The thrill in Rob’s voice was an unmistakable song, that of a rollercoaster rookie on his first of what will prove to be a thousand loopy rides. He proved this by promptly treating me to all he could afford, a night of fun and games at the local batting cages behind the old bowling alley. Surprisingly, there were more people there than I thought lived in our town.

Rob stood inside the cage, a battered yellow helmet doing a poor job of hiding his unwashed brown hair, which hung out from beneath the helmet like hemstrings beneath a little girl’s skirt. He had rolled the sleeves of his orange shirt up to his biceps, which rippled about as much as a stagnant puddle. Standing there like the proud Indian he considered himself to be – Cleveland Indian, that is – he swung mightily at the next pitch. The bat slipped into a curve in the space-time continuum – or so he would claim as soon as he caught his breath and overcame his embarrassment – and he missed. The softball, painted a hideous pink, slammed into the fence behind him with the force of a toddler’s uppercut. I stepped back from the cage and scratched my head. “You know,” I started to say, “sometimes it—“

“Shut up,” Rob said, cutting me off and not even glancing at me. “The space-time c—“

“Continuum was warped again,” I finished, chuckling. “I know.”

“That’s not possible,” a voice said, and I looked down to see a strangely short boy with no hair.

“What’s that?” I asked, crouching before him. His striped shirt was torn at the base, a ragged scar of nothing winding up the side of the shirt towards his underarm. He had a fading bruise on his neck, a pattern of risen blood that looked oddly like.. handprints. I noticed that his hair wasn’t actually gone – not all over, at least. It was badly shaven, with thin patches here and there that merged with the stubbly baldness of his scalp.

“The space-time continuum,” the child said. He couldn’t have been more than seven, but so short. “It doesn’t exist here on Earth. It only becomes an influence on actions when you leave the Earth’s atmosphere and actually enter deep space.”

“Like Star Trek,” Rob said, grunting as he swung at another slowball. “Warp speed!” he shouted in a shrill voice as he turned the pitching speed up a notch.

“He’s wrong,” the boy said to me, leaning in as if confiding a deep secret in me. “Star Trek’s just TV.”

I smiled. Brilliant little boy. His physical size bothered me, though. And those bruises. I wondered if he was –

“Tyler,” hissed another voice, and I looked behind me as Tyler did the same, a worried look scattering across his young face. “Your daddy’s coming. Get over here.”

Tyler turned his small brown eyes back to me. “Bye,” he said to me. “I have to go now.”

“Goodbye,” I said. “Tyler?”

Tyler stopped as he walked away, turning to face me with his hands clasped delicately. “What?” he inquired so intelligently. His voice had the earmarks of a smart man.

“You’re a smart kid,” I said to him, and was rewarded with a smile that I surely thought would push his cheekbones off of his face. He waved goodbye the way small children do, his hand flopping wildly, and then he turned and jogged away to his mother, who yanked him roughly along by one hand grabbed tight enough to sprain, if not break, his tiny wrists. I almost cried for the kid, thinking of the twinkle of beginning tears in his eyes when he’d heard his mother’s voice. His eyes bespoke of a life that no child should ever encounter by that age, a life that nobody should ever live.

I sighed and stood back up. A softball crashed into the melted rusty links of the fence at eye level. Rob glared at me as if I were the cause of his terrible batting problems. “You shouldn’t have swung,” I said, trying hard to push Tyler’s little face away. “An obvious ball.”

“Yeah,” he said following another swing, another miss, another string of unrehearsed and unintelligible obscenities.

"I noticed that, Dr. Ruth. You know, that kid probably was a happy little kid. But if I know you, you’ll analyze this all night, won’t you? Try to enjoy the games.”

“First of all, you piece of unsophisticated trailer trash,” I said, laughing a little so Rob wouldn’t take me seriously, “Dr. Ruth is a sex therapist. Second, that happy little kid had a pair of happy handprints and bruises around his happy little neck. Lay off of this one.”

“I’m not—“

Get out of the cage, Rob. Give me a shot.” I opened the gate and plucked the hard hat from his head.

Rob masked his face in personal offense. “I suppose that you can do better than I?”

