In the end, I finally called her. Obviously, it was all leading up to that. Calling her was the only thing that would break the spell and allow me to resume my life. And so I found her website, she wasn’t on Facebook for whatever reason, and I sent her an email, very short and sweet in case she didn’t read her own emails, and I got a note back, with her number, that appeared to be from her, and which said: OMG, CALL ME!!! Xoxox.
So I called her right then, afraid I would lose my nerve if I waited, and she picked up on the first ring and said, “Well, that was instant gratification!”
“I know!” I said. “I just got your message.”
“I just sent it!”
“Modernity!”
“Or whatever,” she said. “You serving up some academic realness now?”
I laughed. “I guess so.”
“God, I’m so glad you called!” she said. Her voice sounded exactly the same. I felt seventeen again. It was truly surreal.
“I don’t have long hair anymore,” I blurted out.
She laughed. “How do you wear your hair now, Michael, my love?”
“God, I feel so stupid.”
“Don’t.”
“So you’re a boxer?”
“Yep.”
“And do you like that?”
“I love it. It’s like I was born to do it,” she said. “I mean, I’d much rather do MMA because that’s where all the money is, but I’m too big. The UFC’s highest weight class for women is featherweight, which is like one forty-five, and I just can’t cut enough weight to get down there and still, like, keep my eyes open.”
“Oh yeah,” I was saying, but I had instinctively withdrawn. I realized I was hoping that she would say she hated it, that Ray was making her do it. I didn’t like the idea that she was born to do it. But on the other hand, boxing was a legitimate sport. What she was doing wasn’t wrong. It was like a televised thing, not something to be ashamed of. She was an athlete, which is what she had always been.
We went on talking about the trivialities of our lives, catching up as best we could. In moments it would feel like everything was the way it used to be, and in other moments I would catch sight of a side of her I didn’t recognize. She swore a lot. About her most recent fight she said she “dominated that binch.”
“Ugh, binch. Don’t say binch,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Wait, what were we talking about?” she asked.
Then we started talking about meeting up. She was going to be in New York City the following month for a match, would I come down? I said I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
“I’ll get you tickets to the match!” she said. “I’ll book you a hotel! I’m writing a note so I don’t forget!”
“Oooh, yay!” I said, even though the idea of watching the match live horrified me. But I agreed to meet her at a diner she particularly liked off Union Square on the Wednesday before her match. I would take the campus-run bus down. She would book us in the same hotel. It was all arranged.
I entertained fantasies of missing my bus accidentally/on purpose, or of standing Bunny up in some way, only because I was so nervous, but in the end I caught my bus, and I took a cab downtown, and I was a little bit late, but not too late, and when I walked into the diner, my heart dropped down to my stomach. Ray and Bunny were sitting in a booth in the back, and they both waved at me. She had said nothing about Ray joining us, and I was deeply unprepared. I had thought since I was an adult and no longer brought my parents everywhere, Bunny would be the same. I could not anticipate or control how strongly seeing his face made me react. Why was it easier for me to walk around North Shore and park in the same parking lot I had been almost beaten to death in than it was for me to look at Ray Lampert’s face?
His nose was the dark raspberry of a true alcoholic, but his forehead lift had held up well. It was like my subconscious had simply stored all my animus from that time in his file, and now looking at him was allowing it to spill out and spread panic all over everything. But I walked over to their booth like a normal person, and did an impression of a normal person saying hello, sitting down, taking off my denim jacket, which was stupid to wear, it was too hot in the city in September.
I sat next to Ray, mainly so I wouldn’t have to look at him, and he immediately put his arm around me and began slapping me with his giant, warm hands. “Well, look at you!” he crowed. “What a handsome queer you turned out to be!”
“You’re not allowed to call me queer,” I said, trying to say it in a friendly way.
“I thought that was the word now! It’s not fag, is it?”
