what is DEAD may never DIE

Salutations!

My name is Math Johnson.

And I present to all of you… a quandary.

As you all undoubtedly know by now, I have arrived in PRIME. No, your eyes aren’t mistaken, that is indeed a man named “Math” booked on the 90th edition of ReVival. And by the end of that program, you’ll all know precisely the consequences of handing me a legally-binding contract and letting me kill all of your darlings, one-by-one, until I am the sole thing that matters in this company.

It will be enlightening, I promise you that.

You know what else is enlightening? The fact that, in many ways, I’ve always been here.

My essence seeped into every pore of this establishment since long before my body stepped through its doors. I am the cog that turns the gears of professional wrestling, even when I’m not physically present. I am what stays in your shadow. I’m the unsolvable equation that’s about to make a lot of heads explode. Figuratively and mayhaps literally if I’m feeling frisky.

Of course, you’ve all heard the saying. I’ve heard it since long before anyone’s ever heard of me. There’s almost a hint of pride each and every time someone utters these words.

And this is where my quandary comes in.

You see, a time ago, a man briefly showed up in this company pretending that he is a competent wrestler and a math professor and… well, people. Preposterous, I know. He had so many F’s in his name that his failure was guaranteed. Ever since he poisoned the well by noxiously existing, these three words have been a constant refrain in PRIME:

“Math is dead.”

For a promotion called PRIME, whose slogan is “Number One by Definition,” the irony is as subtle as my boot in your face.

Now, I will go out on a limb and trust that my audience aren’t a bunch of brainlets who don’t understand my meaning. Generous of me, I know. But, and I'm going to address you now Miguel of the "Lasagna Boys," this is so obvious a solution that even you could follow the logic. My quandary is such:

This company has already proclaimed my death.

Every single jokey joke, every sneer you make when you so much as breathe a number, every single proclamation that “math is dead.” All of it is designed to smother me in the womb long before my arrival. You have chosen to diminish me. To make light of me. All of you.

And for that, I intend to avenge myself.

You should have all known the consequences of what you’ve sown long before I ever darkened its halls, scythe at hand, ready to goddamn reap. And reap, I shall. For every wrestler that dares to step in the ring with me, there will be a tombstone. That goes double for anyone who’s ever claimed my death before checking to see if the body’s gone cold yet.

Avenging my own death has a certain logic to it, don’t you think?

So it's important to remember one thing when you're proclaiming that "Math is dead."

WHAT IS DEAD MAY NEVER DIE.

 -+%x%+-

Do you know what it’s like to defy your destiny?

I do. Because I was never supposed to be here.

Not in a wrestling ring with your lives in my hands, nor in PRIME, not even in the House That Math Built out in Parts Unknown where I’ve made my name one to watch. And even if I was supposed to be here, I was never supposed to be here in the form I’ve taken now.

Let this be my first lesson to you, then:

Destiny is a joke and you’re the punchline.

“Destiny” is a buzzword used by people to excuse the randomness of this universe as merely the guiding hand of some higher power beyond our comprehension. It’s used by weaklings unable to seize their lives by the reins and steer themselves towards true greatness. You stay the course with the destiny you’re supposed to have and you’ll be some pathetic sad sack on Twitter whining about bullshit for the rest of your life.

Let me use myself as an example, since it’s my favorite subject.

Before I began to haunt the squared circle, the only thing special about me was the clerical error that gave me my name. Some dipshit, probably another overworked intern following their destiny, decided to take the name “Matthew” and… forget a couple of letters on the birth certificate.

Maybe it was you, Miguel.

Maybe, hypothetically, possibly, you went back in time and fucked with my birth certificate. I wouldn’t put it past any of you dipshits. As I understand it, the Whoresmen have a genuine Time Lord at their disposal, and you lot are just irresponsible enough to go joyriding in a time machine. Mayhaps we'll add that to the long list of transgressions I'm beating you to death over later, even if there's a 99.99% chance you have no idea how to work a time machine.

