by Habash, Gabe
“What should you do what?”
“Should I track this person down? Phone records? How do I even do that?”
“You want to know if you should leave off this secret person, who’s probably lying, or try and find her.”
“Yes.”
For the first time, her face clears of stress in favor of something like explicit nurse concern. “You don’t have anyone else?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know, family is important. But this sounds like bad news. I think you should forget it.”
The TV keeps me company. Rawhide is on, then Bonanza, then Gunsmoke. Chester and Matt first have an argument about drinking hot tea when it’s hot outside, but then young Timmy shows up saying he’s been seeing all types of bizarre shit at night, a man and woman robbing and killing people and then going back to their weird shed outside town. Matt is doubtful because Timmy likes to make shit up but he goes with him anyway because he’s Matt. And sure enough the man and woman come back to their weird shed and count their robbed money in front of the hidden, watching Matt and he jumps out and shoots all the crazies to death in their chests. The moral starts as don’t lie but ends up being tell the truth.
They take pity on me and let me wheel down to the end of the hall. It’s a busy hour, so I push my limit a little and go around the corner, where I discover the hospital chapel. There’s a rectangular yellowish window behind the altar. I roll up and put my palm on it. It’s not outside light coming through. Some kind of fake yellow bulb’s behind the surface. On a side table, there’s a statuette of a particularly pretty Virgin Mary, the prettiest Virgin Mary I’ve ever seen. I roll up to her. She has the baby Jesus cradled against her torso, looking down at him with an enraptured visage, and I sort of have to reach around his head to touch the bumps under her garment. While I yank myself I experience eternal, depthless frustration, frustration that someone might walk in at any minute so I’ll have to stop soon, and for all the other obvious reasons.
At some point, I guess between the second and third morphine refill, I start to measure time by the rate that the metronome effusion pain in my knee rises.
If I can be honest with myself, one of my big problems is not facing things head-on. Non-wrestling things, I mean. For instance, if I had told Mary Beth and Linus about Aunt Lorraine, or Mary Beth about my parents, or Linus about Mary Beth, now I could talk to them about it and disperse the pressure. But I never disperse the pressure. I keep it all to myself like the exit’s connected by tube back to the entrance, it’s all doing laps, and now I’ll never let it out. It’s my own show.
I’ll never tell Mary Beth about Masha. Sometimes I think I can be honest with her but whenever she’s with me I clam up like a real coward, as if I don’t want to ask for help on the test. Something about the way she looks at me. I’ve twisted up too many things I’m ashamed of to be able to know which string to pull first.
I’m not sure I see much difference between the past and the future, they’re both featureless pasteboard, but the present is a hospital room and a knee full of dirty bugs.
I remember the names of the ninety-nine wrestlers I’ve ever lost to: 1. Ben Davis. 2. Jeremiah Gross. 3. Patrick Young. 4. Mike Fett. 5. Terry Blalock. 6. Mike Hunter. 7. David Silva. 8. Andre Rasmussen. 9. Charles Powell. 10. John Orlov. 11. Lewiss Tong. 12. Kevin Cunningham. 13. Jaimie Whitehouse. 14. Edward Kittle. 15. Abram Boone. 16. Andrew Wright. 17. Greg Knox. 18. Adam Kirchner. 19. Dan Acee. 20. Lester Whaley. 21. Theo Jernigan. 22. Justin Maine-Hershey. 23. Fred Husbands. 24. Sean Harris. 25. Tom Neufeldt. 26. Myer Hayes. 27. Martin Whitten. 28. Will Springer. 29. John Daniel Hoy. 30. Bernard Hafrey. 31. Kyle Maclean. 32. Elliott van Zwet. 33. John Kot. 34. Mike Mehl. 35. John Tobias. 36. Brian Nesci. 37. Wayne Sullivan. 38. John Henry Rees. 39. Ben Demeke. 40. Zach Coe. 41. Robby Hughes. 42. Jon Pruitt. 43. Francis Melliar-Smith. 44. Pat Hasko. 45. Laurence Rzepka. 46. Tom Nawn. 47. Kip Auerbach. 48. Andrew Shipp. 49. Jess Nardell. 50. Marsh Margolin. 51. James Davis. 