Chapter 14
Casimir
I watch him win my net from a suit in the press box. I feel two things at once. They do not cancel.
I have spent my life making feelings cancel.
It is most of what the order is for. You set one thing square against the next and the wanting comes down to zero and you are level.
I am the best I have ever met at it. Tonight, high behind the glass with a tie knotted at my throat, the two things will not go to zero.
They sit in me side by side. Both of them are true. There is no wall between them.
The first is pride. That is the one I did not expect and cannot afford.
He goes back to the top after the goal against. The way I told him.
I said it over his stall with the room too loud to hear me.
He took it out onto the ice and used it.
I watch it work from behind the glass. The puck gets in on a tip he could not have stopped.
A puck that changed its mind in the air.
I watch his shoulders. I have learned his shoulders the way I learned his everything.
A young goalie’s shoulders climb after a goal.
They come up around the ears. Then the next three shots beat him, because he is still playing the one that already went in.
His do not climb. He resets. Glove up. He runs it clean, the small private course I handed him.
The next shot dies in his chest. Something in me stands all the way up in that press box and says there. That is mine. I gave him that.
A coach’s feeling. A thing I have no right to.
I am not his coach. Sowa is his coach. I am the man whose net he is standing in.
I am proud of him the way you are proud of a thing you built.
It is the most dangerous feeling I have had all year, because it is warm.
And warm is the thing the order exists to keep out.
Under the pride, the other thing. The cold one.
That is my crease. My paint. My showcase, my last one, the final season the whole order was ever secretly the key to.
And I am up here behind glass in a suit, with the man who came all this way to write my name sitting three seats down and one row up, watching a boy play my position.
Every save the boy makes is a save I did not get to make, in front of the one book that is the door.
Both. At the same time. The pride and the cold thing under it. No partition between them. No ritual on this earth that takes them down to zero.
The radio man on my left has been working up to me since the anthem. He waits for a whistle and leans over with his headphones down around his neck.
“Wrobel. Leg all right?”
“Fine.”
“Coach resting you, or.”
“Resting.”
He waits for the rest of it. There is no rest of it. Down on the ice Fortin robs a man from the top of the circle and the barn makes the sound it makes, and the radio man forgets he was ever talking to me, which is the only kindness anybody in this box does me all night.
At the next whistle he comes back. They always come back.
“What’s it like, watching the kid?”
I consider the true answer for exactly as long as it takes me to refuse it.
“He is good.”
“That’s it? He’s good?”
“That is it.”
He does not write it down. There is nothing there to write down. The flat voice is a craft and I have spent my life on it, and tonight, for the first time, I am not sure it is a craft so much as a place I have been hiding.
He plays out of himself. I will not pretend otherwise to make myself feel better.
He steals a game a weaker goalie loses. He is loose where I am sealed.
Half of it is bad. The other half I still do not have the word for.
The early read. The wrong commitment that turns out right.
The glove full of a puck that should be in the net.
The young ones on the bench watch him the way you watch a thing you cannot make yourself look away from.
The barn makes its sound for him. I make myself watch all of it.
It is a discipline. You do not look away from the thing that frightens you.
You learn it, so it cannot surprise you.
So goes the method. It has never once worked on him.
The scout writes when the boy makes the two-on-one save.
I see the pen move. I have spent a season learning to read that pen from the ice and from the end of a bench, and it reads the same from up here.
Tonight it moves for a save I did not make, in a crease I built my whole life to own.
I sit very still and keep my face the way I keep my shelf, square, finished, giving nothing to the row in front of me.
Inside I am doing a thing I have no name for.
It is not clean jealousy. Clean jealousy I could hold.
It is jealousy with pride laced through it and the two will not separate, and a thing that will not separate cannot be filed.
My leg is fine. Whole and useless in a pair of slacks, folded into a seat built for a man who came to watch.
I tell myself I am scouting him, managing the variable.
I am not. I am watching the man I cannot stop watching do the one thing I cannot stand to watch him do, and doing it beautifully, and I would not look away if I could.
Sowa catches me in the corridor under the stands with my tie still knotted.
“You watched him.”
“I watched the game.”
“You watched him.” He does not push. He never pushes. “What did you see?”
“A boy guessing right.”
“Try again.”
I do not try again. He waits about as long as a man can wait in a corridor. Then he lets me keep the lie, which he has not done before, and which frightens me considerably more than the correction would have.
He comes to the room that night still lit up from it.
Still half in the game, as they are after, when the body has not caught up to the fact that the game is over.
There is nothing left to do with all of it.
His music comes down the hall ahead of him, low, the thread of it.
Then he knocks in the rhythm, two fingers, once.
The thing he stole off my shelf and made into a way to reach me.
I open the door and he is already talking, because he has been talking since the horn and has not found anywhere yet to set it down.
“Thirty-one shots. Thirty of them. Did you see the one in the second? Of course you saw the one in the second, you saw every one of them, you were up in the good seats with the free coffee. Was there free coffee? There’s always free coffee up there. Cas.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what.”
“Yes. I saw it.”
He stops in the doorway with the rest of the sentence still loaded in him. Something goes out of his face and something harder comes into it, because he has just this second worked out what it cost me to sit up there and watch it.
“Right,” he says. “I’ll shut up.”
“Don’t.”
I should send him away. I have every reason. He just won my net in front of my scout in my final year. The correct move, the ordered move, is the closed door and the quiet room. The day set down piece by piece until spokój comes home.
I do the opposite. I pull him in by the front of his shirt before the door is even shut.