“No, ‘queer’ is a fine word, it’s just you aren’t allowed to call me that.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Hey, Michael,” Bunny said, as though I had just gotten there, and I thought she was just trying to end the mess I was in with her dad, and so I focused on her, and made eye contact, and I smiled, and for one long moment that’s all we did, smile at each other, and it was good. She looked incredible. She was in peak physical form. Her skin glowed with vitality. Maybe boxing was good for her. Maybe I was just being a ninny. After everything, I marveled, Bunny Lampert was so damn beautiful. Part of it was that the world had changed around her, and people now saw Serena Williams and understood that she was gorgeous. Part of it was that her face had settled into itself somehow. Part of it was just the luster of extreme physical health. But she was a knockout. She took my breath away.
We ordered. Bunny requested seven egg whites and a side of broccoli and two chicken breasts, which caused the waitress to do some eyebrow lifting, which caused Ray to brag about Bunny’s boxing record to the waitress. “She may even be,” he said, “in fact she probably is, the best female boxer in the world.” The dynamics were all very familiar, and at first that felt oddly good, who we used to be and how we used to act coming back to me so vividly, like I was rediscovering something I had lost.
“Have you heard from, oh god, what’s her name? Oh, I know her name, it’s right there, I just can’t get it,” Bunny said.
“Kelsey?”
“No. God, no, we were friends with her. She was black. It’s right there, I just can’t get it.”
“Naomi?” I said, shocked that Bunny could forget her name.
“Yes! Naomi!” Bunny said. “Whatever happened to her?” And so I told Bunny everything I knew about Naomi from Facebook, and since Bunny was not on Facebook all of this was news to her. I filled her in on what I knew of the others, and told her about my life, but when I spoke too long about my work and my dissertation, I could sense her attention wandering. There was a lot we couldn’t speak of with Ray there. Bunny didn’t mention her time in prison, her girlfriend, or what any of that was like.
“Wait,” she said at one point, “is my fight today?”
“No,” Ray said, “it’s tomorrow.”
“I thought it was today.”
“No, Bunny, it’s tomorrow, I promise.”
She loved boxing and she talked about it rapturously. “I just wish my mom were alive to see me box,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just think she’d be so proud of me.”
“I bet she would,” I said, even though I thought Allison probably would have preferred it if Bunny went to college or got married. But maybe that would have been wrong of Allison. Maybe it was wrong of me to have preferred that too.
“Did you ever think of going to the Olympics for boxing?” I asked. “They have that, right?”
She shrugged. “They do background checks, so I don’t think that would work.” I had meant to imply that she had achieved or still could achieve all her girlhood dreams, but instead I had stepped in it.
“Wait, is my fight today?” Bunny asked.
I looked at Ray, alarmed, but he answered calmly, “No, sweetie, it’s tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She nodded, like she was deciding to trust him. “Okay.”
What the fuck was going on here? Ray wouldn’t look at me.
“Did it get rescheduled or something?” I asked. “All this confusion over the schedule?”
Ray didn’t answer, took a huge bite of his club sandwich.
“Wait, what were you just saying?” Bunny asked. “Your train got rescheduled?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, clearly confused.
When Bunny got up to pee, Ray leaned over to me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “She’s taken one too many in the head, if you know what I mean.”
“What?” I asked, though I had heard him perfectly well.
“She’s had a series of concussions,” he said, “so she gets confused a lot. Her memory’s bad.” She hadn’t been uninterested when I’d been telling her about my life, I realized, she’d been literally having a hard time following what I was saying.
“And she’s still fighting?”
“We’re doing this new therapy, that’s part of why we’re in New York, the doctor is the best, the best. They inject stem cells right into her brain, it’s incredible!”
“Why is she still fighting?” I asked again.
“Ach,” he said. “She’s not that bad. Really, with the brain stuff. It’s a very common problem, very common. She’s at the height of her career, she can’t stop now!”
Her brain was dying, and her father was fighting her anyway, like she was a racehorse who could win the cup and then be turned into dog food. Or maybe she would have stem cells injected straight into her brain (Was that even a thing? How could you inject something straight into the brain? It didn’t make sense! Ray Lampert was insane!).
“What does her doctor say?” I asked. “Does he know she’s fighting?”
