7. Roman
ROMAN
The knee goes on a drill I could’ve done in my sleep at nineteen.
It’s late, past nine, the facility emptied out an hour ago and I stayed because staying is better than the apartment.
Elias kept the lights on in the small rink for me, the practice sheet, and he’s got me doing edges, nothing real, just controlled pushes along the blue line to teach the joint it can trust itself again.
Push, glide, stop. Push, glide, stop. I’ve done forty of them and the fortieth is the one that ends me.
I load the outside edge and the leg isn’t there.
Same as the test, the same vanishing, except this time there’s no clipboard, no audience, no Niko in the corner of my eye, just me and the empty boards and the joint folding like wet cardboard.
I go down hard on my hip and my palms. The cold comes up through my gloves, and I’m on the ice again, flat, a thing that fell.
“Goddammit.” It comes out of me ragged and I hit the boards.
Fist, full force, the dasher rattling in its frame, and the impact rings up my arm and I do it again because the first one didn’t fix anything.
“Goddammit, goddammit—” My voice cracks on the third and I hate the sound of it bouncing back at me off all that empty seating, eighteen thousand seats with nobody in them, the loudest quiet there is.
My knee is screaming now, the fire flooding back into the place where the leg disappeared.
I stay down on all fours with my head hanging, and I breathe, and the breath shakes coming out.
I am so far past the edge of what I can carry that I don’t even have the rage anymore.
The rage was the last thing holding me up.
Now there’s just the cold and the wet seeping through my track pants and the fact that I can’t get a hockey stop out of a leg I’ve owned for twenty-five years.
I hear the gate.
I don’t look up. I know the sound of him by now, the steady unhurried steps on the rubber matting, no rush in them, no alarm. And I want to scream at him not to come over here and see me like this, and I want him to come over here more than I’ve wanted anything in weeks.
He doesn’t say it’s okay. He doesn’t tell me to get up. He crosses the ice in his street shoes, careful on the surface, and he crouches down in front of me, down to where I am, so I’m not a man on the floor being looked at from above, and he puts himself in my eyeline.
“Roman. Look at me.”
I don’t. I’m staring at the ice, at the scrape marks, at the small dark spots where something off my face has dripped and frozen.
“Look at me.” Not louder. Lower. A floor under the words, flat and certain, the same voice he used the first night with his hands on my knee, and something in me that’s been thrashing for an hour goes toward it like it’s heat in a cold room.
I look at him.
His eyes are right there, pale and steady, and they don’t have any pity in them, that’s the thing, that’s the thing that lets me breathe. Everybody else looks at me now like I’m a funeral they have to attend. He just looks at me like I’m a problem he already knows how to solve.
“Breathe,” he says. “Look only at me and breathe. In through your nose. Out slow. Nothing else exists in this building right now except that. Do it.”
And I do it. I’m a grown man on my hands and knees on the ice doing breathing exercises because a guy told me to.
And somewhere under the wreck a small voice says this is humiliating; you used to be somebody.
I cannot make myself care, because for the length of one slow breath with his eyes holding mine, the screaming in my head drops to a hum.
He counts me through three of them. In through the nose.
Out slow. The shaking backs off a notch.
My heart stops trying to climb out of my throat.
“There,” he says. “Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve said to anyone in a month.
“We’ll find out together. Hand.”
I give him my hand. He takes my weight, more of it than I mean to give him.
He gets me up off the ice and onto the bad leg slow, and it holds enough to limp on.
He doesn’t let go of my arm the whole way to the gate.
Doesn’t fuss. Doesn’t ask if I’m all right when I’m obviously not.
Just keeps a hand on me and steers. I let myself be steered, and the letting is its own kind of relief, handing the wheel to somebody whose hands don’t shake.
—
The treatment room is the small one off the back, the private one.
He sits me on the table and crouches again to get my skates off, and I let him do that too.
The laces, the boot, the cold sweat-damp sock.
He’s unhurried about all of it. He sets the skates by the wall, lined up.
He stands. He goes to the door. He turns the lock.
