19
We’re Going to Have a Problem
He was standing in the parking lot outside the Quincy Center T the Saturday after taking his mother to the doctor. The sky was overcast, he was wearing sweats beneath his parka, a gym towel around his neck, there was a blue knuckle mark under his eye. He was handing out flyers to a cage fight.
Molly came off the T, carrying a shoulder bag full of textbooks. He hadn’t seen her since her graduation in the spring. She had a gray wool band around her head—like a scarf for the ears. Her coppery hair hung down her back. She wore purple tights that hugged her legs so tightly she looked like a marble statue that had been spray-painted at an auto body shop. They were infused with violet light like an airbrush sunrise. Out of modesty, she had a sweatshirt tied around her waist.
“Is that you, Corey?”
“Molly, hey!”
“What’re you giving away here? Your next rap album?”
“No, this is for an athletic competition.”
“ ‘An athletic competition.’ Let me see. ‘The Brawl at the Palladium.’ What is this, backyard wrestling? Oh, it’s ultimate fighting. Is that why you look like a battered wife? Is this what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
“You nut.”
“How’s college?”
“It’s a lot of work.” She was home for the weekend and had a paper to write and was going to the café to work on it. Corey asked to walk with her. She went to Gunther Tooties. He followed her inside. She stood in line and bought a coffee. While she was waiting, she checked her phone. He got the impression she didn’t want to talk. He said he had to hand out the rest of his flyers. “Good luck with your paper.” He left.
An hour later, the door opened and he came in again.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“No.”
“Mind if I close my eyes for a minute?”
“No. You must be tired from getting black eyes.”
He pulled his towel over his face. With his eyes closed, he could hear her typing. He could feel her when she shifted on the couch.
“I’m sorry about last year,” he said from beneath the towel. He took the towel away and looked at her. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I was stupid, and I’m sorry.”
“Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”
“What’s your paper about?”
“Psychology.” It was her major. She had planned to major in small business administration. “My dad used to work for this really small company, like one guy and a van, and they laid him off when the recession hit in 2008. Now, you know my dad: He’s way too proud to go on unemployment.”
“I never knew he got laid off.”
“That’s because he didn’t tell anyone. So, we were like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ I thought he should go into business for himself so nobody could lay him off.”
“Your dad’s my hero.”
“Every guy says that. I’m like, ‘You’re not living in his shadow.’ ”
“I’d love to live in his shadow.”
“Well, he doesn’t talk much.”
“No, he’s old school.”
“He has no idea how to talk to me. I used to be mad at him, now I just feel sorry for him.”
“Do you wish you’d had a mother?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Molly—and that was all she said about it.
An hour passed. He’d fallen asleep. He woke up and blinked and saw Molly checking her phone. The laptop was off. The café was about to close. The last of the shiny cards his coach had had printed up at the printer’s lay on the table. Corey asked Molly if she wanted to see a fight. To his surprise, she said yes. She closed her laptop and put her things away and stood up and shook her hair out and refitted the woolen band around her ears. “Let’s go.”
“You really want to come with me?”
“Yes, nerd. Get your car.”
On the drive to Worcester, she described her college as being out in the middle of nowhere. They had genuine farm girls there whose idea of a joke was to pronounce pasteurized “past-your-eyes.” They’d take a glass of milk and swing it by your face. For the first time, Molly had heard the ad for a country dating website, FarmersOnly.com: “City folks just don’t get it.” The campus was surrounded by woods. She ran cross-country through miles of trees. At night, she saw the stars.
But usually she was too busy to look heavenward. She had to keep her grades up, she had a scholarship, she played two sports, she worked, and UMass was party central. The drinking was on another level. She had broken up with her shot-putter from last year. As she said this, she looked out Corey’s windshield. They were tunneling down the Mass Pike in the darkness. She said she’d met some asshole guys.
The campus was big and industrial—a concrete factory in the middle of the woods. Soviet-project-sized dorm buildings. A matrix of tiny fluorescent lights in a giant cement slab in the freezing black New England night, one of them her room—hers and the girls she roomed with and the bottle of vodka and the chocolate cake they ate for comfort. Going to the yellow gym to watch squeaky-shoes basketball. Betting online on a website hosted in Costa Rica. Thinking what would they do for spring break if they had no money. Joking about UMass’s isolation. Her best times as always came when she was running for distance and playing soccer—she was a halfback—and she got her instep on that ball.
