Soccer as science fiction, Antonio thinks — science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction, Silvina would have countered since Antonio hasn’t read much science fiction besides A Lexicon of Terror & Other Stories — soccer as A Lexicon of Terror, Antonio thinks, soccer as science fiction culled from interplanetary war films I used to watch with my father at Cine Los Mayas, soccer as a transport between worlds such that, if soccer indicator = 1, for instance, then location = Bogotá and Los Angeles and time = 1989 and 2014, which, sure, isn’t that remarkable, anyone in Los Angeles who possesses even one vivid memory of another city can be in two places / time periods at the same time, but perhaps it would be more remarkable if he adds a discontinuity indicator to factor in the twenty-one-year interlude when he didn’t play soccer, in other words if he, after arriving to the United States, age eighteen, would have continued to play soccer every day as he had done in Bogotá, irrupting into the spaces between his classmates on the dusty soccer field at San Luis Gonzaga as if someone had disinterred his undead and he, without knowing it, was both escaping them and squelching them — pass the ball already, Bruja — accumulating red cards and releasing a sizable fraction of the thermodynamic violence apportioned to him by his upbringing, he probably wouldn’t be equating soccer with science fiction while running SQL queries at Prudential Investments and waiting for news of his sister, in other words if discontinuity indicator = 0, then soccer <> science fiction, but unfortunately for the discontinuity indicator to ever equal zero he would have to have been a different Antonio, because that version of Antonio (henceforth Antonio II), age eighteen, had reprogrammed himself to complete his one assignment, to be admitted to an Ivy League, so Antonio II spent most of his time either solving differential equations for transferrable math courses, which didn’t require him to compute the language, or listening to transmissions of American English at the ESL lab at his community college south of Chapel Hill, learning to compute a new language he liked to believe he knew but didn’t — you also wanted to gain muscle weight at the gym since you were as scrawny as a — that’s neither here nor — you quit soccer because it made you lose muscle weight, you vain fuck — yes and later you stopped watching soccer on television because you wanted to think of yourself as an intellectual ha ha — so given that discontinuity indicator = 1, then soccer = science fiction, location = Bogotá and Los Angeles, and time = 1989 and 2014, and yes, what he’d said to Dora about the soccer linkage between Ada and him was true — as if I was watching an apparition of myself as a boy playing soccer in Bogotá but much better, Dora — but what he hadn’t told Dora is that after Antonio VII (father of Ada & Eva) watched Ada on the soccer field, Antonio IV (intellectual) felt a longing to transport himself twenty-one years back and set the discontinuity indicator for Antonio II (Ivy League) and Antonio III (bodybuilder) to zero, and because that wasn’t possible he purchased soccer cleats, shin guards, expensive jerseys from a Spanish team he didn’t know, and transported himself to a pickup soccer game in Los Angeles, where he discovered, within minutes, that discontinuity or continuity or whatever, time had indeed passed and Antonio IX (old man soccer) could neither run for long nor maintain possession of the ball — why are you even here, nerdo? — and what had been remarkable to Antonio VIII (writer) was how, despite a span of twenty-one years, Antonio IX (old man soccer) couldn’t disconnect himself from Antonio I (young man soccer), and so as Antonio V (database analyst) creates a spreadsheet to tabulate the other Antonios, linking Antonio IX and Antonio I with a Curved Double Arrow Connector, he’s reminded of the essay about the overweight psychotherapy patient who discovered that, as she was losing significant portions of her weight, memories of her life when she last had that weight came back to her — as if my body has a memory, she said to Dr. Irvin Yalom — yes, Antonio thinks, his own body not only has a memory but two twisted ankles due to the irresponsible equivalence of Antonio IX = Antonio I, his left ankle, incidentally, hasn’t recovered so a chronic pain appears and disappears in it depending on the weather, time of day, etc., and just as Antonio VII and Antonio VIII and Antonio V had agreed to shut down Antonio IX to avoid further physical injury, his sister began to ununderstand her life, so all the Antonios still in operation reconvened and agreed that, instead of reactivating temporary disruptive erasure mechanisms like binge drinking or nightclubbing in order to not think about what was happening to his sister (and here Antonio omits Your Sugar Arrangements from his inventory of temporary disruptive erasure mechanisms — déjenme por lo menos un joy, carajo—), they decided to call off the shutdown of Antonio