A Boy Is Burning

“How does it feel?” The heat has long since sucked all the air out of this concrete room. Everything is choked with dust and sweat. Behind the bars of the helmet there is nothing but my own breath. Hot and stale and ancient. A plastic suit rustles like dead leaves when I move. It traps heat against the skin, seals tight against the body. Black and glossy like garbage bags.

It leaks all the fluid out of me because water is life but it is also an infection.

“Good. I suppose.” I try to keep my back to the wall like he had taught me. In here, walls are easy to find but hard to touch. The pads on my shoulders cleave an uneasy space between me and the stone where no comfort can be found. My fingers reach back to trace along the cinderblock so I can still feel attached to something.

“You suppose?” He doesn’t open his mouth much when he speaks, the words scraping out between cracked lips and facial hair. A camel burning short and trailing away into an acrid smell. I wonder how he can stand to smoke when I can’t even breathe.

“A little loose, I think.”

“Most boys complain about it being too tight.”

“Won’t I get knocked around if it ain’t snug?”

He picks the cigarette out of his mouth like it’s a sand spur, flicks it down onto the floor where it sputters out in a pile of grass stained jerseys. He steps forward and all at once I am reminded of how he is 6’2 and I am 5’7. He is 48 and I am 15. He will be gone in two years and I will still be standing here.

“You’ll be getting knocked around either way.”

He smacks the side of the helmet with a pop and a rattle, banging my head around inside the plastic and padding. I think of war movies, the kind where soldiers hold onto lines inside a plane that’s wheezing apart, where they have to follow the lead until the very end. A jump into nothing at all. Fog and clouds and burning. German flak gnashing up into the void, hungry for the meat that tumbles alone somewhere up in all that darkness. Maybe one of them gets shot. Maybe most of them do. It depends on the kind of picture.

“Give it a year or two,” he says, grabbing the collar of my shoulder pads, yanking me away from my reverie before I can see any parachutes. I’m grateful that he can’t find my neck. “You’ll be too big for them, soon enough.”

At once, I am filled with a longing for something that I haven’t even grown to need, something I haven’t even lost yet.

He pulls me away from the wall and I hustle outside, sun bleeding colors across a barren field. He runs me up and down, switching back at every yard line until those colors all run red and hazy, until everything is lost in nausea and waves of heat distortion. I puke at the 45 yard line. Mucus and bile spilling down through the bars. His voice is somewhere far away.

I take off my helmet and quickly learn why that is a mistake. Inside the helmet, you are safe. Not the kind of safe that can stop the hurting, the kind where when something bad happens you can be assured that it wasn’t your fault. You followed orders. You pulled the ripcord at 2000 feet. You did what you were supposed to, doesn’t matter if you have a concussion or bruises on your throat or a tracer round through your skull or large swaths of your childhood that you can no longer remember. If you do what you’re told, you don’t hurt like a bitch, you hurt like a man. You have permission to hold the scars of your labor as trophies rather than failures. Do not take off your helmet.

He runs me for another two hours, head still ringing and jaw still stinging. The taste of iron and acid on my tongue. Thick and foaming. A full body chemical reaction. Muscles babbling in a language of spasm and flame. There is only heat. If my body burns today, boils inside the bag, what will be left? Will there be anything underneath when the flesh turns black and brittle, when the tendons peel away? Will there be a self after the flecks of ash in my eyes blot out the world?

Don’t be silly. There never was a self. There never was a thing called you. In the same way that zero is not a number. In the same way that nowhere has never been a place. There is only an illusion of a boy that could’ve grown up to be something else, someday soon that will be gone too. And then there is only a hunger that you will follow, a figure on the edge of a feverish condition. He stands tall and dark over a strange horizon. He will never meet your longing gaze until that fateful day when that nothing is excised, and in its place, the hulking new. Muscle corded in violence. A predator burst from the skin.

Until then, you will blacken and broil, a trial by fire that will not cease until the day you die. Until then, you keep your head down, pump those legs, never look queer, never ever cry, pick your switch, take what’s due, learn to get hit, and learn to hide your bruises. Maybe one day you’ll get to hit back. Until then you are nothing. You’re just a boy.

And a boy is burning.

I leave my pads and helmet behind. A towel over my shoulder like a white flag. I amble over to a set of squat buildings some ways beyond the field and the supply room and the heat. A sterile little rec center, halogen bars over sweaty carpet and old machines. Housewives lie on their backs in a yoga class, legs spread, stiff as dolls. No one looks at me. No one even smells me.

