The Fighter

Chapter 10

The taxi eased through the wrought-iron gates, following the drive up to Paul’s parents’ house. A taste of early spring: stalactite-thick icicles dripping on the eaves, patches of brown lawn under the melting snow.

Last week a letter from a local barrister’s office was delivered to the boxing club.

Paul’s uncle Henry had passed, it informed him; the will was to be read next week at his parents’ estate, and could he please attend.

He checked himself in the cab’s side-view mirror. A twisting slash on his cheek was healing badly, its puffed edges the same blue-black as a dog’s gums. He hadn’t slept well since the fight, suffering nightmares in which he fought great shadowy shapes the height of power poles that came at him with barbed-wire fists.

Three people sat in the living room: his father and mother, plus a young man dressed in wool pants and sweater. The estate lawyer, Paul assumed. His parents held recipe cards, as if they’d prepared speeches.

The young man motioned to a straight-backed Tiffany chair. “Paul, please take a seat.”

“It’s a shame about Uncle Hank,” Paul said, sitting.

“What got him — high blood pressure? Lord knows he loved his salty snacks.”

“Your uncle is alive and well.” The young man spread his palms, an apologetic gesture. “Max Singleton, Paul. I’m an interventionist.”

“Oh, this is cute.”

“Calm down.” Singleton’s air was that of a scientist handling a highly unstable element. “We’re just here to talk, Paul.”

“Does Uncle Hank know about this subterfuge?”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Max the Interventionist said. “Your parents are worried, Paul. The situation is grim, maybe, but not beyond hope. This afternoon you’re in range of death; tomorrow you can be in range…” —dramatic pause — “… of life”

“Seriously?” Paul appealed to his folks. “This guy is serious?”

“We’re here to help, Paul,” Singleton went on. “Will you let us do that, Paul — will you let us help?”

Paul didn’t care much for the constant repetition of his name; must be a tactic they taught at the Interventionists’ Academy. “Ah, what the hey.”

Barb Harris, demure in a black silk blouse, snatched a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table. “Don’t be so flip, Paul.” Jack Harris sat beside her in a charcoal-gray suit. They looked like a couple of funeral mourners.

“Mr. Harris,” Singleton said. “Start us off.”

Jack shuffled his recipe cards and swallowed. Paul noted the sunken rings around his father’s eyes, the four-day growth of beard.

“Son, I always thought we were decent parents and made the right choices more often than not, but clearly we’ve let you down in some critical way. I’ve watched you fall apart and cannot for the life of me figure out why. There seems to be nothing I can do to help — you won’t let anyone help. I’m afraid for you, Paul. Deeply afraid.”

“Oh, come on—”

“You seem to believe I wanted you to follow in my footsteps… and maybe, thinking back, okay, I did want that. But I don’t care now — you don’t want to work at the winery, fine. Do anything you want, just so long as you’re safe. I mean that. Absolutely anything.”

“But…”

Singleton prompted.

“But you’ve got to quit this self-destructive quest you’re on. This… jihad. You need help, son. A car is outside — will you let us take you someplace so you can get better?”

“What, you got the paddy wagon waiting? Men in white coats ready to chase me across the lawn with butterfly nets?”

Singleton made a motion as though he were tamping down a patch of soil — calm down, Paul, calm down. “Mrs. Harris,” he said, “you go on.”

“Paul, I want to let you know how much I love and admire you. But I’m scared that if you don’t stop this abuse and turn yourself around you will not be with us much longer. I can’t stand thinking you are not in a safe place; whenever the phone rings in the night I’m terrified it is about you, telling me you’re dead. So please, Paul, give me back the wonderful and caring son of whom I’ve always been so proud. A car is waiting outside — will you please accept the help that is being offered and get treatment today”

“This car,” said Paul, “where would it take me?”

“The treatment center is top-notch,” Singleton assured him. “A secluded country estate, rambling meadows, cool valley streams, a four-star chef…” Paul thought Singleton would whip out a brochure. “… the best specialists trained in the treatment of various mood disorders—”

“Are you gay?” Barb blurted. “Is that it, Paul? You feel passionate for men?”

