Record Three: Shame

  There’s no full-contact sparring at the tournament this year; I’m in point sparring, which I’ve been told is a great way to fight and not get hurt. We fight on a padded blue wrestling mat, wearing helmets, jocks, padded gloves, and body armour. In point sparring, fighters hit cautiously—not trying to knock each other out, just trying to win points by tapping the opponent.

  I gaze at the other side of the gym. The adult tai chi competition is still going on. Old Chinese people in traditional silk suits predominate, but there is one tall black man with dreads waiting patiently for his turn to perform.

  I put my foot on the blue mat. It’s cold. My feet are sweating, and the material slips a bit under me.

  “Got your jock?” Mike asks. I nod, make a fist, and knock my groin. A hollow thump comes from the plastic cup beneath my pants. “Got your mouthguard?”

  “Yesh.” I say. I bite down. The moulded black plastic champs down on my teeth.

  Simo, one of the teachers at my school, walks by us. “(Name) is fighting first. Where’s his armor? Strap him in!”

  It’s happening. It’s actually happening. My chest is light. I wonder if I’m breathing weird.

  The gym blurs around me. The judges are organizing—taking their places at the four corners of the mat. The judges are kung fu masters from across Ontario. At a grey folding table a few feet off, Martin and Nick—more volunteers from my school—are sitting with a timer and a scorecard. They’ll keep track of the judges’ rulings. Martin and Nick are on the same level as me at the school, but there are younger students here too, and older ones who came to compete.

  Mike slaps my back, and I jolt out of my freeze. He heaves a black mesh bag over his shoulder. He loosens the drawstring and dumps a heap of sparring gear on the ground. I pick up a padded helmet.

  “Let me do that,” Mike says. I hand it over to him and he undoes the straps. “Find gloves.”

  I search in the pile of equipment, and pull out a pair of red Everlast gloves. I unstrap them from each other and pull them on. They’re light. Not much protective padding. I twist my lip again.

  Mike fits the helmet over my head. A black plastic grid slips over my face, a visor cuts my peripheral vision.

  “Fits good?” Mike asks. The white vinyl slides around my forehead and ears. I shift the helmet around until it feels secure, and nod. Mike pulls the Velcro straps across the back, locking me in. “Yo, remember to be aggressive,” he says. “You’re too nice.”

  I nod. In the month that I’ve been practising sparring, Mike and the others have had to actively train me to hit people in the face.

  Mike turns me around and nods. “Good. Here, raise your hands. Let’s get this wrap on you.”

  Mike picks up a foam chest guard from the floor and wraps it around me. It fits under my armpits and bulges a bit when it meets my gut. Mike straps me in at the back like a debutante getting her corset on.

  My opponent is on the other side. He’s got one of his own helpers fitting him in. He doesn’t have my self-consciousness. He just stands and stares while they pull cords and tighten straps. His gloved hands idly tap each other.

  Sifu, my master, is the ref for this division. A tall, energetic man with close-cropped hair and a champion poker face. He talks to each judge at their respective corners of the mat and then comes out into the centre. He points at me, at the other guy, and gestures for us to come onto the mat.

  Mike thumps my shoulder. “You’re up, man.”

  I step onto the mat. My chest is light and bubbly. The mat feels cold against my feet. My feet feel unsecured without my shoes. I feel off-balance.

  My opponent doesn’t look fazed. His helmet doesn’t have a grid, and it pushes his face into the shape of a T. His lips are pushed out from the thick black mouthguard bulging over his teeth.

  Sifu looks to the judges. He nods to himself. “Okay, bow to each other.”

  We bow.

  “Bow to me,” Sifu says.

  We bow to Sifu.

  “Good. Gloves up.”

  Sifu holds our gloves in place.

  It’s going to be okay, I say. There’s just three rounds of thirty seconds. If I freeze up, I just have to back away and circle around until the clock runs out.

  I feel like I’m outside my body.

  “Ready?” Sifu asks.

  Our hands edge up against each other. I breathe and try to detect subtle movements—will he try to push my hand down and go straight for my face? Or will he retreat? Will he attack right away, or will he—

  “Go!” Sifu shouts.

  I lunge forward. My lead hand pushes to disable his jabbing arm. He retreats and throws a cross from his other hand.

