I AM NOT A BORN TRESPASSER, AND I don’t know that Sean is, but when you spend your days in a concrete hole you will tend to spill out into spaces unsanctioned. Thus Sean appropriated the local Sheraton, where he crossed the long lobby staring at the carpet and hoping no one had the will to remove a man with ears so obviously deformed by consensual violence. The business center was a place to print his bloodwork, the shared kitchen microwave a place to mold his mouthpiece, the sauna to shed weight prefight. Once, long after the months I want to tell you about here, Sean emerged from a half hour in the Sheraton sauna, huffing, eyes gone dead, and lowered himself to lie flat on the concrete floor. A hotel employee walked through the pool area, shot us a look, continued on. Sean splayed his arms and legs and stared up at the ceiling and lay there recovering until finally he said, “I don’t have much direction. Life just kind of flows through me.”
When Sean says he knows no direction, I hear him talking of a grace particular to his kind. To be a great fighter, I came to believe, one had to be naked before the clash, which meant not cluttering one’s life with other people, petty distractions, emotional armor a violent encounter need penetrate. Sean clung to nothing. And so when something in the universe did happen, he was wide open, a gaping hole, an instrument alive to tuning. Feelings had him. When he was hungry he ate, and when he was tired he slept, and when he had need of a woman, he found one online and had her. The future made and unmade itself in the space of a single conversation. “I should become a Navy SEAL,” he’d say, packing a bowl with his thumb, and a moment later, “Nah, I don’t approve of what we’re doing over there,” and riffle through his pockets for a lighter.
There were no fights to be had upon our return from St. Louis, no encounters to encount. I found my position vis-à-vis Sean elevated, for I was still his only spacetaker, and here were fightless days and days in which Sean’s status required shoring up. It was those long stretches of sameness, unraveling over many months, that justified this entourage of one. I attended seminars as seldom as possible—Sean being my Yale College and my Harvard, as I was fond of telling him—and we toured the city: to the art museum, to The Paddlewheel, up the steep hills, back down to the bank. He led, I followed, and even during the dampest, drizzliest November day, this had a feeling of ceremony. A two-person parade, if you will.
What this was like is not easy to describe. To be in Sean’s aura was to be in a suspended state of unpreparedness; it wasn’t just that anything could happen, but when it did happen, you would be empty and unready for it and without resources to react, which was, in the end, just another kind of readiness. Sean’s very presence in this place was a contingency laced with various misfortunes: when he left Tennessee five years before, he headed for Team Miletich instead of to an equally celebrated team in New Mexico because he thought his ’89 Chevy Blazer was more likely to make it to Davenport than to Albuquerque; and when his catalytic converter grew clogged in Illinois he hadn’t had the money to fix it; and when he was told the car could not go over 30 mph, he said OK, and drove it at 29 mph on the highway (“Was it scary? Fuck yeah, it was scary”) until at last he arrived. Thus the most mundane events were laced with a kind of unknowing. The world would provide or it wouldn’t, destroy you or move on.
Thoughts came unbidden, and often late, as did the news that he would be a father at the end of our time in St. Louis. On that occasion I pressed not at all, hoping the moment would pass and I would never hear tell of it again, but he continued the next morning in the car on the way back. We were speeding across mile upon mile of barns and cattle and empty stretches of green soybean carpet followed by more barns and more cattle and very occasionally a white fence with lilies planted by the posts, as we let our arms hang out the windows into the heat.
“She wants money for it,” he said. He was shouting so I could hear him above the wind. “As soon as she told me she was pregnant she started asking for money. Like, it’s yours, give me forty dollars.”
Sean had slept with nineteen-year-old Alexis twice, eight weeks previous to the fight in St. Louis, and a mere month after his divorce was finalized. His knowledge of the basic facts surrounding her existence struck me as rather limited in scope, though he had met her sister. At some point between their lurid tryst and the fight in St. Louis, Alexis moved to Omaha, notified him, by text, that she was pregnant, and demanded cash. The story had certain holes in it, I thought.
