by Gish Jen
Of course, what with the blatant illegality of getting hacked, most potential players had qualms about it. Sign-ups typically involved multiple long conversations which were in themselves quite risky, especially for Eleanor, who held them. In fact, looking back, the greatest wonder of the League may have been that she was never reported—that even as the League expanded beyond friends and friends of friends, people trusted and protected her. Was it because they had heard about her legal work that people kept mum? In any event, they did. They talked to her on the secure line I’d set up, and pondered awhile, and then they almost always made their way down the deflector-lined path to our house as if to be baptized. Are you sure you want to do this? I would ask them when they came. And, Are you fully aware of the risks? To which, solemnly, standing tall, they would invariably answer, Yes. They did not hesitate as they moved toward my wand, and let me say that I could never help but be touched as I waved it over them. At the same time, I could not help but think what a strange new world this was, that had such monsignors in it. Had I really become a kind of Father Baseball? Yet there I was, performing a blessing of the chips. Or was it a hexing?
* * *
—
The first source of recruits had been friends of Eleanor’s—people who had worked with her on various cases and who saw this as a kind of school team for their kids. Next we had discreetly contacted some of my former colleagues, starting with May, my old assistant director, as well as those of our former students who despite Ship’EmBack had somehow managed to stay in the country. Would we ever have enough players for three teams, as we hoped? Reluctant as we were to recruit any of Gwen’s old classmates, we had worried we might not.
But the first batch of kids quietly invited kids they knew, who in turn invited other kids. And so it was that three years later, we had an astonishing nine teams’ worth of Surplus players—some of whom it must be said, were irredeemably unathletic and would just as soon be sitting in their houseboats, playing DumDumGames. For them, the League was a social activity on par with a glee club; if they could have, they would have participated via avatar. Other players, though, were large and strong and coordinated—warrior youth who in another age would have fought for Sparta or the Allies but in this age mostly worried their parents. As one mother bluntly put it, If you let kids this age sit around, they become terrorists.
Was this why the parents were the picture of support? As even with hacked chips we thought it best to vary our locations, parent squads would first scour marooned places for potential playing spots. Then parent squads would paddle over to make additional evaluations, including a wind check—for, what with our ever more blustery world, many places were just too windy for play. Of course, we still set a DeviceWatch during games. We did not want to find out between innings that the place we’d chosen was actually drone-patrolled or, as in the case of a former Ritz hotel, guard-mined. And let me say here that the kids contributed to game logistics with alacrity, too. Being responsible, once a location was set, to inform a teammate of it, for example, they did so with hand signals, lights, semaphores, messages in invisible ink. Inspired by his surname, third baseman Juan Palombo even trained a real live messenger pigeon such as he had read were deployed in World War I to deliver capsules.
But the parents, the parents. For this, the opening game of our third season, the parents—all of whom had gotten hacked so they could attend games—brought bases and a home plate, measuring tapes and a rake. They brought a pitching rubber and mallets; they brought balls and bats. And, of course, they brought treats. No one used a motorboat to transport these things because motorboats were auto-tracked, and, popular as sailing had become, no one used a sailboat, either. The sails were just too conspicuous. Instead it was all kayaks and pedal boats and paddleboards and dinghies, with staggered departure times and elaborate schemes for camouflaging the boats on the other shore. Some of the young people swam—staggering their departures, too, so as not to attract attention, and wearing black neoprene caps that proved such good camouflage they made some parents nervous. As for whether the parental fears were justified, they were not. Once, it was true, a paddleboarder was so startled he dropped his paddle and fell into the water. And once a kayaker grazed a swimming outfielder. The outfielder, though, was not at all hurt; the person rattled was the kayaker, who promptly capsized and lost the orange slices. But these were anxious times. People scanned the waves all the same—grateful, perhaps, to have a risk they could see.
