Girl in the Arena (8 page)

—You’re the most pathetic man in the world.

It doesn’t take much to wound the guy, from the look on his face. I ask if he has a lighter and he actually comes up with one, after he shuffles through his locker.

I don’t look around, I just go back into the dark passageway. I’ll wait for a while, until the photographers clear out. Then I’ll make it up into the stadium again.

—Wait! I hear him call after me, but I don’t wait.

CHAPTER 8

As I look around the stadium, the post-traumatic sky is almost navy blue now and the bodies are gone. Tommy always said Mass General is the best hospital in the country for stampede victims, so I imagine a lot of them are over there, crowding the halls on gurneys, some in surgery. There’s even a specialist for clown injuries. Tommy was pretty loyal to the clowns and made large donations to the hospital.

The cleanup crew will come in the morning. All the power in the stadium is off for the night. The jumbo screens are down and the only light from the moon is caught in the nearly perfect ring of water bottles that surrounded Tommy. But his body’s gone. Maybe he’s risen from the dead. He’d do something like that—rise from the dead. It’s eerie that the bottles are still in place that way. Like one of those roadside memorials with family photos, stuffed animals, things no one wants to disturb.

tommy.

I slump down on a damp bench, kick some trash aside. I have to get home and take care of Allison and Thad but I’m seven ways to tired and need to lie down for a few minutes. Uber will leave by the GSA door, especially if he hopes to avoid the throng that can build at the gates, and no one hangs out in the stadium at night. I know because I’ve done that a couple times with my friend Mark. So I’m not too worried, but I get my knife out of my bag anyway and tuck it under my body, just in case, and then I let my thoughts drift.

Some people think violence is nothing when you’re raised in Glad culture. They say we have no feelings, that we don’t value life. There was a comedian who said we collect death like fast-food toys—something we enjoy with a quick meal. Or something like that.

What they don’t get is this: a Glad has an incredibly strong sense of reality. Dreaming is not, strictly speaking, what we hope for, what we encourage or need. And if you stop dreaming and get real, you have to accept the fact that violence is a part of life, part of nature. Ask any biologist. To a true Glad, the arena is the only fair fight.

Two people sign up to test their skills and bravely take their consequences. We don’t consign slaves, we don’t shackle or bind anyone to fight unless he happens to be on death row when he arrives at the stadium, and even then, this guy has petitioned hard to fight, gone through several screenings. He’s free to drop out and return to prison up to the last minute. And though there was an idea floated by one congressman to have illegal aliens thrown into the arena, that guy is strictly a monster and was eventually knocked out of the club for molesting his young aides.

I have my bones to pick with Caesar’s Inc., but no one has to sign their stupid contracts, especially not the multiple-year ones. But the deals are more than lucrative, or at least they seem more than lucrative, so people sign.

Tommy always said it was our country’s stealth activities he couldn’t stand, the forces neatly stacked against a person where the concept of fair fight just doesn’t exist: the military game, corporate culture, divorce courts, insurance companies, the IRS, government wire taps.

—
You take a boy, eighteen, throw him into a war he doesn’t understand, in a country he’s never even read a book about, because some president has some good old friends and family members heavily invested in certain companies that have to move some products like aircraft or oil or hospital beds, now that’s nuts, 
Tommy would say.

The thing is, I have been thinking about the loose chinks in the basic pro-Glad argument for some time now, which may have something to do with my being a bit of a dreamer, something Allison likes to harp on me about. And now that Tommy’s dead, the chinks are more like gaping holes. And though this is all that I’ve known—this culture—my mind stabs away at it until it just can’t stand.

The first time Allison took me to a gladiator match I was five. Mouse, my second father, was on temporary disability from the arena then, so we made a day of it, stopping for a picnic at Walden Pond before heading over to the stadium. Mouse liked the deep water in the middle of the pond and the way people crowd near the shore to avoid it. He had a broad laugh, and was once a suspect in a big art heist but never served any time. This was, of course, before he found the Glad life.

