Time as habitat
What do I miss about basketball? If I’m being honest, I’m not thinking about it. There is a lot crowding it out for me until somebody else brings it up, nudges it out from under the pile of other news that’s fallen on top. When I do stop, conjure it up if I can get myself clear from the crush of information, of numbers, to keep up with, what I miss gets even harder to place.
Not games. Not standings. Not chasing. More, the miniature searing crisis games can give you. The thud in your guts a Sunday matinee against the Orlando Magic can suddenly churn. Games that seem a forgone conclusion turning instantly feral, coming back to bite complacency and slaver all over expectation.
I miss feats. Winking feats. Those seconds that stretch with a guy’s body doing something he seems just as surprised about. When time crawls, explodes, extends over the development of a dunk, dudes somehow landing after the ball does, they’ve gone up so high. The rangy, coiled, careful prank of players spinning away from a failed post up, the grin on their face as they go, extricated and easy, to the net. Breakaways, bounding layups from past the free throw line. Blocks that are disgusting, a bench falling all over itself in reply.
A day slips into another, sun bright and clear, new gold on white walls, remembering I haven’t stepped outside since yesterday — or was it the day before. Time, spent like how we’re stocking it now, quits hitting pretty quick. Quiet streets, longer days, walking past rooms, back and forth, noticing a new bud, a tiny leaf springing out from its coil, thinking, was it yesterday? When did we start this? Head down in the shower, the radio has switched over morning programs and the conditioner is still heavy at the ends of my hair.
I’ve started checking a marine traffic site every morning, hopeful with my coffee, and again at night, mournful as the sad little foghorn sound I make to myself while the live map loads up with the location of every single boat currently pinging a signal to a satellite somewhere and I hunch over, zoom toward the tiny, triangular dot that now represents my parents, chugging north in the South Pacific without a destination.
At their shoulder is the coast of Chile, receding, then the curving neck of Peru, they’ll eventually pass between Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, see Colombia at a distance, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, a little blip of Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. I picture every country, turned into itself somehow, like the land won’t be available to them because the borders currently aren’t, but know, the times that I’ve been out on sailboats with my dad and we’re heading away or toward land, watching it shrink or recede, that coasts have a knack to just echo back to you however you’re feeling. Headstrong with scope, woozy with relief, impatient, lonely, cold as the scrape of a wind-carved cliff, stomach or heart sick — land from water was one of the earliest arbiters of people’s psychic echo chambers.
I miss, very much, the new terror that rides toward me like a gleeful horseman of the apocalypse as the now familiar rhythm of a pre-game arena gets underway. The routine, but the feeling that in that routine, anything can happen. I could run into Doris Burke in a rare lull between live drops, adjusting her mic and leaning, for a few seconds, against a stool somebody has brought out onto the shining hardwood for her. I could physically run into Kawhi Leonard, lost, looking for his family in the tunnel. I miss the pummel of the ball against the court in warmups, the anticipation crawling up my neck as I eye the floor for who is out and who is missing and who that means is in the locker room, who can be caught. The awareness of every step for who could be running at me, a little out of control, and might catch a toe against mine, concentrating on walking down the painted inbound line in a straight shot. The awareness of every step for how a ball could be coming, too quick for warmup coaches or ball kids to reach for and swing back, my fingers long and easy in case they need to go, casual, before it knocks against the front row of courtside seats, still empty, no real rush. There always is.
Mid-way up a mountain in Nara, Japan, almost a year ago, Dylan and I had gotten off the road for how narrow. Tight coiled switchbacks, one and another and another we’d climbed from the driveway of our small ryokan until, after dodging a few shuttle busses that didn’t slow coming down from the top and had us jumping into the sliver of a ditch, we skidded down a shelf of mud to a path that cut into the woods. It was spring, mid-April, camphor trees angled like broken legs rose above us, black pine, dry and brown leaves and needles from fall through winter nudged by runoff higher up, small streams coming down the mountain we side stepped. The path was quiet, empty, it cut low and opened into a valley with grass almost neon green, bogged with clear water in places. We edged around creeks and big, jewelled black-blue dung beetles ambling slowly along, until the footpath curved and stopped in front of what looked like a giant concrete bunker or olympic sized swimming pool, side covered in turf and the top wrung with chainlink. We looped it, tentative, waiting for people to spring out. There was only sun, only water. Halfway around, our backs to a dense wood of camphor we heard crashing, saw a blur of bodies rocketing toward us through the green dark.
Spinning to see what was coming, and then run, we met a heard of tiny deer, Nara deer but wild, not gorged on crackers like their cousins down in the public park below. They swung wide, angling like birds when they caught sight of us and fanning away, wheeling down the mountainside. We stood there breathing for a long time, eyes playing tricks, hearts racing, backs to the bunker and eyes to a forest that felt hundreds of thousand of miles from not just home but from, suddenly, time. We were scared of stepping a wrong foot in case, as we explained to each other later, of not being able to trace our steps back to where we started.
Neither of us said a thing but the minute we stepped back out onto blacktop, onto the switchback road we followed diligently back to the hotel, we looked at each other with the kind of relief that knows how embarrassing it is. Watching for breakneck busses suddenly seemed an easier thing than not knowing where to look for time that didn’t want us in it.
My mom tried basketball on the boat. She got a pair of low top black Converse before they left and picturing her squaring her feet on some ship deck idling as beside it small tankers pull up to refuel it. How’d it go? I ask. Oh, she’s lousy, my dad says. In the background I can hear my mom go, not good. In my chest, something hitches in a new way. Okay, I think, so now even good stuff, because of all this, can get a handle on your heart, take it within shooting range, and clank it just to prove a point. Cool.
This morning, I had the bathroom speaker start blasting “Crazy Train” while Dylan was in the shower. I was maniacal with the joke before it started but it backfired, because the first thing I thought when Ozzy, demonic conductor, shrieks ALL ABOARD was the intro to that song echoing around the arena between the nine to eleven minute mark of every 4th quarter, and what felt like a little balloon deflated in my chest.
I miss the cutting of my pulse in my neck, against my ribs, rocketing, before I settle it with a breath or a quiet snarl to myself in my head and step up, over, to a player with their legs in ice or shoulders slumped or towel draped across the back of their neck or head down to the phone in their hand or standing, back to me, quiet in time that’s finally just theirs and I interrupt, hear my voice in the room, watch their eyes cut up to mine, see the recognition there. The feeling that any second could be the worst failing, for me, if what I’m saying doesn’t land, catches wrong, knowing in a different part of myself, as it takes over, that there’s no such thing, only an answer, a pause, the edge of a smile or strain in someone’s face, that will turn it in a different direction I’ll be keening to follow. The best part of being there is how unpredictable, but how extremely familiar it feels, my blood rising like a dog that hears a key in the door.
All the things I miss the most were what made the game slow down, made it outright stop. Made seconds catch, curve, blur, took you to just outside the experience for a breath, got you at eye level with luck or chance or, maybe more fundamentally, time. Where I was happiest was with the feeling of manipulating time, of having a handle whether it was through nerves, pushing, giving myself over to overwrought distillation. And now that it’s all stopped, the outlier seconds, the glitches between stop and go are gone. Time as habitat is a weird thing because when it goes, where are you left with?