Chapter 26 Nate - June 2023, Philadelphia #2
He was not looking at the producer. He was looking past her, at the monitor on the stand, which had gone back to the last frame of the piece and was sitting on the freeze at the top of it.
Two twenty-one-year-olds in a handshake line in Chicago, one hand in the other, held half a second past the beat.
"There's a version of it that's a bit," he said. "That's what everybody was watching. And a bit's fine, a bit's good business, we both got a lot out of it and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise."
"So it just ran out?"
"Some games you can only play so long," he said, "before the scoreboard stops meaning anything."
He said the whole thing to the monitor, and he did not turn his head eighteen inches to the left one time.
"Great," said Dana, after a second. "That's the answer. Nate, anything to add?"
"I'd say that's right," I said.
Penelope was in the bar at nine that night, because she was in Toronto, because she had an appearance on the Saturday that her people and my people had built in September, which is what the arrangement had turned into by then.
It stopped being a program a long time before that.
It became two people who knew exactly what the other one was, having dinner four times a year, and one of them holding a door open with her foot.
She was in a corner banquette with a glass of red wine and she had been watching me for an hour before she said anything.
"Nathaniel."
"Hm."
"You've been looking at the elevators all night."
"There's a lot of traffic in this hotel."
"There is, and every single person who has come out of those doors has been a stranger to you, and I've watched you check every one of them and then go back to your drink." She turned her glass. "I'd like to say a thing, and then I'd like to go to bed."
"Go on."
"The costume served its purpose," she said.
"It did. I don't regret one hour of it, and I got something out of it I'm not going to itemize for you, and I never will.
But it's outlived that, and it has for a while, and I've been waiting for you to say so, and you are not going to, because you are a Sinclair and you do not open the subject, you wait to be asked about it at a podium. "
"Penelope."
"So I'm retiring from the role," she said.
"Effective whenever you stop needing it.
Not tonight. There's no date. I'm not walking out of anything, I'll do the Saturday and I'll do the summer thing if you want it.
I'm telling you the position exists to be vacated, because I've known a great many people who did not know that a thing they were inside of had a door. "
I did not say anything for a while.
"I've watched that piece," she said.
"They screened it for you?"
"They screened it for half the building, Nathaniel, it's promotional. I watched four minutes of a montage about hockey and I want you to understand that I've never in my life seen anything less about hockey."
"That's an editing choice."
"Made by people who can't read what they cut," she said, "which is the only reason it's going to air."
She finished her wine and put the glass down and looked at me. "Now I'm going to say the actual thing and then I'm going to go, because you're going to want to be alone for it."
"Fine."
"You bought a house with a kitchen in it that has a hood rated for open flame."
I looked at her.
"You told me that in a car in Boston about eighteen months ago, and you told it as a joke about a contractor, and I've thought about it roughly once a month since," she said.
"You do not cook. I've watched you eat in restaurants on three continents and you have never once mentioned food.
And you paid for a room in a house that is specified for a thing you do not do. "
"It came with the house."
"It did not come with the house. Nothing in your life has ever come with the house, you have had every single thing you own selected by somebody, and this is the one room in that building you argued about.
" She stood up and got her coat. "So here is what I'd like you to do tonight, in this specific hotel, on this specific night.
I'd like you to ask yourself who you designed it for. "
"Penelope."
She leaned down and kissed my cheek, which was for the room, and about four people took a photograph of it, which was also for the room.
Then she straightened up, and she put a hand on the back of the banquette, and she said the last one.
"I've watched you survive scrutiny your entire life. I've never seen anybody better at it, and I include myself, and I've been doing it since I was nine." She picked up her bag. "The only thing I've never once watched you survive is a Tuesday with nothing to hide."
She left me with the check.
I rode up alone.
The corridor on nineteen had a window at the end of it and a housekeeping cart parked by the ice machine and it was very quiet, and I stood outside my own door with the key card in my hand for a long time and did not put it in the slot.
Then I got my phone out and opened the thread.
The last thing on it was a sentence from me with a period on the end, from the 11th of November, 2021. Above that, four months of nothing much. Above that, everything.
I scrolled up. I went all the way back to a message from a number I did not have, in October of 2017, that said I want to speak to whoever is in charge of returns.
And then I came back down to the bottom and typed.
I did not draft it. I've drafted apologies four ways at midnight. I've written a congratulations and deleted it, over and over. I've composed three separate methods of getting out of a bed.
I typed it once and I sent it.
Nate: Formally proposing the following. My entire roster.
Every pick I hold through 2032, conditional and unconditional.
Both goaltenders. The commissioner's office, which I will vacate immediately.
The constitution and all keeper rights in perpetuity.
No-movement clause waived. No retained salary and no conditions. For one conversation. Tonight.
Nate: It isn't an insult. I know.
We built that language in February of 2018 on a notepad in a Courtyard off exit fourteen, and the whole point of it, the reason it was safe, was that everything either of us ever sent the other one was rude.
Nobody has ever picked up a phone, read a man being vicious to a rival, and thought anything about it at all.
That was the design. He worked it out sitting up against a headboard with a hotel pen.
"That's insane."
"It's tradecraft. Nobody reads a man's insults, Sinclair. They read his kindnesses."
He was right.
So an honest offer, sent in that format, at midnight, from me to him, is not a message.
It is a flare going up over open water. It says there is nothing left to protect.
It says I've stopped being careful. And there is exactly one person alive who can read it, and he was somewhere in the same building, and I had just fired it.
It delivered. It read four seconds later.
And then the three dots came up.
I've watched those before. On the 9th of July, 2020, I sat up in my kitchen at one in the morning and watched three dots come up and go away and come up again for a long time, from a man who had not sent me a real sentence in months, and at the end of it what arrived was a joke about a pillow menu.
They rose and went and rose again.
I stood there with a key card in one hand and a phone in the other and did not breathe properly while a man somewhere in that building started something and stopped it and started it again.
And then they stopped. Nothing sent. The dots went away and the bottom of the thread went flat and stayed flat, and the screen dimmed itself, and I stood there and looked at my own reflection in it.
And the next sound in that corridor was not the phone. It was somebody coming out of the stairwell door at the far end, fast, and long strides on carpet, and then a knock.