Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  Hargraves puts his hands on my shoulders. “You got Gerber next. I watched him. He’s defensive, a real turtler. He’s going to wait for your shots. It’s going to be hard to get in on his legs.”

  Like I’m following a trail of pebbles, I retrace all the hallways to the empty one. Every few turns, there are doors to the basement, where losers are already crying their eyes out. One comes out and holds the door for another going down, both red faced. I turn the last corner and am relieved to find Linus isn’t back there, so I test how bad my knee is. There’s a door to a stairway up at the end of the hallway. I walk up and down some stairs, over and over, until my head gets light, trying to keep loose, trying to forget everything, but what I keep thinking is this: that I beat a wrestler named Garber and now I’m wrestling someone named Gerber.

  In his second round, Linus executes one of the most beautiful pins I’ve ever seen, collar tie to high crotch to double leg to pin. While it’s happening, gravity seems to get sucked out of the building, and he puts the kid through the paces like diagrams in a textbook, one, then the other, then the other. And then it’s done.

  I retreat down a hallway and get my heart up. Then I go back out.

  My match is on the same mat as the first. Gerber gets there after me. He also wears a white singlet. I don’t look at his face. I put on the red anklet. I tap my toes. I get ready and the whistle goes.

  I search for a direct line of sight between my eyes and his legs. He immediately crabs up and gets his head and arms in the way. I take a testing shot at his left leg and his forehead bangs against mine, and suddenly his hands are grabbing all over, and I barely have time to get my hands in the way and step back before he gets ahold of me. We fuck around. He gets a stalling warning and becomes a little bit more aggressive, and in my attempt to unturtle him, I get a stalling warning. We stroll around the middle of the circle, I’m trying to follow him. But I didn’t get here by bullheadedly sticking to any system, I got here by adapting to what they gave me, and so I cross off the legs, everything below the waist I scribble out, because he’s not going to give them up. Anything I do he’s going to try to sprawl on me. So I look upper body. I get close. I get nearly on top of him. I knock him out of his stance. He backs up and then when he can’t do that anymore, he goes to the side. I keep pushing on his stance, breaking his base, ignoring my knee. I feel his legs lift and immediately I grab and get double underhooks on him, I choke down on him and after he briefly tries to clear his arm in response, I snap and almost right away he falls forward, as if he doesn’t want to put up with it at all, and I fall with him. But before I can even begin to try to flip him, he’s got my hook separated from my body, he breaks it like a string and I’m grabbing at his scrabbling feet. And this is the way the period ends: with Gerber back in his turtle stance.

  I get bottom first. Eventually, I get the sit out, but he racks up more than half a minute of riding time. Down 3–1, I know he’s going to be more aggressive, to get a takedown and try to run up the riding time, but it’s like a switch flips, he’s coming at me faster than I expected, and I’m not ready for it, his hands are a mess of slaps and he’s got my left leg and I’m on my back before I know what’s happened, landing so the knee is braced and putting me in a worse position, and he’s trying for the near fall or pin but by now I’m caught up, I reach down into the woods of myself and I look into his face for the first time. He has green eyes. I turn my head and swim and he’s holding my flank instead of my chest, and at that point it’s a matter of steps, piece by piece of my body unlatching from his, less and less leverage, until I break his hands. The period ends with me up a point, but Hargraves tells me he’s got a minute and twenty of riding time, which effectively means we’re even. “I guess I’m just going to have to ride him under a minute, then,” I tell him.

  I crouch behind him and right before the whistle goes, he starts. He gets a caution. We reset. The whistle goes and I hold on for the sedation, but the mistake a lot of people make on top is that they try to ride instead of trying to pin, and that’s how you get in trouble, so before Gerber throws all manners of sit outs and turns and roll attempts, tugging my singing knee and all its tendons around with him like a caught fish, I make myself as heavy as possible on his back and try to get my arm up around his head for a half nelson, but he won’t let me pin him, he won’t get flat. He keeps kicking and turning and I crawl around with him for what feels like nothing, but then Hargraves’s voice gets out of the thatch: “A minute!” I’m not just going to ride him under a minute, I’m going to ride him until the very end, which becomes an increasingly proximate thing while I have a seizure of absence, a particularly good one, aided by the harp music of my knee, or the stuttering piano of “Clair de Lune,” or both, because in the seizure all music is an abstract, academic concept. “Twenty seconds!” It’s difficult to ascertain whether I’ve ridden down better wrestlers than this or I’ve gotten heavier on top, a dichotomy worth ruminating on while I keep pushing, attempting a tilt and holding his arms, he’s in my control and my mind whites out like I’m filling out my taxes. He neither budges nor pushes out, it’s like he’s distracted by trying to stop me from turning him, which is enough when the whistle blows.

