After the Lights Go Out Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by John Vercher

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vercher, John, author.

  Title: After the lights go out / John Vercher.

  Description: New York, NY : Soho, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021054026

  ISBN 978-1-64129-331-0

  eISBN 978-1-64129-332-7

  Subjects: LCSH: Mixed martial arts—Fiction. | Chronic traumatic encephalopathy—Fiction. | Racially mixed families—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.E7336 A68 2022 | DDC 813'.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054026

  Interior design by Janine Agro

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mom and Dad

  All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

  —Toni Morrison

  Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

  —Michel de Montaigne

  MY MIND PLAYING TRICKS ON ME

  Last year, he left his groceries in the trunk for two days. He’d just gotten the call—a number-one contender fight. After alternating wins and losses, he’d strung together four in a row, evading a cut from the roster by the slimmest of margins. The old-timer, the journeyman. Not a has-been but a never-was. In spite of—no, because of the doubters and their calls to leave his gloves in the middle of the cage. No one would have thought less of him if he’d quit on his own terms. The game had passed Xavier “Scarecrow” Wallace by. Too many young bucks on the come up looking for a steppingstone to the next level. The cage had no place for old toothless lions fighting for their pride.

  And then four in a row. No tomato cans, either. Championship kickboxers. Jiu-jitsu aces. Each one the next big thing. But none of them had the grind in them. All talent and hormones. Cardio made cowards of them all. Xavier dragged them into deep waters, the championship rounds where lactic acid torched muscles. Where deep breaths provided no oxygen, only the desperate need to breathe deeper. Faster. Shoulders ached. Submissions lacked squeeze. Punches lost their snap. Kicks sloppy, thrown with languid legs, hinging and pivoting at the joints from sheer momentum. Break the spirit and the body follows fast behind.

  But he’d paid a cost for his time in the deep end, too. Worse than the patchwork remnants of stitches in his forehead; worse than the accumulation of crackling scar tissue above his jagged orbital bones; worse, even, than the seemingly interminable, intensifying headaches. Worse than all that was the forgetting.

  Mild at first. Patches of time gone, sketches of memories swiped from a chalkboard where only the faintest outline of the words and images remained. More and more often, feeling that he’d been somewhere, done something, though never sure how, when—or if. The ravages of age, he told himself, nothing more. Some days he almost believed that.

  When the contender call came, he’d been ready. The weight didn’t come off as easy as it had a decade ago, so he’d kept his diet tight. A fight meant keeping it even tighter. Temptation beckoned when the refrigerator was bare, so it was off to the grocery store for the usual suspects. Packs of skinless chicken breasts. Sacks of brown rice. Sweet potatoes. Leafy greens. Broccoli. Gallons of distilled water. He’d tossed his plastic sacks of calorie-bereft blandness into the trunk and drove to the gym to tell Shot the news before heading home.

  That night had been restless. He conjured images of the fight to come. No matter how many times he’d ascended the stairs to the cage, his fearful mental rehearsal was always the same. Involuntary and unwelcome. And never was more at stake than now. A contender’s bout meant media days. Press conferences. Local television appearances. He played those out, as well. The questions about his age and how many more wars he had left in the tank. His thoughts on his opponent, attempts to spark the inevitable trash talk. He lay flat on his back in the darkness, eyes wide open. A hot breeze wafted through his open bedroom window. Sweat beaded on his bare chest. The broken air conditioning window unit sat like a headstone in tribute to its own demise. Even in the dead of night, the humidity of a late Philadelphia August hung in the air like fog, pressing up against the wood siding of his father’s Montgomery County bungalow.

  Resigned to sleeplessness, he peeled the backs of his legs from the sheets and pushed himself to a sitting position on the side of the bed. He gripped the edge of the mattress and closed his eyes as he waited for the spin to slow, then stop, the positional vertigo another unwanted trophy, awarded after years of concussive blows to the head. His doctor had told him the spinning originated in his ears, something about crystals floating loose, a condition requiring a specialist’s treatment. Xavier imagined a long-haired socks and sandals-wearing type with a stringy goatee waving a shard of glass over his ears, collecting a seventy-five-dollar copay for five minutes of work. He told his doctor he’d take his chances. His physician then offered him a medication, but the side effects included dizziness. Xavier stopped seeing him altogether.

