Field of Fantasies

by Rick Wilber

  “Just do one more. I wanna tell the kids—”

  “No. No, I can’t.”

  I hung up the phone, and by the time I turned back to the screen Franco was crossing the plate. “Look what you missed,” Frankie said, aggrieved.

  Olerud was up. Oh, Olerud. I read somewhere that he rode the subway to the ballpark. The drink and the Mets had me soaked with love. Olerud looked like a college professor, like a brain surgeon, like the steady man my father’d been and had always had in mind for me. “Single,” I said.

  “Holy Mother of Christ,” Frankie said, when the ball lined over to right field. “How do you do that each and every time?”

  “Women,” the bartender said. “Scary.”

  Now Mike Piazza hobbled up to the plate, an old man with all his injuries. Across the drunken space from bar to TV, I saw that he was hurting but maybe enjoying the martyr’s role, too. I might have been watching Diego. I was watching Diego, and he was beckoning me to come tango with him. “Look at those arms,” I said, when Piazza settled his bat. “Home run.”

  “You wish,” Frankie said, but there it went, to right center, soaring.

  Frankie grabbed my wrist and squeezed hard. “That’s unbelievable.” The Mets had tied the game at seven-all in the seventh. Piazza trotted across home plate, the weary glorious old warrior. You could hear the bellows and the cheers from bars all across lower Manhattan. You could hear them in Brooklyn. The old men twisted on their stools like schoolboys, punched out at one another, high-fived the bartender, beamed on me as if I were the one who’d hit the ball.

  “Have you heard what she can do?” Frankie shouted. ‘We could make a fortune at this.” Another shot appeared in front of me. Past drunk already, I swallowed the whiskey down and knew I wasn’t just leaking love, going mushy over the wrong team, remembering the way my father and my brother watched the game. My eyes were on the screen but it was Diego I saw, his jowls sinking into his neck, his nose mapped with blood vessels, his arms flaccid, craving a baby. His fat eggplant, his bent summer squash. Now in his old age, when I thought I couldn’t do it, he had to have another child, had to reproduce, that strange old biological urge in the face of his drooping body. Tears rolled down my jaw, but nobody noticed. They were all weeping, the four men in the bar right along with me, when the Braves tied it back.

  * * *

  Outside the loft building, his shoulder pressed against the gates of the discount store, Diego stood smoking, one hand holding up his eggplant painting. He hadn’t even pulled it off the stretcher, which meant it was on its way to some other wall.

  Unless I was hallucinating. I’d never been drunk enough to have visions, but right now it was hard to put one foot in front of the other. The way he watched me from a distance, impassive, made him look like somebody else, not the Diego who wept and begged the other night.

  The sight of him sobered me up. I began to walk faster and then to skip a little. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to reach him. I’d punished him long enough and I’d punished myself, too. I’d be sad again, every once in a while, because he’d cheat again, but I wouldn’t be so sad as I’d been these last few months, hating him.

  “Diego,” I called, in case he couldn’t recognize me, but he only drew his cigarette up for another pull. He looked like somebody in one of Lily’s performance pieces. Was he trying to get me to really pity him? Well, I did pity him, but no more than I pitied myself. The Mets were weeping somewhere tonight and we might as well keep them company.

  “Diego.” I finally stopped, panting, in front of him. “The Mets lost.”

  “Good. You hate the Mets.”

  “I got to like them. It went eleven innings. Now there’s no subway series.”

  “Just another way for those asshole investment bankers to spend their dough.” He tossed his cigarette toward the gutter, but it landed a foot shy and smoldered.

  I fingered a staple along the stretcher’s edge and felt every thread of the canvas below. “Look,” I said. “Will you bring this back upstairs now? Could we talk about stuff?” The future rolled out, hard but workable. Maybe he’d want to come see South Carolina.

  But Diego said: “You make me look like a clown in that piece.” I tried to read his face but saw only how calm it was.

  “You never looked like a clown.”