In the locker room, middle aged men in towels with hairy arms and ogreish gaits. Their voices boom off tile. Some are naked. I try to keep my back to the wall. I choose the shower in the far corner. The yellow curtain. It is lonely and dark, it smells of lysol and mildew. I sit in cold puddles and let the water drool over me. I find myself thinking of caves, of dens. I keep my eyes on the curtain. I keep my hands in fists.

When I weigh myself on the scale, it shows that I have lost 11 pounds in one day. When I leave the building, I know that no one will be waiting for me outside, he’s already gone. When I get home, my mother will ask me how my day went and I’ll ask her the same. We’ll both make up excuses for our twitchy dispositions, our hearts hardened by lies meant to protect the other from truth, a depth of estrangement founded on a false compassion. It sinks like a stone into the cold black that shame only knows.

In a year and a half, I will be 16. I will have a BMI of 22.38. I will be 30 pounds heavier, most of it muscle. I will be a starting defensive linebacker, and I’ll have had three concussions in the span of a season. Two on the field, one off it.

I will dream of werewolves every night. Stalking across wet tile. Biting me and filling me with their infection. I’ll wake up every day feeling sicker even as I get stronger. People will value me more for all the wounds I take in secret. Girls will ask me about the scar across my face and I’ll say nothing about the sharp metal tongue of a belt buckle or hospital waiting rooms. They see only the results of pain, not it’s processes, which will remain buried under the skin, the collar of a shirt, and my mother’s concealer. I will shrink away from everything. I will lose my life and gain only muscle mass and latent brain damage. I will have no friends. And that won’t change.

And he won’t change, he will only get worse. A history of chronic violence can only accumulate, the finger can’t be taken off the trigger. Only squeezed until you can feel the break. Nice and easy like, little by little. And then all at once. Giving way like a broken windpipe.

#

On July 1st, my father drives the cornerback home. He tells me to walk. I don’t know if it is a punishment or a gift. As I stand there, watching the truck kick up dust, I think that nothing could be more normal and I think about how good it must feel to be the kid. To take off your helmet, to let the wind touch the skin for once. Cleats in the remnants of midsummer rain, leaning against a pallet of wood that rattles whenever the truck hits rough road. Nothing could be more normal. Do you think he feels the same way, as the truck slows to a crawl on a backroad? As my father asks him to step out onto the shoulder. Why wouldn’t you trust your coach?

On July 1st, my father kills the cornerback. Strikes him over the head with a 2×4 so hard that it snaps, cracks the grain and splits the skull. Stabs the splinters into the hollow of the boy’s throat. Tears the skin and all the fruit out from beneath. Warm and flowing when he puts his hands over the boy’s neck and squeezes until there is nothing left.

He plans to drive home, has rich aspirations of becoming a family annihilator. The shotgun and sealed letter in the passenger seat can attest. Instead, he flees into the woods. He hides until the sheriff finds the boy with his neck still blooming blood and the stench of death.

When they find my father, he begs to be shot.

At trial, his attorney shows slides of brain scans. Head injuries he suffered in college football. Impact after impact. Early onset dementia. Severe CTE resulting in impaired judgement and high aggression. The prosecutor reads a transcript of his written confession: “There are winners and losers, not just in the world but in the world that comes after. I wanted to take all I could with me, because it all stays. The souls of those you kill are bound to you in flesh and they are your slaves for all time.”

No one will bring up what he did to me. Only I hold those memories, and they only breach the surface when I am on the field. Its rigid geometry of distance markers and crashing bodies throws everything into sharp focus. I think of his hands when I hurt people. I think of the photos he took when I pick a quarterback clean off his feet. And when I stand over the body, as the boy squirms and screams under a snapped arm, pale bone shining under floodlights, I can only think of how jealous I am. Jealous of a boy who doesn’t know that you can just shut your mouth.

You can stop being a person anytime you want, all it takes is a lifetime of losing. You can be an army man or a doll or a dead body. You can be anything you want as long as you let it happen. And when they wheel an ambulance onto the field, when the boy finally stops wailing, you can feel the pleasure of transmitting your disease. You can finally be a werewolf and lie awake at night terrified of your own body, stained forever by the sweat of half remembered violence.