january's pretty bad, november was worse
less than a month until pitchers and catchers, and i find it interesting that we focus on that so intently when it's not like we'll actually be able to see the pitchers and catchers. it's just, like, anything resembling baseball, going on anywhere in the world. i got phoenix built up in my mind like it's two hundred stories tall.
and you know what, it's way too fucking nice in san francisco today. it's been raining in fits and starts and tropical storms all winter, can't stop thinking about what that's gonna mean for the grass and trees once the temperatures climb. but today's good, blue sky and the back door stays open. can't stop thinking, spring is coming, spring is coming. and, you know. hurry the fuck up.
Because I could not write slash as good as ESPN the Magazine, I . . . fucked with the admitted timeline of the ESPN Magazine article. Well, whatever.
This story took just about four months to write. It kept being difficult.
Out There
By Candle Beck
Zito listens to Mulder’s voice on his phone, once, twice, to erase this message press seven. Frantic music in the background and Mulder was plaintive in Florida, trying too hard to be casual, hey man how’s it going just checking in gimme a call when you get a chance. Now he’s in St. Louis and sounds pretty drunk most of the time.
It’s the worst spring of Zito’s life, pink-gray birds following him around like cops and the streets pockmarked. Zito’s whole world is wrapped up in making Danny Haren think he’s cool and getting that sharp fucking look off Rich Harden’s face. He dreams about hugging Bobby Crosby hard enough to break the rest of his ribs, and Mulder is two thousand miles away. Hudson is even farther, but at least they still talk.
Mulder can’t spell worth shit and he writes emails that say stuff like, Did you know that the arch is twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Did you know that the missisippi river is the forth longest in the world. Did you see me hit it off the wall in Chicago last week?
Zito thinks, ‘I’m busy, so fucking busy,’ and doesn’t respond, feeling like he’s been fucked over by the bullpen and other things that aren’t supposed to happen this year.
*
St. Louis fills up with noise when the Cardinals come home. The fans are chipping off pieces of Busch Stadium, prying the metal seat number plates up with their keys, jackknifed over the wall to steal some dirt. Rubble disappears into pockets and the sun moves through the loop of arches like a filmstrip. It’s nine hundred degrees in May, and the back of Mulder’s neck sunburns to almost the exact color of his cap.
All they ever do out here is win. It’s beautiful, one less thing to worry about, like no more earthquakes and no more sociopathic general managers and no more endlessly blue summers. No more dead-end ocean cutting off his escape route, and no more Zito twice-removed like a Polaroid of a Kodak.
Mulder lives in a nice apartment with a blackened view of East St. Louis across the river, and he doesn’t like it very much, the quiet and the stacks of ivory-colored plates in the cupboards that his brother brought him from Chicago.
He has dreams where he brings his hands down and looks to first to check the runner, and Scott Hatteberg’s shoulders swell, his spine cracking as he stretches four inches taller, his jaw getting broad and his eyes dark, the shade of his skin turning like a leaf. Green and yellow melt away and the uniforms are pure white, unmarked. Baseballs come alive and leap out of Mulder’s hands, skyrocketing into the stands, and Mulder chases Zito through the tunnels under the stadium, Zito looking back over his shoulder and whistling songs that Mulder can’t place.
He talks to Crosby and Chavez all the time, but that doesn’t work, and on the outskirts there’s a bar where people don’t recognize him, and he get back late most nights, staggering and forgetting to shut his blinds. Dawn wakes him up in a stupor, and he goes to the ballpark with his eyes swollen and sticky, his mind caught up illogically, ‘better you than me, better you and better me, me then you, better here than there.’ He’s got to find his way out of this.
The red on white on green brings him back to life like nothing else could.
*
When Mulder calls, Crosby will walk away from anybody. Zito is left hanging, holding his guitar with a towel around his neck, a new song stuttering in his head. Crosby’s straight back and pale neck, and Chavez beelines for him, jabs him until Crosby gives him the phone, and then Chavez swears at Mulder for awhile, his arm hooked around Crosby’s shoulders.
Zito goes to find Danny Haren, because Danny Haren never walks away from him. Haren looks weirdly familiar to Zito, though they’ve never even faced each other. He can kinda hear Chavez talking to Mulder, a half a room away, something about the Cardinals’ offense and that must be nice, man, huh, just what you always wanted.
But Mulder always got more run support than any of them. Zito scowls and Haren asks, “What?” owlish with his eyebrows looking physically heavy on his face. Zito shakes his head, never mind, whatever.
Zito’s phone is blinking with a ten-minute-old text message: u won’t believe what happened 2 me last nite.
Zito still doesn’t care. Baseball sucks right now and that’s all he’s got time for. His hands are torn up from trying to stop the skid and he can feel blood running down his wrists, the dents in his forearms like gutters.
Mulder lied, anyway, he talked shit about Oakland to the press and it doesn’t matter if it was out of context. Mulder likes it better out there, though he swore he wouldn’t, he put his hand on Zito’s forehead and said, “nothing beats this,” so there you go. Reason enough.
Crosby’s ribs are broken; Zito can’t get over that. He can see the tan-lines at the edges of the bandages around Crosby’s chest, and it seems like it should be too painful to breathe, certainly too painful to laugh like that at whatever Mulder’s saying.
Zito wants Hudson to come home and cut his hair. He wants Mulder to quit fucking them up in absentia, because it’s stupid and petty and wildly unfair.
*
It gets worse or it gets better, and Mulder’s lost the ability to tell the difference. This team does all the things that the A’s never could, or never wanted to, and Mulder knows it’s a difference of forty million dollars or something like that, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s been playing the game wrong for five years.
Specific weight has been placed on his shoulders, same as always, but Mulder’s not the best pitcher on the Cardinals. It occurs to him in a fever-drunk, sometime in early June, that there was really only a season and a half when he was the best. All the rest of the time there’d been splitters and curveballs slashing in front of him, stealing his place in line. Really fucking strange to realize it now.
Speaking of splitters, Tim Hudson blows into town, all tucked-in shirt and hard backslaps. His accent has gotten impenetrably thicker, and he shows Mulder pictures of his newborn son, rolls up his sleeve and lets Mulder draw the next tattoo on his shoulder in ballpoint pen.
They go out to a different bar than the one Mulder’s been frequenting, so he can show Hudson how people come up to him here and flit their eyelashes, stutter and hold out napkins for him to sign. Hudson doesn’t seem to notice, but then, Hudson never cared about that stuff. He buys Mulder’s drinks for him and says, “I guess Z told you about that psycho chick who kidnapped his iguana, right?”
Mulder blinks and his chest tightens. He’s thrown off by nicknames that were born old and the sudden force of the months kept secret from him. He takes a shot and answers, “yeah, ‘course he did.”
*
Harden pulls him aside, smelling like cheap college-boy beer and Febreeze. His eyes are more gray than blue tonight, and his hand is wide and flat on Zito’s arm as he says fearfully, “We’re never gonna see him again, are we?”
Zito’s phone is ringing in his pocket and, as is typical these days, he doesn’t like that look on Harden’s face. “What-hang on.” He reaches for his phone but Harden snatches it out of his hand and the buzzing green light shines from between his fingers.
“You act like he died,” Harden accuses him, and Zito honestly doesn’t know who he’s talking about, because Zito is drunk and tired like he’s never been before.
“I don’t mean to,” Zito says, confused. “Can I have my phone back now?”
