Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [92]
—I don’t need to tell you that gladiator sport is deeply embedded in our culture as an acceptable form of competition. But you might not recall that the founders hoped it would someday replace military combat. We still hold out this hope for the future.
—The pundits I’m hearing from say this will be more watched than the Olympics. But it’s also the most contested fight Caesar’s has ever presented. You’ve stirred up activist groups around the world. It could mean, ultimately, the end of gladiator sport. I quote this from the Los Angeles Times: “This may well be the maiden voyage of Caesar’s very own Titanic.”
—Great way to sell a newspaper, don’t you think, Jon?
—So you believe this statement is more about hype than reality?
—You know what’s real for most people, Jon? That we have steadily rising unemployment, people are losing their homes, and some say we’re in an economic depression, and now some excitable types want to take away their right to see legalized entertainment.
—But is it fair? We now turn to . . .
I can’t imagine a worse feeding frenzy. If Thad were to go into a supermarket with me, he would find himself on all sorts of magazine covers. If I’d let him watch the general fare on TV, he’d realize that everyone knows, or thinks they know, a young boy named Thad G., Tommy and Allison’s son—the world’s new orphan.
Along with the guards the Ludus sends over and the two bodyguards Caesar’s posted a while back, Caesar’s threatens to provide even more personal bodyguards, but I decline, worried that they’ll make it their business to spy on us as much as protect us. I try to leave the house as little as possible now. I hire a nanny named Sheryl to help with Thad. She seems like a perfectly nice woman in her early thirties, slim and poised, though her tweed skirts annoy me. After a day, I realize she’s constantly chipper and chronically making suggestions about changing Thad’s schedule, what he eats, how much exercise he gets. She tells me she had a cousin with special needs growing up, so she knows.
But Thad wails like a factory siren if I try to do anything without him, so against my better judgment I let him dress in his gladiator outfit and sit in the covered bleachers of the Ludus Magnus Americus while I spar with Mark or one of the female Glads. Sheryl, peeling the wrappers on his Freeway bars up in the bleachers, makes sure he keeps his fluid intake up in the heat.
Julie is barely talking to me now and doesn’t have much to say to Lloyd, for that matter. When Mark isn’t at the arena, he devotes himself to the world of my alter ego, and though Julie doesn’t know what he’s up to, he reports that she seems pleased to have him around the apartment more.
One night I arrange to have Sheryl stay over so I can get away. When Thad drops off, Mark and I drive the Living machine over to the stadium in his van. It takes two hours to lose the paparazzi with a friend of Mark’s driving a decoy van. But we have to try Lyn out in the arena. We set up the machine in an old storage room just a few feet from where the competitions occur and Mark rigs up this miniaturized modem in some kind of protective shell under the sand where we’ll be fighting, so she’ll have the strongest possible signal.
When Lyn appears and the icons above her head light up and then hide themselves, it’s as if she’s just woken from a long nap, stretching and yawning. One of Mark’s little touches.
We both gear up and get in position. She strikes first and our swords clang loudly.
—Good sound, I call out to Mark.
But while I’m turned she delivers a blow to my sword arm, and Mark tells me to look down. Some strange almost phosphorous red substance stains my arm.
—Weird, I say.
—Not as weird as you, she says.
—No, I . . . , I start to say, but she’s coming at me again. I cut her right cheek.
Soon I understand that Lyn will appear to spurt or slowly bleed in proper