“He knows, he knows,” Ray said. “He advised against it, but they have to say that for liability reasons. What doctor is going to tell someone with brain trauma to go get in the ring?”
“Well, exactly,” I said.
“You think Mike Tyson never fought with a concussion?”
“I think when Mike Tyson was fighting we didn’t understand how bad a series of concussions was, and the whole joke of Mike Tyson is that fighting messed up his brain so it’s just a really poor comparison.”
“Touché,” Ray said, and drained his mug of coffee.
When Bunny came back from the bathroom, I stood up and I hugged her and I said it was wonderful to see her. “Are you coming to my fight?” she asked. I told her of course I was, that I would see her later at the hotel but I had to run some errands. Ray wouldn’t look at me and when I said goodbye, he was silent.
“I love you,” I told Bunny, my arms still around her. I only came up to her neck. She looked down at me, smiled with so much sleepy love and joy that it physically hurt me.
“I love you too,” she said. “Always have, always will.”
“Okay,” I said. “Take care. Be careful.”
“I will,” she said.
I walked out of the diner, and then I walked north for a few blocks, my heart pounding. I hailed a cab, and I had it take me to Port Authority, where I intended to take the next bus to Ithaca.
I didn’t believe I could stop Ray Lampert. I could not avert the tragedy, but that didn’t mean I had to watch.
But I didn’t get on the bus. I didn’t even buy a ticket. Instead I bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I had quit smoking my freshman year at Pomona. I stood outside Port Authority watching the frenzy of taxicabs and sweating in my stupid denim jacket in the September humidity, the hot smoke in my lungs like the city itself entering me.
I kept thinking of this joke Bunny and I used to have, where she would pretend to be what we called the “Love Monster.” And she would talk in this strange Muppety voice, and she would say, “Love meeeee, love meeeee!” as she wrestled me and pinned me down so she could lie on top of me like a gigantic cat. “I do love you!” I would cry. “I do love you!” No matter what I said back to her, that’s all she said. “Looove meeeeeee!” And once she had gotten herself arranged comfortably on top of me, she would begin to purr and pretend to fall asleep.
“You’re crushing me,” I would whisper.
“Love me,” she would say.
I spent a few hours wandering the city before finally returning to the hotel. I didn’t want to see them. But when I went to my room and passed by their door, I was somehow disappointed that it didn’t open. I paused for a moment outside it, listening, and heard the low murmur of the TV. Then I kept walking down the long hallway to my own room, slid the key card, collapsed on the bed in a sweaty heap, and listened to the air conditioner singing some terrible robot madrigal until I fell asleep in my clothes, my shoes still tied to my feet.
Bunny’s fight the next day was on the undercard of a fight between heavyweights Tony Barsotti and Mikhail Volkov in Madison Square Garden. When I looked at the ticket Ray had given me and it said Barsotti vs. Volkov, I thought he gave me the wrong ticket. I hadn’t understood that women’s boxing was just the opening act for the real boxing, the men’s boxing. I had watched all of Bunny’s fights, so I thought I knew what to expect, but I had been unprepared for the size of the spectacle itself.
My seat was, as I should have known it would be, right up front, in the second row next to Ray Lampert. “You made it!” he cried. “I’ve been backstage with her, how long have you been here?” he asked.
“Only a minute,” I shouted over the noise of the crowd.
“She’s ready, oh is she ready,” Ray said, rubbing his hands together.
“Yeah?” I said. It seemed disgusting to me, the way that Ray was excited, like we were about to see a sex show instead of a boxing match. Maybe it was just that there was now something lewd about the cranberry-colored bulb of his nose. He could make eating a turkey sandwich seem indecent.
“This is what she loves,” he said. “This is what makes it all worth it. She trains for months, and it kicks her ass, and it’s hard and it’s boring and it’s hard. But then you get this.” He gestured all around us.
