Chapter 22 Nate - August 2020, Toronto, Canada
They scanned us in at the airport and gave us badges, and the badge was the only thing in that city that decided where a man could stand.
Ours were red and Pittsburgh's were blue.
Red took the north elevators and blue took the south.
There was a strip of tape on the lobby carpet, and I watched a grown man with a decade in the league stop dead at that tape like it was a cliff.
From the north rail of the mezzanine I could see the south rail across a drop of open air. I did not do that. I did it twice.
The league had a content crew in there, desperate, because there was nothing to film in a sealed building. So they filmed the balconies, and every rail had towels on it, because the bathrooms had one hook and nobody had one towel.
Mine was on the fifth floor. His was on the tenth, five up and two along, and I worked that out on the second night by counting doors. Square and pushed all the way to the left end meant goodnight.
There is footage, shot from a courtyard in August of 2020, of two balconies five floors apart having a conversation, filmed by a kid who was after B-roll for a montage.
I watched him from behind my drapes and did not move for a minute.
We beat Boston in five and Pittsburgh beat the Islanders in six, and the thread carried more weight in those two weeks than it had in three years.
Riley: the pillow menu is a lie and I have raised it at the highest levels
Nate: You have raised it with me.
Riley: you're the highest level available to me currently. that's the whole tragedy of the bubble. there is no appeal above you and there never has been
Nate: Go to sleep.
Riley: four hours of the pillow menu, sinclair. I'm owed four hours
I answered every one of those inside a minute for three weeks, and told myself it was because there was nothing else to do in that building, which was true and which was not the reason.
The bracket locked late on a Wednesday night. Philadelphia against Pittsburgh, second round, best of seven, starting Saturday. I watched the graphic come up with the sound off, then read for a while and went to bed fifteen minutes late, and I noted it and thought nothing of it.
A little after three I woke up on the bathroom floor, and I don't have a clear account of how I got there.
My heart was going at a rate I've never once produced on a bicycle. My hands were numb from the fingertips to the wrist, both of them, evenly, which was not how an injury worked. There was a band around my chest tightening in increments, and every time I got a breath in it took a little less.
And there was a piece of information sitting in the middle of it, completely calm, in the voice I used for administrative matters. The information was that I was dying, that it was happening now, and that somebody should be told.
I counted my pulse against a watch on the counter. The number was wrong, and knowing it was wrong made it worse, so I counted tiles instead.
I thought about the phone. I sat on a bathroom floor with my chest folding in on itself and thought about the one number in it, and about a man five floors up who was very possibly awake.
And then I thought about the corridor, and the elevator with the sign on it, and a camera at the end of a hallway, and I sat there instead.
It went on a long time and then let go all at once, the way weather does. No chest pain, no pain in the arm, full grip in both hands.
Dinner had been at five. There had been shrimp on the buffet.
I washed my face and issued the ruling out loud. "Bad shrimp."
I slept two hours and skated a full optional and was, by every measure available to anybody, fine.
Two nights later I could not sleep and I had no clean shirts.
Close to three in the morning I took a bag down to the machine room, which was the one part of that building the league had failed to think about. There was a camera in the corridor outside it and none inside, and I had checked that on the first day, without deciding to.
I came around the corner and Riley Kowalski was on a folding chair against the far wall in a Forge t-shirt and gym shorts with a mask on, and one of the two dryers was running.
"There's a chair," he said.
"There's a camera in the hall."
"There's a camera in the hall and there's none in here, and I checked on day one, and I've been sitting in this room twenty minutes waiting to find out whether anybody else in this building can read a floor plan.
" He nudged the other chair with his foot, six feet from his, looking at the floor while he did it, and then moved it another foot.
I put my bag in the washer and sat down.
"You're doing laundry at three in the morning."
"So are you, and you got here second, so the room's mine by possession." He put his head back against the wall. "I've got two clean shirts and there's a rule about the hallway hampers now. Also I don't sleep. You know I don't sleep. That's been in the file since Chicago."
"So we're going to sit here."
"Apparently. Which means I've got a question, and I've had it three years, and I've never been able to ask it, because every time I've been in a room with you there's been a clock on it."
"Ask it."
"What was it actually like? You, at fourteen." He turned his head. "Not the version. I've heard the version. Boarding school, national team, camera at your midget game. I want the Tuesday."
"There's no Tuesday."
"Everybody's got a Tuesday."
I looked at the washing machine. "There was a list on the fridge. From when I was nine until I left for school. A nutritionist made it, and she didn't make it for my father, she made it for me. Two columns. The second column was things I wasn't supposed to eat, and sugar was in the second column."
"At nine years old," he said. "That's a rough document to have on a fridge, buddy."
"It wasn't cruelty. That's the part nobody believes.
He wasn't punishing me. He was maintaining an asset, and the asset was going to be worth something, and he was correct about that.
" I turned my wrist over. "And my mother made crème br?lée on report card nights, after he went to bed, with a torch she borrowed off the man next door.
We ate it standing up at the sink with the light off. "
"You told me that in a Marriott."
"I told you part of it."
"So tell me the rest."
"The rest is that she never once said why.
Not in nine years. She never said I'm doing this because you're a child and this is insane, and I never said thank you, and both of us knew exactly what was happening.
" I heard my voice do something and put it back.
"That's my family. Everything that matters gets done and nobody says it. "
He was quiet a second. "Yeah. Same house. Different furniture."
"Tell me one."
"My dad took me to the plant when I was seven, because my mother had a thing.
A whole shift." He laced his hands behind his head.
"And I remember two things. One, it was the loudest place I've ever been, and I've played in Montreal.
Two, every guy in that building knew him, and they all did the same thing when he walked past. They went like this.
" He tipped his chin up about an inch. "That's the whole greeting.
Nobody said hello or said his name. A hundred men, and every one of them did the chin, and my dad did it back every time. "
"That's affection."
"That's the entire language, Nate." He laughed once, at nothing. "The most my father has ever said to me about anything I've done was the day I bought the truck. He got underneath it in a driveway in a golf shirt for a long time, and then he came out and said, 'Frame's clean.'"
"What did you say?"
"I said thanks and went inside and sat down, because that was a parade."
"Your mother, though."
"My mother's different. My mother says one word and waits four years for it to detonate.
" He shifted his chair, which put it closer, and I noticed it and did not move mine.
"She's never told me to eat before a game.
Not since I was ten. She's watched me not eat for years and never said a word, because she worked out when I was a kid that if she says it I'll do it, and then I'll be a guy who eats because his mother told him to. "
"That's not nothing."
"No. It's just not a sentence." He looked at me. "Nobody in that house has ever said the word. Either direction. Twenty-five years."
"Nobody in mine either."
"Yeah. I know. I worked that out about you inside four days.
" He turned the cup in his hands. "Chicago.
You did the thing at the head table where you moved the water glass an inch to the left before you sat down, and then you did it again at the next table, and nobody in that ballroom clocked it except me.
And I thought, that's a guy who's been getting graded since before he could read. "
"That's an inch of glass."
"It's never an inch of glass with you. That's the whole problem with you." He said it to the floor. "Everything's an inch of something, and you've got a reason for all of it, and you'll give me the reason in a very reasonable voice, and I'll sit here and want the part underneath it."
I did not have an answer for that, and he did not appear to need one.
We were in there two hours. There was no other conversation like it in three and a half years of knowing that man, and it happened in a room with two folding chairs and neither of us allowed within six feet of the other.
And then I said the smaller thing.
"You want to know what I miss?"
"Privacy," he said. "There's a guy with a camera outside the ice machine."
"It's not privacy. It's food made by somebody who knows you."
He did not say anything.