No-one was looking to work Duke out. Not a single team called Freddie about a tryout. How much damage had Duke’s stunt in the ring done to his football stock? He might now have been seen only as a distraction-in-waiting, a Kaepernick without the moral redemption, just as many had warned him—even I had, it was such an obvious concern. The problem, though, could have been less about his taking the fight than about his losing it the way he did, in such a morbid fashion, as morbid, perhaps, as his takedowns of the two Dolphins. After the beating he’d suffered, GMs might have assumed Duke couldn’t be in any condition to play, not so soon. And even if he was ready to go physically, he might have made himself unhireable for the optics alone, given the black cloud hanging over the NFL about player safety, sham concussion protocols, and such. In the event, Duke seemed to have healed up quickly enough. His right eye was still puffy but his depth perception had come back, and his skin was beginning to shed the discoloration. Football shape, Duke wasn’t wrong about this, meant you could recover from nearly any battering in a week’s time. You had to, or you lost your job.
I met him in Washington Square after dark, as we were bearing down on Christmas. A remarkable gap remained between what I saw before me then, as Duke approached me, and the illuminated façade behind him in the square, which carried my portrait of him right after the fight. Grotesque. Arresting. These were the words that came to my mind, looking at the building’s face. But looking at him, in the flesh? There was a gravitas to the man you couldn’t deny.
“You got your face back,” I said. “Most of it.”
He smiled faintly through the vestiges of a split lip. “I’ve been loading up on Theria—we should fit that in somewhere. You still have any? I got a case delivered the day you left Chicago. And it’s better than any PED in existence. Which you know.”
“You’re not supposed to be drinking the old stock, Duke. It’ll end up a PED, from what I’m hearing.”
“Oh, fuck all that. I’m keeping it, at least until I get back on another team.”
“But haven’t you noticed something strange about it?”
“Only when I forget to take it. Look, there’s nothing wrong with it, not at all, if I get signed again. Believe me here.”
“All right.”
“But you were worrying about me, I see,” he said with a laugh. I knew he’d agreed to meet with me only to find out what else I could offer him, namely, further opportunities with Arête, perhaps a few more pictures. I, for my part, just wanted some sense of what he was planning on doing now.
“For a guy without a job, could I be any more famous in this city?” Duke turned and looked up at his mushed-up visage across the square. “And the actress isn’t doing bad either.” He eyed the long retaining wall beside us, the site of the mural John and Connell had helped me with. The tableau offered a sort of improvisatory, backstage history-painting of cinema, with camera equipment, boom mics, tape marks scattered all around, linking me and Jeff and Nik and Alonso to Daphne, all of these valences pulsating together. John had added a few reverberations of his own, some of them emanating from as far away as North Dakota.
“I have no idea what you guys are doing,” said Duke, looking it over. “But I’m good with that.”
We unbundled ourselves at a diner on Mercer for omelets and potatoes. I ordered a shot of whiskey (full bar) and some toast. It was seven at night and very cold.
“We’re close, though. Freddie says they keep talking to him, which is a good sign. Teams get desperate this time of year. For a known producer. They even take wife-beaters back this time of year, as long as there’s no video.”
“The Christmas spirit, I guess.”
“Playoffs. Someone’ll need me. Fresh legs, sticky hands. Just like Jorgas did.”
“Who’s he fighting next?”
“I think he’s got another tune-up, then a title shot. Maybe even straight to it—Anton would know. He’s talking to me again, it’s not all Yuri anymore. I told A. that I’d train right next time, and he told me my game’s football. It’s safer, he said. What you think of that? After everything people are saying about it? Anyway,” he said through a mouthful of potato, “the second I can’t do inhuman things on the field, I’m done. No-one’s going to come knocking, the way I’ve been going at it. But I’ll want to be done, if I’m not dropping jaws, breaking jaws, all of it. What’s the point?”
“And then?”
He swallowed and smiled, nodded with his eyes closed for a moment. One of his teeth looked crooked that hadn’t been crooked before. He was getting uglier all the time.
“Probably get back to being a momma’s boy. Go to grad school. Why not? I’ll be the new American Fanon.”
“Well, I’ve seen your grades. I saw those crates of books, too, behind all the pharmaceuticals in your apartment. No furniture but a shit-ton of books. I was thinking we could use that.”
He stuck his fork in his eggs and leaned back in the booth, as though disturbed that I’d been noting things about him I’d not mentioned. What did he expect?