On the screens above the ring Bunny’s face was projected in pink pixels. A booming bass began, the hype music, and I could smell the fog machine before I saw the smoke rolling down the aisle, the ramp down into the arena. And then a figure pushed through the white wall of fog, and it was Bunny, but she was wearing a white satiny hooded robe, the hood pulled down low over her face. Her gloves were white, and not being able to see her hands or her face made her even more frightening and beautiful. As she walked to the ring, trailed by her coach and some assistants, she moved with a roiling, liquid power.
The announcer over the loudspeaker: “In one corner we have Bunny Lampert, the Knockout Queen, at one hundred sixty-six pounds, with twelve wins, five by knockout, undefeated.” Bunny swept up into the ring and paced in a tight circle, then threw her hood back and the crowd roared. She ripped the robe off, and underneath she was wearing her pink satins. They were so tawdry. I wished Ray had picked a better color. She was spray-tanned a burnished tangerine that made her muscle definition look insane. It was like a twelve-year-old boy addicted to comic books had drawn her.
A new, different hype music began to play and fog rolled down the other ramp into the arena and then a beefy girl with frizzy brown hair in a ponytail pushed her way through. The moment I saw her, I knew she had no chance. She was jogging in a peppy way, but pep, I could already tell, would be inadequate to the situation.
“She doesn’t have a chance,” I said to Ray.
“I know!” he cried with utter glee.
The announcer: “Weighing in at one hundred sixty-two pounds, we have Courtney O’Day, with an eight-and-oh record.”
“Look at how short her arms are,” Ray said with scorn. I looked at the girl’s arms but I could not detect any shortness in them, until I looked over at Bunny and then I understood. The other girl did not have freakishly short arms, but Bunny had freakishly long ones. The bell rang and the round began, and I worried that Bunny would just pummel her, but what happened was in some ways even worse. Bunny was calm and, most upsetting to me, playful. She would use those long arms to just sort of reach over to the girl and pop her in the face, the way a cat might reach a paw into a fish tank. There was such lazy power in that insane reach of hers, and every time it would surprise the other girl, who just couldn’t seem to keep Bunny’s absurd wingspan in mind.
When O’Day would go on the offensive, Bunny would hunch down behind her gloves and wait a few seconds, letting the girl get close enough to get in her combinations, a good deal closer than she probably usually had to get since she was having to punch up (Bunny was a solid six inches taller). And after a few of these ineffectual punches, Bunny would explode into a counterattack series, blows that landed hard, jerking the other girl’s torso like she was a mannequin. Weirdly, this kept happening over and over again, and every time O’Day would take the bait, get Bunny backed up to the ropes, set about babyishly beating up Bunny’s raised gloves, and then get surprised by devastating counterpunches. In between these little exchanges, Bunny just slowly followed the girl around the ring, reaching out those long arms every now and then to hit her in the face.
The rounds were only two minutes long, but the first round seemed to take forever. I was sweating like a sous chef. When the bell finally rang, I thought I might faint. Ray ran up to go see Bunny in her corner, but I was watching O’Day and her coaches. They were rubbing Vaseline on her face and talking to her the way you would as you put a dog down. The girl looked wild-eyed and slick with sweat, the skin of her chest and arms pale and covered in red blotches. I was so afraid Bunny would kill her that I actually said to Ray Lampert when he came back, “She’s not going to kill that girl, is she?”
Ray laughed. “I hope not!”
The second round went along much like the first, and Bunny was clearly having fun. She loved doing a kind of bait and switch where she would let down a hand and create an opening, and when O’Day would go for it, she would duck the blow, move in close, and then explode into an uppercut. O’Day fell on her ass after one of these uppercuts and the crowd started chanting Bunny’s name. They wanted her to finish it, to end the fight.
The bell rang.
“Three rounds,” Ray said. “She should wrap it up.” Bunny looked tired but radiant. She raised a fist at Ray while her trainer poured water into her mouth.
The third round was entirely different from the first two rounds. From the moment the bell rang, Bunny burst from her corner with a speed she had not displayed the whole match and she began a series of punches, all of them landing, that were so fast and beautifully syncopated that the other girl could not react properly or get away. If anything she looked like a movie being rewound, and then fast-forwarded, over and over. I saw the girl’s nose break and the spray of blood that smeared Bunny’s white gloves. The ref was dancing around them, and when O’Day turned her back to say she had had enough, the ref ended the fight.
