"A figure skater." Another pause. "Marcus. When you say 'someone' in that voice, with that particular quality of careful neutrality that you use when you are trying very hard not to reveal something, I need you to understand that the neutrality itself is the revelation."
"I am being neutral because the situation is neutral."
"Meu filho. I have known you for twenty-six years. You have never mentioned another person at a rink. You have never mentioned another person at all, except teammates, and you mention them the way you mention equipment. Functional. Necessary. Unremarkable. This person is not unremarkable. I can hear it."
The turntable was playing Joao Gilberto. "Chega de Saudade." The bossa nova filled the apartment with the warm, precise architecture of a guitar and a voice that understood longing the way I understood angles. The song was about theend of longing. The end of saudade. The arrival of the person who makes the missing stop.
"He skates at 5 AM," I said. "I watch from the stands."
"And?"
"And nothing. I watch. He skates. We have spoken twice."
"Twice. And you are calling me to tell me about this after two conversations. Marcus, you did not call me after your first NHL start. You texted. You are calling me about a figure skater after two conversations."
She was right. She was devastatingly, precisely, Brazilian-motherly right. I had called because the system in my apartment, the system that organized my life into compartments and categories and predictable routines, had developed a fault. The fault was Theo Kimura. The fault was that I had come home from the rink this morning and put on Joao Gilberto instead of my usual post-skate silence, and the choosing of music over silence was a behavioral deviation that my own monitoring systems had flagged as significant.
I listened to music when I felt something. I lived in silence when I was managing. The music meant the feeling had exceeded the management, and the exceeding was new, and new things in my system required investigation.
"Mae," I said. "I do not know what I am doing."
"Good," she said. "Knowing what you are doing is your whole life. Not knowing is where the living starts."
"That is not helpful."
"It is the most helpful thing I have ever said to you. Your father agrees. David, tell him."
From the background, my father's voice, American and unhurried, accompanied by the sound of a guitar being tuned: "She's right, kid. The best stuff happens when you stop trying to predict it."
"Your father is a musician. Musicians are unreliable narrators."
"Musicians," my father said, "are the only people who understand that the space between the notes is where the music lives."
"The space between the notes," my mother repeated. "Marcus. Go to the space between the notes."
I did not know what this meant. I suspected it was the kind of advice that made sense only in retrospect, after the thing it was advising you toward had already happened and you could look back and say "ah, the space between the notes, yes, I see it now."
After the call, I ate dinner. Grilled chicken, rice, roasted vegetables. The nutritionist's plan. I washed the dishes. I wiped the counters. I performed the evening routine that I had performed every evening for three seasons in Atlanta, the sequence of actions that constituted the maintenance protocol for the system that was my life.
Then I did something I had never done.
I took a photograph of the turntable. The record spinning. The amber light of the lamp catching the edge of the vinyl. The sleeve of "Chega de Saudade" leaning against the shelf.
I looked at the photograph. It was not a photograph of a person. It was a photograph of a room that contained a sound that a person had caused, and the distance between those two things was the space between the notes, and my mother was right, and the space was where the living started.
I did not send the photograph to anyone. I saved it. The saving was enough.
For now.
-e
MARS
Row three became mine the way the crease was mine. A position I owned through presence and repetition.
Every morning, 5 AM. The same seat. The same sight line. Coffee in the cup holder of the empty seat beside me, which had become the coffee's seat, a designated territory that I maintained with the unconscious precision of a man whose entire life was organized around geometry and positioning.
Theo arrived at 5:05. This was his pattern. Five minutes after me. Enough time for him to see my car in the lot, to see the lobby lights on, to know I was there. The knowing was the point. The contract we had established in the lobby was built on visibility: no shadows, no hiding, no ambiguity about whether the stands were occupied. I was there. He knew I was there. And knowing was different from discovering, and the difference was the difference between a controlled burn and a wildfire.
