The Fighter

by Craig Davidson

  Chapter 8

  Paul was in an unnamed metropolis with sunlight trickling between the high rises. He was naked, his muscles sleek and oiled, and at the end of one arm hung a snub-nosed revolver. Up and down the sidewalks walked businessmen in identical suits and ties and glossy shoes and briefcases with their hair cut in the same style. They wandered aimlessly, bumping into one another and apologizing, tripping and falling and getting up and falling again, running as if to catch a departing bus only to smash headlong into the spotless facade of a skyscraper. He turned and found one at his side and his breath caught because its only feature was a huge mouth like a puppet's stretching halfway round its face. This thing grabbed Paul's hand and shook it but Paul couldn't feel any bones, a wash-glove packed with chilled lard, and the thing's oversize mouth opened up and said, "You're missing the big picture." It said, "Uh-huh, uh-huh, yup-yup- yup-yup-yup-yup-yup—" and Paul's other hand, the one with the revolver, came up and the muzzle fitted under the thing's chin and when he pulled the trigger the thing's hair fluttered and it fell and Paul saw the hole in its head where the bullet went through but no blood just a sound like wind rushing through a tunnel. And he turned to find another right next to him, noseless and earless and eyeless and Paul wished for a razor blade to slit the milky bulbs where its eyes should be and peel back the skin and see if anything stared back. This one also grabbed his hand and shook it and said "The bubble has burst" with great sadness and its teeth were the size of shoe-peg corn, hundreds of them on account of its mouth being so big, and Paul put the gun to the spot where its heart should be and pulled the trigger twice, the sounds ricocheting between the skyscrapers and echoing along the street and its body curled up and turned to white flakes like instant potatoes that blew away. Paul cracked the chamber and checked the cylinders but each one still had a bullet so he flicked it shut and shot another one and another, laughing like hell, but they spun through the office building's revolving doors without end and his exultation was replaced by hopelessness and he began to wither and shrink, his body dwindling to half-size, then quarter-size and smaller as the sun vanished behind a high rise so black it ate all light and Paul was no bigger than a toy solider, naked and terrified as he fired at legs the size of giant redwoods and fear exploded in his chest as a huge soft-soled loafer came down to crush him ...

  He woke in the backseat of Stacey Jamison's Humvee, wedged between two giant Einsteins. The Humvee—Stacey had painted GET YOUR JAM ON AT JAMMER'S on the side—jounced down a washboard road; silver maples arched their branches overhead.

  Stacey's hands were clad in weightlifter's gloves; his shirt read PRAY FOR WAR.

  Twice a month Stacey and his Cro-Magnon gym buddies engaged in paintball warfare. "It's serious business," Stacey had told Paul before becoming wistful. "They've outlawed it—outlawed war. There'll never be a Big Three, Paul," he'd said desolately. "Not unless those ragheads get hold of a few more 747s." Convinced it was nothing more than an exercise in tactical grab-ass, Paul had accepted Stacey's invite out of curiosity.

  They pulled into an open field. Sport-utes and pickup trucks, Einsteins in camo fatigues smearing lampblack on their faces. Late afternoon sunlight glittered on patches of unmelted snow.

  Stacey popped the trunk and doled out ordnance. Paul got a paint- ball gun and a faceshield. He realized he'd be easy to spot: his puffy white parka made him look, as Stacey remarked, "like a faggot cloud drifted down to earth."

  They divvied up into teams. Paul was selected second-to-last, one ahead of Pegs, an Einstein so nicknamed because he'd lost his feet in a childhood combine accident. Nobody liked to play with Pegs because the hinges of his prosthetics creaked in chilly weather and betrayed his team's position.

  The squads made their way into a forest of maple, oak, and black locust. Stacey captained Paul's team. "Fan out," he told them, "and keep your heads on a swivel."

  Paul found a spot behind a rotted log. An air horn went off to start the match. Seconds later paintballs were whizzing through the air all around him, slamming into trees with pops and splats.

  Paul spied an Einstein blundering through the brush like a crazed boar. He took aim and fired. A phut of compressed gas and his paint- ball curved through the air to splatter harmlessly in a nettle thicket. He ducked as paintballs jack-hammered the log, pok-pok-p-pok! His jaw and chest muscles seized up—taking heavy fire!

