The Best of Lucius Shepard (58 page)

The
ref waves them together, and Mears sucks it up, banishes his pain into a place
where he can forget about it for a while and shuffles forward, presenting a
picture of reluctance and tentativeness. When Vederotta connects with a jab,
then a right that Mears halfway picks off with his glove, Mears pretends to be
sorely afflicted and staggers back against the ropes. Vederotta’s in no hurry.
He ambles toward him, dipping his left shoulder, so sure of himself he’s not
even trying to disguise his punches, he’s going to come with the left hook
under, he’s going to hurt Mears some more before he whacks him out. Mears peeks
between his gloves, elbows tight to his sides, knowing he’s got this one
moment, waiting, the crowd’s roar like a jet engine around him, the vicious,
smirking beast planting himself, his shoulder dipping lower yet, his head
dropping down and forward as he cocks the left, and it’s then, right at that
precise instant, when Vederotta is completely exposed, that Mears explodes from
his defensive posture and throws the uppercut, aiming not at the chin or the
nose, but at that red slit on the black eyelid. He lands the shot clean, feels
the impact, and above the crowd noise he hears Vederotta shriek like a woman,
sees him stumble into the corner, his head lowered, glove held to the damaged
eye. Mears follows, spins him about and throws another shot that knocks
Vederotta’s glove aside, rips at the eye. The slit, it’s torn open now, has
become an inch-long gash, and that steaming, luminous red shit is flowing into
the eye, over the dull black cheek and jaw, dripping onto his belly and trunks.
Mears pops a jab, a right, then another jab, not hard punches—they don’t have
to be hard, just accurate—splitting Vederotta’s guard, each landing on the
gash, slicing the eyelid almost its entire length. Then the ref’s arms wrap
around him from behind and haul him back, throwing him into ring center, where
he stands, confused by this sudden cessation of violence, by this solitude
imposed on him after all that brutal intimacy, as the doctor is called in to
look at Vederotta’s eye. He feels light and unreal, as if he’s been shunted
into a place where gravity is weaker and thought has no emotional value. The
crowd has gone quiet and he hears the voice of Vederotta’s manager above the
babbling in the corner. Then a second voice shouting the manager down, saying,
“I can see the bone, Mick! I can see the goddamn bone!” And then—this is the
most confusing thing of all—the ref is lifting his arm and the announcer is
declaring, without enthusiasm, to a response of mostly silence and some
scattered boos, that “the referee stops the contest at a minute fifty-six
seconds of the third round. Your winner by TKO: Bobby! The Magician! Mears!”

Mears’
pain has returned, the TV people want to drag him off for an interview, Leon is
there hugging him, saying, “We kicked his ass, man! We fuckin’ kicked his ass!”
and there are others, the promoter, the nobodies, trying to congratulate him,
but he pushes them aside, shoulders his way to Vederotta’s corner. He has to
see him, because this is not how things were supposed to play. Vederotta is
sitting on his stool, someone smearing his cut with Avitene. His face is still
visible, still that of the beast. Those glowing red eyes stare up at Mears,
connect with the eye of pain in his head, and he wants there to be a transfer
of knowledge, to learn that one day soon that pain will open wide and he will
fall the way a fighter falls after one punch too many, disjointed, graceless,
gone from the body. But no such transfer occurs, and he begins to suspect that
something is not wrong, or rather that what’s wrong is not what he suspected.

There’s
one thing he thinks he knows, however, looking at Vederotta, and while the
handlers stand respectfully by, acknowledging his place in this ritual, Mears
says, “I was lucky, man. You a hell of a fighter. But that eye’s never gon’ be
the same. Every fight they gon’ be whacking at it, splittin’ it open. You ain’t
gon’ be fuckin’ over nobody no more. You might as well hang ‘em up now.”

