LET US AGREE THAT IT IS A MISTAKE to attribute any human behavior to a single cause, and yet I cannot help but note that mere weeks after Sean found his name conspicuously absent from the birth certificate, his cheekbones disappeared back into the soft mound of his face, his waist receded into a blur of excess torso, he stopped the visits to Chicago, and the daily regimen lost its motivating power. He had agreed to fight in Des Moines at 185 but it was 205 pounds he carried the week prior to the encounter, and so he had twenty pounds to lose in a matter of days, which he managed though not without considerable sacrifice. He lost almost all of it in forty-eight hours, jogging in rubber, sweating in a sauna, soaking in a salt bath. His body was running on a drastically reduced amount of liquid, the heart pumping doubly hard to recirculate its diminished pool; the vessels narrowed to maintain, shall we say, the force that through the red fuse drives a fighter.
He still failed to make weight, arriving in Des Moines three pounds over, but his opponent elected not to quibble over a few pounds, and late that evening all seemed to be well. Feeling fine, Sean drank his weight in Gatorade.
I don’t know how it is, but fighters so often seem to suffer most not when they are most deprived, but when, finally free to return to normal, their strained bodies are given exactly what is most needed. Six hours later, the lining of his stomach began to call attention to itself, and swirling waves of something deep in his torso began to swell. What foul mist ran up his pipes sought some purchase it could not yet find. He gagged and willed it outward until finally he vomited and felt for the moment cured; but then having found egress the sickness surged, and surged, and surged, and by dawn on the day of his fight he was vomiting so profusely the situation seemed, even to our relatively unflappable subject, somewhat alarming.
Sean asked the cornerman with which he’d come, a dapper Miletich-trained heavyweight named Sherman, for help. Neither was possessed of a map, or a smartphone, or a GPS, and so they simply drove around the Des Moines suburb in search of a hospital. When they finally found one, Sean hobbled in, vomiting on the sidewalk, only to be told that he had arrived at a nursing home. He got back in the car. They found a hospital, and a doctor willing to diagnose Sean.
I knew nothing of this until I arrived at the fight. “Well,” said Sean when I finally saw him in the very same locker room he had left to lose to Grigsby, “my kidneys kind of failed this morning.”
Here I registered a tingling in the tips of my fingers, a quickening of breath. For me it had ever been a source of wonderment the way in Sean cracks and fissures and tears are simply swallowed backward into seamlessness. That in lieu of a locatable break, the whole oily system might cease to run was not something I’d had occasion to consider.
“But you’re still fighting tonight?” I asked, worried, and guilty—for when I was most needed, I had been back in Iowa City, nursing a cold a hardier spacetaker might have ignored.
“Yeah, fine now.”
Fine here take to mean only that none of his organs were at that moment in abeyance. As Sean related this story I began to note the sallowness in his cheeks, which I had at first thought merely to be the result of weight loss; I began to note the yellowness of his pallor, which I had thought merely the dressing room fluorescence; and I saw the heaviness with which he lifted his chest. This was something new to the world: Sean breathing against a slow, creeping, unlocatable pain. He was nauseated. He hadn’t eaten in three days. Where the hospital techs had tried to stick IVs in Sean’s narrowed veins, his wrists were stippled with pricks. Among the many bits of advice the doctor had offered—do not attempt to lose ten percent of your body weight in two days, for example—was the suggestion that Sean avoid fighting that evening.
“It took forever for anyone to see me,” Sean said of the hospital. He and I were sitting on the couch, across from a fighter getting his hand wrapped and Brandon, who was, as usual, pacing. “I was like doubled over and the nurses were just walking by. They made eye contact and kept doing what they were doing. Crazy.”
“Here’s what you gotta do,” said Brandon. “Next time, you walk in there, you say you have chest pains. Then they see you right away.”
“Yeah,” said Justin, the fighter getting his hand wrapped, “you have to grab your chest.”
“That’s some cauliflower ear,” Justin said to Sean.
“Yeah,” said Sean, touching his ear, “I haven’t seen many like it.” Sean stretched his legs, sighed. “Except in Japan. In Japan you see guys whose both ears are like this.”
