They went again, and the light came up over San Tomas the way it does in New Mexico, all at once and without negotiation, gold over the edge of the world, and Yusuf called an end to it at six with the authority of a man who had ended ten thousand sessions, and Dee went to shower in the staff room she had cleaned the night before, and to begin, in an hour, a shift of an entirely different kind, mopping the hall she had just been thrown across, which had stopped seeming strange to her many years ago and which she would not have traded, that morning, for any podium with dry hair and an official tracksuit top.
Blake Rennert watched the seven seconds forty-one times before Eddie Krol took the phone out of his hand and put it face down on the physio table, and the terrible thing, the thing he said to nobody, was that by the thirty-ninth viewing he had stopped seeing the throw and started seeing his own face just before it. Not the fall. The half second before the fall, when his weight went where she had invited it to go and his grin went out like a light. He knew that face. He had made other men wear that face for six years, in halls all over the Southwest, and he had a folder on that same phone, curated by his manager, of precisely those faces, slowed down, set to music, sent to sponsors.
"Again," he said.
"No," Eddie said.
"I'm not asking as a discussion."
"And I'm not refusing as a discussion. Sit. Ice. Then we work." Eddie Krol was forty-six, built like a door, a former heavyweight who had come out of a gym in Chicago where the heating was a rumour, and he had coached Blake since Blake was twenty and all appetite. He had one rule that had survived every contract and manager since, which was that inside the training hall his word outranked everybody's except the doctor's, and he enforced it the way Dee fulfilled her conditions, absolutely and without decoration. "You are training your fear today, Blake. Not your judo. Your fear has had three days of excellent training. It is in the best shape of its life. I can see it across the room doing push-ups."
"She has one trick," Blake said. "One. She caught me reaching, she turned under, it's a trick for old— for people who can't move any more, it works once, it works when a man isn't ready, and I wasn't ready, I was laughing, I was doing a bit for the cameras, Eddie, I was doing the bit you told me never to do and the one time I do it—"
"Forty-one times you've watched it," Eddie said, "and that is your conclusion. That she cannot move." He wrapped the ice in a towel with the neatness of long practice. "I have watched it twice. Once as your coach and once as a man who has been thrown by better people than either of us. She moved exactly as much as the throw required and not one inch more, which in my trade we used to call mastery before your manager's generation started calling it content. Hold that against your neck and do not argue with me about mastery while you are icing a neck she gave you."
Blake held the ice. The hall around them was doing its late-morning work, other fighters, other coaches, a normalcy that he understood, with a sudden and unwelcome clarity, was partly an act being performed for his benefit, everybody being very normal at him. He had been raised, if raised was the word for it, on the edited version of himself. A father who filmed everything. A manager at seventeen who taught him that a bout was two products, the result and the story, and that the story paid better and lasted longer and did not depend on judges. He had learned to enter rooms already narrating them. He had learned which angle his jaw photographed best in triumph and he had never once, in ten years, had to learn any angle at all for this.
"What if it's the number," he said, quietly, to the towel.
"What number."