The Throwback Special

3. NIGHT

THE DEFENSIVE BACKFIELD WAS IN ROOM 212 (Vegas). The defensive line was in 256. The touchers were in Room 324. The offensive line was in 432 (the Sty). The receivers and tight ends were in 440. The linebackers were in 560 (the Fracture Compound).

Gear exchange was a chaotic and inefficient and lengthy and primitive process. Over the years there had been several sensible, even elegant, proposals for a more orderly exchange, but each had been ignored. As they did every year after the lottery, the men now roamed hallways with helmets, shoulder pads, and uniforms, searching for the men who required their gear, as well as for the roaming men who had the gear that they required. The cumbersome burden of the equipment was essential to the rite, as was the notion of quest, as was the act of bestowal, as was the inebriated sociability among fellow wanderers. “I hate to say it about my own kid,” Nate told Vince in the stairwell, “but he’s about the sickliest little thing I’ve ever seen.” In the fifth-floor hallway, Robert, having received downstairs the pristine Jeff Bostic gear from Randy, bestowed his Harry Carson gear upon Nate. “Carson,” Nate said, wiping his palms on his pants. Robert could hardly expect Nate to notice the mended chinstrap. In fact, if Nate noticed the chinstrap, it would probably mean Robert had not repaired it well. And he had repaired it well. When Robert was a child, his father had told him that there is never a need to draw attention to one’s own accomplishments. People notice a job done well, his father had said, but in Robert’s experience that had not been true. What people notice is tardiness, failure, moth damage. Robert’s father had been a corporate whistleblower who was pilloried in the press. He now lived alone in rural Illinois, where he sat erectly in a folding chair, listening to police scanners. He carted around an oxygen tank, but still had the power to humiliate Robert.

Nate pinched the Carson jersey at the shoulders, and extended it in front of him. Then with both hands he held the jersey to his nose, and inhaled. He nodded, tossed the jersey over his shoulder. Robert handed Nate the shoulder pads, which Nate clacked twice with his knuckles, and placed on the floor. Next, Robert extended the pants, the interior pockets of which Nate examined for knee, thigh, and hip pads. Finally, Robert handed Nate the helmet, upside down, the chinstrap curled inside like an hors d’oeuvre in a bowl. The long hallways seemed somehow not to be uniformly lit. There were, along the corridor, small patches of darkness. Around a corner came the grave murmurs of bestowal, the clacking of pads. The vending alcove clicked and hummed. The elevator rumbled. Nate peered down into the helmet. He gripped the chinstrap, rubbing its soft interior with his thumb.

Startled, Robert began to back away. “What you’ve got to keep in mind, Nate,” Robert said, imitating Steven, walking backward rapidly toward the elevator, feeling, for reasons he did not fully understand, shame, “is that Harry Carson is from South Carolina.”

JEFF SAT on the floor of the vending alcove, talking on the phone to his son.

“Is this the one where you’re trying to escape the frigid caverns?” Jeff said.

“Dad, no,” his son said. “This is the one where the mutated zoo animals have escaped.”

“And you try to catch them?”

“They seek dominion, Dad.”

“What?”

“Bam! You— Oh, no, my boots. What?”

“Do you catch the animals?”

“They’re mutants, Dad. You shoot them with lava.”

“So you’re pretty good?”

“Oh, God, I hate this parking garage.”

“What are you — do you have me on speakerphone?”

“That is not good.”

“Who else is there?”

“That right there is the very worst one.”

“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

“I think Mom’s taking us— Crap! Uh-oh.”

“Taking you where?”

“To. . Grandma’s.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Shit. Gored again. You messed me up, Dad.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Dad, I told you, I think we’re going to Grandma’s.”

In the machines there were rows and rows of snacks and candy. There they were, in full sight, bright and satisfying and twenty-five percent larger. The vending alcove operated by the honor system. Jeff was bound by his honor not to tip the machine over and smash it open with his Gary Clark helmet.

THE FIGURE AT THE FAR END of the fourth-floor hallway seemed inhuman in its shape and movement. It was Myron. Chad had bestowed upon him the Rick Donnalley gear, but Myron had yet to bestow his Leonard Marshall gear upon Vince, whom he could not find. Thus Myron was one of several men who trudged a long hallway with two bulky sets of gear and a faraway look in his eyes. When he slowly emerged from silhouette, the men in their doorways could see that his face had a startled look, and that two helmets hung like decapitated heads from his hooked fingers. After some confusion and misinformation, Steven explained to the tight ends that the Gorgon was a type of monster, and that the Medusa was the name of a specific Gorgon. Also, that Perseus had beheaded Medusa, though Perseus had not beheaded Medusa in a giant maze.

And where was Fat Michael?

He was in the stairwell between the second and third floors, hiding from Peter, who was searching for him.

Why?

To give him the Theismann gear.

No, why was he hiding?

It’s difficult to say.

Was it unusual for the man selected to play Theismann to hide in the stairwell?

No.

Did hiding remind Fat Michael of anything from childhood?

There was a boy he used to hide from with some frequency. The boy had a metal leg brace, and Fat Michael could always hear it creaking and thumping as the boy climbed the front porch of the foster home. He hid beneath his bed as the boy rang the doorbell.

Why did he hide?

He didn’t want to see that boy.

Did Fat Michael like his nickname?

No. Would you?

How was Fat Michael passing the time in the stairwell?

He was lining up the bodies of dead ladybugs. There were nine. Then some light stretching.

Would Fat Michael have come this weekend if his missing dog had not returned late last night, smelling like garbage?