We settled up and headed for the car he was borrowing from friends. “I just need to make one stop in Brooklyn, and we can get you back to your shithole in the Bronx. You think you get points or something for living up there?”
“They might take down the whole area, tear the thing to the ground, if some of the old-schoolers get their way on the city council.”
“They can never just leave shit alone. Always there’s some brilliant new idea.”
“You think the residents, the companies, would do any better?”
“What I’m saying is a lot of that stuff should never have been built.”
“Where would all the people sleep?”
He wrinkled his brow and kicked the curb; then he smiled at me vaguely and got in the dusty car. I thought of Helena underground, and the park overflowing.
One thing disquieting Paul was troubling me, too: would Duke really find a new team this late in the season? Having just gotten paid for the fight, how much would Duke care right now about football? He wouldn’t tell me, at the diner, how much he pulled in for the bout. Much less than hoped, though, Yuri revealed. Those were just Freddie’s delusions: there was never going to be that much interest in a “chicken-shit” match. That said, Duke had already collected a quarter-million, and the pay-per-view receipts hadn’t been tabulated fully.
What would any of us have, exactly, if Duke didn’t sign with a team for the playoffs? It’d be like all the footage of Daphne ending up on Nik’s cutting-room floor. Yet eighty percent of NFL players washed out after three seasons, disappearing, once they’d burned through the cash, into the underworld from whence they’d come. Realistically, then, maybe Duke wouldn’t lose all that much in future earnings. As for Garrett, I knew, even though he would certainly feel sorry for Duke if Christmas slipped by without his making a roster, he wouldn’t allow any of this to taint our project, or Arête and his flagship bottling, Field 25. The story we’d sold the city, the Public Art Fund, and various landlords around town, would then just become the truth: the whole endeavor was philanthropic through and through, a matter of city beautification, with no ties to anything as coarse as commerce.
It was then, however, as we began to resign ourselves to the worst having come to pass, that the call finally came—the tryout call Freddie always knew would come. Every year, playoff teams signed players to fill holes after a full season of attrition, to make their title push with fresh bodies. If you waited long enough and you had the talent, someone would get hurt and you’d get your shot. Even if they secretly hated your guts.
And the team? If Duke shined at the workout, the gig wouldn’t even take him out of New York. Those demands by desperate Giants fans to give Duke a look, probably more a morbid joke than anything else, were now suddenly answered. He was being looked at, but on the sly—on a Connecticut practice field—to keep the press away; losing a number-one receiver in game fourteen of the season will force a team to take chances. I’d known that Beckham had gone down recently with a broken fibula, and that the Giants, once formidable, had lost three straight, dropping to 9-7 to back into the playoffs. Freddie had actually gotten three calls, not one, but the Giants were first, and that’s where Duke wanted to go. Not because of New York. Because of Chicago. The NFC wild-card game was now set, pitting the Giants against the Bears, who’d managed, without Duke’s services, to surge into the playoffs. Lacking a passing attack to open up their run game, the Giants got shut out in the season finale, losing by four touchdowns—their defense had been porous all season—to the New Orleans Saints, who didn’t even make the playoffs. So now here they were, without their star receiver, facing a wild-card game at frosty Soldier Field, looking in every way like the underdog to make it through to the divisional round.
Having just three days until the tryout, Duke seemed for the first time to be engulfed by the purest fire. The wryness was gone, this wasn’t a lark. He even declined to speak with me until he’d won or lost the position. He had no interest in how the workout would look in one of my drawings, just in locking down the job. He’d never confess to it, but perhaps he was grateful now after beginning to doubt that a team would call. He might have finally come to seem mere bluster to himself, and found it intolerable. In a way, I had to believe Duke was capable of this newfound focus. How else to explain how far he’d gotten in life so far, as a player, provocateur, and scholar-to-be?
Still, there were doubts I had about him that would probably never be assuaged, not entirely, given what happened after we’d gotten into his car that day in Washington Square. That one stop in Brooklyn—it had all happened so smoothly, routinely. His pulse didn’t seem to rise even a beat or two through any of it. What I recall of my experience is this: drifting through Brooklyn Heights in a nice enough Audi, catching glimpses of that icy skyline filigreed with stars between the blocks at each cross-street, and parking on the promenade, near to an immaculate brownstone. I gazed on the thorniness of downtown Manhattan and heard the click of the trunk popping open. When the lid came back down, two young blacks in puffy athletic wear appeared in the rearview mirror. They calmly got in the back seat, thanked Duke for giving them a ride, and politely nodded to me, though without introducing themselves. I remember seeing their giant eyes in the mirror as we set off. They watched me, smiling occasionally but stiffly as we drove south listening to A Love Supreme.
