Extraordinary messages arrived overnight—from that old country manor, I assumed, whatever was going on there exactly. They were tacit apologies, these texts from Daphne, first of all for their not being phone calls. But now, she said, she had to hide all outside communication from Nik, who was growing angrier with each new delay of his production, all of which seemed ultimately to flow, in his mind, from her still-unexplained European sojourn. Her messages to me weren’t entirely insincere—I knew that—yet they also felt played for effect. She was so sorry, for instance, she didn’t say more to me down by the river, that there hadn’t been more time. But Nik was fed up with her! She’d been all nerves, too, about what I made of her performance with Alonso on-set. She’d wanted to know what I thought—obviously—but simply wasn’t prepared to be confronted there and then. I suppose all of this technically could have been true, but it did seem very much calculated to assuage my fears. I’d only just been chastened by Jeff’s terrible tale, after all, of a livelihood lost through entanglement with Daphne, and then of a slow climb back to respectability within the troupe, which justified all the jadedness now radiating from his well-clad frame.
Just like Nik, I was angry. I wasn’t prepared to meet Daphne’s alleged vulnerabilities with any of my own, or offer any appraisal of her performance, a refusal I knew would torment her in a way nothing else could. Nor was I ready to forgive the pre- and post-shoot attention she’d lavished on Alonso, or her neutrality toward me then, whether it was feigned, as she claimed, or not. (Was anyone that good an actor?) She pleaded with me by text: it was nothing terribly serious with the Spaniard; he was new to the troupe, a curiosity; it was only natural she wanted him to be comfortable. None of this corresponded to the impression I got from Jeff, who’d intimated that Alonso was unlocking something significant in her. In fact, this seemed to be Alonso’s forte: he was known to have had the same effect on some of the members in his old theater company. How much could I really trust Jeff’s version of things, though? He had plenty of reason to put me off the woman he’d already lost.
Everything was made more excruciating for me by the sheer pointedness of Daphne’s performance on-set. In truth it had left me mesmerized, or simply confounded. I could think of little else now but the way she’d managed to navigate empty space, calibrating her body to the field of action, that clearing, the primordial stage of first rituals in the forest, and then throw off meanings like sparks with every glide and twist. Meanings she didn’t control. It wasn’t like watching a master technician match physical gestures to inner states. No, she simply shaped the flow of these meanings transcending her intentions. They seemed to accumulate and bunch of their own accord, hinting at something patently human without relying on anything recognizable as character, free as they were of all the Freudian clichés that made us lose sight of our inner life just as it was: neither incoherent nor unified, neither discordant nor harmonious.
I suppose I’m saying Daphne’s movements, and the rhythms of her speech, too, amounted to something more and less than character as we’ve come to understand it. There was no obvious sex in it, though she was patently dealing in feelings. There was no real lust in play, though there was the love between partners. More than anything, there wasn’t much sense of an interior state being extruded into the world, never mind the words that had fallen from her mouth, which were familiar to me from earlier in the day, at her father’s home. The very idea of expression lapsed with her. Most radically, during this performance, just a fragment of the full film, I’m not sure she was even coterminous with her own body. How to put it? She existed more like a field than a stone, neither a pure, uncontaminated surface, an uber-marionette or scenographic instrument to be manipulated by Nik, nor a self that had withdrawn, opaque and mysterious, that only interfaced with the world outside as necessary. This was what Nik was unlocking in her. Those meanings, those densities of significance and suggestion... they seemed, in that clearing, even without hearing a word of what she said, to whirl about her feet, her fingertips, her hair. And though she could influence them, bend them in some way, there was no question of mastery, only negotiation. She didn’t interpret or portray a character, nor did she embody one, the two options Brecht had made so much of in his defense of epic theater. Here she was doing something beyond showing or telling. I didn’t have a word for it. Did anyone? Diffusing personality over space, I suppose, with the entire clearing seeming to absorb Alonso, without destroying him either, at least not then.
It had all left me flustered and at a loss, so that I’d had trouble following Jeff’s thinking on our way back to the city. Afterward, I loitered in Times Square for hours, watching men endlessly hand out flyers in the street for shows no-one but tourists could suffer, before finally making it home and falling into a curious stupor, shot through with a longing I couldn’t fathom except to say it was firmly directed toward her and the rest of the unformed film, two creatures I had only an inkling of, really, drawn from a future devoid of all our notions of identity, however many hundreds of years it would ultimately take us to reach the point they both gestured toward, a moment related to who and what we are today only by faint echoes and chasmic leaps of logic.
