Chapter 11 Rain Delay
Kas woke to the sound of it on the window and lay still for a moment. Body recovered. Heart rate fifty-four. Practice at ten, treatment at one, semifinal preparation after. All of it now useless.
He reached for the phone to begin rebuilding the day, because a canceled schedule still required decisions, and his thumb was over the calendar when the message arrived from a few floors down.
it’s raining, it said, which was very Theo and also not news.
Kas responded: I am aware. The radar suggests a full cancellation.
A pause, the three dots assembling and disassembling, and then: so here’s a crazy idea. what if we did nothing.
Kas looked at the word for some time, as if it had arrived without proper documentation.
Nothing. He turned it over the way a customs officer turns over a passport with a suspicious visa.
In all his years on tour he had logged perhaps four days of genuine nothing, all of them medically mandated and therefore suspect.
I do not have a protocol for nothing, he typed, which was the truth, and was also, he understood as he sent it, an opening of the door rather than a closing.
The reply took four seconds. i know, it said. that’s the whole pitch. room service for two reads as suspicious. there’s a diner two blocks east, the kind where nobody who’d know us has ever eaten. separate arrivals. corner booth. bring the white jacket, it’s raining.
* * *
The diner was called The Capitol Grill, which felt legally ambitious. It contained, at 8:40 on a rained-out morning, a counter of regulars, a waitress named Doreen with a pot in each hand, and a corner booth occupied by a man in a gray hood reading a laminated menu with theatrical absorption.
Kas slid in opposite him, rain-dark across the shoulders, and Theo looked up over the menu, and the performance fell off his face at once.
“You came.”
“It was on the schedule,” Kas said. “I rebuilt the day around it.”
“You rebuilt the day around doing nothing.”
“Nothing requires structure,” Kas said, “or it collapses into errands,” and Theo laughed loud enough that Doreen looked over, decided they were nobody, and brought coffee on the strength of the laugh alone.
They ate enormous, indefensible breakfasts.
Theo ordered for both of them by negotiation with Doreen, a process involving counteroffers, substitutions, and a side of pancakes that arrived on the house “because you’re funny, hon.
” Kas watched the operation with the attention he usually reserved for return position: the warmth deployed, the warmth returned, the whole room adjusting itself around one man in a hood who could not help it.
That face was across the booth, eating his pancakes.
The regulars at the counter adopted them somewhere around the second refill, in the way of diner regulars everywhere: sideways, without ceremony, by argument.
A dispute about the previous night’s baseball game required external arbitration, and Theo, constitutionally incapable of declining jury duty, was sworn in.
Then Kas was consulted on a probability question by a retired postal worker named Earl, who had decided the quiet had the face of a man good with odds.
This morning, the corner booth was annexed by the counter entirely, two men in hoodies ruling on bunts and lottery odds for people who did not know their names and liked them anyway.
Pressed by Earl for a closing statistical opinion, Kas delivered a thorough explanation of expected value. The counter received it in respectful silence.
Earl nodded. “Exactly what I been saying.”
At last, the booth returned to their jurisdiction, lighter, anonymous, fed.
“Question,” Theo said, fork aloft, when the counter’s noise had closed back over them. “Real one. You’re allowed to decline.”
“Noted.”
“When did you know? Not the deal, not the doubles. The other thing. The first data point, in the file you pretend is about tennis.”
Kas put down his coffee. Outside, the rain worked on the parking meters.
Doha came first, then Atlanta, then the towel in the corridor.
He chose the oldest answer: “There is a clip of you from Indian Wells, four years ago. A ball child fell, full sprint, hard, in front of twelve thousand people, and the broadcast caught you reaching her first, before the umpire, before her own colleagues, and you made her laugh before you made her stand up. You checked the cameras afterward. I watched you check. But you reached her first, and the reaching was faster than the checking.” He turned the coffee cup a quarter rotation.
“I knew then the checking came second,” he said.
“I did not know until Atlanta what came first.”
Theo sat very still in the corner booth, and then said, hoarse, “Four years. You’ve been scouting me for four years and I thought you hated me.”
“I am a thorough hater,” Kas said gravely, and Theo had to put his face in his hands, and Doreen, refilling at the counter, told a regular that the two fellas in the corner were having the best Tuesday in the building, and was not wrong.
* * *
They left separately, and Theo took the long way back through the rain because the long way passed a drugstore.
Ten minutes later, he stood under the awning holding his purchase and confronting its central design flaw: he had bought one umbrella.
Large, black, built for two. There was no version of this universe in which two professional tennis players who had denied all association that very week could walk a Washington block beneath it together.
He stood there for a while, getting wet on one side, calculating of his own life. Then he walked back alone under it, taking the rain’s measure.
At the hotel, he left it with the bellman, tagged for the eleventh floor, no note. The bellman delivered it without commentary.
Within the hour, a message arrived from a few floors up.
The umbrella is structurally excellent and emotionally transparent. I am keeping it.
It’s a loaner, Theo wrote back.
Everything here is, came the reply.
Then, before the sentence could be filed under melancholy:
A loan is a structure with a future in it. I have priced the terms. They are favorable.
