Level Up- The Knockout

by Dan Sugralinov

  Lexie bent down again, producing a packet of tissues from the glove compartment. She approached Hagen, turning his face so it would be illuminated by a street light, and started to wipe the blood from his lips.

  “I’d always dreamed of being a nurse as a child. A nurse, not a doctor. I had this dream about taking care of wounded soldiers. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Hm-m, it’s perfectly normal,” Hagen mumbled. “I’d been beaten up so often I could dream of nothing but revenge.”

  “The difference between dreams and goals is that dreams remain dreams,” Lexie said contemplatively. She was clearly quoting someone, but Mike couldn’t quite place the quote.

  She scrunched up the tissue and tossed it into the glove compartment. Then she took the cigarette from Hagen’s trembling fingers and took another deep drag with a mission-accomplished feeling. Mike noticed her closing her eyes partly as she did that, as well as the fact that the shadow of her long eyelashes made her even more beautiful.

  He tried to fill the gap in their conversation and alleviate his anxiety by asking,

  “Uh... I was saying... You said you cared for the wounded, but you’d had no intention of helping Goretsky when I, uh, did a number on him...”

  “Damn, Mikey! You should really learn to zip it. Why the fuck would you bring him up now? What does he have to do with anything?”

  “Sorry.”

  “There you go. Apologizing for something you have no idea about. What kind of a man are you, Mikey? Let’s bury this issue once and for all. As for Goretsky... The thing is, I’ve fueled his false hopes a bit, I have to confess to that. I’ve been on my own for quite a long time, see? Minding the shops, and there are three of them over here. None of my friends live here anymore. I live on my own. I have a dog; his name is Rex. He’s really nice and all, but... Hey! Why are you laughing, you pervo? Well, at least I’ve managed to make you laugh; that should count for something.”

  “Sorry, Lexie. I didn’t mean to,” Hagen said, holding his bleeding lip.

  “All water under the bridge. Anyway, I’d been taken in by Goretsky’s macho style for a while. I mean it. What could I have been thinking? Anyway, it didn’t take me long to realize just what kind of person he was. And he got all sorts of ideas. He thought I was playing ‘can’t-touch-me-but-you-can’ with him. It ended up with you knocking him out cold. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but could we stop talking about him already?”

  Lexie took her phone out and turned it on. “Hey, it’s 3 AM!” She put out her cigarette in an instant and took the driving seat. Then she lowered her window and said, “Don’t bother about coming to work tomorrow. You should heal and visit a doctor. Really. It might be an actual fracture.”

  “Thanks! I’d been meaning to ask for a day off, but I had no idea where to start.”

  “It doesn’t matter where you start; the only thing that matters is the way you finish it,” Lexie chortled. “Thank you. I haven’t had such fun in ages. Such mad fun,” she grunted. “Bye-bye, baby Mikey!”

  Hagen stepped away from the car. He couldn’t do anything about his silly smile. He knew that grinning like an idiot had been a strict no-no, since it made him look even more idiotic, but he could hardly manage it. He was glad Lexie couldn’t see it.

  “Hey, hold on a moment! Hold on, Lexie!” He gave a sudden start and limped as fast as he could behind her Toyota.

  “What is it now?”

  “When could we see each other? Again, I mean...”

  Lexie rolled her window down. “Whoa, hold your horses! I’m sorry, but you’re being pushy.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  She started the car, but a few feet on, Hagen shouted again,

  “Would you please stop?!”

  “God, Mikey, you’ll lose all your points like this. What is it now?”

  Hagen coughed, covering his mouth. “Who... did you bet on?”

  Lexie rolled her eyes. “I warned you, Mike Björnstad Hagen! That’s it. Zero sympathy!”

  Mike felt dejected for a moment. Then Lexie smiled, and his face became animated again. “A twenty on Gonzalo. Tough luck. I’ll make a better choice next time.”

  Mike watched her Toyota disappear around the corner, then limped towards his own car. He had a wide smile on his face now. Could it have actually happened? Could his dreams have come true?