Harden sneers and drops Zito’s phone on the ground, walks away. Zito wants to say, wait dude please, like maybe if he asks real nice Harden will explain things to him, why it still feels like December, why the speed limits seem to have been painted over to read ten miles lower than they used to, why the team isn’t going to St. Louis and the Braves aren’t coming to Oakland. Harden is some strange mix of every pitcher Zito has ever lost, and he’s always known more than he lets on.
But Harden’s back retreats, his neck held stiffly, and Zito picks up his phone. The screen is cracked, a slick blue-green line, shattered right through the heart of Mulder’s name.
*
It’s not hard to talk to the press and Mulder doesn’t get blinded anymore. His ears don’t pop on planes and the pressure has built up in his head until everything sounds fuzzy. It’s the middle of July, and starkly clear that Zito isn’t interested in talking to him, and that’s okay. That’s probably healthy.
Mulder is drunk on wine, his mouth stained red and his balance a thing of the past. Red is the theme of the year, cardinals and bloodshot eyes and cop lights shining on the dirty river, the airplane warning lights on the St. Louis Arch. He can’t stop thinking about all this stuff. Zito is somewhere pitching incredibly well, and Chavez tells Mulder that he’s never seen Zito be better. Chavez would know.
It kills him a little bit, more than the irritation of Zito not returning his calls or the scratch of something unfinished in his mind. The idea that all Zito needed to get back on track was to be alone out there, when everyone might have predicted the opposite.
Mulder wonders if this is the price of being in first place all season. And maybe that’s why they could never go the distance in Oakland, not because of talent but because of heart, all the things that made Oakland brighter and sharper and more fun than here. There were times when what they meant to each other was more important than the game, and he was right to feel sick then, to be dizzy and nervous and ripped up trying to figure out why it seemed so good to be doing something so badly.
Fucked-up priorities and Zito grinning at him on a hotel balcony with a skyline behind him. Zito’s hands were back, clenched on the rail, his shoulders twisted and his chest pushed out. Mulder remembers that he’d been holding a bottle opener, the smooth metal edge dug lightly into his palm, and Zito had been saying something about how there were these doctors, and they were making an artificial heart.
Mulder is lying on the couch in his apartment, watching his phone on the coffee table. He can’t close his eyes because his head will spin, but there are no fixed points to concentrate on here.
Zito had liked the idea of an artificial heart very much, tapping his fingers on Mulder’s chest, like, maybe you can be first on the donor list. And Mulder had been uncertain, appreciating the thump of Zito’s fingers on his sternum, nice hollow sound and a jerk like he’d been jumpstarted. They should have been studying hitters, comparing notes, better preparing themselves for the war that lay ahead.
They’d done everything wrong, Mulder can see that now. Drunk in St. Louis and dreaming about the four-hour drive to Chicago, sweet home and the A’s in town to face the White Sox, and Mulder’s childhood fidelity would be uncomfortably weighed against that of his twenty-second year. It isn’t a fair fight.
He won’t go to Chicago, he can’t. Even if his off-day coincides, there’s nothing for him there. Zito would laugh in his face, and Mulder hates that about him.
*
Zito doesn’t get home in time to catch SportsCenter most nights, so he turns on ESPN News, usually kinda drunk, and he’s thankful that there’s not much else going on in the world that’s not baseball.
He waits through the other games, blinking at his own team’s highlights like he wasn’t there to see it, and the flash of red makes his throat catch, though sometimes it’s Cincinnati and sometimes it’s Anaheim and it doesn’t matter. It’s a new instinct.
One out of every five nights, he gets to see Mulder, wearing the number of thirty and making Zito’s head hurt; he keeps thinking he must be imagining it. He’s happy that nobody else wears seventy-five, he’ll never have to give it up.
Zito knows how Mulder’s doing better than he did when they were teammates. Hudson’s hurt again and he leaves long messages on Zito’s phone, bitching about the drenched heat and the wasp stings on his arms. Zito can see it perfectly, but he can’t call Hudson because it’s four in the morning in Atlanta and Hudson’s kids are still very young.
Mulder isn’t calling him as often anymore, which should be more of a relief than it is. The run the A’s are on feels like flight, or arson, or something, and Zito keeps waiting for that to matter.
There are rolls of film that need to be developed on Zito’s kitchen table, little black canisters with gray tops. He’s gotten skittish, because he doesn’t remember when he took these pictures and they could be anything. Zito’s so fucking tired of being surprised and having to relive his misery in photographs.
Crosby, who is long-recovered, or at least able to swing like it, feels obligated to keep Zito up to date on what’s happening in St. Louis, and Zito never bothers to tell him that it’s unnecessary. Zito sees everything on tape-delay, watches the loop of ESPN News for two or three hours, until his fingers are bleeding and the sun is coming up in the city where Mark Mulder lives.
*
Mulder calls Hudson and Hudson answers, which is surprising even though it shouldn’t be. Hudson has been getting very little sleep recently, Mulder can tell by the slur in his voice and the way he keeps trailing off and then saying, “you know?” like his brain couldn’t quite make it to the end of the sentence but he still recognizes that the end is there somewhere. Mulder can’t follow along as well as he used to. He can’t do anything as well as he used to.
Mulder is in a parking lot somewhere, a long stretch of asphalt between him and the team bus, which sits patiently all red and silver and shiny. The skin of Mulder’s ears is peeling, itching him without pause, and all three of them are on the road right now, Zito’s in Minnesota and Hudson’s in New York City and Mulder’s not really sure where he is, but it’s not home.
His teammates are gathering at the bus, sharply dressed and dragging roller suitcases. Half of them are on their phones, too, grinning and cocking their chins at each other.
Mulder brings the conversation around to the past easily enough, like it’s the natural progression of anything they might talk about. The pitch and tone of Hudson’s voice picks up, even as a child begins to cry behind him. Mulder remembers Hudson bringing his family on road trips sometimes, Zito cursing without thinking and Hudson slapping him upside the head, try not to scar my kids, motherfucker. And everybody laughing.
They’re talking about how things used to be, and from there, it’s not hard for Mulder to say, “Heard from the kid recently?”
Hudson pauses, tells him yeah. Mulder swallows, wanting to ask what they talked about and did he say anything about me and you guys aren’t supposed to recover from this without me. But instead he says, “They’re doing all right, huh?”
“They always do,” Hudson replies, and then it’s quiet for a moment, the rumbling of the bus and the rattle of plastic wheels on the asphalt. Eventually, Hudson wants to know, “When’d you last talk to him, anyway?”
Mulder considers lying, but Hudson will likely relay this to Zito and Mulder can’t stand being caught out like that. “It’s been awhile,” he answers, and his mind ticks painfully, ‘eight months.’
Eight months and the world more precarious with each day, like the sky is shrinking.
“What happened, Mark?” Hudson asks, tired and curious and murmuring to his daughter, only half paying attention.
Mulder smiles and closes his eyes, his whole body hurting. “Nothing,” he says, and that, incredibly, is the truth.
*
Zito wakes up to his phone ringing and there’s some dream, Mulder in dark jeans and a hoodie the color of a burn mark, navy blue cap pulled over his eyes, saying Zito’s name and blending perfectly into the shadows and Zito spins, but there’s nothing, and he spins again, still nothing, he’s alone and now Mulder is laughing at him, black on black. His phone is ringing, beat-boxing and shaking on the bedside table, and Zito can feel the tiny little boy voice that he hates crawling up his throat, mark? mark?
