Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Such was the pattern of his thoughts when a hand fell upon his shoulder like a rough knighthood, a hand so insistent Paul had no choice but to obey and, turning, saw the shitkicker’s face captured in clean profile, that calm and easygoing look on his face as his fist filled Paul’s retinas, a flickering ball that burst like a white-hot firework to rock him back on his heels, his hands flying to his face, and when he looked down his fingers were clad in blood. He’d never been punched — maliciously, viciously punched — i n his quarter-century-plus of life on this planet and all he could do was stare, with a stupid bovine look on his face, at the man who’d popped his cherry.

Todd hit him again. A blinding explosion went off just in back of Paul’s eyes as though his brainstem had been dynamited. He had this terrifying sensation of his nose and cheeks crushed into an empty pocket behind the cartilage and bones, a fist driven so deep into his face the pressure pushed his eyes from their sockets to allow a frighteningly unhindered view of his surroundings.

His skull struck the padded leather door with its tiny brass rivets and he was outside, reeling onto the sidewalk.

And even now, with Todd slamming him against the aluminum shopfront, a vestigial part of him refused to believe this was actually happening. Desperately, like a bilge rat to a chunk of flotsam, he clung to the notion of some innate social mechanism whose function should be to prevent all this.

Paul was struck a blow that caught him on the neck; his head caromed off the shopfront. Two teeth thin and smooth as shaved ice pushed between his lips. He was terrified in the manner of a man with absolutely no frame of reference for what he was experiencing.

Run, he told himself. Just run away. But he couldn’t even move. His mouth flushed with a corroded rusty taste and his bowels felt heavy, as if he’d swallowed an iron plug that was now forcing its way out of him.

His body slid down the aluminum, ribbed metal rucking his shirt up his spine. He spread his hands before his bloodied face.

“I give, okay?” A glistening snot-bubble expanded from his left nostril and burst wetly. “No more, okay? No more.” Quietly: “Come on, man — p lease. I’m begging you.”

Todd prodded his ass with the steel toe of his boot. “Aren’t even going to try? Christ.”

The look in Todd’s eyes: as if he’d split Paul open and caught a glimpse of what lay inside and it wasn’t quite human — everything gone soft and milky and diseased. Todd cleared his throat and spat. Gob landed on Paul’s pants, sallow and greasy as a shucked oyster.

Todd strolled back to his buddies lounging at the bar door and exchanged rueful high fives. “Not much fun fighting when you’re the only one willing.” He was perspiring lightly, every hair in place save a blond lock fallen between his eyes.

Faith exited the bar and spotted him slumped against the shopfront. She reached out to touch him and he shoved her hand away. She studied his face, his lips bloated like sausages set to burst. “Your teeth,” she said, casting her eyes about as though to retrieve them. Rock salt had been spread across the wet sidewalk: everywhere looked like fucking teeth.

“We should call the police,” she said.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

He spied a pale lip of fat hanging over his trousers — Jesus, was that part of him?

Looked like the skin of a maggot. If he unbuttoned his shirt, would he spy his lungs and the pump of his own wasted heart through that rubbery, candle-white skin?

He wanted to find something sharp and go back into the club and slice the shitkicker. Slip up behind him and stab him in the neck. He saw the shitkicker’s body laid out on the smooth stone floor of the bar, blood all over everything, over every shape, his face slashed to pieces and one bloodshot eye hanging out, withered like an albino walnut. But he could never do that and the realization served only to deepen his fear, so toxic now it coursed through his veins like battery acid.

“What are we going to do?” Faith asked.

Paul did the only thing that made sense. Standing on legs that trembled like a newborn foal’s, sparing not a backward glance, he took off down the sidewalk.

She called after him — he distinctly heard the word “chickenshit” — but he didn’t let up or look back.

Paul dreamed he was lying facedown in stinking mud. He rolled to a sitting position and saw he was in a bunker. He wore a cheap suit and shiny loafers and cufflinks shaped like golf balls. A decapitated head sat on a pole jabbed into the mud; the head was rotted or badly burned and a pair of novelty sunglasses covered its eyes. He peeked over the bunker and saw a field burst apart by artillery shells. Everything was blown through with smoke, but he could make out shapes draped over the razor wire and huge birds with boiled-looking heads pecking at the shapes. He was numb and sore and wanted to puke. A man stepped from the shadows and relief washed over him — it was John Wayne. The Duke wore a flak jacket and pisscutter helmet; a cigar was stuck in the side of his mouth.

“We’re going over the top. You with us, dogface?” Paul’s body went rigid. His nuts sucked into his abdomen like a pair of yo-yos up their strings.

“No, I have a… business lunch.” The Duke got salty. “We got a war to win, peckerwood.”

“I’d love to make a charitable donation,” Paul assured him. The Duke looked like he was staring at a piece of ambulatory dogshit. Paul got scared again. “Is there an orphan I could tend to,” he asked, “one who’s been wounded by shrapnel?” The Duke stuck his chin out and glared with dull disdain. He pulled a pistol from his holster and shoved Paul into a corner and told him to face it. That’s when Paul saw dozens of corpses stacked atop one another by the other wall; they all wore suits and their hands were clean and soft and they had very nice hair. Each had a frosted hole in the perfect center of his forehead. “Can’t trust a man who won’t fight,” the Duke said without much emotion. “This is a mercy.”

When the gun barrel pressed to the back of his skull, Paul woke up with a jerk.

Frail angles of rust-colored light fell through the Venetian blinds to touch Paul’s face. His head felt broken and weak, like it’d been smashed open in the night and its contents spilled over the pillow. His mouth felt blowtorched and the tendons of his neck stretched to their tensile limit, seemingly unable to support the raw ball of his skull. He lay in his childhood room in his parents’ house. Surfing posters were tacked to the walls. A glow-in-the-dark constellation decorated the ceiling.

In the bathroom, he consulted his reflection in the mirror: skin dull and blotched, right eye a deep purple, swollen closed like a dark blind drawn against the light. Elsewhere his skin was sickly pale, as though marauding bats had drained the blood from it while he slept. He spread his split lips. Two teeth gone: top left incisor, bottom left cuspid. He poked his gums with his pinkie until blood came.

He stood under the showerhead. The knobs of his spine were raw where he’d slid down the shopfront. He tried jerking off in hopes it might unknit the tension knotting his gut, but it was like trying to coax life out of a rope. In the blood-colored darkness behind his eyelids all he could see was this huge fist, this scarred ridge of knuckles exploding like a neutron bomb.

He carefully patted dry his various lumps and abrasions. He found an old pair of Ray Bans and adjusted them to cover his puffed eye.

The kitchen was a monotone oasis: white fridge and stove, alabaster tile floor, marble countertops. A bay window offered a view of Lake Ontario lying silver beneath a chalky mid-morning sky. The backyard grass was petaled with the season’s first frost.