  I fall back and lie down and close my eyes. Inside my knee, it feels like someone’s reached up my leg from behind and is tuning the wires. I roll up to my feet, get my hand raised with little air inside my head.

  Hargraves takes me back to the same family restaurant. Linus is somewhere with his parents. He talks to me about his brother’s family, his two nieces. I don’t say anything. It’s not lost on me that Bodner, the one-seed, lost right after my match to the eight-seed, Luecke. None of that is lost on me, but what can I do about it until tomorrow? I eat the chicken dinner and blank out my entire life history.

  That night, I stand by the loop driveway and watch the cars pull up to the hotel. I have part of my hood’s fur rammed into my mouth. I wasn’t told exactly what animal went into the collar because the sales associate was unsure, but I have a suspicion that it was a beaver. When I’ve been out there for thirty minutes or so, a car pulls up and Linus opens the door. I’m off to the side and he doesn’t see me as Hargraves walks up. They have a conversation I can’t hear, with Linus standing at the passenger door. They talk for three or four minutes, and Hargraves walks back into the hotel. Then Linus sees me. He turns to his car and I hear him say, “Go around,” then he shuts his door and starts walking toward me. Behind him, his car begins to make a loop.

  “Hi there.”

  Erstwhile. Erstwhile is a word in the Barron’s.

  “You know,” he says. “I know that’s the same Robert Frost poem everyone uses.” I don’t answer. What do you say to that? He says, “Have you heard the one about the overconfident boy?”

  I shake my head.

  “Lemonade was his favorite drink. He drank lemonade every day. But only yellow lemonade, he hated pink lemonade. He told everyone that he could taste the difference between pink and yellow, and that pink was horrible. One day the boy was sitting in the hall after school waiting for his mother to pick him up. She was late and he was very thirsty. A man came down the hallway. He noticed the boy. The man said, ‘Where’s your mother?’ and the boy said, ‘She’s late.’ The man said, ‘You look very thirsty, can I get you a drink from the vending machine around the corner?’ The boy didn’t know exactly what vending machine he was talking about, but he was really thirsty and he said, ‘Yes, a lemonade, please,’ and the man said, ‘One lemonade, coming up. Oh wait, pink or yellow?’ And the boy made a face and said, ‘Yellow, please, pink is horrible,’ and the man said, ‘It is? Are you saying you can tell the difference?’ The boy assured him he could. Then the man said, ‘Want to make a wager? I have a blindfold here in my pocket. I put this on you and get you a lemonade and you take a sip and tell me what kind it is, pink or yellow. If you guess right, you get something, if you guess wrong, I get something.’ The boy thought it would be fun and he agreed.
‘Put this on,’ the man said, and the boy put the blindfold on. He heard the man walk down the hall, heard his footsteps go around the corner at the end of the hall. Then he heard nothing else for a few moments, and when the quiet kept going, he started to become scared. But then he heard footsteps coming from around the corner, heard them coming closer, until they were right in front of him and they stopped. ‘Here,’ the man’s voice said. The boy blindly reached out and took a bottle, and he began to feel uneasy. ‘Take a drink,’ the man’s voice said, and the boy put the bottle up to his lips and drank. He swallowed. The boy said, ‘That’s pink. It’s definitely pink.’ And the man didn’t say anything. The boy was suddenly afraid to take the blindfold off. He said, ‘Well, am I right?’ And then the man’s voice said, ‘It’s not either. And now for you to give me what I get.’”

  Linus’s car pulls back into the driveway. He turns, and as I’m watching him leave, suddenly I’m struck with the thought that the Frogman is only waiting around until after the season. I go upstairs. I didn’t get this far without being able to repress my fear, and though the fear of the inevitable is the deepest and coldest yet, I can focus on what I want, I just need to sit on them all for one more day, and it works, because what I dream about is a city full of alleys, thousands and thousands of alleys.

  This is the part with only one interpretation.

  On the drive over, I roll down my window and breathe Kenosha’s empty air. The collective unconscious of the nation is a wedge or pool of buzzing flies and it won’t get out of my head. The collective unconscious is killing me. Hargraves parks in the same spot as yesterday.

