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Shyanne was so preoccupied planning her wedding, a trip to Vegas scheduled for the first week of January, that she forgot

to tell Margo she was busy on Thanksgiving until Margo called asking what she should bring. “Oh, we’re volunteering for the

needy!” Shyanne said.

Margo knew it was wonderful Kenny was encouraging her mom to volunteer, and that a good deed was a good deed whether it was

done for a cringeworthy reason or not. It was only that Thanksgiving had always been their holiday; she and Shyanne would

order in Chinese food, watch Lifetime movies, and do those Baby Foot peels. It felt like an entire world was being lost.

Instead, Jinx made her and Suzie a whole traditional meal. He really outdid himself: turkey, mashed potatoes, real stuffing

not from a box, and an apple pie.

After pie they all lounged about the living room. Jinx’s body was exactly the length of the pink velvet couch as he dangled

Bodhi above him in the air, then brought him down for raspberries and ticklish kisses before hoisting him back into the air

again. All of this was accompanied by much gibbering and squealing. Bodhi had begun to babble, and all he said was “Dada,

Dada.” Jinx would smile and say, “Yes, I’m Dada!”

“Isn’t it weird for you to be teaching him to call you ‘dada’?” Margo asked. Really, she was just miffed that Bodhi wasn’t

saying “mama.” She worried it was because she wasn’t spending enough time hoisting him in the air and making him squeal like

that. She worried it was because so often when she was holding him, she was looking at her phone.

“‘Dada’ is usually the one they say first,” Jinx said. “He won’t call me dada eventually.”

“They say ‘dada’ first?” Margo was sitting at the coffee table. A Curt Hennig match was on TV. Her dad had some subscription service that gave him access to every WWE match ever.

“At least all my kids did,” he said. “You did. Just about killed Shyanne.”

This made Margo grin. “What do they say next?”

“Either ‘mama’ or ‘baba.’”

“I hope it’s ‘mama,’” she said. Her phone buzzed. It was a message from JB:

Dear Hungry Ghost,

$100 per question (length is up to you) for answers to any of the following questions:

Who are some friends you remember from middle school?

What are your favorite foods, and what foods do you irrationally dislike?

Did you know your grandparents at all?

What has become of your brother, Timmy? Are you guys close?

Do you go to college? Are you thinking about going to college? It really, really seems like you should go to college, and

you look so young. I guess I don’t know how old you are, though. Maybe you have already graduated college and just have great

skin. I don’t know, I don’t know what I am even saying, but what are your goals for yourself? What do you want?

—JB

He had attached a picture of Jelly Bean in an ill-fitting turkey costume looking absolutely miserable. Margo smiled. She hadn’t

told Jinx or Suzie about JB and these strange writing prompts. She’d convinced herself she didn’t need to tell anyone because

they weren’t important. She wasn’t going to let JB know anything real about her. She knew how to keep it under control.

She wrote back: I want a selfie of you and Jelly Bean!

She didn’t know why, exactly; she just wanted to see if he would do it, if she could command him.

He’s not in the costume anymore, JB wrote. He didn’t like wearing it.

HungryGhost: I don’t care about the costume.

There was a pause, then a picture came through, and her breath caught in her throat. She did not know what she was expecting

from a man who was sending a girl he met online weird writing prompts on Thanksgiving Day, but it wasn’t this. JB was tall

and broad shouldered, or at least he looked that way with a pug cradled under his chin, and he had long, thick, shiny black

hair that hung around his shoulders. He looked Asian or Pacific Islander and was wearing a black T-shirt and what she was

80 percent sure was a pearl choker necklace. He seemed to be in his late twenties at most and was absolutely, confusingly

smoking hot.

She set down her phone. Jinx had been talking for some time, and Margo had no idea what about. Thankfully, it turned out to

only be an anecdote about Curt Hennig slipping Yokozuna laxatives so that he shat himself on a plane. “He was always putting

drugs in people’s drinks,” Jinx said. “Which by today’s moral standards is reprehensible, but at the time it was fairly humorous.”

Jinx hoisted Bodhi in the air again and then said, “Oh God, Margo. Take the baby. Take him right now.”

Margo scrambled up and took Bodhi. Jinx kept his arms in the air in the same position, clearly afraid to move.

“I did something,” he said.

“To your back?”

“Oh God,” he said.

She could see that his face was white, and he was sweating. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I think it’s only a spasm. I need Somas, but I don’t— I mean, because of rehab I don’t

have any. I just need the muscles to unclench. I don’t think a disc slipped or anything.”

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

“Go get my phone and call Dr. Murtry.”

But it was Thanksgiving and Dr. Murtry wasn’t answering, nor were two other doctors Jinx tried. When Margo discovered that

Jinx absolutely could not stand or shift position, she started to freak out.

“Well, I can just stay on the couch,” Jinx said, “until someone calls back.”

