God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  Anyway, on the night Archie doesn't make it off the floor till they slide him onto a gurney, crank it up, and roll my man out the swinging doors, I take a cue from Norman's uncolored face looming half a head higher than just about everybody else's in the circle. With Archie laid out and still ain't twitched a muscle and the awful thought cruising our minds that he might not ever move except in a wheelchair, Norman's face does its best imitation of very serious, very unsuccessfully cause he can't hide the fact he's about to crack up. Something tickling the fool, no doubt about it. You know, like a big, scrubbed boy in the vestibule of a church, surrounded by his little-bitty mom and a posse of proper blue-haired old biddies and he's trying to act all nice while inside his balloon head he's jerking off or giggling at some nasty joke. Norman's lips quiver, he sucks in his peach-fuzzed cheeks, shyly lowers his gaze, covers his mouth with a ham-sized hand. None of it's working. Any second the clown will bust out laughing.

  I chose Norman Oakes's face. Call up a wild story with no business being here, something dumb and raunchy I should be ashamed of thinking at a time like this, dissing Archie's danger, dissing myself and the rest of the players around me who make faces, make believe they know which face fits when one of us goes down and the game stops and may be over for good for the one down.

  Why not. Any look right as anyone else's. I don't pick it exactly. It picks me. Like the blues picks me certain days. A look on my face to get me through the blank space till play resumes. Because the game always resumes, doesn't it. We count on it. Isn't that why we bop till we drop.

  Bopping till you drop's what they pay you for when you play major league for major bucks. Always on the road. One city fades into the next and you stop asking Where we headed next cause you're already there. But hey, fans think major leaguers got a lot going for themselves. And in a way we do. Money, yeah, and youth for a minute, talent, a small bit of fame, or publicity at least, enough so people are aware, some people anyway, aware when we hit town, aware we bring money to burn, exotic ways, quick hands, lean muscles, our burning, restless eyes. Why wouldn't city after city spread its legs for us. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's what being on the road means. The city opens doors never open for nobody not on the road. Doors marked Black git back. Doors so the city can sneak out and act a fool. Get juke-joint happy. Hucklebuck, drink moonshine, tell lies, and crawl up under our large, sweaty bodies. Like those old down-home tunes people hear a thousand times, just got to hear one more once again, we are welcome as a known quantity and as a mystery. An unbeatable combination whether the home team kicks our ass or we kick theirs.

  People pay good money to watch us. Love us because we prove they are not alone. Maybe the game's main attraction. For fans. For us. Proving we are not alone. Proving the city's real. Must be a city outside the arena. Where else would the crowd come from. Where else would fans return after a game. Has to be a city to house all the unlucky people too poor to buy tickets. Fans read scores, catch highlights on TV of games played in faraway cities. We prove a whole, big, fabulous country's out there, stretching from coast to coast, its cities glittering beads we string together, a country pitch dark until our long fingers hit a light switch and everything's bright and comfy as a suite in a high-class hotel.

  Even if you're home alone, checking out a game on the tube, you're safe and connected like people on those cell phones every man, woman, and baby got to have nowadays to show there's somebody somewhere takes their calls, and shit it might be Michael Jordan or Ms. Universe on the other end of the line for all you know, sucker, their faces say when you pass people talking to themselves on the street.

  Depending on the hour of our flight, a city slides into view peekaboo through layers of clouds and smog or it swims in blackness ten million quilts of light can't cover. On the ground we're shuttle-bused from airport to hotel to playing site, the city a maze of expressways, boulevards, avenues, streets with familiar names, same names we've read elsewhere on signs drivers followed to wind up in the same place these different signs with the same names will lead us tonight. Here we go again, time to go to work again. We learn to nap and drowse our way through cities, their presence faint as however many ticks of our Rolexes, however many ticks of our hearts required to count down the space separating us from the moment a referee blows a whistle and summons both teams for the tip-off at center court. Once I woke up sitting half naked on a bench in front of an open locker and no clue whether I should be putting on clothes or taking them off.

