End Zone

27

It rained and then snowed. I wrote letters through the blurred afternoons, embryonic queries on the nature of silence and time, notes really, laconic and hopeful, ready for bottling, and I mailed them to friends and former teachers, to people back home, to selfpossessed young women in prospering colleges. There were no picnics with Myna. The days seemed even longer than the meandescent days of summer. Mrs. Tom died finally after remaining in a coma for several weeks.

I took a walk down the hall and dropped into Taft's room. He was sitting on his bed, legs bent in, back quite straight, reading a huge gray book. I sat by his desk. Beyond the window was that other world, unsyllabled, snow lifted in the wind, swirling up, massing within the lightless white day, falling toward the sky. The blanket was gray. The walls were bare except for an inch of transparent tape curling into itself, thumbsmudged, just one corner sticking now, a small light imprint on the wall indicating (to anyone who was interested) exactly how the tape had first been applied, at what angle to the ceiling, at what approximate angle to the intersection of that wall with each adjacent wall, at what angle to all other fixed lines in the room. The complete and absolute bareness of the walls (tapeless) made the tape seem historic. This room had not existed one year before. Room and building were new. Tape was (most likely) almost as old as the room itself, judged by poor coloring and generally shriveled appearance. Tape therefore (applied) was as old as the man occupying the room in terms of roomage or the lapsedtimeoccupancy factor. Tape and man had a special relationship. (As did room and man, tape and room.) They were coeval, in roomtime, and existed as the sum. of a number of varying angles. I yawned and rubbed my eyes, bored with myself. Both my shoelaces were untied. Taft went on reading, his head bowed slightly. I studied the topography of his skull, searching for mountain ranges and rivers, for a sign of ancient civilizations under the saltwhite sand. Without hair, I thought, you will run even faster. Vision of a torchbearer black in the high dawn of a mountain country. (Spurgeon Cole stood beneath the goal posts, repeating them, arms raised in the shape of a crossbar and uprights, his fists clenched. The crowd was still up, leaning, in full voice, addressing its own noise. This was it then, the legend, the beauty, the mystery of black speed. Perhaps twenty thousand people watched, overjoyed to see it finally, to partake in the ceremony of speed, in statistical prayer, the human effort tracked by pulsing lights. They were privileged to witness what happened in real tune, nonelectronically, in that obscure compass point of America, all standing now, the young men of bootcamp countenance, the lightbaked girls with freckled arms, the men with sheriff bellies, the bespectacled and longnecked women-crafty grim inedible birds-of middle age, the old men with one shoulder higher than the other, with dented felt hats and stained teeth. It was not just the run that had brought them to their feet; it was the idea of the run, the history of it. Taft's speed had a life and history of its own, independent of him. To wonder at this past. To understand the speed, that it was something unknown to them, never to be known. Hipwidth. Leglength, Tendon and tibia. Hyperextensibility. But more too: wizardry drawn from wells in black buckets. Much to consider that could not be measured in simple centimeters. Strange that this demon speed could be distilled from the doldrums of old lands. But at least they had seen it now. The hawks in their lonesome sky. It had been a sight to ease the greed of all sporting souls. Maybe they had loved him in those few raw seconds. Truly loved him in the dark art of his speed. That was the far reach of the moment, their difficult love for magic.) Taft wore a white shirt and gray pants. His socks were black. I wondered if he had planned to put a poster on the wall and if he had then changed his mind, stripping off all but one piece of tape. What kind of poster, I thought. Of what or whom. It would have told something. That, I knew, was why he hadn't put it up. And now he enveloped his presence in neutral shades. (A somber cream covered the walls and ceiling.) In his austerity he blended with the shadowless room, reading his gray history, a dreamer of facts. Everywhere it was possible to perceive varieties of silence, small pauses in corners, rectangular planes of stillness, the insides of desks and closets (where shoes curl in dust), the spaces between things, the endless silence of surfaces, time swallowed by methodically silent clocks, whispering air and the speechlessness of sentient beings, all these broken codes contained in the surrounding calm, the vastness beyond the window, sunblaze, a clash of metals no louder than heat on flesh. The snow had stopped falling. I got up and went back to my room.