He will wonder, later, if he forced the moment, if he could have in fact made the twenty steps without falling had he just concentrated harder. But that isn’t what happens. He moves his right foot just half a second before his left one has landed, and he falls, and the plate falls before him, the china shattering on the floor. And then, moving as swiftly as if he’d anticipated it, there is Caleb, yanking him up by his hair and punching him in the face with his fist, so hard that he is airborne, and when he lands, he does so against the table, knocking the base of his skull against its edge. His fall makes the bottle of wine jump off the surface, the liquid glugging onto the floor, and Caleb makes a roar, and snatches at the bottle by its throat and hits him on the back of his neck with it.
“Caleb,” he gasps, “please, please.” He was never one to beg for mercy, not even as a child, but he has become that person, somehow. When he was a child, his life meant little to him; he wishes, now, that that were still true. “Please,” he says. “Caleb, please forgive me—I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
But Caleb, he knows, is no longer human. He is a wolf, he is a coyote. He is muscle and rage. And he is nothing to Caleb, he is prey, he is disposable. He is being dragged to the edge of the sofa, he knows what will happen next. But he continues to ask, anyway. “Please, Caleb,” he says. “Please don’t. Caleb, please.”
When he regains consciousness, he is on the floor near the back of the sofa, and the house is silent. “Hello?” he calls, hating the quaver in his voice, but he doesn’t hear anything. He doesn’t need to—he knows, somehow, that he is alone.
He sits up. He pulls up his underwear and pants and flexes his fingers, his hands, brings his knees to his chest and back down again, moves his shoulders back and forward, turns his neck from left to right. There is something sticky on the back of his neck, but when he examines it, he’s relieved to see it’s not blood but wine. Everything hurts, but nothing is broken.
He crawls to the bedroom. He quickly cleans himself off in the bathroom and gathers his things and puts them in his bag. He scuttles to the door. For an instant he is afraid that his car will have disappeared, and he will be stranded, but it is there, next to Caleb’s, waiting for him. He checks his watch: it is midnight.
He moves his way across the lawn on his hands and knees, his bag slung painfully over one shoulder, the two hundred feet between the door and the car transforming themselves into miles. He wants to stop, he is so tired, but he knows he must not.
In the car, he doesn’t look at his reflection in the mirror; he starts the engine and drives away. But about half an hour later, once he knows he is far enough from the house to be safe, he begins to shake, so badly that the car swerves beneath him, and he pulls off the road to wait, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel.
He waits for ten minutes, twenty. And then he turns, although the very movement is a punishment, and finds his phone in his bag. He dials Willem’s number and waits.
“Jude!” says Willem, sounding surprised. “I was just going to call you.”
“Hi, Willem,” he says, and hopes his voice sounds normal. “I guess I read your thoughts.”
They talk for a few minutes, and then Willem asks, “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” he says.
“You sound a little strange.”
Willem, he wants to say. Willem, I wish you were here. But instead he says, “Sorry. I just have a headache.”
They talk some more, and as they’re about to hang up, Willem says, “You’re sure you’re okay.”
“Yes,” he says. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” says Willem. “Okay.” And then, “Five more weeks.”
“Five more.” He wishes for Willem so intensely he can barely breathe.
After they hang up, he waits for another ten minutes, until he finally stops shaking, and then he starts the car again and drives the rest of the way home.
The next day, he makes himself look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and nearly cries out in shame and shock and misery. He is so deformed, so astoundingly ugly—even for him, it is extraordinary. He makes himself as presentable as he can; he puts on his favorite suit. Caleb had kicked him in his side, and every movement, every breath, is painful. Before he leaves the house, he makes an appointment with the dentist because he can feel that one of his upper teeth has been knocked loose, and an appointment at Andy’s for that evening.
He goes to work. “This is not a good look for you, St. Francis,” one of the other senior partners, whom he likes a lot, says at the morning management committee meeting, and everyone laughs.
He forces a smile. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he says. “And I’m sure you’ll all be disappointed when I announce that my days as a potential Paralympic tennis champion are, sadly, over.”
“Well, I’m not sad,” says Lucien, as everyone around the table groans in mock disappointment. “You get plenty of aggression out in court. I think that should be your sole combat sport from now on.”
That night at his appointment, Andy swears at him. “What’d I say about tennis, Jude?” he asks.
“I know,” he says. “But never again, Andy, I promise.”
“What’s this?” Andy asks, placing his fingers on the back of his neck.
He sighs, theatrically. “I turned, and there was an incident with a nasty backhand.” He waits for Andy to say something, but he doesn’t, only smears some antibiotic cream on his neck and then bandages it.
The next day, Andy calls him at his office. “I need to talk to you in person,” he says. “It’s important. Can you meet me somewhere?”
He’s alarmed. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “Are you all right, Andy?”
“I’m fine,” Andy says. “But I need to see you.”
He takes an early dinner break and they meet near his office, at a bar whose regular customers are the Japanese bankers who work in the tower next to Rosen Pritchard’s. Andy is already there when he arrives, and he places his palm, gently, on the unmarked side of his face.
“I ordered you a beer,” Andy says.
They drink in silence and then Andy says, “Jude, I wanted to see your face when I asked you this. But are you—are you hurting yourself?”
“What?” he asks, surprised.
“These tennis accidents,” Andy says, “are they actually—something else? Are you throwing yourself down stairs or against walls, or something?” He takes a breath. “I know you used to do that when you were a kid. Are you doing it again?”