  I have two matches left in my entire life. I warm up with my coat on in the empty hallway. My bad kneecap is noticeably larger than the other. The nest of worms wriggle around inside.

  It used to be that if I didn’t feel worked up enough I’d just pull up the face of Ben Davis, or Patrick Young, or John Henry Rees, or Fred Husbands, or Patrick Seber, or Lewiss Tong. But now I realize that whenever I imagined them, their faces were made up, I couldn’t actually remember what they looked like when I’d lost to them, they wore out so long ago.

  I do no scouting on Luecke, there’s no point. All I need to know about him is that he beat the best 133 in the country because he is aggressive. I have maintained close and careful control of the proceedings. They’ll never slip through my fingers again. I head through the hallways to the arena, and when I get there, the most astounding thing happens.

  It seems to occur in one prolonged moment, as though the period had no stoppages, but it happens with forty-five seconds left in the second. Linus pushes on the kid, he keeps setting up his shots, breaking the kid down, but the kid keeps breaking Linus’s momentum every time he’s about to strike. There’s some connection between Linus’s move, the move he wants to make, and the kid’s response, every reaction is timed perfectly, as if they were responding to the same signal. But by the end of the first, and when the kid gets out from bottom to start the second, it’s clear that Linus is agitated. They break apart and size each other up, he’s agitated after every reset after a failed shot. And with every failed shot, shots to the kid’s legs and body become less attentive, and the kid’s rebuffals become more forceful. With a minute left in the second, Linus shoots messily, which is the same as lazily, and I guess it might as well have happened this way. It might as well be the kid hitting Linus with a Russian and pulling Linus’s arm forward, might as well be Linus taking a step forward to catch himself, putting all his weight on the foot that gets kicked out from under him, the whole thing takes a little more than two seconds, and when it’s over, Linus is flat and frozen-up under the kid, and in the instant it takes for the match to end, while Linus is folded up like a cheap party chair, I distinctly hear, over all the others, Hargraves let out an agonized bellow.

  I watch Linus. Something upsetting happens: he doesn’t dwell on the mat, he gets up and without heartbreak or defeat, he walks straight off like he’s walking home from the bank. He makes a line straight for me. I have a few seconds to ready my sympathy, which is there, but I’ve never had the practice of comforting him after a loss because I never thought it’d happen, and anyway, he speaks first. “I think I saw Mary Beth.”

  When it’s a few minutes before my turn, and I’m waiting on the sideline while Hargraves rubs my shoulders, I spot Luecke walking through the crowd on the other side of the mat. No one’s talking to him. When they call us up for the semifinal, he pushes forward through the bystanders, straight for the mat. Instead of meeting me in the center, he walks around the circumference of the circle, but not as though he’s afraid to go inside it, more like he’s confirming where it is, like a dog pacing outside the last door he saw his owner go through. Luecke does this until the referee yells at him, and then he comes into the circle. He has scratches and red cuts all over his arms. There’s something wrong with his lip. He won’t look at me. He quickly tilts his neck to the side, trying to crack it.

  I have good news and bad news! The bad news is that the abyss and the void are all the same thing and it is monumental and everywhere. The good news is you can lie still in your bed while the cursed and the unskinned walk around in it and not feel a thing.

  “I want a good match, you two. Good luck.” And just like that, he steps back and we head into the fuckery.

  He comes right after me. He wrestles like he wants to hurt me, a sensation I recognize from high school when I couldn’t redirect the madness in my brain. The ideal is to approach this sensation, to feel it coming closer and closer, and hold it until it stops struggling and helps you. The asymptote of harm. He tries double leg, high crotch, single leg, he goes for the body and the legs, but I keep getting my arms and head in the way, at one point he drives so hard with his head at my legs that his forehead crashes into mine and an inner cymbal clangs. He steps back and blinks. I can taste my knee in my mouth. He comes right back, so I engage his hands, waiting for him to reach but he doesn’t, he gets his head in the place on my shoulder sentimentally reserved for loved ones, and tries to drive, but I shrug and get him in a Russian, but he won’t open up. He tries a level change but I have his arm locked so he can’t, but then he pushes into me with a violence I haven’t felt before, and as he snaps my head down and locks it, I see the whole history of Luecke, a wrestler who’s maybe undergone more shit than me and found a way to process it into a force of frustration, and up against something I can’t control, I’m looking straight down at the white line on the mat and can’t move when suddenly I hear the whistle. “Illegal hold, green, one point, red.” I’m bailed out by him, by how bad he wants it. I suck the snot back into my nose and we reset, and he comes right after me again, with the same violence as before and this time I can’t stop it, maybe he’s an all-time sufferer because he gets both legs and the wind goes right out of me when he puts me to the ground and tries to roll my leg to my chest. Finally the whistle goes, and when it does, the violence immediately leaves Luecke’s body, it goes lax.

