"I told him that. He said that's what everybody's calling it."
"Then everybody can come and repair a kick shield," Dee said, and pulled the stitch through, "and I'll go and talk about their fights." The girl hovered. "Tell him I have no comment," Dee said, more gently. "Tell him the club has a comment. Mr. Greer loves a comment. He's in the office with the door open looking like a man whose door is closed." This proved to be exactly true. Simon gave the Herald forty minutes, and the resulting article, which appeared online before lunch and in print the next day with a photograph of the club's sign rather than of her, for which she was devoutly grateful, quoted him calling the demonstration a wonderful surprise and a testament to the depth of experience at Copperline at every level, a phrase Dee read twice and decided had been constructed, like a piece of flat-pack furniture, to hold more than it appeared to.
Blake's account of the evening appeared at noon, and it was forty minutes older than the article and had plainly been composed with help.
He posted it himself, a video this time, sitting in his car outside the club with the belt, because of course the belt was there, arranged on the passenger seat beside him like a travelling companion. He was smiling the smile from the mat, the held one. He said he wanted to clear something up because people were having fun with a clip and fun was fine, fun was what an open house was for, but let the record show. Let the record show he had slipped coming in. The mat at Copperline, he said, and here he laughed and shook his head at the treachery of mats, the mat had a spot on it by the taped line, anybody who trained there knew it, and he had come in low in socks, no wait, in bare feet, in the wrong shoes for a judo thing, it was a judo thing and that wasn't his world, he was an MMA fighter doing a lady a favour at a demo, he hadn't warmed up his grappling, he hadn't even known she was going to do a throw, nobody had told him there would be a throw, and the arm thing, the arm thing he had tapped to early because it was a demonstration and you tap early in a demonstration, that was respect, that was him being a professional and not turning a fun thing into a hospital thing by muscling out of it. He said lady three times and janitor once. He said seven seconds like a man mentioning the weather in a city whose weather had personally insulted him. He said, "Run it back under real conditions, that's all I'm saying. Full camp, real rules, my world, and we'll see what the clock says then." Then Eddie Krol, from somewhere off camera, presumably the back seat, said, "Tell them about the foot, champ," and Blake said, "I already told them about the foot, Eddie," and the video ended.
Eddie gave a longer version to the radio station, in which the wet patch became a hazard he had personally pointed out to management before the demonstration, a claim that caused Simon Greer to stand in his own office doorway with the telephone in his hand and say, to no one, "I pointed it out to management. I am management. When did he point it out to me, in a dream?" Eddie also said the gi had been the problem, that a gi was a handle, that Blake had been grabbed by a piece of clothing no MMA fighter would ever wear into a cage, that giving Dee Marenco a gi and Blake Rennert a rashguard and calling the result a contest was like timing a fish and a bicycle, and on this point, to Dee's annoyance, several of the internet's louder voices agreed with him, although none of them agreed with each other about which of the two of them had been the fish.
What none of the accounts mentioned, because none of them had noticed, was the half-step. Dee watched the clip eleven times in the end, alone, in the break room, with her tea going cold, and she understood that the camera had not really seen what she had done, because what she had done had not been the throw. The throw was only the part that looked like something. She found this obscurely comforting. It meant the thing itself was still hers. The internet had the seven seconds. It did not have the twenty-six years, or the half-step, or Yusuf's voice in a hall in 1999 saying again, again, not with your arms, Dee, your arms are the last thing, let him bring it to you. She closed the browser. She had floors to do.