by Gregory Hill
I sleep then wake and walk to the store and eat another sandwich and look at the bank and then watch Vero some more. Her eyes have moved away from my proposal and to the pencil next to her left hand, which suggests that she’s ready to give me an answer.
I want to put the pencil in her fingers, guide her hand to the paper, and scribble yes a thousand times. I will not do this.
My joints are recovering from the journey to Denver. My soreness has dropped from an eight to a four. Nevertheless, I remain on my six Vicodin-per-day diet. It makes me feel good. I’m not slurring my words.
In the grocery for more sandwich fixin’s, I pause in front of the back-to-school display with its nubby scissors and glue sticks and plastic backpacks. I pick out a notebook and some crayons and return to the garden and sit across from Vero. If I’m going to stare at her, I might as well use this as an opportunity for self-improvement. I shake several crayons out of the sixty-four-color box, stretch my hands. I was eight years old the last time I touched a crayon. I hated the texture of the paper they wrap around those things. Still do.
My first attempts to capture Vero’s essence are lumpy cartoons with giant hands and masculine features. I revert to stick figures. I draw dozens every day, waiting for Vero to answer my proposal of marriage. Soon, I’ve captured the delicate S of her dorsal curve and the opposing angles of her hips and shoulders. I focus on the oval of her face, on her hands. I fit five or six sketches on each sheet of paper and then flip it over and add five or six more to the reverse side. A hundred sketches a day. I wear down one crayon after another. I do studies of her eyes, the convex irises, the red flesh in the corners where the upper and lower eyelids meet. When a notebook runs out of pages, I place it on Charlene’s kitchen counter and then go to the store for another. When the crayons are all worn down, I switch to colored pencils, which I sharpen with my Everslice knife.
The colored pencils introduce new opportunities for nuance. I give Vero bones, then muscles, then skin. I draw her in the nude, remembering her ribs and her belly button and her breasts and the scar on her back from some childhood bicycle adventure.
I give her clothes. I draw her in the outfit she’s wearing. Which I realize I have not yet described: black tank top, a pair of mid-thigh cut-offs, flip flops. Perfect attire for a hot car. I draw her in a prom dress, as a clown, as Wonder Woman. I crosshatch, I shade.
I begin a ritual. After every meal, I sit in the same spot and make a small, credit-card-sized sketch of Vero in the upper right corner of the latest page of the notebook. I create a flipbook. Since the pages don’t exactly flip, I use the fingers of my right hand to deftly fan each image flat as my left thumb slides to the next. Motion! Watch the lady breathe. She leans forward and one of her feet slides behind the other. Each movement by her hand is preceded by a tug of a tendon in her forearm. I flip the pages so many times the corners turn black from finger smudge.
Vero writes a letter, R, then e, then m. Rem.
Remorse? Remain? Remove? Remora? I can’t watch this. I can’t stop. Days later, the word grows into Remember. “Remember” is exactly what Spock said to Dr. McCoy just before he, Spock, sacrificed his life for the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The world is my still life. I learn shading, perspective, foreshortening. I learn when to stop working on a sketch and call it finished. There’s only so much detail a mind can care about. I expand my subject matter. Leaves of tomato plants, knots on fence pickets, the family of starlings that’s picking bugs out of the rain gutter.
I see qualities in Vero’s face I’ve never noticed before. Her mouth moves slightly as she slides the pencil across the paper. She looks to her left when she’s between words. My little Mona Lisa.
A full sentence, finally, with a question mark:
Remember
the
perfect
game?
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Perfect game?” How can you do this to me, Veronica Vasquez? I shake my fists at the sky, the eastern hemisphere of which is now beginning to light up with stars that don’t twinkle.
I examine Vero’s face, serene, cast orange in the dying sun. I can’t make anything of it. She’s either happy with herself for coming up with a tactful manner of declining my proposal or she’s calmly processing the joy of her betrothal to the seventeen-thousand-mile-an-hour man. Or she’s stretching her neck.
