Illustrations by Lili Wood
The day was cold, cold even for August in San Francisco. As Lionel walked over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, the wind seemed to be coming from every direction—the Pacific, the bay, the brackish creek underfoot. And with every step, Lionel’s left shoe squeaked, an especially maddening thing, given that he’d just had them resoled. For years he’d passed a subterranean shoemaker’s shop, thinking it would be old-timey and fun to engage the ancient Romanian proprietor in some project. Finally Lionel had entered the man’s tiny shop and asked him to resole his favorite leather shoes, so soft they felt like moccasins. The whole encounter had been as quaint and satisfying as expected, until Lionel retrieved the shoes a week later and found that the left one now let out a cartoonish squeak with every footfall.
When Lionel went back to the shoemaker, the old man shrugged. “Some shoes squeak,” he said.
Lionel had learned to walk on the edge of his left foot. This decreased the sound, but gave him a worrying gait. People at the stadium had begun asking him about it.
Lionel covered the Giants for the Examiner—the home games at least. The paper didn’t have the budget to send him on the road. The season was effectively over anyway; the team had no chance at the playoffs, and the mood in the clubhouse was dour. Not that the players were so garrulous in winning, either. Sydney Coletti saw to that.
Brought in to head the media-relations department, she’d drilled the players on verbal discipline, and day after day, they dispensed word clusters that made sense but said nothing: “Trying to contribute.” “Just focused on getting the win.” “Great team effort.” “Happy to be here.”
Sydney strode around the stadium in beautiful suits, sunglasses embedded in her raven hair. As if aware of her imperious affect, she often brought in treats—candy, cupcakes, huge bars of artisanal chocolate. She was polished and warm, but had no qualms about limiting access if a reporter crossed her. So Lionel had traded candor for access, and loathed himself for it.
“Nice work, Lionel,” Sydney said when she approved of something he’d written. It was a terrible thing, to be praised this way.
“Get me sticky,” Lionel’s editor, Warren, demanded.
The problem was that when a player said something even vaguely sticky—Warren’s word for memorable, colorful, controversial—the sportswriters pounced, and often the player paid the price. Apologies followed, and lost endorsement deals, diminished love from fickle fans, a requested trade, a new team. That, or a player could just keep his mouth shut.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Lionel entered at the stadium’s media gate and made his way through the dim hallways to the locker room, where he showed his lanyard to Gregorio, the security guard.
“Hannah beat you,” he said.
“Beat me how?” Lionel said, thinking it could be any of 10, 12 ways. There she was, interviewing Hector Jiménez.
Hannah Tanaka was technically his competition, in that she wrote for the Chronicle, the larger of the two valiant locals. But from the time he’d started on the Giants beat, she’d done everything humanly possible to help Lionel—introducing him to every staffer at the stadium, sharing every tip and data point—and he’d quickly fallen in love with her. She was so steady, so funny; her laugh was raspy, almost lewd.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
She turned when she heard him. She had her notebook out, and her phone—she had some transcription app that converted everything a player said to text, instantly—but she looked at Lionel and smirked. That smirk! Good lord.
She was married, though, and had two teenage girls, and so every year Lionel had gotten better at disguising his heartache. During the games, they sat next to each other, bantering, complaining, comparing notes, and with every word she said, in her low, clenched-jaw way, he was stung by the great injustice of finding his favorite person, sitting next to her every day, but heading home each day alone.
Lionel looked around. He could talk to the second baseman, Hollis, who had some kind of problem with his heel, but what was the point? Warren wouldn’t give him space for news of another almost-injury to a player on a losing team.
Hannah finished with Jiménez and sidled up to Lionel. “Behold the new guy,” she said, and nodded to a gangly man in the corner. She handed Lionel the day’s media packet and pointed to the relevant paragraph about a middle reliever, Nathan Couture, being called up from AAA Sacramento. “Get him before Sydney puts the muzzle on,” Hannah said.
The man in the corner was holding the sleeves of his uniform apart, apparently dumbfounded to find his own name, COUTURE, stitched to the back of a Giants jersey.