Eventually we reached the generic apartment blocks of Flatbush, the place where some of Duke’s crew had been forced to relocate from the dwindling stock of rent-controlled tenements on the Lower East Side. Duke opened the trunk again. The men in the back got out, and soon they were joined by other men, all of them shrieking with delight as they pulled the goods from the trunk: several laptops, a set of floor-standing speakers, an amplifier, a gorgeous vintage record player, and a pair of jewelry boxes. Only then did I grasp what I’d been a part of.
Duke drove me back to the Bronx somewhat sheepishly, switching to Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come, for the long ride. He was less proud, I think, than he might have thought he’d be, after doing this run with me in the car. Maybe he’d seen the matter through my non-black eyes and was embarrassed by the affair. I took the episode in stride, though. I wasn’t especially angry with him. The after-effects of Theria seemed to have made me immune to real surprise, no matter how strange the path turned. I expected the bizarre now, depended on it, even, perhaps sought it out. Nothing appeared beyond the pale anymore, particularly as it related to Duke.
Karen was mortified by the story of that night—she was still subject to shock, after all. I should have spared her; the tale brought her needless trouble. But I’d had to explain to her my latest drawings of Duke: one shirtless and in jeans, among piles of books in his empty loft, the white tarp thrown off them, with the great lake outside his window; and the other, the scene not of the crime but of the celebration in Flatbush, though I’d made sure not to use any suspicious faces or goods. The person we’d robbed, the Post said, was a distinguished orthopedist whose family had lived in the Heights for generations. The police were investigating.
I learned about the days leading up to the Giants tryout from Yuri, who had the details from Anton. The old trainer retook his place in his Duke’s corner, now that the former charge had turned his focus back to football where he belonged. Duke had gone out to Prospect Park, Yuri told me, to rehearse the go-up-and-get-it that had made his name, the kind of ball for which he had an almost occult gift. His friends, some of whom doubtless helped executed the robbery, continuously arced balls his way, trading off when their arms tired, sending Duke diving across the frozen grass for them all afternoon, just as he’d need to at Soldier Field—if he could make the cut in Connecticut.
The workout came, among much skepticism from the Giants’ top brass: only the receivers’ coach had insisted they look at Duke, among a batch of four free agents, given the team’s desperation for a pass catcher. Afterward, with the team’s decision pending, Duke sent me the tryout tape. I put it on and saw a player transformed. His route running had bite to it now; he could make right angles just as easily as amorphous swoops. He took directions better, too, adjusting his technique as instructed by football personnel; you would have thought he was a diligent plodder all his life. And he ruled the jump ball, the same kind that the man he’d be replacing, Beckham, did, notably in the corner of the end zone, back shoulder, where he repeatedly beat the Giant defenders pitching in for the workout. Fundamentally, Duke looked like a man doing something he believed in, and perhaps he finally did. He could belittle football all he wanted to, but there had to have been genuine desire in him somewhere for its rigors, for all it did to you, for you, and here it was, all on tape.
The playoff contract, a tryout for his future, was his. He won. And for the first and last time, Paul and Garrett, Karen and I, all felt a common joy, a distinctive blending of the moral and artistic sentiments that had come down to us from Athens. In the week leading up to the wild-card game, both New York and Chicago were festooned in my imagery, thanks to Paul’s planning; and on the day of the game, a Saturday not long after New Year’s, Karen and I lounged in the Bronx in front of the plasma—I still considered it Claire’s—to watch Duke play. We’d managed not to mention my ex’s name more than once or twice since we’d started seeing each other: some matters could be indefinitely tabled, it seemed, at least until the woman in question returned from her fellowship in Indonesia. Karen and I weren’t exactly a couple, of course; she still treated me fraternally often enough, in the way of old friends. At those times, times like now, watching the game, I wanted to ask her badly about the woman I’d lost. I’d heard so little over the last nine months, and hadn’t found much online about her either. Did that mean Claire had been struggling? Or that she was engrossed in a project so large, she would only surface once she’d triumphed? How could I ask this of Karen, though, while we were together?
