Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [14]
Then he gets back in his beautiful car, backs up, and speeds away.
It takes Allison a while to calm down from our near miss and she takes a wrong turn and we get lost for a while—which, if you know Boston, is an easy thing to do no matter how long you’ve lived here.
Normally, we sit in the heirs section, way down in front where cameras are trained on us the whole time, but not so close any blood hits you. But we’re nowhere near our box when we arrive, so we just grab the first seats we can find in the stadium because the match is about to start.
Romulus is an open-air arena built to hold sixty thousand fans and it’s pretty close to capacity today. I look around at the people who have painted fake wounds and gashes on their bodies. Drinks slop from plastic goblets. Styrofoam truncheons and axes are waved about. Beer is consumed—kegs, buckets, rivers of it. The hot dog buns are in the shape of lances and there are lots of folks with banners made from sheets and flattened boxes: some for TOMMY, some for UBER. Crazy hats meant to look like helmets and broken skulls. Tattoo concessions, piercing vendors. All of them call out, hawking for business. At home I have one of those giant foam hands with the thumb you can turn up or down or just wave in the air but I’ve always felt too embarrassed to bring it to the stadium.
This is the American Title fight, so people are watching this one all over the globe. When a gladiator wins the American Title, this is his job: to look large, to be the largest man on Earth really. His name appears in novels, it’s shaved into hair art. He might sign a movie contract and he can always get plenty of cameos. Game shows, no sweat. In two weeks his name will be printed down the length and over the breadth of thousands of condoms. His name is packaged and unpackaged and rolls out before us. He grows large and larger. He becomes the sign. He becomes a giant where endorsements are concerned. He helps the population to buy poorly assembled vehicles with tires that will blow out, and small over-wrapped meals, and trillions of bottles of diluted water. His face stops the world. I’d say she but no woman has ever won the title, though a couple have gotten close.
We take heat because there’s no Glad Husbands Association. But give Caesar’s time. They’ll find roles for all of us.
We’re pretty high up in the stadium here and in many ways I actually prefer this. Because when the American Title is awarded and the victor raises his fists, the fans start pushing against the reinforced steel fencing around the arena. If they knock it over, they flood the arena and hoist the dude up on a carpet of shoulders. But then a lot of fights break out and sometimes people get trampled to death, the tally of bodies appearing in a small box in the upper right-hand corner of the jumbo screens, each one a tiny skull and crossbones.
Uber enters the arena first to thundering applause. I’ve read in Sword and Shield that he rubs a quart of Glow on his skin before a match. With the black lights that rim the stadium, as soon as he starts to overheat it will look as if that peacock green sweat is pouring out of him like in those sports drink commercials.
Thad tugs at me until I get a Freeway bar from my sack and peel back the wrapper for him. They make my mind too speedy and I think it would be easy to go into road rage even if you weren’t driving, but with Thad, they soothe him. His whole sense of time and space has always been jumbled up. Sometimes I think he’s living at the speed of light, only I can’t see it.
Uber checks his helmet repeatedly and then crosses himself.
When Tommy steps into the arena, all of us stand and flood the air with sound. Everyone loves Tommy.
I see he’s chosen the short sword today. But he still looks off to me. There’s almost no swagger as he walks into the center of the arena and raises his arms.
—Tommy looks good, I say to Allison.
—Do you think so? Allison shouts above the cheering.
—He’s all over this, I say.
—I’ve heard Uber wasn’t born in to the Helmet Wearers, she