I signed on to email, ready to relay photos of last night’s work to my new employer, only to find that Garrett had already delivered a message of his own around five in the morning. There was no subject heading and the text was brusque, without greetings or names, his or mine, just two hyperlinks—onion links—accompanied by telegraphic annotations.
Follow #32, he’d written beneath one URL, in a miniaturized point size that nearly obscured the injunction. And the redhead came after the other link, but in a different typeface, as though the note wasn’t dashed off but assembled through cut-and-paste. The phrase PASS:PASS concluded things.
I hadn’t used Tor in a long while, not since streaming a clutch of Salafi dismemberments that represented speech “of the most radical kind,” in the words of an artist I’d known years back who I was in no particular hurry to reconnect with. Since then, though, I always kept the military-grade browser on my computers; that was his lasting impression on my life. I opened up a Tor window, dropped in the first link, and went bouncing blindly around the world through the network’s encrypted relays. Eventually I arrived at Antral’s servers. A password field hovered over a grayed-out archive of mpeg files, each one named only by its length. After supplying Garrett’s four-letter word—what was the point of using an onion domain if your password was this primitive?—195minutes.mpeg became mine. The same letters unlocked the other file, 131minutes.mpeg.
Strange to say, but these inscrutable titles prompted little curiosity in me about the contents of the videos. Instead I basked in the prospective pleasure of duration. Specifically, the professional obligation to spend five hours gazing into my titanic plasma. An actual workday was in the offing; it would even divide neatly into two sessions, morning and afternoon. Here was my riposte to my dismissal from the Carrington, I realized with defiant glee. Who wouldn’t prefer my new job to the last? Yesterday I’d been able to do it downing half a bottle of whiskey, and today my labors would in all likelihood take place prone on my couch. The perks of organizing arts events were nowhere near as seductive.
Through this film session, Garrett had created ideal conditions for sampling the sports drink—passive, spectatorial conditions, I mean. It would be like sipping soda at a double-feature matinee. There was something redemptive about a day with a shape to it I wasn’t responsible for imposing. I put several bottles of Theria in my freezer, which was empty but for the chalky ice-cream sandwiches, imported from Central America and bought at the local bodega, that from time to time I depended on for sustenance. I took two bottles with me into my little theater. Lying on the floor against the far wall was a dusty silver laptop, permanently linked to the screen through thick legacy cables. I knelt at the keyboard and felt the sticky, familiar alloy of dust and oil, plaster and paint, on the pads of my fingers. This same detritus suffused the entire room; it’s why I declined to make myself any more comfortable there on the floor. I jabbed awkwardly at the keys, which wobbled and squeaked owing to their cartoonish degree of travel. This had once been a desirable ergonomic quality, travel, but recent laptops had forsaken it for the flatness of calculator buttons. This machine was not five years old and already felt like the product of another era, a Remington or an Olivetti, though not nearly so distinguished. It had until recently been my primary unit, but by the time I’d retired it from frontline service, maxing out its RAM no longer offset the incapacities of its motherboard, which suffered mostly from our apparently limitless demands on computing power. I picked up the laptop, leaving a crisp brown square in the dust on the floor, and slouched onto the yellowed couch while the first video slowly loaded.
Finally, I poured the drink, and somehow found this aqueous substance to have hardly any aroma. Pushing my nose deeper into the glass I managed to pick up a medicinal note. Juniper? Elderflower? Elderberry? Blind guesses, really. I wasn’t on intimate enough terms with any of these fragrances to draw distinctions. No matter: I shut my eyes, inhaled deeply once more, and meditated on the question anyway. Nothing came to me, of course—except the low rumble of marching drums. A fight song. My eyes opened onto a field of green. Amidst that vast expanse of grass, a stream of blue, white, and yellow swept toward the center and struck me hard. These were Cal men, in Cal colors; I knew them too well. As a boy in Berkeley I’d never gone to a game, but I remember big-game weekends, especially against archrivals. Soon, a whooping, leaping red and yellow train emerged from the opposite tunnel: Trojans barreling into the Coliseum. Here was a Pac-12 grudge match, any native Californian could tell you this. The camera panned back toward mid-field as the red jerseys gathered along the thirty-five-yard line, preparing to surge forward behind the kicker, who would lead the way with his one bare foot and his single-bar helmet that always put me in mind of earlier eras, where each player, not just the kicker, wore so little facial protection that his identity might be known to all at a glance. Today, of course, a football player was nearly an android, a veiled homunculus buried deep within a raft of high-tech gear, seeing only through the chinks in the metal grating encasing his visage, which was further shielded by a polymer visor, the kind Garrett was beginning to manufacture. Probably some of the players onscreen were wearing his prototypes.
The commentators had already begun to blather, using those peculiarly torqued voices that abound on television and radio. I was tempted to mute the screen, as it so often was in my childhood: a preference of my father’s. You could barely see the game, he’d say, or hear yourself think, with all these media personalities manhandling your attention. As if you couldn’t find your way around on your own. For the moment, though, I let these voices have their say, in case they were relevant to Garrett’s purposes. Just before kickoff, the camera cut to the booth and the two men made chummy introductions. The color commentator was a washed-up quarterback, I knew, a mere game-manager whose acquisition of a Super Bowl ring had been serendipitous in the extreme, in that anyone quarterbacking the Ravens that year would have got one, and not just the ring but all the spoils that flowed from winning a title, including media gigs like this. All I could wonder as he rambled on was just how he’d gotten this fat so soon after retiring. Nestled beside him in that cramped space was a journalist of an altogether different rank, a storied California play-by-play man I didn’t even need to see to recognize. His cadences were so distinctive, indeed so instinctively pleasing, they managed temporarily to expel his underachieving partner from my mind.
Back on the field, slanted amber rays collected in the stadium like felled pillars, one on top of the other, turning Pasadena red-gold as their kicker launched the ball deep into the sky. Cal’s returner dropped back from the goal line into the end zone, sensing the cleanness of the strike, but the ball sailed over his head just the same. The whistle trilled and the Trojan gunners shortened their strides like sprinters just past the line, while the returner trotted toward the sideline with a strangely gloating air, as if he’d furthered Cal’s cause without even getting a finger to the ball. The camera cut to an aerial shot of the field, an aggressive hard-rock riff buzz-sawed beneath it, and the everything faded abruptly into a Pontiac commercial with an unlikely operatic score. Schumann, possibly. Garrett’s staff must not have bothered to take the commercials out, I thought, even though it would have been simple enough to do.
This must be why he’d asked me about football at Antral’s headquarters. This video. It was true, what I’d told Garrett. My knowledge was rudimentary. I never really watched football, not properly. Generally the games remained at the edge of consciousness, even when I was staring directly into the screen, as I had over these last months, doing little else but dwelling and drifting in thought. Sports were more or less like background music to me, with one difference: I strongly preferred live matches, for the close companionship realtime uniquely produced—the kind you may have with, say, an upstairs neighbor you never meet face-to-face but still hear regularly through the ceiling, day and night. With live television, the screen effectively becomes a window between two co-ordinated spaces, not something you look at so much as through, giving access to whatever is there, in the studio or the stadium, at the very moment you are looking. Really, I suppose the screen is more like a telescope than a window, an instrument that positively enhances the powers of the eye, collapsing space but not time.