He falls off the bed, taking a pillow with him, and doesn’t mean to answer the phone like that, “mark?”
There’s a very long pause, and then Eric Chavez is saying, “Buzz. Try again.”
Zito doesn’t understand this, and Eric Chavez has known him for at least a hundred years, and Zito mumbles, “hey,” hearing everything in lowercase, a dropped register.
“You’re late, dude. And I think maybe you were talking in your sleep.” He sounds like he’s eating something, and Zito doesn’t know how Chavez has survived a mother and two wives without manners being smacked into him.
“I’m up now.” Zito’s mind clicks slowly. “I’m late?”
“Way late. You were supposed to come to dinner.”
Zito’s curled up around the pillow on the floor, and he would have sworn it was the middle of the night. The last thing he remembers is being inhumanly tired, catching sight of himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator and his eyes had looked like bullet holes.
“Sorry,” he says insincerely, yawning. “Forgot to set my alarm.”
“Yeah yeah. You’re always doing that.”
Zito wants to go back to sleep and not have to think about words anymore. “Bad habits die hard.”
“I think you’ve got that wrong.” Chavez goes quiet and Zito blinks at the carpet, right under his face so that he can see every fiber. The shades are open and the city light bleeds in all Halloween orange and sap yellow. “You should call him, you know.”
Zito closes his eyes, forcing himself to remember that Chavez isn’t all that bright. He once got them irreparably lost because the map he’d gotten off the internet was for the Kansas City in Kansas, not the one in Missouri. Five miles away from where they’d intended to be, somehow a whole different state.
“Thanks for the advice, kitten,” he says tonelessly, and Chavez gets roughly angry just like Zito knew he would, calls him a motherfucker and hangs up. Zito scrapes his forehead on the carpet and he’s on the twenty-third floor, in a soundproof room, and up here the quiet is more real than the light.
*
It’s quickly September, and then Mulder is pitching ever-so-slightly better than Greg Maddux, and the St. Louis Cardinals clinch the division. Nobody’s very surprised; they could see it coming even if the telescope was turned around backwards.
The champagne hurts his eyes and his hair spikes, sticky patches under his ears and on the back of his neck. He doesn’t get a chance to shower before they’re being rolled out of the clubhouse, and in the parking lot their voices echo and there is a crowd pressed up against the chain-link fence, hollering and cheering, calling their names.
It’s dark enough that Mulder can’t see the red of the caps and shirts, the bloody flags. He can believe for a moment that there is green and gold on the other side of the fence, though never was Oakland this warm in September, and never was the crowd this big after the A’s had won the division.
He’s got a hand on someone’s shoulder and he can feel a fist against his back. There’s a high tuneless beeping in his ears, and somebody yells at him, “Dude, isn’t that your phone?”
Mulder waves it off. Nobody important could call him tonight, because everybody important is out there.
They go to some bar and it’s a mess of faces, tear-streaked, hugging him so tightly he could feel his ribs give under the pressure. Mulder has never known unconditional love like this, that all he had to do was wear a uniform and beat Greg Maddux and now these people would die for him.
His phone rings many more times, but it’s too loud to hear. It’s not until he gets home, stumbling drunk, that he sees the two missed calls from Zito’s phone, and the briefest message Mulder can imagine, after nine months of silence:
Congrats on the clinch. C U in October?
And Mulder wants to take the question mark away. He wants to lie down right here on the floor and sleep until it’s time to go to San Diego.
He laughs until his eyes go white, and texts back, can’t wait, his heart pounding hard.
*
Zito is drunk too, drunk tonight and drunk forever and imagining the signal thrown up from his phone and bouncing off a satellite, spiraling like radar back through the earth, arrowed into Missouri, finding Mulder out there with accuracy that couldn’t be believed.
He can only do it with his eyesight all fucked up the way it is, the room waltzing low in his mind. He’s thinking about the last time they saw each other, Mulder showing up at Zito’s apartment in Hollywood a couple of weeks after he’d been traded, and Mulder’s grin had been as hard as a line shot up the middle. Zito’s reflexes were slow from the off-season.
Mulder had leaned in his doorway, his arms eerily long, hands casting big shadows on the wooden floor. He’d said, over and over, “I don’t know, man,” and at one point he’d put his hand on Zito’s stomach, looking suddenly surprised.
Zito had counted to twenty in his head, feeling his muscles jump up against Mulder’s hand, staring at Mulder until he was sure his eyes had turned blue. Mulder’s throat moved and he said again, slowly, “I don’t know, man,” and when Zito had rolled his eyes and turned away, Mulder’s fingers caught on his belt and then fell away from him, and Zito bit open the inside of his cheek, copper and warm inside his mouth, nothing else.
Mulder had passed out on Zito’s bed and Zito had taken the couch. He’d woken up with a bruise on his arm that he didn’t remember. Mulder was gone, the bed neatly made and a pot of coffee congealing on the kitchen counter.
So now he’s drunk and Mulder is going back to the postseason, and the A’s might still, but probably won’t. Zito wants to see him again, the particular run of Mulder’s neck and the flat angle of his cheek. Mulder’s stomach like a plank that Zito could walk.
He’s tired of being mad at Mulder for things that happened months and years ago. He wants some new stuff.
Zito waits, holding his phone in his hand, and hours pass and Mulder doesn’t call him back. Zito supposes that’s only fair. He crash-lands into unconsciousness and he’s too far gone to feel the phone buzzing in his hand, four in the morning in St. Louis.
*
Mulder gets to San Diego in a wash of flashbulbs and pink-purple sky, knee-buckling pretty down here in California in October. They won the first two games in St. Louis, but Mulder’s been two games up before, he knows not to trust it.
He wants to rent a car and drive around town, looking for the places that Zito told him about once upon a time, the Circle-K with Zito’s blood sunk into the asphalt, the beach where Zito’s surfboard used to stick up out of the sand like an exclamation point, the ground under the far bleachers at the high school littered with the ends of jays and crushed beer cans.
That’s not what he’s here for, though. There’s no one in the whole world who expects the Padres to beat the Cardinals tomorrow, though there are people in this city who might wish for that, and one of them maybe used to be one of Mark Mulder’s best friends.
But they were never really that close. They were situational. Mulder keeps trying to remember if he even liked Zito that much.
The hotel room is nicer than any he’s ever stayed in, and he supposes that’s what the extra forty million dollars can afford, along with the first baseman who shoots sparks from his fingers and the center fielder who flies.
He’s half-asleep, half-drunk, unsure, is he starting tomorrow? For the second time in his life, Mulder is acutely aware that a teammate of his will win the Cy Young, but it’s important to not think about that tonight, with the desert and the ocean outside his window and the worst team ever to win a division title waiting to be decimated in a brand-new ballpark in a few hours.
The phone rings and someone at the desk says that his brother wants to come up and see him. Mulder’s lost, because he just talked to both his brothers and they plan to cook out tomorrow afternoon and watch the game on the satellite television.
Mulder says, “okay, let him up,” out of pure curiosity more than anything, and leaves the door open with the deadbolt thrown and resting against the frame. He lies back on the bed and watches the ceiling duck and roll.
“Isn’t this just how I left you?” Zito asks.
Mulder blinks at the ceiling, dry-mouthed and praying for cracks and stains, like in Triple-A motel rooms and the place Zito had lived when they’d first come up at the turn of the century, but the hotel is very nice and the ceiling is perfect-white and smooth.
