4

It was nearly midnight. Henry pressed his ear to the door. The noises that came from within were sweaty and breathy, loud enough to be heard above the pulse of the music. He knew what was happening in there, however vaguely. It sounded painful, at least for one of the parties involved.

“Uhh. Uhh. Uhhh.”

“Come on, baby. Come on—”

“Ooohhh—”

“That’s it, baby. All night long.”

“—uuhnghrrrrnnrh—”

“Slow down, now. Slow, slow, slow. Yeah, baby. Just like that.”

“—ooohhhrrrrgghhh—”

“You’re big! You’re fucking huge!”

“—rrrrooaarhrraaaah—”

“Give it to me! Come on! Finish it!”

“—rhaa… rhaa…ARH—”

“Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes!”

“—RRHNAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHH!”

The door swung open from within. Henry, who’d been leaning against it, staggered into the room and smacked against the sweat-drenched chest of Mike Schwartz.

“Skrimmer, you’re late.” Schwartz wrenched Henry’s red Cardinals cap around so the brim faced backward. “Welcome to the weight room.”

After hanging up with his parents, Henry had put on his coat and wandered out into the dark of the campus. Everything was impossibly quiet. He sat at the base of the Melville statue and looked out at the water. When he got home the answering machine was blinking. His parents, probably—they’d thought it over and decided it was time for him to come home.

Skrimmer! Football is over. Baseball starts now. Meet us at the VAC in half an hour. The side door by the dumpster will be open. Don’t be late.

Henry put on shorts, grabbed Zero from the closet shelf, and ran through the mild night toward the VAC. He’d been waiting three months for Schwartz to call. Halfway there, already winded, he slowed to a walk. In those three months he’d done nothing more strenuous than washing dishes in the dining hall. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions. Maybe they could teach you to build your own dorm furniture or grow your own food. Instead everyone kept talking about the life of the mind—a concept, like many he had recently encountered, that seemed both appealing and beyond his grasp.

“Skrimmer, this is Adam Starblind,” Schwartz said now. “Starblind, Skrimmer.”

“So you’re the guy Schwartz keeps talking about.” Starblind wiped his palm on his shorts so they could shake. “The baseball messiah.” He was much smaller than Schwartz but much larger than Henry, as became apparent when he peeled off his shimmery silver warm-up jacket. Two Asian pictographs adorned his right deltoid. Henry, who didn’t have deltoids, glanced nervously around the room. Ominous machines crouched in the half-dark. Bringing Zero had been a grave mistake. He tried to hide it behind his back.

Starblind tossed his jacket aside. “Adam,” Schwartz remarked, “you have the smoothest back of any man I’ve ever met.”

“I should,” Starblind said. “I just had it done.”

“Done?”

“You know. Waxed.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Starblind shrugged.

Schwartz turned to Henry. “Can you believe this, Skrimmer?” He rubbed his tightly shorn scalp, which was already receding to a widow’s peak, with a huge hand. “Here I am battling to keep my hair, and Starblind here is dipping into the trust fund to have it removed.”

Starblind, scoffing, addressed Henry too. “Keep his hair, he says. This is the hairiest man I know. Schwartzy, Madison would take one look at that back of yours and close up shop.”

“Your back waxer’s name is Madison?”

“He does good work.”

“I don’t know, Skrim.” Schwartz shook his big head sadly. “Remember when it was easy to be a man? Now we’re all supposed to look like Captain Abercrombie here. Six-pack abs, three percent body fat. All that crap. Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something.”

“Profound loneliness?” Starblind offered.

“Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all that’s forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”

“That’s Schwartzy.” Starblind yawned, inspected his left biceps’ lateral vein in one of the room’s many mirrors. “Just living from ice age to ice age.”

Schwartz held out a big hand. Henry realized that he wanted him to hand him his glove. No one but Henry had touched Zero in seven or eight years, maybe longer. He couldn’t remember the last time. With a silent prayer he placed the glove in the big man’s hand.

