I’M READY WITH an apology when the door opens that night. The more I think about it with my feverish mind, the more I feel like the bully at the beach who kicks over some little kid’s sand castle.
“Hey, Razor, I’m—”
My mouth drops open. There’s a stranger holding the tray, a kid around twelve or thirteen.
“Where’s Razor?” I ask. Well, more like demand.
“I don’t know,” the kid squeaks. “They handed me the tray and said take it.”
“Take it,” I echo stupidly.
“Yeah. Take it. Take the tray.”
They pulled Razor off Ringer duty. Maybe chaseball’s against regs. Maybe Vosch got ticked, two kids acting like kids for a couple of hours. Despair is addictive, for the one watching it and the one experiencing it.
Or maybe Razor’s the ticked party here. Maybe he asked to be reassigned, took his chaseball and went home.
I don’t sleep well that night, if you can call it night under the constant sterile glow. My fever shoots up to a hundred and three as my immune system launches its final, desperate assault on the arrays. I can see the blurry green numbers on the monitor inching upward. I slip into a semi-delirious doze.
Bitch! Leave me. You know why they call it baseball, don’t you? It’s a deep drive into center field! I’m done. Take care of yourself.
The grungy sil
ver turning in Razor’s fingers. It’s a deep drive. A deep drive. Lowering toward the board in slow motion, where the fielders come up, second base and shortstop go back, left goes right. Blooper on the first-base line! Fielder races up, baseman back, boom. Fielders up, infield back, cut to the right. First baseman back, right fielder up, boom. Up, back, cut. Back, up. Boom.
Over and over, let’s go to the instant replay, up, back, cut. Back, up.
Boom.
Now I’m wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. No. Can’t see it as well. Better with my eyes closed.
Center and left slash down. Left cuts across:
H
Right steps up. First base runs back:
I
Oh, come on. Ridiculous. You’re delusional.
When I got back to our camp that night with the vodka, I found my dead father curled into a fetal position, his face covered in blood where he had clawed at the bugs born inside his mind. Bitch, he called me before I left to find the poison that would save him. He called me another name, too, the name of the woman who left us when I was three. He thought I was my mother, which was ironic. From the time I was fourteen, I was more like his mother, feeding him, washing his clothes, taking care of the house, making sure he didn’t do something catastrophically stupid to himself. And every day I went to school in my perfectly pressed uniform and they called me Her Majesty Marika and said I thought I was better than everybody else because my father was a semi-famous artist, the reclusive genius type, when the truth was that most days my father didn’t know what planet he was on. By the time I got home from school, he’d be full-on delusional. And I let people on the outside hold their delusions, too. I let them think I thought I was better, the way I let Sullivan think she was right about me. I didn’t just foster the delusions. I lived them. Even after the world crashed around us, I clung to them. But after he died, I told myself no more. No more brave fronts or false hopes or pretending everything’s okay when nothing is. I thought I was being tough by pretending, calling it being optimistic, brave, keeping my head up or whatever bullshit seemed to fit the moment. That’s not tough. That’s the very definition of soft. I was ashamed of his disease and angry at him, but I was just as guilty. I played right into the lies right up to the end: When he called me my mother’s name, I didn’t correct him.
Delusional.
In the corner, the camera’s blank, soulless eye staring.
What did Razor say? Just think about it!
That’s not all you said, is it? I ask him, looking blankly back at the blank, black eye. That isn’t everything.
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.