Vapor trails poured from our mouths, and the windows were caked with ice. It was as frigid then in New York as it was in Chicago, and Kiver hadn’t managed to resuscitate my radiators. So we cloaked ourselves in a half-dozen blankets, as Helena would have done in the subway below, and settled in for the ice-bound game. During the season, the linchpin of the Giants’ success, I well knew, had been rushing, not passing. Their lead back, Kinney, a number three pick out of Auburn, broke 1300 yards on the ground for the season, but hadn’t done much in his last few games. Ever since Beckham’s injury, defenses simply loaded the box, eight men getting after the runner, sealing up the seams Kinney normally worked his way into. If Duke could do enough damage away from the line, or at least threaten to, things would open back up for Kinney.
For two-and-a-half quarters, Duke ran Platonic routes, the kind on the tryout tape, netting him just three little catches on the edge, all during Chicago’s first few possessions. Yet two of those receptions involved long, twisty runs after the catch—enough to demonstrate the danger Duke posed. He’d been drawing double coverage ever since, springing Kinney, who cut up the Chicago front line, right up the middle, with six- and seven-yard gallops, while Duke ran his decoys on the outside.
As the third quarter wound down, Karen and I huddled for warmth. We were beginning to find more interest in each other than in this run-heavy game of attrition, which stood tied at ten. No-one had scored since the beginning of the second period. With thirty seconds left until the final frame, on fourth and two, in the no-man’s land of midfield, the Giants decided to press the action, break the stalemate. By this point it was clear Kinney would get the ball, but the Bears suddenly showed blitz. At the last second, Manning audibled out of the play call, took the snap, and when the pressure inevitably came crashing toward him, he hurled the ball—entirely inadvisably—down the right sideline, in Duke’s general direction.
To judge from the replays, Manning was simply avoiding the sack by throwing the ball away—except that the pass, high and arcing, never made it out of bounds. It had so much air under it—Manning was hit while delivering it—four players had time to converge on the spot: two Giants and two Bears. The ball fluttered in the icy wind, held up in the air, and finally died, freefalling toward the field. It was at that moment, the moment of death, that this clutch of receivers and cornerbacks, all versions of each other, players who would at some point have filled their opposite number’s position, whether in middle school or college, prepared for war.
Duke was coming back to the ball from the sideline, on what was supposed to be a straight go-route. He and his coverman abandoned the plan once they saw the pass mangled at the point of release. As the other three looked to cradle it like outfielders squinting up for a flyball they’d lost in the lights, Duke, from a low crouch and at the last instant—late, even—launched himself through his own man, knocking him out of the play, and over the top of the Bears’ low-held hands. Duke fingertipped the ball to himself and crashed to the granite-hard tundra without having time to brace himself. Even with his body rebounding violently off the frozen turf, he held on. First down, on a tiny four-yard mess of a play. It was the moment of the game, a drive-saving effort in a frigid, see-saw battle, and you knew it right then, or I did. Karen was trying to be impressed, I could see; she wanted to experience the gravity of the occasion, but she couldn’t recognize all that this play contained, the consequences carried within it, for Duke. Not yet.
The Giants’ tight end scored the actual points, six plays later, on a curl route, before a defensive freeze set in. Duke had actually hurt himself on the critical catch, bruising the same thigh we’d watched him injure playing against the Giants earlier. After gamely trying to play on, he settled on the sideline, his leg heavily wrapped. But the Bears couldn’t muster anything more—the sides had ground each other down, and now they succumbed to the chill—so the game ended quietly on Duke’s former home field: 17-10, Giants. Nineteen walked off with the help of his new teammates, who’d clearly warmed to him, and the camera recorded a soft little smile from Duke. That’s all anyone needed, even Karen. She looked so pleased, I didn’t know she could be this free, as we lay there under the blankets and did what we wanted.
Duke had done his job on the field, and without incident: the only one he’d hurt was himself. That last catch of his, even with the aid of replay, continued to beggar belief. It was the only thing SportsCenter was interested in for the rest of the evening—that, and how brilliant the Giants were for signing the unknown quantity. In the press conference after the game, Duke offered nothing of substance, having wisely been muzzled by his new coaches, who spoke admiringly of his grit. Duke talked in circles: lots of words and no thoughts, the birthright of athletes. He seemed to revel in it. He was wincing now and then, too, though, and his leg sported an even larger wrap than the one he’d worn on the sideline during the game. Victory, for Duke, always seemed to come like this. Still, the Giants were going to the divisional round, and the team that had forsaken him, however good their reasons, was going nowhere.