“What your mother’s trying to say,” said Singleton, “is that sudden interest in hyper-masculine activities is frequently indicative of a latent homosexual drive.”

“The posters in your room,” his mother went on. “Those… surfing posters.”

“So, what, being gay is a mood disorder? Are you gonna cart me off and straighten me? Would it be better if I was gay — I mean, would it make this any more palatable? Okay, fine, I’m gay. Gay as a French foreign legionnaire!”

“See?”

Barb spread her hands, apologizing for her son’s behavior the way she might for a senile dog with a penchant for biting the mailman. “It’s like I said — he’s disturbed.”

“Oh-ho-ho!”

Singleton gave a ghastly chuckle, the chuckle of a man who’d just witnessed a ten-car highway pileup and was trying to wring a drop of hope from the tragedy.

He cast his soothing gaze upon Paul. “Nobody’s disturbed here, are they?”

“What do I know? You’re the professional.”

“That’s right — I’m the professional. And I say nobody’s disturbed.”

“I’m sold,” Paul said amiably.

“Why are you doing this?” his father wanted to know. “Why take punches just to prove you can? Why suffer just to suffer? That’s how animals do it, Paul — no, animals have more sense.”

“Because…” Paul was staggered a bit by his father’s question. “… people need to suffer. People need to feel pain and experience want and get smashed apart if only to fix themselves.”

“Do you have any idea,” Jack said, “what you’re asking of us? A son asking his parents to let him go through hell in hopes he might come out of it a better man? Who says you’re going to come out better — who says you don’t come out scarred and irreparable? We can’t let you do that. It goes against every single parenting instinct; it goes against basic human nature.”

“And is it our fault?” Barb said. “Our fault you didn’t suffer enough? What should we have done — daily beatings to strengthen your constitution?”

“Mrs. Harris—”

“No, really, I’d like to know. Would you have rather we’d locked you in the root cellar, fed you bread and water — would that have been suitable?”

“Let your parents know how you’re feeling,” Singleton told Paul. “Let them in; together we can help.”

“Do any of you remember that killer whale, Friska?” Paul said after a moment’s consideration. “She performed at the amusement park down in Niagara Falls.

This animal-rights group held a rally to free her a few years ago. A bunch of protesters chained themselves to the park gates, and they had this giant blow-up whale with a lead ball and chain clapped to its dorsal fin. The park agreed to set her free; they drugged her to the gills and flew her to Vancouver Island and dumped her in Queen Charlotte Sound. But the thing is, this whale, she was born and bred in captivity. Her whole life she’s fed, cared for, protected. She was out of shape, bloated, and sickly. She didn’t know how to protect herself. Her life was this tiny pointless world where all she’d ever done was perform tricks when the trainer’s whistle blew. Maybe she dreamed — if whales dream at all — about her natural place in the world, the ancestral sea.

But even so, would she really have understood?”

Max the Interventionist opened his mouth to interject. Paul shut it with a look.

“I think of her limited world blowing up in those new unknowable depths,” he went on, “the strange fish and new waters and her not even having a concept of those depths, not knowing the language of any whale pods she might meet. That sudden, violent explosion of her world, lawless, lacking the parameters that had governed her existence: just bubbles and seaweed and storms and freighters and volumes of blue water that went on and on forever. A tuna boat found her floating near a wharf. She was drawn to sounds she understood: machinery, motors, human voices. Her belly was slashed open. She got chewed by a boat’s rotor blades, or maybe killed by other whales — or by creatures much smaller than her. Her tongue and lower jaw had been eaten.

“They winched the body in and buried it in a whale-sized casket. Over a thousand people at her funeral. A picture in the paper: a giant half-moon-shaped coffin lowered into the ground. The caption went, Noble burial for a noble creature.”

