I can’t do anything that involves moving objects through space. It’s a realm where I’ve never found any success, so I learned early on to stick to things that don’t physically exist, like digital bits and thoughts. I have this fear that, if I walk past a park where kids are playing baseball, a foul ball will soar over the chain-link fence and plop right down in front of me, parabolically and predictably like an easy physics exercise. Then I’ll be obliged to throw the ball back over to them, which, yeah, that’ll never happen. The ball wouldn’t even scale three-fourths of the barrier; it would clang impotently against the rhombi and droop down like runny yolk, and kids one fourth my age would laugh at this stupid fucker who can’t throw a ball. So I always reroute my walks around any games in progress to avert disaster.
I actually saw this happen in front of me the other day, validating my paranoid level of caution. About twenty seconds of walking distance ahead of me, a baseball escaped containment, bounced off the sidewalk, and continued rolling into traffic on Acushnet Drive. Part of me wanted to see a truck flatten the ball, like a hydraulic press in an Oddly Satisfying YouTube video. But the most important thing was that I was clearly outside of the radius within which a failure to help would have made me the asshole. So I projected a face of sympathy to no one, a convincing Aw, that’s too bad, where the right corner of my mouth just barely curled downward, and then I turned ninety degrees away from one of my worst fears and fled down the next side street.
I couldn’t avoid the baseball diamond today, though, because I had agreed to attend my friend Hal’s son’s baseball game in the afternoon. Hal was actually my intern many years ago. I plucked him out of grad school and made his career: now he was a legit multimillionaire, with money compounding and compounding into eternal security. Actually he would have been completely fine without ever having met me, but it’s nice to convince yourself that your brief candle had some impact on the universe. Counterfactuals, It’s a Wonderful Life type shit.
I’d told Hal I could only watch the last couple of innings of the game. It was the only viable intersection of our Google Calendar “free” time, as I had been gone for a month and now he was about to leave with his family for the last vacation before school started up again. The academic calendar somehow maintains its stranglehold on my existence, no matter how far I think I’ve strayed from it. I still have the nightmare of sitting for the final exam of a class I never attended, not totally a fictional invention.
At a park halfway between our neighborhoods I spotted Hal in the bleachers in his heavyweight luxury tee. His micro-generation was on the upswing of the fashion cycle toward baggy fits, whereas baggy would obscure what little I have to show. Hal saw me speed-walking toward him and gave me a cozy smile of amused recognition; it felt like he genuinely cared. That’s why everyone loves the guy.
I was embarrassingly late, officially having missed the majority of the game. The kids were in position, just about to start the fourth of their five innings. I jogged up the steps and scooched past a guy who did that useless maneuver of tucking his calves under his seat obliquely, as if that would vacate sufficient space for my safe passage. At least give me the “You should’ve gotten here earlier, but I’ll halfheartedly do this half squat for you” stand.
“There he is!” Hal beamed—which is one of the highest forms of respect you can receive in this man’s culture. I offered a “Hey man” back to him, relieved to finally reunite.
I usually don’t know whether to shake the hand of my good friend. I’ve never figured this out in all my years of trying to be a passable human. But the baggy-fit generation also seems much more amenable to hugs than my own, which I’m cool with. And when enough time has gone by, I’ve deduced that Hal’s hug meter actually resets and makes room for some physical collegiality. I hadn’t seen Hal in three months. Can I call that a quarter? Do we divide our years like a board of directors or an offbeat university?
He went in for the hug without hesitation, guided by his precise internal gauge. Two very solid pats on the back, an overly long pause, and a third pat for good measure, conveying that he anticipated my misery. We sat down as the first pitch of the inning went out. Ball. “Last time was?”
“It was Adi’s birthday at the hot pot place. Three months ago.”
His eyes rolled back in incredulity; his lips almost imperceptibly parted. “Jesus. That was so long ago. I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah, you’re telling me. Everything goes by too fucking fast. I hate it.”
It’s crazy to me that Hal has raised a nine-year-old already. He molded an entire person, who has no idea how shitty life is for almost everyone who’s ever lived.
“Sooo?” He dragged out the o in jubilant expectation. “You got back from Germany last week? How was it?” He shook my bony left shoulder with immense pride.
“Yeah. I think I just need to make it permanent. The immersion thing is so real.”
