He sees me. Through the glasses. Through the professional distance. Through the wall I built out of notebooks and press credentials. He sees the person behind the journalist, and the seeing is not casual. The seeing is deliberate.
"Should I turn the recorder back on?" I ask, because I need to return to professional territory before the non-professional territory becomes the only territory.
"Yeah," he says. "Probably."
I turn the recorder on. The red light blinks. We complete questions ten through twelve. The answers are fine. Professional. The wall is back up on his side and the glasses are back on, fully, on mine.
But the three minutes with the recorder off have changed something. The room is the same room. The table is the same table. The journalist and the source are the same journalist and the same source. But underneath the sameness, in the space where the recorder can't reach and the glasses can't protect,something has shifted. The distance is shorter. The wall is thinner. The glass between us (press box glass, Declan, it's press box glass, and press box glass is a boundary not a window) has acquired a transparency that was not there before.
I pack up the recorder. We shake hands. His hand is warm and his grip is firm and the handshake lasts approximately one second longer than a professional handshake should.
I walk to my car. I sit. I take off my glasses. I put them back on.
The glasses are a wall. The wall is optional.
I heard that from Mik Volkov's own mouth. I published it. I called it stunning. And now I'm sitting in a parking lot understanding, for the first time, that the walls Mik was describing are not exclusive to closeted Russian hockey players. The walls are available to anyone who has built a structure to keep themselves safe and is discovering that the structure is also keeping them alone.
I start the car. I drive home. I write the feature. The feature is excellent. The feature does not mention the three minutes with the recorder off, or the question about knowing, or the handshake, or the expression on his face when he said "you answer the thing underneath the question."
The feature is professional. The person who wrote it is in trouble.
JAMIE
Philadelphia. 2 AM. The hotel room is dark except for the light leaking under the door from the hallway and the glow of Jonah's phone, which is face-up on the nightstand, periodically illuminating with texts from Ren that Jonah is too deeply asleep to receive.
I've been lying here for an hour. The game was a loss (3-1, I had an assist and a minus-two) and the bus ride back to the hotel was quiet in the way that buses are quiet after losses, the specific silence of thirty men processing failure privately. Jonah fell asleep in the seat next to me, his head against the window, and I sat with my headphones in and my eyes open and the post-game analysis running in one part of my brain while the other part, the part that doesn't shut off, ran its own analysis.
Now Jonah is asleep and I am not and the hotel room is dark and my phone is in my hand.
The screen is bright. I dim it. The brightness adjustment is the first decision. The second decision is opening the browser. The third decision is tapping the search bar. The cursor blinks.
I have been here before. The cursor and I have met in hotel rooms across the Eastern Conference. Each time I've typed a few characters and deleted them. Each time the cursor has waited.
Tonight the question is louder. The question has been growing louder since the rink in Decatur and the film room and the hallway and the bar in Nashville and the Sprite and the couples and the interview and the recorder and the journalist who answers the thing underneath the question.
The journalist. Declan. Whose name I learned three weeks ago and have been carrying in my head like a key to a room I haven't found yet. Declan, who took his glasses off when he was thinking about how to answer honestly, and the taking-off was a removal of something more than glass and wire, and I saw the person behind the professional the way he apparently sees the person behind the player, and the mutual seeing is the thing that's making the cursor louder.
I type.
what does it mean if you've never been attracted to girls
Eleven words. The longest sentence I've ever typed into a search bar. The search bar processes the query with the indifferent efficiency of a machine that does not know or care that the person holding the phone is shaking.
Results. The screen fills with results.
The first result is an article. The headline contains the word "normal," which is a word I have been looking for without knowing I was looking for it. I tap the article. I read.
The article talks about orientation as a spectrum. It talks about people who know at twelve and people who know at thirty and people who know gradually, the way a photograph develops, the image emerging slowly from a blank surface until the moment when the shapes become recognizable and you understand what you've been looking at all along.
I read another article. This one is a personal essay. A man, twenty-three, writes about growing up in a small town and kissing a girl at homecoming and feeling nothing and spending years believing that "nothing" was what attraction felt like. Hewrites about the first time he saw a man and felt something, and the something was so different from the nothing that the difference was its own kind of proof.
I read a third. A forum post. Someone my age, nineteen, anonymous, asking the same question I typed. The responses are kind. The responses use words I have heard but never applied to myself: gay, bisexual, questioning, valid. The words sit on the screen like objects in a room that I have been circling for years without entering.
I read for an hour. The phone's glow illuminates my face and nothing else. Jonah sleeps. The hotel is still. Philadelphia is silent outside the window in the way that cities are silent at 3 AM, which is not actually silent but is a specific, muffled frequency of distant traffic and air conditioning and the hum of a world that is resting.
I am not resting. I am reading. I am reading the way I watch game film: systematically, looking for patterns, looking for the thing inside the thing. The thing inside the thing is this: the feeling I have been carrying, the one I wouldn't name, the one that the cursor has been waiting for, the one that made the journalist's attention land in my chest like a physical object, the one that made the couples at the bar look like a language I didn't speak, the one that made Mik's word "walls" land like a grenade in a film room, that feeling has a name.
Several names. The articles offer options. The options are not mutually exclusive. The options are a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is available, and the availability is the thing I was afraid of. Not the word. The availability of the word. The fact that it exists and applies and that applying it would change the architecture of my life in ways I cannot predict and cannot control and cannot undo.