Paul laughed, a brittle hack. “Burying a whale. How unnatural is that?”

“Paul—”

Singleton said.

“Shut up and let me finish. I think about the whale and wonder — who’s to blame? The amusement park for keeping her penned up all those years? The protesters for freeing her? The more I think about it, the more I come back to the idea that it was nobody’s fault. The whale was born in captivity, the trainers loved and cared for her, the protesters were doing what they thought was right. Everybody’s heart in the right place. But the reality is this poor whale adrift in a place she doesn’t understand, scared shitless and so fucking witless she didn’t last a week on her own. But what if she’d been given a chance to strengthen herself so that she might survive?”

“Paul,” Singleton said, “all these fears and regrets can be worked through in therapy.”

“Jesus Christ,” Paul said, “did you hear a word I said? I don’t have any regrets!”

“But first you need to admit you need help,” Singleton overrode him. “Will you do that, Paul — admit you need help? Will you let us help you?”

“You knew the answer to that the minute I walked in here.” Singleton nodded. “I’d like you to set your credit and bank cards on the table.”

“Why?”

“Your bank account’s been frozen.” Jack Harris looked impossibly weary: a man crossing a desert on a mission whose purpose he could not recall. “The cards are in my name.”

Barb’s needless clarification: “They aren’t yours, Paul.”

“They aren’t, are they? I can’t lay claim to any of it. Nothing stands in my name. None of it’s mine.”

He fished the cards from his wallet and laid them on the glass-topped coffee table.

“They’re yours again,” said Singleton. “Anytime you’d like. Just let us help.”

Paul looked at his father and mother sitting on the couch, hopeless and confused.

“Why didn’t you ever let me suffer?” he said. “Just once, let me struggle?”

“We’re your parents,” Barb said. “We love you. How could we let you suffer?”

He went to his bedroom to gather a few things. The room smelled musty and tomblike, a scent peculiar to places long absent of human habitation.

His mother poked her head through the door.

“Is it okay?”

“Come on in.”

Barbara sat on the edge of the bed. “Was it really so bad, Paul? The life you — the lives we had together?”

“It wasn’t bad,” Paul told her, “just fake and empty. All the people I knew, guys I went to school with — what stories did we have? You and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, their parents and on back — you have stories.”

“You really believe that, don’t you? That everyone who came before had it rough.

Sorry to tell you, kiddo, but it didn’t happen that way. I was a farmer’s daughter, your dad a farmer’s son. Our parents weren’t rich but there was always enough. Christmases, birthdays… god, I had a pony. And my dad fought in the war, yes, but with no choice. Was he courageous? I’d like to think so — but he was courageous because the situation called for it.

Circumstance can make a hero out of anyone.”

“Or a coward.”

She smiled sadly. “Is it worth it, Paul — to suffer your whole life just to prove you can?”

Paul could not tell her his deepest fear: that his suffering would always be insufficient and never enough to ensure any lasting happiness. “Do you ever think of the old house we lived in, before Dad bulldozed it? You ever think, what if we’d lived there forever?”

“Sometimes I do,” Barb admitted. “But our life… we’ve moved on.” She fixed her hair and said, “We could get you counseling, Paul. You could stay here with us, or we could rent you a place, and you could see a therapist.

I’ve heard Prozac—”

“Mom, I love you and I love that you’re trying to understand what I’m going through, but…” He hugged her, kissed her cheek, held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders.

Barb reached into her skirt pocket and produced a tinfoil packet. “Hold out your hand.”

She dropped two small objects into his palm. Whitish yellow, the size of corn kernels, each tapering to a pair of reddened tips.

“I called Faith, the girl you were out with,” she said, “the night… that night. She told me the bar you’d been at. I went the next day and hunted around for hours until I found them.”

Paul picked one up, rolled it between his fingers.

“Mom, is this — are these — my teeth?”

She nodded, her entire being swollen with hope. Did she really think it would be that easy? Like his teeth were the wave of some magic wand and — poof! — everything went back the way it was? Paul turned them over in the light, realizing, with dawning awareness…

“Oh my god — these aren’t my teeth!”