“Dude,” Mulder says, shocked without reason, because of course Zito would show up on the night before the third game, with Mulder’s left shoulder feeling worn down to a nub and his mind stuck endlessly in the past.
He can hear Zito smiling. “Hi.”
Mulder sits up, which is a bad idea and he almost retches. He stares resolutely at the spot between Zito’s eyes until things settle down. Zito’s always been pretty good at being still. Both of them have.
Zito comes over and sits down on the bed beside him. It fucks up Mulder’s equilibrium. He’s got nothing to focus on. It’s been ten months since they’ve seen each other. Not that he’s been keeping track. Zito’s got the ruin of another season on his face, the second time in his career that he hasn’t made the postseason, and at least Mulder’s got that on him.
Ten months, and Zito looks way too old.
“You were on last night,” Zito tells him.
Mulder is trying to think, it must be strange because Zito doesn't watch the postseason. Was it really just yesterday? The very last October in Busch Stadium, and their certainty in the seventh inning that the wood and metal of the stands would give out, the sea of red would crash down upon them. The infielders eyeing the sky warily, the relievers crossing themselves in the bullpen, protect us against the fifty thousand. As if anything could.
“Thanks,” Mulder replies. He lies back down and after a second, Zito lies down beside him. Mulder can taste metal in his mouth and feel Zito’s arm against his own, though the surface of his skin is otherwise numb.
He doesn’t want to think about baseball tonight. His whole life has been baseball this year. He’s not sure if it’s enough anymore.
Mulder has dreamed for months of facing Zito in the World Series, and it’ll never happen. Nothing that good ever happens to him. Although, stuff that bad always happens to him, so who knows.
Mulder’s wondering if this line of thought makes any kind of sense, and Zito wants to know, “What are you gonna do if you have to face Huddy for the pennant, man?”
Of course that’s what Zito would want to know. Hudson is still losing-by-bullpen, like a curse, a black mark on his forehead that sets him apart: break this man’s heart. Break it again and again because it’ll grow back in the off-season. There’s a skewed kind of perfection in Hudson pitching for the Atlanta Braves after his awful history of falling short.
“Gonna beat him,” Mulder says, picturing it in full Technicolor. “And hit a homerun. Or, no. A double. Then steal third.”
Zito snorts a laugh, and Mulder hears the air tear. “You’ll steal third the day I sprout fucking wings.”
“Turn over, let me check,” Mulder says without thinking, and then his face heats, because he’d like for Zito to turn over. He bites his tongue. “You guys did good this year, you know?”
“Yeah,” Zito sighs. “So everybody keeps telling me.”
Mulder rolls his head to the side. He wonders if Zito’s drunk too, because it’s been ten months but they’re talking like they just woke up together on the plane. Zito’s face is closer than Mulder can ever remember, but he’s got to remember that he’s pretty drunk and more favored than he ever was when he played for the Oakland Athletics.
Zito doesn’t have any freckles. His eyelashes are longer than any girl Mulder’s ever dated. Mulder can remember the feel of Zito’s stomach under his hand, believing intently in that moment that Zito would close the space, he would be okay because Zito would do all the work.
“Nobody thought you’d do anything, is why.”
“What, because you weren’t there anymore? Nice, dude.” Zito doesn’t sound mad. Zito never really sounds mad, just hurt, which is probably worse, and not to mention the fact that Mulder would like to injure him right now, if only because he has heard Zito’s voice break before.
It’s just. It’s been a long time.
“Me and Huddy and J.D. Everybody.” Mulder swallows, feeling something thick move down his throat. “And you’re wrong, you know. You didn’t leave me. I left you.”
Zito is quiet for a while. Mulder counts the seconds, and he gets to two hundred and figures he might as well fall asleep.
“You didn’t have a choice,” Zito says eventually, and shifts so that his arm overlaps Mulder’s, the bones of their elbows pressed uncomfortably together. He’s still not looking at Mulder.
“Maybe I did,” Mulder tells him, his breath hitting the line of Zito’s jaw. “Maybe if I’d, like, handcuffed myself to you. And refused to leave. Maybe Billy would have said ‘fuck it.’ And fuck Danny Haren, man, seriously.”
Zito flinches, and Mulder wonders morbidly if Zito’s spent the season fucking Danny Haren. He decides he doesn’t care.
“We should have hid Huddy, you know? He’s little, he coulda fit anywhere.” Mulder’s slurring now, the fuzz in his head tangible like shredded cotton. “And you, I coulda pretended you were me. Or I was you. Or something. And then we coulda still been on the same team. I just. I don’t like being on a different team, man.”
Zito turns, finally, and looks at him. Mulder’s never really liked Zito’s eyes, the way they look too hot in the summer time and he’s never seen them in the winter. Mulder doesn’t know what’s happening right now.
“Me neither,” Zito says low.
Mulder’s brow furrows. “But you’re not on a different team.”
Zito’s teeth appear, a match-thick line of white digging into his lower lip. He shakes his head awkwardly against the bed and tells Mulder, yeah I am, and then his hand is on Mulder’s stomach.
Mulder looks back to the ceiling, but that’s never helped. Zito is sliding closer to him, Mulder can feel Zito all hot against his side, hair rustling on Mulder’s forehead. Zito’s shoulder presses against Mulder’s and that hurts, an extra pressure that he doesn’t need right now.
“Kinda fuckin’ useless, man,” Mulder mumbles, and Zito’s mouth opens on his face, the shallow dent of Mulder’s cheek, and Mulder shivers. He thinks again and again that it didn’t happen in five years and that’s reason enough for why it shouldn’t happen now.
But he does want Zito, a spade shaped and dug into his chest. Zito’s breath is on his mouth. Mulder is drunk like maybe being drunk is the cure for the life he’ll live out there with nobody and nothing, chasing the Oakland A’s even when he’s got a twenty-game lead. Even when they don’t play in the same league and will never meet in October.
Zito pushes his hand up under Mulder’s shirt and bites his ear, says quietly, “so goddamn tired of you being gone.”
Mulder jerks up, and his hand buries itself in Zito’s hair. Zito has always had fucked-up hair, worse when Hudson was cutting it for him, and Mulder thinks sharply of Zito at the start of 2004, clean-cut and his ears showing for the first time in years. Mulder hardly recognized him.
Zito’s mouth is curved up and Mulder is allowed to kiss him if he wants to, or shove Zito off the bed to snap his knees on the carpet. He’s allowed to turn Zito over onto his stomach and check for wings.
He pulls Zito’s head down and Zito’s mouth attaches to his neck. Mulder is going to figure this out, any second now, but it’s hard to keep track of that. Zito’s fucking with his sweatpants, tugging out the waist and slingshotting it back. Mulder could have every kind of sex there is with Zito, but it won’t change anything. It never could.
Handcuffs are for shit. Zito’s just trying to fuck him up because Mulder’s playing for the only team in major league baseball that won a hundred games this year.
He pushes at Zito until Zito gets the hint and starts moving his mouth down the line of Mulder’s body, and Mulder knows about teeth on his stomach and a rattling chord of fingers on his neck, knows about the first week after your team gets knocked out, when everything stupid seems like a good idea.
He knows about Zito, still and forever. They were never that close, but they’ve always been good at playing to the cameras. It wasn’t hard to make believe there was something more complicated between them than low-grade animosity and a bad rivalry that never brought them anything worth having.
