18
Body Puzzles
On the last day of September, Corey went to New Hampshire on the Concord Express bus out of South Station. His teammates sat behind him, reclining, listening to Beats headphones. Corey sat in a window seat, watching the redbrick waterfront and long wharves below as they climbed the Zakim Bridge and took the elevated highway north.
Soon they left the city behind, started coming to strip malls, big signs on super-tall poles that could be seen for miles: Nissan, Wendy’s, Best Buy, Mobil. The buildings shrank to the ground, the trees rose up, and the highway became a broad channel into the woods. The entire way, he could feel them traveling uphill, up a slowly rising mountain. He heard it in the engine.
After an hour, they exited. The driver took a long, disorienting turn, a seemingly endless, swinging turn, past a needly wall of pine trees an inch away from the windshield, and let them off at a brick building by the highway cloverleaf. There was no town, only a huge expanse of churning gray sky, the tan road curving like a child’s racecar track through the rolling hills, pine trees at the horizon, and Corey could contemplate what the world meant this far away from Boston.
They checked in at the Travelodge, and Eddie took them, walking as a team, a mile down Policy Road. Coming out of the woods, they saw a mall, which looked like a formerly grand hotel, and on the other side of it, the casino—a dirty white swan sitting in the great lake of a parking lot.
The lobby was empty. They entered through unattended turnstiles. Banners billed tomorrow night’s fight as “The Combat Zone.” They went through a vast amphitheater with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an overgrown racetrack like an air traffic control tower. Gamblers hunched at airport-lounge-type tables, watching miniature TVs tuned to races occurring somewhere else. Everyone was smoking cigarettes. Junked furniture was piled behind betting counters: “Cash/Sell—All Bets.” Pillars held up the ceiling like an underground garage. In their tracksuits and hooded sweatshirts, the athletes walked through the smell of rotting carpeting, must and mold and years of cigarettes. Outside the chained-shut doors at the end of a hall, one saw cracked asphalt and nature taking over.
They followed Eddie to a doctor’s scale in an upstairs room. The athletes took their clothes off. An athletic commissioner, wearing a gold badge on a leather wallet flipped out of his breast pocket like a sheriff, watched the weigh-in. A referee with slicked-back hair manipulated the sliding weight.
Corey had been dieting for weeks, taking one slice of bread off his sandwich every day at lunch. Three times he had reached for a piece of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting in the high school cafeteria, and three times he had pulled his hand away. After practice, he put peanut butter on his dry skinless chicken—anything to get his protein up. If he got hungry at night, the only thing he could eat was a can of tuna fish with the oil drained out. Before practice, he drank Gatorade and ate a gummy protein bar. He had gotten to the point where he could feel exactly what was in him. Every day he had gone to the locker room and weighed himself on Eddie’s scale. The fat under his skin had disappeared.
But the thought of losing muscle had troubled him and late at night when he couldn’t sleep because he was worrying about the fight, he had gotten up and gone out to the kitchen in the dark and eaten his mother’s protein powder, which tasted like vanilla.
Everyone but Corey was on weight.
“It’s his first time,” Eddie said to the ref.
“It happens.”
“How long does he have?”
“I don’t want to see anybody forfeit, but four thirty’s the latest.”
“Can you cut the weight in four hours?”
Corey had never cut weight before. “Yeah,” he said.
“Get him on weight,” Eddie told Corey’s teammates.
“You’re just wringing water out of a sponge,” they told him. “Zip up everything and get moving.”
Corey zipped up all his clothes and ran out across the parking lot. The northern sun was shining. It was warm for late September. His hood was cinched tight, leaving a tiny circle for his eyes. He cut through the mall and lost his way in the empty atriums, the loud pop music, all the girls in store windows folding jeans, dodged around families drinking smoothies, broke outside again into the lot, so huge it took minutes to jog across—a bundled figure in the warm day, sweat blotches appearing on his sweatpants.
