The Laughter of Strangers (19 page)

Is it because I’m satisfied with the end result of the fight?

Is it because I now understand who I am, or is it because, as number one in the league, there is irrefutable proof that I am Willem Floures? I am number one, which means the world considers me the peak of the identity. No one else is quintessentially ‘Willem Floures’s as I am, and that has nothing to do with the fact that maybe I started the league. Maybe I am the first to be Willem Floures.

Maybe I’m not. I don’t feel like I need to know the difference.

Fact: What’s my name?

There you go.

HEY, ARE YOU THERE?

I tend to the TV. Someone has to watch the TV; otherwise, it’ll cease to exist. The same goes with the people that populate each show. If there aren’t enough viewers, their shows will be cancelled; their careers will suffer. They won’t receive as many offers, auditions. Their futures will be a future with less work, fewer opportunities. Their lives will reflect their identities: narrow, negligible. It’s why you really want to put yourself out there. You want to do whatever it takes to make that name, your identity, be a brand that is immediately recognizable.

Look at me:

Spewing media-speak.

It sounds like I’m delivering the intro to a seminar on brand awareness.

I’m way too drowsy, too high on the painkillers they gave me, to be taken seriously. At this moment, my body looks like a battlefield post-airstrike.

But I feel absolutely nothing.

Everything I hear echoes out like it’s being repeated by two separate voices. Everything I watch is in slow motion. This movie on TV is supposed to be nonstop action but I really think it would have been more effective if the action star ran faster, the death scenes more plentiful, and the explosions a little less exaggerated. But hey—

It’s just my opinion.

Maybe not even that…

It could be the painkillers.

HEY, ARE YOU THERE?

What?

HUH?

Are you there?

AM I WHERE?

What?

WHO’S TALKING?

I was going to ask you the same question.

WHAT?

What?

WHAT IS GOING ON?

What?

STOP TALKING

Okay.

GOOD

Where do we go from here? I tune into the silence of the basement. Look over my shoulder and notice that one more has disappeared. That leaves seventeen left. I admit that I don’t feel much of anything at the moment. The impossibility of their kidnapping right on down to the impossibility of the numbness I feel somehow having something to do with their disappearance:

It registers at face value.

The inherent value being…not very much. Apparently.

Carrying the numbness, the most I can manage is keeping my focus on the TV and so that’s what I do. Through the haze of painkillers, the movie either ends or my attention span splinters to nothing.

Whatever happens I end up flipping channels every thirty seconds.

Meanwhile I bask in the silence I have decided to be the most perfect victory. I pass by one of the sports channels where, big surprise, they are talking about the fight like it was a barnburner.

Did it really look like a barnburner?

Hmm?

Special mention of both of our aliases.

HEY, ARE YOU THERE?

No answer of course because whoever’s left is right here in the basement with me. The rest of the league is out to get me. That is, to say, the majority vote being against the idea that I have made some great accomplishment.

I turn to them, “Hey…have I accomplished anything?”

No answer because I haven’t.

No answer because their mouths are taped.

No answer because I decide the nature of the silence and I’ve decided that it should be all encompassing.

If I am unable to understand, I don’t want to be able to feel.

If I am unable to feel, I don’t want to see anything that’ll remind me of what I’ve mentioned above.

If I am unable to see, I certainly don’t want to hear anything.

I just want to watch TV.

Watch other identities take the spotlight.

Skip to the next sports channel.

They analyze the version of the fight that didn’t happen. If they had been watching, and I mean really watching, they would have blocked it from memory much like I did.

The only evidence of victory (and loss) is my beaten, broken body.

Fact: It’s the same as any fight.

Their favor always fades long before I can recuperate.

I DON’T KNOW

That being said,
I don’t really know
how I got here.

I must have been treated in order to get like this.

Picture: the IV hooked to my veins, the dosage and documentation of how much to take, the gurney, the nurse spoon-feeding me, the neutral white, the sighting of blood bleeding through the dressings.

To get here, I must have gone through a lot.

I am the spotlight and no matter what I do to try to relish in the satisfaction of having reclaimed my title spot, “number one,” the designation registers as meaningless to me. It doesn’t help make any better sense of what I’ve slaughtered. I worked so hard, did so much, to get here.

But am I any clearer of my objective?

My purpose?

Who I am?

What is this supposed to be for?

I DON’T KNOW

Exactly. I am a lapse of everything but what the TV tells me.

There are sit-coms telling me to laugh and surely there are news channels telling me all about my accolades. They call me a fighter, a real pugilist celebrity.

Sure enough I am, to them, but for how long?

How ironic to discover that the achievement is nowhere near as satisfying as the fight to get there.

I try to remember what it felt like when I was younger, achieving so much at such a young age, and remaining undefeated for such a long time; however, where there should be reason I am left with basic facts.

I won.

And my fight record.

League stats.

I always focused on what I hadn’t achieved rather than what I managed to become. Especially now, where everything is consistently muted and disengaged from the actual circumstances, I am essentially living more in my head than out in the open. I switch the channels but nothing registers as anything more than a set of images, colors, and criticism.

They favor me, but what does that even mean?

Tomorrow it’ll be different.

Tomorrow might be like yesterday—

Full of uncertainty and the discussion of a follow-up fight where I am the potential underdog (he’s old—he’s not what he used to be) and every lie, every single time I shilled to become significant, will have gone to waste.

