The Throwback Special

2. THE LOTTERY

“‘HAIR ON A MAMMOTH IS NOT PROGRESSIVE IN any cosmic sense,’” George said to Rick, a copyright lawyer for Prestige Vista Solutions.

“Okay,” Rick said, looking at his shoes.

“That’s Stephen Jay Gould.”

“Is it?” Rick said.

“What he means,” George said, stepping into the elevator with Rick, “is that there is no inherent or objective value—good or bad — to the woolly mammoth’s thick hair. The hair becomes valuable, or not, only within a specific context or environment. Only in an ice age would hair be favorable. Only in warmer temperatures would it be deleterious. The woolly mammoth is not, cosmically, a fit creature, and neither is its hairless counterpart. Fitness, always, means fitness within particular environmental conditions. It’s not as if you could look at both and predict which one would survive.”

Rick pushed his floor button, then pushed the door close button several times. He shifted his weight back and forth from left foot to right.

“Gould provides an interesting analogy,” George said slowly. “So you said, what, that the flea flicker was a horrible call. Well, yes and no. I would argue that you need to consider a play in its context, its environment. And the environment of a play is, to a large extent, the opposing team’s play. A play can take its form — and value and fitness — only within the medium, the crucible, of the adversary’s play. What we call a play in football is actually the reaction that occurs between two plays, which up to the point of the snap are just competing abstractions, just fantasies of domination. To call a play is simply to transmit information.”

George was pacing the car. Rick stared at the illuminated and unchanging numbers above the doors. The elevator stopped, and its doors opened to an empty hallway. Rick resolved to write an online review of these elevators.

“The plays that are called from the sidelines are speculative, abstract. The line of scrimmage is the narrow barrier between those abstractions. When the ball is snapped, the barrier dissolves and the two plays begin to act upon each other. We have confluence! From two plays the play comes into being. Each team’s playbook fantasy takes on terrestrial form. The play lives a fleeting life, like certain unstable isotopes. Each play attempts to assert dominance over the other play, by force and deception. This is why football is the most scientific of sports. A game is a series of discrete experiments. Hypothesis, observation, results, analysis, conclusion.”

The number 5 button was illuminated, but Rick jabbed it eight or nine times. Rick’s simple point in the lobby, which he now regretted making, was that if your quarterback’s bone comes out of his leg during a play, then it was a bad play.

“The Throwback Special was not a priori a bad play. Or what did you say? Dumbshit? A dumbshit play. You can’t say it was a dumbshit play merely because it didn’t work. That’s a tautology! The trick play happened to be catastrophically bad on that unseasonably warm evening on natural grass on a first and ten from near midfield against the Giants’ charging linebackers, who were drawn in, it is true, by the handoff to Riggins. And of course one of those charging linebackers was Lawrence Taylor, who was really a kind of player the league had never seen before. Taylor himself could make a lot of teams’ plays seem, what you said, fucking asinine. But every play is in fact a limitless number of plays, depending on contingency. Not just the opponent’s play, but injury, wind and weather, field conditions, crowd noise, execution, personnel, and all of the special properties of the compound that is created by the two constituent plays. Bye. Peace. This was fun.”

REALLY, any container of appropriate size would have worked just fine. An ice bucket, a duffel bag, an empty case of beer. Just something large enough to hold twenty-two ping-pong balls. In the early years, the men used whatever was handy, and there were never any problems. But eight or nine years ago Steven showed up with a huge lottery drum that he had built in his basement. The spinning drum rested on a detachable metal frame constructed of heavy metal poles that screwed together. The drum itself was a Plexiglas barrel with a small latched door on one end, and a superfluously large crank on the opposite end. The barrel would have held four hundred ping-pong balls. The commissioner spun the drum with the crank, then unlatched the door, reached into the barrel (often up to his shoulder), and drew out a ball on which was written one of the men’s names. One half of the drum was painted blue and red, with a Giants logo, and the other half was painted burgundy and gold, with an impeccably rendered Redskins logo. Consequently, the drum was ugly. The paint seemed to be coated with a scratch-proof, high-gloss polyurethane. The two halves of the drum, like the poles of the frame, could be taken apart for storage and transportation, though the disassembled unit remained gigantic and unwieldy. When assembled, the lottery drum was immense and foreboding, just far too massive and ornate and shiny for its simple purpose. Steven kept the dismantled drum and frame in a canvas sack, and the kit was commonly mistaken, even in a hotel, for a large camping tent. The men joked that the canvas sack would work just as well as the drum it contained. The men, almost all of them, strongly disliked and disapproved of Steven’s lottery drum. They could not, it is true, fault the design or the construction. Well, yes, they could. That was exactly what they could fault. The drum was too fancy. In fact, several of the men called it Fancy Drum. It was, after all, simply a tool. “It would be like, what if I decorated my jigsaw?” Wesley said one year, though in fact he did not own a jigsaw, or any other power tools, and always had his boards cut by the grumpy associates at Home Depot after waiting twenty humiliating minutes in the wood-cutting area, during which time the automated female voice on the store intercom said, over and over, “Special assistance needed in the wood-cutting area.” The men, most of them, despised Fancy Drum based on their sense of propriety or rectitude or congruity or harmony or aptness or accordance or seemliness or fitness or meetness or concord. The drum’s crank, it was evident, had been polished. “God, there it is,” one would whisper to another. “I hate that thing.” Countless threats against Fancy Drum had been made in the past several years, and consequently there was no real surprise, and no clear suspect, when one of the poles for the frame went missing.

“That pole was here two hours ago,” Steven said to Trent, sitting on the floor of Room 324, searching the canvas sack once again.

Trent asked if the drum had been in Steven’s possession the entire time. He asked if the item was insured. He asked if Steven felt he could definitively rule out those human resource reps from Prestige Vista Solutions.

“It’s not funny,” Steven said.

“You know,” Trent said, “the drum was always great in the conference room where we had plenty of space. But this year, in here. .”

The lottery was being held this year in Room 324. The room had two queen beds with diamond stitch comforters, an orange sitting chair, a desk, a dresser, a television, a mirror, a bedside table between the beds, a standing lamp, and four sconce lights. Above one bed was a framed watercolor of fireworks over a lake. Above the other bed was, as far as Andy could tell, precisely the same framed watercolor of fireworks over a lake. He stood between the beds, staring first at one painting, then the other, looking for minuscule differences. There were no differences that he could see.

Beneath the window was a heating and cooling unit that ticked and clanked. Trent had parted the window curtains, both the heavy, scratchy primary curtain and the gauzy, membranous under-curtain so popular in hotels. The windows overlooked the dark wet parking lot. It was still raining.

Most of the men had not yet arrived in the room for the lottery. They were resting or showering or watching television in their temporary rooms. Here in 324, Gil lay on one of the beds with his eyes closed. He needed a haircut. Trent flipped through a three-ring binder of laminated menus. Steven found the missing pole for the drum’s frame.

“Here it is,” he said.

“The remote control,” Myron said, “is the dirtiest item in a hotel room.”

“Dirtier than the sheets?” Chad asked.

