by Rick Yancey
“Chaseball?”
“Chess-baseball. Chaseball. Get it?” He plops a coin beside the board.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s a quarter.”
“I know it’s a quarter.”
“For the purposes of the game, it’s the ball. Well, not really the ball, but it represents the ball. Or what happens with the ball. If you’d be quiet a second, I could explain all the rules.”
“I wasn’t talking.”
“Good. You give me a headache when you talk. Name-calling and Yoda quotes about chess and cryptic elephant stories. You want to play or not?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He places a white pawn just in front of the black queen, saying that’s him, the batter.
“You should lead off with your queen. She’s the most powerful.”
“That’s why she bats cleanup.” He shakes his head. My ignorance is astounding. “Real simple: Defense, that’s you, flips first. Heads, it’s a strike. Tails, a ball.”
“A coin won’t work,” I point out. “There are three possibilities: strike, ball, or a hit.”
“Actually, there are four, counting fouls. You stick to chess; I’ll handle baseball.”
“Chaseball,” I correct him.
“Anyway. If you flip a ball, that’s a ball, and you flip again. Comes up heads, though, and then I get the coin. See, that gives me a chance to get a hit. Heads I connect, tails I miss. If I miss, strike one. And so on.”
“I get it. And if you flip heads, I get the coin back to see if I can field it. Heads I throw you out . . .”
“Wrong! So wrong! No. First I flip, three times. Four times if I get a TT.”
“TT?”
“Two tails. That’s a triple. With a TT you get one more flip: heads is a home run; tails, just a triple. Heads-heads is a single; heads-tails is a double.”
“Maybe we should just start playing and you can—”
“Then you get the coin back to see if you can field my potential single, double, triple, or homer. Heads, I’m out. Tails, I’m on base.” He takes a deep breath. “Unless it’s a home run, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Are you making fun of me? Because I don’t know—”
“I’m just trying to absorb—”
“It kind of sounds like you are. You have no idea how long it took me to come up with this. It’s pretty complicated. I mean, not like the game of kings, but you know what they call baseball, don’t you? The national pastime. Baseball is called the national pastime because, by playing it, we learn how to master time. Or the past. One of ’em.”
“Now you’re the one making fun of me.”
“Actually, I’m the only one making fun of you right now.” He waits. I know what he’s waiting for. “You never smile.”
“Does it matter?”
“Once, when I was a kid, I laughed so hard, I peed my pants. We were at Six Flags. The Ferris wheel.”
“What made you laugh?”
“I can’t remember now.” He slides his hand beneath my wrist and lifts my arm to press the quarter into my upturned palm. “Flip the damn coin so we can play.”
I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but the game isn’t that complicated. He gets very excited on his first hit, triumphantly fist pumping, then proceeding to move the black pieces around the board while he calls the play in a hoarse, high-pitched imitation of an announcer’s voice, like a kid playing with action figures.
“It’s a deep drive into center field!” The center-field pawn slides toward second base, the bishop second baseman and the pawn shortstop drop back, and the left-field pawn runs up, then cuts toward center. That’s with one hand while the other manipulates the quarter, turning it in his fingers like a ball spinning in flight, lowering it as if in slow motion to land in center-left field. It’s so ridiculous and childish that I would have smiled if I still smiled.
“He’s safe!” Razor bellows.
No. Not childish. Childlike. Eyes fever bright, voice rising in excitement, he’s ten again. Not all things are lost, not the important things.
His next hit is a blooper that drops between first base and right field. He creates a dramatic collision between my fielder and baseman, first base sliding back, right field sliding up, then smack! Razor cackles at the impact.
“Wouldn’t that be an error?” I ask. “It’s a catchable ball.”
“Catchable ball? Ringer, it’s just a dorky game I made up in five minutes with a bunch of chess pieces and a quarter.”
Two more hits; he’s three runs up at the top of the first. I’ve always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason. Razor must sense my enthusiasm waning. He amps up the commentary while sliding the pieces around (despite my pointing out they’re my pieces, since I’m on defense). Another drive deep center-left. Another floater behind first base. Another impact of first baseman and outfielder. I don’t know if he’s repeating himself because he thinks it’s funny or because he has a serious deficit in imagination. There’s a part of me that feels as if I should be deeply affronted on behalf of chess players everywhere.
By the third inning, I’m exhausted.
“Let’s pick it up again tonight,” I suggest. “Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better.”
“What? You don’t like it?”
“No. It’s fun. I’m just tired. Really tired.”