“I bet you’d kill someone if you took Muay Thai.”
“Muay Thai: What’s that?”
“A martial art.”
She said she didn’t remotely have the time.
They reached Worcester and parked in the square lot outside the Palladium. The building looked like an old New England textile mill, like the ones in Lowell where Tom, her father, had worked as a young man. Molly had been here before to see My Chemical Romance on their Black Parade Tour. They waited in line, got wristbands and found seats inside with a view of the as-yet-empty cage.
Molly took out her phone and looked at Facebook. “How long will this be?” Her girlfriend wanted to meet her back in Quincy later. “No offense,” she said, but to her, the ultimate smackdown stuff was just brutality. If you wanted to give blood, play hockey.
“Hockey’s a combat sport,” Corey agreed.
The rock ’n’ roll came on, the stadium filled up with athletes and their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, coaches, friends and training partners wearing fight academy T-shirts. The round card girls came in and sat on folding chairs. One was a blonde, one was a brunette, they were wearing matching strawberry spandex jog bras and shorty shorts and sneakers without socks, and when they sat down, they crossed their legs the same way. Molly rolled her eyes. “Who’re they? The Doublemint Twins? I get why you like this.”
“I never noticed them before.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’d destroy that little outfit if I tried to wear it.”
“Me personally, I think everyone should be big—males and females—with tons of muscle.”
He excused himself to say hi to a few fellows from Bestway he’d seen across the stands. “Back in a minute.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” A crew of big good-looking men in cammie hats, drinking beer and dipping chew, had just taken seats next to Molly.
When Corey was gone, the brunette round card girl turned around and waved. One of the good-looking guys climbed over the seats to her and gave her a respectful half hug. He was neatly dressed, manly and self-possessed. His black hair was combed on top and trimmed short on the sides, revealing his big clean ears and handsome neck. The girl talked in his ear. Her round breast was an inch from his chest. One could feel their bodies straining together. Under the cover of drawing him close to speak to him better, she placed her hand on his ribs.
They hugged again, and he climbed back to his friends, other wide-shouldered guys in hunter’s hats drinking beer and spitting chewing tobacco in plastic cups.
“Oh, of course,” Molly said, watching this spectacle.
By now, Corey had returned. “What is it?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing.”
The lights went down, the rock went off, and a man in a sharkskin suit and a black-on-black dress shirt entered the cage and grabbed a microphone and said, “Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “No problem.”
“We welcome our first fighter to the cage.”
The music kicked on and a girl walked out to the cage under a spotlight.
“Is that a girl?” Molly asked.
She was white and had her hair done in cornrows. Behind her came her coaches, men with full-sleeve tattoos. They took her black silk robe when she removed it. She was scrawny and flat-chested with a short torso and long arms, wearing a sports bra and big shorts emblazoned with Thai script, which looked like a chain of m’s or elephants. Underneath, she wore knee-length silky spandex bike shorts in pearl gray. Her legs were a contrast to the rest of her. They were glamorously long and strong with long-bellied calves like a dancer. Ankle wraps covered her insteps and exposed her white heels.
Next, her opponent marched out of the wings to the sound of military drumbeats: a glossy brown-skinned Dominican woman from Lawrence, with a fierce young face. Confident, good-looking and bursting with aggression, she had biceps, her shoulders were capped with epaulettes of muscle, and she had heavy legs and hips. She was wearing royal blue bike shorts. Her African hair was twisted into a pair of short pigtails and bobby-pinned to the back of her head like two sausages. She ran up into the cage clapping her hands and gave her opponent a smile in which one could feel the bad intentions.
The guys near Molly said, “This is going to be nasty.”
As soon as the ref said, “Fight!,” the women started throwing full-force punches at each other’s faces. The entire room reacted. Everyone could feel the fighters getting brain-damaged, the egg yolk commonly cited by scientists sloshing in the skull, rupturing and leaking into the white. “Sweetness!” somebody yelled. “All night long!” Blood was running out the white girl’s nose. She had a bloody mouthpiece. She kicked the Dominicana in the lower belly as if she wanted to destroy her reproductive organs. She pulled her head down and threw a knee at her beautiful face.
Corey twitched as if he were in the cage with them. “Gotta have more head movement!” He ducked punches in his seat.