Andy turned from the watercolors, and there commenced a discussion of the meaning of the idiom Fish or cut bait, which all of the men were accustomed to hearing. Trent thought it was basically synonymous with When the going gets tough or maybe If you can’t stand the heat. Myron was under the impression that the expression meant that one should just do something, anything. Get involved. If you don’t want to fish, fine, but then you should at least help those who do want to fish by preparing their bait. Trent wanted to know exactly what kind of bait required cutting. Steven, sitting on the floor and assembling the frame of the lottery drum, said everyone was wrong. Trent assured the men that the keg was on its way.

The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Gil’s leg twitched. That guy. His father had been a French horn player. He could sleep through anything. The men — Trent, Steven, Andy, Chad, and Myron — felt compelled by tradition to go ahead and try the shaving cream trick on Gil.

“THERE YOU ARE, Charles,” Nate called from the foot of the crowded bed.

Charles was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard. He waved negligibly to Nate. The room was hot and loud. The men around the bed compared their devastating commute times with a kind of pride, converting liability, momentarily, into triumph.

“Could we step outside for a minute?” Nate said.

“No,” Charles said.

Nate slid between Randy and Wesley, and then shuffled down the narrow alley between the wall and the bed. “I’m glad you’re here, Charles.”

“I like those boots,” Charles said, wondering what size they were, and whether Nate might give them to him in barter.

Nate looked down at his boots and shrugged. “Robert said I was not responsible for my thoughts,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem right to me.”

Charles could not comfortably make eye contact with Nate from his seated position. His neck ached when he looked up at such a severe angle. He felt like a child, or a baby bird. This was no position from which to adjudicate pathology. Nate had a hairy throat, and a strong, though not unpleasant scent. Charles was the expert here, and this would not do.

“Switch places with me, Nate.”

Nate climbed over Charles’s legs as Charles spun them toward the wall, and stood. “Excuse me, Gil,” Nate said. “Sorry about that.”

Now Nate sat against the headboard, and Charles stood beside and above him. This was much better.

“You can help me, right?” Nate said.

“Yes,” Charles said, “I can.”

“What I said to my wife was that I was curious. That’s all I said. Sexually curious about them. And she acted like I had a big problem.”

“Slow down,” Charles said.

“Sexual curiosity is completely normal, right?”

“Generally speaking, yes,” Charles said.

“That’s what I told her,” Nate said. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“But it does depend to some extent,” Charles said, “on the object of your curiosity.”

“What?”

“About whom are you sexually curious, Nate?”

Nate looked across the crowded room. He waved, though Charles could not see anyone waving back. Then Nate turned his face toward Charles’s hip. “The women in children’s books,” he said quietly.

“I didn’t hear you, Nate,” Charles said, though he had.

“The women in the children’s books I was reading to our kids.”

“I see.”

“The illustrated women. You’ve seen them, right?”

“Some.”

“I mean, they’re women. There they are with breasts, hips, legs. The illustrators made them, not sexy, I guess, but definitely feminine. And I suppose technically speaking, these are not all human women I’m talking about. Some are squirrels or mice or rabbits, but they are female and they walk upright and they’re gentle, and in the drawings we see their housecoats and blouses and the definite suggestion of the female form. I wouldn’t say this about just any creature in the woods on a nature show. I’m not interested in animals.”

“What are you interested in?”

“These characters in the books have had children, so you know they’re sexually active. That’s not some sick thing I’m imposing on the book. And in some of these old books the mothers are so. . Like in Blueberries for Sal? Do you know that one, Charles?”

Charles said that he did know Blueberries for Sal.

“So lock me up,” Nate said. “That mother is definitely someone I’m curious about.”

“The woman,” Charles said, “or the bear?”

“The way McCloskey crosshatched her long skirt? That’s all I’m saying, Charles.”

“And her sweater,” Charles said.

“I guess one thing I’m saying is that in trying to make these drawings not at all risqué or suggestive, the illustrators made them very risqué and suggestive. Does that make sense?”

“Go on.”

“I read the books to our kids, and occasionally I am curious about the women. Or the female animals. I didn’t say attracted to them. I didn’t say turned on. I said curious. The drawings are not indecent, and I would say my thoughts are not all that indecent, either. We have this old book that belonged to my wife when she was a kid. It’s my favorite. It’s about an elephant.”

“In terms of my expertise—”

“There’s this scene in the book when the elephant is performing at a circus, and there is a crowd of delighted people in the bleachers behind the ring. And if you look really closely, Charles, you can see these women sitting in the bleachers. They’re wearing tight knee-length skirts, and they have nice figures, and they look happy. Almost ecstatic, Charles. The picture isn’t vulgar, but. . it stimulates the imagination. I’ve read the book a thousand times. I notice the women behind the elephant, right? Big deal. I think about their sexual histories. I wonder what they like to do in bed, either alone or with others.”

“And this is a drawing?”

“Colored ink. The old four-plate process, I think. But fairly realistic. It’s clear how happy the women are.”

“Okay.”

“And yes, these women are depicted at an elephant show, but we know that’s not all there is to them. We know they have a private life that is off the page, away from the circus. So that makes me a pervert? Their sexuality seems to me to be, I don’t know, part of them. Right? It’s not something I. . It seems. .”

“Intrinsic?” Charles said.

“No,” Nate said.

“Yes,” Charles said.

“It’s not like it’s something I would ever act on,” Nate said.

Charles pressed the back of his head against the wall. He had no idea what that would entail. “Why did you tell your wife?”

“I just pointed out the women at the elephant show,” Nate said. “I don’t know why I did that. She didn’t seem to understand.”

“I’ve seen this before,” Charles said, and Nate looked up at him with an expression that shifted from surprise to relief to disappointment. The room was hot and agitated. “You are processing this experience as sexual, but it is not.”

“Yes, it is,” Nate said.

“It’s not sexual,” Charles said, trying to earn the boots. “What you find provocative is the women’s happiness, and their privacy. You’re longing to know them, and they are concealed. Your curiosity is not fundamentally erotic. There’s nothing wrong with you, except the normal stuff.”

“But I look at their breasts,” Nate said.

“Your mind,” Charles said, “strives to put these images and feelings in a familiar context.”

Nate suddenly seemed despondent. He would rather, it occurred to Charles, have been diagnosed as an untreatable pervert than as someone who was just lonesome. Apparently, he had forgotten that he had sought out Charles for reassurance or explanation. Nate had finished talking, and it also appeared that he had finished listening. He seemed miserable.

Charles rested his hand on top of Nate’s head. He watched as Gary, Vince, and Fat Michael tried to carry the lottery drum across the room. Fat Michael just happened to be wearing short sleeves (in November), and the cephalic vein in his bicep bulged tyrannically. Go to sleep, all you pussies, Fat Michael’s cephalic vein said to the men who had gathered in Room 324. Sweet dreams.

“Where?” Gary shouted to Trent. “Bathtub or hallway?”