Schwartz slung it over his shoulder into a corner. “Lie down on that bench,” he instructed. Henry lay down. Schwartz and Starblind, quick as a pit crew, pulled from the bar the heavy, wheel-sized plates Starblind had been lifting and replaced them with saucer-sized ones. “You’ve never lifted before?” asked Schwartz.

Henry shook his head no.

“Good. Then you don’t have any of Starblind’s crappy habits. Thumbs underneath, elbows in, spine relaxed. Ready? Go.”

Half an hour later Henry threw up for the first time since boyhood, a weak quick cough that spilled a pool of pureed turkey onto the rubberized floor.

“Attaboy.” Schwartz pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. “You two keep working.” He returned with a wheeled yellow bucket full of soapy water and a long-yarned mop, which he used to swab up the mess, whistling all the while.

With each new exercise, Schwartz did a few reps to demonstrate proper form, then spotted Henry and Starblind, barking insults and instructions while they did their sets. “Coach Cox won’t let me lift before baseball season,” he explained. “It drives me nuts. But if I get too big up here”—he slapped himself on the shoulder—“I can’t throw.”

The session ended with skullcrushers.

“Come on, Skrim,” Schwartz growled as Henry’s arms began to quiver. “Make some goddamn noise.”

“uh,” Henry said. “gr.”

“You call that noise?”

“Big arms,” cheered Starblind. “Get big.”

Henry’s elbows separated, and the squiggle-shaped bar plummeted toward a spot between his eyes. Schwartz let it fall. The dull thud against Henry’s forehead felt almost pleasant. He could taste a cool tang of iron filings on his tongue, feel the throb of a future bruise.

“Skullcrushers,” Starblind said approvingly.

Schwartz tossed Henry his glove. “Good work tonight,” he said. “Adam, tell the Skrimmer what he’s won.”

Starblind produced, from some dim corner, a gigantic plastic canister. “SuperBoost Nine Thousand,” he intoned in a game show announcer’s baritone. “The proven way to unlock your body’s potential.”

“Three times a day,” instructed Schwartz. “With milk. It’s a supplement, meaning it supplements your regular diet. Don’t skip any meals.”

The next day, Henry could feel the soreness mounting throughout his dishwashing shift. When he returned to the room, a glass of milk heavy in each hand, Owen was seated behind his desk, dressed in white, picking broken twigs from a baggie.

“What’s that?” Owen gestured toward the canister, which Henry had left atop the fridge.

“SuperBoost Nine Thousand.”

“It looks like it came out of a hot-rod garage. Put it in the closet, will you? Behind the guest towels.”

“Sure.” Owen had a point: the black plastic tub didn’t exactly fit the room’s decor. The label’s lightning-bolt letters slanted forward, trailing fire behind as they wrapped across a stylized photo of the most grotesquely muscled arm Henry had ever seen. “But first I have to try some.”

Owen licked the fringe of a small piece of paper. “Try it how?”

“By mixing one heaping scoop of SuperBoost with eight ounces water or milk.”

“You’re going to eat it?”

Henry twisted the lid off its threads and peeled back the shiny aluminum seal. Inside, half buried in pallid powder like an abandoned beach toy, lay a clear plastic scoop. He dumped both glasses of milk into his quart-sized commemorative Aparicio Rodriguez cup, which Sophie had bought him on eBay for Christmas, and added two heaping scoops of SuperBoost.

Instead of sinking and dissolving, the powder floated on the milk’s surface in a stubborn pile. Henry found a fork in his desk drawer and began to stir, but the powder cocooned around the tines. He beat at it faster and faster. The fork clanged against the cup. “Maybe you could do that elsewhere,” Owen suggested. “Or not at all.”

Henry stopped stirring and lifted the cup to his lips. He intended to down it in one gulp, but the sludgy mixture seemed to leaven in his stomach. When he set down the cup it was still almost full. “Can you see my body’s potential being unlocked?”

Owen put on his glasses. “You’re turning a little green,” he said. “Maybe that’s an intermediate step.”