He shrugs like it doesn’t matter, which it does, or he wouldn’t shrug. He slips the quarter back into his pocket and packs up the box, muttering under his breath. I catch the word chess.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” Cutting his eyes away.
“Something about chess.”
“Chess, chess, chess. Chess on the brain. Sorry chaseball has nothing on chess in the sheer thrill category.”
He shoves the box under his arm and stomps to the door. One last parting shot before he goes: “I thought maybe I’d cheer you up a little, that’s all. Thanks. We don’t have to play anymore.”
“Are you angry at me?”
“I gave chess a chance, didn’t I? You didn’t see me bitching.”
“You didn’t. And you did. A lot.”
“Just think about it.”
“Think about what?”
He shouts across the room: “Just think about it!”
He slams out the door. I’m out of breath, shaky, and can’t figure out why.
61
I’M READY WITH an apology when the door opens that night. The more I think about it with my feverish mind, the more I feel like the bully at the beach who kicks over some little kid’s sand castle.
“Hey, Razor, I’m—”
My mouth drops open. There’s a stranger holding the tray, a kid around twelve or thirteen.
“Where’s Razor?” I ask. Well, more like demand.
“I don’t know,” the kid squeaks. “They handed me the tray and said take it.”
“Take it,” I echo stupidly.
“Yeah. Take it. Take the tray.”
They pulled Razor off Ringer duty. Maybe chaseball’s against regs. Maybe Vosch got ticked, two kids acting like kids for a couple of hours. Despair is addictive, for the one watching it and the one experiencing it.
Or maybe Razor’s the ticked party here. Maybe he asked to be reassigned, took his chaseball and went home.
I don’t sleep well that night, if you can call it night under the constant sterile glow. My fever shoots up to a hundred and three as my immune system launches its final, desperate assault on the arrays. I can see the blurry green numbers on the monitor inching upward. I slip into a semi-delirious doze.
Bitch! Leave me. You know why they call it baseball, don’t you? It’s a deep drive into center field! I’m done. Take care of yourself.
The grungy sil
ver turning in Razor’s fingers. It’s a deep drive. A deep drive. Lowering toward the board in slow motion, where the fielders come up, second base and shortstop go back, left goes right. Blooper on the first-base line! Fielder races up, baseman back, boom. Fielders up, infield back, cut to the right. First baseman back, right fielder up, boom. Up, back, cut. Back, up. Boom.
Over and over, let’s go to the instant replay, up, back, cut. Back, up.
Boom.
Now I’m wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. No. Can’t see it as well. Better with my eyes closed.
Center and left slash down. Left cuts across:
H
Right steps up. First base runs back:
I
Oh, come on. Ridiculous. You’re delusional.
When I got back to our camp that night with the vodka, I found my dead father curled into a fetal position, his face covered in blood where he had clawed at the bugs born inside his mind. Bitch, he called me before I left to find the poison that would save him. He called me another name, too, the name of the woman who left us when I was three. He thought I was my mother, which was ironic. From the time I was fourteen, I was more like his mother, feeding him, washing his clothes, taking care of the house, making sure he didn’t do something catastrophically stupid to himself. And every day I went to school in my perfectly pressed uniform and they called me Her Majesty Marika and said I thought I was better than everybody else because my father was a semi-famous artist, the reclusive genius type, when the truth was that most days my father didn’t know what planet he was on. By the time I got home from school, he’d be full-on delusional. And I let people on the outside hold their delusions, too. I let them think I thought I was better, the way I let Sullivan think she was right about me. I didn’t just foster the delusions. I lived them. Even after the world crashed around us, I clung to them. But after he died, I told myself no more. No more brave fronts or false hopes or pretending everything’s okay when nothing is. I thought I was being tough by pretending, calling it being optimistic, brave, keeping my head up or whatever bullshit seemed to fit the moment. That’s not tough. That’s the very definition of soft. I was ashamed of his disease and angry at him, but I was just as guilty. I played right into the lies right up to the end: When he called me my mother’s name, I didn’t correct him.
Delusional.
In the corner, the camera’s blank, soulless eye staring.
What did Razor say? Just think about it!
That’s not all you said, is it? I ask him, looking blankly back at the blank, black eye. That isn’t everything.
62
I HOLD MY BREATH when the door opens the next morning.
All night I seesawed between belief and doubt. I wallowed in every aspect of the new reality.
First option: Razor didn’t invent chaseball any more than I invented chess. The game is Vosch’s creation for reasons too murky to see clearly.