* * *
◆
Real snow was rare these days. Winter in these parts mostly meant sleet—day after day of wintry mix, often whipped by the wild winds of Nor’easters—and spring snow was even more unheard of. But this April Fools’ Day had packed a prank: gobs of melting snow clobbered our heads and shoulders while improbable lengths of white shone elegant as evening gloves on the upper sides of the tree limbs.
Beyond the trees, the ground needed a bit of scraping but was already fairly clear—a former prep school football field, on which I could still make out traces of the old fifty-yard line. At either end of the field, too, the white goalposts maintained their solemn sentry even as between them, some of the kids threw and ducked snowballs. Other kids considered the mud. There were treacherous mounds of yellow-green weeds to contend with as well, but it was the mud that had captured certain imaginations, so that no sooner had we pegged the bases in place than players were practicing their slides, laughing and wiping their hands on their teammates until everyone was streaked with filth.
Of course, Gwen’s team, the Lookouts, were hardly a tidy bunch at any time. Ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-three, they were not only every possible color, shape, and size but had noticeably wide-ranging ideas about appropriate baseball attire: people sported sweatshirts and jeans but also a bowler hat, a cape, a dashiki, and a kilt. Still, all-accepting as they were, they made a good team, and anyone could see that there in their midst, Gwen felt, for once in her life, that she belonged. Never mind the mud. She smiled and smiled, and when she sure enough had to stop to clean out her clumped-up cleats, she did it with a laugh that rang with pure spring happiness. Over the winter, she had had a kind of undecidedness to her, as if her parts were still making their way through a crowd to their destinations. Now Eleanor and I were amazed to see that everything had arrived. Her arms at age seventeen were as long as her babyhood had suggested they would be—her fingers, too—and she was still tall and whippet-like. But now she had the open, proud shoulders of a pitcher and a face that somehow remade her mother’s and mine into something potent: her mother’s high planed cheekbones, for example, made her face difficult to read from a distance, and eyebrows I recognized as my own dark caterpillars had become, on her, slashes. As for whether Gwen herself realized how intimidating a figure she now cut, I doubted it. She was used to being ostracized, of course, but not because of her appearance; she had never developed a faculty for seeing herself from the outside, and Eleanor and I both had. But she was intimidating. Intimidating and promising: In some urgent new way, she seemed to Eleanor and me to whisper, Watch me. And so we did. We watched her.
* * *
—
We flipped an old-time coin such as no one used anymore but did still come in handy for tosses. Heads. The Lookouts were first at bat.
The Jets, their opponents, were also coed. But as we had made no attempt to sort recruits as they signed up and as word about the League had at one point spread to a group of handball players, all of whom had signed up, the Jets were both more male and more athletic than the Lookouts. Indeed, their nickname was the Jocks, and they should probably have beat the Lookouts on testosterone alone.
But in fact, the Jets’ pitcher was new and, hard as he threw, his pitches came straight through the middle of the strike zone. It was as if they were thrown by a PitchBot with just one setting, and that the worst possible one. So the Lookouts managed a couple of hits, even if they did not scor
e, and headed out to the field optimistic.
Gwen, meanwhile, not only had a four-seamer, a changeup, and a curveball, but seemed able to place the ball where she liked. That first inning, the Jets’ first baseman did still hit a line drive into left field for a base hit; their catcher hopped a ball right past our shortstop, too, putting a second runner on base. And after them came the Jets’ shaggy second and third basemen, Gunnar and Bill Apple—identical twins who had been normal-sized kindergarteners back when they were classmates of Gwen’s, but had since grown to be big as bison. They looked as though they belonged on a prairie, not a field. Gwen struck them both out, though, and in the bottom of the second kept their damage to a single and a walk—leaving it to her teammates to keep them from advancing.
Then the Lookouts’ shortstop, Brianna Soros, turned her ankle on one of the weed mounds. We broke out the SprayIce and a QuikAce; Brianna was all right. Since, like all the teams, we had no bench, however, Coach Mabel had to pull in an outfielder to take Brianna’s place. That left no one in center field.