  It hits my face like a brick.

  My head snaps. I reel back. My vision fuzzes. That was way too hard for point sparring, I think.

  I don’t notice my hands are down. He comes forward. He does a jab-cross combo on my face and I can’t think anymore. I back off. The punches don’t make sense. Too fast. I dodge two, but get clipped three times on the left.

  “Stop!” Sifu shouts.

  The other guy stops. I catch my breath. Thank God. I made it through the round.

  Sifu points at me. “Out of bounds.”

  I look down. My feet are off the mat. The round isn’t over; I just got penalized for stepping out.

  We set up again in the centre of the ring. My head is ringing. A dull, warm pain is trickling down my neck.

  “More control,” Sifu says to the other guy. “You don’t need to hit that hard.” The other guy nods.

  “Ready. Go!” Sifu shouts.

  I switch up my feet and look for an opening. The guy hasn’t retreated yet. And for a second it looks like I have better footwork. That’s my advantage. I shift and cock my back hand for a punch.

  A fist looms in my vision. Bam! My head flies back.

  What happened to control? I back off to the side of the ring. The guy isn’t turning so fast. Maybe I can circle around and—

  “Stop!” Sifu shouts. “Judges call!”

  The round is over. The judges at the corner of the ring all raise their hands. They’re voting on who won the round. Everyone has their right hand raised—the other guy’s side. Simo is there too. She’s voting for him. Don’t I get points for fighting spirit?

  “Good.” Sifu calls us back to the centre. He holds our gloves together.

  Sifu looks at me. “Ready?”

  I nod.

  “Circle (Name)!” Geoff shouts from the side. “Remember to circle!”

  Good idea.

  We set up into a fighting stance. I get my feet confused—can’t remember which side goes in front—and shift around to get into the proper stance. Sifu holds both of our gloves.

  My vision narrows to the gloves, brushing each other, both tense, ready to hit. This time I’ll be ready.

  “Ready!” Sifu shouts. “Go!”

  I bat his lead hand aside and step to the side, circling. I see an opening.

  Bam. He clips me with a jab. Pain shoots down my neck. Where’d that come from?

  Bam. Another hit. My vision blurs. My body jerks back. My hands are down.

  Thwack.

  A massive hit erupts near my ear. I spin. The gym blurs grey, and tilts. My knees hit the cool, soft mat.

  It’s calm on the mat, and I consider falling onto it. No fighting down there. I catch a big breath of air, and realize I haven’t been breathing. Someone shouts. I can’t hear it. I can’t hear anything except static and a high tone like a TV tuned wrong.

  I gulp for air. I readjust my helmet—it’s slid over my face. My vision is back. I can hear in my left ear, but nothing in my right. I breathe a few more times. I think my eardrum has burst.

  That was a haymaker: the brute-force punch boxers use to get KOs. Who uses a haymaker in a point sparring match?

  “Hey!”

  I look up. Sifu’s face stares down at me.

  “Huh?” I ask. The hearing comes back in my right ear. br />
  “You okay?” Sifu asks. I’ve never seen emotion get past Sifu’s customary poker face, but I can see he’s worried now. Do I look that bad?

  I force myself to jump to my feet. I nod to Sifu. He nods back.

  We set up again. When Sifu tells us to start, the opponent comes at me, hands already striking. I crumple into a defensive position. For the next thirty seconds, I’m a punching bag. He rains down jabs and crosses, and I just stand and take them as best I can. I can’t remember what I’m doing. I just want it to end. I’m sick of fighting. I suck at fighting. Who the hell throws a haymaker in a point sparring match?

  “Stop!” Sifu shouts. “Judges call!”

  My opponent straightens up and heads back to the centre of the ring. I walk up to Sifu, who’s surveying the judges. I tap on his shoulder dumbly.

  “That’s it?” I ask Sifu.

  “That’s it,” he says. “Practise more next time.”

  I walk with Sifu back to the centre of the ring, where my opponent is standing.

  “Okay, bow to each other,” Sifu says. We bow.

  “Bow to me,” Sifu says. We bow to him.

  Sifu grabs both of our hands. He holds the other guy’s glove up.

  “Winner!” Sifu shouts. Everyone claps.