Then the keg came through the door. It advanced into the entryway, but stopped when it saw the lottery drum directly in its path. The lottery drum halted but did not give way. The keg and the lottery drum squared off in the narrow strait of the entryway, beneath the looming form of the ironing board. Myron looked startled, but he always did. The quiet standoff lasted perhaps a minute. This was not to be decided by feints or clever maneuvers. The men cheered as the keg lurched forward.

THE RULES AND RESTRICTIONS of the lottery, formulated by Steven at its inception, were simple, clean, and egalitarian: Each man writes his initials on a ball, and places the ball into the approved container. When all balls are mixed in the container, the commissioner draws each of the twenty-two balls, one ball at a time. The man whose ball has been selected then has three minutes to choose any available player from either team. The following restrictions apply: (1) you may not select a player who has already been selected; (2) you may not select the same player twice in any five-year period; (3) you may select a player from the same team for no more than three consecutive years; (4) you must serve on the Redskins offensive line (which includes tight end Donnie Warren, but does not include tight end Clint Didier) at least once every five years; (5) you must serve in the Giants defensive backfield at least once every seven years; (6) you may not select a player whose physical dimensions are so radically different from yours as to inhibit your performance or to introduce basic issues of credibility (this restriction is enforced by the commissioner); (7) you may not choose Lawrence Taylor more than once in any eight-year period; (8) you must make your selection in a timely way, or it will be made for you by the commissioner; (9) you may not select a “toucher” (Donnalley, Riggins) in consecutive years, or the year after being Theismann; (10) you may not, of course, select Theismann. The man whose initials are on the final ball remaining in the container will be Theismann. None of the rules for selection (above) apply to the player who is selected as Theismann.

The lottery drum had been damaged in its encounter with the keg, and it lay on its side in the hallway outside 324. An IT associate and two graphic designers from Prestige Vista Solutions examined the drum warily, as beachgoers inspect a washed-up animal. The IT associate, Josh, asked the other two if they remembered when Lawrence Taylor snapped Theismann’s leg in the Super Bowl. The graphic designers nodded, though they were too young to remember. Their grisly cultural touchstones were much more recent, and high-def. “I had mono,” Josh said. The two young men nodded. “Well, wait, so I guess it couldn’t have been the Super Bowl. Plus the Giants and Redskins can’t play in the Super Bowl. Never mind. Maybe I was thinking of Tim Krumrie. Remember when Tim Krumrie’s leg snapped, and kind of flapped around in the air in the Super Bowl?” The two young men nodded.

The keg was stationed just inside the room’s door, on top of several thin gray hotel towels. Some of the men by the keg were reminded of the skirt of a Christmas tree, and this association, far from merry, was for them unhappy. The men by the keg were also outside of the bathroom, and they heard an almost constant cycle of urination, flush, and wash. Carl, filling his cup with beer, said it sounded like a car wash in there.

“Guys?” Trent said.

“Okay, guys?” Trent said.

The room was hot, and very crowded. The pizzas and breadsticks had been delivered, and exchanged for a moist wad of bills that due to an accounting error had included a sixty-eight-dollar tip. The room now smelled of sweet tomato sauce and warm meat. The pizza guy in his rain-slick red windbreaker had asked, upon entering, if this was a bachelor party, and Gary had said that it was, and Steven had said that it wasn’t, and Peter had said something incomprehensible through his mouthguard.

“Lot of men in here,” the pizza guy had said, pocketing the large wad of bills and planting himself on the corner of a bed.

Randy, who had sold his Jeff Bostic equipment at Internet auction and then lied about it, was in the corner, as alone as it was possible to be in a hot room packed with men. Derek stood in another corner, ardently surrounded. Bald Michael was standing on one bed, using two breadsticks to dramatize a boating accident he had witnessed last summer. All of the men, almost all of the men, licked the sauce from their fingers.

“Should we begin?” Trent said.

“Guys?” Trent said.

“Hey,” Trent said, waving a ping-pong ball above his head. “Guys.”

“Guys, should we begin?” Trent said.

“Let’s go ahead and get started,” Trent said.

“Guys,” he said.

Someone did one of those whistles that requires either two fingers from one hand, or one finger each from two hands. Probably Carl, who had once coached soccer.

“. . pyramid scheme!” Vince shouted into the silence that ensued after the whistle. The toilet flushed. Bald Michael’s breadstick, being driven by a drunk teen without a boating license, stalled in the water high above the queen bed.

“Anyway,” Gil murmured, “it’s a farmhouse sink. The thing is one hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Anyway,” Tommy said quietly, “the walls are plaster, so there are those strips of wood lathe underneath.”

“Anyway,” Robert whispered, “after that, I shelled out for snow tires.”

“Long story short,” the pizza guy, smoothing the bedspread, said to Andy, Chad, George, and Jeff, “I met my wife about ten years ago through an online dating site called Firestarters. We hit it off, we got married a couple of years later, we had two kids. Things were going fine. I had a good job as a consultant for a company that installs geothermal systems. Everything was fine.”

George, who was eager to know more about geothermal systems, gave enthusiastic nonverbal listening cues to the pizza guy.

“People sometimes ask me if it was a good marriage,” the pizza guy said. “And I’m like, compared to what? It was fine. We lived in the same house. We grilled on the patio. We selected paint colors. We bought stuff from the neighborhood kids who came to the door. Fine. So then last January we get a letter in the mail. It’s a check for one hundred and seventy dollars, made out to both of us, along with a letter explaining that the check is a payout from a class action suit that we didn’t even know we were a part of. Turns out that the guy who ran Firestarters had gone to jail for fraud. He hadn’t actually matched people together based on their profiles, using what they’d called sophisticated algorithms of affection. There were no algorithms. There wasn’t even a computer. In the Firestarters office? You know what they found? Twenty cases of diet soda and a color printer and a big bulletin board full of headshots. This guy and his staff just matched people together based on their pictures, without any consideration of other information about pet allergies or ideal vacations or religious affiliation, et cetera. And even though his success rate was as good as any of the other top dating sites, he went to jail, and there was a class action suit, and all of the defrauded couples got a check.”

“That’s a sweet deal,” Jeff said.

“When I first found out, I was excited. It was a jolt. Like, okay, you and me, honey, we’re outside of science here. We’re off the grid. This isn’t about being a city mouse or a night owl or a neat freak. It was like a new start. It was like we could start over, almost like we were strangers. The thought that we had not been united by a computer I found exciting, and even kind of sexy. It was exhilarating to think that we may or may not be well suited for each other in terms of temperament or retirement goals. It’s like I suddenly had a mistress, but the mistress was my wife. It really spun my head around. No algorithm! But listen, guys, my wife had completely the opposite reaction. She said she suddenly felt that she did not know me at all, and she said that made her frightened. Wow, I didn’t think anyone actually used that garlic dipping sauce. She said she was scared of me, this big stranger in her home. My big boots, my big parka. And she said that this news just validated certain suspicions that she had had over the years about how truly incompatible we are.”

Trent was saying something. Andy, George, Chad, and Jeff leaned perceptibly toward the pizza guy. None of the men would have necessarily considered the pizza guy big.