“Sure they are,” Barb said quickly. “Who else’s?”

“No, they aren’t,” he insisted. “They’re too… big, or something. Too yellow. This one’s practically brown.” He saw the tiny lead plug. “It’s got a filling! I never had a cavity in my life!”

“Maybe you did,” his mother reasoned. “Maybe you forgot.”

“How do you forget that?”

“You’ve been hit in the head a lot lately.”

But they were obviously not his teeth, which brought up the obvious question:

“Mom, who the hell’s teeth are these? Where in god’s name do you findteeth!’ Paul’s mind reeled. He saw his mother rummaging through Dumpsters behind the dental clinic. Creeping through windows to snatch molars from beneath sleeping children’s pillows. “Did you buy them? How much does a tooth go for in today’s market?”

Barb was weeping now, sniffling and holding her head.

“I thought…” Her chest hitched. “Thought maybe…”

“Hey, calm down.” He laughed a little — getting over the initial shock, he saw it was the craziest, most impetuous thing his mother had done in years. He was oddly touched.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

He stifled another chuckle. “It’s nice, really. A very… nice gesture.”

But his mom was not to be consoled. Tears turned to sobs. She sat on the bed, rocking.

“Oh, come on. Really, I love them. Look.”

He selected a tooth — an incisor by the looks of it — and jammed the pointy root ends into a gap in his gum line. The prongs pierced the soft skin; Paul shoved hard with the pad of his thumb, socking it into the pocket of flesh. It looked like a fang.

“See?”

he said. “Peachy. Good as new.”

He grabbed another tooth — a canine? — grasped firmly, and drove it into his lower gums. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror: the tooth, large and brown as a Spanish peanut, jutted from his mouth at a coarse angle. This one looked like a tusk.

“I vant to suck your BLOOD!” he bellowed in his best Nosferatu accent. “Blah! Blah! Blaaaaaah!”

Paul collapsed into uncontrollable giggles with blood bubbling over his lips. He found the whole scene uproariously funny.

He wiped tears from his eyes. Barb regarded him with an expression of stunned, horrified awe. The room was silent save the pitty-pat of blood on the floorboards.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought maybe…”

But Barb was already up, running to the door and slamming it behind her. Paul heard her stockinged feet thumping down the staircase, ungainly in flight.

He spat another mouthful of blood and wiped his lips on the pillowcase. On the dresser sat a framed photo of himself on the afternoon of his high school graduation. He smiled under his mortarboard, as did his folks on either side of him. Paul struggled to recall himself at that age, that boy’s dreams and needs and fears. He wondered how his then-self might’ve reacted had his now-self shown up on that sunny afternoon years ago, crashed the graduation ceremony all cut and bruised and bloody. Would then-Paul have been sickened and ashamed — or fascinated? Perhaps he would’ve viewed his future self as a different species of creature altogether, one whose life bore no resemblance to his own.

Paul waited while the whore — her name, she said, was Adele — paid for the room. The A-l-Motel: owing to a string of dead neon, the marquee read simply a motel. Niagara Falls, the red-light corridor. Streetlights along the quay cast their brightness upon the frozen Niagara River, a blue-gray sheet stretching to the rocky escarpment of New York State.

He lacked any clear recollection of how he’d gotten here. He’d borrowed five hundred dollars from his father’s dresser before leaving the house, but since he had no means or intention of repaying it, stolen was the more accurate term.

Adele came out dangling a key from its plastic diamond-shaped fob. She was young and skinny as a guitar string. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s blade, Lou Cobb might’ve said. She led him up a rusted staircase to a small clean room on the second floor and sat him on the bed.

“I got to say you’re not looking so hot, cowboy.” She drew a circle around her lips. “Your teeth are all shot to hell. Couple of them look too big.”