  The guy turns to me. Not knowing what else to do, I bow to him again. He bows back.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  I head back to my own side of the ring with a sore neck and a ringing head. No one looks at me.

  Mike is the first to come up. He pats my on the shoulder while he undoes the straps of my armour.

  “You were too nice again.”

  The others come after. They each have their own take on what happened.

  “That guy was crazy.”

  “He was way too aggressive. I hope Mike puts him down.”

  “It happens to everyone on their first time.”

  I nod, smile, and watch the rest of the fights. Everyone is nice to me for the rest of the day.

  Fool Myself

  (Name Withdrawn)

  Sunlight slips through the half-open blinds over the crossed window. I sit, apprehensive, a tic-tac-toe grid of red lines down my left wrist. I watch the counsellor—also a former French teacher—’s face from the side as she types something up on her computer. She turns. Dust floats over the couch below the window and across to me. I shift in my chair and wipe the sweat from my palm on my pant leg. There’s no sign of emotion beneath her burnt orange curls.

  “No, I won’t tell anyone. Unless you tell me you’re actually planning to,” she says. “Then I have to tell your parents, the police… everyone.”

  Everyone. What a funny word. The difference between what it means to me and what it means to her. For me, everyone already knows. They knew when I approached them in the gym—the gym-come-backstage dressing room for the play—and asked, one by one, “If I told you I would give you ten minutes to convince me not to commit suicide… what would you do?” They would talk to me. They would call someone. They would cry. They would make heartfelt gestures like “Promise me you’ll call me before you think of anything like that…” For me, the “everyone” of the woman across the desk from me is, in the grand scheme of things, a non-entity. A no-one who shouldn’t be included.

  It’s my mom taking a slow seat on the couch, half-facing me on my computer—a mirror image of the dusty sunlit situation in the counsellor’s office—to say her sister-in-law told her something, something she heard from my cousin.

  There are so many things to tell. This play is The Diary of Anne Frank. I’m Peter, Anne’s best friend. And Sylvie is Anne. Sylvie, whom I love, to the point of death, but who doesn’t love me back. She’s after Rob.

  Sylvie, with her chestnut hair… that picture of her on her Facebook, where she’s climbing on a bridge in the woods… She was the one who inspired me to go nature-walking. You never think about how there has to be a second person there to take the photo. Sylvie has been so kind to me. One night on MSN Liz stopped talking to me because I don’t make a good friend—I’m arrogant—and Sylvie was there to talk to me about it. That’s when I told her all about how I felt.

  “I’m so sorry for causing you any pain,” she said. “Believe me, that is the last thing I would want in the world. I am glad you told me, though. I knew for so long that something was going on… and it killed me to see you hiding it from me.”

  Killed. Another funny word.

  I keep looking over old MSN conversations but I’m not old enough to hate myself for them yet.

  I shift on the chair again and let the counsellor know I understand. And thanks for keeping it confidential.

  “Would you like to sit on the couch and we can talk about it?”

  Would I? No. Do I have to? Yes. I can’t believe my friends told her about this. I can’t believe it. A secret I entrusted to them. I get up and go over to the black couch. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, I realize, my shoulder heating up under the sunlight. The counsellor starts telling me my own history. She turns people’s words into nicer versions of themselves. “Manipulation” becomes a story about drawing on a network of friends, drawing emotional water from them like a well, but never being satisfied, and expanding this network more and more and making those first few friends feel useless and yet somehow used.

  Sylvie now puts the é in her last name on Facebook, maybe because I insisted on using the original French form. You never know with these things.

  One day it was Rob’s cast on stage, which meant Sylvie’s and mine was off. But Sylvie promised Rob she’d watch him from the audience. It was his last performance, after all. We were helping the cast get made up and set up the stage and props, and then all of a sudden the house was hot, and the actors had to get backstage and everyone else infiltrate the wings or the audience. I slunk away to a little carpeted staircase leading up to a nameless door in the back corner of the gym, and I watched everyone put away what they were doing in the bright light and file out the doors. I sat and I watched Sylvie.

  Someone turned off the lights and it became very dim. Sylvie noticed my look, hesitated a moment between the stage and the staircase, and walked over to me. A few days had passed now since I asked her what she would do if she had to save me from myself.