They learned the fighters’ names, when, at the start of the second round, the fighters sallied forth with their fists up to meet again in the center of the canvas and half the crowd began chanting, “Let’s go, Rachel! Let’s go!”; and the other half of the crowd began cheering for Alayah, the Dominican. Her supporters shouted, “Mama says knock you out!”
“Come on!” screamed Molly. “Both of you! I’m rooting for you both.”
The women fought through a second round and then a third. Rachel was repeatedly staggered by her opponent, but eventually the more muscular Alayah began struggling against fatigue. They fought until the final bell. No one gave in. The ref had to separate them when the clock ran out. The audience was applauding and cheering. The guys in camouflage hats put down their beer cups and clapped and whistled.
“That’ll be fight of the night! Hands down!”
The announcer declared the winner by decision, and the ref raised Alayah’s hand. She crossed herself and pointed up at God and said, “Thank you.” Her corner went wild, pounding the apron of the cage. The two women hugged each other tightly. A wag in the audience whooped, “Oh yeah!,” precipitating a bit of laughter.
Rachel’s coach embraced her. The top of her head came up under his chin. “Sorry,” she said. “I tried.” She seemed not to take the loss too hard. She left the arena, high-fiving members of the audience who reached out to congratulate her. The sound system played “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar.
Molly kept saying, “God. Oh my God.” She turned to the guys next to her. “That was balls-out!”
“Totally,” they said. They recognized Corey. “Didn’t we see you fight in New Hampshire?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You getting in there tonight?”
“Not tonight. And, hey, this is Molly, by the way.”
“Hey, Molly-by-the-Way.”
She curtsied—“Charmed, I’m sure.” And the men said, “So are we!”
After the card was over, Molly and Corey sat in the hatchback, talking, while everyone else drove away from the Palladium. He was explaining martial arts to her. He’d been explaining it all night long and if she gave him another few hours, he’d explain the rest. There was a lot to cover—boxing, kickboxing, the clinch, trips, throws, takedowns, the ground game—Muay Thai, which he’d mentioned earlier—he was getting there—but she had not been bored, had she? It was a real sport, as real as hockey, wasn’t it? Wasn’t she glad that she had come?
“Yes—oh my God, those girls were tough.”
“I’d be a girl if it’d make me tough as them.”
Molly gave him the old sneer. “You’re still weird.”
“Come on, I’ve gotten better.”
“You have. I’ll give you that.”
“I owe you for everything.”
“For what?”
“Last year when I was fucking up, your father talked to me.”
“That’s not me, that’s him.”
“No, it was you too. He told me about you playing basketball, dealing with your coach, the one who said you were slow…”
“Oh, that.”
“That. Yeah. That made me change my life.”
The car fell silent.
She said it was about that time. He drove her back to Quincy. When he let her off, he asked if they could hang out the next time she came back from school, now that she didn’t consider him too weird.
She said, “Yes, you geek, we can.”
On Saturday nights, when the rest of the student body was at a cappella or watching Monty Python, Adrian was making his way across the long dark athletic field to the edge of campus, through a dead zone of industrial labs and into an enclave of private homes, public art and quiet parks near a Trader Joe’s that faced the river. Among the private homes of Cambridgeport, there was a redbrick house, a dorm, that belonged to the university, which Adrian had begun to visit.
It was a house of many rooms, an old colonial structure, shabby and cavernous inside, with steep staircases, flaking plastic walls, and a multitude of corridors and closets. Upstairs, there was a common room, which was hung with tapestries. It had French doors and curtains and a TV set that no one watched. Adrian would take a seat on one of the soft, well-used couches or easy chairs and turn it on. If anyone else was there, he would encourage them to leave by talking to the TV, farting loudly, whooping with laughter. After they were gone, he’d shut the doors and draw the curtains, turn off the lights.
Tonight, as soon as Adrian arrived, the students in the common room, a pair of girls, got up and left. He sat in an easy chair in his wrestling cup and kneepads, and watched Saturday Night Live alone.
After midnight, footsteps came up the stairs and Leonard came in in uniform. He closed the French doors and adjusted the curtains. He sat on the couch, turned down the squelch on his radio and set it by his side. Adrian rose, inserted a thumb drive in the TV. A movie began to play.
“Oh, nice.” Leonard glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was coming.
“You won’t get in any trouble for this, will you?”
“Nah. You will,” Leonard said.
