Shadowboxer

by Tricia Sullivan

  The fight was not over. She did not have control, because I was pure chaos. Never mind Old Jade. There’s an older Old Jade, older than anybody, older than this lifetime. There’s an ancestor Jade who remembers how to survive, down in the bones. Beast? There’s a part of me that’s a fucking cavewoman. I could hear myself grunting and snarling and I could smell Gretchen’s sweat and feel the shape of her skeleton where she tried to exert leverage on me and I twisted and thrashed like a rabid animal and shook her off. Got up to my knees still hand-fighting her.

  Then we were on our feet, locked together, my back arching and every scrap of style got stripped from my performance. I must have looked like a mental patient, because I saw her face as I drove her back.

  She was scared.

  And she broke away from me. A tactical decision, maybe—but I think she just didn’t like what she saw.

  Let’s face it: it’s like those old horror movies where the bad guy is supposed to be dead but he keeps coming back, even with a knife between his ribs, even with an axe through his head: you can’t kill him. I’m that guy. And now I was moving flat-footed and my muscles were full of lactic acid and I was sluggish, but so was she.

  Then her corner screamed encouragement—she was winning the fight, after all. She only had to finish me off. How hard could it be? I must have looked half-dead already.

  She came again. And again her onslaught drove me across the mat and put my back to the cage.

  The bell rang.

  Round One over. Longest three minutes of my life.

  I crashed onto my stool and spat out my mouthguard. Water on my face, in my mouth, Cake shoving sticks of cotton up my nose to stop the bleeding.

  ‘You got to circle left,’ he kept saying. ‘She get you again with round kick, so circle left, circle left.’

  Sometimes I am a little slow, but I get there in the end. The kick had come out of nowhere because she was a southpaw and I’d moved right into her powerful side.

  Gretchen’s coaches huddled around her. They were fussing with her gloves. The ref went over and talked to the coach while Gretchen switched gloves. My gecko started itching like crazy. I slapped my ass to make it stop itching.

  It’s not like I don’t know I’m in trouble, gecko, buddy. Tell me something I don’t know.

  Round Two.

  Circle left. Gretchen wasn’t quite so much of a slugger now. She was saving her energy, doing little range-finder thingies with her right hand, testing me out. Trying to set me up for that left round kick again, but I kept stepping around left like Cake said, so she couldn’t get the kick off.

  Gretchen was confident. She knew she had the skills. She had muscles that made me look like an old chicken. She had sparks in her eyes, too. What did she see when she looked at me? A substandard opponent who had gotten lucky so far and who was only here on freak appeal. A scrappy little nobody. A nuisance.

  But I was still here. She could not put me away with punches, I’d survived her guard, and now I had her big round kick figured out. I was moving around the ring freely and she couldn’t get me now.

  So then she tried the left round kick against my left leg. Wanted to take out my knee or maybe just hurt me, slow me down, but my right hand reached down and caught the kick instinctively, while I moved in with my left arm across her body and threw my head down, dumping her.

  No surprises—she put me in guard again. In fact, she stuck me in a low guard with my head against her belly and her legs wrapped around my upper back, which meant she’d be setting me up for an arm bar or maybe even a triangle choke.

  Except I wasn’t scared of her guard anymore. I wasn’t scared of her BJJ. I was going to hit her. Just like before I started stacking, forcing those legs back toward her head, forcing her to curl up, and at the same time I stopped her arms by reaching over my head, grabbing her biceps and pushing her arms away from me while I drove with all the strength in my legs. I could hear myself roaring as I drove into her. I wanted to hit her.

  Like a swimmer coming up for air, I lifted my head for a second, drew back my right hand and brought it swinging in with a big overhand to her face; then head down and bicep control locked on again, still driving and stacking her until her head and neck were against the fence. I broke off and hit again. And again.

  I was starting to get through.

  She was covering up with her right hand, no longer trying any ties, just defending. So I swung with the left, and the right again, big blind swinging hits, until I’d made myself enough space to really get to work. Then she was mine. I was rearing over her with both fists going like pistons. The ref was there and his hands were between us and he was stopping the fight.

