Wherein I question my senses.
I’ve been over this night countless times in my mind. There’s so much I don’t understand, so much that seems to mutate in my memory the longer I think about it. A shadow of darkness falls over the whole memory. Ultimately I know I shouldn’t try to understand it, but recount it as best as I can remember. Maybe you will understand better than me.
I stood in the middle of the hobo camp in what was their boxing ring. Though I was surrounded by hundreds of homeless gentlemen, an eerie, oppressive silence had descended over the area. I could hear the wind as it whipped over the top of the basin out onto the cracked desert. All I could feel were my conflicted emotions swirling within me as I stood in front of my final opponent.
In a twisted betrayal, I found I was to fight Swearing Jim. Since I had first joined the hobo community, Jim had always been my protector, my mentor, and my sponsor. I would not be here if it was not for him and his kindness. Now all that kindness had been upended. As I fought my way around the hobo boxing circuit, he was my manager, the one who arranged my fights, who trained me. It was his effort that brought me to the notice of the Tournament of Champeens. It was all through his efforts that I was brought here. I had thought he had my best interests in mind. Now everything he had ever done for me was in question.
The Jim that stood before me was not the Jim I had known. I had known a happy bearded man bundled in old patchwork clothes, fond of giving me advice and occasionally telling me how to throw a better punch. Before me stood a different man, one of intensity. This bare-chested man was covered in scars and sinewy muscles. There was a ferocity to his eyes that I had never seen before. Something behind his eyes was old, far older than I would guess Jim was. Behind that I saw a darkness that made me look away.
“Why?” I asked him. There was more pain in my voice than I had realized.
“I knew it would be you,” he said with a glimmer within those dark eyes. “I saw your potential in that first punch. You had the raw talent. I knew you would be the one to make it here. “
“But why? I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me you were training me for this?”
“Knowing your destination was not required. It gets in the way. It’s been a problem before.”
“Before? I’m not the first you’ve played this sick game with?”
“Not the first,” he said with a grim smile, “and not the last.” And then there was a redoubled intensity in his eyes.
“I still don’t understand,” I said pitifully. “Why? Why this game?”
“I need a worthy opponent,” he said, his teeth gritted. “And if none exists, I am willing to make one.”
“So I had to become worthy?”
“Oh, you haven’t proven yourself worthy yet,” he said. “Oh no, not yet.” His voice changed with that last sentence. And things were suddenly very different.
He inhaled deeply and I felt the air shift. All around me, the hundreds of hobos suddenly became less distinct. Since Jim had appeared, they had all stayed silent and immobile, when just seconds before they had been cheering rambunctiously. Now they were grey and transparent, each face dour and forlorn.
He exhaled and I could see his breath. I suddenly felt colder. Goosebumps prickled my skin. I shivered involuntarily as the wind picked up. Jim’s eyes began to glow faintly. A whitish – almost blue light – filled his entire eye sockets. He inhaled again and flexed his arms. The other hobos became even less distinct, a crowd of grey lost souls. I began to wonder where I really was.
As he exhaled, I saw his cold breath again. Whitish blue flames appeared around his hands, like strange will o’wisps. Those flames also began burning in his eyes. I suddenly felt dizzy, the air around me thick.
“This is a test,” he said, his voice reverberating all around me. In the air, the ground, inside my head. He raised his fists. “Your test.”
“A test of what?” I asked, pulling myself into the best fighting stance I could. I had trouble finding my balance. His voice continued to echo in my head after he stopped talking, the word “test” bouncing around and colliding with my thoughts. It was a hot throbbing vertigo that reduced my will to nothing, just a faint whisper fighting against the echo.
He came at me then. I felt it before I saw it. There was a sudden feeling of heat in my mind and a cold tingling on my skin. I drunkenly began moving as soon as I felt these odd sensations. I barely had the willpower to move – I felt like I was trying to move jello by poking it with a stick. But somehow I did it, tumbling out of the way before I saw Jim move. I barely saw him move. He suddenly became transparent as a blur of afterimages lunged towards my location, those white blue flames barely missing me.