52. Mill Hamm. 53. Evan Sanders. 54. Myer McDermott. 55. Curtis Woll. 56. Nikola Glenn. 57. Ross Wagner. 58. Stanley Sutton. 59. Ellary Carter. 60. Norman Seeger. 61. Clay Goodchild. 62. Jacob Niedewski. 63. Corbin Kendrick. 64. Ivan French. 65. Robb Penman. 66. Marco Russell. 67. Adam Gansheroff. 68. Grant Weber. 69. Isaac Chasson. 70. Benjamin Crouse. 71. Patrick Seber. 72. Jason Lane. 73. James McDonald. 74. Brian Leape. 75. Scott McKee. 76. Ryan Campbell. 77. Todd Smith. 78. Josh DeWitt. 79. Alex Thompson. 80. Bill Fisher. 81. Ian Seaver. 82. Tony Burden. 83. Alan Jones. 84. Mark Broadfoot. 85. Kyle Brown. 86. Albert Perry. 87. Nick Grant. 88. Terner Reid. 89. Jose Yandell. 90. Tom Schneider. 91. Rudy Banks. 92. Caleb Karns. 93. Chris Gomez. 94. Ben Brown. 95. Derrick Ebersole. 96. Dan Vernon. 97. Jeff Riddell. 98. Bart Frazier. 99. Joseph Carver.
I had them written down in a notebook I kept until high school when I got them all memorized. They all have a number that orders them in time with when they came into my life. When I get access to the press sheets, the tournament brackets, it’s the first thing I do: check for a name I recognize. I tracked all this info down. Seventy-seven of them don’t appear anywhere in the materials, meaning, I have to assume, that they’re not wrestling anymore. Cross off the names, you have twenty-two left. Eight of those wrestle in the other divisions. Cross them out, you have fourteen left. Wrestlers in my division, my weight. I’d like to start with those fourteen. I would do anything for another chance. How wonderful it would be to carry that notebook around, if I still had it, finding all ninety-nine of them, getting to compete against them again, to redo it and spend the next few years working back through my past, wiping clean the record one by one, crossing the names off until I got to Ben Davis, who was a thirteen-year-old with red hair and braces when he got a 4–3 decision on me in Oakes in front of my fucking parents.
“Mr. Florida, you should get some sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”
More morphine for me! Yum-yum morphine! Put it in myself good!
February 5 is my birthday.
Who was that on the phone anyway?
I think about them getting in the car. They were going to see a movie, I don’t remember what one, something my mom wanted to see and my dad was going to make her happy. I hate the commonness of how they died, the predictability of the death of one’s parents in a car accident. I get tired of retelling the same story. The details never change. I don’t want to tell it anymore.
There’s a rotting smell in the room like it was just here next to the bed but ran out into the hall when I woke up. I grab my fluids pole and hop to the door. I look down the hall. “Who is it? Who’s there?” At the end of the hall, a nurse gets up from her station and starts coming toward me. I duck back into my room and shut the door. The smell is coming from the bathroom. The door is cracked. The light is on in there. I hobble over and pull it open. The seat is up. I go over and look inside, and it’s full of vomit.
The nurse, a different one, wakes me up and tells me it’s time for the surgery. She waits outside while I go to the bathroom, which is clean, and then wheelchairs me to the operating room, where there are more people and Dr. Moon.
Well, they give me the gas and out I go.
I wake up and within seconds, like they know, a nurse walks through the door.
“One to ten, please quantify your pain.”
“Three,” I say.
She makes some scribbles on her clipboard. Teeth or horns grow out of her red face, which is the red face of the devil. “Thank you, Mr. Florida. There were no complications.”
Later, I wake up in my hospital room. I pick up the buzzer and the nurse comes in.
“I’m ready to leave now.”
I take the bus home and crutch up to my room. My only instructions are to go to the student health center in a week to get my stitches out and to rest in the meantime. I haven’t had this little to do in years. In a normal week, I hover between 133 and 136 and leading up to weigh-in I like to feel the weight come out of my body, I like to feel it vanish. Work pain s
uccess.
