Perdedores en Juego de Pelota
(with apologies to Hemingway, and real Mayans)
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The rain fell as Nacon turned into the path that entered the great ball court. The limestone walls were damp and the sea wind tore across the field. Nacon stopped and picked up a head-sized rubber ball from the ground, bouncing it between his left hand and his right.
To the far left was the court storage hut. He watched as smoke bellowed from the top of the hut into the tempest above. Coconut palms swayed far over in the wind as he watched. It was the first of the winter hurricanes. As Nacon crossed the open field, the door of the storage hut opened and Chac came out. He stood on the steps looking out.
"Nacon," he called.
"Hey, Chac," Nacon said, coming toward the steps.
They stood together looking out across the country, down over the field, beyond the court, across brush and beaches to the ocean. The wind was lifting the waves. They could see the surf curl along Chichan Itza point.
"She's strong," Nacon said.
"Ix Chel is vengeful," Chac added. "Come on in."
Nacon went inside the hut. There was a fire burning in a pit in the center. The wind made it hiss. Chac shut the door.
"Pulque?" he said.
He handed Nacon a cup and poured from a ceramic bottle, then poured one for himself.
"All right?" he said.
"Good," said Nacon.
They sat in front of the fire and drank the pulque.
"It tastes like seaweed," Nacon said, and looked at the fire.
"That's the agave," Chac said.
"I thought it might have been the maize," Nacon said.
"It doesn't make any difference," Chac said.
"You ever had a twitch in your eyelid?" Nacon asked.
"No," said Chac.
"I've had it for two weeks now. I can't stop it," Nacon said
"It'll go away. Cut out the coca leaves," Chac said.
"What do you think of next week? The match?" Nacon asked.
"I'm introducing my new wall technique."
"That's not what I meant."
"Hand me that ball there," said Chac.
Nacon reached down to his left and handed him the rubber ball.
"This is a heavier ball. My father says they used to put skulls in the core to make them lighter," said Chac.
"I call bullshit," said Nacon.
Nacon reached down to the pulque bottle. He refilled his and poured more into the cup Chac held out.
"See, this ball has nice edges to it. Game ball is slicker. I'm going to take it high off the left wall and then let the momentum take it to the right, back and forth like, until there's more cuts in the rubber. Then you can really get that nice backspin," Chac professed.
"How many ringers have you had this year?" asked Nacon.
"Two, not counting practice," Chac said.
They sat and drank.
"This is the best time of year. Quetzalcoatl's time," Nacon said.
"I'd like to meet him," Chac said.
"Who wouldn't?"
"I mean, just to ask him the truth."
"What is it, two-thousand and twelve he's coming - ask him then."
"Isn't he supposed to be white? I don't buy it."
"Neither do I."
"Let's get drunk," Chac said.
"All right," Nacon agreed.
Chac filled the cups to the brim.
"What'll we drink to?" Nacon asked, holding up the cup.
"Let's drink to ball games," Chac said.
"All right," Nacon said. "Gentlemen, I give you ball games."
"Ringers," Chac said. "Everywhere."
"Balls," Nacon said. "That's what we drink to."
They drank the cups down.
"Now let's drink to Quetzalcoatl."
"And balls," Nacon punctuated.
Nacon poured out the pulque.
"Gentlemen," Chac said, "I give you Quetzalcoatl and balls."
"Exactly, gentlemen," Nacon said.
They drank. Chac filled up the cups.
"You ever think about that, balls? Why balls?" Nacon murmured.
"It's all about not thinking," said Chac. "Just let the ball be the ball and you be you."
They thought about this for a while.
"You were right to shut it down," Chac said.
"What do you mean?" asked Nacon.
"To quit playing ball this year," Chac said.
"I guess so," said Nacon.
"It was the only thing to do. If you hadn't, by now you'd be sacrificed."
Nacon said nothing.
"Once a man's sacrificed, he's gone," Chac went on. "Obviously."