“Nathan?” Lionel asked.
The pitcher turned around and smiled. His teeth were small, and he was missing his left canine; it gave him a look of youthful incompletion. He had a narrow, pockmarked face and a weak chin. A wispy mustache overhung his stern, chapped lips.
“First time in the majors?” Lionel asked.
“Indeed,” Nathan said.
That word—it wasn’t heard so much in a locker room. Lionel wrote “indeed” in his notebook, and then asked the most inane, and most common, query in sports. “How does it feel?” It hurt to utter the words.
But Nathan nodded and inhaled and exhaled expansively through his nostrils, as if this was the most provocative question he’d ever heard.
“When I got the call, just yesterday, I was elated,” Nathan said.
Lionel heard an accent. Rural. Southeastern maybe. Georgia? He wrote down “Elated” and underlined it.
“The drive from Sacramento was a fever dream,” Nathan continued. “The scenery rushed by like meltwater. And then to get here, to this cathedral, to warm up, and to meet these men at the top of their craft”—he swept his arm around the room, now filled with a dozen or so players in towels and jockstraps; one was jiggling his leg, as if to awaken it—“and to be welcomed by them without condition, and now to see my name on this shirt … I have to say, it’s sublime.”
Lionel wrote and underlined “sublime.” He looked around to see if he was being pranked. But no one was listening; no one was near.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” Nathan said, and extended his hand. Lionel introduced himself, and found that Nathan was examining his face with a friendly but jarring intensity. He rested his eyes on Lionel’s notebook. “Do you take shorthand?” he asked.
Lionel’s handwriting was a chaotic mix of cursive and all caps—a madman’s scrawl. “No, no,” he said. “This is just my personal code, I guess.”
In four years, no player had ever asked even the vaguest question about Lionel’s process or profession.
“I assume you’ll call me a journeyman,” Nathan said.
Lionel had just written that exact word. He quickly crossed it out.
“Don’t, don’t,” Nathan said. “I like the word, and for me it’s apt. And removed from baseball, it’s a good word, don’t you think? Journey-man. I know not everyone loves it, since it implies a kind of purgatory just below success, but in isolation, the word has a simple beauty to it, right? How could you not want to be called a journey-man?”
Lionel looked at the word he’d obliterated. “I guess so.” He circled it. When he glanced up again, Nathan was looking down at him with priestly interest.
“Did you dream of this work as a boy?” he asked.
Lionel couldn’t speak. He returned to the assumption that this was a prank. He looked around. No one looked back.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t probe like that,” Nathan said, and laid a hand on Lionel’s shoulder. “I just had the sudden awareness that the two of us are in the enviable, even surreal position of living out our most impossible dreams. The fact that we aren’t digging ditches or mining coal—that I’m paid to play a game and you’re paid to watch a game and tell people what you see—it seems, in a world of sadness and misfortune, to be a thing of great luck. Don’t you think?”
Lionel watched the game in a daze. He sat in the press box, Hannah on his right. On his left was Marco DaSilva, in his mid-20s, round-shouldered and stat-obsessed, and for some reason doing AM radio, where the average listener was 76. Lionel read, and reread, his notes, while hoping Nathan Couture would be called in to pitch.
“Interesting guy?” Hannah asked.
“His numbers are shit,” Marco said.
It was not right to withhold anything from them, but Lionel kept the strange interview to himself. The Giants lost badly and Nathan didn’t play, and somewhere along the way, Hannah, bored by Lionel’s distracted state, moved to sit next to Marco, and made a show of having an especially good time with this new seating arrangement.
Lionel wrote up the game, but because Nathan hadn’t been a factor, it made no sense to include him. He’d play sooner or later, Lionel figured, at which point he could get him into a story. Maybe Warren would let him do a profile. Or maybe not. Warren didn’t generally like human-interest stories.
