The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Enough! I don’t know the details, I don’t want to know the details. What matters is the chemistry sucks right now. All three of you are playing below your capabilities. That’s my opinion, and I’ve told ownership as much, and I’ll tell the press the same when we get home. That’s all for now.”

  End of meeting.

  We lost the last two games of the road trip and flew back to New York. On the plane I slept and dreamed of missed shots. The cabbie who took me back to my Brooklyn apartment asked me how I felt about the trade.

  “What trade?” I asked, and the cabbie just said, “I’m sorry.”

  The Disney Heat were a mediocre team with one big star: Gerald Flynnan, their center. He played with the skills of Hakeem Olajuwon, and he carried their team to the lower rounds of the playoffs each year, but no further. The rest of the team was talented but young, disorganized, and possibly stupid.

  Knicks management had offered me, Elwood, and a first round lottery pick to the Heat in exchange for Flynnan, and the Disney team had taken the bait. The Knicks picked up a dominant center to replace the injured Pharaoh, and to fill his shoes in protecting Vanilla Dunk. And they’d gotten rid of the tension in their frontcourt by unloading Elwood; McFront and Dunk would start.

  What the Heat got was a mid-season mess: an angry, talented star and a tall white guy with a jumpshot. The lottery spot wouldn’t help the team until next year. Elwood and I were flown down and in the Disney uniforms before we knew what hit us, and the coach tossed us into a game before we’d even had a chance to introduce ourselves to the other players.

  The result was an ugly loss, but then the players there seemed pretty used to that.

  The crowd too. The Disney fans were a jaded, abusive bunch, mostly concerned with heckling Coach Wilder for not playing local favorite Earlham “Early” Natt, a talented eccentric who carried the skills of Marvin Barnes. At the start of the game they cheered Elwood and greeted me with shouts of “Where’s Gerald?” but by halftime they were drinking beer and shouting for Early Natt, a request which Coach Wilder ignored except in the final, hopeless moments of each game. Natt looked pretty dynamic when he got in, which explained the crowd’s affection. He also paid zero attention to defense or team play, which explained the coach’s resistance.

  The same pattern held in the two losses that followed.

  That brought us to the all-star break. Elwood and I were 0–3 with our new team, and nobody was particularly happy. I couldn’t figure Elwood—he was playing quiet, walking quiet, and, I suspected, mixing a little thinking in with his brooding. For my part I was just trying to keep my head above water—to my embarrassment, I was too out-of-shape not to be exhausted by starting every night. Plus management and media caught on that I was the communicative one of the new pair, which meant I was answering questions for me and Elwood both.

  The all-star break gave us most of a week before we played again, and Elwood surprised me by suggesting we get out of town. He’d located a beach hotel on Key West with a nearby high-school gym we could rent. I agreed. Without having to say so, we were both avoiding paying any attention to the all-star game, which was sure to be yet another installment of the Vanilla Dunk show.

  Elwood shocked me again by getting up first that morning, to rouse me out of bed. He called up a breakfast on room service; I swear in all our years rooming together I’d never seen him pick up a phone before.

  At the gym he said, “Okay, Lassner. I’m gonna teach your tall white ass how to play a trapping defense.”

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  “What is this punishment for, Elwood? What did I do? Just tell me.”

  “Here—” He threw me the ball.

  And proceeded to do exactly what he’d promised.

  The next day word had got around—possibly with Elwood’s help, I never found out—that a couple of pros were working out in the local gym. Six guys showed up: confident, tall kids out to impress, all lean and strong from boating on the island, a couple of them with real talent. Elwood worked them into the clinic he was giving me, and they and he spent the next four days busting my ass.

  I went back to Miami exhausted, and Elwood still wouldn’t tell me what he was getting at.

  It quickly became clear, however, that he’d been looking at the schedule. The first team we played after the break was the Knicks. That afternoon in practice, while the rest of the team was drilling, he took Coach Wilder aside.

  “Let me call the plays tonight,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “What?”

  “Let me call the plays.” He actually smiled.

  “We’re playing the Knicks.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What are you saying, Elwood?”

