Chapter 9
Emile
So this is getting what you want. Nobody warns you it comes with a bill, and nobody warns you the bill comes due about a breath after, while your hand is still knotted in the guy’s shirt and your whole body is still ringing like a crossbar somebody just put a slapshot off of.
He kissed me. Casimir Wrobel kissed me. The wall, the monk, the saint who arranges his day into rows, he crossed a room he’s spent a year keeping people out of and put his mouth on mine.
Or I kissed him. Who moved first? I genuinely can’t tell you, which never happens to me.
Knowing who moved first is basically my whole personality.
I’ve made a career out of reading which way a body is going before the body knows, and the one time it counts, the one time I’d give a finger to have the tape, there’s no tape.
There’s just his mouth and my hand and the flat gray light.
I keep going back to it all night. I run it and run it.
How he crossed the room slow and sure. How he didn’t stop coming.
The exact moment his stone came off. I couldn’t find that moment then.
I can’t find it now, no matter how slow I run the thing back.
And the sound. I keep landing on the sound.
He made a sound with my first name still in it, and I’ve got a whole drawer full of Casimir Wrobel, not one thing in it prepared for that sound.
So I lie there in the dark with the thin wall at my back and I want to knock on it. Just to hear him not answer.
And what does my idiot brain do with the best thing that’s ever happened to it?
It starts doing math.
Because two things are true at the same time now, and they won’t fit in the same room, and I have to live in the room.
One. I’m getting starts, real ones, and the only way through that door is to be better than the guy on the other side of it, who is the guy who just kissed me like the building was on fire.
Two. I want to kiss him again more than I want to walk through the door. How does that fit inside one guy?
You can’t have the net and the man. I did that math weeks ago, lying awake, and it came out ugly, and it hasn’t gotten one bit prettier for the kiss.
There’s one net, one crease, one job, one name at the top of the list, and I’ve wanted that name to be mine since I stood at the end of a bench in full gear watching a building come off its feet for somebody else.
That want is the oldest thing I own. It got me out of a town two hours from anywhere and it’s the reason my mother worked the shifts she worked.
You don’t get to set a want like that down because a guy kissed you in the equipment room.
Then there’s Casimir, who is the name at the top of the list, who I have to climb over to get it, who says my first name like it’s the only word he trusts.
You can’t climb over a man you’d lie down in traffic for.
Tabarnak, how does a guy carry both of those into the barn every morning and act like a person?
So obviously, being me, I decide I’ll have both.
That’s the plan. All of it. It’s a terrible plan, and I know it’s a terrible plan.
You know the ice is thin. You skate out on it anyway.
And I’m going to run it. Because the puck went out there.
The puck is always out there. That has been the entire problem with me since I was small enough to fit inside the equipment bag.
I catch him the next morning before anyone else is in the barn.
I get there in the dark, before even the rink kid with the mop, which I didn’t think was geometrically possible, and he’s already there.
Because of course he is. The man beat me to the dark.
First idiot in has always had exactly one competition and its name is Casimir Wrobel.
He’s at the shelf. Glove, blocker, the two fingers on the corner, the whole quiet chapel of him.
I stand in the doorway and watch him not-look at me the way only he can not-look at a person, a not-looking so total it’s the loudest thing in the room.
The equipment room has its usual cold in it, the one bad fluorescent ticking overhead and washing the color out of everything under it.
It doesn’t wash out of him. He looks like the only warm-blooded thing in a walk-in cooler, moving through the sequence with his back half to me, each piece going down square to the next with a small click of foam on wood.
I’ve watched him do this a hundred mornings.
I watched it as a scout. I watched it as a menace.
I’ve never watched it the morning after his mouth was on my throat, and it turns out that changes the whole thing.
Now every square piece looks like a sentence in a language he taught me by accident.
I stand in the door and read it, and my chest does something I’ve got no chirp for.
So I say the dumbest, truest thing I’ve got.
“I’m still taking your net.”
His hands don’t stop moving. “I know.”
“On the ice. Fair. I’m not going to stop coming for it just because you.
” I make a gesture. The gesture covers a lot of ground.
It covers a shirt and a mouth and a first name.
“So if that’s a problem, if last night was a one-time short-circuit and now we go back to me being a menace and you being a monk, then tell me, okay?
I’ll live. I’ve lived through worse. I’ve been the second guy my whole life.
And there’s probably a trophy for it somewhere in my mother’s basement, second place, engraved wrong.