That night, Lionel went online, searching for Nathan Couture. His hometown was Thomasville, Alabama. He was 28 and had never been to college. His statistics were unremarkable in every way, which meant he was unlikely to remain in the majors for any stretch of time. He was both average and old. A mediocre pitcher who was happy to be in the bigs, and who asked about Lionel’s work and method? What was he thinking?
Nathan was sent back to Sacramento the next day.
Lionel wrote up his summaries of the games that week, printing the players’ inanities, and Sydney baked white-chocolate brownies, which were exceptional.
“I don’t like her baking, actually,” Marco said. He and Hannah and Lionel were watching batting practice on another cool August afternoon.
“Her cookies are brittle,” Hannah said. Lionel hadn’t thought about Sydney’s cookies that way before, but they were definitely on the crumbly side. Soon the three of them had turned on all the food in the stadium. The garlic fries, which had been so crisp last season, were now less crisp, and the little pepperonis on the pizzas had dropped a few notches.
“Remember when they were sort of curly?” Lionel asked.
The gates of complaint were now open. The architects of the park, they agreed, had not allotted enough elevators, so the writers often had to wait—sometimes many minutes—to get from the field to the press box.
“And the paper towels!” Marco said suddenly, tragically.
In the bathrooms closest to the press box, the paper-towel dispensers had been replaced by air dryers, which they all agreed were too loud.
“Well,” Marco said, his voice weary, “I guess we should go inside and get the lineup for tonight.”
Lionel grabbed the copy Sydney had put in his cubby and saw Nathan’s name. He felt a flutter of excitement that embarrassed him.
“Couture is back,” Hannah said, and Lionel nodded, giving away nothing.
The game began, and by the sixth inning, with the Giants up 5–0, it was highly unlikely they would need Nathan. He was the third or fourth middle reliever on the roster, and the starter was still soaring.
But the Padres hacked a series of singles into shallow left and right, and suddenly it was 5–3, then 5–4. The manager made his way to the mound and took the ball, and the starter walked to the dugout, head low and muttering. Lionel looked to the bullpen to see who would emerge.
When Nathan stepped out, he waited on the warning track, taking a long breath. He walked onto the grass like it was the first step of a royal staircase, and then broke into a steady trot. The rest of his entrance and preparations were routine. He kicked the dirt and took his warm-up pitches. His face appeared on the massive outfield screen, in a goofy photo, and 20,000 fans wondered, idly, who he was. Then, without fuss, he struck out the first batter with three pitches.
“Damn,” Marco said, and typed feverishly for a while. Lionel assumed he was looking for some numerical context for what had just happened.
The next batter hit a rope toward left. Winebrenner, the third baseman, knocked it down but bobbled it, and there was a runner on first.
When the third man up hit a dribbler to second, Hollis fielded it—clumsily—and flipped it to the shortstop, who stepped on second and threw to first for a double play.
“Okay,” Hannah said. “Okay.” For Hannah, this was high praise.
Next inning, Nathan took care of the first three batters in much the same way—with crafty pitch selection and pinpoint placement. When the third hitter fouled a ball high, Nathan ran after it, briefly confusing the first baseman, who waved him off and caught it.
Between innings, Hannah took a cryptic call.
“Huh,” she said. Apparently Hollis, the second baseman, was getting an MRI. The heel that had been bothering him was now shot. Something had happened during that double play.
More experienced pitchers closed out the eighth and ninth, and that was that. The Giants won, 5–4. Down in the locker room, the early word on Hollis’s heel was bad. Warren would not want the story of Nathan Couture, not on the night the starting second baseman got injured. Lionel wandered over to Nathan anyway. Most of the players had showered already, but Nathan was still in his uniform.
“Is that corny?” Nathan asked. “I wanted to savor it a bit longer.”
Hollis seesawed into the room on crutches and the reporters swarmed. The professional thing to do would be to go over and hear from the player who’d won four Gold Gloves and was being paid $12 million. But Lionel stayed with Nathan.
“I noticed you paused when you first stepped out,” he said.
“I did,” Nathan said. “I assume you want to know how it felt?”
Lionel smiled and licked the tip of his pen theatrically.
“It was big,” Nathan said.
