The Tournament Trilogy Read online

  In the kitchen his mother talked to him as she taped the corners of the cabinets in preparation for painting. With the changing season, she aimed to make the kitchen a warmer color than stark white. Stark white was for summer, and summer was gone.

  “So who paged you?” She looked over her shoulder at Ian.

  “McGee Trucking again. They want me to do a few runs, say they’ll pay me time and a half,” Ian lied.

  “You’re never around when you work for them,” she said. “In and out, here and there. I can hardly get a hold of you.”

  “Only for a short while,” Ian said eyeing the pager, squeezing his hand, flipping the pack.

  Whenever the Tournament buzzed him, he told his mother that his boss at McGee Trucking Company had paged and wondered if he could run cargo across Britain for a few weeks. He told her that they paid him well and under the table. Ian actually had worked for McGee Trucking just out of sixth form, years ago. They ran out of nearby Lisburn. Three weeks into the job he quit because they wouldn’t let him smoke in the cab. But the excuse still worked well because truckers had odd hours and were always running off here and there at a whim.

  “Ian?” His mother stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at him.

  “Yes? Sorry. I was—I guess I kind of spaced out there.”

  “Are you going to take the job?”

  “I think so. The money’s too good.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Is your hand bothering you?”

  Ian realized he was still squeezing and releasing his left hand. He snapped it open.

  “Force of habit, ‘suppose. It never bothers me anymore. Not for years since it was fixed.”

  In July of Ian’s seventeenth summer Father Darby took the young man to see Dr. Marcus Shay, a muscular surgeon who had once worked for Belfast Mercy Hospital, but who had elected to open a private practice at the age of sixty. He was a wiry man, thin and spry for his age. He insisted upon dying what hair he had left on his head a dark brown and made absolutely no attempt to hide the fact. He prided himself on the mustache that he could still grow, which he also dyed the same color. He examined the tendons in Ian’s damaged left forearm with a light and sure touch. His hands never wavered or trembled, and his nails were immaculate. When he spoke it was quick and abrupt, but kind.

  “I can tell you right now that you have a truncated flexor tendon. It seems to have fused unnaturally with the muscle grouping about halfway up your forearm. You can feel it. Here.”

  He took Ian’s right hand and placed his index finger on the pale underside of his left forearm. Ian knew exactly what Dr. Shay was talking about. Where he pressed there was a minor bump, barely noticeable to the naked eye. Ian could push it around a bit under his skin.

  “My guess is that whenever your hand quickly seizes up it’s because you’ve tensed a muscle somewhere in your upper arm, connected in some way to the fusion point. It, in turn, snaps your hand shut. Like dominos.”

  “To find out just how each muscle is connected, we’ll need to do some further testing, perhaps a muscle dye injection,” Shay said. All the while Father Darby stood to the side, his hands crossed over his black cassock, listening and nodding.

  “Will he be able to control it?” Darby asked softly.

  “Before I can comment any further on that, I’ll need to see the results of testing.”

  “Whatever you have to do, you do it,” Darby said. “Money is not a factor here.”

  Dr. Shay looked at Father Darby for a moment. Then he nodded.

  “Fine then. We’ll start now. Today. With an X-ray for muscle motion. It’ll give us a thorough base to work with.”

  The two men seemed to have temporarily forgotten about Ian, who sat on the examination table, legs dangling. Adolescence had not been kind to him. Recently seventeen, he was in the thick of puberty, and his pale coloring made the spots on his face that much more apparent. He was already acquiring the slightly sunken, haunted look he would never quite grow into. Already there were hints of the pale shadowing that would settle in varying degrees under his soft green eyes and make him look perpetually exhausted. All in all he was a sickly looking boy.

  “Wait here for a moment while I prepare,” the doctor said before ambling out of the room. Father Darby stood leaning against a sink nearby. Ian looked at his left arm, and then up at Darby.

  “Why’re you doing this? Why now?”

  “I thought you said you wanted it.”