He pawed up a grassy incline, crossed a major road, forcing traffic to wait, stumbled across another fringe of grass and burst into a gas station convenience store. The cashier and a customer—a guy in a Palmer Gas & Oil hat—both straightened up and watched him. Corey sprinted down the aisles, grabbing trash bags and duct tape and dumped them on the counter. He paid, and, right there in the store, while the men watched him in silence, kicked off his sneakers and pulled trash bags on his legs like trousers. He tore leg holes in a bag and stepped into it like a diaper. He pulled another bag over his head and stuck his arms through it. He had a sense of body asphyxiation, even though he could breathe—he tore a hole for his face like a knight’s chain-mail hood. He taped his arms to his chest, his legs to his diaper, his top to his bottom, vacuum-sealing himself in. Covered in trash bags, his feet slipped back in his sneakers with frictionless ease. He pulled his sweatshirt and parka back on over his rustling plastic body and zipped up, banged out through the door and started shuffle-jogging back to the arena, his temperature skyrocketing, unable to hear anything but the trash bags on his ears, like a rumpled bedsheet sliding back and forth over a microphone.
At the casino, he ran straight upstairs into the men’s changing room and turned the showers on hot. The air steamed up like a sauna. He jogged in place, varying his gait, skipping, his sweatpant-ankles heavy, swinging around his feet. After a while, a teammate looked in and said, “They’ve got a stationary bike set up, if you want.”
It was the kind of bike where you rowed with your arms as well as pedaled with your feet. Corey got on and pedaled and rowed. He rowed into the sun, which was shining in his eyes. The wheel spun like a fan blade in a wire cage—a ratcheting and sawing of chains and flywheel. The window glass steamed up, as if he were breathing on it with a giant mouth. The sun moved. He turned his rustling body and checked the clock. He kept rowing until the hour hand moved again. His teammate came back and told him he was out of time. He climbed off, his ankles sloshing, took off his jacket, sweatshirt, ripped open his garbage bags like a present. Water spilled out on the floor. His soaking-wet sweatpants were loose around the waist. He pulled the drawstring and they dropped to his ankles. He was thinner. He wrestled off his shirt—suddenly cool—and stepped on the bathroom scale in his wet underwear.
“You there?”
“Right on it.”
He made weight in the green room and tried to eat and drink all afternoon. That evening they went back to the hotel and he kept eating and drinking even though his body didn’t want the food.
Eddie put out the lights, and the team lay in the dark, on beds and on the floor, which smelled like feet. Corey shut his eyes and imagined he could feel the protein he had eaten flowing out of his stomach and reassembling his muscles.
“You’re not going to think about your fight,” he told himself. “Everybody’s in the same boat. You have to deal with it the same as them.”
The next day they lay around not moving, like reptiles conserving energy. Around noon, someone said, “It smells like mad balls in here,” and opened up the door, letting in the sun, and they started stirring, coming out of hibernation, getting up and walking back and forth, tossing out their hands, throwing punches.
“You ready to do this? Let’s go.” Eddie took them to the casino.
Carrying their gym bags, they went through the turnstiles and followed him upstairs to a room that said Fighters Only on the door. Inside, there was a mural of a jockey and a racehorse on the wall, and the room was filled with gangs of guys in team shirts—Sityodong, Bucket Brigade Fight Team, Destiny Boyz Wrestling Club, Renzo Gracie New Hampshire, Team Irish Fighter, Gorilla Crew, Cage Strikers Manchester, Team Havoc, Bearstrong—sitting in separate camps, welcoming their friends with handclasps and hugs, treating all others to silence.
Eddie checked them in at a picnic table. A young woman in silver hoop earrings found their names on a list. Upside down, Corey saw Goltz, 154 pounds, in blue ink, next to Ochiottes, 154 pounds, in red. The room was divided into two halves by a counter and a banner for Budweiser Select Poker. Opponents went to opposite sides like bride and bridegroom before the wedding. Bestway claimed a picnic table and dropped their gear. Eddie went downstairs to get a yellow wristband, proving he had a New Hampshire cornerman’s license. Corey took off his clothes and put on his cup.
The athletic commissioner arrived, opened a briefcase and handed out badges on lanyards to the officials.
