Chapter 18 The Draw #2
Kas set a ball on the hopper’s pile with the care of a man placing the last component.
“We play tennis,” he said. “It is the thing we were both true at before anything else. On court, nothing changes. I will try to beat you with everything I have, because anything less would be a lie, and I am not willing to lie to you there.”
Theo stood with the evening coming down gold over the outer courts and understood him perfectly.
“Okay,” he said. “Same. Everything I have.”
“Good.” Kas zipped the hopper cover. Then, quieter, the machined edge gone: “Off the court is a different room. We will need to be careful in it. The man from ServeBot has a credential here. He has written two empty articles. Empty articles are nets waiting for a ball.”
“I know. Marsha sent me the second one with a thumbs-up emoji, because Marsha believes all coverage goes to heaven.” Theo rubbed the back of his neck.
“There’s also the Halcyon shoot tomorrow morning.
The grocery thing. They want to film us being domestic as a bit.
I can kill it if you want. I should kill it. ”
Kas was silent for a moment, the long-odds calculation visibly running. “No,” he said finally. “We do the shoot.”
“Seriously?”
“It is the best available cover. No one looks for a hidden thing inside its own advertisement.” A pause, and then, with the smallest fraction of the cheek muscle: “Also, you do not know what groceries cost. It will be educational.”
Theo laughed, too loud for an empty court, the sound bouncing off into the gold, and they walked back toward the transport loop side by side, partners, opponents-presumptive, the whole impossible bracket of it, while above the grounds the stadium lights came on one bank at a time.
* * *
The grocery shoot happened the next morning in a Whole Foods in Chelsea that Halcyon had rented for the morning, and it was, Theo would later tell Owen, the most surreal two hours of a career that included a Davis Cup tie played during a typhoon warning.
The premise was Fire and Ice provisions for the tournament.
The crew tracked them down the aisles while Theo performed grocery shopping the way he performed everything, holding up obscure vegetables for the camera, polling the crew on rice brands, and making a meal of the cereal aisle.
Kas pushed the cart and submitted to it all with the long-suffering patience the internet had decided was his entire personality and would have been astonished to learn was real.
The trouble was that the unscripted parts kept being true.
Kas, unprompted, put Theo’s coffee in the cart: the correct brand, the correct grind, an object he had no reason to have memorized.
Theo, reaching past him for pasta, said “behind you” in the doubles voice without thinking.
At the register, dividing the bags, they ran the logistics in the shorthand of two people who had eaten a great many meals together, and the director watched the monitor with her chin in her hand and said to her assistant, delighted and oblivious, “God, they’re good at this. It’s like they actually live together.”
It almost got away from them once, in the cereal aisle, and the cameras almost had it.
Theo, walking backward narrating breakfast options to the lens, caught a heel on a pallet edge and tipped, and Kas’s hand was at the small of his back before the thought finished forming, not a bit, not a beat anyone had blocked, just the flat reflexive steadying of a man who had done it in the dark more times than either of them counted.
For a moment they both went still inside the gesture, too close, Theo’s breath stopped, Kas’s palm exactly where it had no professional business being, the boom drifting in overhead for the audio.
Then Kas withdrew the hand at the precise speed of a man returning a borrowed pen and said, “Center of gravity. You have none,” flat enough to read as an insult on any monitor, and Theo laughed a beat too loud and the moment dissolved back into content.
On the playback it looked like nothing; they had gotten good at making the truth look like nothing.
But the camera operator had felt the air change in the aisle, and spent the rest of the morning not quite able to say why.
For the last setup, the director asked them to carry the bags out to the car like roommates.
The sun came down Seventh Avenue sideways and gilded the whole ridiculous tableau, and for a few seconds, crossing the sidewalk with paper bags and the man he loved, in public, filmed, applauded, Theo got a taste of the life he wanted, and the joke was that it was the bit.
He smiled for the lens. The smile was real. That was the problem.
The clip of Kas selecting the coffee, captioned HE KNOWS THE ORDER, ran up millions of views by the weekend.
The best available cover, Kas had called it.
No one looks for a hidden thing inside its own advertisement.
Watching the number climb that night, Theo understood the part neither of them had said in daylight: the cover only worked because the truth kept showing through.
Millions of people were laughing at how real it seemed.
Somewhere in Queens, a man with a credential and a timeline was not laughing at all.
Their doubles first round, when the tournament proper finally arrived, was a reminder that Slam doubles was a different sport.
The Australians played at a pace that treated rallies as administrative delay: serve-volley-handshake, blink and the point was over, and the first set was gone before the adjustment came.
The adjustment was Kas’s, delivered at the changeover in a handful of words: “Stop returning their pace. Return their feet. Lob early.” The match turned from there, the Australians’ velocity converted into liability one floated return at a time, and afterward the elder of them, sweat-soaked and cheerful, told the net, “You blokes are rude,” which entered the partnership’s private glossary before they reached the tunnel.
Twelfth seeds at a major, one round survived. Somewhere above the grounds, the bracket kept moving toward Friday.
Friday would tell them, one way or another. Neither man said that part. Both of them slept on it anyway.