HOW OBVIOUS HIS IMPAIRMENT SEEMS in retrospect! Why, in retrospect, I can fairly see those neurons failing to connect, little zaps of white energy fizzling out before they touch. But my ignorance went levels deep: I did not know about the punch; I did not know what longterm symptoms which a concussion was capable of manifesting; and even if I had, I could always, with the self-delusion of an ecstasy-seeking optimist, attribute irritability to nervousness (though this was not characteristic of Erik) and absentmindedness to the extended effects of starvation (though this, too, was inconsistent with prior experience).
I thought little of the fact that when I arrived at Erik’s New Orleans hotel room, notebook in hand, he was not there at the appointment time. An hour later Erik and Wes and his four Milwaukee-based spacetakers arrived to find me sitting in the hallway.
“Oh,” said Erik. “Hi.”
“I thought we were meeting at four?” I felt the protective eyes of his other spacetakers upon me.
“We were? Guess I forgot.”
There were several nonconcussive, unpleasant explanations for this lack of courtesy. I had arrived late in the weekend because I had not wanted to leave Sean; perhaps Erik’s other spacetakers had told him to turn on me due to my divided loyalties. Perhaps Erik wanted to rid himself of every vestige of his pre-Milwaukee life, though the presence of Wes agitated against that particular conclusion. Or perhaps—and I thought of this as I gazed at the young bright faces of Erik’s other spacetakers—I had passed some threshold of agedness that rendered me unwelcome. Fewer than two months from a momentous birthday, I was especially sensitive to this consideration, and wondered whether I seemed to these men more a misfit elder than a fun-loving comrade. Perhaps the power of invisibility, which I took myself to have when among Erik and his friends, atrophied, like everything else, with time. I thought of Pettis’s vulgar uncle, and the unseemliness of his tagging along with a group of much younger men.
In the hotel room, on a table beside the bed, was an instructive list Erik had made for those already present: “Whole Foods—Biggie 11:30; Jimmy John’s—Brent 12:00” and so on. Erik had remade his social life, such that what had been a team of equals was now a coterie of eager underlings.
Normally at this stage, having weighed in, rehydrated, and incorporated any number of sandwiches, Erik would be shadowboxing and chattering animatedly about the fight. He would want me to know what he thought of his opponent, or what he might buy with the money should he win. But he said next to nothing as the pack of us left the hotel and penetrated the city. Sweaty bands of tourists, blue beads around their necks and beers in hand, crowded the sidewalks and slowed traffic. A driver, surely intoxicated, backed onto the curb in front of the Marriott. “Fuck that curb!” a stranger shouted.
“Is that seerp?” a raggedy black man asked us, gesturing toward a red gallon jug of Pedialyte in Erik’s hands. Erik didn’t seem to hear; he kept walking.
“He means syrup—cough syrup and 7UP—what Lil’ Wayne drinks,” translated Biggie, the only black spacetaker and the youngest. Biggie was chubby cheeked and almost as excited about eating as was Erik.
“Really, cough syrup?” said someone.
“Seerp!” said Biggie. We tried the sound on our tongues. Erik led us to the French Quarter. Women in lingerie slunk in doorways, under neon signs that sucked the light from their skin and replaced it with blue pallor. We all stared, except for Rick Glenn, a married twenty-two-year-old from central Iowa. Earlier they had tricked Rick Glenn into coming with them to a strip club on Bourbon Street. “I didn’t know it was this kind of place,” he had said, grimacing at the floor with his hands in his pockets. These were not men like Anthony Pettis; they were all possessed of a certain innocence.
On one side of Erik was the curb; on the other, Biggie. I wished to engage Erik in conversation; perhaps because I wanted some assurance that everything was as normal between us. So I sidled between them and suggested that a vice-ridden city like New Orleans, so uninvested in the ecstasy-denying impulses of civil order, was an ideal place to stage a fight. But it was Biggie who responded, to say that there was vice in Iowa, too, and if you showed up in the wrong place in Waterloo, you could be killed. He said it like he wanted to believe it.
