The Laughter of Strangers (8 page)

The world does not pass the front door.

Here, there is silence.

Here, this is where I escape.

Where I live, that apartment somewhere posing as my place, broken into more than a handful of times by desperate media seeking something of me, might as well not even exist. I might as well just consider the world out there as unreachable.

Because when I retreat to the calm of the house, it feels like I no longer exist. And you know what?

I like the fact that I can lose it all with a single step into the house.

It swallows us whole and it feels like we operate on an entirely different spectrum of time. Spencer was always aware of this fact. I’m not the only one that finds worth in the home. He offered me one of the spare rooms, “Fuck if I think you’ll get any solace anywhere else.”

The house holds onto a simpler time.

That’s what I believe, anyway. Spencer would never tell you but he never got over the passing of his wife. It happened quickly, the details omitted, but the fact that he drove away the grief by fixating on something all-encompassing as boxing, he began a new era of his life.

The previous era, I imagine, is felt in the confines of this home.

His daughter, Sarah, nine years of age, has the house and it’s hauntings to take care of her whenever Spencer leaves for work.

No nannies, no daycare—

Spencer can leave and Sarah never feels like she’s been left alone.

There’s something about the house…

And hear that?

SILENCE

It is what I seek. Especially now, given what we must do.

So I have to admit that I can’t believe that Spencer thinks it’s a good idea. A good idea…admitting to murder. A good idea… sensationalizing and lying about fiction made fact. A good idea… no-showing all of today’s prefight media events. A good idea…

How much is it worth?

Is it really worth the calm, the silence that helps settle those bothersome thoughts?

SILENCE

Sarah skips into the kitchen, sits with us at the table, listens to talk about theoretical murder made ‘true.’

Sarah giggles, “Are you going to die?”

“Maybe,” Spencer grins, “maybe.”

I tell him about how it might not catch on. I tell him, “Really how easy is it to pretend you murdered someone?”

Spencer’s reply: “Easier than you’d believe.”

“What about name, motive, all of that?”

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT

“Why don’t you go back upstairs and play?”

Sarah frowns, “But James won’t let me back into my room.”

James. Just another one of those hauntings, I gather. The names change every time; as far as I’m concerned, I haven’t come across any of those so-called hauntings. Neither has Spencer. Product of a child’s imagination? Well, there
is
something here, something about the house, but I’m not about to try to explain it. I like it here. Isn’t that enough?

“Well tell James to play nice.”

Sarah skips around the kitchen table.

She punches me in the arm, “I punched you.”

Pained expression, “Yes you did.”

“Did it hurt?”

Actually it did. She got me right where I was already sore.

Turning to Spencer, “Your daughter knows how to throw a punch.”

“Course she does. Her father is Spencer Mullen.”

Sarah shadowboxes, “I fought James once. I won!”

“Good girl,” Spencer sips cold coffee from a mug.

We’ve been sitting here, scheming, not getting anywhere. Doubt on my end, assurance on his, we mostly drink coffee while scouring the internet on our respective laptops, attempting to find something to use.

Material, an image, I don’t know.

Ask Spencer and he tells me:

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT

“Lie about what?”

Say anything. It can be true if they believe it to be true.

Sarah runs up the stairs, leaving Spencer and I to the unproductivity of this day. Waste of a day. Spencer is determined that this will help rebuild some of the cache I have lost.

“You know we were supposed to continue with prefight promotions,” I warn Spencer, given that he’s usually the one stressing out about this kind of stuff.

Spencer types something, looks up at me, screen glow causing him to appear pale, malnourished, “I have something in mind.”

When I ask, he shakes his head, “Later.”

Later becomes much later becomes a lot of wasting time searching websites, playing free browser videogames while Spencer types away at something he won’t show me until “later.”

LATER

After the painkillers start to wear off and I sit still, not moving at all, staring at my screensaver—a series of colorful psychedelic light shows—because to move an inch is to send radiating waves of pain up my arm, my leg, across my face.

I sit still because pain has me pinned.

“Okay,” Spencer says, sigh of relief.

WHAT IS IT?

Well, it’s a bunch of lies.

If it doesn’t make any sense, lie until it does.

Okay, I’ll do my best to summarize:

HE HAS A PAST

As in, I have a past history of violence.

As in, I have been known to partake in drunken misconduct.

As in, there have been a lot of bar fights.

As in, pretty much anyone would agree, given that I’m a fighter and that bar fights are so common someone will step up and attest to the lie, validating it via testimony.

As in, whatever we don’t have an answer to, we’ll lie about it later.

As in, I might have taken a knife to a man during one of these quarrels.

As in, I should have been training but instead I was busy blacking out during the killing.

As in, that’s my cover story:

My excuse for not remembering.

As in, I will plead innocent and in pleading innocent, people will think I’m even guiltier than they thought.

As in, there is a missing dead man, no longer in this world, dead by my drunken hands.

As in, it’s all a lie but the search for evidence will fuel promotions, sending the media my way.

As in, all news is good news, no matter if it’s terrible, bad, slanderous.

As in, you will know me in the next couple days as “that boxer guy who killed a man.”

As in, the world is fickle, but the media-outlets are far worse.

A TERRIBLE PAST

I have my reservations about all of it but it was my idea, remember?

Can’t back down now.

I move into the other room, leaving my laptop and that link to anxiety, on the kitchen table. Spencer follows me, carrying the laptop, reading aloud a dizzying list of deceit.

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT

“If you haven’t a clue, it doesn’t matter ’cause you killed a man and everyone will believe it even if they don’t.”

Where is my heart?

Why is my heart not in this?