  The spinning stopped and he stood. A cacophony of pops and clicks sounded in his joints, ankles to spine. He tried but failed to ignore the swell of pressure behind his eyes, the steam whistle of tinnitus in his ears, an unwelcome and worsening addition to the forgetfulness of late. From a pile of clothes at the edge of the bed, he donned a paint-splattered tank top and basketball shorts and stepped into the short hallway leading from the bedroom to the kitchen. Canvas tarps covered the floor. A roller sat in a pan. Paint congealed in the well.

  The roller sizzled against the wall as he crossed it back and forth, up and down, the motion hypnotic, sage green covering the off-white. The first coat completed, he was no more ready for sleep than before, but the tinnitus had grown louder. He moved to the kitchen where he leaned his hands on the counter. His eyes squeezed shut, he willed the whistling to go away, but the intensity increased. He sat on the floor, long legs stretched out in front of him, and rested the back of his head on a cool cabinet door.

  And then awake.

  Not in bed.

  Eyes open. Neck stiff. Ass sore.

  Sweat had stuck the skin of his scalp to the cabinet door and he peeled his head away. He wiggled the stiffness from his knees and stood, gripping the edge of the faux granite countertop to steady the room. Through the window over the sink, the high bright sun shined orange through his closed eyelids as he waited out the spin. The carousel ride over, he scanned the room and saw the roller in the pan. The hallway walls had more paint on them than before.

  Didn’t they?

  The fumes, perhaps. That made sense. They’d made him drowsy, and he’d sat. He should have opened more windows. That seemed like something he might have told himself at the time. Of course, that was why he fell asleep. On the floor. In the kitchen. Perfectly reasonable. Unlike the time on the microwave clock. 3:24. In the afternoon.

  That’s impossible.

  He walked from the kitchen to the living room, ducking his head under the jamb, and retrieved his cell phone. The clock on the screen read the same as the one on the microwave. There were a number of texts and calls from Shot. Xavier had missed his morning workout. And his afternoon training session.

  My bad, Shot. I’ll double up on the roadwork. Hitting the trail right now. Catch you at the gym tomorrow.

  He watched the screen. The speech bubble appeared, the dots darkening and fading in sequence before disappearing. Xavier’s face tightened. Then:

  K.

  “Fuck,” Xavier said. No way to make the drive to Manayunk now. Rush hour would be a nightmare by the time he got to Lincoln Avenue. Another headache swelled at the base of his skull. Back in the kitchen, he grabbed a gallon of distilled water from the pantry and downed two ibuprofens. A pair of running shoes sat by the front door. He scooped them up and stepped out into the summer haze.

  AN HOUR LATER, HE’D RETURNED home, sweat-soaked and ravenous. The heat of the asphalt trail had burned through the bottoms of his shoes, propelled him forward, faster than his planned pace. The sun’s relentless blaze had weight and rounded his shoulders. He peeled off his tank top, dropped it to the linoleum with a wet slap, and downed more than half of the gallon of water in loud glugs as the plastic imploded. The remaining water he poured into a pot on the stove. He ignited the gas burner and went to the refrigerator for a chicken breast to boil and noted that it was his last. The vegetable drawer was equally sparse, and his bag of rice in the pantry was down to his last serving. To the grocery store tomorrow then.

  The next morning, the list he’d taped to the refrigerator reminded him of his errand. He headed to his car, opened the driver’s side door, and was hit with a potent smell. A sour odor, like the meat drawer in his refrigerator when the power had gone out in the middle of a summer some time ago (when was that?). He poked his head in the backseat, the odor stronger there. Some sweaty rash guards and shorts sat lumped behind the passenger seat. He knew that smell, and it wasn’t this one.

