Girl in the Arena (6 page)

—I have to tell you something, he says.

When he gets going, Thad can have something to tell me every five minutes.

He cups his hands around my ears. —Mom’s going to lose the house, he says.

That’s the randomness of Thad. And you can’t say: 
That’s nuts, Thad. 
You have to play along like you’re going to lose the house. Otherwise, he goes into a worse state. And then I feel upset seeing him get upset. And the truth is, now that Tommy’s dead, we can live in our house forever, well, at least until Allison dies, because Tommy always fought a clean fight. And that’s in the rules. 
Fight clean and a gladiator’s family enjoys ongoing and generous subsidies.

—Things will be okay. There are other houses, I say to comfort him.

I straighten his hair so it’s out of his eyes. Then I sit down next to Allison and put an arm around her shoulders.

Suddenly I realize that Uber might think my bracelet is actually Tommy’s because it’s a wide, flat band made in the man’s style. I feel sick knowing he could reach down and pluck it off the arena floor. It just sits there by his feet, like an eight ball ready to drop into a pocket and end my game. Because the thing is: 
No man is allowed to hold your dowry bracelet, except your father. If a man holds your dowry bracelet he’s required, according to GSA law, to marry you, 
Bylaw 87.

I watch Allison pull her small yellow coat around herself, as if this will wrap her tight enough to get through the worst day of her life. She says, —He shouldn’t even be in the league. They’re going to nail this guy, she says, looking at the penalty flag again. —You watch. They’ll boot him right out.

Uber unclips his mic from his black and gold breastplate.

—Wait!! he shouts, slamming his voice into the sound system.

It’s eerie the way people go quiet in waves.

Here is this giant who will be able to sell anything to anyone, and he’s standing in the middle of the arena, Tommy cut to pieces in front of him, the penalty flag up, and then—and this is something I can only record and not explain—Uber hangs his head. He touches his chest. I swear I see him mouth the word: 
tommy. 
Even if no one else does, I see it. My skull freezes. This is like being in some kind of sick fairy tale. He has no right to look like he cares or that he’s pledging allegiance or something.

In the still, I hear the soft drink machines recharging, the sprinkler tanks filling, the cotton candy spinning in the dead quiet, in the rising heat as Uber looks dumbly at the ground. Everyone in the stadium stands up now, if they haven’t already, and they touch their hearts and they hang their heads to honor Tommy. And then, after what seems like minutes, though it must be seconds, Uber breaks his stance. He looks up at the crowds and he reaches down. His long black braid swings forward.

And he picks up the bracelet.

CHAPTER 6

Uber angles my silver band this way and that, catching and bending stadium light. When the close-up comes on the screens Allison gasps and a winnowing sound erupts from her throat.

—That’s your bracelet, she says.

A gladiator has the right to handle, pick up, and generally plunder any object his opponent abandons to the arena floor, 
Rule 44.

I can’t feel my spine anymore. My knees are air.

—Why was Tommy wearing your bracelet? she asks.

I can barely get the words out, but I tell her the truth, that I lent it to him for good luck. If this were about a matter we didn’t agree on, she might say something with a sharp edge to it, something unfortunate about luck. But at this moment in time, about this issue, we are allies.

—We have to get it back, she says.

Now the lucid images arrive on the jumbo screens. I’m aware that you can see Tommy’s corpse just about anywhere on the planet with only a slight delay. And if it weren’t so terrible, I’d say there’s something mystical about this, this ability to be everywhere at once, as if his ashes were strewn about the globe.

Uber slips my bracelet onto his right wrist and begins to walk across the arena toward the staging area. Officials trot after him, one of them calling him back. Thad starts pushing at me, and Allison... I don’t know how to stanch her emotions. The officials are arguing.

Thad cups his hands over one of my ears and shouts, —THE HAND IS POINTING AT YOU, LYNIE!

I turn his head and cup my hands around one of his spongy ears, and shout back, —That’s Tommy’s hand! Tommy’s dead, Thad! His hand isn’t pointing at anything!

