Chapter 6 Luca
The plane levels out somewhere over the Carolinas.
Thompson has the window seat three rows up and is asleep already, head against the glass, mouth open.
Jensen is across the aisle reading a paperback with the cover folded back.
Mueller is two rows behind me working through a bag of trail mix with the focus of a man who has a system for the order he eats the components.
Marchetti is in the seat next to mine. He has one earbud in and one out, his phone balanced on his thigh, scrolling through something.
"What are you listening to?" I ask.
"New album. Came out this morning." He pulls the earbud out and holds it toward me. "You want to hear?"
"What genre?"
"I don't know how to answer that. It's like jazz but not jazz. There's a trumpet and a drum machine and somehow it works."
"That is not a genre. That is a description of an accident."
"It's a good accident. Try it."
I take the earbud. He presses play. The trumpet comes in first, clean and bright, and then the drum machine underneath.
He's right. It shouldn't work. The two sounds have no business being in the same song.
But the trumpet finds a line through the beat and follows it, and the thing that should be a mess becomes a conversation between two instruments that don't speak the same language.
"Okay," I say. I hand the earbud back. "That's not terrible."
"Not terrible. That's the Berger review. I'll put it on the poster."
The captain comes on about turbulence. Seatbelt signs. Marchetti puts the earbud back in and then takes it out again.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"You just did."
"What was Miami like? I mean actually. Not the humidity bit."
I stretch my legs under the seat in front of me. Through the window on his side, the clouds are flat and gray and going nowhere.
"Hot," I say. "But you already know that."
"I know the weather report. I'm asking about the city."
"The food was good. There's a street, Calle Ocho, and the Cuban places there will ruin you for Cuban food anywhere else. The beach is right there. You wake up and the water is outside your window."
"You miss it?"
"I miss the ceviche."
He looks at me. His head tilts slightly. "That's not what I asked."
"Some of it," I say. "Yeah. Some of it."
He nods. He doesn't push. He puts his earbud back in and turns toward the window, and for a while neither of us talks. The plane moves through the gray. I listen to the engine noise and the occasional laugh from the back rows where Davis and Kowalski are playing cards.
"What about you?" I say. "Where are you from?"
"Jersey."
"All of Jersey?"
"North Jersey. About twenty minutes outside the city. My family still lives there. My nonna too. She calls me every Sunday to tell me I'm too thin and I don't visit enough."
"Do you visit enough?"
"Nobody visits enough. That's the whole point. If you visited enough she'd have nothing to call about." He grins. "If I ever visit enough, she'll be out of a job."
"How often do you go back?"
"Couple times in the summer. Maybe Christmas if the schedule works. The neighborhood is different. My nonna's block is the only thing that's the same."
"That's how it is," I say. "The place stays the same in pieces."
"You go back? To Switzerland?"
"For my sister's wedding last summer. I haven't been back otherwise since I left for Seattle."
"That's a while."
"Yeah."
"You know what's weird about Atlanta?" He shifts in his seat, pulling one knee up against the armrest. "Nobody is from here.
Not one person on this team grew up here.
Even the staff. We're all from somewhere else and we all landed in the same building in September and now we're on a plane together. "
"That's how expansion works."
"I know that's how it works. I'm saying it's weird. Twenty-odd guys who didn't know each other two months ago and now I'm sharing an armrest with a Swiss man who rates music on a ten-point scale."
"I did not rate the music."
"You said not terrible. That's a rating."
"Not terrible is an observation. A rating requires a number."
"Not terrible is at least a seven."
"Not terrible is at least a seven," I agree.
"See? We're getting somewhere." He settles back into his seat. "That's what I mean. Two months ago I didn't know your name. Now I know you rate bread and you miss the ceviche and your sister got married in Bern. That's a lot for two months."
"That's not a lot. That's the surface."
"It’s where friendships start."
Marchetti falls asleep twenty minutes before we land, his head dropping slowly to the left until it's almost on my shoulder. I think about all the things below the surface that I can’t share with him.
The plane descends through the clouds and the city appears below us, another skyline I will learn the shape of once and leave in the morning.
The game goes well. I put up an assist in the second period on a play where I read the lane before it opened. Hájek gets his first pro-league point on a secondary assist in the third. When he sits down on the bench after his shift, he is trying not to smile and failing completely.
The hotel bar has a back section the team takes over. Long table, chairs pulled from neighboring sections, the server moving fast. Mueller orders wings for the table. Thompson orders a second basket before the first one arrives.
I hold up one finger.
"The wings. Seven-point-three. The breading is committed. The heat comes in late, which is a choice, but it's defensible."
"Seven-three for hotel bar wings is generous," Marchetti says.
"I am occasionally generous."
"Since when?"
"Since the wings earned it. Move on."
Hájek is at the end of the table with a glass of water, not quite inside the group but not outside it either. Watching the room the way I watched rooms when I first arrived somewhere new.
"Hájek," Marchetti calls down the table. "First point. How does it feel?"
Hájek looks up. "Good."
"Good? That's it? You just scored your first pro-league point and all you've got is good?"
"It was a secondary assist."
"A secondary assist counts. It goes on the sheet. Tell me how it feels."
Hájek considers this. His water glass turns in his hand. "It feels like I should score again."
The table goes quiet for a half-second and then Thompson laughs first before the rest of us. Hájek's face breaks open into a grin he has been holding in since the third period.
"Rookie's got the right answer," Jensen says.
"Rookie's got the only answer," Mueller says. "Score again. That's the whole sport."
"That is not the whole sport," Marchetti says. "The whole sport is scoring again and then talking about it for forty-five minutes."
The table thins by eleven. Marchetti grips my shoulder on his way past. "Good game."
"You too."
"See you at breakfast."
Later, in my room, Kowalski posts a photo to the team chat. Hájek on the bench after the assist. The almost-smile. The controlled joy. Mueller has circled it in red and captioned it: this man is trying SO HARD to be cool.
Thompson:
let the kid be cool
Marchetti:
he is the coolest person on this team and i will die on that hill
I type:
Seven-point-eight for the composure. The eyebrows doing nothing while the mouth does everything. Championship-level suppression.
Kowalski:
BERGER GIVES IT A 7.8
Marchetti:
the man rates joy
Mueller:
of course he does
I put the phone down. The names scroll. The team talking in their own rooms, the conversation carrying on across the floors of this building. I watch the notifications for a while before the screen dims.
?