Volume Twenty-Nine

VOLUME TWENTY-NINE Training journal, current volume. Private record. First entry since the defence. ———————————————— The previous volume closed on a claim, as they usually do, and I want to report on it first. I wrote that the repetitions had a subject again, and that the subject was a man, and that I did not have to think about myself while I was doing them. I recorded it as a relief and it was one. That match is finished. The subject went with it. I had assumed, without examining the assumption, that another would arrive — that the office would name somebody, or that somebody would name me, and the work would take the shape of whoever it was, as it did for a fortnight in August. That has not happened. Nobody has been named. I have not named anybody. So the repetitions are back to having no subject, and I am back to not knowing what they are for, and I want to state at the top of this volume that I have not solved it. I am going to spend the rest of the entry failing to solve it in more detail. That is the only honest use of the pages I can find. ———————————————— THE NIGHT I have been asked, eleven times by nine people, what it felt like. I do not know. I want that recorded because it is true and because I think the people who ask would prefer a different answer. I remember the twenty-six minutes with more precision than I remember most things. I could write them out here, exchange by exchange, and I will not, because I have done so already in my head perhaps forty times and it has not produced anything the tape does not show. What I do not remember is deciding to sit down. The match ended and I was on the mat with the belt across my knees and my head down, and I have been told the building was very loud, and I believe it, and I did not hear it. I was looking at the canvas between my feet. There was a scuff on it, a dark mark shaped like a comma, from somebody's boot at some point in the evening. I looked at that for what I am told was about ninety seconds. I have since been asked why I did not raise the belt. I have given the true answer, which is that it did not occur to me. People find that answer unsatisfying and I understand why. It is also the only one I have. If I am more honest than that, here, where it costs nothing: I think I did not raise it because I did not know who I would be raising it to. ———————————————— A LIST I am going to try something I have not done in twenty-nine volumes, which is to write down directly what the work is for. Not the limiting factor. The purpose. I have been asked for it by nobody and I am asking for it myself. What the work is for: 1. The work is how I have lived for twenty-three years and a man does not stop living the way he lives because one sentence in his life has been completed. That is true and it is not an answer. It is a description. 2. The belt must be defended and defending requires preparation. True. The belt was not the purpose before I held it and I do not see how it becomes the purpose now. This is a job and not a reason. 3. Mr. Fukazawa did not fly me to Tokyo and correct my trailing foot so that I could stop. I wrote that and then I sat for some time. It is the closest of the three. It is also his reason and not mine, and he would be the first to tell me so, and he would not be kind about it. 4. ———————————————— I have left the fourth one as I found it. I tried for most of an evening and there is nothing in it. I will not fill it with something because a list looks better with four. ———————————————— TWO A professional note, because it is the only part of this entry I can speak to with confidence. I wrote before the defence that one result is not a method. I now have two. Both title matches in this company were decided by the same correction: the trailing foot, as Mr. Fukazawa adjusted it in a cold room before No Escape, built specifically for Mr. Reyes-Montoya, and used a second time on a man whose style shares nothing with his. Two results is also not a method. But it is the beginning of the obligation to find out whether it is one, and I recognise that I have been avoiding the obligation because the answer might be that I have been winning on a single borrowed detail, and that a man who was not in that room for four hours would have lost both nights. That is recorded as a limiting factor. It has a name. I prefer it to the other kind. ———————————————— THE CORNER It has been reported that I regret what I did before the bell. I want to correct the record in the only place I keep one. I do not regret it. It was correct. I stood somewhere I was entitled to stand, and I took something from a man that he had never had to account for, and what stood up in front of me for six minutes was something I had not scouted, and I am alive and have the use of most of my arm because he put it away again himself. That last part is his doing and not mine and I will not take credit for it. It was correct. I would not do it again. Both of those are true. I have been in this business long enough to know that the correct thing and the repeatable thing are different objects, and that a man who confuses them is about to get somebody hurt. ———————————————— PROOF The office has announced that the next card will be assembled by request. A man who wants a match must stand up and ask for it, by name, aloud, and the man named must answer the same way. I have not asked for anything. I note that I am the only champion in this company, and that the rule was written, as far as I can tell, to prevent exactly the kind of man I have become: someone who is present in the building and does the work and waits. I have waited for twenty-three years. It was the method. I waited for one thing, and the waiting organised everything, and I was very good at it. I do not know how to ask for something I do not want. That is not modesty and it is not a strategy. I have checked. I do not want anything that is on offer, and I would rather not stand in the middle of the cage and ask for it in front of eight thousand people and have them see that I am asking for nothing. I have been told nobody has asked for me either. I find I do not mind that as much as I would have expected. I also find that I noticed it, which I record. ———————————————— THE BODY Left shoulder: worse than after No Escape. The capsule strain was aggravated in the eighteenth minute of the defence and I finished the last eight effectively one-handed, and it is now slower to answer than it has been at any point since the knee. Seventy per cent on a good morning. It is on the federation's record now, because everybody watched it, and I no longer have the advantage of it being private. Right arm: the healthy one, which he dismantled. It has recovered faster than the left. It is the only thing about that night that has behaved as I expected. Right knee: quiet. Sleep adequate. Weight on plan. The trailing foot is how I stand. ———————————————— THE WORK Hour of stillness this morning. Then the drills, the full sequence, in the room they have given me here. Every repetition correct. I counted them because I have always counted them. At some point in the second hour I lost the count. I do not remember when. I looked up and I did not know what number I was on, and I stood there for a while, and then I went back to the beginning and started again from one. That has not happened since I was nineteen. I do not know what it means and I am not going to guess in writing. The work remains the work. Two volumes ago I gave that sentence a second half. I am not going to write it this time, because I no longer know whether it is true, and I have never once put a line in these pages that I did not believe when I wrote it. — H.K.