“She said she had never truly been happy, but she always thought the problem must be with her. She said the science, the computer, had intimidated her. She said she knew it sounded silly, but she believed if she had left me she would have been leaving reason and common sense. And so while I’m excited by all this, she starts flinching around me, and pressing her back against the wall every time I walk by. She starts sleeping in the guest room, and when I go there to smell her clothes and sheets, I find a kitchen knife under the bed. She was acting crazy, which was attractive to me because one of the things that had always bothered me about her was how completely measured and reasonable she always was. So now she was unreasonable, and I loved it, but when I moved toward her, she got even more scared and unreasonable, which I found almost irresistible. And we fought all the time, which was exciting, but it became clear that she in some way considered me — and not the convicted founder of Firestarters — the fraudulent and deceitful party. The whole marriage just disintegrated in a really exciting way immediately after that crappy little check arrived. In April — early April — she asked me to move out. So I moved out.”

“That is some story,” Andy said. He patted the pizza guy on the shoulder, and made his way toward the keg. Chad chewed on the inside of his lip, considering whether or not to tell the story about the nest of mice in his dishwasher.

“Late June, she calls me one day, out of the blue, completely frantic about a noise in our chimney. Her chimney. It’s loud and it’s low down, directly above the damper. She said it was a loud chittering sound, and she thought it was a squirrel or a raccoon or a bat. She held the phone to the fireplace, but I couldn’t really hear anything. She said she was sorry to bother me, but she didn’t have anyone else to call. So I went over there to the house we used to live in together. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see her. She had a weird new haircut, but she looked nice. After a few minutes by the fireplace, I heard the noise, a very agitated chirping sound. Really loud. My first thought was squirrel. My wife sat on the love seat behind me with her laptop.”

“Guys?” Trent said.

“She was trying to find audio recordings of different animals stuck in chimneys. She played them. She apologized again for calling me. I said it wasn’t a problem. I put on my big work gloves, and maybe she had that scared look again. She said, Hold on, does it sound like this? She played another recording of an animal stuck in a chimney. All the recordings of stuck animals sounded like the animal stuck in our chimney. Every one. I got a cardboard box from the basement and I put it inside the fireplace. She said to hold on, she wanted to look up a few more things. I squatted down, and I used the poker to open the damper. When the damper opened, I threw down the poker and got ready to close the flaps on the cardboard box when the squirrel fell out. Wait, my wife said. Don’t do that. At first nothing happened, but then all of a sudden — plop plop plop — three baby birds fell into the box, squawking and cheeping. And then I could hear the mother bird up in the chimney, making all kinds of noise. Now of course the mother bird sounded exactly like the recording of birds that my wife had played on her computer. It’s birds, I said. My wife said, I told you to wait. She read to me from her computer. She said they were chimney swifts. She said they’re common in our area. She said they would have flown the nest in another two to three weeks, all of them, mother and young. There had been no need to do anything. I could have left them alone and they would have been fine, but now what? We both looked down into the box. The baby birds were wet-looking, and covered in black dust. Their eyes weren’t even open. Christ, Henry, she said, they’re federally protected! I took the birds outside in the box, I don’t know why, and then a while later I brought them back in, so at least they could be close to their mother. My wife paced around the room, and then she got back on the love seat with her laptop. She was leaning way over, her hair nearly touching the screen. She said, Please don’t do anything. Just don’t do anything at all. She found something online. Plenty of other people have had baby birds fall out of their chimneys into a box. The thing to do, she said, is place them gently back where they came from. They will try to clutch you with their claws, but they will not hurt you. Try, she said, to reach above the damper and place them on the wall of the chimney. They like to be on a vertical surface. I thought you weren’t supposed to touch baby birds, I said. She said, Just put them back! They’re federally protected. I took off my gloves and one by one I picked up the baby birds and placed them back into the chimney, above the damper. They did grip my fingers with their claws, which made it difficult to let them go. But I did it, and then I closed the damper. The mother and the babies made a terrible racket for a while, but then they all got quiet. Everything seemed to be okay. My wife closed her laptop. She stood up from the love seat, and thanked me for coming, though she wouldn’t look at me. My hands were black from the soot in the chimney.” The pizza guy looked down at his hands. “I told her I thought we made a good team. We saved those birds, I said. She said, We saved those birds from the danger that you created for those birds. Which, she said, feels pretty familiar. Then I left.”

“What happened with your consulting job?” Chad said.

“Long story short,” the pizza guy said, “the next weekend I was down in the basement. I would come in through the bulkhead, sit in the old rocking chair that used to be in the nursery, and just listen to my wife and kids upstairs. I liked to hear them. This night they were playing Yahtzee — my son, my daughter, my wife, and some man named Kent I had heard a few times before. It’s my Yahtzee game, by the way. I’ve had it since I was a kid. They were playing in the living room, and every time they shook the dice in that cup, the birds in the chimney went nuts. They clearly were thriving. They chirped like crazy at the dice, and then my family and Kent all laughed and laughed like it was the funniest thing. I could hear my daughter say, They like it! And then Kent said, Or they don’t! Laugh, laugh, laugh. Now who’s the fraud? Now who? And that’s why I went upstairs, and that’s how this whole thing got started.”

“Guys?” Trent said.

“Chad? George?” Trent said.

“Jeff?” Trent said.

“Take it easy,” the pizza guy said, and he left. He had another delivery.

“Guys, let’s do this,” Trent said.

•

FANCY DRUM lay capsized in the hallway, but really, any container would have worked just fine. With mock altruism several men simultaneously offered up the use of their capacious jockstraps, while Gary suggested Vince’s purse.

“It’s not a purse,” Vince said.

Someone stripped a pillowcase off a pillow, and the case was passed hand to hand up to Trent, who stood in front of the television. Trent began to transfer ping-pong balls from a large freezer bag into the pillowcase. Some of the balls were yellowed like teeth. Four or five of the men tried quickly to formulate a joke about Trent’s weight, and Gary got there first. “Don’t eat them, Trent!” Gary yelled, just as Bald Michael was about to do his Cookie Monster voice. Trent smiled mirthlessly, patting his stomach. The weight had simply come with his third marriage. His habits had not changed. He hadn’t stopped going to the gym, hadn’t altered his eating or drinking. This was just who he was in this marriage. With his first wife he had been an outdoorsman; with his second wife he had been really into live music, and he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day; with his third wife, apparently, he would be overweight. From what Trent could gather online, his first wife still enjoyed the outdoors, as did her current husband.

When Trent had finished dropping the ping-pong balls into the pillowcase, he gripped the opening as one would grip the neck of a large bird, and he gave a trial shake. The soft clacking of the balls in the case was pleasing, and several men closed their eyes to hear it better. It is true, however, that many men felt the absence of the lottery drum, though they knew it to be ridiculous and excessive. The drum, like the conference room, had become part of the way things were done, and its excess, it might be said, had become part of its necessity. It was, perhaps, after all, appropriate. Not just any container would have worked just fine. More than one man had the odd sensation that a lottery without the drum somehow wouldn’t count. Others felt exposed somehow, or denuded by the loss of ceremony. This anxiety caused them to be garrulously nonchalant about ceremony.