Zito bites Mulder’s hip, stone-white and sharp as pebbles, and Mulder can only think that it was better when Zito wasn’t speaking to him. Silence could never hurt like this.
THE END
and you know what, it's way too fucking nice in san francisco today. it's been raining in fits and starts and tropical storms all winter, can't stop thinking about what that's gonna mean for the grass and trees once the temperatures climb. but today's good, blue sky and the back door stays open. can't stop thinking, spring is coming, spring is coming. and, you know. hurry the fuck up.
Because I could not write slash as good as ESPN the Magazine, I . . . fucked with the admitted timeline of the ESPN Magazine article. Well, whatever.
This story took just about four months to write. It kept being difficult.
Out There
By Candle Beck
Zito listens to Mulder’s voice on his phone, once, twice, to erase this message press seven. Frantic music in the background and Mulder was plaintive in Florida, trying too hard to be casual, hey man how’s it going just checking in gimme a call when you get a chance. Now he’s in St. Louis and sounds pretty drunk most of the time.
It’s the worst spring of Zito’s life, pink-gray birds following him around like cops and the streets pockmarked. Zito’s whole world is wrapped up in making Danny Haren think he’s cool and getting that sharp fucking look off Rich Harden’s face. He dreams about hugging Bobby Crosby hard enough to break the rest of his ribs, and Mulder is two thousand miles away. Hudson is even farther, but at least they still talk.
Mulder can’t spell worth shit and he writes emails that say stuff like, Did you know that the arch is twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Did you know that the missisippi river is the forth longest in the world. Did you see me hit it off the wall in Chicago last week?
Zito thinks, ‘I’m busy, so fucking busy,’ and doesn’t respond, feeling like he’s been fucked over by the bullpen and other things that aren’t supposed to happen this year.
*
St. Louis fills up with noise when the Cardinals come home. The fans are chipping off pieces of Busch Stadium, prying the metal seat number plates up with their keys, jackknifed over the wall to steal some dirt. Rubble disappears into pockets and the sun moves through the loop of arches like a filmstrip. It’s nine hundred degrees in May, and the back of Mulder’s neck sunburns to almost the exact color of his cap.
All they ever do out here is win. It’s beautiful, one less thing to worry about, like no more earthquakes and no more sociopathic general managers and no more endlessly blue summers. No more dead-end ocean cutting off his escape route, and no more Zito twice-removed like a Polaroid of a Kodak.
Mulder lives in a nice apartment with a blackened view of East St. Louis across the river, and he doesn’t like it very much, the quiet and the stacks of ivory-colored plates in the cupboards that his brother brought him from Chicago.
He has dreams where he brings his hands down and looks to first to check the runner, and Scott Hatteberg’s shoulders swell, his spine cracking as he stretches four inches taller, his jaw getting broad and his eyes dark, the shade of his skin turning like a leaf. Green and yellow melt away and the uniforms are pure white, unmarked. Baseballs come alive and leap out of Mulder’s hands, skyrocketing into the stands, and Mulder chases Zito through the tunnels under the stadium, Zito looking back over his shoulder and whistling songs that Mulder can’t place.
He talks to Crosby and Chavez all the time, but that doesn’t work, and on the outskirts there’s a bar where people don’t recognize him, and he get back late most nights, staggering and forgetting to shut his blinds. Dawn wakes him up in a stupor, and he goes to the ballpark with his eyes swollen and sticky, his mind caught up illogically, ‘better you than me, better you and better me, me then you, better here than there.’ He’s got to find his way out of this.
The red on white on green brings him back to life like nothing else could.
*
When Mulder calls, Crosby will walk away from anybody. Zito is left hanging, holding his guitar with a towel around his neck, a new song stuttering in his head. Crosby’s straight back and pale neck, and Chavez beelines for him, jabs him until Crosby gives him the phone, and then Chavez swears at Mulder for awhile, his arm hooked around Crosby’s shoulders.
Zito goes to find Danny Haren, because Danny Haren never walks away from him. Haren looks weirdly familiar to Zito, though they’ve never even faced each other. He can kinda hear Chavez talking to Mulder, a half a room away, something about the Cardinals’ offense and that must be nice, man, huh, just what you always wanted.
But Mulder always got more run support than any of them. Zito scowls and Haren asks, “What?” owlish with his eyebrows looking physically heavy on his face. Zito shakes his head, never mind, whatever.
Zito’s phone is blinking with a ten-minute-old text message: u won’t believe what happened 2 me last nite.
Zito still doesn’t care. Baseball sucks right now and that’s all he’s got time for. His hands are torn up from trying to stop the skid and he can feel blood running down his wrists, the dents in his forearms like gutters.
Mulder lied, anyway, he talked shit about Oakland to the press and it doesn’t matter if it was out of context. Mulder likes it better out there, though he swore he wouldn’t, he put his hand on Zito’s forehead and said, “nothing beats this,” so there you go. Reason enough.
Crosby’s ribs are broken; Zito can’t get over that. He can see the tan-lines at the edges of the bandages around Crosby’s chest, and it seems like it should be too painful to breathe, certainly too painful to laugh like that at whatever Mulder’s saying.
Zito wants Hudson to come home and cut his hair. He wants Mulder to quit fucking them up in absentia, because it’s stupid and petty and wildly unfair.
*
It gets worse or it gets better, and Mulder’s lost the ability to tell the difference. This team does all the things that the A’s never could, or never wanted to, and Mulder knows it’s a difference of forty million dollars or something like that, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s been playing the game wrong for five years.
Specific weight has been placed on his shoulders, same as always, but Mulder’s not the best pitcher on the Cardinals. It occurs to him in a fever-drunk, sometime in early June, that there was really only a season and a half when he was the best. All the rest of the time there’d been splitters and curveballs slashing in front of him, stealing his place in line. Really fucking strange to realize it now.
Speaking of splitters, Tim Hudson blows into town, all tucked-in shirt and hard backslaps. His accent has gotten impenetrably thicker, and he shows Mulder pictures of his newborn son, rolls up his sleeve and lets Mulder draw the next tattoo on his shoulder in ballpoint pen.
They go out to a different bar than the one Mulder’s been frequenting, so he can show Hudson how people come up to him here and flit their eyelashes, stutter and hold out napkins for him to sign. Hudson doesn’t seem to notice, but then, Hudson never cared about that stuff. He buys Mulder’s drinks for him and says, “I guess Z told you about that psycho chick who kidnapped his iguana, right?”
Mulder blinks and his chest tightens. He’s thrown off by nicknames that were born old and the sudden force of the months kept secret from him. He takes a shot and answers, “yeah, ‘course he did.”
*
Harden pulls him aside, smelling like cheap college-boy beer and Febreeze. His eyes are more gray than blue tonight, and his hand is wide and flat on Zito’s arm as he says fearfully, “We’re never gonna see him again, are we?”
Zito’s phone is ringing in his pocket and, as is typical these days, he doesn’t like that look on Harden’s face. “What-hang on.” He reaches for his phone but Harden snatches it out of his hand and the buzzing green light shines from between his fingers.
“You act like he died,” Harden accuses him, and Zito honestly doesn’t know who he’s talking about, because Zito is drunk and tired like he’s never been before.
“I don’t mean to,” Zito says, confused. “Can I have my phone back now?”