Lionel wrote down “It’s big” and for a moment, he wondered if Nathan’s earlier eloquence had been a fluke.
“Kidding, Lionel. Truly, I think it’s a happy, wholly irrational spectacle,” he said. “Don’t you think? I mean—”
“Hold on,” Lionel said, and scrambled for his tape recorder.
Nathan took a deep breath. “I mean, those upper-deck seats are probably 200 feet up. Think of it. Twenty-five thousand people were here tonight, some of them sitting 200 feet in the air, to see men play as silly a game as has ever been conjured. Balls and bats and bases—all of it perfected and professionalized, sure, but essentially childish and irrelevant. And to serve it, to celebrate it, this billion-dollar coliseum is built. People come 100 miles to watch it under 1,000 lights. When you and I first met, it was a day game, a completely different atmosphere. At night the stadium takes on the look of deep space. The sky is so black, the lights so white, illuminating a surreal sea of green. When you jog out there, as I did, in the dark, it feels, briefly, like you’re in a spaceship, approaching a new planet.”
Hector Jiménez, the catcher whose locker was next to Nathan’s, had begun listening, and was giving Nathan a disapproving look.
“There was some confusion over that foul ball,” Lionel said, and already Nathan was nodding.
“First of all,” he said, “that ball was rightfully Gutierrez’s, but it started out over my head, and that northeast wind took it toward the first-base line. So I had it in my sights, but then it evaporated. I mean, it ceased to be!”
Lionel caught Jiménez’s eye. He looked alarmed, horrified.
“And for a long moment,” Nathan continued, “as I searched the void for the ball, I thought, I’ve caught a million balls. How could I lose this one? And then I thought, Why am I here? Where are my legs? Are my arms still raised? Why can’t I see? The sky was so black, and this solid thing, this baseball, had utterly disappeared in it! So I wondered if the ball had been real, and if I was real, if anything was real.”
Jiménez tossed his gear into his duffel and zipped it loudly.
“Then I smelled roast beef!” Nathan said, and laughed loudly, placing his hand on Lionel’s shoulder. “I thought, Is that roast beef I smell? Who brought roast beef to the ballpark? Then Gutierrez yelled, ‘Move, kid, I got it!’ and my eyes swung toward him. As they did, I saw the blur of 1,000 faces in the stands beyond first. Then he caught the ball.”
Jiménez walked away. Seconds later, Sydney appeared. She always grew suspicious when interviews ran long.
“Everything good over here?” she asked.
“Fine,” Lionel said, but the interview was over.
Lili Wood
Lionel had to wait a few days for the drama of Hollis’s injury to play out before asking Warren for some space in the paper to profile Nathan. Warren had zero interest in it, especially since Nathan hadn’t played again. But then one day an ad dropped out, so on page 23, Lionel was allotted six column inches to introduce “Nathan Couture, Pitcher With Unique Outlook.” He did little more than print the two long quotes he’d gotten from Nathan before Sydney had hustled him away, but the article made an impression.
“You have to play me that tape,” Hannah said, clearly dubious.
All the reporters wanted to talk to Nathan, but Nathan was suddenly unavailable. Sydney felt they’d dodged a bullet in having this eccentric Alabaman talk and talk and somehow avoid a catastrophic mistake. She would not risk it again. But then she said she would.
“The owner insisted on it,” Warren said.
The octogenarian owner of the team had evidently read Lionel’s article, and was an immediate fan of Nathan’s. He wanted Nathan in games, and wanted Nathan to talk, as much as he could, before and after games. The owner, viewed as an eccentric himself (though from Kansas), was assumed to be not long for this world. Three days after Nathan’s first outing, he pitched the eighth inning of another tight game, and again he held his own, and the Giants won. This time, he had to bat, and actually stroked a line drive into Triples Alley. Against the wishes of the first-base coach, Nathan rounded first base and was easily tagged out at second. It made for a comical and eventful inning, and the home crowd went berserk.