“RIP, Fancy Drum!” Myron called out, raising his red cup of beer. “Let it never be said she shirked a fight.”

“To Fancy Drum!” the men said, and drank. Several men slapped Steven on the back. This small tribute was composed of a complex alloy of sincerity and derision, the ratio of which was a dark mystery to every man present. Still, it was sufficient for Steven, who stopped pouting, and accepted the attention with a smile and a raised cup. It could be said of Steven, as it could be said of each man, that he was the plant manager of a sophisticated psychological refinery, capable of converting vast quantities of crude ridicule into tiny, glittering nuggets of sentiment. And vice versa, as necessary.

“She’ll be back,” Steven said.

“Yes, she’ll be back. .” Gil said, raising his arms like a choral conductor.

“But she won’t be back tonight!” the men shouted on cue.

“Let’s keep it down,” Robert said.

Indeed, the men were boisterous. Peter chewed his mouthguard, feeling the strain, poignantly familiar from a childhood spent salvaging curbside furniture, of making do.

Traditionally, the commissioner said a few words before starting the lottery. Nothing formal, nothing prepared, just a welcome, maybe a joke. The men grew quiet. Trent slung the pillowcase of ping-pong balls over his shoulder. This posture, combined with Trent’s recent weight gain, and perhaps with the thin hotel towels beneath the keg, and possibly also with the experience of waiting anxiously for a special annual event that would be over all too quickly, necessitating a return to normal life, evoked for some men the image of Santa Claus. Trent shifted his weight from foot to foot. His face glistened with sweat and tomato sauce, and he unconsciously wiped his forehead with the pillowcase. He removed from his back pocket a wrinkled piece of paper, then used his mouth to unfold the paper. This was one of the worst things that could have happened, and a wave of agitation passed through the crowded room.

“I’ve written an invocation,” Trent said. “A rhyming invocation.” He cleared his throat. “Now, if you would, please bow your heads.”

The men, all of them, stared into their cups. They could hear the tap of the cold rain on the window. This was quite possibly going to be worse than the year George was commissioner, when he circled the conference table, speaking slowly about the freedom of assembly, the value of ritual, and the theory of play espoused by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga. He had touched all of the men as he passed their chairs.

“What a devout group of assholes,” Trent said, laughing. He balled up the sheet of paper and threw it at Myron. “Come on, let’s do this. Carl?”

Carl, still wearing the Jim Burt jersey, turned off the sconce lights above the beds, and turned on the projector, which he had made from a shoe box, a magnifying glass, and his phone. In this way the men could see, projected onto the wall above the television, the “board,” or list of players available for selection, which Carl would update after each man’s turn. Although this jury-rigged projection system was resourceful, and not vastly inferior to the system in the conference room, it nevertheless caused some mild embarrassment.

“Bravo, Carl,” Tommy said.

“Focus!” Andy said.

Trent lowered his hand into the pillowcase, first grazing the ping-pong balls gently with his fingertips, then plunging his fingers into the mass, scooping and mixing, rolling them across his moist palm. He pinched a ball (Chad’s) between his thumb and forefinger, then dropped it. He selected another ball, and gingerly lifted it from the sack like an egg of the endangered loggerhead turtle. Before looking at the name on the ball, he held it aloft, presenting it to the room.

“God, I think that might be mine,” Bald Michael whispered from the open door of the bathroom.

It was as one would expect: Some men in the room fervently wished to have the first selection. Gary was one of them. George. Wesley, strangely enough. Carl. Steven. These men wanted a full board, a large menu. They knew what they liked, and they were not frightened of options. And then there were other men who desperately did not want to choose first, who were at this moment, this and every year, filled with a sense of dread that their initials were on the ball in the commissioner’s hand. The prayer that they silently prayed was the same one they chanted as children beneath beds or behind woodpiles: Please, let me not be found. From the hallway came the sound of ice spilling violently into a bucket. Randy was one of these men. And Tommy. Robert, for whom choice was oppressive. Myron, like all Myrons. Bald Michael, who became paralyzed in the well-stocked aisles of supermarkets or home improvement stores. And perhaps especially for Derek, whose anxiety about the lottery, this and every year, was unique and complicated. Derek was concerned — nearly to the point of nausea, in fact — about the thorny psycho-

racial thicket into which he, a mixed-race man, would be plunged if the commissioner called his name. He could, with the first pick, just choose Lawrence Taylor. Throughout the years, most men had chosen Taylor with the first pick, either because they genuinely wanted to be Taylor, the prime mover of the drama, or, in one or two cases, because they worried what the other men would think if they did not choose Taylor. (In those years the reenactment had been marred by a mincing and tentative antihero.) But Derek had always been vaguely troubled by the portrayal of Taylor as villain — or, more accurately, as monster, a kind of soulless, inexorable beast who laid waste to Caucasian linemen on his way to the wavy-haired former Notre Dame quarterback who was dating Cathy Lee Crosby. Who leaped almost supernaturally onto Theismann’s back — who jumped him, basically — surprising Theismann at home at night in the safety of his pocket. Not content merely to sack Theismann, but intent on destroying him, snapping his bones, ending his career. Taylor as black devil, as bogeyman. A noble savage, at best. For the men, Derek thought, Taylor offered the opportunity not only to sublimate their roiling, middle-class aggression, but also to take a transgressive racial thrill ride. Not an emphatic immersion but a ritualized, sanctioned projection of fear and disgust. In a helmet, in a jersey, their volatile subconscious had an outlet that seemed both safe and dangerous. Was Derek making this all up? Of course Taylor had truly been a ferocious and relentless player who scared the daylights out of offensive players and coaches, but Derek could not help but feel a twinge of distaste about the way that some of the men played Taylor, with a kind of wild-eyed, watch-your-daughters primitivism, licensed both by Taylor’s revolutionary abilities and, unfortunately, by his considerable off-the-field troubles. Granted, you could not portray Taylor with the workaday, gap-toothed brutality of the archetypical white linebacker (Butkus, Nitschke, Lambert, Ham, Urlacher), but one needn’t venture into minstrelsy, either. So Derek, were he to choose first, could choose to choose Taylor, seizing the role for himself, rejecting caricature and adding nuance. He could modify, adapt, and deepen the portrayal, providing a model for those who followed. He could play Taylor with ferocity, but also with dignity and humanity and intelligence, and in this way he could perhaps subtly instruct his peers. But seriously, even if he could somehow see his way toward some authentic vision of Taylor, both distinctive and emblematic, did he really believe that he, a lone man with a righteous cause, could enact change? What kind of fantasy was that? Derek noticed for the first time that George had cut off his ponytail. And if he were thinking in terms of exemplum or emblem, wasn’t he already far, far away from an authentic and idiosyncratic representation of Taylor? Unless of course being a symbol was integral to Taylor’s particularity. Unless, that is, Taylor himself was playing a role, and so to portray Taylor was to take on the role of a role, to act like an actor. That sounded right. That sounded like being black. Wasn’t it true that Derek, too, felt at all times like both a distinctive person and a representative, man and mannequin? What would more likely happen, Derek knew, was that the role would seize him, and not the other way around. By choosing Taylor, he would create — reveal? create? reveal? — a metadramatic racial tension. Though light-skinned, Derek was black, and here he would be, irreducibly, a black man choosing Lawrence Taylor.