It’s difficult to say.

Would Peter ever find Fat Michael?

Yes, Gil would eventually tip him off.

What would Peter say to Fat Michael?

He would say that everyone should play Theismann once. He would say it’s hard to explain, but it’s an intense experience. What he would mean was that it’s powerful to relinquish control, particularly for those men, like Fat Michael, who are determined never to relinquish control.

Why did Peter always wear that mouthguard?

It made him feel safe.

What would Fat Michael say?

He would say not to call him that.

What else would he say?

He would ask Peter about the drought and a new operating system.

Would he apologize?

There would be no need.

Would he clack the shoulder pads with his fist?

Yes.

Would anyone else join them there?

Terence, a guy from Prestige Vista Solutions.

What would the men’s voices sound like in that stairwell?

Hushed and loud at the same time.

CHAD WALKED ALONG the fourth-floor hallway. He had no shadow, and his feet made no sound as he walked. The hotel had transformed his sense of scale and reference. Chad had ceased being a discrete unit of biological meaning. It felt okay. The sound from Room 414 may or may not have been a cat.

It was not yet late, but many guests had already hung their lewd Do Not Disturb signs from their door handles. Chad thought of them as Do Not Disturb signs, though in fact they did not say Do Not Disturb. There were no words on the signs at all. At some point in the history of hospitality, it occurred to Chad, the Do Not Disturb sign had become symbolic, metaphorical. It no longer utilized the crude and literal three-word injunction that ineluctably suggested wanton acts within. These signs on the fourth floor featured a sprig of bamboo leaning evocatively against a lurid stack of polished black wellness stones. This ideograph, as it turned out, was no less prurient than the old imperative, though it was no doubt more sensual than carnal. Moving noiselessly through the hall, imagining the varieties of intercourse to his port and starboard, Chad collected the signs from the door handles as he passed.

In an attempt to avoid Andy and Nate, Chad stepped into an elevator containing Andy and Nate.

“We were just looking for you,” Andy said.

“Me, too,” Chad said as the doors closed.

The men were quiet as the elevator dropped slowly toward the lobby. Andy took a long, slow drink from his red cup. Nate stared at the illuminated number above the doors, confirming the descent. Chad looked down at the shoes his wife disliked so forcefully. His wife’s contempt for the shoes was in fact their primary feature, more salient than their color, style, material, or comfort. He could not even see the shoes anymore. He could see only that face she made. The shoes were haunted. Why did she insist on expressing her disdain for these shoes? Or put another way, why did he continue to wear them? On the floor was a sticky note that read 45 DAYS. Chad felt trapped. The elevator stopped on the first floor, and the men got out. Standing on the floral carpet, Chad suffered that fleeting vertiginous wobble that health experts in an Internet anxiety forum had diagnosed as either an inner ear malady or multiple sclerosis. Nate felt it, too, an unpleasant dipping sensation, his assiduously untested hypothesis having always been that the operations of the elevator create tremors and vibrations in the hallway area in the immediate vicinity of the shaft.

Without speaking or conferring in any way, the men turned and walked down the hallway toward the side exit of the hotel, and it seemed to each man that their pace slowed as they neared the door. Outside the exit, there was a picnic table next to a dumpster, and it was there that these three men traditionally convened for a post-lottery smoke. During the year, however, Chad had quit smoking, and he had yet to tell Nate and Andy. He did not know Nate and Andy well. He saw them once a year, and these nighttime smokes by the hotel dumpster were the sole basis of their friendship. They had created sub-tradition, sub-community. Chad had not quite articulated this to himself, but he felt that it would be inhospitable not to smoke at the picnic table with Andy and Nate. It would perhaps be construed as a renunciation, or as a claim of superiority or judgment. Because he saw them only one weekend per year, it might seem to them that the reason he had quit smoking was that he no longer desired their friendship, when in fact there had been other reasons that he had quit smoking cigarettes. He did not want the other men to think that he did not value their company, though in truth he valued their company only very slightly.

Nate, also, had quit smoking nine months ago, but was reluctant, obviously, to tell Chad and Andy. For Nate there was something distasteful, almost shameful, in quitting. Doctors and schoolchildren and righteous billboards were always exhorting him to quit, and even though they were right, Nate found repugnant the notion that he must capitulate. It made him feel like a child, and he hated being made to feel like a child — though he supposed that Charles would say that nobody can make you feel anything. He had wanted to quit, of course, but to quit was to obey, to be good instead of bad, and he did not want to admit to annual smoking friends that he had surrendered.

Andy had also quit smoking during the year, but he simply could not find a way to tell Chad and Nate. Andy had quit smoking numerous times in the past — in fact, a year ago when they had smoked beside the dumpster, Andy had not previously smoked in six months — and he had become sheepish about the very attempt to quit. He was reluctant to tell the other two because he did not want to see the knowing smirks, the nods, the raised eyebrows of men who very well knew he could never really quit. “Let us know how that works out for you,” one of them might say. “Good luck with that,” the other might say, though in fact it was difficult to imagine either Chad or Nate saying such things. The three men moved toward the exit door with lassitude and dread. They might never reach the door. A desk clerk watching the men on closed-circuit television might have thought they were demonstrating one of the paradoxes of motion, though the desk clerk was not watching the monitor but instead reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Each man, it is true, was also beginning to crave a cigarette.