Afterward, a scrum of reporters surrounded him, and Lionel, who had unwisely waited for the elevator, found himself in the third ring. He felt oddly proprietary, even jilted. He wanted, to a degree that filled him with shame, some kind of acknowledgment from Nathan that he was different, that he had been first.
Nathan looked around and smiled broadly. “Well, this is extraordinary.”
Hannah was closest. “General thoughts, Mr. Couture?”
Nathan stared at the ceiling for a while, as if peeling back the many layers of the query, then rested his eyes upon her.
“First I thought about the smell of the grass,” he said. “They cut it today, so the smell was fresh and just a bit sour, as newly cut grass is. There’s something both wet and dry at the same time, both dead and alive. I inhaled a bit longer than usual, wanting to take everything in, and I saw four men, all gray-haired, arm in arm in the stands, posing for a picture. Then the Jumbotron showed a picture of the same men, as teenagers, at a ball game. Same four guys, same pose, just 50-odd years ago. And I had the feeling that the four of them, whenever they stand side by side like that, probably feel invincible.”
“Nathan, I—”
Another reporter broke in, thinking Nathan was finished. But Lionel knew he wasn’t.
“Then I saw a seagull. Maybe you did too? It hovered over home plate for a moment, maybe 20 feet up. Under the lights it looked like a tiny angel. I wondered what brought this bird, alone, to the ballpark. No doubt he hoped he might come across some discarded chips or fries, but the risk is considerable, too. Wouldn’t the lights, and 30,000 people, be daunting? But then again, he can fly. Is anything daunting when you can fly? And briefly I thought about the nature of flight. I do think there will come a time when humans can fly more or less as birds do, and I wondered how that would affect our idea of freedom. Will anyone ever feel constrained, spiritually or materially, if they can fly?”
Lionel wrote down “If we can fly.”
“And then it was time to pitch,” Nathan said. There was scattered laughter, and the exchange of looks. Nathan was stranger in person than he had been in Lionel’s article. A dozen hands went up.
“Oh jeez,” Nathan said. “I just went on and on. And you probably have so many other players to talk to. Why don’t we do a speed round? Deal?”
Someone in front asked, “What was it like to get your first hit?”
“If you remember,” Nathan said, “I fouled off the first two pitches. And fouling a ball off is like every mistake you make in life: You put everything you’ve got into a task, and if it’s just a little wrong, it’s wrong enough to make the whole effort a waste of time. The ball goes nowhere, or worse than nowhere. But when the barrel of the wooden bat hits the ball just so—you feel nothing. There’s no resistance. Nothing at all. The ball leaps into the sky. The struggle is gone.”
Marco edged in. “Nathan, the average spin rate of your four-seamer is solid, at 2320, putting you ninth among middle relievers, but tonight, your average for the last three batters was 2090. Do you have a plan to address that?”
As Marco talked, Nathan’s face slackened, his eyes glazed, and when Marco was finished, he said, “Honestly, Marco, I have no ever-loving idea.”
A balding man in a baby-blue sweat suit raised his hand. It was Tom Verlo, from the L.A. Times. He’d likely come upstate to throw a bit of cold water on San Francisco’s new attraction.
“Can you tell us about running?” he asked. “You looked a bit rusty.”
“Was it as bad as I’m thinking it was?” Nathan said, and flashed an enormous and spectacularly awkward smile. “You know, as natural as it was when I hit that ball, running was the opposite. I felt like I was running in 1,000-year-old armor. By the time I got to second, the ball was in the second baseman’s glove. He was waiting for me like a groom would a bride. When he tagged me out, I was so relieved, I wanted to fall into his arms.”
Tom smiled. “On the broadcast, it looked like he said something to you.”
“He did. He said, ‘Mijo, now you can rest.’ ” Nathan looked at the clock on the wall. “We should hurry. Superspeed round now.”
“What does it sound like when a ball is caught?” a young web reporter asked.
“When I was a kid in Alabama, my grandfather lived in the backyard, in a little cottage. Every night after dinner, I would walk back to his place with him, and he would kiss me on the crown of my head and say, ‘Adieu.’ Then he would close the door, and the sound of his door closing would be a muffled, wet, and decisive click. That’s what it sounds like when a ball is caught. Like the click of the door to my grandfather’s home.”
