Chapter 13 Nate - July 2018, Philadelphia
They re-aired it in July.
That's the thing nobody warns you about with television. It doesn't happen once. It gets cut up and put in a folder, and then some producer needs ten minutes of airtime on a Tuesday in the summer, and it happens again, exactly the same, in your living room, a year later.
Product of effort, not talent. He's honest. He's also replaceable.
I was standing in the kitchen with the sound coming through the speakers the firm installed in the ceiling. I had a phone in my hand with a number in it that I'd once gone half a year without using, and had used every single day since.
I did not go out on the balcony this time.
What I did instead was go get a legal pad and rebuild the letter.
Six hundred words. From memory, because the original died unsaved on a March morning when my uncle said the phrase lane discipline to me.
It came back easier than it had any right to.
Controlled entry rate, entries with possession by score state, the shorthanded deployment nobody looks at, the two sequences with the time stamps.
I tightened the citations. I fixed a sentence in the fourth paragraph that had been doing too much.
And then I printed it.
I had a printer in the second bedroom that had printed almost nothing in its life.
I printed it on real paper and dated it in the top right corner in pen, the way you date something you intend to keep.
I put it in a folder, and I put the folder in a drawer in a desk in a room nobody has ever gone into.
Sending it is impossible. It was impossible in March and it was more impossible in July.
Destroying it turned out to be more impossible than that.
I've never once tried to work out why those two things are not the same size. I noticed the asymmetry, and then I closed the drawer.
September, the league's preseason media tour, one hotel ballroom in midtown Manhattan with camera setups all down one wall, and both of us summoned to perform.
We were extremely good at this. That was the terrible part. We were so good at it that producers requested us.
"Okay, gentlemen. Nate, you're on the left. Riley, on the right. Turn in toward each other a little. Little more. Great. Now, big question, don't overthink it: what does the other guy do that drives you crazy?"
"He talks," I said.
"That's it? That's the whole answer?"
"The entire time. Sixty minutes of hockey and he uses all of it. He talked to me during a television timeout once. There was nothing happening. Two grown men standing on a faceoff dot while a truck got sold to somebody in Ohio, and he was still going."
"You looked lonely!"
"There were eighteen thousand people in the building."
"And not one of them was talking to you, Nate. I did a kind thing and now I'm being punished for it on camera."
The crew was gone. They loved it. They asked for a second take with more of the thing where we look at each other, and we gave it to them.
"Riley, same question."
"He's polite," Riley said. "He's the most polite man I've ever played against. He knocked me down in November, and while I was on my way to the ice he apologized. Who does that? Hit me and mean it, you coward."
"You apologized to me in Chicago."
"That was for a completely different thing and you know it."
"Sure."
"That was a tie thing."
That went on tape. That is on the internet. Nobody has ever asked either of us what it meant.
Afterward there was a green room with a coffee urn and a plate of pastries, and we were in it alone for about a minute and a half while they reset for the next pairing.
There was a producer outside the door with a clipboard. There was a camera on a tripod in the corner with the light off, which I checked, twice.
"Good flight?"
"It was two hours in a chair."
"That's a flight."
"That's a bus with wings, Nate."
"You look tired."
"I've been up since four. They put me on a morning show with a magician. He went on before me. He pulled a scarf out of the host's ear and everybody clapped, and then they turned to me and asked about the forecheck."
"How's the forecheck?"
"In the best shape of its life. Thriving. Nobody has ever asked it a follow-up question."
That's all it was. We were four feet apart the entire time and neither of us moved and neither of us said one thing that mattered.
I was aware of every inch of that four feet the whole time, and I know he was too, because he did not touch the pastries, and Riley Kowalski had never left food alone in his life.
Then the producer put her head in and said Riley's name, and he pushed off the wall, and on his way past me he said, very quietly, without turning his head, "October sixth."
"I know when it is."
"Just checking you had it."
"I've got a calendar."
"You've got a paper calendar," he said, and went out.
October sixth. Our building. Opening night.
We won it two to one. I had the winner with six minutes left, a wrist shot from the top of the circle through a screen. It went in and the whole building came up out of its seats and my bench came over the boards.
And I did not celebrate.
I did not raise my arms. I did not yell. I got mobbed by four guys and I let them do it, and then I skated back toward our bench, and about halfway there I turned my head and looked at the visitors' bench.
And I held it.
That's all. One long look, delivered directly, to one man on a bench of twenty, with my father's voice coming out of a booth above me describing the shot.
The broadcast replayed it in slow motion. Twice. They put a circle on it. One of the panel guys said something about the rivalry having real venom in it now, and my father said, "That's a young man who does not like losing to Pittsburgh."
Four minutes after the final horn I was in the tunnel with my helmet in my hand, and my phone was in my stall, and there was going to be a room number in it.
That is exactly how long the arrangement's formality survived. It's how long it takes to get from the ice to a hotel door.
He got the door open and I got my hands on him and it went nowhere near the bed for a while.
His jacket came off in the entryway and went on the floor and neither of us picked it up. I had him against the wall by the closet with a forearm braced beside his head and my mouth on his throat, and he was already saying something. I got a hand over his mouth and he bit it.
"Don't," I said.
"You put your hand on my face."
"You were talking."
"I'm always talking, that's a known…"
I kissed him and he stopped. It took about a second and a half, and then his hands came up into my hair and he made that sound in the back of his throat, and the entire man went quiet from the top down.
I kissed him until he wasn't holding his own head up, one hand fisted in the back of his shirt and the other flat on the wall beside him, and every time I came off him he followed, mouth still open, chasing it, and I let him have it and then took it away again just to feel him do it.
