Open Palm

The chalk smells like a kindergarten classroom, and Clay works it between his palms in slow circles, the way his father used to thumb Bactine into a split lip. His fingers leave white prints on everything he touches. A white hand on a man's cheek tells the referee where the slap landed.

The left half of Clay's face is his résumé.

Tulsa. Reno. A converted Sam's Club outside Baton Rouge, where the ring was a shipping pallet and the referee was also the bouncer. The cheek stays flushed now. Pink and violet capillaries spread out from the swelling on his orbital bone like cracks in a windshield. His dermatologist calls it telangiectasia. His mother calls twice a week and says nothing about it.

Here is what you need to know about the human face.

The cheekbone will hold up a grown man standing on it. The jaw hangs off the skull on two hinges, and a hand that catches it right turns the whole head, and the brain rides along inside like the last pickle in the jar. The sweet spot, the place every slapper aims for, sits two fingers below the cheekbone and one finger in front of the ear. The parotid gland lives there against the ramus of the jaw like a small animal hiding in a wall. The facial nerve, the one cable that works the eyelid and the lip on that side, runs through the middle of it. When a palm lands flush, the gland flattens with the cable inside it, and half your face goes slack. The medical community calls this blunt force trauma. Clay calls it a living.

Tonight the ring is a plywood platform in a fairgrounds expo hall, with a podium bolted to the middle of it at the height of a belt buckle. A rented video screen hangs over the beer line at the back of the hall. Across the podium, under the Bud Light banner, stands his opponent. The bracket board calls him BISHOP in dry-erase marker, which could be a first name, a last name, or a rank. He has the dense, unfinished look of a man assembled from parts intended for a larger man. Each hand is the size of a cafeteria tray. He rolls his shoulders in their sockets, his traps climb toward his ears, and the crowd behind the barricade lets its breath go like an air mattress with the plug pulled.

The announcer says a name into the microphone and feedback eats it, skreeeeee, and half the front row covers one ear and keeps filming with the other hand.

The stage lights stop at the edge of the plywood, and past the barricade the hall is dark. Clay's shadow lies across the plywood with its head already knocked sideways. The crowd holds its phones overhead, and from the platform the phone screens are a field of small blue rectangles tilted toward him. This is what a crop looks like before the combine.

His corner man, Deke, puts a hand on the back of his neck. The calluses catch on his skin.

"You ready?"

Clay nods. He fits the mouth guard over his teeth. The silicone tastes like the inside of a new shoe.

Here is the thing about getting slapped.

Pain is for the tourists. A competition-grade open palm does to you what a power surge does to a motherboard. The signal scrambles. Your brain loses contact with your face, and in that gap, while the system reboots, the surge wipes your name. It wipes your mother who calls twice a week. You are voltage looking for a ground wire.

Clay won the coin toss, so Clay slaps first. Bishop steps up and sets his hips against the podium. This is the posture. Hands behind the back. Chin up. A man offering his face like a communion plate.

Clay sets his feet. Left foot forward. Hips open. The rotation starts in the floor and climbs through the ankle, the knee, the hip, the obliques, the shoulder, the arm, and it finishes in the hand, which is open. The rules want heel, palm, and fingers to land in the same instant. Lead with the heel and the referee calls it clubbing and the round is gone.

The referee checks Bishop's feet. He checks Clay's. He raises his arm.

The crowd noise packs down into a single frequency, and if you have ever stood inside a car wash while the brushes spin, that is what a hall full of people sounds like when it wants to see a face change shape.

The arm drops.

SLAP.

It sounds like a hymnal dropped flat in an empty church, and it hits the metal rafters and comes back smaller.

Bishop's head turns until his nose points at the Monster Energy banner on the side wall. His eyes stay open and nobody is using them. He stays like that while the referee steps in and reads his cheek. Clay's hand is printed in white on the sweet spot. The fingers are together and the thumb is tucked.

Then Bishop blinks. He reaches up and touches his cheek the way a person touches a stove they are not sure is still on. He nods at the referee. He smiles the smile of a man who has just been told the lab results are fine.

Now the posture is Clay’s. Hips against his own edge of the podium. Hands behind the back. Chin up.

He grips his wrist. The metacarpals shift under the skin and arrange themselves into a fist he is not allowed to make.

The announcer says Clay's name, and it sounds like a word in a language he studied once and forgot.

