Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [87]
If ever there was going to be an epiphanous moment in his life, his body might now be the profound courier. It was evening, the next day, in his Hilton suite, his body bent and listing to the right, so badly had his organs been seared; he had been urinating blood since the fight. “Everything in me is on flame,” he said. “He stood there gazing at the sun bleeding a dark, tragic red (no sun so fits a land, its dramatic sunsets unrivaled), eased down over the brown water of Manila Bay. His right hand hurt and was swollen, his eyewhites streaked with blood. He looked at his right hand, tried to make a fist but couldn’t. “What this man do to me?” he asked with a rasp as he guided my hand over a ridge of bumps on his forehead. “Why I do this?” He searched the horizon as if looking for an answer. “It was insane in there,” he said. “Couple of times like I was leaving my body. The animal could’ve killed me. That man weren’t human in there. I must be crazy. For what?” He took in the sunset again, then said: “This is it for me. It’s over.” Had the body, at long last, trounced the ego?
NOCTURNES
Six years earlier, in 1983, when that chicken leg jiggled like a baton in his hand, it was still possible to exclude him from brain damage. No one knew for sure, and those from the old entourage loudly brushed off his condition (as if they could not face that they had been so close to an interstate pileup) as a thyroid problem or hypoglycemia. Now, in 1989, there was no turning away from it, though his current doctor was trying. There was the feel of a damp offshore mist to the hospital room, a life-is-a-bitch feel, made sharp by the hostile ganglia of medical technology, plasma bags dripping, vile tubing snaking in and out of the body, blinking monitors leveling illusion, muffling existence down to a sort of digital bingo. Propped up slightly, Ali lay there with a skim of sweat above his lip and on his forehead, with a tremor to his arms and head; one of his metaphorical, helpless flies caught on a melting sugar cube.
Images and echoes filled the room, diffuse and speeding, shot through with ineluctable light and the mythopoeic for so long that no one (enemy or friend) could have guessed on the dizzying arc of the ride that he would land here in a little hospital on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Sonny Liston once said, while gnawing on some ribs, “He way up there now. Like an eagle. Where he gonna land, how he gonna land?” Leave it to Sonny to insinuate, in his own way, the law of probability to Ali’s streaming contrail. He was, after all the social fuss, a fighter, not stone shaped by a Medici court sculptor. Keep your eye on the wear and tear, Sonny was saying, not the ancient poets singing Greek verse to him. Ali knew the margins of dominance had compressed perilously. But his talent was so persuasive, his ring wisdom so minutely cataloged. As he often said, all he would ever do is grow old. What was he doing here? After so many realities, it was not easy to inhabit this final one, this blinking out of neurons so precious that they were called the “butterflies of the soul” in early brain science.
The fights with Frazier had done true damage to Ali, and Manila had been the last life-altering choice of his long, long trip in a game where longevity is a killer. Every organ, every centimeter of bone in his body wanted mercy. Looking at him on the hospital bed, I was reminded of his face during the latter rounds in Manila, his eyes closed with the pain of exhaustion, his whole frame coming down like one of those old buildings erased by implosions. No one will ever know how he was able to revivify himself; he didn’t even know. William James’s second wind, though valid, won’t do for that kind of effort. A guess: somewhere in the twelfth round, not expecting it, by now barely capable of noticing it, he must have picked up a faint signal from Frazier, maybe