Stephen Florida Read online

  On the main path, he walks backwards next to me and whistles, unmindful of the ice patches. He’s too young to be afraid of getting hurt, there’s a flock of hummingbirds in his head. “I forgot what ice cream tastes like,” he says. Linus pinches his fingers in front of his lips, pretends to inhale, and blows the breath out like smoke.

  I don’t really miss anything anymore, but I know he’s like everyone else and falls for life’s left-behinds. Everyone’s unfortunately born with a memory. But this is what I tell him if I sense he’s sick over it: if you turn your thoughts over to the nothingness of what’s here, nothing land, nothing people, nothing houses, nothing lakes, nothing cold in nothing bones, you can squeeze your happiness to a pinpoint—you are here to wrestle other men like your oldest enemies, leave them damaged or worse on the mat, until you’re by yourself. I’m not one for bringing up memories. Whatever part of the brain that’s in charge of memories, it’s probably somewhat retarded in mine. Yet if you pay attention to the simplicity of your ritual, like stooped men praying in lightless pagan hovels, you can live without your memory. It’s surplus.

  I’ll tell you what else I know: that the buildings of Oregsburg are nothing but shadows in the week after daylight savings, but I can find mine by scent and pattern, like a dog. That the Frogman, who has straight antlers and is silently giggling at me, is behind one of the walls. That Linus is walking faster because he wants to get back to The Shining. (He gets mad at me when I rub my dick on his books. It’s only through the pants, anyway.) That there’s absolutely no noise at eight o’clock at night, no one outside walking, and it creates the illusion that you’re alone. That it feels good to be close to your building, to know that your bed is inside and you will sleep in it soon, before you wake up tomorrow and follow a schedule more rigid than what most people can put up with, but that most of all, approaching your bed is a pacifier-level comfort because you don’t know what would happen if you had your purpose taken away from you.

  I guess I should describe myself.

  No, I don’t want to do that. But in the interest of keeping any potential listener on my side, I suppose I can share something personal. It’s that my name isn’t really what everyone thinks it is. In the third week of my senior year in high school, when I was living in Hillsboro with my grandma, I sat down at my lab table for first-period physics, the study of the world’s rulebook. It was a Tuesday. Mrs. Cosgrove came into the classroom and handed me an envelope with a red seal in the upper-left corner that said OREGSBURG COLLEGE. I thought I’d heard of the place, though maybe I’m making that up now. On the outside, it said my real name but on the inside, in the letter from Coach Hargraves, it was addressed to Stephen Florida. It was an invitation to come wrestle for them, on a full ride. But because Division IV is forbidden to give athletic scholarships, they’d combined a favorable need-based financial package (all grant, no loan) with the Harriet Howard Leadership Scholarship. I got that because of “exceptional displays of leadership and commitment, and the capacity for setting a model example for peers at Hillsboro High School.” When someone puffs you up with this kind of language, you believe it. It was written on a piece of good paper that’s now in a box in my closet. According to this official stationery, the only requirement for the scholarship was that I “give a presentation on an unspecified topic in March of the graduating year.” It was the only real college offer I got. Before the letter was handed to me, I was looking at a few community colleges nearby. My grandma was sick at the time, otherwise I would’ve gone right away to meet Coach Hargraves and to see the school. I don’t mean to give the impression that I was making up my mind. I knew right then I had my chance and I was going to take it. On a Monday in September, I didn’t know what I’d do after high school. On Tuesday, just like that, I had a piece of paper promising me four more years of wrestling. I called them during my third-period break and they sent me the application materials. It happened very quickly. They said things like they could make my SAT score work, that everything was taken care of, and they were still calling me Stephen Florida. Grandma, who promised she was in very little suffering and indeed possessed an air of total resignment as the clock wound down, reading and rereading the first chapter of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, died at the end of November with the book in her lap and took all the white lights with her.