In any case, through all these hours of observation, careless as they were, I must have picked up quite a lot about football. No other hypothesis was tenable. Yet it was knowledge of a sort that always had to be jogged, that is, called forth by other experiences. If, in a bar, I overheard patrons discussing a particular player, a dossier’s worth of details about him would spontaneously assemble in my mind. And if no-one had mentioned the athlete’s name? I would have had no hope of recovering that information, intricate as it was. How much of anyone’s understanding took this fugitive form? How ignorant might we appear, to others and ourselves—how ignorant might we in fact be—if not for these chance spurs to memory the world routinely offers up?
Up until the last few months, my knowledge of football had been acquired almost entirely by osmosis, through chronic exposure. The game, growing up, had graced our television often enough for me to have absorbed the essentials, even if the deepest, tactical elements eluded me. Ty of course was a bona fide fan, he watched the game, whereas the rest of the family merely heard it through bedroom walls, or saw it while passing by the living room sofa, catching it only in snatches. For my part, I found real pleasure not in the game but in watching Ty watch it. Usually I would be sitting in the breakfast nook, a few yards behind him, observing his head in quarter-profile while his eyes tracked movements on the screen. Whenever he stirred from that affectless trance common to spectators, I would follow his line of sight and share in whatever it was that had triggered the disturbance in his aspect, whether a grimace, an exclamation, even or a laugh.
My mother would play this game with me, too. Any excuse to gaze at her two boys, and to understand their respective pastimes. At first Ty would react self-consciously to the careful study we were making of him, unsettled by the meaningful looks I exchanged with our mother, but after a time he seemed to resign himself to our scrutiny. Which was important, actually: much of what I know now about the human face, its fluidity and fungibility, came to me first through observing my brother in this recurring scene, though somehow I never once thought to draw or paint it. There’d been no need.
I found his fandom puzzling, really. He couldn’t have picked it up from our father, who quietly derided all serious interest in the playing of children’s games by adults who’d failed to outgrow the habit,and moreover were magnificently rewarded for this failure. It was the fans who arrested the players’ development, with real human consequences, he thought, given how poorly the bulk of players did in their retirements, losing their fortunes on half-baked business ventures or obliterating their minds with high-grade pharmaceuticals. They were thirteen-year-olds suddenly expected, at thirty or thirty-five, whenever the end came, to act their age. Anyone would flounder, my father pronounced.
Even in a sports-hostile environment, with all my parents’ talk of Parkinsonism and traumatic brain injury, Ty developed a lasting attachment to football. Given his logical, linear bent—strong enough to take him through an engineering degree at Caltech (which my father, normally quite restrained, couldn’t help but gloat about sometimes, that he’d had a son that smart) and on to a consulting position at Bain—Ty thrived down in the thickets of the game, where my appreciation didn’t extend. He took me for a philistine on this front. Whatever it was I was seeing in the game, he’d say, the surface stuff, the crashing helmets, the broken bones, it hardly mattered at all; the real interest lay far deeper, at the nexus of calculation and chaos. It was in working to distinguish these two factors in the game, what could be controlled and what could only be observed in awe or terror, once the ball was snapped and the men were in motion, that the devotee’s pleasure was to be found. I’d never tasted this, though. Maybe in paintings, but not here.
On Sunday afternoons and especially Monday nights, football played out on the television while life carried on in the rest of the house. Usually my father would be occupied with intellectual property, his legal briefs. Doubtless he spent some of this time pining for the downtown offices of his firm, and not just for their conduciveness to work. No, I suspect he also longed for breathing room, some refuge from the household, and particularly from my mother, who could be more than a little unpleasant while preparing lectures for her University of San Francisco classes. You couldn’t help but pick up the resentment. Professing reminded her that she was no longer a proper participant in the art world, a shaper of its substance, only one more teacher of unimpeachable pedigree standing on the sidelines. She’d had to step back from her curatorial practice because my father’s career in law had required it, at least in her mind, though I think we all knew the deeper obstacle was her disillusionment with professional art circles, her difficulty in rising through the ranks at the Getty. No-one dared remind her of it, though, out of both fear and tenderness. She’d learned about my withdrawal from Hinton, my unhappiness with most existing places of exhibition. Yet she had no real response to it, which I found odd, and telling, too. She must have seen a part of herself in me. But did she see a part she was proud of? And was she rooting for me to succeed, or simply to turn away and become, say, an administrator at the Carrington? She was inscrutable on these matters, distressingly so. But then, I generated complications for her that Helena and Ty never could.
So what exactly was I doing in those early days? While Ty watched endless games on the set, I was mostly sketching my way through reams of paper. Most of these pictures went straight into the garbage. For even then I realized that my work, like my mother’s, was merely prep, though for a day that was still years away. I have retained almost nothing from that time. No juvenilia survives, I destroyed it all so quickly. I suppose I was already thinking of the record.
After spending a decade in Los Angeles, when I was still just five or six and only beginning to come into my own, we moved to a nice house with a small yard just outside San Francisco. My father was relocated there by his firm, and not exactly with his blessing, though the position he took up was a plum one. Still, it mattered that it wasn’t his choice. It’s why my mother couldn’t properly resent him, only fate, the larger patterns of life that no-one can govern. And if it had been up to him? I’m not sure what he might have done. Easy to say now, of course, that he would have remained in Los Angeles, supporting my mother’s stalling career. In fact I think he might have still pushed for a move, for her sake, to get her away from an established order of art in the habit of humiliating its own.
When I was a bit older, we moved to the outskirts of Berkeley, which not only granted us a more expansive home (and yard) but satisfied my father’s need to be closer to a serious law library and intellectual hub, away from the crass tech overrun of San Francisco, which he seemed genuinely to despise—the personalities of that culture, specifically—even if much of his business involved the patents and copyrights surrounding digital technologies. This migration within the Bay serendipitously conferred on Ty and I the right to root for either of the area’s two NFL teams of that time, the Raiders (then in Oakland) or the 49ers (still in San Francisco). The latter squad surged to the forefront of my mind now as I studied USC’s colors on the plasma, colors that differed in shade but not hue. Given our earlier residence in Los Angeles, I suppose I might have had a right to root for them, too, if only they weren’t playing against Cal. These days another professional California team, the Los Angeles Rams, bore Cal’s blue and gold. Even my father watched the Rams, from time to time anyway. Generally speaking, he could put aside his broader misgivings about football—he was strangely coy about their full extent—plunk down next to Ty on the sofa, brief usually still in hand, to take in the fourth quarter of almost any close match, just so long as it involved at least one team from Los Angeles, the city where his life first took flight—his career, his wife, his kids. The Bay would never compete: he’d already established his fundamental arc by the time he arrived there, which meant, given the bond between memory and adversity, that his richest recollections would always be tied to the city of angels, where everything had still been uncertain. He and Ty parsed the game with the same analytical cool. I could see this in the steadiness of their gaze, discreetly sizing up goings-on. It was this gift for objective appraisal, surely inherited from our father, that made Ty more of a football aficionado than a fan. Fans, after all, were almost definitionally partisan. But Ty followed the Raiders and the Niners with equal avidity. He was loyal only to great football, whichever team—it needn’t have been a Californian one—happened to produce it on a given day.
