I watch his face while he talks and I think: there's a wall here. (The Mik Volkov wall, the one Mik described in my feature, the wall that looks like protection and functions as a prison.) Jamie has a wall and the wall is the podium version, the monosyllables, the floor-watching. Behind the wall is this: a boy who loves his father and his sister and a frozen lake and who talks about all of them with a specificity that suggests he misses them in a way he has not told anyone.
The recorder captures everything. The recorder is doing its job. I am doing mine.
At question nine, Jamie stops mid-sentence. He looks at the recorder. The look is brief but I see it: the awareness that the machine is listening, that the words he's saying will be transcribed and published and read by thousands of people, and the awareness produces a contraction. The seam closes. The wall goes back up.
I turn off the recorder.
"We can stop whenever you want," I say.
He looks at the dark recorder. Then at me. The transition from recorder-on to recorder-off is visible in his body. His shoulders drop. His hands, which had re-folded when the wall went up, separate and rest on the table, open, palms down. The change is so immediate and so physical that it confirms what I've suspected: the performance costs him. The wall is not effortless. The wall is labor.
"Can I ask you something off the record?" he says.
"Of course."
The question he asks is not the question I expect. I expect something about the article, the angle, the publication timeline. A professional question about a professional process.
"How did you know you wanted to write about hockey instead of play it?"
The question is simple on its surface. A young athlete asking a journalist about career trajectory. But the emphasis is wrong for that reading. The emphasis is on "how did you know." Not "why did you choose writing" or "what made you become a journalist." How did you know. As if the knowing is the part he's interested in. As if the knowing is something he's struggling with in a context that has nothing to do with journalism.
I take my glasses off. The gesture is automatic (I clean them when I'm thinking) and I only realize I've done it when the room goes slightly blurry and Jamie's face across the table loses its sharpness. I put them back on. The world returns to focus.
"I didn't know," I say. "Not all at once. I knew I loved hockey. I played in high school. I wasn't good enough to play in college, which was a hard thing to accept because when you love something, 'not good enough' sounds like 'not enough.' But what I realized, eventually, was that loving something and being the best at it are two different relationships. I could love hockey from inside the game, as a player who wasn't good enough. Or I could love it from a vantage point where I could see the whole shape of it. The press box. The notebook. The words."
Jamie is listening with an intensity that I've only seen from him on the ice. The focus that makes his skating electric is directed at me now, and the quality of the attention is physical. I can feel it. Not metaphorically. I can feel his focus on my skin the way you feel sun.
"The vantage point," he says. "The place where you can see the whole shape."
"Yeah. For me it was writing. For other people it's coaching, or broadcasting, or analytics. It's the moment you realize you can be close to the thing you love without being inside it in the way you originally planned."
He nods. The nod is slow. Processing. He's turning the words over the way a goalie turns game film, looking for the angle, the read, the thing inside the thing.
"Did it scare you?" he asks. "The knowing. When you figured it out."
We are not talking about journalism. I am a journalist and I am trained to recognize subtext and the subtext of this conversation is so close to the surface that it's barely sub. We are talking about knowing. About the moment when a person recognizes a truth about themselves that changes the architecture of their life, and the terror that precedes the recognition, and the question of whether the terror ever becomes something else.
"Yes," I say. "It scared me. Because knowing meant letting go of the version of myself that I'd been building. The hockey player. The person I thought I was supposed to be. And the space between who you were and who you're becoming is the scariest place in the world because it's empty. You're not the old thing anymore but you're not the new thing yet, and the emptiness is where most people turn back."
"Did you turn back?"
"No. I walked through."
"How?"
"One step. Then another. There wasn't a map. There wasn't a guide. I just kept walking until the space stopped being empty and started being mine."
The media room is quiet. The recorder is off. My glasses are on but the thing they're supposed to protect (the professional distance, the journalist's detachment) is not functioning correctly because the man across the table is looking at me with an expression that I am not equipped to process professionally. The expression is vulnerable and grateful and searching and young, and the young is the part that hits me hardest becausenineteen is so young and the question he's asking is so big and I want, with a force that surprises me, to give him an answer that helps.
I want to help him. Not as a journalist. As a person. The distinction is the line, and the line is the thing I've been standing on for weeks, and the wanting is the thing that's pushing me off it.
"Thank you," Jamie says. "For the honest answer."
"I'm a journalist. Honest answers are the job."
"That's not what I mean." He pauses. "The other reporters answer questions. You answer the thing underneath the question."
I don't have a response to this. The observation is so precise, so perfectly articulated, so far beyond what I expected from a nineteen-year-old who gives monosyllabic press conferences, that I sit with it for a moment and feel it land.