No one knew for sure, and those from the old entourage loudly brushed off his condition (as if they could not face that they had been so close to an interstate pileup) as a thyroid problem or hypoglycemia. Now, in 1989, there was no turning away from it, though his current doctor was trying. There was the feel of a damp offshore mist to the hospital room, a life-is-a-bitch feel, made sharp by the hostile ganglia of medical technology, plasma bags dripping, vile tubing snaking in and out of the body, blinking monitors leveling illusion, muffling existence down to a sort of digital bingo. Propped up slightly, Ali lay there with a skim of sweat above his lip and on his forehead, with a tremor to his arms and head; one of his metaphorical, helpless flies caught on a melting sugar cube. Images and echoes filled the room, diffuse and speeding, shot through with ineluctable light and the mythopoeic for so long that no one (enemy or friend) could have guessed on the dizzying arc of the ride that he would land here in a little hospital on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