  Some nights you hope the game will last forever. Or wish it had never started so you won't have to deal with it stopping. Back in the day, the thrill of playing made you wish games would never end. Your youngblood fear and cockiness a high-octane, adrenaline rush only playing burns off. Hungry for the next game before the one you're playing's over. Always worried you won't get enough game. Then one day your beat-up body's begging for shortcuts, not more game, would phone ahead and cancel games if it could. Though your body whines and wags its nappy head, huh-uh, no-no, still some nights you don't want the game to be over. Wanting to play, wanting to be a star's got nothing to do with the feeling. What's up is fear. Maybe tonight your night to go down or, worse, your night to step off the court, out the arena's back gate, and fall, falling and falling, no sidewalk, no sparkling city out there under your feet.

  On such a night Satterwhite, Archie Satterwhite, the Archie Satterwhite, the last player as usual left in the locker room besides me, tries one more time. Archie's my main man, we've been through it all together, so he tries to convince me one more time. Not tonight, Sat, I ain't hanging out tonight. Tired, man. My heart's not in it. You go on ahead without me, Sat. Sat an old nickname hardly anybody uses anymore. Nobody's allowed to use it except us few old heads who remember Sat's short for Sat-the-Bench, the teasing name tagging Archie his rookie year when an aging white hope kept Sat sitting instead of playing. No way Sat could hope to win the veteran's spot by virtue of talent, hard work, pure, unadulterated superiority in every facet of the game. So Sat sat the bench night after night till the white dude went down, and Sat an all-star every season since. Should have been all-league his first season except the sportswriters gave it to White Hope for old times' sake.

  Sat hollers over his shoulder, What you mean you ain't hanging, man. Thanks, man. Thanks a fuck of a lot. What I'm spozed to do with two bitches.

  Do these ladies have names.

  Don't go getting cute now. Course the hoes got names. Lena and Rena.

  Last names.

  You hanging or not, man. Got no time to be messing wit you. Told you it's Lena and Rena. Sisters. Or go for sisters. Or cousins. How the fuck am I spozed to know. Jackson. Johnson. Jefferson. Take your pick. Since when you been so particular about names. Take your pick.

  Bet you already picked the fine one. Left me the bow-legged, wall-eyed little sister.

  You know Sat wouldn't do nothing like that to his bro. Both ladies fine as wine.

  Not tonight, Sat. I'm tired. Got a letter to write. Some reading I've been trying to get to.

  Reading. I'm worried about you, blood. Reading. Letters. Shit. The night still young. Ladies all fired up. You getting old on me, man.

  Instead of answering I stare at my feet. Think how strange they look in street shoes. Wonder why I bother with street shoes just to walk to the bus. Hear the locker room door wheeze open. Sat hovers an extra beat or two, giving me another chance.

  Who's the one getting old, Sat. Once upon a time when you a young man, two ladies wouldn't have presented no problem to the Great Mr. Satterwhite.

  After he slams the locker room door, after Archie Satterwhite crashes to the hardwood floor, after I toss and turn for hours too busted-up and road-weary to sleep and decide this season's my last go round the league, before I inch the final mile of waking up, I'm standing in a crowd alongside a freshly dug grave. A body wrapped in rags lies on a plank next to a deep hole in what I take to be red Mississippi clay. A gaping pit, blacker and blacker if you dare peep
over the crusty edge, down, down into never-ending darkness. The people around me are Africans, brown men, women, children, a gang of strangers who are also, if I look closely at any one of the sad faces, a teammate or a person I've known my whole life. No one's lips move, but I hear a loud humming like millions and millions of bees or locusts whirring in the woods behind my grandfather's house in the country, where I used to be sent summer weekends to keep me out of city trouble. Or maybe the music plays only inside my skull like the goddamn tinnitis plaguing me. No sign the others beside the grave hear what I hear. But how can you ever know what somebody else is hearing or thinking. All you can do is ask, and if the other person bothers to answer, why would you believe he'd tell the truth. So I don't ask. Anyway, if these other people are Africans, and somehow I'm sure they are, how would they understand my question. What language, whose language, should we speak here, wherever here is. Wherever this impossible shit happens and drags in more strange stuff. I'm not in charge. This space belongs to someone older, smarter. Maybe the ancient, crippled-up grandfather of my grandfather. Babysitting that old, old man my grandpa's job when he was a boy in South Carolina. Watching his grandfather sleep, listening to his grandfather's stories, feeding him, tending his slop bucket. Maybe I'm listening to my great-great-grandfather remember a secret gathering of slaves in the woods, slaves in a circle chanting, returning one of their own to Africa or a place even more distant and older than Africa, an unnamable, desirable place none of us huddling around the grave will ever reach alive.