  “No, I do, I suppose. I mean, I suppose I don’t care one way or the other. Neither does my ma. It’s my father that said to take advantage of this.” There was skepticism in his voice. Darby simply nodded.

  “Your father tells me you don’t visit him much.”

  Ian watched him for a moment, trying to read him. Darby leveled his gaze back at Ian.

  “Probably not as much as I should.”

  Darby nodded again.

  “Why does my father want me to do this?”

  “That’s between you and him.”

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “I owe your father.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  Ian exhaled sharply and shook his head in exasperation.

  “The decision to go through with this surgery is entirely yours, Ian. You know this. If you want to walk out right now, you walk out right now, son.”

  Ian remained seated. Perhaps if his mother had said outright that he didn’t need anything done then he would have walked out. His mother’s ambivalence coupled with his father’s strange endorsement made him stay. Part of the reason he would go through with the surgery was the residual guilt he felt for not visiting his father, as if it was somehow penance. Before the visit a week ago, it had been almost six months since he’d seen Peter Finn. Something about his father, his incarceration and his attitude towards it, his complete indignation, as if it was an affront to him and a shame upon those who held him, did not sit well with Ian. It never had. But he had to know his dad’s role in this strange turn of events. Naturally, he’d gotten nothing more out of his father than his confirmation of approval and a few wry smiles. The trip had been short.

  Twice a week over the next two months Dr. Shay tested Ian’s left arm and hand, from the end of summer into the beginning of Ian’s final year of sixth form. Often Father Darby was with him, but not always. By the end of the testing period, Shay had constructed several multi-layered models of the entirety of Ian’s left arm, from his shoulder joint down to the tip of his middle finger. It resembled a plastic print flipbook of the creation of an arm, from bone to vein to tendon to muscle and skin. Shay marked certain spots on all of the films, most often around the area in the middle of Ian’s left forearm where the slight bump was. On several of the films Shay drew a fan of straight lines leading from this area up to his deltoid muscle and down to the muscles in his pointer and index fingers. When compared to a sample film of a normally developed left arm, Ian’s appeared similar save in the area of the bump, which contained an abnormally high concentration of muscle tissue and veins. Although Ian couldn’t see it very well, Shay showed him with a laser pointer how this fused muscle development affected his entire arm: it pulled on his muscle slightly, which was why his hand curled inward. Certain shoulder muscles were also affected and pulled tighter than normal, which was why his arm unnaturally hitched itself upward and in towards his body.

  “When you quickly seize your hand, it’s because you’ve unknowingly tensed this muscle grouping,” Shay said, pointing out the bump.

  “And you can fix it?” Ian asked.

  Shay looked at Father Darby, who had come for this, the last testing session, and was sitting quietly, legs crossed, in a chair at the back of the room. He stood up, put his hands in the pockets of his black slacks, and walked slowly to the front of the room.

  “We can.”

  Darby studied the prints, hung from their tops all along the wall, lit with a cold white light. He turn
ed around and looked at Ian.

  “Are we going to do this?” he asked.

  “I’m willing.”

  Darby then looked at Shay for what seemed to Ian like an uncommonly long time.

  “And you?” Darby asked. “Are you willing?”

  “I am,” Shay said, after a moment. “Whenever Ian is ready for the surgery, I’ll schedule a team. It’s not going to be a particularly difficult procedure, but it’s no appendectomy either. I estimate three hours for surgery, one day of in-hospital recovery, and then physical therapy—probably a month. All said, about a month and a half before he’ll be totally recovered.”

  Darby looked at Ian. Ian nodded.

  “Sooner the better,” Ian said quietly. “Just get this over with.”

  They scheduled the surgery for the following Thursday. He arrived early in the morning on an empty stomach per the request of the anesthesiologist. Father Darby sat in the waiting room reading a book. He greeted Ian and Mary with a smile and a handshake and didn’t reference the surgery at all. He simply gestured into the operating room.