By now I was profoundly familiar with intrastate rivalries like USC-Cal. No-one could grow up in America innocent of football, even if you never actually watched it yourself, no more than a Brit could be oblivious to soccer. It ran too deep in the culture not to reverberate through it. But my early steeping in football put me, unlike many of my art school friends, in a position to draw pleasure from the game whenever I found it playing out in front of me; whereas any enjoyment they took in it came freighted with self-consciousness, which invariably contaminated the experience. Often enough their appreciation had an anthropological quality to it; yet from an outsider’s standpoint, I knew, the substance of the game was effectively invisible.
Luckily, I was primed to experience football in an easy, half-conscious sort of way, which was the very way most fans took in these three-and-a-half hour spectacles: with a domestic beer or five. Football seems more or less reverse-engineered with beer in mind. The tenor of alcohol—every substance has its own—meshes with the game on a constitutive level, particularly the creeping drunkenness brought on by low-point drinks. It’s no accident that football began to displace baseball as America’s pastime not long after the country rose to superpower status. As a cousin of cricket, baseball was essentially a gentleman’s sport, a poor fit with the tough’s role.
Today it was going to be up to a sports drink, not alcohol, to get me through the entirety of a game, which was back in my sights after Pontiac and Chevy and All-State and Raid and Nabisco all put in appearances during the break. Who was I supposed to be looking for, again? I checked the note from Garrett on my phone. Number thirty-two. Bear or Trojan, though?
The first huddle broke with a clap and Cal’s offense began arranging itself along the line of scrimmage. Immediately I could see a number thirty-two. Briar was the name, stitched in blue right above his number. I was sure I’d heard of him on SportsCenter, having watched so much of the program these last months that even minor subplots in college football had little chance of escaping my eyes and ears. Briar trotted languidly to the far side of the field, right near the sideline, lining up at receiver. An undrafted wide-out in search of a contract—that was his story, wasn’t it? I could see he wasn’t much bigger than his defender, strong evidence of a modest stature, given that cornerbacks are nearly always diminutive. It’s why they’re cornerbacks and not receivers themselves. That and a lack of the soft hands needed to reel in the ball. No wonder, then, that the antipathy between pass-catcher and coverman runs so deep, why so many fights break out between these counterparts and not, say, between linemen, where there is no implicit disparity in talent, no second-class citizenship.
The Trojans nudged their safeties up close to the line, threatening to blitz, but Cal’s quarterback, Henderson, audibled out of the play-call and reset a few steps back, in the pistol formation. They ran a simple power draw to the left side, the running back, Fonseca, crashing through the line after the shortest hesitation, straight into the arms of Cal’s middle linebacker, who casually spun him to the ground. A three-yard pick up, on one of those archetypal plays executed a couple of dozen times a game. You’d have to know the sport uncommonly well to differentiate this particular run from all its relatives, the way the commentators tried to. How many fans could actually do this? Could understand what was meant by A-gaps, or overloads, or stunts? And did it even matter? I’m not at all sure the intensity of your fandom had much to do with such minutiae. Mostly you just skipped over this sort of sporty technical talk, even while being reassured by it, to wit, that the events transpiring were more controlled, more skill-driven, than they appeared to the untrained eye. What you were watching, it appeared, was more than simple violence: it was organized violence, pain with a point, which made all the difference. You were witnessing strategy, not savagery, even if it was the latter that was responsible for your tuning in.
Second and seven. This time Briar was the man in motion, jogging down my screen toward me. Henderson, a moderate talent who’d had to wait till the third day of this year’s pro draft to have his number called, took the snap out of the shotgun, but the Trojan nose-tackle immediately bulldozed his center, forcing the quarterback to fling the ball toward the sideline. His target, if he’d had one and wasn’t merely avoiding the sack, had to be the back shoulder of forty-four, Hilliard. Here was a wideout of more conventional proportions, not undersized like Briar. The first thing I noticed about him were his exceptionally long arms, arms so long his hands nearly reached his knees when he’d lined up in formation, waiting for the snap. He slanted out farther toward the sideline now and used every inch of that reach to corral the errant ball, right on his fingertips. I’m not sure how he managed to decelerate so sharply then, keep himself from crashing out of bounds, which is exactly where his counterpart ended up, spilling past the sideline having only barely grazed the receiver’s helmet.
For a moment, forty-four seemed to freeze in place on screen, studying the fallen man. Then he was moving at full speed again, racing toward the goal. Another defender—number twenty, Khaleel Barker, free safety, the commentators would later elaborate—had good position and rapidly closed on him. Barker seemed certain to force Hilliard out of bounds, if the receiver expected to avoid a brutal shot. Hilliard slowed, as if recognizing the choice facing him and considering the matter. The safety adjusted his angle of attack, but Hilliard kept jogging forward, refusing to step off the field and save himself from the blast.
Barker was almost on top of him now, Hilliard’s fate looked to be sealed, when a blur of yellow and gold broke in from left of frame, directly into the Trojan’s chest. Barker crumpled on impact; forty-four, proceeding untouched down the sideline, couldn’t help rubbernecking. No-one could blame him. It was one of those collisions—cataclysms, really—that happens two or three times a game, where you have no idea which of the parties involved will come out worse for it, the impact is so severe. Moments later, with Trojans distantly trailing him, Hilliard arrived in the end zone. Fourteen minutes left in the quarter and the score was already six-nothing.
This is just how college football goes. Big plays rule, plays that depend less on brilliance than incompetence. It’s why I prefer the pro game. The missed tackle on Hilliard, just after the catch, where he might have been stopped for a two-yard gain, was the first of several blunders. Hilliard had applied only a perfunctory stiff-arm to the cornerback; nevertheless the Trojan sailed past him—past the sideline, too—and sprawled violently to the ground. Then there were the lapses of the other defensive backs in the vicinity, who’d been far too slow to react to the catch, or probably just assumed the tackle would be made by someone, anyone, other than themselves. Finally, there was the misjudgment of the safety, Barker, who should have met Hilliard at the sideline and channeled him out of bounds or forced him back into the interior, where he would have been easily brought down by the rest of the defense. Instead, Barker opted for the straightest line of attack on the receiver, who baited him with that insouciant little jog, buying time for his blocker to arrive. Smelling blood, the safety fell right into the trap, and got buried by the Bear he saw too late.