I didn’t answer. He jammed the handle of the bat into the fence, letting it hang like a straining tendon. I stepped into the cage, greasing myself past his bulky body, which he placed in my way as a statement of dissatisfaction. “Close the gate.”

He huffed and stepped outside of the cage, slamming the gate shut and fisting the latch into place. He stood where I’d been just a moment before, relegated to the position of spectator, which made him less than happy. “Seattle, huh,” he said, more of a misspoken statement than a question.

“Seattle, Washington,” I said to myself, thinking of postcards and rain, Meg Ryan and meant-to-bes.

“Yeah, yeah – so when are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow night.” Again, absent-minded, thinking of slipping deep into the young culture of the art world and of the extreme differences between Rob and myself.

“No – what time?”

The first pitch came floating out of the rusted machine, and I threw all of my strength into the swing, graceful McGwire – lifted it high. Rob was quiet behind me, watching the ball gain altitude – until it lodged itself in the chain-link ceiling of the field.

I laid the bat back on my shoulder and turned to Rob – “I fly out at eight thirty.”

The hammer fell. “No. You can’t do that. Reschedule. Reschedule your flight.”

I could hear the machine grind as it wound up for the next toss. “Can’t do it,” I said, tensing for the next pitch. “Why?”

The next pitch, slow though it might be, drifted by me like a butterfly on a breezeless day. Rob chuckled. “Now I could’ve sworn you claimed to be better than me,” he said.

“One strike to the record of my own,” I said. “Twenty-plus to yours.”

“Whatever,” Rob said, waving a hand. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow night’s the Deeply Shallow concert, remember? Backstage passes, dinner with the band. Am I ringing any bells here?”

I stepped into the following pitch too far. It thumped against my left arm lightly. Too lightly. “Rob, you want to jack up the speed on this for me? Tee-ball isn’t really my style.”

He cranked the dial without a look. “You’re not listening to me.”

“I am. But I’m not going to the concert, Rob. Deeply Shallow, dinner with the band, backstage passes – whatever. I’m not going. I’ve got to go to Seattle.”

“Seattle.”

“Seattle,” I said, steadily growing angrier by the moment. I punched the next one deep and watched it ricochet off of a steel post. “Seattle’s where my dreams come true.”

This silenced his attempts to change my mind. He kicked the fence and swore quietly. “You know,” he grunted. “My cousin’s going to – I don’t know, put out a contract on your life or something. He went through a lot to get these tickets for us. And we’re talking hate here. He’ll hate you.”

The machine hissed and spit as though a cat were caught in the rotator. “What did he go through, exactly?”

Behind me, Rob kicked at the ground. I could hear the gravel scratching beneath his tennis shoes. “What?”

“To get the tickets. What did he go through to get the tickets, exactly?” I knew Rob had no definite answer for me. He tap-danced around the question with all the grace of an obese elephant on ice.

“A lot,” he said. “Want to trade out with me now?”

“Tell me,” I said, and swung, driving a hard grounder to the left wall.

My inquiry was met with only silence. Rob didn’t say a word.

“I’m waiting,” I said, straining my arms, waiting for the next softball to be shot through. “And I don’t think you’ve got an answer.” The ball soared towards me and I attacked it with that temporary anger known only to men and their love for sports. The ball connected with that fabled sweet spot of the bat and, as though in slow motion, rocketed through the air and towards that corner where the back wall and the ceiling joined in an L-shape.

“Nice one, kid,” somebody that wasn’t Rob said behind me. I turned. There was a small handful of people watching me. I felt rather good about this – until I noticed that there was nobody else playing the cages. And not many of the people seemed interested. In fact, they all seemed to be there together, waiting around for one guy to lose interest.

I smiled at them all, and then winced when I felt a ball slam into the soft skin above my waist. It hurt only moderately, but it reminded me that I had put on a couple of unwanted pounds lately. I turned back to the machine and drove the next one – overly hard – in a steep arc towards the ground. It bounced heavy and high. “Rob?” I asked, picking up where we left off.

“I don’t know,” he muttered from somewhere over my left shoulder, “but I’m betting it was an awful lot.”

“If he’s part of the band, then I somehow doubt that.” I swung and missed the next one. At this, Rob chuckled and I knew I had him back in the thick of the conversation.

“Explain again,” he said. “Seattle, I mean.”