I used to think the best thing in the world would be if a camera crew followed me around and documented everything, but now I can’t think of anything worse.
For a very long time, I look at the stitches.
I go to class, take my final in What Is Nothing? The whole exam is a single sheet of paper with only one question at the top: “What is nothing?” I don’t know how to start, so for the first half hour I draw pizza slices in the margins, then I write all that I know until I don’t want to write about it anymore and I hand it in. Afterwards, I shut my door and get into bed. Someone knocks. “Hello? Stephen? I have to talk to you about something.” It’s the voice of Linus but I don’t make any noise, I pretend I’m not there, and he goes away.
I have figured out that a good way to make time pass faster is to sleep a lot.
I wait until I’m least likely to run into other people to leave my room. I shower with my leg outside the curtain. When someone spots me in the hallway and asks what happened, I just mumble, “Nothing serious,” and they leave me alone. At the cafeteria, I scrape some peanut butter into a cup. I take some fruit and put some celery and two eggs in my pocket and bring it all back to my room. I do dips and use the resistance band under my bed. I scoop out the peanut butter with my hand and spread it on my face.
At one point, though I don’t very much care anymore, I look over my definitions for Basic News Writing in my bed. I go to class and take the test. Because I came to every single class and put my name on the sign-in sheet passed around the room, I’m given the preferential final, which is one hundred definitions. This was the deal Mr. Mills offered on the first day of class and I took it. My test in part looks like this:
18.__________, also called lower thirds, are electronically generated captions superimposed on a screen.
19.______________________ is what we call interviews with members of the general public.
20.A ________ is a short name for an in-production article.
I grab my bag and take the test up to Mr. Mills at the front of the lecture room, leaving while the slack-ass kids taking the nonpreferential test start their essays. I’ll never see any of them again.
“Are you in there? You should have some help with your knee. If you’re in there make a noise or something.”
A few nights and days stocking up on sleep makes you restless.
I was hoping to avoid Mary Beth after our last day of Drawing, but of course that doesn’t happen. After I hand in my sketchbook to Mrs. Caple, which contains a blow-up sketch of my stitches, autographed, I find Mary Beth waiting outside the studio.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to carry your bag?”
“No, thank you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” I say. “Are you going to Renaissance?”
“Yeah, have my final. Want to walk with me?”
“O.K., I can do that.” My mouth remains shut because of extreme embarrassment. I try to smile. We’re at the central part of campus where everyone else needs to walk to get where they’re going, a hundred different directions, and they all make way for the cripple and his partner. Mary Beth is the hardest person to be around because she amplifies my embarrassment to the highest level. So, more than anyone, I’ve been avoiding her, but perversely I don’t want anyone else’s help but hers. I can’t picture anyone else doing it.
I just need to tell her I need some time to figure this out. First I need to get my stitches out and start rehabbing, then get back into the routine and shit on Kryger and come back and get to regionals, then get to the championship. It sounds so easy when put in logical order. One night’s homework reading said, “In a certain sense we cannot make mistakes in logic.” I can tell her to just wait a few weeks and be patient, when she comes back from the holiday break, I’ll be fine. I start small.
“Is the final going to be hard?”
“No,” she says. “I have to tell you something.” That same homework said, “In logic process and result are equivalent. (Therefore no surprises.)”
“Tell me what, Mary Beth?”
“That I think if I had met you before all of this started, I wouldn’t have let it start. But I didn’t, and so it did.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I met you, I was sending out letters to museums and galleries in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, anything I could find. I was doing it since September. I stopped sending them a week after I met you. And then we started talking, and this whole time I’ve been hoping that none of them would write back, that I wouldn’t have to make this fucking decision. But one did write back, it’s from a gallery in Birmingham. In Michigan. It’s just an assistant position, but …”
She hands me the letter and I hold it in front of my face but I do not read the words.
“How are you going to finish school?” I say, which means we’ve already moved on to the formalities. I kept waiting for the consequences and now here they come.
“I only have two electives left, they’re going to let me take them in Birmingham.”