Vero’s left hand brings the pencil back to the paper. She’s not yet done writing.
*
Days and days go by. Her hand moves, her lips press tight. I know this look. She’s suppressing a smile. There’s a second sentence:
Remember what
I
said
when
you
told
me
about
it.
Vero’s fingers finally release the pencil.
This is her answer to my proposal. Remember the perfect game? Remember what I said when you told me about it.
Nope, but I hope you said yes.
62
I’ve worked a lot of games. A lot of them were terrific, but I can’t remember any of them being perfect. There was the octuple overtime extravaganza between Manual High and Denver East. There was the donkey basketball game between several ex-Denver Broncos and the coaching staff of Heritage High school wherein the donkeys won. I got to work a three-on-three tournament in Park Hill in which a sophomore Chauncey Billups literally leapt over a stunned freshman for a dunk. I rewarded young Mr. Billups—future MVP of the 2004 NBA Finals—with a whistle for air-walking. I did a Cherry Creek vs. Overland game in which both teams were so obnoxious that by the end of the first quarter I’d fouled out everyone but three players on each team.
Each of these games is amongst my most treasured memories, but none of these games was perfect.
I won’t prolong this any more than necessary, but I will prolong it for a bit, because I’m completely flummoxed. I reflect on my life from my earliest memory (slapping my wet hands against a rock) to right now (staring at a woman with a beehive on her head). I attempt to reconstruct my existence, my profession, this allegedly perfect game.
It’s a yes or no question, Vero. Will you or won’t you?
One considers the approaching conclusion to this tale and one wonders what good can come of it. Scenarios are limited to two:
I will remain in this state until I die—lonely, clueless, unredeemed, whereupon my corpse will turn to bones before Vero’s sparkling eyes.
I will awake one morning, having miraculously returned to normal speed. Veronica and I will be wed in a ceremony officiated by the pilot of the plane I mistook for a one-legged seagull.
The first scenario seems far more likely. Miserable, arthritic, opioidal death with my arms around Vero’s ankles.
*
I climb upon the roof of Charlene Morning’s house and sketch the final rays of the sun as they drown into the edge of the earth. The drowning takes a good long while, like two days. The sunset itself happens too slowly to be considered dramatic, but the green flash was a nice surprise. As the last rosy finger of the sun went sub-horizontal, a green glow swelled like a bubbly borealis. This happened quickly, like in less than ten heartbeats. It grew larger and larger, and as it did so, it grew fuzzy around the edges and less and less vivid, until, it smeared into half the sky and finally dissolved into nothing.
It’ll be happy, my ending.
63
Here’s how the game went.
Once, shortly after Vero and I first met, we made plans to convene at a local tavern. I arrived a little late to the rendezvous. This was a Saturday afternoon. I was a little late because the tournament I’d been working went a little late.
The tournament was kiddie basketball. Little kids, pre-school with Nerf balls and plastic three-foot hoops. I took the gig because it paid fifty dollars and I only had to do three games, each of which lasted, like, fift
een minutes.
The kids chased around like kittens, never dribbled, shot at the wrong basket, and cried and cheered and whined and laughed constantly. The parents and coaches, I didn’t even notice them. Just these little farts having a blast, learning about the most important sport on earth.
Without question, the kids were horrible basketball players. But being bad at something is not the same as being bad.
Listen, nobody gives a duck’s wet ass about your millionth step. It’s your teetering-toddler first steps that get the applause, and those are the most incompetent steps you’re ever going to take. But they’re your first, so that makes them special.
I fell in love with every single one of those little booger-dripping ballers, so much so that I voluntarily worked six more games. By the time the tournament ended, I was near tears. I remember hugging the fathers of a little girl who spent the entire game crawling on all fours pretending to be a puppy. The two dads did not reciprocate my love. In fact, I think I made them uncomfortable. I suspect they mentioned this to whomever hires the officials for these things, as I was never invited back.
