The Locker Room

I.

He sat in the locker room with his head pressed to his knees, elbows digging into muscle already beginning to twitch with post-performance tremors. Sweat soaked his shorts, his socks, his everything. Beneath his cleats was a storm of logos—Nike upon Nike, a jungle of commercial bark like fungi eating through the linoleum. His breath came like broken glass, stifled sobs not of weakness but of burden: the weight of performance, of having been seen, and of failing—maybe not even that, but of being evaluated by men who clapped anyway. He hated the clapping. He hated how it echoed in the tunnels after games. He hated how his father clapped once, when he was nine, after a game in which he hadn’t even scored.

In the background, blurred and ghostlike, other bodies moved, half-naked, half-human, stretching and laughing and arguing over fouls like boys on the edge of war. The scoreboard had been irrelevant to him. What mattered was the pass he didn’t make, the slip, the stutter-step in the third quarter. He remembered it too vividly and not at all. Already the locker room was transforming into a mythic underworld of retold errors, misunderstood greatness. Already it was being swallowed into the memory-world of Sport as Legend.

II.

Cut to the dream sequence: a poster plastered across a bus stop, dripping from the rain, pulsing with 1960s psychedelia. LOVE, it screamed. LOVE in all caps. And a character from some utopic animation ran across cotton-candy clouds, spilling flowers and doves in her wake. She was all knees and elbows, long hair and bright boots, a creature of insistent optimism. Behind her: a swollen red heart like the sun before the last war.

He remembered it now. This image. He had seen it in his sister’s room. She was dead. Car crash. He had borrowed her socks once for a game, and they were too small, and he had worn them anyway. After the match, he found the cartoon girl in a drawer, torn at the edge but somehow perfect. He pinned her up in his locker, behind the protein charts and the taped fingers of saints.

The girl was always running, and he was always breaking. She was Love, and he was the Locker Room. He sometimes whispered to her, like a lunatic at a bus terminal. “Run, love. Run faster.” As if her escape would free him.

III.

By the third week of his suspension, he was working temp logistics in a windowless building—an office park that grew like tumors on the side of some freeway he’d never memorized. There were racks and racks of equipment, boxes labeled with numbers and codes and brands that seemed to belong to a different America. He had to match labels with forms. VRK Series. VMRK Series. SR-40-22. Sometimes, he imagined they were coordinates on a ruined map. Sometimes, he pretended it was all military. That he was assembling bunkers for a war no one would talk about.

But mostly it was mindless. And it was silence. And that was maybe what he needed.

The catalog pages he handled spoke with the tone of an engineer who had never cried: “provides extra racking space,” “optimized for managed cable bundles,” “locking pivoting center section.” He read these aloud during lunch, like mantras, like gospel for a faith that had no blood. The diagrams were clean. The words were clean. Nothing bled in the pages. Nothing wept.

One day he caught himself drawing on the edge of a datasheet. The same flower-haired girl, running. A dove in her hand this time. His coworker asked him what it was. He said nothing.

IV.

One night he returned to the stadium parking lot, half-drunk and humming. He sat in his car staring at the floodlights long since dimmed. Somewhere a janitor moved inside, a shadow in a distant corridor. He thought of the locker room—how it must look now, empty and blue. He thought of taking off his shoes, walking in, and sitting in the same spot, just to see if his ghost was still there. If the moment had fossilized somehow. If pain had a residue.

Instead, he opened his trunk. Pulled out an old binder from his playing days. Clippings. Photos. A scribbled note from a girl he’d loved once who said she couldn’t understand why he was so sad all the time. The note had a heart drawn on it. He held it up against the stadium lights. For a second, the heart looked like it belonged there.

Then he drove home.

V.

That night he dreamed the three worlds converged.

The locker room was full of flower-haired women, replacing socks with feathers and bandaging wounds with cartoon hearts. Doves flew out of the open lockers. The Nike swoosh was replaced with stars.

A rackmount catalog descended from the ceiling like scripture. It hovered in the air and sang: “Extra racking space will be provided unto thee.”

He laughed and laughed, his mouth a stadium full of people clapping not because he won or lost, but because he had been seen. Really seen. He woke up weeping.

And outside, doves flew over the parking lot in pairs.