It was a phenomenal block, a brilliant bit of improvisation. The broadcast lavished attention on the end-zone celebration, the Cal players cracking their helmets together and tugging on Hilliard’s face-mask with worrying force. Only later did the camera bother with Barker, who remained prone on the field at the site of the collision. By this point, several players from both teams were leaning down over him, patting his shoulder pads in pro-forma consolation. Medical personnel knelt beside the safety—the resonances with classical art were unavoidable—and in the end Barker managed rather dutifully to wiggle his fingers, even lift one of his legs a few inches off the ground.
The feed kept cutting away from this poignant scene, almost shame-facedly. But the lens couldn’t help being seduced—rather obscenely, though what is football if not sublimated obscenity?—by the instigator of this medical emergency: thirty-two. That was Duke Briar’s touchdown, really, said the aged quarterback confined to the booth. Since USC tradition dictated never using names on the backs of the jerseys, it would have made more sense for Garrett to single out a Trojan solely by number, not a Bear. But after that block, all else was far from equal. It was Duke I was meant to see.
While his teammates had sprinted to the end zone to join Hilliard in celebration, Duke had apparently gone straight to the sideline. The camera framed him on the bench, a towel wrapped around his head like a hijab, with his helmet by his side. On his other side were three pylon-orange kegs of Gatorade, in front of which a procession of teammates formed. Each detained Duke only briefly with a fist-bump or sharp slap of the head or shoulder, all to salute this block to end all blocks.
The celebrated man was not especially handsome. His features were unhappily delicate, given his vocation, especially those liquid almond eyes that carried the quality, anyone could recognize this straight off, of the quickened mind. A calm one, too. Calm, indeed, because it was quick. Duke could see, as Barker could not, just what was coming, I speculated, including perhaps these very congratulations, which he accepted politely but without the usual vim of a football player who’d just made a defining play, offering only shallow nods and the weakest slaps of hands. By this I mean he merely extended his hand, palm up, and left his teammates to do the slapping (many obliging, to be sure, with magnificent force). He didn’t need to run hot to get through a game, not like the other players. They were manic, and always on the edge of violence, so that exultation couldn’t be prevented from descending into mild forms of mutual battery.
As the play-by-play man noted, Duke was also a native son, an Angelino returned home, which explained the ovation he got from the crowd when he’d gone up on the jumbotron, despite his just having demolished one of their Trojans. There were boos amid the cheers, of course, it would have been unseemly otherwise, but the jeering simply confirmed the fans’ attachment to him.
Hilliard, the one who’d actually spiked the ball and scored the points, finally dropped onto the bench beside Duke, or rather Duke’s helmet, which sat stolidly between them. Forty-four said nothing, he just looked out ahead into space aloofly, drawing from Duke the intended response: a soft smile—his first definitive reaction since laying the block. Yet the smile seemed otherworldly, its meaning only incidentally related to the game.
I thought I saw the two players’ lips subtly moving then. I wondered about the backstory that made possible such a muted exchange, so uncharacteristic of football. I wondered, too, who was the true star receiver between them, or if the pair were, as occasionally happens, genuine equals. One thing I was sure of: at well over six-feet tall, and with that long galloping stride he’d shown on his way to the end zone, the kind greats like Randy Moss and Calvin Johnson had flaunted, Hilliard had the look of an alpha, one who’d go on to deliver an NFL team a thousand-plus yards a season on a regular basis—if of course he didn’t suffer the sort of catastrophic injury Barker had intended to inflict on him. Somehow, though, even this stud receiver evinced a circumspection bordering on reverence toward Duke.
The fans crowed, no hisses at all this time, and the camera cut away to its cause: Barker finally found his feet. He used a pair of white medical staffers like crutches, one small man lodged under each of his arms, to cover the first half of his trek to the sideline, before going the rest of the way on his own, even galloping a little toward the end, not out of jubilation, I thought, but simply to get the feeling back into his lower body. He shook his head widely and wildly, as if offering a vehement no meant to be visible at one-hundred yards, though really he was stretching his neck to confirm that that it hadn’t been broken. Just minutes before, when he’d first been knocked to the ground, there’d been reasonable fears of paraplegia. Now it looked as if he wouldn’t miss a snap. What a picture he made, dancing to the sideline, shaking off fate. It had missed him by a hair’s breadth, this fate several players suffered each decade: to walk no more, much less to run.
Commercials intervened again. If football seemed reverse-engineered for the consumption of beer, I thought, it was even more perfectly designed as a vehicle for marketing, frequently heavy with the same digitally generated imagery that Fox and ESPN used during their broadcasts, all those abstract metallic backgrounds shifting and glinting in tribute to some sort of masculine futurity, while the announcers confidently strode in front of them in their light brown shoes and procurers’ suits. Full-body shots prevailed these days, with not even a desk between viewer and presenter; the on-screen talent seemed almost to float in virtual space, as meteorologists had for decades. Fox, perhaps unsurprisingly, pushed things furthest in this direction with their android football-player avatar. This machined man looked very much like a Transformer, a version of Megatron perhaps, given the sullen menace he radiated as he bent and stretched his limbs, warming up for some cybernetic football game whose kickoff was scheduled for next century. Sometimes, particularly during intro and outro segments, this football-Megatron with glowing red eyes would pound his fist in his hand, looking ready to hurt something. And since he was staring directly out at the viewer, the only conclusion you could draw was that, whatever it was he had planned exactly, it was you who would be on the receiving end of it. In the presence of this android—or was there still some trace of wetware within?—I always felt as if I were being implored to drink, that intoxication would ease the pain of the beating I was about to take, the spectacle I was going to join, and smooth over the disjunctions emanating from all that CGI: those textureless digital interludes, backgrounds, and superimpositions that seemed to bleed into the live footage of the game itself.
Before the match returned, I held up the bottle of Theria by the neck and peered through its marine tones, tones that made me imagine this liquid might have been siphoned out of some remote lake in the wilds of Alaska. With their saturated chemical hues, Powerade, Body Armor, and Gatorade made a very different impression, even if they aptly symbolized what athletics had become: a biotechnological affair, a physics experiment. I took a good gulp and, happily, the sense of wildness persisted. There was, again, the medicinal, jammy note I’d smelled, and my confidence grew that elderberry was indeed responsible for it when I realized that Burleighs, a favorite gin of Claire’s, used the same fruit to great effect. But in Theria this was coupled to an edge, just as Karen had suggested. It wasn’t a matter of simple tartness or sourness. John was wrong about that, though I don’t know how seriously he was taking any of it anyway, at the point of his first sip. He’d seemed keener on irritating me with his bluster. Whatever it was, the drink certainly owned a sharp, pungent, not unpleasant bitterness.