  How the fuck am I going to solve this one?

  I get bottom for the second. When we start, the wild, reckless energy, the one I can’t stop, seems to have gone away, but because he’s good, I can’t get out. I can’t get out. Getting out’s like trying to write a note while someone’s rattling your desk under you. He seems less concerned with turning me than choking out my air. Every few seconds, I feel a nudge from a different place and I push it away. Time passes. For the first time in what feels like forever, the sound of the crowd gets into my ears, and his hand moves up my neck and I feel like I’ve eaten a group of old pills, the referee mutters for him to watch it, and the only way to get rid of the feeling in my throat is to turn so I’m on my side, which is exactly what he wants, he’s putting me through the stages. It starts to get really bad. From behind me I can feel him bend me over and I can’t help it, I’m straining so hard against it my nose runs, something bends in my neck, between my neck and shoulder, but I keep pushing against it, everything i
s collecting into one shape and colors fill my eyeballs, he’s going to get a near fall on me, or worse. He has my arm behind me and the feeling drops out and something’s about to pop in my neck when the whistle blows.

  He lets go of me and I flop forward onto a spot of my own fluid, sucking for breath. My first thought is to buy time. I hadn’t realized how close to losing consciousness I was, the pain is in at least three places and it’s worse than what Carver did to my knee. I step up to my feet and stay still to gather myself. Blood comes back into my head and I shake my left arm. The feeling is like crackles of light and that’s the best I can get out of it.

  “Red, let’s get it going here.”

  I take my spot on top, going into it the way I always do, with my left around the waist, but I realize it’s weaker. I flip and put my right around his waist. He has a full two minutes of riding, a full period of it. I put all of it into one idea. It only takes him a few seconds to get his knees out but I’m right behind him like the devoted husband for the water birth. Both of my hands are on his left arm, gripping it to his chest. I put everything into it. I do a two-on-one, I rip and plant, plant with my knee and pay for it, but I rip him back into my lap as hard as I can and he rolls with me, it’s like magic, like the trick working for the first time, you only need the trick to work once. I plant my left leg under him, I’ve never felt any pain like this, and he tries to jump through but he can’t do it, I have my left arm under his face-up body and my right arm on top, latching his arm to his hip, he can’t do it, his stubbornness works against him now, he keeps trying to roll toward me. By the time he realizes he needs to go the other way, that’s all it takes, I get my two-count, but because he’s so stubborn it turns into a five-count, and I get my three points put on the board. Finally he turns, but I go with him because it’s like he’s doing exactly what I’ve whispered in his ear, and we’re back to where we started the period, me on top. I was correct in assuming he’d be easier to handle on the ground, but now I feel the violence rise up, I can feel it start to move out from his center. I have just enough time to turn my head so I get smashed in the cheekbone, and all I can do is hold on to him for a few more seconds before he’s out, and then he comes at me harder than ever. He changes levels right away and I barely get my head in front of his, but he keeps pushing, he pushes me back like I’m nothing, and his hand hits my shoulder, close enough to the spot that’s pulled in my neck, and I just try to keep close to him though he’s trying to keep me off, and when he tries to pull away to reset for another shot, I hear something rip. The whistle blows. Luecke steps back, looks at me in shock. It’s my knee. It’s my knee again. But I look down, and there’s a tear in the strap of my singlet. “Grasping the singlet, green, one point, red.” I look over at the clock. Twelve seconds left. I just have to hold on. The brain in its seat way up above the duodenum is instructing: Finish Finish Finish Finish. When I tilt my head to the side, a shingly shower of pesetas shifts to the tilt and we reset and I look at him and know he’s coming after me with everything he has, I just have to hold him off for twelve seconds. The whistle goes and he almost dives forward, but I don’t engage, I circle, I intentionally move away, and it takes six seconds out of the twelve for the referee to call me for stalling, to give me the warning. He comes at me one last time, but I get as low as I can and dive back, and we’re standing each other up when the whistle ends the match.