Anyway, that foolishness didn’t end there, because my parents took one look at my certificate and thought it was funny enough to keep calling me “Math” until the name stuck. Some real “fuck it” energy on their part.

What my life was before all this was a series of average happenstances that disappointed a boy with a funny name and big dreams. An average athlete, deemed unworthy by talent scouts hanging the scholarship over my head that I rightfully deserved from the effort I put in. An average academic, not even worth a glance by any good school. I’m not some nepobaby gliding by on the name of some distinguished wrestling family, either. My mom is a travel photographer and my dad’s a fucking plumber, for fuck’s sakes.

I was nothing and nobody, destined to become just another speck in the dustbin of history. If I had remained on this trajectory, Math Johnson would be selling fucking insurance and not here in PRIME.

Destiny was going to make me its latest punchline.

And then the means of seizing my destiny appeared before me, in the form of a man named Mendoza.

To be honest, I wasn’t even that much of a wrestling fan growing up. Oh, sure, all the children I had to tolerate growing up liked their Jason Snows and their Wade Elliotts. Losers, the whole lot of them. So I didn’t recognize the professional name Mendoza initially used to greet me during my parkour routine.

Yes, I do parkour. No, I don’t shout “parkour” as I do it. Grow up.

Mendoza gave me this whole spiel. He’d been searching for the right kind of guy, and I was his latest “right kind of guy.” He told me he wrestled all around the northeastern United States as some sort of hotshot top level guy, and… Well, I never heard of him. Like I said. Still, there was something in what he said that made me curious. I’d never been anyone’s “right kind of guy.” Even now, when my name has become something of a curse, nobody else had ever called me that.

And so, I was curious.

What made me so important that I was the “right kind of guy,” I wondered? I thought about it for so hard that I might’ve gone a little crazy. Could I become something more than I was? Could I be something greater?

Could I punch destiny in its smarmy little bitch face?

And so, I indulged Mendoza.

I took his invitation to his little wrestling school.

The place was called “Burkley’s” and it wasn’t an actual wrestling school. It didn’t even belong to him, which in retrospect was probably why it was called “Burkley’s” and not “Mendoza’s.” It was a boxing gym that Mendoza worked in on the side, and occasionally he would train students that would take one little landing in the ring and were unmade. As a trainer, he went by feel and his instructions were hard to follow.

As such, no one ever trained under Mendoza for long.

Except me.

I lingered.

Even as my bones cracked and my flesh bruised, I alone believed that when Mendoza said I was the “right kind of guy” that he meant that I was special. Even when my body wanted to quit, I kept going. Even when even my spirit itself was begging me to stop, I kept going. Even when I walked in one day and Mendoza himself said I needed to rest, I kept going.

Why?

Because someone told me that I was the “right kind of guy.”

Here’s the thing about Mendoza. He walks with a weariness in his step, because he’d been a professional wrestler for twenty years toiling around in obscurity. His body is a road map of nicks and scars from hardcore matches only witnessed by handfuls of people at a time. His messy dark hair had patches of gray, his salt-and-pepper beard was trimmed short. Maybe he was attractive a few years ago, before the turn to barbed wire and thumbtacks. Today, he looked like a human car wreck. Maybe he could’ve been something. But like so many men who come to his profession of ours, he’s chewed up and spat out and didn’t have much to show for it.

His destiny was to mold me into a weapon.

And mold me, he did. Every day, I’d come in. He’d make me go get him Starbucks in the morning, then I’d smash my body against that fucking cement block of a ring, collect my bruises, and come back the next day. Rinse and repeat.

The day of my graduation from Mendoza’s little boot camp, he was as excited as I was.

There I was, dressed in my best suit. People should know that I always dress for success. Maybe if I were you, Miguel, I’d start taking some fucking notes.

Mendoza met me and guided me to his office.

Sorry, “office.”