  Gretchen Van Der Hoef lay beneath me, bleeding. Defeated.

  Victory

  THE CROWD CHANTED ‘Beast, Beast, Beast!’ There was a haze of light around me. After a little pause Gretchen pulled herself together. Her corner huddled around her. Then both of us came to the middle of the cage. Max the Axe read out the results and threw my arm in the air. Gretchen leaned over and gave me a perfunctory losers’ hug. My gecko itched and itched, but I was too high to care.

  I ran up the side of the cage like a monkey and sat on the top bar, waving back to the crowd.

  There was a stabbing pain in my left eye. Then, very suddenly, I was not feeling too good at all. My eye must have swelled up where I got hit, because that side of my vision was going black.

  I swung my leg over the side of the cage to climb back into the ring, but I couldn’t seem to control any of my muscles.

  I fell off the cage and hit the mat. Rolled. There were knives stabbing into my body. My eye was burning. My vision was messed up. But I could see Tommy Zhang looking at me. I could see Gretchen’s trainer dragging her gloves off her hands and shoving them out of sight, looking right at me as he did it.

  They done something bad to me. A chorus of geckos sounded in my ears and I heard a sound like wind in the trees.

  ‘Jade! Jade, what’s wrong?’

  Mr. B was beside me, his face down on my level. He looked scared. I was on my hands and knees on the mat, and there was foam coming out of my mouth. It felt like my skin had cracked across my face and the cracks were spreading and all along the fault lines my nerves were screaming at the invasion. It felt like razors were scoring me, and acid poured into the cuts. Knives bit deep into my skull, across my back, down my legs, into my stomach, under my nails. I tried to stay still, thinking it would pass. It would have to pass. No pain ever went on so long.

  But it just got worse. And I couldn’t pass out. No escape.

  There were feet and legs around me. The ref was waving his hands in my face and shouting at me, one latex-gloved hand on my shoulder. The medic was kneeling beside me, talking to me. Asking me questions.

  A shock went through me. I screamed and jumped up. Threw my head back. If I could have jumped out of my body, I would’ve. Would have jumped right through the roof of the hall.

  Then Khari got hold of me. All those times I’d fantasized about being in Khari’s arms. His strength, god the smooth ripple of his six pack, the way his shoulders made a v-shape, his brown skin as smooth as a baby’s on the inside of his arms, with those biceps... oh, yeah, I used to think about him a lot.

  Now I didn’t notice none of that good stuff as he scooped me up and carried me away from the scene, shoving away a medic and two of Tommy’s people with his knees and shoulders as he walked.

  I couldn’t even relax into it; I was stiff as an ironing board in his arms, and I clawed at him in panic. There was foam and vomit on my face and then on his t-shirt, and I smelled the forest again.

  ‘Mya!’ I choked.

  The crowd parted and the noise subsided as he brought me back to the dressing room.

  ‘Just take it easy, Jade. Let the doctor check you out.’

  The doctor stuck a needle in my arm. He peeled back an eyelid and shone a light in my eye. I jerked away from him. In my peripheral vision I could see vines
. I smelled flowers.

  The doctor was talking but it was like he was on an international line with a bad connection.

  ‘Jade! Jade, stay with me. Jade, are you allergic to anything?’

  I tried to answer but I couldn’t get the air. My whole body was on fire. I writhed in his arms, trying to get away from the heat. Khari’s deep voice was in my ear and faraway, like the sea in a conch shell. He said, ‘Mr. B got all the water bottles, he’s checking everything to see if somebody mess with you. This is so fucked up. The ambulance is outside.’

  I looked up at him. It made sense now. Tommy Zhang had brought me back from Thailand to kill me. What a hater.

  ‘I’m dying,’ I said. Then the convulsions started.

  They tried to roll me into the recovery position. I kept kicking over onto my back, and the fluorescent lights above me stretched and blurred.