  His life transformed drastically, but he mused on how few things had actually changed.

  The fear, for example. Someone without any fear whatsoever would be a psycho or a drunk, of course. But the fear Hagen felt in the ring was something different. Something he’d need to withstand. His childhood terror was merely the flight part of the fight-or-flight reflex.

  He’d just had his opportunity to eschew flight, but his path dependency took the better of him. Hagen acknowledged the fact that the ropes around the ring were the only thing to prevent him from trying to flee right after the first couple of blows dealt by Killa.

  The interface had appeared to be growing a new personality inside of him, quite unlike the former Hagen, but he kept on sabotaging himself as persistently and annoyingly as any banner ad.

  Still smiling, Hagen placed his hands on the steering wheel. That’s when the tiredness hit him like a ton of bricks, making the mere act of turning the key in the ignition a near-impossible feat.

  He shut his eyes. He could still hear the crowd roar. Some were yelling in support, and he’d actually had a large part of the audience rooting for him. Yet Hagen had been too accustomed to filter out the good and only see the negative. Suddenly, kind faces of all sorts started to spring up in his mind. The old schoolteacher-type man was nice. And there were two guys in the bar genuinely happy about his victory. They must have placed their bets on Mike for a lark, and their relatively small bets must have given them unexpectedly large winnings.

  There are lots of nice people around, and yet we fail to notice them, either fearing of getting ripped off in some way or afraid of meeting someone who’d be actually evil, Mike thought.

  A few scenes from the fight flashed through his head again. Cocksure Gonzalo jumping around, and then falling, as in slo-mo, shedding blood and sweat, with Hagen standing nearby as though he was an actor on a stage. Himself being gripped by fear so hard he’d even missed the moment of bliss given by the system after a victory and a level-up. Hagen had been so afraid he couldn’t tell the difference between the limelight and the column of light the system had given him after leveling up.

  His fear spoiled the joy of his victory. It used to be a survival mechanism, but it appeared to have become an obstacle.

  Hagen came out of his reverie with a whimper. He raised his head from the steering-wheel and looked around. He’d had a feeling he’d slept the whole night through, but he’d only said goodbye to Lexie ten minutes ago.

  He shook his head and rubbed his face. He’d have to get moving, or he’d zonk.

  He checked his phone, still in the dock. A good job he’d forgotten all about it, or it would have been gone like his money—the locker room was no place of virtue.

  He turned it on and checked whether he’d had any missed calls or texts. There was zip, zilch, nada. He didn’t receive much correspondence, anyway. It would either be spam or some motivating army-related meme from Uncle Peter. The uncle was worse. His spamming had to be replied to.

  Hagen browsed through his playlist and found Eminem’s Lose Yourself. He jacked up the volume and started his engine.

  “I didn’t get a signature track. Might as well go for some exit music,” Hagen said, turning a corner.

  He reached home eventually, feeling as though he were driving in a dream, and barely managed to climb the staircase leading to his apartment. He stumbled into his room, turned on the lights and reclined against the wall. His thigh bone was hurting even worse. He’d have to go to the bathroom and find some of the painkillers left over from the time of his mom’s fatal health problem.

  He tried to motivate himself in the Och
oa fashion. “Stop that! Be focused!” He’d had just about enough of suffering. Was he a real winner?

  He favored his leg en route to the bathroom. There he spent a while splashing his face with cold water. He’d have to take a shower to wash off all the blood and the sweat.

  His first reaction was to leave it until tomorrow. Than he checked himself. He’d been leaving things until tomorrow all his life. And he’d had enough.

  He groaned and moaned as he undressed and got into the shower. The places struck by Gonzalo felt as if they’d been on fire, anyway, so Hagen lowered the temperature of the water until it became cold enough to soothe the pain.

  Hagen had always been someone wearing a hat during the summer as per his mother’s advice. He realized he was taking a cold shower the first time in his life. He thought of colds, meningitis, pneumonia, and other diseases one could get from hypothermia. His mum had given him the full list.

