Chapter 12 Declan
DECLAN
The Jamie Kowalski feature runs on a Wednesday, below the fold of the sports section, with a photograph of Jamie mid-stride that the staff photographer captured during the Carolina game.
In the photo, his hair is flying and his blade is cutting and his eyes are focused on a point that only he can see, and the image captures something that I tried to capture in the prose: the gap between the speed and the silence.
The boy who is electric on the ice and invisible everywhere else.
The piece is good. I know it's good because Sharon called (the phone call metric, which never lies) and because three colleagues texted me variations of "you got something from him that nobody else has gotten.
" The quote they're referring to is the Duluth section, where Jamie talks about his father standing at the end of the rink, making Jamie come to him.
"He never chased me. He stood there and waited.
" Sharon said the line read like poetry.
I said the line was his, not mine. She said "that's what makes it poetry. "
The part they don't know about is the recorder-off section.
The "how did you know" conversation that lives in a space the article can't reach, because the article is a professional document and the conversation was not professional.
The conversation was two people talking about knowing, and the knowing was not about journalism, and I understood this while it was happening and I let it happen and I did not redirect the conversation back to professional territory because redirecting it would have broken something that was forming between us and the forming was more important than the boundary.
This is the kind of thought that ends careers.
Jamie texts at 10:14 AM. The text is six words: "I read the piece. You got it right. Thank you."
I see the text at 10:14 AM. I do not respond until 2:37 PM.
The four hours and twenty-three minutes between seeing the text and responding to it are an exercise in professional discipline that I perform with the full awareness that the discipline is failing.
The discipline says: wait. The discipline says: a source texted you about a feature, and the appropriate response time for a journalist receiving feedback from a source is measured in hours, not minutes, because minutes suggest eagerness, and eagerness suggests personal investment, and personal investment suggests the line has been crossed.
During the four hours, I write a game preview.
I attend a press briefing. I eat lunch at my desk (leftover jollof rice from Sunday, which my mother sent in a Tupperware container because my mother believes that a man who eats takeout more than three times a week is a man in spiritual decline).
I check my phone fourteen times. The text is there each time, unchanged, six words that my professional brain categorizes as "source feedback, standard" and my personal brain categorizes as "he read it, he cared, he said thank you in a way that suggests the thank you is about more than the article. "
At 2:37, I type: "Just did my job. You made it easy."
The word "easy" is a lie. I write it and I know it's a lie.
Nothing about Jamie Kowalski is easy. The feature was not easy.
The interview was not easy. The three minutes with the recorder off were the opposite of easy.
The smile in the hallway was not easy. The eyes across the press conference were not easy.
The specific, growing, professionally catastrophic awareness that this person exists in a category that my notebook cannot contain is not easy.
I send the text. I put the phone down. I open the game preview draft and stare at it and see nothing because my brain has allocated its processing power to the word "easy" and the word "easy" is doing laps around my skull like a fire alarm I can't silence.
This is the problem. Not the text. Not the response.
The problem is that I am a man who built a career on precision, on choosing the right word for the right moment, on never writing "easy" when I mean "devastating," and I just sent a text containing a word I know is wrong because the right word is one I cannot send to a source because the right word is not a professional word.
I close my laptop. I go to the press box for the evening game.
The press box is my crease. (I'm thinking in hockey metaphors now, which is either professional immersion or something else.) The press box is where the journalist operates.
In the press box, the glasses are on and the notebook is open and the game is the thing that matters, not the text on my phone that I have not checked since sending because checking would confirm that I'm waiting for a response and waiting would confirm that the text was not professional.
The game starts. I watch the ice. I make notes. I do my job.
But the doing is different tonight. The press box, which has always been a sanctuary (the one place where the glasses and the notebook and the professional frame work perfectly, where the world is reducible to plays and stats and the clean geometry of hockey), feels smaller.
The glass between me and the ice, which is there to separate the observers from the participants, feels like the wrong kind of barrier.
I've spent my career on this side of the glass and the this-side has always been enough.
Tonight, for the first time, the this-side feels like a limitation rather than a position.
Jamie scores in the second period. A wrister from the slot, his fifth of the season.
The bench erupts. I write the goal down in my notebook: "Kowalski, wrister, slot, 14:23 2nd.
" This is a professional notation. The professional notation does not include the fact that when the goal light went on, I felt a surge in my chest that was not the neutral, observational response of a journalist watching a source achieve a professional milestone.
The surge was pride. Specific, personal, inappropriate pride.
I write the game recap after the final horn. The recap is clean. The writing is good. The Kowalski goal is the lead, because it was the game-winner, and the description of the goal is vivid and accurate and does not contain any words that a colleague would find unusual.
The words that a colleague would find unusual are in my head, not in the recap.
The words are: he's getting better every game.
The words are: his confidence is building and I can see it in his posture.
The words are: someone should tell him that the thing he's carrying doesn't have to be carried alone.
These are not professional words. These are the words of a person who is falling for someone he covers and who is running out of ways to pretend he isn't.
I file the recap. I drive home. I check my phone.
Jamie responded. At 3:12 PM, thirty-five minutes after my text. Three words: "Not that easy."
Three words that I read and reread and that could mean anything (the feature process was more challenging than I'm giving it credit for, the transition to the NHL is harder than the article suggests) and that I know, in the part of me that the glasses can't protect, mean something specific.
Not that easy. The "easy" was a lie and he called it.
The "easy" was a wall and he saw through it the way he sees through everything, the way he saw through the recorder and the press conference and the hallway, because Jamie Kowalski is paying attention with the same supernatural focus that makes his skating electric and his passes impossible and his silence deafening.
I put the phone down. I take off my glasses. I hold them. The familiar weight in my hands.
I sit in my apartment with the books and the quiet and the growing, unavoidable recognition that the wall I built (press credential, notebook, professional distance, the glasses, the glasses, the goddamn glasses) is developing a crack, and the crack is shaped like a nineteen-year-old with blue eyes who types "not that easy" at 3:12 PM and means something that neither of us is ready to say.
The glasses are on the counter. The wall is optional. The crack is widening.
I go to bed. I do not sleep well.