Burkley’s had a few proper offices for the ownership. The one that belonged to Mendoza was little more than a glorified broom closet. It was like someone made a mistake in their math (heh) and realized they didn’t have enough room in the floor plan for an office and said “fuck it, we ball” and built one anyway. I know a dumb motherfucker in Sheffield that’d probably think it’s cozy like a locker, at least.

It’s so cramped that I can’t even shut the door behind me due to the lack of space, and I barely squeezed into the chair in front of his desk.

The walls of this broom closet are filled with memorabilia of a masked wrestler. He had the same series of nicks and scars that Mendoza did. I can put two and two together, don’t be surprised.

Mendoza sat down smiling wistfully.

“Kid, I’ve been waitin’ a long time for this day,” he told me. As he did, he started to reach under his desk.

I tilted my head, and I asked him, “For what?”

“Long time ago, a guy comes up to me, much like I did you. I’d only been playin’ this game for a year. Didn’t know what I was aimin’ for. Tells me he saw potential in me, then he hands me this, and takes me under his wing.”

Mendoza passed a box across the desk towards me.

I stared at the box.

I didn’t understand.

“My journey’s been long and hard, tryin’ to keep the legacy goin’. Y’know, people don’t know this, but there were two others before me.”

Two others? I asked myself as I absently opened the box and flipped it open.

I saw a mask staring back at me. It was mostly white with a few odd markings in blue that I didn’t immediately understand, but the face had a disconcerting shape imprinted on it that gave me a feeling of unease.

Most masks, you see, didn’t include trapezoids in the design.

I almost had to laugh. “I don’t understand?”

Mendoza laughed, and his laugh wasn’t the mirthless thing I’d just done. He was happy. Genuinely happy in a way that I’d never seen him during this entire boot camp.

“Startin’ today, Math, you’re going to be the fourth Hardcore Isoceles Trapezoid.”

-+%x%+-

I struggle to understand things sometimes.

Call it the average academic within me.

So, Miguel, I would like for you to help me understand something.

I know, you might think that such a thing is beyond your capabilities considering that you are something called a “Lasagna Boy.” But it’s that very thing that causes me to ask the important question:

Why?

When you were born and you grew up (assuming of course that you didn't crawl out of a mountain fully-formed like Cancer Jiles did), was this your life’s ambition? Was the destiny you sought from the day you were born to always to live in a dog cage under the yoke of a slaveowner with a… let’s call it a curious understanding of how language works? Can you truly say that you have lived, knowing you did everything you could to challenge what the fates had in store for you?

Or were you always going to be Lasagna?

There was a time, little man, when I could’ve turned out exactly like you. When the mundanities of life drug me down to the point that I might have let myself become enthralled by a boiler room dragon. Mendoza could have been that dragon to me. I could have let him erase the concept of Math Johnson from this world and given me a mask to hide who I was.

To enshrine me as yet another cog in a history that wasn’t my own.

To replace me with someone else.

To enslave me to the legacy of that fucking mask.

So, let me make this clear: I am no slave, Miguel. 

Not to Mendoza, nor to Fred Dick, nor to destiny, nor anyone else.

I rather despise the concept in fact.

And so, when Mendoza tried to force upon me a legacy that wouldn’t have been my own, I chose to do something about the man who wished to shackle me.

-+%x%+-

I’m sure that when Anton Mendoza passed that mantle on to me, he felt a real sense of release.

I’m sure that he did everything he thought he could to live up to Justin Williamson’s legacy as the first man to call himself the HIT. I’m sure he thought he could hold his head up high and go live out the remainder of his days in that dingy little boxing gym where he inflicted unknown cruelties upon the man he hoped to pass the mantle to.

I’m also sure that he never noticed that deep down I wanted to take this mask he’d given me, throw it in a trash can, and then beat him to death with that same trash can. And I only restrained myself because I thought of a better use for it than to trash it immediately.

I’m even sure that he took my restraint to not act on that little fantasy as a sign that I was genuinely accepting of what he’d done for me. Maybe even happy. Proud.

