Thank you, Kensei.
We attacked at the same time. He tossed his head to the side and his upper body shot forward wildly. It was the charge of a bull. I closed my eyes, the Glow rolled in like a dark sea, completely at my service. I knew that this was the same rage that had possessed my ancestor Hend Hermans before they smashed his brains out with a crowbar. It ran in the family, the way some people have red hair or stubby fingers. In Dirk and me it had blossomed in full.
I began wrenching my arm back and forth, the way you rock a heavy cart to get it over a hump, to and fro, tut-TUT, to and fro. We shot past perpendicular and back again like a poplar in the wind, I toyed with him until I had enough room for the final push, and on TUT! he went down. Broken at the base, as it were. When I let go, I fell off my stool as well.
For the first time that day I felt a rush of well-being. Joe jumped up from his chair and gave me a powerful hug.
I had tasted blood.
I would go looking for more. I had penetrated to the ecstasy at the core of human existence: struggle and conquest.
All Joe could do was shake his head and say, ‘Super, ab-solutely super,’ and I floated to the ceiling, warm and light as a feather. We had reached the finals, the top two. .
‘Here, man, have another beer’, Joe said. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’
For the first time, I heard someone place a bet on me. Money was changing hands like lightning, someone said it was a ridiculous long shot, there was no way I could win from the last man standing, Mehmet Koç, a prizefighter par excellence. I’d already seen him at work against a black powerlifter from Portsmouth, and it had stunned me a bit. Koç was a kind of Turkish wrestler with chest hair that seemed to grow out of his shirt like an upside-down beard.
‘So, what do you think?’ Joe asked in hushed earnest.
I pursed my lips to show that I was less than confident.
The announcer called Koç’s name, then mine, I heard shouts of dismissal and encouragement. Even though the aficionados all agreed that I didn’t stand a chance, in the course of the last few matches I had won an ambiguous kind of favour.
About what happened next I can — no, I want to — be brief: I was blown right off the table twice by a Turkish Hulk. After having been mistaken during the rest of the tournament, this time the aficionados had it right. There was no strategy one could bring to bear against Mehmet Koç, he was simply much too strong. I put up all the resistance of a bicycle pump. It was even sort of exciting to be crushed the way the Turk did it, it was the power and beauty of a wave that crashes down on you and leaves you tumbling underwater.
So I needed to become stronger. To practice repetitively. To never let up. But I’d won my very first second prize! After we’d changed the money at the border, Joe split the take with a big casino grin. Five thousand down the middle: I’d never had so much money in my life.
When we got home the briquette installation had been removed without a trace, leaving only the dark spots on the tiles where the washing machine and press had stood. The racks against the walls of my house were gone too, all of it taken away. Without a word. Good, excellent. Fine by me, let’s pretend it never happened.
The burning pain that arose in my forearm thirty-six hours after the tournament was nothing but muscle soreness that would last a few days; more serious and longer-lasting was the inflammation of the biceps tendon. I sat at home immobilized, unable to move myself in any direction. Even the tiniest effort brought on agonies like the paralyzing stabs of pain one felt during the growth spurt of adolescence.
‘That can’t be good for you,’ Ma said, ‘just look at you.’
I made her even more worried when I slid ten hundreds across the table.
‘What is that?’ she said severely. ‘I don’t want your money, you’re my child, I would never. .’
I slapped my hand down on the table. Then I wrote: Take. It’s nothing.
‘A thousand! That’s not nothing! I’ll put it in your savings, otherwise someone we know will spend it all on God-knows-what.’
Mother, it’s for you. That’s the way I want it.
She looked at me long and hard, I looked back coaxingly, mixed with a kind of anger. She nodded, folded the notes one by one, made a bundle of them and said she hoped it wasn’t ‘bad money’. She slipped the bundle into her apron pocket.
Joe came by during his lunch break to see how things were going. He massaged my arm and rubbed it with Tiger Balm. Then, after filling the mustard glass with rollups, he went back to work.
Sun and clouds came and went in a restless pattern that made the house light at times, dark at others, a phenomenon that had made me feel sombre even as a child. At a quarter-past five, Joe returned.
‘Man, this place is like a haunted house. Have you been outside today?’
A little later he was pushing me along the dyke. The sky was the colour of zinc, heavy clouds were squeezing all the light out of the washlands. A final, pale crack of sunlight stood ajar on the horizon. A swarm of starlings was searching for a place to roost, gulls argued above the dark fields, and far in the distance veils of rain brushed against the greyness. The prospect of another winter weighed on me.
Twelve days later I was ready at last for a light training session. It came as a relief: using my muscles intensively had become a remedy for the darkness inside. The dumbbells, the arrival of that neutral soul Hennie Oosterloo, the tournament in Liège; it had kissed awake the man of action in me. Wearing out my locomotor apparatus freed my mind, because of the endorphins it released. That was the first conclusion to be drawn from arm wrestling. The second was that I was a temple of burning ambition. That had nothing to do with Kensei’s philosophy; it was all rage and bloodthirstiness, and I understood now why some sports were symbolic massacres.
I racked my brains over how I could ever defeat colossi like Mehmet Koç. How one sweeps away a mountain of sand with a feather, that question.
I could see only one solution: hypodermic redemption. I suggested this to Joe, but he never added such rough remedies to the training program. ‘If we can get as far as we did in Liège with just a few months’ training,’ Joe said, ‘then you’re nowhere near the limits of your natural ability.’ We did increase the volume of protein supplements, though, and the number of repetitions, and he gave me a jar of creatine, a controversial performance enhancer made from animal tissue. ‘An advance on your birthday present,’ he said.
They say lots of activity boosts your testosterone. Maybe that’s why I dreamed so immoderately of P.J. during that period. Lewd dreams, with no fucking whatsoever. Can you dream of copulating when you’ve never actually done it? What I remember of those dreams are violent, exhausting scenes between me and other men before she and I even touched. That touch brought on feelings so ecstatic that I knew they had to exist in real life as well. She twisted her body in such a way that, in the course of things, I could never see her cunt. That was the trick my dream mind played, to camouflage my lack of anatomical insight.
But the truly special thing about those dreams was this: that I walked upright, ran and leapt. And when I made love to her, it was with a body that was whole.