The teeth his mother had “found” were still lodged in his gums. They didn’t hurt that badly, though to leave them in much longer was to risk infection. “They were a gift.”

“For the man who has everything, huh?” She flipped her hair — a strangely girlish gesture — then squeezed Paul’s crotch. “I’ll go wash up.”

The bathroom door shut. Running water, splashing water. Paul removed his shirt and stood bare-chested before the window, considering the reflection of his body.

The flesh over his ribcage was an ugly bluish-yellow mottle. It still hurt to breathe.

The name of the man who’d done this damage was Tom Tully; Lou had given him the name after much prodding. An ex-pro boxer. He and his brother shared a small house in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls. Tom Tully was at Mount St.

Mary’s hospital, comatose fifteen days now.

Paul often thought about Tom Tully. What sort of person was he? He’d visited the local library archives and hunted through old Ring magazines.

He’d dredged up an article: sammy “night train” layne & tommy “boom boom” tully set to tango on holmes/cooney under-card at msg. A photo: Tully looking impossibly hale beside a cigar-chomping manager. A trial horse, the scouting report said. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.

For the past few days Paul had taken a cab over the river. He idled across the road from the row house off 16th Street. Everyone looked so different. Nobody wore suits or carried briefcases. Everyone took the bus. Though a mere forty miles separated Paul from his childhood home, the distance seemed much greater. Paul Harris and Tom Tully — he wondered, were their lives in any way similar? The prospect gnawed. If they’d met outside the ring, somehow by chance, might they have been friends? Paul remembered the bigger man saying he’d take it easy on Paul. He remembered Tully’s awkward, shamed smile.

A trial horse. Loads of heart, little skill. Takes a mean punch.

The whore, Adele, was singing. A sweet voice. She stepped into the room with a towel wrapped around her head and another draping her body.

“So,” she said. “Ready to rock and roll?”

Paul realized, somewhat abruptly, that he had no desire to fuck this girl. He wondered if he could ask her to get dressed and leave so he could catch a few hours’ sleep.

Adele stared at Paul, fascinated with his body: the lumps and abrasions and bruises.

She leaned back on the mattress, a slatternly pose, running her bare feet over the puke-green shag. Paul retrieved his handwraps from a coat pocket and sat beside her.

“Give me your hand.”

Gently, the way he’d been taught, he wrapped this whore’s hand. Holding firm her wrist, he felt the birdlike bones pulse under her skin. The wraps were filthy, stinking of sweat and blood. Adele didn’t seem to mind. Paul worked slowly, applying gentle pressure, testing his handiwork. Again he was struck by just how young she was: the rosy, fresh-scrubbed complexion of a high school girl.

He considered asking her to leave — but perhaps her being with him tonight was the lesser of so many possible evils.

“What’s your name?”

“Rex,” Paul told her. “Rex Appleby.”

Adele offered him a soft smile. “And what do you do, Rex?”

“I’m the last good cop on the force. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire… Rex Appleby.”

When Adele’s hands were wrapped, Paul set them back in her lap. He knew he wanted something from her — not sex, not comfort or intimacy, any of that. Contact, was all. Not loving contact, or even professional tenderness. Something more forceful that would leave him scarred.

He heeled off his shoes, unbuttoned his jeans and shucked them. He removed his underwear and stood before her naked.

“You sure got a big dick.”

Paul knew she was lying: his cock was a runty wrinkled thing sunk so deep into his crotch it almost looked like a second belly button. She was no different from the stylist who runs her hands through a balding customer’s hair and remarks how lustrous it is.

She was tall: they met eye to eye. Her lips were almost colorless, her mouth big and hard and brutal enough to chew right through him.

Her shaved pussy had a starchy, ruffled look, like the collar of a Victorian gentlewoman’s dress. In the room’s sulfurous light she looked like a young man.

Her breasts so small, slender body roped with taut muscle. Like a teenage boy.

Paul pulled bills from the pocket of his jeans and placed them in the Gideon bible, between pages in the Book of Leviticus.