The Italian restaurant Erik had lusted after, the one where they hand-pull the pasta, was on a quieter corner of the French Quarter. He walked in with the jug by his side, in a jersey and jeans, with six spacetakers in T-shirts behind him. Every man in the restaurant had a jacket on; most were seated near a fireplace away from the street. The maître d’ looked at Erik. “Are we allowed in here?” Glenn said from the back of the pack.
I suspected that we should redirect our party to the nearest Jimmy John’s, but we were led without comment to a large table by the window. The Pedialyte made a loud thunk as Erik plopped it on the table, beside a vase with a wine list tilted against it.
“They got goat on the menu,” said Biggie.
“What’s rabbit taste like?” asked Grant.
“Squid ink!” said Rick.
“What’s arugula?” asked Grant.
The waiter explained what bruschetta was, and then he explained about arugula. The squid ink cavatelli, he said, was not as briny as might be expected.
“What’s in the jug?” he asked.
“Pedialyte.”
“He’s a fighter,” said Biggie. “He’s fighting tomorrow.”
“Oh!” said the waiter. “Like MMA? Oh, wow. I have a friend who fights sometimes, I mean not that serious, but he is really into it, goes every week, but he knows a lot of chokes and—”
“Oh yeah?” said Erik, politely but without looking up from the menu. He ordered bruschetta, orecchiette, spaghetti, soup. “For now,” he said.
“Tomorrow, you’re fighting?” the waiter asked.
When the food came—Rick’s jet-black squid ink pasta was a shock to him—the owner of the restaurant, a middle-aged man in a suit, came too. He shook Erik’s hand and thanked him for coming to his restaurant. “Tomorrow we will watch and say we saw you!” he said, very nearly bowing, while the waiter rattled off a list of bar recommendations to Grant, and agreed, with Biggie, that bruschetta was a strange word.
Erik was staring into space, his fingers tight around the handle of the plastic jug of Pedialyte.
“What?” he said, lost yet again, unable to keep up with the multiple conversations being held across the table.
“The strip club,” said Grant, catching Erik up, “Rick wants to go.”
“I hate strip clubs,” said Erik. “I want frozen yogurt. Why is everyone taking so long?”
Erik had the check in front of him, but he seemed to have drifted off, deep in a lonely thought none of us could reach. Had there ever been a time for him to admit to his dysfunction, it was certainly not now—now, when we six spacetakers had journeyed 1,000 miles south of Iowa in hope of release, when 7,000 fans were en route to this gothic swamp, when 1.8 million Americans had made their Saturday night plans and their Saturday night plans involved watching Erik Koch fight. When Erik’s eyes flickered back to attention, and he saw the bill before him, he simply put his hand in his pocket and drew out his wallet as if everything were normal.
The next afternoon I made my way to the venue alone. By September of 2011 my project had endured precisely a year, and the anniversary brought with it certain concerns about the speed of my progress. By nature opportunities for the observation of ecstatic experience were few and fleeting; each required months of preparation that might, in the end, come to nothing, as I had dejectedly discovered while ensconced in the bubble. I had no intention of rushing a work that would be of such lasting importance to the study of consciousness, but it was dispiriting to reflect upon the fact that in over a year of observation I had accumulated only five moments of heightened sensation on which to expound. And having recently abandoned my program, struck out as a sole roving scholar without any institution at my back, I longed for a moment of reassurance from the universe I was chronicling.
I approved of that flat water-side arena, the way it held us all on the same softly tilted plane instead of shooting up into steep terraced walls. We looked, pressed together at such a uniform height, like a crowd that might with small provocation incite ourselves to riot. For that reason I rejected the cageside seat labeled “Cedar Rapids Gazette” for a cheap seat in the rafters. If there were some possibility of an ecstasy-driven uprising, I did not want to be isolated among bespectacled sports journalists.
