Chapter 10 Declan
DECLAN
The recorder is a black rectangle on the table between us and it changes everything.
When the recorder is on, Jamie Kowalski is a professional.
He answers questions about the speed adjustment, the weight room work, the transition from juniors, and his answers are competent and media-trained and contain exactly the amount of information that a media coach would approve of.
He sits with his hands folded on the table, his posture correct, his eyes meeting mine at intervals that suggest he has been told that eye contact conveys confidence and is executing the instruction without feeling the confidence it's supposed to convey.
The shift happens at question seven.
"Tell me about Duluth," I say.
This is a standard biographical question.
Where did you grow up. What was it like.
The kind of question that produces paragraphs about lake-effect snow and community hockey and the rhythms of a small city.
I expect a rehearsed answer. I expect Duluth-as-origin-story, the version that exists for public consumption.
Jamie's hands unfold. His posture changes. Not a collapse, not a relaxation. A settling. The way a body settles when it encounters a topic that lives in the muscles rather than the media training.
"Duluth is cold," he says. "Not Minnesota cold, like people say when they mean regular cold.
Duluth cold. The kind of cold that shapes you.
My dad's outdoor rink froze in November and didn't thaw until March, and I was on it every day, before school, after school, until the streetlights came on and my mom called from the porch. "
He talks about his father. Tom Kowalski.
High school hockey coach. A man who taught Jamie to skate by standing at the far end of the rink and not moving, making Jamie come to him.
"He never chased me. He stood there and waited.
The point wasn't the skating. The point was that I had to want to get to him badly enough to figure out the skating on my own. "
He talks about the lake. Superior. The way it looked in December, frozen at the edges, open in the center, the specific grey-blue of water that is colder than anything should be and is still, somehow, alive.
He talks about his sister. Becca. Sixteen. "Smarter than me. She'll tell you that. She's not wrong."
The answers are not media-trained. The answers are personal in a way that his body seems surprised by, as if the words are escaping through a seam he didn't know was open.
His voice is different. Lower. The rhythm is slower.
He is not performing Jamie Kowalski, 4th overall pick.
He is being Jamie Kowalski, kid from Duluth, and the difference between the two is the distance between a postcard and a photograph.
I watch his face while he talks and I think: there's a wall here.
(The Mik Volkov wall, the one Mik described in my feature, the wall that looks like protection and functions as a prison.) Jamie has a wall and the wall is the podium version, the monosyllables, the floor-watching.
Behind the wall is this: a boy who loves his father and his sister and a frozen lake and who talks about all of them with a specificity that suggests he misses them in a way he has not told anyone.
The recorder captures everything. The recorder is doing its job. I am doing mine.
At question nine, Jamie stops mid-sentence.
He looks at the recorder. The look is brief but I see it: the awareness that the machine is listening, that the words he's saying will be transcribed and published and read by thousands of people, and the awareness produces a contraction. The seam closes. The wall goes back up.
I turn off the recorder.
"We can stop whenever you want," I say.
He looks at the dark recorder. Then at me.
The transition from recorder-on to recorder-off is visible in his body.
His shoulders drop. His hands, which had re-folded when the wall went up, separate and rest on the table, open, palms down.
The change is so immediate and so physical that it confirms what I've suspected: the performance costs him.
The wall is not effortless. The wall is labor.
"Can I ask you something off the record?" he says.
"Of course."
The question he asks is not the question I expect. I expect something about the article, the angle, the publication timeline. A professional question about a professional process.
"How did you know you wanted to write about hockey instead of play it?"
The question is simple on its surface. A young athlete asking a journalist about career trajectory.
But the emphasis is wrong for that reading.
The emphasis is on "how did you know." Not "why did you choose writing" or "what made you become a journalist." How did you know.
As if the knowing is the part he's interested in.
As if the knowing is something he's struggling with in a context that has nothing to do with journalism.
I take my glasses off. The gesture is automatic (I clean them when I'm thinking) and I only realize I've done it when the room goes slightly blurry and Jamie's face across the table loses its sharpness. I put them back on. The world returns to focus.
"I didn't know," I say. "Not all at once.
I knew I loved hockey. I played in high school.
I wasn't good enough to play in college, which was a hard thing to accept because when you love something, 'not good enough' sounds like 'not enough.
' But what I realized, eventually, was that loving something and being the best at it are two different relationships.
