by Lise Haines
A gladiator has the right to handle, pick up, and generally plunder any object his opponent abandons to the arena floor, Rule 44.
I can’t feel my spine anymore. My knees are air.
—Why was Tommy wearing your bracelet? she asks.
I can barely get the words out, but I tell her the truth, that I lent it to him for good luck. If this were about a matter we didn’t agree on, she might say something with a sharp edge to it, something unfortunate about luck. But at this moment in time, about this issue, we are allies.
—We have to get it back, she says.
Now the lucid images arrive on the jumbo screens. I’m aware that you can see Tommy’s corpse just about anywhere on the planet with only a slight delay. And if it weren’t so terrible, I’d say there’s something mystical about this, this ability to be everywhere at once, as if his ashes were strewn about the globe.
Uber slips my bracelet onto his right wrist and begins to walk across the arena toward the staging area. Officials trot after him, one of them calling him back. Thad starts pushing at me, and Allison… I don’t know how to stanch her emotions. The officials are arguing.
Thad cups his hands over one of my ears and shouts, —THE HAND IS POINTING AT YOU, LYNIE!
I turn his head and cup my hands around one of his spongy ears, and shout back, —That’s Tommy’s hand! Tommy’s dead, Thad! His hand isn’t pointing at anything!
It’s hard to forgive yourself for being that harsh, that wrong with someone you love, even if it settles him down. The thing is, Thad doesn’t have an unkind bone in his body. And I think I’m pretty patient with him most of the time, probably more patient with him than anyone except Allison. Really patient. Because he’s one of my favorite people. But sometimes he’s a lot to deal with. Before I can tell him how sorry I am, a bank of cameras light Allison’s head and bust. The media has found us.
Allison blinks into the lights and her image sputters onto the giant screens. I watch her there as she stands next to me, wiping her tears away. She is suddenly luminous, almost together in an instantaneous way, the cracks of her psyche temporarily mended. She mirrors her new role as a GSAW. I think of portraits of Roman noblewomen. Right now that’s Allison.
I am the sliver by her side: the braid of long hair, part of an eyebrow, half an eye. It’s easy to be out of the picture. I can’t move fully into the frame or shift completely out of it, we’re pinned so tight by the crush of people, everyone wanting to get into the shot now, waving to friends, pulling up their T-shirts to show their abdomens, sometimes their breasts.
It’s what we do. We want to be there: on screen.
The sound system issues this alert: Remain seated. Free water will be distributed shortly. Remain seated.
The sprinkler system goes on. Thousands of free bottles of water are handed out.
Like Tommy’s corpse, you can see Allison’s face from any geographic point on the globe now. Even in Katmandu you have only to find an Internet user and see Allison’s splendor. She floats in the Earth’s atmosphere in millions of copies. Allison here and Allison everywhere. She is, for all intents and purposes now, a god.
She grabs my hand. She’s trembling slightly. Turning from the cameras she says, close to my head, —Why are they holding up the blessed ambulance?
Three officials in green-and-white-striped shirts are talking with Uber. They go over and look at Tommy, they get within inches of his body. They point to his wounds with their pens. They measure his body parts with skinny measuring tape that snaps back into their palms.
—I’m surprised they haven’t offered free parking yet, Allison confides in me.
She does a beautiful job with bitter when she’s up for it. Ever since the GSA went through its major restructuring they have frequently offered free parking for anyone who makes it out of the stadium within twenty minutes. They’ve been accused of doing this because it ups the trampling numbers. Caesar’s likes to boast a good trample the way NASCAR likes to have their flameouts. I know how quickly we could get separated and crushed by adulation. She knows this too so she’s keeping Thad as close as possible.
Thad begins to say in a singsong voice, —Lynie’s getting married! Lynie’s getting married!
His words volley against my tight eardrums, against my grief. Then Thad is calm and maybe a little embarrassed. He sits down in his chair and looks out toward the spectacle of moistened people.
—Lyn’s not getting married, dear, Allison says softly.