  Paul's hopes that the Einstein would hump off in search of less elusive quarry were dashed when he heard, "I got all day, goat-fucker! I smell your fear, and it fuels me!"

  Most Einsteins spoke the same patois of intimidation and degradation. Paul tried to imagine them at the supper table: Pass the margarine, Mom, you turkey-armed weakling; Dad, make with the salad or I'll poke your eyeballs out with a toothpick and serve them to you in a nice dry martini...

  Paul would settle for one-for-one. He wasn't Rambo; nobody expected him to mow down an entire regiment. He jammed two fingers under his faceshield and wiped away the condensation; then he jumped up, unleashed a primal scream, and charged the Einstein.

  He squeezed off a few rounds before his visor exploded orange. Once he cleared the paint away his heart took a giddy leap: he'd hit the Einstein. Not lethally—his left foot. Had it been Pegs, he probably would've been allowed to play on. But he was not, and since any hit counted, he was out.

  "Flesh wound!" the Einstein cried. "If this were a real war, I'd keep fighting."

  "So would I," said Paul, tetchily.

  "What," the Einstein wanted to know, "with a hole through your head? Wait a sec—what team are you on?"

  "The Log Jammers." Stacey's brainchild.

  The Einstein hurled his facemask to the ground. "We're on the same team, you retard! Killed by friendly fucking fire—I should rip your face off and wear it as a mask!"

  Paul and the other KIAs assembled back in the field. A gasoline- stoked fire raged; a boom box played "Hatchet to the Head" by Cannibal Corpse. Slit open crushed eyeballs dripping hanging / A life of beheading I must have. Einsteins walked around shirtless, flexing, their chilled flesh marbled like Kobe beef.

  Paul kept his shirt on. Stacey had him on Androl, Winstrol, and Human Growth Hormone—a dog's breakfast that bloated him up like a dead cow. He sloshed like a wineskin; he could bench-press two-fifty but looked like a walrus. With his liver values out of whack, his skin had gone the color of dried lemon rind. The HGH, concocted from the pituitary glands of cadavers—"The best stuff," Stacey told him, "comes from aborted third-trimester fetuses"—had given him the swollen forehead and elongated jaw of those giant heads on Easter Island. "Think of it as a cocoon," Stacey had told him. "You puff up, look disgusting for a month, then I put you on Lasix to leach the fluid out—a whole new you."

  The boom box kicked out "Skull Full of Maggots," "Sanded Faceless," and "Fucked With a Knife," and by the time "I Cum Blood" hit its final note the other players had made their way back. The Einstein sought Stacey out and started bitching about Paul's gaffe.

  "Is this true?" Stacey asked. "You killed your own man?"

  Paul glared at the Einstein, who stood behind Stacey like a tattletale behind his headmaster. "I didn't kill anyone. It's a game."

  Stacey bristled. "Shooting your own man is the most disgraceful act a soldier can commit."

  "Nail on the head, Stace," the Einstein spat. "He's a fucking disgrace."

  "What were you doing in front of me?" Paul asked.

  "He was probably running an end-around flanking pattern." When Stacey sought confirmation on this, the Einstein gave him a "what else?" look.

  Paul's teeth clenched the length of his jaw; it felt as if someone had slapped a jellyfish on his scalp, stinging, stinging. If the Einstein bitched once more, Paul resolved to punch his nose down his throat.

  The players loaded up fresh paint and headed out for round two.

  "Paul," Stacey said, "you take point."

  Paul had watched enough Tour of Duty to know that point was not anywhere a soldier wa
nted to be. But he was sick of these over-muscled jackasses and their war games; the prospect of getting killed early wasn't a heartbreaker.

  He hunkered down behind a tree stump. The air horn sounded. Paul scanned the woods for any sign of movement, keeping his eyes sighted down the gun barrel. He spied a body crashing through the underbrush and opened fire. His target dodged and wove; Paul cursed as his shots went wide or fell short. He managed to pin him down behind a tree.

  "I got all day!" he cried out. "I can—"

  A paintball slammed into his head—the back of it, above the trim of fine dark hair. His skull snapped forward like he'd been donkey-punched. He'd been shot at point-blank range and expected to find the back of his head blown apart: bone fragments, spattered brains. But his fingers came away clown's-nose red: only paint.