  He popped the trunk. There sat the groceries he’d forgotten he’d bought the day before. Chicken spoiled in a cloudy pink puddle of its own juices. Wilted broccoli glistened with slime. Cooked under the summer sun.

  He held the waste at arm’s length as he hauled the bags to the trash cans next to the garage. The stench rose up out the can in a whoo
sh as he dropped them in, and he gagged. He left the door open to air out the car and sat on the edge of the driver’s seat. He recalled wanting to go for groceries. He remembered knowing that he needed to. Yet he didn’t remember having gone. He’d been busy, he rationalized. His mind preoccupied with the fight, among other things. The groceries had simply slipped his mind. Just like falling asleep in the kitchen, it could have happened to anyone.

  Sure, it could have.

  THE MEMORY OF THAT DAY had faded like many others since, and he’d not thought of it again—until this morning.

  Late (again) for work at the gym, Xavier opened his driver’s side door. The trapped heat blew a stench against his face like a blast furnace—but it smelled nothing like the reek from last year. He reflexively slammed the door shut and held one nostril closed as he blew snot out of the other, but the odor lodged in his olfactory. The smell of shit and piss was unmistakable, but there was something else, too. Something he couldn’t place.

  He walked toward the trunk, stopping to look in the backseat. On the floor behind the driver’s seat was a pile of feces sitting in a pool of urine. Across from the mess, in the same space on the passenger’s side, was a dog with grayish blue fur, curled into itself.

  “What the fuck?” Xavier ran around the back end of the car, whipped the rear passenger door open, and held his breath. “No, no, no, no,” he said, wishing the dog had been some kind of mirage, brought on by the haze and glare of the high morning sun. He kneeled on the cracked driveway and hovered his hand over the dog’s body, skin pulled tight across the ribs. Xavier went to rest his hand on the dog when the ribs moved.

  He jerked his hand back. A hallucination, surely, born of wishful thinking, but he lowered his hand again, and the curved bones rose to meet his palm.

  “Hey,” Xavier said, softly.

  The dog’s whip-like tail pulled away from where it had curled against the hind legs, lifted, and then dropped to the floor with a thump.

  A little louder. “Hey.”

  The tail thumped twice more.

  Xavier slid his hands under the dog’s head and hind quarters and gently lifted him out of the car. Its skin was hot to the touch through its thin fur coat. He cradled the dog to his chest and could not differentiate the dog’s rapid heartbeat from his own. Xavier lowered his nose to the top of the dog’s head and breathed in.

  Through the smell of the dog’s own fluids, there was a scent embedded in the fur on its crown, one that unleashed a torrent of recollection, though one stood out more than any other. When he first saw the dog, he wondered who would put it in his car, what kind of person would leave it there to suffer in the summer sun. The scent told Xavier what kind of person would do such a thing. He didn’t need to see the rescue adoption papers sitting on the passenger seat with his signature to discover the answer.

  The dog was his.

  GRAND CHAMP

  The dog shivered despite the heat radiating from its skin. Xavier’s sweat soaked his shirt as he carried the dog the short walk up the uneven sidewalk to his father’s back porch, pulled him close while his hand searched for the handle of the screen door. He heard a rustle and saw movement in his periphery. Ray, his father’s next-door neighbor—or rather Xavier’s neighbor now—sat on his back porch. He made a show of turning the pages of his newspaper, pretending to mind his business when he most decidedly was not.

  Xavier had first met Ray on a return trip from the grocery store. Xavier had gone to pick up his father’s medications, along with an assortment of frozen dinners and liters upon liters of diet soda. Ray had been raking leaves in his tiny front yard and Xavier lifted his chin at him and waved. He hadn’t yet noticed the white embroidered MAGA on Ray’s red baseball cap, perched high on his balding head. The hat had his full attention when Ray asked with no small sense of entitlement if Xavier lived in the neighborhood. Xavier smiled tight-lipped, a practiced response to like-minded questions from the many Rays he’d encountered, a mask he wore when explanations were in no way owed but nonetheless demanded.

