The Death of Baseball

by Orlando Ortega-Medina

  Clyde struggles to his feet and moves to the building. He knocks on the front door, feebly at first, then more forcefully as his adrenaline kicks in one last time. The faint sound of a TV reaches him from a distance. He resurveys the building from the middle of the road. A soft blue light flickers in the upstairs window. Approaching the building once again, he locates a side staircase then ascends it to a second-story landing and bangs on a door there insistently.

  “Help me, please… help me…” he calls, then collapses.

  When he returns to his senses, he finds himself on an examination table in a dingy cream-coloured room, dressed in a hospital gown. Painfully raising himself on one elbow, he catches sight of himself in a mirror. His right eye is swollen shut, but the cuts and scratches on his face are washed and dressed. He tenderly touches his eye and grits his teeth against the pain that radiates into his face from the pressure, then falls back onto the table. A moment later he hears a noise emanating from outside the room and calls out.

  A dark, squatty man in his early forties, wearing a white lab coat pulled over red plaid pyjamas, appears in the doorway drying his hands with a dishtowel. He regards Clyde with a concerned yet cautious look on his face.

  “What is this place?” Clyde feels the room tilting on its axis. “Who are you?”

  “You collapsed on my doorstep,” the man says in perfect prep school English. “I treated your wounds.”

  “You’re a doctor.” Clyde struggles to sit up. “You speak English, and you’re a doctor.”

  The doctor crosses the room and eases Clyde back onto the examination table. “Remain still, please. You may have suffered a concussion.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Clyde tries to sit up again against the firm pressure of the doctor’s hands. “I’m not the one who needs a doctor.”

  “You’re hurt—”

  “I have a friend,” Clyde whimpers. “He’s injured badly, he’s losing blood.”

  The doctor raises an eyebrow at Clyde.

  “Please, we have to hurry.”

  Clyde grabs the doctor by the wrist and looks him in the eye.

  “I have money.”

  * * *

  Clyde bursts through the hotel room door followed by the doctor and sees Ralph’s body dangling from a radiator pipe on the ceiling, at the end of a black leather strap wrapped around his neck—his skin blue, his eyes wide and bulging, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. The chair lies on its side, half in the bedroom, half in the bathroom.

  Clyde screams and crosses the room. He upends the chair and climbs it to unhook Ralph’s body, sobbing hysterically. The doctor moves forward to intervene, but Clyde slaps him away. He lowers Ralph’s body to the bed and desperately claws away the leather straps from Ralph’s neck. Then he hugs Ralph’s body tight and repeatedly kisses his face between loud choking sobs. The doctor touches Clyde’s shoulder.

  “Get out!”

  “Please, let me help,” the doctor says.

  Clyde arches his back and whips around, baring foaming teeth at the doctor.

  “I said get out!” He leaps from the bed and shoves the doctor toward the open door. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The doctor falls to the floor and crawls the rest of the way out of the room. Clyde slams the door shut behind him, then starts back to the bed when he sees Ralph’s strongbox on the floor, its contents spilt out across the room. He moves to it, almost afraid to touch it, and picks up the papers and photographs and various notebooks with trembling hands. Then he lifts the strongbox onto the table and lovingly places the items inside. He spots a manila folder under the desk out of which have slipped a few newspaper clippings. Stooping to pick them up, a headline catches his eye:

  Transvestite Arrested for Trespass at Former Monroe/DiMaggio Honeymoon House

  Clyde stares at the headline for a moment, his heart pounding in his head, not comprehending, and not wanting to comprehend. He picks out another clipping and gasps as he sees a photograph of himself at his arraignment. Then he snatches up the rest and cries out as he realises that all the articles are about him. He turns and looks at Ralph’s corpse in horror. The corpse stares back, wide-eyed and silent.

  Clyde turns back to the strongbox and pulls out the notebooks, much less reverently, and skims through them, one after another after another, through the various versions of Ralph’s treatment for his documentary about Clyde Koba, a demented Monroe-obsessed fan, shaking his head with increasing vehemence.