Adele smiled. “What is your pleasure, sir?”

He considered her and sighed. He could only make a fist and slug his thigh. Adele intuited something in this gesture — his need was as naked and undisguised as the buzzing neon M through the parted drapes.

She said, “I can do that.”

They stood close but not quite touching.

“Well,” Paul said softly, “what are you waiting for?”

The first blow glanced off his forehead. The room was so dark, visibility so poor, that he did not see it coming. Adele’s fist had some serious steam behind it: fragments of shooting light spun before his eyes like formations of burning birds. He was still grinning stupidly when a second punch, this one much harder, rocked his jaw.

Paul tripped backward, startled and unbalanced. His thigh rammed the bedside table, knocking the lamp off as his feet swung out from under him. His skull slammed the wall and he dropped to the floor, crushing the lamp: the cheap cellophane shade crumpled and the light bulb burst with a powdery pop to drive eggshell shards of glass into his ass.

Her hand twined in his hair, dragging him up. Her lips pressed to his ear, breath stinking of sour bananas: “Like that, don’t you?”

Before Paul could reply she slugged him in the belly. Twin whips of snot spurted from his nostrils. She punched him under the chin, an unforgiving uppercut that shut his mouth. His new teeth collided. One shot straight up into the air. He swallowed the other one and fell back on the bed.

When the cobwebs cleared he propped himself on his elbows and found her kneeling between his spread legs sucking his cock. She bobbed up and down, her hair — yellow like greased wheat — fanned over his thighs. Her tongue was small and pink, hot and wet, and she kept flicking it over the tip of Paul’s hard cock as she sucked him off.

“Wait, now,” he said, groggy but alarmed. “My god—!”

She took a swing at him with his cock still in her mouth, clipping his chin, and he fell back again. She grasped his hips, sharp painted talons digging deep into his ass, thick strings of saliva hanging from her lips as she bent to inhale his dick, taking the whole of it into her throat. She gagged around its size, a barfy-burpy sound. Paul had never felt anything like it. She kept pumping the shaft, impaling her mouth on it while at the same time slipping one finger between his legs, between his ass cheeks, pressing that finger against his asshole, circling, rubbing, and he tensed a bit before relaxing to let that raw skinny finger slip up inside him and he squirmed, helpless as an infant as she worked his cock, finger pressing his prostate, and it felt as if his every nerve center had been dynamited until she abruptly removed her finger from his ass and punched him in the kidneys so hard he retched.

She clambered atop him, straddled his hips. She punched him in the face — he could have avoided the blow but elected not to. Brilliant stars pinwheeled across the dark space between his eyes and the ceiling. She gripped his cock, rubbed the head over her clit. He was bleeding now, a ton of blood spilling from his torn mouth and ass. She ground her pussy against him, thrusting and bucking and slipping his cock up into her, riding him bareback as Paul idly contemplated the many diseases she might be infested with before realizing he didn’t give a damn. Her pussy was tight and wet, not loose and used as a first-time customer might suspect.

She grabbed the bible off the bedside table, laid it flat on his face, and smashed her fist into the cover. His nose cracked. She slapped his forehead with the Good Book, as if she were a revivalist preacher and he a possessed worshipper speaking in tongues. In the brown light she regarded him with an interest best described as clinical — a specimen pinned on a dissecting tray.

She slid his cock out of her and stood at the edge of the bed.

“Come on.” She was panting like a dog. “Let’s see it.”

Paul jolted off the bed and hit her as he might a tackling dummy, shoulder driven into her stomach, shoving her back. He had her up against the wall with his mouth hot on her neck, kissing and licking and sucking, hands propped under her ass lifting her a few inches off the ground. She guided his cock into her and he thrust up, slamming into her like the pump arm on an oil derrick, her long legs clamped around his hips, and she was kissing him now, biting his lips, one hand wrapped around his neck and the other clenched into a fist punching him lightly in the jaw, and in a high trembling voice she whispered, “This is great. This is really, really… great” and the realization that she was enjoying it, that the rough goings-on had penetrated her hard whorish soul, flooded Paul’s heart with a bizarre species of joy and he orgasmed uncontrollably, the world blanking out for a few seconds, and all he saw was this endless sheet of gray-blue ice as his knees buckled and he slipped out of her. He slid down the slender plane of her body, exhausted and trembling, until his lips came to rest on the bony swell of her hip.