  “You traded for me, man. Give me a night to run the show. One night. If you don’t like the results we go back to your way tomorrow. Nobody will ever know.”

  I walked over to show my support—for what, I didn’t exactly know. “Give him a half, at least,” I said.

  “He did this in New York?” asked Coach Wilder. “Called plays?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  Elwood pulled Early Natt off the bench as we took the floor at the start of the game, saying to him only, “Go crazy.”

  I got Elwood aside. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve waited long enough. What’s the deal here, Elwood?”

  “We’re gonna defend these mothers,” he said. “That’s the deal. Our guards can play a zone defense if they hang back. You and me are boxing out Dunk, taking the rebounds, stripping the ball. Don’t hold anything back.”

  “What’s Early doing?”

  “Cherry-picking. Outdunking the Dunk.”

  “I never saw Marvin Barnes play,” I said, “but I didn’t think he could hang with Michael Jordan. Early is stupid, Elwood.”

  “We’re not playing against Michael Jordan,” said Elwood. “We’re playing against Vanilla Dunk. Jordan had an integrated game. The best there ever was. Dunk’s just a show. I’ve played a little one-on-one with Early. He can put on a show if he doesn’t have to think about defense or passing, and if the coach isn’t breathing down his neck. That’s our job, Lassner. Keep Early from having to think about anything. He’ll put on a show. Trust me.”

  Gerald Flynnan, the Knicks’ new center, beat me on the tip-off, so the Knicks came up with the ball. I followed Elwood’s lead—after the week of drills, it was second nature. We charged the ball, my hands up wide and high to block the pass, Elwood’s hands low for the steal off the dribble. Our guards scurried behind us on the zone defense, picking up the slack.

  Otis Pettingale beat us on a headfake and went up. Score: Gulf and Western 2, Disney o.

  One of our guards fed it in to me, and Elwood hissed, “Up to Early!” I did what I was told. Early Natt was halfway up the court. He twisted through three Knicks, not looking back to see if he had any support, and scored. Tie game.

  The second time up the court the ball was in Vanilla Dunk’s hands, and Elwood seemed to go into another time signature. He was all over him. Dunk dribbled back and circled and came up again. I put up my hands and cut off a pass opportunity. Dunk hesitated, and Elwood stripped the ball away. A flip pass upcourt into Early’s hands and we were ahead.

  The crowd went wild. Not because they had any idea what me and Elwood were up to, but because Early was in the game, showing off, doing the only thing he knew how to do: score. The Knicks brought the ball back to us, and this time Elwood took it away from McFront, tipping it into my waiting hands. Not waiting to be told this time, I tossed it to Early. Score.

  The strategy was working, at least for the moment. No team in the league played this kind of defense, and it had the Knicks confused. High on the novelty of it, and the crowd’s response, we roared to a fifteen-point lead by halftime. Elwood ran back to bench and spread his hands in a mute appeal to Coach Elder.

  “This one’s yours,” said the coach.

  In the
second half the Knicks adjusted somewhat, and I got tired and had to sit for a few minutes. Flynnan bulled his way through Elwood for six straight points, and Otis added a couple of outside shots, and they nearly tied it. But Vanilla Dunk looked all flummoxed, and he never got into the game. A few minutes later we opened up the lead again and we ended up winning by five points.

  I took Elwood aside in the locker room. The media all wanted Early Natt anyway. “When I was sitting in the third period I checked my suit,” I said. “It wasn’t working.”

  Elwood just smiled, and made a little pair of imaginary scissors with his fingers.

  “You fucked with my suit?”

  “I just noticed you play better without it, man. You think I didn’t see you were turning it off?”

  “That’s just for my jumpshot!”

  “I saw you in practice in Key West, white boy. You play better without it. Notice I ain’t saying you play good. Just better.”

  “Fuck you, Elwood.”