There would be four televised fights that evening of which Erik’s was the second, but most of those watching his fight would be far more familiar with his opponent. In 2011 Jonathan Brookins was already a television phenomenon. Over twelve seasons of The Ultimate Fighter, the insulting, undignified reality show in which producers forced a dozen martial artists into a tight living space, took away solitary entertainments that might detract from social drama, and kept the lights on twenty-four hours a day, Brookins was the first to vocally bemoan the lack of books. He was the first to express a longing for his local library, the first to appear in a yogic headstand before his fight, and the first to describe his time in the house as “a journey of self-discovery.” When finally it seemed like Brookins might win the show, he was seized with a horror that he might lose his humility. “I hope only to be worthy of the word humble,” he said. “I’m praying every day, ‘Lord, don’t let this thing go to my head. Let me go home, ride my bike; let me go to the library.’”
I cannot say whether Brookins was albino, though his black features and alabaster-blond complexion suggested melanin deficiency and a “caveman” quality to which others alluded. Unlike Erik, who would grab any microphone in the vicinity, Brookins grew nervous and fidget-prone on camera. “I’d rather be focusing on bigger questions of the universe,” he said, quite admirably I thought, halfway through the show’s duration. He won the season, was granted a loyal following, and found himself, but a year later, fighting the rather less famous Erik Koch, which he said was a great honor. Thus it was that Erik found himself with the problem of nurturing enmity for the world’s most cordial opponent.
“I hate how nice he is,” Erik had said in the hotel room that afternoon.
“He looks like a caveman,” offered Wes.
“At weigh-ins he was like, ‘It’s an honor to fight you.’ Yeah, well,” Erik said, as if repeating something he’d heard somewhere, “it’ll be an honor to knock you out. I’ll be the bad guy if I have to be.”
As the pre-Erik fights flew by that evening I endured the conversation of my neighbor, who knew not the slightest thing about the spectacle pouring forth. He had won the tickets, he told me, through a contest, which he called a “sweepstakes,” and as he said this I noticed that a quarter of the crowd was wearing the same T-shirt as this man—they were all sweepstakes winners swept in by a beer company as if this sacred encounter were a Carnival Cruise to be enjoyed by the common tourist. The worst sort of desecration comes not by the hate-filled vandal but by the oblivious pleasure seeker; think only of the way the sublime majesty of the sea is sadly wasted on actual cruise enthusiasts. The blue-shirted had come not to heighten their perceptual capacities, find escape, but to dull even further each already attenuated sense.
When my charge burst into the arena all the listless languor of the previous evening was gone. He danced toward the cage slapping the sweating hands of dancing fans, mouth open, each step a jump, each hand-slap a definitive smack, each scream unworded as if he were too present to require the cold distancing mechanism of a language. He must have been terrified of drifting off in the middle of the encounter, forgetting where he was, losing the thread on which was strung each fighterly moment, but there was nothing even the most intelligent observer would have noticed in his demeanor to suggest fear or uncertainty. Brookins waited, patient and polite and soon to be penetrated. The laser lights shifted like roaming eyes and the ring girls touched their hair and the cameras slid on tracks with the glorious simultaneity of a proper spectacle.
Brookins was even taller than was Erik. How this is possible at 145 pounds I could not figure; it would seem that a man so long of limb would exert more gravitational pull, unless he were made of some superior substance, some hard and light frame on which to hang his flesh. But still I was not afraid, even as the uneducated man beside me left for more free beer, even as the ref put his hands together in a prayerful gesture of respect before the octagon, paused, and waved his flat palm as if to chop in two the air between the fighters.
With his blond hair pulled into cornrows, Brookins’ ears were unpleasantly visible; he looked nothing like lithe Erik, who had in his being the satisfying consonance of a marble sculpture carved from a single slab. Brookins crossed the cage with a long lumbering stride to rush his vastly more graceful opponent, slamming Erik against the cage. From where I sat I saw only Erik’s back, white diamonds of flesh outlined in black wire. He wrapped his arms around Erik’s waist and pulled and pulled and grimaced, pulling still more, but could not pull hard enough to yank him to the mat. “What’s happening?” asked the man at my side, and I ignored him, for if he could not see that Brookins was afraid to fight standing up, there was really no hope of my helping him through this brief encounter.