  All told, the operation took just shy of three and a half hours. Minor incisions were made at pertinent muscle groupings on Ian’s forward left deltoid and just to the left of his elbow, but the extensive work was done on his forearm. Throughout the surgery, Ian’s left arm was palm-up, forearm exposed. Dr. Shay made a six inch long cut and extended it three-quarters of the way up his forearm. At either end of the primary cut, Shay made a smaller, perpendicular cut. Together, the three incisions looked like an angry, seeping letter “I”.

  The cuts were just deep enough to expose the abnormal muscle grouping beneath. Ian’s skin was flayed out to either side of his arm. Underneath the skin was a series of grainy red lines, here and there peppered by knobby bits of what looked like gristle. On these Dr. Shay went to work for three long hours, assisted by his small team.

  When Ian awoke four hours later, his arm was spray-on-tan orange and an “I” had been stitched midway up his forearm like a personal monogram. There were also smaller groups of sutures near his elbow and on his shoulder. His left arm was totally numb and he had a lingering headache. He felt very groggy and stiff, as if he had slept long without once moving.

  “Everything went very well,” Shay said, studying Ian’s arm like an artist stepping back from a finished painting. “Exactly as planned.” Father Darby was in the room as well. Ian wondered when he had come in.

  “Now we just wait for it to heal.”

  Something about the way he referred to his arm as a separate entity unnerved Ian, but his mind was still sloshy and things didn’t stick. Ian nodded and closed his eyes, shutting out the bright operating lights.

  For three weeks Ian wore a sling around his left arm, but for the first time in his life his arm felt held there by the sling only. It was a strange sensation, having an arm that felt inclined to the ground. Although he didn’t move it much for fear of splitting the stitches, he could already feel a difference. Everything felt loose.

  It didn’t hurt much, but it itched terribly. Ian babied it, cleaning it gingerly, touching it lightly, barely a tickle, and reveling in the self control it took to not tear into it. At three weeks his shoulder stitches had healed and were removed by Dr. Shay, after which he no longer needed the sling. He stood in front of the thin, rectangular mirror in his room for a long time that first night after he no longer had a sling, admiring how symmetrical his body now looked all of its own accord.

  In physical therapy Ian worked with a very small and very kind lady, Mrs. McKinney, who constantly talked to him while she prodded and maneuvered his arm, warning him, in her calming, motherly voice, of certain pains he might feel, and oo-ing and aww-ing when Ian flinched or sucked in a breath, as if she also felt his pain even though she was relentless. Father Darby often joined him for these sessions. It was he who found Mrs. McKinney and set up the appointments, twice a week for two hours.

  Ian’s left arm was naturally weaker from its lack of use over the years of his life, so the surgery just made what was already bad even worse. Once the sling and primary sutures were removed and all that remained was the welted “I”, Mrs. McKinney started Ian on light weight training. Wrist curls were the worst. Ian was already skinny: He had never lifted weights in his life. One set of ten curls with a ten pound weight was excruciating, especially since he had to go through the motions so slowly. The day after his first weight training session, his left forearm was so sore he could have sworn he ruptured something.

  Four weeks into the therapy, Mrs. McKinney started gently back-stretching Ian’s left hand, and for the first hour it felt like someone was kneading a big bruise on his body. The second session was less painful, but Ian’s left hand could still be bent back to only roughly half of the angle of his right. He asked Mrs. McKinney why this was even after a month of therapy.

  “All in good time, Ian,” she said, tutting. “Therapy is about patience.”

  “But it doesn’t feel like a simple tight muscle. It’s... I dunno, harder. It feels like it can’t move past that point. Like I’m pressing back on a wall.”

  “All in good time.”

  At the end of that session she gave Ian a grip-squeeze device. She told him he must use it twice a day for half an hour a time. Ian did so without fail, yet he gained no more backward rotation on his left hand.

  Ian was dozing in class when he first snapped his hand forward.