Just as I said this to myself, though, I took another drink and rather sheepishly had to concede something to John’s description. Perhaps it really was just a sourness here, pure elderberry, nothing more. That’s what the second swig suggested, anyway, contradicting the first. I held up the bottle in front of me again—something I’d end up doing frequently with this bewitching drink—as if holding it so might help me penetrate its mystery. The sum of the two swigs, taken so many seconds apart, had seemed to result in an unalloyed tartness, whereas one swig alone registered as bitter. It clearly had been bitter, hadn’t it? And had John deemed it sour after his first or second taste?
Though the game had returned to the screen a little while ago, only now did it come to the fore of my awareness. Lost in the puzzles of the drink, I’d effectively missed the Cal kickoff. A mirror image of what had come before unfolded in front of me now, with red not white holding the ball on their twenty. From here the déjà vu ceased: the Trojans bypassed a simple draw for something exotic, tricksy, even effeminate by the reckoning of diehards (cleverness wasn’t smiled on in the game). Besides a faked kick, it might have been the only gimmick play I knew by name and could recognize on sight: the flea-flicker.
O’Leary was under center for USC. Unlike Henderson, he was an elite prospect—USC had long been a quarterback finishing school—destined to go in the top five of the draft. He took the snap and tossed the ball to a running back. Just before reaching the line of scrimmage on the right side, the runner pitched the ball back to O’Leary, who, however, had two defenders harrying him by this point. The line had crumbled, so that as soon as the QB caught the ball and began searching upfield for a receiver—and there was one streaking down the sideline unattended, just as he’d hoped—a Cal blitzer swept O’Leary’s legs out from under him on a play you couldn’t suspected was designed to snap ligaments. What’s a roughing penalty next to knocking a quarterback out of the game, or even the season? O’Leary’s teammates seemed to be pondering this question. Naturally a scuffle broke out.
I returned to the drink as the referees separated the players, all deeply engaged in the elaborate pantomime of a fight that was nearly always a bluff on both sides. In the finish I discerned a burgeoning sweetness. Vanilla? I took a third taste, several contiguous gulps really, though they were so closely spaced you could have called them one. The sting came out of the sourness as the vanilla bloomed.
When I talk of vanilla or elderberry, I should say I am speculating on the actual composition of the drink, not what the drink’s taste might resemble, which was the connoisseur’s modus operandi: reaching for metaphors, that is, not facts. But was my way, finally, any more sensible? I was no more an epicure than I was a chemist. And in any case it wasn’t my job to distinguish the drink’s elements so much as grasp it as it was and transpose the whole into a visual register. That the substance had to be broken down before the transposition could be effected was mere analytical presumption. Ultimately, finding analogues doesn’t depend on being able to take things apart; it might well get in the way.
It was becoming plain to me that Garrett’s brew was truly protean, refusing to resolve into any one flavor or arrangement of intensities on the palette: even to the nose it seemed kaleidoscopic. I sipped the drink and gazed into the screen abstractly—as one was meant to, really. A football game is too long, too full of incident, to really sustain attention, except perhaps the last half-quarter of a close game, which anyone knows can be ecstasy. USC picked up two first downs before the drive stalled and the special-teams units trotted out onto the field. They were set to punt, and who should have come back to return but my thirty-two. He was emerging as an all-purpose player, a Percy Harvin, Tyreek Hill type, though Duke blocked more like another receiver I’d always held dear as a child, for his venom: Hines Ward. There’d even been a special rule, hadn’t there, implemented to protect players against his predatory tactics? I could have texted Ty about it, he would have known.
Hoping to pin Duke back with his kick, the punter put a lot of air under the ball, so much that it disappeared into the lights and soared off-camera, above the stadium. When it reappeared in the sky it was coming almost straight down on Duke, who was planted just inside the ten-yard line. The ball had nearly made it down to him when the defense arrived. At just that moment, he offered something like a low, truncated wave of the hand, I couldn’t quite tell if he meant anything by it. It was as if he were unsure whether to bail out of the play with a fair catch—the sensible choice—or grab the ball and try to spin away from his pursuers just before impact. In the event, the ball reached him in the same instant two Trojan gunners did, the catch and the tackle coming so close together that I experienced them as a single event. The hit was so crisp, so sharp, it jarred me, straight through the screen, the crunch of those helmets deep in Duke’s chest. Why no targeting penalty was called, no-one understood. Then, for once, the commentators fell silent. What was there to say, other than a prayer for Duke? A freeze-frame of the three players in a pile would have given you a good idea of mortality. Slowly, the Trojans got to their knees, revealing the Bear beneath. Evidently the two of them had paid a steep price for the hit, crawling around on all fours and grasping the backs of their necks rather than celebrating their work. It was no ordinary hit, of course. This was revenge—for Duke’s block on Barker, a play that quite naturally put a target on his back for the rest of the day, and therefore made it genuinely perplexing as to why he didn’t take the fair catch and save himself the trouble. Even the two gunners would have thought he’d never give them such a sublime opportunity for vengeance. I suppose Duke might have assumed mere rules weren’t going to stop them from retaliating. Best, then, to take a shot at the punt return, even if it was only a most fanciful one, the kind you’d need to be able to freeze time to bring off.
After the two Trojans hauled themselves to their feet, they stood over Duke and peered down at him. With menace or glee? The helmets made it impossible to say. But when Duke didn’t move, not even a little, the Trojans were right back on their knees, checking on him. You wanted to anguish your opponents, absolutely. You wanted them to feel the psychic force of physical pain, the inner burden that carrying it the rest of the game involved. You wanted, in short, to torture them. But you never wanted to injure them, not if you had the spirit of the game in you, anyway, which was sometimes a question you had to ask yourself, after plays like this: what were you trying to do exactly, what were your hopes here?
Medics raced once more from the sideline—their job seemed to center on this little sprint—though this time they were Cal’s. Long before they could sweep the Trojans out of the way and give succor to Duke, and long before other players could begin to put down one knee in tribute, with their helmets in their hands, the victim’s eyes flared so brightly you could see it through his mask. His revival got the gunners back to their feet, all their solemnity converted back into the gentle scorn inherent to competition. Duke raised his already splayed arms from their places on the ground, up toward the Trojans, and the crowd rumbled.
A moment’s hesitation and the rumble turned threatening; the Trojans were being shamed into action; they grudgingly clutched Duke by the forearms and ratcheted him up to his feet. As soon as his arms were free he slapped one of them on the helmet and banged heads with the other. All was forgiven. The arriving medics wanted Duke to hold still while they assessed him. Too late: he was already jogging to the sideline—a bit gingerly, of course, but surprisingly well for someone who’d just gone through what he had. Meanwhile the rest of Cal’s offense strode onto the field to start the drive from the eight-yard line.
I polished off the bottle of Theria, relishing the puzzle of its flavor, the way it held in suspension the classical dimensions of taste—salt, bitter, sweet, sour—so much so that I was overlooking the real breakthrough Garrett said the drink had made, which had little or nothing to do with its taste. Still, might its action on the tongue carry some clue to its bodily effects? Garrett hadn’t said otherwise. Which left me to wonder.