I joined Ray as he rushed up to the ring, and we stood around while Bunny gave some brief on-cameras.
“I wanted to knock her out.” Bunny was panting as she spoke into the microphone. “But unfortunately she didn’t want any more.”
“Who’s the greatest?” the reporter asked, which struck me as a bizarre question. Ray let out a pleased laugh, then looked at his shoes, but I could tell he was listening for what she would say. I wondered if he had coached her on what to say. Or did all those hits to the head leave her uncoachable?
Bunny looked at him funny. “Me,” she said. “But I mean, I was the greatest before the fight also.”
“Oh god,” I said, because to me her answer seemed psychotic, evidence of delusions of grandeur, as embarrassing as a turd on the carpet.
“What?” Ray said to me. “You shocked? She’s literally the best in the world.”
“What?”
“She is literally the best female fighter in the world. At least right now. And after the next few fights we have lined up, everyone will know it.”
The man laughed. “Do you think O’Day knew what she was getting herself into tonight?” he asked.
“I always wonder what they think. They must not believe I am what I am,” Bunny said. The reporter laughed and slapped her on the shoulder.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll keep handing out the thrashings,” Bunny said with a rascal’s grin.
Ray and I did not stay for the main event, but trailed Bunny back to her dressing room. We waited on a black leather couch while the doctor checked Bunny over. I was shocked to see that she kept spitting blood into a white coffee cup. I had not seen the other girl hit her in the face, certainly not hard enough to loosen any teeth. The doctor was fussing over her ear.
“If you don’t want me to drain it now, just go in and get it drained tomorrow.”
Bunny grunted.
He felt up and down her ribs. He palpated her kidneys, felt around in her abdomen, though how he could feel anything through her Ninja Turtle abs was a mystery to me. “Let me see the hands,” he said, and Bunny gave him her hands, which were still wrapped, and he unraveled the gauze and tape as delicately as if her fingers were broken birds. I was watching, curious, then had to look away as I understood what I was seeing. Her knuckles were so swollen that the backs of her hands bulged, the skin pink as raw pork.
“Jesus,” I said.
“That’s probably fractured,” the doctor said, feeling for the bones in her hand through the swelling.
“I know,” Bunny said, “I felt it go.”
“But the bone’s still in place. Just a splint for now and then you can see in a couple days. Now, I saw you walk out of there, let’s talk about your left foot.”
“Are you thinking burgers?” Ray asked.
“Steaks,” Bunny said.
“Steaks!” Ray cried, delighted. He began consulting his phone, clearly looking for a good steak house nearby, but he kept raising and lowering the phone to his face, like trying to scan a difficult bar code at the grocery store. “I can’t fucking see,” he said. “Can you look at this please?” and he handed his phone to me.
I found us a decent steak house in midtown and Bunny took an icy shower then had various parts of her wrapped. She hurt so badly that Ray had to tie her shoes for her, zip and button her pants. She was slow and impassive as a zombie.
“You won,” I said. I guess I had expected her to be happy.
“Yeah,” she said. “Wasn’t much of a fight, though.”
“It was a great fight,” Ray said.
“There’s just no one really,” Bunny said. Her brow furrowed and she looked confused, but then I realized she was about to start crying. “There’s no one,” she said again.
Ray wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her out and down the hall. “Shhh…we just need to get you some food.” He turned to me and said, “She’s like this sometimes. All the adrenaline. She literally has no serotonin left in her little noggin.”
The restaurant was a yokel’s cheesy fantasy of a fancy New York steak house. Both Bunny and Ray liked it immediately, and I felt briefly proud of my choice. I knew them well, knew them still.
Bunny ordered two Long Island Iced Teas and a shrimp cocktail to start, Ray got a Seven & Seven, and I ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. “Can I put in more food now, though?” Bunny asked anxiously. The server, a pretty redhead who was probably an actress, said of course. “Then I’ll have the filet and can I also get the chicken breast, and can I also get a side of fries, and does it come with bread? Do you bring out bread?”