Outside, the rain still fell, not hard but insistent, and at cruel angles. Chad’s shoes became heavy and wet, but even with these new qualities they were still, primarily, the shoes that his wife disliked. The shoes had become a host for parasitic scorn. The eggs of his wife’s contempt had hatched inside Chad’s shoes, and now the larvae feasted on the leather uppers. The three men stood hunched by the picnic table in November. Beside them was the dumpster, brimming with sodden cardboard. Only cigarettes — only their glowing orange tips — could give meaning or coherence to this scene, and yet none of the men carried cigarettes. Thinking quickly, which is to say without thinking at all, Chad bent down to unlace his shoes.

IN THE DEFENSIVE LINEMEN’S ROOM, Vince and Carl were arguing about electrocution. Vince claimed that the volts killed you, while Carl seemed certain that it was the amps. The debate had entered a silent phase, during which each man, working intently on his laptop, rapidly sent the other man Internet links that corroborated his position. The unread links piled up in each man’s in-box faster than he could delete them. Then Carl, mindlessly palpating the hard, tender lump in his armpit, began to watch a video of the demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, while Vince began to watch a video of juvenile red pandas playing in the snow.

Wesley did not feel well, and he left the room. In the vending alcove, he stepped over Peter, who was sitting on the floor with the gear of both Theismann and Kenny Hill, talking on speakerphone to a loved one whose attention was not fully on Peter. “Tell him I promise we’ll do marshmallows next weekend,” Peter said. Wesley assumed the vending machine would not contain ginger ale, and he was correct.

There was no sidewalk along the service road. There was, instead, a narrow dirt path through the pallid grass and litter. Wesley walked the path, ducking beneath tree limbs, his shoulders lifted against the cold rain. He did not own an umbrella. Like sunglasses or suitcases, an umbrella seemed to Wesley to be a kind of luxury item. He needed it only occasionally, which is to say he did not really need it. His stomach felt unsettled, but he enjoyed the walk. He found poignancy on the path. A sidewalk merely represented a planner’s idea of where you might walk, where you should walk. A sidewalk revealed no history, no desire. It yielded few traces of its use. A sidewalk was prescriptive, dogmatic. A path, though, was the expression, the record, of something vital and communal. An individual, no matter how determined, could not create a dirt path. The path expressed and served the aspirations of many. It represented a kind of bottom-up history — no matter what anyone thought people might do, this was what people had done, what they did, they walked here, the dirt now so compact it did not turn to mud in the rain. Wesley felt connected to the thousands of people whose feet had contributed to the path, those who had walked along this ugly and perilous service road, day and night, for years. He could see his breath in the cold. He tried not to think about the year that Bald Michael got mugged. He passed a small group from Prestige Vista Solutions, exchanging with the group a nod and a stoic greeting that Wesley found moving. Beyond a high and steep embankment, the interstate ran parallel to the service road, and he could hear the cars and trucks passing at illicit velocity. The embankment was festooned with plastics that glowed wetly in the dark. By night it looked ceremonial, festive, as if it had once stood for something holy but now just stood prettily for itself. Drivers on the service road honked boisterously at Wesley, and their male passengers leaned out windows to startle him with invective. “Don’t get wet, jackass!” shouted a passenger in a cowboy hat. “Homo walk!” shouted another. “Boo!” yelled a face from a sunroof. “I’m a ghost!” Though he knew it was not personal, Wesley always took this kind of spontaneous and indiscriminate meanness personally, and it demoralized him. He was a real estate lawyer for a major department store, but it did not matter, he knew. Anyone could be heckled walking a dirt path along a service road.

The terminus of the dirt path was a parking lot shared by a biscuit restaurant and a convenience store that offered the state minimum prices on cigarettes. Wesley emerged from beneath the large branch of a tree, and walked like a man presumed dead through the wet lot to the flickering brightness of the convenience store. Inside, he examined the refrigerated drinks. Just as he no longer recognized the celebrities on the covers of magazines, or the songs on contemporary radio, he did not recognize most of these brands. There was beer, there was soda, there were sports drinks, there were energy drinks, there were water drinks, and there were coffee and tea drinks. There were a lot of rockets, feathers, and glowing feline eyes. There was a lot of packaging that was made to look as though it had been shredded by fierce talons. All of these dazzling stimulants and depressants, all these water variants, but no ginger ale to settle a queasy stomach. Wesley did not want to be transformed. He did not want to be a werewolf. He wanted to be a slightly less uncomfortable version of himself. He wanted, it’s true, to feel safe and loved. He could not help but remember the way that his mother would cut the toast into buttery strips. It seemed impossible to Wesley that the store did not offer ginger ale. Had his culture just given up on comfort? A culture that has moved beyond ginger ale, Wesley thought, is a culture that has moved beyond nurturance. How could such a childish culture have such contempt for childhood? Wesley stood so long in front of the drinks cooler that the cashier asked him curtly if he needed help.

“I’m just blind,” Wesley said. “I can’t find the ginger ale.”

“Not here, man,” the cashier said. “Just beer, no liquor.”

Wesley knew better than to look for saltine crackers. He glanced again at the drinks, then he circled the store without picking up or purchasing anything, walking very slowly and with his hands out of his pockets, so as not to look like a shoplifter. In his attempt to allay suspicion, he aroused suspicion, and the cashier watched him carefully, one hand beneath the counter, fingers wrapped around the sticky tape of a baseball bat.

•

IN THE FRACTURE COMPOUND, Gary, Bald Michael, and George sat on beds, passing George’s flask of homemade liquor. Bald Michael, grimacing and shuddering at the aftertaste, handed the flask to Gary, who grimaced and shuddered while drinking. George grimaced and shuddered in anticipation of his next drink. The small flask, which seemed never to become empty, had been a gift to George from his Wiccan coworker at the public library.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Bald Michael said, shuddering.