But how odd Brookins’ persistence appeared to the seasoned watcher of fights; how inelegant this hard dull adamancy in a pursuit meant for the playfully supple. He did not grow playful or more interesting, but he grew tired; so instead of trying to pull Erik to the ground, he stood tall and hugged Erik tight against the cage. Erik focused his strength on breathing inside Brookins’ arms, forcing his chest to rise and fall against the crushing pressure of Brookins’ hug. Neither of them could strike, as Brookins’ arms were wrapped around Erik and Erik’s arms were pinned against his sides. Brookins’ chest slid an inch across Erik’s chest; he leaned into Erik with the full force of his weight, shoved his shoulder into Erik’s windpipe. Again he tried to drag Erik to the ground. One of 7,000 people coughed. Ten seconds passed, twenty seconds. I felt embarrassed, as I am sure the whole crowd did, at Brookins’ animal persistence, his refusal to surrender to the fluidity of the fight.
“Fight!” someone screamed from the cheap seats. Erik slid his right arm from under the clinch; Brookins lifted his left arm to wrap Erik back up in the hug. Erik slid his arm out and Brookins wrapped him up again—a slow labored weaving of limbs, two men swimming into one another. Locked in the hug, Erik thrashed and writhed, throwing his shoulders and hips at Brookins in an attempt to break free. Another cough from the crowd. “Elbows,” someone shouted. Sweepstakes winners got up in search of beer while on television announcers struggled to fill the air with chatter. The camera stayed unchanging on this still of two men trapped. The audience waited for Brookins to untie himself and give them the show for which they had come.
At the ring of the bell I began to breathe deeply as I had been instructed to by the woman of Korean descent. The man beside me looked at me, concerned, but really he ought to have been concerned for himself, for he would always be trapped in his body, and I had a way out upon occasion, though perhaps, it was dawning upon me with a growing sense of disappointment, not this occasion.
At the dawn of the second round Brookins rushed Erik once again. He tried to drag Erik to the canvas, just as he had before. He pulled on one of Erik’s legs, then the other leg, then the ankle of that leg. In all of his other fights Brookins had been able to yank the other man to the floor and submit him, but Erik would not go down. Brookins went, once again, to his plan B, which was to play human straitjacket. Erik spun to his right, and the caveman spun, and Erik spun, and they landed right where they started, clinched, with no air between their two chests. Erik hipped and pushed and kicked and spun and finally, finally he was free, with inches of space between his body and Brookins.
Broken free, the fight was an open, dangerous thing; in the space between Erik and Brookins lay all the possibility for terror, all hope of pain and penetration. The moment Erik finally spun out in the great glorious empty center of the cage I breathed deep and let loose a supportive scream, for now the fight might begin; and just as I shouted Erik unfurled his balletic limbs, stretched his right arm long into a lunging jab. There was a gasp from the crowd, then a quick breath in; for no satisfying solidity met Erik’s fist as he swept past. Brookins was fast, perhaps as fast as Erik, and though Brookins could not throw a punch he could duck Erik’s punches with the flickering speed of a puckish sprite.
Erik shook his head and shoulders like a kenneled dog stretching upon its emergence back into the world. This was his opportunity to unleash himself on a lesser man. Instead of unleashing, he tapped Brookins with a few tepid shin-kicks, as if daintily dipping his toes in icy water. Brookins rushed Erik and they were again against the cage, Brookins hugging Erik, both men cobwebbed into a dull and ordinary stillness. The opportunity was lost. The round ended. I closed my eyes, breathed heavily. I was cold in that arena but a sweat had broken out over me; drops of water popped onto my neck and slid down my shirt.
“Someone doesn’t want to fight,” I heard Duke say. He meant Brookins, but Erik too was withholding. He ought to have rushed Brookins just as Brookins rushed him, not cautious shin-taps but a vicious slew of strikes, not this halting static hug but a fluid writhing roll. The Erik I craved would slide out of a clinch like an eel in a fist, shed the skein of self-conscious worry and unravel before us. If not for himself, then for us. For me.
