Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  I finish at dawn. I paperclip the pages, then I go to the closet and start putting the nice clothes on. I pick the blue tie.

  I’m the only one waiting when they open the cafeteria. I sit at a table by the window with a bowl of oatmeal. Expecting to be fully moved, I read what I’ve written. But instead of returning me to the feeling I had when I wrote it, the paper is immature and overly sensitive, trying too hard. I rip it ceremoniously, down the middle, but just after I’ve split the first page, I realize I have nothing else and nothing better. After I bus my tray, I walk over to the career center, go up to the second floor of the building where the offices are. The secretary lets me into the waiting area and has me take a seat. She goes over to her desk and unwraps some foil, and quickly the room fills with the scent of eggs. I fall asleep.

  Something bumps me awake, a woman’s leg, a girl’s. I turn my head and she’s pretending to study her notes, but looks up right away, too fast, so I know she’s intentionally awoken me.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  This is one of those conversations I’m meant to push forward. She notices my torn opening page.

  “I had an accident,” I say. “What’s your presentation on?”

  “First, ask me what my roommate’s doing.”

  “O.K.” I rub my eyes and she tells me about her roommate’s plan, her presentation, which is to photograph every winner of the Michaelis Medal, a photography prize that’s given once per year by a foundation in Germany to the taker “of a single distinguished photograph representing man’s consciousness and/or ontology, and/or the line between.” Her project will take her all over the world, and she’ll have to photograph forty-three people, including sixteen gravestones, since the recipients have an eerily high mortality rate.

  “Your roommate, she’s a photography student?”

  “Yes, she’s already filed some grant applications.”

  “Grants, wow.”

  “Mine’s a few experimental models predicting famine. I’ve been working on them for a few months.” She angles her paper over and I make out this equation:

  “This one I used the abandonment formula for oil fields as a starting point, and I plugged in new pieces and basically just tinkered with it like crazy, and got some interesting results.” She has on a red headband I’d like to tug. “What’s yours on?”

  A wave of foreign dust comes over me. Unconsciously, I lift both arms and begin the process of unscrewing my head. It’s time to reveal it to her. But then I quit, seeing her face, which is not Mary Beth’s, to whom I’d silently promised the privilege of being my widow, her face is not even close. One of the mollusk’s sixteen tentacles squirms beneath my tie, having had such a close call.

  She leans over and reads out loud the first sentence of my paper, which is the homework quote I’d wanted to shove down Silas’s throat. “‘Among the possible groups of truth-conditions there are two extreme cases,’” she says. “That’s good. What’s it mean?”

  “Mr. Florida?” the receptionist says. I smile at her and she yawns.

  The door I’m sent through leads into a room that’s much smaller than expected. A single man is sitting at a desk. “Hi, Mr. Florida. Please take a seat, my name’s Graham Danbury and I’m temporarily taking over the Howard presentations.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Howard?” I’m suddenly afraid to look around the office, as if she’s hiding in one of the corners.

  “Sorry to say she passed away in December.”

  “But I have her real signature. It was a letter addressed to me last month.”

  “Yes, well, Mrs. Howard was in the habit of signing a lot of her correspondence ahead of time.” A signature from the hand of a dead woman, a thing of weird and terrible power. “Do you have any questions before we begin?”

  “So am I the last round of the scholarship now?”

  “Not at all. Mrs. Howard had a lot of money—waste engineering—so the scholarship will keep going. But there will be some changes. We’ll now hear presentations the whole academic year instead of just in March, which was the only time she visited Oregsburg. The rest of the year she lived on Baffin Island.”

  “Baffin. Well, O.K.”

  “The scholarship was very important to her, and she spent a lot of time, almost an entire month, deciding the recipients. She picked you out of everyone. There’s a reason for it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, let’s get on with it.”

  “O.K.,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I’d be amiss if I didn’t first point out that the content of my presentation includes real things. In that light, I’ve changed the names in order to freely talk.”

  “All right.”

  “The name of my speech, I wrote it out here, is ‘The Inextricable Connection Between Jazz and Murder, A Case Study.’”