“If anyone complains, we’ll tell them it’s educational.”
They fell silent watching the movie. Adrian had the volume turned up high. The characteristic porn movie soundtrack was audible through the doors and curtains in the outer hall.
Adrian pointed out what one of the actresses was doing onscreen. “See how she’s trying to destroy his cock? That makes me so mad.”
A female student passed on the other side of the French doors. The lights were out in the dormitory and she went by like a shadow in the blue darkness of an aquarium. Leonard, silhouetted by the movie screen, his glasses picking up the images of flesh, looked at her and she swam away.
They had been meeting like this for weeks. They didn’t always watch pornography. Sometimes they simply watched TV and analyzed the ads. They discussed physics, society as Adrian saw it, and human nature. Adrian would begin by talking about the advances he had made in his studies and would end by talking about his mother. Sometimes Leonard’s radio squelched and he got up and disappeared and returned much later, having tended to his rounds. Adrian would stay to talk until two or three o’clock before leaving. He would descend past the unmanned guard post with its still-burning desk lamp and head back to campus through the blacked-out streets, the klieg-lit research labs, strangely buzzing or crackling in the silence, and cut across the playing fields, the frozen cold coming from the river, having left Leonard upstairs in the cavernous house full of sleeping students.
Tonight, after the movie, they discussed what they had seen.
“I have this nightmare,” Adrian said. “I’m lying in my bed and I see this thing looking at me in the doorway. There’s nothing I can do. It starts coming closer and closer and I can’t stop it. And I get so mad and scared, I can feel my muscles jumping like I’m hooked up to a car battery.”
The thing had been a rubber monster mask with eyeholes, the kind you pull over your entire head, for Halloween.
“Was someone wearing it?”
“My mother. She was angry because my dad had just divorced her.”
“So, this is not a nightmare; this actually happened.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“How old were you?”
“Like five. My parents had just got divorced. I guess I made my mother mad.”
“So she put the mask on…?”
“To punish me.”
“How did she do that?”
“She came into my room and acted like a monster.”
“But she did something else, didn’t she? Something physical. What did she do?” Leonard pressed.
“She had a pair of scissors.”
“What did she do with them?”
The physics student sighed.
“Does it depress you to talk about it?”
“It’s not happy. It’s a bummer. I mean, I’m mad. I could kill her.”
“Well, she did something…”
“I have homicidal thoughts about her.”
“Just to be clear, she had a pair of scissors, and she threatened you physically. She threatened to…”
“To castrate me, yeah.”
“And now you wear a cup and have nightmares to this day.”
“Yes.”
Adrian felt boundless gratitude to Corey’s father for eliciting this tale of childhood trauma. He was better than a trained psychiatrist, Adrian insisted.
Later that month, a group of female students were gathered in the common room behind his back making comments Adrian was meant to overhear. One said, “That guard’s a creep.” The young man turned around and replied, “No, he’s not. I think he’s a saint.”
The team’s hardest conditioning workouts were led by a former college wrestler. He had a crewcut with a slice in it, a coiling dragon on his arm. His front teeth were missing, and when he didn’t have his plate in, he looked like a vampire. He said to start the running. Their bare feet pattered around the mat. He called for bear crawls. They hit the deck and scrambled on all fours. Corey ran on all fours, seeing the heels of the man ahead of him.
The wrestler’s drills were based on lifting your opponent off the ground. When you weren’t lifting another man, you were lifting yourself. He had them doing jumping split lunges, bunny hops, springing down the mat throwing Superman punches, leaping up and throwing jump knees. “Ong Bak that shit!” He was a small-framed man, but he believed in strength at any cost, even if you had to take steroids to achieve it. He was the athlete of power, the antigravity fighter leaping off the earth.
Corey had to give a piggyback to a full-grown heavyweight wearing a compression shirt with a dagger of white silk-screened down the front and a bow tie at the throat like a tuxedo. It was mechanically impossible to lift the man’s legs high enough to get his feet off the ground; Corey needed higher shoulders. The heavyweight raised his feet himself while Corey ran. No sooner had Corey dropped him than the call went out for High Crotch Carries. The guy said, “Let’s go, pick me up,” and swung himself sideways into Corey’s arms. It was like running with a fire ladder. The man’s weight pressed on Corey’s heart. His body slopped with sweat. The hairs on his shins were plastered to his skin in patterns left by running water, like fossil traces in a riverbed. The man did the work of hanging on to him; Corey’s biceps failed. The second lap he had to walk. When he dropped him, the heavyweight stepped out of his arms with his long legs and walked away, a much bigger life-form leaving a smaller one, who was bent and gasping.