I DON’T KNOW

It’s true. I don’t know what’s happened and I don’t know what’ll happen. I don’t want to look back at them because I know the number will have dwindled at least by two.

What will they do?

I DON’T KNOW

What will I do besides watch TV?

Isn’t that enough? After you are in a fight where you are beaten into a bloody pulp, watching TV is the perfect answer to “what do you do?”

I switch from a soap opera to a talk show.

“On how they got a second chance.”

Tell me about the world, TV.

Tell me why I’m watching you.

The host brings a bunch of celebrities past their prime onto the stage. Together they televise the basic message that has existed as an unsung law of sorts in our culture.

An identity is like a person in that it has to continually change and evolve to stay alive. One step further—

A person is an identity.

When hasn’t this been the case?

Much like a roundtable discussion, they tip-toe around the basics and they barely get their point across to the audience before they have to cut to a commercial break. Tantamount to a knockout, a commercial break is suicide to the momentum of a debate.

When they return, they talk more about themselves. They use the opportunity to be on camera as a means of promoting their next projects.

As I watch, I see the celebrities not as different identities but as different versions of myself, talking feverishly about their relevancy.

Prove to the world that you matter.

I switch channels.

Watch the world go by with a single step up from twelve to thirteen on the dial.

I cough and I can feel the house cough with me, trembling at the foundation. I close my eyes and feel the resonating pull into the grey that the medication makes me feel.

I reopen my eyes and I feel like I’ve lost something else.

What was it like to win the title?

I DON’T KNOW

Back to the TV, the window into the outside world, and it’s already reached middle age. If I had my phone, I would have favored that window over this one. I can barely move; my arms feel heavy. My legs…I’m not even going to try to walk at this point. Someone sat me here in front of the TV.

This is where I will continue to sit.

What happened to…

I DON’T KNOW

I forgot what I was about to ask.

What am I trying to say?

I DON’T KNOW

This is the kind of confusion that I am not used to. It’s not a waking confusion; it is the kind of confusion that renders my memory useless. At least before, I wouldn’t know until a few triggers recovered the item from the so-called archive of my battle-tired brain.

However, so numbed out by the medication, I am barely alive.

I am barely alive at a time when I could be considered someone that is the most alive. At this very moment, my worth is skyrocketing and I can do nothing to care.

Why?

I DON’T KNOW

That is good enough of a reason.

I will not be able to enjoy my achievement.

Never have, never will.

And I could worry about what they will do to reclaim some of the spotlight. I might wonder about Executioner and Lights Out and Buster and Ice and…and…and…and…and…and…
But not Black Mamba; he is as bad off as I am, trading comments, sharing the same internal monologue that lately sounds more like a machine than a human voice.

Change the channel.

Change the channel.

Change the channel.

Change the channel.

QUIET!

I hear it droning on and on and it gets to a point where I am on the verge of being irritated before a distraction, as if on cue, pulls me out of the definite haze.

I hear footsteps upstairs.

Right on cue.

I look over at them.

Three more gone. That leaves fourteen.

I struggle to my feet. It’s a lot like watching a zombified version of your body from over one of your shoulders. It’s like I’m holding the game controller and I am directing my next move with every press of the button.

I shuffle my way to their side of the basement.

I tear the tape off X’s mouth.

I lean in close and it takes me a long time to finally say what I want to say, “Did…did…you
hear
…something?”

X’s tired eyes, his sunken skin, his horrible deathly breath as he says:

“You…”

I want to ask him what he means but that’ll take too much energy.

I’m lucky enough to have asked him anything.

And besides, X’s eyes roll back in his skull, collapsing against the harness, hanging there, circling the drain of death.

The fourteen that remain, they are young but ill.

They are versions of me that remain only because I’ve moved on. I have outlived their goals, their lives made, met, and finally matriculated to the point of losing momentum. My way of saying they would have followed in my footsteps, not wanting to change anything.

The ones that escape me are the ones that think they can do better.

Haven’t I done well enough for myself?

I DON’T KNOW

Each stair is excruciating when your knees buckle and your body does not want to cooperate.

The sounds coming from upstairs, just above me, are all that keeps me going. The footsteps sound like mine. Somewhere in this house, I will recover a few basic facts about myself. Namely, I will figure out why
they
escape and why I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself at the same time that I should feel like I am complete, a champion, a celebrity.

I should find out how it all ends because everything comes to an end if it’s anything of value. That’s why I cling to my brand.

Willem Floures lives on forever.

But what about me?

It’s selfish, I know.

That’s something else I’ll recover, the fact that I am self-absorbed.

I DON’T KNOW

“I don’t know” is a placeholder hanging with the drug-induced numbness of the past week. I haven’t so much as left the basement since leaving the hospital. I’ve failed to really grasp the events of the week before.

I reach the door to the basement and after taking a couple heavy breaths, I step into the kitchen. The comfort of the house is never more apparent than in the kitchen and adjoining dining and family rooms.

Recover: the memories of spending long nights watching movies, analyzing fight footage, and smoking cigars in the family room while Sarah Mullen ran around playing various imaginative games, often mixing drinks for Spencer and I.

Recover: the memories of Spencer Mullen, my only friend, longtime agent and trainer.

It’s all starting to snap into place.

Recover: the memories of the fight between Executioner and I.

Recover: the memories of public spectacle, “I KILLED A MAN.”

Recover: the memories of Spencer paying off the authorities, keeping them quiet on the fact that it was a lie. No man murdered. No man harmed.