Happily, Gwen stayed ahead in the count on hitter after hitter, and, just as they thought they would, the Lookouts began hitting. But no sooner had they settled in than, in the bottom of the fifth, Gunnar Apple hit a double. Then there was a hit right up the middle to our missing center fielder, and suddenly the score was 3–2. The Lookouts were still ahead, but as one parent put it, the Jets had found their fuel. 4–3. 4–4.
5–4, Jets.
5–5.
The field was finally drying in the warm sun, yet no one mentioned it. Instead, when we broke to have some pie, people chewed tensely. Typically, the pie was a highlight of the afternoon, as Eleanor and Gwen not only filled them with fruit from our own garden but topped them with a kind of conversation-piece crust. Once Gwen drew a Turing machine tape on top, for example, with squares bearing 0’s and 1’s feeding a reader made of pastry dough; it looked like a shoe buckle. And today she had inscribed the crust with the google-eyed C logo of the Chattanooga Lookouts—a partisan act, to be sure, this being her team’s namesake. But it was also a heartfelt salute: for it was as a Chattanooga Lookout that Gwen’s idol, lefty Jackie Mitchell, was pitching long ago when she struck out Babe Ruth. As people did now appreciate knowing. Was Mitchell really just seventeen at the time? they asked. And did she really go on to strike out Lou Gehrig, too? They whistled and shook their heads. But then they squinted up at the sky as if the wisps that had appeared there had never before been seen in our hemisphere.
In the bottom of the ninth, it was 6–5, Lookouts, and getting cool. People did the sports-watcher two-step—moving from one foot to the other, and kicking their standing foot as if to knock some sense into it. One out. A double and a steal. Another out.
Then the Jets’ second baseman came up to bat—Gunnar, that same Apple twin who’d doubled in the fifth inning. Gwen threw him a fastball—strike one—followed by a curveball. Strike two. Now Gunnar eyed her. Though a sweet guy in other contexts, what with the tightness of the score and a Jet on third, he was unmistakably deliberately intimidating. He spat on the ground; he pushed up his sleeves as if to show off his forearms—hams so massive, he could have been Goldilocks’s big brother, somehow stumbled into the dugout of the Three Bears, and hoisting now the bat of the baby bear. He gave a challenging look.
Gwen took off her glove, tucked it between her knees, and redid her ponytail. Feeding it through the back of her cap, she let it expand, then put her glove back on with maddening slowness. In fact, way back when, Gunnar and Gwen had been childhood sweethearts. That was in kindergarten, and they were friends now, but between that bit of complication and the score, Gwen took an especially long moment to gather herself. Of course, Eleanor and I knew that moment and that ritual: the way Gwen looked down—contemplatively, it seemed—staring at the ground until, when she looked back up, it was with a focus you could almost see, that almost had a shape and a volume. She was hardly a terrifying girl, but it was a terrifying look—her prosecutor look, Eleanor called it. Ralph Changowitz, the catcher, was signaling something, but Gwen raised one of her eyebrows—no. A train of clouds sped across the sky. She wound up. Then she threw another fastball so fast Ralph had to ice his hand when he got home. Gunnar said later he never even saw it.
Game!
We finished up the pie, congratulating the Lookouts on their win and the Jets on their playing before heading home. The water was orchid and orange in the setting sun; Eleanor swayed back and forth playfully as we paddled, her loose hair flashing orchid and orange, too.
“What a game!” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed, and laughed in a way that brought to mind my efforts, long ago, to try to explain to my students the word “giddy.” “It was marvelous,” she said. “Marvelous!” And, as happy as I have ever seen her, she continued to sway as above us, Venus appeared, and some space hotels, and some stars.
