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.

 

Under The Sun

A young woman leaned on a towel on one of the wide lawns of the city park. She had taken the day off from work and she had decided to walk a few blocks and spend a few hours under the hot rays of the sun. Bright sunlight was rare in this city of fog, so the few days that were sunny had to be treasured like golden nuggets in a mountain stream. Laying out on her white towel, she wore only a white cowboy hat, a gift from an old boyfriend whose name she had already forgotten, and a light green bikini which covered her breasts, her crotch and most of her buttocks. The rest of her white skin was bare and covered in a thin layer of suntan oil and sweat.
When the young woman looked down at her own body, in full display in a public setting, every detail amplified by the unforgiving light of the afternoon sun, she couldn’t help being critical. Through her own eyes, her skin was too white, all from month after month of living and working indoors, and it would take more than one afternoon of sunbathing to change her pale coloring. Her breasts were too small and, even at her young age, she could tell that they were already starting to droop. She knew in the back of her mind that sooner or later she would have to get surgery, she would have to get bags of silicone implanted under her skin to give her an appearance of robust abundance. Her smooth belly showed signs of slight wrinkling and she perceived the wrinkles as fat, and so she worried that she had been eating too much. She made quick ephemeral decisions about eating much less, eating better, doing more exercise, doing whatever needed to be done, all decisions that would quickly be forgotten and put away like old clothes.
She poured some more suntan oil on her hands and started to rub it over her shoulders and her arms. She wished that her boyfriend was here, the one whose name she could remember, the one that she had met only a couple of weeks ago. She wished that he could be the one pouring the oil over her body. It would be easier that way and much more pleasurable. Her body ached for the touch of his firm rough hands. It had only been two days but it had already been too long. She already needed the silk of his lips on hers, for his finger through her hair, for his arms around her shoulders once again. Just as her hands were covered in greasy oil, steaming hot under the sun, her cell phone rang. She hesitated for a second to answer it, she didn’t want to get the device all greasy, but she quickly realized she had no choice. She grabbed the phone and flicked it open with a practiced move of her right hand. She brought it to her face and said a simple: "Hello?"
Two men rode their bicycles down the sidewalk, about twenty feet away from her. A group of teenage girls were laying all together in a circle to her right, sunbathing like she was. A couple was laying on a large brown towel near the trees behind her. Cars drove by in quick succession and a pickup truck was parallel parking across the street. The young woman’s eyes grew wide, digesting all this movement with her eyes, perceiving it all as a strange background to the words that the tiny metal device whispered into her ear, a movie with a strange voiceover that was sliding unexpectedly into slow motion and distress.
"I don’t understand… why today? Why right now?"
There were more words and more whispering. Two women in flowing light brown dresses walked by, talking excitedly as they moved in the direction of the tall brown building a few blocks away. A tall woman in loose gray shorts ran by on the sidewalk, gasping for breath, grunting with effort. Two more men rode by in thin stylish bicycles. The pickup truck finished parking and a large man with colorful tattoos on his forearms stepped out of the cabin.
"Shouldn’t we get together… it would be better if…I would really like to talk in person… it’s just that…"
A family of four walked by, a teenage girl in black walking ahead of them, a little boy in shorts running in circles around their feet. A tall bearded man walked by with a camera. A slim Asian girl rode by on a small bicycle. The teenage girls on her right were now laughing loudly and turning over onto their backs.
"I would rather that… but listen… I…"
The laughter of the girls seemed like an offensive intrusion. Two little boys ran ahead of their father in the direction of the restrooms in the northeastern corner of the lawn. The man with the tattoos was taking out a large bicycle from the back of the truck. He put a cap on his head with the figure of a colorful eagle and closed the bed of the pickup truck with a loud bang.
"Ok then… yeah, later we’ll… sure… ok… bye."
She closed the phone with a soft click and stared at the clouds and the sky. The landscape seemed to shift slightly each time one of the teenage girls laughed. The little boys screamed to their father from the door of the bathroom. A car honked in the distance and a motor rumbled as it started. She put the phone away and looked down at herself. The sun was no longer as warm. The park was no longer as inviting. The rough hands would not be touching her again, there would be need to find new ones. Everything she had ever thought about herself was true. She was getting old and ugly. There was no other reason for him to do what he had done. She would have to go home soon. She had to take steps. She would call around for prices on breast surgery. She would call around for diet programs and gyms. She would face up to her problems and solve them, just like she always did. She would look at time in the eyes and emerge victorious. And she would soon forget another name, another gift, another night of passion, another day of sunlight and warmth. Many more had already been forgotten.