Allison reminded him several times that day to watch his ribs. She had him taped in white adhesive from his armpits to his swim trunks to help mend the broken ribs. There was no Thad then. Allison stretched out in the sand, bits of mica clinging to her legs, lighting up her skin. Mouse was the first one who taught me there’s only minimal gain in talking. I saw the way he studied Allison’s glow in a mute way. Then we packed up and headed over to the Romulus.

I have a clear picture of the newly painted blue benches in the stadium that day, and how beautiful Allison looked with one of those thin magician’s scarves she likes to tie in her hair. She had me sit in our reserved box, where she crouched down in front of me and took my hands. Her straight skirt stretched tightly over her lap. Her nylons held her knees so they looked like small pale balloons.

—Kitten, we’re going to see some funny things today. Men being... a little silly.

She rubbed my knuckles with her thumbs as she spoke.

—If we see anything that makes us a little sad or upset, we just have to make a game of it.

I said I wanted to play a game. And she started over.

—The men are going to look like they’re having a big fight. Your father is a famous fighter, so this is something we’re proud of.

—He’s a gladiator, I said.

—Yes, exactly, and we know that gladiators have weapons. Like... axes and knives and...

—And clubs.

Mouse had given me a boy’s plastic club and a matching sword and shield with spikes like small nipples. I had my own bludgeon made of balsa wood. Allison didn’t approve of this kind of thing for 
young ladies 
but there weren’t many women’s leagues then—an idea she would never take to. She had been newly widowed when she met Mouse, and she was eager to make a go of things with him, so certain standards were overlooked for a time to please him.

—Yes, clubs too. Good girl. So nothing to be concerned about. And I brought your coloring book and crayons. And look, she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out my favorite stuffed animal. —I brought your dog and her pajamas if she gets tired.

Even then, I knew it was important to get to work dressing my dog Lucy, that if I didn’t Allison would keep talking and rubbing my knuckles and making me nervous. I sensed her fragility the way I knew her scent in a room she had vacated hours earlier. Allison straightened up and sat next to me on the bench and said, —If one of them loses an arm or a leg, we just say 
too bad 
or 
poor man
.

—Poor man, I said.

—Sometimes I look at the big screens and it makes it a little less... real. And you know, when I cut up poultry for dinner...  she said, starting on a new tack.

And that’s how Allison began her lesson about making associations, about ways to detach and get through rotten experience. A man loses a hand in the arena. It hits the sand and that’s a chicken wing dropped into flour.

I don’t have any memory of seeing the fight that day. In fact, I don’t remember what it was like to see the fights before the age of nine or ten, and by that point matches were something we attended regularly, like church.

My family was heavily filmed. So Allison taught me how to look and what my face should and shouldn’t give away to the cameras, as if she were designing a will and the public was one of her beneficiaries. And sometimes we experienced a personal loss and those were the dark times when Allison seemed to disappear entirely, as if she had only been an overlay on a screen. Someone would go to the grocery store and buy us canned goods to last a month, or they’d arrive with casseroles and other soggy dishes, and we wouldn’t leave the house for anything.

If I have a girl someday, Allison has often told me, I will be expected to bring her to the amphitheater for the first time when she’s five. It’s four for a boy. A couple of weeks ago, I stopped hedging and just said, —That’s never going to happen.

Watching her face fall, I might as well have said: 
Thad’s run away 
or 
The house is on fire.

*

I wake with a start. Allison says I’m such a sound sleeper I’ll make it all the way through Armageddon in a deep slumber. But some random brain synapse lets me know I’m about to roll off the bench in the amphitheater. It’s the middle of the night and there’s a stadium blanket covering me, and a towel under my sore head. I can feel the official GSA embroidery at one corner of the blanket, so I figure this has to be Uber’s.

I’m relieved to see he’s not around, though it’s a little creepy being alone in the stadium this late. When I sit up, I feel like I’ve been in a hard fight. The arm I was sleeping on is basically dead, my hips numb.

Sucking the last juice out of the phone, I call Allison.

