But the performance costs something. The performance always costs something. The energy required to sit at a table and be Jamie Kowalski, fun rookie, good teammate, one of the guys, while the unnamed feeling presses against the inside of my ribs like a second heartbeat. The performance is a wall, and the wall requires maintenance, and the maintenance is exhausting, and the exhaustion is invisible because the wall is designed to be invisible. That is the whole point of the wall. Nobody sees it. Nobody sees the labor of keeping it up. Nobody sees the boy behind it who is drinking Sprite and watching couples and feeling the shape of a thought he cannot think.
The bar closes at midnight. The team filters out. I share an Uber with two of the fourth-liners back to the hotel. Jonah is already in bed when I get to the room, asleep in that instantaneous way of his, the phone still on his chest, theFaceTime with Ren presumably ended mid-sentence like all of Jonah's evenings.
I lie in the dark. The hotel ceiling is white and textured and Nashville is muffled outside. The room smells like hotel (detergent, recycled air, the ghost of a thousand strangers who slept here before me) and the smell is anonymous in a way that makes the dark feel larger, like lying at the bottom of a well.
I take out my phone. I open the browser. The cursor blinks.
I type two letters. Is.
I stare at them. Two letters on a white screen. The beginning of a question I can't finish. Is it normal to. Is it possible that. Is there a word for. The possible endings multiply in my head, each one a door I could open, each door leading to a room I have never entered, and the rooms are dark and the rooms are mine and the rooms have been waiting for me to arrive.
I delete them. I type three letters. Am I.
Am I what? Am I different? Am I wrong? Am I the thing I think I might be? The letters sit on the screen like objects on a table, small and inert and harmless, and yet deleting them feels urgent in a way that is disproportionate to their size.
I delete them. I close the browser. I turn off the phone and put it face-down on the nightstand and press my hand against it as if the phone might open itself and type the question without my permission.
The dark is quiet. Jonah breathes. The hotel is still.
I lie awake for a long time. Not thinking about anything specific. Just lying in the general vicinity of a thought that I can feel the shape of without seeing the details, the way you can feel a wall in a dark room without touching it. The thought is there. The wall is there. I navigate around it. I don't look at it directly. Looking at it directly would require turning on a light, and the light would illuminate other things, and the other things are not things I am prepared to see.
The cursor blinks in my memory. Patient. Persistent.
Am I.
Two letters. Two words. The beginning of something.
I fall asleep before the end arrives.
DECLAN
Jamie Kowalski makes a no-look, backhand saucer pass through two defenders in the third period of a Tuesday night game against Carolina, and the pass is so good that I write "how" in my notebook and underline it twice.
The puck leaves his stick blade at an angle that should not be physically possible given his body position (weight on outside edge, momentum carrying him laterally, two defenders bracketing the lane). It rises, rotates, floats over the first defender's stick, clears the second defender's shin pad, and lands flat on the tape of Jonah Park's blade at the far post. Jonah doesn't even need to adjust. He redirects it into the net like he was expecting the puck to arrive exactly there, which, based on the celebration, he was not.
The play is eleven seconds long. It contains approximately four decisions that a normal hockey player would need two seconds each to make and that Jamie Kowalski appears to make simultaneously, as if the decision-making process in his brain runs in parallel rather than in sequence.
In the post-game scrum, I ask about it.
"The saucer pass in the third. Walk me through the read. Where did you see the lane?"
Something happens. The kid who gives monosyllabic answers to monosyllabic questions straightens. His shoulders drop from their habitual position (up, guarded, defensive) to a lower, more natural setting. His eyes, which typically address the floor during press conferences, come up and find mine.
"The lane wasn't there when I picked up the puck," he says. "It opened during the carry. Their D-man was cheating toward the boards because he expected me to go wide, which is what I'd done twice in the second period, so he was playing the pattern. But I felt Jonah moving to the far post. Not saw. Felt. The weight shift on the ice changes the sound, and I could hear him cutting across. So I threw it where I knew he'd be in a half-second, not where he was."
He talks for ninety seconds. Full sentences. Animated hands. He describes the biomechanics of the saucer (the wrist angle, the blade position, the follow-through that gives the puck its spin) with the enthusiasm of a person who loves the subject so much that the love temporarily overrides the caution.
The other reporters write down the quotes. I write down the quotes and the posture change and the eye contact and the way his voice sounds when he's talking about something he understands, which is lower and steadier and more present than his podium voice.
I use the quote in my game recap. "Kowalski said the lane opened during the carry and he felt Park's movement through the sound of the ice. 'I threw it where I knew he'd be in a half-second, not where he was.'" The quote is good. The kind of quote that makes a game recap more than a summary. The kind of quote that suggests the player has a brain as interesting as his skating.
After the scrum, the hallway.
The same hallway. The same fluorescent lights. The same floor wax. But the hallway has acquired a quality over the pastthree weeks that it did not have before, which is the quality of being a place where Jamie Kowalski and I occasionally end up at the same time, walking in the same direction, in the ten-minute window after the scrum disperses and before the building empties.
Tonight, the window opens.
He's walking toward the exit. I'm walking toward the media room. Our paths converge at the junction where the players' corridor meets the press corridor, a T-intersection that is, architecturally, the most unremarkable point in the building and has become, through repetition, the place where I am most alert.