They fight by torchlight in Kuan Lon. He sees a boxer fall with blood pouring from his mouth, get rolled out of the ring and left at the edge of the jungle. They fight without gloves—the red firelight glints on the ground glass on the fighters’ hand-wraps. He sees a skinny Thai boy, younger than he is, die in the ring; he’s close enough to see the boy’s fixed, dilated pupils, his slack mouth as the doctor, a Japanese whose short-sleeved shirt reveals track marks, pushes on his chest in vain under the watchful eyes of the victor in his corner. He sees knife matches, the crowd silent as the blades test the distance, flickering over isoclines of commitment and dread, like serpents tasting the air, and finally the explosive attack, the arc of arterial blood. He hears bets made in Chinese, German, Japanese, English and Thai. He sees winners paid in yuan, yen, dollars, euro, bags of cocaine, bricks of heroine, fuel cells, ancient mosaics, Buddhas, Garudas, missiles, guns.
They’ve never cleared out the jungle—he guesses they didn’t want satellites seeing in—so you can never see far and it always seems to be dusk; flashlights glow through the jungle’s constriction, and, during the day, parallelograms of sun. He haunts the tracks worn through the undergrowth between the tents, the retrofitted shipping containers, the quonset huts that were surplus from a few wars back; everyone ignores him, except the bar girls, who call out invitations and snatch at his wrist as he passes them by. There’s a market where geckos scamper over piles of damp Gucci tote bags, sparkling crystal bottles of cologne, mildewed jeans; there are cardboard boxes brimming with plastic bags of coarse yellow opium, tied shut with a twist of wire. He sees a Karon tribesman showing his eight-year-old son how to analyze opium with a portable mass spectrometer, which is oddly comforting, because it’s the same model used back home by the more upmarket dealers. Burmese gunmen bargain quietly over jackets of French kevlar; big white Americans with army haircuts and oversized watches sit at cafe tables, drinking rice liquor, smoking hash and watching the girls go by. At night strings of red and white Christmas lights burn in the trees and show him the way to the ring.
He watches every fight but doesn’t try to get in the ring, though he has little money left. He sleeps on a thin mat in the woods, in a waste space where fragments of torn cloth flutter in the branches and the pale remnants of old plastic bags make the copse look like a burial ground. There’s a girl, whose name might be Lily—she speaks no English—who came to him, one night, of her own accord, and in the grey corpse-light filtering through the trees he marvels at the contours of her body, how an object of desire can be composed of these abstract curves and swells of tissue—the dark pucker of a nipple, the pores and hairs on the olive skin; running his hand over her stomach, he finds he’s become an anatomist, and knows where pressure would bring pain. Sometimes he talks to her in English, as he caresses her, and that helps, a little, but then he forgets words and there’s just the release, then the slight rankness of her, the stones pressing into their bodies through the mat, and her skin against his, which seems to be thawing something.
One morning he wakes alone—the copse is quiet, and the girl is gone, along with the last of his money. He lies there awhile, trying to find some lingering trace of her warmth, then goes into town to look for her. He can’t find her but in a bar housed in a shipping container there’s a girl with burgundy lipstick and a matching sheath dress who looks at the girl’s picture on his phone and says, “That’s Lily. Lily gone home. You want a new friend?”
He’s at the ring when the Christmas lights come on; he’s hungry, but that will have to wait. He finds the promoter, a small Thai with a laptop and decaying cargo shorts that show the boxer’s scars on his shins, and says, “How do you get on the card here?”
The promoter takes him in, shakes his head and in an Aussie voice says, “Sorry, mate, we’re full up, try another night,” and turns back to his laptop.
“So make some room,” he says, his voice almost cracking. “How about I bust up some of your boys, here, get the clutter off the card.”
The promoter regards him from under raised brows, then calls out something in Thai. A fighter with brown, snaggled teeth and a mass of scar tissue on his eyebrows laughs, shrugs, says something back; the promoter says, “All right then. You and young Chaksenedra here are now our prelim card, and may the experience live up entirely to your expectations.”
An old man beckons him over to a table by the ring and wraps his hands in strands of coarse hemp so tightly it hurts. The wrap finished, the old man takes a tube out of his pocket, smears Kern’s knuckles with glue and presses them into a plastic tub full of ground glass. He examines Kern’s glittering knuckles critically, says, “Dry two minutes,” in thickly accented English, smiles toothlessly and moves on to the next fighter.
He tries to warm up but his body seems to have no mass, his hands flickering through the air as though they’re weightless, empty shells, as harmless as smoke. The light is failing and a crowd has gathered, the white lights in the trees stellate through the billows of cigarette smoke and ganja. Someone lights the torches and the reek of kerosene fills the clearing. He knows they’re watching him, that the local wireless is buzzing with wagers on the events of his victory, defeat, death. He wants to run but beyond the torches and constellations of electric lights there’s just the jungle darkness, and he feels his death is waiting for him there. He remembers his discipline, starts stretching like he does before every training.
Before he is ready (but you’ve been waiting for this a long time, a voice says) the promoter takes his arm and ushers him toward the ring. He and the Thai with the bad teeth and scars climb in, and when the bell rings he’s still oppressed by lightness, feeling as ineffectual as a dream. He sees that Scars is dancing a little, intending to play with him, so he kicks him in the leg and closes; the openings are obvious, and for a moment he suspects the fight’s been rigged, but no, there’s the pain and the disbelief in Scars’s face as he eats punch after punch and he never sees the knee that finally breaks his jaw. Kern steps back, not even sweating yet, not believing it’s over, makes a point of not looking into the flash of the cell phones from the crowd.
45
Good Thing to Own
Thales peers up into the ether, the snowflakes pinpricks of momentary cold. He hadn’t wanted to go back through the Club Oublier, had thought to find the car by dead reckoning. A mistake, in retrospect. Hadn’t expected snow. Vast the city, endless its streets. He checks his phone—still dead—onward, then.
Eyes flickering shut, he sees the towers in the waves, their light, ascending … He blinks, wavers, brushes snow from his shoulders and goes on.
Snow-dusted ruins, shuttered bars. Is this his street? And there, down the block, his car, he thinks, smothered in white.
Closer up, he’s sure it’s his. He grips the door’s frigid handle, waits for it to read his fingerprints, but there’s no vibration, no click—is it as dead as his phone, leaving him locked out in the cold? He yanks at the handle, steps back in surprise when the door opens, snow sloughing off in a sheet.
He’s already halfway into the car when he registers the presence in the seat opposite—it’s a girl, the maybe-Asian one from the mountain house, huddled in her thin jacket, the grip of a gun protruding from her pants pocket.