It’s hard to forgive yourself for being that harsh, that wrong with someone you love, even if it settles him down. The thing is, Thad doesn’t have an unkind bone in his body. And I think I’m pretty patient with him most of the time, probably more patient with him than anyone except Allison. Really patient. Because he’s one of my favorite people. But sometimes he’s a lot to deal with. Before I can tell him how sorry I am, a bank of cameras light Allison’s head and bust. The media has found us.

Allison blinks into the lights and her image sputters onto the giant screens. I watch her 
there 
as she stands next to me, wiping her tears away. She is suddenly luminous, almost together in an instantaneous way, the cracks of her psyche temporarily mended. She mirrors her new role as a GSAW. I think of portraits of Roman noblewomen. Right now that’s Allison.

I am the sliver by her side: the braid of long hair, part of an eyebrow, half an eye. It’s easy to be out of the picture. I can’t move fully into the frame or shift completely out of it, we’re pinned so tight by the crush of people, everyone wanting to get into the shot now, waving to friends, pulling up their T-shirts to show their abdomens, sometimes their breasts.

It’s what we do. We want to be there: on screen.

The sound system issues this alert: 
Remain seated. Free water will be distributed shortly. Remain seated.

The sprinkler system goes on. Thousands of free bottles of water are handed out.

Like Tommy’s corpse, you can see Allison’s face from any geographic point on the globe now. Even in Katmandu you have only to find an Internet user and see Allison’s splendor. She floats in the Earth’s atmosphere in millions of copies. Allison here and Allison everywhere. She is, for all intents and purposes now, a god.

She grabs my hand. She’s trembling slightly. Turning from the cameras she says, close to my head, —Why are they holding up the blessed ambulance?

Three officials in green-and-white-striped shirts are talking with Uber. They go over and look at Tommy, they get within inches of his body. They point to his wounds with their pens. They measure his body parts with skinny measuring tape that snaps back into their palms.

—I’m surprised they haven’t offered free parking yet, Allison confides in me.

She does a beautiful job with bitter when she’s up for it. Ever since the GSA went through its major restructuring they have frequently offered free parking for anyone who makes it out of the stadium within twenty minutes. They’ve been accused of doing this because it ups the trampling numbers. Caesar’s likes to boast a good trample the way NASCAR likes to have their flameouts. I know how quickly we could get separated and crushed by adulation. She knows this too so she’s keeping Thad as close as possible.

Thad begins to say in a singsong voice, —Lynie’s getting married! Lynie’s getting married!

His words volley against my tight eardrums, against my grief. Then Thad is calm and maybe a little embarrassed. He sits down in his chair and looks out toward the spectacle of moistened people.

—Lyn’s not getting married, dear, Allison says softly.

Thad whispers back, —Uber has her bracelet!

I didn’t even think he knew this rule. How can he know some things so precisely and miss other things entirely? In the confusion, I don’t know how much the media has picked up—if Thad’s pronouncements were detectable. Does the world listen to 
every 
word? My brain is a racecourse of thought.

The red PENALTY sign starts to flash. The word blinks on and off like a cursor. 
PENALTY. TOMMY G.

One of the refs turns on the mic at his hip, makes a gesture with his right hand as if he’s cutting his left arm into sections from his shoulder to his wrist, and says, —Unnecessary small cuts. Provision 187. Loss of rank. Dishonored.

The booing starts.

The crowd throws their plastic water bottles into the arena. Bottles rain down on the officials. The air turns to cylindrical hail. The officials do not look happy, one guy takes a full water bottle right on the nose. They look like ants in a downpour.

I realize this sounds impossible, but the plastic containers form a nearly perfect ring around Tommy, and glisten in the lights.

Allison clutches me hard now. I don’t think she realizes that her fingernails are digging into me, rib by rib. I am practically lifted onto my toes from her pain. Suddenly she backs off and shouts, —Provision 187? What the hell is that?

—I don’t know. I can’t hear anything! I shout back.

But we know what this means: Caesar’s Inc. will, in essence, eliminate his death, his benefits, his place of honor.

—Tommy’s retirement funds, she says, realizing she’ll lose this money now.

I know the whole thing was rigged. It’s always rigged. They never like to pay out to the family. They must have come up with Provision 187 just this morning.

I had often thought when Tommy G. died, I’d cry in a pure way. I’d tear my hair out by the roots. I’d pull out my eyelashes so the tears could run unimpeded. But nothing can express this.

