[The following are confessions by Mackenzie Squarepusher, a former muay thai champion turned dominatrix.]
Memory is being a bitch again. You must forgive me. My shit be buffering all the time. Data gets lost in the scramble, sometimes even completely changed throughout the years. It was either a good kick or a terrible kick. Maybe even a so-so kick. I don’t remember. Either the Thai pouted again—Not bad—or he and his trainer shook their heads, robbed me of my caramel popcorn, and convinced me to get lost.
I’ve been here hundreds and hundreds of times—on the leading edge of recollection, only to teeter over a cliff of the stored-up past, unsure as to where the sheer drop of amnesia leads. Yet I know a soft reboot will do the trick. If I get into a good-old brawl with a client, or at least a heated exchange where I take a few to the mug, I’ll get the answer to the mystery as if it were burrowed there deep in my head all along. I just needed a bit of thwumping to shake it out from the folds of gray matter.
A flyweight came in today. He was the third combat-sports practitioner in a row. Something was up. I’d chalk two in a row up to coincidence. But three? Come on, son. Some tomfoolery had to be afoot. Maybe reception was lining them up against me to gloat over getting my ass beat. Maybe word was getting around the MMA/kickboxing gyms of a long-legged dominatrix who possessed no small striking game.
The shorter the guys get, the bigger their heads. Or perhaps more accurately, their heads stay the same. This guy, all shredded up and in weight-cutting shape, had the same head size of a cruiserweight.
The first thing he did once he stepped in and the doors closed behind him was the shoeshine—the warm-up people do by throwing short, light-speed uppercuts while sprinting in place. I got worried by that as much as by the lack of trepidation he showed. So I clicked all the lights off. Pitch black. Green for me. His shoeshining suffered a hiccup, but he kept it up. Because little guys like him, especially fighters, are overachievers, I lead-leg roundhoused him right in the neck. Screw it: make your karma rather than wait for the world to dole it out.
He fell face first onto the floor. It took two minutes for him to come to. Once he stirred, I flickered the lights on and off rapid-fire style. I wanted to pose a question to him: Do you want to get off or do you want to get in some cross-training? I would get those answers through the mute language of motion. Whether he got either would depend on how I felt like playing it.
As he gingerly stood up, I approached him. The lights were completely on. He did a double take at my height. He held out a hand and headed toward the door. He wanted no part of it. He had made a mistake in coming. There were no refunds, though. I clinched him—overhook with my left hand on his right biceps, Thai plum with my flat hand across the back of his head—and swept at his right leg, sending him flying off his feet. He yelped like little men his size yelp when they’re met with big-boy pain. I clicked the lights off and dragged him into the middle. There are no refunds.
Once he sensed I had him where I wanted, he up-kicked me in the knee. My leg buckled. He bolted to his feet with an impressive speed for someone having just been starched. I scaled the north wall and climbed up to the ledge. He jittered around like a lizard, unsure as to which direction to go scampering in. I turned the lights on. I activated a highlight reel of my boxing on the eastern wall, which he faced once he stopped turning. He smirked, impressed. It was all going to be all right, the smirk meant. Getting the shit beat out of him was okay, because it was part of training. What did Jorge Luis Borges say the Qur’an said that the Archangel Jibreel said unto Muhammad? “Upon approach, the Angel of Death is terrifying. But her embrace is Heaven.” It made it all acceptable. It was the same with sexual deviants. Coming to terms with the aberrations, no matter how sordid or socially unacceptable, made it somehow tolerable. By the way: total bullshit, that.
Dysfunctional is dysfunctional. Trust me. I know. Don’t adorn it with the garnish of introspection and call it eccentric art.
I scratched an itch at my nose. The shadow shot across the screen. He saw it. Dammit. He turned toward me. I must have appeared like a dark wraith there in the darkness, with the lights from the highlight reel blasting across my saturnine countenance. I must have looked like those long-legged, black-leather-clad aliens from the west wing of my Santa Barbara home. Though I was suited up in aquamarine, it being a Thursday.
He put up his dukes and nodded.
Found out, I figured I may as well turn on the lights. I hopped off the ledge as if entering the ring from the top rope. It was twice as high. The soles of my feet hurt. Lucky I didn’t break off a high heel. I put up my dukes. I smirked. He smirked. I shoeshined. I activated Venetian Snares.
(From Round Two of Our Lady of the Hypercube)
Time dilation does not mean time manipulation. I cannot freeze time and tinker with it. I cannot, for instance, keep everyone and everything around me stationary while I get to fiddle around by dropping someone’s pants around his or her ankles or tipping over a glass of water, then restart time. That’s all hocus-pocus bullshit, which I’ve no use for. What I’m able to do is juice way more out of picoseconds than the vast majority of humanity can. My reaction time allows me to decode things quicker. I don’t know what to attribute this split-second serenity to, other than to an unwillingness to get rattled, to get caught up in the moment and consequently become frazzled. It’s a blessing. It’s also a curse.
