The Infinite Sea

62

I HOLD MY BREATH when the door opens the next morning.

All night I seesawed between belief and doubt. I wallowed in every aspect of the new reality.

First option: Razor didn’t invent chaseball any more than I invented chess. The game is Vosch’s creation for reasons too murky to see clearly.

Second option: Razor, for reasons only clear to Razor, has decided to seriously mess with my head. It wasn’t just the hardhearted and resilient who survived the wi

Third option: All of it is entirely in my head. Chaseball is a silly game made up by a kid to take my mind off the fact that I may be dying. There’s no other point, no secret messages traced on a chessboard. My seeing letters where there are no letters is the human brain’s tendency to find patterns, even where there are no patterns.

And I hold my breath for another reason: What if it’s the squeaky-voiced kid again? What if Razor doesn’t come back, ever come back? There’s a real possibility that Razor is dead. If he was trying to secretly communicate with me and Vosch figured it out, I’m sure Vosch’s response would be one thing and only one thing.

I let out my breath slow and steady when he steps into the room. The beeping of the monitor kicks up a notch.

“What?” Razor asks, narrowing his eyes at me. He senses something’s up right away.

I say it. “Hi.”

His eyes cut right, cut left. “Hi.” Drawing the tiny word out slowly, as if he’s not sure if he’s with a lunatic. “Hungry?”

I shake my head. “Not really.”

“You should try to eat this. You look like my cousin Stacey. She was a meth addict. I don’t mean you literally look like a meth addict. Just . . .” Face turning red. “You know, like something is eating you from the inside.”

He pushes the button beside the bed. I rise. He says, “You know what I’m addicted to? Sour Patch Kids. Raspberry. Not so crazy about the lemon. I have a stash. I’ll bring you some if you want.”

He sets the tray in front of me. Cold scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a blackened, crusty thing that may or may not be bacon. My stomach clenches. I look up at him.

“Try the eggs,” he suggests. “They’re fresh. Free range, organic, chemical free. We raise them right here in camp. The chickens, not the eggs.”

Dark, soulful eyes and that small, mysterious, beatific smile. What did his reaction mean when I said hi? Was he startled I offered him a halfway human greeting or was he startled because I had figured out the real point of chaseball? Or was he not startled at all and I’m picking up cues that aren’t there?

“I don’t see the box.”

“What box? Oh. It was kind of a stupid game.” He looks away and says softly to himself, “I miss baseball.”

He’s quiet for the next couple of minutes while I move the cold eggs around the plate. I miss baseball. A universe of loss in four syllables.

“No, I liked it,” I tell him. “It was fun.”

“Really?” A look: Are you serious? He doesn’t know that I am 99.99999 percent of the time. “You didn’t seem too down with it at the time.”

“I guess I’m just not feeling well lately.”

He laughs and then seems surprised at his own reaction. “Okay. Well, I left it in my quarters. I’ll bring it someday if nobody swipes it.”

The conversation meanders off the game. I discover Razor was the youngest of five kids, grew up in A

“Mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the old man didn’t think I was smart enough . . .”

“Wait. Your dad didn’t think you were smart?”

“Smart enough. There’s a difference.” Defending his father even in death. People die; love endures. “He wanted me to be an electrician like him. Dad was a big union guy, president of his local, stuff like that. That was the real reason he didn’t want me to be a lawyer. Suits, he called them.”

“He had a problem with authority.”

Razor shrugs. “‘Be your own man,’ he always said. ‘Don’t be the Man’s man.’” He shuffles his feet, embarrassed, like he’s talking too much. “What about your old man?”

“He was an artist.”

“That’s cool.”

“He was also a drunk. Did more drinking than painting.” Though not always. Yellowed photographs of showings hanging crooked in dusty frames and the students buzzing in his studio nervously cleaning brushes and the cathedral hush that fell when he walked into a crowded room.

“What kind of shit did he paint?” Razor asks.

“Mostly that. Shit.” Not always, though. Not when he was younger and I was small and the hand that held mine was stained with rainbow colors.

He laughs. “The way you joke. Like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and it’s your own joke.”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t joking.”

He nods. “Maybe that’s why you don’t know it.”

63

AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:

HI

Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”

“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”

“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.

“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.

The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:

HLP

Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands . . .”

He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.

HOW

I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged ru

PLN

I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.

“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”

And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.