At the advent of the third round Brookins stood in the center of the cage and let himself be hit. Erik seemed to be waiting for something, his feet free once again, dancing around Brookins as if trying to solve a problem—a careful kick to the shin, a safe, quick jab. Brookins’ cornrows had fallen out into thick stalks of blond hair, dreads really, and when Erik finally landed the perfect shot to Brookins’ face the dreads fanned golden like spread feathers behind his head. I tried to feel myself dispersing, the chair broken into a billion atoms, the illusions of temporal space ripped from consciousness. But all I felt was the effort of trying. This, then, was the fight’s most beautiful moment and it was only that—beautiful.
“What are they doing now,” asked the man, clearly bored. “Hugging?”
“Failing,” I snapped without looking at him, “they’re failing.”
Brookins rushed Erik, hugged him. The crowd booed. On television the announcer read an advertisement for a new sitcom.
“Who won?” asked the man, and I came back to consciousness of his presence with no small embarrassment. The world thought us cretins, children warped into perversity by the abandonment of a careless god, bloodthirsty thugs with no sense at all of the sacred; and for all this man and his fellow sweepstakes winners would ever know, we were exactly that. Another opportunity had passed me by, and it would be months before Sean or Erik had another fight.
“I don’t know,” I told the man, turning away. Bruce Buffer inhaled deeply and exhaled a string of numerals—30–27, 30–27, 29–28—by unanimous decision, Erik “New Breed” Koch. Erik squinted his eyes, frowned, and fell to the ground in tears.
At the press conference following the evening’s final fight, Erik was asked a question about his lachrymose postfight display. “I’m an emotional fighter, man, and this fight was for me, for some of my demons,” he said. “Yeah, I cry. Real men cry too.”
“This is what happens when you go on a journey of self-discovery,” Jonathan Brookins said. “You don’t fight that well.”
I was by this time fairly desperate for a drink. There are many lesser ways to forget oneself, and a shot of whiskey is among them. Which is not to imply that I considered Erik and his entourage ideal company for an obliterating binge. I would be better off going to my old university library and selecting random graduate students from their respective carrels.
“He’s a UFC fighter!” Biggie said as we approached the doors of the club at which the official after-party would take place, and the bouncer rushed ten people—all of us touching to show that we were really just extensions of Erik—into the club without a cover.
Now as I say, if you seek regular partners with which to consume emboldening amounts of alcohol, with which to scout and pursue single women hoping to be scouted and pursued, with which to unleash musical displays of physical competence (“In the dance,” says Nietzsche, “the greatest strength remains potential”), professional fighters are not your best option. Firstly, their tolerance for drink is horrendous. They won’t drink, and when they will, a few shots have their knees buckling in a dispiriting and unfamiliar division of mind and body. They cannot dance, certainly. They do, in their defense, attract women—unless the fighter you have chosen is Erik Koch, and then, it seemed to me late that night, he would actively seek to repel them. Picture Erik at the official after-party, alone in the corner, checking his texts, dancing with his phone, bopping his head as his thumb brushes across the single square of light, bright in the dark bar. There are women dancing around him, attractive women whom one supposes would not be averse to attention from a rising UFC star, but Erik would not cross the chasm. Self-denial may become a kind of sickness. Perhaps Erik was no longer capable of giving himself any satisfaction that did not relate to a victorious encounter.
Erik swayed alone, all light and youth, veins like taut rope running down his muscled arms, bright blue eyes, skin so perfectly unlined he looked even younger than twenty-two. I remembered then why I had chosen him. Here was health itself, a perfect machine right off the line.
“Let’s go back to the French Quarter,” I said.
“I can’t walk everywhere with my ankle fucked up,” Erik snapped at me, and the other five grew quiet. I looked straight at him, shocked—this, his first impolitic words to me in our year of acquaintance.