Sparring turned ugly all the time. Real fighting was encouraged. You had to wear a mouthpiece. You had to wear a cup. The wrestler, who had been in combat sports since childhood and was working on a pro career, said that one time he forgot to wear a cup and someone kneed him. Later in the shower, he felt a sting. The end of his penis had been split.
“I woulda healed up faster, but I had to get me a little somethin’-somethin’.”
The listeners, who were fighters, winked. Corey tried to show the right reaction, which was no reaction.
A blow to the groin could result in injury to the genitals, rupture of urethra or testes. A hard enough blow can smash a testicle, render it necrotic. One could get Thai-kicked in the leg so much in a bout—think of a leg being smashed over and over with a baseball bat, inflicting hematomas and then bursting these same bruises—that a gap opens in the flesh, the entire thigh fills with pus like a rotted orange—this is called compartment syndrome—and has to be drained. One could get a finger in the eye, deep in the eye, fingernail tearing the cornea; a torn cornea or detached retina. If you were mounted and punched with your head against the canvas, your skull could absorb impacts in the neighborhood of a thousand foot-pounds, depending how hard your opponent hit. Broken nose, jaw, orbital. You could get heel-hooked and wreck your knee. You could get double-leg slammed or suplexed, land on your head, and break your spine. Taking repeated blows to the head could cause dementia pugilistica or, as has been coming to light in football, make one prone to a neurodegenerative disease like ALS.
For all these fears, you wore a cup, you wore a mouthpiece, and moved your head. You tried to be skilled. As for your opponent, there was not so much you could do about him. You didn’t know how good he’d be until you felt him in the cage.
There was one thing you could do. You could ensure you were in fighting shape, which meant you were conditioned to struggle even when your air was being taken away.
Green wind feeding red muscle in a never-ending Taoist cycle—Corey thought. Red muscle making motion. A calligraphic line cooling into green. A body swirling to arouse the wind—a Wu Li dancer, a flashing quantum body breathing air. He had strange thoughts in training when he was being crushed and couldn’t breathe: “I’m dying into being Vairocana,” and, when he had held out long enough to break free of a bad position and reverse it: “Break through and go the distance—out of chaos—the Grand Tour!”
“Okay, ladies,” said their coach. “Get a drink and get your gloves.” The young men ran for their gear. “You have one minute.”
The bell rang and sparring started. A fight broke out between Robert, the tuxedo wearer, and a visitor to the gym, a pale fellow with a deep voice, it was said, from Macedonia, who spoke plodding English. He swung his fist like a bolo at Robert’s head. Rob leaned back and kneed him in the stomach. The Macedonian instantly fell on the ground and made a sobbing noise. His diaphragm was in spasm. The point of the knee had hit him in the solar plexus.
“World Star!”
Corey put his hands down, thinking they should see if he was okay. The coach said, “Keep fighting, ladies! The round’s not over.”
Tonight, Corey’s sparring partner was a twenty-five-year-old named Francisco, a recent immigrant, now living in Plymouth, who had trained in jiujitsu back in Brazil for the last ten years and had a brown belt under one of the leading São Paulo schools. When their bout went to the ground, Corey received a merciless grappling lesson. No matter what he did, Francisco slid over him like an anaconda, squeezing his ribs, riding his abdomen, asphyxiating him before he even got to his neck. To get starved for air when he was working as hard as he could—when he had just done the equivalent of sprinting up four flights of stairs with a human being on his back—was excruciating. Corey’s lips turned blue. He gave up submissions just to make it stop.
By the end of the night, he could barely function. His face had been scraped raw by the man’s stubble. The bridge of his nose was bleeding. His arms and legs appeared fragile, as if he’d used his body up. He was five pounds lighter, bruised all over. When he peeled off his kneepads, his knees were skinned and macerated. He stank like kerosene, ammonia, aldehyde, sweat. His waterlogged clothes looked like he’d been dunked in the ocean. Foreign hairs from the mat were sticking to his skin. His arm was hyper-extended. His toes were jammed. There was a pull in his back. His head ached. Water nauseated him, yet there wasn’t enough water in the world that he could drink to satisfy his thirst. His brain had shrunk inside his head. He could hardly think or talk.