The ball there in Trent’s hand, held above his head. The quiet of the room. That chintzy projector, projecting far more than the board. Well, and of course the angry black man would select the frightening black man. And now look, the entire group of men would be made uncomfortably aware of the racial dynamics of reenactment, which was good because white people needed to be far more aware of the subtext of race. Which was terrible, because they were all here to have fun. Derek, too. This was one of his favorite events of the year, even if the other men tended to come on a bit strong. He liked being part of the group, studying film, wearing the uniform. He liked the collective pursuit, each man doing his job so that that play could be successfully catastrophic. So why was he doing this? What was his problem? Why did he insist on turning something fun into a grave American ordeal? What kind of pathology seeks to diminish pleasure and play? Oh, and Derek just knew how it would look if he chose Taylor. Here he had been, playing along for years, lying in wait, biding his time patiently, yearning for his opportunity to play Taylor, to (re)enact, symbolically, racial vengeance not just upon Theismann and the Redskins — good Lord, they were named the Redskins — but upon the man playing Theismann, and upon the whole group of men, and really upon all white people everywhere. It was so obvious that Derek would choose Taylor, for at heart he was just an angry black man. Which he wasn’t, because he would not be reduced like that. Which he was, because who wouldn’t be? Selecting Taylor — it was so clear — would not be an opportunity for racial healing and gentle instruction, but an outright act of hostility and aggression. He, Derek, would not control the meaning and significance of Lawrence Taylor’s sack. Centuries of American history would control the meaning and significance of Taylor’s sack. It was the worst kind of soft, sentimental thinking to imagine that an individual by force of will and conviction might provide. . Plus, Jesus, he detested the thought that such a vexed decision would be regarded as such an obvious decision. And never mind the profound rhetorical challenge of actually uttering his selection of Taylor, of speaking it to the group in a hotel room. If he said it forthrightly, confidently, he would create discomfort and fear. If he shucked and jived to comfort his peers, he would activate his dormant self-hatred. And there were other variations — should he pause, appear to be uncertain — each of them fundamentally dishonest. So okay, over the years it had become pretty clear to Derek that he could not choose Lawrence Taylor, lest he convert the Throwback Special forevermore into a charged racial allegory (which it really already was!), and convert himself from one of the guys to type and ambassador (which he really already was!). But Derek knew that not choosing Taylor was also a decision laden with significance. If he selected another player, he would not be primarily choosing that player; he would first and foremost be not choosing Taylor. He would in essence be renouncing Taylor and all that Taylor represents. It would be an evasion, a denial. A betrayal? The not-choice would resound as a choice, and quite possibly as deficiency or fear. And whom would he choose instead? He had worked it out many times. He could be black Giants safety Kenny Hill. Yes, he could station himself as far as possible from ball and bones, could in fact move away from the collapsing pocket, far beyond the camera’s eye. He could excise himself from the historical record. That would be a forceful racial statement indeed. Or he could be black Giants linebacker Harry Carson. He could charge with Taylor, swell the progress. He could get to Theismann first, make him step up in the pocket, prepare him for comminution. But that would look to all like Derek wanted to be involved, but could not handle the heavy symbolic burden of Taylor. Or hell, he could go white! This was his way out of the conundrum. This was the escape hatch. He could be Didier! He could be the Redskins second tight end, a beefy Caucasian named Clint. That would show them all! It was devastatingly clever. It was Derek as trickster, subverting the group and the performance through ironic appropriation. Or something. But Derek was not convinced that choosing Clint Didier or any of the other seven white Redskins would actually expose or undermine the system in any meaningful way. It would probably just look odd, and perhaps even cowardly. It might look like he was trying to pass. It might arouse pity. It might appear to be another instance of racial self-loathing. Or it might after all actually be another instance of racial self-loathing. With the first pick — there was no way around this — you were either Lawrence Taylor or you were not Lawrence Taylor, and both choices were fraught. There was no other option. Derek wanted to take a large drink from his beer, but he worried his hand would shake. He was relatively certain that none of the other men, not even Charles, had ever considered the racial dimensions of the lottery, and he knew they would not unless and until the year that Derek’s name was called first. No, not even then. It would not be until Derek spoke, until he chose, at which point Derek would be guilty of introducing an ugly topic into a fun and friendly tradition. He was desperate for the ball in Trent’s raised hand to be his ball, and also for the ball not to be his ball.

Trent lowered the ball to his eyes. “Gary,” he said.

The men applauded and whistled. Several men nudged Charles in the arms and ribs, presumably because chance had now given way to psychology, Charles’s métier.

Derek regarded the intricate patterns of the carpet.

“Hmmm,” Gary said, rubbing his chin and gritting his teeth and staring up at the ceiling in a grotesque pantomime of indecision. The men laughed and told Gary to fuck off.

“L.T.!” Gary shouted, beating his chest with his fists.

OUT OF HABIT, Robert checked his watch, but failed to perceive the time. He looked up, squinting into the shabby light of Carl’s projector. How is one to live? When Robert helped his wife prepare a nice meal, he invariably thought of all the dishes they would have to wash later. When he loaded the car for his family’s summer vacation to the beach, he thought of how unpleasant it would be to unpack the car a week later. Even if the family vacation was “fun”—and often it did contain pleasurable moments for Robert — it would soon be over. While it was happening it was ending. As soon as the vacation began, it was eroding. How do you enjoy something that has, by virtue of beginning, commenced its ending? How, for instance, do you put up a Christmas tree? (All those fragile ornaments, wrapped in tissue.) There was in fact no beginning, or middle. It was all end. How silly, then, to load the car, to drive eleven hours for something that was just going to be gone. Wouldn’t it be easier to remain at home? That’s where they would end up a week later, with their sunburns and sandy towels and a thousand digital pictures of that time — which year was that? — that they went to the beach. Everything that had happened to Robert in his life was over, and the things that had not yet happened were on their way to being over. Some would be over sooner, others later. He often looked forward to watching a game on television, but when the game started, it was ending, and so he could not enjoy the game. Robert glanced at Charles, who was scratching his armpit. He wondered whether Charles was respected by peers. When Robert heard a song he liked, he was aware that the song was dissolving in time, second by second. I like this third verse, he would think. Here comes the third verse. Here it comes. Then the third verse just evaporated. What did it even mean to like a song? There was no song. The song wasn’t there. It was just like that cocktail in the screened-in porch after a day of hot sun at the beach, the happy pink children eating watermelon, the handsome and serious wife reading a frivolous magazine, her feet propped up, her toenail polish flaking, a breeze coming through. It wasn’t there, either. Anything good that would happen to Robert would be converted instantaneously to something good that had happened. And something good that had happened was, because it was already over, something somber.

