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I’m not so sure about his expression. I think he’s missing some quality. I don’t know what it is.
    —Humanness, perhaps? I hate to tell you, but Living is intended to be a game, something people do for entertainment, for fun. You can’t have a virtual husband. That’s just not right. And even if that’s what you want...
    —I don’t, she says, looking contrite.
    —Well, even if you did, you can’t tell me that would be good for Thad.
    —I could turn the volume down, she says.
    I hope she’s deadpanning me.
    —You want him to have a quiet father who vanishes if we blow a fuse? I ask.
    —Someday when you’re a mother, you’ll get it, she snaps.
    —I’m going downstairs, I say.
    I get why she’s so crazy right now, but I don’t have to stand around in the line of fire.
    She calls after me. —Virtual reality is very successful in treating trauma victims! Burn patients! Look it up.
    I trudge down the blue carpet of Allison’s grand staircase.
    —You’re not a burn patient! I call over my shoulder.
    —You shouldn’t be so hard on me! Your father was always hard on me! she calls back.
    —Which one?
    —All of them! All seven! They’ve all been hard on me like you!

CHAPTER 5
    By now Tommy’s stepping into his competition gear in the locker room of the amphitheater. But his family is having a later start than planned because my mother kept changing her outfit. Now we take the surface streets, hoping to avoid the afternoon rush hour. The sun is too bright, the heat without letup, and I know just how nervous Allison is because she keeps sliding her fingers off the wheel to dig her nails into her scalp. We’re all just nerves and we almost hit a brown Audi that swerves at the last second to avoid us.
    The driver, a man with thin gray hair, looks pretty rattled. Allison’s hands shake as she lights a Marlboro, trying to calm down. She stays put in the car. The man and I get out of our respective vehicles and look at how close we’ve come. Our front bumper is less than an inch from the Audi. Like that space between God and Adam. The man looks at the decals on our bumpers and windows.
    —Goddamn gladiators, he says.
    Then he gets back in his beautiful car, backs up, and speeds away.
    *
    It takes Allison a while to calm down from our near miss and she takes a wrong turn and we get lost for a while—which, if you know Boston, is an easy thing to do no matter how long you’ve lived here.
    Normally, we sit in the heirs section, way down in front where cameras are trained on us the whole time, but not so close any blood hits you. But we’re nowhere near our box when we arrive, so we just grab the first seats we can find in the stadium because the match is about to start.
    Romulus is an open-air arena built to hold sixty thousand fans and it’s pretty close to capacity today. I look around at the people who have painted fake wounds and gashes on their bodies. Drinks slop from plastic goblets. Styrofoam truncheons and axes are waved about. Beer is consumed—kegs, buckets, rivers of it. The hot dog buns are in the shape of lances and there are lots of folks with banners made from sheets and flattened boxes: some for  TOMMY , some for  UBER . Crazy hats meant to look like helmets and broken skulls. Tattoo concessions, piercing vendors. All of them call out, hawking for business. At home I have one of those giant foam hands with the thumb you can turn up or down or just wave in the air but I’ve always felt too embarrassed to bring it to the stadium.
    This is the American Title fight, so people are watching this one all over the globe. When a gladiator wins the American Title, this is his job: to look large, to be the largest man on Earth really. His name appears in novels, it’s shaved into hair art. He might sign a movie contract and he can always get plenty of cameos. Game shows, no sweat. In two weeks his name will be printed down the length and over the breadth of thousands of condoms. His name is