American Spirit: A Novel (7 page)

And now, with the body so many years older and the heart pretty much the same age, what we have here is a slow and awkward wrestling match that seems to be only confusing the two men involved, no clear line between aggression and tentative entanglement. The conjoined middle-aged beast of many hairy arms and legs rolls slowly across the floor and into a tall pile of mats; the mats fall silently without commotion, really, and Matthew thinks for a split second that fighting is not nearly as glamorous as it seems in the movies. He starts punching, if you want to call it that. He starts jibbing and jabbing with the one arm that is only partially trapped under the instructor—who in a still photograph right now would look like someone receiving CPR, or a cradled lover. The arm starts kind of flinging into back fat in a sidearm jab
that looks like the type of thing one issues somewhat firmly to one’s own chest when coughing, a simple gesture more than anything efficiently violent or defensive. The instructor finds something within him, probably the same fourth- or fifth-grade experience, he drops the namaste bullshit, and rolls his bear-shaped body over so that now he’s on top of Matthew instead of half underneath him. This position effectively renders Matthew’s punching arm another three or four inches shorter in reach since he’s pinned on his back. Matthew’s weird little flipper jab continues now at a faster speed since it is no longer connecting softly with back fat, but landing in midair about four inches from the target when fully extended. The instructor grunts something, what would usually be a tough guy line if this were a real fight or a movie, but in this case it is a grunt and heave of some basic kinesiology.

“You’re not connecting, you’re gonna hyperextend it.” The man says this like someone under only minor duress; like, say, a man crammed in behind a boiler in a basement, telling someone how they have to help him hold a wrench so it stays on and tightens the bolt that’s nearly impossible to get at.

“Thank you. Sorry about that,” Matthew, oddly, grunts back.

“Is… is the stress of this… worth it?”

“I’ll fucking… kill you.” Matthew tries to flip out from under him.

“Are you drunk?”

“What the fuck, with people asking me that?” Matthew tries to flip out from under him.

“You smell like beer. And vitamins and…”

“Okay, fuck, yes.” Matthew tries to flip out from under him.

“Say you surrender. Give up.”

“What, this is a fucking intervention? You want some of?” Matthew tries to flip out from under him.

“Say you give up this fight, I mean.”

Matthew makes a new fight move; he plays dead. He’s heard about this trick and how people will use it in a bear attack or when gunmen have stormed a school in America, or a hotel lobby in some faraway country, and one wants to appear already hit so they can be left alone to crawl out later among the actual dead. So Matthew employs it; goes limp; even suspends breathing and when he needs a breath, he figures he’ll breathe just barely, not even enough to inflate his chest. And the brain reels at this request, launches a string of logic at the head that says this:

1. Playing dead makes no sense in this situation.
   
2. How is it even possible that, in this pathetic, soft white, mildly homoerotic gentle wrestling, you would have wound up dead?
   

The instructor feels Matthew’s body go limp, notices no breath, and calls up the same string of logic, but with the zeal of a nine-year-old playing cops and robbers.

“What? You wouldn’t be dead from that! You’re not dead!”

Matthew lies still saying nothing.

“Don’t screw around. You can’t be dead from that.”

Matthew is still saying nothing.

“How did this even happen? Hey, say something, man.”

Matthew, still, saying nothing, and all of a sudden: He opens his eyes wide and fast in a flash, like some bad actor’s attempt at delivering a dramatic flourish to the proceedings. He grunt-shouts his reply like this was a secret technique that has succeeded in catching his opponent unaware: “I slowed my breathing and pulse down!”

Matthew rockets over onto his belly into a push-up position and bucks his way almost all the way free from underneath the instructor, landing an actual punch in the process, a punch that connects solidly, with purpose, and it would be like the movies if the punch hadn’t landed squarely to the side of the instructor’s head. They both yell in pain, Matthew instantly cradling his hand in his crotch and hunching over a bit, his eyes brimming with tears. They square off, these two, face-to-face and totally still in some weird pose that is perfect parts old-fashioned put-up-your-dukes and sumo wrestlers squatting, and bending down to touch one hand of knuckles to the mat while looking up at each other from the tops of their eyes; the anticipatory tension is boyish, dumb, and silent, and neither man moves a muscle. The anticipatory tension of another round peaks in stillness, and then they both exhale in truce, lose their form, and start milling
about the room; as if they’re cooling down after a sprint or jerking a huge Olympic barbell of weights above their heads. There’s an awkward attempt at a sporting handshake that only half-connects in sloppy grips, then a huff or two as they walk little lazy circles trying to catch their breath; trying to grab a little extra oxygen from the empty community center’s air.

“You got me on the head pretty good, man. How’s your hand?”

“The cartilage hurts.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s no cartilage in the hand. Not the human hand.”

“The tendons, or whatever.”

“Was that a Tibetan trick, when you slowed your pulse like that?”

“I don’t know any of this shit, I told you that. I don’t know namaste, I don’t know Tibetan fighting tricks…”

“No, it’s a Tibetan meditation thing.”

“Most of my fighting stuff is just… I just make it up right then, basically.”

“Well, anyway, help me stack these back up.”

They stack the mats together, and Matthew feels the calm and sense of connection that comes with meditation. It’s working, though he knows he can’t always meditate like this. But for now he enjoys the silence and sense of camaraderie that it came with.

“These things just went flying all ape shit when we rolled
into ’em,” the instructor says, and they both start to laugh and then get quiet and calm again. They continue stacking and straightening the mats.

Matthew smiles and thinks to himself:
not too shabby for basically a free class.