Sean curled into the couch crease, hands against his stomach, legs fetal, face pressed into the armrest. After a few slow minutes watching him furl up among nervous fighters, some nameless sensation welling under my lungs, I realized that I was afraid of what might happen to him in the cage. I thought to advise him against fighting at all, but thoughts of my project, not a month after New Orleans had come to nothing, stopped me. And so I plunged myself into the project of a priori spacetaking, trying to anticipate his needs. Perhaps he would awake hungry and think to eat an energy bar, I thought, not displeased with the idea of leaving the locker room for a few moments. I had no desire to learn more about proper emergency-room strategy.
Outside, past the curtain, the stage, the locker room bouncer, the place was packed. It was just a warehouse by day, parked next to a megachurch in a Des Moines suburb that seemed to have no real streets, only wide highways with car dealerships popping up from the flatland, and the kind of uninterrupted sky that makes the streetlights seem too close to the ground. I slipped past some guards, some drunk spectators, and outside into a warm October evening. Across the parking lot, on the church sign—Christian Life Worship Center—no worship times, only a smiley face oriented changelessly toward the stream of passing cars. The trees in view were saplings, shepherded into being, staked against the wind and ringed with haloes of mulch. A half-lit convenience store cast a red glow on its corner of the parking lot.
Back in the arena, on my way to Sean with a pocketful of energy bars, I ran into Brandon and his majestic girlfriend. Sammy was a zaftig self-assured college student and part-time stripper, a gorgeous virago who commanded so much attention that I found myself doubly invisible beside her. She and Brandon had taken some front row seats I can’t imagine they had paid for. “I’m realizing that there is a lot Sean doesn’t know,” Brandon said to Sammy. “A lot he doesn’t know. Eating healthy isn’t the same as eating like a professional fighter. Like, for instance, you’d think fruit would be good for you. But it’s full of sugar and it holds water like a motherfucker.” It wasn’t clear whether Sammy was listening; Brandon turned from her to the fight. “Kidney shutting down,” Brandon said, letting the wind whistle through the gap in his teeth. “Man.”
When Brandon and I returned to Sean, he looked skeptically at the assortment of bars, then chose one, tore it open, and nibbled, which is not, you will notice, a verb I have heretofore associated with Sean. Justin returned to the room stoop-shouldered and ushered in the kind of silence to which our room was accustomed. Sean’s fight was minutes away. Brandon and Sherman and I were standing now, hovering, Sherman and I in our worried silent way, Brandon in his manic-but-helpful manner.
“You have a bucket, Sean?” Brandon asks.
“OK, that’s OK, you have a towel?”
“No.”
Sean pushed himself off the couch and walked around slowly. He handed me the bar, half-uneaten, and shook his head.
“No bucket, no towel, you a warrior, Sean! That’s OK, that’s OK, I tell you what—you get real wet and I’ll just take my shirt off and give you that, OK? What are you walking out to?”
“Um,” said Sean, “I think Metallica.”
“Way to be original, Sean, way to be original.”
Sean pulled on a shirt with a pink fist and a big pink ribbon picture on the front. “We won’t stop ’till breast cancer gets slept” the shirt said.
“Breast cancer research is your sponsor?” I asked.
Sean looked down at the shirt. “I don’t know, somebody said he’d pay me fifty dollars to wear it.”
Sean pushed away from us, strolled in and out of the room, his eyes far away, bobbing his head as if listening to music the rest of us could not hear. He was frowning, the lines on his forehead as deep as I’d ever seen them. He lifted the lid of a dumpsterlike container placed in the hallway right outside the locker room, peered inside, replaced it, walked in the room, walked out of the room. He wasn’t breathing so much as sighing repeatedly. He waited for the first bars of “Enter Sandman” to pop on and walked out, little Brandon scurrying with long-legged Sherman strolling in his wake.
Teddy Worthington has the same red glow as Sean, that Scots-Irish tinge that so readily yields to bruise-blue. His eyes are small below a large forehead—that, at least, is fighterly about him—but his neck is so long, and the red scruff about his chin so sparse as to seem unwillingly sprouted, like the awkward first mustache hairs of a boy hoping too hard for adolescence, that he cannot wear comfortably an air of intimidation.