IX, allowing him to recalibrate himself by (1) following the instructions of how-to-tape-your-ankles videos, (2) studying the less taxing passing strategies of Modrić and Iniesta in midfield, (3) not following the instructions of how-to-stretch-before-and-after-a-soccer-match videos because stretching reminded him of his mother’s yoga classes in the forest and made him feel old, and once the recalibration had been completed, he began to not think about his sister while chasing a stupid ball for an hour and a half, and despite the sports tape on his ankles and the Epsom salt baths afterward and restricting the wrecking of his body to twice a week, he exists in a constant state of strain now, beginning with his left toe, which cramps on him for no discernible reason, his left thigh, which requires a thigh sleeve while he’s reenacting a recalibrated Antonio I — there are turns and feints that only occur while stamping across a soccer field, Antonio writes, and perhaps because these movements are otherwise dormant they electrify everything when they reawaken — this new state of strain, paradoxically, at the same time (1) assuages him, (2) extirpates (most of) his impulse to sink himself with his sister, (3) aerates the subspace corridor that links him to his sister, wherever she might be, okay, 5:01 p.m., folks, enough with the SQL queries and the nebulous science fiction associations (last week one of his classmates at San Luis Gonzaga posted a recent photo of Cine Los Mayas, where he used to watch interplanetary war films with his father on Sundays, its windows and ticket booth boarded up), so Antonio removes his oversized circumaural Sennheiser headphones, which have been transmitting Phase Patterns by Steve Reich on repeat, switches off the fluorescence of his cubicle — goodnight, Lucid — rides his Shadow VLX from the Prudential Investments building to the apartment where his daughters live, thinking along the way of the futility of the bodybuilding efforts of Antonio III since Antonio IX has now lost so much muscle weight due to this new recalibrated soccer that he’s almost as scrawny as he was at twenty-one years old, and after dinner with Ada and Eva and his former wife — no dinner for me thanks I have soccer tonight — you should have told me I wouldn’t have fried the steka yet, monkey — he stretches out his body on the living room floor so he can wrap his ankles with a layer of self-adhesive bandage and multiple layers of sports tape, those are my scissors but you can borrow them, Eva says, can I come watch you, Tata, Ada says, they have no school tomorrow, Ida says, of course, Antonio says, so Antonio transports Ada and Antonio IX to a turf field on Woodbine Avenue, where Antonio tries not to think about the message he received from his sister’s attorney informing him that his sister is finally being transported from Milwaukee to Baltimore through an interstate police system that doesn’t allow him to know her precise location yet but instead tries to focus on scoring, passing, skirting opponents, including an oversized college student who clearly doesn’t know anything about soccer because whenever Antonio has the ball he just barges against Antonio as if the ball belonged to this giant and Antonio was just a nuisance to be shrugged off, and perhaps because this amorphous giant reminds him of El Mono, a classmate at San Luis Gonzaga who resembled an orangutan (and who used to beat up Antonio whenever), Antonio becomes flustered, irrationally angry, and when this awkward blob dispossesses him again by interposing himself between Antonio and the stupid ball, Antonio pushes him so hard that this primate piece of shit falls backward, quit fouling me, motherfucker, Antonio says (later Antonio will consider that if he would have had his metal water bottle handy, he would have smashed it against this guy’s face), I call the fouls, the organizer of the pickup game says, we don’t do violence here, we don’t want people like you here, you’re out, but he’s been fouling me all night, Antonio says, embarrassed as he exits the field because he’d forgotten Ada was watching him, what happened, Tata, Ada says, that moron kept fouling me, Antonio says, they should have kicked him out, Ada says, that mnemocartographic dunce, Antonio says, trying to lighten the mood on their drive back to where his former wife will shake her head at him — no milk for you, little boy — that wocket in the pocket, Ada says, that zelf under the shelf, Antonio says, do you believe in ghosts, Ada says, no nobody has seen them, Antonio says, the caretaker at this church told us that it was built over a cemetery and they have footage of ghosts, Ada says, we would have heard, Antonio says, ghosts are like Jesus or god, made up, imagine if I say I’m going to invent a strange creature called Snæborg Ocampo, and then I say oh but Snæborg Ocampo is invisible, ah, Ada says, I understand, we humans have a need to believe someone is watching over us, Antonio says, but there is someone watching over me, Tata, Ada says, you and Mama.