“Told you. Book deal.” Another swing, this one a beautiful fast one, long and wonderful.

“Book deal. Okay, you told me this, but you didn’t really explain it to me.”

“What speed did you put this thing on?” I asked him as the next pitch cut through the air like a plastic knife, dropping harmlessly to the ground ten feet in front of me.

“Ahh,” he said, looking at the dial. “Adult. It’s on adult.”

I stared at the softball as it rolled slowly towards the pitching machine. The ground was sloped in the center of the concrete field, and, in a depression below the stand that the machine rested on was some sort of revolving wheel that reloaded the machine’s reservoir. “Is there anything faster?”

“I’ve got child, young adult – but these are lower speeds, of course – and then professional, extreme, and.. well, there’s one here that’s been scribbled out, but I think it says insane.”

“You had it set on young adult?” I asked, grinning. Another ball popped out, and I bunted it just to keep it from hearing that annoying chain link jangle.

“Wh—“

“Never mind,” I said. “Put it on professional.”

“Whoa,” someone said. “Go for extreme. C’mon, extreme!”

A little kid: “Naw, insane!”

The group of people, now attentive, took up the chant. “In-sane! In-sane! In-sane!”

I looked back at Rob, and he shrugged, turning the dial to insane to satisfy the masses. The next pitch I didn’t even hear wind up – just a colorless blur. I put everything into my swing, more than I’d ever put into the twenty swings before, and I whiffed it like a tennis player trying to hit the rain with his racquet. There was a lot of laughter, so I blocked it out.

“So explain the book deal to me,” Rob said. His voice was only slightly louder than that of the crowd.

“The other night,” I said, taking a swing and clipping the ball high into the fence behind me while the crowd gasped and instinctively stepped back, “when you called, I was reading a letter from a publishing house in Seattle. I thought it was another rejection, like all the others.”

“Right, right. And?”

“Well, I called them. I’ve got a meeting on Friday – they want to discuss what they call contractual possibilities with me and my agent. Friday.” I swung again, and this time connected again, but only barely. “That’s why Seattle.”

“What agent? You have an agent?”

“Yes. I’ve got an agent, and it was Lydia that set me up with him. Harry Silver. What a name, huh?”

“Sounds Hollywood-ish.”

“Exactly,” I said, not even attempting to swing at the next pitch. The ball jammed itself into the links. The little boy – I assumed the one that had started the insanity chant – punched it back through and it dropped with a strange plastic thump to the floor.

“How long?” Rob asked, staring at a girl through the corner of his eye.

“How long what?”

“How long have you had an agent?”

“Oh,” I said, hearing the machine crank up another fastball. “What time is it?”

“Nine. Ten. I don’t know.”

“About five or six hours,” I choked out, swinging again. I took the pitch deep – found that I was getting used to insanity.

“A real writer,” Rob said, his voice deeply affected with a sense of awe. “A writer! And I know you, too. My God, this is better than being the cousin of the fifth alternate bassist for a one-hit wonder. Jake Haskell, author extraordinaire!”

I laughed at him, laughed as I missed the next pitch.

“How long are you staying?”

“Til next week or so. I’m coming back, though. Never you worry,” I said. “Jacob the Great shall return.” I missed another pitch, nullifying my claim to greatness.

Rob’s amazement was unaltered. “Wow,” he repeated. “You’ve made it, man. No more rejection letters. No more rejections!"

The next pitch, however, came in just right. I hit it just right. It was – well, just right. The softball hit the bat just right and I lined it into the pitching machine. The machine tipped off of the stand and hit the ground, echoing like the sound of a garbage truck hoisting a dumpster, spilling crazy pink softballs everywhere. The rotating wheel sprung off of the pitching machine’s upper casing and crashed hard into the asphalt.

“You broke it,” someone whispered behind me, and I heard a little kid cheer: “Woo hoo!”

I turned around, embarrassed but proud. Rob was grinning, but the people lined behind him were a mixture of slack jaws and white eyes. A long-haired kid slowly diving back into the hippie era shook his head, took off his black plastic rims – which, by the way, were leftover from a whole other era entirely – and said in contempt: “No wonder. Dude, writers can’t play baseball.”

© 2005 Jason Gurley