  Diego stared up Chambers. I had no idea what expression that was in his face. Regret? Relief? Fury? He and his canvas were one body, waiting, leaning into something I couldn’t imagine. “This one doesn’t fit in the van before.”

  “What van?”

  As if I really were hallucinating, not just Diego but the whole night, a beat-up white van chugged toward us and double-parked in front of my door. The girl at the wheel averted her eyes. This time she didn’t look so much like me. Her left ear was laced with little safety pins, a dozen of them at least. She appeared to be about twelve. It was a wonder she could drive that truck around without getting pulled over for underage driving every fifteen feet.

  “See you sometime,” Diego said, and hoisted his painting. “Maybe at the MoMA, huh?” He didn’t say it unkindly. He looked back and winked. He was sober and he knew where he was spending the night.

  I turned my back to the van and fumbled with my keys. It would take me half an hour just to figure out which one went in the door. I didn’t want the girl to see me weeping. Diego wouldn’t mind, but the girl would hold that frame of me forever, would think she knew something about me just because of the way I stumbled and cried after the Mets lost the pennant.

  I sniffled over my shoulder. Diego had finished loading the painting. He stood behind the van, one hand on the closed doors, waiting for me to look. I looked. He was wearing his black Art & Anarchy T-shirt. He was full of beans and he wanted me to know it.

  I stuffed my keys in my pocket and extended my arm for a solo tango. That would be my goodbye to Diego: I would let him drive off remembering the dance lessons when I could predict his every move. Off I went, on my own, stretching across Chambers, dancing past the gated stores. Maybe I looked like a clown. For a minute I thought I might remember how to go deep into my own body, but I knew they were both watching me and really, it was only a big act. Sometimes you just have to go through the motions. I bent my knees like Bernie Williams. I settled my face like Chuck Knoblauch. I watched the van lurch past me.

  Gardner Dozois is one of the most influential editors in science fiction and fantasy as longtime editor of the annual The Year's Best Science Fiction, which began in 1984 and continues today. He also served as editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine for twenty years. He has frequently won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor and has twice won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In this story he tells us of one of those frozen moments in baseball's past, like Bobby Thomson's home run, or Don Larsen's final pitch in his perfect World Series game, or Bill Mazeroski's Forbes Field home run. Or Karl Holzman's hanging curve.

  The Hanging Curve

  Gardner Dozois

  IT WAS A COOL October night in Philadelphia, with a wet wind coming off the river that occasionally shifted to bring in the yeasty spoiled-beer smell of the nearby refineries. Independence Stadium, the relatively new South Philly stadium that had been built to replace the old Veteran’s Stadium, which still stood deserted a block or so away, was filled to capacity, and then some, with people standing in the aisles. It was the last game of a hard-fought and bitterly contested World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, 3—2 in favor of the Phillies, the Yankees at bat with two out in the top of the ninth inning, and a man on third base. Eduardo Rivera was at bat for the Yankees against pitcher Karl Holzman, the Yankees’ best slugger against the Phillies’ best stopper, and Holzman had run a full count on Rivera, 3—2. Everything depended on the next pitch.

  Holzman went into his slow, deliberate windup. Everybody in die stadium was leaning forward, everybody was holding their breath. Though there were almost ten thousand people in the sta
nds, nobody was making a sound. Even the TV announcers were tense and silent. Hey, there it is! The pitch.

  Some pundits later said that what was about to happen happened because the game was so tight, because so much was riding on the next pitch—that it was the psychic energy of the thousands of fans in the stands, the millions more in the viewing audience at home, every eye and every mind focused on that particular moment. That what happened was caused by the tension and the ever-tightening suspense felt by millions of people hanging on the outcome of that particular pitch . ..

  And yet, in the more than a century and a half that people had been playing professional baseball, there had been many games as important as this one, many contests as closely fought, many situations as tense or tenser, with as much or more passion invested in the outcome—and yet what happened that night had never happened before, in any other game.

  Holzman pitched. The ball left his hand, streaked toward the plate .. .

  And then it froze.

  The ball just stopped, inches from the plate, and hung there, motionless, in midair.