Nacon said nothing.
"It was probably hard quitting just for a sprained ankle," Chac conceded, "But you can always come back next season."
"All right," said Nacon. "Let's get drunk."
"All right," Chac said. "Let's get really drunk."
"Let's get drunk and then go swimming in the hurricane," Nacon said.
He drank off his whole cup.
"Let's take the ball outside and practice. I'll just play with my left foot," Nacon said.
"All right."
"How do you feel?" Nacon asked.
"Edgy. Going to highlight my skiiiils." Chac was strapping on shoes.
They stepped out the door. The wind was annihilating.
"It's coming right off the ocean," Nacon shouted.
Chac threw the rubber ball out the door and followed it into the field, running and kicking. Nacon followed him down the steps and into the open. None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head. His eyelid stopped twitching. He might be able to play next week after all.
All Together Now
Driving down the street the other day, I noticed a flickering in front of my car. I slowed down and made out the figures of two birds, one fallen, stationed in the lane before me. The fallen bird was clearly dead, and probably hadn't fallen as much as had been run over. As much as I could see, the standing bird was nudging the body of the fallen, urging it skyward, pushing it alive. It took two hops away, then returned back to the certain corpse, prodding once more in vain before fluttering over my hood and into the air from which it came.
Later on I watched an overwrought documentary in which physicists explained how nothing ever really touches. Cells respond and electrons activate with proximity of energy, yet there's never really anything pushed together to the point of touching. But that's taking into account that we're separated in the first place. The bird tells me everything is always connected.
If you argue that all is not connected, explore the alternative - we are all alone. There is no halfway. Where do you come from that you are not connected to something? It's a bleak acceptance of your mind's perceptual limitations to think that everything is separate from you and therefore containable. Put it on the shelf, ignore it, chop it down, build it, tear it to pieces, keep it away.
There's an programmed idea we like to perpetuate that insists on fractioning reality. That is a person, that is a dog, that is a building, that is the ocean. Yet on the most elemental level, we are comprised of matter and space. Mainly space. In fact, there's not much matter in anything at all, and the particles vary only to a small degree. So it's all held together by what? There's an absurdly vast interconnected space between everything from the most minute atom to the ends of our comprehendable universe. And no one knows what it is.
Schopenhauer writes, "After death you will be what you were before your birth." Carbon dust, either scattered into the void, or absorbed back into the web.
One way or the other, that bird suffered. I was there to witness this very real display of denial and mourning. The emotions we attach to our soul are only chemical delusions, but the space inside is real. It brings us together and tears us apart, even though we've never really touched, and we never were apart.
Joachim Finds Meaning
Joachim was growing tired of tests. Every day it was tests, tests, and more tests, and not in metaphors. These were tests of needles and gauges, of straps and tongue depressors, shavings and sterile gauze wrappings and faceless aids, hovering over the hygienic white space, filling and emptying. Jump through this. Can you hear that? Does it hurt when I do this? Tests. More tests.
It wasn’t his fault. Joachim was only a boy.
They had a name for his condition – hyperthrihos – which Joachim couldn’t even pronounce. His body was covered from head to toe in hair, like a primate, topped with an oval-shaped skull. Nothing like anyone had ever seen.
His father Rafael had said, “His life will be full of struggle. He will be mocked. He will be ridiculed.” And so, when Joachim wasn’t undergoing tests behind hospital doors, he was shrouded underneath white draping cloths, leaving only a slit for his hairless eyes.
“Perhaps you should have him join the circus,” Rodolfo, his grandfather, had tastelessly joked, to lighten the doom of his family’s misfortune. Mayalen, Rodolfo’s only child and the mother of Joachim, was a ceaselessly pious woman, or entirely humorless, depending on the circumstances at hand. What was certain was that, at the age of twenty-eight, she had swallowed enough exhales of wounded innocence to forever crush a heart into blackness. She endured with fury alone. She told her father, plainly, “Joachim is going to be a man, not a beast.”