I could love hockey from inside the game, as a player who wasn't good enough.
Or I could love it from a vantage point where I could see the whole shape of it.
The press box. The notebook. The words."
Jamie is listening with an intensity that I've only seen from him on the ice. The focus that makes his skating electric is directed at me now, and the quality of the attention is physical. I can feel it. Not metaphorically. I can feel his focus on my skin the way you feel sun.
"The vantage point," he says. "The place where you can see the whole shape."
"Yeah. For me it was writing. For other people it's coaching, or broadcasting, or analytics. It's the moment you realize you can be close to the thing you love without being inside it in the way you originally planned."
He nods. The nod is slow. Processing. He's turning the words over the way a goalie turns game film, looking for the angle, the read, the thing inside the thing.
"Did it scare you?" he asks. "The knowing. When you figured it out."
We are not talking about journalism. I am a journalist and I am trained to recognize subtext and the subtext of this conversation is so close to the surface that it's barely sub.
We are talking about knowing. About the moment when a person recognizes a truth about themselves that changes the architecture of their life, and the terror that precedes the recognition, and the question of whether the terror ever becomes something else.
"Yes," I say. "It scared me. Because knowing meant letting go of the version of myself that I'd been building.
The hockey player. The person I thought I was supposed to be.
And the space between who you were and who you're becoming is the scariest place in the world because it's empty.
You're not the old thing anymore but you're not the new thing yet, and the emptiness is where most people turn back. "
"Did you turn back?"
"No. I walked through."
"How?"
"One step. Then another. There wasn't a map. There wasn't a guide. I just kept walking until the space stopped being empty and started being mine."
The media room is quiet. The recorder is off.
My glasses are on but the thing they're supposed to protect (the professional distance, the journalist's detachment) is not functioning correctly because the man across the table is looking at me with an expression that I am not equipped to process professionally.
The expression is vulnerable and grateful and searching and young, and the young is the part that hits me hardest because nineteen is so young and the question he's asking is so big and I want, with a force that surprises me, to give him an answer that helps.
I want to help him. Not as a journalist. As a person. The distinction is the line, and the line is the thing I've been standing on for weeks, and the wanting is the thing that's pushing me off it.
"Thank you," Jamie says. "For the honest answer."
"I'm a journalist. Honest answers are the job."
"That's not what I mean." He pauses. "The other reporters answer questions. You answer the thing underneath the question."
I don't have a response to this. The observation is so precise, so perfectly articulated, so far beyond what I expected from a nineteen-year-old who gives monosyllabic press conferences, that I sit with it for a moment and feel it land.
He sees me. Through the glasses. Through the professional distance. Through the wall I built out of notebooks and press credentials. He sees the person behind the journalist, and the seeing is not casual. The seeing is deliberate.
"Should I turn the recorder back on?" I ask, because I need to return to professional territory before the non-professional territory becomes the only territory.
"Yeah," he says. "Probably."
I turn the recorder on. The red light blinks. We complete questions ten through twelve. The answers are fine. Professional. The wall is back up on his side and the glasses are back on, fully, on mine.
But the three minutes with the recorder off have changed something.
The room is the same room. The table is the same table.
The journalist and the source are the same journalist and the same source.
But underneath the sameness, in the space where the recorder can't reach and the glasses can't protect, something has shifted.
The distance is shorter. The wall is thinner.
The glass between us (press box glass, Declan, it's press box glass, and press box glass is a boundary not a window) has acquired a transparency that was not there before.
I pack up the recorder. We shake hands. His hand is warm and his grip is firm and the handshake lasts approximately one second longer than a professional handshake should.
I walk to my car. I sit. I take off my glasses. I put them back on.
The glasses are a wall. The wall is optional.
I heard that from Mik Volkov's own mouth.
I published it. I called it stunning. And now I'm sitting in a parking lot understanding, for the first time, that the walls Mik was describing are not exclusive to closeted Russian hockey players.
The walls are available to anyone who has built a structure to keep themselves safe and is discovering that the structure is also keeping them alone.
I start the car. I drive home. I write the feature. The feature is excellent. The feature does not mention the three minutes with the recorder off, or the question about knowing, or the handshake, or the expression on his face when he said "you answer the thing underneath the question."
The feature is professional. The person who wrote it is in trouble.