Nathan looked at the clock. “Okay, one last one? I see you, Lionel.”
Lionel, standing in the back, was happy for Nathan, and for the moment felt unnecessary. He shook his head.
That was the game, and the interview, that broke Nathan Couture into the national media. The next day, and for the following week, he was everywhere. ESPN did a segment, and Jimmy Kimmel had him on his show. With Sydney offering Nathan freely to all, the only thing Lionel could do was go to Phoenix.
Nathan’s parents, though they’d raised Nathan in Alabama, had moved to Arizona, and Warren green-lit a longer profile. In a stolen moment before a game, Lionel told Nathan he was thinking of going, and Nathan gave his blessing. “I trust you,” he said.
“Thank you,” Lionel said.
“You report accurately and you listen carefully,” he said.
“I try,” Lionel said.
“They are tremendous people,” Nathan said. “Immeasurably charming. You’ll love them, and they you. I’m envious that you get to see them. I’ll call ahead and let them know I vouch for you.”
Lionel arrived at a comfortable ranch house 20 minutes from downtown Phoenix. A pickup truck was out front, and next to it, a small fishing boat rested on a trailer. Lionel rang the bell, and when the door opened, a thin couple in their late 60s stood before him, arms around each other’s waists. Jim and Dot, short for Dorothy.
“Lionel,” Jim said.
“I took the liberty of pouring you a glass of ice water,” Dot said.
Lionel followed them in. He walked on the side of his left foot, but the squeaking was clearly audible. Lionel guessed, correctly, that they would be too polite to mention it.
“Come sit,” Jim said, and indicated a plush leather recliner in the living room. It was almost surely Jim’s TV chair, and Lionel took the honor given. Nathan’s parents sat to his right, on a matching couch.
“Nathan speaks highly of you,” Dot said.
“He does,” Jim agreed.
Lionel got his notebook out and looked around the room. He’d expected a house full of books, but saw few. There were no trophies, either—no shrine to their son, the professional baseball player. An enormous TV dominated one wall. Next to it were two photos, from middle school, he guessed. One was clearly Nathan. The other was a girl, younger by a year or two, who shared a version of Nathan’s goofy smile. But there was something knowing, even sardonic, in her eyes.
“So how does it feel,” Lionel asked, “with Nathan becoming this …” He almost said “curiosity” but instead chose “phenomenon.”
“Oh, it’s been so nice,” Dot said.
“He worked hard,” Jim said. “Deserves it.”
Lionel smiled, thinking they were warming up. But they were done. Dot held her glass of water with two hands and smiled at Lionel in a motherly way. Lionel looked down at his notebook.
“So outside his skill as a pitcher,” he said, “one of the things that’s gotten Nathan noticed is his way with words. Was he always loquacious?”
Dot winced. She looked to Jim. Jim chewed his cheek.
“I read your first article,” Dot said. “When you had him saying ‘Indeed,’ right away I thought, That’s the comebacker.” She pointed to her temple.
“He was never, you know, book smart,” Jim added. “That was his sister.”
“Never read a book unless you tied him down,” Dot said.
“He didn’t talk a whole lot,” Jim said, “and when he did, he did it in a regular way. He was all laser-focused. That’s how his coaches described him.”
“Single-minded. Then the comebacker happened,” Dot said.
“I’m sorry. The comebacker?” Lionel asked.
“Well, he was hit by a comebacker,” Jim said, sounding surprised that Lionel didn’t know. “In Sacramento. It was on the radio up there.”
“We were at the game,” Dot said. “It was awful. Nathan threw a fastball to a very big guy, I think he was from Nevada, and this guy hit the ball right back at him a million miles an hour. Hit him right here.” Again she pointed to her temple.
“From our angle, it looked awful,” Jim amended. “But later we saw it on tape, and it was more of a … It sorta grazed his head. The doctor checked him out and said he was okay. Nathan felt okay too. He pitched the rest of the inning and did fine. But then he took us out for dinner afterward, and it was like talking to some other person.”