“Yes,” the server said, “we bring out a basket of bread.”
“Can you make sure they bring out two?” Bunny asked. Her right cheek was swelling, and the skin was stretched and glossy in the dim light of the steak house.
“Of course,” the waitress said.
“Or you can just put double the amount of rolls in a single basket,” Bunny said helpfully. “You’re really pretty.”
“Thank you,” the waitress said, backing away from the table, her check pad held tight.
“Well,” Ray said, “I’m just so proud of you, Bunny. That was an incredible fight. You’ve trained so hard. And now it’s over, and it’s done.”
“Shut up,” she said, and just looked at her swollen hands on the table.
“She doesn’t really mean that,” Ray said softly to me. “She can’t help it.”
“I said shut up!” she moaned.
Just then a busboy scurried over with a basket overflowing with rolls, and Bunny snatched one before he had even set it down.
“That’s good,” Ray said, “just eat.”
“Shut up,” she said with her mouth full.
So we didn’t speak, and we just ate rolls. I had the sense that Bunny was concentrating hard on just trying to keep it together in the restaurant. Our drinks came. Bunny downed the first Long Island in a few gulps and after that she visibly relaxed.
“You feeling better?” Ray asked.
“Not yet,” Bunny said, waving her hand at him as if to shoo him away. This was the first time I had seen her treat Ray badly in our whole lives, and to be honest I was enjoying it a tiny bit. She still didn’t like to look either of us in the eye, and she didn’t want us to talk either.
“Well, Michael,” Ray said, keeping his voice down in an effort not to upset Bunny, “so tell me what it is you do again? I mean, you’re getting a PhD, I remember that much, but what do you study?”
“I study evolutionary biology,” I said, “which is—”
“Boring?” Bunny asked. “You’re both fucking boring.”
Ray looked at me apologetically and pantomimed zipping his lips shut. Even I, who had only the most pop-culture understanding of head injuries, knew that concussions could cause belligerence and temper issues. It seemed so obvious to me that Bunny’s brain had been re-traumatized by the fight. Why had the doctor let her go? Why had he looked at her hands, at her feet, at her ribs, and not at this, this most obvious thing? We shouldn’t be at a steak house, we should be at the hospital.
But after the shrimp, which Ray and I did not attempt to share with her, and about halfway through the steak, which Ray had to cut up for her, her hands were so fractured and swollen, Bunny seemed to come around.
“Did you see my fight?” she asked me.
“Yes, I did. It was incredible.”
“Thank you. Who was O’Day training with again? Dad?”
“Dave McNair, or Mc-something?”
“I mean, I guess they really can’t train her not to be stupid, that was the thing that was most frustrating about it, how stupid she was. She just kept walking into it again and again. I don’t like that.”
“I know,” Ray said.
“Is it less of a challenge that way?” I asked.
“No, it’s like, I just, I don’t like them to feel like victims. And when they’re stupid like that. It just makes me feel like I’m slaughtering animals.” She drank the rest of her second Long Island.
“They’re not victims,” Ray said. “They’re fighters.”
“You’ve always hated fighting,” Bunny said to me.
I paused, a bite of salmon halfway to my mouth. “Yeah,” I said, wanting to go on and lie, to say something about how while I didn’t prefer to fight myself, I admired her for fighting. I couldn’t even think of a way of phrasing this. I worried I would gibber like a hostage to a gunman.
“I think,” Bunny said, suddenly laughing, “that you would prefer to never have to act at all. To just passively let things happen to you. Like, blah. Like, I’m just a crying statue of pure suffering, wah.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, flustered and wishing I had not drunk so much of my wine. I was such a lightweight that even a glass left me spinning. “Just because I don’t like to beat people up doesn’t mean I’m some passive crybaby.”
“Not a crybaby,” she said, “not a crybaby. But like…an artist that doesn’t make anything. You study yourself. You study life instead of living it. And everything you feel is like a fine wine and you sniff it and swish it around and in the end you barely fucking drink it.”