At the bell Ted rushes pale, tired Sean, unleashes all his lanky limbs upon Sean’s huddled form. He lands a hard kick to Sean’s torso not far from where I suspect a failed kidney is trying to recover, and rains down so many punches Sean shields his face like a child. He catches Sean on the chin, and Sean doesn’t roll, just absorbs; he lands a body shot where the kick hits, under the ribs. Sean rides out this red whirlwind, hands up, legs planted.
That is when I notice something in my peripheral vision—a brunette right outside the cage, standing over a seated blonde and pointing, screaming, poised in runner’s stance such that the deep gravelly rush of words bellows from her torso and out of her mouth in a stick-straight line of invective. Her voice rises incredibly above the din of the stadium, to the astonishment of everyone on that side of the cage. It is Sammy, defending her right to the seat I suspect she stole, and when I look back at the cage Sean has tripped Ted and is mounting him from the back, all Ted’s limbs splayed out on the cage floor like a squashed spider, and Ted is trying to squirrel out but Sean keeps catching him and pressing him back into the cage floor. In the moment all eyes turned to Sammy, the octagon had arrived. Sammy knew this. She stopped and turned from her victim, looked to the cage, and screamed a command.
On the opposite side of the fence Sean pops up from Ted’s chest, shouts with a force equal to Sammy’s one single monosyllabic sound. “WOO!”
Sean is facing Ted’s back now and searching for a submission, looking to lace both his legs through Ted’s and one arm round Ted’s neck, but slithery squashed Ted never stops moving under Sean’s weight, wriggles this way and that, slides his leg outside of Sean as soon as Sean catches one. Sean thinks this is funny. “Why don’t you get up?” he whispers in Ted’s ear, playing big brother to Ted’s infantile immobility. “Come on, get up.” Ted cannot get up. Ted turns, and Sean turns with him; Ted kicks out a leg, and Sean hooks it back in. To watch the ease with which he corrals Ted’s body is to know that not a trace of his sickness has followed him into the cage, that his body has suspended its calls for help and rest and granted him this much respite from nausea-laced fatigue.
The round ends with Sean still flat against Ted, Sean’s legs laced through Ted’s in such a way as to render Ted totally immobile. At the start of round two Ted, finally erect, jabs Sean in the face a few times and flails until Sean throws him down and holds him, once again, against the floor. They’re facing one another now, their necks touching, and I can see the top of Ted’s torso where a wash of blood is smeared across his delicate collarbone. He huffs under Sean’s weight, wriggles, breathes, wriggles. Sean needs merely to inch his body forward to undo all the work of Ted’s effortful wriggling, which he does, and Ted closes his eyes in frustration as round two ends.
In the ring between rounds little Brandon and big Sherman hover over bucket-seated Sean, begging him, no doubt, to finish the thing before another organ fails. When the bell rings Sean allows Teddy to throw a few jabs, then lunges for Ted’s legs and pins him to the floor. He’s found yet another way to render Ted immobile; legs astraddle Ted’s slim waist, Sean sits atop him as Ted tries to kick himself into a better position, which at this point would be any position at all. Ted is wide open and unable to move. Sean should be slamming him with punches, laying in, putting all his weight behind great heavy sledgehammer jabs. It is what the crowd, growing restless, very much wants. But Sean knows himself to be so much stronger than Teddy, and the fight has taken so definitively the shape of an adipose bully going after a bespectacled underdeveloped loner, Sean can’t summon the will to do more than stay firmly mounted. Boos rise up from all sides of the cage. Later Sean will say he lacks the “killer instinct” required to put a downed man to sleep, though I suspect that he simply doesn’t want to be outside the cage, where his focus, adrenaline-sharp, will melt back into that sad couch-bound malaise. Instead Sean lets Ted squirm out, traps him, lets him squirm out again. When the bell rings and Sherman and Brandon jump back into the ring to high-five Sean, who has undoubtedly just won.
