Page 83 of Mean Machine

As the next few rounds wore on, it became increasingly clear that something would have to give. Everything hurt, sides, ribs,drawing breath, his face, but adrenaline was a funny thing, wasn’t it, because it kept some part of his wits sharp enough to lash out. It wasn’t a matter of choosing to fight or flee at this point—some primal thing inside him must have decided that turning his back now meant certain death, so he fought with the fierceness of a wounded tiger.

He knew he was hurt—but he’d been pushed so far, being pushed even further was inevitable. And that same animal sense made him aware that Thorne was arguably hurt worse—he was exhausted, breathing through his mouth like that, lungs pumping the way they were. The fierceness in him, the flashing eyes, the confidence to keep moving forward, to keep punching, to keep trying to force a decision, had been slowly washed out and now looked like doubt was creeping in at the edges, doubt and even, when Brooklyn attacked and Thorne could feel that he was not in control of the exchanges now, fear. He’d also lost much of his strength, or maybe the blows just didn’t hurt as much as the first ones.

Thorne was exhausted enough that he was getting sloppy about protecting himself, sloppy about timing and distance. Brooklyn had thought in previous fights that Thorne was getting overconfident when he’d reached this stage of a fight, but the truth was, actually facing him, watching him change in front of his eyes, picking up things no TV camera or mobile phone ever could—that right underneath, Thorne was brittle—it was a matter of grinding away enough of his bulk and substance to reveal the cracks and give them a chance to come apart.

A nasty hook from the side surprised him because his eye was swelling shut, limiting his field of vision, and it would rob him of depth perception, and it would end the fight with a TKO.

No.

But before Brooklyn could do anything about it, a straight punch exploded in his face, the kind of punch that rattled every tooth and every thought and switched all remaining power to pure survival, eradicating everything else. Something cracked, and he hoped it was the nose but knew it wasn’t.

Don’t let them break your pretty face, baby.

It was part rage, part horror that made him lash out with everything he had left—tearing into Thorne with a hail of blows driven by nothing more than instinct, he vaguely noticed that half the audience was off their chairs, and then he hit Thorne perfectly, high up on the temple.

The man staggered and went down, and through Brooklyn’s rapidly narrowing vision, he saw the ref seemingly undecided between looking at Brooklyn and at Thorne, whose movements were erratic and resembled more those of a sleepwalker trying to get out of bed. The ref then seemed to make the sensible decision that one man was standing and the other wasn’t, so he seemed to focus on Thorne, beginning to count.

Just fucking stay down.

Thorne struggled up like a puppet that had its strings tangled up somewhere, moving the wrong limb at the wrong time, but he managed to stand. The ref shouted something at him, and Thorne nodded vaguely, more an automatic motion than a response. The ref seemed again dubious, but then stepped away and motioned for them to continue.

Thorne moved towards Brooklyn, gloves raised, but there wasn’t anything in his eyes, no fight, no clarity. It was frankly terrifying that the ref thought Thorne could—or should—continue. Brooklyn braced himself for what he hoped were the final few exchanges because he had nothing left either. The way his eye was swelling, he’d only have a few minutes left himself.

A motion from the corner of his vision, and then the ref stepped between them and ended the fight. At first Brooklyn felt the ref might have reconsidered, might have seen how badly hurt Thorne was, but then he noticed the pink-stained white towel lying in the ring, and for a moment he expected that it might have been Joseph ending the fight, but before he could confirm that, the ref raised Brooklyn’s arm, and the crowd cheered, though Brooklyn could feel a kind of seething resentment underneath that the fight had been stopped—and not fought to its grisly conclusion.

Joseph was at his side, and the ring was full of people from both corners.

“You’ve done it, Brook. It’s done. You win,” Joseph said, his tone soft and concerned like somebody might talk to a relative on their deathbed.

He wanted to reach out for Thorne, check that he was okay, in the end, but the man’s crew around him blocked his line of sight, and after Thorne making up his whole reality for those rounds, being unable to see him almost felt like a loss. A bond had been severed, and now other people were between them, in their space, in the square where they’d battled so hard for what had felt like days or weeks.

There were cameras everywhere, flashing lights, a great wall of noise, but nothing really reached him. This should have been his big triumph, the thing he’d worked towards for all of his pro career, the thing that he could only have dreamed of when he’d stepped into a gym that first day, largely to work off the frustrations of his job and the gut from too many takeaways.

Later, he’d look at the recording of the fight from the outside. He had no memory of any of that milling around in the ring, only faintly remembered he’d tried so hard to focus on what was going on around them, worried he might pass out, couldn’t remember saying “I’m fine” and “I feel great,” when somebody pointed a camera and a microphone at him.

He did remember, almost, the reverse ring walk, Joseph talking to some medical personnel. “No, if he can walk, let him walk, all right?”

Somehow, he must have lost the gloves, and likely Joseph had cut them off his hands. He changed into some warmer clothes, but none of that really sank in. He remembered sitting and waiting in hospital, where somebody checked out his cut face, which ended up needing ten stitches, and one doctor seemed concerned, murmured, “Just making sure there’s nothing worse underneath all that swelling,” and then an X-ray and CT scan, when he should be popping champagne and celebrating his victory.

Waiting in the hospital with Joseph was pretty anticlimactic, all told, and while they moved him speedily along the chain, they didn’t exactly treat him like an emergency after somebody had shone a penlight into his eyes.

When they got called into a doctor’s office, she had the scans and X-rays clipped to a backlit screen, and Brooklyn realised belatedly that this alien-looking structure of bright bones and dark hollows was his head.

She shook his hand and settled behind her desk that had several piles of medical files of varying heights on it. “The bad news, Mr Marshall, is that you’ve suffered an orbital fracture, that is, damage to the facial bones.” She nodded towards the X-rays. “The good news is that it’s not a blowout fracture and there’s no serious damage to the eye, apart from some bleeding, or the visual nerves, as far as we can tell right now.”

He noted the hedge. “What does that mean? Do I need surgery?”

“In this case, surgery is a distinct possibility, but the truth is that with the swelling and bruising in that general area, we can’t really operate right now. The swelling needs to go down first, in other words, then we can reassess. It’s entirely possible that it’ll heal by itself—but obviously all damage to the facial bones needs to be taken seriously. Surgical solutions won’t restore it to its former strength, so there is an argument for letting it heal naturally.”

“What does that mean for boxing?”

Joseph twitched as if he were going to raise a hand, maybe to tell Brooklyn that wasn’t important right now—except it obviously was.

“Difficult to say at the moment. It’s most likely not a career-ending injury, but you should give it a lot of time to heal.”

“Yeah, I’m not going back into the ring anytime soon. Thank you, Doctor.”

She gave them some more advice, and they filled their prescription of horse tranquiliser-level painkillers before Joseph organised them a car. A few journalists lingered in the foyer, but Brooklyn assumed that wasn’t about him, because much more high-profile people also had medical needs—this was New York City, after all. Joseph still recruited staff to show them a way out and to the car that was discreet and fast.

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