The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [141]
Just as the slow rolling waves touched his chin he reached a sandbar that exposed him to his hips again. The wind bit through his wet shirt and flak jacket. His teeth chattered loudly. The water, though freezing, felt more comforting than the wind. He sank to dunk his head. His Cards cap stayed on the surface when he went under, as if refusing to participate in whatever asinine shit he was getting into; the waves carried it beyond arm’s reach, into the darkness. He leveled his body to the water and began to swim.
The first dozen strokes felt hard, almost impossible, because of the drag of the vest. But once he’d reached a good speed the vest didn’t hamper him much. He swam past the first buoy, past the second buoy. The campus lights receded behind him. He kept swimming.
When he’d gone what felt like halfway across the lake he slowed to a paddle, his chin atop the dark water, atop of which was dark air. All he could see were stars. There were no gulls out here and nothing to listen to. It seemed possible no one had ever swum to this spot before, so far from shore. Or maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago people did it all the time. Maybe that was their sport. The water seemed to groan beneath the weight of itself, the weight of other water.
He turned around to face the campus, those few little lights pricking the distance. He let his bladder go, peed into the water. It calmed his whole body, if only for a moment.
All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.
He knew it sounded crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he’d ever craved since he’d been born. Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you’d based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.
When the season ended, his teammates, even Schwartzy, gorged themselves on whatever was handy—cigarettes, beer, coffee, sleep, porn, video games, girls, dessert, books. It didn’t matter what they gorged on as long as they were gorging. Gorging didn’t make them feel good, you’d see them wandering around, dazed and bleary, but they were free to gorge and that was what mattered.
Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense. You ate till you were full and then you drank SuperBoost, because every ounce of muscle meant something.