Faraway

Today

Wheeeeeeere have you beeeeeeeeen? All my liiiiiiiiiiiife.

Jasmine Jeong swats the car radio off, and realizes she’s been clenching her jaw for the past half-mile. Traffic will do that to you, Rihanna or no. And nothing is more indie wrestling than sitting in Southern California’s world-class traffic, with a duffel bag that’s been Febreezed into an acceptable state of funk riding shotgun. Chandler Tsonda’s protege has driven these snaking Pacific roads for months now, as she chases the dream. And on days like today, it does feel like a chase; legs heavy, head drowsy, the horizon a distant taunt. Somewhere out there is a parking spot, and a gym, and a locker room, and a ring, and an opponent, and a chance.

But, her phone’s GPS directions remind her, that’s all an hour and twenty-six minutes in the future. Now: traffic.

Jasmine starts as the directions disappear, and an incoming call ambushes the screen. The caller ID announces brightly: Chandler Tsonda.

She taps the red icon, sending to voicemail purgatory the call and the caller. The GPS map pops back up. One hour and twenty-five minutes.

/~/~/~/~/

Before

Seven days. The amount of time it took Abraham’s God to build the world is how long it took me to burn mine. No disrespect to the Big G, but I could’ve done it in five if I hadn’t had to fly back from Paris to San Diego.

You got a win that night, didn’t you? At ReV 47? I walked out of the arena and kept right on walking out of my life. I didn’t want to talk about the reasons (obvious, petulant, existential) and I didn’t want to answer any questions and I didn’t want to be talked out of doing something stupid and self-destructive.

Wealth is not helpful for the aching void of the soul, but it can solve more terrestrial issues, like: how to get somewhere no one can find you, and quickly. The concierge travel service was oh-so-happy to take my money and an NDA. In return, I got a series of private conveyances to a rental home on Deer Isle. Never heard of it? Yeah, that’s the point.

The windows looked out on something called Jericho Bay, but as far this lifelong Californian knew, it was all Atlantic to me. On the seventh day after ReV 47, my first in the big house alone, I stared out at the cold and uninviting thrash of sea, and I decided that after a lifetime of yammering, maybe I would be quiet for a long while.

Rejecting the inner voice that cringed at being both basic and crunchy, I took a circuitous walk around the island. There were vast stretches of wooded dirt road, not a soul to be seen. Surrounded by birdsong, I thought of losing to Jason Snow.

Every so often, I’d catch a glimpse of the liquid glass of the ocean. I walked to the edge, shaded under an ancient conifer. In between softly undulating waves, I thought of losing to Ivan Stanislav and Jonathan-Christopher Hall.

And on and on it went. There was no peace and tranquility that the riot of my mind couldn’t shout down. The sight of a fox loping up from the shore into the treeline? Thinking about losing. Sunflower buds erupting into a shock of yellow among the dark earthen hues around the house? Cycling endlessly on a legacy tarnished.

The phrase “mid-life crisis” implies something manageable. I will freak out about having reached a certain milestone in age for precisely four days, buy a motorcycle louder than an F-15, and call it a day. No other crisis do we expect swift and tidy resolution. Still, I found myself humiliated at the spiral, which only worsened my poisonous state of mind. You’ll be my age someday and you’ll get it. Every day, I looked at my phone, where text notifications from Aubrey, Jaime, and Jasmine piled up. I read the previews and then left the texts unread; the only thing worse than the isolation was the thought of seeing their kindness and having to reject it with silence.

After two weeks on the island, miserable, alone, and certain that I was getting what I deserved good and hard, I wandered into town, where I found myself at the counter of the breakfast cafe.

“Hi there. Can I get a matcha latte?” The first words I’d said to another person since the black car had left me and my duffel bag at the front door of the house.

The young woman behind the counter had a blindingly sunny disposition.

“Sure thing, sir. What kind of milk?”

“Do you have oat?”

“We have whole, skim, soy, and almond.”

“Soy then.”

“And then name for the order?”

I looked around. There were only two other customers, both of whom were seated and eating breakfast. There was one other employee behind the counter. My name was utterly unnecessary. I denied myself the perverse pleasure of picking a fight over this detail, and told her my name.