  She sat beside me and embraced me.

  I buried my face in her chestnut hair, cradled on her shoulder.

  She talked to me. And Liz came over, too, and sat two steps up from us, and talked.

  I often remember the smell of her hair now, even while I’m talking to the guidance counsellor here, and I close my eyes and bring my chin down to my clavicle and let the image fill my mind’s eye.

  She got up to go to the washroom, and Liz left with her.

  “Can we talk about the origin of your feelings?” asks the counsellor. “Would you say that they are… centred on this girl. It’s been a couple of months now, said your friends, since you’ve been acting like this, but perhaps you’ve been feeling this way since November… October… maybe even earlier.” She scrunches up her forehead and tries to hold my eyes with hers.

  “My friends? Which friends specifically talked to you?” I pry.

  As soon as Sylvie left the gym, and I was alone in that dark space, a strut chinked free from my internal dam. Suddenly I was crying in a way I hadn’t cried since I was a child. I was astonished by how much I was crying and could tell it was coming from the shock of realization, the realization of the gravity of my spontaneous words, my weapons. I brought my fingers to my face to stop the tears. Sobs escaped from my lips. It didn’t feel good.

  And then there she was again, holding me, sitting me down on the step.

  “Sometimes,” I shuddered, “I see you. I stared at the wall… I literally saw you, like a hallucination. Once during rehearsal I saw you and Rob talking, and you weren’t really there…”

  She nodded.

  “And I’ll be lying in bed… imagining if you came into the room, eve
n though it’s probabilistically impossible, and I’ll… move over, to one side of the bed, and save a space for you... I know you can’t actually appear in my hallway.”

  She nodded.

  Somewhere deep inside, deeper even than I’m letting myself think about, I know I only imagined hallucinating. I like to fool myself.

  My throat and forehead hurt from crying. “Sylvie,” I stuttered, “I’m insane.”

  “No!”

  Before I could even raise my face and show my confusion, she continued in a whisper.

  “Not insane.”

  And then Rob was standing there over our embrace. I observed to Sylvie that my crying had made her shirt wet. He observed that she’d missed his performance.

  The counsellor won’t even tell me which friends came to her regarding me.

  One day I’ll be unendingly, gaspingly aware of the intolerability of my person: I’ll read those records I thought it so important to save and hear myself pronounce those insults, those sheer arrogant insults I made to the most rational people I knew. And I’ll understand just how see-through I was myself, how hollow I looked to all these people who looked after me. For now—just resentment at having my feelings given away to…

  The counsellor pauses, straightens her blouse, fixes her glasses. I look away from her, out the window, but it’s all just illuminated dust.

  From behind me her voice says, “Talking seriously, now, between you and me, whom you can trust, isn’t it possible that this suicidal tendency is, well, perhaps just to get attention?”

  There’s one thing I know I didn’t dream up; as I told Sylvie one day in the midst of all of this: I went on a nature walk, at last. It was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. It began simply enough: a walk down the path I never finished but intended to. It was warm and sunny, the leaves were all over… I noticed that it looked cool off to one side off the path. So I departed from the path. And everywhere I turned, every direction, was a new delight, more and more wonderful and beautiful, until I came to a hill which was at such a slant that the sun was just over its ridge. Now, somehow it got into my mind that God was waiting just over the ridge—I don’t know how I imagined it. And that he would say, “Luke, are you willing to give up everything and everyone and come to heaven right now?” And I was practicing my answer aloud (I was delirious!): “Yes, yes, yes!” And I was more than a little surprised not to see anyone there. Then I realized how silly I was being. But I kept walking past the hill, by now very happy with the beauty. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more to do than go to heaven immediately. Because, I reasoned, heaven must be like this, only better. So I kept walking. Finally I came to this large crevice with a path in the centre, and of course immediately descended and walked in it, as there were lots of leaves that had gathered there. I went up the slope on the other side and found I was on a hill looking over all the forest I’d just been to. I fell back against a tree, and was sobbing with joy, and afterwards I just sat there, my back to the tree, staring in wonder and awe, and I wished I could do that forever—just sit there and watch the trees drop their leaves one by one, and the leaves gently float to land at my feet.