  I'm changing. Happy to change, though I'm not sure why I'm happy about becoming a slave. Soon I'll remember my tribal name, the name of the dead traveler. I'll be able to pick out members of my clan from the crowd, speak to them. If none of my kin survived the raid on our village, the long, forced march in chains, the nightmare voyage across oceans, I'll begin here and now to fashion a new family. New flesh, bodies linked to mine, determined to soldier on with me in spite of how much we've been hurt, how much we've lost. Soon, soon, a pair of eyes set in one of these brown faces will catch a glint of light, fix me in a kinsman's all-seeing, welcoming smile. Or perhaps I'm the one who's on the ground, giving it up, my warm skin cooling, at last, at last, in the bundle of rags and the humming background noise an arena slowly drained of all its scurrying, scrambling occupants, the busy traffic of thousands of feet fleeing in many directions that is really the same direction, away, away, a termite mound emptying, like my body emptying, leaving me behind. Everybody gone and me left behind. Or everybody left behind and me gone. It could be happening. Must happen one day.

  Goody-bye, goody-bye. What I read Africans used to say to spirits coming or going. What they chanted to send one of themselves back across the water with letters from survivors not quite ready to return. Africans flying home, Africans floating, skywalking and skyrunning the air of Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas. Goody-bye, goody-bye. Africans shape-shifting from one skin to another. Faster than the speed of light. I read that the message-bearer who's called home, sent home, must be silent. Only silence has room for the humming I'm hearing, room for cannons booming, flames roaring, room for the screams of the murdered, wailing of captives, room, room, and still more room to drown our sorrow while we circle this grave and still more room for messages we send to the other side. Room for a freshly fallen body and our weary bodies, room for words we're not ashamed to load on the dead's shoulders, the shoulders of the unborn, greetings, wishes, confessions we hope they will not be ashamed to repeat. An ocean of silence, untroubled, unmarked, lost-and-found room for everything, no matter how much noise, how many burdens we shovel into the hole.

  That's why the fallen one must lie so still. With far to go, much to carry, a body must rest and rest. Where I stand, I can see myself watching. Not here. Not there. Not me. Not the one down. I'm present and absent. Motionless though time never stops. Falling. Falling slowly and everyone watching me fall, but I'll be the last to know. My scribbled words in the wrong language alongside ribbons, a bloody bandage, a lock of hair, salt, wildflowers, the leg of a toad, a crow's feather, bee's wing, leaves and sticks and stones others have smoothed, tucked, sprinkled, spit, rubbed on the winding cloth, our good news and bad news mailed home for eyes we'll never see, hands never touch, voices never hear.

  Goody-bye, goody-bye. I see fish swimming across a plowed field. A pale worm sprouting wings and rising. Birdfish, fish-birds leaping, bodies arched like rainbows, their feathers or gills or hide or shell, whatever you'd call their wrappings for which there are no words, glisten, shimmer like metal, like wind, like water, thousands of messages, thousands of tiny faces climbing, row after row, from courtside to rafters, tiers of eyes circling the arena.

  I'm catching on at last. In this unfolding space nothing stays what it appears to be. What happens is a door into itself, through itself, to something else. Like the hip clothes we profile sauntering into the arena. Like our flashy uniforms. Like our steaming, naked skin after we peel off sweaty gear, toss it on a pile for someone to wash whiter than snow. Like the dead. Like the fallen one we cover with our messages, our chanting. Dressing him, hiding him.