“I hope I can get custody,” Sean said. “At least for the weekends.”
“What?” I asked, alarmed at the fact that this fetus, which I took to be an imaginary agent of blackmail, had suddenly become a human child with weekend plans.
“I want to be in its life, take it camping back in Tennessee, that sort of thing.”
The side of Sean’s face was purple with bruises.
“Little kids are amazing,” he said.
“But—”
“It’s going to need to spend time with someone more educated than Alexis. Her grammar is terrible; she’s just really ignorant.”
“You sent her money?”
“Just a little, she said it wasn’t enough.”
I quite doubted that this woman was pregnant at all. But my strategy here, if you could call it that, was to let this comment hang and hope it swelled into a portentous suggestion Sean might assimilate. We were quiet for a while; I turned on the radio. He turned it off.
“She smokes,” he said. “That’s crazy, right? It’s so risky.”
From this conversation I do not mean it to be inferred that Sean was particularly credulous; indeed, Sean’s Pyrrhonian skepticism and anarchic antiauthoritarianism was of the sort only afforded those so strong in body and mind they haven’t need for fragile elaborate delusions carefully balanced, like stacked glass, upon the delusions of others. One of his favorite expressions was “running a scam,” an accusation he flung at almost everybody with a broad-minded enthusiasm that knew no boundaries of class or status. Sean doubted not only the architects of the war he’d fought in but also the presumed authority and easy sanctimony of the men with whom he fought. He doubted women, promoters, bartenders, anyone remotely involved with the UFC or its television show, car mechanics, the people at Legal Aid, the staff of the University of Phoenix, and landlords. He doubted the President. “You suddenly find and kill this guy in an election year?” he said when Barack Obama announced the murder of Osama bin Laden. “Right. Yeah. Very convenient.”
Truth be told, I thought little of our Alexis-related conversation during those months, its uncharacteristic fixity. I paid attention instead to all the jobs Sean liberated himself from just a few weeks in, the way he escaped from the office stapling OSHA manuals, walked out one night of the bar where he bounced. One job was becoming very regular—a job at a construction site, six days a week, seven hours a day for two months—and it was this regularity that made Sean stop, one day, halfway through his morning commute. He stopped the car. He started the car. He drove back home. “I don’t want to build stuff for a living,” he told me later that day.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep a job?” someone asked him once at The Paddlewheel, and Sean said that would not be easier at all, because he was a fighter, and to pretend to be otherwise was to struggle against himself hour after hour, day after day, though, that being said, this was not a period in which Sean demonstrated much interest in working out. Sean’s fluidity was such that he had taken on a kind of phantom quality; he slipped between houses so quickly one could not expect to find him where one had last seen him, though through each move—from the concrete hole, to the first floor of a Motel 6, to a studio, to a shared apartment above the gym—if one were to find him, one could be sure he’d be planless and happy to wander outward.
Nevertheless, I felt inspired by his determination not to let life interfere with his artistry. I was inspired enough to email the Director of Graduate Studies and explain that I was engaged in some exciting experimental philosophy, and that I supposed my ongoing study of the phenomenological basis of ecstasy to be more important than taking a few survey courses at what was, after all, a midranked philosophy program. I felt that they should make some allowances on my account. He responded with a rather abrupt note informing me that the requirements of my degree would remain in force. I did attend my classes on occasion, most often a course on the Philosophy of Language, taught with some competence by a Professor Knowles who, when told of my project, deemed it “a possibly interesting revisionist study of nineteenth-century Francophone aesthetic theory.” I took this to be an expression of enthused support tempered by twenty years of imprisonment in the Department of Philosophy building, which, thanks to an era of university architecture principally inspired by fear of rioting youths, quite literally resembles a bastille.
