Numbers That Went Up

NUMBERS THAT WENT UP --- A training ledger. Green cloth cover, cracked along the spine, Amman, purchased 1988. The first eighty-one pages are in a man's handwriting. The rest are in his daughter's. --- PAGE 82 — 14 JULY New page. Day one. The book has thirty-one pages left in it and I have decided that is enough. My father filled eighty-one pages between 1988 and 1996 and never once wrote a sentence longer than a line. My mother taught for thirty-one years and told me that a thing you do not write down did not happen in any way that can be checked. Between the two of them I did not have a great deal of choice about becoming a person who keeps records. Yesterday I tapped. Thirteen fifty-two. Left wrist, at the base of the cage wall, where there is nothing to reach for and no official can be asked to intervene. I want it written that I held the hold for eleven seconds before I did it. Not because eleven seconds is a long time. Because I counted them, and a person who is counting is a person still making a decision. Columns as before. --- DATE SQUAT PULL MAT LEFT NOTE 14 Jul 165.0 190.0 0 41° Wrist iced. No mat. 15 Jul 165.0 190.0 0 40° No mat. 17 Jul 167.5 190.0 30 41° Right-hand grip only. 19 Jul 167.5 195.0 45 41° — 21 Jul 170.0 195.0 60 42° — 23 Jul 170.0 197.5 60 41° — 25 Jul 172.5 197.5 75 41° — --- PAGE 83 — 26 JULY Specialist in Amman, second opinion, forty minutes. The scaphoid did not heal in the position it was meant to heal in. It was set in 2019 by a man who was doing his best in a room with four people waiting behind me. It can be broken again and reset properly. Recovery is eleven months. Eleven months. I asked whether the number improves if I am disciplined. He said discipline is not one of the variables. He said this kindly. I have been told my whole life that discipline is the only variable and it was strange to sit in a chair and be told, by a serious man with no reason to lie, that there is a part of my own body which does not speak that language. I declined. I want the reason written down properly and not softened, because a soft reason is a reason you can go back on. I am twenty-nine. Eleven months is not eleven months. Eleven months is a division that reshuffles twice while I am gone, a champion crowned and defended and possibly beaten, and a woman who has not appeared in a building for a year, returning at thirty with a repaired wrist and no record. The wrist is not the thing that is running out. --- DATE SQUAT PULL MAT LEFT NOTE 28 Jul 172.5 200.0 90 41° — 30 Jul 175.0 200.0 90 42° — 1 Aug 175.0 200.0 105 41° — 3 Aug 177.5 202.5 105 41° — 5 Aug 177.5 202.5 120 40° — 7 Aug 180.0 205.0 120 41° — --- PAGE 84 — 9 AUGUST Twenty-seven days. No call. I do not say this as a complaint. I want to be exact about what I am recording, because I am aware that a private book is the easiest place in the world to lie. I am not owed a booking. Nobody is owed anything in a company whose entire proposition is that the result decides. I am 0-2. Both losses to the same woman. She is now the champion, and she was correct both times, and if I were making the card I would not be looking for me either. What I am recording is the shape of the days. They are excellent days. Five o'clock. The gym is cold until seven. Nobody watches. The numbers go up. And there is a thought I have every single morning at the top of the second set, which is this: every number in this book is going up, and none of them is the number. --- DATE SQUAT PULL MAT LEFT NOTE 11 Aug 180.0 205.0 135 41° — 13 Aug 182.5 207.5 135 41° — 15 Aug 182.5 207.5 150 42° Cage wall work. Left side only. 17 Aug 182.5 210.0 150 41° Cage wall work. 19 Aug 185.0 210.0 150 41° — 21 Aug 185.0 210.0 165 40° — --- PAGE 85 — 22 AUGUST I went back and read my father's pages tonight. I have owned this book for eleven years and I have read the front of it perhaps four times, and always for the numbers. Page 34. February 1991. He writes the lift. Then underneath: failed. Then the same lift again: failed. Then again: failed. Then a fourth line, same weight, and the word is different. Four lines. He did not explain any of it. He did not write what he was feeling on the third one. He wrote it