Violence, 1

The taking of another’s life is an act that can be learned to transparency much as a particular algebraic trick or sequence of dance steps. Children in Sierra Leone can learn this skill, and do. Killing is merely learning by rote. A fight is different—not because of it is romantic, or anything else so adolescent. No, a fight is different because it is irreducible. It is a plurality of acts but it is contingent on no single one of them—each equilibrium is incidental and all its own.

The first thing that happens is fear. Total and overwhelming, it courses over and through you, lighting your synapses ablaze. When you look the man who you are going to fight, your fear magnifies him to grotesque proportions. His nerves appear steely while yours are gelatin. How does he stand so coolly, when your knees wobble and your legs feel unable to hold the ground? He must feel nothing but a brutal readiness. When he punches you the blow will be precise and it will be with maximum force, whereas your swings will be glancing and amateurish.

You could just sink into your own gut, then.

These few seconds before you jump into the fray are timeless, as is often said about them. They are also torturous--they force a fireworks show of potentiality through your mind, possibilities that burn with manic intensity into existence, fade rapidly, and are replaced almost immediately by others more shocking and terrible.

**

Fear? He felt it for a few moments, but then an explosion of force sent him, shoes squeaking on wet concrete, to the ground. The feeling was something like magnesium burning at the tips of his nerves. There is something peculiar about being hit in the face for the first time, if the hit is a good one. You feel less terrible than you’d imagine. The explanation is part chemical, part intangible: a mix of adrenaline and dopamine, and uncertainty dispelled by total directness. His jaw ached somewhere far away.

**

The first blow confirms your worst fears and thereby liberates you from them. You know that the fight has started. You know the substance of it: knuckles digging into muscle or glancing off bone; nervous stumbling and the skinning of knees on pavement; a kind of deafness that spares only your heartbeat, your heartbeat which fills your chest, throat and ears, and which, with the amphetamines and opiates painting your psychic palate with Pollackian imprecision, is its own special madness.

**

His mind felt blurred, but he was clear and had purpose. Pushing himself up from his knees, he charged forward. Though he paid no attention to it, he had unconsciously put his hands in front of his face and bent his back. His body was struggling to remember boxing matches, movie combat-- playground self-defense, even. The first punch he threw was no good, a bad straight that would have been glancing even if it’d been aimed right. It cost him another wack to the face. This time, though, he did not stumble. Relaxation swept through the muscles of his lumbar spine and abdomen, then down into his quadriceps, so that he was squatting, and then pushing against the ground, driving a curled fist at the other man’s throat and jaw. It connected; the hands that had in the meantime taken hold of his lapels loosened, the other man slackened and his eyes went hazy.

**

A fight goes on like this: sometimes you feel elation and you move with smooth athleticism, only to be cut off by a misstep or mere chance and returned to anxious caution. Then there is the exhaustion. You put your whole self behind each strike in the hope that it will be the last one needed, and you do this repeatedly, endlessly. Your chest begins to scream. Fatigue is the worst pain of them all, far worse than physical injury. Fatigue is an oracle: it can tell you long in advance whether you’ll come out the better or not. When your lungs cannot keep up with your body a grim satisfaction overtakes you. It is the kind of satisfaction that a man going to his execution might feel, knowing contentedly, if not happily, that he no longer need suffer any lingering ambiguity about his fate.

**

This man’s lungs were about at this point. He was lucky, though--he had always been lucky. His opponent seemed to be if anything in worse shape, despite having boxed a better round. A small cut over the other man’s cheek was filling his mouth with blood so that if he didn’t spit constantly he was seized by spasmodic coughing. Had the man been a more experienced fighter—had he done no more than run a few miles in the morning over the past few months—he would have recognized this as a time to clinch the set. At least he could take his breath, which he did with large, clumsy, liberal gasps.

**

The end of a fight is instantly recognizable because it feels just like that. It is the literal end of the body. In each person the end is timed differently, a function of physique and willpower. Nevertheless it is inevitable and ubiquitous. The muscles no longer function: a punch or a kick thrown then is habitual, not strategic. The contestants come closer, unable now to deliver power and so hoping that strength, if not pure mass, will decide the struggle. With hands soaked in sweat, sometimes in blood, they take limbs and torsos in their grasp, pulling and pushing, wrapping around each other’s legs. In truth what both need is the support of the other. Their bones feel brittle. Their muscles cannot deliver. So they come close, putting their heads on each other’s shoulders even while wrenching this way and that with their whole bodies. That this scene is a facsimile of romance—that the whole exchange is unmistakably sexual—is oft remarked upon.

**

He kicked at the other man’s shins and had his kicked in turn. He did not do what he did because of volition. The dopamine had left him, and the adrenaline was following fast behind. A badly aimed but exceptionally forceful stab of the knee sent him reeling back onto his feet. He saw the eyes of the other man not for the first time but for the first that stuck in his memory, and was momentarily stilled. And then came the magnesium fire again and he was suddenly facing the wall, the trash cans, a seam in the concrete and what he thought of as a lake of blood. Oh, he thought. Oh, I’m the one who’s bleeding. And then he might have been kicked, he couldn’t tell. It had already become too dark to notice.

**

Sometimes we lose—more often, one suspects, than we admit. The loser is lucky; he goes to sleep. It’s the winner for whom complications loom. The body on the ground that moments before was a threat, an enemy, ceases to be foreign and, in its helplessness, becomes human. It is a strange metamorphosis, and sympathy an uncomfortable reward. Few men find it too much of an immediate bother, though. They leave the body, leave the street, congratulate themselves on their strength, take pride in their wounds (no longer embarrassments but trophies), and find others to celebrate and exaggerate them. A fight has that strange propensity to generate exponential dishonesty, a cascade of lies and half-truths that help fashion mystique from what is really nothing more opaque than pain and terror. The winner will savor his victory only until he is called upon to defend this new myth. He will fight again.

The loser will awake eventually to his own dilemma. He will confront it with cuts, bruises—maybe even a sprain or broken knuckle—that have had time to set into his body and become horrid. His luck is that he will be an object of sympathy, if he can lie soon and well enough. Inside he will feel inadequate and angry. He will look for any slight against him with eagle eyes; alcohol will help both his courage and to shorten his fuse. He, too, will fight again.

On some street somewhere these opposite strains will coalesce. The sequence of blows will not matter, and the winner may change. Violence, like matter, is conservative and chaotic; ignorant of circumstance and unchanging it is a moral-less force. But for the man who awakes on the ground at its worse end, or the one who sleeps guiltily in his bed at its best, that same panoply of emotions, chemicals, tension and desiccation, will appear unrelentingly anew.