The Cause (5 page)

Seee’s chest was scarred. Jagged lacerations. Cigarette burns. Near the ribs there were a couple of patchy bullet wounds. Tribal scars were scraped into his biceps, crisscrossing patterns, tic-tac-toe where the scratches seemed to be etched out with a sharp rock or arrowhead. His hands were callused, dirt scratched into his fingernails. Part of his pectoral was cut out, a teaspoon lump of flesh removed. He stuck his finger in the hole and when he removed it, a black ant crawled up his finger before he sucked it off the back of his hand.

“Isse Corvus,” he said. “The SWAT negro. The college graduate ghetto boy. The computer ace. You weren’t just a sneaker were you? You were a black hacker wearing the Black Hat. Why did you quit?”

I laughed at him. “You’ve been fed the wrong information.”

“Does it look like I feed on lies?” He was lank but sculptured, cutout and molded from marble. A Rodin’s
Athlete
in the flesh. Arms that bore muscles twisting with toil, racehorse sinews in his forearms aching in strain. His jaw pushed outward from his face with Euclidean edges, a geometry that said he was used to a punch. “An officer-involved shooting for every year on the force.” He shuffled his glide foot over his right ankle in a Sugar Ray shuffle as he began circling me. Stomach muscles were bunched hills of flex, tightness born from the labor of twist and pull. He looked steel-wired into my unflinching eyes. “So you like to kill people?”

“I prefer not to, but you know how it goes.”

A shifty grin beamed over his face, as if out of the whole world of everything, I stood there as nothing. A taunt of fate perhaps, or
a clear look into the cloudy days of my future. Unlike overblown fear-my-wrath glares I got in the octagon, he gazed right through me as if I were a window. I stood statuesque as his eyes moved over me sculpting me into something worthy of a fight. Then he nodded, and his whole body held the tension of an electrocution, muscles ripping like fissures during an earthquake, a body glittering with droplets of sweat. Yet he circled, calm and composed. “But do you shoot for the right reasons?”

“All of my hearings came out favorably.”

“Even with your father?”

Anger welled up inside me. An astute observer, he read it as easily as a seasoned card shark reads the rookie after the flip of the door card. “Even with my father,” I said finally, taking a moment to claw back an edge.

“You are the man who will not quit.” He said it in a tone more enunciated as a question rather than a statement.

“The word is not in my vocabulary.”

“So you see things clearly?”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“How do you know?”

“You think you’re about to win.”

I was six-foot-two and outweighed him by twenty-five pounds. My MMA record would have been better if I had not broken my knee. Still I said, “I’m not so arrogant that I take it for granted, but it seems you are.”

“You’re not much of a shit-talker.”

“It’s never won me any fights.”

“I respect that.” He smiled and his yellow cheetah’s eyes widened inside his skull—pupils dilated to the size of coins, every ray of light bending into them, glowing with the fire of the orange-cindered sky.

Our chests swelled, and there, in the middle of that piss-hot jungle fogging up the ground, we shuffled on the edge of a
volcano that wasn’t there. It was the square off, and the screaming of cicadas combusted with the howling of gawking men egging us on.

Kick his fucking ass. Beat the punk
.

Each man picked a side. There was a melee of betting.
Tune him up, Five-O
, Grus taunted me. Bunker, fist pumping the air, yelled, “Don’t listen to him, Isse. Got my green riding on you, baby. Fuckin’ knock him out.”

We circled one another until the air burst and hearts thumped against sternums and time compressed into a grain of sand under the muddy clearing.

I throw a quick left. Swift with zip—not a lot of weight behind it, but he evaporates in front of me. I feel a counter-hook sting my temple—a powerful ball-of-the-toes sort of punch. Snappy. Ear ringer. But he’d have to throw a lot of those to bring me down.

He follows with his glittery bloodshot eyes, throwing a flurry of fists and kicks. Triplets launched from rotating hips. I block incoming one and two, but he catches me with an inside leg kick close to the knee. I fake a wobble, but he’s too smart for that.

Raucous bellows bleed from the crowd.
Five-O gonna get KO’d! Five-O gonna get KO’d!