—Are you all right? she asks, her voice raspy and urgent and I know she’s been crying and chain smoking all night. I explain about falling asleep but not about caging—she’d go insane if she knew I had shrouded Uber. I’d go insane if I let myself. She wants me to crash at Mark’s so I’m not out in the middle of the night any more than I have to be.

—How’s Thad? I ask.

—He ate a big dinner.

—Did he say anything on the way home?

—I don’t know. Probably, yes. He said something. It doesn’t matter right now, does it? she asks.

That’s how I know Thad has made a new prediction that Allison is worried about.

—Tell him I’ll be home in the morning and that I miss him.

I explain that Uber wouldn’t give me the bracelet back, that there’s this new rule and as far as he knows, it’s our family’s bracelet. Of course she and I know, but neither of us wants to say, that technically I’m supposed to be his fiancée now—if he wants to pursue it or if Caesar’s Inc. finds out.

I tell her to go back to sleep.

—I can’t sleep.

—Drink some of that tea.

—If it worked I would.

I tell her she’s going to be all right, that we’re all going to be all right. The way Tommy would have said it.

The phone goes dead. I hoist myself up and grab the knife I tucked away and slip it back into my bag. Then I make my way down the stairs, and go past the covered concessions and locked vendor booths. I wind my way out of the turnstile.

The streets are jammed, the lights blue, and some people double take when they see me but they don’t ask for autographs. I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders and up around my head and make my way toward the subway. This used to be a neo-Glad neighborhood, so there are plenty of leftover gladiator sports bars. Then all the rich folks moved in because they thought that was a cool thing to do and now a lot of the Glads can’t afford to live in the area. So it’s strictly pseudo culture and I can’t wait to get out of here.

Replays of the American Title match are on all the giant screens as I move down the street. One bar called Steamers projects the fight onto a thick wall of mist. Steam jets embedded in the sidewalk shoot straight up into the air, another series of jets come off copper piping above. The replay action appears to be taking place on the sidewalk—a regular Disneyland effect. And then I’m walking right through their weapons, through Uber’s legs and Tommy’s chest and life being one second and death being the next. And when I’m on the other side, and I look back down the sidewalk, it’s just so much steam and colored lights, and I feel hollow as a tree that’s been gutted by lightning.

And suddenly I want someone to come up to me and say, 
I loved your father. Tommy was the man.

Because then I could say, 
He should have won
. Or, 
His fans meant everything to him. 
But when I play these conversations all the way out, they’re full of self-pity and I really have to get off the street and take care of my head.

Even if I could look away from the pictures of him fighting in every bar—in slo-mo, in flashplay, psychedelic patterns and Warhol color grids—the audio is cranked so loud I hear every last sound that comes out of his chest as if my head is leaning against it. I hear his effort to turn things around and win, at least to stay alive—I know he wanted that.

Then the way the crowd calls, —
UBER, UBER!

And just before I duck into the subway, I see that Visigoth reach down and pick up my bracelet again.

CHAPTER 9

Mark’s family lives less than a block from the subway, on a high first floor, directly across from a lighting shop that’s always ablaze. His family saves a lot on electricity. They have no shades or curtains on their windows. It’s just light pouring in at all hours, the feeling of wattage—and I’ve never been happier to be anywhere.

I let myself in with the key above the door frame and go past his parents’ bedroom. Lloyd, his father, or maybe his mother, Julie, snores within. Julie’s a total Glad wife and the best stitcher in the city—a veritable surgeon. She met Allison when they were both freshly widowed from their first husbands and Mark and I were toddlers. Mark doesn’t remember his first father, but his second father, Lloyd, is one of those Glads who managed to run his contract out. He got through a whole year of competition with only a small dent in his forehead. Then Julie had a dream one night that he would lose his nose and both his ears if he signed up for a second year. Since Lloyd refused to wear a helmet with face gear, like Tommy, she found herself investigating face grafting online. Pretty soon she couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about loving one man with another man’s face. And the day she woke up from a dream about Lloyd having some dead man’s face, she convinced him to become a trainer.