Around us the entire restaurant seemed dark and shadowy, as if we were in a massive cave with many chambers. I tried to remember that she was not right in the head, that I shouldn’t take it personally, the things she said, but they were dangerously close to the truth and I could feel the muscles in my cheeks start involuntarily twitching.
“Like, on some level, don’t you think you let those boys beat you up?” Bunny said.
“What boys?” I asked, incredulous. “Jason and Tyler and them?”
“You could have run into the Rite Aid,” she said. “You could have screamed for help. The brewery was right there, someone would have heard.”
“But I didn’t understand what was happening until it was happening. I froze.”
“You choked,” she said. “I mean, isn’t that the same thing?” Her left eye was now almost completely swollen shut. She had eaten her filet and her chicken and all of the rolls.
“You know what I think we should do,” Ray said, “go back to the hotel and order a movie and just turn in and relax.”
“Ugh,” she said. “You’re so fucking obvious, all you are trying to do is control me. That’s all you ever try to do.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” he said.
“Everyone’s a victim,” Bunny said. “Everyone is just fucking helpless.”
Ray studied his watch. He seemed very tired. “I’m not trying to control you,” Ray said finally.
“But you’re gonna freak out,” she said.
“I’m not going to freak out,” he said.
She studied him for a moment. “Good. Then let’s order another drink.”
“I don’t think another drink will—”
“Control. Freak out,” she said.
“Fine, order the drink,” he said, and she did.
“I’m sorry I’m being so mean,” she said to me.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I said, though that wasn’t true at all. I felt panicky and unclean, like I was in an early Harmony Korine movie, and yet I couldn’t fully bring myself to blame her. As I always had, I found it much easier to blame Ray, who was encouraging her to do this to herself.
“Do you think everything means something?” Bunny said. I wasn’t sure if this was a continuation of her earlier complaint, or if we were going in some new, terrible direction. I was done pretending to eat my salmon. Its skin looked sad and ruined on my plate.
“Like, it seems like you think everything means something and if you could only understand everything then it would all be okay. It’s like thinking a map will change the size of the ocean. Do you have any gum? Dad?”
He handed her a piece of gum, then realized her fingers wouldn’t work well enough to unwrap it, so he took off the foil for her. He motioned to the waitress for the check. They were both chewing gum, I could smell the spearmint over the odor of the steaks. Someone in the dark of the restaurant was laughing. I couldn’t see him but it sounded like a big man was laughing.
“Even God can’t understand everything,” she said.
“I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything.”
“Some things he chooses not to understand,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked.
“That’s the whole point of hell, isn’t it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”
“Dear lord,” Ray said, and rolled his eyes.
“Like, this one.” She pointed at her father. “You would always ask me back in the day, ooh, what was his relationship with his mother like? That was what you thought would explain it. Like, if you knew why Ray Lampert was the way he was, then—what? Then what? What does understanding someone get you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“My mother was a fucking cunt,” Ray said.
“Where’s our hotel?” Bunny asked. “Is it near here?”
“It’s downtown,” Ray said. “We’ll take a cab.”
We said goodbye in the hallway without any fanfare, Bunny didn’t even look at me, just shuffled into her and Ray’s room saying, “Take off my fucking shoes, oh god, I need them off right this second,” and Ray scurried after her. I took a long, hot shower in my room and called Conor and tried and failed to explain to him what had happened.
“That’s such a tragedy,” he kept saying. Was that the name for what it was?
“I wish I could teleport and just be in our house. I know what things mean in our house.”
“Hotel rooms are terrible,” he said.
“They really are,” I said.
After we got off the phone, I turned off all the lights, but I couldn’t sleep. The air conditioner kept clicking on and off, on and off. You could have run, she said. You could have screamed. You could have done something, but you did nothing, you let it happen to you.