Come back with a left jab. That’s it. Use the reach advantage. I hear old Bluetooth yelling at me from my corner from back in the day. I see him with that squint-eye and blue-capped incisor.
Hit and run
, he yells,
480-484
. All the way from Harold’s gym on Figueroa Boulevard, he’s in my head, police codes. I hear him repeat
480-484, loosen him up
. I obey. I hear him like it was a million years ago. I’m dishing out combos. Leg kicks make his quads go pink. But this guy’s absorbing the shots, loving them, as if each one makes him stronger. Other men would have slowed by now, but he’s dancing around with a cherry leg and toothy smile. He squares off on me and delivers the same low-leg mule-kick to the thigh. I show him nothing. The smile is gleaming on his face, daring me to wipe it off. I push him backward and try a
flying knee. He sees it coming—counters with an uppercut as I turn back to face him. Taste of blood in my mouth, hot and metallic. I spit it out with the gaggling of the men pleading for more.

He fakes a leg sweep. Throws a right hook. I block. He counters, catching me in the groin with a front kick. There is an instant where I feel nothing. I lunge forward with my right, but he is backing away, knowing the delayed reaction is a freight train coming. I fall to the ground and roll up into a ball.

“You want to know what his problem is?” he yells. His back is to me, lecturing the riotous men who have fallen silent like children being scolded by a boarding-school teacher. “He thinks this is a fair fight. He’s used to playing by the rules. Fucking MMA style. But there aren’t any rules out here. Look around. If I kill him now, who would care?”

The men look at one another uneasily. They didn’t bargain for this so soon.

Now the cicadas are the only ones answering, and they screech like fingernails grinding chalkboards. I push myself slowly to my feet. Blue pounding on the octagon floor yelling,
Now you mad—up and at’em, dog—no mercy yo
. I’m bent over, but I’m watching closely. I’m glaring with an intensity that could burn the sun. A whirl of strategies flood my mind. I’m in the game now. A blitzkrieg of rage, bones solidifying into new shapes, ready for a new fight. A different sort of animal awakes, one bitter and full of hate. It’s born inside me, a feeling of primordial madness cracking like splinters through spine and joint. This animal doesn’t feel the tap. Doesn’t loosen the boa grip of the sleeper. He grits his teeth with eagerness while swallowing the key of the death-lock. He spits on mercy and calls it a four-lettered word.

I fall on him with the wind of a tornado. His back still toward me, he whirls around in time to face a hurling storm of fists and kicks—jabs, hooks, uppercuts, neck grabs, knees—landing here
and there before he dashes out of the flurry. His lips curl into the same menacing smile.

Stun a man before a take down
, Blue says.
You want your opponent’s head ringing, dog—like a clanging bell
. And it’s then I catch him with a right hook. Fist on cheekbone. Crack like a baseball. Head snapping. Sweat ripped from his face. Suspended in mid-air. His body not yet gotten the signal to fall. The crowd knows it’s solid. They groan simultaneously, a hint of shock in their moans. But I have the feeling of orgasmic connection. Discombobulating—his smile vanishes—a keen sense of trouble has his eyes shaking. A microsecond of electrical pulse to his brain—fusion with fear, reverting to a spark of instinct. Arms raise, ready for a pounding, a hesitation where I slip below his chin, driving my shoulder into his chest and locking up his legs.
Now finish it yo
, I hear Blue cry and I roar to his tune.

Lift. Body slam.

Pelletier, dead man for delivery.

As I crush him to the ground, the spray of mud splatters around us wetting the men tight in their circle. He squirms into a guard and latches on tight. I push my arm close to my cheek and pry him away. I feel a sharp pain come from my shoulder. He has bitten a hunk of my flesh and there is fresh blood dripping down my chest. I elbow him once, but he’s wrapped up tight, squirming like a snake under the swash and slither of sweat and blood and inching closer to my throat.
This part of it is your game, yo. You gonna fix him up or you gonna date this bitch?
I push forward and lock one knee by his hip. I strain for the other and then burst through his guard. The full mount is like a summit I’m raging upon. I rain down a tumult of punches and his only defense is cover-and-pray. The mountain is below me and I have conquered this bitch. I want to feel him fold. I want to straddle a limp body underneath me. And if nobody’s going to drag me off, I’m going to keep punching until there’s nothing but skull and cavity.