After mindlessly staring at the shop’s community notice board, overcome with the minutiae of other people’s lives, my drink came out. Across the side of the cup: CHANDLER <3.

I stepped back outside and took a sip of something sickly sweet and creamy. I took off the lid. The drink was brown and frothy. A mocha instead of a matcha. My name and a heart stared back at me. I threw the drink away and started the miles-long walk back to the cabin.

/~/~/~/~/

Today

Do you think you’re betterrrrrr off aloooooooooone? 

In between the heavy exhale of his own breath, Jaime Aguilar hears a snippet of a techno song that strikes him as very corny. Maybe the ring crew are listening to music while they deconstruct the night’s set.

“¿Yoooo, qué haces, jefe?”

Jaime looks up and sees the glimmer off the mask of Lobo Rojo Junior coming towards him.

“¿Hey, qué pasó, Rojo?”

Lobo Rojo is a dyed-in-the-wool luchador. His abuela still lives in Mexico City, and his cousin plays for El Tri. The original Lobo Rojo is still a true, blue celebrity to Jaime’s dad. Jaime has shaken off the starstruck feeling after their time together, but occasionally it still throws him for a loop that they both occupy the same roster.

“You were looking like an ace out there tonight, jefe.”

“I dunno,” Jaime says, always shy in response to public praise.

“They love you, muchacho! If you can get two hundred people on their feet in a ballroom, that offer’s coming soon.”

Eastern Seaboard Wrestling isn’t the big time, but neither is it the San Diego VFW’s that Jaime was in this time last year.

“You better clean up fast. We’re going to grab pozole, eh?”

Jaime nods. Rojo doesn’t need to make an effort; he’s a main eventer, and Jaime’s only barely just started getting wins. But Rojo does, and Jaime swells with gratitude every time he’s invited to be one of the boys.

“I’ll be right there. Ok?”

Jaime goes into his bag to grab a towel. The gray banner on his phone catches his eye, illuminating a missed call from his ring idol, Chandler Tsonda. He takes a long look at the screen before flicking left. The notification vanishes. He grabs his towel and heads towards the showers.

/~/~/~/~/

Before

One hundred seven days on Deer Isle made it the end of August. In no way had I become a true islander, save one: I resented the summer influx of chittering, needy tourists. All of New England and New York seemed to have spilled their upper classes out into the nowhere that I needed coastal Maine to be. I wore a hat (the ignominy!) and sunglasses every time I went out, halfway petrified someone would recognize me, and halfway curious if recognition from a stranger would—momentarily, just—allow me to feel something.

A habit had formed. On Wednesdays, the quietest night in town, I would jog the three miles to The Kelpie. There, I would down three vodkas with diet tonic, before jogging the three miles home. It was wretched. The way into town was craggy with hills that burned lungs and thighs alike. The Kelpie never carried a vodka worth a squalid shit. The way home nauseated me, the logical endpoint of three drinks on an empty stomach in the middle of a six-mile round trip run. It was wretched, and it was punishment.

“You mind if I get another?” I asked Pete the bartender. A good thing about Pete: the abyssal depth of his ambivalence. He wasn’t one of those guys for whom the bar in a far flung locale was a labor of love or a fun retirement plan. I could tell that he needed money, and this was the most straightforward way to make it without having to endure a boss or a background check. I knew his name because other people, more interested people, sometimes used his name. I didn’t use his and he didn’t use mine.

A bad thing about Pete: his glaring lack of given fucks meant that The Kelpie had the amenities of a drainage ditch. “Sure thing,” he said, turning towards the bar’s middle shelf to mix some kind of Chernobylian vodka into a highball glass for me.

The number of missed text notifications had ballooned. The bottom left of the screen simply said 1000+, as if my iPhone too, had given up the ghost of pretending to be interested in other people. I had missed Jasmine’s birthday, I knew that. Maybe somewhere in the digital pile, long after “Hello?!?!” and “Dude, seriously. What the fuck?” she had sent me a message excoriating me for missing her birthday. That would be nice.

Pete put down my drink.

