DO YOU THINK ANY FIGHTER WILL BE surprised one day to find his head grown soft, his strikes unblinkingly absorbed, his legs dropping under him from the sinking force of a single kick? Waking from a knockout he could not, having lost youth’s alacrity, dodge, will he greet diminishment with denial? I am here to tell you he will not. As was once thought that in the womb, the fetus cycled through every stage of evolution before settling on its modern form, men in the ring rehearse their inevitable atrophy two dozen times before they retire. Think of it: what is aging but a sealing in, a crude duct-taping of the box in which you are born; and what is fighting but a mere acceleration of the battle we’re all doomed to lose? One day a pageant a dozen yards away proves just so slightly out of range; the sound of your grandchild speaking across the room somehow fails to carry. The world must work harder to find you. And as you lose the world, your own body creakingly calls out louder and louder. Minor muscles, silent for sixty years, grow suddenly conversational. Will any of this seem new to the man whose profession leaves him so bloody that he spends the third round blind in one eye, so weak on his feet that he must work to stand? Another man stamps on his toes, pulls at the backside of his elbow, knocks at his knees. Will sore joints thirty years hence be some kind of revelation? Age comes to the fighter not as a shock but as a memory.
The collapse of all I had worked for, and the interruption of my phenomenological study, brought with it a certain haunting clarity. In the mirror I saw brown irises shorn of their brightness, three tiny lines visible under the soft of each eye. I pressed my index fingers to the sides of my ski-jump nose and traced the deepening lines to the edges of my mouth. Soon my whole face would be cast in shadow.
There is an integrity in sticking by your fighter even when he proves himself injury-prone; even when he cannot take you to ecstasy because he brings with him an aura of worry; even when you can see, with a premonition clear enough to draw up a calendar of failures, how he will ultimately go down, grow soft, acquire children and a house and pay his taxes on time.
Erik did not have the courage to call me; it was my place to affirm that I remained loyal despite being failed. I thought to make up a list of men who had recovered from precisely his injury. I thought to sit down with him at his parents’ kitchen table, his leg brace on, his crutches leaned against the wall, and watch with him video after video of his body in its glorious willowy symmetry. But I had nothing to say, except perhaps that I was thirty years old, and very afraid, and he couldn’t help me anymore.
I pulled out one suitcase, and then two. I packed my notes, my books, then all my belongings. I got in the car without knowing where I was headed, but I drove south, in the direction of Corcovado. The cornfields faded into scrub and then into desert and the desert into lush wetland. I was in Texas, and tired of driving, when I stopped and found a place to stay.
For a long time I did nothing but read and reread my notebooks, my ninety pages of ecstatic observation. I thought about a gym Sean had once mentioned in the southeast part of the state, a strip-mall training ground started by a Miletich protégé, and wandered in one evening. When I opened the door a wave of wet heat washed over me, and I heard the shuffling sounds of men struggling on the ground, the occasional thump of a man hitting the mat, and I thought that perhaps I had come to the right place. But when I wiped the fog from my glasses and focused on the group of men tugging at one another’s limbs at the far end of the single-room gym, I saw that all the men were Sean’s age. On my way out the door I picked up a flyer for an event that evening—Legacy Fighting Championship 18—a few miles away.
I walked into the arena, slipped by some distracted ticket takers without paying, and set about finding the locker room. High above me, on the arena’s uppermost floor, a group of men said something I could not hear to a guard and disappeared behind a door. I ascended to the top floor and feigned interest in some sound equipment adjacent to the room, thinking I might be taken for an engineer, turning this knob and that.
When an excitable fan tried to engage the guard in speculation about the night’s fights, I appended myself to the back of someone’s entourage and slipped finally into the locker room. Inside, pacing men shouted over one another, and in a corner, sitting on a cooler, a silent boy watched his father wrap his hands. He was just emerging from adolescence. His olive skin was as unlined as a child’s, and his bright brown eyes, slightly too far apart, shined from either side of an unbroken nose. He was too young to be beautiful, but he would be beautiful soon.
I said I had come to watch him win.
His name was Charlie Ontiveros, he was twenty-one years old, and he was from Cleveland, Texas. He had never lost a fight.