6

The return was quicker that time, as I had no narcotic stupor to keep me numb to the sensations of my daily routines. Once the infection had been beaten and the fever let me go, my daily wrap changes, debridements and therapy kept me locked solidly in the real world, though my confidence in reality was shrinking. I felt like a polar bear on ice flow drifting south into warmer waters.

When are you going to see me again? I’d sent a variation on this text a dozen times and hadn’t received a response, but this time I followed it with. I almost died again. Bad infection. My heart stopped twice.

Oh my God. You’re okay now?

Jim dandy. Except the antibiotics killed one of my kidneys. How are you?

Drunk.

It’s barely noon.

Haven’t you heard of a liquid lunch?

Now that you’re responding, when will you see me?

I don’t know. I came to the hospital two weeks ago. Talked to the nurses.

Why didn’t you come here?

Feel too bad. Every day it’s harder.

I need you.

You don’t need me. Nobody needs me.

I need you.

* * *

Madison and I met in the food court of the student union. It’s funny, the little things that determine your life. I usually didn’t have breaks on campus if I could help it. I just didn’t have the time to waste. I’d eat lunch in the fifteen minutes between classes. But one of the classes I’d taken was with my least favorite professor. And then I couldn’t get the books, and it’d be at least three weeks before they’d come in, which meant I’d have to try to borrow. And then I showed up to class the first day and found my grad school nemesis Mark Stoddard smiling at me from the front row as I stepped into the room, and I just turned and walked back out. Since our first class together, we’d spent all of our time trying to squash each other’s answers. I wasn’t going to deal with it, not with that professor, not without the book. I went and dropped the class right then.

So I had ended up with an empty hour and a half there on campus right over lunch time, and started going to the student union every day, where they had a food court and comfortable chairs to study in. And that’s where I saw Madison for the first time.

It was spring semester. She had on the classic rich-girl winter outfit: sweater, skirt, thick white tights. Her huge blue eyes peered out at me from beneath blunt bangs. Then she looked quickly back down at her basket of fries and the book she had spread on the table, pinned open with a phone.

I watched her for a bit longer. She was very pretty, like a little doll with her heart-shaped face and her small stature. But she was of a different breed. I could tell just from looking at her. She didn’t know anything about striving for something better or hustling every opportunity. Most of my classmates were well off. They’d have an easier time because of the paths their parents had forged, but they’d still have to work. They were using their advantages to the fullest, but this girl was of the sort whose status wasn’t used to give an advantage in the struggle, but which alleviated struggle altogether. I guess I’m class conscious, because I knew before I even knew.

Looking back down at my own book, I ignored her as best I could, though I could feel her eyes through those heavy bangs.

Two days later, she was seated at the same table when I sat down. I put my back to her, not wanting to be distracted. An empty hour and a half was bad enough. I could at least get some reading done. So why didn’t I choose a seat completely out of sight?

I was engrossed in the intricacies of corporate structure when a small voice said, “I love your hair.”

My hair sits in big, loose curls—what I call a halfro—and I was using a Goody band to wrangle it into a halfro puff and out of my face. Women constantly complimented my hair. I said, “You can touch it if you want,” before I even saw who it was.

That might sound strange, but my hair draws women’s hands. Especially in the more casual college atmosphere, I was constantly being petted. It might not be dignified, but I can’t say I minded.

When I looked around, my eyes fell into hers. It was the rich girl, looking at me from beneath those heavy bangs like a guard peering through a slot in the fortress door. She smiled and reached forward, and I tilted my head to her and she patted my puff.

“Oh my God, it’s so soft. I’d kill for hair like that.”

I laughed a bit. I always laughed when these white girls who obsessed over the position of every strand of their hair said that to me, while women with hair like mine fried their curls out attempting to get “good” hair.

“It’s kind of a pain in the ass,” I said. “If I wear it short I’ve got rogue clumps trying to curl all over, and if I wear it long it looks too casual. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it when I graduate.”

“It looks nice long. Don’t cut it.”

“I can’t walk around in a suit and my hair in an elastic band.”

“It’s beautiful, and I think you would look very handsome in a suit with your hair just as it is.”

“Are you going to hire me?”

“Maybe I will.”

I gestured to the other chair at the table, and she sat down. “And what do you study that’s going to enable you to take me on as an employee?” I asked, having no idea what kind of business connections she had, that her father was the CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world.