I stumbled across the ground, barely maintaining my balance. I somehow managed to stand back up and swung my body around. I have had drunken binges where I could control myself better. Something was making me fall apart inside, and I was not sure how long I could keep it together.
“Good!” said his twisted voice. “You impress me, boy. Few are able to move once they get started. But, so you don’t get cocky…”
I saw him inhale, then he streaked towards me, punching me in the face. His knuckles were burning and sharp as they scraped across my skin. Pale white light flashed in my mind when he made the connection. For a second I teetered, but then he lunged from the opposite direction, breaking my ribs in two places with a devastating punch to my chest. The impact made the sound like the crack of whip and I saw white light again. I had barely time to acknowledge this when he came at me again. A punch to my stomach caused blood fill in my mouth and more white light. The blur that was Jim stopped ten feet away and appeared to breathe cold air again.
I teetered in the air. I was going to fall. My legs were unharmed, but between the new pain I was in, the vertigo I had been fighting against, and blood in my mouth, I was going to fall. Moreso, I wanted to fall. I was out of my league. I felt like I was going to die and I was ready to let that happen. I had been trying so hard to keep myself together, but now I was ready to give up on it all, just to let go and finally rest. Let the darkness overtake me… it seemed so easy.
I began to fall. But suddenly Jim was next to be grabbing my left arm. I didn’t even see him move. One second he was ten feet away, the next he was clutching my arm in a death grip. Where he touched my arm I felt an icy cold.
“Not yet,” he said.
I felt that frostbitten cold coursing through my veins as I felt something torn from me. I could only focus on the white-blue fire in Jim’s eyes as he stared at me.
“Not yet,” he repeated. “We’ll meet again,” he said, releasing my arm. I fell to the ground.
It wasn’t my loss of consciousness that made the next thing happen. It was not my vision going black. I swear I saw it. All around me, the crowd of hobos faded away, their grey forms becoming more and more transparent until they were gone. Then Jim began to fade away as well, until just the white-blue lights in his eyes remained. In a moment those ghost lights also slowly faded away. I lost consciousness seconds after.
* * *
When I awoke it was daylight. I was still in the basin where the tournament took place, thought it was different. It was the same place, though wrong. It was not how I remembered it. The rock formations were the same, though the stream which had flowed through it was a tepid trickle of water.
What was jarring was that there was no sign of the tournament. No tents, no garbage, no forgotten belongings. There were not even the remnants of the fire pits. This was strange, because even if they packed up and left without me, there should have been some trace. There should have been some sign it was here, some mark of the gathering of hundreds of men. Tent pole holes, ashes, cans of beans – something. But there was nothing left.
It was like they was never there.
My head spun. Did it really happen? Was it some strange dream? Had someone slipped me some drug along the road and in a hallucination I walked here? Maybe I had some bad beans on the train going west and I had leapt off of my own accord, wandering the desert until I sobered up here. Perhaps I had just missed the tournament and it had happened somewhere else. I was just mistaken and delusional. So many possible explanations flooded my mind. I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to be able to slot my memories in some safe box.
I’m not sure what I wanted to believe. Did I want to believe I was at some midnight tournament that didn’t exist in the morning? Did I want to believe I was at a gathering of hundreds of homeless who abandoned me? Did I want to believe I was simply hallucinating and had wandered the desert far from friends? Did I want to believe in a man with death in his eyes?
No, I did not.
I tried to shake off the thoughts as I raised myself from the ground. My body hurt in so many places it was hard to get up. Breathing had me wince with pain. Maybe I had fallen into this basin? My left arm was cold and numb. When I looked at my arm, I caught my breath. A shiver went through my body and I felt something cold in the pit of my stomach. There are things I can deny, there are things I can believe I was mistaken about. There are things I can reinterpret, and there are things I can dismiss. But this? No, I knew what happened last night.
On my left upper arm was the worst bruise I had ever had. It was a dark purple mark, almost black. The mark was exactly in the shape of Jim’s hand, when he held me in his icy grasp. And as I looked down my arm to my hand, I had another shock.
In my hand was held the bowler hat I had received for winning the tournament.
A cold wind howled over the top of the basin, almost sounding like a sinister laugh.
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