Chapter 12 Nate - June 2018, Las Vegas
I came up out of half sleep at four in the morning and could not work out, for a second, why I couldn't move my left arm.
Then the room assembled itself. Vegas. The suite. Curtains not quite shut, one bar of orange light across the ceiling. Air conditioning going.
And Riley Kowalski asleep with his head on my chest.
Flat on my back, both of us on top of the sheet, and his head was over my sternum.
His hair was in my mouth and his whole arm was across me.
His hand had come up in his sleep and curled over the left side of my chest. Loose, fingers half open, right over my heart, like it had every right in the world to be there.
I lay completely still.
I could feel him breathing. My own chest was going up and down and his was going up and down on top of it, out of sync at first and then, while I lay there, not out of sync.
And the thing that went through me was so large and so completely without a name that my body did the only thing it knew how to do with something that size.
It classified it as an emergency, the kind with a procedure attached. My heart went. My skin went cold in a hot room. Everything in me said get out of this building in the exact voice it uses when a puck is coming at your face.
So I extracted.
It took a long time and I did every second of it on purpose.
First his hand. I got two fingers under his wrist and lifted it about a quarter inch and waited. He made a noise. I stopped with his wrist in my hand and did not breathe. Then another quarter inch, and set it down on the sheet beside me.
Then the head. That was worse. I got my palm flat under the pillow next to us and slid it in about two inches at a time. Then I moved out from under him a fraction at a time and let the pillow take the weight as I went, like a bomb technician, like a man defusing something.
At the end there was a second where his head was half on me and half on the pillow, and he turned his face into it and sighed, and I stood there beside the bed with my heart in my throat.
Then the clothes. My shirt was on a chair, my jacket over the desk, one shoe by the bathroom door and the other under the window. My belt was on the floor of the entryway with the buckle open.
I got dressed in the dark, silently, holding my own belt so it wouldn't make a sound.
And then, with my bag over my shoulder and my hand on the door, I turned around and looked at him one more time. That was a mistake.
I did the inventory anyway. Face flat on the pillow, mouth open, one arm out across the part of the bed where I had been, hair completely ruined, a mark on his shoulder that I had put there in defiance of rule six.
The Calder trophy was on the dresser with his tie hanging off it. I took the tie off it, folded it and left it on the end of the bed.
Then I went out the door and down the service elevator and through a casino that never closes, past two women in sequins eating pancakes at a bank of slot machines and a man asleep sitting up at a blackjack table.
I came out onto the Strip before five in the morning, which belongs to janitors, gamblers, and men leaving their own hotel rooms.
I walked it end to end.
It takes a long time if you don't stop, and I didn't stop, and the whole time I was negotiating.
That's what I was doing. I was not thinking. I was conducting a negotiation with a feeling, the way you'd conduct one with an agent, and I had a list of offers.
I offered it money first, which is stupid, but that is genuinely the first thing my brain reached for, because that is how I was raised. Whatever this costs, I'll pay it.
Then I offered it discipline. A monastic summer. Nothing but training. Six days a week, two a days, a nutritionist, no phone after nine, the whole thing, all of July and August, and in exchange it would be gone by camp.
Then I offered it a season. Take the year. Take all of it. I'll play eighty-two games and not think about anything else, no calls, no thread, four games and nothing outside them, and at the end of it we're done.
Then I offered it anything it wanted. Anything at all, any terms, name them.
And the feeling, which had been sitting in me accruing interest since a rubber chicken banquet in Chicago fourteen months earlier, declined every single offer without discussion.
Somewhere past the fake Eiffel Tower, with the sky starting to go, I called my grandfather.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Nathaniel, you're up early. It's what, two out there?"
"Five. How's the motor?"
"Oh, don't get me started. It's the carburetor," he said, and he was off, and I let him go.
He went for a long time.
I walked and listened to my grandfather talk about a dock. My eyes were doing something I did not authorize, and I kept my breathing even so it would not get into my voice.
Then he stopped.
"So, you called me at five in the morning." Another creak. He was in the chair by the window, I could hear the gulls. "You've been on this phone twenty minutes and you have not said one thing."
And then he waited.
He just waited. He did not fill it. He did not give me a door to walk through with a joke on it.
He held the line open and let it sit there, and I stood on the sidewalk with the phone hot against my ear and the sky going pale behind the buildings and the traffic starting up. I got about as close as I've ever come.
I could feel the shape of it in my mouth, all of it, the whole thing. And then, I changed the subject.
I got back into the suite at one and the door swung open on the aftermath.
Two water glasses. An empty bottle on its side by the desk.
A pillow on the floor. The sheets pulled up flat on one side and destroyed on the other, because I had made my own half of that bed at four in the morning like a lunatic and he had slept in the rest of it for another seven hours.
My tie on the doorknob, which I could not account for.
And no Riley.
He'd gone back to his own floor at some point after eleven. The protocol had held even then, even after that, even with nobody watching and nobody to hold it for.
I did what I always did. I audited.
I'd been doing that since October. You go through a room after and you find everything. That's not paranoia, that's just the job of it. A pair of socks in a corner. A receipt with a name on it. A charger. Anything that says two people.
I did the whole suite. Bathroom, closet, under the bed, both nightstands, the couch cushions, the little entry table.
Everything was accounted for, except the cork.
I stood in the middle of the room with my hands at my sides and did the only arithmetic that has ever actually frightened me.
It wasn’t here, which meant that at some point after eleven, a grown man who had woken up alone, got down on the floor next to a desk. He reached under it. He found a two cent piece of bark, and put it in his pocket, and got on a plane with it.
I stood there and I understood exactly what that meant. There is no other reading of it. There never has been.
He took it because it touched that night, which meant I wasn’t the only one carrying the file around.
I got as far as understanding it, and then I picked the understanding up and put it in the drawer.
There was a drawer. It had a cocktail napkin in it from April with a phone number on it in dried ink, a keychain Ginny Okafor had been transferring between bags without comment since October, and a navy tie with lighthouses on it, in quarantine at the end of a rack.
Everything in that drawer was nothing.
It was the fullest empty drawer in the state of Pennsylvania. I closed it and went and packed my bag.
At the airport my phone buzzed while I was in the priority line.
I read it standing in a line with a bag on my shoulder. I countered before the jet bridge.
Nate: 91 for 29 is not a trade, it's a hostage situation. Counter: your 29, your 4, and every future consideration you have, for my 91.
Riley: absolutely not. that's my entire future. you're asking for my entire future in exchange for one defenseman
Nate: Yes.
Riley: you know what, fine. but I want it noted in the minutes that this was extortion
Nate: Noted.
Then I got on the plane and sat down in 2A and put my head against the window and did the arithmetic.
It was the last week of June.
Camp opened the second week of September, which was most of a summer away.
Our first game was the sixth of October, in my building, and then December, and then February in Pittsburgh, and then March.
Four. And the All Star break made five if the league put us in the same city again, which it would, because the league is not stupid.
The desert went out from under the wing and turned into that flat brown nothing that goes on for an hour.
I'd just spent a morning on Las Vegas Boulevard offering a feeling everything I own to please leave me. It had said no to all of it, and here I was in the middle of the afternoon at altitude, counting the days until October like a man marking a wall.
A hundred and four days. The count was the truth. Everything else was a scouting report I wrote about myself.