But then, something suddenly happens. My arms go limp. My
chest tightens. A thought whizzes by that there’s no way I could have punched myself out already.
What the fuck, Blue? What the fuck is going on? Punch, you son of a bitch. Punch!
But nothing’s happening. My arms flop—shoulders twisting to move dead branches. Limp hands dangling in the slop. He loosens his guard, flashes the insidious smile.

“You’re done now, Isse Corvus.”

The paralysis has spread to my legs. He flops me over and I fall like a rootless tree axed at the knees. Then he unloads on me with a right hand as he pins my neck down with the left. I see blood jumping, the splatter of it when he connects, his knuckles bloody, his tawny-brown face speckled and flaming. In the eyes burns a no-mercy meanness. I don’t know how much he’s hurting me ’cause I can’t feel it. It’s like a knee surgery you’re awake for. The tug of the scalpel and a light brushstroke sensation that is blood they’re wiping away from you. Blood is running over my tongue, which is only just beginning to numb. I ask Blue if I’m going to die, and he says,
I don’t know, dog. I don’t know. Ain’t seen anything like this
. So in the middle of a ground-and-pound, I give him a smile, the same smile he’s given me, a smile that says I’m ready for whatever you got coming next. I’ve been through worse. A lot fucking worse.

A fog is coming and I’m slipping out of the world, running into a deep, dark rabbit hole, and something’s down in there hollering. It says
respect
, and perhaps it’s him or perhaps it’s Blue. The voice is murky and I’m none too sure. But through the red pool I’m swimming in, the rain of fists stop. Halfway in my vantage point, I see him there by the men. He’s dripping under my eyes, but I can’t tell whose blood is whose. My ears catch what he’s saying, but it’s echoing from the hole and coming in black, fringed at the edges like a burnt piece of paper.
Blue, I think he’s done me. Not yet, dog, you ain’t done. How do you know? I ask
.
Too easy, yo. He got somethin’ special planned for you. Too easy to waste you now
.

And from down in the hole, he speaks, his voice echoing from a distance a parsec away, a staticky voice coming at me like radio waves in a tunnel. “An asset that fights fair is a liability, a liability that brings you death in the real world.”

He’s in my purview—a red, watercolored, dripping man facing the men. His waving arms blend with the men in their olive camouflaged fatigues and the forest behind them. My swollen tongue hangs out of my mouth and sags in a mud puddle. I’m dying, and I don’t even feel a thing.
Look, Blue, I really am a dog. You ain’t shittin’ me, son, Blue says. You hang tight. You gonna make it through this. I don’t believe you, I say
.

And then I hear Seee speak once more.

“Here, where you are now, we play in the real world. Your training will be real world. Not all of you will come out of it alive, as I’ve said. So lesson number one is to take a fucking good look at this man and understand that, by God, there are no rules. Men are out to kill you, and every fight is a fight for survival.”

The men holding their breaths out there blur with the trees, faces like thumbprints, branches gobbling them up.
Jungle’s gonna swallow me, Blue. I’m just the first. I’m the lucky one
.

“You will play dirty. You will play to win at all costs, because the cost of your life is a price too high to pay unless you are asked to sacrifice it. And in this camp, you will be prepared for that too. You will prepare for combat in its many forms. As you’ve seen today, size makes little difference. The cunning are the victorious. Small beats large.”

He walks over to me and pokes something tiny and glassy up to my eyes. A miniature syringe that glitters in the light.

“I will seek to stretch you from the two polarities of humanity—from your intelligence to the deeply primordial. These two coexist, albeit in dormant forms. Those that successfully finish the training will learn how to be both animal and sifu. Here we are in the womb of Nature, where mercy is interpreted as weakness and weakness is locked in the jaws of death.”