  Then the thoughts evaporated.

  The day was sure full of surprises.

  He found some fresh Band-Aid in the box of medicines and used it to cover the abrasion on his face. It looked skewed, but he’d done his best. The smell of medicines reminded him of the days when his mom was sick. He’d never managed to throw away any of her possessions, including the half-empty blisters with pills for terminal cancer patients.

  He found a painkiller and went toward the fridge, the pill clenched in his fist, to find some liquid to wash it down with. Then he suddenly stopped in the middle of the room and took a look around.

  He’d do something different this time. It seemed to be the right time to reassess all his values.

  “God, how do I even survive in this mess? It all looks like the bottom of a garbage pail.”

  What would Lexie see if she ever decided to pay him a visit? All of this? It felt like sharing an apartment with a bum who’d had poor hygiene and lived there during his work hours.

  Mike cringed at the thought. His mother had always told him homeless people had all kinds of diseases known to medicine, as well as a few that weren’t.

  He didn’t have proper curtains. His windows were covered by what would amount to dirty rags by any account, making the room look even more sordid. Those rags used to know better days. They had been curtains once, when his mom was still alive. But he did nothing to care for them properly.

  His kitchen was even worse—the cooker looked as though the Tasty Dog staff had used it for their cockroach dogs. Mother used to keep the floor waxed and shiny. Hagen had managed to make it look like the pavement somehow. Worse, actually. Pavements would occasionally get swept by school graduates doing community service.

  Even the furniture seemed disheveled and disfigured without his mom’s attention. The chairs seemed to have disappeared, the sofa had become hard as a rock, and the mattress on Hagen’s bed had a depression in it so deep Hagen would fall into it every night as if it were a pit.

  Lexie’s romantic feelings would evaporate at the first sight of the mess. Given their existence in the first place.

  It became crystal clear to Hagen why everybody had always despised him so much. He’d been treating himself like shit all along. Did Goretsky made him stare at the floor and answer in mumbles? Did the bullies fill his room with garbage? Did Uncle Peter, who’d actually seen his comrades killed in action, make Hagen afraid of the merest shadow of a branch outside the window?

  All those thoughts were only beginning to come to him now, which felt odd. Right after a victory. With a girl who’d seemed an impossible dream, wiping away the blood from his lips. And she didn’t cringe or anything—she seemed to care for him genuinely. Almost like... his mother. Why would it have to happen now, with Luke Lukas turning up to provide Hagen’s imagination with a direction?

  The most discouraging thing is that the dream had always been there, and he didn’t even need an interface to make it a reality. He’d just have to stop being a shit, living in a shithole, and being afraid of all kinds of shit that could happen, which would never be in short supply.

  Hagen unclenched his fist to look at the crushed pill.

  He was finally done with running away from pain. He’d have to take it. And there’d be a lot. Little Mikey the Crybaby would still cry, probably. But he’d grin and bear it, and punch back.

  Mike gave a loud roar that appeared to be coming from the very bottom of his newly-awakened soul. He rose from the sofa and strutted his way to the garbage pail with pride. Then he dumped the white powder he’d had in his fist.

  A minute ago he would just have thrown it onto the floor. But he was past that now. He’d have to start with small things.

  As he went to his bedroom, he took a careful inventory of the objects he would get rid of first thing tomorrow. Why would he need a bunch of broken PlayStations? The third modification, too, quite obsolete by now. Could he use them for parts? It would have made sense to take them to his workplace, then, rather than letting them gather dust at home.

  He stopped for a while next to the closet.

  There was another thing.

  It would hurt, but...

  He’d have to get rid of his mother’s clothes. Or donate them to some charity. Fox News mentioned people in the former Soviet Union oppressed by authoritarian regimes and hardly managing to clothe themselves.

  Propaganda would be another garbage item to get rid of, but Hagen didn’t realize as much by that point. He believed the TV like his mom had. For the time being, anyway.

