I was in a dark room, or maybe a corridor. It’s possible I was backstage somewhere. Either way, I couldn’t see a thing. I wanted to sit down but it felt better to stand. I started wondering if I really was inside anything, or if I was outside and I just had my eyes closed. Everything seemed to be contracting and expanding, including my guts, my eyes, my mouth. I thought about screaming, whistling, singing a little song, and then being quiet forever, or at least for a long time…
It probably isn’t clear from what I’m saying, but I’m actually very intelligent. At school I achieved exceptional grades. I can say with confidence that I have a very high IQ. I discovered this because my mother thought I had a very low IQ. She told the school I needed help. She said I needed to take one of those tests to demonstrate to the higher-ups (that’s the phrase she used) that I was struggling and would continue to struggle in life. I could barely put my socks on; how was I supposed to get by in the real world, make myself dinner, get a job, a loving wife and cat? I took the test. It showed that I was supernaturally intelligent. I ended up being entered into various competitions and olympiads.
I remember one of them was in Korea. I think it was in Seoul. We arrived and I had no idea what was going on. I thought we were going to Kentucky. Everyone there was so nice. I met another kid while we were waiting to enter the competition hall. He told me his name was Mr Iguana. He had an extremely strange face (at least it looked strange to me then): he was very pale, practically transparent, with misaligned features, and bright blue veins running across his cheeks and down his neck. He looked as though he should be grimacing, even though he was smiling very calmly. I looked at him like he had a very low IQ.
– What do you mean?
– I mean I’m called Mr Iguana.
He explained that anyone could choose their own name. You could just get rid of a name you didn’t like. That was true for anyone anywhere at any point in history. I wanted to say that I didn’t think that was true. And at this point in history I’d like to be Mrs Iguana. But I didn’t. I just nodded and said I didn’t think either of us was going to win.
I did very badly in that olympiad. Mr Iguana did even worse. He didn’t seem to care. (I recently learned that the guy who won is serving several consecutive life sentences, though I’m not sure for). Afterwards, we went to get ice cream. Mr Iguana told me that he was from another country, but he lived in a nearby town and his aunty lived here in the city. He said his school had entered him as a kind of joke. But no one from the school seemed to be here, and if they were, he hadn’t heard anyone laughing.
He asked about my parents. I said they were alive and at home. He said that he struggled to tell his parents apart. They both had very squeaky voices. He also said that when he grew up he was planning to be a greengrocer, but wasn’t sure that would happen. His aunty lived a couple of streets away, but he didn’t invite me to her house.
There was a knock on the cafe window. It was the teacher who’d brought me here. He was gesturing frantically for me to get outside. Then he swiped his finger across his throat, implying he was going to slit mine, which made me laugh.
– I think we’ll see each other again, Mr Iguana said.
– When?
– Maybe on the subway.
I didn’t go on the subway. In fact we left Seoul the next morning. And after that I stopped entering olympiads, or allowing myself to be entered. They were making me nervous, even though there was no pressure on me to do well. My mother hadn’t wanted me to go in the first place. She bragged about it in supermarkets in a way that made me feel guilty. She said things like:
– It’s just so amazing that a boy with his particular ways gets to go on all these trips.
She could have come (the school would have paid for it) but she said it was a waste of money. She said she wouldn’t know what was going on, she was stupid; it was all beyond her.
She did however want to go and see Mr Olympia. She had hundreds of videos from bodybuilding competitions, which she got from a guy across the road, an enormous, page guy who could barely walk, and who was known as The Rhino. She kept them in a cupboard in the kitchen. There was also a copy of Pumping Iron that she watched every night after I went to bed.
– Yes, Mr Olympia, she said one evening just before she sent me upstairs. If you ever enter that, I’d be there in a shot. I’ll get a loan, take an early pension (not that I have one) – whatever it takes to get a ticket, a hotel, and ideally a backstage pass. Yes, that’s something I’d like to do; actually, I’d love it.
A few years later, I remembered her saying this when I was in the college gym. It was in the basement. I was trying to build myself up, or at least not to get any skinnier, which was what seemed to be happening to me, no matter how much I ate. For unknown reasons I was withering away, I was always ill, and I’d almost completely lost my voice. But I didn’t need my voice to squat, press, clean, pant, and sweat, which I did every lunchtime, along with the history teacher, who mostly sat on the lat pulldown machine with his suit trousers tucked into his socks, and watched me train.
I remember I was sitting on a creaky bench across from a mirror stained with rust and little black dots, pressing a couple of dumbbells above my head, when I saw the face of Mr Iguana behind me. It wasn’t attached to a body. At first it looked as though it was hovering over my shoulder; then it drifted forward and superimposed itself over mine. As I pushed and grimaced, looking directly into the eyes of Mr Iguana, my arms began to quiver. Then I felt a sudden jolt in the nape of my neck, and watched as a skein of dark blue veins shot through and illuminated my entire body. They flashed green, yellow and purple, fizzing around in snarled little squiggles in my throat and stomach. It looked as though I was being electrocuted.
When I dropped the weights to the floor, the whole gym seemed to shudder. I remember feeling weak and breathless. I felt the history teacher’s hand on my shoulder. In the mirror, I saw the flickering light above the gym entrance in the mirror. The caretaker was standing underneath, staring at it as if he could fix it telepathically. I remember wondering if I should change my name to Mr Olympia. I remember the caretaker shrugging and muttering: eh, I’ll fix it tomorrow. And then I remember wondering exactly what would become of me.
*
A version of this story was first published in BRUISER.