  HARGRAVES DRIVES ME and Linus to Kenosha five days early. We stay in a tall hotel. Hargraves finds a middle school that lets us use the gym during the afternoons, and we practice over and over. He drills us on different scenarios, I’m the aggressor, then Linus plays someone who likes to shoot left, I practice sit outs for an hour, then we switch.

  They give us the brackets. 133 looks like this:

  (1) Bodner

  Hahn

  Heckelman

  (8) Luecke

  (5) Gerber

  Jones / Borden

  Northrup

  (4) Florida

  (3) Skouras

  Cooke

  Zasadzinski

  Fisher / (6) Chanatry

  (7) Taube

  McBride

  Iralu

  (2) Veith

  Hargraves gets off the phone with Farrow and tells me about Aldo Northrup. He got third in the West Regional. The strategy for Northrup is he likes to shoot from the outside, and so it’s very simple: tie him up and get in his face. We drive back to the gym. We stretch and pull, warming up like always, and Linus pretends to be Northrup for the morning, and I pretend to be his first-rounder in the afternoon. Over the years I’ve wrestled and sparred thousands of times and sometimes, not often, when you’re continually close against the other person, the roughhousing can turn in a different, deeper direction, a sexual direction, where you feel their skin as distinctly not yours. I’ve felt it when I’ve touched Linus’s acne scars, seen his tongue come out of his mouth when he’s hand fighting me. You feel them being brought nearer and nearer to you. The whole thing just happens. There’s not really another way to put it. It hasn’t happened in a while but it’s happening with Linus. Every time it does, there’s no chance the other person doesn’t feel it, too, and after the first time with someone, it only returns stronger the next time. Toward the end of the day, Hargraves has Linus try to stalemate me. He tells Linus (and this is true) that he needs to work on developing out of an inferior position because he hasn’t had the practice of being behind yet. I go in on a high crotch and he falls over, and I know what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to get my ankle, so I pull my leg away and he only gets my calf. “Basic defense!” Hargraves screams. I spin over on top of him, his clenched teeth, looking down at his face, the whole history of ours is there, the sloppy container of all I have for him, and he’s not anyone else’s. I find myself pressing my hand against his face, mashing it to the mat, squeezing, his visage squirming out of my palm and trying to get up, but I can tell we’re not practicing anymore so I don’t let him. “Hey!” Hargraves yells, but he gets ahold of my knee and pulls it, the bad one, and I feel something inside there just as I drive my other knee, the good one, into his ribs twice and he grabs anything he can to get me off his back and what he gets is the waist of my shorts and pulls them down to my compressions, so I gather his facial features in my hand and squeeze again like it’s a bike horn, everything is sooner than expected, I’m ramming my knee into his ribs, the same place, harder and harder, and he tries
to turn over like a fish and I give him credit because he’s good so he’s able to, he’s very small and slippery, and what happens is because I put my face right up against his elbow where the skin is smudged darker than the rest of him he cracks me right above my eye socket, the eyebrow, and he again shakes his face out of my hand, but I immediately slam it down onto the mat and when I see his face again it’s got jam coming out of the middle.

  “Fucking shit, goddamnit!” Hargraves screams, wedging between us. When Linus finally rights himself, the blood goes down his mouth and blobs on his shirt. Hargraves has to lie down on top of him. I stand up and shrug my shoulders, walking out, not letting them see what’s happened in my knee, and so I deal with the pain and don’t limp. Practice is over for the day.

  We go to a family restaurant (Hargraves sits between us) and eat in silence until the waiter drops three plates of steaks on the ground. After we’ve finished laughing at him, we are again able to pretend like nothing’s happened. Linus has gauze in his nostrils.

