Thomas Mixon

Rematch

Before the rematch, on the jumbotron, we see what happened after last week’s fight. We see the locker room, the victor toweling off, in good spirits, only to be blindsided, attacked by the loser. The loser is slightly bigger, but both men look generally the same, long hair, half-beards. The loser is kicking the victor’s bad leg, a former injury we are reminded of, because the loser asks, “I’m sorry, is this your bad leg?” before kicking it again and again. The camera fades to black with white-centered text that says Tuesday, before revealing the victor’s bedroom. We know it’s the victor’s bedroom because he has posters on the wall of his brother, his brother winning the title, his brother embracing the loser, which reminds us that the victor’s brother and the loser were once friends, and fought side by side, until the loser turned on the victor’s brother. We’re a little fuzzy on where the victor’s brother is now, but only for a moment, because in storms the loser, breaking open the victor’s bedroom door, screaming, “Playing house while your ____  brother’s off with that ____ in Paris?” The bleeps remind us that this is a family show, and also that the loser used to be married, to the women’s champion, before she ran off with the victor’s brother. The loser pummels the victor’s leg, which, in order to ensure we recall how bad it is, is in a cast and elevated. The victor cries, and we can’t tell whether it is due to the pain from the pummeling, or the fact that his brother ran off with the women’s champion, to Paris, where, we’re reminded by desecrated French flags taped to the bedroom wall, the victor is either not allowed in or hates, or both. A certain amount of confusion and ambiguity is good, like when the loser suddenly ‘sees’ the camera filming all this, and screams, “Get out of here!” which makes no sense, since this is all rehearsed, and fake, but it furthers the drama, and cultivates a kind of honesty we are unable to achieve even when we say the most basic things, in our own life, where we have never once broken our leg. The camera cuts out instead of fading to black, and white-centered text appears that says Wednesday. We see the victor in a wheelchair, at the grocery store. He is paying for his items when the cashier tears off a wig and we come to understand this was another setup, that the loser was pretending to be a cashier at the grocery store, and was waiting for this exact moment to further pummel the victor’s leg. The pummeling is captured by the close-up camera we’re familiar with, but also a black and white security camera, and also a ‘fan’ camera. Then, we feel our pocket buzz, and the app we had to download in order to show our tickets is prompting us to allow the app to access the camera on our phone, which of course we do, and then it is us filming, for we see the loser carrying the victor on his back, down the walkway. When we position the pair in the center of our screen we’re rewarded with an x-ray effect, so that we can see the bones of the victor’s leg, under the cast, shattered in many places. We follow the pair with our phone as they make their way to the ring, and, with the x-ray effect still enabled, we can see that under the ring, beneath the canvas, the victor’s brother is crouching, ready to pounce. We do not know if he is there to save the victor, or turn on him, and we are fine with either, or both, because duplicity is one of those concepts that should be very easy to comprehend, in theory, but in reality is muddled by love, money, or even something as basic as what to eat for dinner, which reminds us that we were running late, and didn’t get to eat dinner before the rematch. We were calling our own brother, on the little screen that now is displaying a displaced tibia and fibula, helpfully highlighted and named. We had our brother’s contact profile pulled up, just his first name and a missing photo, which we’ve always meant to add, because the default of the silhouette blank face is terrible, and scares us, and we’d like to think that maybe that is the reason we don’t talk to our brother often, that it is technology’s fault, that it is all a misunderstanding. But the truth is there was always a restraint between us, even that time he almost broke our leg, as children, practicing the same moves that we’ve come here to see tonight. It didn’t quite happen, was only bruised, just as it appears the legs of the victor’s brother are, under the ring, for it seems he is trapped under there, and we don’t know if something’s gone wrong, or if this is part of the show, and we are a little too distracted to discern, because now we are thinking of our brother, and how we were so close to pushing the little icon, next to his name, on our screen, earlier, knowing he was in the same city, for neither of us have ever been able to leave. How easy it would have been to call him, and say, “I have two tickets for the rematch tonight,” because we do have two tickets, because we’ve been buying an extra ticket each year that the show comes to our city, which