The referee with slicked-back hair called, “If I could get everybody down here for the rules meeting.” The fighters gathered round and he started talking like an auctioneer: “Elbows to the back of the head: No twelve to six. Give me an angle on that. We’re worried about the brainstem. Slamming: If you sign up for the ride, it’s not up to us how you land. Vaseline: After you get your high-fives and hugs out of the way, then you do the grease. You’re okay as long as you stick with the raccoon eyes. Groin and mouth protection: If your mouthpiece falls out, we won’t stop the fight. In a choke hold, we ask for motion to show you’re still awake. Move something for us. But don’t let go of the choke to give us the thumb’s-up.”
His audience laughed.
“Eye pokes have been a huge problem in the sport. Don’t stick that pitchfork in your opponent’s face. Pros, if you don’t want to tap and something breaks, that’s up to you.”
Eddie returned carrying a bucket of ice. He took out the top tray of a toolbox, loaded with tape, gauze, Vaseline, a single-use cold pack, rubber gloves, scissors. Sitting backwards on a chair, he wrapped his students’ hands. Corey spread his fingers and watched Eddie winding gauze between his fingers. “Make a fist.” Corey stiffened his arm, and Eddie slammed his palm into Corey’s knuckles.
For the past hour, a crowd had been entering the turnstiles and going to the event room. By now, a sea of people was standing in every available space, stepping over folding chairs, eating pizza, drinking beer. One could smell the mustardy tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights. The room was airless and loud. Miller Genuine Draft and Pickle Barrel banners hung from the ceiling. People were getting drunk already. A biker gang, the Risen Dead, out of New Haven, sat at the best section of the bar—big bearded men with mean little eyes, wearing leathers. An army of cops in blue nylon jerseys was massed at the exit. Behind them stood a pair of EMTs, part-time firemen from Haverhill. Strapped to their gurney, instead of a body, were bags of medical equipment. In the center of the heaving room, under hot white lights, stood the cage.
The judges took their seats at cageside. A camerawoman wearing an orthopedic boot climbed a ladder one step at a time and aimed her camera down into the cage. The rock ’n’ roll went off. The lights went off. An announcer in a tuxedo walked out under a spotlight. “Good evening, everyone!” he said. “The action tonight is brought to you by American Irrigation. Let the red, white and blue make it green for you!”
They heard him in the dressing room, which was connected to the event room by a tunnel.
The first fight was called. It was one of Corey’s teammates, who put his mouthpiece in and went off down the tunnel, shrugging his shoulders and throwing uppercuts. Corey watched him go. The dressing room went quiet. A bunch of guys stared at a monitor on the ceiling. Suddenly, it was like everyone exhaled. Then Eddie and his boy were back and they were excited: He had won by knockout. Corey slapped him on the shoulder. His shoulder was warm. All the guys were excited. The victor posed for a picture with Eddie, who put his arm around him and held up a finger—number one.
“One up, one down. That’s the way everybody’s gonna do it tonight. This is our night, Bestway.”
“Damn straight,” the guys said.
Corey started bouncing in place. He checked his spot on the card. Goltz and Ochiottes were ninth.
The next bout went the distance. So did the next. Corey stopped bouncing and tried to meditate, without success. Around the dressing room, some fighters curled up like babies and slept. One lay in his girlfriend’s lap while she stroked his head. They pulled their hoods over their heads exactly like depressed people, people at a doctor’s office facing a grave diagnosis. A woman fighter put her face down on a table like a student who had failed her finals. Some shuffled around in sport-flops, sipping water. A few stalked back and forth with monster rock leaking out of their headphones, throwing combinations and snorting through their clenched mouth guards.
As the night wore on, out in the event room, the crowd got drunker, looser. The cops started drinking too. A fighter got kicked in the groin, and the ref gave him time to rest. He squatted froglike. The fight resumed. He wasn’t local. He was up from Taunton. He got hit in the groin again—his opponent threw a lot of inside kicks. This time, he made a show of agony. A drunk kid in the audience yelled, “It’s not that big, Taunton! Come on.”
Eventually, all the Bestway guys had gone except for Corey. Eddie grabbed the pads. “Let’s warm you up.” He moved around him like a target in a shooting gallery. He flashed a mitt; the image triggered Corey’s brain to fire a punch. Eddie beat Corey’s fists with the pads. He made him kick. “Relax. Again. Better.” He dropped the pads and dove into Corey, chest to chest, and they started pummeling. They swam their arms in alternation under each other’s arms while slamming their chests together and switching their legs back and forth. The white towel in Eddie’s waist whipped like a tail.
