Joe Speedboat (25 page)

‘It is essential to crush him all at once.'

He was three-quarters of the way to defeat.

‘The primary thing is not to let him recover his position even a little.'

This is How to Crush, as Musashi prescribes it: ‘If we crush lightly, he may recover.'

I had crushed the farmhand, but he showed no sign of disappointment. He got up off his stool, walked around the table and grabbed my hand to congratulate me. He wore his defeat like a saint, and by shaking my hand seemed to forgive me for having crushed him. I would have liked to say sorry or something, or do the whole match over again and let him win, just to stop feeling so shitty about it.

‘Man oh man,' Joe said, ‘the semi-finals. You understand now?'

Fifteen minutes later or so, what I understood best was this: my next opponent was going to be a Walloon who I'd seen win before, a man who wore at least one gold ring on each of his oily fingers, as well as on both thumbs. Right before the match he would take them off one by one, then slide them back on again when he was finished. One of his front teeth
was framed in gold as well. He gave the impression of being built entirely of soot and motor oil. His strength was hard to judge.

We fell into the referee's ‘Go' at exactly the same moment. After thirty seconds I was almost certain we were applying the same strategy. I let him come, there was no hurry. Haste comes when you're afraid of losing. All this time the soot-and-oil man was staring at me with eyes slightly narrowed. He was doing an awfully good imitation of the Stance in Strategy, but in a natural sort of way; he didn't seem like the kind of person who would study Japanese techniques. He maintained constant pressure on his half of the triangle, and that gave me the feeling he was holding back. He was saving something to use against me at a certain point, and with his hand on top he already had the advantage. The first thing I had to do was correct that situation.

I closed my eyes and bowed my head, and right away I felt the soothing influence of the Glow, that invisible instrument for explosively multiplying power, and brought the triangle back upright. I should have noticed that he was giving in too easily, though, because the moment we reached starting position he struck. He had been waiting for me to take the initiative, and had applied the principle of
Tai Tai No Sen
, ‘to accompany him and forestall him', in masterly fashion. When I opened my eyes his golden grin was beaming right at me, and I was leaning over sideways and powerless.

Stay calm, I told myself. Nothing's been lost yet. I sucked in air; breathe in, breathe out. This was an opponent I had to fight like stone. Going into our second round, I withstood his initial attack. He was feeling sure of himself now, and exerted much more force than he had before. With that, in a certain sense, he had become me during the first round, and I was able to
anticipate what he was going to do. When I looked up I saw his eyes closed in great effort. Yes, this was a glorious reversal of the first round!

Before I continue, it might be useful to explain that when you're arm wrestling you feel a continuous flux of muscle tension, ranging from the very slight to the extremely pronounced, and it's important to pay close attention to such changes in pressure. You can feel them, like the dying down or rising up of the wind. Musashi writes that in a duel we must make sure that our opponent changes position, and that we must profit from his irregular rhythm.

It was a joy to feel the soot-and-oil man's power increase, he wanted to beat me quickly. At the moment his pressure crested I yielded just a tad, only a couple of degrees, just enough to cause a minimal modification, and that was the One Right Moment: I threw everything I had into it and pressed him past deadlock at a single go. He groaned in dismay but there was no stopping it, his hand smacked down on the table.

The crowd bellowed indignantly, from one corner of my eye I saw Joe drop back in his chair in relief. The soot-and-oil man grimaced at his supporters, a crowd of gold-bedecked caravan dwellers who made noises that sounded like they were rounding up a herd of bison.

We assumed our positions for the third and decisive round. I looked at him from a kind of inner distance, and saw something I had never seen before in someone I had beaten: humiliation. You could see it around his nose and mouth, little twitches that spoke of a wounded ego. I knew now that he would go for the full offensive, he would show his fellow caravanners that the second match had been nothing but a stupid mistake and, with a total blitz, erase his defeat.

Then I did something that startled him; I brought my lips
down to my upper arm and seized the sleeve of my sweater between my teeth. I snapped at it four times to raise the cuff up above my bicep, then put my arm in the box. The twitching of his face had grown worse, he had completely lost the composure of our first match. It had been only veneer, glued on from the outside, not enlightened from within. I was seeing ‘Knowing Collapse'. All things can collapse, Kensei noted in the final weeks before he died. ‘Houses, bodies and enemies collapse when their rhythm is disrupted.' His advice then, when one sees the Collapsing happen, is to pursue the opponent without mercy. ‘Focus your gaze on the enemy's collapse, chase him, so that you do not let him recover.' And he adds: ‘The chasing attack is with a strong spirit, you must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position.'

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.

It was Joe who arrived with the news that P.J. was at her parents' and that she was ‘not doing well'. Not doing well meant: beaten up by Lover Boy Writer. In a fit of psychotic rage he had damaged home and garden, as well as the temple of his
beloved. She had been at her parents' place for days without showing her face. I saw a disturbing correlation between the violence in my dreams and that of her slaphappy Lover Boy Writer.

Joe and I went to Acacia Florist's on Breedstraat and had a red-and-white bouquet put together for delivery to the White House.

‘It's actually more the season for autumnal tints,' the noodle of a shopkeeper said.

We ignored him.

‘Would you like to add a text for the recipient?'

Joe looked at me.

‘You're the writer around here.'

The shopkeeper handed me a folded card with a hole punched in it. I wrote:

We're around.
Your friends
Joe and Frankie

‘What kind of a text is that?' Joe said. ‘Don't you have to write something like “best wishes” or something?'

I shook my head. I had full confidence in P.J.'s ability to decode the message; she would read that we were here if she needed us, and that we were thinking of her without imposing our presence. That's the way it was.