The Bridge of Stone

The man came up from the south, walking slowly up the stained stone stairways that cut the great park in two. He came up through the thick old trees that rustled with the faint breeze of the sunny afternoon. He came up in the silence that is the exclusive realm of birds and leaves and dirt. He came up looking ahead towards the last few steps and the open doorway of curved trees, but his mind was firmly placed in the murky past that embraced him like a hot invisible coat. He came up with eyes covered by glasses, with his body covered by a gray jacket and dark pants, with his heart covered by the ice that had built up over so many years of being left without shelter. He came up and he stepped onto the cement path, the one that made its way all around the lake that rested like a giant living mirror at the top of the hill. There he rested for a moment. The man came up and he had no purpose or reason, and now he stood helpless, not knowing where to go or what to do. The man looked back towards the stone steps which were still quiet, lonely and silent. Then he looked to the cement path which was littered here and there with people walking back and forth. Then he looked to the lake where little pedal boats and row boats crisscrossed the calm green water. Then he looked to the mountain in the center, where the brown soil formed the background for a web of branches and leaves. The man then turned to the right and started to walk.
A man came by running, wearing bright red shorts, a sweaty T-shirt and thin white wires hanging from his ears. The whisper of loud music surrounded him like a swarm of sleepy buzzing bees. The man that walked saw the man running and stepped aside. The man faintly nodded in greeting but the running man was too lost in his music of bees and screeches to notice a greeting of such subtlety.
The man that walked continued to walk and looked at a great big stone on the side of the path where a couple had etched their names around a rough skinny heart. He wondered how long ago they had been here. He wondered if they were still together, if the heart that had been carved here still was burning bright in between them and if they could still watch the sunset blazing in each other’s eyes. He knew he couldn’t. It had been a long time since he could. But maybe the couple that etched their name here still strolled through this path today, this very afternoon, or maybe the man, even now, rowed a wooden boat slowly, while his beloved leaned back on the curved wooden surface, looking up at the empty sky.
The man kept on walking, while a little boy ran past him. The little boy’s mouth was wide open and his eyes were pressed tightly in a sign of intense pleasure. A tall muscular blond man walked behind him, cautioning him to stay close. The man that walked once again nodded in greeting but the blond man didn’t see him, or pretended not to see him. Then a flock of pigeons rose up to the sky from the bush to the man’s left and the boy ran towards them and a shadow fell upon the blond man’s face and then he called for the boy to be careful once again and the man that walked just kept on walking.
He heard the clicking of heels on the cement behind him. The clicks were quick and frequent and soon a woman in a flowery brown dress walked past him, holding a large square cardboard box. The box was pink and slightly stained and the woman held it up with great care. In the distance ahead, the man could see a group of little girls that screamed and ran on the path and along its edge. The woman with the box moved quickly towards them and they descended on her like pigeons flying to a mountain of seed. The man made his way around them carefully, and he saw the woman open the box to reveal the cake inside and the little girls squealed with pleasure and anticipation. Behind the trees, away from the lake, there was a woman kissing a man, both lying down, the woman pressing her body against his in a show of intense lust, both oblivious to the girly squeals and the laughter just above them.
The man reached the edge of the stone bridge and stopped. Beyond the bridge was the mountain, with its intertwining paths and its shadow world of unknowns and sudden surprises. Beyond the bridge was the pagoda and the dirt path and the commitment of journeys that may be much longer than one can initially anticipate. Behind the bridge stood a woman he hadn’t seen in years and he was with her and their hands were together and they walked as if the whole world belonged to them and every bright flower that fell was a gift from the goddess mother of the world, just for them and for them alone, and the air itself was shining and trembling, sharing in the delight that they felt in simply walking together. Behind the bridge was the realization that the woman was no longer there, that his hand was only in his pocket and that the world was no longer his and the air was no longer shining. Behind the bridge was horror and despair. The man turned away from the bridge and kept on walking.
