Seconds Out by Martin Kohan

Author:Martin Kohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2010-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nothing. Nothingness. Nothing at all. Nothing on nothing. Not a consideration or an awareness of nothing, just nothing (this isn’t philosophy, it’s boxing). His mind a blank, a complete blank. The little voice inside his head, the one everyone has and which talks to us all the time, has suddenly fallen silent. His mind a blank and his senses annulled. He hears nothing, feels nothing, sees nothing: nothing. Neither the twinkle of the floodlights above the ring nor the much weaker twinkling of the stars in the sky, way up beyond the lights. Neither the roar of the crowd (the astonished crowd has fallen silent anyway) nor the referee’s count (he is dimly aware that Mr Gallagher is crouching down somewhere near him). And he doesn’t feel anything either: neither the vertigo of the fall (he’s no longer falling, he’s already fallen as far as he can go) nor the pain of the single decisive punch to the face, nor the other blows he’s received as he was falling. None of this. Nothing at all. Everything there was to feel or think has been annulled, and all that remains is this lack of everything. A moment in the fight, on that night of 14 September 1923, reduced to nothing, as if it had never existed. A similar gap, a similar moment, missing from his life. If at some point in the future he comes to write his memoirs, or more probably dictate them to a ghost writer, there will be many pages about tonight’s fight, and among those many pages several will describe this fall. He will have to tell the story time and again until he dies; tonight, even, in only a few minutes’ time, when the journalists come poking their noses around his dressing-room door, he will start to tell the story of the fight and his fall. Standing there in their suits that contrast so strangely with the usual bare bodies of boxing dressing rooms, they will listen to him, taking notes, writing everything down without taking sides, the neutral purveyors of a myth in the making. However attentive they are, they will not be able to write that at the heart of the scrupulous, detailed and careful story they are hearing there is an empty, hollow centre: a place of forgetting where nothing exists because nothing was registered, the place where Dempsey’s mind was a blank, the second when he thought nothing, felt nothing. Nothing, nothing at all. What would these chroniclers raising their pencils do if Jack Dempsey suddenly spoke of this black hole where he saw and felt nothing? On the one hand, they might decide quite reasonably to write nothing, because nothing can come of nothing; on the other, they might insist they were there to chronicle the myth, and resolve that since there was nothing, what they write has to concentrate on that nothing, and treat it as if it were everything, or at least something. Awareness, memory, the senses: they can all accept these nothings, but writing cannot.

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