The Silk Screen Shadow Boxers' Club

Short Story

I was invited not in so few words. The truth is, I heard my father’s lover tell him about it: I was delirious with fever and searching for water in the dark house. Why it was dark, I don’t know, since my father wouldn’t have entertained anyone while the family was asleep. But I know it isn’t a trick of memory or disease. Maybe the curtains were closed. I can’t say for sure. I walked barefoot across the tiles and saw their silhouettes combined, moving gray-darkness against the still brown-darkness of the master bedroom. The wooden statue of the heron winked its eye at me, something it only did in low light. “The silk screen shadow boxer club,” were the only words I made out, carrying through the still air between the master bedroom and the floor in the corridor.

It wasn’t for years that I believed I’d heard that phrase, or those phrases in that order. I didn’t believe that there was someone other than my mother in the house that day. Until I was older, I put it all down to the fever.

I was rarely really sick. I had a gift for acting – I liked to malinger with it. From a young age, nothing in the world excited me. I preferred the things I could come up with in my room, with the curtains drawn; with a humidifier and the somber quiet of a place everyone else has just left. If it was possible to be there instead of out in public, at school, or helping around the house, and sometimes when it should not have been possible, I succumbed to the precise symptoms that would keep me in bed. I missed my own graduation from high school, I skipped my aunt’s wedding, I stayed home to water plants and collect mail during those dreaded family vacations. This sedentary tendency was indulged more in my predictably turbulent adolescence, but as a boy, honing my performance was crucial.

I quickly learned around six or seven, that is is impossible to fake most symptoms. I had no choice but to have symptoms, and they couldn’t be repetitive. A stomach-ache works once, not twice. It was before the fever, lying in wait for a funeral, that I first succumbed to symptoms that were not fake, but that I knew would never be diagnosed. They were symptoms that I had been born with, things that I had always ignored. An ache that couldn’t be localized, that might just work every time: and yes, my ache, the one that kept me in bed to dream, never stayed in one place. I developed a new pain whenever I heard the word “pain” – it was method, and it produced novel results. I missed the funeral because of muscle fatigue and signs of exhaustion. I learned how to talk thickly, and used the voice specifically before faking an illness, to signal its coming. But mostly I covered my head with the blanket and thought of being taken various places on archaic modes of transportation: a steamboat, a covered wagon, a hot air balloon, a palanquin. I thought of landscapes, of moving and shaping them with my hands, rolling prairies and mountains like bubbles in a bath. I often went motionless, speechless, but not asleep, for hours on end.

That fever was my karmic punishment: it was the middle of summer and I came down with flu. For once, the world had been tempting to me, since I was going to take an apprentice position – the details of which didn’t matter, only that it was close to home and consisted of puzzling, repetitive work in a cold environment.

I missed my first week from the flu and when I walked in the next, they said my position had been taken since they assumed I was never coming.

I have no idea what kind of work I’d have been doing there – it was a while ago. It didn’t hurt me in the long term. I have an excellent job repairing chipped ceramic at an antiques store. Any day now, they’ll let me repair other materials too – I’ve gotten a promise and a handshake.

It was at this job that I heard, or rather read, those words again.

Drilled into a metal tag hanging off a tote bag the size of a placemat, which was full of rolls of mesh, it said:

THE SILK SCREEN SHADOW BOXER CLUB

Legible and enormous. Before I could recognize the name, the customer who was carrying it left – not before smiling at my coworker at the register, and in more than the usual way.

My coworker Lee is better looking than I am. And I don’t mean that to disparage myself, it is simply true: people flock to them. Even when I’m closer, the customers gravitate to Lee. They even make our uniforms look good. On me, well. I’ve said enough about Lee.

“Is that a band?” I asked, pointing to where the tag had been. “I think I’ve heard of it.”

“Is what a band?”

That smile hadn’t signaled affection – the wistful, shallow affection beautiful people are surrounded by – but commiseration. They hadn’t been so close to each other that the interaction suggested romantic entanglement. They were party members. I repeated the phrase, imagining a large square display of two muscular boxers, feeling silk swish on the interior of my mouth.

“Oh – no, it’s not a band.” Lee sized me up. The antique dealer who ran this place hired ‘frail’ people, in her own words, and we were both small, but Lee had the benefit of looking miniature while I was woefully disproportionate. A small head on a blocky set of shoulders, spindly arms and stubby fingers. My lifelong capacity for steady-handed work wasn’t evident from the way I looked. Lee seemed satisfied with whatever they had gathered from the cursory scan. They took my phone and prompted me to put their number in: I was glued to the spot like refixed ceramic, but somehow, I complied, and they told me mysteriously they would text me later.