“Do you know anything about your guy?”
“No.”
“Has anyone heard anything?”
“Who’s he got?”
“Ochiottes.”
“Do you know what school he trains with?”
“Sityodong, I think.”
“Take him down. Get on top. Ground and pound.”
The girl with earrings called, “Bestway, is that your fighter? I’ve been calling you!” The preceding bout had ended with a knockout. Eddie grabbed the ice bucket and said, “That’s you! Got your mouthpiece? Come on!” They ran after her into the tunnel. She had a thick-legged, low-hipped frame, her Rockingham Park shirt untucked over khaki pants, which she wore low. At the final doors, she held up a hand and told them to wait as she listened to her earpiece.
“Are you scared? Run in place like this, like you’re climbing a mountain.”
Then the girl said, “Go!” and Corey went through the doors into the arena. Hip-hop was blasting. People were shouting and yelling and drinking cups of beer. He walked down a chute through the shadowy crowd towards the glaring spot-lit brightness of the cage. A woman reached for him and gave out a piercing scream. Guys slapped his hands as if they loved him. A bodybuilder in black rubber gloves stopped him and patted him down as if he were checking him for weapons before letting him into a club. Corey closed his eyes and someone greased his face. He stepped into the cage.
There was a Budweiser King of Beers advertisement on the padding. There was Vaseline in his eyebrows. He saw stains on the canvas and felt the heat of the lights. It was beach-hot under the lights, like being on the shore in August.
He sensed a turbulence in the outer darkness coming this way. As it got closer, it became a person with red gloves taped to his hands. Behind him came a group of unshaven men in ball caps. One looked directly at Corey while speaking to this person, who nodded. The fighter took his sweats off and held his arms out. The bouncer frisked him, and a moment later he bounded up into the cage, opposite Corey.
Eddie banged the fence. “Hey, Corey! Hey! Listen up! I just heard, this guy’s a grappler. You’re gonna have to watch out with him.”
“What do you mean, watch out?”
“He’s a purple belt.”
“But what do I do differently?”
“Keep it standing!”
But Corey didn’t hear him, because someone else was yelling, “Give it everything you got! Don’t quit! Just do it!”
And the ref was shouting, “Blue fighter! Turn around!”
Corey turned around, and the bell rang.
The two young men went towards each other like two arachnids in a terrarium. Ochiottes caught him in a front guillotine choke while they were standing, jumped guard, pulling him down, and made him tap in under a minute.
The mechanics of it were: His opponent’s legs weren’t holding him and he thought he might get free. But then Abel kicked him off and figure-foured his arms around Corey’s head when they were on their knees, then rolled on his side taking Corey over with him. The ref moved in to watch. Corey tried to grab his opponent’s hands. But you can’t untie a knot behind your head unless you know how it’s tied. Abel caught him with his feet and pulled their bodies together, folding Corey in half, compressing his neck. Corey’s face turned the color of a raw steak. He tapped Abel’s arm. The ref lunged down and pulled Abel’s arm off Corey’s neck. Abel’s corner jumped up in celebration.
Abel’s corner ran in and hugged him. Corey went over to shake hands. Abel’s unshaven coach gestured that someone was behind him. Abel turned around, glanced at Corey, said, “Good fight,” and turned away.
The ref grabbed Corey by the wrist and dragged him to the center of the cage. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner.” The ref raised Abel’s hand and held Corey’s hand down, as if he was afraid Corey would try to take credit for a fight he hadn’t won. Corey went to the dressing room and found someone with scissors to cut his gloves off.
It was almost midnight when they left the arena. Corey hadn’t eaten anything. One of his teammates had had the foresight to get two slices of pizza and a hot dog to celebrate his victory before they closed the concession. Now all you could get was beer.
The fighters and the fans were dispersing. A crowd remained in the event room, drinking and talking, the music still playing: “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day…” But the carpeting was littered with ticket stubs and napkins. The garbages were full. The exit doors had been blocked open so that people felt encouraged to leave. Drinkers pissed with the restroom doors open so they could shout to their friends. In the cigarette-musty betting room, the horses were galloping on the TVs—bringing their front legs and back legs together like hands frenetically grabbing more life, grabbing more life. No one was watching any longer. The spotlight over the cage went off. The event staff started folding up metal chairs and stacking them in the back of the room. The rock music went off and left the room silent with just the clattering of the chairs.