“Dad, you’re sweating bullets. You are clearly in excruciating pain.”

“Well,” Jinx said. “Maybe ice?”

“Dad!” Margo said. “You need to go to the ER!”

“I don’t think I can get in a car.”

“We’re calling an ambulance,” she said.

“We are not,” Jinx said. “Do not call an ambulance!”

But she called 911, and she could tell by the way he didn’t really try to stop her that he was glad. Once they knew an ambulance

was on the way, his main concern was that she pack him some books to read in the hospital. “I’m coming with you,” Margo said.

“You don’t want to bring Bodhi to a place like that! A hospital full of germs!”

“I’ll watch Bodhi,” Suzie said.

They both looked at her. Suzie had never volunteered to watch the baby before.

“How hard could it be?” she said. “I mean, I watch you guys do it all day!”

“There’s pumped milk in the freezer,” Margo said, and rushed to show Suzie everything she would need before the ambulance

arrived. “And if he’s freaking out text me, and I’ll leave and come home. I don’t think I’ll be gone longer than an hour or

two tops.”

“It’s fine,” Suzie said, “I think we’ll be totally chill.”

Margo placed Bodhi in Suzie’s arms experimentally. Both Suzie and Bodhi seemed at ease.

“Okay,” Margo said, like she was judging a Jenga tower for stability. “Okay!”

When Jinx and I were finally alone together again in his little curtained-off area of the brightly lit ER, he was already doing much better. The nurse had given him muscle relaxers and pain meds in his IV.

“Margo,” he said softly, almost a whisper, “I am not going to mention substance abuse issues unless they ask directly. Is

that all right with you?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. The idea that I would somehow object and tell his doctor he had just gotten out of rehab hadn’t even occurred

to me. Now I wondered if that was actually the right thing to do.

“We can figure it out after, I can refuse to take whatever they send me home with. I just know from experience that if you

bring it up they instantly treat you like a criminal.”

“Okay,” I said. Certainly, I wanted my dad to get the medication he needed. I was also uneasy about this. His addiction was

a large uncharted area I didn’t truly understand. I worried this was how it always started for him: with the best of intentions.

I could hear an old woman asking for water through the curtain on our right. “My mouth is so dry,” she was saying.

“In the hospital, when I was having Bodhi,” I said, clearing my throat from a sudden attack of phlegm, “there was this nurse

who was checking my IV, and she ran her hand over my hand in this weird way, and I realized she was checking for a ring. And

maybe they have some policy to remove the patient’s rings in case of a C-section, but I suddenly felt scared that I didn’t

have this marker, this thing that indicated that someone loved me, that I was valuable, that someone would get mad and sue

if I died. It was probably all in my head, but I felt like I’d press the button for something, and she wouldn’t come for,

like, hours, and she would walk out without answering my questions, and she made fun of Bodhi’s name. They didn’t release

me for forever, and they wouldn’t tell me why. She’d just decided I was this certain kind of girl, you know?”

“She made fun of his name?” Jinx asked, and I could see a strange coldness coming into his eyes, like ice forming on a lake.

“Yeah, I didn’t tell you this? Shyanne slapped her!”

Jinx only stared at me, his eyes completely dead. “I would have burned that hospital to the ground,” he said. All the hair on my arms stood up.

“I just... I get it,” I said. “The way how they treat you can change.”

“To the ground,” Jinx said again.

I laughed. “Thank you,” I whispered.

He looked at me and nodded, his eyes dark with love.

“What is the book you’re reading about?” I asked, gesturing at the book he had tucked in his armpit.

“Gladiators,” Jinx said, flashing the cover.

“You’re really into ancient Rome,” I observed.

“What gave it away?” my dad asked, winking. Of the books that lined his room, Rome was in about half the titles.

“Why? I mean, what interests you about it?”

“Oh, the violence, I suppose.” He gave a cute little shrug then winced, tried to resettle his shoulders.

“Because of wrestling?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you feel, like— Do you feel conflicted about the violence?” I asked.

My dad squinted then said, in that soft-loud ASMR voice of his, “I’ve spent so many years being defensive that it’s hard to

tell. You know, recounting to myself how violent football is, or hockey, and don’t even get me started on MMA. I always wanted

to defend wrestling; in a way it’s the most ethical one. Because we’re trying to put on a show, not truly harm each other.

It’s a bunch of boys from the middle of nowhere, you know, kind of screaming, ‘Look at me! Love me! Look at the insane and

beautiful things I can do with my body! I can make you gasp, I can make you scream, I can make you cry!’”

“That’s beautiful,” I said, “to think about it like that.”

Even though he was looking better, his skin was still so waxy and pale in the bright light, his eyes sunken. I had never been so aware of my father’s mortality. It was palpable, my sense that someday he would die. I’d also never been able to so fully imagine him as the wild milk-white bull my mother first fell for, the young man from Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada, screaming, “Look at me! Love me!”