But the thing is, I didn’t blow my whistle once that day. A no-whistle game is a perfect game. It’s a game that has no use for a referee.
*
I used to believe that, in the struggle between the immovable object and the unstoppable force, the immovable object would always win. Imagine the Statue of Liberty as the immovable object. This imaginary Statue of Liberty is imbued with the ability to not ever be moved by anything.
In the role of unstoppable force, I introduce the Incredible Hulk. Although our goliath in purple pants pounds mercilessly on the SOL, the statue neither bends nor breaks, for it is truly immovable. The Hulk, who draws his power from anger, grows more and more angry at the immovable object and he pounds her in the nose with his cinderblock fists. He clobbers the statue so hard the noise sends a flock of seagulls flying out of a park in Brooklyn. But Liberty doesn’t move. Eventually, the Hulk grows so angry he suffers an aneurysm and his head explodes.
Lesson: One exerts a great deal of effort when one tries to move an immovable object, and that effort can lead to death. But it takes no effort to not move. It’s easy not to move. You simply don’t move. So go ahead, Hulk, punch that statue until your brain explodes. The SOL doesn’t give a flying fig.
Now consider. What if the unstoppable force isn’t a simple-minded gamma beast fueled by pure rage? What if the unstoppable force is an idealized version of Narwhal Slotterfield? I’d throw a couple of punches at Lady Liberty and then, upon concluding that she’s immovable, I’d move on to a more productive activity, like telling Vero I love her.
Greater point: there’s no point in me trying to tell the world what to do. The world doesn’t listen and it doesn’t care for my opinion anyway. And there’s no purpose in me imposing my morality on a bunch of cute kids who want to shout and giggle and triple dribble. I just need to stand around in a zebra shirt and watch.
Screw unstoppable, my force is irrepressible.
I’m pretty sure what I actually said when I met Vero in that bar was, “I just reffed nine perfect games.”
She would have made some sort of frequently cited womanly gesture, perhaps pushing a locket of hair behind her ear or pursing her lips, and then said, “Holy flarping shit. That sounds awesome!”
Vero Vasquez is my fiancée. I am her fiancé. Holy flarping shit. That sounds awesome.
64
We could call it quits right here.
The betrothal I intended to propose back when I was in the bathroom of Cookie’s Palace Diner has been accepted. Time can now re-align itself and Vero and I will make love and have baby teeth. Reader, if you want to walk away with a satisfied hum in your heart, walk away now. Because this is not the end of my trials. My trials do not end.
65
Night has settled. The sun is a faint afterglow, soon to be even fainter. This isn’t just some silly old Arctic winter I’m facing, with six months of darkness. Jesus Horatio Christ, no. It’s going to be D-A-R-K here for … Let’s think about this.
Due to the serious logistical issues posed by the night ahead, I have temporarily suspended my boycott of time-related—and demonstrably inaccurate—math problems.
One of Vero’s hours is roughly one year for me, plus or minus six months. A night in early September lasts roughly twelve hours, normal time. Which means that, in hypertemporal terms, every acre of Eastern North America, from the Rocky Mountain peaks of the Continental Divide all the way to the New York Island, will be sunless for the next twelve years of my life, plus or minus six years. That’s the amount of time that transpired between the death of JFK and Nixon’s farewell speech, plus or minus the Johnson administration.
This darkness is going to be problematic. And this, my friend, is solutionmatic: Vero and I shall venture west. We’ll abandon the Great Plains and we’ll walk to the land of California, where the sun is shining and Lauren Bacall’s home is open to all visitors. We will cross the Rockies, we will cross the deserts, we will see the land of plenty.
Before we go anywhere, I compose one more note for my darling.
Cool! Wanna get hitched in California?
It doesn’t pack the emotional punch I would have preferred, but I need to keep it short. I am unwilling to twiddle my thumbs in the dark for a month while Vero plows thru a whole paragraph of exposition.
She does need to see what I’ve written, though, and that’s become increasingly impossible since the sun went down. I enter Charlene’s house and flip all the light switches to on but nothing happens. Why can’t I turn on a fucking light?
