Chapter 15 Long Distance #2
Thursday night, when Cincinnati’s night session made the call hour impossible, Theo sent a voice memo instead.
He recorded it on the covered court at the base while a storm hammered the roof: the rain on aluminum, his own footsteps, the metronome thock of serves into the fence, and at the end, over the racket, his voice close to the phone with no performance in it.
“Florida says hi. Go win your quarter. Call me when the world’s asleep.”
He nearly deleted it twice, the old reflex checking whether it sounded charming enough, then sent it anyway.
The reply came in the small hours, after the night session, after the press, in the spare machined phrasing Theo had learned to read like sheet music: I have listened to it more times than is defensible.
The rain is good. The serves are rushed; you are decelerating on the second toss. Send another tomorrow.
Then, minutes later, a second message arrived: I sleep with the phone on the nightstand now. This is new.
Theo lay in the dark of the dormitory wing holding the recorded rain between two cities, understanding that they had invented, by accident and under logistical pressure, a way to leave the room open.
Owen’s text arrived an hour later, with the cosmic timing he was developing: how’s solitary. Theo typed honest answers and deleted them and finally sent: learning a lot about myself. it’s terrible here.
The reply: that’s growth, champ. one thing while you’re growing. masks have a shelf life. you’ve got maybe one more month where you get to choose how this story gets told. after that the story chooses.
Theo looked at it for a long time, thumb hovering, the storm arriving on the courts outside in a gray wall.
choosing is the part i’ve never been good at, he typed, and for once sent the true thing instead of the funny thing, and put the phone down, and watched the rain take the baselines one by one.
He watched Friday’s quarterfinal from a sports bar in Bradenton, because the base televisions were communal and his face was not yet trained for communal viewing of this particular athlete. Cap low, corner stool, basket of fries as cover.
It worked for a set and a half, Kas dismantling the fifth seed on every screen in the place at once, until the bartender comped his beer with the studied casualness of a man who had known for an hour.
“Your boy’s playing well.”
Meaning, presumably, his doubles partner. Meaning, possibly, everything.
Theo said, “Yeah, he is,” and discovered the sentence cost nothing either way.
A table of retirees adopted him for the closing games. A kid got a photo. Nobody filmed him watching the screen during the handshake, which was fortunate, because no face he owned could have covered it.
He left a tip the size of the check and drove back to the base through the warm dark with the radio off, replaying a backhand pass that had nothing to do with him and felt, anyway, like receiving mail.
Marsha called Saturday with the New York plan, and the New York plan had a deck.
“Content calendar through the final weekend,” Marsha said, items pre-loaded.
“Halcyon wants a docu-style piece. Three days embedded. Cameras at practice, cameras in the players’ restaurant, a sit-down with the both of you, and, this is the big one, they want the apartment thing: you and Varga doing a grocery run in the city.
Domestic bromance. The numbers on domestic bromance, Theo, you would not believe. ”
Theo stood at the window of the base watching a storm assemble over the practice courts and felt the deck land on his actual life with its full corporate weight.
A grocery run. They wanted to film a fiction of the exact truth: the two of them, domestic, learning each other’s brands of coffee.
They wanted to stage the thing he wanted so badly his teeth ached, and sell it as a joke between bros, and the worst part, the genuinely radioactive part, was how easy it would be.
Nobody hid better in plain sight than a man playing himself.
“I’ll talk to Kas,” he said.
“Talk fast. They’re papering the renewal for finals weekend, big signing moment, very visual. Oh, and Theo? Whatever you two are doing, keep doing it. Q score’s never been higher. People believe it, baby.”
People believe it. He hung up and stood in the storm light for a long time.
Sunday’s call set New York. They built the logistics the team’s way, flights and floors and practice grids, and at the end of it Kas said, “I land in the afternoon. So do you.” A pause, freighted. “I have reviewed the bookings. Yours was four minutes later, and you changed it.”
“I have a model,” Theo said. “It says be four minutes early to the things that matter.”
The line did the thing their lines did now, went quiet without going empty, the whole distance between them carrying nothing but two men holding their own systems out to each other like cupped water.
“It is a good model,” Kas said at last, in the register with no machining anywhere on it. “I will see you in New York.”
On his last morning at the base, with New York finally on the boarding pass, Dex cornered him at the gate of the practice court with a phone and an apology already running, “for my wall, sorry, I know it’s…
” and Theo took the photo, arm around the kid, both grips visible, and then held onto the phone a second longer.
“Free advice, since you’re stuck with me on your wall.
There’s going to be a day they tell you what you’re for.
Some clip will land, some bit will work, and suddenly you’ll have a brand, and it’ll fit so well you’ll wear it for years without checking the size.
” Dex blinked at him, all forehand and future.
“Check the size,” Theo said, handed back the phone, and went to hit serves, feeling like a message in a bottle that had finally figured out what to write.