  It was an unseasonably hot September day, one week before physical therapy ended. There was no wind, and the air in the classroom was muggy with the collective breathing of thirty teenagers. It happened during Literature class, Ian’s least favorite subject. The students had been asked to re-read five pages of a particular chapter in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that Ian found particularly ridiculous. While reading, Ian’s eyes drooped and he dropped the book off of the corner of his desk. In a hazy daze he bent over to pick it up, resting the tip of the mechanical pencil he had been holding in his left hand on to his thigh as he did so. It happened faster than he could have imagined, faster than he could make himself aware, so that at first he noticed nothing more than his pencil clattering across the wood floor.

  Then Ian looked down at his thigh and saw a clean, deep gash, about a foot long, starting just shy of the hemline of his shorts and ending above his knee. At first it was simply a white line, even his body was caught unaware, but soon an angry red rose up and out of the split skin until it overflowed and spilled down either end of his leg, dripping to the chair and pooling, then dripping to the floor. Still Ian didn’t understand what had happened, but a girl who sat next to him was roused by the clattering pencil. She screamed right as the pain hit Ian like hot water on sunburned skin. He started to sweat.

  “I think I’ve cut myself,” he said, gone past pale.

  His teacher ran to get some paper towels from the dispenser and shoved them at him.

  “Press it! Press it!”

  Ian pressed it, and the red soaked upward upon the papers, creeping like an exotic spider walking up a wall. He was handed more towels and he pressed them over the old ones. One particularly quick student jumped up and moved his desk over to where Ian sat.

  “Put yer leg up! Elevate it! Jeysus Christ. Look at all that.”

  By now Ian was surrounded and he was breathing heavily and swallowing profusely.

  “It’s all right, Ian,” Toby said. “It’s all right mate. Step back! Give him some air!”

  The students all looked at Toby for a moment, surprised at the vehemence behind the voice of the normally silent boy. Then they stepped back. The teacher handed Ian more towels until the nurse arrived, and by then Ian had stopped the flow, if only by the sheer force of pressing down. Having done that, he was terrified at the prospect of having to remove the towels to allow the school nurse a look. Thankfully, when she arrived she took one look at the spattered floor around him and told everyone that it would be best if he got to a hos
pital.

  Later that evening, with twenty new stitches to echo those he had only recently freed himself of, Ian sat out on his front porch and leaned against the banister, his left leg stretched out sideways along the length of the top step. He was squeezing the grip-builder Mrs. McKinney had given him and staring off into the darkness beyond the glow of his houselights. His leg throbbed and itched and generally felt like it was going to burst.

  Outside, the remaining bugs had been fooled into thinking it was still the thick of summer and were chirping again. They could be heard all around him. It was here that Father Darby found him. As he approached the house, Ian looked up at him but said nothing.

  “Don’t be disappointed, Ian,” Darby said.

  “It didn’t work. Something is still wrong with my hand.”

  “No. Your hand is exactly as it should be.”

  Ian furrowed his brow and shook his head.

  “I don’t even know what happened. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t even feel it at first.”

  Darby nodded, and then with much popping and groaning he sat himself down on one of the lower steps, his back towards Ian.

  “I know what happened,” Darby said, talking out into the night. He almost sounded cheerful. Behind him Ian shifted about as much as his leg would allow, trying to peer around to see Darby’s face.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You triggered your hand.”

  “But I thought that was one of the things the surgery was supposed to fix, that... twitching.”

  “It wasn’t like the twitching though, was it? Like the twitching before?”

  “No. It was way more... fast. Stronger.”

  Darby nodded. Ian watched the bobbing of his wispy head.

  “Wait a fu—wait a minute. Are you telling me this was supposed to happen?”

  Darby slowly stood and turned. He scratched the faint gray stubble that was growing under his nose. He fixed Ian with a gaze that held him; even if Ian wasn’t nursing a cut-bruised leg, he wouldn’t have been able to move. Ian recognized it from his most impassioned sermons, those in which it seemed he was speaking directly to you alone.