“What cities again?” he asked, already shifting to half paying attention. Not that I even really minded—he had a whole other life that required unending maintenance and that didn’t involve me at all.
“Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Marbach.”
“I’ve flown through Frankfurt so many times, dude. So you feel like you’re getting it? You can talk now?”
“It’s so weird. I’ve studied the language for so long, and I cannot get past translating word for word. I’m just always wondering, when’s it gonna click, when’s it gonna wash over me. I’m frustrated, as always; I’m asking people to repeat things more than twice, which feels sinful. And so then I was actually at the archives in Marbach at the end of I think the third week? Talking to one of the librarians, and as I was doing it I was fully aware in real time that I was conducting an organic, meaningful German conversation for the first time in my life, at middle age.”
“Jesus Christ, so fuckin dramatic.” Hal always has to plug any earnestness leaking from me, lest we have to reckon with it and mop up the mess, put up the Danger! ¡Peligro! sandwich board. “Midway through the journey of life, this guy! You look 35.”
“You know, I’ve gotten that a few times and I always think it’s funny that people think it’s a compliment to shave off single-digit years from the actual. The diff is so negligible that the comment actually crosses over into the ironical.”
“How is that not a compliment, dude! You look good for your age! I am so terrified of this hairline going away.” His demeanor suddenly turned grave, as if there flashed an omen of the end of days.
“Your luscious curls will be fine, man, trust me.”
He felt better already. “Was the librarian hot?”
“You just assume the librarian was a woman?”
“She was, but continue,” he grinned conspiratorially.
“I mean, sure, but that’s not what I’m thinking about at this point in life.”
“You should be thinking about it, Bruder. You should be.”
Hal’s kid, Raphael, was at bat now: 2–2, top of the 4th, no one on base. Is that how you report it? That’s the best I can do, fuck it. I noticed Raph’s imperturbable concentration, curls equally bountiful under his batting helmet, and he looked precisely like the commingled genes of Hal and Emma. Both families must have been at loggerheads since the delivery room in that important contest of whom he looked like more.
Hal’s voice addressed me while his eyes locked onto his assured legacy. “If money’s still a problem, you can always try to supplement with something on the side while you’re there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like—I don’t know, man. Tutor some kids. Au pair gig? Get verified and monetize your X. ‘Life of an expatriate’ TikTok series. Or any hidden talent, really.”
“All right, now—let’s go point by point here. First, don’t call it X. Really? Two, if you are actually making fun of my Twitter instead of sincerely suggesting a solution, that is my life’s. Work. It’s fine for your unit of thought to be a tweet. Three, there are no middle-aged male au pairs, my dude. What kind of fuckin creeper arrangement is that. Yeah, I’m sure Deutschland welcomes abject failures with open arms, helping them, y’know, speak at the level of five-year-old child while they cook and babysit. What am I on, four? I lost my train of thought already.” I paused, trying to remember his last item. Hal was smirking sidelong at me but simultaneously verifying whether his batting lessons had been inculcated. I sort of enjoyed entertaining him like this, even while I was falling apart, and then I finally remembered: “Yeah, I don’t have a hidden talent. If I had a hidden talent, I would fuckin unhide that shit immediately and make money off it. I have to eat.”
“So fuckin dramatic. You have never struggled to eat in your fuckin life. Fuck outta here.”
I had achieved my prevailing mix of angry-depressed already. It usually comes later in the evening, when I have no more distractions but the ultimate distraction. “Dude,” I just sighed dejectedly. I needed to cry in private and had to stop talking to let the water drain into the ducts. I pictured a TV commercial of clots of leaves getting stuck in your rain gutters, occluding the flow, which is why you need to buy, etc. Scrape the leaves, enclose the gutters, unclog the downspout. Please, please drain. “You—don’t know everything in my life. I actually have gone hungry. Many times.”
I’m not sure he heard me because everyone else jumped up at the crack of Raph’s home run. It was in comic-book lettering, spelling out C-R-R-A-A-A-A-A-C-K!!! over the panel of my Ben-Day-dotted face, providing fortuitous cover as I silently blinked out tears from the dull pain of life. In my delayed standing I didn’t even see where the homer ball had rushed heavenward, but I was glad I wasn’t on the hook for throwing it back into the infield. Plop! Forcing itself in front of me, with zero skills for how to handle the situation. He hadn’t heard me. It was better that way. We’re good friends, and I love him, but that’s not the sort of tier that this relationship is.
