3. Roman #2
The orange bottle from the team pharmacy, the one Elias signed.
I shake them out onto the nightstand and stand them in a row like little soldiers, the day’s allotment.
I look at them. Marv used to say I had the best hands in the league.
Surgeon’s hands, he’d say, soft hands. I line the pills up with those hands until the row is perfect and even, and I know exactly how many hours of quiet are sitting there on the wood.
The next one isn’t due for forty minutes.
The bottle says every six hours and it’s been five and twenty.
I know this. I’ve started knowing this like I used to know a goalie’s glove tendencies, by feel, without trying, the clock that lives in my body now counting down to the next time the world gets to step back and let go of my chest.
I take it twenty minutes early.
I tell myself it’s the knee, which woke up screaming on the drive and hasn’t stopped, and that’s even true.
That’s the worst part—it’s always at least a little true.
I dry-swallow it and lie back on the bed in my street clothes, waiting for the gold to come up like it did in the recovery room.
It comes, smaller now, thinner, but it comes.
The row of soldiers on the nightstand has one empty space in it, and I already don’t like looking at the empty space.
I nudge the row down with one finger so the gap sits at the end, where it’s easier not to count.
Before the warmth takes me all the way under, I do the math I’ve started doing without meaning to.
If I move the next one up the same amount, and the one after.
I set an alarm on my phone for the one after that, so I won’t have to lie here watching the clock, so I can just be told when.
Some flat voice telling me when. I set it, I put the phone face down, and I let the thin gold close over my head.
The last thing I think, stupidly, is that I did thirty-plus-ten today without my head once, that it was the best hour I’ve had since the ice came up, that I want to go back tomorrow more than I want almost anything.
I’m too far under by then to ask myself why.
—
Next session he runs me harder and I let him.
That’s the new thing, the thing I’d never admit out loud.
I show up early. I do the count. When the knee shakes, I look at him instead of the leg.
He says again, and I find the four more I swore weren’t there.
My head goes to that clean empty place and stays there.
For one hour a day I am not a wreck or a brand or a disappointment on a wire.
I’m just a body doing what it’s told, and it’s the only peace I’ve got.
So at the end, I stall.
I don’t even decide to. He calls the session, says we’re done, good work, start the ice when you get home, and I should get up and go.
Instead, I say, “One more set.” He looks at me.
I say, “The, uh. The extension. I felt it slip a little on the last one; I want to make sure I’ve got the form.
” Which is a lie, my form was clean, and we both know it’s a lie.
I do the set anyway with him standing there, slow, dragging it out, asking a question about graft timelines I already know the answer to just to keep him in the room a minute longer.
Because when I go home there’s a glass box, a row of soldiers, a clock in my body. Here there’s a flat voice telling me what to do next. And I’ve started to need the second thing in a way I don’t have a name for, in a way I’m not ready to look at.
He lets me finish the set. He answers the question I didn’t need answered, short and exact. And then he reads me like he reads everything, those pale eyes going over my face one slow pass. Something moves behind them that’s gone before I can catch it. He says, not unkind, “Go home, Roman.”
So I do. I gather my stuff and I leave him standing in that bright back room.
In the parking lot, I sit in my car a second before I start it.
The knee’s throbbing again, the session’s woken it all the way up, and I do the math on the next pill before I’ve even got the key turned.
Two hours, maybe less if I move it up again.
I think about the row of soldiers waiting on the nightstand, the alarm I’ll set, the gold coming up the arm.
And then, right behind it, with no warning at all, I think about his hand coming under the treadmill for the band.
The neat coil of it around his fingers. The flat good.
And I notice, sitting there in the cold car, that the two thoughts have started living in the same place in my chest, the pill and the man, the relief and the relief, that I’m already counting the hours to both.
I drive home one-footed to the box, the blinds, the bottle. I count those hours till tomorrow, when I get to come back and have my head go quiet again. And I tell myself that’s just the rehab. That’s just wanting to get better. That’s all it is.
I almost believe it. That’s the part nobody warns you about. How much of you wants to believe it, right up until you can’t.