Shockingly Literate

This is a story I wrote for a fiction workshop in Fall 2008.  I felt that I was putting too much emphasis on plot in my writing while letting other aspects of it suffer, so I wrote this shorter piece about boxing with a focus on intense description. Let me know what you think:

Thanatos

Later, under sweaty sheets in a dim bedroom, a woman would ask me what it was like to kill a man. Not taking my eyes from the ceiling, I’d tell her it felt no different than breathing. But that’s later.

Adrenaline – the body’s natural defense mechanism. Afterburner fuel. When your mind perceives a life or death event, it sets off the red alert for your body. Your adrenal gland fires into action, pumping your brain, your blood, with the stuff. Juicing you up for what’s to come.

Fight or flight.

Some people spend their whole lives chasing that thrill. Sky diving, bungee jumping, roller coaster theme parks – all of them in pursuit of that adrenal high, all of them shams. Phonies. Fakes. They’re for kids that’re too rich to die and too dumb to know it. Their parachutes have two fail-safes. The rollercoaster has a seatbelt, a lap-bar, and three separate emergency braking systems. These things lie to the body.

There’s only one way to get that perfect adrenaline high. Those knockoffs produce a cheap copy of the real thing. The only way to get there is to fight another man. There are many ways to battle another human being. Warfare, debate – hell, even video games. All of them tap into that primal killer instinct inside all of us. For me, it’s boxing. Two men fight until only one is standing. And that’s how it should be. It’s beautiful.

It’s a minute into the third round when his right connects with my left cheek. Adrenaline does funny things to the body. It super charges all the senses. At the moment his glove comes into contact with my head, I can count the lashes on my opponent’s left eye. The smell of burning fat and oily smoke coats the air, rolling up off the grills in the back of the arena. Cheers from the crowd wash over me in waves, pulsating with my heart, against my heart. I can taste the blood pooling in my mouth. I would choke on it in a few seconds. What I can’t do, however, is feel. I don’t feel the smooth, plastic glove grinding into my cheek bone. My whole body aches, but I can’t feel that shattering blow that knocks me back, stumbling, until I collapse to one knee.

The referee storms between us as Chris “The Executioner” O’Kieff winds up for another blow. The ref puts one arm on my shoulder, the other on O’Kieff’s chest, screaming something I don’t hear. I’ve lost the roar of the crowd under the throbbing in my skull, so they cheer louder, and the throbbing pulses harder. If anyone were there to look into my eyes, pupils dilated, they’d see straight through to my mind. Months of training slipping away. Running until I could feel my ankles grind and my lungs burn. Taking hit after hit from my sparring partner. Endless pull-ups. The ringing in my ears lets up enough for the ref’s haggard voice to pierce through. He’s counted up to six.

I steady myself, putting a hand down on the mat, and I lift my head. O’Kieff is dancing around the ring, hyping up the crowd, and they love it. The ref is in my face, another number bursting from his fat lips, along with a flood of saliva that splatters against my naked shoulder. Behind me, I hear my trainer and manager screaming at me to get up. All around me, I hear the crowd just plain screaming. The lights put a kind of halo around the ring. I can hear the crowd, and I can smell their sweat. But I can’t see them.

I wobble to a standing position, then take control of myself and lift my fists. The ref takes a look into my eyes, touches my gloves, and cuts his hand through the air between me and O’Kieff. He steps aside, and O’Kieff comes at me, intending to put me down for good before I get my head back.

I’d already lost too many points by taking that knee. We were evenly matched going into this fight, and that was the advantage he needed to win by ruling. If we both go the distance, the judge’s are going to give him the match. I would have to knock him out now to win, and I only have one and a half rounds to do it.

Mid-stride, O’Kieff brings his elbow back into a haymaker, planning to tear through my guard in a single swing. Or maybe it’s a feint, so I’ll dodge to the side, stepping into the hook he has planned for me. I never find out. I drop my hands and dash forward. Two steps: my left foot, and then my right, and with it comes everything I have. My arm locks, a perfect line extending in sinew, bone, and muscle from my shoulder to his face. His mouth guard shoots out to the left, followed by a tidal wave of sweat, spit, and blood. By all means, he should have gone down in that moment, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, looking dumb. His face goes slack, and he raises his fists in a mockery of a guarded stance. I push him back across the ring with combinations of left, left, right, taking him all the way to the ropes. He blocks most of what I throw. The crowd goes insane, feeding on the frenzy I’m entering, devouring it. O’Kieff drops his guard.

