The Throwback Special (13 page)

Trent chuckled, staring into his screen. “Hey, Gil,” he said, “I’ve got a mole in the Compound. Looks like George is walking on backs.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gil said, rolling his eyes, though his own back had been walked on by George four years earlier, which had nearly precipitated a severe late-night breakdown. He remembered George’s feet clearly, the high arches. He remembered the weight, the struggle to find his breath. He kept flipping channels, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He couldn’t concentrate, and totality was eluding him. He turned off the TV and pitched the remote onto the empty bed. Pitching a remote onto a large bed was a satisfying hotel activity, and Gil retrieved the remote so that he could do it once more.

“You know, here we are, the offensive line,” he said. “We’re paid to do one thing, protect the quarterback.”

“It was 1985,” Trent said. “So we aren’t paid all that much.”

“Counting Warren, there are six of us down linemen, right? And five of them coming on defense? There’s one thing we have to do, and we will just fail so bad at it.”

“Not you,” Trent said. “May is solid. Wait until you see the film.”

“But six against five.”

“The play call was terrible,” Trent said. “I don’t care what anybody says.”

“It’s a bad feeling, though,” Gil said. “Can you even imagine what those real guys must have been feeling like the night before?”

“They didn’t know it was going to happen, Gil.”

“But still,” Gil said.

“Hey, Gil,” Trent said, chuckling at his laptop screen. “George has got his magic flask out.”

Andy was gone, and Robert was in the bathroom, washing his hands and face. The bathroom fan obscured Gil’s infuriating television habits, to which Robert had been introduced in a previous year. He dried off with a thin towel, noticing as he often did the twin scars on the backs of his hands. He had received both injuries as a child. One was from a cigarette, one from hot coffee. As a child—seven years old, or eight—he liked to crawl beneath chairs and tables, particularly tables draped with tablecloths. He liked to be near his family but not with them. He liked the secrecy, the privacy. His parents were always telling him to get out from under there or he would get hurt. And that’s what had happened. His father dangled an after-dinner cigarette beside his chair, and the glowing tip pressed into the center of Robert’s hand. At some other point, perhaps a year later, he crawled out from beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, jostling the leg and spilling a mug of hot coffee onto his other hand. It had been Robert’s fault, both times. His parents had not been cruel or punitive, but it was clear that they regarded the injuries as the child’s fault. They felt bad for Robert, and they cared for his wounds, but they did not feel culpable.
After all, they had told him repeatedly not to crawl beneath things, and they had told him what would likely happen if he did. He did not listen, and it happened just as they said it would. And that was how Robert had always thought of the injuries, too. The scars were reminders of foolish things he had done. They
stood for
his folly and mischief. The accidents happened to occur during a generation when children could be at fault, and that era was long gone. If Robert’s hot coffee spilled onto his daughter, or worse, if he smoked cigarettes in the house and if one of his cigarettes burned the girl, he would clearly bear the burden of guilt and responsibility, regardless of whether he had warned her. The child’s scar would stand for his carelessness, his neglect. It’s not simply that he would feel it as censure from others (though he most certainly would); he would legitimately feel at fault. The child, doing childlike things, would be innocent. If you have children, you just don’t dare drink hot beverages. And if you are irresponsible enough to drink hot beverages, you don’t use an open-mouth mug, and you certainly don’t set the mug on a table, where it could be knocked to the floor, scalding your unsuspecting child, who is merely exploring her world in a trusting, innocent, curious way (their brains are like sponges!), and who could not be expected to heed admonitions in simple English to stay out from beneath the table. Robert could hold both verdicts in his mind—that his childhood injuries had been his own fault for crawling beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, and that his own child’s heartbreaking (and
hypothetical) burn injury beneath the table would also be his fault. Neither conclusion seemed to impinge on the other, a paradox rooted either in psychology or culture. Robert did not know which. There was no point in talking to Charles because he was never any help, and in fact he seemed uninterested.

Robert left the bathroom, and nearly bumped into Andy, who was just returning to the hotel room.

“Hi, Robert,” Andy said.

