Chapter 30 Riley - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal #3
Bratislava. A balcony rail, four towels, an entire language built out of laundry in nine days without either of us discussing it once.
Both of us clocked the echo. I know he did, because on the sixth night he handed me a pan and his hand stayed on it half a second too long, and neither of us said anything, because the echo was the point.
And then there was the radio.
There was a radio in that kitchen from about 1974 with a dial that turned by hand, and the reception up there was a rumor. Most nights it gave up static and a Portuguese talk show and more static.
On the fourteenth night I was drying a pan and turning the dial with my other hand, and it went through the static, and it landed. American. Old. One of those with the whole highway in it. I knew it in about three notes.
I hummed the first bar, which is a thing my body does without consulting me, and then the second, and then the third. And the fourth bar arrived, and went past, and I did not stop.
In May of 2019 I sat on the floor of a sixth floor corridor in Bratislava at eleven at night taping a stick, and I hummed three bars of that exact song, and then I heard myself doing it and my mouth shut on it in the middle of a phrase because I was in a hallway where somebody could hear me.
I did not know he was standing at the corner until he told me in a hotel room in Toronto at four in the morning, and I had to get up and walk around that room.
Fourth bar. Then the verse. Then the chorus. I sang the whole thing, badly, in a farmhouse kitchen with a dish towel in my hand, out loud, from the chest, with the windows open to the Atlantic.
And Nate Sinclair came across that floor like a man moving into his own life. He took the pan out of my hand, put it on the counter, put one arm around my back and the other hand in mine and we danced.
"You're leading."
"I'm leading," he said, into my ear. "On the authority of eleven Sinclair Christmases and a grandmother who counted out loud. And you're going to let me, because you've been humming for nine days and you didn't know you were doing it."
We were both terrible at it. I fought him for it out of principle for about eight bars and then let him have it, and we went around a kitchen floor in bare feet with two dish towels still over our shoulders, through the whole song, and then the next one, which was somebody else and slower and which neither of us commented on.
And I put my chin on his shoulder and did the arithmetic, because I always did the arithmetic.
Seven years of being told, by him, by me, by the sport, by four men in checked jackets, by a memo from a league office, by my own equipment, that this specific hour was not available at any price, ever, to men like us.
There was a pan in the sink and the radio was going and it was a Tuesday in August, and it had cost us nothing at all.
Two things arrived that day, and the order of them mattered.
That afternoon I was hunting for the sunscreen in his luggage, which he had not unpacked in fourteen days and which was not a suitcase so much as a filing system. Everything in that bag was a cube. There were cubes inside cubes.
And under the second layer, at the back, there was something rolled in tissue paper. I knew before I opened it. My hands knew.
Navy silk. Two hundred tiny white lighthouses in rows, each one about the size of a grain of rice, and they disappeared completely from more than a foot away.
It had been retired since a media day in Bratislava in May of 2019, where he said the word out loud on a stool in front of a dozen countries and I felt something go across my chest and declined to open it.
It came off the far end of a rack in Philadelphia that same spring and went into a drawer in a room nobody went into, and it did not come out again for five years, and then it was on the passenger seat of a car going up the coast of Maine before dawn in June, packed by hands that had stopped consulting him a long time ago.
And it had come to an island in the Atlantic, rolled in tissue paper like contraband, quarantined at the bottom of a bag, saved for something.
I sat on the floor of that bedroom with it in both hands and my heart going like a rookie's. Then I rolled it back exactly the way it was, tissue and all, and put it under the second layer at the back, and squared the cube, and zipped the bag.
Because there are cards you do not play for the other man. You leave them where they are and you keep your mouth shut, which for me is a discipline I have been in training for since 2017 and have failed at every previous opportunity.
I found the sunscreen in the outside pocket.
And that night, late, with the lamp off and the window open and the man mostly asleep on his side with one arm over me, he said it into the dark like it was nothing.
"Tomorrow."
"What about it?"
"There's a lighthouse up the coast," Nate said. "I owe somebody a visit."
I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open and my hand on his forearm and said, "Yeah, okay," in the most normal voice I have ever produced. And then I did not sleep for a while.