down and he came back the next day and there is a next day, in his hand, on the following page, which is the entire argument. I had never noticed the column at the far right of his pages. He ruled it himself with a straight edge. Every one of his eighty-one pages has it. I did not copy it across when I started this book. I remember deciding not to. I was twenty-two and I thought it was vanity — a man drawing himself a special box to put his good days in. I have been keeping a log for eight weeks with no column for the result. --- DATE SQUAT PULL MAT LEFT NOTE 24 Aug 187.5 212.5 165 41° — 26 Aug 187.5 212.5 180 41° — 28 Aug 190.0 215.0 180 41° — 30 Aug 190.0 215.0 180 42° — 1 Sep 190.0 215.0 195 41° Booking received. --- PAGE 86 — 1 SEPTEMBER Behind Closed Doors 13. Opening the show. Adeyemi. Fifty days. --- PAGE 86 (cont.) — 3 SEPTEMBER Someone sent me the package the company made of her. Two minutes forty-one. Three million people have watched it and I am, apparently, one of them now. Notes, honestly: She does not look down. Not once, in either match, in a six-sided cage that has half this roster still counting corners on the way up. It is not bravado. It is gymnastics — she has known where the floor is since she was eight years old and she has never had to check. Second note. She has never been made to look down. Both of her losses are to women who took her arm or her balance and did it quickly. Nobody has yet put her against a wall and simply stood there while the options went out one at a time. That is not a criticism of her. It is a description of a thing that has not happened to her yet. Third note, and this is the one I have been sitting with. Every second of that package is from a match she lost. Three million views of a woman losing beautifully. They made her a film. Nobody has made a film of me. There is no package. There is no thread. There is a green book with numbers in it and a gym in Amman that is cold until seven. I do not envy her the film. I want to write that plainly because it would be easy to and it would be a lie. What I notice is that she and I have arrived at exactly the same number by completely opposite routes — she has been watched by three million people and I have been watched by nobody, and we are both 0-2, and on Saturday one of us stops being that and the other one goes back to a very quiet room. I have been in the quiet room for fifty-two days. I know precisely what is in there. --- DATE SQUAT PULL MAT LEFT NOTE 3 Sep 190.0 215.0 195 41° — 5 Sep 192.5 217.5 210 41° — 7 Sep 192.5 217.5 210 41° — 8 Sep — — 210 41° Deload. --- PAGE 87 — LAST ENTRY BEFORE Squat up twenty-seven and a half kilos in eight weeks. Pull up twenty-seven and a half. Mat time from nothing to three and a half hours. Left wrist: forty-one degrees. It was forty-one degrees on the fourteenth of July and it will be forty-one degrees on Saturday and it will be forty-one degrees for the rest of my life unless I give away a year to get eleven more, and I have decided, on the record, in writing, that I will not. So it is not going to be fixed. It is going to be carried. Both times I tapped, I chose the arm over the result. I have gone back over both and I would choose the same thing twice more. That is the sentence I have not been able to get past for fifty-seven days, because it is true and it is also the reason there is nothing in this book worth showing anybody. Here is what I have understood, and it took my father's handwriting to make me understand it. He wrote failed three times because he had somewhere to put it. The column was not vanity. The column was a place for the answer to go, and a man who rules one has already decided he is going to keep coming back until there is something to write in it. I have spent eight weeks measuring everything about myself except the only thing that decides anything. --- [The final page carries a new vertical line, ruled with a straight edge from the top of the page to the bottom, forming a narrow column at the right-hand margin. It is headed in two hands' worth of care, in Arabic and then in English:] نتيجة RESULT [The column is empty. Beneath the last row, one line:] It is not vanity. It is a place to put it. Saturday.