is every year, which we feel ridiculous about, because the tickets are expensive and we let one go to waste, each year. With all that money we could have bought a plane ticket to Paris, which we’ve always wanted to go to, which our brother used to make fun of us for, and we know it’s cliche but there is something so magical and refined and simple and sincere about walking with a baguette on the street, and eating it, and drinking wine, and we suppose we could do this in our city, but we’ve never had the guts, and no one would know us in Paris, we’d be surrounded by others, not from Paris, doing the things they always imagined people in Paris do, which would then make it come true, since all of us would actually be doing it, and none of us would know the others were not from Paris, and of course everyone in Paris would know none of us were from Paris, but we wouldn’t know that. And right on cue, we hear music, which is patriotic but not of this country, which our phone helpfully labels as the French national anthem, telling us to please rise, which is unnecessary since we are already standing, which reminds us that we’ve never had a broken leg, and maybe the reason we derive such pleasure from seeing the victor’s leg completely mutilated is because we’ve always wanted the story of our own broken leg, which has been denied to us, due to our brother not being strong enough, our brother channeling his energy toward making fun of us wanting to go to Paris, instead of focusing hard enough to break our leg. There is commotion coming from the main aisle, and a path is cleared, and the women’s champion appears, carrying a large ladder, designed to look like the Eiffel Tower, and the victor and the loser in the ring are stunned, and stop fighting, and we are screaming, because she is pushing the ladder under the ring, and we can see on our phone that it is crushing the victor’s brother, and it doesn’t look like she’s doing it on purpose, it looks like a plan gone awry, and she has no idea, she’s pushing and pushing it, and is waiting for a specific reaction, and not getting it, which we identify with. We think, of course, we have been waiting and waiting for our brother to call us, each year, and when it doesn’t happen we buy two tickets for the front row, and wonder if he will watch the broadcast when it airs, and regard the empty seat next to us with curiosity, shame, jealousy, regret, yearning, and we realize these aren’t our words at all, that we’re being fed these words on the jumbotron, that some kind of pre-recorded trailer is playing now because there is definitely something wrong with the show. A bunch of actors wearing faux custom and border patrol uniforms are given some sort of signal, for just as they are about to bound down the aisle, toward the women’s champion, they turn around, and look very, very scared. Which is when we realize it, yes, it was the women’s champion that wasn’t allowed in our country. That is why the victor’s brother went to Paris. That is the origin. That is why all of this has happened. That is why we escape from the confusion, our screen warning us that we will not be readmitted to the arena, our screen warning us that we are getting farther from our car, our screen warning us about the wind chill and potential for ice. That is why we think of streets we’ve never walked, as we walk the familiar streets, a path we’ve not taken in years, but which our body remembers, stopping at the corner store which doesn’t have a single bottle of wine, which is fine, because we don’t have the courage yet to carry something so large with us when we are trying to hold on with everything we’ve got to what is inside us, this little spark in the freezing temperature of our soul, as we buy a can of beer and walk the familiar streets, across the city, pretending we’re in Paris though there’s nothing magical or refined or simple or sincere about these buildings, this unromantic pavement, slipping just as we are thinking about cobblestones, just as we make it to where our brother lives. We panic, because we’ve fallen, and our leg hurts real bad, and we discover, in this moment, that no, we don’t want a broken leg, or, yes, maybe we do, but not like this, please let our tibia and fibula be OK, we need to be going, we shouldn’t be here, a light is turning on in our brother’s house, and it’s only a matter of time before he comes out, and finds us, like this, on the ground and cradling our leg, which he should have broken when he had the chance, my brother, we could have had a story, we could have had a better story than this, we could have gone to the rematch tonight, together, we could have gone to Paris, we could have gone to the hospital, had you just pressed a little harder on my bones back then, not telling Mom, you carrying me yourself, all the way there, just as I’ve carried myself, all the way here, to you, standing above me, in short sleeves despite the cold, arms crossed, the universal symbol for you’re on your own, and you’ve got to get up by yourself, you've got to get up, get up. Except.