And so the tests justified the man, for the boy’s mother. The professionals kept their distance from the boy, treating their subject as humanely as possible without engaging his full humanity. To be accurate, they were unsure of the immediacy of this human link. Joachim was not only covered in hair, but also off the charts in his mobility, flexibility and strength – already he was a man.
“Not only that,” said one specialist, “But his intuition is very unique, and he’s demonstrated an innate sense of placement and direction. Even blindfolded with earplugs in, his response is alarmingly acute. A marvel, really, a total anomaly.”
But none of this meant anything to Joachim, as his perspective was drowned in a sea of white chaos – indifference, analysis, despair – and his loyalty had no measure of balance. All of it felt the same, distanced.
At home he would sneak away to the basement of the family’s two-story house, disrobe into his underwear only, and stand on old furniture and boxes, looking out the windows unto the lawns and streets before him. From this vantage point he could envision a framed world, bustling with activity and movement of wheels, organisms organizing, dogs sniffing, other children chasing down desires. Standing on boxes behind icy windows, he was safe and unobserved.
* * * * * *
Kostas Vondapoulos set down his book and looked out the window. It is now warm and clear, he thought. Now is a good time.
He stood and walked into his bedroom and pulled his shoes out of the closet, returning then back to his chair. All of his movements economical, all of his gestures with a purpose. Every breath coming in and going out of his lungs was measured and grateful.
Kostas stood again and looked closely out the window, thinking he had seen something dart across the lawn. He shook his head and thought, too hurried, I am much too hurried. He sat again and slipped on each shoe, dressed as every day in lightweight black cotton pants and pullover shirt. He re-examined the drawstring on his pants, pulled out on the shoulders of his shirt, and rose back to standing, seemingly all at once. For a man of seventy-one years, Kostas was admirably fit.
He went outside to his side lawn carrying a mat under his left arm, which he then unrolled across the perfectly trimmed surface. The sun burned a hole through the sky and shone across much of the block, yet the air remained crisp.
Kostas began his series of postures by leaning forward and touching his toes and holding for several breaths as the wind whisked by his head in sporadic gusts. He breathed in, and out. In and out.
There had always been an elusive channel of stillness in between the busy shorelines of Kostas’ consciousness, or at least as he liked to picture it. Always the river flowed, caged in the past by smoke and mirrors, now widening with each quiet day. Kostas was close. He knew what he was approaching and knew how to approach it. Almost, he thought, almost I am there. The movement of stillness, the breath, once more, one move closer. It had taken a lifetime to begin what he set out to encounter, and on sad days he found himself wondering what might have been done with all of those lost years. But now, he reminded himself, I have started now, and now I am close and there isn’t a lost day to remember, nor a reason not to try.
Arts come in many languages, and Kostas had adapted many of them into his practice. His daily routine mixed equal parts ashtanga, hatha, and Kostas, he liked to joke. In all of his seventy-one years on this earth he hadn’t so much as a migraine headache, and he intended to keep on that path. Variety within the construct of discipline, he repeated, is that which breeds vitality. The string cannot be too loose, or it will lack the strength to resonate, nor can it be too tight and risk snapping at the slightest touch.
Kostas reached into a warrior’s posture and inhaled deeply into his open chest and then saw something – what was that – out of the corner of his eye. He sensed it coming from across the way, and stood up tall to look. It had come from the basement window of his neighbor’s home.
* * * * * *
He knew he had been looking for too long and would soon enough have been caught staring, and so Joachim, in his underwear, cursed himself as he crouched beneath the opening of the window pane. His knees bounced together, and for the first time in his life there was an unstoppable coursing through his veins. Breathlessly, he moved up and peered over the bottom frame of the window, just his eyes and forehead. He just had to look.
And there stood Kostas, staring from across the lawn.