Theo read it lying on his bed with the rain working the glass and thought, not for the first time, that Kas had learned young to hand things back before they were taken. Now he was keeping an umbrella.
* * *
They walked back separately and reconvened, by text, in the service stairwell of the fourth floor, because the day had ten hours left in it and neither of them had any further interest in apportioning those hours to different rooms.
Kas learned what Theo’s nothing looked like: a movie Theo had seen nine times and narrated anyway, the director’s commentary growing less honest by the minute until Kas threatened formal review; a tournament of paper football across the desk, which Kas won and which delighted Theo in a way that contradicted every theory of competitive psychology; and then, eventually, actual nothing.
Rain on the glass, Theo horizontal with his head on Kas’s chest, the day slack beneath them, refusing to become useful.
Kas waited for the vertigo of schedulelessness to arrive and registered instead, at fifty-two beats per minute, the absence of any need to be elsewhere, an instrument reading he had no prior file for.
Theo learned what Kas’s nothing looked like, which was that it did not exist, and that this was not a flaw to fix but a country to visit.
Even half asleep, Kas retained a quiet running inventory of the room, the day, the rain, him.
Theo had been counted by crowds for fifteen years.
This was different. The crowd counted itself. Kas counted him.
The paper football tournament had stakes, because Theo had proposed them and Kas had accepted with a speed that should have warned him: loser answered one question, any question, with zero deflection, no jokes, no polishing.
Theo lost the tournament twelve to ten on a disputed crossbar ruling he would contest for the rest of his life.
Kas considered his winnings for a long moment, the rain filling the silence, and declined the obvious vaults.
He did not ask about the slide, the wrist, the money, the fear.
He asked, instead, with the precision of a man who had been holding the question since a corner booth at breakfast: “The day you stop playing. Whenever it comes. What is the morning after it like? You have imagined it. Men like us imagine it constantly and report it never.No polish.”
Theo lay back on the carpet among the dead paper footballs and gave the answer the contract demanded, slowly, no jokes arriving to rescue him, none sent for.
“It used to be a cliff,” he said. “The morning after, I mean. No crowd, no schedule, no mirror with a job. Just air. I think that’s why I never let the ranking go completely, even when it was bad.
Losing was awful, but at least it was still tennis.
” He turned his head, looked across the carpet at the man propped against the bed, listening the way other people breathed.
“Lately it’s different. I imagine it and there’s a kitchen in it.
Coffee. Some kid I’m coaching who hits the net cord and swears in two languages.
Somebody’s cello somewhere in the house.
” He heard what he had said one second after the room did.
The rain held its line. “Anyway,” Theo said, hoarse, “that’s the data. You going to log it?”
“No,” Kas said, very quietly. “Not that one.” And the tournament was never spoken of again, and was never once forgotten.
“Say the numbers,” Theo mumbled into his chest later, when the afternoon had gone gray at the windows . “The heart rate thing. I like it. It’s like a weather report but the weather’s me.”
“Fifty-six,” Kas said, fingers at Theo’s wrist, professional, ridiculous, neither of them moving. “Rising slightly. Conditions are good. There is a system developing to the south that bears monitoring.”
“That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It is meteorology.”
“Kas. Read me the extended forecast,” and Kas, who had never in his life performed a bit, performed one, a five-day outlook of escalating absurdity and total accuracy, and the rain held the city down all afternoon, and the schedule update at 14:00 moved the semifinal a day, and neither man checked the app until dark.
* * *
At six, hunger came back and the protocol came with it: room service for one, twice, on two floors, forty minutes apart.
Kas ate at the desk, unhurried, with nothing on the schedule to interrupt him.
The day had produced no result, no ranking point, no measurable improvement.
It had also been the best day of his year.
He opened the study and sat over the empty entry line for a long time. The findings resisted clinical language. He typed, finally, the only sentence the day would accept, and it was not in the study’s format, and he entered it anyway, dated and timestamped:
Today it rained, and we did nothing, and I have never accomplished more.
Four floors down, Theo sat with a club sandwich and a notes app open, failing to write anything that did not sound like a bit. At 8:56, he texted instead: same time tomorrow? checked the forecast. unfortunately it’s sunny.
Tomorrow has a semifinal in it, came the reply. But the morning is unscheduled until nine.
i’ll bring the schedule, Theo sent back. you bring the nothing.
Then he turned off the lamp, the bracket waiting somewhere past the dark.
The unscheduled morning, when it arrived rinsed and blue, was short and took place at the diner, by unanimous silent vote, corner booth, Doreen unsurprised.
They split the check this time, a negotiation Theo lost on the principle that “the loser of the darts owes in perpetuity” was, per the presiding authority, “not a recognized instrument.” Afterward they stood on the corner in the scrubbed light, two professionals a short walk from a semifinal, and performed the morning’s last exchange under cover of stretching.
“Yesterday was good,” Theo said. “For the record.”
“The results justify a longer study,” Kas said.
And he walked off toward the grounds first, per protocol, white jacket in the new sun, and Theo gave it the regulation four minutes, bought a coffee he did not need from a cart, and followed him down the block at the mandated distance, helpless and grinning into the cup.