“DO YOU WATCH ALL THE DEBATES?” SEAN asked me at The Paddlewheel as I shifted in my seat. From a high-perched television a heavily made-up woman I did not care to watch spoke of ephemeral political maneuverings I did not care to fathom. “I can’t believe it. It’s like watching Jersey Shore. Like a bunch of babies arguing over something that happened in high school.”
I nodded.
“I mean those people are gonna be sitting in the office that decides a lotta shit.”
“What was that?” I asked, and he repeated the sentiment with the kind of gentle patience a person such as myself never could have summoned, for it wasn’t the first instance in which I had required redundancy, nor even the second. All the while Sean was talking that night I was sliding a finger over the surface of my phone, hoping for some word from Erik, so that I sometimes lost the thread of Sean’s thoughtful diatribe. Though I cannot attribute my neglect fully to distraction; in fact I was having some trouble hearing in the weeks after Sean’s Des Moines fight. Sometimes when he and his friends would talk their words would melt into the din of the crowd and I would sit back in my stiff-backed chair, alone. It was as if I were being sealed in.
“Want to smoke?” Sean asked, and we walked the cold block to his apartment, through the unmarked door at the back of the gym, up the narrow stairwell. When we were fully lit, seated across a dining room table with Dopo at my feet, Sean threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. His palms lay flat on the table, as if to steady it. “I’ve missed a Father’s Day, Halloween,” said Sean in a kind of whine, “and now Christmas. She stole that from me.”
I slid to unlock, tapped the picture of the envelope, swiped down the length of the screen to refresh. Having not received a message forty-five seconds ago, I did not expect to receive one then, but something about the very motion, the cold imposition of glass against the warm pad of the finger, kept me from having to stand and pace.
“What do you think of Ron Paul?” Sean asked.
Most of what I knew about Ron Paul I had learned from Keoni, who had recently become such an enthusiast that he papered the gym with pro-Paul signs and dropped the words “gold standard” into casual conversation with fellow fighters. Perhaps, I thought for the eighth or ninth time that December afternoon, I should ask Keoni why Erik had stopped responding to my phone calls and text messages and emails and notes through various social networks, but I came to the same conclusion I had in my previous phone-bound reveries: To ask Keoni about Erik was like asking a priest about joining the parish next door, an oblique challenge to the quality of one’s product, a notice that one was shopping for something more sating. It would not be well received, and even if it were Keoni would say that he’d be the last person to know about his deranged brother’s whereabouts, a position he would state with a kind of pride, as if knowing would be weakness. It was Keoni’s belief that Erik would rend any relationship at any moment at will for no particular reason, as he had ended relationships with Jared and Rocky and himself, and the person who did not expect this to happen deserved all the condescension with which Keoni treated memories of his younger, naive, Erik-soft self.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”
“Just been thinking about him.”
“You’ve been thinking about Ron Paul?” I said.
Sean shrugged.
“Seems like a good guy.”
I would rather have talked politics, certainly, than progeny. In the winter of 2012 Alexis had moved from Omaha to Moline, a city inferior but adjacent to the fighterly city of Davenport, where she had a stepfather evidently willing to provide shelter and monetary support. Sean knew nothing of the move until she called, prevailing upon him to help her move a couch her stepfather said he could not possibly lift without another man’s assistance.
Sean left his apartment immediately; he left the door unlocked and rode his bike along busy streets the few miles to her house. It was November, and filthy, stubborn patches of snow lined an icy sidewalk not particularly friendly to bikers. He weaved in and out of the streets, where sidewalks and traffic permitted, and arrived finally at an undistinguished rectangular white box of a house in a neighborhood of such houses. He ditched the bike in the yard and jumped onto the porch, rang the bell. When she didn’t answer he walked over to a window, peered in, and knocked on the siding.
Alexis finally came to the door, Josiah on her hip. She met his eyes and backed up, wordless, to let him in. Josiah shifted ever so slightly toward him and away from his mother, a few inches of encouraging movement in which Sean would later take great solace.
Alexis led Sean through the small house, over some garbage bags and between piles of dented cardboard boxes. “We could live here together,” Sean thought, though he had come to despise Alexis, and this was not, in the end, her house.