There’s another funny thing about adrenaline. Maybe this dates back to the days where we trudged around in the rocks and mud, spears in hand, hunting for survival before we began hunting for sport. Adrenaline lets you, no, it makes you focus. You enter this perfect tunnel vision – all of your senses brought to one terrible point. You can taste your enemy’s pain, smell his fear, feel the blood pounding through his veins. They told me later his manager had thrown in the towel after my first big punch connected, when he saw that I intended to follow up. I never saw it. My goal, my thrill, my life depended on knocking this man down, and that’s all I saw and all I wanted.

When he dropped his hands, the ref should have been quicker. He should have dove between us, halting my attack. He was too slow. I tense my abdominal muscles, bending forward ever so slightly, and then release them in a surge of energy directed from the core of my being, through my arm, and across O’Kieff’s chin. My fist nails his head to the side, a jerky, violent motion. As the plastic padding of my glove drives into his head, sweat leaps from both our bodies, droplets colliding in the air, hailing down in sheets on the mat. He collapses backwards into the ropes, a rag doll caught in a spider’s web. He flips over them, the top rope wrapping around his body as he falls out of the ring. The rope reverses its force, bouncing back to send O’Kieff spinning as he tumbles to the floor of the arena.

Every muscle in my body is saturated and ready to snap. The fiery hormone slices through my brain layer upon layer, lightning behind my eyes. As O’Kieff’s trainer and manager rush to his crumpled body, I stab both my fists into the air. The ringside bell shoots off three shrill notes declaring the end of the match, but they are lost in the raucous screams of the audience. You beat a man senseless, and that adrenaline gets pumping. You do it to the cheers of an insatiable mob, you’re positively soaking in it.

My manager, a real slick douche named Tony, who I don’t know outside the time I put in at the gym, steps into the ring. It’s around now that I realize something’s not right. I’m undefeated in the ring, and after every match Tony swaggers across the mat with the same shit-eating grin and puts his arm around my shoulder and raises his fist into the air next to mine, like he was fighting right alongside me the whole time. Not this time though. There’s no smile on his face. He’s got my robe, “Derek Jett – When In Doubt, Knock ‘Em Out” (his slogan, not mine) stenciled across the back, and he’s rushing it to me. He slips it over my shoulders and whispers into my ear that we’ve got to go, and it’s then I realize that I can hear him. The arena has gone silent. As he hustles me under the ropes and out of the lights, I get a glimpse of the ring doc on all fours next to O’Kieff. Then my manager has me through a door and back in the locker rooms.

There’s a sick humidity unique to locker rooms. It’s so hot the sweat boils right off a guy and coats the air. Every breath is thick with it. You’re floating in it, smelling it, tasting it. My manager sits me down on a bench in my private room. He goes off in a hurry. Says he’ll send in a kid to get my gloves off and unwrap me. The hammering in my chest starts to slow down the longer I simmer in the locker room’s stew of stink and sweat, but the thrill of victory isn’t quite the same. I wonder what’s going on out there. The kid comes in a minute or two later, scrawny and in a too-big white tee. He starts taking my gloves off. While he’s still unwrapping my right hand, Tony comes back in. Looks like the wind is knocked out of him. He says I need to get out of there. It’ll probably be okay, that he knew what he was getting into when he stepped in the ring, and I’m not legally liable, but to be safe I should get out of there. I ask him what’s the matter with him. He says O’Kieff is dead.

He must have landed on his head, twisted his neck, something. They carried him off on a stretcher, and after a few minutes back in his own locker room, the doc made the call. My manager starts off telling me it’s not my fault, he knew the risks of the game, all that shit. I’m not listening, and I don’t need to hear it. That could have been me sprawled out on the floor, my head twisted at an impossible angle. That could be me tomorrow, or the next day, or next year. We all die. We’re all dieing. We’re all dead. It doesn’t matter when it happens. I’m not even sure it matters how it happens.

I sneak out the back entrance with Tony. He’s driving me home. I hear the announcer inside begin to introduce the next bout as we shuffle through the parking lot. They won’t tell the audience what happened. It would ruin the rest of the matches for the night. People got money and careers riding on them. The crowd won’t know until tomorrow, if they care to check. We get into the car and pull out onto the main road. As we drive, an ambulance with its lights and siren wailing soars past us. Too late, buddy. Too late.

I won’t tell that woman any of what I just told you. I won’t tell her about the adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I won’t tell her about the visceral explosion I feel when the other man crumbles under his own weight. When she asks me what it feels like to kill a man, I’ll only tell her the truth of it. Killing’s no different than eating, breathing, or taking a shit. It’s in our nature to kill, and it’s in our nature to die.