I could do nothing now but dwell on Daphne, worrying this strange absence—a literal absence, as she’d be inaccessible to me for a while. She didn’t know just how long she’d have to spend holed up with the others in that swampy hotel, like one of those German spas buried in the Black Forest. She’d see me as soon as she could, though, she promised, ending her text, for the first time, with xs and os. All I offered in return for her dozen messages was Don’t worry. I would do the worrying. Really it seemed I was capable of little but worry and fantasy since I’d gone off the drink. What was it? The question called out to me incessantly now.
I’d asked Garrett more than once when the new formulation of Theria might be ready, but so far he’d managed to deflect my every inquiry into its arrival time and indeed into its nature. He spoke of Theria’s magic, of the talent of his research team, but not at all about what this magic consisted in. There were copyrights to protect, of course. But I had to wonder whether there was more to it than that. Asking me to dump the stock I had, to wait for a new batch that seemed never to arrive, could only nourish my suspicions. Admittedly, my fears about what the nootropic had done to me, changed in me, had a tinge of absurdity to them. I felt fine enough to be getting on with things, didn’t I? Yes, maybe, but I felt different, and sufficiently desperate about the matter to request a meeting with Garrett. Just as I had in his distillery, I told him I needed to steep myself in Antral’s atmosphere, to sit with him and Paul, discuss our principals and our principles, too, if I was fully to fire my imagination. Nothing less would do. Every change in medium, or distance, changed the effect, I insisted. Garrett consented to the meeting while being vague about its timing: a display of the very reluctance that made returning to Roosevelt Island so crucial. Once again he claimed the new formulation wasn’t ready just yet; once again he checked whether I’d stopped drinking the remainder of the last batch. It was all a little fanciful, I knew, showing up at headquarters and... what? Shaking my hosts somehow and snooping around for, well... what? Would these notions ever have occurred to me before I’d started drinking Theria? Had it changed me permanently in this respect, inflaming my fantasies? Or was this simply a protracted phase of withdrawal that I’d ultimately emerge unscathed from, fully in possession of my senses, my self? The most difficult possibility to contemplate might have been that my feelings were simply what reality required of me.
All week, another mission weighed on me. Perhaps my thoughts of subterfuge and intrigue in Garrett’s labs opened the way to it. Whatever it was, I was now quite urgently feeling the need to test Daphne’s regret about her absence, that is, to discover precisely how strict Nik was about exiling me and every other distraction from the set, and how much Daphne was simply avoiding me. Couldn’t I sneak a trip into those woods? I could lurk and leer from, what, the gas station? Immo would drive me. Actually, it would be good to have him along. He’d never made it out to Chicago, and this would be more his sort of jaunt, with a girl at the center of it, and plenty of leering.
The day after Duke’s suspension was handed down, on a Friday, he’d spoken about it at a press conference organized by the Bears, with Cotter, normally media-shy, by his side, perhaps to deflect some of the pressure. I tuned the plasma to it. The receiver was dressed tastefully, unlike so many of his colleagues outfitted in bright shiny fabrics and fashion-house shoes. He had a prepared statement before him, presumably drafted by someone in the front office. He read the first couple of sentences, the usual throat-clearing that traditionally came just before the plea for clemency or the acceptance of punishment. An abrupt pause ensued, his mood visibly changed. Though Duke’s eyes remained on the page in front of him, you felt he saw nothing there anymore. Cotter was stoic, waiting. Finally Duke began to speak, this time more slowly, with the natural syncopations of spontaneous thought replacing the metronomic pacing of a PR script.
“What I did on Sunday, it was... strange. We all know that much. Coach knows it better than anyone. I need to think about that, what transpired on the field that day. And I’m going to have the chance to do that for the next four games. That’s a lot of time. I didn’t expect that much to be handed down. But I’m not going to appeal the commissioner’s decision. It’d be a disgrace to, I think. It would take time away from coming to grips with the events of last Sunday.”
Cotter grasped his receiver’s shoulder and nodded, as large a sign of support as he was likely to give.
“Events that seem, honestly, like they’re from another world,” Duke continued. “Where is that world? What is it—what’s it made of? How can I make sure I never go back unless I know exactly what that place is all about? It’ll take four games to figure that out. How to be a Bear.”