“Hi, Andy,” Robert said. He had always liked Andy, and he was not displeased to see him. Given the alternatives, he hoped they would be sharing a bed.

“Are you done in there?” Andy said.

“It’s all yours.”

Holding a pair of dripping shoes, Andy entered the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the hair dryer attached to the wall.

FAT MICHAEL
was not in the touchers’ room. Carrying a bottle of Advanced Water, a pack of antibacterial wipes, and his Theismann helmet, he had left the room without saying anything to Tommy and Myron. Tommy and Myron, though, could pretty well guess where he had gone.

The room, after the lottery, looked like a site of explosive violence. Pizza sauce streaked the walls, congealed bits of flesh-colored pizza lay strewn on the beds. The keg
lay on its side, as if, once depleted of beer, it had perished. Having never seemed alive, it now resembled nothing so much as something dead. Crumpled napkins covered the floor like peach blossoms after the Battle of Shiloh. Tommy began to clean immediately, before Myron had an opportunity to ask or exhort him to clean. Tommy did not mind work, but he disliked being asked or told to work. If Myron had said to Tommy, “Let’s get this place cleaned up,” Tommy would have immediately become sullen and insolent, but if he could begin on his own initiative, he could labor assiduously. Myron, who also did not like to be asked or told to do work, immediately left the room to get a trash can before Tommy could ask him to go find a trash can. He found one in the vending alcove, which clicked and hummed. He had to step over the legs of a man from Prestige Vista Solutions, who sat on the floor, chanting lifelessly into his phone, “But
that
does
not
make
any
sense.” Myron filled the trash can while Tommy scrubbed the walls with a white washcloth that almost instantly turned pink. The activities began as a kind of race, but each man slowed as he realized that the race’s winner would be forced to clean the bathroom, an unpleasant task. The problem with doing your work fast was that you made more work for yourself. Myron finished first, but then left the room with his trash can, staying gone, Tommy thought, for a suspiciously long time. Tommy draped the keg with a towel, then trudged alone into the bathroom.

Later, their space tidy if not dry or fragrant, Tommy and Myron sat in chairs on opposite sides of the room,
throwing a football and talking about public education. Myron’s kids’ school’s library’s roof had collapsed under the weight of snow last winter. Tommy’s kid’s teacher’s aide was someone he could not stop thinking about. Because he called her “striking” and “pretty,” because he talked about her “features” and her “figure,” Tommy did not sound creepy to Myron, nor to himself. It was but a partial and genteel confession of his depravity, and it trailed off into silence and obscene ideation. The men did not need to talk because they were throwing and catching a football. Or, if they chose, they could talk about throwing and catching a football. Eventually, of course, one man sat beneath the window and tried to time his throw so that the other man, running from the door, could make a diving catch on the queen bed. They alternated positions. Both men became flushed and sweaty. Neither man cared to remember the year that Vince broke the corner off of a bedside table. Both went about the game with gravity and good-natured intensity. It was important to them to throw and catch the ball well.

“Nice one.”

“My fault, bad throw.”

“The one-handed grab!”

“I suck.”

“That one will no doubt be reviewed.”

“I used to be able to do that.”

“Lead me a little more next time.”

“Crap.”

“Whoa.”

“You okay?”

“Nice one.”

“Got my bell rung.”

“Hold on.”

“Broke the plane!”

“It went in the closet, I think.”

“Fearless over the middle.”

“I have to blow my nose.”

“That’s it.”

“On a roll now.”

“Oh, shit.”

“That was my bad.”

The wall sconce was chipped, but functional. The men quit their game, and prepared for bed. They texted their wives, brushed their teeth. Fat Michael had still not returned. Tommy and Myron got into the same queen-size bed. Myron asked Tommy if he wanted to read, and they both laughed. Myron turned off the light. Tommy, it seemed to Myron, fell asleep immediately. He had never seen someone fall asleep so quickly.