Gary wore Taylor’s two white wristbands, so bright they revealed other allegedly white objects — the men’s teeth and eyes, their stretched V-neck T-shirts, the pillowcases — to be yellow or gray. The ring finger and middle finger of Gary’s left hand were taped together, though not in historically accurate fashion. He dropped from the bed to the floor, and performed nineteen push-ups. When finished he lay on the floor, breathing. There were people who could do one hundred push-ups. He wished he could lose fifteen pounds. He thought of Fat Michael, that vein in his arm. It would not be satisfying to destroy, ceremonially, Fat Michael’s leg. With his ear pressed to the carpet Gary thought he could hear the subterranean rumbling of the hotel’s complex machinery, but he knew that didn’t make sense because he was on the fifth floor. He was in a box inside a bigger box. The carpet was redolent of nothing at all. Granted one wish, Gary had chosen invincibility. It was often the case that the men who chose Taylor experienced a post-lottery affective crash that left them anxious, listless, disappointed, and sad. And something else — perhaps frightened, or preemptively guilt-ridden. Bald Michael was talking about air quality again.

“Hey, man,” George said to Gary. “You okay?”

Gary tried to nod, but the flesh of his cheek against the hotel carpet had a relatively high coefficient of static friction, and his head barely moved.

“Hey,” George said, “you want me to walk on your back?

“No,” Gary said quickly, though George was already peeling off his black socks.

Nate, the fourth linebacker, entered the room. He was not wearing shoes.

“Hey, Nate,” George said, “can you turn off that light? Yeah, that one.”

Nate turned off the light.

“And can you put that jersey over the bedside lamp?”

Nate laughed, though he did not know why. He draped Bald Michael’s Gary Reasons jersey over the lamp, and the room grew dim and blue. George unzipped his duffel bag, and selected a CD. He looked around the room, then inserted the CD into Gary’s laptop on the orange chair.

Gary said, “Hey, George, I don’t think—” but the first track on the mountain dulcimer compilation was “Wildwood Flower,” and he found that he could not complete his objection.

“Wait until you hear ‘Shady Grove,’” George said. “Gary, you’re going to want to lift your shirt up.”

With his face still on the carpet, Gary lifted his shirt up.

“Okay, Gary,” George said. “You ready?”

Gary did not respond, and George approached with his pant legs rolled. Gary stared at George’s feet, which were coarse and clean and dry, with high arches, long and hairless toes, and toenails that appeared to be trimmed but not fussily managed. The feet were not tender and pale, helpless in the way of baby animals, but neither were they the hairy, black-soled, thick-nailed feet of a wandering hippie. If they had a smell, it was faint and mild and organic, like cucumber or loam. They were good feet, expressive of proper values. Observing no overt sign of resistance, George stepped onto the middle of Gary’s back. Gary grunted, winced, squeezed his eyes shut. George stood still for a moment, achieving his balance, allowing Gary to grow accustomed to the weight. “There you go,” George said. “That’s it. Arms straight out. Now find your breath. Find it.” Gary tried to find his breath, and gradually he found it. The dulcimer played “Black Mountain Rag,” and George began slowly to shift his weight from one foot to the other. In his cold, wet socks Nate watched, wincing in sympathy with Gary. He could feel George’s feet on his own back. He could feel a shortness of breath. Bald Michael took several pictures of George and Gary with his phone. Eventually George began to shuffle deliberately up and down Gary’s back. His balance was excellent.

“How’s that?” George said.

Gary grunted and tried to nod.

“Seriously,” George said, “feels like I’m standing on a coil of rope, man.”

With a librarian on his back, with dulcimer music in the air, with the cold rain still tapping the window, with the heavy mantle of Lawrence Taylor upon his shoulders, Gary had the rare opportunity to break down entirely. He felt he could really lose it, and he was startled by the energy it took to resist it. “How. . did. . you. . know?” Gary said.

“About your back?”

Gary tried to nod.

“Man,” George said, “it’s everyone’s back that hurts.”

Nate was hoping he would be next, though he could not bring himself to ask. The dulcimer played “Whiskey Before Breakfast.” In the dim blue light, Bald Michael looked through the photographs he had taken, deleting each one for its failure to portray.

JEFF HAD A THEORY about marriage:

