13. Elias #2
"Give me a day," Frey said. "And get some sleep before tomorrow. You sound like a man who's trying to do two jobs."
***
Nolan pulled Hannah's container out of the refrigerator at six, and he heated it in a pot on the stove.
It was the first time I'd seen the stove's burners do any work.
She'd braised beef and made a stew with caramelized onions and at least five kinds of vegetables.
It made the entire condo smell like somebody lived there.
We ate at the island with cloth napkins. When I raised an eyebrow at them he said, "She'd know."
He was quiet through the first half of the meal.
"Your contract," he said finally. "With the team. It runs through the end of the run, whatever happens?"
"Through the run. They included a few days of wind-down and time to write a handoff report, that kind of thing."
"And then back to Minnesota?"
"Hopefully for a week or two. Then it's to wherever the next client is."
He nodded and pushed the stew around with his spoon. "Have you given any thought to after? I don't mean the next client. The rest of it."
"Sure. Everybody does."
"You've done this many times." He looked up. "It's your whole thing, right? You just gave the speech. You're the guy who lived through the end of your world and came out fine. The first week, you started to tell me what swimming was to you, and then you stopped. Finish it now."
So I told him. I ran through the entire story out loud for the first time in years. I talked about being twenty-one years old and a real contender. The butterfly stroke was the only language I was fluent in. It occupied nearly every waking hour of every day.
Then, on an ordinary day in June, after practice, in the diving well, three of us were horsing around. It wasn't anything strange. We were twenty-one, and our bodies were invincible. They never told us no.
I tried a backward dive that looked harmless. My body hit the board on the way down.
"Five seconds," I said. "That's the part people can't comprehend.
There's no villain, no Boris Badenov twirling his mustache.
I wasn't being brave, I was bored after practice.
The knee still worked fine for everything on earth except the one thing I'd built my life around.
I lost four hundredths of a second off my turn, consistently.
That was the difference between good and fighting for world records. It was all over at twenty-one."
Nolan didn't speak.
"And I lived," I said. "That's the point of the story.
There was an after. I finished school, got the doctorate, taught for years, and I liked it.
I built the next thing, and when time was up on that, I went to the next.
The dream died, but I didn't. There's a whole life on the other side of the last game, Nolan. I'm not guessing. I'm the proof."
"Okay," he said. "So where is it?"
"Where's what?"
"The whole life." He didn't mean anything by it, but it was a real question.
"You keep telling me there's one waiting past the game.
You insist it's a good one. So show me yours.
Who's at the center of it?" He leaned forward and stared at me.
"Who gets the first call, Elias? If something wonderful happens to you tomorrow, who are you gonna call? "
I opened my mouth to give an answer. I always had an answer.
Some options came to mind. There was the rowing club, Tuesday and Saturday mornings.
It was a group of twelve men who knew my stroke rate but not where I lived.
There was Michael, who called me at one a.m., about work.
I had former students who sent me Christmas letters and former colleagues who'd blurb the book if I ever wrote it.
My sister lived in Duluth. I saw her on Thanksgiving when I wasn't working.
The answers scrolled by in my head. None of them was right.
I couldn't give a proper answer to his question. I didn't have that one person.
"That's what I thought," Nolan said.
He didn't press for more. He stood, took my bowl, and put the electric kettle on, keeping his back to me for a minute.
"We're done eating, and you barely touched it. She'll ask."
"Tell her it was the best thing I've had in this city."
"Tell her yourself sometime." He turned around. He wasn't angry; that would have been easier. "You've spent weeks here reading me like a chart, Elias. You knew about the hip in a day." He shrugged. "I see you, too. That's all. I just decided to say it out loud."
He didn't let it sit for long. "Come on," he said, drying his hands. "You owe me a rematch. I bet you don't remember."
The game room woke when Nolan flipped the switch. The screens lit up in sequence. He took the left chair and handed me a controller. We were on the same squad in the game.
I was still the worst, behind Nolan and the computer players. I walked into a doorframe, shot a wall, and got us both eliminated once by standing in an open street admiring the map. Nolan laughed the second time. It was a real one, rising up from deep inside his chest.
"Left side," I said. "Two of them, the window above you."