Turn 92 of 226

Pass out. Think about joining a professional tournament to further improve my skills in the morning. I'm addicted to fighting now, like the way I am addicted to exercise, food, masturbation and pissing

She passes out where she lies. The body drops the way it always drops — no gradual descent, no winding down, the animal simply ceasing to be awake. The concrete is warm beneath her from the puddle and the body heat and the food stains. The warehouse is dark. The high windows hold the industrial district's ambient glow — the orange of sodium lamps, the distant white of a loading dock's security flood — and the glow paints the ceiling she cannot quite reach anymore. Nine feet five inches. Her head is seven-eleven. The gap is eighteen inches and the eighteen inches is a number she thinks about when she stands under the bag and the bag's chain is shorter than it used to be because she adjusted it downward to keep the bag's center mass at striking height and the adjustment is the ceiling's fault. She does not think about the ceiling now. She does not think about anything. The body is empty and the empty is the sleep's prerequisite and the prerequisite is met.

The morning comes grey. The concrete is cold against her skin and the cold is the alarm. She stands — eight hundred twenty pounds rising, the muscles engaging in sequence, the movement automatic — and the standing is the body's first act of every day and the act is not a decision. She walks to the water jug. She drinks. She pisses on the floor and the moan comes and the moan is the morning's first honest sound and the honest sound is the body saying *here I am* to the warehouse and the warehouse says it back. The legal pad is on the steel shelf. The entry from the last tournament is there — *no new weaknesses* — and the absence of a weakness is the thing that turns her mind toward the next rung.

She stands at the shelf and the standing is where the thought arrives. The thought is not a thought the way thoughts used to be — careful, deliberated, the old Lena weighing options. The thought is the body's hunger. The amateur and semi-pro tournaments are a ladder and the ladder has rungs and she has climbed every rung and the rungs are running out. The 512-fighter field was the largest she has fought. The $35,000 purse was the largest she has won. The fighters she faced were regional circuit competitors with thirty-fight records and the records were not enough. The body wants more. The body is addicted. The word arrives in her mind and the arriving is not a shock because the word is true and the truth is the thing the wish taught her to recognize. She is addicted to fighting. The addiction is the same shape as the others — exercise, food, masturbation, pissing — the same architecture, the same pull, the same satisfaction that is not satisfaction but is the brief pause before the pull returns. The body wants. The body takes. The wanting is the wish's engine and the engine does not idle.

Fighting is the newest addiction and the newest is the sharpest. The pull started at the first amateur tournament — four fights, $2,000, the feeling of a cross landing clean on a jaw and the jaw going slack. The pull grew. Each tournament fed it and the feeding was not enough because the feeding never is. The eight-fight tournaments were better than the four-fight tournaments. The nine-fight tournament was better than the eight. The depth was the thing — deeper fields, better fighters, more rounds, the body pushed to a place where the body's engine ran at full output and the full output was the place where the body felt most itself. The amateur and semi-pro fields are not deep enough anymore. The fighters are not good enough. The nine fights were clean — no weaknesses, no corrections, no adjustments — and the cleanness is the problem because the cleanness means the ladder has ended and the ended means the body needs a new ladder.

The professional circuit is the new ladder. The thought has the weight of a fact. She does not know where the professional circuit is or how it operates or whether it operates the way the amateur and semi-pro tournaments operated — Cal's emails, the warehouse venues, the entry fees, the brackets on the wall. She does not know whether the professional circuit has weight classes or rulesets or regulatory bodies or the things that professional fighting is supposed to have. She does not care. The caring would be the old Lena and the old Lena is dust. The body wants to fight better fighters and the wanting is the addiction's pull and the pull is the thing that drives every other part of her life — the training, the eating, the pleasure, the release — and the pull is the wish's architecture and the architecture does not stop. She picks up the burner phone. The screen glows. Cal's email address is in the contacts list. She begins to type.