A hundred and four days. That's what I'd counted on a plane out of Vegas in June, and then I counted the rest of them one at a time all summer. I had all of them with me in that entryway, and we converted them at the full rate.
He got my shirt off over my head and it took the buttons with it and neither of us cared.
I got him out of everything and got both his wrists in one hand up over his head against the wall.
He looked at me with his mouth open and stopped fighting it entirely, which is the single most anybody has ever given me.
Both of us were hungry after spending a summer pretending we weren't.
The wall was involved before the bed was. So was the desk, briefly, which did not work, which was funny at the time and funnier afterward.
The first coherent sentence of the entire night arrived a long time later, from the floor, where he'd ended up with a pillow that had come off the bed at some point.
"$19," he said. "For a beer. There's a card on the minibar, Nate. It's a human rights violation."
"Don't drink the minibar."
"I'm not going to drink it, I'm going to report it. I'm going to raise it at the next meeting of the competition committee under any other business."
"Come up here."
"In a minute," he said, and stayed on the floor, and I lay across the end of the bed with my head hanging off it upside down looking at him.
But there was a third thing in the room that night, and it had been in there since we walked in, and around one in the morning he went and got it.
He came back and sat cross legged on the bed in his briefs with a quarter.
"Wager."
"Now?"
"Yes. Standard terms. Loser owes one honest answer, any question, no dodging." He was flipping the coin over his knuckles. "Call it."
"Riley."
"Call it, Sinclair."
I called heads.
He caught it and slapped it onto the back of his hand and looked at it and did not show me.
"Tails," he said, which I could believe or not.
Then he set it down on the nightstand very carefully, on its edge first and then flat, and lay down on his back and reached over and turned the lamp off.
The dark helped. That's a thing we found out somewhere along the way. Neither of us could tell the truth with the lights on.
"Vegas," he said. "Why'd you leave at four in the morning?"
And there it was. A hundred and four days of me being absolutely certain it was coming and then absolutely certain it wasn't, and it came in a dark room while both of us lay on our backs eight inches apart, exactly the way the February one had.
I paid it, in installments, because that's the only way I could get it out.
"I woke up," I said, "and you were asleep on my chest. And your hand was on me. Here." I put my own hand on the spot, which he could not see. "Over my heart. Just resting there, like it lived there."
He didn't say anything.
"And whatever went through me when I understood that…
it was so big that my body decided it was an emergency.
That's what happened. Not fear of getting caught, not the door, none of that.
My heart went and my hands went cold, and every single part of me said get out of this building right now, the way it does when something's coming at your head.
So I got out. It took a long time, because I did it a quarter inch at a time so you wouldn't wake up.
Then I walked the entire Strip. Then I came back at eleven. "
"Nate."
"I've got an exit strategy for every room I've ever walked into," I said.
"That's not a joke. I do it before I sit down.
Where the doors are, who I'd have to get past, how long.
I've done it since I was a kid, in every room, at every dinner, in every locker room, because a room has never once in my life been a safe place to be all the way in. "
The air conditioner cycled on and then off.
"And there's no protocol for waking up wanted," I said. "I've got one for everything. Losing, winning, my father, cameras, a bad night, a good night, a man asking me a question I can't answer. There isn't one for that. And I'm made of protocols. There's nothing else in here."
I stopped.
I lay in the dark and waited for the chirp, because there is always a chirp. That is the entire way this works. One of us says a true thing and the other one puts a joke on top of it so nobody has to look at it directly, and we've been doing that since a loading dock in Chicago.
He didn't. Not one word. He took the whole thing, all of it, and did not put anything on top of it.
And then, after about thirty seconds, he said, "I woke up alone in a suite bigger than my house."
I turned my head.
"And that's not a complaint. That's just the fact.
" His voice was completely flat. "I woke up at eleven and the sheet was pulled up on your side because you made the bed on your way out, which I want you to know is insane.
And there was this thing under my ribs. Like a hole.
Right here. And I ordered coffee and I sat on the end of that bed and I diagnosed it as a hangover.
" He laughed, once, with no humor in it at all.
"Which it was not. I've had hangovers, Nate.
I know what one feels like and that was not one. "
"Then what was it?"
"I've known since about Chicago," he said, "that my equipment lies to me. It's been lying to me for months and I keep taking the reading anyway, because the reading's the only thing I can live with."
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
Nobody had bet him for that. There was no coin on it. He had won the toss and paid one back anyway, for free, which is against everything we built.
Neither of us talked about the cork. He did not say he had it. I did not say I knew.
Some time later, without thinking about it, out of pure habit, I sat up and reached over the side of the bed for my jacket.
That was the protocol. That was the whole extraction. It ran by itself.
I got two fingers on the collar of it.
"Hey," he said, from behind me, in the dark. "What's the rush?"
Nothing else. Not stay. Not don't go. Three words, in a completely level voice, from a man who was very carefully not proposing anything.
I sat there on the edge of the bed with my jacket in my hand. Then I let it go, and it fell back on the floor, and I lay down.
The extraction protocol died right there, without a vote, without a discussion, without one word about it from either of us, which is how every single rule we've ever written has died.
In the morning I woke up at six forty with his forearm across my back and his face in the pillow. I got up and got dressed, and I did not use the service stairwell.
I walked out through the lobby with my bag on my shoulder like a person. Past the desk, past a bellman, past two women with roller bags and a man on a phone. Nobody looked at me twice.
I got in the car and sat there for a second before I pulled out.
Four games a season. That was the thing I used to say. Four games, plus the break, plus whatever the schedule does, and that's the reason, that's why any of this happens, we're two guys the calendar keeps putting in the same city.
I sat in a car outside a hotel in my own city, on a night with no travel in it at all, having driven there from an apartment I own, and I stopped telling myself that one.