  I'm no less a stranger here even though I can account for some of the strangeness. Not the mixed blessing of déjà vu. More like I've been prepared by voices that know how to grab my attention, even though, like my grandfather, they speak barely above a whisper and not often. The scene's not exactly meaningless, not quite crazy: the fallen one could be Sat or Sat in drag or a stranger wearing a Sat mask calling me, teasing me, C'mon, Negro, the night's still young. Sat hesitates at the locker room doorway. I can't not look. He starts to lift his mask and I cringe. Expect a horror show of bloody meat, drool, pus, veins, sinews. What I get is Sat's voice: Maybe it's me, bro, maybe not, but your boon coon Sat's with you, bro, part of this shit, always, don't you forget. Then I see past whatever Sat's pretending to be, see Sat's hidden features pressed up against the back of the mask, breathing through nose holes, mouth hole, hear him suck his teeth, watch the big, bald, bowling ball head wagging Sat's wag.

  One by one, my brother, Sat says. Going down one by one. Faster and faster. Soon won't be none us leff. Nobody speaking de ole language. Nobody wit de ole moves. Going down one by one, baby. Poor baby. Goody-bye, goody-bye. Ain't it what dese funny-looking niggers, I mean African sisters and brothers, be saying. Goody-bye. Won't be none us leff in a minute.

  Sweat darkens Sat's uniform. A puddle spreading under him, a black hole he's dived in and ain't never coming back.

  Here comes the little rooster of a referee with the basketball tucked tight under his wing so nobody will run up behind him and pull one of those corny old Globetrotter reams—steal the ball and eat it or change it to a bucketful of water and douse the fans with confetti. He squeezes through the circle, whispers in the coach's ear. Coach nods and the ref in his zebra shirt and last season's black stretch pants with not enough stretch for this year's butt and belly heads for the official's table to make sure no one cheats up the score during the break. Or maybe this once he'll blim-blim, bling-bling over to the scorekeeper and order more time on the clock, or less time, whatever it takes to erase the terrible fall.

  Tomorrow everybody will say they knew it was coming, but nobody knew shit till the moment Sat landed. Still don't know shit. Hear people tell the story you'd think Sat's fall a replay. Like been there, done that. Like no big thing, seen it a hundred times before. Like they're connected and get the news beforehand so nothing surprises them. But the game goes on and on, not one game repeated—more game, different game, always. Always news. No playback or fast-forward or time out. Game doesn't end when somebody falls. For a moment you might think so and study the one who's down. Could be you, but you still won't know shit.

  My grandfather had a shotgun and hunted birds and that's what I thought of when Sat fell. A bird high up flying fast and then pow, bird drops like a stone. Knuckle crack of bone split on the shiny floor. Sat's long, dark body not moving. Damn. Didn't belie
ve the old boy could still hop that high. Sat's glazed eyes staring at nothing we're able to see. The hushed arena kneels, leans in closer for a peek, for a listen.

  We tighten our circle, seal the gap where the ref slipped through. Part of our job. We're pros, paid for holding on and letting go, winning and losing, good news and bad news. Who cares. Just as long as we get paid. Just so everybody feels safe. And for the moment everybody is, except the one down. Who we love because we're not him. And love standing around for a couple of minutes with nothing harder to do than worry about how we look, wishing our big shorts had pockets to hide our big hands.

  In the same fat book where I read about slave burials I learned down is not necessarily bad. Some Africans believe down's holy, one of the Four Kingdoms of the Sun. Without down no up, no world. The sun must rest every day so these African people carve fancy stools for kneeling and watching the sun drop into the sea. Double sun for a while, one in the sky, its twin shining on the water, then half a sun as it sinks, then no sun it seems, just brightness bleeding, spreading, blinding you, scaring you because the sun might not rise again, and for a heartbeat the gold fire really does seem to die. You can almost hear the sizzle. You worry that the sun's too heavy, heavier even than the steel-boned arena kneeling behind our backs, so how will it get its big self up off the floor. The sun will drown. Night never end. But down's not out, the Africans say. Sun sleeps faster than the speed of light. Shoots through the thick earth, pops out the other side still burning if you're awake next morning to see it. So down can't be all bad. The sun bends down and warms water swallowing it. People bend their knees to pray, to dance, to jump up and fly. To get down.

  How long. How long will this stranger, this messenger dropped from the sky, stay down. We don't know the answer, can't set our faces right. How long will he cover for us. When will our safe moment end. Who goes down next. If the teammate stretched out on the floor doesn't answer these questions we load on him, who will. How long will it take our messages to cross the sea. How long before play starts up again. All the things we wish to know swirl in the chanting. All we can't know thickens it.