  It was a nice night, but it was just a night. A fluke loss by the almighty Knicks—it happens sometimes. The Vanilla Dunk Revue went back to cakewalking its way to a championship, while we struggled on, treading water in the middle of our division, barely clinging to our playoff hopes. Surprisingly, Elwood didn’t seem that interested in applying the defensive techniques we’d developed together against any of the other teams. Oh, we trapped here and there, but Elwood didn’t ever take command the way he had. He seemed to go back into a trance, like he’d done when we were first traded. We won our share of games, but nobody was particularly impressed. As for Early Natt, he saw more minutes, but they only seemed to give him more opportunities to blow it, and soon enough he was in the doghouse. Elwood had abandoned him. I guess Elwood liked that one-dimensional game a little better on a hapless black man than he liked it on an arrogant white one, but not so much that he wanted to encourage Early to make it a regular habit.

  Elwood and I were shooting alone in the gym when I asked, “Why don’t we go back to that trapping game?”

  He didn’t even turn around, just sank a shot as he answered. “Element of surprise the only thing makes it work, Bo. Teams’d see through that shit if we hauled it out two nights in a row.”

  “Some great teams won with defense, back—”

  “Shut up, Bo. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “What have we got to lose?”

  “Shut up.”

  Elwood’s playing got more and more distracted, and we went on a losing streak, but I didn’t catch on until two weeks before the end of the season, when the Knicks came to town again. I waited for Elwood to rouse us again, to make a big demonstration, and instead he played in what was becoming his usual trance. He almost seemed to be taking a masochistic thrill in letting Vanilla Dunk run wild.

  The next day I glanced at the papers, and I realized that, for once, Elwood was watching the standings.

  We had to lose three games in the standings to drop out of a regular playoff spot, and into the wild card spot. The wild card team played the team with the conference’s best record in the first round of the playoffs, in a quick best-of-five series, a sort of warm-up for the real playoffs.

  The Knicks, thanks to their win over us the night before, were now the team with the best record, by one game over the Pistons.

  In other words, the victory over the Knicks earlier in the season wasn’t the main point; that was just Elwood finding out if he could do it.

  Elwood and Coach Wilder yelled at each other for a straight half hour in the visiting coach’s office in the bowels of the Garden. In the meantime I was left to play diplomat with the press and the rest of the team. I’d never been in the visitors’ locker rooms of the Garden before, and it frankly got me a little depressed. I’d never dared mention it to Elwood, but I missed the Knicks.

  When they came out it was Coach Wilder who looked beaten. Elwood didn’t say anything to me, but his eyes said he’d won his point. When we got out on the floor he flipped the practice ball to Early Natt, then crooked a finger and beckoned Early over to him.

  “Remember when I told you to go crazy?” he said.

  Early just nodded, smiling defensively. He looked a little intimidated by the roar of the Garden crowd.

  “We gonna do that again. Remember how?”

  Early nodded.

  “Just stay uptown, look for the pass. Stay open, that’s all.” Elwood turned to me, but didn’t say anything, just stretched his arms up in the air. I mirrored them with my own—albeit six inches higher.

  Our moment was swallowed in a roar, as the Knicks came out of the lockers and were greeted by the crowd in the Garden. I looked out and then back down at the Heat uniform on my chest. I felt about as small as a seven-foot guy can feel, at that moment.

  This time I somehow beat Flynnan on the tip-off, flipping the ball to one of our guards. We went up the court and scored, Elwood sinking a jumper from midway out. The Knicks inbounded and I realized I was frozen, that I wasn’t following Elwood into the trap defense. The Knicks got the ball to Vanilla Dunk. Dunk flew upcourt, Elwood dogging his steps, and broke loose for a fabulous mid-air hook shot. I cursed myself.

  Elwood grabbed the ball and hurled it upcourt to Early who ran into a crowd and had the ball stripped away. Defense again. This time I rushed the ball—it was in Otis’s hands—and forced a weak pass to Flynnan, who was too far out for his shot. I jumped on Flynnan, my hands in his face, and heard a whistle. I’d fouled him.

  Flynnan went to the line and hit both shots. 4–2, Knicks.

  Elwood rushed the ball to Early again, passing into a thicket of Knicks, and Early was immediately fouled. Early went to the line and missed one.

  The Knicks came up and Flynnan rolled over me for an easy layup. God, he’s a big motherfucker, I wanted to whisper to Elwood, but Elwood wasn’t meeting my eye.

