The Angle You Were Looking For

THE ANGLE YOU WERE LOOKING FOR Notebook. Private. Hotel desk, night before NO ESCAPE. Third entry about the same man. Last one before the cage settles it. ———————————————— ONE. I want to go back to something I wrote three weeks ago and did not finish, because I am not walking into that cage tomorrow with an unfinished sentence sitting in my own notebook where I put it on purpose. The entry was called "The Chain." Section Four. I wrote: he wrote about men on the roster who spent fifteen years learning to do badly what I do correctly on instinct. He meant it as a compliment. It landed somewhere else. Because the question underneath it is the one I — And then I stopped. I wrote "No." I called it well played. I told myself the angle he was looking for was not in my knee, and I closed the notebook, and I fought Dorian Graves two days later and did not think about it again until tonight, which is a lie, because I have thought about almost nothing else, and a private notebook is supposed to be the one place I do not lie to myself just because the sentence is inconvenient. So. Finishing it. The question underneath it is the one I cannot answer, and which occasionally prevents sleep, and it is this: would I be what I am if the early rooms had been harder. ———————————————— TWO. I have turned this over in enough hotel rooms now to know what shape it takes when I actually let it sit instead of shutting the notebook. I came up fast. Triple jump to Cape Town to main events on two continents in eighteen months. I have said, on the record, more than once, that I chose the path with the fastest route to meaningful competition. That is true. It is also, looked at from a different angle — and Mr. Pryce is very good at finding the different angle — a way of saying that I chose not to find out what happens to a twenty-four-year-old who spends five years losing to people better than him before he is allowed to win. Cormac Healy has lost six times in this federation and shown up to a shipping-container gym the next morning regardless. Dorian Graves fought me last week on a shoulder that had already failed once and made me earn every inch of the decision not to go looking for it again. Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin has been doing this fifteen years across three continents and has a scar for every year. These are people who know exactly what they are made of because the room told them, repeatedly, at cost, before it told them anything else. I do not know what the room would have told me. The room agreed with me almost immediately. I have never had the specific experience of finding out what is on the other side of failing against someone who was simply better, over and over, until the losing itself became information. Mr. Pryce is the first man who has ever pointed at that gap in my file and been correct to do it. ———————————————— THREE. Here is where I expect the entry to turn, if I were writing it the way the federation would want it written, and I am not going to write it that way, because I do not lie in this notebook. I do not have an answer. I am not going to manufacture one to make this entry end tidily. I do not know whether the gift is real in the way I have spent four years insisting it is, or whether it is real and untested in a way that only looks the same from the outside. Mr. Pryce does not know either. Nobody knows. The question does not have an answer sitting anywhere waiting to be found, which is, I think, the actual reason it has cost me sleep and not just pride — a man can argue with an insult. I have never once found a way to argue with a question that has no bottom to it. So I am not going to argue with it anymore. I am going to do the other thing. ———————————————— FOUR. I told him, in the corridor, in front of a camera, that I read his work and there is no error in it and I am going to open anyway. Every person in that federation who watched it assumed I said it the way I say everything — certain, because certainty is the whole of my presentation, because a boy who holds a pose for exactly five seconds does not get to flinch afterward. I want it on the record, here, where nobody else reads it, that I said it already knowing what I have only just finished writing above. I did not say it from the certainty. I said it from underneath the question, with the question still fully open, because I have decided — and this is the decision, this is the actual content of this entry, everything before it was just the work of getting here — that the unanswerable question does not get a vote on what I do next. It doesn't get to decide whether I climb tomorrow. It only gets to sit there, unanswered, for as long as it likes. I am not going to solve it to earn the right to open. I am simply going to open, with it still sitting there, because that is the only version of courage available to a man who has been handed a question with no floor. Mr. Pryce thinks the absence of an answer is the crack in me he is going to put his hand through. I think it is the one thing about me that is not for sale to a document, because I have looked directly at it, tonight, on this page, and I am still going up to the top rope tomorrow regardless of what it turns out to mean about where I came from. That is the angle he was looking for. He found it. I am telling him, here, that I found it first, and I am bringing it into the cage with me anyway. ———————————————— FIVE. I am aware of what I have just written and I am not going to soften it in editing, because a man does not get to be honest on page four and then polish it into something safer on page five. Tomorrow. Mr. Pryce. The championship he carries low, like a briefcase whose contents he already knows. I am going to find out what I am made of in the one room built to actually answer the question instead of just asking it. Whatever the cage says, it will be the first honest answer I have ever gotten. I am ready for that in a way I was not ready for it three weeks ago. That is the whole use of a notebook nobody else reads. — N. D.