Thad whispers back, —Uber has her bracelet!
I didn’t even think he knew this rule. How can he know some things so precisely and miss other things entirely? In the confusion, I don’t know how much the media has picked up—if Thad’s pronouncements were detectable. Does the world listen to every word? My brain is a racecourse of thought.
The red PENALTY sign starts to flash. The word blinks on and off like a cursor. PENALTY. TOMMY G.
One of the refs turns on the mic at his hip, makes a gesture with his right hand as if he’s cutting his left arm into sections from his shoulder to his wrist, and says, —Unnecessary small cuts. Provision 187. Loss of rank. Dishonored.
The booing starts.
The crowd throws their plastic water bottles into the arena. Bottles rain down on the officials. The air turns to cylindrical hail. The officials do not look happy, one guy takes a full water bottle right on the nose. They look like ants in a downpour.
I realize this sounds impossible, but the plastic containers form a nearly perfect ring around Tommy, and glisten in the lights.
Allison clutches me hard now. I don’t think she realizes that her fingernails are digging into me, rib by rib. I am practically lifted onto my toes from her pain. Suddenly she backs off and shouts, —Provision 187? What the hell is that?
—I don’t know. I can’t hear anything! I shout back.
But we know what this means: Caesar’s Inc. will, in essence, eliminate his death, his benefits, his place of honor.
—Tommy’s retirement funds, she says, realizing she’ll lose this money now.
I know the whole thing was rigged. It’s always rigged. They never like to pay out to the family. They must have come up with Provision 187 just this morning.
I had often thought when Tommy G. died, I’d cry in a pure way. I’d tear my hair out by the roots. I’d pull out my eyelashes so the tears could run unimpeded. But nothing can express this.
Now the sirens go off, and the horns. And the cars whiz into the center ring, and the tall clowns—the ones dressed like Mercury, a full team of eight—lift Tommy G.’s blood-soaked corpse into the air. His long wavy hair sweeps the ground, touches some of the bottles, as they hoist him into the ambulance.
i can’t think.
Down in the stadium, several sections below us, chairs are being uprooted from their rivets. I can’t see Uber anywhere. A fence comes down and is thrown into the arena. A manic-looking clown with high-arching eyebrows and a tulip in his hat—he’s crushed. Officials, a couple of them go. People rip the wings off the Mercuries. Off their heels, as if they’re insects. The weapon carrier who gave Uber his drink just minutes ago appears to be dead. People cry out, yell, scream. Everyone screams.
I get my jacket off and push Thad’s arms into the sleeves, zip the zipper.
—I’ll meet you at the house! I tell Allison.
Something hits me in the back of the head then, something heavy and dull. When I touch my head, I feel blood.
She wants to fuss with me, but I tell her there’s no time. I tell her I’m getting the bracelet back before anyone knows it’s mine.
—You’ll never get to him, she says.
But she fishes some cash out of her wallet and I throw this in my bag. I give Thad’s meds and Freeway bars to Allison. She gives me a small hairbrush. I almost laugh but I see her need and simply take it. She sees I have one of those Tibetan Buddhist tracts in my bag—something she would normally toss out if she found it in my bedroom—but she doesn�
�t say anything. I have one of Tommy’s short knives I use for cutting through plastic packaging, cleaning my nails, and stuff. Allison has one of her own, so there’s nothing to exchange there. We work without conversation, trading things back and forth. Her weariness covers me like a hot wool blanket and I feel like I’m going to pass out if I don’t move. Then I see the light on my phone.
—God, my battery’s almost dead. Don’t call me. I’ll reach you as soon as I can, I say.
For years I’ve thrown millions of pixels together in my head, trying to see what it would be like to leave them. It was never this way.
Thad shouts, —Your hands are going to turn red with blood, Lynie!
—I’ll find water, Thad. I’ll wash my hands. Stay with Mom.
I turn back once, to see the way Allison holds his giant, weak head against her breast as they head toward an exit.
chaos.
