Chapter 16
Casimir
The system is gone.
Not the leg. The leg is a lower-body thing, a collision. A piece of bad luck with a skate in it.
“I’m not giving you a number,” Kilpatrick says.
“Give me the number.”
“You’d hold me to it. Then you’d hate me on the day.”
“Give me the number.”
“Weeks. Maybe the season.”
“That is not a number.”
“No,” he agrees, and does not produce one, and I understand somewhere behind my own anger that it is the kindest thing anyone is going to do for me this week. A number is a thing that can be taken from you. A number is a promise the body does not have to keep.
“Does Marquette know?”
“Marquette knows what I know.”
“Then he knows nothing.”
“Then he knows nothing.” He puts his hand on my shoulder as they all do, the calm voice, the weight of it. I nod. There is nothing to say back to a leg.
The leg is not the amputation. The leg will knit.
The amputation is this. There is no net.
There is no crease to keep. There is no shelf that means anything anymore, because the shelf was always only the front hall of a house.
A house whose one room was the save. There is no save now.
I set the gear I am not using in its order and touch the corner, two fingers, once.
It settles nothing. It is a sentence with no object.
Glove, blocker, chest, pads, mask, and then nothing.
The sequence has always ended in the ice.
It ends now in a stall in a locker room I dress in and do not play out of.
A boy in my paint. A spring going gray like weather coming down the ridge, with nothing to hold it off.
I keep the order anyway. My hands know how to do nothing else. I set the day down. The room holds. I do not. And the gap between those two facts is the widest it has ever been.
The days have a shape I did not build and cannot fix.
I go to the barn because a man who does not go to the barn is a man who has quit, and I have not quit, whatever the leg thinks.
I dress in my stall. I set the gear that has no game to go to.
I sit on the bench in a suit and a brace and I watch practice.
Sowa runs the goalies. One of the goalies is in my crease.
I make myself watch him the way I made myself watch him from the press box, because looking away is a surrender I cannot afford even now.
The young ones have stopped watching him like weather no one forecast. They watch him like the forecast. He is the guy now.
You can feel a room decide a thing like that.
It does not take long. A week of a boy stopping pucks and the room quietly rearranges its whole idea of where the net lives.
The man it used to live with sits on the bench in dress shoes and watches the furniture move.
Sowa comes and stands at the boards with his back to the ice, which he never does, because Sowa does not turn his back on ice.
“You don’t have to be here.”
“I know.”
“That was not permission. That was a question with the question taken out of it.”
“I am here.”
“You are here.” He looks at the brace once and then does not look at it again, which is his entire idea of tact. “What are you doing while you sit?”
“Watching him.”
“Good. What do you see?”
“That he is going to be very good.”
“You see that he is very good now.” He turns back to the ice, where the boy in my crease is doing something the book does not allow and getting paid for it.
“Tell me the day you can watch him without doing arithmetic about yourself, and I will know you are healed. The leg is the easy half of this and it is the only half anybody in this building is treating.”
I keep the order. Glove, blocker, the corner touched, two fingers, once, chest, pads, mask. And nothing. The sentence ends in nothing every day. Every day I say it anyway, because the alternative is to stop. What is a man once he stops?
He comes to my room. Of course he comes.
He always comes. I should not let him in and I let him in every time, because the one thing worse than needing him is the room without him in it.
The empty room is the dark. He is the thing that keeps the dark on the far side of the wall.
I built a whole life so that would never be a person, so it would only ever be a shelf and a candle and a folded cloth.
Now it is a person, knocking in my own rhythm at my own door, and I open it.
It is not tender. It is not the road-trip slow with no clock and no wall.
It is not even the teeth of the press-box night.
It is worse than any of those and I do not have the good word for it, because I have lost the good words.
The ordered ones fall off me the second his hands are on me. They do not come back until morning.
It is like drowning and reaching.
He is barely through the door before I have my hands on him.
There is no talk in me. There is never much talk with us in the dark, and tonight there is not one word left in me, because talk is words and words are order and I have run out of both.
I have hands and a mouth and the need to be nearer than skin allows.
My hands go on him too hard. I know they are too hard and I cannot make them gentle.
I get my teeth into his throat and he arches up into it instead of away.
“Yes,” he says, into my hair. The one word.
The only one either of us spends tonight.
And that undoes something, so I keep going, mouth open, wanting the salt and the pulse and the sound he makes when I bite down.
I am not trying to make him feel good. I am trying to climb inside the one thing left that still answers when I reach for it.
He lets me. He gives me all of it, every piece.
His hands fist in my shirt and drag it up and off, and then his palms are hot on my back, hot everywhere they land, the only hot thing in a cold room in a cold season.
I get his belt open. He gets mine. There’s nothing careful in any of it.
But I do not take him against the door. I do not want him upright.
I want him down, and I want to be down there with him with the whole weight of the night on top of us both.
I take him to the bed and I go under with him.
I keep no space between us tonight. None.
I press the whole length of me down the whole length of him, bare and already slick where we meet, and I put my face in his throat and stay there.
Like a man going under and choosing it. His arms come around my back.