People streamed from the casino’s half-moon lobby out into the night. Engines revved, headlights came on. You heard cars ripping away and laughter in the dark.
Bestway struck out for the hotel, carrying their gym bags. They argued about the way and got lost trying to circumnavigate the mall. Corey brought up the rear in silence. They walked back through the ankle-tickling grass on the side of Policy Road. Cold emanated from the countryside. The windows of roadside houses were as opaque as cataracts. A chittering echoed from the towering trees and deep weedy grass. There was a great three-dimensional space around them and it was full of insects.
When they got back to the Travelodge, one of Corey’s teammates threw his bag on a bed and said, “I won. I get the bed tonight!”
Corey went out to the snack machine. He bought a pack of Oreos and called his mother on his cell.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, Corey. How’re things?”
“They’re okay. I lost.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do better next time.”
“I know. I will. Are you okay?”
“About the same.”
“Is anyone there with you tonight?”
“No. Just me and my lonesome. I watched a science program I think you would have liked about the brain. They were talking about all the things the human mind can do. It was just magnificent. They had a pianist hooked up to a machine, and you could actually see the nerve impulses coming out in waves together with the music when he was playing. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw. They said he had trained from the time he was seven. His whole body had become the instrument. I thought, Corey’d love this, because he had your discipline.”
“I don’t feel very disciplined tonight.”
“It’s just one little night. You’ve got the whole rest of your life to be great. I’d give anything to be your age, Corey. I’d give anything not to be facing this.”
“Mom—”
“You asked me how I am, Corey. I’m sad. I’m sorry, I’m so sad.”
“Mom…” He kneeled in the parking lot, hunching himself over the phone. “Mom, it’s okay…It’s okay…It’s okay. I’ll be there soon.”
He wiped his eyes after getting off the phone and ate the Oreos. The trash can was in the motel office. He threw the wrapper out. The night clerk was out of sight. He went back to his room. He told Eddie he was thinking about going to the bus station and getting the next bus home right now.
“You can’t go there now. There’re no buses now.”
Corey lay down on a bedspread on the floor. “I’m taking the earliest bus tomorrow.”
“What does he want to go home so badly for?” one of the guys asked. Another said, “Shut up. Let it go,” because Corey was the only one who had lost.
The next morning, Corey left before the others and caught the six a.m. bus back to Boston. At South Station, he transferred to the T and stared at the subway tunnel walls.
The T rose out of the tunnel. Now he was looking out over the water, the sun in his eyes and the shore going by. Then they sank into the concrete cut between the houses. He got off in Quincy and went to Grumpy White’s and ate a chicken parm, fries, a milkshake—near a thousand calories.
When he got home, it was noon. His mother had been alone all morning while he had been feeding himself. He put down his gym bag and made her lunch.
But once he had fought, it changed things at the gym. Scott the fireman tried to rough him up and, while not his equal, Corey was relaxed and unafraid of him and able to neutralize much of what he did. Furthermore, he didn’t tire.
The fireman flopped on his back and groaned.
“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked.
“This kid’s annoying me today. Nothing’s working on him.”
“He fought on Saturday.”
“I should have known.”
He decided he would get his gear, his game, his life in order. Rather than taking his mother’s protein powder, he bought Gaspari and Xtend at GMC and set them in his room with his board shorts, bag gloves, rash guard, jump rope, mouthpiece, kneepads, cup and hand wraps—all laid out so he could see them day and night. He’d learn to box you on the feet, using timing and angles, punch his way into the clinch, hit his favorite takedown, work his knee-slide pass, his Leo Vera, punch you from the top, ride you, hunt a choke, use leg-weave passing. His life would be devoted to solving body puzzles. He saw future contests in his dreams. If he lost position, he’d shrimp his hips away or Granby and recover guard and immediately go to mission control or the London and work between an omoplata and a triangle. He’d learn to ping-pong between positions, stay one step ahead of his opponent—to never get guillotined again. It suddenly seemed possible to do everything in life the way it should be done. Sometimes Eddie stopped him as he left the gym and shook his hand.