  I got the acceptance letter in the first week of December and that weekend took the Greyhound three hours west on ND-200 to Aiken, a town even smaller than Hillsboro. I met Coach Hargraves. He shook my hand and said, “This is Stephen Florida. The man who’s going to help build Oregsburg wrestling.” I liked the sound of that, it made me feel good. He called me “a corner brick.” He was an old coach but this was a new school for him, and the program itself was just starting back up after being cut because of Title IX years ago. I didn’t think much about how or why they found me. I didn’t care. He dropped me off at the admissions department, where I got signed up for my classes way in advance. It was there, in the admissions office, that I figured out why my name had changed. Behind the desk, there was a nice old lady holding a piece of paper two inches from her nose. Her name was Ms. Rutledge, and when she lowered the paper she looked brittle enough to be broken by anyone older than twelve and she had, no kidding, the thickest glasses I have ever seen. They extended from her face like telescopes. They were foggy and yellow. What happened, I knew, was a letter of interest was to be sent to Steven Forster at Hillsboro High School. This woman, Ms. Rutledge, had misread my name. “Hello, young man,” she said. “How can I help you?” I signed it, I signed it all Stephen Florida.

  What did I have to wait around for? Nothing. I got to Oregsburg as soon as I could, on the bus the day after graduation. It was June. There was no one there. In my new room in McCloskey Hall, the one I’d have for all four years, I unpacked my clothes and put my nice shirts on hangers. I wanted to get started. I put on sweats and ran outside. It was not as hot as I’d wanted it to be, maybe upper seventies, but it was so bright, light shining off everything, that I had to squint to run. I passed a Christmas tree patch, the trees so small they looked like large broccoli. A few cars went by. I was running on roads I’d never seen before, everything was strange to me. I was sweating through my clothes on new roads and looking up with my eyes shut. I felt like I’d come somewhere that had no one else in it, or no one else had really been there before me, but more than that, I’d picked it. It was my choice, it was intentional. I stopped running, miles from school and in a place I didn’t recognize but was somehow familiar, like a distorted vision of the past, fields in every direction. One tiny red crop duster was buzzing over a field, and then another very far in the distance. In one of the fields off the road, I saw a tremendous metal arm hundreds of feet long spraying water over acres of corn. It seemed like a process of the ice age. Hundreds more center pivots were all over, spaced far apart, churning all around, and standing still I could sense the movement on all sides, and though I have never been in an airplane I knew that when you flew over and looked down, there were massive green circles all over the earth. I began to love Oregsburg very early.

  I took three years of my life and sacrificed them like pretty virgins thrown in a volcano. And I don’t want to lie, so I won’t say I didn’t expect to have a championship by now. It was never going to be easy. That’s something you pigheadedly learn in hindsight. I pigheadedly wrestled and wrestled, playing wiggledick for three years, during which time I finally figured out that the trophy was never going to be handed to me because I deserved it, during which time I was often so tired I wanted to throw up, so unhappy I wanted to throw up. But I guess all along I’ve been waiting to see what happens in my fourth year, the very last year of my life, which feels long and formidable like a pregnancy or a North Pole trip, and because it’s so long, parts of it I spend clipping my toenails on my bed while Linus reads Stephen King in my desk chair. Parts of it I dwell on what it’d be like if people from the sticks of North Dakota descended on the places
where I wrestle, the poorly ventilated heat boxes that mostly smell like cleaning spray and concrete, if even a few of them knew who I was by sight and waited for my match, if a widow who nevertheless still had the zest of life saw me from behind and said, “Hey, it’s Stephen, look at that tight butt,” or maybe children shouting for a memento, and I’d toss my headgear to one and I’d hand my shoes to a little girl, who’d try them on and smile because they’d still be sweaty. I could give intimate souvenirs to fans after every match.

  “I’d like to go to Maine,” Linus says. “Small towns creep me out.”

  None of this will ever happen. There’s no money for extra headgear and shoes, this is all a flight of fancy. There are no children looking for heroes in tiny gyms, no horndog housewives. I keep my bullshit to myself, and I always try not to believe other bullshit.

  On the side of the big toe is a blister I clip open and fluid comes out of it that smells. I tell myself that I’m not a goddamn coward.