I don’t believe Lee expected me to ‘make the cut’ as it were – I was being informed, not invited, and even this was shrouded, obtuse.

Lee directed me to a website listing “Radical Erotic Art Collectives” in the continental US. I could barely look at the website. It depicted, in the banner advertisements and the logos, naked people. But they weren’t only naked. They were distorted grotesques with inflated, gnarled sexual characteristics: knobby breasts, sworling, elongated penises, cleaved and chasmic vaginas lined with enlarged bumps. The site was pure red. The font cartoonish. Other than the sides and the top, which were smeared with these morbid pornoglyphs, it was only a list of links. There were no more than 15: things like “Knife Dancers”, “Leather Kangaroo Pouch Inc.”, “Frankenstein Fan Club”. Some had a city or state appended after their title. Most didn’t. The Silk Screen Shadow Boxers’ Club link redirected to a page with an address and a plaque that read:

AREN’T YOU TIRED OF SEEKING THOSE MOVEMENTS IN THE DARK?

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE THEM TO LAST FOREVER?

I asked my neighbor, who liked to smoke long banana-flavored cigarillos outside her door, what was meant by the term “artist collective”.

She mimed jacking someone off and rolled her eyes, before dragging on her Swisher and blowing banana-smell at me.

“That depends on where their funding comes from.”

Apparently, I was right to ask her. I had never learned her name, but I think I was her closest neighbor, since I always talked to her and never complained about the smoke (even though it drafted into my rooms). She let me into her apartment to show me a shadow box display of a cat skeleton. “I imagine you’re being courted?” she asked with an air of secrecy. I was even more lost than before, but the unprecedented welcome into her place and the sense that I was a part of (or becoming a part of) something special told me not to correct her. Without confirming whatever she believed, without denying it either, I just sighed and looked at the light coming in through her translucent curtains. I tried making my disproportionate body work for me, in a way worth being ‘courted’. She gave me a can with the cheapest variety of beer in it and some free advice:

“People don’t know what they like; they hate being told what to do but they react well to structure and expectation. For the most part. There is a structure for everyone, but not every structure is suited to every person. Naturally.”

The shadow box on her table was one foot by one foot and contained the fragmented remains of a cat and collar. As I looked closer, I also saw a fine, shiny gray powder that seemed painted-on to every surface it could touch. The bones were fixed in place with glue, maybe, its design wasn’t visible. It produced the strange effect of these parts floating in mid-air.

She went on, watching me take in the art and its levitating properties.

“You’ll enter into a structure and find out very quickly if it’s for you. But the same goes for everyone else there too: don’t forget, young artist, how you’ll affect everyone around you. Don’t forget, they’re changing you, but there’s no you that doesn’t change.” She lit a banana-flavored cigarillo and let me back into the hall.

“Did you listen to me?” she asked bemusedly while I unlocked my door. I nodded, then shrugged, and she tittered. “Always in your own little world,” she said to herself.

Lee didn’t work the next day. There was a new frail person, or really, an old frail person: 105 and with a keen ability to replace small glass fixtures for sunglasses and telescopes. I didn’t want to send Lee a message; I wasn’t sure what was expected of me.

The decadian glass-master and I worked in near total silence; we were interrupted by two kids who jangled the door bell, talking loudly, but their voices dropped once they were inside the store.

The next day, I called out sick, but I didn’t stay in bed. I had a feeling, beyond the whole-body ache that I’ve tapped into now and again, a feeling that made me dress, write down the location on the website, and wait for my neighbor to go back inside so I could leave unseen. I wanted to get a look at the club, even if I couldn’t go in.

Though it had given me the impression of an organization, the Silk Screen Shadow Boxers’ Club’s online address directed me to a sparse plot of land by the highway. As if designed to be accessible, the land was near a bus stop. Four hills and two highways belted the land behind me; looking at the plot, I faced a dream-type landscape. It was entirely flat, balding prairie, that rose suddenly into a wall of mountains in the distance. There was a collapsed wooden shack and tall grass and wildflowers. Was this the art? Or had it once been something else? Where was the collective? Their displays? Their exclusive club? I had expected a silkscreen print or two.

If I reached out to ask Lee about it, they’d know I wasn’t ‘in’.

Standing away, at the edge of the shack, was a figure in the shadow of a tree I hadn’t noticed. They weren’t smoking anything, but held their hands to their lips as if they were. I went forward: I hoped either they were lost, like me, or they knew what I had come for and they’d tell me the expectations, the structure, I was approaching. I even hoped, stupidly, that they would ‘court’ me.

As I came close, they turned and dropped their hand. I saw it was an effeminate man in a badly cut shirt. He sized me up, then sneered. “Hello, little fool.”