  During the few nights in the hotel, I shut myself in my room as soon as we get there and leave the television on until morning. I stare for hours at my kneecap and the curved, grinning scar. The wall the television’s on is the wall I share with Linus, and I keep it very loud. I think about Linus’s tendinitis, Linus’s face. The same way a word loses its meaning if you say it over and over, a human face ceases being a face if you look at it long enough. It’s hard to elect to join the human race, I mean fully, when they all just appear to be a collection of moving blood tubes and protein. The television talking is still going when I float up from sleep, news going into sports going into news again, a cycle that shifts words every four hours as new things happen. I do sit-ups and bounce on the bed. I open the window and bend over the balcony. I can’t believe my luck, I’ve got enough for two people! I stand in the shower, set the television loud enough so I can hear it over the water. Though his room is right next to mine, Linus never once knocks on my door, and I don’t knock on his.

  That’s not true. The night before it starts, Thursday, I’m cleaning up after a shower when I hear a series of doors slamming or just one door slamming a few times. There are three or four voices in the hall. I put my clothes on, and after standing with my forehead pressed against my door, breathing in and out, I open it and knock on Linus’s door. I stand there for sixty seconds. I count it out. And then I realize that he’s left to be with his family, that they’ve driven here from Nebraska to be with him and that he’s gone and I’ve knocked on a door to an empty room, which is just as well because all I’ve got left are cheap, discounted feelings.

  No one ever called me a monstrous talent in the newspaper. I was always in love with the unfaithful thing. But look where I am anyway, on top of a hotel in a faraway city that I was invited to, alone, all this room. Watch.

  I have a dream that a Stasi agent named Carl is very sorry about it, but he creeps into Linus’s room late at night when he’s sleeping and sprays radiation on him. He is so quiet and good at his job that he doesn’t even disturb Linus’s tycoonish dreams. After, as part of the assignment, Carl follows him around at a distance pointing a Geiger counter at him, to keep track of the demise. He was told in a letter, which also included all Linus’s information, that Linus was an enemy of the state, but Carl didn’t care about the state, he had two daughters and needed to work. And then the dream ended with me at Linus’s funeral, outside the church, pacing in front of the door like a father outside the delivery room, unable to work up the nerve to go inside. He died of a vague, unplaceable cancer and was buried with his lacrosse ball.

  On Friday, I wake up and turn the television off. I’ve been sleeping naked. The knee is quiet but I’m always aware of it. My singlet is hung up in the closet. I sit on the toilet and void everything, then I go to the sink and run cold water into my cupped hands and dump five handfuls over my head. Then I step into my singlet, and put the rest of my equipment in the bag. I’m not expecting Mary Beth but I’ve brought her earrings. I lug the worms around. Their nest is inside my knee. I wait downstairs in the lobby for the car.

  On the drive over, it’s just me and Hargraves. I have four matches left. I start laughing.

  Linus meets us in the parking lot by the main doors. We walk through the general entrance with the rest of the crowd. Linus and Hargraves and me are stuck behind a menopausal woman, one that has an enormous, grotesque tush, the kind where it’s a gland thing, where she has to buy the special wide-seat pants all the time, the kind where she relies on vehicles and elevators because her body is malfunctional, she’s very short and her whole self looks like a garlic bulb. We’re stuck behind her, and so we enter slowly.

  The cavern of the gym is already filled up. Linus leans over to me. “Jesus Christ, we are so talented!” He gently touches my ear, squeezes the thick parts. His are starting to flower, as he hasn’t requested a drain since Fink got locked away. He lets go and walks away before I can speak.

  They weigh us.

  Hargraves leads us through a bunch of tunnels, passing groups of wrestlers everywhere, huddled together and sparring at half speed or jumping rope, or jumping in place, shaking their heads like water’s in their ears. We take a bunch of turns. When there’s an empty hallway, he stops. Shouting echoes off the walls. He puts his arms around us, leans us over so we’re huddled with our heads together.

  “I don’t know what’s left to say. You guys are here. You’re really here. Stephen, you got your knee busted up but you worked your way back. Linus, you came in and right from the get-go you dominated, you lost your grandma and you kept dominating. I can’t fucking believe it’s going to be over so fast and you’re going to get on that pedestal with your trophies. I’m going to leave you two be. Linus, you come up and meet me when you’re ready, you’re almost up.”