And then little Raph’s own existence started to plunge me into sadness. I started thinking about how that entire window had now passed me by, and how I’d wanted a kid for a long time because I knew I could do it right. I knew how to do things right this time, and I wanted to do it right for my own kids. I’d really left all that behind at this point—it wasn’t possible. I actually think there’s maturity in losing hope.
Consciously I refocused my draining eyes on the national pastime. Why are “runs batted in” tracked? How correlated is it with just the batting average? Can you predict the financial success of a player from it? “How early on did you know Raph’d be good at this?” I ventured a topic change.
Hal was a pragmatic man, much more aligned with wrangling the universe than I. “Now my turn for a soapbox,” he opened. “This is all hard work, dude. Em and I really hate this idea of, whatever, he was always gonna be good, it’s a God-given talent. We made him good because we all put in the time. Him, her—me, of all people. You, on the other hand. You are constantly down on yourself because you keep telling yourself you hit some natural ceiling. You think destiny is God-given talents.”
“But I have hit my ceiling. Ceilings, plural. I stopped being good at math at 19. I’ve been out of shape for more than a decade. I am bony in some places and positively ro-fuckin-tund in others. I can’t speak the language I’ve studied for more than half a lifetime.”
“But you haven’t studied it that long, D. Not the speaking part. Not that long. Have you studied speaking for half a lifetime? Have you? You didn’t even want to practice with people here. It took us years to finally get you to go to Germany again.”
“Ya, I’m very aware, Hal. You know, a lot becomes possible when, like, there’s nothing—”
“Don’t go there. Point is that you actually don’t have a good view of how much work you’ve put into something.”
“Ah, but you do, right? You can judge me and you can judge yourself on top of that?”
He dismissed the direct challenge. “I’ve been on Raph’s ass since he was four, when there was an emerging personality that wasn’t, you know, screaming chaos. But I balance it, you know? He has to learn that hard work, over a long-ass period of time, actually pays off. And he doesn’t even know what ‘long-ass period of time’ is with his brain. And then the final-final lesson is that hard work over a long period of time often ends in nothing, too.”
“That’s too harsh of a lesson for anyone to understand. That’s what you’re saying you’re teaching? You’re teaching that when he walks in home from school? I’m not even at peace with what you just said.”
But he was already talking over my indignation before I’d finished. “I’m not explicitly teaching it. I don’t map out weekly homilies for our DoorDash dinner table. You literally just learn this over time when you put in the work and live. You’re an agent experimenting in an environment; you get carrots and sticks. Reinforcement learning, Bruder. Deep RL, baby! What I worked on for you in my first real job.”
“I don’t think you ‘literally just learn this.’ I think you had a good childhood, and it gave you a good adulthood, and it gave you good—great—money. And the money gave you space to think, and the space gave you a kid.”
We were silent for a long time. This is the impasse we always hit, because he was constitutionally incapable of getting how much easier he’s always had it and would always have it, with the heritable curls and the heritable charm. I had lost track of the game; I glanced up at the manual scoreboard through my overgrown hair and Raph and the Angels were still up 1 because of his homer. The humid summer air was ruining my rewear-count tolerance for every article of clothing; it was typically a revolting five for t-shirts at this point, but I’d have to be forgiving during the heat dome. I then turned toward Raph, who was diligently taking practice swings exactly like his father had taught him, trusting that he would be rewarded in his cherubic, prelapsarian innocence—and the continuous chain of life suddenly moved me in a way that’s hard to express. My heart overflowed with vicarious joy, imagining another good soul like Hal’s moving forth in the world, and then, when I realized I was on the outside of all of this, I tumbled into the abyss.
“D. Hey. Hey!” Hand on clavicle. I remembered what I was supposed to do again. “Your life isn’t all that bad, you know.”
“I objectively see that I’ve had a good life, yes. I also despise the entire last era, but it was my life. ‘It’s my life, and I can’t delete it / Is that the life I lead?’ Julian Casablancas. I have to be proud of my life. What choice do I have. I’m more balanced than you think.”
“Nein, I accurately judge your imbalance.” Top of the last inning, 3–2, 2 outs, one on first, one on second.