  But he relied more on the amazing interface inside his head. As he was falling asleep, he called it up for a while to take another look at his available stat and ability points.

  It was a lovely day by all accounts, at any rate.

  Chapter 10. Want Your Face Smashed Again?

  We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.

  BioShock

  LEXIE WOKE UP later than usual the next morning. The elderly pitbull Rex had already been sitting by the bed waiting anxiously for his owner to get up, feel for her slippers with her feet, take a bathrobe from the chair and shuffle toward the kitchen. The dog was intelligent enough not to hurry her—the morning ritual had been worked out to the finest detail, like the guard mounted at Buckingham Palace.

  Lexie proceeded to the kitchen while Rex placed himself between the cupboard and the fridge. Everything was going according to plan. Rex’s owner visited the small room—moist and redolent of shampoos and cosmetics. The dog didn’t venture there much. Then she cooked something and made coffee in a machine that made such a terrible buzzing sound. Having done that, she sat down at the table, engaged in several activities at once: namely, drying her hair with a blow dryer, taking bites of toast, chasing them down with swigs from her cup of coffee, and reading the news off her phone screen.

  Those would normally be the moments for Lexie to talk to her dog.

  “If you only knew, Rexie... Even coffee doesn’t seem to work today. I’m, like, totally sleepy.”

  Rex opened his mouth and started panting, signaling that he was listening. He’d been eager to hear something familiar in all that unintelligible rambling—something like “Let’s go for a walk” or “Your neck, Rex”—he knew he’d have to get up and wait for the leash lock to click into place on his collar. That would be a signal for him to express happiness and wag his docked tail. Perhaps he could even woof a few times in a cautious manner.

  However, his owner was behind schedule that day.

  Things like that would happen, of course. Especially when she would come home late at night or in the early morning, reeking of cigarettes and alcohol. Sometimes she’d be in a good mood; sometimes she would sit down on the floor, hug Rex, and ask him, “Why am I so unlucky? I’m cute, and no idiot, either, but it’s a dog’s life... No offense, Rexie...”

  Rex would normally pant as hard as he could to demonstrate his undivided attention. He would already know that his mistress would not wake up early the next morning to tell him to get ready for the leash. There would
be no pieces of ham left over from her breakfast, either. She’d sleep, and keep on sleeping until the sun would be way up high in the sky. The poor dog was aware he’d have to keep it in so that he wouldn’t make a puddle of pee at the door, his balls hurting like hell.

  He became somewhat sad, imagining it would be one of those days again, full of pain and suffering—his owner did say the well-familiar word “sleep.” However, Lexie rose from the table, stretched herself, her arms spread wide, and finally pronounced the well-familiar word “walkies” that Rex had been waiting for so eagerly.

  It was early morning, although a little later than usual. Rex pulled on the leash, overjoyed, while Lexie followed him, sipping her coffee from a cup with a lid. Rex sniffed around the nearby bushes, and then wasted no time dragging his owner toward the waste lot where a dog could take a crap without incurring any fines for failure to remove dog excrement.

  Alexa Hepworth, the head manager of the DigiMart chain, lived in a single-story townhouse, renting half of it. It wasn’t a gentrified community, but it wasn’t a slum, either.

  Her neighbors behind the party wall kept to themselves most of the time. They were an elderly couple from Missouri. On various dates commemorating the birth of their grandson or the death of their son in Afghanistan, they would offer her a burnt cookie from a tray. Lexie had to pretend to be overjoyed about the offer and try to choose one with fewer brown spots to be able to digest it.

  There was a chubby Polish couple living in the house across the street, with so many children Lexie had lost count. There could have been three, or there could have been a dozen. The children were chubby, too, and telling their sex was something beyond Lexie. She couldn’t pronounce the names, either, so she’d given up on the whole thing. Her best option was to call them “those angelic children.” The Poles kept track of every single Catholic holiday, decried Russia’s meddling in world affairs, and believed medical marijuana and gay marriages had been the devil’s idea. In general, they opined that America was doomed and that they should move elsewhere.