Third and ten and the Bears sent in Duke, who’d just finished having flashlights shone in his eyes and fingers waved in his face by the medical staff. The offense ran an option to the near sideline, with Duke attracting what looked like a triple team on the other one. Henderson found a seam and hit a wide-open Fonseca out of the backfield for twelve yards. This was the beginning of a succession of first downs, the yards coming off screen passes and check downs and crossing routes, short- and medium-yard plays the Trojans ceded to seal off the deep threat posed by forty-four and thirty-two. Finally, the defense loaded the box, eight men on their own thirty. Duke ran a go route—a foot race with the corner, effectively. The coverage was tight, the corner was quick, and Duke’s straight-line speed was manifestly modest, his short strides failing to create separation from his defender; worse, the safety came in over the top to give help. None of this deterred Henderson. But as the ball came out of his hand, you could see from the start that it was under-thrown, with too much loft. It might even have been deflected from behind by the defensive end who got to the quarterback just after he delivered the throw. The result: a jump-ball scrum between the safety, cornerback, and receiver, just in front of the end zone. It was strange to see—I wondered if the drink was affecting me then—but Duke, though no taller than the other two, seemed to me to rise at least half a head higher; not only that, as with all great leapers, he held his apex longer: while the Trojans were already headed back down, he somehow floated there, clasping the ball and tucking it just beneath his chin. Only then did he drift earthward and crash upon the bodies of the other two.
I sat, mesmerized.
The rest of the tape would show this soft rainbow throw of Henderson’s to be no mistake: there hadn’t been any deflection. No, this was actual team strategy when it came to thirty-two: Duke may have lacked elite speed, but his capacity for vertical separation was simply eerie; it made me doubt my eyes and, naturally, wonder what exactly was in the bottle in my hand. For on any play whose success depended on the leap or the quick cut—the diving catch, the crushing block—Duke was visibly the best on the field. Even double-teamed, if the ball was lofted high enough, or thrown off to one side far enough, back-shoulder, near-shoulder, Duke would get there first. Yet the quality of his leap was only part of his gift. There was also his aptitude for the airborne scrum, the same skill the great rebounders have in basketball, this nose for where the ball will ricochet through all the limbs in the air.
Duke rose now from the pile with the ball’s tip planted in his palm and quietly placed it on the hash mark where he’d landed. A twenty-eight-yard catch. Bears were crashing downfield in a rising wave of celebration. Yet Duke shrugged them off on his way back to the huddle. They took the rebuff well, I thought, contenting themselves with congratulating each other while their receiver thought only of the next play.
I, like them, was still lost in what he’d just done.
First and goal from the two. The Trojans played the run but Cal swung the ball out to Ellesnic, a scrawny tight end with bony hands that looked like they might shatter when Henderson’s firm ball found them. But Ellesnic held on, and after tiptoeing into the end zone over the bodies of fallen Trojans, he merged into a frenzy of Bears. Duke, who decoyed on the play, drawing two defenders away from the action, stood patiently to one side, helmet in hand, looking almost philosophical, or just bored: who could tell? He checked the jumbotron several times, but that might have been a way of discreetly gauging whether the party was over yet. Eventually Ellesnic freed himself from the chaos and Duke took him on a quiet amble to the sideline. As the camera zoomed in on them, I could see Duke mouthing something as they went. He seemed to have a lot to say, actually; he was almost delivering a talk, without obvious affect or inflection, positive, negative, as if nothing of gut-level significance had just occurred, as if it were all merely an occasion for reflection. Ellesnic’s face, though, was very much animated, and mostly by violent bemusement. Not the kind of thing one usually sees after a touchdown drive, the commentators noted with a nervous chuckle.
As they reached the sideline Duke split off from Ellesnic, taking up his familiar place on the bench near the kegs and settling his helmet next to him with as much care as he’d offer an old friend. Coaches approached. But before any could reach him, he wrapped his head in a towel—not the usual drape over the back of the head and neck but an eccentric sealing of the face, as though total sensory deprivation were his aim. A couple of coaches shook their heads and smirked. Another pursed his lips. All of them kept their distance.
With Duke on the bench and Cal up fourteen-nothing after the extra-point try, I turned back to the drink. What had I noticed about it so far? What did I notice about myself? Only fifteen minutes had passed since I’d taken my first sip—four minutes, if you went by the game clock. Searching my mind I discovered little of significance besides the general sense of quiet exhilaration induced by Duke’s play. Maybe I was looking for the wrong things. What mattered, perhaps, was not what the drink did to me so much as what it did to the world in my eyes. That world, the world of the game, well, so far it had been... odd. Might the drink enhance this sense somehow, bringing curiosities to the surface? Or could it well have the opposite influence, and make the game seem more intelligible than it otherwise would—by which I mean, could it accelerate my uptake of its patterns, which would give one the feeling of the world slowing down? Yet wasn’t this a question of response times, an empirical matter, not something introspection was specially equipped to detect? Enhanced rates of reaction: that would be a quality of real use to an athlete, the prime customer base for Theria. Really, though—and I knew this was important to Garrett and the drink’s wider prospects—seeing things at immense speed, comprehending the world’s complexities all in one go rather than serially, could be of use to anyone. How far could things be taken in this direction? Could one’s attentive capacities be so greatly amplified as to bring the world nearly to a halt? Would this even be a desirable quality, outside the context of a sporting match?
The more of Garrett’s video file I watched, the stranger things got. But everything fanciful, everything grotesque, too, appeared to spring not from the recesses of my drugged mind so much as from the object of my consciousness, this taped football game, which was to my reckoning blatantly over-rich with extraordinary moments. In the first half alone, there were, by my count, five interceptions (two pick sixes), a kickoff returned for a touchdown, a blocked field goal and a blocked punt, not one but two safeties, and four scores of over fifty yards. Even for college football, this was freakish eventfulness.
Two of those scores were Duke’s, including one just before half-time, with Cal up twenty-one ten. Duke caught a lateral from Henderson and managed to shake three separate tackles, using that unreal burst, raw strength, and the fabled and unanalyzable quality of elusiveness every scout dreams of. He took it nearly seventy yards down the sideline for the score, flanked by a convoy of blockers who saw off all threats. Even then, with such total security, there were no celebratory antics from him along the way: no goose-stepping or turning back toward chasing defenders, no deceleration even as he crossed the goal-line. His way just seemed so out of character for the game I knew—so measured.
He also scored on an eye-watering ninety-eight yarder, a kickoff he took all the way back that must have felt to him like recompense for the punt return that had left him unconscious. This time, he had more space to operate with, and wending his way down the field he must have juked a half-dozen players, putting me in mind of Maradona more than any American footballer.
