Chapter 15 Long Distance
Cincinnati did not hand out wild cards to players ranked where Theo was now, which Marsha called “a blessing for the narrative arc” and Theo called a week alone in a Florida training base with a phone.
The phone was the problem. It was also the only thing he kept within reach.
They had not discussed what the week apart was, which for a relationship containing Kasimir Varga was itself remarkable; there had only been the last morning in Washington, the eggs-as-alibi, and Kas at the door saying he would call, as if the matter had been entered and confirmed, and then calling four minutes early, which Theo chose to interpret as the most extravagant declaration of the modern era.
The calls found their shape the way everything around Kas found its shape.
Match recap, then logistics, brisk and brief.
Then the part with no agenda, which kept running longer each night, a few minutes at first and then most of an hour, Kas’s voice loosening by degrees down the line until, somewhere past midnight Florida time, the edges came off it.
The training base ran him hard, which he had asked for. Mornings with a hitting partner named Dex, who had Theo’s old posters on his wall and tried to disguise it; afternoons in the gym undoing years of compensations; and in the dead hour before dinner, he voluntarily drilled the boring patterns.
The percentage forehand. The plus-one. The shots that won points without asking to be liked, over and over, until Dex finally asked, toweling off, “No offense, but where’s the other stuff? The Doha stuff. That’s why I started playing.”
Theo bounced a ball on his strings, considering the kid, the question, the whole inheritance of it.
“The other stuff is dessert,” he said. “I spent years trying to live on dessert. Ask me how that went.”
Dex laughed, uncertain, and Theo fed him a short ball. The kid crushed the conventional winner, clean and repeatable, the right choice, and Theo applauded it like a trick shot until Dex broke into a grin.
Somewhere up north, a man who believed in repeatable outcomes would have approved of the entire exchange, and Theo missed him hard enough to lose the next feed.
“Tell me the room,” Theo said on Thursday, lying in the dark with his arm over his eyes. “You’re in a hotel I’ve stayed in a dozen times and I can’t picture you in it.”
A pause. Then Kas, correctly, took it seriously. “Top floor. Corner. The desk is bad. The chair is worse. There are two bottles of water on the nightstand and I have moved one of them more than once.”
Theo laughed into the dark, undone by it. “Symmetry or accident?”
“You remember.”
“I remember everything about that night. I could sit a written exam.”
Theo heard the smile come down the line. Impossible, but there it was.
The jokes rose by reflex. For once, he let them pass. There was no room to work, only a voice in the dark. He was quieter on those calls. The strange part was that Kas stayed.
The base had a custom Theo had forgotten, and the week returned it to him.
Each night the groundskeeper killed the court lights in sequence, bank by bank, north to south, the darkness arriving in stripes, and the juniors raced the shutdown, cramming final serves into the dying light, their shouts carrying across the dark like the sport’s whole future being argued after hours.
Theo watched from the dormitory balcony with the memo app open and narrated it once, briefly, for a man in Ohio.
“The lights are going out in order. Everything here happens in order. You’d love it. Last bank now…”
The recording caught the final shouts, the last bank dying, and Theo’s own breath in the warm dark. The reply arrived hours later, post-match, and said only: I have listened to the shutdown more times than I will admit. Send it every night.
He did. Within a few nights, neither of them had to ask: lights out in Florida, arriving in Ohio at midnight, a man falling asleep to Theo’s voice counting down the dark.
“I don’t like the week,” he said on Friday. No bit first.
The line was quiet a moment, which from Kas was a paragraph. “No,” Kas said. “The week is inefficient.”
“God. Say more inefficient things to me.”
“The schedule,” Kas said, slowly, like a man translating out of his native tongue, “contains a flaw I did not design for. It assumed I would be content to be where it sent me.”
Theo lay there with his heart going like the back end of a Slam, and didn’t perform anything at all.
Wednesday’s call had been a match night, Kas’s second round in Cincinnati, and Theo had watched the whole thing on a laptop in the players’ gym with the sound low, alone, doing involuntary commentary under his breath like a courtside coach with no credential.