I know how to want a thing and not get it and still show up in the morning. ”
Now his hands stop. He turns around. And there it is, the window, up high where I found it, except this time he doesn’t slam the blind down over it.
He lets me stand there and watch him decide something.
It costs him. I can watch it cost him, same as I watched the lights stutter and cost him, the whole weight of a man leaning against a thing that leans back.
“Off the ice,” he says. Slow. Careful. Like he’s laying brick, like he’s building a small room he can survive inside of.
“Off the ice is a separate thing. It stays off the ice. It does not touch the net. It does not touch the room. It does not touch the order. Two things that don’t know about each other. ”
I watch him build it in real time, laying each brick, testing each brick, setting the next one on top, and standing there I understand something I wouldn’t say out loud with a gun on me.
This is how he keeps everything. This is him, top to bottom.
He takes a thing too big to hold and puts walls around it until it’s a size his hands can manage.
He’s doing to us what he does to the dark.
He’s squaring it on a shelf. And the terrible part, the part that tells me exactly how far gone I already am, is that I find it unbearably dear.
I want to live in whatever small room he’s willing to build for me. I’d take a closet.
“A contained thing,” I say.
“A contained thing.”
And I should say no. I want to be clear about that, in case somebody runs the tape on my whole life someday and stops it right here.
A smarter version of me is standing in that doorway screaming no.
You can’t wall the two of you off from each other, you absolute goalie.
What line do you draw down the middle of a person that you can stand on one side of?
But smarter-me doesn’t have his hand in the shirt.
Smarter-me didn’t hear his own first name come out of Casimir Wrobel’s mouth against his skin.
Smarter-me is a coward with good instincts, and in a whole life I have not taken his advice one single time, me.
I’m not about to start. Not on the best morning I’ve ever had.
“Okay,” I say. “Contained.”
We shake on it. We actually shake on it, like it’s a trade at the deadline, like you can sit down and negotiate the terms of a thing that already has both hands wrapped around your throat.
His palm is dry and cool, a goalie’s palm, and mine is not.
I feel the shake go all the way up my arm and land somewhere it’s got no business landing.
He sees it land. I know he sees it, because the corner of his mouth does a thing, a small private thing, a thing I’d fight the entire conference to see again.
He lets go of my hand a half-second after he needs to. I count the half-second. I keep it.
I go to practice. The barn is loud and ordinary.
Sticks, shouted names, the scrape of a hundred stops.
Sowa lines the goalies up head to head and calls it competition.
It is competition. So I put my mask down and become the daylight version of me, the one the room gets, the one who wants the net and nothing softer.
I outplay him in the duel. I go five-hole on him twice, clean, up the middle, looking him dead in the eye and going anyway.
Both times it lands in me like a betrayal and a love letter at the exact same time.
Because I’m the only guy alive who can find that gap on him.
I proved it the first time I ever stood across from him.
And now I’m finding it in front of the whole room, to keep a job I want, on the one man on earth I’d sooner throw my body in front of than beat.
The first one, the young guys make their sound, the short bright one.
The second one they go quiet, because twice isn’t luck.
Twice is a scouting report walking around in pads.
I skate back to the line and I don’t look at him, because if I look at him I’ll do something my face can’t afford in front of Sowa.
I look at my glove instead. I tap the puck out of it. I get back in line like it was nothing.
The second time, he says it flat, from his crease, not even mad. “You’re showing off.”
“For the scouts,” I say.
We both know it isn’t for the scouts. There are no scouts at a Tuesday practice.
He knows it, I know it, and neither of us can say the true thing at the top of a faceoff circle with twenty guys and a goalie coach watching.
So we say the rivalry thing. We’re so good at the rivalry thing.
It’s the one language we’ve found, the one we’re both allowed to speak in daylight, out loud, where the team can hear.
It fits in the mouth. It doesn’t give us away.
That’s the game now. Two games. The one everyone in the barn can see, and the one that only exists in the two feet between his stall and mine, in the thin place in the wall, in a contained thing we both already know is going to leak. Even standing there shaking hands over it like idiots.
Because here’s the thing about a contained thing.
It doesn’t stay contained on its own. It’s a fire, and I built my half of the wall around it out of wet cardboard.
Wet cardboard, at a fire, and who does that?
I lay another sheet of it up every morning anyway.
He’s better at walls than me. But even the best wall in this conference has a gap in it dead center, and I’m the guy who finds gaps.
I’m in so much trouble. And I’ve never in my life been happier to be losing.