Chapter 9
NIKOLAI
The road trip to Nashville is the first test of a system that does not have a manual.
At the apartment, we have a rhythm. Eli sleeps in my bed. His toothbrush is in my bathroom. His sneakers are by the front door in a configuration that would make a shoe organizer weep. The rhythm has been forming for eleven days.
On the road, the rhythm breaks.
On the bus to the airport, I sit in my usual seat (fourth row, window, left side).
Eli sits three rows behind me with Bennett, who is already talking about something involving a restaurant in Nashville that serves, according to Bennett, the best hot chicken in the southeastern United States.
Bennett's voice carries the way weather carries: across all available space, without regard for boundaries.
The three rows between us are the system's first road-trip decision.
The three rows say: we are teammates. The three rows say: the bus is public and the public is where the performance operates and the performance does not include sitting next to the man whose body was in my bed at 6 AM this morning.
I can hear Eli laughing at something Bennett said. The laugh fills the bus the way his laugh fills every space it enters.
At the airport gate, Jonah Park slides into the seat across from me, still half asleep, and says: "Weird question, but why does Mercer smile like that every time you walk into a room?"
I put my coffee down very carefully before I answer. "He smiles at everyone."
Jonah tilts his head. "Not like that, he doesn't."
Jonah moves on because Jonah always moves on. But the sentence stays.
I open my book. The book is Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, which my mother sent from Detroit with a note that said "you need to read something that is not hockey" and which I have been reading in ten-minute intervals between film sessions and practice and the time-consuming project of learning how to share a living space with a person who considers organization a hostile concept.
The book does not hold my attention. The book is not holding my attention because my attention is three rows behind me, laughing with a Canadian defenseman about hot chicken.
At the hotel in Nashville, the rooming assignments are posted in the lobby.
I am roomed with Anders Lindqvist, a Swedish forward who communicates primarily through silence and who considers the ideal hotel room interaction to be: enter, nod, sleep, wake, nod, leave.
I have been roomed with Lindqvist for three seasons.
The arrangement works because Lindqvist requires nothing from me and I require nothing from Lindqvist and the mutual nothing is the ideal roommate dynamic for a man whose emotional bandwidth is fully allocated elsewhere.
Eli is roomed with Bennett. This is the correct assignment.
This is the assignment that maintains the professional boundary.
This is the assignment that does not require explanation or adjustment or the career-ending conversation that would begin with "Coach, I'd like to room with the rookie" and end with the end of everything.
In the hallway, between the elevator and the rooms, Eli passes me. The passing is ordinary. Two teammates in a hotel corridor, moving in the same direction, separated by the three feet that the corridor provides.
His hand brushes mine. Not an accident. A graze of the back of his fingers against my palm, the contact lasting less than a second, hidden by the angle of our bodies and the corridor traffic and the fact that nobody is looking because nobody expects to see it.
The graze is fire. The graze travels from my palm up through my wrist and settles in the place behind my sternum where the match-strike lives, the place that has been warm since the corridor and the folder and the first time Eli Mercer's skin touched mine.
He does not look at me. He keeps walking. Bennett is ahead of him, still talking, and Eli follows Bennett with the casual stride of a man who did not just set fire to another man's central nervous system in a hotel hallway.
I go to my room. Lindqvist is already there. Lindqvist nods. I nod. The mutual nodding is complete. Lindqvist opens a book (Scandinavian crime fiction, always Scandinavian crime fiction, the man has read every murder committed in Sweden). I open mine.
I do not read. I sit on the hotel bed with Bulgakov in my hands and my palm burning from the graze and my brain performing the specific, failing calculation of how to survive three nights in Nashville with Eli Mercer three rooms away.
The game is that evening. The Reapers play Nashville at seven. I dress in the visitor's locker room with the routine that eight seasons have encoded: pads, jersey, tape, the physical ceremony of becoming the player. The ceremony is the control made ritual. The person is gone. The player is here.
On the ice, the player is here. The player is excellent.
The player shuts down Nashville's top line with the mechanical precision that is my signature, the calculated dominance that earned me two All-Star selections and zero highlight reels because defensive excellence is invisible by nature.
Nobody cheers for the thing that doesn't happen.
Nobody cheers for the shot that is never taken because the lane was never open because the lane was me.
Eli plays well. Eli plays well because Eli is getting better every game, the speed and the instinct sharpening into something that the coaching staff can build around.
He has an assist in the second period, a backhand saucer pass through traffic that is the "elite option" in its purest form: the dramatic play that is also the right play, the timing and the talent converging.
When the goal goes in, he does not celebrate toward me. He celebrates with the bench, with Bennett, with the physical, communal joy of a hockey goal that is appropriate and normal and does not include looking at the defenseman on the far blue line.
He does not look at me.
I do not look at him.
The not-looking is the system.
We win 3-1. The locker room is warm and loud with the energy of a road win. I change out of my gear. I shower. I dress. The routine.
In the corridor, heading toward the bus, I pass Mars Santos.
Mars is walking from the goalie room, his bag over his shoulder, his face in the configuration that Mars's face is always in: calm, analytical, reading.