  After a second of stunned surprise, Rivera stepped forward and took a mighty hack at the motionless ball. He broke his bat on it, sending splinters flying high. But the ball itself didn’t move.

  The catcher sat back on his butt with a thump, then, after a second, began to scoot backward, away from the plate, He was either praying or cursing in Spanish, perhaps both. Hurriedly, he crossed himself.

  The home-plate umpire, Kellenburger, had been struck dumb with astonishment for a moment, but now he raised his hands to call time. He took his mask off and came a few steps closer to lean forward and peer at the ball, where it hung impossibly in midair.

  The umpire was the first to actually touch the ball. Gingerly, he poked it with his finger, an act either very brave or very foolish, considering the circumstances. “It felt like a baseball,” he later said, letting himself in for a great deal of comic ridicule by late-night talk show hosts, but it really wasn’t that dumb a remark, again considering the circumstances. It certainly wasn’t acting like a baseball.

  He tried to scoop the ball out of the air. It wouldn’t budge. When he took his hand away, there it still was, the ball, hanging motionless a few feet above home plate.

  The fans in the stadium had been shocked into stunned silence for a few heartbeats. But now a buzzing whisper of reaction began to swell, soon growing into a waterfall roar. No one understood what had happened. But something had happened to stop the game at the most critical possible moment, and nobody liked it. Fistfights were already beginning to break out in the outfield bleachers.

  Rivera had stepped forward to help Kellenburger tug at the ball, trying to muscle it down. They couldn’t move it. Holzman, as puzzled as everyone else, walked in to see what in the world was going on, managers flew out of the dug-outs, ready to protest something, although they weren’t quite sure what. The rest of the umpires trotted in to take a look. Soon home plate was surrounded by almost everybody who was down on the ballfield, both dugouts emptying, all shouting, arguing, making suggestions, jostling to get a close look at the ball, which hung serenely in midair.

  Within minutes, fights were breaking out on the field as well. The stadium cops were already having trouble trying to quell disturbances in the seats, where a full-fledged riot was brewing. They couldn’t handle it. The fans began tearing up the seats, trampling each other in panicked or angry surges, pouring out on to the field to join in fistfights with the players. The city cops had to be called in, then more cops, then the riot squad, who set about forcibly closing the stadium, chasing the outraged fans out with tear gas and rubber bullets. Dozens of people were injured, some moderately seriously, but, by some other miracle, none were killed. Dozens of people were arrested, including some of the players and the manager of the Yankees. The stadium was seriously trashed. By the time the umpires got around to officially calling the game, it had become clear a long time before that World Series or no World Series, no game was going to be played in Independence Stadium that night, or, considering the damage that had been done to the bleachers, probably for many nights to come.

  Finally, the last ambulance left, and the remaining players and grounds crew and assorted team personnel were herded out, still complaining and arguing. After a hurried conference between the police and the owners, the gates were locked behind them.

  The ball still hung there, not moving. In the empty stadium, gleaming white under the lights, it somehow looked even more uncanny than it had with people swarming around it. Two cops were left behind to keep an eye on it, but the sight spooked them, and they stayed as far away from it as they could without leaving the infield, checking it every few minutes as the long night crept slowly past. But the ball didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  Most of the riot had been covered live across the nation, of course, television cameras continued to roll as fans and players beat each other bloody, while the sportscasters provided hysterical commentary (and barricaded the doors of the press room). Reporters from local stations had been there within twenty minutes, but nobody knew quite how to handle the event that had sparked the riot in the first place; most ignored it, while others treated it as a Silly Season item. The reporters were back the next morning, though, some of them, anyway, as the owners and the grounds crew, more cops, the Commissioner of Baseball, and some Concerned City Hall Bigwigs went back into the stadium. In spite of the bright, grainy, mundane light of morning, which is supposed to chase all fancies away and dissolve all troubling fantasms, the ball was still frozen there in midair, motionless, exactly the same way it had been the night before. It looked even spookier though, more bewilderingly inexplicable, under the ordinary light of day than it had looked under the garish artificial lighting the night before. This was no trick of the eyes, no confusion of light and shadow. Although it couldn't be, the goddamn thing was there.