  “Man,” Linus says. “You are really going to town on those nails.”

  Five months, a winter, can be an oppressive and long thing to people other than just the drinkers. You can look out the window, miles and miles of land designed to demonstrate emptiness, pump sites, mud, rigs covered in rust, fields where durum and flax and canola used to be. A hole of a well: that’s what winter looks like. Food processors, water haulers, and rich roughnecks driving their cars through it and walking and sleeping in houses in it, and every time you look out the window, it’s pressed right up against the glass like a goblin waiting for you to notice so it has permission to leap in your face.

  “What’s that smell?” Linus says. Without looking up from the book, he lifts his leg, releases a trumpetous fart, and laughs a little.

  Here’s what I regret: that I didn’t win every time I wrestled, that too many losses have already happened, that I didn’t pledge to wrestling earlier in life, that I’ll never know how much better and faster I could have been, that I never had any brothers or sisters, that I won’t ever be as strong going right as I am going left, that I wasted so much time wrestling not to lose, that I was too eager and fell right into Derrick Ebersole’s duck, that at regionals I shouldn’t have tried to grab Chris Gomez’s right ankle and I let him out and I couldn’t get him back down and that was it, that my grandma had the stroke, that I couldn’t do better on my SAT, that I’ve forgotten sometimes how to be mean, that I couldn’t hold the near-side bar, that I don’t remember what my grandpa looked like without the help of a picture, that years ago the ice was where it was and the road curved where it did and the other car was where it was and that the other driver had to go, too, and also that I sent that kid to the hospital by himself, that his parents hadn’t ridden in the back of the ambulance and there was no audience to cry over him.

  “I don’t think a serial killer would ever come to North Dakota,” Linus says. “Maybe Sioux Falls. He’d kill one person and then get bored and probably go find more interesting people to kill in Minneapolis.”

  There is a hidden growing torment in me. I keep myself occupied and try to forget it, but in moments when I can’t lie, I know that I’m susceptible to it more and more, that the misery is digging itself out.

  The Frogman moves in the corner. I don’t look.

  Linus says, “What’s the difference between a bug bite and a rash, because I have this one by my neck.”

  But I also know I can have wild swings in my thoughts. I’ve gotten used to this over the three seasons at Oregsburg. I think of this discrete period of my life as a room, and these are simply the dirty problems I find inside with me to take care of. I keep everything clean around here, the Frogman is always in the room with me, he came along sometime after the accident but I try to keep him in the corners, try not to look, because if he’s let out and gets his way something might happen.

  Linus is where he was before. This is my room. I’m not ready to go yet. As it always does, the purpose returns, it comes around the corner at the last minute.

  The two best reasons to do anything are

  To prove to yourself you can do it

  To prove to everyone else you can do it

  And I will put my head down, remembering that I’ve been afforded these five months. They are mine to take, and this is my entire life. I am a good donkey.

  Linus says, “Your feet have a tremendous amount of dead skin on them. I’m just pointing it out.”

  What I’m thankful for: this season, drive, motivation, success lust, that I’m not fat, that I’m not a handicapped, that I don’t have fucking spina bifida, that no one can hear my thoughts except me, that activeness forestalls the sludge of the cosmos, that my hands are big for my size, Linus, Oregsburg, that my great-grandpas put it in my great-grandmas and that my grandpas put it in my grandmas and that my dad put it in my mom, that I wasn’t born in King Leopold’s Congo or Siberia, that my sinuses are a high mountain cave and there is a little grendel in there tending her mushrooms, that I’ll never have too much time on my hands, that there are other wrestlers out there waiting for me to come tear them down, my grandma, that I have a job to do.

  “God, Stephen, the fire hose just tried to attack Danny.” Linus closes the book, but not before reading the first lines of the next chapter. I’ve noticed that when he gets really fixated, books or wrestling usually being the cause, he develops a kind of general wetness around his lips and spends a lot of time wiping it off with the back of his hand. “I’m going to go to sleep now. Six thirty, then?”

  I nod. I thank God I’m a modern orphan, given a chance instead of singing for my supper, covered in chimney dust.