And like all things related to pride, we come to the fall.

Mendoza walked into the gym maybe a week after he'd given me the mask, and froze. He saw seven luchadors staring daggers at him from inside the very boxing ring where he used to punish me. I happened to be out of sight, but I could see and hear everything.

“What’s this about? What're you guys doing here?”

The seven luchadors wore masks of different entities. They were a hare, a tortoise, a panther, a lion, a dragon, an elephant, and whatever the fuck those stars did. They beckoned Mendoza inside the ring. Gotta be honest, I’d never seen him so nervous in my life when he stepped through those ropes.

“Anton Mendoza,” growled the man in the star-lined mask in a voice far deeper and gravelly than someone of his size should have, “You know why we have come.”

“I don’t, actually.”

The seven luchadors look confused among each other, because I imagine that a scary little organization like the Lucha Council has as many brain cells as they have members. They stepped closer to each other to confer with one another.

The old luchador in the hare mask was the one who spoke first from their conference, “We have reason to believe that you have committed a cardinal sin.”

Mendoza grunted, “Yeah, that’s what my ex-wife told me, too.”

The panther shifts uncomfortably, “Not that kind of cardinal sin. The other kind.”

I could see Mendoza’s face, and the way the color drained from it.

“That’s a grave accusation,” Mendoza said, “Even coming from you. What proof do you have?”

When Mendoza asked the question, the hare put on a video from his cell phone.

I couldn't see the cell phone or the video from where I was, but I knew its contents. It depicted a masked man who looked like Mendoza removing the mask of another luchador in front of an audience. There’s a few other sins in there, of course, sometimes you gotta go for the gold in the Sin-plympics. My favorite one of those cardinal sins was Mendoza taking the fallen luchador’s mask and then wiping his ass with it.

I know, I know.

You’re probably asking yourself how I'd know so much about this video. Well, that's because... I made it. All it took was using Mendoza’s mask, a little bit of makeup to match his scars, and a few… "willing" conspirators, and then I could fill in the details.

It’s amazing what you can do with AI these days.

My revenge was best served with a couple of swimming pools of boiling water.

Mendoza’s face was a mixture of horror and anger. “You can’t be fucking serious.”

He stormed up to the hare, but was suddenly brought to the ground by the dragon with some silly lucha move and trapped in an armbar. The lion took his other arm.

The starry-masked luchador squatted down to Mendoza’s face.

“Anton Mendoza. By decree of the Lucha Council, for crimes committed against lucha libre, you will be sent into exile. Effective immediately.”

“What? No! NO! This is a mistake!” he shouted. His pleas went unheard as the luchadors started to drag him away.

I’d heard that the gravest crimes against lucha libre as decreed by the Lucha Council often involved sending offenders to a faraway place where lucha couldn’t feasibly happen.

Last I checked, they were sent to Greenland.

As York's dipshit friend from his bowling league often told me: "Wrestling law is quite strange."

The luchadors dragged Mendoza out of the gym, right past me.

Mendoza and I locked eyes at that moment. He looked at me pleadingly, as though he wanted me to say something. To save him. I wonder what he thought of before they took him out of Berkley’s on his way to a plane to Nuuk?

Well, I imagine he was furious.

After all, I had myself a latte from Starbucks.

And I’d written a little message just for him, which I made sure he could see through the ginger way I held my cup. Right next to the little trapezoid I drew next to it.

“This is not my destiny.”

Maybe he’ll figure it all out while he sits among all those colorful buildings up in Greenland, wondering how the hell this could’ve happened. What he does with that information is, quite honestly, none of my concern.

Because by the time he does put it all together and realized in all of the myriad ways I've fucked him, I will have a legally-binding contract that lets me kill all of PRIME’s darlings. The Council will have no authority over me by then. Free to do as I will, just the destiny that I've foretold for myself.

So, I hope you were taking notes, Miguel.

This is ALL going to be on the test.