Chapter 31 Nate - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal #2
He did the first four clean and fast, the way he always had. He did not think about any of them. He said the numbers the way a man says his own address.
Then he got to 2019, and he missed it by four, and I sat there with the cliffs roaring underneath and heard the half beat go past.
There was a hitch. About a quarter of a second, and it came before he did something he had decided to do, and it lived in the crossover before the move he loved.
I drew it for him on hotel stationery in Pittsburgh in December of 2018, and he stood over my shoulder and asked me why I had never used it, and I told him I was saving it.
I've watched that hitch since 2017 and I took a second-round series off it in a building with no crowd in it in 2020.
He hitched, and then he said a wrong number, in a completely level voice, and reached for his glass.
Riley Kowalski, who has never conceded anything in his life, who taped his own bad press inside a stall door and built a wing out of it, who contested the physics of a coin flip in a hotel room in Tampa for most of an hour, who has argued with a linesman about a measurement that did not exist. He was throwing it.
He was buying the debt on purpose. He was going to lose event seven so that he would owe me one completely honest answer to any question, because after seven years the debt was still the only door he trusted to walk sincerity through.
He could not sit down at a table and simply say a thing.
He had never been able to. So he built a tournament, and he wrote seven events on a card in June and left the last one blank, and then he walked me up a cliff and lost.
I sat there and understood the whole architecture of it in about two seconds.
And I understood, at the same time, that declining it would be the cruelest thing available to me.
If I said I know what you're doing, that door closed, and he had no other one, and I would be taking away the only mechanism the man had ever been able to use.
So I took the win.
"That's four out," I said. "It's ninety-one. You said eighty-seven."
He looked at me for one second too long, and then he put his glass down and put both hands flat on the table. "Four to three. Series is yours. Ask your question."
The last debt I was owed I collected in a Courtyard off exit fourteen in February of 2018, in the dark, eight inches from him, and what came back was the first sentence that man had ever said out loud about himself.
This one was four hours old. I could have asked about the transcript taped inside a stall door and whether he still believed one word of it.
I could have asked about a suite in Las Vegas in June of 2018 and a man on his knees under a desk in the dark.
I could have asked about a cork, or a withdrawal notice, or a pool on a roof in Bratislava.
I did not want any of those. I have all of those, and some of them I've had for years.
"What did you throw the game to be asked?" I said.
He went white. The wind came up off the caldera and moved the paper on the table and neither of us reached for it.
"That's cheating."
"There's no rule against it."
"You wrote a rule about the intent of a stair race four hours ago."
"You built the machine, Riley. You've been building machines since February of 2018 so that neither of us ever has to hand the other one a plain sentence, and I've used every single one of them, and I'm not doing it tonight.
You threw an event. You threw it in the one category where you have never lost to anybody.
So pay the debt, and pay the one you actually bought. "
He sat there for about fifteen seconds. And then he did it.
"Okay. April 12th, 2017." His voice had gone down about half an octave and it did not come back for the rest of it.
"There was a seating chart on a staffer's clipboard the night before and I read it upside down over her shoulder, and my name was next to yours, and I stood in a room in Chicago and felt like a man who'd been handed a five minute power play. "
"Riley."
"Let me get through it. You'll like this part less.
" He was not looking at me. He was looking at the tie.
"I've known since a laundry room at three in the morning in a sealed building that I was going to have to say this out loud eventually or die of it.
I've had it in my chest since I was twenty-one years old.
I told Bo Berglund four years ago in the front seat of my own truck in the snow and I gave him the exact date, and he did not ask me who, because he already knew. "
The candle on that table did whatever the wind wanted with it.
"I love you," said Riley Kowalski. "That's the whole word.
That's what I threw it for. I've loved you since Chicago, since a chicken dinner and a loading dock and a napkin, and I have never once been able to get it out of my mouth without a wager under it, and there's no wager under this one because I paid for it in advance, and I want you to notice that I did that. "
I noticed.
"That's it," he said. "That's the debt. Cleared."
There was an unwritten law between us, older than the fantasy league and older than the Marriott document, and it was that a truth received must be repaid.
He gave me one for free in a hotel room in Philadelphia in October of 2018, when he had won the toss and owed me nothing and told me about a hole under his ribs anyway. I have carried that for six years.
Nobody bet me. Nobody had a coin. The series was over and I had already collected.
I said it. "I love you."
He put a hand over his eyes.
"I've never said that in this configuration in my life.
Not to anybody, and you're getting the whole context on it because you've just given me yours.
I've said it to my mother maybe four times and once to my grandmother, and never once in a sentence that had another man in it, and I have been thinking it in one direction since a loading dock in Chicago where a man told me my power play was broken. "
"Nate."
"I said it out loud with no sound at all against a window on a charter out of Bratislava in 2019, to my own reflection, to find out what it felt like, and then I got off the plane and did not say it for five years."
He took his hand off his eyes and his face was wrecked.
"Even," he said. "And that's the last one, you understand. The score's even and I'm not playing it again."
"Then we'll stop playing."
And then he reached into his pocket and put the cork on the table between us.
It had a bit of wire cage still on it. It had been in two apartments, two bags, a suit carrier to a Stanley Cup Final, a hotel bed in Toronto in February, and the inside pocket of a jacket ever since, and he had carried it across an ocean.
"Custody. It's yours. I've had it seven years and you had a keychain seven years, and then you gave the keychain back in a hotel corridor at six in the morning, and I have not been able to look at that cork the same way since."
I picked it up. "That's a two cent piece of bark."
"That's what I keep telling people."
"You've never told anybody."
"No," he said. "I haven't."