CHAPTER 7
Tommy showed me how to get into this hidden place underneath the stadium. It’s a long corridor without windows or electricity—where I’m trying to get to Uber. It’s the only entryway free of paparazzi.
Tommy always had a cigarette lighter with him. Somehow I’ve lost mine in the exchange with Allison. So I’m moving four inches at a time, hoping I don’t smack into anything. I realize the beta-blocker I take for the matches has started to wear off, which means my heart is ratcheting up.
This is where they used to cage wild animals when they needed extra holding pens. So it smells blessed rank down here. I didn’t mind it when I was with Tommy because he thought there was something cool about this place, something kind of anthropological.
One time I stood in the dark with him and watched him as he smoked a cigarette. When he took a drag, we both lit up. He laughed at my skittishness and I pulled the lighter from his hand and held down the button for a while. Sometimes memory rips you and that moment, that experience of light, keeps going through my brain like burning fuel. It’s hard to imagine that Tommy is gone, even though I saw him cut out of this world.
The walls are damp, every surface tagged, drawings from people who were here before us.
He said, —I guess everyone wants to go back to the womb.
It was a dumb joke, this place is not where I’d imagine anyone coming from, but I laughed anyway. I loved his voice, especially when I let my thumb off the lighter and it turned dark again and he was nothing but voice and I could imagine he was six-foot-six and fifteen years older and finally right for Allison.
—I don’t, I said.
And I didn’t. I never wanted to return to the crawl space of Allison or the belly of the cosmos or wherever we hail from. Not because there’s something wrong with her, entirely, or wrong with the universe, entirely. I mean, I love Allison and feel sorry for her, for it. But you don’t want to travel backward.
—Yeah, well, that’s what makes you smart, he said.
He didn’t say it sarcastically. Tommy meant things like that. I looked down at the crown of his head, the smoke swirling around it. I took a drag from his cigarette and then he took my hand and showed me the way to the locker rooms.
Remind him constantly of his victories. Keep his heart warm even if you have to set the house on fire, Bylaw 32.
I don’t know if Allison did that enough. She was kind of burned out by the time she married Tommy. Or she was just too taxed with Thad. I think they hooked up because of her position, the influence she could offer. I don’t know. I think she loved him. Probably more than I understood.
I open my phone now and use it as a flashlight, weak as it is, because Tommy told me you can run into false doors down here, that it’s easy to get lost, that you never know who or what you’ll find. And that thought has my skull pounding. I can feel a patch of sticky blood where I got hit in the back of the head. I remove my T-shirt, wad it up, and hold it there with my free hand.
I want to call Allison but the reception is worthless down here. I begin to take pictures with my phone. Not for the images but for the small pulses of light the phone throws off. I’m draining my batteries for light.
Water is coming off the pipes now, it’s drumming on my shoulders and head, dead water running down my back and chest and arms. That happens when they turn the fire hoses on the crowd in the stadium, so I know what’s going on up there. And I’m feeling sick wondering what they’ve done with Tommy. That’s something I’ve never wanted to know before—what they do with the people who die in the ring. Because we always left right away and the organization took care of all of the arrangements, and all we had to do was make it to the funeral in one piece. Allison has never talked about what happened to them and it’s possible she doesn’t know. But I suddenly feel guilty for not knowing if the caskets of her husbands, my fathers, were sometimes empty or missing parts. Thinking back on the succession of men Allison married, I’m convinced this was true: that there was a lightness to some of their caskets.
What I’m really worried about is that someone will steal Tommy’s hand and try to sell it on eBay, though I don’t know what it will be worth now that Caesar’s Inc. has begun the process of downgrading him.
The noise of the stadium crushes overhead, the vibration drills into my bones. I find a doorknob.
I’ve been in this room before.
A few pieces of stalled-out equipment. Old signs. I take a dozen phone shots, just as things start to settle down overhead.
