The Resisters

by Gish Jen

  And, of course, that was right. Gwen didn’t bring up the no-hitter she had pitched for the League with Ondi catching, but I knew she had to have that on her mind—their utter comfort with each other. Their telepathic communication.

  To her I wasn’t just a coppertoned novelty. To at least one person, I was Gwen. Also, I was the rock that I’d promised Coach I would be. Everything washed over me. Even as everyone was screaming Can-non, Can-non! I just kept my nose going toward Ondi’s mitt. Until, yes, we had won! 4–0, and for the second time I was carried off by my teammates, right past that glaring Renata, whatever her problem is. What a game—I just wish you had been there to see it!

  The rest of the story came by PigeonGram.

  So later on Coach told me, “This is what you were meant for. An arm like yours is once in a generation. Did you hear the crowd?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, they know it, too. And look at where you are after just a couple of months here. Can you imagine where you’ll be in a few years? You have great things in you, and I don’t say that lightly. You are the most talented pitcher I’ve ever coached.”

  Honestly, I didn’t know what to say to that. So I asked, “And Ondi?”

  “Ondi?” He looked as if he’d just lost his hearing.

  “What about Ondi?”

  “She has a chance.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, we always need women. And there are people who see that you probably perform better with at least one other Surplus around. So there’s that in her favor.”

  “But she’s doing great independent of me, right?”

  He gazed into his beer like there was a bug in the foam.

  “She’s doing great and gets along great with the guys,” he said finally. “The pitchers like her. But I’m not sure how well she does with other women, ironically. Is she a team player? I’m not sure.”

  “Does that mean someone doesn’t like her?” I said. He didn’t want to say but I knew. “Like Clara Zee, maybe?”

  He hesitated. “Ondi’s complicated, isn’t she.”

  “Clara Zee has been far less of a team player than Ondi,” I said. “Far, far less.”

  I’m not sure he was listening, though. Instead he looked at me and said, “Even with you she’s complicated.”

  And what could I say then? She was.

  * * *

  —

  What with Cyber U coming right on the heels of Net West, Gwen didn’t have time to think about whether there was something else she should have said in Ondi’s defense. Because while Cyber U did not GenetImprove like ChinRussia, they did, it seemed, use TrainerBots. They used DrillBots to give players more drill time, Gwen reported, and they used DoItAgainSam to help players reinforce their muscle memory. They used iCoach to analyze motions, strategies, and lineups. And they used KillingIt to give players stats after every workout. Gwen said that people had only to hit How’dIDo to see how hard they’d pushed themselves or how much better they’d gotten at judging the ball or how much more efficiently they’d swung. Those who had signed up for StimLearn could see how much faster their NeuroStimplants were helping them learn. And people with How’dHeDo could not only see how others on the team had done that same day but could push CanIGetHim to see how they could catch up to any player they picked. Gwen’s GreetingGram went on,

  How can we compete against that? some guys wanted to know. To which Coach pointed out that we could have any Bot or program they did. If we wanted, he said, we could have How’dHeDo with the CanIGetHim feature, too. But these things wrecked team spirit and burned people out, he said. They burned out people’s souls. “We should be thinking first and foremost about how best not to destroy our assets,” he said. “Beginning with not destroying one another.” He went on to say that it was his belief that what a ball club does on any given day is finally a matter of heart. “I know that sounds like horseshit,” he said. “But we all have it in us to rise to heights we cannot imagine. The question is, What makes us rise, and what makes us sink?”

  In his “Keep Umps Human” campaign, for example, he had apparently argued that it demoralized players to be judged by robots they believed to be just as biased as human umps, only invisibly and immovably so. In contrast, sometimes right, sometimes wrong as human umps were, they brought out the wiliness and fight in the players. And he believed other conditions helped us, too—helped us or hurt us. Certain words, he said. Certain tunes. Certain chords.

  Translated, that meant that Beetle and Fudge had to stop trying to kill each other, I think. But Coach said it in such a way that everybody got that at the same time as they got more than that.

  “He’s smart,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor.

  I really think he’s the smartest man I ever met.

  “She means except her father,” said Eleanor.

  * * *

  —

  We worried so much about Coach Link we were almost relieved when, not long after that, Gwen found out more about Renata. In the longest PigeonGram she’d ever sent, she wrote,

  I have something terrible to say. I don’t know if I can even tell you but I don’t know who to tell.

  “Sounds like we better sit down,” said Eleanor.

  Renata found her way to my dorm room. I couldn’t believe Pink and Sylvie let her in, but Renata said she was a friend. “And she looked like a MeteorWar addict or something,” Sylvie said. “Like a type my mother sees all the time. Like someone seriously StarGored.” And so in I walked one night after dinner and there she was sitting on my bed. I screamed and campus police heard the commotion and came, but I told them everything was okay and that they should leave. Of course, they ScanID’ed her first. But she didn’t have any kind of record so they said okay, she could stay, so long as Pink and Sylvie kept an eye on her until she left. And they agreed.

