Chapter 17 Ten #2
The crowd applauded politely, hearing staffing news.
In Florida, a man watching on a laptop in a dormitory made a sound that brought a junior running from down the hall to check on him.
Theo was fine. He was not remotely fine.
He saved the clip and watched the sentence again and again before sleeping, the words recently expanded doing more for him than any direct address could have, because he knew the speaker’s exchange rate: one coded sentence, on a podium, on the world feed, was worth a thousand private ones, and had cost more.
Sunday night, packing for New York, he opened the tablet to review serve files and found, in the recommended queue, a stream of an exhibition in Boca Raton: a charity hit, Callahan and a few others, shirt untucked, mic’d for the crowd, doing the act.
Kas’s protocol was iron: video inputs capped, muted, analytical.
He pressed play for the serve mechanics.
He watched a long time.
Then he did the thing the study would have flagged as terminal escalation: he opened the thread and typed, You are good with the grip change.
The reply arrived almost at once, the latency of a man whose phone lived in his hand: that clip is six min into a two hour stream. how long have you been watching.
Kas considered several phrasings. I watched more than the protocol permits, he sent, the confession dressed as data.
HOW long.
An irresponsible amount, Kas typed, and put the phone down. A thousand miles away, a man in Florida held his screen to his chest like a trophy, which Kas did not know and knew absolutely.
He had watched Theo clown for a kids’ clinic and then, when the cameras drifted to the other court, kneel to reteach a small girl’s grip with total, unperformed patience while the broadcast wasn’t looking.
The girl was small, all elbows and fury, and her forehand grip had been taught wrong by someone who loved her, which was the hardest kind of error to fix.
Theo did not correct it outright. He showed her his own grip, then deliberately took hers, the wrong one, and shanked balls into the fence with full theatrical commitment until she was laughing too hard to be defensive.
Then he said something the stream’s drifted audio did not catch, put the racket back in her hand his way, and watched her next ball clear the net with topspin.
The face she made was the face every player who ever mattered had made once: the oh, the door opening.
Theo applauded her like a sold-out stadium while looking around for her parents with the urgency of a man who had found something valuable and wanted it claimed.
Kas watched the difference between the two Theos the way other men watched film of opponents, and somewhere in it understood he was not scouting anything. He was missing someone. The protocol lay broken on the floor of the evening, and he stepped over it without ceremony.
After the semifinal, the obligations had run past one in the morning: press, treatment, the federation’s photo.
Instead of the car, Kas had walked out into the player garden, empty at that hour, the grounds crew’s sprinklers ticking somewhere in the dark.
He sat on a bench still warm from the day, his bag at his feet, and called.
It rang once. “Mmf. Hey. You won.” The voice arrived sanded with sleep, pillow-adjacent, the lowercase register at its lowest case. “Saw the last two games. Backhand pass was rude.”
“You were asleep.”
“I was resting my eyes in a tactical formation. What time is it there. Why are you outside, I can hear crickets.”
“The garden was on the way to the car.” This was false. The garden was nowhere on the way to the car. It was a bench in the dark, chosen because he was not ready for the room yet. “I beat the world No. 3 tonight.”
“I know, I watched you do it.” A rustle, the sound of a man relocating deeper into pillows, and then, soft and entirely awake underneath the sleep: “Tell me a thing you couldn’t tell the press.”
Kas looked up. Above the garden, the sky held a few urban stars.
“Late in the tiebreak,” he said, “the crowd was very loud, and I could not hear my own count. And I discovered it did not matter. I have used the count for years to keep the noise out. Tonight there was something better than the count.” He stopped.
The crickets went on. “You will ask me what. I am not going to say it onto a telephone.”
A long exhale down the line. “Monday,” Theo said. “Say it Monday. In person.”
“Monday,” Kas agreed, and they stayed on the line a while longer saying nothing of any informational value whatsoever, and the bench was cold by the end and he had never once noticed.
Monday morning, the ranking became official the modern way: an app refreshing before dawn Eastern. Kas was awake for it, which he told himself was circadian and knew was ceremony. The row rendered: 9, VARGA, K. (HUN).
He looked at it for the allotted time. Then his phone began producing the day: the federation’s congratulations, the sponsor’s, his banker’s, a number in Budapest he had not seen in years and declined with a steadiness he was prepared to call closure.
Four minutes before the hour, because the model ran in both directions now, came a single message containing no words at all: a photograph of a Florida sunrise over a practice court, and in the foreground, held up to the lens, a paper coffee cup on which someone had written, in marker and terrible handwriting, the number 9 inside a drawn heart.
Kas saved it to the folder before he answered any of the congratulations.
He flew in that night with his phone face down on the tray table, and Manhattan came up through the window all at once, lit like a draw sheet. Somewhere inside it was a hotel, a tournament, the last contracted fortnight, and a man who would land tomorrow at a time Kas already knew without checking.