“I’m going out,” she said, placing Josiah on her bed. She was fully made up, her eyes lined black and her black hair blown unnaturally straight, as if in reference to the linear and insincere life she wanted to impose on Sean. “Can you watch him and build his crib?”
Sean nearly cried then, so strong was the force of his gratitude. And he intended to build the crib, right after he played with Josiah, felt the boy’s tiny hands squeeze his once-broken finger, asked him all sorts of questions—“Who’s your favorite fighter?”—and answered for him—“Daddy? OK good choice.” Sean lay with his back on the floor and the baby on his stomach. He placed his thick hands around Josiah’s tiny body and lifted him straight into the air, blew air from his mouth in a manner intended to mimic an airplane, and lowered him back down. Sean’s was a broad, warm chest, and Josiah seemed happy to lie there rising and falling with Sean’s breath. The baby fell asleep, and from that moment Sean was as good as paralyzed. He remained completely motionless for two full hours, pinned by his progeny to the floor.
With the sound of gravel crunching, a car door slam, Sean considered running. But still he did not move. “You didn’t build the crib?” she asked, setting down some plastic bags, tripping over a box and steadying herself against a wall. She snatched Josiah from Sean’s chest. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said.
“You kidnapped him,” said Sean from the ground. “I should take him home.”
Alexis pulled her phone out of her pocket, dialed 9-1-1, and held the screen up in Sean’s direction. Sean stood up, walked slowly to the door—backward, so he could still see Josiah as he walked—and left. It had grown colder and darker, and he fell off his bike twice on the ride back to his apartment.
“I saw the lawyer,” Sean told me shortly after the episode. I was prepared for this, but it remained a disturbing image—Sean, gnarled-eared, smash-nosed, in the presence of a skirt-suited middle-aged lawyer, as if an altar boy had wormed his way into a brothel, having been wrongly informed that therein lay true salvation.
We needn’t dwell on this grotesque descent step by ungodly step. A man with expenses has need of a job. A man with a job has need of an ordered existence—a pleather-bound planner, tax preparation, automatic bill-pay, if it came to that. I could see it all coming, the slide into the world of human arrangement. It wasn’t a week later that Sean told me he had found a position at Pizza Ranch, a well-known establishment that pushed a bread-and-cheese product on Iowa’s populace. Sean, the man I had watched give himself over to chaos and be repeatedly penetrated by another man’s fist, would prepare, every morning, forty trays of chicken. He would chop vegetables. He would pour mayonnaise into neat rows of porcelain cups. There was a schedule on the wall with his name on it, as if Sean were just another laborer, no different from other people who toil from nine to five because they’re no better at confronting the terrible immensity of the world than is anyone else.
The lawyer’s job was to force Alexis into a DNA test, such that Sean might be determined Josiah’s father and thereby extract some right to see him rather than pursue his correct vocation, which was giving himself over to the universe in the course of a violent contest. It took, in the way of lawyerly contrivances, many months.
“Need $50 fr food,” Alexis texted one afternoon.
“Let me see him,” Sean said.
Alexis indicated a park at which they would conduct the transaction. Sean arrived early, as was not at all characteristic of him, and waited on a swing, its chains thick and rusted, under the shadow of a water tower. Sean, having never been able to play with his son in such a context, planned to sit his son on that swing and push him very gently, back and forth. Across the street, patches of snow dotted the otherwise tidy lawns of semiprosperous Iowans.
When Alexis pulled into the parking lot Sean ran up to her minivan. Through the back window he could see Josiah strapped into a plastic baby contraption itself strapped to the minivan seat. Alexis rolled down the window.
“Where is the money?” she asked.
Sean ignored her. He pressed his face into the window and took in the image of his strapped-in son. Josiah stared back.
“Here’s twenty-five dollars now,” he said, handing her some crushed bills from the pocket of his jeans, “I’ll give you twenty-five when we’re done playing.”
Alexis took the twenty-five dollars, rolled up the window, and drove away. Sean ran after the van a bit, then sat down on the pavement, thinking perhaps that she would come back. After fifteen minutes passed, he left.
“There’s something wrong with her,” Sean told me afterward, “something not right.”
I hated this story in a nonsensical way that somehow made me feel implicated, as if Alexis and I were on the same side, in league, both of us using Sean for what we wanted and then watching him crumble from the rearview mirror. But of course my wishes were aligned with his interest in living a worthwhile existence, while Alexis merely sought to extract small amounts of cash.