All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watch you. He paced in front of the mute television, on which a pickup truck drove over boulders in slow motion. He sounded exasperated, as if the other eligible receivers in Room 440 (Randy, Steven, and Derek) had worn him down, forced him to defend his position, though in fact no one had asked him anything, and no one had been speaking about marriage. No one had been speaking much at all. That’s all it is, he said. He said when you’re a kid, your parents watch your life. They know what’s going on, they’re watching you pretty carefully. Or at least let’s hope they are. They know you have a spelling quiz or a baseball game, they keep track of it all, and so you get the idea that your life is important, valuable. But then you grow up, Jeff said, and it turns out nobody is really watching anymore. It would be weird if your parents knew that you switched cereals in the morning, or that the power went out at your office for two hours. Nobody really knows what your days are like. Jeff said he wasn’t talking about the big things — moving to a new city or having a kid or losing your job. He said he was talking about the tiny, stupid crap that fills most of our days, and that you can’t tell people about because it’s too small and stupid. But it’s your life, Jeff said, right? It doesn’t matter to anyone else, he said, but it matters to you because it’s your life. The water in your basement, the strange smell in your shower drain. Changing your kid’s bedsheets in the middle of the night. Jeff said that life is a precious gift, sure, but usually what life is, is going to the store to buy a stupid piece of shit-ass hardware, and then buying the wrong size, and then having to go back to get the right goddamn size, except the store doesn’t have it. If you’re not married, Jeff said, chances are, nobody sees you make two trips to the store on Saturday morning for that hinge or flange that you don’t even get. Marriage — Jeff saw it so clearly now — what marriage does is at least guarantee that one person is watching. There’s one person who knows you got the oil changed today, or that you waited over an hour for your dentist appointment, or that you’re trying a new shave gel, or that the running shoes you’ve worn for years got discontinued. On television an adopted child was reunited with her birth mother, but none of the men saw it. And here’s the thing, Jeff said. The wife does not have to care about any of this stuff. It would be weird if she did, Jeff said, right? Because it’s boring, he said, and because she has her own tiny crap she’s got going on in her own life, and that seems important to her. And you’re watching that for her, Jeff said. See? You don’t have to care, he said. You just have to watch. You just have to be sentient, a witness. You don’t even have to watch very carefully. You’re not a scientist. You’re not some astronomer. It’s not like that, Jeff said. It’s certainly not about keen perception, and it’s not about gratitude or sympathy or even appreciation. It really is not about giving or getting credit. Just, Jeff said, just trying to keep the squirrels out of the goddamn mulch. If that person who is watching happens to love you or respect you, or if that person concedes to have oral sex with you, that’s a bonus, Jeff said, but it’s not necessary. It’s not what marriage is for. It’s just vital to have someone who sees your life. It’s no small thing. And look, Jeff said to the men, if you want any more from marriage than that, you’ll be disappointed. He walked to the door, squinted into the peephole. If you want to be connected, Jeff said, or if you want to share a passion, or if you’re thinking at all in terms of big, old trees with thick roots, you’re going to end up on the couch. First the couch, he said, then a crappy studio apartment. The only thing marriage can really give you is the sense that your life is witnessed by another person. A kind of validation, Jeff said. That’s it, he said, and it’s plenty. If you have that, you have a lot. You have everything. But here’s the thing, Jeff said. People don’t like being watched. They resent it. Jeff said that he resented it. He said he wanted to be free from it. He wanted his wife to mind her own business. But when he got away from it — when his wife was no longer watching — he didn’t feel free, he said. He didn’t feel relieved or liberated. He didn’t. He said now he just feels like there’s suddenly no point at all to buying the wrong kind of caulk for the windows. You’re not in a movie, Jeff said. He said that over and over. Nobody sees you, he said. He said that’s why people pretend they’re in movies. People say they want privacy, but they would actually like a camera out in their cold backyard at midnight, pointed through the kitchen window while they make a school lunch for their kids. They want someone to just notice, Jeff said. He said that’s what marriage is for. Otherwise, he said, honest to God, we’re all just like penguins at the North Pole, doing it all for no real reason.

Steven stood at the window, listening to the dark rain. Any weather, when sustained, begins to feel like an interrogation technique. He needed to call the front desk to report the theft of the lottery drum. He needed to tell Randy that Donnie Warren’s wrists are wrapped in tape. It looks like wristbands, but it’s not. It’s tape. Was Jeff still talking about marriage? Was he still yammering with his stupid face about squirrels digging up the mulch? Steven didn’t care at all about anything Jeff said. Steven would rather hash things out with George than endure another speech from Jeff about human relationships. For some reason he found the mention of astronomy particularly infuriating. He checked his phone for pictures or news from the school play, but there was nothing. He was, of course, still glad he had come. He could not have not come.

Randy lay on the bed, flipping through a woodworking catalogue. He disliked Jeff, but not strongly, so he was free to ignore him. Derek lay beside Randy, bored and restless. He was not listening to Jeff. What if, Derek had been wondering, the offense just didn’t run the Throwback Special? What if they drew up another play in the dirt? What if they broke the huddle and then surprised the defense with some other play? They could change the snap, even go with a silent count. Why had this never occurred to him before? Was it crazy? Steven would never go along with it. Randy would. It was an insidious thought, and drunken. A draw is particularly effective against aggressive linebackers, Derek considered. Or a screen.

ADAM STOOD LOOKING out the window of Room 212 like a homesteader during an April blizzard. The defensive backs, and particularly the safeties, were the least prominent of the players. They backpedaled from tragedy, like inverse first responders. Their job was essential, but remote and untelevised. This feeling, of being important but unrecognized, distant from the hub, was all too familiar to most of the men. The long-standing notion was that the defensive backs’ room was the party room—“Vegas”—but the truth was that the room typically had a sour mood and an early bedtime.

“If you work in the automotive industry, you have to be thinking about the end of cars,” Adam said, still facing the window. “If you work in phones, you have to be preparing for the day when people don’t use phones anymore. If you work in laptops, you spend your days imagining what comes after laptops. Everything thriving is dying. Every industry has become the fashion industry. The car is dead, the book is dead, the PC is dead. My office is paperless. Potatoes are somehow bad for you. People don’t want to live in houses anymore. It’s exhausting.”

“Why were you so late, Adam?” Peter said.

“It was a domestic situation,” Adam said.

“What isn’t?” Peter said.

“It was a family emergency,” Adam said.

“You got that right,” Peter said.