As
he walks away, as the TV people surround him, saying, “Here’s the winner, Bobby
Mears”—and he wonders what exactly it is he’s won—it’s at that instant he hears
a sound behind him, a gush of raw noise in which frustration and rage are
commingled, both dirge and challenge, denial and lament, the final roar of the
beast.

*
* *

Two
weeks after the fight he’s sitting in the hotel bar with Arlene, staring into
that infinite dark mirror, feeling lost, undefined, sickly, like there’s a
cloud between him and the light that shines him into being, because he’s not
sure when he’s going to fight again, maybe never, he’s so busted up from
Vederotta. His eyes especially seem worse, prone to dazzling white spots and
blackouts, though the pain deep in his head has subsided, and he thinks that
the pain may have had something to do only with his eyes, and now that they’re
fading, it’s fading, too, and what will he do if that’s the case? Leon has been
working with this new lightweight, a real prospect, and he hasn’t been
returning Mears’ calls, and when the bartender switches on the TV and a
rapper’s voice begins blurting out his simple, aggressive rhymes, Mears gets
angry, thoughts like gnats swarming around that old reeking nightmare shape in
his head, that thing that may never have existed, and he pictures a talking
skull on the TV shelf, with a stuffed raven and a coiled snake beside it. He
drops a twenty on the counter and tells Arlene he wants to take a walk, a
disruption of their usual routine of a few drinks, then upstairs. It bewilders
her, but she says, “OK, baby,” and off they go into the streets, where the
Christmas lights are gleaming against the black velour illusion of night like
green and red galaxies, as if he’s just stepped into an incredible distance
hung here and there with plastic angels filled with radiance. And people, lots
of people brushing past, dark and shiny as beetles, scuttling along in this
holy immensity, chattering their bright gibberish, all hustling toward
mysterious crossroads where they stop and freeze into silhouettes against the
streams of light, and Mears, who is walking very fast because walking is
dragging something out of him, some old weight of emotion, is dismayed by their
stopping, it goes contrary to the flow he wants to become part of, and he
bursts through a group of shadows assembled like pilgrims by a burning river,
and steps out, out and down—he’s forgotten the curb—and staggers forward into
the traffic, into squealing brakes and shouts, where he waits for a collision
he envisions as swift and ultimately stunning, luscious in its finality, like
the fatal punch Vederotta should have known. Yet it never comes. Then Arlene,
who has clattered up, unsteady in her high heels, hauls him back onto the
sidewalk, saying, “You tryin’ to kill yo’self, fool?” And Mears, truly lost
now, truly bereft of understanding, either of what he has done or why he’s done
it, stands mute and tries to find her face, wishes he could put a face on her,
not a mask, just a face that would be her, but she’s nowhere to be found, she’s
only perfume, a sense of presence. He knows she’s looking at him, though.

“You
sick, Bobby?” she asks. “Ain’t you gon’ tell me what’s wrong?”

How
can he tell her that what’s wrong is he’s afraid he’s not dying, that he’ll
live and go blind? How can that make sense? And what does it say about how
great a fool he’s been? He’s clear on nothing apart from that, the size of his
folly.

“C’mon,”
Arlene says with exasperation, taking his arm. “I’m gon’ cook you some dinner.
Then you can tell me what’s been bitin’ yo’ ass.”

He
lets her steer him along. He’s too dazed to make decisions. Too worried. It’s
funny, he thinks, or maybe funny’s not the word, maybe it’s sad that what’s
beginning to worry him is exactly the opposite of what was troubling him a few
seconds before. What if she proves to be someone who’ll stand by him no matter
how bad things get, what if the pain in his head hasn’t gone away, it’s just
dormant, and instead of viewing death as a solution, one he feared but came to
rely on, he now comes to view it as something miserable and dread? The darkness
ahead will be tricky to negotiate, and the simple trials of what he’s already
starting to characterize as his old life seem, despite blood and attrition,
unattainably desirable. But no good thing can arise from such futile longing,
he realizes. Loving Amandla has taught him that.