She was breathing heavily. “Was it good for you, Rex?”

Before Paul could say a word she brought a knee up into his chin. His head snapped back, then he didn’t know a thing.

When he came to, Adele was gone. So was the cash in the bible.

In the bathroom he managed to tweeze most of the light-bulb glass from his ass with his fingers. He splashed cold water on his face and crotch and in the mirror surveyed the crazed geometry of his face.

A few fresh lumps and cuts. One of his testicles had swollen to the size of a racquetball; a violet spiderwebbing bruise spread over his ballsack. It was hard to distinguish one injury from the other: they all blended, cut-to-bruise-to-scab-to-bump-to-bruise-to-cut, red-to-black-to-purple-to-yellow-to-pink-to-blue. It had become impossible to recall where he’d absorbed them — in his mind they had merged into one single catastrophic injury.

He pulled his lower lip down and bared what remained of his teeth.

“Booga booga.”

From the motel he made his way toward Mount St. Mary’s hospital. He followed snaking streets and narrow alleyways, crossed bridges spanning iced-over streams on his way to the place that he realized, deep down, he was destined for all along.

He bumped into a guy as he crossed the Rainbow Bridge. His fists instinctively curled before he got a look at the guy’s face in the yellow glow of the bridge lamps.

“Jesus,” he said. Then, “Hey.”

It was Drake Langley, his old prep school chum. But Drake looked nothing like he had: he wore an old army fatigue jacket and sported a clean-shaven skull. And apparently he’d rediscovered how to walk without assistance: the dog-headed cane was nowhere in sight.

Drake was missing a handful of teeth. The dome of his skull was grooved with long slits stitched with catgut. His face looked odd. After a moment Paul realized that his eyebrows and eyelashes had been shaved off.

“How’s it going, man?”

“I’m all right,” Paul said. “…you?”

“Fuckin-A great.”

Drake said he’d moved out of his parents’ place and was holed up with “a pack of hardcore animal rights activists” in an abandoned house on Paper Street.

“PETA is a little dog with a big bark,” he said. “We’re a little dog with a mouthful of razor blades. We bite”

Paul was distressed at the mania in Drake’s eyes: skull cored out like a jack-o’-lantern, flickering candlelight dancing behind his eyes. Drake showed him the contents of his shopping bag: boxes and boxes of Eddy matches.

“Do you know,” he said, “that if you stuff a PVC tube with enough permanganate, Sweet’N Low, and match heads, you can blow up just about anything?”

“I didn’t know that,” Paul said. “No.”

Drake caught something in Paul’s demeanor and got agitated. “Know how they skin a fox at a commercial fur ranch? They slit it right here,” his fingers made slashes at his own crotch, “and pull its skin off. It’s alive when they do it. When the skin’s off they chuck the skinless body in a plastic barrel. They don’t even slit its throat. You know what a fox with no skin looks like? A newborn baby. A bloody squirming baby. Picture a barrel full of babies, Paul.”

“I’ve got to get going, Drake. Nice to see you.”

Drake grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” he said softly, “thanks, man. I mean it.”

Now Paul stumbled down a white-walled corridor with hospital beds lining the walls.

He was shivering, having walked fifteen blocks without benefit of a jacket. His teeth hammered and clashed.

The room at the end of the hallway was spare and antiseptic, its lone window inset with steel mesh. Tom Tully lay on the nearest bed. Shirtless, white EKG disks plastered to his shaved chest. The crown of his skull was swaddled in layers of surgical gauze, below which his eyes stared, wide open, at a spot on the wall.