The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Chad sat in the orange chair, looking at his phone. His feet, in socks, were wet and cold. He felt that the cold, wet socks were emblematic of his folly and weakness. His throat burned from the cigarette he had bummed off that gray-faced marketer from Prestige Vista Solutions. He wished he had not smoked that cigarette. And it had been foolish to throw his shoes in the dumpster, he now realized. The only other shoes he had were his cleats. At the time he had thrown his shoes in the dumpster he had felt a rush of defiance, but whom, exactly, had he defied? He liked the shoes, or had at one time, and so he had apparently defied only himself. He had spited his face. He had hoisted himself. His wife hated the shoes, and though she had not demanded or even suggested (nor would she, ever) that he discard the shoes, in discarding them he was, he now felt, executing remotely her unspoken wish. That the actualization of his wife’s desire had felt, out in the rain by the hotel dumpster, so authentically like the actualization of his own desire, meant either that they were soul mates, or that he lived under a totalitarian regime. How was it that he could not, here in his cold, wet socks, make any meaningful distinction between compliance and defiance, or ascertain to whom he had stuck it, if indeed he had stuck it to someone? It was true, however, that his wife was frugal, and she would no doubt object to his throwing away perfectly functional (though detestable) shoes, and so in this way perhaps the act was defiant in its profligacy, like the Boston Tea Party. He would teach her a lesson. He would show her not to not like his things. But that was not what he wanted! He wanted her to like his things, which meant that inevitably she would not like some things. He cared about what she thought. If your defiance reveals vulnerability, not strength, it’s really not very effective defiance. Chad’s original embarrassment about buying the shoes was now compounded by the embarrassment about throwing them away. He had acted like a maniac, and now he wanted his shoes. A genuinely defiant act, he realized, would be to retrieve the shoes from the wet dumpster. That would be a bold expression of his life force. He could dry them with the hair dryer attached to the wall in the hotel bathroom. But what about Andy and Nate? They had thrown their shoes in the dumpster, too, in a spirit of inebriated and defiant camaraderie, and as an expression of their individual wills. They had all thrown their shoes away, together, instead of smoking a cigarette, but then the guy from Prestige Vista Solutions shuffled out of the side exit with a full pack, and they had all smoked a cigarette anyway, even though they had all quit. Chad hated himself. If he pulled his shoes out of the dumpster, Nate and Andy would no doubt see the shoes tomorrow, and they would consider the recovery a sign of weakness, not strength — a kind of capitulation to the overwhelming forces of (feminized) convention, a disavowal of their defiant ritual in the rain. Chad was trapped between two incommensurable systems of meaning. Sifting through the cold and soaking trash of the hotel dumpster would be both noble and craven, depending upon the interpretive community. “Fun here,” Chad texted to his wife. “Luv u.” Charles, who was either a psychologist or a psychiatrist, was here, in this room, and perhaps he could be of help to Chad, but he was at the moment occupied by Peter, who was troubled by a recent incident in the home.

(Chad had missed some of the story, but it seems that Peter had been roasting marshmallows by himself with his gas stove in the middle of the night when his seven-year-old son entered the kitchen and witnessed the scene. I thought I smelled something, the child had said, staring at Peter warily, refusing to return to bed. Peter just stood there with two perfectly golden marshmallows on the end of a barbecue fork. Big deal, Adam said, still staring out the window. Continue, Charles said. He had the look of one betrayed, Peter said. I think he had a hard time with it, with the idea that this person he loved and trusted could roast marshmallows while he slept. It’s been a couple of weeks, and he’s had trouble falling asleep. He’s wet the bed a couple of times. I shouldn’t have done it, I guess, Peter said. It wasn’t a dessert night. A phone vibrated in a duffel bag. I’m glad you’re here, Charles. Charles, I’m glad you’re here. Chad waited in his wet socks, and the waiting felt emblematic.)

“WHERE’S ANDY?” Gil said in the offensive linemen’s room.

“Probably out smoking,” Trent said.

“No, he quit,” Gil said.

“I could smell it on him earlier,” Trent said.

Trent was lying on his back in bed. The laptop quivered on his stomach like a dog on a roof. Gil stood in front of the television, flipping rapidly through channels.

“What are you looking for?” Trent said.

“What?” Gil said.

“What show are you looking for?”

“I don’t watch shows.”

“Then what do you watch?”

“I don’t care about individual programs,” Gil said. “That kind of vertical viewing doesn’t interest me.”

“What interests you?”

“This,” Gil said, continuing to cycle swiftly through the channels. “Holistic viewing.”

“I watch shows,” Trent said.

“Every channel, every show, is just part of one big show. Like every channel is a pixel, making up a larger picture, the big picture. I started watching like this, and I realized I was getting more and not really losing anything.”

“What does your wife think?” Trent said.

“She hides the remote,” Gil said. “But she’s not a horizontal processor. She doesn’t think that way. A lot of women don’t.”

“What about, like, cohesion?” Trent said. “Or suspense?”

“Suspense is an ancient value,” Gil said.

“Exactly,” Trent said. He steadied his wobbling laptop, and sent a message to the Fracture Compound about Gil’s horizontal viewing.

“I had an idea to program my remote to do it for me,” Gil said. “But then I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. Why alter the auxiliary technology when you could alter the primary technology? The ideal thing would be to have a dedicated channel, a station, that moved through all other channels at random. Horizon TV, I call it. I bet you could sell plenty of ad time because a thirty-second spot would seem, in contrast, like a vast narrative space. And you’d basically have zero production and development costs. No writers, no producers, no actors. But I couldn’t see a way to get past the lawyers.”