  I could hear Khari saying stuff like, ‘No, you ain’t gonna die. The ambulance is right outside. You stay right here with me, Jade. Everything’s gonna be—’

  Photograph

  I WAS IN another place. World of pain doesn’t begin to describe it. The pain was like an entity that only knew how to hate. It dragged me in and out of consciousness. Then it broke into beats that hammered on me one at a time, each blow jerking my whole body. The beats slowed. Finally they stopped.

  I was gone. It wasn’t just that the pain had left. I couldn’t feel my body at all. But I could see.

  I was in the woods. I seemed to be lying on my back, and there were fluorescent flowers all around me, flowers the size of hats and umbrellas. Looking down on me were animals: a deer, a huge bird, a dog—real animals, but in bright, Crayola colors. They looked down at me like I was the zoo and they bought the tickets.

  ‘She will be one of us soon,’ said the voice. ‘She has been poisoned with the night orchid.’ There was no language barrier. I understood perfectly.

  One of us? I wondered if Khari had tried the kiss of life on me yet. With all that foam and vomit, I really hoped not.

  ‘Jade!’ Mya was there. She fell on her knees beside me. Her pupils were wide with fear and her tone was urgent. ‘Jade, this is bad. You are in trouble!’

  I felt sorry for her, having to see me like this.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I hid at Combat Sports. Everyone watched the fight on TV. As soon as you collapsed, I knew something was wrong. The animals helped me find you.’ Mya touched the skin near my eye. ‘Gretchen had night orchid on the glove,’ she said. ‘It must have gone into your eye.’

  A boy’s ghost bent over me. ‘Night orchid. It’s way Mr. Richard always kills people.’

  This had to mean Mr. B was in on it. The feeling of betrayal was horrible. But I had to face it: Richard Fuller’s poisons... the CCTV footage showing Mya stumbling into the gym... the poison introduced to my system during the fight. There was no other interpretation. Richard Fuller and Mr. B had been in it together all along. I’d been betrayed by my own trainer.

  Mya was talking to me urgently. ‘The drug in your body. In small amounts, it lets your body and spirit travel here. If you have a guide, like me, and if you have the antidote, you can come here and return alive. If not, you die here.’

  ‘No, that can’t be right,’ I muttered. ‘This is just a dream.’

  ‘It’s a very old trick,’ said the ghost cheerfully. ‘You would not be the first.’

  ‘I can’t take you back,’ Mya continued. ‘Your body is poisoned. The drug holds you here.’

  ‘She is doomed,’ said the ghost.

  Mya closed her eyes. ‘I know where Mr. Richard keeps the antidote. Stay with her, Luck.’

  ‘Don’t leave me here!’ I called. It was only when I tried to raise the volume of my voice that I noticed I wasn’t making any sound. I tried to get up, and something really funny happened. I seemed to peel away from my body, like a sticker from a kid’s sticker book, leaving only the outline of myself behind. I looked down at my body. Sweat still gleamed on my muscles, and my eyes were rolled back.

  I didn’t want to see that.

  I started following Mya, but my feet didn’t seem to touch the ground. Without my body I was all soft and flexible. You know those old cartoons where Bugs Bunny or Sylvester smells something delicious and they go drifting along all soft and stretched out, swimming in the air and following the smell? That was what it felt like. It was like I was all lips and eyes, following Mya while a smoky outline of my body trailed away uselessly behind me.

  She closed her eyes and held her hands in front of her chest to pray. Then she stepped through some underbrush and climbed down into a dark room.

  It turned out to be more of a covered porch than a room, a wooden expanse of floor covered by a slanting roof and open to the forest on three sides. It was night here, and there was a wide open door leading into a house lit only by the faint blue light of a computer monitor in the adjoining room. The light passed through a bead curtain, glimmering, and caught on a display of carvings of Thai deities that decorated the outside wall of the house. By the doorway there was a Western apothecary table with a pathetic-looking stuffed monkey on it, standing guard.

  I tried not to think about what was happening to my real body in the forest. It was easier just to float. I couldn’t see myself. I seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. When I turned my attention back toward the forest I couldn’t see it anymore. We were in the ‘real’ world, on the upper floor of a house that stood on stilts surrounded by jungle.