“Oh yeah,” my dad said. “That’s the heart of it. Boys on trampolines fooling around with their friends. That is the beautiful

seed wherefrom the wrestling flower sprouts. But you know, almost all my friends are dead. Not all. But more than half. And

sometimes they died in horrific and gruesome ways. So the cost, the cost of it, is not beyond me. You know, when you said

you would never let Bodhi become a wrestler, I thought, What is wrong with me that I would? I don’t want that for him. Why

was I saying he could take it? He’s four months old! Even before Bodhi, though, I mean, for years and years, I’ve been thinking

about this, about violence and how much we love it and how we can’t stop. And just as all roads lead to Rome, all histories

of blood sport lead there as well.”

“We’ve always been this way,” I said.

“On the contrary, I think we used to be much worse.”

“Really?” My knowledge of Roman gladiatorial contests pretty much started and ended with that Russell Crowe movie.

“The kinds of contests they held would really challenge a modern sensibility. I mean, involving animals, making women fight

dwarfs, plays where when someone is killed in the story, they really kill them onstage. Slavery made all this possible, as

a mental category, of course.”

I had not thought at all about slavery outside of the context of America.

“They would make these long seesaws, like teeter-totters. And then they’d chain criminals up at either end, and let in, you

know, a dozen starving lions and bears, and watch as the men all pushed off with their legs, trying to be the one in the air,

even though they knew that when their counterpart was done, you know, being eaten, that weight would be removed and they’d

come crashing down and be eaten as well.” His dark eyes were dreamy, focused somewhere on the ceiling.

“That is horrifying,” I said.

“You know, and little kids would see that. People would watch and laugh and yell and boo, just like a wrestling show. And you have to think about how profoundly different it must have been in their heads. Now we’d think watching someone be murdered is profoundly traumatizing, except it wasn’t traumatic for them. It was fun. And trying to imagine how that worked, what beliefs had to be in place, is just fascinating to me.”

“Why do you think it changed?” I asked. “Like, civilization?”

“I don’t know what a historian would say, but I would say Jesus: love thy neighbor, and it’s easier for a camel to fit through

a needle’s eye than a rich man to get into heaven. In a place like Rome, insisting everyone had intrinsic value—it rattled

them. I mean, they killed him for it.”

I was not expecting an answer like that from my dad, who was, as far as I knew, violently atheist.

A doctor came in through the curtain right then, interrupting our conversation. I sat quietly as he asked Jinx questions about

his back and various surgeries. Even without Jinx saying anything about substance abuse, the questions about pain management

and medication were pointed and repetitive. The doctor asked what pain medication Jinx was on multiple times, as though he

didn’t believe Jinx when he told him none. He explained they would order X-rays and an MRI to make sure there was no compromise

to the spinal fusion.

I was growing agitated. It was the way the doctor talked to my dad, the image of those metal parts implanted in his spine.

Across from us there was a girl who’d slipped in a hot tub and was bleeding profusely from a cut along her hairline, waiting

to be seen by a doctor, holding a paper towel to her forehead. Sometimes wrestlers would sneak a razor blade into a match

and cut themselves at their hairline so that they’d bleed; they called it “adding color” to a match. Abdullah the Butcher’s

head was practically grooved from all the scars.

Mick Foley and Terry Funk, the tacks and the razor wire and the broken glass, or Nick Gage, oh God, Nick Gage. Rubbing that

pizza cutter in men’s mouths until the blood flowed down their chins and necks, mixing with the sweat. The time he got stabbed

in the stomach with a broken fluorescent light tube and had to be helicoptered out. I kept thinking about the men who wrote

to tell me to kill myself.

“You should head home,” Jinx said. “I’ll be fine here.”

“No,” I said. But I found I was desperate to leave, wild with the need to be home with Bodhi safe in my arms.

“I’m okay now,” Jinx said. But how could he be okay in this brightly lit space filled with people who did not love him?

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m so worked up.”

“Go home to that baby,” he said. “Good night, my sweet.”

He used to call me that when I was little. I had almost forgotten it.

“Good night, my meat,” I said, which is what I used to say back.

I left him in his little cubicle and stumbled out into the dark night, where I took a cab that smelled like wax and gummy

bears to my apartment, sprinted up the stairs, and burst into the living room only to find Suzie and Bodhi solidly asleep

on the pink velvet couch, both gently snoring.

But as I tried to go to sleep that night, Bodhi safely tucked in his crib, Suzie covered with a blanket on the couch, I couldn’t

stop hearing it, my dad saying, “I would have burned that hospital to the ground.”

I pictured the burned-out frame of the building, the clouds of ash, my father standing in his black pants and black shirt

and black jacket, standing there, looking at me, loving me.