The toss never drifted once. Geneva-adjacent patterns kept surfacing in the singles, the body serve, the early cross, their summer showing up in another tournament’s box score, and when Kas closed it out and the camera caught him not celebrating, Theo found himself lit up at a screen in an empty gym like a man with a secret, which, technically, clinically, contractually, he was.
“You watched,” Kas said that night. Not a question.
“I have a model that predicts these things.”
“My service motion was filmed from the north camera. It is my worse side.”
“Your worse side,” Theo said, “is a rumor you started to seem mortal,” and listened, the better part of a thousand miles away, to the rarest sound on tour, twice in one phone call.
* * *
Wednesday morning the base’s head of development cornered him at the gym door with the guileless ambush of all academy administrators: the under-fourteens had a session that morning, their coach was at a tournament in Orlando, would he, possibly, since he was here.
Which is how Theo Callahan, ranked in the forties and climbing, spent a chunk of his separation week running a basket drill for a dozen children, and discovered a country.
They were terrible and magnificent, hitting with the unedited violence of children who had not yet learned fear, missing by a wide margin, and looking to Theo after every ball with the same raw question: did it count.
He knew the question. He had been asking it since he was their size, at this same facility, into the same humidity.
Ball after ball, he heard himself saying the things nobody had said to him: that the miss was fine, that the swing was the asset, that the only person whose witnessing mattered was standing inside their own shoes.
A girl with a two-handed everything asked if it was true he knew Varga, “the robot one,” and Theo said he did, and that the robot one was the hardest worker he had ever met, and also, “Don’t call him that.
He’s the realest guy on the tour.” He heard the sentence leave at full sincerity in front of a dozen witnesses under five feet tall, the safest press conference of his career.
He found Dex feeding the next court and made him hit for the kids, the future demonstrating for the further future, and stood at the fence in the wet heat with a strange new ache running under the week’s loneliness: not for the crowd, for once, but for usefulness.
He filed it, the way Kas had taught him without teaching him, and texted the man that night: found out i like coaching.
alarming development. The reply came after the night session, machined and unmistakable: It is not alarming.
You have been performing teaching for years.
Today you did it without the performance.
The student survives either way; the teacher only survives the second version.
Theo read it more times than he would admit and slept like a person.
That night’s call happened in two acts, and the first act was a disaster of an entirely new genus.
Kas had played his second round that afternoon and won without incident; the incident had instead occurred in the press room, where a Cincinnati beat writer, friendly, harmless, fishing for color, asked what he missed most about the doubles week in Washington.
Kas, with the entire press corps watching, had gone silent for four full seconds, a geological event by his standards, and then said, “The towels were better organized,” and left the podium.
“The towels,” Theo repeated that night, delighted beyond any decent measure. “Dead air on the world feed, and then towels.”
“It was the only true sentence available that was also legal.”
“Kas. Buddy. Light of the rankings. You panicked.”
“I do not panic. I experienced a retrieval failure under load.” A pause, and then, with the grim honesty of a man filing his own incident report: “It presented identically to panic.”
Theo lay back on the training-base bed and stared at the ceiling fan, undone by it. The most controlled athlete of his generation had blue-screened in a press room at the mention of a week with him in it. There were entire seasons of his career that had given him less than that sentence.
“Okay,” he said. “Free coaching, because apparently I’m the specialist now and you’re the project.
The trick to deflection is you don’t go around the question, you go through it with the wrong vehicle.
They ask what you miss. You miss me, you can’t say me, so you grab the nearest true thing that sounds like a joke.
Towels was actually elite, that’s my whole point, you did it on instinct.
You just have to do it on purpose, with the panic on the inside, where mine lives. ”
“You are teaching me to perform.”
“I’m teaching you to survive a press room with something worth hiding. There’s a difference, and the difference is what it costs you after.” He heard himself say it, and the line went quiet. “Anyway,” Theo said, quieter. “Towels. Strong debut. Couple more weeks and you’ll be insufferable.”
“I am told I began insufferable,” Kas said, and the second act of the call ran long and wandered a long way from tennis.