Instead of my texts, I pawed through enough internet to see the state of PRIME. So Avalon was king of the heap. This provided me with an instant's relief, or maybe it was just the second vodka. Losing to him twice in a row had been the start of The Great Fuckening of my life. Now in retrospect, those losses looked…better? The thought passed; I didn’t really believe that. I hadn’t ended up in my own special purgatory by taking heart in any loss, no matter how close, how noble, or the accolades of the competition. And it wasn’t the losses to Coral Avalon that had upended me, it was the concussion from fucking Ivan. It was the headaches, the dread that came without warning, the fact that I didn’t remember big swaths of the match against Jason Snow.

Cold sweat made me realize that I had been away for three months, and I hadn’t even gotten away. There was no away. Ten minutes of checking in on PRIME had me topsy turvy. Putting my phone down, I called for another drink.

“Bottom’s up,” Pete said, sliding the glass my way.

“Thanks.”

“You want a lime?”

“Nah.”

“You want somebody to ask you how far into hell you’ve got, that you’re drinkin’ clear liquor in my bar?”

“I don’t.”

“Alright then,” he said, and turned his head towards the TV mounted high overhead, where a baseball game crawled lazily along.

I left money on the bar, and housed the drink. With a sour stomach and a sour mood, I jogged in the direction of Jericho Bay.

/~/~/~/~/

Today

“I showed up. Did your guy?”

Aubrey Calvino doesn’t care for the lackadaisical tone on the other end of the line. She pedals on the stationary bike furiously, though she doesn’t seem to sweat a drop and she isn’t at all out of breath.

“Mark, with all due respect, that sounds exclusively like a you problem, not a me problem. Please figure out your side’s issues, and let me know what that’s going to look like by the end of the day. I look forward to seeing something that makes this right.”

She ends the call and removes her AirPods, putting them in the central console of the bike. She leans harder into the pedals.

“Siri, read my reminders for the day.”

It’s in keeping with the…everything about Aubrey that she has an intimate relationship with Siri. Aubrey is the CEO of Tsuperstar Enterprises, a mover and shaker in her own right. In a pure business sense, she has long surpassed her PRIME Hall of Famer cousin. She likes, no, loves competence, and models for others that which she loves.

Her version of Siri has an anodyne female voice, which responds to her prompt:

“11 AM - Call with Lawyer Jackass.” She tuts a laugh. “1 PM - Review Taxes with Chandler and CPA.” The laugh catches in her breath. A recurring yearly appointment for her to accompany Chandler through his byzantine taxes with their CPA. She must have forgotten to cancel it when he ghosted his entire life, with her in it.

She is keenly aware that he left a message for her several days ago. It lingers, unattended, in her voicemail box. She knows he is back in PRIME, back from God knows where. She knows he left her without a word in May of last year, and so she knows that whatever he has to say to her doesn’t matter.

She clicks into her mailbox, and sees his name.

She deletes the voicemail without listening to it.

Her feet fly on the pedals. There. That feels better.

/~/~/~/~/

Before

Two hundred seven days on Deer Isle made it early December. I realized, taking in my morning cup of tea and overlooking tempestuous waters, that I had turned forty-nine at the stroke of midnight.

I had gone cold turkey checking up on PRIME since that day over the summer. I knew nothing, other than that Colossus must be coming around the corner. The passage of a year, most years, is marked by my birthday, and then Colossus. I had marked time on Deer Isle with little more than my Wednesday ritual. If it wasn’t Wednesday, then I struggled to place it. But today, it was Wednesday.

Life without routines was its own form of disorientation. My success had been built on the back of structure, a disciplined approach to my body as a tool. In this state, there weren’t enough mindless exercises in all the world to fill the hours. At times, I would snap out of a near fugue, and realize my triceps were on fire, with little memory of when I’d started doing push-ups. I didn’t allow myself any admission that I missed the physical labor of PRIME. I didn’t miss the headaches and dizzy spells. They had lessened, then dissipated entirely some time in the fall. As a minor consolation prize, my banishment seemed to have allowed my concussion to heal. Play the world’s smallest victory trumpet.

When I had killed enough time in the day, I threw on black compression gear, and laced up my running shoes. As always, the run agonized as much as it provided relief. This wasn’t training, but a monk’s devotion. The fire in my legs and dry cold air in my lungs cleared my head like nothing else could.