In between these touchdowns, and this is where things became especially strange, he was penalized for taunting a defensive line-man, though it was done in a manner so genteel—invisible to the cameras even after multiple replays—that it left the broadcast booth perplexed as to what the referee might have seen or heard. Duke hadn’t touched anyone when the flag came flying out of the referee’s pocket, and his lips had barely moved after he’d pulled out his mouthpiece. Perhaps his jaw had shifted slightly, or he’d ground his teeth, that’s the extent of what replay established. All you saw for sure was Duke, right after throwing a low but legal block on USC’s middle linebacker, brushing past the lineman on his way back to the huddle. Maybe he’d also mouthed a couple of choice words, though without even looking at him; the lineman’s sharp surprise implied as much. Duke didn’t protest the call against him. Perhaps he had history with the lineman—this was the play-by-play man’s proposal—and knew he was already on a short leash with the referees. He merely stared at the twist of yellow cloth not far from his feet, negating an eight-yard run for a first down, this phantom affront, which almost certainly cost the team points by pushing them out of field-goal range.
All of this is to say, if there were a single origin to the aberrations riving this game so far, it had to be Duke. He was behind, or anyway hovering around, most of the bizarre or transcendent or bizarrely transcendent moments of the first half, the terrible blunders as well as the demonstrations of consummate skill. And his involvement didn’t actually end with the Cal offense. I noticed partway through the second quarter, when I wasn’t much paying attention, since the Trojans had the ball, that Duke was somehow still on the field, on defense, lining up at cornerback. I don’t know exactly how many snaps he took like this, maybe half-a-dozen, possibly more, since I must have missed some before grasping his dual assignment (triple, really, given his return duties on special teams). Cal was cycling him in to cover one particular receiver, Creighley: the two were always lined up opposite each other, out wide, on the edge, or else in the slot. Duke played corner brutishly, grappling with Creighley, his taller, slenderer opponent, bumping him off the line in those first few yards from scrimmage, one time with such force it actually knocked Creighley to the ground. On some plays, Duke appeared badly beaten, overmatched. But thirty-two had a way of launching himself toward the ball at the last moment, just in time to slap it away from his counterpart. The first few times you saw it, it looked like an emergency maneuver; the results must have been lucky. Yet over time it emerged as a skill, and what it meant for opposing quarterbacks was ominous: you didn’t have him beat quite when you thought you did.
The second half of the game played out faster than the first, giving the lie to all speculation that Theria, which I continued to swig with increasing frequency, slowed down the experience of time. Perhaps just as its flavor refused to settle, it could both stretch and condense time, depending. The game came down to its final few minutes. Cal recovered a Trojan fumble at their own five-yard line, off a strip-sack of O’Leary: by this point such plays, usually destined for highlight reels, registered to me as entirely mundane. Leading 44-41 with three minutes to go, Cal had a chance to ice the game. The Trojans’ defensive front had worn down a while ago, as Cal moved away from the passing game and, relying on Fonseca, gashed the defense for six and seven yards a play, all while burning up the clock. It was third and two on the Cal twenty-three and everything said run. But the coach gambled, as college teams will. Duke split off the end and found himself deep over the middle on a slant. The safety—Barker had rather remarkably been revived and returned to the game by his team—had tripped on no-one in particular in getting back to defend Duke’s route, tripped out of sheer anxiety or a lingering wooziness from his first run-in with him. Having already shed the cornerback, this left Duke to make a simple enough catch and gallop the rest of the way to the goal.
Barker’s blunder was catastrophic, or should have been; somehow he was redeemed by another error that was truly unfathomable. Just as Duke was crossing the goal line, untouched, holding the ball aloft in one hand in celebration, and it squirted away from him out of the end zone for a touchback, along with the six points it represented. The crowd, muzzled so far by Cal’s success and the growing inevitability of defeat, came back to life. Duke looked shaken, getting back to the sideline. USC took possession, with fifty-one seconds to get into field-goal range and tie the game.
Yet when Cal’s defense came onto the field, there again was Duke—with a growing intensity, a new sharpness to his movements. I’m not sure what sort of deal he’d made with his coaches, but this time he was lining up not against Creighley but LeCroy, the Trojans’ star wideout. It was remarkable to see: Duke played LeCroy so tightly and effectively, like a bona fide shutdown corner, that O’Leary never even dared to throw his way. Four plays later, on fourth and eight, with LeCroy and Creighley blanketed, the Trojan quarterback’s check-down pass fell harmlessly to the ground. One kneel-down in the victory formation for Henderson and this strange game, three-and-a-quarter hours after it had begun, finally ended, with Duke absolved. In the span of the game I’d gone through almost four bottles of Theria—although, from about the end of the first half, I’d hardly thought of the drink again, or any of the questions about its effects that I’d meant to ponder. After I’d downed the first bottle-and-a-half, I’d been drinking the stuff like beer, in that mindless sort of way, partly because it wasn’t laden with any of the sickly sweetness of the typical energy drink, which was invariably nauseating in large amounts, like a bag of candy corn.
The longueurs of a football game always distressed me, no matter how happily I’d begun watching it. Two or three quarters in and I would have to give up, sometimes even quite close to the end, when the game was still in the balance. And this was with the aid of beer. But alcohol takes you away from the game. The niceties of it are replaced by gross facts visible without much concentration: interceptions, touchdowns, and only blurs of movement in between, men crashing into other men in a mad scramble for the ball. Under Theria’s influence, though, so many of the game’s quieter dynamics, matters of momentum, and all sorts of strategic considerations, the kind Ty savored, opened up to me. Everything appeared hyper-vivid and pre-parsed, too: the technical game-talk of the commentators lost its ring of higher gibberish. Most of all, my desire to understand, to see, seemed unnaturally stoked.
I was left with the question: could the eccentricities of this particular match be the real explanation of my reaction? Or could Theria make anything singular, cutting through the generic surface to reveal the variegations below? I finished the bottle in my hand and let the liquid roll around my mouth, searching for further indications with my tongue, as if something in its flavor—that medicinal bitterness perhaps, which competed against salt and brine, not just vanilla—could speak to my questions. Yet for hours now I hadn’t really been able to concentrate on taste; the game had turned out too fantastical for that, too unlikely, and nothing is so consuming as unlikelihood, those things that by all rights shouldn’t happen but do. Events—recorded, televised events—had occupied me. Really, number thirty-two had. You couldn’t bring any semblance of sense to this game without grasping his role in it. He was its meaning: its ebbs and flows, its textures and tones, its strategy, its substance. The only word for it was spectacle, though not in a unbecoming sense.