  He turned and saw the Einstein he'd shot in the foot. The guy's body was locked in an action-hero pose; C02 smoke curled from his gun barrel.

  "Mercy," was all he said.

  A flashpot went off inside Paul's braincase, a tiny superheated sun that scorched the walls of bone; the light froze in thin sharp icicles that dangled, luminous, from the roof of his skull.

  He clawed himself up and shot the Einstein. His gun went phut: a bright Rorschach appeared over the Einstein's heart. The Einstein returned fire. They were less than two feet apart. Phut-phut-ph- phut. The air was alive with twisting, curiously static strings of paint.

  Paul gripped his gun by the barrel and swung it at the Einstein's head. The C02 canister struck his jaw and the guy went down in the sedge grass.

  Paul sat on his chest and rained blows. Fierce chopping punches, left-right, left-right. Dark arterial red plastered the inside of the Einstein's faceshield; red bubbled through the mask's airholes.

  Left-right, left-right. A fist cracked the faceshield: needles of red, pulped skin. Left-right, left-right. Things crumpled and snapped and split and tore loose. A shockingly bright ring spread across the grass. The Einstein wasn't moving; his left leg twitched the way a sleeping dog's will. Paul's shoulders throbbed. His fists dripped.

  He tore a bush from the ground. It came up easily, root system clumped with dirt. He replanted it: now the bush appeared to be growing up out of the Einstein's face.

  Back in the field Paul opened car doors until he found one with keys in the ignition. His paint-splattered parka left carnival smears on the leather interior. He gunned the engine and careened through the fire and scraped up the side of Stacey's Humvee; sparks leapt through the open window. He lined up the boom box and hit it dead center: it exploded in a spray of cheap plastic and a woofer glanced off the windshield as he accelerated out of the field howling like a banshee.

  He kept an eye on the rearview and even pulled over, idling at the roadside for a minute. Nobody came after him.

  Paul dropped the vehicle at Jammer's, where he'd left his own car, and grabbed a tire iron from the Micra's trunk.

  The gym was empty save for an old guy on a treadmill plodding along like a prisoner on the Bataan death march. Paul took the tire iron to the locked drawer behind the front desk. He filled his pockets with Deca, HGH, two 500-count jars of Dianabol. He was amused to find that the drawer also held Polaroids of Stacey in naked bodybuilding poses. He sported a boner in one shot: the thing looked like a whippet's backbone. Paul emptied out his locker and departed Jammer's for the last time.

  Back in the Micra he wiped his face with fast-food napkins; red paint was still grimed into the creases at his eyes. He gobbled a handful of Dianabol and a live-wire jolt thundered up his spine. His skin was yellow and tight and infested with a bone-deep itch, as if his skeletal system were constructed of pink fiberglass insulation.

  He drove down Geneva to Queenston then on to Glendale past a stretch of shipyards. He got the little car up to eighty, sparks hopping off the muffler like flaming crickets. Popping the cap off an HGH syrette and plunging it into the hard-packed muscles of his trapezium, he wondered if he'd shot himself with quality fetal brain tissue or run- of-the-mill cadaver.

  Had he killed that guy? The silly fucker who shot him—was he dead? Paul pictured the Einstein on the frosty earth with that fucking shrub growing up out of his face. Had he been breathing? Probably. Human organisms are tough and it's hard for them to die. He tried to concentrate—had the guy's lungs been pumping, even a little?—but the image dissolved, his mind unraveling in messy loops.

  People were jogging and dog-walking along the canal. He thought how easy it would be to skip the curb, accelerate across the greenbelt, slam into one of them. He pictured bodies crumpling over the hood or rupturing under the tires with red goo spewing from mouths and ears and assholes; he saw smashed headlight glass embedded in faces, saw windshield wipers flying at murderous velocity to sever arms and legs.

  He was doing sixty-five when he wrenched the wheel and sent the Micra over the curb. His skull hit the roof and the seatbelt cut into his porcine, fluid-filled body.

  His target was riding one of those idiotic recumbent bicycles. He wore a shiny metal-flake helmet, royal purple, like the paint job on a custom roadster. Paul figured he'd hit him broadside and crush him against a dock pillar, or else clip his wheel and launch him into the ice-cold sky, a flailing purple mortar crashing through the canal ice. The Micra shimmy-shook as he gunned it over the greenbelt; a tree branch tore the side-view mirror off. The cyclist caught sight of the car barreling down and pumped his pedals as if to outrun it. Paul had a hearty laugh—what bravado!

