La Lucha Libre

It’s hot. Thick. The air tonight is more tangible than you’re used to. You could shape it, create snakes and snowmen by wrapping your hands around it, twisting, molding, stacking. When you breathe it in, it settles in the lungs like the vinegar portion of homemade dressing. This is what asthma must feel like. Or drowning. Or puncturing a lung. The taste of the air bares a hint of salt. Disappointing, somehow, as its texture and consistency recalls pancake syrup.

It is not just the air that suffocates tonight. It is also your own perspiration. Smeared thick across your brow, your chest, your stomach. It collects in pools at the corner of your eyes, stinging, blurring. Your eyes fight back, salt water against salt water, only making things worse. Damper. Waterfalls, cascades make their way downhill, gravitationally bound to the sheets below. The cotton sog deepens, forms puddles, lakes. Cools slightly, ever so slightly, not nearly enough. You think this must be what it feels like to be the iron core of the planet. Ninety-eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Solid. Surrounded by a molten blanket of viscous magma. Only Eighty thousand degrees itself. Cooler, ever so slightly, not nearly enough. Forty-four million pounds of pressure per inch, and you feel every unit.

The wall unit AC kicks on, hums like a refrigerator for a moment, kicks back off. Cooling absolutely nothing in the process.

There is a slam against the door. The THUD of a spinal column against wood. The deadbolt, the chain, cylinder lock hold firm. There is swearing in Spanish. You don’t speak it, but you know swearing when you hear it. THUD as the body hits the door a second time. More swearing. A second voice, smaller, meeker, Spanishes back.

THUD.
THUD.
THUD.

You convulse with every vibration.

You drift in and out of consciousness.

Spandex. Apple Red. Stretched over a large, bulbous skull. Two eyes, yellow as if recent participants in a glaucoma test, peer out through violent tears in the red. Teeth barred, glistening, shiny like mint Chiclets. Here and there a pink slug darts out from behind the teeth and circumnavigates a ring of dry, cracked lips.

You don’t know this man. You don’t want to know him. You don’t want to know why you and he are standing in a clearing in the forest. You don’t want to know why the sky is as red as his costume. You want to escape, escape, escape. But this man is all you can think about.

THUD.

The woods shudder. Silhouettes of birds take flight. The man flexes his bulged arms, legs, seemingly expands to twice his size. And he takes off running, full speed, straight at you.

You stand there, don’t move, don’t twitch, don’t budge. You can’t. Despite every effort to coax your legs, thighs, arms to craft a getaway. Nothing. The spandex man draws nearer, larger. You can feel his sweat, his body heat as he looms fractions of a second above you.

Nothing.

And then.

You fall away, somehow. Without any action on the part of your muscles. You drift down, to the side, floating, hovering in lazy circles like a sheet of loose leaf caught in the breeze.

As you land on red grass, suddenly and without recoil, you see the red man collide with a blue counterpart.

THUD.

Muscle intersects muscle. A purple tangle of slapping palms, elbows, stubby toes, tiny shrinkwrapped genitals.

THUD.
THUD.
THUD.

You awaken, squeegee the sweat off your face with the crook of your thumb and pointer.

THUD.

More Spanish, angry, rapid. Still assaulting that tiny voice against the bolted door to your hotel room.

This was not the place to be tonight.

Still, here you are. Feverish. Slowly suffocating. Rotting alive.

You get up, maybe a bit too quickly. You have to steady yourself, put your arm, your hand down in that human-sized sweat puddle on the mattress. You wobble over to the sink, jam the lever to cold, splash some water on your face. Put those stringy arms back on the marble to steady yourself.

This isn’t air. It is vapor. It is fumes. It is lethal. You have got to start breathing something else soon or you are going to die.

You hobble, quickly, over to the door. Undo the chain. Flip the deadbolt. Reposition the cylinder. Turn the knob. Pull the bulk of the door toward you. A thin, wiry, man with dark skin collapses into through the open door frame. You step over him. A larger, lighter man in a white sleeveless takes a step back. Stares for a moment. Directs his unintelligible in your direction.

You hobble right, along the side of the building, and collapse against the brick. You keel over, clutch your head between your hands.

THUD.
THUD.
THUD.