Four in the morning.
A visitors’ locker room that smelled of liniment and other people’s victories.
One lamp, clipped to the door of locker nineteen, and under it a Lime, writing.
Overhead, the fight went on. It always went on. Round three had been reset four times before midnight and once more since, and somewhere above the concrete the bell was still ringing on its borrowed thimble, and nine thousand grapes were still stamping, though more slowly now, the way a crowd stamps at four in the morning when it has forgotten why it started and is too proud to stop.
The Lime had the bench to himself. He had spread the essays out along it in order, one through eighty-five, a long green-inked runway of argument with a gap at the end where the eighty-sixth should go.
The eighty-sixth was in his lap.
The cream envelope was on top of it, still keeping his place.
He moved the envelope to the bench beside him and read what he had so far. It was about the commission. Everything he wrote, lately, was about the commission, because the commission was the only part of the arena nobody had bothered to build properly. Nine judges and no rules for who gets to stand in front of them. A Tomato in the front row with an annotated opinion and an appeal nobody had scheduled. A referee who reset the round whenever he finished a thought.
The essay’s title, at the top of the first page, in his own fast slanting hand:
No. 86. Concerning the Commission, and the Question of Who May Be Heard Before It.
It was the best thing he had ever written. It had been going badly for six hours.
He crossed out a paragraph. He wrote it again in the margin. He crossed out the margin.
He had always written like this. Fast, and too much, and against a clock nobody else could hear. He had come from an island where a storm had once taken everything, and he had written a letter about the storm that was so good the island took up a collection and shipped him north to be educated. He had been writing his way out of things ever since. Every crisis, a pamphlet. Every insult, an essay. Every question anyone had ever asked him, twelve thousand words and a postscript.
He looked at the envelope on the bench.
There was no essay for that one. He had checked.