He bought his own gear. Did his laundry. In October, he turned seventeen. Balanced job, gym, mother—even school—for a little while at least—in the lull after his first fight.
The only signs Corey saw of Leonard during this period were his dirty rumpled clothes, bags of toiletries and jars of pickled garlic. The futon remained folded up. He almost dared to think his father had gone away. But one day, on his way to a Craigslist job in Milton, Corey smelled something in the air. He went into the kitchen. A great mass of Leonard’s dishes was drip-drying in the sink: pots, pans, plates, spoons, tongs, his green enamel skillet, his canary yellow butcher knife.
Corey checked the trash. He found onion skins. The window had been left open to the marsh. His father must have cooked, but he had washed his dishes.
He knows I’m fighting, Corey thought. He doesn’t want to play with me.
His eye fell on the dish soap, a 28-ounce bottle of Palmolive he had bought on sale at Stoppies only days before. It had been full this morning; it was almost empty now. He looked in the sink again. The dishes were covered in unrinsed soap foam. There were mountains of soap foam billowing out of the sink. It was so full of foam you couldn’t see the bottom.
He stared at Leonard’s message to him.
In Milton, he went to a woman’s basement and hooked up her dryer to the gas, a simple procedure, connecting the silver exhaust hose to the vent. She lived in a dark house and Corey thought that she was very strange.
In early November, Corey stayed home from school to take his mother to her clinic day at Longwood. It took a long time to get her to the car. He did up the buttons of her navy pea coat while she stood with her arms at her sides. A wind was blowing on the shore. She wore her sweatpants, white socks and white sneakers. Corey put her hat on her head—a knit hat with a pompom.
“Am I Santa?”
It started raining, wetting the black asphalt. He helped her into the hatchback and buckled her seatbelt while she stared out the window at the rain. Her hands in orthotic braces lay in her lap. She had orthotics on her feet. He put her walker in the trunk, the cold metal wet on his hands, and got behind the wheel.
They were due at Longwood at three o’clock. He drove them north along the shore. She sat next to him with her arms in her lap, bundled into her navy coat, the pompom bouncing on her head with the breaks in the road as the rain came down. The windshield wipers were sluicing the rain off the windshield. They were driving along the line of white houses and the gray ocean shore, heading north into the gray sky.
They drove up onto 93 and promptly hit traffic. It was already 2:40, and he was watching the time. At 2:47 they were getting off 93, driving down Huntington Ave. He braked for a red light and they waited, the stick in neutral, surrounded by idling city traffic. The wipers worked across the glass; his turn signal tick-tocked. At 2:52 they were turning south, past townhouses with limestone angels.
At 3:00, they reached the wide modern road flanked by towers like giant books standing on their ends. He turned into the Beth Israel driveway, paved in glazed brick. He waited for the machine to give him his ticket. The barrier went up and he drove down into the underground garage.
He parked and jumped out and opened the trunk and unfolded his mother’s walker, unbuckled her seatbelt and let her lift her legs out by herself, “under her own steam,” as she put it. When her legs were out, he lifted under her woolly arms and helped her stand. He put her thin weak hands on the walker. They felt like two thin fillets. She couldn’t squeeze him back. He stepped out of her way and let her push the walker forward. She took a high slow step, the toe of her sneaker pointing down, and set her foot on the concrete floor. A ventilator roared. The garage smelled like diesel fumes. She took a step with her other leg, another high slow step.
He closed their car door and checked by feel that it was locked. He didn’t take his eyes off her while she was moving. If he had to look away, he kept his hand on her back to feel her balance. He was ready to catch her under the arms if she fell. In wrestling, this was called the cow catcher. He could never be farther away from her than the time it would take him to catch her before she hit the ground.
She pushed her walker forward and began taking another step. He followed behind her, not touching her, but waiting and ready. She had fifty feet to go to the elevators. He checked the time. They were going to be late.
They took the elevator to the neurology department. Medical personnel in white coats and blue scrubs got off at an intermediate floor and hurried away, holding their clipboards to their bosoms like schoolgirls holding schoolbooks. The doors closed, and Corey saw his and his mother’s reflections in the polished metal: his mother, now shorter than he was, her spine humped, leaning on the four-legged walker.