  Elwood went up, got caught in traffic, and bailed out to one of our guards, who threw up a brick from outside. Flynnan and I fought for the rebound, and Flynnan won. He dumped it out to Vanilla Dunk, who immediately had Elwood all over him. I rushed up from behind and stabbed at the ball.

  Dunk twisted out from between us, head-faked, made a move. The move didn’t come off. He and Elwood tangled up and fell together. A whistle. The ref signaled: offensive foul, Knicks. Number double zero, Alan Gornan. Vanilla Dunk.

  Dunk got up screaming. Elwood shook himself out and turned his back. The ref rushed up between them while a kid wiped the sweat off the floor.

  Then Dunk yelled one word too many.

  “What?” Elwood turned fast and got in his face, real close, without touching. The ref squirted out of the way.

  “I said nigger,” repeated Dunk.

  They both drew back a fist. I grabbed Elwood from behind, so he couldn’t get his shot off. Don’t ask me why I grabbed Elwood instead of Dunk.

  Vanilla Dunk’s punch was off-line. It slammed into Elwood’s shoulder. That was his only shot. The other Knicks were all over him.

  The refs threw them both out of the game, and soon, all too soon, it was restarted. With Elwood gone it was too much a matter of me against Flynnan, and it was Flynnan’s night. I couldn’t hang with him. For help on offense all I had was Early, who seemed completely cowed by the Garden and baffled with Elwood gone. I tried to dump it off to him, but he’d lost sight of the basket, kept trying dumb passes instead. Whereas Flynnan had McFront, who’d found his midrange shot, and was pouring in pull-up jumpers.

  They blew us out. An hour later I was sitting on the edge of my hotel bed, watching it on television. Early Natt and one of our guards were there with me, but the room was silent except for the tube. Elwood had disappeared, so we didn’t have to be ashamed to watch the sportscast.

  It was Vanilla Dunk all the way. He’d run straight to the press, as usual, and the tape of his interview was replayed every fifteen minutes. The commissioner had already decided: both players were available to their teams for the rest of the
series. Elwood would be fined five thousand. Dunk, who’d thrown a punch, would pay fifteen thou. I’d saved Elwood ten grand by grabbing him. And probably saved Dunk a broken jaw.

  They barely even mentioned the fact that we’d lost. I guess the New York press considered that pretty much a foregone conclusion.

  I flipped to MTV just in time to catch Vanilla Dunk’s new video: “(Dunkin’) In Yo Face.”

  Elwood showed up just in time for the second game. I never did find out where he spent that night. For a minute I was afraid he was stoned on something—I’d seen him stoned, and gotten stoned with him, but never before a game—because he looked too happy, too loose. I even wondered for a second if he somehow thought we’d won last night.

  There wasn’t time to confer. He flipped a thumbs-up signal to Coach Wilder, and called Early over to him. The coach just shook his head. A minute later the refs started the game.

  I put my head down and vowed to get physical with Flynnan. I wanted rebounds, I wanted blocked shots, I wanted steals. I wanted Elwood not to hate me, primarily. He still wasn’t meeting my eye.

  Otis missed a shot and Elwood came down with the rebound, and passed it to Early with nearly the same motion. Early ducked underneath Flynnan and jumped up to the height of the basket. Slam.

  The Knicks came upcourt and put the ball in Dunk’s hands. Elwood and I swarmed him. He faked a move, pivoted, then faked a pass, which shook Elwood for half a second. Half a second was all Dunk needed: he went up.

  But I got my hand around the ball, and stuffed his shot backwards, out of his hands. It bounced upcourt, to Early, who was alone.

  Slam.

  The Knicks came back up, and McFront hit from outside. We took it back up and this time Elwood faked to Early and twisted inside himself for a pretty backwards layup. 6–2, Visitors.

  Otis brought it up for the Knicks, and flipped it to Flynnan, inside. I went up and matched his jump, forced him to dump it off or be stuffed. He looked for help, didn’t find any, and Elwood took the ball away from him. Early was waiting upcourt, like a puppy dog. 8–2.