In the faint red glow of the alarm clock, Myron could see the empty bed they had left for Fat Michael. It was customary for the man playing Theismann to sleep alone. It was intended to be a perk, or a compensation, but it had always seemed to Myron to be mildly punitive, a form of exile or symbolic estrangement. Myron, who six or seven years ago had been Theismann, imagined Fat Michael slipping into bed later tonight. He knew what it was like. Now Myron, feeling Tommy’s warmth beside him, remembered
so very clearly that time after the birth of his first child. He remembered tucking her in at night, leaving her alone in the dark of her room. It had always seemed odd to him, somehow unfair or backward, that the adults could sleep together at night for warmth and comfort, while the child, fearful and lonely, had to sleep by herself.

IN BED,
in the dark, Andy and Robert talked quietly about injuries. Robert’s neighbor had sliced himself wickedly with a hedge trimmer. There had been blood on the
roof
. Andy knew it didn’t sound like much, but he had ended up in the ER because of a splinter from his back deck. Both men had been laid out with back spasms. Both men found themselves using the railing when they climbed stairs. Neither man could put on socks while standing up. They had both lived in the paradise of a painless body for years without even realizing it. The inglorious body had become, for Robert and Andy, one of life’s most prominent themes. They often woke up sore, scanning their minds for possible causes. Each man in the bed cupped his genitals, not for arousal but for comfort.

“I’m sorry to hear about your marriage,” Robert didn’t say.

“It’s just one of those things,” Andy didn’t respond. Nor did he say anything about the day he and his wife told their two children. That night, one of his final nights in the
house, Andy went to check on his nine-year-old son in his room. He planned to sit on the edge of the boy’s bed, to say things to him while he slept. But the boy wasn’t there. Andy searched the house, gripping his phone, preparing to call someone, the police. Finally, he climbed to the third floor to his thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Andy said none of this to Robert. He opened his daughter’s bedroom door gently, even though he was expressly not allowed in the room, and had not been for a couple of years. A lamp was on inside. Andy smelled the fresh paint. She had painted her walls. The color was ridiculous, but she had done a neat job. The room was heartbreakingly clean and organized. The items on her bookshelves were arranged perfectly. He had had no idea what was up here, but he never would have guessed this. A silk butterfly dangled from the ceiling, spinning slowly in an invisible draft. The girl was in bed, texting. Andy’s son was curled beside her, asleep. His son and daughter didn’t even like each other. All they did was fight. The boy was not allowed in this room. Andy’s daughter did not look up from her phone. Andy nodded to her, and he left the room.

Robert knew that Andy was going through a hard time. He knew he had a kid, maybe two. The question Robert would not ask had a long answer that Andy would not provide. Robert wanted to help. He wanted to give something to Andy. “My mother has Alzheimer’s,” he said quietly.

“Really?” Andy said. “Robert, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks,” Robert said.

This was something Robert could offer, even if it wasn’t true. He had just visited his mother in Wisconsin, and though her mind certainly was not as sharp as it had once been, she was doing just fine, still living by herself. Together they had handed out candy to neighborhood trick-or-treaters. They had run out of treats and turned the porch light out at eight o’clock. Then they had watched a documentary about the enormous salt mines beneath the Great Lakes.

- 4 -

THE FOUNTAIN

T
HE EMPTY HALLWAYS WERE HAZY WITH
sconce light and Wi-Fi radio waves.
The small red lights of ceiling smoke detectors blinked in no discernible pattern. An elevator car rumbled in its shaft, transporting nothing but a name tag (
Marc
) and the scent of degraded deodorant. A ghost coursed the stairwell. The vending alcoves clicked and hummed.

Vince’s T-shirt read
Daytona Beach
, and he snored intermittently.

Carl’s T-shirt read
No Coffee No Peace
, and the Sharpie wouldn’t wash off his hands.

Wesley’s T-shirt read
Richardson’s Lawn & Garden
, and he composed, in his mind, in the dark, a long letter to his son.

Gary’s tank top read
I ATE THE MEGABURGER
, and he snored aggressively.

Bald Michael’s T-shirt read
Miller High Life
, and his sleep apnea machine made a pleasant bubbling sound like a fish tank.

George’s T-shirt had a picture of Darwin with an enormous
block of text far too small to read, and he snored slowly.

Nate’s T-shirt read
WTF?
, and in the dark he regretted the cigarette.