Harden sneers and drops Zito’s phone on the ground, walks away. Zito wants to say, wait dude please, like maybe if he asks real nice Harden will explain things to him, why it still feels like December, why the speed limits seem to have been painted over to read ten miles lower than they used to, why the team isn’t going to St. Louis and the Braves aren’t coming to Oakland. Harden is some strange mix of every pitcher Zito has ever lost, and he’s always known more than he lets on.
But Harden’s back retreats, his neck held stiffly, and Zito picks up his phone. The screen is cracked, a slick blue-green line, shattered right through the heart of Mulder’s name.
*
It’s not hard to talk to the press and Mulder doesn’t get blinded anymore. His ears don’t pop on planes and the pressure has built up in his head until everything sounds fuzzy. It’s the middle of July, and starkly clear that Zito isn’t interested in talking to him, and that’s okay. That’s probably healthy.
Mulder is drunk on wine, his mouth stained red and his balance a thing of the past. Red is the theme of the year, cardinals and bloodshot eyes and cop lights shining on the dirty river, the airplane warning lights on the St. Louis Arch. He can’t stop thinking about all this stuff. Zito is somewhere pitching incredibly well, and Chavez tells Mulder that he’s never seen Zito be better. Chavez would know.
It kills him a little bit, more than the irritation of Zito not returning his calls or the scratch of something unfinished in his mind. The idea that all Zito needed to get back on track was to be alone out there, when everyone might have predicted the opposite.
Mulder wonders if this is the price of being in first place all season. And maybe that’s why they could never go the distance in Oakland, not because of talent but because of heart, all the things that made Oakland brighter and sharper and more fun than here. There were times when what they meant to each other was more important than the game, and he was right to feel sick then, to be dizzy and nervous and ripped up trying to figure out why it seemed so good to be doing something so badly.
Fucked-up priorities and Zito grinning at him on a hotel balcony with a skyline behind him. Zito’s hands were back, clenched on the rail, his shoulders twisted and his chest pushed out. Mulder remembers that he’d been holding a bottle opener, the smooth metal edge dug lightly into his palm, and Zito had been saying something about how there were these doctors, and they were making an artificial heart.
Mulder is lying on the couch in his apartment, watching his phone on the coffee table. He can’t close his eyes because his head will spin, but there are no fixed points to concentrate on here.
Zito had liked the idea of an artificial heart very much, tapping his fingers on Mulder’s chest, like, maybe you can be first on the donor list. And Mulder had been uncertain, appreciating the thump of Zito’s fingers on his sternum, nice hollow sound and a jerk like he’d been jumpstarted. They should have been studying hitters, comparing notes, better preparing themselves for the war that lay ahead.
They’d done everything wrong, Mulder can see that now. Drunk in St. Louis and dreaming about the four-hour drive to Chicago, sweet home and the A’s in town to face the White Sox, and Mulder’s childhood fidelity would be uncomfortably weighed against that of his twenty-second year. It isn’t a fair fight.
He won’t go to Chicago, he can’t. Even if his off-day coincides, there’s nothing for him there. Zito would laugh in his face, and Mulder hates that about him.
*
Zito doesn’t get home in time to catch SportsCenter most nights, so he turns on ESPN News, usually kinda drunk, and he’s thankful that there’s not much else going on in the world that’s not baseball.
He waits through the other games, blinking at his own team’s highlights like he wasn’t there to see it, and the flash of red makes his throat catch, though sometimes it’s Cincinnati and sometimes it’s Anaheim and it doesn’t matter. It’s a new instinct.
One out of every five nights, he gets to see Mulder, wearing the number of thirty and making Zito’s head hurt; he keeps thinking he must be imagining it. He’s happy that nobody else wears seventy-five, he’ll never have to give it up.
Zito knows how Mulder’s doing better than he did when they were teammates. Hudson’s hurt again and he leaves long messages on Zito’s phone, bitching about the drenched heat and the wasp stings on his arms. Zito can see it perfectly, but he can’t call Hudson because it’s four in the morning in Atlanta and Hudson’s kids are still very young.
Mulder isn’t calling him as often anymore, which should be more of a relief than it is. The run the A’s are on feels like flight, or arson, or something, and Zito keeps waiting for that to matter.
There are rolls of film that need to be developed on Zito’s kitchen table, little black canisters with gray tops. He’s gotten skittish, because he doesn’t remember when he took these pictures and they could be anything. Zito’s so fucking tired of being surprised and having to relive his misery in photographs.
Crosby, who is long-recovered, or at least able to swing like it, feels obligated to keep Zito up to date on what’s happening in St. Louis, and Zito never bothers to tell him that it’s unnecessary. Zito sees everything on tape-delay, watches the loop of ESPN News for two or three hours, until his fingers are bleeding and the sun is coming up in the city where Mark Mulder lives.
*
Mulder calls Hudson and Hudson answers, which is surprising even though it shouldn’t be. Hudson has been getting very little sleep recently, Mulder can tell by the slur in his voice and the way he keeps trailing off and then saying, “you know?” like his brain couldn’t quite make it to the end of the sentence but he still recognizes that the end is there somewhere. Mulder can’t follow along as well as he used to. He can’t do anything as well as he used to.
Mulder is in a parking lot somewhere, a long stretch of asphalt between him and the team bus, which sits patiently all red and silver and shiny. The skin of Mulder’s ears is peeling, itching him without pause, and all three of them are on the road right now, Zito’s in Minnesota and Hudson’s in New York City and Mulder’s not really sure where he is, but it’s not home.
His teammates are gathering at the bus, sharply dressed and dragging roller suitcases. Half of them are on their phones, too, grinning and cocking their chins at each other.
Mulder brings the conversation around to the past easily enough, like it’s the natural progression of anything they might talk about. The pitch and tone of Hudson’s voice picks up, even as a child begins to cry behind him. Mulder remembers Hudson bringing his family on road trips sometimes, Zito cursing without thinking and Hudson slapping him upside the head, try not to scar my kids, motherfucker. And everybody laughing.
They’re talking about how things used to be, and from there, it’s not hard for Mulder to say, “Heard from the kid recently?”
Hudson pauses, tells him yeah. Mulder swallows, wanting to ask what they talked about and did he say anything about me and you guys aren’t supposed to recover from this without me. But instead he says, “They’re doing all right, huh?”
“They always do,” Hudson replies, and then it’s quiet for a moment, the rumbling of the bus and the rattle of plastic wheels on the asphalt. Eventually, Hudson wants to know, “When’d you last talk to him, anyway?”
Mulder considers lying, but Hudson will likely relay this to Zito and Mulder can’t stand being caught out like that. “It’s been awhile,” he answers, and his mind ticks painfully, ‘eight months.’
Eight months and the world more precarious with each day, like the sky is shrinking.
“What happened, Mark?” Hudson asks, tired and curious and murmuring to his daughter, only half paying attention.
Mulder smiles and closes his eyes, his whole body hurting. “Nothing,” he says, and that, incredibly, is the truth.
*
Zito wakes up to his phone ringing and there’s some dream, Mulder in dark jeans and a hoodie the color of a burn mark, navy blue cap pulled over his eyes, saying Zito’s name and blending perfectly into the shadows and Zito spins, but there’s nothing, and he spins again, still nothing, he’s alone and now Mulder is laughing at him, black on black. His phone is ringing, beat-boxing and shaking on the bedside table, and Zito can feel the tiny little boy voice that he hates crawling up his throat, mark? mark?
He falls off the bed, taking a pillow with him, and doesn’t mean to answer the phone like that, “mark?”