Francisco slapped him on the arm.
“Keep it up. You should fight.”
“I will. I am.”
Corey saw Adrian after signing the contract for his next fight, which was going to be held early next month. As soon as he had signed the contract, he wanted nothing more than a vacation from fighting; so, for a vacation, he called Adrian. His friend agreed to meet him that Saturday. Adrian suggested they meet at Boston Common, since it was closer for Corey than going all the way to MIT. But the real reason, Corey realized later, was that Adrian liked the Park Street–Downtown Crossing area—there was something there that attracted him, though Corey never knew what. And there was the Common itself, which, like the Esplanade, was a park. Even though it wasn’t sunbathing season, Adrian liked to walk around the park, in among the trees and benches, inspecting things and laughing.
When Corey met him, this is what he did—wandering in willful-child fashion hither and yon, directing Corey’s attention to details that had meaning only to Adrian and connecting them to the abstruse subjects he was taking at MIT.
Tiresome as this was, it took Corey’s mind off his fight. It wasn’t as unpleasant as what could happen at Bestway on any given sparring night.
But after an hour or so, Corey would take no more. It was late afternoon. Dusk was setting in. By now, they’d walked over the bridge to Cambridge and had arrived at MIT. He hadn’t been here since his friend had started college and was curious about the place. He asked Adrian to let him see his dorm.
At first, Adrian didn’t want to take him, but Corey goaded him, saying, “What are you afraid of?” Finally, Adrian gave in, but he wasn’t happy. He insisted this was a bad idea. “It’ll be fine,” said Corey.
They were walking towards his dorm when Adrian stopped in his tracks.
“Oh no.”
“What is it?”
A woman in a wig was coming towards them.
“Adrian,” she said, “you haven’t been answering your phone.”
Adrian went to confront her, saying, “Now just a minute. What evidence do you have?” He parleyed with her in the cove-shaped parking lot from a dueling distance of ten paces beneath the security lights, not letting her approach.
She said, “I had radiation. You’re not allowed to ignore my calls.”
Corey backed away. Snatches of their discussion reached his ears. Mrs. Reinhardt wanted to take her son to dinner at Red Lobster. Adrian said he was busy. “With what?” she asked. He began listing his courses and assignments.
“I have your schedule, Adrian. Don’t lie to me.”
Adrian headed into his dorm. His mother made a move to follow.
“I thought we agreed on boundaries.”
“Oh, Adrian!” She tried to hug him.
“Stay back,” he said. “You’re radioactive.”
He disappeared inside. Mrs. Reinhardt vanished too. Corey saw her getting in a minivan. Annoyed and bothered by the episode, he went home to Quincy.
The event had a postscript. Days later, when Corey was icing his arm—he’d tweaked it during training—Adrian called him to complain, again, about his mother. Corey realized his friend was somehow under the impression that he took his part. He decided it was time to set him straight.
“I don’t care what she’s done to you. She’s your mother. You don’t call her radioactive.”
Adrian said Corey had no idea what he was talking about.
They wouldn’t talk again until April after that.
Gloria only left the house on five mornings that November. On each of these mornings, Corey helped her get dressed. He fit her skeletonized hands into the orthotic gauntlets, strapped them tight, strapped on her ankle braces, as if readying her for a Thai fight; then put on her hat and boots and winter coat and walked her to The Ride. Her disability had come through from the state. Under its terms, she would receive full pay for working forty hours a month. She was finally on her way to being liberated from her job.
At her office, they allowed her to sit there and do little. Her employer, having no choice under the law, assented to this arrangement but was unhappy with it.
If she was staying home, Corey poured her coffee, plugged in her laptop and then he left her.
“I’m going to learn something today,” she said as he was leaving. “I saw a Sanskrit course online.”
He wore his hat, gloves, winter parka, sweatshirt, long johns, double socks, drove to Quincy High and sat through class with his gym bag between his legs and thought about his mother.
Once, he had a fear premonition and went outside and called her. The call was disconnected. He hit redial. No answer. He was about to drive home. Finally, she picked up.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just had trouble with my hands.”