  ‘We must hurry,’ Mya whispered, slipping into the computer room. ‘That monkey sees everything.’

  On the other side of the bead curtain Mya started going through drawers and rummaging among bottles. There was equipment that looked like a still or something to do with chemistry. There was also a desk. I drifted over there, scanning for something I could use, some way I could help Mya. The computer was running. A video chat service was onscreen with the userpic of Fuller himself, I guess—a freckly old goatee-wearing dork with a weak chin. His contact list was huge and international. I saw the names of politicians and celebrities, one after another. Shea hadn’t been kidding when he’d said Fuller was an adviser to the stars.

  Then I saw the video contact, ‘VShea.Independent.’

  Of course. Shea had helped his boss interview Fuller about the orphanage. Fuller had saved Shea’s contact information.

  If only I could type! But it seemed that although I could look anywhere I wanted, from any angle, I couldn’t act.

  I had to reach Shea. If I could just move the mouse, just a little, and click on his number...

  ‘Mya!’ Even though my words didn’t sound in the air, Mya understood me. She turned.

  I pointed to the mouse with my ghostly hand. She came over and clicked.

  Please let Shea not be in Bangkok. Please let him be close. Please let him be... human.

  ‘Hello?’ he said over the speakers.

  ‘Shea, it’s me. Jade. I’m at his house. You know, Richard Fuller. Can you get here fast?’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Shea? Can you hear me?’ Of course he couldn’t hear me. I wasn’t even really here. I was in a forest beyond the world, half-dead. Mya backed away from the screen. Her mouth clamped shut. She put a finger to her lips, looking again at the stuffed monkey.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I heard Shea say to someone on his end. ‘I can’t hear anything. Guess it’s a wrong number.’

  ‘Better turn the phone off,’ A woman’s tinkling voice said in Thai. ‘No interruptions.’

  I want to say I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach, but the fact is I’ve been kicked in the stomach plenty of times and it was nothing compared to this.

  Well, I thought. Looks like I’ll die here. And Shea’s already got female company.

  I wondered if she knew about his ‘problem.’

  Mya set about ransacking the drawers of the apothecary chest. Pills and powders and syringes came out of the drawers. Bottles. Bags of flu
id. Ugh. Then Mya gave a little cry. She held up a bag in her hand. Except for a few specks of blue powder, it was empty.

  A soft voice said, ‘A good thief never burgles the same house twice.’

  Richard Fuller was standing in the doorway that led to the rest of the house. He held up a second bag, this one full of a blue powder.

  ‘Fortunately, you will not be a thief the second time. I have saved you from that.’

  Mya’s face had become a mask. She must have been terrified, but she showed no expression at all.

  Richard Fuller was gawky-looking. Harmless and soft-spoken. His physique was waxy and weak, but his voice had a quality of persuasion.

  ‘You try to do good, but everything goes wrong for you. When you steal food and bring it to the animals in the forest, you only prolong their suffering.’

  He paused, but Mya did not move. She knelt by the apothecary table, as still as a statue.

  Mr. Richard shook his head sadly as he moved out to the porch. ‘This is foolishness, Mya. You are a child. You have misunderstood everything, and your actions have lost merit for your family.’

  Mya’s body was shaking but her face gave nothing away.

  ‘When we are together, then you will understand. My wisdom will guide you and you won’t make all these tragic mistakes. It is time for us to be joined as a single being, to move through all the worlds as one.’

  At last Mya moved. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

  ‘Go back, Mya,’ I told her. ‘Run away. Don’t listen to him. He’s a scumbag.’

  She didn’t look my way. I wondered if she could still hear me. I wondered if I was already dead and this was how it was going to be, like in movies where ghosts talk and can’t get through to the living.

  Then the video application chimed from the computer, announcing a call. Mya jumped. I felt a surge of hope—could it be Shea?

  It was Tommy Zhang.

  Richard Fuller ducked through the bead curtain and glanced at the screen. Shea’s contact information was still up there. His eyes narrowed as he took this in, but he just clicked on ‘answer’ and Tommy’s voice filled the room.