  “You know I haven’t heard you say anything in two days?”

  I hear that male’s arm snap again and again. “Mm.”

  He’s by my window, book tucked under his arm. On the sill, he looks at the picture of my parents holding me as a baby on the couch in my living room, which I never remember until someone else is looking at it, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead he wipes a finger across the sill next to the picture and says, “Your room is so clean. It’s almost abnormal how clean it is.”

  “Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.”

  “Tell me what happens at Miles City.”

  “You’re going to wrestle three times, win three times, and have a 4–0 record at 125.”

  “No, I mean, like, in—what happens if I lose?”

  “Well, in a tournament there’s something called a wrestle-back, but this is just four schools—”

  “I know what a wrestle-back is. I’m just thinking about what’s going to happen.”

  “Start telling yourself facts. Here we go, I’ll start. You are Linus Arrington. You are sitting in a chair in my dorm room, which is … five doors down from your own dorm room. It is November. November is one of the cold months. Stalin was a weatherman and his left arm was way shorter than his right because of a carriage accident. You wrestle for Oregsburg College at 125 pounds. You won your match today. You are from Bellevue, Nebraska.”

  “My father’s name is Dale, my mother’s name is Tina. Milk is white. I have wrestled since I was seven, and I won my first college match. In three days, I will be in Montana, wrestling in Miles City.”

  “The Miles City gym smells like every other gym. You have won your first match of your career here. You are 1–0 as a President.”

  “If I’m aggressive I will win.”

  “You are going to win three matches in a row in the Miles City gym because you are a heinous 125-pound barbarian and they are all cheesecakes.”

  “I’m a heinous barbarian and I will perform evil on their heads.”

  There’s a certain way Linus’s face looks when he believes something. I feel like I’ve known him a long time when he does that, like I lost my milk teeth with him biting into corncobs in Nebraska, like I had a different babyhood, like I’m a whole different person.

  Linus says, “Do you ever think about what life would’ve
been like if you were born a girl? Or if you had a clubfoot? Or were Asian? Or in New Mexico?”

  “If I had a clubfoot I’d kill myself.”

  “Me, too, I think.” Sometimes I worry that Linus has difficulty grasping abstract concepts.

  “A different life … doesn’t seem like a different pencil to write with,” I say. “I have all my legs and feet. You do, too. I’m good at wrestling and so are you. Those are the circumstances. Point is. That’s the pencil I was given. You got the same pencil.”

  “All right.”

  “Put your forehead against mine. Stable as a table?”

  “Stable as a table.”

  “Let’s go, sweet child. I’ll tuck you in.”

  “Can I use your toothpaste? My mom didn’t put any in the package this time.”

  After he shuts his door, I turn down the hallway, empty except for the cleaning lady at the far end scrubbing the vomit off the trash chute. The floor runs in a square, rooms on the outside, communal bathroom in the center, which I head into. A freshman named Perry, who will live to be ninety or die next summer, who knows, leaves a stink in the stall he exits. He nods, I nod, I don’t know his last name.

  I turn the sink on. In the mirror, I check for signs of impetigo, herpes, ringworm. I turn the razor on. I run it over the buds on my pate, mowing down the little guys before they can grow big. Insect teeth on the top of my head. A peeler for the potato.

  I read about flensing in my Culture of Global Capitalism course. I sat up in my seat and imagined three hundred years ago. I saw a massive, ugly whale shored up on a beach, grinning dumbly with its big mouth and its small eyes while fishermen tromped along its back in their boots, stabbing and hacking with knives and hooks in straight lines to make panels of blubber to be peeled, just like wallpaper, the wet sucking noises as they’re pulled off a red-white underflesh. And the fisherman yanked harder at the pieces that wouldn’t come off the fascia, tearing until they separated from the connective tissue. The mess in the sand. And when all the blubber was flensed, the fishermen walked away with it, leaving the stupid peeled whale there on the beach, bloody and white, a muscle skeleton, eyes bulging and mouth open, still smiling, the sun setting over the waves.