“He had a $10 word for everything,” Jim said. “He said the wine was ‘unafraid.’ I remember that. The wine was ‘unafraid.’ That was new.”
“He did say that. He said a lot of things,” Dot said.
“He talked a lot that night,” Jim added. “We flew home the next morning, and a few days later, he gets called up to the Giants. Which is when you met him.”
“We figured the new way of talking was some temporary thing,” Dot said. “But then your article comes out, and he’s still talking this way—‘indeed’ this and ‘glorious’ that.”
“His sister talked like that. She was the reader.”
Lionel was afraid to ask.
“She passed young,” Dot said, and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “It was a tumor. When they found it, it was too big.”
Jim cleared his throat. “Anyway. With Nathan, when he was talking like that, we put it together. It had to be the comebacker.”
Dot was nodding steadily, her eyes locked on Lionel. “Like something got knocked loose, and whatever was clogged up in there came pouring out. Sometimes people get hit in the head and start speaking another language.”
Jim nodded enthusiastically. “French, Portuguese, Turkish. But it seems like it’s usually French.”
By the time Lionel left, the impossible heat of paved Arizona had relented. He drove with the windows open, the red sunset behind him. He got back to the hotel and checked his messages. One was from Hannah.
“Sorry about your boy,” she said. “You probably know more than I do. Call if you want to compare notes.”
Lionel looked online and found a short blip about it. Nathan had been pitching in Cleveland when he blew out his arm. He left the park in a sling.
The professional thing for Lionel to do would be to return to Nathan’s parents’ home and get their reaction. But he couldn’t bring himself to bother them, and was so shattered that he sat on the bed and stared at the wall for the better part of an hour. Finally he got to his feet and drove his rental car to the airport.
Back in San Francisco, Lionel waited for news. For two days Nathan wasn’t at the park, and no one had updates. Finally a press conference was called.
The room was full. Lionel sat at the back. The team doctor came out and said they’d done an MRI and consulted with the best specialists in the city. Nathan would need surgery, and even after that, the prognosis was not good. “I can’t promise anything,” the doctor said.
And then Nathan walked in, wearing a coat and tie, his arm in a sling. He sat down. He looked warmly out at the throng of reporters, but before he could begin, Tom from the L.A. Times walked in late. “What’s the prognosis?” he asked.
The room groaned, but as always, Nathan treated the question with great decorum.
“If I were still 18,” he said, “I might be able to get the surgery. Then, in 10 or 12 months, I could return, though with reduced capacity. But I’m almost 30, so there is no way back. Even if I did every last thing right, I’d be, at best, a single-A player. And an old one at that.”
Hannah was in the front row. She raised her hand.
“Hi, Hannah,” Nathan said. “I’m guessing you’d like to know how it feels?”
She laughed and lowered her hand.
“It’s a good question. At the moment, I’m still stunned. Numb. I have to admit my imagination had gotten away from me, and I saw great glory ahead. I was looking forward to the rest of the season, to seasons to come, to the lights, all those people sitting 200 feet in the sky to watch this game. It’s over sooner than I expected, for sure. So for the moment, I’m adrift. Don’t you cry now, Hannah.” He looked around the table for tissues. “All we have up here is water. Here,” he said, and poured her a tall glass from the pitcher. And as he did, time slowed. Every reporter in the room watched closely, as if they’d never before seen water move from one vessel to another.
Nathan sat down again, and called on Lionel.
“Did you have any warning?” Lionel asked.
“You know, my friend, I really didn’t. I felt good that day in Cleveland. But it’s probably like any other thing. How can a sequoia withstand a thousand years of earthquakes and fires and wind, and finally, one day, it just falls? One afternoon, a gust comes and it gives up.” Nathan stood. “I’ll miss you all. Hope I see you here or there or somewhere in between. Goodbye now.”
