Volume Twenty-Eight

VOLUME TWENTY-EIGHT Training journal, current volume. Private record. Entry begun in the requested room. Two days out. ———————————————— The previous volume closed on a sentence I was not certain about when I wrote it, and I want to report on it before anything else, because reporting on my own claims is the only thing that makes this journal worth keeping. I wrote that the work had stopped being about me. It has held. I want to record how, because it did not resolve the way I expected. I expected to find a replacement — a new absence, a new organising thing to put at the end of the four hundred. There is no replacement. What happened instead is smaller and I have found it a considerable relief: the repetitions have a subject again, and the subject is a man, and I do not have to think about myself at all while I am doing them. I did not know that was available. Twenty-three years and it did not occur to me that the alternative to working toward something was working toward somebody. The limiting factor from the previous entry is still there. It is quieter. I am not going to call it solved and I am not going to name it. I will note only that I have stopped checking whether it is there, which is either progress or the beginning of a mistake, and I will know which in two days. ———————————————— BEING THE ONE WHO HOLDS IT A short structural note, and then I will leave the subject. Winning it was an arrival. I had prepared for the arrival for twenty-three years and the preparation was correct and it worked. Defending it is a job. I did not prepare for a job. Nobody in that dojo ever sat me down and explained what a man does on the second morning, because nobody in that dojo believed in the second morning — the whole method is built on the first one, four thousand times. I have been the champion for a fortnight and the fortnight has been almost entirely administrative. I have been photographed. I have been asked how I feel eleven times by eight people. A man from the office asked me to hold the belt at shoulder height and I did it and I have thought about that more than I would like to admit. None of it is a complaint. I record it because it is a load I have never carried and an untested load is a limiting factor whether or not it feels like one, and this journal exists to record limiting factors before they announce themselves. ———————————————— WONE Now the work. I have watched every match he has had in this federation. I did that before and I have done it again, differently, because the first time I watched them to learn what he does and this time I watched them to learn what he is never surprised by. Here is the finding, and it is not the one the federation expects. His technique is not exceptional. I want to be precise, because that sentence will be misread. It is excellent. It is clean, it is economical, there is no waste anywhere in it and no ornamentation at all. But there is not one thing in his repertoire that I have not seen executed to that standard by other men in other countries. If you gave me his tape without his name on it I would tell you he was a very good technician working somewhere small and honest. That is not what beats people. What beats people is that he is never behind. Watch him against Mr. Graves. Watch him against Mr. Reyes-Montoya. Watch him against me, at Behind Closed Doors 1, which I have now watched eleven times including the portions I had been avoiding. He is not faster. He does not counter more often than a good counter-wrestler counters. What he does is arrive at each exchange having already discarded the wrong half of it. A man does that when he has information. So the question I have been sitting with for two weeks is not what does he do. It is where does the information come from, and I have narrowed it, and the narrowing is the entire plan. It does not come from the match. It is already present at the bell. In all five of his matches in this company he is correct from the first exchange — there is no adjustment period, no first ninety seconds of gathering. Whatever he has, he walks in with. Which means it happens before. ———————————————— WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE Every person in this building has watched him do it and not one has interrogated it, including me, for a year, which I record here as a professional failure of my own. He stands still for approximately twelve seconds. Then he turns once, slowly, all the way around, and reads the six corners in order. The same order. Every time. Then he faces his opponent's side and waits. Mr. Graves has made a great deal of this on commentary and has made it sound occult, which has had the effect of ensuring nobody looks at it seriously. I am going to look at it seriously. I do not know what it is. I want that in writing, plainly, because I am about to describe a plan built on something I cannot identify and a man who pretends otherwise in his own private journal is a man who has started lying to the only reader who matters. Here is what I know without knowing what it is. It is fixed. Not approximately fixed — fixed. Same duration, same rotation, same sequence, in five matches across three venues, including one where the entrance ran long and he did it anyway while the timekeeper waited. It is not preparation in the ordinary sense. Preparation varies with opponent. This does not vary at all, which means it is not about the man across from him. It is about him. And it is completed before the bell, without exception. He has never once been caught mid-sequence. That last one is the fact I have built two weeks around. ———————————————— THE PLAN I am not going to work out what the count is for. I want to be exact about why, because it looks like laziness and it is the opposite. If I spend the next two days constructing a theory, I will walk into that cage carrying it, and I will look for evidence of it, and I will find some, because a man who is looking for a thing finds it. That is how frameworks fail. I have watched better men than me lose to their own hypotheses. I do not need to know what the count is for. I need to know what he is without it. So I will take it from him. Not cleverly — there is nothing clever available. I will simply be somewhere I am not supposed to be, at a moment he has never had to account for, and the sequence will not complete. And then I will watch. That is the whole plan and I am aware of how thin it looks written down. Two possibilities. Either the count is habit, in which case nothing happens, he is mildly inconvenienced, and I have spent an opening on a superstition and will have to beat him the long way with a shoulder that is not right. I have prepared for that. It is the likelier of the two and I would put it at seven in ten. Or it is load-bearing. If it is load-bearing then what stands up in that cage will be something I have not scouted, because it has never been on tape, because it has never once been permitted to happen. I have thought carefully about whether I am entitled to do this. He has been courteous with me. He met two conditions at a cost I would not have asked a man to pay. There is a version of me that considers this beneath the exchange. I have concluded that version is being sentimental. He wrote that he is owed the reading. A reading is not a courtesy call. He did not offer me a conversation, he offered me the only room where he is legible, and a man who accepts that offer and then declines to look at the difficult part has not read anything. He will understand. I am reasonably certain he will understand better than I do. ———————————————— A SEPARATE NOTE Mr. Reyes-Montoya is on this card. I am told he intends to work his way back and that he has said so to nobody, which is consistent. We have still not spoken. I have no plans to change that and I do not believe he does either. I want to record one thing and then close it, because it is a thing about me rather than about him. I am not troubled by it. I had expected to be. A man rebuilding toward the thing you are holding is supposed to sit somewhere in your chest, and it does not, and after some examination I have concluded it is because he is the only person in this federation whose approach I do not have to guess at. Whatever he does will be correct and it will arrive on schedule and it will be exactly as difficult as it looks. There is a kind of rest in that. I did not expect the man who nearly ended my career to be the restful one. ———————————————— THE BODY Right knee: quiet. No heat, no morning stiffness. The replacement holds and is not the limiting factor and has not been for some time. Left shoulder: the joint capsule strain from the twenty-first minute at NO ESCAPE is at approximately eighty per cent. It is improving and it is not going to be a hundred by the night. Recorded here so that if it fails I have not pretended otherwise. He will not know about it. It is not on the federation's record and I have not been asked. Right wrist unremarkable. Sleep adequate. Diet on plan. Weight two pounds under, deliberately. The trailing foot is how I stand. ———————————————— Tomorrow: the hour of stillness. Then the Behind Closed Doors 1 tape one final time — the last four minutes only, which is the portion where I stopped being able to explain what was happening to me. Then the entry. Four hundred repetitions. Cold room. I have never taken something from a man before a bell. I have been in this business twenty-three years and it has never once been the correct thing to do. It is the correct thing to do. The work remains the work. In two days I find out what his is for. — H.K.