He’s quiet for the next couple of minutes while I move the cold eggs around the plate. I miss baseball. A universe of loss in four syllables.
“No, I liked it,” I tell him. “It was fun.”
“Really?” A look: Are you serious? He doesn’t know that I am 99.99999 percent of the time. “You didn’t seem too down with it at the time.”
“I guess I’m just not feeling well lately.”
He laughs and then seems surprised at his own reaction. “Okay. Well, I left it in my quarters. I’ll bring it someday if nobody swipes it.”
The conversation meanders off the game. I discover Razor was the youngest of five kids, grew up in Ann Arbor, where his dad worked as an electrician and his mom as a middle school librarian, played baseball and soccer and loved Michigan football. Until he was twelve, his great ambition was to be the starting quarterback for the Wolverines. But he grew tall, not big, and baseball became his passion.
“Mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the old man didn’t think I was smart enough . . .”
“Wait. Your dad didn’t think you were smart?”
“Smart enough. There’s a difference.” Defending his father even in death. People die; love endures. “He wanted me to be an electrician like him. Dad was a big union guy, president of his local, stuff like that. That was the real reason he didn’t want me to be a lawyer. Suits, he called them.”
“He had a problem with authority.”
Razor shrugs. “‘Be your own man,’ he always said. ‘Don’t be the Man’s man.’” He shuffles his feet, embarrassed, like he’s talking too much. “What about your old man?”
“He was an artist.”
“That’s cool.”
“He was also a drunk. Did more drinking than painting.” Though not always. Yellowed photographs of showings hanging crooked in dusty frames and the students buzzing in his studio nervously cleaning brushes and the cathedral hush that fell when he walked into a crowded room.
“What kind of shit did he paint?” Razor asks.
“Mostly that. Shit.” Not always, though. Not when he was younger and I was small and the hand that held mine was stained with rainbow colors.
He laughs. “The way you joke. Like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and it’s your own joke.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t joking.”
He nods. “Maybe that’s why you don’t know it.”
63
AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:
HI
Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”
“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”
“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.
“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.
The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:
HLP
Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands . . .”
He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.
HOW
I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged runners. Time slows down; events speed up.
PLN
I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.
“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”
And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.
“I didn’t understand that last play,” I tell him.
“Chaseball isn’t some lame-ass game like chess,” he says patiently. “There are intricacies. Intricacies. To win, you gotta have a plan.”
“And that’s you, I guess. The man with the plan.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
Tap.
64
I HADN’T SEEN Vosch in days. That changes the next morning.