  “No… no… no!”

  Shoving the strongbox away, he lets out a loud animal-like wail and falls to his knees. He drops his head to the floor, wraps his hands around his neck, and moans loudly. In his head, he hears Marilyn’s voice beckoning.

  Psst, hey there! she coos soothingly.

  Clyde clamps his hands over his ears and shakes his head. But Marilyn’s voice only grows louder. Clyde shakes his head more and more violently.

  Hey there. Don’t let them get you down.

  Clyde looks up and finds Marilyn staring back at him from the closet mirror. He leaps up, grabs the strongbox, and flings it with all his strength at the mirror, shattering it to pieces.

  * * *

  The Porsche barrels south down the scenic coastal highway that runs along the edge of the cliffs between Tijuana and Ensenada. Tears flow freely down Clyde’s face as he attacks hairpin turn after hairpin turn, barely keeping the tyres on the road. Several police helicopters fly swiftly in his direction.

  As the road levels off, Clyde sees a collection of squad cars blocking the road a half-mile ahead. He can make out scores of Mexican federales standing behind the cars with their rifles drawn and pointed in his direction. Clyde sets his jaw and guns the engine. Seeing the Spyder roaring straight for them at full speed, the federales scramble into the hills and take position among the rocks. The helicopters swoop in overhead and land behind the roadblock.

  Clyde blinks at the scene laid out before him as he races toward his doom, and flashes on his life, on Momma, Hiro, Kevin, Auntie Doreen, even his bastard of a father now lying at the bottom of a freezer under a pile of frozen fish. They hurt him; they made him strong; he was a victim; he was a manifestor. He had the power to do anything. Even now, on the doorstep of oblivion, at the receiving end of a hundred high-powered rifles, he could still take control. In his past life, he had chosen suicide, like that fake idiot Raphael. “Not this time,” he says out loud, as he reduces his speed. “I’m not going to go kamikaze for the sake of an illusion.”

  He brings the Porsche to a complete stop a few feet from the roadblock and raises his arms over his head.

  The federales look at each other and breath deep sighs of relief. They clamber out of the rocks and from around the roadblock and approach the Porsche with rifles drawn. Clyde’s face is inscrutable, almost catatonic. A tall twenty-something federale breaks from the others and opens the driver’s side door. He takes Clyde out by the arm and escorts him to a waiting squad car. Clyde doesn’t react. He just stares ahead blankly.

  * * *

  1

  KIMITAKE

  1982-1983

  US-Mexico Border Complex, San Ysidro, California

  26 December 1982; 1 a.m.

  A retinue of heavily armed US marshals mills about in the semi-darkness of the transfer facility awaiting the Prisoner. A loud clang of metal-on-metal echoes through the room, and a bank of glaring spotlights snaps on. The marshals group together and stand at attention as a cortege of Mexican federales escorts the Prisoner into the room. He is shackled and dressed in a tattered orange jumpsuit, head lowered, non-reactive. His yellow-blonde hair hangs in his face; his black roots are showing.

  One of the federales goose-steps forward and presents the US commander with a document. The commander quickly scans and signs it, handing it back to the federale. Another marshal pats down the Prisoner and notes that he raises his eyes at the reflective glass on the opposite wall; upon seeing himself, his head instantly snaps down, and he squee
zes shut his almond-shaped eyes.

  The marshals whisk the Prisoner out of the featureless concrete building by the arms, one on either side of him, toward three identical black squad cars idling in the distance. He squints painfully in the harsh glare of a searchlight positioned on the top of an adjacent building and pointing at him. The marshals shove him into the back of one of the squad cars and slam the door shut. A moment later, the squad cars speed north up Highway 5 caravan-style, sirens blaring.

  * * *

  U.S. District Court, Los Angeles, California

  10 January 1983; 10 a.m.

  The Prisoner sits rigidly at the counsel table next to his government lawyer, his hair slicked back into a short ponytail, long streaks of black infusing his dyed blonde hair. He is dressed in a dark blue suit that is one size too large for him, an oddly creased white dress shirt straight out of the packet, and a clip-on red necktie. He stares straight ahead, expressionless and unblinking, as the trial unfolds around him in stop motion. Sounds reach him as if filtered through molasses.