Now the sirens go off, and the horns. And the cars whiz into the center ring, and the tall clowns—the ones dressed like Mercury, a full team of eight—lift Tommy G.’s blood-soaked corpse into the air. His long wavy hair sweeps the ground, touches some of the bottles, as they hoist him into the ambulance.

i can’t think
.

Down in the stadium, several sections below us, chairs are being uprooted from their rivets. I can’t see Uber anywhere. A fence comes down and is thrown into the arena. A manic-looking clown with high-arching eyebrows and a tulip in his hat—he’s crushed. Officials, a couple of them go. People rip the wings off the Mercuries. Off their heels, as if they’re insects. The weapon carrier who gave Uber his drink just minutes ago appears to be dead. People cry out, yell, scream. Everyone screams.

I get my jacket off and push Thad’s arms into the sleeves, zip the zipper.

—I’ll meet you at the house! I tell Allison.

Something hits me in the back of the head then, something heavy and dull. When I touch my head, I feel blood.

She wants to fuss with me, but I tell her there’s no time. I tell her I’m getting the bracelet back before anyone knows it’s mine.

—You’ll never get to him, she says.

But she fishes some cash out of her wallet and I throw this in my bag. I give Thad’s meds and Freeway bars to Allison. She gives me a small hairbrush. I almost laugh but I see her need and simply take it. She sees I have one of those Tibetan Buddhist tracts in my bag—something she would normally toss out if she found it in my bedroom—but she doesn’t say anything. I have one of Tommy’s short knives I use for cutting through plastic packaging, cleaning my nails, and stuff. Allison has one of her own, so there’s nothing to exchange there. We work without conversation, trading things back and forth. Her weariness covers me like a hot wool blanket and I feel like I’m going to pass out if I don’t move. Then I see the light on my phone.

—God, my battery’s almost dead. Don’t call me. I’ll reach you as soon as I can, I say.

For years I’ve thrown millions of pixels together in my head, trying to see what it would be like to leave them. It was never this way.

Thad shouts, —Your hands are going to turn red with blood, Lynie!

—I’ll find water, Thad. I’ll wash my hands. Stay with Mom.

I turn back once, to see the way Allison holds his giant, weak head against her breast as they head toward an exit.

chaos
.

CHAPTER 7

Tommy showed me how to get into this hidden place underneath the stadium. It’s a long corridor without windows or electricity—where I’m trying to get to Uber. It’s the only entryway free of paparazzi.

Tommy always had a cigarette lighter with him. Somehow I’ve lost mine in the exchange with Allison. So I’m moving four inches at a time, hoping I don’t smack into anything. I realize the beta-blocker I take for the matches has started to wear off, which means my heart is ratcheting up.

This is where they used to cage wild animals when they needed extra holding pens. So it smells blessed rank down here. I didn’t mind it when I was with Tommy because he thought there was something cool about this place, something kind of anthropological.

One time I stood in the dark with him and watched him as he smoked a cigarette. When he took a drag, we both lit up. He laughed at my skittishness and I pulled the lighter from his hand and held down the button for a while. Sometimes memory rips you and that moment, that experience of light, keeps going through my brain like burning fuel. It’s hard to imagine that Tommy is gone, even though I saw him cut out of this world.

The walls are damp, every surface tagged, drawings from people who were here before us.

He said, —I guess everyone wants to go back to the womb.

It was a dumb joke, this place is not where I’d imagine anyone coming from, but I laughed anyway. I loved his voice, especially when I let my thumb off the lighter and it turned dark again and he was nothing but voice and I could imagine he was six-foot-six and fifteen years older and finally right for Allison.

—I don’t, I said.

And I didn’t. I never wanted to return to the crawl space of Allison or the belly of the cosmos or wherever we hail from. Not because there’s something wrong with her, entirely, or wrong with the universe, entirely. I mean, I love Allison and feel sorry for her, for it. But you don’t want to travel backward.

—Yeah, well, that’s what makes you smart, he said.

He didn’t say it sarcastically. Tommy meant things like that. I looked down at the crown of his head, the smoke swirling around it. I took a drag from his cigarette and then he took my hand and showed me the way to the locker rooms.