I know what it’s like in the arena now. My fifth father, Larry, used to watch old news clips of the war in Vietnam. Guys in the jungle, blown to hell, yelling, Oh my God, I’ve lost my leg! I had to ask him to turn the sound down all the time. I couldn’t take it. Help me, somebody help me! Maybe he thought if he had us as crazy and grief-stricken as he was some score would even up. Larry knew a lot about chemical compounds. Napalm. He was always trying to figure out some legal way to hide explosives in his Glad weapons but he was taken out before he realized that dream. Tommy was different. He liked a clean weapon, a pure fight, no gimmicks. Maybe Tommy was the only one who made any sense.
Now I know where I am.
I crack the door open and peer into the locker room. There are two lines of benches and the floor is soaked, empty champagne bottles strewn about and the sound of a shower going. The cameras are gone and the paparazzi have disappeared. I remember to turn my phone off. My head still hammers but I’m not bleeding anymore, so I put my bloody shirt back on. If he’s anything like Tommy was after a match, Uber will be in the shower for hours.
It’s weird that no one’s around; typically there are handlers of some sort. I guess it’s possible Uber dresses his own wounds. Some guys do, but not many. Allison did all of Tommy’s until they had a big fight and he asked me to take over, which I didn’t want to do because I knew it would hurt Allison’s feelings. She’s the one who taught me how to stitch, how to wrap, which tinctures to use. Sometimes I feel all I do is hurt her.
I’m about to slip into the main room when two men come into view and I slide back just in time. I recognize the short one in the T-shirt and jogging pants, the thin buzz cut—one of the better trainers in town. —You need a rubdown! he calls into the shower area.
—I have someone coming over to the apartment. That woman who does Thai massage, Uber calls.
—You know I’m happy to stick around, the guy in the suit yells as he adjusts his shades.
—Just make sure the bodyguards stay put for a while! Uber says.
His voice is deep and resonant and full of shower room echo.
—We should be celebrating, the suit says.
I feel nothing but rage, yet I just have to keep my mouth shut.
—Yeah, well, that’s what you guys are for. We’ll talk tomorrow, Uber says.
—I’ve never seen him like that, the suit says in a low voice to his friend.
—It’s tough when you take out your hero, you know? the trainer says just before he opens the main door at the far end of the room. As it widens I hear the paparazzi flame u
p, so many flashes going, I can’t really see anything except bright and dark shapes. The bodyguards push the crowd back. Slowly, the men make their way into the throng.
And before long, the room is almost quiet again, except for that lone shower thundering the concrete floor. I enter the stale air of the men’s locker room, where I met my fathers a hundred times after their matches.
Uber’s clothes are slopped over a bench. I go through his pockets. There’s an inhaler, a St. Christopher medal, and a small comb. Maybe this is the weakness of the Helmet Wearer? This anxiety that his hair is continually being crushed and deformed so he feels he needs a comb in the arena? The sign of an endlessly vain man?
The shower stops. I hear a loud sigh as if he’s decompressing. Then the sound of metal curtain rings whip along a steel rod. Wet feet slap against the painted floor. He looks awkward as he stoops to walk under an archway, a towel tied at his waist, his hair soaked. Finally he looks up and sees me standing there.
He’s wearing the bracelet.
Most of the Glow has washed off. None of my hatred. He studies me, cinches his towel tighter.
—Yeah? he says.
I’m surprised he doesn’t recognize me. It’s not that I’m famous or anything, but Tommy, at least, always knew about his opponents’ families. Some pictures of me circulate too, a lot more lately.
But Uber does look worn out. Tommy got that look at home sometimes, but then he suffered from bouts of melancholy and I always tried to take that into account and not feel like I had done something wrong. Maybe Allison’s right, that Uber doesn’t have the true gladiator look to his jaw. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy who pumps a lot of iron, someone who always feels a little down on his luck no matter how things go, his hair thinning in front, which could be the constant grating of the helmet. In any case, not the way Tommy used to look after a match, certainly after winning a title match. Tommy had a playfulness after he won a fight that drove Allison insane. He took us out to big dinners afterward, insisted everyone eat steak.
—You’re not allowed in here, Uber says, like he cares but doesn’t care.