I dangle my headlamp from the branch of an overhanging tree and arrange it to shine directly on my note. Until such time as Vero has finished reading it, I’ll have to navigate the streets of Keaton by streetlights and starlight. I shoulda taken two of these headlamps when I had the chance.
While Vero reads, I prepare for our journey. A few of the houses in Keaton contain human occupants and those occupants have turned on their lights, which work even though when I flip a switch it does, as I may have mentioned, nothing.
I ransack these homes for shoes and sweatpants. I scrub my zebra shirt clean against the concrete of Charlene’s front walk. I enter the grocery and load my backpack with granola bars and I say hello to Charlene. She has begun to turn to a different page in her tabloid. The woman has a serious ability to not give a shit about things. I really wish I could have met her.
The quest to California, I figure, will take us two hundred days, maybe a year if I pace myself. That’s less than ten minutes in Vero’s world. I’m about to walk (halfway) across America. Someone sponsor me, please. All donations will be used to purchase teeny crutches for one-legged seagulls.
You know, it occurs to me that, by the time we get to Cali, the sun will be setting there as well. No prob. I’ll stow us away on a westbound cruise ship. We’ll follow the sun and get ourselves a free honeymoon in the deal.
I double check my supply of painkillers, which, due to my growing tolerance, is starting to wane, but I’m not concerned, since there are a million pharmacies between here and the Golden State, and I bring my loaded backpack to Charlene’s place where I sleep and then I wake and I fix a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I wait. We can’t leave until Vero reads my note and gives me a thumbs-up or a wink or something.
During this interim, when I’m not sketching Vero, I pass my time on Charlene’s bed, eating, resting, digesting my pills. The less I move, the better I feel. My joints continue to improve, my skin stops flaking off. The Vicodin doesn’t make me groggy anymore, but it continues to help with the pain. Disregarding the single, inconvenient, side-effect—this being a perpetual case of lethargic bowel syndrome—these little white ovaloids of indifference are pure magic.
Over several more days, I fill yet another notebook with time-lapse sketches of Vero. In the fast-forward flipbook version of this notebook, she scans left to right. Sh
e lifts her eyes, her shoulders rise, her mouth opens in a wide bray of laughter. I am terrified. She thinks California is a joke. But then, the fingers of her left hand curl into an unambiguous okay sign.
Hot damn tamale, we’ve made our wedding plans. I confess, this is not how I thought things would end up, with me carrying her across a continent in search of sunlight. Not that I mind. California, here we crumb.
Say goodbye to Charlene’s house, goodbye to Keaton. I tidy up all the little messes I’ve made. I move thru the rooms like an astronaut, chomping hovering cracker crumbs and stray drops of water; I straighten the quilt on the bed; I gather empty shopping bags and apple cores and bring them outside and shove them into the trash barrel.
Under the bruised sky, I run my hands over the browning leaves of the bean vines as well as the last of this season’s tomatoes, which will certainly freeze before they ripen. It is September and we are in Colorado. Soon, autumn will arrive.
I haven’t yet eaten any of Charlene’s garden bounty. I couldn’t do that to her. But just one? I pluck a fist-sized tomato from one of her plants. It’s still warm with the day’s heat. I clamp my teeth and the skin pops.
Lord almighty, that was a tasty tomato.
On Vero’s TV tray is the thin stack of paper that comprises our entire correspondence from the time I first went hyper. My ghostly dispatches from the blurred realm, her hurried handwriting, her absolute faith in me. If anyone is irrepressible, it is Vero. Seven minutes, maybe, have passed in her life and she’s never once doubted the words of her poltergeist of a boyfriend. She kept her cool in Cookie’s Palace Diner, she allowed me to carry her to Keaton, she read my notes, she accepted my marriage proposal, and she’s agreed to a two-thousand-mile hike for our nuptials. This all happened to her in seven minutes. Do you see now why I love this woman?