The click of it is very loud.
I hear it and I know what it is. I’m not stupid and I’m not so far gone I don’t understand a locked door in an empty building between a man and his patient at nine at night.
Some clean, cold part of me—the part that’s still a professional athlete who’s been in a thousand rooms with a thousand people who wanted something—flags it.
That door wasn’t locked a second ago. You could get off this table.
The lock turns from this side too. You could put your skate guards on, walk out into the parking lot, drive home, and never book the late slot again.
I look at the door. I look at him. I think about the apartment, the dishes, the framed dead man on the wall, the four a.m. ceiling.
I think about the hum his voice put over the screaming, how it’s the only thing in three weeks that’s reached the actual fire, and I think: I’m not walking out that door.
I’m not even going to pretend to myself that I might.
Whatever this is, it’s the first thing that’s touched the pain, and I am an animal in a trap who has just been shown that the trap is warm.
I stay on the table.
“You’re going to do something for me,” Elias says.
He comes back across the small room and he stands close, closer than the work has ever put him, and his hands go to his belt.
Unhurried. The buckle, the leather sliding, and my breath goes shallow and high.
My whole body lights up with something that is not fear—or is fear with all its wires crossed into want, the two of them so tangled I couldn’t pull one out of the other if you paid me.
I should say something. There’s a sentence I could say.
I don’t say it. My mouth is dry, my pulse is in my ears, and I am hard in my track pants already, before he’s done a single thing, just from the lock, the belt, the certainty coming off him in waves.
“Look at me,” he says, when my eyes drop.
“Not the door. Not the floor. Me. You only have to do what I tell you. That’s all.
You don’t have to think. You’ve been doing nothing but think for three weeks and look where it’s got you.
” His voice is low and even. It slides right under all my defenses because it isn’t asking.
“I’m going to take all of that off you for a while.
The thinking. The deciding. You don’t have to carry any of it. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah.” It comes out wrecked.
“Then get off the table.” He’s got himself out now, his cock in his hand, and he doesn’t make a thing of it, doesn’t perform it, just stands there holding it like the next instruction is the most natural one in the world. “Get on your knees.”
And here’s the joke of it, the joke God built into this exact night.
For three weeks every person in my life has been trying to get this knee strong enough to hold my weight, to keep me off the ground, to get me standing.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of medicine pointed at one goal, keep Roman Vane on his feet.
And the only thing that’s going to make any of it stop hurting is going down.
I lower myself off the table onto the floor, onto both knees, the bad one and the good one.
The bad one flares white as it takes the hard tile, and I welcome it, I go down into the pain instead of away from it for once.
And I kneel in front of him in the locked room and look up.
“Good,” he says. Just that. The same flat good he gives me when I hit a rep, except down here it drops through me and I feel it everywhere, in my chest, in my dick, in the back of my neck.
Good. I have spent my whole life chasing a building full of people screaming my name and it turns out the thing I’d crawl for is one cold man saying one quiet word like he means it.
He puts his hand in my hair, not gentle, gets a grip, and guides my head. I open my mouth and let him push in.
It’s a lot. He doesn’t ease me into it, doesn’t ask, just feeds it back.
My eyes water immediately. My throat works against it, and he holds my head where he wants it and says, “Breathe through your nose. Same as on the ice. In through your nose, let me in, you can do this.” And I do.
I breathe through my nose, let my jaw go slack, let him use my mouth.
The tears come, run hot down my face and off my jaw, not from grief, from the body, from the deep of it.
And I don’t try to stop them, and he doesn’t either.
He looks down at me crying on his cock with my ruined knee on the tile and something in his face I’d kill to see again moves behind his eyes, and he says, low, “There you are.”
And the strangest thing in the world happens.
The knee stops hurting.
Not less. Stops. For the first time since the night it went, since the stretcher, since the recovery room and the first dose and every dose after, the fire in my leg is just gone, switched off at the wall.
Every circuit I’ve got is full of this, of him, of the stretch of my own jaw, the salt of my own tears, the grip in my hair, the one job I have, which is to kneel here and take it and not think.