  The grounds crew did everything that they could think of to get the ball to move, including tying a rope around it and having a dozen hefty men yank and heave and strain at it, their feet scrambling for purchase, as if they were playing tug-of-war with Mighty Joe Young and losing, but they could no more move the ball than Kellenburger had been able to the night before.

  It was becoming clear that it might be a long time before another game could be played in Independence Stadium.

  After two days of heated debate in the highest baseball circles, Yankee Stadium was borrowed to restage the potential final out of the series. Thousands of fans in the stadium (who had paid heretofore unheard-of prices for tickets) and millions of television viewers watched breathlessly as Holzman went into his windup and delivered the ball to the plate at a respectable ninety-five miles-per-hour. But nothing happened except that Rivera took a big swing at the ball and missed. No miracle. The ball thumped solidly into the catcher’s mitt (who’d had to be threatened with heavy sanctions to get him to play, and who had a crucifix, a St. Christopher’s medal, and an evil-eye-warding set of horns hung around his neck). Kellenburger, the home-plate umpire, pumped his fist and roared “You’re out!” in a decisive, no-nonsense tone. And that was that. The Philadelphia Phillies had won the World Series.

  The fans tore up the seats. Parts of New York City burned. The riots were still going on the following afternoon, as were riots in Philadelphia and (for no particular reason anyone could see; perhaps they were sympathy riots) in Cincinnati.

  After another emergency session, the Commissioner announced that entire last game would be replayed in the interests of fairness. This time, the Yankees won, 7—5.

  After more rioting, the Commissioner evoked special executive powers that no one was quite sure he had, and declared that the Series was a draw. This satisfied nobody, but eventually fans stopped burning down bits of various cities, and the situation quieted.

  The bizarre result went into the record books, and baseball tried to put the whole thing behind it. In the larger world outside the insular universe
of baseball, things weren’t quite that simple.

  Dozens of newspapers across the country had independently—and perhaps inevitably—come up with the headline HANGING CURVE BALL!!!, screamed across the front page in the largest type they could muster. A novelty song of the same name was in stores within four days of the Event, and available for download on some internet sites in two. Nobody knows for sure how long it took for the first Miracle Ball joke to appear, but they were certainly circulating widely by as early as the following morning, when the strange non-ending of the World Series was the hot topic of discussion in most of the workplaces and homes in America (and, indeed, around the world), even those homes where baseball had rarely—if ever—been discussed before.

  Media hysteria about the Miracle Ball continued to build throughout the circus of replaying the World Series; outside of sports circles, where the talk tended to center around the dolorous effect all this was having on baseball, the focus was on the Miracle itself, and what it might—or might not—signify. Hundreds of conspiracy-oriented internet sites, of various degrees of lunacy, appeared almost overnight. Apocalyptic religious cults sprang up almost as fast as wacko internet sites. The Miracle was widely taken as a Sign that the Last Days were at hand, as nearly anything out of the ordinary had been, from an earthquake to Jesus’s face on a taco, for the last thousand years. Within days, some people in California had sold their houses and all their worldly possessions and had begun walking barefoot toward Philadelphia.

  After the Gates-of-Armageddon-are-gaping-wide theory, the second most popular theory, and the one with the most internet sites devoted to it was that Aliens had done it—although as nobody ever came up with an even remotely convincing reason why aliens would want to do this, that theory tended to run out of gas early, and never was as popular as the Apocalypse Now/Sign from the Lord theory. The respectable press tended to ridicule both of these theories (as well as the Sinister Government Conspiracy theory, a dark horse, but popular in places like Montana and Utah)—still, it was hard for even the most determined skeptic to deny that something was going on that no one could even begin to explain, something that defied the laws of physics as we thought we knew them, and more than one scientist, press-ganged into appearing on late-night talk shows or other Talking Head venues, burbled that if we could leam to