  Renata, meanwhile, was freaked out but insisted she hadn’t come to harm me, just to warn me.

  “I’ll go away after this,” she said. “You won’t hear from me again. But I have something to tell you. Do you want to hear it?”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked sad and stood up.

  “Okay,” she said. “In that case, good luck. And beautiful blankets, by the way.”

  Then she tucked her hair behind her ears and I saw that she had baseballs tattooed onto her earlobes, like earrings. And then, I don’t know why, I changed my mind.

  “You sure now?”

  “No,” I said. “But what the hell.”

  I made her some tea with RealCream and sat down to listen to what she had to say, starting with the fact that she was the star girl pitcher before me. She wasn’t me, she said. She’d seen me throw—she didn’t want me to think she could do that. But her ERA was 3.51 and she had a mean sinker. Also, she wasn’t above throwing a knuckleball, disreputable as that seemed to be at Net U.

  “In fact there are dozens of pitches pitchers don’t throw,” she said. “Baseball can be kind of conservative. While my view is, Whatever it takes to get the job done.”

  But to cut to the chase, she had been doing great—and yes, seeing Coach Link. Woody, as she called him. Which was probably not the best idea but so normal in her view that when I told her I wasn’t seeing him, I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  “I guess it’s living in SurplusVille. You were sort of sheltered, in a weird way, weren’t you?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Or maybe he’s learned his lesson.”

  Then she told me the creepiest story you ever heard. Starting with how she was plucked out of nowhere, and asked to try out, and given access to a special stadium and then a tour of Net U. And then she was given a lot of attention by the coach, who told her that her secret was maybe her ankle.

&n
bsp; “Your dorsiflexion,” I said.

  “Yes. My dorsiflexion.” She had kind of this hoarse laugh, as if she had a piece of something caught in her throat.

  She went on to say she started pitching far better than she ever dreamt she could, in part because Coach knew how to reach her. The words to say. The chords to play.

  “The chords,” I said. “Interesting.”

  But she made a mistake. She was never one of the guys, which was no surprise, given that she was the only woman on the team. And that was fine when she occasionally pitched relief. When she started to pose a real threat, that was something else. Because some of the guys were pretty cutthroat.

  “We have guys like that,” I said. “But it’s the catchers.”

  “Well, it used to be the pitchers,” she said, which meant in her case that they started exposing themselves to her. Like she’d be walking down the hall outside the locker rooms, and they’d pull out their equipment. One would even trap her against the wall and ask whether Woody was having fun with her. And if Woody was having fun with her, why couldn’t he have some fun, too. “That was our star pitcher, Demolition Johnson,” she said. “I can still hear the crowd chanting De-mo! De-mo! De-mo!”

  I was so shocked, I could hardly react.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. I really am,” I managed to say. I was trying not to sound wooden, but I must have because she looked at me and shook her head.

  “You’re awfully young,” she said, and she sounded tough. But then she started to cry and said, “I was young, too.”

  And then I don’t know why but I started crying a little with her.

  “I’ll keep it short,” she said finally. “As short as I can.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  So Woody, it seems, trying to get the guys to behave but not wanting to single out Demo, told the team they had to stop everything that was making her uncomfortable. Including obscene behavior and other things, too. Things that he said created the wrong atmosphere.

  “Like?”

  “Like cock bumping,” she said. “Like after every home run, they’d bang their protective cups against each other’s. And everyone would bump everyone else except, of course, me. I never complained about it, but Woody told them they had to stop anyway. And there was a lot of grumbling about that, but things did start to get better for a while. Like we were all acting chummy, and going out drinking together, and sometimes getting drunk.”

  “Did you play beer pong?”

  “Yes. And everything was buddy-buddy until Woody started me in a big game. Which he told everyone wasn’t even his decision. Which he said he was doing on the recommendation of an AutoCoach—the assistant coach he was using because he didn’t have the budget for a human. And the next time we all played beer pong, the pong was pong but the beer wasn’t beer. Or it was but it had something in it.”

  I didn’t want to hear the rest but she told me anyway.

  “Then Demo raped me,” she said.

  Do you remember that time Ondi told us about being Cast Off and about her Grandpa Barney, and everything? I felt like that. Like I just couldn’t take in what I was hearing.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” she said. “But maybe you see now why I wanted to tell you. You have a different relationship with the team. And Demo’s graduated. Plus, even the guys who used to show me their flagpole are on good behavior. Everyone was pretty shook up.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe that happened.” That didn’t seem like enough, but I couldn’t get any more words out.

  “It was…I can’t tell you what it was.” She started to cry again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. And, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for telling me. I’m sure you don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  But she wasn’t done.

  “You’re probably wondering what Woody did then,” she went on. “Because everyone was expecting he would do something.”

  I couldn’t ask.