Two months later, when tryouts began, Henry didn’t look much bigger in the mirror, but at least he didn’t throw up anymore, and the weights he lifted were slightly less small. He arrived at the locker room an hour early. Two of his potential future teammates were already there. Schwartz sat shirtless in front of his locker, hunched over a thick textbook. In the corner, smoothing a pair of slacks on a hanger—

“Owen!” Henry was shocked. “What are you doing here?”

Owen looked at him as if he were daft. “Baseball tryouts begin today.”

“I know, but—”

Coach Cox appeared in the doorway. He was Henry’s height but thick-chested, with a strong square jaw in which he ground a wad of gum. He wore track pants and a Westish Baseball sweatshirt. “Schwartz,” he said gruffly as he stroked his clipped black mustache, “how are those knees?”

“Not bad, Coach.” Schwartz stood up to greet Coach Cox with a combination handshake-hug. “I want you to meet Henry Skrimshander.”

“Skrimshander.” Coach Cox nodded as he wrung Henry’s hand in a painful grip. “Schwartz tells me you plan to give Tennant a run for his money.”

Lev Tennant, a senior, was the starting shortstop and team cocaptain. Schwartz kept telling Henry he could beat him out—it had become a kind of mantra for their evening workouts. “Tennant!” Schwartz would yell as he leaned over Henry, dripping sweat into Henry’s open mouth while Henry struggled with the skullcrusher bar. “Beat out Tennant!” Henry didn’t know how Schwartz could sweat so much when he wasn’t even lifting, and he certainly didn’t know how he was supposed to beat out Tennant. He’d seen the smooth, sharklike way Tennant moved around campus, devouring girls’ smiles. “I’ll do my best, sir,” Henry said now.

“See that you do.” Coach Cox turned to Owen, extended a hand. “Ron Cox.”

“Owen Dunne,” Owen said. “Right fielder. I trust you don’t object to having a gay man on your team.”

“The only thing I object to,” Coach Cox replied, “is Schwartz playing football. It’s bad for his knees.”

Tryouts would take place inside the VAC, but first Coach Cox ordered the assembled crowd out into the cold. “A little roadwork,” he instructed them. “Around the lighthouse and back.”

Henry tried to tally up the bodies as they filed outside, but everybody kept shifting around, and anyway he didn’t know how many guys would make the team. He ran faster than he’d ever run and finished the four miles in the first group, alongside a surprisingly nimble Schwartz and behind only Starblind, who’d sped ahead in the first hundred meters and disappeared from view. The second group included most of the team’s established players, including Tennant and Tom Meccini, the captains. Schwartz’s roommate, Demetrius Arsch, who weighed at least 260 and smoked half a pack a day between the end of football season and the beginning of baseball, brought up the rear. At least everyone assumed he’d brought up the rear, until Owen cruised into view.

“Dunne!” Coach Cox bellowed.

“Coach Cox!”

“Where the goddamn hell’ve you been?”

“Doing a little roadwork,” Owen reminded him. “Around the lighthouse and back.”

“You mean to tell me”—Coach Cox planted a hand between the shoulder blades of Arsch, who was bent over, gasping for breath—“that you can’t beat Meat here in a footrace?”

Owen bent down until he and Arsch came face-to-face—Arsch’s damp and fragrantly purple, his own composed and dry. “I bet I could beat him now,” he said. “He looks tired.”

But when batting practice began, Owen knocked one line drive after another back up the middle of the batting cage. Sal Phlox, who was feeding balls into the old-fashioned machine, kept having to duck behind his protective screen. “Get out of there, Dunne,” grumbled Coach Cox. “Before you hurt someone.”

Henry had never taken grounders on artificial turf before; it was like living inside a video game. The ball never hit a rock or the lip of the grass, but the synthetic fibers could impart some wicked spin. In four days of tryouts he didn’t miss a single ball. When the roster was posted, four freshpersons had made the team: Adam Starblind, Rick O’Shea, Owen Dunne, and Henry Skrimshander.