“You just laid on him ’cause you’re fat!” screams a lady cageside.
Sean looks at her. She’s not small herself. “This lady just called me fat?” he says to Sherman.
He saunters over to Teddy. “Hey man good fight,” he says, touching Ted’s back.
“Get the fuck off of me!” says Ted, to which Sean cops a wide-eyed look of extreme surprise, then chuckles.
“Well,” says the ref to the crowd, “that wasn’t the most exciting fight.”
The decision comes back and the ref reads: “The winner by unanimous decision, Sean Huffman!”
Sherman raises Sean’s hand and the whole place boos, so Sean puts a hand on the ref’s microphone.
“Hey,” he says, “I won that fight fair and square.”
The ref has his hand on the microphone, and he is tugging it gently back in his own direction.
“I’d like to dedicate this fight to my friend John,” Sean says, “whose life was way too short.”
The ref pulls back the mic; there are more fights, and no time, and he is out of the cage smiling and slapping hands and being manhandled by everyone in the crowded path from cage to locker room. He looks happy, even glowing, but now I fear a trick of adrenaline has us seeing a victorious form that will, like a hologram, appear from another angle only spent. I would rather have seen his face torn and bulbous, as it had been last time we left this arena—a slice to be stitched back together—than known of some dark curdled part calling out from deep beneath his ribs.
Sean watched the rest of the fights, and I watched him recede gently back to his former fatigue. He dipped lower and lower into the couch, growing imperceptibly smaller like a balloon left over from a child’s birthday party, until finally Sherman said it was time to go to Sean’s postfight celebration. Sammy had decided that we’d go to her favorite Des Moines bar. Sherman drove a beat-up sedan.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we turned onto the highway.
“Some gay bar,” said Sherman.
Sean laughed. Then reconsidered. “No but seriously, I love gay people.”
“Gay people are really fun,” said Sherman.
“Gay bars are so clean,” said Sean.
Sherman walked ahead of us in the bar parking lot, where Brandon and Sammy waited. I had not met many heavyweights, and it was hard not to leer at Sherman’s physique, his huge sharp cheekbones, his thick hands, endless ivory nailbeds. He stood a full foot taller than Brandon.
“Sherman is huge,” I said to Sean.
“Sherman?” he said slowly, coming back to me. “Are you kidding? He’s lost a ton of weight.”
“Why?” I asked.
Sean shook his head.
“Why?” I asked again, persistence being integral to good scholarship.
“Rectal cancer,” said Sean.
The bar was called Kung Fu Tap and Taco, and though it was in a wealthier section of West Des Moines, the clientele seemed to be primarily grizzled gray-bearded bikers. Sean sat quietly, not listening to Sammy recount her altercation with the woman whose seat she stole, and stared past all of us. He sipped a Coke, then shuddered and sighed as a wave of something foul passed through his body. A diffuse pain burned in his lower back and he could not forget himself as Sammy was forgetting herself, now sweeping her long brown hair back to better imitate the blonde’s irate boyfriend. This party was not for Sean at all; it was another thing he had to endure.
No one in that bar was as conscious of his body as Sean was: the juices of his stomach rebelling, his kidneys blaring a long loud ache that made him lean back in his chair and stare at the ceiling. The rest of us could drink and forget, having drawn our high from Sean without the tiniest of disturbances to the wet skin along the soft of our eyes.
“I’m thirty-three,” Sean said, picking the label off his Coke bottle and I wondered but did not ask how many fights he’d had now—sixty? a hundred? Instead I said, “Randy Couture still fought at thirty-three. He fought at forty.” This was the standard call and response, the Couture-did-it palaver every spacetaker feeds every post-thirty doubt-ridden fighter, and it was so uninspired a thing to say Sean just raised his eyebrows and turned away.
“I’ve still never been knocked out,” Sean said to the wall.
“What do you think it would take?” I asked.
“Maybe the first time I get knocked out, I just die,” Sean said, and laughed. And even as I watched Sean suffering in his breast-cancer T-shirt, sipping on his Coke, I was worrying about when the next fight would be, when he’d heal up, how long I’d have to wait before he abandoned himself once again.