Trent chuckled, staring into his screen. “Hey, Gil,” he said, “I’ve got a mole in the Compound. Looks like George is walking on backs.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gil said, rolling his eyes, though his own back had been walked on by George four years earlier, which had nearly precipitated a severe late-night breakdown. He remembered George’s feet clearly, the high arches. He remembered the weight, the struggle to find his breath. He kept flipping channels, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He couldn’t concentrate, and totality was eluding him. He turned off the TV and pitched the remote onto the empty bed. Pitching a remote onto a large bed was a satisfying hotel activity, and Gil retrieved the remote so that he could do it once more.

“You know, here we are, the offensive line,” he said. “We’re paid to do one thing, protect the quarterback.”

“It was 1985,” Trent said. “So we aren’t paid all that much.”

“Counting Warren, there are six of us down linemen, right? And five of them coming on defense? There’s one thing we have to do, and we will just fail so bad at it.”

“Not you,” Trent said. “May is solid. Wait until you see the film.”

“But six against five.”

“The play call was terrible,” Trent said. “I don’t care what anybody says.”

“It’s a bad feeling, though,” Gil said. “Can you even imagine what those real guys must have been feeling like the night before?”

“They didn’t know it was going to happen, Gil.”

“But still,” Gil said.

“Hey, Gil,” Trent said, chuckling at his laptop screen. “George has got his magic flask out.”

Andy was gone, and Robert was in the bathroom, washing his hands and face. The bathroom fan obscured Gil’s infuriating television habits, to which Robert had been introduced in a previous year. He dried off with a thin towel, noticing as he often did the twin scars on the backs of his hands. He had received both injuries as a child. One was from a cigarette, one from hot coffee. As a child — seven years old, or eight — he liked to crawl beneath chairs and tables, particularly tables draped with tablecloths. He liked to be near his family but not with them. He liked the secrecy, the privacy. His parents were always telling him to get out from under there or he would get hurt. And that’s what had happened. His father dangled an after-dinner cigarette beside his chair, and the glowing tip pressed into the center of Robert’s hand. At some other point, perhaps a year later, he crawled out from beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, jostling the leg and spilling a mug of hot coffee onto his other hand. It had been Robert’s fault, both times. His parents had not been cruel or punitive, but it was clear that they regarded the injuries as the child’s fault. They felt bad for Robert, and they cared for his wounds, but they did not feel culpable. After all, they had told him repeatedly not to crawl beneath things, and they had told him what would likely happen if he did. He did not listen, and it happened just as they said it would. And that was how Robert had always thought of the injuries, too. The scars were reminders of foolish things he had done. They stood for his folly and mischief. The accidents happened to occur during a generation when children could be at fault, and that era was long gone. If Robert’s hot coffee spilled onto his daughter, or worse, if he smoked cigarettes in the house and if one of his cigarettes burned the girl, he would clearly bear the burden of guilt and responsibility, regardless of whether he had warned her. The child’s scar would stand for his carelessness, his neglect. It’s not simply that he would feel it as censure from others (though he most certainly would); he would legitimately feel at fault. The child, doing childlike things, would be innocent. If you have children, you just don’t dare drink hot beverages. And if you are irresponsible enough to drink hot beverages, you don’t use an open-mouth mug, and you certainly don’t set the mug on a table, where it could be knocked to the floor, scalding your unsuspecting child, who is merely exploring her world in a trusting, innocent, curious way (their brains are like sponges!), and who could not be expected to heed admonitions in simple English to stay out from beneath the table. Robert could hold both verdicts in his mind — that his childhood injuries had been his own fault for crawling beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, and that his own child’s heartbreaking (and hypothetical) burn injury beneath the table would also be his fault. Neither conclusion seemed to impinge on the other, a paradox rooted either in psychology or culture. Robert did not know which. There was no point in talking to Charles because he was never any help, and in fact he seemed uninterested.

Robert left the bathroom, and nearly bumped into Andy, who was just returning to the hotel room.

“Hi, Robert,” Andy said.

“Hi, Andy,” Robert said. He had always liked Andy, and he was not displeased to see him. Given the alternatives, he hoped they would be sharing a bed.

“Are you done in there?” Andy said.

“It’s all yours.”

Holding a pair of dripping shoes, Andy entered the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the hair dryer attached to the wall.

FAT MICHAEL was not in the touchers’ room. Carrying a bottle of Advanced Water, a pack of antibacterial wipes, and his Theismann helmet, he had left the room without saying anything to Tommy and Myron. Tommy and Myron, though, could pretty well guess where he had gone.

The room, after the lottery, looked like a site of explosive violence. Pizza sauce streaked the walls, congealed bits of flesh-colored pizza lay strewn on the beds. The keg lay on its side, as if, once depleted of beer, it had perished. Having never seemed alive, it now resembled nothing so much as something dead. Crumpled napkins covered the floor like peach blossoms after the Battle of Shiloh. Tommy began to clean immediately, before Myron had an opportunity to ask or exhort him to clean. Tommy did not mind work, but he disliked being asked or told to work. If Myron had said to Tommy, “Let’s get this place cleaned up,” Tommy would have immediately become sullen and insolent, but if he could begin on his own initiative, he could labor assiduously. Myron, who also did not like to be asked or told to do work, immediately left the room to get a trash can before Tommy could ask him to go find a trash can. He found one in the vending alcove, which clicked and hummed. He had to step over the legs of a man from Prestige Vista Solutions, who sat on the floor, chanting lifelessly into his phone, “But that does not make any sense.” Myron filled the trash can while Tommy scrubbed the walls with a white washcloth that almost instantly turned pink. The activities began as a kind of race, but each man slowed as he realized that the race’s winner would be forced to clean the bathroom, an unpleasant task. The problem with doing your work fast was that you made more work for yourself. Myron finished first, but then left the room with his trash can, staying gone, Tommy thought, for a suspiciously long time. Tommy draped the keg with a towel, then trudged alone into the bathroom.