He smiled inappropriately, pleased with his wordsmithing when he ought to have had other things on his mind, like blood and bodies and simple decency. Instead he gave us an almost mystical speech about the “world” from which this sort of behavior issued, a world he couldn’t renounce until he knew just what he was renouncing. The press corps, so used to tossing out questions they already knew the answers to, was too stunned by Duke’s pronouncements to speak. It was all so far from athlete-speak or corporate-speak. Even Cotter didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually questions began to take shape on reporters’ lips, but by then Duke had hopped off-stage, his side-vents flashing as he walked off, leaving Cotter there staring at him from the podium, shocked like I’d never seen him.
I found out Duke was no longer a Bear through a picture of his empty locker on the Chicago Tribune’s website. After gathering myself a little, I called him up, but there was no reaching him. Garrett tried him, too, even through the Bears, but without luck. It was enough to kill off Garrett’s exclamation points and send him careening into fear and doubt with the rest of us over where we were all heading, particularly now that we were finally starting to make the link to Duke manifest in my pictures.
For days, I kept trying Duke’s phone, leaving him messages in all sorts of tones: facetious, philosophical, funereal. All to no avail. And every day, Garrett was on the phone with me. We never usually talked this much, but now he demanded to know where Duke was (should I know?) and what we ought to do next. Paul and Karen grew increasingly exasperated, as if Garrett and I bore responsibility for what was happening, which was absurd. In no way had we egged Duke on, even if we had given him a vessel in which to pour his dreams and keep them safe, which might well have been too much for anyone to manage. It’s why public figures came apart so grandly. Having that megaphone in your hands, you had to go mad at some point, screaming your lungs out.
Eventually, I heard something, or saw something: a photo of Duke. I thought it was him, anyway, but I couldn’t be sure, since I recognized neither the person in the picture nor the phone number by which the likeness had come to me. There was a syringe buried in a muscled black thigh, flash-lit and falling into seductive shadows on all sides of the frame, so zoomed you could see the follicles, the way the needle itself appeared to plug one of them. It was just a joke, Duke said when he called a bit later. Although it was him.
“If Cotter’s going to cut me, shouldn’t it be for the PEDs?” I laughed for his sake, just to keep him on the phone. Were PEDs involved, or was he playing with me? I couldn’t get into that right now. I was happy simply to find that he still existed, which meant my contract with Garrett did, too. “I’m giving up the apartment, man.” There was that manic laugh again. “You hated it anyway, though, didn’t you?” There’d been no signing bonus, he said. No real guaranteed money either in his 460K contract. “Do you know where I’m calling you from?” My own city, New York, it turned out. He was at a hotel downtown, nothing too stylish, yet the little money he had—that he’d not already spent on extracurriculars with his boys—would go fast.
I hurried downtown, overjoyed to have someone to trail, now that Daphne would be off-limits to me for a while. The place was near the tip of the island, where the buildings got prickly and the lanes narrowed uncomfortably until you felt you were on videogame terrain. The hotel—he’d only given me the street address—was actually quite luxurious, abutting Battery Park, not far from the water glistening icily in the pure fall light.
He met me in the foyer in a tight tank-top, wool trousers, black Aldens. Though he’d been laughing on the phone, cheerily inviting me down to see him, there was an air of menace about him. He always carried some menace, of course, but usually it was more equivocal, which could frighten you in the best way. This was different. His darkness couldn’t have been clearer, and the mad happiness I’d felt on my way over curdled into caution on seeing him sit down at the house bar, which was just a continuation of the front desk and lobby—all roads naturally leading to alcohol in the hospitality business.
Before I’d even caught up to him at the bar, Duke fired off a question: “Does the boss want me out?”
“He wants to know what’s next,” I said. “But I’m just thanking God you’re back in touch.”
He got orange juice—not a screwdriver, just juice, he emphasized. Karen had once explained to me over brunch, I replied, that orange juice was the purest of marketing inventions, a way to dispose of surplus oranges around the turn of the twentieth century. I thought it relevant—weren’t we technically trying to sell drinks, even if we didn’t know of the surplus we were dealing with?—but Duke wasn’t in the mood. He ordered me juice as well and nodded at me as if I were the deranged one. But could I be sure he wasn’t right, post-Theria? I flagged down the bartender and he tipped Stoli into my juice. It was the only way I knew of quelling my doubts these days.
“I’ve got to see if there’s another team. Freddie’s been looking and no-one’s calling him back.” Duke mustered a weary little chuckle and got the bartender to convert his drink into one like mine. It might settle both our nerves. “You have a bad game, right? You speak for real at a presser, okay? And they toss you the fuck out.”
A “bad” game? He couldn’t really have believed this.
“But whatever—do you know what the Cal man’s going to put up next?”