“Oh, that’s good.” I give her the letter back without looking at her.
“I have to go, Stephen. When I got here three years ago, it took me about three weeks to get sick of it. I don’t like it here, I never liked it here, really, until I met you. Oregsburg isn’t a good school. I only came here in the first place because they gave me the best scholarship. I told myself I’d never set foot in North Dakota after I finished school, and I only stuck it out because I thought it gave me the best chance to go somewhere else and move on. This is what I’ve been killing myself for, you of all people should know what that means. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Look at me. Do you?”
“Yes.” She’s crying, but I start crutching toward her class. “You’re going to be late for the final.”
“Goddamnit, this is so stupid,” she says. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I wanted to get dinner with you tonight. So I’d like to do that before I leave, if that’s all right.”
“O.K.”
“Good, I’ll come to McCloskey at seven. I’ll wait outside for you. At Allnighter?”
“Yes, that sounds good.”
“Are you sure you can find something? I’m not sure they have anything you can eat.”
“Don’t worry, I can find something.”
We’re at Rainbow. “I wish I could just skip this test because I think there are things we should really talk about. So don’t be late, O.K.?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for walking with me,” she says. And then kisses my cheek and goes inside.
I stare through the glass doors of Rainbow, which strangely do not reflect back at all. All you can see are the people inside.
Later, I’m convinced that something has gotten under my brace and so I keep undoing the straps to get it open right there on my bed but when I do there’s nothing, of course there’s nothing. And so I refasten everything back up but then I swear something’s there, I can feel it touching me, and I quickly undo it all over again.
“Stephen, I’m going to go to the Subway, do you want me to bring you something back? You don’t need to talk or open the door, I’ll wait here a minute, you can write down what you want on a paper and slide it under the door, O.K.?”
In the night, when no one else is awake, I leave my room to shave my head. The tip of my crutch stabs the cold sandwich left at my door. I shake it off and lettuce scatters in the hallway.
I encounter no one and stand in the communal bathroom, waiting for the sounds of people. When I’m convinced I’m alone, I do a quick loop past the mirrors and showers just to be sure, and then I head to the sixth stall (there are ten altogether), close the door, and set my crutches against the divider. It is mildly humiliating, even with no audience, to hoist myself with one good leg onto the toilet. I commence shaving my head, head shaving as med
itation. The old sensation of the clippers is a pleasure that never diminishes, the buzz is dulling and senseless in my ears. My little hairs drift down to the mouth of the toilet and start forming like rare algae on the surface. I’m going over my crown when I think I hear a door. I shut off the razor. I breathe through my nose. Footsteps. Quickly, I snatch up the crutches from the ground and hold them just as the bathroom door opens. The footsteps start down the row of toilets. Someone stops right outside my stall. “Stephen? Are you in here? Did you get my sandwich?” My messed-up leg twitches, fighting against the rest of my body trying to hold still. Sometimes lying is your greatest weapon. I’m full of lies like bees. “Shit, I guess he’s not in here.” As the footsteps go away, I let myself down and exit the other door.
I’m ten feet from my room when I hear again, “Stephen? Goddamnit, let me talk to you.” And he’s going to come around the corner right now, directly between me and my room, so I quickly open the utility closet door and close it quietly behind me. I don’t want to be anywhere that freak can find me.
The closet is big enough for four people but it’s all mine. All mine. There’s rusted metal shelving against the one wall, bottles of bright liquids, duct tape, a wrench. A drain in the center of the floor. It’s uncommonly hot, at least fifteen degrees above room temperature. The gigantic water heater takes up half the space, radiating waves of heat. There’s a mop bucket and a broom. On the eye-level shelf, there’s also a lipstick tube, nail polish, and a hand mirror propped against a white paint can. The handle is chipped. It’s showing me my face, but what I picture is Masha hiding in here, making sure she looks nice for her cleaning route, an old vain Russian woman snapping on her yellow gloves and going to work. I fully extend my arms and touch both walls, listen to the submarine noises of the large building I’m inside. I feel very safe, like if a bomb went off outside, I’d be safe in here, like no one could ever find me if I didn’t want them to, a needle in the haystack.