The men stood limply in anticipation as the world went black. The singed forest fringed reality, crackling and then puffing out into darkness. This way it would stay for a period of time that would be difficult to recall.

I woke under The Abattoir. My body crumpled and my mouth sucking in fine industrial dust off a scabby concrete floor. I coughed it out like a man buried alive, spitting earth. As I slid into consciousness, glimpses of the fight came back to me—the take down, the ground-and-pound, the tiny syringe and little speech about suckers playing fair. Not yet fully awake, I dug myself out of unconsciousness, probing my surroundings for light. Yet, light did not come—the darkness surrounding me pure and unbroken. I softly touched my swollen eyes. One was the size of a baseball and completely shut. The other was a knife-edged slit. I pried the blood-crusted eyelashes open gingerly with my fingers. Again, I sought out any sliver of light that might have crept into the place, but there was only blackness. My lips were puffed and cracked, freshly bleeding from my new movement. The salty taste of blood, the only liquid wetting my mouth, and it evaporated quickly on the swollen meat of my tongue. My bruised cheeks were small fruits blooming on my lumpy face. I felt more like a bag of beaten-up flesh than man.

None of it new to a ring-fighter, but the extent of the beating was one I had never known. I’d had ribs broken in the past, and a couple were certainly broken now. I’d had my face pounded and lost teeth, even swallowing one when I lost my mouthpiece against Horez. But this was all of it at once—the mashed face, the collapsed side and broken ribs, the gnashed lips, the bruised scalp, the dislocated shoulder, the scraped knees, sprained ankle, and the ache that extended from back to toe—and left me in a world of hurt. Shocked at the lack of my own mobility, I felt only
loosely coupled with my flattened body. I crawled to a wall on my elbows and felt its grainy surface. A small victory—a boundary beyond the gritty floor. I pushed in another direction and found a foul-smelling commode, a porcelain toilet stripped of a cover. I searched for paper but found none. Close to the toilet another concrete wall defined the dimensions of the space. I guessed the cell’s space to be nine square feet. I crawled to the other side of the room and found the bars of my prison.

The fight with Horez had been one I wasn’t ready for, and now I was reminded of it. I had stepped into the ring full of rage and false moxie. It didn’t matter who they put in front of me, I thought. Horez, a top-notch undefeated fighter looking for an easy win, wanted to move on to a title fight. I fought my way to being a 4-0 contender who would oblige. The fight was my fifth one after my mother lit the house on fire. I had trained for a few months unrelentingly, not able to forgive myself for what the firemen called humanely
an accident
. I had my first MMA fight a few months before, and it went two rounds before I knocked the other guy out. For half a minute, I had forgotten about my mother, for whose death I had only myself to blame. I continued like that until I hit the wall of Horez.

After my father’s death, sometimes I would pass by in my car and see the short, white candle she kept molded on a picture frame burning in the window over the smooth voice of Etta James. The candle would drip with teardrops of wax, burying him in a sarcophagus of sticky ceresin. It was a web of woe overflowing until she would whittle it off, scraping away the solidified wax in corkscrew flakes with one of his old razor blades. But mostly the candle would be obscured through the curtains, a muffled yellow ornamental light with a figure sitting on the edge of a dusty old ottoman junk-heap of a chair, slumped over the pocket of flame gazing into loss, hypnotized by its quiet heat. Sometimes she held a hand close to the flame, biting her lip as she inched it further into the fire—the pain a catharsis, the
skin shriveling red as the nerves awoke. Perhaps forgiveness lurked somewhere in the flame, forgiveness for my trespasses, and when she jerked her hand away the forgiveness would be gone, like my father’s ghost that slid by her bedroom door whenever she snapped awake in the middle of the night.

After my brother had put me in the hospital, hijacking me with a group of thugs and beating me senseless for what I had done, he once came for a visit and spread the news that our mother had explored each religion, one after the other, following the accident. A conquistador for the Spirit now, he said. The humanized God of the Presbyterian Church had failed her, and her faith in Him had burned up like her nightly candles. She studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and even the more ridiculed Scientology. Holy books scattered on the den carpet, desecrated amongst a sea of self-help books, books on transcendence, the clairvoyant, astrology, tarot cards. Pages marked with
Post-it
notes and dog-eared, ripped out of their bindings and littered across the coffee table. The peacock of faith then lost her feathers—the apostles, the prophets, the soothsayers, the djinns, all colorful paper droppings from her aborted religious experiments.