Between
two department stores, two great, diffuse masses of white light, there’s an
alley, a doorway, a dark interval of some sort, and as they pass, Mears draws
Arlene into it and pulls her tightly to him, needing a moment to get his
bearings. The blackness of street and sky is so uniform, it looks as if you
could walk a black curve up among the blinking red and green lights, and as
Arlene’s breasts flatten against him, he feels like he is going high, like it
feels when the man in the tuxedo tells you that you’ve won and the pain is washed
away by perfect exhilaration and sweet relief. Then, as if jolted forward by
the sound of a bell, he steps out into the crowds, becoming part of them, just
another fool with short money and bad health and God knows what kind of woman
trouble, who in another time might have been champion of the world.

<>

*
* * *

Radiant
Green Star

Several
months before my thirteenth birthday, my mother visited me in a dream and explained
why she had sent me to live with the circus seven years before. The dream was a
Mitsubishi, I believe, its style that of the Moonflower series of biochips,
which set the standard for pornography in those days; it had been programmed to
activate once my testosterone production reached a certain level, and it
featured a voluptuous Asian woman to whose body my mother had apparently
grafted the image of her own face. I imagined she must have been in a desperate
hurry and thus forced to use whatever materials fell to hand; yet, taking into
account the Machiavellian intricacies of the family history, I later came to
think that her decision to alter a pornographic chip might be intentional,
designed to provoke Oedipal conflicts that would imbue her message with a
heightened urgency.

In
the dream, my mother told me that when I was eighteen I would come into the
trust created by my maternal grandfather, a fortune that would make me the
wealthiest man in Viet Nam. Were I to remain in her care, she feared my father
would eventually coerce me into assigning control of the trust to him,
whereupon he would have me killed. Sending me to live with her old friend Vang
Ky was the one means she had of guaranteeing my safety. If all went as planned,
I would have several years to consider whether it was in my best interests to
claim the trust or to forswear it and continue my life in secure anonymity. She
had faith that Vang would educate me in a fashion that would prepare me to
arrive at the proper decision.

Needless
to say, I woke from the dream in tears. Vang had informed me not long after my
arrival at his door that my mother was dead, and that my father was likely
responsible for her death; but this fresh evidence of his perfidy, and of her
courage and sweetness, mingled though it was with the confusions of intense
eroticism, renewed my bitterness and sharpened my sense of loss. I sat the rest
of the night with only the eerie music of tree frogs to distract me from
despair, which roiled about in my brain as if it were a species of sluggish
life both separate from and inimical to my own.

The
next morning, I sought out Vang and told him of the dream and asked what I
should do. He was sitting at the desk in the tiny cluttered trailer that served
as his home and office, going over the accounts: a frail man in his late
sixties with close-cropped gray hair, dressed in a white open-collared shirt
and green cotton trousers. He had a long face–especially long from cheekbones
to jaw–and an almost feminine delicacy of feature, a combination of
characteristics that lent him a sly, witchy look; but though he was capable of
slyness, and though at times I suspected him of possessing supernatural powers,
at least as regards his ability to ferret out my misdeeds, I perceived him at
the time to be an inwardly directed soul who felt misused by the world and
whose only interests, apart from the circus, were a love of books and
calligraphy. He would occasionally take a pipe of opium, but was otherwise
devoid of vices, and it strikes me now that while he had told me of his family
and his career in government (he said he still maintained those connections),
of a life replete with joys and passionate errors, he was now in the process of
putting all that behind him and withdrawing from the world of the senses.

“You
must study the situation,” he said, shifting in his chair, a movement that
shook the wall behind him, disturbing the leaflets stacked in the cabinet above
his head and causing one to sail down toward the desk; he batted it away, and
for an instant it floated in the air before me, as if held by the hand of a
spirit, a detailed pastel rendering of a magnificent tent–a thousand times more
magnificent than the one in which we performed–and a hand-lettered legend
proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Radiant Green Star Circus.