Yet another long pause, both of us playing out our divergent lives. I pivoted: “You know, you’re the only non-family member who remembered my birthday while I was in Marbach.”
“Non-family member? Offensive, just sayin.”
“All right, Vin Diesel, we’ve never crossed that threshold, but it would mean everything to me if you actually felt that.” Then I overreached. “I wish we could hang out all the time, every day, like family. But I know it’s not your job to fill this gap.” He just coolly snickered and casually adjusted his frame. I’d taken it more seriously than he’d intended.
Hal deflated expectations, plugged the leak. He confessed through clenched teeth, like talking through the grimacing emoji, “I actually remembered the night before because Em reminded me.” Three strikes. Bottom of the youth 9th now.
“I mean, yeah, it totally makes sense. You know there’s actually a term for that? Kinkeeping. You’re offloading the emotional labor of caring so you can be successful in other arenas.”
“Everyone look at the woke fucker over here! Woke fucker alert! Did you want your first birthday text of the day to come from your optometrist’s CRM? I’ll tell Em you said thanks.”
“Thanks, Hal. Truly.”
I was done for the day. Probably for longer.
“Hal.” I had lost myself in the leaf accretion. Hal. “Hal. I don’t know. It seems silly to dream of more than this. It’s never gonna be better than what I’m doing right now with you. D. H. Lawrence has this line I read a few months ago: ‘He had no future in this life. Even if he lived on, it would only be a kind of enduring.’”
“So you just commit sad shit like that to memory, fuckin weirdo? Did you tweet that sad shit?”
“I do because people had more time to think back then and they worked it out in ways that we can’t anymore.”
“You are out of balance once again, my friend. Life, out of balance,” he diagnosed with full confidence. “And you know D. H. Lawrence also traveled to Italy, and Mexico, and the United States. He also seemed at one with the earth. I think he wanted to fuck the earth. What happened to Fräulein Librarian?”
“I would love to go to Italy and Mexico. I would love to see the rest of the United States. You know I couldn’t travel until this year. I’ll always be the guy who never had enough money, even if I finally have some money now. I’ll always be the guy who doesn’t fit in because I can’t talk about my extra-pages passport or my fuckin aristocratic sports in the office.”
“D, this is the thing I’ll leave you with as my kiddo fuckin obliterates everyone this season! Let’s goooooo, Raph!” The stands erupted once again in triumph by proxy. Game over, time for summer vacation number 3. He fully turned to me and looked me in the eye. I had to deflect and look askance, as if my half paying attention could return some power back to me. “You don’t know how to zoom in enough,” he averred flatly. “You are. So obsessed with zooming out and looking at the long arc of your life. Everything you just said, as always, is so zoomed out, so fatal. ‘This is where it eventually is gonna end up, so why bother,’ whatever,” he muttered in a mocking whine. “I don’t know how to plan that out for you, Bruder, but I think you actually need to go the other way and zoom in.”
Raph blithely ran up to us after all the good game, good game, good game, and in his radiant victory, and ceilingless potential, it really did feel like the children were our future. Teach him well, Hal.
*
I trudged home in the unabated swelter, lightweight, graphic t-shirt reaching premature expiry, and two things that Hal had said merged in my mind. In my apartment I looked up my sad-shit notes on Paradiso. Dante looks back on all the planets in Canto XXII and basically has a Pale Blue Dot moment long before the actual Pale Blue Dot moment, realizing the tranquil insignificance of everything on earth from his ultimate vantage point.
So with my vision I went traversing
The seven planets till this globe I saw,
Whereat I smiled, it seemed so poor a thing.Highly I rate that judgement that doth low
Esteem the world; him do I deem upright
Whose thoughts are fixed on things of greater awe.
Dante couldn’t even see a plane’s view of earth, let alone an extraterrestrial view. I thought about the visual power and depth of feeling that he had to have with his medieval cosmology, intuiting what that outer-space perspective would look like and then feel like almost 700 years early. It doesn’t matter but it does. Hard work over a long-ass period of time works and it doesn’t.
I have a high probability of living a long life if I want to, and the unbearable burden of making that time matter. I mean, I might keep going a little while longer because consciousness is miraculous, but imagine doing this for thirty more years.
Or maybe I zoom in instead.