Episodul 164 · The Lamp

The next morning Soles came in before the gym opened, because Tesa had said the side door would be open by seven and he wanted to see what the place was like without anybody in it.

Day eight. His arm went over his head now without the face. Phenom had been quiet since the mirror, the kind of quiet that meant waiting, not leaving. When Soles lifted the arm too high, a clipped Lower. came with the pull in his shoulder. He lowered it. That much help he could use without accepting everything else the man wanted.

The gym was not empty. Tesa was sitting on the edge of the ring, taping her good hand.

Three lamps hung over the canvas on long chains. Two burned steady. The third, the far one, buzzed and flickered and went dark for a heartbeat, then came back as if nothing had happened.

She had stopped taping. The roll hung from her wrist. She was looking up at the lamp, and her lips were moving, very slightly, the way Krista’s did when she counted.

— Tesa?

She did not hear him. Her taped fingers closed slowly, as if around a stem. The lamp went out. She did not blink.

— Round I —

The depot lamps buzzed louder than the crowd, and the far one flickered.

Reil was twenty-two and had been hit more times in two rounds than in the whole of the year before. The purse tonight was rent for the room he shared with his sister, and a pair of school shoes she had stopped mentioning so that he would stop feeling bad about them. The docker across the ring was a head taller, with arms that reached into the next week. Every time Reil stepped in, the long left was already in his face. Every time he slipped it, the right was waiting.

The men on the crates did not care. They had money on the docker, and the docker was doing what money wanted. It was the end of a shift. The depot smelled of coal smoke and wet wool, and somebody had hung a tarpaulin across the loading door to keep the rain off the ring and the police out of it.

In the corner, Oskar held the towel and said nothing. He never said anything between rounds. He watched. Reil had learned to sit still and let him watch, because when the old man finally opened his mouth, there would be one word in it, and it would be the right one.

Water. Blood in the bucket. His ear sang.

Over the ring the far lamp went out. Across the canvas, the docker blinked at the dark and turned his head a fraction, looking for where the light had gone.

It came back. Nobody else had seen it. The docker had already forgotten it.

Oskar leaned down to the ear that still worked.

— Count.

Then he took the towel and stepped back.

Reil counted.

He counted through the whole third round while the left hand found him and the right hand waited. He did not try to get in. His nose went, somewhere in the middle of it, and the taste ran down the back of his throat, and he kept counting through that too. He covered, and took it on the arms, and listened to the lamp. It buzzed, and it buzzed, and on the eleventh buzz it went out. Not always the eleventh. Sometimes the tenth. Never fewer, never more than twelve.

Eleven. Ten. Twelve. Not a clock. A man coughing.

The men on the crates were bored with him. A docker shouted that the depot boy had come to dance.

Fourth round. Reil let himself be walked back. He went back where he wanted to go, under the far lamp, and the docker followed him there because that was where the easy work was.

Eight. Nine.

The left came in. He took it on the forearm and felt the bone hum.

Ten.

Nothing. The lamp held.

Eleven.

Dark.

The docker blinked.

Reil was already inside. There was no room to wind up and he did not try; he turned, and the hand was only the end of the turn, short, rising under the long arms where nobody so tall ever thought to guard.

When the light came back, the docker was sitting on the canvas with the look of a man who has missed a step on a familiar stair.

He did not get up in time. The crates went quiet, then loud, then angry, then quiet again while money changed hands it had not expected to.

Reil walked over to him. The docker held up a glove without looking, embarrassed, and Reil touched it with his own.

In the corner, Oskar was coiling the towel.

— After, the old man said. That’s when you touch them. Not before.

It was two words more than he had said all night. Reil remembered every one of them.

He took the purse home in his sock. His sister made him sit under the kitchen lamp while she cleaned his face, and complained that he had bled on the good towel, and did not ask how much he had won until he put the shoes money on the table.

❦

The lamp came back.

Tesa blinked, and looked down at her hand as if surprised to find the tape still hanging from it. She wound the rest on, quick and neat, and tore it with her teeth.

— How long have you been standing there?

— Long enough to see you count.

She did not deny it. She flexed the hand, made a fist, opened it.

— Nobody’s fixed that lamp in years, she said. I asked them not to.

— Why?

— Because it’s honest. It always tells you when it’s going to go. Most things don’t.

— Who taught you that?

She thought about it longer than the question needed.

— Somebody who counted it before me.

Soles thought of the hunter in his own head, who had also done everything before him, and did not ask her anything else. Some answers you only got by waiting for them.

She swung down off the ring and walked past him to the bags, and he stood under the far lamp a moment longer, listening to it buzz.

He lost count at seven. The light went out on eleven.

Of course it did.

Behind him, Tesa hit the old bag once, the ordinary way, and the chain rang against the bar.

— Gloves, she said. Today you’re going to learn why you never fight under that thing.