But with repetition, he thought, That’s not true, and the whole point of me being in this stuffy room is to tell the truth, so they’ll tell the truth. After that, he said some variation of: The knee still hurts, but I didn’t rehab it properly. I can still feel the places where it broke. Invariably, the players leaned away from him at this point, as if the damage might be contagious.
But telling the truth worked. The boys—the freshmen looked young to William—told him what had happened to their bodies, growing up. Only one or two were unscathed and fully intact—that’s what they claimed, anyway. Nope, zero injuries. No accidents. I’ve been lucky, I guess. Everyone else had a story. Two of the boys had been in car crashes because of drunk drivers, leading to a broken shoulder in one case and a herniated disc in the other. A freckled kid from a famous basketball high school in Oklahoma had recurrent Sever’s Disease: terrible heel pain from growing so tall so fast while playing a lot of basketball. The boys who had also played football had histories of concussions. A cocky freshman who introduced himself as “A-one from day one” had torn a hamstring. A sturdy six-and-a-half-footer with a prominent forehead told William that his shoulder frequently dislocated but he’d never told a coach or trainer, because he knew how to pop it back into place. A player from Los Angeles said, “Does it count if I was stabbed? Because I was stabbed in the lower back a couple years ago.”
“That counts, yes,” William said, trying to hide his shock. “It certainly does.”
At the end of the final afternoon of interviews, William stumbled out of the warm room. He felt the impact of all the injuries he’d heard about. When those young men ran the court, they didn’t look like college kids; their preternatural athleticism made them appear superhuman. The isolation scorers set screens for the lumbering bigs, who in their turn made plays from the post, shoveling passes to the open man. The scrimmages were punctuated with shouts of pleasure because of how good it felt to play at this level. Before the interviews, William never would have guessed at the pain inside the talented young players. He remembered seeing Sylvie’s sorrow. He remembered some of his own anguish, with the shattering of his knee and the opening of the envelope from his father. Now William could see pain as if it were a dark cloud chasing each of the players across the court. They were outrunning it, for now. William had outrun it for a time too.
“They’re telling me about all the bad things that have happened to their bodies,” William said to Arash. “Not just what happened on the court.”
Arash nodded. “I’m glad.”
“You’re glad?”
“They need to let that out to someone. We hardly ever ask each other how we’ve been hurt. You did better than I’d hoped for, William. Excellent work.”
William was surprised. Arash rarely gave compliments. But as the words settled inside him, he knew that those boys wouldn’t have shared as much, or at all, with someone else. William wasn’t sure exactly why this was; his broken knee was part of it, but not the entire reason.
After leaving the gym, William walked the sunbaked paths of the campus, looking at strangers and wondering not if but how they had been hurt and how well they’d recovered. When he paid close attention, he could almost see their stories in their silence, like the wake that trails a boat. Abusive fathers, distant boyfriends, bad choices, debt, dreams of success of one kind or another that they feared would never be achieved. When William was close to the university library, he spotted the elderly history professor sitting on a bench. There was a droopiness to his posture that sent William over to him.
“Are you okay, Professor? Can I help you?”
The old man looked up at him, and William had a flash of Charlie peering up at him from his armchair. “You’re the tall one.”
“Yes, sir, William Waters. It’s very hot out here.”
“Yes, it is, William Waters. Yes, it is.”
William positioned himself in front of the old man so that he cast him in shade. “Do you need help?”
“Oh, well, don’t we all? Why don’t you sit down beside me, William Waters? A little sunshine never did anyone any harm.”
William sat down beside the old man. He watched students—about half the normal number, because this was the summer semester—move groggily across the quad. He could hear the old man’s ragged breathing. The professor smelled of lemons, or perhaps lemonade. William closed his eyes for a moment. The baby woke up a few times a night to be fed, and Julia and Alice would fall right back asleep afterward, but William was often unable to. He would listen to Julia breathe, more deeply than she used to, as if she needed more air now. The only way to make sure the baby was breathing was to lean over Alice’s bassinet and put his ear to her mouth. Her inhales and exhales were almost silent, so William would get up and listen, to make sure she was breathing, several times each night.
When William opened his eyes again, the air was light purple, and the professor was gone. It was twilight. The trees in his line of sight were darkening to silhouettes. William blinked several times, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. His body was stiff. His knee throbbed. He looked at his watch and took in such a sudden breath that he coughed. His Scientific Revolution class had ended forty-five minutes earlier. He was the teaching assistant. There was no one else in charge; for all intents and purposes, he was the professor. William scanned the landscape, looking for a solution. The outlandishness of this predicament would require an equally strange fix. Perhaps a magical tree that could turn back time to when William had sat down on this bench.
In all of his education, William only had one teacher not show up for class, and it turned out that the man had been locked out of his house during a torrential rainstorm, with no access to keys or a phone. Other than that occasion, every teacher had walked into the classroom right on time, if not early. In cases of illness or a family emergency, enough notice was given for a substitute to be called. A college classroom with a mysteriously absent professor was unthinkable. William pictured his students, first bored, then confused. They would have told the department secretary on their way out of the building that he’d never showed up.
William sat very still on the bench. The baking heat of day was gone. The sunlight was gone. He thought of the players’ torn ligaments and concussions and painful heels and dislocated joints, and he felt immovable. He had made a terrible mistake, one he couldn’t erase. When darkness cloaked him, when he had to hold his hand in front of his face to see his fingers, he walked home. He was relieved that Julia greeted him normally; this told him that the department hadn’t called looking for him. He thought that maybe he should tell her what had happened. Julia was great at solving problems, and this would probably seem like a softball to her. He could hear her saying that he simply had to call the department first thing in the morning and apologize, and all would be fine. But, he thought, his wife was no longer interested in answering his questions. She wouldn’t understand why he’d been at the gym either—Julia had no idea he’d embedded himself in the basketball team. He’d be embarrassed to tell her that he’d fallen asleep on a bench in the middle of the afternoon—what kind of a man did that? He wondered what the old professor had thought of him slumbering beside him.
“Are you all right?” Julia asked him, near bedtime.