There’s a very long pause, and then Eric Chavez is saying, “Buzz. Try again.”
Zito doesn’t understand this, and Eric Chavez has known him for at least a hundred years, and Zito mumbles, “hey,” hearing everything in lowercase, a dropped register.
“You’re late, dude. And I think maybe you were talking in your sleep.” He sounds like he’s eating something, and Zito doesn’t know how Chavez has survived a mother and two wives without manners being smacked into him.
“I’m up now.” Zito’s mind clicks slowly. “I’m late?”
“Way late. You were supposed to come to dinner.”
Zito’s curled up around the pillow on the floor, and he would have sworn it was the middle of the night. The last thing he remembers is being inhumanly tired, catching sight of himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator and his eyes had looked like bullet holes.
“Sorry,” he says insincerely, yawning. “Forgot to set my alarm.”
“Yeah yeah. You’re always doing that.”
Zito wants to go back to sleep and not have to think about words anymore. “Bad habits die hard.”
“I think you’ve got that wrong.” Chavez goes quiet and Zito blinks at the carpet, right under his face so that he can see every fiber. The shades are open and the city light bleeds in all Halloween orange and sap yellow. “You should call him, you know.”
Zito closes his eyes, forcing himself to remember that Chavez isn’t all that bright. He once got them irreparably lost because the map he’d gotten off the internet was for the Kansas City in Kansas, not the one in Missouri. Five miles away from where they’d intended to be, somehow a whole different state.
“Thanks for the advice, kitten,” he says tonelessly, and Chavez gets roughly angry just like Zito knew he would, calls him a motherfucker and hangs up. Zito scrapes his forehead on the carpet and he’s on the twenty-third floor, in a soundproof room, and up here the quiet is more real than the light.
*
It’s quickly September, and then Mulder is pitching ever-so-slightly better than Greg Maddux, and the St. Louis Cardinals clinch the division. Nobody’s very surprised; they could see it coming even if the telescope was turned around backwards.
The champagne hurts his eyes and his hair spikes, sticky patches under his ears and on the back of his neck. He doesn’t get a chance to shower before they’re being rolled out of the clubhouse, and in the parking lot their voices echo and there is a crowd pressed up against the chain-link fence, hollering and cheering, calling their names.
It’s dark enough that Mulder can’t see the red of the caps and shirts, the bloody flags. He can believe for a moment that there is green and gold on the other side of the fence, though never was Oakland this warm in September, and never was the crowd this big after the A’s had won the division.
He’s got a hand on someone’s shoulder and he can feel a fist against his back. There’s a high tuneless beeping in his ears, and somebody yells at him, “Dude, isn’t that your phone?”
Mulder waves it off. Nobody important could call him tonight, because everybody important is out there.
They go to some bar and it’s a mess of faces, tear-streaked, hugging him so tightly he could feel his ribs give under the pressure. Mulder has never known unconditional love like this, that all he had to do was wear a uniform and beat Greg Maddux and now these people would die for him.
His phone rings many more times, but it’s too loud to hear. It’s not until he gets home, stumbling drunk, that he sees the two missed calls from Zito’s phone, and the briefest message Mulder can imagine, after nine months of silence:
Congrats on the clinch. C U in October?
And Mulder wants to take the question mark away. He wants to lie down right here on the floor and sleep until it’s time to go to San Diego.
He laughs until his eyes go white, and texts back, can’t wait, his heart pounding hard.
*
Zito is drunk too, drunk tonight and drunk forever and imagining the signal thrown up from his phone and bouncing off a satellite, spiraling like radar back through the earth, arrowed into Missouri, finding Mulder out there with accuracy that couldn’t be believed.
He can only do it with his eyesight all fucked up the way it is, the room waltzing low in his mind. He’s thinking about the last time they saw each other, Mulder showing up at Zito’s apartment in Hollywood a couple of weeks after he’d been traded, and Mulder’s grin had been as hard as a line shot up the middle. Zito’s reflexes were slow from the off-season.
Mulder had leaned in his doorway, his arms eerily long, hands casting big shadows on the wooden floor. He’d said, over and over, “I don’t know, man,” and at one point he’d put his hand on Zito’s stomach, looking suddenly surprised.
Zito had counted to twenty in his head, feeling his muscles jump up against Mulder’s hand, staring at Mulder until he was sure his eyes had turned blue. Mulder’s throat moved and he said again, slowly, “I don’t know, man,” and when Zito had rolled his eyes and turned away, Mulder’s fingers caught on his belt and then fell away from him, and Zito bit open the inside of his cheek, copper and warm inside his mouth, nothing else.
Mulder had passed out on Zito’s bed and Zito had taken the couch. He’d woken up with a bruise on his arm that he didn’t remember. Mulder was gone, the bed neatly made and a pot of coffee congealing on the kitchen counter.
So now he’s drunk and Mulder is going back to the postseason, and the A’s might still, but probably won’t. Zito wants to see him again, the particular run of Mulder’s neck and the flat angle of his cheek. Mulder’s stomach like a plank that Zito could walk.
He’s tired of being mad at Mulder for things that happened months and years ago. He wants some new stuff.
Zito waits, holding his phone in his hand, and hours pass and Mulder doesn’t call him back. Zito supposes that’s only fair. He crash-lands into unconsciousness and he’s too far gone to feel the phone buzzing in his hand, four in the morning in St. Louis.
*
Mulder gets to San Diego in a wash of flashbulbs and pink-purple sky, knee-buckling pretty down here in California in October. They won the first two games in St. Louis, but Mulder’s been two games up before, he knows not to trust it.
He wants to rent a car and drive around town, looking for the places that Zito told him about once upon a time, the Circle-K with Zito’s blood sunk into the asphalt, the beach where Zito’s surfboard used to stick up out of the sand like an exclamation point, the ground under the far bleachers at the high school littered with the ends of jays and crushed beer cans.
That’s not what he’s here for, though. There’s no one in the whole world who expects the Padres to beat the Cardinals tomorrow, though there are people in this city who might wish for that, and one of them maybe used to be one of Mark Mulder’s best friends.
But they were never really that close. They were situational. Mulder keeps trying to remember if he even liked Zito that much.
The hotel room is nicer than any he’s ever stayed in, and he supposes that’s what the extra forty million dollars can afford, along with the first baseman who shoots sparks from his fingers and the center fielder who flies.
He’s half-asleep, half-drunk, unsure, is he starting tomorrow? For the second time in his life, Mulder is acutely aware that a teammate of his will win the Cy Young, but it’s important to not think about that tonight, with the desert and the ocean outside his window and the worst team ever to win a division title waiting to be decimated in a brand-new ballpark in a few hours.
The phone rings and someone at the desk says that his brother wants to come up and see him. Mulder’s lost, because he just talked to both his brothers and they plan to cook out tomorrow afternoon and watch the game on the satellite television.
Mulder says, “okay, let him up,” out of pure curiosity more than anything, and leaves the door open with the deadbolt thrown and resting against the frame. He lies back on the bed and watches the ceiling duck and roll.
“Isn’t this just how I left you?” Zito asks.
Mulder blinks at the ceiling, dry-mouthed and praying for cracks and stains, like in Triple-A motel rooms and the place Zito had lived when they’d first come up at the turn of the century, but the hotel is very nice and the ceiling is perfect-white and smooth.
“Dude,” Mulder says, shocked without reason, because of course Zito would show up on the night before the third game, with Mulder’s left shoulder feeling worn down to a nub and his mind stuck endlessly in the past.