There’s no room left in me for the knee.
There’s no room left in me for the comeback clock or my father or Dara’s shoot date or the dishes or the ceiling at four a.m. There’s just this, this narrow burning now, and it doesn’t hurt, none of it hurts, and I understand in a flood why people end up here, why a man would trade everything he is for a feeling that turns the pain off this completely.
I’ve been chasing it in an orange bottle and it was never going to be in the bottle.
It was always going to be in something exactly this dangerous.
I make a sound around him, helpless, and he says, “I know,” like he can hear all of it, the whole avalanche, and maybe he can.
He sets a pace and I stay with it. My hands find his thighs and grip the fabric and hold on, not pushing him away, the opposite, pulling myself into it, anchoring to the one solid thing in a building full of empty seats.
He’s not loud. He doesn’t talk dirty at me, doesn’t degrade me, just keeps his hand in my hair, his eyes down on me, and feeds me low steady words, that’s it, take it, you’re doing so well.
Every one of them lands in the hole in my chest the cheering used to fill.
When he finishes, he holds me there and makes me take it, and I do, I swallow because he wants me to.
I’m still crying, and I have never in my adult life been this far from the thing that’s killing me.
—
After, the floor is hard and my knee has come back to life.
The room is too bright, too quiet. I’m a twenty-five-year-old man on his knees on a treatment-room floor with a wet face, and I should feel like garbage.
I keep waiting for the shame to land, the real kind, the kind that would make a healthy man scramble up and grab his bag and never come back.
It doesn’t land. There’s a version of me that would be wrecked by this, the version that exists on the framed jersey on my wall, the kid my father drove four hours each way to watch, the captain eighteen thousand people stood up for.
That guy would rather die than be found on this floor.
But that guy got left on the ice three weeks ago when the leg went, and I’ve been finding out ever since that there was less under him than anybody thought, including me.
Take away the ice, the scoreboard, the noise, and what’s left is a man who’ll kneel on a bad knee in a locked room because somebody finally made the pain stop.
So the shame doesn’t come. What comes instead, as he tucks himself away and reaches down to help me up and the warm dome of nothing-hurts starts, already, to recede at the edges, is panic. Not at what I did. At him leaving.
He gets me up onto the table again, back where I started.
He turns to go get the ice and the chart, to become my doctor again, to put the coat back on between us.
I watch the distance start to open, and I cannot stand it.
The second he steps back into that cold, the pain’s going to come back.
The apartment’s going to come back. The four a.m. is going to come back.
I will be alone in the glass box with all of it, and I have just found out, kneeling on a floor, that he is the off switch.
My hand shoots out. I catch his sleeve.
“Don’t go yet.”
It’s small. It’s the smallest I’ve ever made my voice.
I hear how it sounds, a grown man, a captain, a guy who’s never asked anybody to stay for anything, and I don’t care, the pride’s gone, I gave it to the floor twenty minutes ago and I don’t want it back.
“Just—” My throat closes. “Don’t go yet. Please.”
He looks at my hand on his sleeve. He looks at me.
And whatever’s behind his eyes does that thing again, the move, the flash of something that isn’t the doctor and isn’t the cold.
Without a single word, he pulls the stool over with his foot and sits back down beside the table, close, within reach, and lets me keep my fist twisted in his cuff.
I don’t let go.
We sit there in the bright locked room, him on the stool, me on the table with my ruined knee and my wet face and my hand full of his sleeve.
Neither of us says anything, and the pain stays gone a little while longer because he stayed.
The clock on the wall reads nine-forty. Out past the locked door, a Zamboni idles somewhere, then cuts out, and the building goes even quieter around us.
Just the hum of the overhead light and the two of us breathing.
And some last sober watchman way back in my head, the one who saw the lock turn and counted the exits, says very quietly, this is the one.
Out of all of it, the bottle and the whiskey and the rest, this is the one that’s going to take everything. And I hear him. I hear him clearly.
And I tighten my grip on the sleeve and I stay.