I did know, in fact. I’d been working on various ideas all week. Paul and Karen had just told me of the one they wanted to use, a quite fragile line drawing of a man spitting cloudy blood.
“It’s not a picture of you, per se.”
“Is it one of the guys I hit?”
“Not that either.”
“And why the fuck not make it me, though? Why can’t we do the needle in the thigh at least?” he pleaded. “But you’ve got to put me on display, somehow. Show them. Because, well, how long is it till I disappear, without football?”
“Cotter wouldn’t have signed you if you didn’t have something serious going for you. It’ll trump everything. Freddie will figure it out.”
“I went in for this, being Arête’s guinea pig, this urban renewal wet dream of your boss’—I mean, we know this shit never works. You can’t plan, you can’t have projects, even when they don’t look like the old projects. Did he not get the memo?”
“You’re not a fan of what I’ve done with you, I guess.”
“Actually, no, I am. I am. As much as people would have me not be, that it’s too racist or whatever. But that’s not it, not all of it, for me. Garrett’s paying me fine, but the way I get my next gig, whatever it is, to get that gig, I need to be revealed. You understand that? How’re you going to buy something, even a person, you can’t recognize? That’s how I fix all this. Teach a man to fish, right. So yeah, why the fuck not make this next one me, clearly me, Duke Briar Jr. Start the goddamned bidding.”
The way he’d said his own name saddened me. There was an uncertainty to it, about the value of the man so named. We parted on that lugubrious note. I ambled along the water.
“What about clearing away enough of the blood, thinning it out a little, so we can ID him?” I asked Garrett over the phone about the upcoming piece, in the car home. Not only, he rejoined, was the needle image not smart, it wasn’t even interesting. He might have been right. Yet he had sympathy for the modification I suggested. As soon as I reached the Bronx, then, I began to adjust the picture still sitting on my drawing board, applying turpentine to the encrusted, fire-red paint Duke’s face was laden with so that it slowly lost its opacity, its density, and became workable once more. The visage beneath the blood-paint began to dissipate, too, of course, and so I went about retouching the hatching and contours with firm strokes. In the end, even if he was badly savaged, Duke—it was unmistakably him now—appeared calm and graceful in the thick black turtleneck I’d put him in, the kind of thing you might see in, yes, a post-game press conference. The shirt seemed to strangle him, as Cotter had.
When the picture made its appearance on the streets of New York about a week later—this was the sort of dizzying speed we were able to work at now, because of Paul’s careful planning and Garrett’s bottomless pocketbook—Duke’s notoriety, as he’d desired, was more or less instantly established, given the broad discussion over gratuitous violence his suspension ignited in the sports world. Garrett hadn’t minded the revelation, because nothing yet was linked with his products, so any mixed message the image might carry couldn’t touch his reputation. In fact, no-one yet knew whether what we’d been doing to the city through October and November was an art project or some sort of stealth advertising scheme, which pleased Garrett to no end—the questions he’d made loom over everyone.
The picture quickly did something for Duke, too: his newfound infamy might have more value than any positive appeal. Athletes frequently didn’t mind playing the villain: just in basketball, there was Kobe, Lebron, Jordan. But Duke, he was being the villain. You could hardly claim, after what he’d done to his opponents’ faces, it wasn’t really who he was, just a posture or a character. This would be the equivalent of players like Albert Haynesworth or Ray Rice or Greg Hardy positively celebrating their own NFL misdeeds and ill repute, enjoying the scandal. It was genuinely unprecedented.
My picture certainly didn’t parse itself. Did the blood on Duke’s face imply regret? Was it just narcissism? In their weekly pieces, the sports columnists had begun to dissect my images like art critics, and they treated Duke as if he were still an active player. He was getting more coverage than anyone on the Bears’ roster, that was certain. There was, of course, a history of athletes making more of an impression outside the league than in it: basketball had Stephon Marbury, the point guard who became a kind of American deity in China, complete with operas about his well-documented travails. In football, there was Johnny Manziel, aka Johnny Football, the Heisman-winning Texas A&M quarterback who appeared, for a time, to have the most charmed life in America, before the NFL snuffed it out—the charm, if not the life—over a pair of seasons. The press, perhaps, was sensing this sort of story with Duke; they were going to get their fill of his eccentricity, even his malevolence, so long as it lasted, which generally wasn’t long, not in professional sports. As Manziel learned, if you couldn’t reasonably compete at the highest levels, your relevance faded, interest waned. This was the bracing objectivity of athletics: you couldn’t be permanently famous simply for being famous; you had to be good, at least in flashes. And for the moment, Duke wasn’t even on the field.