It is not tender, not like the storm night with the one bed.
It is teeth. It is the two things I am feeling with nowhere to put them but him.
I get him against the door hard enough to rattle it in the frame.
Nothing in me is soft anywhere. He gives it back the second I start.
He always gives it back. He cannot be filed, a man who wins your net and then bites your lip like he means to take that too.
“Harder,” he says into my mouth. “I mean it. Don’t be careful with me.
” I taste blood, mine, and I do not stop.
My hands are in his hair, dragging his head back so I can get my mouth under his jaw.
Then his hips, hauling him into me, gripping hard enough to leave marks I will be glad of.
His teeth come down on my throat and I let them.
I want the mark. I want proof in the morning that this happened to a man who does not let things happen to him.
We do not make it to the bed. There is the dresser and the door and no patience left in either of us for anything farther.
I get his fly open with hands that will not steady.
He gets mine faster, his hands never anything but sure, and then he has my cock in his fist and I have his in mine and my forehead goes down on his shoulder because I cannot hold my head up through it.
It is still a contest. Even here. Even now.
Which of us breaks first. He strokes me rough and slick, talking into my ear, low and filthy and unbroken, until there is nothing left in me that knows how to hold still.
He wins it. Of course he does. He is loud and I am not, and the sound he tears out of me is the last word in the argument.
He goes a breath after me, hot over my knuckles, his body pulling tight and then giving out against mine.
We finish standing, holding each other up, foreheads knocked together, breathing the same hard air.
I do not think. The not-thinking is the only mercy I get all night.
Afterward we are wrecked and tangled. His heart is going against my side, slowing. The room is warm. It is not supposed to be. I lie there in the dark under his weight. And I almost tell him.
It is right there. Closer than it has ever been.
The winter I stopped sleeping. What was in the house.
Why the plates, why the candle a thumb from the curtain.
I have never said it to a living soul. Not Sowa, who knows the shape of it and has the grace never to reach for the middle.
Not anyone since my grandmother went into the ground.
Here, with his hand open on my chest and his breath gone even and slow, I get closer to saying it than I have ever been. I feel my throat get ready to make the shapes.
I could start with the house. That is how I would have to start.
Not the order, not the shelf. The house first. The cold rooms of it and the mill whistle across the valley.
The way you learn as a small boy to read a grown man’s boots on the stairs, fast or slow, and what each one means for the night.
I could tell him the whistle is still in me.
That a horn in a barn is a mill whistle to my body, no matter how many times I explain to it that it is only a horn.
I could tell him my grandmother’s hands over mine, and what she taught them, and why.
I could tell him she gave me a country to live in that was only as big as a shelf.
That I’ve lived in it ever since. That it’s the smallest safe country in the world and I have been the only citizen.
The words are right there. I have never had them this close to the surface. It would take so little.
Then I feel how much it would be to hand him.
How completely it would put me in his hands.
This boy who is taking my net a start at a time, with my own coach’s blessing and my own rope in his glove.
Who has been gathering me since the first day.
I have no proof of that and I do not need proof.
I read shooters for a living and I know the feel of being read back.
Somewhere in that boy is the whole map of exactly how to take me apart, and he has never once said so, and I have never once asked.
He is warm against my side. He is also the living reason my crease is not mine tonight.
The old thing closes my throat before the words can get out.
The gap. The one place I cannot let anyone through, even now. Even him. Especially him, because he is the one who could get all the way in. A thing that gets all the way in can bring the roof down. From the inside.
“What?” he says. He felt me go still. He always feels it. He’s learned my body the way I learned his. “You were going to say something. What was it?”
“No,” I say.
He waits. He knows it’s a lie. He’s lying against a man who has studied him at close range all season, and he knows it the second the word is out.
He does not call it. That is new. He has always called it before, the bald lie handed over like a dare, and he takes the dare and turns it back on me.
Tonight he doesn’t. He lets the lie stand in the dark between us.
Is that mercy? I can’t tell. I don’t know if he is learning, finally, to keep his own ledgers quiet. To hold a card back the way I hold every card back. Either way it costs me more than the calling would have. A man who lets your lie stand is a man who has decided the lie tells him something.
I board the window back up with him lying right next to me.
Brick by brick, over the exact place I nearly opened.
It is the loneliest thing I have ever done, and I have done a great many lonely things, on purpose, for years, as a way of life.
I do it because the alternative is a fall and I do not know the bottom of it.
A man who has spent his life keeping the dark on the far side of a wall does not go looking for the bottom of a fall.
Not in the one season he cannot afford to land wrong.
He falls asleep with his arm across me. I lift it off a knuckle at a time, the way I did the first night, and I stand up in the dark of my own room with the day scattered on the floor around my feet.
So I pick it up. His jeans off the chair, my shirt from by the door, every piece back where the room says it goes, quiet enough not to wake him.
When I finish, the room is perfect. I am still holding the thing I did not say, and a perfect room has not moved it one inch.
I tell myself it was the right call. I do not believe me.
You cannot lie to a body trained to read the smallest tell, and mine is reading my own tell in the dark, the way it read the scout’s pen.
It knows the flat voice for what it is. A wall.
Not the order. Nobody has ever put a name to the difference for me.
I feel it anyway, standing in a squared room over a warm bed, holding a secret I could have set down in it and chose to carry back out into the cold instead.
I could still wake him. One word would do it. I stand there long enough to be sure I am not going to, and then I get back in and put his arm across me where it was. Because safe is the country I was raised a citizen of, and I have never once applied for another passport.