Throughout the years, she had been the bearer of my bad will. Whenever I spoke with her over the phone in college, or afterward, when I was working in the Silicon Valley, she provided the circuit I could wire my frustrations through, her ear a forbearing conduit into which I could voice my current problems by taking them out on her. So when she spoke of the Pembroke’s teenage girl getting pregnant, I told her she had already told me about it for the third time now. When she told me my uncle had been laid off from his county groundskeeper job after thirty years, my voice would lift and I would say she sounded like a broken record.

She played this role throughout the years. She acted out the part of the wall I could throw a ball of my anxieties into, and they
wouldn’t rebound back. She would absorb the aggression, hide it away within herself, knowing that when it came down to it I would always be there for her. What I failed to realize was our conversations had become a struggle for her, that I intimidated her intellect, that the boy she had reared had outstretched her aptitude and now she struggled to find common ground, and in so doing, often repeated herself. But the realization she was my intellectual inferior made me haughty and dismissive, and her repetitive conversations created a negative feedback loop that accumulated inside, the frustration of her failing to understand me combined with the fiery problems of my habitual life in school and at work exasperating an already sullen and weighty attitude within me. Yet, when my father died, I no longer received the luxury of forgiveness, no matter how many times I voiced it. The weight of my neglect reversed onto me, and deservedly so. The front door of our home where I grew up for seventeen years, slammed back in my face, no matter the amount of apologies. It got so bad even my brother felt sorry for me. This sense of not being able to forgive myself took me into the gym where the catharsis of pain would prick my mind away from guilt. There I would learn to become a fighter, even if self-forgiveness hid itself away in a closet of my mind.

In the darkness, I reached through the iron bars of my cage and groped around. The back of my hand bumped into a canteen, and I pulled it to the bars, but it wouldn’t fit through. My throat ached with thirst. I pushed myself painfully up to my knees, uncapped the lid of the canteen, pushed my mouth through the bars and drank. I drank as if I wanted to be drowned.

They had dropped me in The Hole. Unceremoniously left me there. I fell back to sleep and thought about joining my parents in the other world. A length of time passed; I guessed bled into a couple of days. Time seemed measurable only by the number of times I closed my eyes. Occasionally, the squeak of an interior
steel door opened and closed; feather-light footsteps the only sounds escaping the place that I myself did not manufacture. The person who came to feed me let in no light. Nothing escaped the steel door when it slid open. The shroud of darkness hung itself around me unbroken. The blind fed the blind. Whoever delivered the food wouldn’t speak even after I tried to arouse a response from him. The shuffling sounds of his footsteps the only voice he offered.

The days I swallowed in bites. Killing time by eating a meal in tiny morsels. My shaking fingers would tear off a crust of bread and roll it into a ball. Then I would plop it in my mouth and savor it between the lower jaw and cheek, every succulent nutrient sucked out of a stale crust with each dimension of tongue. A game to pass the time. Locked in there with just my thoughts—my new best friends. Never one to be friendly with myself, here I had to try—easing into it as slowly as fucking. “Why don’t we take our time with breakfast today?” Then another shadow of myself would answer, “How do you know it’s breakfast—they just brought you a tray two hours ago.” I would drop a gumball of bread in my mouth and I would hear, “They’re fucking with you, Isse. Time isn’t a sensation they want you to feel.”—“I know.”

Darkness creates its own characters. A puppeteer winding you up with your own strings. When we would get to know each other better, Seee would say that the darkness had its own sort of light. He said I just couldn’t see it yet, but that I would.