He can hear Zito smiling. “Hi.”
Mulder sits up, which is a bad idea and he almost retches. He stares resolutely at the spot between Zito’s eyes until things settle down. Zito’s always been pretty good at being still. Both of them have.
Zito comes over and sits down on the bed beside him. It fucks up Mulder’s equilibrium. He’s got nothing to focus on. It’s been ten months since they’ve seen each other. Not that he’s been keeping track. Zito’s got the ruin of another season on his face, the second time in his career that he hasn’t made the postseason, and at least Mulder’s got that on him.
Ten months, and Zito looks way too old.
“You were on last night,” Zito tells him.
Mulder is trying to think, it must be strange because Zito doesn't watch the postseason. Was it really just yesterday? The very last October in Busch Stadium, and their certainty in the seventh inning that the wood and metal of the stands would give out, the sea of red would crash down upon them. The infielders eyeing the sky warily, the relievers crossing themselves in the bullpen, protect us against the fifty thousand. As if anything could.
“Thanks,” Mulder replies. He lies back down and after a second, Zito lies down beside him. Mulder can taste metal in his mouth and feel Zito’s arm against his own, though the surface of his skin is otherwise numb.
He doesn’t want to think about baseball tonight. His whole life has been baseball this year. He’s not sure if it’s enough anymore.
Mulder has dreamed for months of facing Zito in the World Series, and it’ll never happen. Nothing that good ever happens to him. Although, stuff that bad always happens to him, so who knows.
Mulder’s wondering if this line of thought makes any kind of sense, and Zito wants to know, “What are you gonna do if you have to face Huddy for the pennant, man?”
Of course that’s what Zito would want to know. Hudson is still losing-by-bullpen, like a curse, a black mark on his forehead that sets him apart: break this man’s heart. Break it again and again because it’ll grow back in the off-season. There’s a skewed kind of perfection in Hudson pitching for the Atlanta Braves after his awful history of falling short.
“Gonna beat him,” Mulder says, picturing it in full Technicolor. “And hit a homerun. Or, no. A double. Then steal third.”
Zito snorts a laugh, and Mulder hears the air tear. “You’ll steal third the day I sprout fucking wings.”
“Turn over, let me check,” Mulder says without thinking, and then his face heats, because he’d like for Zito to turn over. He bites his tongue. “You guys did good this year, you know?”
“Yeah,” Zito sighs. “So everybody keeps telling me.”
Mulder rolls his head to the side. He wonders if Zito’s drunk too, because it’s been ten months but they’re talking like they just woke up together on the plane. Zito’s face is closer than Mulder can ever remember, but he’s got to remember that he’s pretty drunk and more favored than he ever was when he played for the Oakland Athletics.
Zito doesn’t have any freckles. His eyelashes are longer than any girl Mulder’s ever dated. Mulder can remember the feel of Zito’s stomach under his hand, believing intently in that moment that Zito would close the space, he would be okay because Zito would do all the work.
“Nobody thought you’d do anything, is why.”
“What, because you weren’t there anymore? Nice, dude.” Zito doesn’t sound mad. Zito never really sounds mad, just hurt, which is probably worse, and not to mention the fact that Mulder would like to injure him right now, if only because he has heard Zito’s voice break before.
It’s just. It’s been a long time.
“Me and Huddy and J.D. Everybody.” Mulder swallows, feeling something thick move down his throat. “And you’re wrong, you know. You didn’t leave me. I left you.”
Zito is quiet for a while. Mulder counts the seconds, and he gets to two hundred and figures he might as well fall asleep.
“You didn’t have a choice,” Zito says eventually, and shifts so that his arm overlaps Mulder’s, the bones of their elbows pressed uncomfortably together. He’s still not looking at Mulder.
“Maybe I did,” Mulder tells him, his breath hitting the line of Zito’s jaw. “Maybe if I’d, like, handcuffed myself to you. And refused to leave. Maybe Billy would have said ‘fuck it.’ And fuck Danny Haren, man, seriously.”
Zito flinches, and Mulder wonders morbidly if Zito’s spent the season fucking Danny Haren. He decides he doesn’t care.
“We should have hid Huddy, you know? He’s little, he coulda fit anywhere.” Mulder’s slurring now, the fuzz in his head tangible like shredded cotton. “And you, I coulda pretended you were me. Or I was you. Or something. And then we coulda still been on the same team. I just. I don’t like being on a different team, man.”
Zito turns, finally, and looks at him. Mulder’s never really liked Zito’s eyes, the way they look too hot in the summer time and he’s never seen them in the winter. Mulder doesn’t know what’s happening right now.
“Me neither,” Zito says low.
Mulder’s brow furrows. “But you’re not on a different team.”
Zito’s teeth appear, a match-thick line of white digging into his lower lip. He shakes his head awkwardly against the bed and tells Mulder, yeah I am, and then his hand is on Mulder’s stomach.
Mulder looks back to the ceiling, but that’s never helped. Zito is sliding closer to him, Mulder can feel Zito all hot against his side, hair rustling on Mulder’s forehead. Zito’s shoulder presses against Mulder’s and that hurts, an extra pressure that he doesn’t need right now.
“Kinda fuckin’ useless, man,” Mulder mumbles, and Zito’s mouth opens on his face, the shallow dent of Mulder’s cheek, and Mulder shivers. He thinks again and again that it didn’t happen in five years and that’s reason enough for why it shouldn’t happen now.
But he does want Zito, a spade shaped and dug into his chest. Zito’s breath is on his mouth. Mulder is drunk like maybe being drunk is the cure for the life he’ll live out there with nobody and nothing, chasing the Oakland A’s even when he’s got a twenty-game lead. Even when they don’t play in the same league and will never meet in October.
Zito pushes his hand up under Mulder’s shirt and bites his ear, says quietly, “so goddamn tired of you being gone.”
Mulder jerks up, and his hand buries itself in Zito’s hair. Zito has always had fucked-up hair, worse when Hudson was cutting it for him, and Mulder thinks sharply of Zito at the start of 2004, clean-cut and his ears showing for the first time in years. Mulder hardly recognized him.
Zito’s mouth is curved up and Mulder is allowed to kiss him if he wants to, or shove Zito off the bed to snap his knees on the carpet. He’s allowed to turn Zito over onto his stomach and check for wings.
He pulls Zito’s head down and Zito’s mouth attaches to his neck. Mulder is going to figure this out, any second now, but it’s hard to keep track of that. Zito’s fucking with his sweatpants, tugging out the waist and slingshotting it back. Mulder could have every kind of sex there is with Zito, but it won’t change anything. It never could.
Handcuffs are for shit. Zito’s just trying to fuck him up because Mulder’s playing for the only team in major league baseball that won a hundred games this year.
He pushes at Zito until Zito gets the hint and starts moving his mouth down the line of Mulder’s body, and Mulder knows about teeth on his stomach and a rattling chord of fingers on his neck, knows about the first week after your team gets knocked out, when everything stupid seems like a good idea.
He knows about Zito, still and forever. They were never that close, but they’ve always been good at playing to the cameras. It wasn’t hard to make believe there was something more complicated between them than low-grade animosity and a bad rivalry that never brought them anything worth having.
Zito bites Mulder’s hip, stone-white and sharp as pebbles, and Mulder can only think that it was better when Zito wasn’t speaking to him. Silence could never hurt like this.
THE END