Tommy, who seemed to have withdrawn behind his mustache, was on the clock for the second pick of the lottery. The men waited, while Tommy rubbed his temple and squinted at the unfocused list of players projected on the wallpaper. There were, it should be said, different “schools of thought” regarding a post-Taylor selection. This was what the men said. They conceived of “schools of thought,” so that their decisions would be attributed not to their own deeply rooted and wholly individual fears and psychoses, but to an established external system. These schools of thought only very slightly resembled the real categories. Some men, for instance, just did not want to be on the offensive team. To be a Redskin, even a blameless wide receiver, was, for these men, to don the tainted uniform, to participate willingly in a campaign of spectacular demise. They would rather be the most insignificant player on a pillaging defense (e.g., Terry Kinard) than a Redskins player who was essential to the calamity. Other men, those who had taken drama in high school, or those who danced willingly at weddings and office parties, found a kind of tragic nobility in ruinous failure, and they were inclined to spend high lottery picks on Redskins players in the pocket, close to ground zero, even or especially those players who do their jobs poorly. Members of another group, who willingly allowed themselves to be mistaken for members of the previous group, were drawn to Redskins players out of a keen, if unrecognized, identification with disappointment and culpability and bumbling malfunction. Some other men were simply averse to periphery. These men did not care what uniform they wore. They wanted a central role, and they tended to select the most prominent and involved player remaining on the board, Redskin or Giant. There was of course a shadow group, whose members craved the familiar comfort of anonymity and insignificance — and feared responsibility and centrality — and yet tended to overcompensate for this shameful desire by choosing the most significant player available, and thus appeared to crave centrality and import. A couple of men, those with large contributions to their 401(k) plans, almost every year made an unexciting pick in preparation for next year’s selection. A final group, which consisted only of Steven, was composed of the dilettantes and aesthetes, men who chose players based on very specific and idiosyncratic qualities of uniform (tape, towel, wristband, face mask, cleats) or stance or movement. For these men, the play was not the thing; the play was not essentially communal, nor was it tragic or allegorical or even violent. The significance of the play was that it provided an opportunity to approach perfection by matching one’s own appearance and movement to a historical model. The small white towel tucked into Perry Williams’s pants, his crouch as he lines up across from Art Monk wide left, the strange jiggling dance he performs while waiting for the ball to be snapped. .

The bland optimism, high ceiling, and corporate sterility of the conference room would probably have mitigated the effects of Tommy’s facial hair, but here in the hot and crowded hotel room, his mustache acted as a pernicious depressant. A few men’s thoughts returned unpleasantly to the complicated and contentious eleventh-hour custodial negotiations that had allowed them to come this weekend. Without looking directly at Tommy, the men waited for him to make the second pick.

“Take your time, Tommy,” Trent said not unkindly, looking at the curtains. Trent’s comment had the effect not of putting Tommy at ease, but of making him more anxious. The toilet flushed, and the inordinately brief span between the flush and Gary’s emergence from the bathroom suggested that he had not washed his hands.

Tommy, overcompensating for a shameful desire to be insignificant, chose Redskins running back John Riggins, whom Jeff had once called “the vice president of the disaster.”

“Riggo!” Gil shouted.

“The veep!” Nate shouted.

“The Diesel!” Chad shouted.

“Well, yes and no,” Steven said. “The Diesel at age thirty-six, in his final year in the league. His yardage was way down.”

Riggins, along with center Rick Donnalley and Theismann, was a toucher. The Throwback Special was a flea flicker: Theismann handed to Riggins, who then pitched back to Theismann, who was then supposed to throw a forward pass but instead was broken into pieces by Taylor. Tommy, who this evening had already spilled two beers and a piece of pizza, had not considered that he would be handling the ball.

Trent picked Gil’s ping-pong ball from the pillowcase, and Gil, who had not been on the Redskins line in the past four years, was compelled by rule to select a lineman. Scowling, Gil chose right tackle Mark May, whom he considered not a good selection but the least terrible selection, given his options. Bald Michael, who had been Mark May three times, and Andy, who had been Mark May last year, made eye contact across the room. Gil was disappointed now, but he wouldn’t be for long. Once you had played May, you understood.

With the fourth pick, Nate chose Giants linebacker and South Carolina native Harry Carson, whose chinstrap Robert had mended carefully and now did not want to relinquish. Then Bald Michael and George, perhaps in an attempt to bask in reflected glory or perhaps because they wanted to share a room with Gary and Nate in the Fracture Compound, chose the other two Giants linebackers, Gary Reasons and Byron Hunt, respectively.

“Borrowed plumage,” Robert muttered to Derek, whom he generally tried to avoid out of respect.

Derek, uncertain how to respond, raised his empty cup to his mouth.

There was some rowdy chatter about the Big Blue Wrecking Crew, as well as the Crunch Bunch. Steven, acting quickly, was able to douse the enthusiasm with historical fact.

Randy, sitting glumly in the orange chair, selected Redskins tight end Donnie Warren with the seventh pick. He just said it, with no hesitation. Donnie Warren. His mind, apparently, had been made up. The men grew quiet. They could not recall Warren ever being selected in the top ten. Steven would have to check his notes. Warren’s job on the play is to help protect Theismann’s tibia and fibula from blindside pass-rushers. Though an eligible receiver, he remains at the line to help left tackle Russ Grimm handle Lawrence Taylor. But Taylor, as it turns out, deposits Warren on the grass in a biodegradable heap on his way to Theismann. Warren is the breach point. And his one-on-one battle with Taylor is not, it must be said, particularly noble or stirring. He is not elevated in defeat. It is difficult to locate the grandeur. Last year Randy had been left guard Jeff Bostic, and now here he was, voluntarily sliding two spots toward mayhem’s gate. Randy had, in the winter, lost his eyewear business, and he had sold the Bostic gear at Internet auction. Then he had claimed, in a largely incoherent, inconsistent, and self-pitying late-night email to Trent, that the gear was stolen from a storage unit near his home in Dover, Delaware, at which point Trent had reluctantly purchased new Bostic gear with the dues money. But now Randy seemed to be accepting culpability, albeit ceremonially, by choosing one of the players most culpable for Theismann’s monstrous injury. This was the only explanation for Randy’s pick. You didn’t have to be Charles to get it. Traditionally, the men made oinking and snorting noises when a Redskins down lineman was chosen, but the men were too surprised to snort, and the room remained quiet. From the hallway came the sound of ice spilling violently into a bucket.

“Heavy is the head,” Andy whispered, even though it made no sense.

“The pick don’t lie,” Vince whispered, more to the point.

AS THE LOTTERY PROGRESSED, as his ball remained in the pillowcase, Derek began to consider the possibility that Trent would select his ball last. That would make things interesting indeed. What if Derek were Theismann? How would a black Theismann— But no, Trent pulled Derek’s ball from the case, giving Derek the sixteenth motherfucking pick. The men applauded. Why? Why were they clapping for Derek and his shitty pick? Were they relieved that he would not be Theismann? All that was left for Derek, of course, was a choice between some fleet-footed Negro in the Giants secondary and some grunting Redskins trench dweller who almost certainly enjoyed bow hunting in the off-season. Derek squinted drunkenly at the blurry board. There was Perry, Terry, Kenny. Or there was Rick, Clint, Ken.