I froze. He was a disproportionate body and he held himself against the side of the shack as if too exhausted to stand, wincing with a ubiquitious pain and sneering to hide it. I couldn’t count him as an extraordinary beauty. He had a plain aspect much like my own. “Little?”

“Do you disagree with my usage of that because you think it’s inaccurate, or because you don’t think I should’ve said it?”

“-- I don’t know who you are.”

“And of course, you don’t, because you didn’t ask.” There was an absence of kindness in his tone.

I stared at him and wanted to go on staring until he realized how strangely he was behaving. But the response came anyway, from me, drawn out of me by some force that knew my lines better than I did: “who are you?”

He laughed. “Do you always do as you’re told?”

I huffed, though I realized in twin I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of provoking me. “That must be it,” I said aloud, “you’re trying to provoke me.”

He looked sadly at me then, pitiful, by far the worst expression he could’ve returned me:

“Is this your first time or something?”

“Yes,” I admitted, expecting him to laugh. “I’ve never been here before, I wanted – I thought – there was art to see.”

“How can you expect to see the art? You haven’t brought any, have you?” He reached out and took my hands in his. He folded my fingers into fists, loosely, and raised them aloft. I let him. “Defend yourself,” he said.

“With my hands?”

“Words don’t cut it – not yours.”

I swung at him. I didn’t feel angry, but giddy; when he didn’t react with pain, it only made me more fervent, and I grabbed his shoulders, launching my weight against him and by extension, the shack.

As it splintered and we pitched forward, I suddenly felt very dreamy, and dreamy in a way opposed to my sedentary tendency. I was energetic. I was plunging through the shack, splintering layer on layer of brittle wood, more than should have been there, accelerating and exhilarating.

The woods’ cracking stopped. There was a swish – a bouncy, gauzy, gentle swishing – as the fall went on. I had the vision of two boxers in the display, and was sure – I would open my eyes and see people all around, looking at me, and my strange effeminate companion frozen across from me, our arms locked permanently in the moment before blows.

We landed hard on the floor of the shack and he wheezed as the force knocked the wind out of him. How long we rolled on the dirty, leaf-scattered floorboards, I don’t know, only it was night when we stopped. We hit each other until our bodies locked together, mitigating our violence to biting, scratching, until our bodies locked together were too weary to move any more. Then we traded insults: I said he was too girly, and he said the same, that I was stupid too, and I said that only stupid people insult other people’s intelligence, and he said only stupid people make sweeping generalizations, and I said he lost the fight and he said I won because he let me, and on and on until the pitch black night swallowed us up and the last bus came and went.

The fight and the talk died out.

He stood up and walked away, teetering. I didn’t call out: I was sick and tired of him. But for once, I wasn’t sick. I sat at that bus stop for hours waiting for sunup. That feeling, that ache, had miraculously vanished. I looked out at the balding landscape and could shape it with my mind. I was utterly present; I felt like a well-placed prop.

My role was clear. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but a feeling of purpose and well-being overwhelmed me. Someone shook my shoulder, waking me up to take the bus.

After a two-day absence I returned to work to find Lee. They gave me the cold shoulder; with my newfound certainty, I knew it was intentional, this behavior that I would ordinarily attribute to my own anxieties. They didn’t say hello, didn’t speak to me, avoided my eyes.

Then someone with a tote bag as big as a placemat set it down on the counter in front of Lee. The metal tag had been removed, and they lifted out a wooden box from their bag.

For the first time ever, Lee pointed to me. “He’ll take care of you.”

I nodded and took the box with a smile, easing into a professional affect like I was born for it. Inside, there were two ceramic boxers.

“Well, look at that,” I said. They were nestled into layers of bloody gauze bandages. “But these aren’t broken?”

The customer laughed. “It’s a gift.”

“Why?”

They took their tote bag and left. I wasn’t sure what to do with the box, so I gave it to my banana-smelling neighbor shortly before she was evicted. The bus stop outside the shack might still be there. I was disinclined to return, and even in the one mad moment I had when I looked at the website again, there was only a broken link – as if to confirm I had no more need of it.

I should be happy. I won a prize, of sorts. I only wonder what I’m going to do if my ache comes back.

It hasn’t so far. I know it will. Every “cure” is really a kind of treatment. Even this odd thing, which never happened to me before or since, could not rid me of a feeling I’ve had all my life. Or maybe it did, maybe it was a miracle, maybe it was super-scientific: rid me of my ail by giving me a new one.

I don’t ache. I don’t dream. I approach every day with feverish earnest. It’s as if any moment, another thing, another odd, miraculous thing, will be coming along. But this is no way to live. Always on edge, always straining to see around the corner. The mundane world accumulates around me and I wait for strange things to happen, unable to dream or escape, in a kind of permanent suspense. And I still smell the banana smoke.