Lionel walked onto King Street, trying to figure out how to shape the story, or if he should bother. He still hadn’t written about his time with Nathan’s parents; his heart wasn’t in it. When he turned the corner at Third Street, heading home, he felt a presence next to him.
“Caught up to you!” It was Nathan, out of breath. “I tried to find you at the park, and then was wandering around the neighborhood, hoping to run into you. I know you live around here. Then I heard the squeaking.”
They ducked into a burrito place. Lionel tried to order margaritas for them both, but Nathan declined. “I don’t know why my mind is working the way it does now, but I don’t want to mess with it.” He ordered a lemonade.
Lionel ordered a lemonade too, and they sat by the window facing the park. “Your parents told me about the comebacker,” he said.
“Yeah, I figured,” Nathan said. “Funny thing is, I don’t feel different, and I don’t see differently than I ever did before. I’ve always noticed the same things, but I guess that now I have the need, and maybe the words, to describe it.
“My sister was the eloquent one,” he continued after a pause. “My parents mention her?”
“A little bit,” Lionel said.
For a second Nathan smiled, as if thinking of her, of something she’d said. “Anyway,” he said, “I’ll be reading you, making sure you get it right.”
“I can do better,” Lionel said suddenly, and Nathan did not argue the point. It was criminal to sit in that park, Lionel thought, with all that color, all that vaulting joy in a world of sadness and misfortune, and not do better.
“You plan to fix the squeak?” Nathan asked.
“I took it back to the shoe guy,” Lionel said, “but he freed himself of any responsibility.”
“Can I?” Nathan asked, and Lionel took off his shoe and handed it to Nathan.
“It has to be an air pocket, right?” Nathan said. Even with one bum arm, he quickly found the pocket and aimed a fork at it. “Can I?” he asked again. Lionel nodded, and Nathan jabbed a strategic hole. “Try it now.”
Lionel put the shoe back on and walked a few steps. The squeak was gone. His relief was immeasurable. “Thank you,” he said.
They finished their lemonades and stepped back into the city. The lights were on in the stadium. Lionel had forgotten there was a home game that night. He turned to Nathan, thinking he’d be wistful, but his eyes were sharp and happy.
“So what will you do now?” Lionel asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that. Are you walking this way?” Nathan was heading toward the water, his gait loose. Lionel followed.
“Maybe you buy that Romanian shoemaker out.”
Nathan laughed. “You know,” he said, “a few years ago, I was in a high-rise in Guangzhou, visiting a friend at his office. Long story. But anyway, this was 42 floors up, and there was a man outside, cleaning the windows. He had one of those wide T-shaped tools for cleaning the glass—like a blade. You know the tool. So simple. He drenched the window with soap, applying it with such liberality. Just soaked this vast window overlooking this limitless city.”
Nathan turned to the towers of downtown San Francisco.
“And then, with the T-shaped blade, he slashed the surface of the glass with the precision and finality of a guillotine. He got every last white sud. As we watched, the view through the window went from muddy to crystalline.”
Lionel couldn’t figure out what the connection was. Nathan wanted to be a businessman in a Chinese high-rise? And how had this minor-league pitcher from Alabama ended up with a friend in Guangzhou?
“So I thought I’d like to do that job,” Nathan said. He meant cleaning the windows. “Not necessarily in Guangzhou, and not forever, but I’d like to try that for a while. I like being outside.”
They’d arrived at the water, and Lionel thought he should get back to the ballpark. He reached out to shake Nathan’s hand. Nathan lowered his sling and took Lionel’s fingers in his.
“Or babies!” he said, still pumping Lionel’s hand. “You know how after babies are born in hospitals, there are nurses who hold the babies while the moms recover from the birth? How do you get that job?”
Nathan released Lionel’s hand and began backing away, toward the South Beach marina, where hundreds of white masts looked like lances aimed at the night.
“Imagine holding babies all day!” Nathan said. “Wouldn’t that be a worthwhile life? So tomorrow I’m going down to the maternity ward to find out who gets to hold the babies. I want to hold all those babies before they go home.”
This story appears in the September 2023 print edition.