The neurology clinic smelled like antiseptic and human beings. Corey went to the counter to check them in.
“You could call next time,” a scheduling nurse told him, a plump woman with bangles and painted-on eyebrows. “I’ll have to tell the doctor to come back.”
“I’m sorry,” Corey said. “It’s not my mom’s fault. I hit traffic in the rain.”
The waiting room had a plate glass wall that looked out at the gray sky. They were on a high floor and there was cottony fog swirling around the top of a neighboring office tower, so it was almost like they were in the mountains with the clouds.
His mother took a seat to wait. The sealed room was hot and stuffy. Corey took her hat off and began unbuttoning her coat. The banks of seats faced each other.
Across the room from Gloria, there was a woman lying in a wheelchair, a massive mechanical contraption. Complex supports held up each of her limbs. Her deformed neck twisted sideways like a vine. Her head resembled an orange at the end of the vine, and the headrest had to be off-center and out of true to support her. Long bolts stuck out from the headrest like torture devices that screwed into her head.
“I wish I’d brought a book for you,” Corey said.
“Can you show me something on your phone?”
“Of course. What do you want to see?”
“Show me anything.”
He went through his pictures. “Here. Look at this. This is a mandala.”
It showed the Tibetan universe, a central mountain peak surrounded by the continents with uncountably many worlds bubbling into existence all around them like fish eggs foaming in the sea, teeming with black- and red-skinned gods and demons in gold finery with elephant trunks and tusks, white-skinned maidens, and various hells. In the upper world, farmers worked and prayed with their families by the river shores for healthy crops and healthy children. In the hells, scowling priests tore victims’ legs apart and disemboweled them. The Buddha sat above the mountain peak, enthroned on a cloud in Suyama Paradise. His hair looked like the overlapping leaves of an artichoke. His cone-shaped head rose to a point, which ended in a jewel of flame. His soft earlobes hung down like dewdrops. His cheeks were soft and hairless, as if plumped with estrogen, and he levitated on his lotus cloud at the center of the cosmos but outside it—smiling, sexless, all-powerful and calm.
His mother looked at the image on his smartphone. Come on, Gloria! she thought. Breathe! She raised her aquiline face, her narrow nose and jaw, and closed her eyes, as if she were basking in a joyous sunlight coming from the clinic’s ceiling and hearing beautiful music.
The nurse with bangles called Gloria, and she went in to see the doctor. He reviewed her progress and told her it was time to go down to the basement.
There was a workshop in the basement that looked like a lost-and-found for canes and crutches. Women who were both therapists and mechanics were waiting for them. Corey saw a box full of foam rubber, sheets of different thicknesses and densities. The therapist-mechanics had a workbench, plastic templates, a T-square, compass, cutting tools—shears, matte knives; and a wheelchair seat supported on a horizontal axle, whose height could be adjusted. They asked Corey to help his mother sit in the chair, then began to make adjustments to her height. They slipped a sheet of foam rubber behind her spine and asked where she felt the most pressure on her skin. They added inserts to the foam. It was like building up a contour map: concentric islands. They did the same beneath her backside. Finally, they arrived at this solution: a piece of stiff white Styrofoam with oblongs cut out for each of her hip bones and foam rubber artfully cut to fit inside the oblongs.
All the pieces would have to be glued together to fabricate a custom cushion for Gloria’s body. They would install it in Gloria’s wheelchair and ship it to her at home.
“They’re gonna make this just for you, Mom,” Corey said.
One of the women was the physical therapist who had given Gloria her dumbbells. She wore olive cargo pants with the ankle ties untied and had a winter tan, as if she’d spent a month out west hiking. Squatting, she put a wheel on the mock-up wheelchair with a socket set.
Corey asked if she was a cyclist.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Do you need any help with that?”
She answered by putting her wrench back in its case and spinning the wheel—it gave out a fast, well-oiled ticking against the bearings—and asking Gloria if she liked the angle she was sitting at.
On the drive home, Gloria didn’t speak.
“It’s just a bike on four wheels, Mom,” Corey said. “We’ll go anywhere you want.”