  “He did nothing. He knew it really happened because most of the guys wouldn’t talk but one guy did. This guy Lester said he saw how Demo pinned me down and how I had passed out and how no one did anything because Demo was Demo and told them I was his secret whore anyway. Which is what Demo told Woody, too. He told him that I’d been two-timing him all along, which Woody knew was a lie. He knew who to believe, and even told me he did. But he consulted an AutoCounselor anyway, and the AutoCounselor said this was classic ‘he said, she said.’ ”

  “Why did he do that?” I managed to ask. “If he knew?”

  “It was what the university called ‘best practice.’ ”

  “But he didn’t have to?”

  “It would have looked bad if he hadn’t. As if he didn’t want an objective perspective. But you know how objective these things are. Like what questions do they ask, right? And who entered the data?”

  “He did?”

  She shrugged. “Of course. And, you know. Garbage in, garbage out.”

  I swallowed. “And then?”

  “And then he did nothing. He let me drop out and when people said I was a drunk and a whore he didn’t correct them.”

  “Because of the program?”

  She gave a horrible laugh. “To protect college baseball, which, you know, he single-handedly resurrected.”

  “Almost single-handedly.”

  “Yes.” She laughed again, and her laugh this time was even worse. “ ‘Almost’ single-handedly.”

  “But what about you? Didn’t he care what happened to you?”

  She shook her head as if she couldn’t even laugh. “I mean, I think he cared some.”

  “But not as much as he cared about the program.”

  She broke down again. “The donors loved Demo. They loved him. And I wanted to file a complaint but I waited too long to get my urine tested. I mean, when I woke up in a strange place with my clothes all torn, I just got myself home and slept and slept. I didn’t know you had to get tested for drugs right away. And my sperm test was too late, too. They could find a Y chromosome but they couldn’t prove it was Demo’s.”

  And that was why she had to warn me, she said. Why she couldn’t believe it when she heard about me, and why she had to come to my games. To see.

  “I’m not dating Coach, you know,” I said.

  She nodded but still said, “Maybe he’ll be better to you. If anything happens, which hopefully it never will. Because if there’s one thing Woody wants, it’s for there to be no replay, ever. That’s why there isn’t just one woman anymore. And that’s why they accepted Ondi, even though they’d never accepted a Surplus before, much less two. Because you were such a potential threat to the guys. Or that’s what the old guard says, anyway. They took her to make sure you had a buddy.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Is that true?”

  She nodded again. “Aren’t you glad that you know?”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant about Ondi or about Woody, but still I said, “Yes. And even if nothing goes wrong, I’ll remember it was because of you. That you were the guinea pig.”

  Or at least I think that’s what I said.

  I wouldn’t say that by the time she left, we were friends. But my heart definitely went out to her.

  “I hope you believe me,” she said as she stood up.

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

  She shook her head. “You really have been sheltered,” she said and left.

  And sure enough, later, when Gwen told Sylvie and Pink, they were prepared to be sympathetic but said they needed more information. Because could all that really be true? Could this woman just be playing with Gwen’s head? What with Gwen’s bugged backpack out i
n the living room, I had heard this part of the incident myself, although before I saw the PigeonGram I hadn’t been sure what to make of it.

  “She was pretty convincing,” said Gwen.

  “I mean, it might be true,” said Sylvie.

  “I am never, ever going to let anyone in again,” declared Pink. “I don’t care if it’s your mother. I’m going to make the person wait outside.”

  Gwen laughed, but Sylvie wasn’t done.

  “I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, but whatever you do, don’t fall for him,” she said.

  “Just in case?” Gwen said.

  “Just in case.”

  Thank you, Sylvie! Thank you! Now Eleanor and I PigeonGrammed,

  This is so terrible. Are you okay? Do you want to see if you can come home for a bit? It was kind of this poor Renata to come find you. Kind and brave. But—the shock. Are you okay? We can contact the school and try to arrange a home visit. Or we can come out and see you.

  Naturally, though, she insisted she was all right. And her next GreetingGram was surreally normal. Wasn’t she going to say something to Coach Link? How could she simply go on? Was this Gwen writing, or was this that ointment? I remembered teaching the phrase “under the influence of” to my students long ago and wished now that a sample sentence did not pop so easily to mind. Was Gwen under the influence of that ointment? She GreetingGrammed,

  So what with Fudge and Beetle having finally been benched for fighting, Coach asked Ondi to start in the Cyber U game, can you believe it? Which went okay in the beginning. In the top of the first inning Bento allowed two singles. But thanks to a triple play, they didn’t score. As for the Cyber U pitcher, long ago he would have been running a train station. When they finally allow PitchBots to take the mound, they will throw exactly like him, and select the same pitches.

  Anyway, the score was 1–1 when at the top of the fifth, Bento suddenly gave up a base hit. Then another. Then he walked a third batter, loading the bases. Then Cyber hit a grand slam. So suddenly it was 5–1, Cyber. Probably I shouldn’t have been brought in at the top of the sixth, seeing as how I’d just pitched against Net West. Probably I should’ve been allowed to rest, and no doubt Coach thought that when I promptly gave up a hit.