Joachim darted back down and thought about panicking. Perhaps he could cry for his mother and fabricate a story, but how could he justify the half-nakedness? Why had he been down here, staring at strangers performing calisthenics on their side lawn? Had the man really seen him?
He slowly looked out the window another time, and the man was no longer staring. Joachim watched as the old man sat, legs crossed, and with his eyes closed, how the man hummed to himself, and soon enough the boy’s curiosity trumped his fear.
And once again Kostas opened his eyes, only this time without the retreat of the boy, who, frozen in place, had been caught for good. For a moment the boy considered running, but there was truly nowhere to run. Something the man said with his eyes said come here son I have something to show you.
* * * * * *
Joachim approached the old man, covered in his white shawl. The lawn was immense, and it seemed to take an eternity to cross it and for the old man to finally acknowledge Joachim’s presence.
“I see you are curious,” said Kostas.
Joachim nodded beneath his hood.
“Come then, we will have tea.”
And the boy watched as the man rolled his mat with tireless care and followed as the man went inside the house.
* * * * * *
Joachim liked the taste of the tea, and held it close to his face to let the steam warm his nostrils.
“You are fond of Chai tea, no?” said Kostas.
The boy smiled through his hair.
Kostas set his cup down and leaned forward.
“You,” Kostas said, “Are not like the others. Do you know your history?”
Joachim nodded his head no.
“Always there is history,” said Kostas, “And yours is very much ancient and rich. You please wait here.” Kostas left to the other room and returned immediately, holding a book covered in black silk embroidering. He flipped through the pages as Joachim sipped the tea and stared around the kitchen, fascinated especially by a painting of the purple Krishna pinned above the stove in the old man’s kitchen.
“What is your name?” asked Kostas, still leafing through the pages of the book.
“M-My name is Joachim.”
“Ah,” said Kostas, “The lord will judge, that is your name, this is what it means. But perhaps your mother and father, they did not know, because – “
He held the book open and passed it across the table to Joachim. On the page was a small sepia-toned picture of a man wearing a three-piece suit, framed formally, the exception being the hair streaming across both sides of his face, along his eyebrows, over his nose and mouth and chin. Hair; long, beautiful strands parted down the middle of every feature. Covered in hair.
Joachim looked to Kostas with clear eyes, and Kostas grinned assuredly.
“This,” Kostas pointed to the picture, “Is the fiercest in all of the warriors of the Shao-Lin. China, yes? You see, he was left as a child, left behind as you say, a rubbish thing, a demon they think, perhaps. And one day then, a monk passing by, took the child along with him and then home to the circle of the Shao-Lin masters. They knew very much it would be hard for him to live out, in the world, so for him they decided training would be best. And do you know then what happened?”
Joachim shook his head no.
“The child proved very much to be strong, and to be how you say, vigilant. Never does a man train in every branch of the Shao-Lin, but for him they make an exception. For him they have a name, Su Kong Tai Djin.”
Joachim brushed his fingers over the picture and wanted to keep it with him forever.
“Su Kong means grand master, and soon this was his name. So strong were his skills and technique, that he fought bears with his own hands, for practice.”
With this, Kostas pantomimed with his arms held high and growled, as a bear might, and it made Joachim giggle.
“So too was the time for when a meeting, yes, was arranged for Su Kong and the other twelve Shao-Lin masters, and the masters bowed to greet him. And instead then of bowing, Su Kong threw a knife straight up high – SHA! – and struck in the heart of an assassin, trying to hide in the rafters above. It was the breathing. Thirteen breaths he had heard, one more than he expected.”
Joachim’s eyes grew wide and Kostas laughed with great enthusiastic bellowing for some time.
“You are very much surprised then, no? That you have a history?” Kostas inquired.
Looking back down to the page before him, Joachim felt the burn of relation in his chest and it trembled down his arm as he held fast onto the book. He looked into the eyes of the man in the picture and they sang back with possibility.
Kostas leaned back and nodded.
“For you,” he said, “The book.”
“Oh,” said the boy.