“Philosophy,” she said, her eyes challenging me to say something. “With a special focus in ethics.”

“So you’re going to need a CPA for your…I can’t even come up with a fake philosophy business.”

“You practical people, always so proud of your practicality.”

I scoffed. “Come on, this country worships artists and actors.”

She scoffed right back. “This country judges you by one thing above all: the size of your bank account. If you didn’t think that were true, you wouldn’t be reading—Capital Structure and Corporate Financing Decisions. Oh my God, it’s worse than I thought.”

“I admit it’s not everyone’s thing.” I felt a bit indignant, but decided to keep any ‘little rich girl’ comments to myself. “So what are you reading?”

She went back to her table and gathered her things, then showed me Hegelian Dialectic. I fell back in my seat and started snoring.

“So trying to better yourself is boring?”

I snored even louder.

“Okay, well I’ll leave you to your nap.”

When her chair scraped, I sat quickly back up. “Alright, alright. I’m sorry. I don’t even know what a Hegelian dialectic is.”

She started explaining it to me, and it was the perfect topic of conversation because not only didn’t I have any interest, but even if I had I wouldn’t have understood a thing given the specialized vocabulary she was using that made business-speak sound like plain English. So I could just watch her talk.

She was very intense, gesturing with her small hands to emphasize her points, her forehead bouncing like crazy somewhere behind that wall of hair.

I liked her a lot. I liked her looks. I liked her passion. I liked how serious she was about it, never making light about her subject, or seeming apologetic for caring so much for something most people found silly.

When she was done giving me the basics, she stopped dead and just watched me. I knew that what I said next would determine if I got to talk to her again.

“Are you an undergrad?”

“Yeah.”

“What year?”

“Junior.” It felt like I’d walked out onto thin ice again. Given her stature and baby face, she probably got pegged as a teenager all the time, and seemed to be waiting for me to say something about it, to prove that I was as boring and predictable as everyone else. With this girl, I was betting it was all thin ice.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“Oh, I would have guessed forty, but you must hear that all the time. Seen a lot of hard living, huh?”

Her eyes opened wide and she stared at me in total shock for a moment before she hiccupped out an awkward laugh. She tried to find something to say, and it was funny to watch her mouth move without words after the long, eloquent lecture she’d just given.

“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, “but do you want to go get a drink sometime soon? Like, tonight?”

“Yes.”

* * *

At the end of my hospital stay, my metabolism dropped and my wounds closed, so I no longer needed massive quantities of protein poured into my stomach. On the breathing front, I was out of critical condition, and the infection seemed to be the last time I’d need a machine to keep me alive. I could also get out of bed without too much fear of a delicate graft ripping open, and spent quite a bit of time upright in physical therapy, so the liquid no longer settled in my lungs. So they removed my trach tubes and let the hole heal.

It was fun, the first time my parents visited and I was able to say, “Hi, guys.” No one had told them. The people who worked in the burn unit orchestrated these happy surprises, I guess to balance out just a bit of the tragedy they dealt with all day every day. My mom started sobbing so hard her legs almost went out from under her. My dad caught her, and Nurse Jake slid a chair beneath her. Seeing her reaction made even me a bit misty, a bit of moisture welling up in my eye. But what I soon learned was that the long weeks of silence—stretched to a seeming eternity by nearly unbearable pain—had turned inward. I no longer wanted to talk. It seemed a silly thing to do. Words were incapable of expressing what I’d been through, what I was still going through, and if they couldn’t communicate that, they couldn’t communicate anything worth saying. I wasn’t interested in chatting about the weather or what was on television. I was no longer interested in arguing politics with my dad, a blue collar, economic liberal but social conservative, me a free market economic conservative and social liberal. The conflict of ideologies had seemed so important to me before. I’d watched 24 hour news stations like an addict while I endlessly refreshed news websites on my computer or phone. It had seemed like the world was ready to collapse into chaos from a thousand different causes. The people championing their causes made me believe that with their fervor. And yet I fell away for weeks and came back and the prominence of the various catastrophes had shifted, but the same arguments were being made with the same level of boundless energy and I saw it for what it was: distraction. People needed to believe that what they did and thought mattered. I’d learned that wasn’t true.

Regulation or free market?

Fracking or coal?

