Chapter 5 Mars
MARS
Idid not intend to speak.
The system was failing. The speaking was an attempt to fix the system by addressing the variable that was causing the failure, which was the distance between the watching and the knowing.
I did not know him. I knew his body on ice.
I knew his programs, his timing, his tendencies under fatigue.
I knew the technical vocabulary of his movement the way I knew the technical vocabulary of a shooter's release.
But I did not know him. And the not-knowing was the leak.
He finished his program. The Chopin. He skated to the boards for water and I saw the exact moment he registered my presence in the stands because his shoulders changed pitch by approximately two degrees.
Not a flinch. An adjustment. The recalibration of a body that has been alone and is now observed.
I stood up. This was already a departure from protocol. I had never stood during his sessions. Standing implied intention. Standing implied approach.
I walked to the boards. Not quickly. Not slowly. The pace of a man crossing a crease to talk to a defenseman during a stoppage. Purposeful but unhurried.
He was on the other side of the glass. Water bottle in hand.
His hair was damp at the temples and his chest was moving with the controlled exhalation of a body coming down from high output.
His eyes tracked me the way a skater's eyes track the edge of the ice: with precision and constant awareness of distance.
"Your toe pick on the triple axel entry is a quarter-inch too deep," I said.
This was, objectively, an insane thing to say to a person you have never spoken to.
The words came from the analytical part of my brain that had been processing his skating for three weeks and had built a comprehensive technical model without my conscious authorization.
The model had observations. The observations needed to be delivered.
The delivery mechanism was my mouth, which had operated without consulting the rest of my decision-making apparatus.
Theo stared at me through the glass.
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"The toe pick. On the triple axel. Your entry edge is clean but the pick is planting too deep, which costs you approximately two hundredths of a second on the launch and requires compensatory rotation in the air.
You're making the compensation, which is why the jump lands, but the landing is slightly back-weighted because the extra rotation shifts your center of gravity by a margin that's invisible to judges but audible to anyone listening to the blade contact. "
He continued staring. The staring had a specific quality that I could not read, which was unusual because I read everything.
Faces, bodies, trajectories. But this face was doing something that my model did not have a category for.
The expression was not angry or startled or offended.
It was something closer to recognition. The expression of a person hearing their own language spoken by a stranger.
"You can hear the difference in the landing," he said. Not a question.
"The clean landing has a specific frequency. Approximately 2,100 hertz. The back-weighted landing drops to around 1,800. The difference is subtle but consistent."
"You measured the frequency of my landings."
"I estimated. I do not have instruments."
"You estimated the hertz of my blade contact by ear."
"I have good ears. It is a goalie trait. We track pucks by sound when the visual is screened."
Something happened on his face. The something was small and involved the area around his eyes and the slight relaxation of the muscle group that controlled the tension in his jaw.
If I had to name it, which I did not want to do because naming things about this man was the behavior that had caused the leak in the first place, I would call it the beginning of trust.
"You're the goalie," he said. "The one who sits in row three."
"Yes."
"Every morning."
"Yes."
"With the coffee that you never drink."
"I drink it. It is simply cold by the time I remember to."
The almost-something on his face deepened. Not a smile. A thaw.
"Why do you watch?" he asked.
I considered lying. I considered a deflection about ice time and scheduling and the convenience of the facility. These were available options that would have preserved the system and resealed the compartment and allowed me to continue operating within predictable parameters.
I did not choose those options.
"Because I have never seen anything move the way you move," I said. "And I watch things that I cannot solve. It is compulsive. It is not something I can turn off."
The glass was between us. The physical barrier that separated the ice surface from the stands, the plexiglass that I had been watching through for three weeks, was approximately four inches thick and six feet tall and it was the only thing preventing this conversation from being two people standing close enough to touch.
"You can't solve me," Theo said. The words were quiet. Directed at the glass more than at me.
"No," I said. "I am beginning to understand that."
He looked at me for a long time. The looking was not the wary assessment of the first week or the grudging acceptance of the second.
It was something else. The looking of a man who had been watched by audiences and judges and cameras for his entire career and who was now, for possibly the first time, being watched by someone who was not measuring a score but was simply paying attention.
"The toe pick," he said. "You're right about the depth. My coach used to say the same thing."
"Your coach had good eyes."
"My coach wasn't listening to the hertz."
"No. That part is just me."
He turned and skated back to center ice.
He did not say goodbye. He did not make plans.
He simply returned to the ice and set up for the triple axel entry, and I watched him adjust the toe pick depth by approximately a quarter-inch, and the landing frequency shifted from 1,800 to 2,100, and the sound was clean, and the sound was beautiful, and I stood at the glass with my cold coffee and listened to the sound of a man I could not solve getting closer to solving himself.
I went back to row three. I sat down. The coffee was cold.
The system was not fixed. The system was, in fact, more compromised than before, because now I knew what his voice sounded like, and the voice was lower than I expected and steadier than I expected and the cadence of it had a quality that my analytical brain was already cataloging and my emotional brain was already replaying and the two brains were, for the first time in my life, in complete agreement about something.
The something was: more.
I wanted more.
-e