* * *
◆
At home, we made love the way that old married people do—with more practice and patience than passion perhaps, but no less love and certainly no less risk: for all her daytime forbearance, Eleanor was not above yoga sex, featuring downward dog and some arresting variations on pigeon—positions that threatened to put me in a MediLyft. “Whoa, Nellie,” I moaned—an old joke—to which she ambiguously groaned, and when I murmured, “Nell, Nell, Nell,” she exclaimed, “Grant!” We were happy.
Almost as soon as we had softened into a four-armed heap, though, she wanted to know, “Did your meter work?” To which I answered, “Meter?” Because in truth, it took me a moment to understand what she was asking. But then I came to myself and answered yes. Having scored a DIY laser-beam kit and a first-rate 3-D printer at a recent yard sale, I had moved them into the basement, along with a battery of deflectors to keep the house from knowing. And then with my treasures I had cobbled together a discreet handheld meter to measure ball speed. Which, yes—worried though I was that its green flash might be glimpsed, I had brought to the game where, happily, no one except Eleanor had noticed.
Now she asked me about it in a whisper though we had started running both a white noisemaker and a voice scrambler at night. Can I turn that off? asked the house every evening. Who can sleep with so much noise? Can I turn that off? As for why we nonetheless persisted, it was simple. Having heard that a rebellion against Total Persuasion Architecture had broken out in ChinRussia, we knew that, seeking to capitalize on this, Aunt Nettie would be Redoubling her efforts to outdo them. What exactly that would entail, who knew. Once Redoubling had meant changes in our privacy laws: believing them to give ChinRussia a leg up in AI, we had eviscerated them. And once, it had meant changes in our ethics laws: believing them to hobble our genetics research, we had eviscerated those, too. Of course, Eleanor had fought both changes and paid for it. Besides the incarceration, she had been subjected to TouchShocks, ToeBombs, and more—what we Surplus called distinguished treatment. One ToeBomb had literally cost her a pinky toe but she always joked that the treatment was more distinguished than its target, which was all but vestigial.
Now we braced for whatever might come next and, in the meanwhile, discussed my meter.
“Yes,” I said softly. “It worked.”
“And?”
“Seventy-three miles an hour.”
I knew what Eleanor was thinking.
“Seventeen years old and she’s throwing seventy-three miles an hour,” I went on, just for the marital satisfaction of it. “And she hasn’t even been focusing on speed.” This was true. Gwen had been working on control since without commensurate control, she believed, there was no point in throwing harder. Also, she was infatuated with her off-speed pitches, at which she was so preternaturally good.
“We should tell her,” Eleanor said.
I agreed. But would we? When we had not even told her that our local Enforcer had recently come around, asking about her? Dana
had been an importer of cork yoga mats before Automation and was still covered in Sanskrit tattoos. Last week, though, he had had an agenda in his smile as he asked whether we had heard the news—that baseball had been designated an Official National Pastime! We probably did not need to be told, he went on, that the sport had been languishing since Automation. And, of course, we did know that organized baseball had so roundly resisted Aunt Nettie, it had finally been discontinued. We knew that the great teams had been disbanded—the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Cardinals—and that the great stadiums had been torn down—Fenway and Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium. We knew, too, that the one stadium still standing was mostly used for DestructoTruck duels. Rumor had it that some baseball was still being played in Netted colleges—at places like Net U. But now, Dana said, the real thing was coming back.
“The AutoAmerica Stadium is being fixed up,” he said. “There’s going to be a Team AutoAmerica, too, and programming! Hoopla! The works!” He smiled. “It’s going to be an Official National Pastime!” he said again.
Of course, the last time a national something was announced, all our handphones had vibrated at once. We were SpritzGrammed with champagne scent as a HoloPic of fireworks popped out, along with a command to celebrate! Celebrate what, though, I could not now remember.
“And that’s why we’d love to see Gwen try out for the Official Netted League,” Dana went on. He did not need to explain that there was not going to be a Surplus equivalent. “Her schoolmates said she threw so hard she once killed a Canada goose with a rock.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Her bio-profile, too, suggests baseball could just be her sport. Not to say her grandfather.”
