Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

Arm Saint, at last.

He seized the peg (damn, his left arm was just as big as his right, he really could take on opponents with both at the same time) and slid his elbow into the box. Only then did he look at me; bulging eyes, lots of white around them. His palms were white too. I put my arm on the table and we engaged. Solid as a wall, like laying my hand against a warm building.

From what I’d seen of Mansur’s earlier matches, I knew that his openings alternated between the Fire and Stone Cut and the Red Autumn Leaves Cut (‘The Red Autumn Leaves Cut means knocking down the enemy’s long sword. The spirit should be getting control of his sword’); I readied myself. His palm was dry and soft, mine was little and clammy. Mansur kept his eyes on me the whole time, I knew it was part of his strategy to hypnotize his opponent with a penetrating, uninterrupted stare. In an interview he had once said that his greatest strength came ‘from inside’. ‘When your spirit is concentrated, you can block out everyone around you. Your opponent is the centre of attention.’ Although that may sound rather banal, I could actually feel his energy grow solid and I was drawn into his gaze. I became the glowing core of his attention, sealed in a vacuum by his eyes.

‘Go!’

Mechanically I tightened all my muscles and felt that enormous hand pulling all power toward it. For a moment I wrested free of those eyes and looked at his arm, lined with quivering muscles trying to break through the skin. Then I resumed my spot in his field of vision. In that way we had finally become the middle point of the universe, Mansur and I, and I felt a deep sense of gratitude and justice. I knew that the outcome was unimportant; all that mattered was the fatefulness of this moment, the collision of two heavenly bodies that had sought each other out in boundless space, forces coursing toward beauty and destruction. The moment of impact went slowly, without a sound.

I withstood his attack; my defence had improved in the course of time. The muscles in his neck were tight as snares, from his shoulder had grown a low hill that I’d never seen in another wrestler. Was that P.J. who screamed? With my eyes I traced the course of a vein on Mansur’s forearm. All my life I had longed and sought for something without flaws, without contamination, and in my dreamlike state I remembered a story about perfection — about Chinese artisans, masters of the art of lacquer painting, who would board a ship and only start work on the high seas; on land, minuscule dust particles might contaminate and spoil the lacquer.

The triangular construction Mansur and I formed belonged in that category: perfect, superhuman — we were far beyond time and space now, the roar of the crowd I heard only as though it were coming from a valley far below. A great deal clearer was the sudden sound of a dry twig breaking close to my ear — I felt us losing balance, being slung back into the world, heading for the end.

Only then did I become aware of a raging, maddening pain in my forearm, the flames were shooting out of it, and I saw Mansur let go of my hand and look at me in amazement. Halfway down my arm the pain was bundled like a glowing knot. I knew the bone was broken. The muscles had stood up to Mansur’s inhuman strength, but the radius or the ulna had not. Snapped like a twig; I bellowed in rage and pain. Joe was at my side.

‘Frankie, what is it?’

I shook my head, this was the end of everything, it was the bone that turned out to be my Achilles’ heel, I would have to start again from scratch. Mansur came over to us.

‘I think he broke his arm,’ Joe said.

Mansur nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a good fight.’

He looked at me, thought about it for a moment, then corrected himself.

‘It was a spiritual fight. You are a strong man.’

He raised his right hand to his heart, the same way Papa Africa had always done, and disappeared with the woman into the crowd of inquisitive onlookers.

‘We have to get to a hospital right away, Joe!’ P.J. said. ‘He’s turning all white.’

I suddenly went limp with pain and felt that I would throw up at any moment. The arm lay useless in my lap. My sole weapon: broken. Two taxis were waiting outside, the drivers leaned smoking against the grille.

‘Hospital!’ Joe barked. ‘ Krankenhaus! ’

The rest was exactly what you might expect: the shot of painkiller, the setting of the ulna, the splint, the sling, the whole shit thing. The only startling detail was that we had to pay the equivalent of almost 500 smackers, to which end P.J. loaned us her credit card. For that price we got to take the X-rays home with us. Now I couldn’t do anything anymore, at most scratch out a few block letters with the fingers sticking out of my plaster sleeve. In the taxi on the way to the hotel, Joe turned to me.

‘Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds, then you broke.’

Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds: I was amazed, it had felt like an eternity to me.

‘You didn’t give an inch, the others all went down within the first minute. Well, that’s the importance of calcium. Just imagine if that bone hadn’t broken? You had a chance, you really did. But OK, a couple of months, Frankie, then we’re back on the road.’

P.J. groaned in disapproval.

‘You guys are nuts.’

The nurse had given us a box of painkillers, the first of which was administered to me at five o’clock and washed down with beer.

‘Sleep in our room tonight,’ Joe said, ‘for if you need to pee and things.’

I hadn’t even arrived at that complication yet; Joe would be assuming Engel’s old role. . I decided to get sloshed.

All things considered, my arm left me less depressed that I would have thought. I took comfort in the fact that it had happened while doing battle with the Arm Saint: it was my Fracture of Honour.

P.J. showed her solidarity, drinking at the same pace I did. Our waitress’s face bore an expression of boundless long-suffering. Out in front of the hotel entrance, Joe was bent over the engine of the Olds, repairing the leaky radiator with duct tape. The waitress brought more beer, P.J. stuck a straw in my bottle and set it in front of me where I could get to it easily. I drank with a vengeance, to calm the spasms; the arm was immobilized, but the contractions caused me hellish pain. She pulled the X-rays out of the envelope and held them up to the light one by one. When you looked at them like that, the bones were flimsy little things. A wonder that they had held up for even two minutes and thirty-nine seconds.

‘A clean break,’ she said, ‘not jagged or anything. Does it hurt?’

Yes, dear Florence, it hurts. Will you ease my pain?

‘We’ll have to take care of you for a little while now, you can’t do anything. My finals are in August, but I can study at my parents’ place.’

P.J. slid the photos back into the envelope and said, ‘Come on, let’s see what’s happening in town. I’ve pretty much had it with this place.’

She rolled me out of the dining room and across the lobby to the desk, a dimly lit niche at the end of the hallway. The clerk was reading a book.

‘ Bitte ,’ P.J. asked, ‘do you have a map of the city? We’re looking for a gutes Restaurant , or maybe a bar.’

The man looked up angrily.

‘ Hier keine Bar! ’ he snapped. ‘ Keine Bar in Poznan! ’

His Slavic accent sharply emphasized each syllable, his eyes glowed with a kind of anger.

‘Here we have only Arbeitslosen und Banditen ! Going into town is suicide.’

He demonstrated to us how deadbeats and bandits would knock us over the head and steal all our money. P.J. looked on in amusement. Then she tried a different tack.