I don’t want to register the strained look on his face as he remains frozen in midair. I don’t want to unpack all the data of the killer instinct tension visible in every sinew of his body. Why have I chosen to keep him frozen there? It’s shooting fish in the barrel, really. I could have selected a more competitive juncture with which to demonstrate my freak ability than an obvious maneuver on his part. He’s looking to perforate my cranium. Duh. I guess I’ve chosen this moment precisely because it is a telegraphed technique. A dedicated combat-sports fan, analyst, or fighter would understand a more nuanced example, but I’m looking to keep things simple for the sake of comprehension.
I kept getting time dilations every time I sparred. I saw knockout blows coming even before there still remained two techniques preceding them. I anticipated a spinning elbow not just by keenly zeroing in on my sparring partner’s body language as I broke down information streaming to me through the sweat-laced panic going on between us. I saw that we were close enough to clinch up, that straight punches wouldn’t do, that his lead hand was tied up, that his foreshortened rear arm was cocked back, and that his rear leg was crisscrossed behind his lead leg—a real no-no in stance maintenance. Your garden-variety fan or coach could deduce what was about to happen from a still shot of my partner’s position in space-time. And that was just it: I saw still shots the entire time. Things slowed to a crawl. What should have been hectic bouts of kinetic problem solving between two people were for me one-sided sequences of frames, like film time stamps or animation cells marching across my view, one by one by one. All I did was react accordingly. The only drawback was that I had to be a counterstriker.
You know, you get into an amazing groove when you spar frequently. It’s really quite unreal. Iron sharpens iron. That’s a cliché, but it’s a damn fine one. Where I once caught kicks to the head from leaving my hands down when trying myself to kick, I then blocked even before my sparring partner’s hips had loaded up from the opposite side from the launched leg.
(From Round Three of Our Lady of the Hypercube)
We overdid the sushi. Lionel didn’t appear until a good hour later. We did see Hecate. She got passed around by people either ignorant of the danger she posed or of similar depraved disposition as her owner. “You girls made it,” said our host, dressed in an elegant black suit. His hair was dyed blond and parted to the side. All of his fingers held thick rings. “Come and see my installation,” he said and grabbed Maria by the hand. “You needn’t worry about missing any formalities. There really aren’t any. A party should only be partially planned. Informal, unchoreographed, spontaneous. Art, however, should be the opposite. Deliberate. Calculated. Dare I say . . . premeditated?” He led us past the dining room and into a room of black velvet walls.
A bald, chubby middle-aged man with no clothes on lay on the floor. A pool of scarlet originated from his opened jaws. Maria, seeing Lionel’s attention taking up by the tableau, widened her eyes at me. The tough Latina from Boyle Heights looked scared out of her mind. The man wore a headset microphone, into which he spoke, “The blows are violent. Undeniably forceful. They inflict pain. They cause physical suffering. They reap structural damage.” He clicked his mandible to the side and it gave a loud, sickening pop. One or two people cringed. Ice cubes shifted seismically in cocktails. “But to say that the blows are doled out in malice would be untrue.”
A female figure in a purple skin-tight suit faced the far black wall, on haunches and hunched over with her head down. She slowly stood up and stretched, like a silent Butoh dancer, not turning around. The definition of her legs’ musculature defied the scant light. She shifted her weight from one side to the other, revealing voluptuous buttocks.
“Were these blows to originate from some other source, say a man, or a less prepossessing woman, they would certainly smart all the more. That she metes them out in empathy means everything. What does this signify? That intention counts more than outcome.”
“My newest piece,” whispered Lionel into my ear. “Our Lady of the Hypercube.” His breath suddenly reeked of absinthe.
“There is salvation in this suffering,” said the bald man. “I endure. For she is the Patron Saint of Head Trauma. And I achieve the rapture of the bruise.” He struggled to stand up. As he began shuffling toward the woman, discordant chamber music started up. Mad pizzicati from the strings commenced on cue as the woman, sensing her victim’s approach, mule-kicked him in the stomach. She turned around and step-shuffle-leaped forward to blast him with a straight right to the chest with a loud kiai. She had a Shotokan background.
“Life doesn’t imitate art,” said Lionel into my ear. “That’s hokey bullshit. Life and art are clearly separate. Though never mutually exclusive. But therein lies the wonder. Where one ends and the other begins. One wishes to live artfully, no? Doing so gives the humdrum day meaning. I know you’re young and full of verve. Every dawn brings with it the hope of a spectacular day. But once broken down into components, enjoyment of anything and happiness itself seem futile. It gets worse the older you get, I’m afraid.”
(From Round Four of Our Lady of the Hypercube)
Our Lady of the Hypercube is available for purchase in paperback and ebook. Cheers.
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. Enjoy more below.
did not know what I was getting myself into with this story, but damn this is good
This is a wild ride. Thoroughly enjoyed this one. Bravo