The oddest part, I considered, was how this spectacle’s polarity had reversed itself throughout the game, in a way Duke couldn’t control. You would be admiring a razor cut, a beautiful break on the ball, an aerial maneuver whose grace was such that even casual observers could sense something extraordinary in it, and what followed was some abomination, the purest manifestation of athletic incompetence—incomprehensible given the heights he’d just reached. It was as if he were in possession of his talents only three-quarters of the time, and, for the balance, he wasn’t merely ordinary but inferior, the sort of player who costs his team points (and games) in egregious ways. While I watched, I’d found myself trying to predict the net result of his on-field schizophrenia. Here was something every Cal fan, and certainly the coaches, would be asking themselves: is he costing us more points than he’s helping us score? I could certainly imagine him being pulled in games when the ratio was off, like a streak shooter in basketball having to ride the pine on a cold night. Such players invite questions. Would time expire before he had a chance to redeem his lapses? Or would a lapse turn up just before victory could be sealed, undoing the team’s good work? I had an itch to draw now and it was nothing like a visitation from the Muse. No, it was almost literally an itch, a particular spot on the page that needed scratching out with a pen. This is how I usually got my hand in with a new subject, acquainting myself with it tactilely even in its absence. I plucked one of the dusty sketchbooks lying near the window from a stack that managed to stand only with the wall’s assistance, it was so tall. I backed up the video, and after hopscotching through a series of low-res stills, I arrived at one of the last images of Duke. He was out on the field, post-game, along with hundreds of others, and for the first time he was genuinely divorced from his helmet, which sat on the ground, at his feet, no longer looking like much of an equal. Remarkably—this was why I picked the image—he was peeling off his jersey for a swap with none other than Barker. The Trojan, for his part, was removing his own shirt rather gingerly, as if his chest were cracked.
I wiped my hand down the face of the sketchbook’s plastic cover and a hazy residue collected in a mossy line along the edge of my palm; the notebook itself reclaimed its true hue, lipstick red. The cream stock felt almost brittle under my fingers. It was heavy paper, it ought to have aged better, but its color seemed to be fading. With my fingernail, I poked a Bic out of the spiral binding it was jammed in and searched for the first empty sheet. This was Claire’s notebook; all of them were, a whole tower of them. This room was her space; sometimes I forgot that, surprising as it sounds. These books, none of which was ever filled up—that’s why I’d reached for one in the first place, knowing I’d find large tracts of blankness, though how much depended on when exactly an idea had proved itself empty, an illusion—these books were how Claire made new starts. With crude ballpoint drawings she remolded shapes pulled from the imagination rather than from life. Generally, there were conceptual origins to her projects, though the work went best, I thought, once it’d freed itself from those moorings and her instincts took charge. She hated hearing this, she found it condescending and misogynistic. Perhaps it was, but it was also true. Even she knew that. This was really a graveyard, this stack of sketchbooks cobwebbed at the base. That’s why Claire had left them behind. The forms that had taken flight, that had managed to consume full notebooks, perhaps two or three even, would still be with her, as would the children of those books, the sculptures themselves.
This pad began aggressively, with a series of overlapping, irregular shapes, inked in a heavy blue line—Bic blue, Claire called it—which looked as though it had been retraced many times. Most of these figures fanned out from a horizontal line bisecting the lower half of the long rectangular sheets. The first few pages were thickets of line work, extraordinarily intricate and hard to interpret. Flipping through the first fifth of the book, the chaotic density began to wane and a single form, in so many variations, emerged from that swamp of ink. This, more or less, was a transcript of Claire’s imagination at work, extracting shape from a blank page like a sculptor hewing stone. Her mind worked this way in all domains, actually; it marked a fundamental divide between us, as I tended to operate constructively, slowly filling a primordial emptiness with the world. Which meant the first pages of her sketchbooks might be the last pages in mine. Although it was a question without an answer, or rather too many answers, I did sometimes wonder, when my hours turned idle, how our time together had been prefigured by this difference, and how it might have quashed our prospects from the start.
By about the halfway point, Claire’s chosen shape in the book transformed into a proper form, by which I mean a representation to which one can imagine some correlate in the world: a carefully proportioned wooden chest, in this case, or else a steamer trunk. What had been on her mind at this point? Travel? Escape? What was this unrealized thing? Her old sketchbooks always raised these sorts of questions for me, often pleasantly so, in the early days, when they weren’t yet pregnant with the sort of meaning that blooms only when everything is finished. Yet paging through the book I observed the classic symptoms of one of her doomed gambits. The subtraction of linework turned so severe that the chest began to lose all plasticity, disintegrating until it was no longer a chest at all, just a collection of interlocking shapes, and then not even that; the contours became so open that nothing remained but slants and angles meeting in increasingly untenable ways, until they didn’t even meet, leaving simply two parallel lines. On the next page, at the two-thirds mark in the book, there was only the original axis, a horizon marking eye level, about a quarter of the way up the page. The idea had entirely disappeared. That was the way with her failures. I flipped to the next page and found what I was looking for. The axis was gone. Blankness had entirely reclaimed the book, just as it had prevailed on the very first page; that one was always left empty, reserved for some unknown purpose. I ran my fingers over this void hidden deep within the interior of the book, this page that seemed less aged, with nothing brittle about it.
Having readied both paper and pen, I turned back to the still displayed on the screen. Duke and Barker were stripping off their jerseys just before the moment of ritual exchange. I drew blind, without much thought, simply letting my hand wander, tracing what I took to be the edges of the men’s forms, the places where insides became outsides. This went on for three or four minutes. I barely allowed the pen to come up off the paper. Instead I went around and around the shapes, not just the shapes of the men but the ghost shapes of the empty jerseys they held up, so that it looked as if four men held the field, not two. I kept working over the paper, incising it with what seemed like a very dull blade, this scratchy, dried-up Bic whose line you didn’t have to scrutinize to know was worthless.
Eventually my hand slowed, and at just that moment I felt like closing the sketchpad without ever turning my eyes to it. Whatever was there on the paper, in some significant sense, wasn’t a drawing at all. No particular result, I mean, could have undone the preparatory value of this movement of my hand, the familiarity I was cultivating with my subject. Yet no-one, certainly not I, was beyond vanity. I briefly studied the page, wanting to know whether my blind drawing with this terrible instrument, on falsely attractive paper that would age awfully, was nevertheless a match for artists who were actually looking at what they were drawing.
The two silhouettes, or four silhouettes, including the two torsos they dangled in front of them, held my eye. My tracing and retracing had been unusually accurate, notwithstanding my long practice at this sort of blind mass-drawing, so that it seemed as if I’d done only two or three passes with the pen rather than ten or more. The two faces themselves were mostly undefined. Besides the relative clarity of the contours, I’d kept internal definition to a minimum—this being guesswork in the extreme when one’s eyes are diverted. Yet even then, something of Duke’s peculiarity came across: the slant of his lips, his aloof smile, the mild squint of incredulity he gave Barker. Something of the various permanent possibilities of appearance, to pervert a phrase, that lived in the face of each man came through in the sketch. This resided in a small set of features, in the tensed deference and proffered absolution of the safety, most definitely a casualty of this game, not a star. He held out his jersey quite firmly, gripped it almost with closed fists, but this somehow only confirmed his weakness. Duke held his by the neck, while supporting the jersey’s back with his other hand, as if presenting a Christmas gift to a child. Much of Duke’s nature I may have simply been dreaming up here, of course; much, too, of the world as he saw it. That this developing picture of him demanded consid-eration, however, was beyond doubt.