Episode 163 · A Smaller Turn

Four days later, Soles carried his own bag into the gym, lifted his left arm above his head in the doorway without making the face, and waited for someone to notice.

Nobody did. The old man who mopped the floor, and who according to Tesa owned the place, went on mopping. Tesa was taping her hands on the edge of the ring. The heavy bags hung in their row from the beam, and at the far end the oldest one, patched at the bottom, hung alone on a chain from a steel bar bolted under the ceiling.

Day seven. Eight left. Let’s see what the sofa bought.

Not much, for the first ten minutes.

Tesa came at him slowly, gloves up, and touched his forehead with her left. He went backward. She did it again, and the bottom rope pressed into his calf, and he had nowhere left to go.

— That’s where you keep going, she said.

— I’d noticed.

— Then stop going there.

He moved his right foot first, the way he had watched her do it from the sofa, and brought the left after it without letting them meet. Her glove went past his face. Not far past. Far enough.

It was only a step. But it was the first time in a week that his body had done what he asked without sending him a bill, and he wanted, absurdly, to tell somebody.

Her other glove tapped his ribs.

— You left me that.

He brought his elbow down. Next time she found nothing there and tapped his forehead instead, and he was grinning like an idiot behind his gloves.

— What?

— That one was better.

— That one was worse. You just liked it more.

She did not explain much. She did the wrong thing slowly so he could see it, then the right thing at speed so he could feel the difference when it hit him.

Somewhere in the second half hour, the floor started talking to him.

The ring was old boards under canvas, and boards carry weight like any structure; he had spent a week of nights on the sofa learning how his own house carried it. When Tesa settled over her back leg, the plank under his front foot eased by a hair, the way a load comes off a jack. He felt it before he saw her hip move, and moved before her glove had left her cheek.

She stopped and watched him finish the step.

— What did you see?

— I didn’t. I felt the floor.

Tesa inspected the canvas, then him. Soles could not tell whether she was impressed or annoyed; the reply sounded like both.

— Fine. Feel this.

Her shoulder moved. Her feet and her weight stayed exactly where they were, and he stepped anyway, because the shoulder had told him a story and his body believed it. Her glove met his forehead in the place he had stepped into.

— Sometimes I want you to think that.

He should have been annoyed. He was delighted. A mistake you understand is half a lesson.

The step and the punch together, short, his glove meeting her raised hand with a flat sound that came back off the windows. He missed twice. On the third, step and punch arrived together, and his shoulder worked through the whole movement, and he realized he had not thought about the shoulder at all. On the ninth, Tesa lowered her hand.

— Stop grinning. You look like a man who’s found money in an old coat.

— I have.

— It’s my money. I’m lending it to you.

Between drills she skipped rope by the bags. Her feet went in threes. One, two, three, a little hitch. Her lips moved with it.

— Who are you counting for?

— Him.

He did not have to ask who. She had told him once, on a bad night, that her fists had grown heavier than she was, as if someone else were hitting along with her. A boxer from a war she could not place.

— Reil, she said, still skipping. His name was Reil. He liked threes. I’m trying to work out if I do.

— And?

— I like threes. I hate his jab.

She showed him: a long, lazy left that would have been beautiful on a tall man. On her it reached for a face a head higher than his and left her stretched and open. She shook her head at it the way he would at a part made for the wrong model.

— He had arms like a crane. I’ll keep his rhythm. I’ll keep my own arms.

She went to change at nine and left him the gym.

He faced the mirror and did the step alone. Nothing came after him. That was the trouble with mirrors.

So he thought of Phenom.

He pictured Phenom close enough to reach him and tried the remembered exchange against the empty space in front of the mirror.

He knew how Phenom’s feet had moved, light and sideways on snow. His own hip would not follow. In the movement he was recalling, that delay left his guard open to the second hand. His breath caught and he folded before he could finish the step.

In the mirror, nobody had touched him.

Beaten by a man who isn’t in the room. Tell no one.

He lost again, in three moves this time instead of two, and then he understood. He was borrowing Phenom’s legs, and Phenom’s legs had never had a ceiling fall on them. What was worth having was in his eyes: the way he looked at a man and saw where he kept his weight, what he protected, which way he wanted to run before he knew it himself.

So Soles kept his own feet and let Phenom look.

Through those eyes the man in the mirror was easy to read. He dropped his left hand when he thought. He leaned back when he was afraid, as if an inch of air would save him. Soles fixed the hand and the lean. Phenom came again, and Soles went past the first hand on his own short step, felt the second meet his forearm and stay there, and answered with his left.

It landed in the place where Phenom’s jaw was going to be.

Nothing met it but air. But he had seen the opening before it opened, and gone through it on his own feet, and he laughed out loud in the empty gym. At the far end, the old man looked up from his bucket. Soles did not explain.

He set his feet to go again, and something else came with the next breath.

Not a thought. The next move, already decided: the man is hurt, so you follow him down, and you keep going until there is nothing left that can get up and come after you. It was so calm that for a moment it felt like his own idea.

He lowered his hands.

No. We’re practicing footwork. Nobody’s following anybody anywhere.

Phenom did not argue. In the garden, beside his plant, he only waited, patient as a noose.