After school, he drove to the academy, wrapped his hands, put on his headgear, groin protection, mouthpiece, shin guards, and got in the cage to spar. At five, he took off his gear and rolled with the jiujitsu class, and at six he put the hand and foot wraps back on and trained Muay Thai. Twice a week, he stayed late and lifted weights—a conditioning circuit whose goal was to make him throw up. Sometimes it was successful. Lying on his back, he performed leg raises while someone smashed him in the belly with a Thai pad. Every weekend, he took a long slow run along the shore, wearing his down coat, his body getting leaner and lighter under his sweats. The ocean detonated on the gray beach. He listened to it as he jogged. He ate tuna fish and frozen broccoli and weighed himself.
His skin burned constantly from chafing, and he went to Walgreens and bought skin lotion and it relieved him. At night, after training, he soaked his board shorts and compression shirts in white vinegar and hot water to kill staph, ringworm, herpes gladiatoris, and on weekends he took his and his mother’s laundry to the coin laundromat next to Point Liquors and washed their clothes in Era Plus. While they dried, he fell asleep. He took them out of the dryer, cleaned the lint off the filter because he liked the soft, warm feltlike feel of the lint, and carried their clean clothes out in a plastic hamper to the old red hatchback, which his mother had started driving when she was a kid at Lesley College.
One of his Craigslist jobs took him to Central Square, to a residential development not far from MIT. He assembled Ikea furniture for a pair of girls who lived in a brand-new three-floor house with hardwood floors and a brick patio in the back. One girl had a conference call with a finance company, which she took in the bathroom, while he was working. She was still there when he was leaving. He flagged down her roommate, a blonde in her pajamas. “Oh. You need to be paid.” She got her purse. “It was twenty, wasn’t it?”
“Actually your ad said twenty-five.”
Riding home on the T, for the hundredth time, he thought about quitting high school and getting a full-time job.
Every morning he woke up, the fight was a day closer. His opponent was with the Gracie Barra fight team. Corey looked him up online, saw his record. He didn’t want to think about him any more than he had to. Once a day he thought whatever was going to happen in the cage would eventually happen no matter what he did and then it would be over.
While he was away, Gloria, alone in their house in Quincy, put aside her online Sanskrit lesson and left her bedroom and used her walker to make her way to the front door, which she somehow managed to open with her gauntlets. She stood on the top step of the stairs outside her house, which she was unable to descend on her own, and stared out at the seawall, clutching her walker.
The fight was going to be in his mother’s hometown of Springfield, Mass. Three days beforehand, on December fifth, an arctic wind raced down from Canada and crashed into a warm surge boiling up from the Gulf of Mexico. Low, dark clouds rushed across the skies of Boston. Within minutes, the daylight world turned eerily black and a storm hit. Hurricane-force gusts bombed through the streets. Hail drove down violently. Trapped in the house in Quincy, Corey felt like a sailor on a tiny ship at sea. Beyond his windows, he could see nothing but a churning, impenetrable darkness that blotted out everything and had a frightening sulfurous cast.
He let the blinds close and went to the bathroom and found the clippers. While hail rattled the windows, he buzzed his hair off. Shorn and tense, he looked in the mirror.
“Ding!” he said. “The bell rings. I come out, I take my time…”
He moved through the house, throwing punches in slow motion.
“What do I do if he gets my back?”
He got down on the floor and bridged. “Handfight, handfight, handfight—respect the choke—kick the leg out—free that leg—don’t let him mount—turn into him—payback time.”
While he was twisting on the floor, his mother’s wheelchair came by UPS. The weather had abated just enough for trucks to drive, but the driver and the shipping box still got soaking wet. Corey ran out to help the driver get it up the steps. Rain flew in when the door was open. He broke the box open with a razor-knife. The chair was folded. He pulled the sides apart and locked the bolts in place with a wrench and fit the custom-made cushion in its sleeve.
His mother was distressed. She had him hide the wheelchair in the corner and drape it with a bedsheet.
Corey put on a slicker and went up to the city, to the North End, the old Italian neighborhood. He bought her a license plate that said Mafia Boss and brought it home and wired it to the axle.
He knew it would offend his father. That may have been why he did it. The next night, his father walked in just after dinner. Corey heard him talking to his mother as if they were still a family. When Corey came out of his room, he saw Leonard sitting on the futon, reading a Committee to Protect Journalists book called Attacks on the Press, and Corey knew he’d seen the license plate.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, Leonard looked up from his book and said, “It’d be interesting if you met a real gangster someday, Corey.”