Tom looked so small and frail, so badly — shrunken. His skin was drawn tight to the bones of his hands, making them appear grotesquely clawlike. Paul pictured a scarecrow with a tear in its belly, straw guts bleeding out in a blustery farmer’s field.

Gummy matter had gathered at the sides of Tom’s eyes. Paul took a Kleenex from a box on the shelf and dabbed at the sticky accretion. Tully’s eyes didn’t blink.

A wave of panic, near-hysteric in scope, washed over Paul. The skin tightened over his head, stretched so taut he was sure it would split to reveal the vein-threaded dome of his skull. He wanted to grab Tully and shake the daylights out of him; wanted to scream WAKE UP! into his sweetly smiling face.

“I’m… sorry,” Paul whispered, his mouth so close to Tully’s head that the downy hairs of his inner ear quivered. “I never saw it happening like this. I never meant to hurt you this way — it wasn’t ever about that.”

A young man came in. He carried an orange cafeteria tray, setting it down.

Seventeen or so: a high school senior, maybe. Not that big, but a strong, compact frame. Dark, short-clipped hair. Eyes the same cornflower blue as Tom Tully’s.

“Who are you?” he asked Paul.

“I’m nobody. Just visiting. Who are—?”

“Robbie. Rob. He’s my uncle.”

“I’m Paul. Were… are you close?”

“He’s my uncle,” Rob said again.

They stood across Tom’s body. An accordionlike breathing bellows rose and fell.

Narcotics dripped through a catheter into his spine.

Rob said, “What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to see how he was faring.”

“So you’ve seen him.”

Rob’s fists clenched and unclenched; brachial veins pulsed down his biceps. Paul set himself in a defensive stance, figuring the kid might leap across the bed.

“You look like shit.”

Paul picked at the crusted blood on his lips. “It’s been a long night.”

“You crawl out of a Dumpster?”

The kid was goading him — he had every right. Paul picked a condolence card off the bedside table, skimmed it, and set it back.

Rob shifted from left foot to right. Antsy, ready to explode. “Where are you from? I’ve never seen you before.”

“Across the river.”

“You’re a… Canadian? Were you fighting to make ends meet?”

“Would that have been any better?”

“Were you fighting for anyone?”

“I was fighting for someone. Myself.”

Paul pictured the way Tom Tully had fallen: heedlessly, like a trench coat slipping off its hanger to the floor. He pictured Tom Tully with blood coming out his ears and recalled the rush of pure power that flowed through him at the sight; power born of the knowledge he’d reduced another human being to a thoughtless slab of meat, erasing every trace of history and memory and dream. And while he couldn’t quite reconcile the hideous selfishness of these thoughts, neither could he deny he’d harbored them.

“So you didn’t need the money?” Rob asked.

“Money’s never been an issue for me.”

Rob looked at Paul and peeled away the new muscles, bruises, and missing teeth to catch a glimpse of Paul as he’d once been: frail, monied, fearful.

“Can I ask you something?” Paul nodded; Rob went on. “Are you rich?”

“I was never rich. But my parents were.”

“So that, with my uncle… proof of something?”

“I needed to know what I was capable of,” Paul told him. “To know I could walk into a room and know that nobody in that room could… fuck with me, I guess.”

Rob gave a look of such seething hatred it shocked Paul. “I’ve heard spoiled rich kids do a lot of self-centered things, but that takes it.”

He went to the door and shut it. After a brief hesitation he dragged the chair over and lodged it under the doorknob. He crouched on the floor, his posture that of a baseball catcher. For a full minute he sat that way.

“My uncle was a solid fighter,” he said finally. “This shouldn’t have happened.” He raised his head and stared at Paul with those blue eyes of his. “I want to hurt you, Paul. I think… I think I more or less have to. And I think you want to be hurt.”

“We both know a place. How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“If you think it’ll answer anything. Maybe I owe you.” Paul smiled sadly.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Then, with perfect honesty: “Or maybe I do.”