same night, after the reading but before the waif showed up at the hotel, I turned on my phone and found I had a text from Emma: ‘Thinking of you.’ That was it.

  The next morning I had a brief but friendly conversation with a railroad police officer as he swabbed my garment bag for traces of explosives. While he waited for a machine to tell him whether or not I was a terrorist, he asked why I’d been in Pennsylvania, and where I was headed. For whatever reason, I neglected to mention I was spending the winter in the Caribbean, and simply told him I lived in Maine. He said he imagined the seafood was good there. I assured him that it was. He pointed to the fading bruises on my face and asked what had happened. I told him I’d gotten into a fight, which news he accepted with a bare nod, the Yankee sensibility to mind one’s business trumping the police officer’s innate suspicion. We stood there in silence for a moment, looking at each other. Then the machine beeped, exonerating me, and the officer said I was free to go.

  Down on the train platform the sun was too bright, and the wind bared its teeth, and I tried without luck to find a place to hide from the cold. Guys in sweatshirts and hard hats ground old paint away from steel I-beams. The sound was like robots screaming. A paint chip flew into my eye right out of a Plath poem, and I had to turn away from the train as it pulled in because I was afraid I might have the urge to jump in front of it.