Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic
gone to Comiskey Park and sat in the bleachers. You saw the pitcher throw, the batter swing, the ball react. But you didn’t hear the crack of the bat for a half a beat or so. And you could hear each word the announcer said several times. She’d gone first with a group of spelling champions from Chicago elementary schools. They were paraded out onto the field while the crowd had recognized “these Chicago youngsters for their hard work and the excellence they’d achieved in spelling.” She could still hear the phrases circle through the stadium like they were surrounded by twelve announcers. She’d never heard the word “youngster.” It sounded to her like some kind of furry pet that ran on a wheel in a glass tank. She looked around to make sure the voice was talking about them. And she didn’t know anything about baseball but she immediately loved the open arena in the night air. The solidified glow of the false daylight fell dim and bright at the same time. The smooth diamond, the precise line between the brown dust and the green grass. And, most of all, she loved the overlapping and askew play of sight and sound laid out in space so she could examine it. This seemed like the whole point of the game to her.
Inning—another new word—after inning she sat there knowing that the laws were the laws. Sight and sound must behave in this strange way all the time. She knew about thunder and lightning and one-Mississippi, of course. But still she wondered why she’d never been in an arena where you could watch it happen like this in so many ways at once. Who’d hidden this from her? This was what “education” was to mean to her always. There was a rush of discovery followed by an immediate, accompanying, cutting sensation that it had been hidden from her on purpose. The thing whirred in her, a tornado of elation from the discovery and rage at the withholding. Later, she’d wondered if this belly-twisting sensation happened to all the kids she knew. If it had, they’d certainly kept it a secret from each other. She couldn’t remember learning how to do it, but she’d converted the hot twists in her belly into a kind of tutor, a partner with whom she rehearsed all the hidden, secret things she learned. Even when Ndiya found that facts in history or certain characters in books were common knowledge to many people, she retained the feeling that, in fact, she and her twisting partner were acquainted with these things in ways only they could understand. “Hide it from me, from us, we’ll find it and make it into something only we can recognize,” she declared. Staring at the dim-bright distance while the sounds and sights dove and arced, she thought, “If everyone had their own night and night was a fruit and you could split it open when it was ripe,” this was exactly what the inside of her ripe night would be like.
The basketball game down the designer alley and Comiskey Park and the tornado effect she’d learned to quell enough to hide from everyone but herself roamed through her again. She couldn’t really hear anything from the scene down the alley. She tried to summon up her almanac of ways to “here” and “there” herself and found no familiar cues. The ball didn’t seem to make noise when it bounced. She assumed it bounced but she hadn’t seen anyone bounce the ball. The shot was the first action she’d focused on. The ball hung there and she got the roller coaster–belly feeling she had waiting for the sound of the hit to catch up to her vision of the swing. But unlike the split-open instant inside her ripe-fruit night at Comiskey Park, this thing went on and on and on and on. The ball was like a singer holding an impossibly long note. It hung in the air like a question no one could answer. From the career described by the ball and the rate of its diminishing speed, she sensed the shot would probably make it to the apex and go down the other side. Then again, it might not.
Three figures sat against the wall. They all focused on one of their outstretched arms. Ndiya couldn’t tell whose arm it was that warranted such scrutiny or why. She looked back and the ball was still slowing down, traveling upward. From the first moments of their first meeting, she’d had this sense that things involving Shame Luther took a long, long time to happen and then they seemed to have happened while they never had actually been happening. Still, this was another level. The other people on the court walked around each other, placed their hands on the back of the person in front of them; those in front seemed to hold their arms out to their sides like wings as they backed up into the ones behind. They all moved in a two-step, four-beat rhythm.
The players didn’t move nearly as slowly as the ball suspended in the air. Suddenly, one man broke the spell and moved more quickly than the rest. He took off his hat, dropped it on the ground, stomped his foot firmly on top of it and walked off the court to talk to the three sitting against the wall. He gestured easily and slapped the hand of the young man with the beard and the deep-set eyes she’d seen on the street. She thought, “They all move like Sunday morning.” Easy like her uncle Lucky’s voice sounded when he drove her around in his loping ninety-eight, like she remembered watching the trees move from the front porch down in Greenville on a thick summer night full of her great-uncle Clem’s music and the electrified skeletal glow from thunderstorms in the distance. The South. Everyone in the alley laughed at something the woman sitting on the ground said and the basketball player bowed to her and ceremoniously removed the hat he didn’t have on down to his waist and back to his head as he straightened up.
“Jesus,” Ndiya thought, “they’re all high? All of them? Always were? Lucky, Clem, those splayed-out pecan trees too? Southern thunder is high? Even the ball’s high?” Normally, stopping to look at anything in an unfamiliar neighborhood like this was out of the question. The trick was to stare twenty miles off and always, always, look like you had somewhere to go and not quite enough time to get there. At the same time, you never made a rushed or sudden move. Ndiya realized she’d just broken all the rules at once. She was soaking wet up to her knees, in high heels, starstruck still and staring, blind to everything else, at the slow-motion scene down the alley, a scene no one else on the block seemed to think noteworthy at all. “Here I am,” she thought, “an easy mark, an open wound.”
The player went back to the game. He slowed down as he returned to the court, making exaggerated motions with his arms and hips so that it looked like he was wading out into deepening water when he crossed under the lights at the court’s perimeter line. He waded back to his hat and the player dancing in place behind it. He picked up the hat, put it on, and resumed his movements with what, just then, looked like his dance partner in the area just to the right of the hoop.
As she watched the other players, Ndiya wished she’d paid closer attention to basketball once or twice so she could judge what was going on here. They clapped their soundless hands, rubbed them together and held them out, palms up, at arm’s length so that they looked, from the waist up at least, like they were about to meditate. One knelt down low as if to pray, then untied and retied both his shoestrings. One swayed back and forth, holding on to the pole beneath the hoop. Ndiya thought she saw one kiss the neck of the player in front of him. Another, off to the far left by himself, stood in place watching the ball while his right hand worked its way into his back jeans pocket. He removed a pack of cigarettes while his left hand produced a lighter. The decidedly unathletic gesture made her notice that none of them had on gym clothes of any kind, though a few at least wore sneakers. Then she checked quick to make sure the gym shoes weren’t all the same like the black Nikes of those crazy Comet Hale-Bopp folks who’d followed that comet up out of here a few years ago. Nope.
The smoking player held both arms extended straight out to either side. His lighted lighter in one hand, glowing cigarette pointed upward and pivoting to follow the movement of the ball in the other. Obscured by her angle of view, Ndiya saw the flame and the glow from the tip of his cigarette while the rapt, stationary player traced the flight of the shot as it moved beyond the apex and began to pick up speed. It looked as if something impeding the ball’s progress had been removed from in front and placed behind to push it on its way toward the rim of the hoop which, Nydia now noticed, had a long net of tinsel stars and sequins hanging down from it. She’d seen basketball courts. She’d never seen one with the net hanging down almost halfway to the ground. This hoop looked more like one of those West African crowns worn by kings to obscure their human faces while they performed supposedly divine duties.
Most of the courts she remembered in Chicago either had chain nets or no nets at all. Her brothers had always had their own nets that they took with them and brought home when they were done. Just then it dawned on her that the net-thing had something to do with the question of touch. Her brothers had always discussed “touch”