Page 49 of Breakout Year

Akiva

On Monday, he watched the Cosmos game: Eitan wasn’t playing, but he was in the dugout, hoodie on, pants slumped over his socks and slides.

He sat at the dugout railing for most of the game, and the camera kept catching on him as it panned around the ballpark, the announcers recounting a version of The Ankle Incident that mostly sanitized the details.

“Baseball used to be a rougher game,” one said, then went into all the rules changes and procedures the league had put in place to protect players’ bodies.

Baseball was safer. Teams weren’t feeding players greenie amphetamines by the handful.

Shredded pitcher arms could be reconstructed.

Eitan’s ankle, the commentator said, had undergone extensive imaging, as if Goodwin had been merely trying to break his bones and not his will to play.

Still, Eitan was there. That counted for something in the baseball media.

He was there the next two nights, yawning and chewing seeds, and clapping hitters on the back as they cycled through their turns in the batting order, hand always carefully above their belts.

Akiva watched. Edited and watched. Watered his plants and watched.

Proofed Sue’s transcriptions and watched.

Sat down determined to write but the only words that came out were ones of formless longing, lovers separated by the tides of history vastly beyond their control.

No one wants to read depressing crap , Sue once told him.

He was being maudlin. There were worse things, surely, than if he moved with Eitan to an up-and-coming city with—he checked real estate listings for the cities the media said were Eitan’s likeliest landing spots—incredibly competitive rent prices compared with New York.

Of course there was no guarantee that was where Eitan would end up.

Sue had lived in this area for long enough she considered Pennsylvania an obscene distance.

His working relationship with her would not survive a move out to a different coast, and there went Akiva’s chance to be published, even under someone else’s name.

He was being practical, he told himself. He texted Mark. Surely someone who’d married their college sweetheart and settled down to a middle-class life in New Jersey would understand.

Akiva: Eitan’s probably leaving New York

Mark: He decided?

Akiva: He knew from the start this was temporary.

Mark: So you’re going with him?

Akiva: I live here. My job is here.

Mark: Yeah and?

Akiva: What if it doesn’t work out?

Mark: What if it does??

A question Akiva certainly wouldn’t answer. Things didn’t work out: that was sort of the prevailing theme of his life. Things didn’t work out and you made the best of them. Taking giant leaps just led you to faceplant at the bottom of a cliff.

Akiva tossed his phone aside, opened his draft again, typed sentences without seeing them. Some days, writing felt like art and some days it felt like clocking in at the word factory. Today was definitely the latter.

He wrote until the game was over. The Cosmos won; the Blossoms lost. This feed included a postgame show, the commentators breathless over Eitan Rivkin’s Hometown Reunion happening on Friday .

Was it even a reunion if they kicked you out?

Akiva supposed it was, even if some part of this felt like Eitan was being cast as the disgraced son about to crash a dinner party at his family’s country estate.

Akiva made a note of that in his writing journal— bad son returns home, interrupts dinner, symbolically overturns soup tureen onto family portrait .

Then, after a moment, he drew a line through bad .

Eitan wasn’t the problem in all of this.

Still, Eitan would be asked to bear all this himself, in a city that should love him and didn’t. How could anyone not? Akiva certainly?—

Opened his email. Went to the ticket Eitan had forwarded him.

A less than two-hour flight leaving from Newark at the civilized time of eleven thirty in the morning.

Akiva couldn’t go. He had a series bible to update, a million emails to slog through, Sue’s notes to transform into a story, though this iteration was less notes and more vague suggestions.

Along with those, he had Mark’s question that he couldn’t escape: what if something worked out for once?