Bishop chalks up. He rubs his hands together and the chalk comes off his palms in small white clouds.

He sets his feet.

The referee raises his arm.

Here is the thing about the waiver.

It lists the risks in the type size they save for the side effects on a pill bottle. Concussion. Subdural hematoma. Cervical sprain. Temporomandibular joint dysfunction. Loss of consciousness. The words sit in one paragraph between "assumption of risk" and "hold harmless," and Clay signed at the bottom the way a person signs for a package that is already on the porch.

Later tonight a discharge summary will list the evening as a left facial contusion and the cause as accidental strike by another person. The co-pay will be forty dollars, and the insurance company will file it under recreational.

The arm drops.

The hand comes.

Clay sees it the way a driver sees the car that is running the red. The palm puts out the stage lights. The fingers are together. The thumb is tucked. The palm is a country, and he is about to live there for the rest of the evening.

CRACK.

The hall goes white.

Then his feet are on the platform and the platform has become a boat, the platform has opinions about which way is down, and his head has gone around to the right without asking him, and the picture comes back aimed at the Monster Energy banner, where two EMTs sit on a folded gurney sharing a tray of nachos and one of them has stopped chewing, and the referee is asking him a question and the question comes in as static and the mouth guard tastes like the inside of a new shoe and a voice that might be Deke's is saying his name and he nods.

Nodding is the only word he has left.

The face comes back like tenants moving into a condemned building. The smell of kindergarten gets in first. Heat takes the left cheek, the jaw finds its hinges, and the left ear plays one clean note. This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test.

The referee holds up a hand. The fingers on it smear together. It was two in Tulsa. It was two in Reno.

Clay works his tongue around the silicone. "Two."

The referee nods and turns to the judges' table.

Deke is up on the platform now. He hooks the mouth guard out with one finger, drops it in his shirt pocket, and presses a water bottle to Clay's lips. The water is warm and tastes like plastic, and Clay drinks like a man borrowing somebody else's jaw. He sips and waits, sips and waits. He takes the bottle himself and it crinkles in his fist, and he eases off, because even the water is taking damage.

Deke takes the bottle back. "Good. Didn't even wobble."

Everybody wobbles. Over Deke's shoulder, the screen above the beer line is showing Clay's. The camera bolted above the podium caught it and fed it to the screen, and the screen is feeding it to the phones, and the phones will feed it to an app where strangers will watch Clay's face take another man's hand frame by frame, and they will see the skin fold and the fat pad slide toward his nose and the left eye close one frame ahead of the right, and they will watch it in bed, on the train, on the toilet, over cereal, in line for coffee, and their pupils will open the way pupils open during sex.

Clay follows Deke down the steps. Bishop goes down the other side. A match runs three rounds, one slap apiece, and the promoter rotates the bouts, because nobody buys a ticket to watch a man recover. Two flyweights are already climbing the steps. High score on the judges' cards takes four thousand dollars. Both men take their jaws home, and one day a dentist will hold an X-ray up to the light and say, "How fast was the other car going?"

In the hallway behind the stage, the cinder block is painted the green of elementary school cafeterias. Clay leans against it and the cold comes through his shirt. The crowd comes through the concrete with its consonants stripped out and sounds like the ocean from inside a motel room.

Deke comes through the fire door with the chalk bag in one hand and Clay's phone in the other. "Two more rounds."

Clay nods.

Deke hangs the chalk bag on his wrist, licks his thumb, and goes to work on Clay's left cheek. He rubs Bishop's fingers off the capillaries one at a time. His thumb moves in slow circles. Clay holds still for it. The phone goes off in Deke's other hand, bzzt, bzzt, and Deke turns the screen around.

MOM.

Clay takes the chalk bag off Deke's wrist. He works the chalk between his palms, and the powder settles into the creases a palm reader would call his life line, his heart line, his fate line.

Deke tilts the phone at him. "You want it?"

Clay shows him two white hands.

Deke puts the phone in his shirt pocket and brings out the mouth guard. The phone lights the cotton blue until the call gives up. Clay opens, and Deke sets the mouth guard on his teeth. The silicone tastes like the inside of a new shoe.

Deke leans back into the fire door and it swings open. The crowd comes in with its consonants back, and it is chanting Bishop's name. Clay pushes off the wall with one palm and leaves a white hand behind on the green block, and he is halfway to the door, left cheek first, when the phone in Deke's pocket lights up again.