I tried to think about a paper I was writing, to think about how I wanted to frame the abstract, and perhaps I was half asleep already because I realized I was explaining the paper to Anthony of all people. He was sitting right there before me, eight months dead, a newly minted ghost wearing a white hotel-style robe. “Essentially, the perceived risk of predation can affect melanin production and thus feather coloration in the nuthatch.”
“Break it down for me,” Anthony said, smiling.
“I played predator calls constantly to baby birds and their feathers turned out funny.”
“A little more,” he said.
“Fear can change you. It can change you on a physical level. It’s not just feelings, it’s chemical cascades.”
“That’s right,” he said. And then I understood that he was going to give me a lot of money, it was like a prize that ghosts gave out to those who sincerely quested for knowledge, and he had been part of the selection committee even back when he was alive.
I became aware of a pounding on my door and I staggered through the dark, confused a little as to where I was. I wasn’t entirely aware I was in a hotel room and that there was probably a peephole, so I just opened the door.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Bunny said. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” I said, because it is what I would have said when we were seventeen, even though now of course I did not want her in my room in the middle of the night. I did not think to turn on the light and she made no move to turn on the light, so we both just got into the bed in the dark. She smelled like liquor, like whiskey or something.
For a moment she said nothing, then she said, “Man, I really took her apart, didn’t I?”
“Sure did,” I said, terse and pissy, suddenly more awake.
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“What? No, I mean, no. Why would you ask that?” Of course I hated her. She symbolized everything I most feared in the world.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her nose sounded even more stuffed than usual, and I wondered if it was from the swelling in her face. In the reflected light from the street, I could see that her cheekbone was still warped and shiny, like half an apple had been inserted under the skin.
“I can’t believe you said I let those boys beat me up,” I said. “I just can’t believe you fucking said that.” My heart was beating fast with how angry I was, and now I was entirely awake, scrutinizing her blue outlines in the dark.
“When did I say that?” she asked.
“At dinner.”
“I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “I don’t remember saying that. But I know I’ve thought it before. I mean, couldn’t you have run? Couldn’t you have screamed?”
“Maybe I did,” I said. “Maybe I did both those things.”
“Did you?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. It just wasn’t—it wasn’t like that.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“You just don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know what it is to be weak. You don’t know how to be afraid. You can’t even understand it.”
“But you can’t let things like that happen to you,” she said. “You can’t let things like that—those people, there are people, Michael, who are bad and who will hurt you and who will kill you, and you can’t just let them because you are innocent and they are bad. You have to try to get away. You have to fight with everything you have.” She was almost in tears, and I realized she was saying all of this because she wanted there to be some way to undo the beating, to avert it, to go back and make it not take place, to never let it take place ever again, and she felt that way because she loved me.
“Are you one of those people?” I asked.
“What people?”
“The people who will hurt and kill.”
“People choose to fight me,” she said. “They decide to get in the ring with me. It’s different.”
I didn’t say it, but I think we were both thinking of Ann Marie, who had not chosen, who had not entered any ring at all, who had merely made the mistake of gossiping, of running that glossy little pink mouth of hers.
“What do you want me to say, Michael?” she asked. “Do you want me to hate myself? Do you need to hear that? I’m cold, can I get closer? You have the AC up really high.”
“Yes,” I said, and she scooted closer to me under the covers and then I could feel the heat of her breath and the warmth of her body.
“I want to put my arms around you, but my hands,” she said.
“Here,” I said, and lifted my head off the pillow so she could snake an arm under me without crushing her hand.
“Sometimes I do hate myself,” she said. “Sometimes I do.”
“I don’t want you to hate yourself,” I said.
“Sometimes I forget to hate myself. Or I hate myself for all the wrong reasons.”
“You don’t have to be good,” I said.
“Is it okay that I’m in here? I forget how we got here, how I got in your bed, but I am so, so happy to be here,” she said, nuzzling her face into my hair.
“It’s okay,” I said. “That you’re here.”
I loved her body so much. I loved her so much. She was exactly as good and exactly as evil, I thought, as a panther. As any of us animals. As me.
“Everything hurts,” she whispered.
“Everything hurts,” I agreed.
And then we fell asleep.