I can lie to Spencer, you know. I can lie, saying that I’m excited, that this will be a boon for us. However, what I think about as I sit down on the old couch, the couch that always smells of chocolate ever since Sarah accidentally spilled hot chocolate into the cushions. No amount of cleaning washes away the smell. Frankly, I look forward to it. It pulls me out of my head and back into the house, this room, right now.

Here I am.

I want to relax.

The pain numbs the soul.

I look like I’m listening.

I look and act like I am tuned into our “most deadly” little plan.

I look the part but really there’s only one thing I’m listening to:

SILENCE

The silence I seek is right here, cradling my beat-the-shit-up body, carrying me away, in search of one of those hauntings.

I seek an adventure, if only because by going on an adventure, I will be going somewhere else. Somewhere away from Willem. Meaning, I want to step outside myself. I am often way too self-absorbed and not because I care so much about this identity but because I feel obligated.

I am not the only Willem Floures.

There are forty-one of us. A whole league.

I am number two, which means I’m not number one. How can you be second best to yourself? Does it make any sense to you because it doesn’t to me. The internal monologue isn’t mine. I hear voices, all of their would-be voices, discussing dreams, ambitions, and what it means to be ‘me.’

Sometimes I just want to be a person.

Not this personality.

The pressure to keep fighting is the force of the fight itself; we fight to entertain and to be enlightened. I am not so sure I’ve achieved any sort of enlightenment. Once, back when I was minted as “undefeated” and destined to build and brand the league as one of the best, the premier boxing syndication worldwide, I thought I knew.

I thought I saw it, that spark in my eyes.

“It’s me,” that’s what I said.

In the mirror, I see the shadow take shape.

My silhouette is cookie-cutter, just another permutation of the identity that is ‘Willem Floures.’

We all manage to look, act, speak, and spell the same.

That seems remarkable until
you
realize—

Scratch that—until I realize what’s at work here.

Don’t ask.

If you do, guess what?

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT

I will be forced into another lie.

Never was very comfortable, barely any good at, lying but when you have an agent like Spencer who does all the talking for you, I just have to be there. Just barely.

Funny then, to come to another realization (it must be the fact that I am just so comfortable, most at ease, when in this house):

I am a fighter that has always loathed the act of fighting.

The sweet science is one of the most difficult to master and somewhere I found out that I was a natural. Well…maybe the truth is:

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT TOO

I proclaimed myself a fighter and not just a fighter but a:

STRATEGIST

Not a boxer-puncher, not a brawler, not a throwback kind of style. I defined ‘Willem Floures’s to be a strategist. Meaning: I am all of the above. Meaning: I am full of shit. We are all full of shit. I mean, come on, a fight is a lot like a dance: it takes two to get things going.

Swing and a miss.

Round by round edge-of-your-seat fighting isn’t possible if I am not who I think I am. See how I am a contradiction?

Which part of me will inevitably change/fix that problem.

I used to think it was me; I’d be the one to make things work.

SILENCE

So the murder, the lies, will be enough to buoy an entire campaign Spencer has conceived tonight, as of this evening, four hours of what I had felt to be unproductive surfing the net. Guess I was the one wasting time, not Spencer. He also talks about how X will become a nonissue, might even be psyched out by the idea of having murdered someone.

What I wonder is:

“If I claimed to have killed someone, wouldn’t that mean X killed someone too?”

“No,” Spencer replies, “but yes. But no.” Never looks up from the screen.

YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT

“If you need to,” Spencer adds.

I killed a man.

It still feels strange to say these words.

I haven’t actually said them aloud.

Spencer says that I should.

That I have to.

“Say it, I want to hear you say it. You need to get used to saying it.”

Close one eye, open the other. Fine—

I KILLED A MAN

The statement hangs there, like I just carved through a curtain of space, rendering it wounded, broken, a black hole.

“You sound like you don’t mean it.”

True. True statement. I don’t mean it.

I don’t want to mean it.

“You have to make it sound genuine in order for this to work.”

Close my mouth. Someone find a needle and some string; I want to stitch my lips closed. Never again will I speak.

“Say it again,” Spencer commands.

I KILLED A MAN

He plays it back.

I hadn’t noticed that he was recording me saying the words.

“Does that sound like someone who killed a man?”

Of course not.

Spencer sighs, “We either do this or we don’t. Tell me now, what is it going to be?”

So someone that knew me would probably say that I’m not acting like myself. I have never been the type to go soft on something sinister; I am not a moralist. Not at all. I used to enjoy the way it felt to punch someone in the face. You might know me well enough to see that I haven’t been myself since the first chapter. Then again, was that me, or just a permutation, some kind of performance? Where do I look, what do I find when I look in the mirror?

Willem Floures, I hear, has always been a bit of a rebel.

He goes against the so-called grain.

In addition to being a fighter, he used to be the calm and brooding being in interviews, the one that barely spoke but said more with his silence.

He was all of these things, but not lately.

Or, maybe, he’s changed. He certainly fights using familiar signature moves and combinations. Depending on where you look, he’s a young prodigy, a journeyman looking to redefine, or an old mainstay, rambling to himself, turning to sensationalism and big lies in order to maintain the audience’s attention. Odds are that’s him. Willem Floures.

When he says:

I KILLED A MAN

He should mean it.

He shouldn’t cower behind morality and other sorts of principles.

He should stop talking in the third person; he isn’t that kind of stylist.

Yeah so I say it twice more, for Spencer’s sake.

Each time it feels easier, more innate. Give it a little while longer and I might actually believe it.

Really though, I just want to rest. I want more painkillers.

I want to spar for a few rounds. Maybe fight through the pain long enough to feel nothing at all.