  The gallery is sparsely populated. The Prisoner’s mother sits alone in the middle of the second row, wearing a canary yellow sundress. She wears no makeup, and her grey roots are showing. She leans forward, anxiously straining to catch the Prisoner’s attention. Sitting at the end of the row behind her is the Prisoner’s psychiatrist, one Doctor Seth Menner. He observes the trial through half-closed eyes, every so often scribbling in a notepad and then looking back up at the long string of witnesses that gives testimony in front of an angry-looking judge and an impassive jury over the course of the day: a car saleswoman, the owner of a fancy dress shop, a bank teller, a security guard.

  The prosecutor plays a video of a bank robbery on a screen set up at the front of the courtroom. At a critical point, she snaps her fingers and instructs the video operator to stop the tape and enlarge the frame. The image of a person wearing an evening gown and a rubber mask comes into focus. The prosecutor uses a long pointer to indicate what looks like a gun trained on a group of people standing in front of the masked person. She then picks up a bag off the floor and pulls a rubber mask and toy gun out of it and offers the items into evidence over the half-hearted objections of the Prisoner’s defence lawyer.

  The afternoon sun streams through the west-facing window of the courtroom as the jury files back in for the last time, and the foreman hands a verdict form to the bailiff, who carries it to the judge. The Prisoner’s lawyer stands and pulls up the Prisoner by the arm as the judge reads out the verdict of guilty. The crack of the gavel resonates through the courtroom. The Prisoner’s mother collapses, striking her head on the edge of the bench. The court attendants rush to help her as she convulses on the tiles. The bailiff leads the Prisoner out of the room.

  * * *

  Metropolitan Correctional Center, Los Angeles, California

  Prison Processing Center

  07 March 1983; 8 p.m.

  The Prisoner stands naked in a long queue of naked male inmates. Two marshals move down the queue and perform a full body cavity search on each one of them. The Prisoner watches nervously out of the corner of his eye as the marshals dig into the rectum of the inmate next to him, who is bent over and holding his ankles.

  * * *

  The Prisoner sits in a barber’s chair with his eyes tightly shut as the barber buzzes off all his hair with six passes of an electric razor, leaving behind only a blue-black shadow on his scalp. He swings the Prisoner’s chair around to face a large mirror. The Prisoner keeps his eyes squeezed shut.

  * * *

  Metropolitan Correctional Center, Los Angeles, California

  Parking Structure

  08 March 1983; 7:30 a.m.

  The Prisoner and six other inmates move sluggishly toward a waiting van escorted by two armed marshals. They are handcuffed and shackled. Two transport marshals watch them as they climb into the back of the van and arrange themselves on the bench seats, facing each other, three on one side, four on the other. The transport marshals slam shut the doors of the van and chain them closed.

  The inmates quietly regard each other as the van heads south on the Santa Ana Freeway on its way out of the city. The day is heavily overcast. Downtown Los Angeles looms in the background, barely visible through the barred and blackened window on the back door. One of the inmates, a thin man in his middle thirties with watery green eyes, flashes a crooked smile at the Prisoner, who returns the smile with a scowl. The inmate shrugs and turns to a stocky Middle Eastern man in his late forties sitting to his right who is staring at the floor.

  “What are you in for?” asks the thin inmate.

  The Middle Eastern inmate is startled out of his introspection. He regards his neighbour with a sideways glance.

  “Are we allowed to say?”

  “I don’t see why not. I’m Bleeker, by the way.”

  The Middle Eastern inmate turns his head away. “Wire fraud,” he mumbles and looks back at Bleeker. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Two of the other inmates chime in that they also got done for wire fraud.

  “How much time did they give you?” Bleeker asks.

  “Three years, eight months. How about you?”

  “Computer theft. They gave me six years.”

