Free Duplex by Kathryn Davis Page B

person to begin with; the material part of his body including his brain cells and his memory couldn’t forget that fact, even while the cold black wind of soullessness kept blowing through the empty space inside. Besides, baseball is a soulful game and at some point, despite how rich and famous he’d become, Eddie decided he’d had enough.
    There had been a great tent of blue sky above the ballpark, there had been a field of green turf beneath his feet. Walter Woodard and Mary had just entered the owner’s box. “I want it back,” Eddie said, at the exact moment the batter connected with the ball, sending it high into the outfield. “Look!” Mary exclaimed, to which Walter replied, “We’ll see about that.”
    BY NOW MARY HAD GROWN USED TO HEARING HER HUSBAND converse with people who weren’t there. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder who was to blame when Eddie collided with a teammate as they both came flying toward the same ball, crash-landing in front of the Alka-Seltzer sign.
    It was midseason; the game had gone into extra innings. Midges clouded the stadium lights; the fans, in a body, held their breath. Of course Eddie had the ball, he always had the ball. The teammate should never have been there in the first place. A tie game and without Eddie’s game-ending play the Rockets wouldn’t have stood a chance; as it was, they ended up winning. The other player broke four ribs and had been back in the outfield for a while now—he wasn’t anywhere near as popular as Eddie had been, but the accident happened long enough ago that Eddie’s fans had all but forgotten him.
    If the planets are in alignment sometimes what they do is crash into one another, Eddie’s physical therapist explained. When that happens, she told him, you can’t always see the damage.
    She was standing at the foot of the bed, vigorously rubbing his feet with witch hazel, her yellow hair in a heavy braid that draped over one shoulder. When he’d asked her if that was why he was on the disabled list, she’d laughed. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you could say that.” She seemed to find most of Eddie’s questions hilarious.
    For a while after the collision he had been nowhere, in the same place he’d been when he was a boy on the street and got taken away, a place that wasn’t a place, without shape or color or dimension, but—for all that—so beautiful that for the rest of his life the memory of it could make him cry. It was like he saw nothing and then, very small and very far away at first, an avenue of trees and at its foot a triangle of grass with a small pool in the center, its water catching fire in the moonlight. There was a moon overhead, a gold-horned moon—there were fireflies, there were mosquitoes. A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.
    Later he was tired; someone put him to bed. When he opened his eyes he saw a door and an arched window and a woman’s head on the pillow beside him. Their brains weren’t fully formed yet. He had been on his way somewhere; the gates to the city were barred but when he sounded his horn he’d been allowed to enter. To be brave and strong, he knew, was the most wonderful thing of all.
    Something happened. The sky was deep black like at midnight but with a sun in it. The bladed leaves of the plants, the twigs of the sycamores, the tree trunks, and the whole world radiated from where he lay curled on his side looking out the arched window, everything just beginning to settle back into stillness after a period of terrible agitation, as if for a while nothing had remained itself but had spun into shining bits and the bits themselves had gotten mixed together, so that whoever he was lying there had pieces mixed into him of trees and plants and sky.
    He was pretty sure he’d never before seen the woman who was lying beside him, but when she moved closer there was something about the temperature of