Shimano or fixed gear?

Legal pot smoking or illegal pot smoking?

This celebrity versus that celebrity?

So much passion wasted. Ignore it for a few days, weeks, years and see what happens. See how much it counts for. What would have happened if we hadn’t argued about it? Talked about it at all? Thought about it? The only problem I could see was obvious: too many people. It was a problem that we couldn’t solve with policy, but which would eventually take care of itself.

For awhile, I tried to make small talk, and found that it took more effort than reading one of Madison’s books on continental philosophy, so that I wished I had never regained the ability to talk.

“Who do you like in this fight?” my dad asked me, about an upcoming MMA event being advertised on television. I was the one who’d gotten him to accept the transition from boxing to MMA, to see the skill and strategy in the match instead of “two guys hugging for fifteen minutes.”

It was a big fight, the light heavyweight title. I shrugged.

“I think the champ is staying put,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the division who has a skill set to challenge his.”

I nodded.

“What do you think his weakness is? I’d say wrestling, but he’s obviously a good wrestler. That kind of takedown defense is good wrestling on its own, so that people have forgotten what he can do on the ground because he never chooses to take it there.”

He waited for me to interject. I had once been able to talk for an hour at a time about any given fighter. I tried to respond, fished around inside for something but found nothing that could be put into words. I nodded.

“He didn’t even wrestle in college, did he?” my dad asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“That’s what’s so crazy to me. How did he get so good so late? Most really good wrestlers start in grade school. I’ve heard it’s not just about learning the skills, but developing that special strength. But he never even wrestled until he started training for MMA, and he’s got this natural skill. Kind of makes you question how far hard word can take you, you know? Other guys put in decades of work, and when they try to use the skills they’ve spent thousands of hours developing, he shoves them headfirst into the mat because he was just made for this. What does that do to a person?”

It destroys him. For some sadistic reason it doesn’t kill him. It proves to him that life is struggle, but that the struggle is meaningless, and then it leaves him with this meaningless life. It leaves him paralyzed as if it had broken his neck at the fifth vertebrae.

“These documentaries have been popping up showing these guys training for big fights,” my dad said. There was quiet panic in his eyes, barely covered by light-hearted joviality. I watched him with my one eye from behind my silicon mask. I’d grown to love how it hugged my face, reminding me that it was there between me and the world. He kept his eyes on the television, where they were showing highlight reels of the two light heavyweights. “They put themselves through hell. They bring themselves to a level of physical perfection that can be maintained for only a few days. It takes months of careful planning to get to this point where they operate at what I think must basically be a superhuman level. They get to the perfect weight so that after losing every ounce of water they can they can make their class, then rehydrate and step in fifteen pounds heavier just to match the extra fifteen pounds the other guy has put on. And then it only takes one mistake. I’ve noticed that these documentaries mostly end with the fighters losing. I hate it. You want to think all that work pays off, or you want to be able to ignore it all and just enjoy the competition. To know that the worst performance you’ve ever seen, the dopiest move, the fastest knockout, to know that those guys had worked for months to bring themselves to a level of perfection to perform for say—how fast was the fastest knockout? Eight seconds?—trained like that, sweated like that, sacrificed like that, lived in the back of the gym, lost girlfriends and wives, gave up careers, all that for eight seconds and then to become a joke…It’s horrible.”

Why was he saying this to me? I couldn’t believe that he would consciously undermine all the energetic pep talks he’d been relentlessly giving me.

“What should they do?” I asked

“I don’t think they have a choice. They fight until they can’t fight anymore. They’re fighters. It wouldn’t be tragic if they said, ‘Well, I’ll just go back to psychiatry, now that this hasn’t worked out.’ They just keep fucking fighting.”

“Should they?” It was more than I’d spoken all day, but I felt that this moment might decide everything. Here was my father expressing what I’d thought inexpressible, what I thought I alone understood. But did he understand? Did he get what a root existential problem he was discussing, or was he really talking about two guys stepping into a cage to punch each other in the face until one fell down?

“Should? I don’t think should comes into it.” He looked at me for a quick moment before looking back to the television, that great excuse to look away, to avoid facing what you can’t face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m getting so worked up. Those two, though…I tell you what, I think it’s going to be a good fight, but not a close one.”

It wouldn’t be a close fight at all. It would be a savage, decisive beat down.