There was a knock on the door. A number of men flinched and grimaced at the sound, and several even seemed to duck or crouch furtively, as if in an attempt to conceal themselves in a small room containing more than twenty men. A couple of men reflexively put their index fingers to their lips. A couple of men pressed themselves flat against a wall, and seemed to hold their breath. Myron found himself gripping the window curtain. A knock was bad.

In loud falsetto Gary said, “Who is it?”

“Guys, it’s me,” a voice said.

“Hold on,” Gary said. “I have to locate my panties.”

“Open up, Gary,” the voice said.

Gary looked through the peephole. “It’s just Adam,” he said. “I didn’t see him leave.” Gary opened the door, and Adam entered the room.

“Jesus, it’s hot in here,” he said. “Why aren’t we in the conference room? I went there first, and there was some other group in there.”

The men stared at Adam, realizing for the first time that Adam had been missing all day. Now that they saw him here, it was obvious that he had not been here. Adam. Good old Adam. He looked good. Not very good, really, but the same. Not bad. Just like Adam, like himself. Medium build, dark bags beneath his eyes. It was nice to see that guy. Not nice, but normal, customary. Though, honestly, it was disconcerting for the men to realize that they had not previously noticed Adam’s absence, as it suggested to each man the possibility that his own absence might go unnoticed here. Far more seriously, they suffered a kind of retroactive anxiety about the missing man. He was here now, but he hadn’t been here. He very well might not have come, a fact they had not considered before but were forced to consider now, even though he was here. His arrival should have comforted them, but in fact made them more apprehensive. Several men began counting men.

The men gave Adam a hearty greeting. They said they knew he’d make it. Where had he been?

“Don’t ask,” Adam said, taking off his wet jacket and pumping the keg with vigor.

“We waited as long as we could,” Trent said.

“Seriously,” Gary said, “where were you?”

“I mean it,” Adam said. “Do not ask.”

“Get yourself a beer, Adam,” Gil said, though Adam already held a full cup in his trembling hand.

“What did I miss?” Adam said. “Why are we in here? Why is Fancy Drum in the hallway? Who’s L.T.?”

After the knock on the door, someone had bumped Carl’s projector, and the phone had toppled inside the shoe box. Derek, though, had memorized his options: Perry, Terry, Kenny. Rick, Clint, Ken. He knew, when he thought about it, that he wanted to be in the Redskins huddle. In his experience that huddle was a grave and sacred gathering. Something happened in there, and he wanted to be a part of it. While nobody seemed to be listening, Derek chose Clint Didier. He announced it quietly, to nobody, and Steven recorded it.

“Almost Indian summer weather here in mid-November,” Vince said in a terrible Frank Gifford impersonation.

“You sound Chinese,” Jeff said.

“Gil, you do it,” Vince said. “Gil’s is great.”

“Why is Carl wearing Burt?” Adam said. “Is there any pizza left, or did Trent eat it all? Why didn’t you wait for me?”

Someone tapped Derek on the leg. He looked down to see Randy, sitting glumly in the orange chair. Randy tapped him again, and Derek leaned over.

“You’ll wear the black gloves,” he said confidentially.

“What?”

“Didier wears the black gloves,” Randy said, holding up the backs of his hands.

It was not clear to Derek whether or to what extent this despondent liar with the tragic socks was aware of Derek’s intense ambivalence about the racial implications of the lottery. Did Randy get it? Was he trying to fold Derek gently back into the community? This glum bankrupt with the patchy beard — he was either offering something to Derek, something humane and real, or he was just fetishizing sports gear.

“And the elbow pad on your right arm,” Randy said.

Derek nodded, involuntarily cupping his elbow with the palm of his hand.

•

“WHAT DID I MISS?” Adam said. “Who’s still on the board? How does that projector even work? Is this really what we’re doing this year?”

Myron chose center Rick Donnalley, and the men snorted and oinked. Adam chose Giants cornerback Perry Williams. Charles selected Giants safety Terry Kinard, who lines up deep downfield and cannot really even be identified in extant video of the play. Peter chose what sounded like Giants safety Kenny Hill.

“I’ll see all three of you in Vegas,” said Chad, who earlier with the thirteenth pick had selected Giants left cornerback Mark Haynes. “Vegas” was the name given to the hotel room shared by the defensive backs, presumably because their distance from the sack, their relative unimportance in the play, constituted a license for debauchery and mischief.

There were just two balls remaining in the pillowcase, Trent’s and Fat Michael’s, and one player remaining on the board, Redskins right guard Ken Huff, traditionally a very late selection because he fails to block linebacker Harry Carson, who then chases Theismann into the pulverizing embrace of Taylor. The men at this late juncture considered the possibilities. The next man selected would be forced to take Huff, and the final man would be Theismann. Trent would have made a decent Theismann as recently as last year, but now his weight was an issue in terms not only of verisimilitude, of course, but also of agility. The man who plays Theismann must be nimble and adroit; he must step up into the pocket to avoid the man playing Harry Carson, then he must crumple convincingly when mounted by the man playing Taylor. You had to be fairly athletic and dexterous to suffer a simulated compound comminuted fracture, and everyone knew that Trent would have been a terrible Theismann. There had been unconvincing Theismanns in the past — Tommy always came to mind, as well as George — but perhaps none who had seemed so clearly unfit to play the role. The rain tapped the windows.

Trent bit his lip, dropped his glistening forearm into the pillowcase. The room was quiet as he drew out a ball, then read his own name. His ensuing gestures and expressions of disappointment were pretty obviously feigned. Similarly relieved, the men all looked at Fat Michael. His body was so excellent that he could tuck in his shirt, and he had. He looked like one of the figures cavorting athletically on ancient Greek earthenware. What would it mean to break Fat Michael, to cut him down, albeit ceremonially? Some of the men realized that they had wished for the wrong thing, that Trent might have been the preferable option.

Fat Michael appeared to blanch, though it could have been the sconce light that Carl turned on after shutting down the projector. Theismann’s iconic helmet was produced from a duffel bag in the corner, and it was passed hand over hand across the room to Fat Michael. Following custom, Fat Michael put the helmet on, and the men cheered and whistled, slapping his shoulders and the top of his head. With just its single crossbar, the face mask did not mask Fat Michael’s face. Everyone could see it. He made his way around one queen-size bed and over the second. The men parted, making room for him to pass. He went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the fan.

“And guys,” Trent said.

“Hey, guys,” Trent said.

“And guys, remember,” Trent said, “if history offers us any lesson at all, it is this: do not hang your jerseys on the sprinklers!”

The men bellowed merrily at Andy, who, a decade earlier, had been the protagonist of the year the sprinkler went off. The misadventure had been a kind of gift to the community, and Andy was subsequently regarded as a major donor. Those who were close enough to punch him in the arm punched him in the arm.

Out in the hallway Fancy Drum was gone.