Halfway through my penance, I pulled up short. I’d reached The Kelpie, where no lights were on. Ragged breath traced foggy white constellations in front of my face. Standing still in the frigid air was somehow worse than running. I leaned over, bouncing in place for warmth, to read the handwritten note plastered on the front door:

Heat is on the fritz, and we’re past time to close up for the season. If you didn’t pay your tab, you’ll see me in your nightmares. All my other regulars, see ya in the spring, if the cold don’t take me first. Happy holidays. 

-Pete

“You’re fucking killing me,” I said aloud.

I know this will sound like a stretch to you, but that was when I knew I had to come back. I could’ve made it another thousand and seven days, but for that grody little bar shuttering. My hamster wheel could’ve kept me, quiet and unhappy, on that island forever. But as I read the note, cold creeping into my joints, I knew it was over. You’ll know the feeling soon.

I had to face my losses, and my loved ones, and my life, and the cost of gas in Southern California, and the losing, and the abysmal way I had left things, and the fallibility, and the ticking clock, and the prospect of the end.

But first I had to face this fucking god-awful run back to the cabin. For the first time on Deer Isle, I felt a smirk widen its way across my features. I raced out to a sprint. My feet were light.

/~/~/~/~/

Today

I don’t know what I expected, calling all of them after all that time. I think I must have wanted to be screamed at, the emotional equivalent of those runs to and from the cabin. An hour-long string of invective from Aubrey, a cutting series of explanations of just how deeply I had disappointed Jasmine, a confession that I wasn’t and had never been Jaime’s favorite wrestler.

They’ve all returned to me the gift I gave them: indifferent silence. It occurs to me that they might have made a group pact not to engage. But more likely, I singed each of them with their own bespoke burn pattern. Aubrey is reliability incarnate, and we had always agreed that family comes first. Jaime’s optimism has no bounds. Jasmine believed in my pledge to her that hard work would get her to the big stage. My abandonment of love, duty, obligation, responsibility, it’s all home to roost. And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pesky consequences of my own actions!

My phone gleams back at me, impassive. It’s just me. That’s the punishment. What’s worse: exile or solitary confinement? Yes.

So now, in my big house in Carlsbad, where the fires spared the town but there’s the scent of ash on the wind, I’m as alone as I’ve ever been. And that, more than anything, is why I’m telling you this whole sordid tale, Rose.

It’s an awful revelation for me, a curdled homecoming. All the cheers in the world at ReV 62 didn’t fix that. They help a little to fill the void, sure; I’m only human. They don’t bring back my family. I’m down in a hole with nothing but a shovel.

And all of this is terrible, horrible, very bad news for you. For Comrade Vanya. For the whole of the Red Army. Because I’ve been on a diet of nothing but solitude and damnation. I went to the end of the earth, and found nothing but self-loathing, the bottom of a highball glass, and a return ticket right back to the place I can’t leave: PRIME. Desperation is a hell of a drug.

I’ll have to scratch and claw my way back to having purpose. I’m afraid of what’s next, no bullshit. It wakes me up at 2 AM and puts me through long nights of the soul to think about what I’ve squandered, and how far I am from having it again. I’m an exposed nerve within a deep gash. I’ll have to punish myself more before it gets better. I had the best things in my life, I fucked them all up because I’m selfish, and I’ll have to spend half of forever just getting the three people I love most to take my calls.

What do I have anymore? It’s bounded by four ropes, and a piece of canvas. That’s the beginning and the end of it.

And Rose, I’m worried that some small part of me—a part of me I hate even more than the ego and the vanity and the preening and the frailty—did this all on purpose. I worry that deep down, I knew the only way I could be dangerous in the ring again was to set my life adrift and swim back to shore alone. Because the truth is that when I think about being in the ring again, I’m famished, hungry like I’ve never been.

I have to get them back.

I have to be truly great in the ring.

I fear only one of those statements can be true, but I deserve no sympathy.

So, my apologies. Sorry for talking so much about myself, but, ya know, it’s kind of my thing. Sorry for the longwindedness but, again, kind of my thing. Sorry that you’re stuck with those Siberian roaches. Sorry that we couldn’t meet under better circumstances. And sorry for what comes next. But I just told you that this is all I have left, and I told you what I’ve done to myself, what I have to do to myself, just to be whole again.

Now imagine what I’m going to do to someone who’s in the way.