  He slewed onto the pedestrian footpath, his heart palpitating madly. He popped an ampule of Deca-Durabolin into his mouth, crushed the light-bulb-thin glass between his molars, and swallowed it all down.

  An old man was seated on a bench scattering bread crusts to pigeons; his eyes became cavernous white Os at the sight of the onrushing car. Paul considered grazing the bench, severing his legs at the knees, but the old man didn't deserve it half so much as the cyclist so he swerved through the pigeons instead and had to admire their reluctance to pass up a free meal, even in the face of death; their gluttonous shapes bounded over the hood leaving blood and shards of pigeon skull on the windshield. One bird's beak got jammed in the windshield-wiper arm—its body sailed over the roof but its knotted rag of a head, with its calcified beak and diseased eyes, that stayed put. This unsettled the hell out of Paul; he flicked the wipers but the damn thing just flapped side to side across the glass.

  The cyclist glanced over his shoulder and saw Paul twenty yards back; his legs were pumping like a pair of sewing machine needles. Paul checked the speedometer, saw he was doing nearly forty klicks, and felt grudging respect. He pictured himself in a courtroom, defending his actions to a powder-wigged judge. Mitigating circumstances, your honor: not only was the deceased riding a recumbent bicycle, but let the record show he also wore a fruity purple helmet. He inched up on the bike tire, close enough to see the cyclist's terrified reflection in the bike's rearview mirror—Your honor, he had a rearview mirror bolted to the handlebars! I throw myself upon the mercy of the court!

  Paul was charged up, galvanic, rocket fuel coursing through his veins, but at the last possible instant he jerked the wheel and the Micra went skipping back across the greenbelt, the front bumper clipping a trash can and sending the car into an unchecked swoon. His head cracked the dashboard and stars, whole constellations, blossomed before his eyes as the car spun across the frictionless grass, one revolution, two, three, then he was back on the street as the windshield filled with the blaze of oncoming headlights, tires screeching, horns bleating, and Paul, still woozy, hit the gas and cut across lanes into the parking lot of an insurance broker, mercifully closed. He lay draped over the wheel until he heard angry voices nearby and veered onto the street again.

  In a supermarket now, pushing a shopping cart down the aisles. The industrial halogens stung his eyes. In the produce section he picked a ripe peach, took a bite and grinned as sweet nectar dribbled down his chin.

  He bagged up a dozen tom
atoes then swung down the next aisle and picked up six cartons of extra large Omega 3 eggs. He spied a pack of firecrackers in the discount bin and chucked it in the cart.

  He passed down the household gadgets aisle. He saw the Remington Fuzz Away; phone attachments with 200-number autodial memories; something called the Racquet Zapper, an electric flyswatter that promised to make "pest control a zap." It was funny, Paul thought, how we do it to ourselves. He thought of all the inventions over the past fifty years and figured ninety-nine percent were of the "quality of life" variety. Inventions to make life easier, lighten the roughness of existence—as if an electric flyswatter could somehow ease the stress of daily life. So now everyone's got a houseful of these dopey gadgets, mountains of cheap plastic and wiring, and can't possibly live without their juicers and pepperballs and hands-free phone sets and—he scanned the shelves restlessly—yes, their cordless Black and Decker Scumbuster 300s, couldn't visualize life before any of them—god, how did the pioneers manage it?—when all they really did was make everyone weaker, more reliant, less able to do for themselves until they were nothing but puddles of mush.

  "Remember your own damn phone numbers," he muttered. "Roll up a newspaper to swat at flies," his voice rising. "Pick lint off your fucking sweater with your fingers?' he screamed.

  In line at the checkout he scanned newspaper headlines. The Weekly World News'S top headline read: CLONED HITLER TURNS SEVEN YEARS OLD! The Toronto Star's seemed equally absurd: SHOT IN THE DARK: BLIND STUDENTS TREATED TO DEER HUNTING TRIP. He felt much calmer now, having settled on a plan of attack.

  The cashier eyed his purchases skeptically. "Looks like you've got an evening all planned out."

  "Yes," said Paul. "I'm baking a pie."

  She waved the firecrackers over the scanner. "Missing a few ingredients."