  “Jesus!” a tall inmate sitting to the left of the Prisoner says from across the van. He keeps his head low to avoid banging it against the roof whenever they hit a bump in the road. “Six years for stealing computers?”

  “Not for stealing computers, buddy,” Bleeker says. “I used a computer to transfer money out of people’s bank accounts into an account in Switzerland.”

  “Oh, we got a genius here,” the tall inmate says. “How much money we talking about?”

  “A couple hundred thousand.”

  “That’s not bad.” The tall inmate thrusts out his long legs, positioning them between the legs of the two inmates across from him and rests his head against the front of the van. “They gave my ass fifteen years for transporting three hundred kilos of mushrooms over the border.”

  The Prisoner looks at the tall inmate and arches an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t know there was such a big market for mushrooms,” says a Hispanic inmate sitting to the right of the Prisoner.

  “Not yet there isn’t,” the tall one says. “You might say me and some other businessmen were starting up a little joint venture.”

  The Hispanic lets out a sarcastic chuckle. “What’s wrong with this picture, eh? Mr Genius there gets six years for stealing hundreds of thousands of other folks’ money, while a respectable businessman like yourself gets fucked for fifteen years.”

  “Or doesn’t get fucked,” a pimply faced inmate barely out of his teens sitting across from the tall inmate says with a nervous giggle.

  The inmates laugh at the joke.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Bleeker says.

  The laughter quickly dies down, and the inmates eye each other suspiciously as the van skirts the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, speeding in the direction of the Coachella Valley. Patches of snow are visible on the hillside out of the window.

  A professorial-looking inmate in his thirties wearing a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses and sitting to Bleeker’s left clears his throat and raises his hand. The others turn their heads and stare at him.

  “You don’t need to hold up your hand, precious,” Bleeker says. “This isn’t exactly grammar school.”

  “We should introduce ourselves properly.”

  The others look at each other and nod.

  “You go first, darling.” Bleeker winks at his neighbour.

  The professorial-looking inmate flashes a shy smile, exposing a mouthful of braces. “Okay, my name’s Dick.”

  The others laugh a bit.

  “Is that your first name or your last?” Bleeker asks.

  “Last.”

  “What’s your first name? Little?”

  Dick reddens as Bleeker’s comment
draws even more laughter from the others.

  “I’m just yanking your chain, man,” Bleeker says, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Anyway, as I said, I’m Bleeker.” He turns to the Middle Eastern inmate on his right. “It’s your turn.”

  “I’m Mehmet.”

  “What’s that?” Bleeker says. “Arabic?”

  “It’s Turkish. I’m originally from Istanbul.”

  Mehmet points at the pimply faced inmate. “It’s your turn.”

  “I’m Rugger.”

  “I’m Mushman,” the tall one says. He turns to the Prisoner.

  “How about you, China Boy? You’ve been awfully quiet. What’s your name?”

  The Prisoner closes his eyes; Mushman shrugs at the others.

  “I’m Lopez,” the Hispanic to the Prisoner’s right says.

  “Well, okay,” Dick says, “I’m here for tax evasion; I got five years. So, let’s see, we’ve got three wire frauds, one theft by computer, one drug trafficker, one tax evader…”

  “How about you there, Mr Sociable?” Bleeker asks. “What are you in for?”

  The Prisoner opens his eyes. “Armed robbery and felony murder.”

  His response draws an exchange of confused looks and intense murmuring from his comrades.

  “Those aren’t federal offences,” Bleeker says.

  The Prisoner flashes a menacing look at Bleeker. The others grow very quiet.

  “Maybe he got on the wrong bus,” Lopez says.

  The van speeds through a yellow sand desert dotted with Joshua trees. A high wind forcefully lashes grit against the windows.

  Six hours later the van drives through the gates of the United States Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, and stops in front of the Quonset hut that serves as a temporary intake centre. The transport marshals hop out, unchain the rear doors, and pull out the inmates one by one. Two reception marshals meet them at the back of the van. The inmates stretch their legs and regard their surroundings and the barren, open desert in the distance. They shield their eyes against the driving wind.