Matt Bell - Scrapper

The revealment of the boxer hidden beneath the garment, the contender’s name on the lips of every spectator: Bringer. Bringer. Bringer. This man Kelly did not know but that he had agreed to hurt, to be hurt by. An abstraction of the deadliest order.

Kelly pulled the orange jersey over his head as the referee began to speak. The call to the center. The expectations of a good fight, a clean fight. The gloves touching gloves. The bell ringing and the contender not waiting for Kelly, coming at him faster and stronger than Kelly had imagined but in both men there existed a matching will to hurt, to be hurt, the suspension of the man outside the ring for the man within, for the contest, the agony, the two words that once meant the same thing.

The contender loomed a foot taller than Kelly but Kelly moved in on him, ducked low under the contender’s sprawl. Kelly was comfortable in the clinch, tried to nullify the difference in reach, but the contender was fast on his feet, technically skilled in a way Kelly would never be. The contender landed a first punch harder than any Kelly had ever suffered and at first Kelly couldn’t find a way under the punches that followed. He took a step back, another. Another punch landed and Kelly thought of the tightrope beam above the plant, the impossibility of walking it backward like the total ineffectiveness of Kelly’s defense, the sudden uselessness of raising his arms, of trying to ball up against the contender — at last the real violence had arrived, the end of the simulation of sparring, the absolute terror of a fighter born to fight — and by the end of the first minute Kelly was forced to embrace his inability to defend himself, the muscles in the shoulders numbed and dumbed by the contender’s fists.

Kelly pushed back in, swung wildly, fought against the gaining lethargy. He crossed his feet, made other mistakes. For the first time in his life he felt his true age, the accumulation of injury obvious in the face of the contender’s still-limitless youth. The gap between them only a few years, a slim fraction of a life. But enough. More than.

The bell rang, the round ended. The water bottle, the towel, the encouraging word. The fight a third over and who knew what the score was.

The bell rang, the next round began.

Kelly knew someone should stop the fight but his trainer was the contender’s trainer and what the trainer wanted was a knockout. One of Kelly’s eyes was shutting, the swell of his brow collapsing his vision on the left side. The contender jabbed, jabbed again, followed with a hook, a cross, more punches Kelly couldn’t track, couldn’t count. The number of punches fewer than you might imagine. Kelly had made himself strong but strength alone wasn’t a strategy. He had made himself tough but toughness wasn’t enough.

With every strike his quiet mind exploded into sound.

The cacophony, the choir: thought, voice, memory, the simultaneous swarm.

Bringer drove a fist through the side of Kelly’s head and for the first time Kelly’s knee touched the mat. The brain suddenly a size too big for the shell. Sparks flooded Kelly’s eyesight as he pushed himself upright but a grin grew around his mouthguard, a wrong-shaped expression easily mistaken for a grimace.

What Kelly saw: the way the contender rushed in, the way he could be goaded.

The bell rang, the round ended.

The water bottle, the towel, the bell ringing again so fast.

The third round began. The contender uninjured, undaunted, moving fast toward Kelly’s corner. Encouraged by the damage he’d done. Kelly protected his face, protected his body, let the injury come. This was the way. Not only to turn the cheek but to offer the entire person. He took one blank step, then another. He was afraid but the fear could make him stronger. He would act out of his fear but first he needed to be scared enough to move.

The contender landed uncounted punches, each one accompanied by a grunted exhalation of angry breath. Their breathing grew sharp, strained. The contender tired now too. Every fighter exhausted in the third round. You could win and still injure yourself with the effort. Kelly dropped to a knee again, invited the overeager rush. It took everything left to stand into the next blow, to take one more punch on his way around the contender — and the gorgeous punch broke every last resistance, exploding a sound inside Kelly’s head, a tearing of some supporting structure twisting free of the skull — and for a moment Kelly found his advantage, its fantastic temporariness, the contender’s body turned sideways, his flank exposed for mere seconds.

Kelly filled those seconds with his fists, held back nothing. There was no future to his strategy, only a winnable present. He heard the dulled and distant roar of the crowd as he drove the contender to the mat, nearly punching him all the way down, as he stepped away from the falling body and into the rising sound.

The old ringing in his ears. The sound of the fire. The sound that existed long before the fire. He spit out his mouthguard, found the name caught behind his teeth.

Bringer, he said. Stand up.

The referee counting: one second, two seconds, three.

Bringer, Kelly said. Come on.

Now the contender standing into the same noise, the cries of the crowd, their vocalized belief in the possibility of his defeat. Now the contender left with no choice, now the outcome requiring a knockout because nothing else would satisfy the crowd. Now the trainer howling ecstatic, in love with his orchestration of the disaster.

Kelly raised his gloves, jerked his fists toward his body, called in the blow. Thou shalt not kill suspended for another minute and a half. He didn’t have any legs left but he raised his gloves and with them he said Kill me and when Bringer came carrying the killing punch across the mat Kelly surrendered into the absolute absence of doubt: If Kelly died the target would go free. If Kelly lived he would take the target. If Bringer struck him right he might never experience doubt again, instead only this fear perfect enough to swallow him whole, a whale of fear, and from inside its black body he saw more darkness, and from the dark he watched Bringer’s last punch leave the shoulder at speed, bringing with it the first pinpricks of light appearing somewhere in the black, stars come to see him home, constellations lit for no one else.

When the punch arrived Kelly felt every higher function stall, his body tumbling, feet turning under softening ankles, calves collapsing, the knees going sideways, the stupid body crashing like a carcass from its hook. The judder of the mat coming up to meet him. Behind closing lids he tried to protect the memory of the impossible thing he’d seen: the knockout blow you were never supposed to see coming, how as it had moved through space to strike his body Kelly knew he would never die. It was as if the match had not actually ended. Before the knockout Thou shalt not kill had been suspended and for as long as the injunction remained absent Kelly might do as he wished.

When he opened his eyes the contender was already leaving the ring, the trainer and his assistant both by the contender’s side, the crowd heading out into the night satisfied, high on the simulated destruction of a man. Kelly was alone upon the mat with the ringside doctor, who checked Kelly’s open eye, pronounced him concussed, guided him to the locker room. The doctor tested his reflexes, listened to his breathing, bandaged a cut atop his bruised cheek. Kelly measured the tightness in his chest, the numb ache in his limbs, said nothing. He was seeing two different rooms, one out of the closed eye, one out of the open eye, but he didn’t describe either to the doctor. He hadn’t eaten a meal all day but his stomach felt full, bloated. He’d known it could come to this but he kept quiet, wanted the ticking clock in his chest left untouched.