The Truth, Knocked Loose

I
N THE HALLWAY LEADING
out of the community center, one is free to grab a handful of things. To begin with, a schedule of all classes offered. And below the rack of them, there’s a cardboard box that has the phrase
TAKE ME
! written in felt pen on the side of it. Inside of the box is a book called
Shifting Parameters in Nonlinear Models Optimized for Repeated Measurement Data.
Matthew bends slowly down and picks it up. He reads the back cover summary of this thing, then stands wondering why something like this even gets published, why it isn’t just spoken between people discreetly in whatever dull beige chamber they’re suffering in together. Convinced this sort of thing is part of the problem, he moves it from the Put ’n’ Take box into the recycle tub to the left of him. There is also a magazine about hairstyles, a
beautician trade magazine of some sort maybe, called
Hype Hair!
He grabs it and after a moment of hesitation, returns it in a gentle drop back down. There is a magazine about yachting, which won’t be coming in handy at the moment. There’s a small cluster of paperbacks underneath it, though. A shot in the dark, since the yacht rag is covering the stack. Matthew painfully groans one last bend to investigate and takes something yellow and white, medium in size, paperback, and free.

Back in the Bavarian Motor Ward, Matthew reviews the schedule of other classes offered at this ashram of self-improvement. No matter how awkward, soft, and gentle, he cannot afford many more fights, so the choice of what class to investigate next is a weighty one in that regard. Financial planning class is out of the question, this precarious bridge between steady employment and whatever comes next is precarious, and discussing solvency in a classroom environment is fraught with too much potential for tension and discourse and more physical confrontation. Photography seems like torture, to capture these days in pictures flies precisely in the face of whatever comfort denial and beer bring. But crafting! Crafts are the perfect everyone’s-a-winner-just-for-trying environment. There can be some more meditating once things finish cooling down, but it won’t be this week. And so, crafting it is. On Friday. Two days to kill, but days have been dropping like flies.

The keys go into the ignition and the beeps are issued from the dash, and before music can distract him, before a
plan can be laid, it seems the so-called fistfight has knocked something loose—one word,
territorial.
It falls from the brain and right down into the center of the chest where it causes a deep wince of regret. New Time Media was basically in the business of promoting benign pop music, decent cable television programming, and semi-bankrupt magazines that convince people they aren’t skinny enough or happy enough. The doors to the place should’ve been large, thick wooden doors with quotes from Greek myths or early philosophers that might assuage one’s guilt for doing this business. The long corridor to Matthew’s office was a calcified artery of framed magazine covers and platinum album awards; sixteen million copies of a song about the trials of love sung by a seventeen-year-old girl with fake breasts who has never had a boyfriend; ten million albums sold by a white kid from San Diego who raps like his favorite rappers from the Bronx and South Central. One of the first magazines to convince men that they need to have twenty-eight-inch waists, wax their chests and backs, and buy jeans that cost two weeks’ salary of what average Americans make on average. You’re welcome, ladies. That’s why each morning involved clearing such stiff security, in case every woman in the world decided to come rushing into the building at once with knives and guns to even the score with the people who made men into hairless, skinny little boys who spend more money on clothes than their girlfriends or wives. And on that Friday—the Friday when the doctor told him something was wrong but they weren’t sure what, on that Friday when he had to
convince a doctor that he hadn’t been, unbeknownst to himself, kicked in the nuts a few times, the Friday that has only been referred to as the Incident—Matthew made his way down the artery of trophies and to his office door. There are tests that will come back, there will be scopes and scans and X-rays that will yield clues, but suffice it to say, this is the first day of the rest of his life. At the door to his office, his assistant told him there were no phone calls except one.

“Office Services called and said they had a couple more questions for you about the smell you were complaining about.”

“Oh. It’s fine now. It kind of took care of itself somehow.”

“Are you sure? Because they can just…”

“I’m going to take care of it right now. I figured out how. But thanks for the message; thanks for taking it, and no calls or visitors while I take care of this.”

“You seem a little…”

“You’re the one that seems drunk, if you ask me.”

“… tired.”

The door shuts behind him with the little terrier’s exit clearing the slam by an inch or so. In Matthew’s head, a montage of how he tried to go through the usual channels with a level head. He had gone as far as putting in several calm, passive-aggressive calls to Office Services simply stating that his office seemed to smell like urine for some reason. He never threw any human or dog under the bus, he went about this the way that is supposed to almost guarantee success. When one calls Office Services to tell them that, say,
your office is too cold from the air-conditioning, the reply is kind and pleasant, small talk and a course of solution, and the problem is fixed. But when one calls Office Services to say that one’s office smells of urine, there is a deafening pause on the other end of the line that seems to suggest you should simply stop pissing in your own office if you aren’t fond of the smell. And if you persist, there are only calls back to ask you questions.

Off with his jacket; hung it on the back of the door; unzipped his pants. After the doctor’s office, unzipping his pants in an office didn’t feel as out of place as it once may have. Matthew was under contract with New Time Media for another five years of employment. More than that though, he was under the implicit social contract that everyone in the world is honor-bound to, the one that implicitly says you won’t urinate all over your workplace. He broke that contract by holding himself, aiming himself, staring up at the ceiling to relax himself, and then proceeding to paint a primitive border; a language that the president’s dog would understand on its next visit; a circle that started at the closed door and went over to the desk and looped back again, and then sort of mapped the remaining real estate in short intermittent remaining bursts, demi-borders if you will, that claimed the territory to the side of the desk, and then the last of the bladder’s reserve dotting and dashing a small square sub-border to mark the area where he would like to be able to set his bag when he comes in. And then one last small stream began that could be spent filling in any dashed borders
that didn’t seem solid enough. The entire process was wrapping up perfectly, discreetly, effectively, until the office door flew open and his boss poked his head in. This was that most painful of impromptu meetings with a company’s president, the sort where one has to quickly stop urinating midstream
and
think of something to say.