I turned away sharply, toward light heavyweight Ryan Bader, who was gathering women into his massive wingspan and smiling at the pigtailed official UFC photographer. Bader, at maybe 220 pounds, and Joseph Benavidez, 135 and 5'4" on a good day, brushed themselves against the same blonde with a sparkly T-shirt and three different shades of blue eyeshadow. I wanted to know nothing of Erik’s sexual proclivities, but perhaps fighters, who cannot love lest they lose themselves, require a release that looks something like the blonde. It is one thing to maintain the kind of space from other people that makes a fight possible, and quite another to exile yourself completely. Watching victorious Erik thumb through his phone that night, I thought I had never seen a man so alone.
We got in the taxi, but it could only ferry us so far into the French Quarter, so Erik would have to walk. His ankle was flaring up and he lurched with zombielike stiffness; Biggie made fun of him. Having gained twenty pounds since last night, he’d traded the menacing shadows around his skull for a newfound softness around the eyes and cheeks, but even as he grew healthily fatter the bruises under his eyes were growing darker. A teenage girl in heels and an “Ask Me to Bayou a Bud Light” T-shirt stumbled into him, nearly knocking him into Biggie. The group of men she was with rushed past us; due to Erik’s ankle we moved more slowly than the rest of Bourbon Street, and crowds spilled past us in both directions. A slow crowd of our own coalesced; suddenly Duke had arrived, and Duke’s wife, to whom Duke introduced me as “a great writer for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.” Anthony Pettis was there, and all the many spacetakers who took their positions behind him, and everyone was eating by-the-slice pizza in cold fluorescent light. “Brookins is tough,” Erik said, perhaps because complimenting Brookins’ chin gave him a way to talk about the pain. “Everywhere I hit him hurts. My hands hurt, my elbows hurt, my knees hurt. Something in my ankle is definitely cracked.”
The night had only grown more humid; every reveler was covered in a sweaty sheen now, gone electric blue in the neon. A girl in a wedding veil with a Corona in her hand and six friends packed tight around her jostled past us. Erik’s eyelids were half closed; he was just following the crowd now, into a bar where when you ask for a beer they hand you three, and Erik was given six shots of vodka, plus some tonic, in an oversized white plastic cup.
“I’m going to go hit on some bitches,” Erik said when the cup was empty, not without determination.
But when he lurched back toward us he just said that it was time to go to another bar and plunged everyone back into the wash of limbs, back through a door, slow up some stairs, onto a trellised balcony. At this bar a block down Bourbon, waitresses wore pins: “Ask me about my tooters: $3.” From the balcony we watched cops on horses clop between the masses. One of us dropped a ring of beads; a middle-aged woman picked them off the ground without looking up, placed them around her neck, and walked on. Someone had just washed the stones in front of the bar; they glistened blue. Elbows on the wrought iron, Erik stared at the top of a lighted sign, where a dirty white bra lay abandoned in the long limbo between porch and street. It was 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, no one knew anymore. Grant was approaching a shot in a test tube lodged between the breasts of a waitress. A tooter, $3. Biggie was still inside, leaning close to another waitress with a larger goal in mind. “Look,” he was saying, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll probably never see you again. One night. What do you say?”
She had orders to take, and was gone.
A four-foot black porky waitress in black lingerie, all breasts and thighs and no waist, grabbed Erik by the collar and shoved him into a chair she had placed in the middle of the bar. She jumped on him, pressing her bare round thighs into his bony legs, hooking her ankles behind the chair back and bopping up and down as if riding a bucking pony. She jumped off, went prone on the floor, thrusting up her round buttocks in a kind of erotic worship. The bar went quiet. Pettis, who had arranged this encounter, was positioned a few feet from the action and quite casually holding a flipcam. Erik sat up, looked around with a frozen smile. The waitress stood up and shook her buttocks inches from his face. Erik glanced at the camera. He raised his hand a few uncertain inches and began to spank not her ass, but the air just in front of her ass, as if he might simultaneously please Pettis by the apparent licentiousness of the spank and waft her, like a barely extant airborne particle, up over the balcony and down to the street below.