  Xavier told Ray that he was in fact Sam Wallace’s only son. Ray’s face registered a mélange of surprise and disappointment. Whether the man’s expression was because his neighbor’s son was Black, or because he felt he no longer had a good enough reason to call the police, Xavier didn’t know. Nor did he care. Arms encumbered by the groceries, Xavier had fumbled for the keys, used the wrong one twice, conscious of Ray’s watching him until he slid the right one home and made his way inside. Xavier imagined Ray back in his house, grumbling something in racist, peering through the aluminum blinds bent just wide enough to see whatever Black shenanigans Xavier would most assuredly be up to.

  “Don’t let me find that thing’s shit on my lawn,” Ray called out. Xavier’s fingers grasped at air as he cradled the trembling dog. His arms burned from the strain. He shifted the animal, pressed his thumb down on the door handle’s release. Ray snapped his newspaper. “Or in anyone else’s yard for that matter. This is a decent, clean neighborhood. And I better not hear so much as a whimper past eight P.M. You know we have a noise ordinance around here, don’t you?”

  Xavier leaned his rear against the door and closed it behind him. Ray continued his screed unfazed by the lack of audience. Xavier stepped into his bedroom, just off to the left of the back door. The dog still in his arms, he pulled the sheets from the mattress and dragged them down the hall to the kitchen. Once there, he piled them into a makeshift bed with his foot and gently laid the dog down. From the cabinets he pulled down a bowl and filled it with cold water. Xavier placed the bowl by the dog’s muzzle and lay down on the floor in front of him, their faces inches apart. The dog’s dried nose flared, each breath a struggle. One eyebrow lifted, then the other, as he looked to the water bowl, to Xavier, then back again. His eyes interrogated Xavier, asked him why and how, pleaded for answers. Xavier heard the unspoken questions, ones that echoed his own, but those answers on the chalkboard, like many as of late, had been partially wiped away.

  YESTERDAY HAD BEEN, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, one of Sam’s better days at the nursing facility. Xavier hadn’t been able to make it that week as many times as he would have liked—or at least as many times as he told his father he would have liked. As the end of his suspension neared, Xavier stepped up his training, the intensity and frequency as though he was in camp, ready to take a fight any minute, though the chances were remote given the circumstances of his exit. The promoter had told him as much. Still, he had to stay in fight shape. Being unprepared when the call came was a luxury for fighters under contract. If that meant missed visits to Pop, then so be it. To see his father’s decline was difficult. Not being there to see it remedied that particular malady.

  There were, of course, days where Xavier simply forgot to go—and then there were the days that he forgot that he forgot. Yesterday was not one of those.

  Lying on the floor across from the dog, he remembered that he’d remembered to be at the nursing home for a family care conference with the team coordinating Sam’s care. The nurses and therapists told Xavier his father’s emphysema had worsened, and in his demented agitation, he had been pulling his nasal cannula out, which caused him to desaturate. When Xavier asked them for a translation of all the words that weren’t “agitation” into English, one of the care team explained that it was getting harder for his father to breathe on his own and that the Alzheimer’s symptoms made him pull out the oxygen tube from his nose. When the staff tried to help him, he’d become combative. The lack of oxygen caused him to pass out, and only then were they able to replace the cannula.

  If all that hadn’t been enough good news, he’d also grown increasingly verbally abusive of his new roommate, unable to recall (and even then, understand) that once his money had run out, medical assistance meant no more private room. The team conveyed the situation to Xavier with a rehearsed compassion, their words spoken in a mixture of kindness entwined with the fatigue of delivering bad news.

  Xavier folded his hands on the conference table and hung his head. “I’m working on his house to get it ready to put on the market. That might get him enough to put him back in a private room, right?” The care team exchanged glances across the table. “What? It can’t be that expensive.”