Throughout the day, or night, or whatever time it was when I thought I was conscious, my mind constricted, became prone to fear and hallucination. Rebelling against these sinkholes, I learned the dimensions of the room by heart—a divot in the concrete floor near the bars where someone must have dug before giving up; the commode’s oval egg shape; how there was a screw loose in its base; the gritty floor and pebbles stacked into a small pile in the corner. On this discovery, I imagined the
invented games someone must have played. I went through the pile, fingering every little rock, discovering their shapes. I asked myself why I had chosen this world, when life back in L.A. as a cop had been certainly easier than this one. As I fingered the largest of the pebbles, I remembered being a kid, skateboarding downhill and hitting a stone in the road when I was eleven. The board came to a violent stop and my momentum threw me forward onto the pavement. I suffered some bad scrapes and a broken arm. My mother ran me to the emergency room where we waited six hours with my bone sticking out, and then they had almost refused us because of no health insurance. I laid the stone back on top of the pile, felt the small bump in the middle of my forehead, and for the first time in a long time, a tear fell out of my eye.

Later, I found three names scratched into the wall behind the commode, hidden at an angle from any flashlight that might have shined upon it. I felt the deep grooves in the wall. The last name was Jaybird, dated roughly two years before. I wondered what he must have been like, whether he had the same thoughts as me. The others dated back as far as five years before, all in the month of September. These were the others stepping into the same trap as I, suffering here, perhaps dying here. I listened for their ghosts when all I listened to was silence. I heard nothing, which is perhaps the hardest thing to listen to, as silence itself is an abstraction on a planet teeming with sound, where in outer space it reigns supreme. I filled my mind with thought for long hours. Long ago, I had read an article in
Wired
about screen forging and thought about what sort of algorithm it would take to do such a thing. I imagined how I would have approached it—hijacking events, manipulating bit streams. It kept my mind active, and it gave me something to think about, but I needed more than that to feed the loneliness of solitary, so I thought about how I’d kill Seee. A misguided bullet? A little push near a cliff edge? Every option dangerous, and I would have to run
afterward. But where? I had been too eager, and hadn’t asked Pelletier for any details.

I healed slowly, started a regimen. I practiced a limited number of yoga positions, the ones that were possible in a small space—inversions, back and forward bends, boat poses. Then, I put on the yolk of the oxen and told the farmer to whip me—little thunderbolts and wheel poses, compass positions. I wanted to cut up the earth and plant new seeds, grow new samskara. Where the old roots of wrongdoings dug into my thoughts, I plowed over them with sweat and strain. I wrung my body out like a wet, healing rag. The pain bit like bee stings, but I welcomed each prick, the punishment a light in the darkness, a torch to help erase the stupidity I felt for stepping out of line. My burning muscles and strained tendons stretched like rubber bands bending away from my own self-loathing.

After some time, Seee visited me down in the dungeon. I heard a voice while doing pushups far off in the darkness. Perhaps he stood there silent for hours before he said anything, submerged like a periscope, peering above the surface, letting his gravity weigh down on me, attracting me to what later he would offer for those strong enough to survive. I hadn’t yet understood how to see, so therefore he had to speak before I really knew he was there. The first words I heard in days were a kindness. “How do you feel?” he asked.

I paused with my nose touching the dust in the middle of pushup seventy-six. “Like a million bucks,” I said, continuing my set. I asked him how long I’d been down here.

“Three days.”

“Should I believe that?”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

“Is it night or day?”

“You’ve already lost track?” He seemed disappointed.

I finished my set and then sat in a lotus position. “Breakfast is bread and water so it’s throwing me off.”

He laughed from somewhere out in the darkness. “Lunch and dinner are the same then?”

“There’s varying degrees of staleness.”

“I’m not sure Kumo likes you.”

“It’s hurting my feelings.”

He sighed. “You’re disappointed you lost.”

“You don’t fight honorably.”

The reverberating walls echoed his voice. “The Red Coats fought with honor. Then they were shot apart like pheasants by a bunch of inexperienced farmers with inferior arms. In a fight you should never expect the honorable, and you of all people should know it.”

“So that was the lesson?”

“As I’ve already said, there is no word
fair
in a fight. Lesson one in Primitive Law. Nature knows no losers. Losers are extinct, overrun by evolution. Losers are fools who fail to adapt.”