Dear Clay

DEAR CLAY [A kitchen table in rural County Clare. Wide pine boards, scarred from years of use. A blue mug of tea cooling at the right hand of the writer. A single sheet of A4 paper, ruled. A black biro. Through the window above the sink, the lower paddock is visible — six sheep, a stone wall, a sky working itself toward rain. BRÍD Ó'SÚILLEABHÁIN sits in a hand-knit cardigan over a white shirt. The gray streak from her left temple catches the morning light. She has been writing for approximately twenty minutes. The letter, as transcribed below, is the second draft. The first is balled up in the bin beside the back door.] ———————————————— Dear Clay, I read your piece. The matter on your mind has been on mine since you mentioned it. You wrote that you would like to talk to me about it at some point. Not yet, you said — not until the matches were done. The matches are not done. Yours with the kid is still ahead, and mine with whoever the federation eventually decides is not even yet booked. So I am writing this letter instead of waiting for the conversation, which is a thing I have done before when waiting felt like the wrong shape for the question. You will remember Lubbock, in 2015. We were on the same card on a Tuesday in March in a converted bowling alley with a roof that leaked over the third row. You worked the opener with a boy from Oklahoma whose name has gone out of my head. I worked second-from-last with a girl from El Paso who later married my road agent. You and I shared a Marlboro outside in the rain afterwards. We talked about my left knee, which was younger than it is now but already complaining, and about your second daughter, who would have been three at the time, and about whether the form was going to hold up for any of us. I do not remember what conclusion we came to. I remember that we both seemed to think the answer was probably no, and that we were going to keep doing it anyway. I am telling you this because I want you to know that the letter is being written by the person you had that conversation with. Not by the federation's veteran. Not by the woman the broadcast keeps referring to as the third corner of the Triangle. By me. The person you smoked outside the bowling alley with. The work has been long enough that the people who knew us then are mostly retired or dead, and I do not want either of us to write the next part of this with that audience missing. ———————————————— I watched Behind Closed Doors 6 from a hotel room in this country. I was not at the building. I have not been at the building since Ignition. I will be at the building soon. You will know already what I am going to say about your match with Rancid. He did what he said he would do. You did what you said you would do. The barbed-wire bat went where the bat went, and you did not pick it up afterward, and the audience saw you do something most of them have never seen a hardcore fighter do, which is decide on the broadcast record that there was a thing that they had paid to see and you were going to refuse to give it to them. I want to put this in writing somewhere it will not disappear. You held a line, Clay. The line was the right one. I do not know if the federation has fully understood yet what you did — they will, eventually, because the federation tends to understand things in arrears — but I understood it that night, and I am telling you so now, because there has not been a lot of letter-writing in our generation of this work and the absence has cost us things. ———————————————— Now. The matter on your mind. I will not pretend I do not know what it is. I have been thinking about it for the same period you have been thinking about it, possibly longer. There are three people in this federation who do what we do — Rancid, you, me — and the three of us have three different relationships with the work. The audience has been told one of those is wrong. I am not sure the audience has been told what the right one is. I am not sure I have decided what I think the right one is. I have my own thoughts. They are not yet a thesis. They may end up being one. The conversation you want to have, I would like to have also. I would prefer to have it in person. Not on paper. Not on the broadcast. In a corridor at The Foundry, or in a parking lot afterward, or in some kitchen with worse light than the one I am writing this from. I will be in the building soon. I do not know which night yet. I think you will know when. The federation has a way of arranging these things without anyone announcing them. ———————————————— I have one more thing to say in this letter, which is not for the federation and not for the audience and not really, when I think about it, for you either. It is for me. I am going to put it down anyway, because I am the one writing. I have been retiring from this work for fifteen years, Clay. I have actually retired twice. I have come back twice. I do not yet know what the third time is going to look like, or whether it is going to be the third retirement or the third match. I think the matter we have to discuss is part of the question. I think there is a version of being done with the form that does not look like leaving it, and I think you may have walked into one shape of that version at Behind Closed Doors 6 by accident. If that is what you wanted to talk about, the answer is: yes. I would like to. If it is not what you wanted to talk about — which is also possible, because I am putting words in your mouth from rural Ireland, and that has never been a wise practice — then forgive me the assumption, and we can find out what you did mean when we are in the same room. ———————————————— The kettle is going for a second cup. I will post this on the way down to the village. Be well between now and the building. Bríd [She folds the letter, slides it into an envelope she has had at the side of the table the whole time, writes a short address on the front in the same biro, and sets it next to the tea. The scene ends with her looking out the window for a long moment before standing up.]