His legs come up and lock around me and I let myself sink.
He says my name into my hair, the real one, the first one.
There is no wall for it to go through tonight.
There is only the sound of it, and the dark, and his heart coming up through his chest into mine.
I do not think. For the first time in a long stretch of nights I am not running math in the dark.
There is no leg. There is no net. There is no scout and no gray spring.
There’s his heat under me and the cold room shoved somewhere far off.
I move against him, slow to start and then losing the slow entirely, my mouth never leaving his throat, and he is hard against my hip and I am hard against his and every drag of it takes another piece of me away.
He works a hand down between us, slick, and takes us both in his fist. I let him carry it.
I have nothing left to carry anything with tonight.
His fist moves and I shove my face harder into his neck and put the sound I make into his skin instead of into the room, because if it gets into the room it will be a word, and the word will be please.
He holds on. His breath breaks open against my ear.
Then he goes, his whole body drawing tight under mine and loosing all at once, and it drags me down with him in the same second.
Both of us pulled under together. Nothing separate left in it.
Afterward I do not lift off him. I stay down.
I stay under, because under is the only place tonight the math cannot follow.
And when it is over I am not steadier.
We lie there in the wreck of it, both of us wrung out.
His chest going hard and then slower against my arm.
The sweat cooling on us in the cold room that is not cold anymore.
He turns his face into my neck. He doesn’t say anything.
For once he doesn’t say anything, my loud one, my boy who fills every silence he finds.
The quiet coming off him is the softest thing in the room.
I want to keep it. I already know I will not let myself keep it, because keeping it means trusting it, and trusting it is the fall.
That is the part I did not know to be afraid of.
Every other time there was a stretch of quiet after that was almost the settled feeling, spokój borrowed off his body instead of off the shelf.
Not tonight. Tonight I lie in the wreck of it with his heart going against my ribs and I am worse than before I let him in.
Because I needed that. Not wanted. Needed.
I reached for a person the exact way I reach for the shelf when the world will not hold still, and he held it, and now I know he can.
A thing that can hold the roof up is a thing that can drop it.
He falls asleep with his arm across me, heavy and warm and trusting.
The way he always sleeps. The way I never do.
I lie in the dark under the weight of it and do the arithmetic the order does not want me to do and cannot stop me doing.
He is asleep and the dark is mine again, and the dark is where my worst work gets done.
I have never envied anything the way I envy his sleep.
A man who has never believed the dark would come for him.
He can afford to be soft because someone was hard for him first. I never had that.
Now the softest thing I have ever let near me is asleep against my ribs, and I cannot stop working out how he could bring it all down.
He has my net. Indefinitely now. He will have the scout’s eye soon, because the hot hand always draws it.
He has been gathering me since the equipment room.
Every tell, every ritual. The two fingers.
The horn. The winter I nearly told him about and did not, with his hand open on my chest. He knows exactly how I work.
He is also the warm reason breathing against my side.
I let him in. I opened the door. I ran the sequence from the bed on the storm night on purpose, where no one has ever been allowed to watch. I called it a door instead of a broken window. And I was proud of myself for the difference.
The paranoid thing and the true thing wear the exact same face in the dark.
I cannot get a nail between them either.
Is he the truest thing that ever happened to me?
Or is he the most patient robbery in the history of the position, a boy who worked out that the only way past a wall is to be let through the door, and got himself let through?
Both of those are lying here in this bed.
One of them has his arm across my chest.
By the time the window goes gray I have started, without deciding to, to build the wall back up.
Over the exact place he got through. Thicker this time, because I know now how thin I let it get.
I opened my own hand and pointed at the one place I cannot be touched.
Here, I said. This. This is where I let one person through. I let him be the one.
I taught him where the gap is.
I do not sleep. He sleeps like a boy who has never done a wrong thing. Maybe he has not. It does not matter. Because in the morning I am a stranger. I make myself a stranger the way I make the shelf straight, on purpose, brick by brick.
He wakes and reaches for me and finds the cold, and goes still with his hand still flat on my chest.
“Hey.”
“I have rehab.”
“It’s early.” He is awake all at once. He is never awake all at once. “Cas. What’s happening right now?”
“Nothing is happening.”
“Something’s happening. You’re doing the thing with your face where there’s no face in it.
” He props himself up on an elbow. I keep my eyes on the ceiling, because the ceiling is the one object in this room that is not going to ask me for anything.
“Talk to me. One sentence. You can pick the sentence, I’m not fussy. ”
“I have rehab.”
He sits with that. I can hear him decide not to be funny about it, and the deciding takes him longer than I would have guessed, and costs him more.
“Okay,” he says finally. “That’s the one you picked.”
“Yes.”
“You should know I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear it.”
“I know.”
I let him understand that the door is closing. I watch it hurt him. And I do it anyway.
That is where it starts to end. I know it even while I am doing it.
I do it anyway. The tragedy of a man built like me.
I can watch the end coming from a long way off, like you watch weather come down the ridge, and I cannot make myself step inside out of it.
Because stepping inside means needing the house, and needing the house is the one thing I swore I would never do.