Mars reads everything. Mars reads shooters and film and the emotional states of his teammates with the same comprehensive, prediction-based attention that makes him an elite goaltender.
Mars looks at me. Brief. The Mars look. It says: I have data. The data is about you. It is sufficient for a conclusion. I am not sharing the conclusion because the conclusion is yours to reach. But I have reached it.
I keep walking. Mars keeps walking. The hallway is a hallway.
At the team bar after the game, Eli sits in a booth with Bennett and two of the other young players.
He is laughing. He has a beer in his hand (Eli is twenty-two and can legally drink and the legality of his drinking does not diminish the fact that seeing him with a beer makes me feel, for reasons the control refuses to examine, old).
Bennett is telling a story that involves hand gestures broad enough to qualify as interpretive dance.
I sit at the bar with Lindqvist. Lindqvist drinks one beer. I drink water. The water is the routine.
From the bar, I can see the booth. From the booth, Eli cannot see me. The one-directional visibility is the system's road-trip configuration: I watch, he does not know I'm watching, the watching is private, the privacy is the control.
Except the watching is not private because Mars Santos is sitting four stools down the bar and Mars Santos's eyes have traveled from his own water glass to my face to the booth where Eli is sitting and back to my face, and the traveling has produced a conclusion that Mars is not sharing but that his face, in the bar light, is communicating with the understated precision of a man who has been reading people for his entire career.
Mars catches my eye. The eye contact lasts two seconds. Two seconds from Mars is an eternity. Two seconds from Mars is the Mars equivalent of a conversation that another person would need twenty minutes to have.
The two seconds say: I see you. I see where you are looking. I see who you are looking at. I have seen this before, in this building, four times. The data is clear. The conclusion is formed. I am not going to say it because saying it is not my function. Seeing it is my function. I see it.
He returns to his water. I return to mine.
The bar continues. Lindqvist finishes his beer and nods goodnight.
Bennett's story reaches a climax that produces laughter from the booth.
Eli's laugh is the loudest. The laugh carries across the bar and lands at the place where I am sitting and the landing is the painful, impossible-to-manage sensation of a man who is hearing the person he wants being happy in a room where the wanting must remain invisible.
After the bar, in the hotel elevator (a different elevator, a Nashville elevator, an elevator that does not contain a mirror or a memory), Eli stands beside me. We are alone. The elevator is moving. The floors pass.
"Good game," I say.
"You too. The shutdown on their top line was surgical."
"Surgical is what I do."
"I know." He pauses. "Mars was watching."
"Mars watches everything."
"Mars was watching you watch me."
The sentence is quiet and accurate and I do not respond because the sentence does not require a response. The sentence requires an acknowledgment that the system has a flaw. The flaw is not the watching. The flaw is that the watching is visible to a man who reads everything.
"He's not going to say anything," Eli says. "Mars doesn't say things. Mars just... knows."
"Knowing is sufficient."
"Is that a problem?"
I think about the question. Mars knowing is not Alexei knowing.
Mars knowing is data stored by a man who stores data the way other people breathe: automatically, comprehensively, without the impulse to weaponize it.
Mars stored the data about Cole and Mik before Cole and Mik were public.
Mars stored the data about Wes and Luca before the bread became a love language.
Mars stores data and the data is safe and the safety is the difference between this team and every other team I have played for.
"No," I say. "It is not a problem."
The elevator reaches his floor. He steps out. In the hallway, between the elevator and his room, he turns back.
"Three nights," he says. "Three nights of the system."
"Yes."
"I don't like the system."
"The system is necessary."
"The system is you sitting at a bar watching me from four stools away and pretending you don't want to be in the booth."
The doors begin to close. His face disappears. Then his hand, catching the door, holding it open for three more seconds.
"I want you in the booth," he says.
The doors close. The elevator takes me to my floor. Lindqvist is asleep. The room is dark. The Scandinavian crime fiction is face-down on the nightstand.
I lie in the hotel bed in Nashville and I think about the system and the bar and the booth and the hand-graze in the hallway and Mars Santos's two-second look that contained a career's worth of data and Eli's face in the elevator saying "I want you in the booth."
The booth. Not the bed. The booth. The ordinary. Sitting with the man I am sleeping with and the team I play for and the two facts existing in the same sentence.
The wanting is new. Not the body wanting, which has been present since the corridor. The ordinary wanting. That is why it frightens me more.
The ordinary is the thing the control prevents.
The ordinary is the thing Alexei made impossible.
The ordinary is the thing this team has built and that I have been living inside for three seasons without accessing because accessing the ordinary requires the control to step aside and the control does not step aside.
Except the control stepped aside in an elevator. And in a kitchen. And in a bedroom. The control has been stepping aside in increments and the increments are building and the building is approaching a threshold and the threshold is the booth.
I close my eyes. Nashville is quiet outside the window. The game is won. The system is intact.
The system is also, I am beginning to understand, a prison with excellent plumbing.
Irina's voice in my head, unbidden: "Control is my gift to you, Kolya."
The gift is a prison. The prison is a gift. The distinction is the thing I need to learn.
Three nights.
The system holds for three nights. And then the system changes.