Second option: Razor, for reasons only clear to Razor, has decided to seriously mess with my head. It wasn’t just the hardhearted and resilient who survived the winnowing of the human race. A lot of sadistic assholes persisted, too. That’s the way of every human catastrophe. The douchebag is nearly indestructible.
Third option: All of it is entirely in my head. Chaseball is a silly game made up by a kid to take my mind off the fact that I may be dying. There’s no other point, no secret messages traced on a chessboard. My seeing letters where there are no letters is the human brain’s tendency to find patterns, even where there are no patterns.
And I hold my breath for another reason: What if it’s the squeaky-voiced kid again? What if Razor doesn’t come back, ever come back? There’s a real possibility that Razor is dead. If he was trying to secretly communicate with me and Vosch figured it out, I’m sure Vosch’s response would be one thing and only one thing.
I let out my breath slow and steady when he steps into the room. The beeping of the monitor kicks up a notch.
“What?” Razor asks, narrowing his eyes at me. He senses something’s up right away.
I say it. “Hi.”
His eyes cut right, cut left. “Hi.” Drawing the tiny word out slowly, as if he’s not sure if he’s with a lunatic. “Hungry?”
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“You should try to eat this. You look like my cousin Stacey. She was a meth addict. I don’t mean you literally look like a meth addict. Just . . .” Face turning red. “You know, like something is eating you from the inside.”
He pushes the button beside the bed. I rise. He says, “You know what I’m addicted to? Sour Patch Kids. Raspberry. Not so crazy about the lemon. I have a stash. I’ll bring you some if you want.”
He sets the tray in front of me. Cold scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a blackened, crusty thing that may or may not be bacon. My stomach clenches. I look up at him.
“Try the eggs,” he suggests. “They’re fresh. Free range, organic, chemical free. We raise them right here in camp. The chickens, not the eggs.”
Dark, soulful eyes and that small, mysterious, beatific smile. What did his reaction mean when I said hi? Was he startled I offered him a halfway human greeting or was he startled because I had figured out the real point of chaseball? Or was he not startled at all and I’m picking up cues that aren’t there?
“I don’t see the box.”
“What box? Oh. It was kind of a stupid game.” He looks away and says softly to himself, “I miss baseball.”
He’s quiet for the next couple of minutes while I move the cold eggs around the plate. I miss baseball. A universe of loss in four syllables.
“No, I liked it,” I tell him. “It was fun.”
“Really?” A look: Are you serious? He doesn’t know that I am 99.99999 percent of the time. “You didn’t seem too down with it at the time.”
“I guess I’m just not feeling well lately.”
He laughs and then seems surprised at his own reaction. “Okay. Well, I left it in my quarters. I’ll bring it someday if nobody swipes it.”
The conversation meanders off the game. I discover Razor was the youngest of five kids, grew up in Ann Arbor, where his dad worked as an electrician and his mom as a middle school librarian, played baseball and soccer and loved Michigan football. Until he was twelve, his great ambition was to be the starting quarterback for the Wolverines. But he grew tall, not big, and baseball became his passion.
“Mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the old man didn’t think I was smart enough . . .”
“Wait. Your dad didn’t think you were smart?”
“Smart enough. There’s a difference.” Defending his father even in death. People die; love endures. “He wanted me to be an electrician like him. Dad was a big union guy, president of his local, stuff like that. That was the real reason he didn’t want me to be a lawyer. Suits, he called them.”
“He had a problem with authority.”
Razor shrugs. “‘Be your own man,’ he always said. ‘Don’t be the Man’s man.’” He shuffles his feet, embarrassed, like he’s talking too much. “What about your old man?”
“He was an artist.”
“That’s cool.”
“He was also a drunk. Did more drinking than painting.” Though not always. Yellowed photographs of showings hanging crooked in dusty frames and the students buzzing in his studio nervously cleaning brushes and the cathedral hush that fell when he walked into a crowded room.
“What kind of shit did he paint?” Razor asks.
“Mostly that. Shit.” Not always, though. Not when he was younger and I was small and the hand that held mine was stained with rainbow colors.
He laughs. “The way you joke. Like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and it’s your own joke.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t joking.”
He nods. “Maybe that’s why you
don’t know it.”
63
AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:
HI
Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”
“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”
“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.
“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.
The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:
HLP
Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands . . .”
He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.
HOW
I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged runners. Time slows down; events speed up.
PLN
I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.
“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”
And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.