He came to where a woman was sitting alone on the bench, looking at her watch and reading a piece of paper. The woman seemed impatient and she looked at him with eyes that fused hope with sadness, anger with desire. He nodded to her as he nodded to everyone but his nod was so subtle, so tentative, so shy, that the woman couldn’t see it and instead she looked at the man that walked behind him and then at the one that might come even further back. The man walked by her and saw the boats passing nearby, a pair of men in long shorts laughing loudly, a pair of thick women staring away in silence, a small blonde family in a large boat that rocked with their screams and jokes and eagerness. The man passed by a strong black woman leaning on a bench who talked in random spurts to a man in a wheelchair, across the path from her. The man who walked passed in between them and the woman nodded at him and he nodded back, wishing he could say something but unable to find the words.
The man saw a little old lady, bent over and drenched in sweat, offering mountains of seed to the birds of the lake and he saw the birds come in great flocks of unified hunger and descend upon the seed like flying ants on a bowl of soft honey. There were two women taking pictures of the feast, and they were happily commenting on what the old woman was doing. Two older women walked by and loudly expressed their disapproval, shaking their heads and talking of rats with wings and people who couldn’t obey simple instructions. An old skinny man sat on a green bench reading a book, his shirt was off and his ribs were pressing out against his skin. There was another man on the same bench, a homeless man with dark skin and ripped jeans and no shoes. The homeless man simply looked at the man that walked with great big round eyes full of empty curiosity. The man that walked passed by the bench and, as he passed, he felt the man’s eyes on him, like tickling rays of electrical need reaching across a gulf of unknowable emptiness. He came to where the boats were tethered and he saw a single lonely row boat waiting for a couple to make it complete. He saw its faded paint and its curved underbelly and the signs of small graffiti that had been left as reminders of other gentle afternoons and he saw it rocking back and forth with the touch of the gentle waves that made their way across the lake. The man looked with soft eyes of sadness and then the man kept on walking.
The man that walked came once again to the choice that was engraved in the bridge of stone. It was a different bridge but it was the same one, and the woman still stood on the other side, looking at him with eyes of lost stormy evenings and dark clouds lined with lightning. She was wearing her pink dress as always, her hair flowed around her shoulders, as always, her hands were on her hips as always. She was as she always was, except that she wasn’t there at all, and so she wasn’t like she was at all. A little white dog rummaged through the leaves on the side of the bridge and then made its way across. The man saw his little white body bobbing back and forth as it crossed the arched surface of stone. He felt within him for a sign of courage, a sign that now things may be different, a sign that he could face and resist the shadows that were lined up against him on the other side, a sign that now he could be like a white dog and find some simple satisfaction in dead leaves and empty holes on the ground. Finding nothing, no sign, no response, the man that walked just kept on walking.
After many times around, after finding the same people once, twice and many times over again, after seeing that the cake had been eaten away and the box had been discarded, after seeing the couple kiss and touch and kiss and touch again, after seeing the waiting woman walk away and the man in the wheelchair pushed away by the strong black woman and after the air started to turn cold, after the bridge had appeared and disappeared so many times that he had lost count and every time the woman on the other side waited calmly, knowing that nothing would ever change and she could wait forever, after all that, the man came back to the stone steps that descended to the south and away from the lake. He looked around and found that he had no purpose or reason, that he stood helpless and alone, not knowing where to go or what to do. Then the man started to walk down the stained stone steps, away from the bridge of stone that lead to darkness and back to a simple loneliness that could be covered in a blanket of forgetfulness and quiet noise. The bridge of stone would still be there tomorrow.