  And then Hargraves leaves us alone.

  We stretch each other in silence. I tell him vaguely to stay away from my left leg, and after, he practices stagger stance and shooting on an invisible opponent. Then we stretch again.

  I try my best.

  “I know you put the notebook there for me to find it.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  I say, “In the training room, you put it there. Were you afraid to admit anything out loud?”

  I’m holding on to his arm, bending it back to ready the muscle and keep it loose. “Stephen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What notebook?”

  If he’s not going to be truthful I can wait until he’s ready. He’s mine and I guess I’m still somehow his.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you but it’s over now.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Then he leaves, jogging around the corner. He’s the 125 one-seed and he doesn’t need me to be there to watch him pin his opponent. I’m alone in the hallway. Months ago, on one of those nights after practice when he’d sit in my chair and read, he said, “Do you think we’d still be friends if neither of us wrestled?”

  I attach my headgear. The debris spins around my kneecap like an agitated snow globe. I start writing in my head the biography of Aldo Northrup. It’s a lie, it’s a game I play with myself, but I won’t have to do it much longer. I lace my shoes all the way down to the foot of the tongue, then go all the way up, rolling the knot at the top. I’m sweating through my singlet. Life and the human condition are the exact same thing and it makes no difference, the design is sadness, gravitational and old, except the few times it hiccups and it’s not. I come out one tunnel after another. I wear my coat until the last hallway mouths up against the full arena, the blue seats barely visible under all the flesh, and then I take my coat off.

  Linus and two fat people are next to me.

  “Stephen, these are my parents.”

  They’re standing behind him, as though afraid.

  “Hello, I’m Stephen.”

  The father is the first to step forward to shake my hand, then the mother. She says, “I’m so glad we got to meet you fi
nally. Linus has told us so much.”

  “Thank you for the deodorant.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Is this a bad time?” the father says.

  “Yes, it is.”

  I walk around the sides of the mats. There are six of them: two red, two blue, and two black. I’m in front of thousands of people. I turn my back to them. The noises they make smash into one sound that rushes in a wave past my body onto the mats. The end is the point of wanting something in the first place, isn’t it? I good-luck tug my straps and square my bulge.

  The successful mentality I’ve been going into every match with is this: if you’re lower-rated than me, I’ve been insulted and have to make a show of how much better I am, if you’re higher-rated than me, I’m being insulted because they think you’re better than me, and I make a show to prove they’re wrong. Either way, I hand the insult back.

  I walk past Hargraves, who says something.

  My designated mat is one of the red ones. Aldo Northrup is in a white singlet with a blue stripe. I put the red anklet on and then the official puts us in the center of the circle. All of the cement and bone and sticks of wood crowd up against my sides but stay out of the circle, an effect of heat, a halo of heat and closeness gathers, and I never look at Aldo Northrup’s face. But I do hear the whistle. I get very close to him in a defensive stance with my legs out to the sides, I creep toward him with my elbows to my chest. He tries shooting, he’s very fast, fast enough to shoot from that distance. I knock him away, my knee stinging every time. He tries high and low, both sides. We go around the circle. I finally get him to tie up with me. At first he doesn’t want to, but he runs out of space to back up and so I finally get my forehead against his. I keep close, I’m trying to wrestle him in the phone booth. He tries to get below my hands but he can’t, so our wrists and forearms keep tangling, which is what I want and what he doesn’t want, we’re rotating but he’s too frustrated to notice he can back up and he finally reaches, which is what I want, and I get him in an overhook. I’m lower than him. I step forward, between his legs. I body lock, driving him all the way across the mat until his feet catch and he goes flat on his back, and though I can’t get the pin, I hold him to the mat for the rest of the period, and I know I’m going to win. He picks bottom for the second, which is foolish. I think he’s just a sophomore. I ride him the whole second, conserving my knee. He gets out at some point toward the end, but I get the point back at the beginning of the third, and the rest of the time, he can’t decide if he wants to shoot from far, which I won’t let, or close, which he can’t. And so I roll up like an armadillo and store my energy. The whistle blows.