Later, their space tidy if not dry or fragrant, Tommy and Myron sat in chairs on opposite sides of the room, throwing a football and talking about public education. Myron’s kids’ school’s library’s roof had collapsed under the weight of snow last winter. Tommy’s kid’s teacher’s aide was someone he could not stop thinking about. Because he called her “striking” and “pretty,” because he talked about her “features” and her “figure,” Tommy did not sound creepy to Myron, nor to himself. It was but a partial and genteel confession of his depravity, and it trailed off into silence and obscene ideation. The men did not need to talk because they were throwing and catching a football. Or, if they chose, they could talk about throwing and catching a football. Eventually, of course, one man sat beneath the window and tried to time his throw so that the other man, running from the door, could make a diving catch on the queen bed. They alternated positions. Both men became flushed and sweaty. Neither man cared to remember the year that Vince broke the corner off of a bedside table. Both went about the game with gravity and good-natured intensity. It was important to them to throw and catch the ball well.

“Nice one.”

“My fault, bad throw.”

“The one-handed grab!”

“I suck.”

“That one will no doubt be reviewed.”

“I used to be able to do that.”

“Lead me a little more next time.”

“Crap.”

“Whoa.”

“You okay?”

“Nice one.”

“Got my bell rung.”

“Hold on.”

“Broke the plane!”

“It went in the closet, I think.”

“Fearless over the middle.”

“I have to blow my nose.”

“That’s it.”

“On a roll now.”

“Oh, shit.”

“That was my bad.”

The wall sconce was chipped, but functional. The men quit their game, and prepared for bed. They texted their wives, brushed their teeth. Fat Michael had still not returned. Tommy and Myron got into the same queen-size bed. Myron asked Tommy if he wanted to read, and they both laughed. Myron turned off the light. Tommy, it seemed to Myron, fell asleep immediately. He had never seen someone fall asleep so quickly.

In the faint red glow of the alarm clock, Myron could see the empty bed they had left for Fat Michael. It was customary for the man playing Theismann to sleep alone. It was intended to be a perk, or a compensation, but it had always seemed to Myron to be mildly punitive, a form of exile or symbolic estrangement. Myron, who six or seven years ago had been Theismann, imagined Fat Michael slipping into bed later tonight. He knew what it was like. Now Myron, feeling Tommy’s warmth beside him, remembered so very clearly that time after the birth of his first child. He remembered tucking her in at night, leaving her alone in the dark of her room. It had always seemed odd to him, somehow unfair or backward, that the adults could sleep together at night for warmth and comfort, while the child, fearful and lonely, had to sleep by herself.

IN BED, in the dark, Andy and Robert talked quietly about injuries. Robert’s neighbor had sliced himself wickedly with a hedge trimmer. There had been blood on the roof. Andy knew it didn’t sound like much, but he had ended up in the ER because of a splinter from his back deck. Both men had been laid out with back spasms. Both men found themselves using the railing when they climbed stairs. Neither man could put on socks while standing up. They had both lived in the paradise of a painless body for years without even realizing it. The inglorious body had become, for Robert and Andy, one of life’s most prominent themes. They often woke up sore, scanning their minds for possible causes. Each man in the bed cupped his genitals, not for arousal but for comfort.

“I’m sorry to hear about your marriage,” Robert didn’t say.

“It’s just one of those things,” Andy didn’t respond. Nor did he say anything about the day he and his wife told their two children. That night, one of his final nights in the house, Andy went to check on his nine-year-old son in his room. He planned to sit on the edge of the boy’s bed, to say things to him while he slept. But the boy wasn’t there. Andy searched the house, gripping his phone, preparing to call someone, the police. Finally, he climbed to the third floor to his thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Andy said none of this to Robert. He opened his daughter’s bedroom door gently, even though he was expressly not allowed in the room, and had not been for a couple of years. A lamp was on inside. Andy smelled the fresh paint. She had painted her walls. The color was ridiculous, but she had done a neat job. The room was heartbreakingly clean and organized. The items on her bookshelves were arranged perfectly. He had had no idea what was up here, but he never would have guessed this. A silk butterfly dangled from the ceiling, spinning slowly in an invisible draft. The girl was in bed, texting. Andy’s son was curled beside her, asleep. His son and daughter didn’t even like each other. All they did was fight. The boy was not allowed in this room. Andy’s daughter did not look up from her phone. Andy nodded to her, and he left the room.

Robert knew that Andy was going through a hard time. He knew he had a kid, maybe two. The question Robert would not ask had a long answer that Andy would not provide. Robert wanted to help. He wanted to give something to Andy. “My mother has Alzheimer’s,” he said quietly.

“Really?” Andy said. “Robert, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks,” Robert said.

This was something Robert could offer, even if it wasn’t true. He had just visited his mother in Wisconsin, and though her mind certainly was not as sharp as it had once been, she was doing just fine, still living by herself. Together they had handed out candy to neighborhood trick-or-treaters. They had run out of treats and turned the porch light out at eight o’clock. Then they had watched a documentary about the enormous salt mines beneath the Great Lakes.