Thus buoyed, I responded to Knowles’s assignments with the rigor of a scholar rather than the craven parroting of a student. He assigned a paper on the antirealism of Hilary Putnam, who believed that the only independent reality is beyond the reach of our perceptual capacities. I did not see much point in rehashing Putnam’s various casuistic maneuverings, and offered instead ten pages explaining that there was a way, even in our time, to intensify the body’s poor perceptual capacities, if only for a fleeting moment. My examples required some illustration of various martial-arts stratagems so I included, for Knowles’s benefit, graphics meant to convey the meaning of “rear-naked choke” and “leglock.”
One afternoon Sean and I parked right up against the Mississippi and together walked up the limestone bluffs, where a few whimsically turreted mansions endure. This was the Davenport of Gilded Age German landowners who covered the hills in wrapped-porched Palladian-windowed well-columned homes perched high above the river. It was September then and chilly but as we ascended we shed our jackets and held them in hands that swayed with our long climbing gait. There were some places where it felt a little odd to have a companion whose face had been reshaped by his profession, but then Davenport’s industrialists were dead and its fighters very much alive.
Sean was telling me about his latest job; his boss told old ladies that the earth beneath their homes exuded an invisible toxic gas, then installed tubes to suck the poison out of the earth and fan it out into the atmosphere. Then his boss told the old ladies to rest easy: problem fixed. Sean was paid in cash.
“Is that safe?” I asked, breathing hard. The cold made my knuckles ache.
“Well I can die now,” he said. “I’ve already passed on my seed.”
The mansions’ current inhabitants had arranged their expensive cars to angle just-so against the curves of their long black driveways, as if to pose one still life against another. The lawns had been edged, planted, trimmed. The only movement was a man mowing the edge of his lawn where it met his neighbor’s. The mower of lawns looked us up and down, registered that we were not of this neighborhood, but, being that this was Davenport, probably understood that we were together of the fighting class. We walked on.
“If there is one thing I’m afraid of,” said Sean, “it’s lawn mowers.”
Sean was texting the whole way back down the hill. He was shaking his head.
“What is it,” I asked.
“The mother of my child,” he said, “thinks ammonia is a disease you can get.”
It was clear now that she really was pregnant, though no one could say by whom, and that she was living in Omaha with a boyfriend named Kris. Had there been a delicate way to suggest to Sean that he was very likely not the father, I might have ventured forth into such awkward territory, but he seemed to have shut down the skeptical elements of his cognition in all matters Alexis.
A long, curt, increasingly antagonistic written correspondence swallowed the months that lay ahead. Every time he brought up the subject of Alexis, I would try to change the subject, but he insisted upon reading her texts aloud. I have no record of their correspondence, as it is not the kind of thing with which I would have sullied my notebook, but what I can reconstruct from those dramatic readings goes something like the following:
Boy or Girl?
Send $
Boy or Girl?
2 soon
Stop smoking
Dont tell me what to do
Boy or Girl?
Boy
Sending $$
$60? Its your SON
Stop smoking
Send $
In the end Sean always sent money. I suppose in retrospect the birth of a living distraction might have worried me even more, the lack of attachment being something I so admired in Sean, but because nothing else changed—there was no fixed job, no permanent house, no pattern to any given day—I could see this emergence only as a kind of infatuation that would pass when Alexis disappeared completely, one hoped, into a dark textless pocket of the earth. But it got to the point, somewhere around December, when every conversation terminated in the imminent birth of a child at the hands of a demanding adolescent.
Don’t have it
How can u do this to your son?
Will get it. Want 2 b there when hes born tho
Hell no ur just a sperm donor
yah MY sperm
In January Alexis sent Sean a picture, by text, of a boy she had named Josiah. She said the sister was there when the doctors put the baby into her arms. A writhing creature revealed himself to them. “Yep,” said the sister, laughing as she touched Josiah’s fist and welcomed this permanent fixture of the world into being. “Sean Huffman.”