From the table I stared fixedly at the blue mat that took up half of Sean and Brandon’s apartment, which was clean and uncluttered in contrast with the rest of the place. It looked unused in a way that worried me.
“When are you leaving for Christmas?” I asked.
“I can’t go home. I need the gas money to pay the lawyer,” he said.
With that I turned again to my phone. I had dispatched six, seven text messages to Erik that day. I sent another one: “I will purchase airplane tickets to Vegas presently.”
Not two months hence he was to face a Louisianan named Poirier at Mandalay Bay, and obviously we were to face this challenge together, fighter and spacetaker. Yet I had heard nothing of travel arrangements, as if my presence were not crucial to the coming contest.
Now it is not unheard of for a fighter to drop a spacetaker just as brutally as Nietzsche turned on Schopenhauer; indeed some may say that it is his right, but I consider the arrangement more democratic than tyrannical, soluble only under mutual agreement. Certainly we had had no quarrel that I could recall, no reason that I ought to be traded in for another—someone who would be attracted to Erik’s new celebrity, but would know nothing of his past. Had I not, a year and a half back, perched myself on a wooden bench in a ramshackle gym and been therein baptized in the sweat of a dozen men? Had I not taken space beside a violent bum in Manhattan, a closed buffet in Las Vegas, a fat shimmying stripper in New Orleans? Indeed, given that he had never lost a fight at which I was present, I thought I could make a strong case for being a kind of luck-bestowing phylactery, an animate amulet without which Erik would be vulnerable to injury. For even if you are not given to superstition, your subconscious may be, and who was to say that Erik would not, at the last moment, look with panic upon the empty cageside seat where I would properly be? “You are making a mistake!” I wished to wail into my phone, but to display such raw need would surely put me among those who, like Jared and Rocky, had been summarily abandoned. Erik did not like to feel thusly obligated to people who had provided prior services; his history with Keoni told us this much.
Fifteen minutes later it became clear that there would be no answer to this query, either, and I found that I wished to be alone. I gathered my scarf and jacket and, grabbing both sides of his enormous head, bid Dopo a merry Christmas.
“Why would he simply cease all communication?” I asked Sean as I left, knowing this to be an act of dereliction, the speaking of one fighter while spacetaking for another.
“Because he’s an asshole,” said Sean, inverting a green plastic lighter into yet another packed bowl. “Maybe he’s injured. Maybe he has an STD.”
I sat in my freezing car for a few moments. I was, truth be told, a little afraid to drive. Having left Sean’s house this intoxicated once before, I had experienced a rather unpleasant sensation on the long drive home; gliding along the highway, I began to meditate on how easy it would be to drift unknowing off the side, and so drove all the way back to my domicile clutching the wheel that I might not, in a moment of inattention, slip clean off the road. I thought it better, this time, to sit in my car and wait for sobriety.
Cold air blew from the vents. I slid to unlock, tapped the picture of the envelope.
All I saw for a moment, were symbols on glass.
GOOGLE ALERT — erik koch
For some reason I thought that I ought to go back upstairs, find Sean, but before I could fully consider this course of action I lowered my hovering finger.
“Fast-rising featherweight Erik Koch suffered an undisclosed injury during training camp that has forced him out of a highly anticipated bout with fellow contender Dustin Poirier, UFC announced Tuesday.”
Why does it seem that my fears are forever ill-directed, that what pessimism lies in my nature leads to no true prophecy? How is it that I am always prepared for the very misfortunes I am spared? Know that the reaching tendrils of the analytical mind, even as they wrap themselves round a million problematical abstractions, leave a universe of calamity untouched. The world has infinite ways to wrong us. I feared that I would lose Sean to age, and now, incredibly, risked losing him to the animal mundanity of procreation. I lay awake December nights preparing for the delicate navigation of Erik’s emotional state, some finical politicking through the prickly kingdom that was Erik’s ego. All day in Sean’s apartment I had prepared judicious and rational arguments I hoped would win my way back into Erik’s favor. But this—this was a natural disaster immune to maneuvering. Do not ask me, then, what catastrophe will reduce this sorry Earth to dust. I will be the one staring at the skies speaking of asteroidal collision as below my feet the world splits open to swallow us whole.