Broadcasting from the End of the Season

The bar was in Phoenix, one of those places near the spring training complexes that hasn’t updated its decor since 1994 — pennants from teams that have moved or folded, a jukebox loaded with discs nobody plays because the speakers blew out in 2011 and the owner just left the machine plugged in as furniture. It was two in the afternoon. The air conditioning was losing a war against the parking lot heat that came in every time someone opened the door.

Johnson was already in the back booth when I arrived, drinking ice water with the intensity of a man who’d recently been drinking other things. He looked dried out and focused, the way he always looked when he was ready to work — like someone who’d been staring at the sun and had just blinked. Beckett arrived fifteen minutes later. He stood in the doorway and surveyed the bar the way you survey a room you intend to spend eternity in, which is to say without hope and without disappointment. He ordered nothing.

I told them about the press box. Two old men in an abandoned minor league stadium, broadcasting a baseball game that isn’t happening. Play-by-play of phantom at-bats. Color commentary drifting into failure and philosophy. Sparrows in the grandstand. Nine innings.

Johnson leaned forward. “How abandoned? I need to know the degree.”

I said the stadium was mostly intact. The field had gone to weeds but the press box still had power — or they’d rigged something, a generator, batteries, I hadn’t decided.

“No,” Johnson said. “The power shouldn’t be explained. If you explain it, it’s a detail. If you don’t explain it, it’s a condition. The microphones work. The broadcast goes out. Whether anyone receives it — that’s not their department. They’re doing the job.”

“No one receives it,” Beckett said. His first words. He’d settled into the booth opposite Johnson and had arranged his hands on the table in a configuration that suggested he’d be leaving them there for the foreseeable future. “That must be established. Not as pathos. As premise.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe someone does receive it. A trucker on a weird frequency. Some kid in a basement.”

“No.” Beckett was definitive. “The moment someone is listening, you have written a story about communication. About the desire to be heard. That story has been written. It was sentimental the first time. What you have — if you are willing to have it — is two men performing an act that has no audience, no purpose, and no end. The sparrows are not an audience. The sparrows are sparrows.”

Johnson smiled, which with Johnson always looked like it hurt. “Sam’s right that no one is listening. But Sam’s wrong about why. It’s not because the story is about purposelessness. It’s because the men don’t care. They’re not broadcasting to be heard. They’re broadcasting because that’s what the booth is for. You sit in the booth, you call the game. The game isn’t happening, but the booth is still a booth. The microphones are still microphones.”

“The tool implies the function,” Beckett said.

“The tool implies the compulsion,” Johnson said. “There’s a difference. A function can be completed. A compulsion just keeps going.”

I asked about the two men. Who are they? What’s the relationship?

“They’ve known each other a long time,” Johnson said. “But that doesn’t mean they know each other. They’ve been in proximity. Bars, jobs, the kinds of places where men end up together not because they chose it but because the other options fell away. One of them — the play-by-play man — he’s the believer. Not religious, not exactly. But he believes in the game. In the act of narration. Every phantom at-bat is real to him because he’s saying it. The words create the event.”

“And the other,” Beckett said, “does not believe.”

“The other knows it’s nothing,” Johnson said. “And does it anyway.”

I said that sounded like the difference between them — between Johnson and Beckett. The visionary and the skeptic.

“I’m not a visionary,” Johnson said, and something in his voice made me realize I’d offended him. “Visionaries have systems. They see the machinery of God or whatever and they describe it. I’ve never seen machinery. I’ve seen a man in a ditch who thought he was an angel, and the terrifying thing wasn’t that he was wrong. It was that he might not be. The play-by-play man doesn’t see the game because he’s deluded. He sees it because seeing is what he does. Take it away and he’s just a man in a box with a dead microphone.”

“Which is what he is,” Beckett said.

“Which is also what he is. Both things. That’s what you can’t resolve, and the story shouldn’t try.”

Beckett unfolded one hand and placed it flat on the table, a gesture so deliberate it felt rehearsed, though I don’t think it was. “The question of whether the game is real is not interesting. Hamlet is not real. The question is whether the performance is sustained. Whether they can keep going. Each inning is a negotiation — will we do another? The answer is always yes, but the yes gets harder. By the seventh inning stretch, the yes should cost them something visible.”

“What does the stretch look like,” I said, “when there’s no game?”

“They stand,” Beckett said. “They stretch. The ritual is performed. What fills the silence during the stretch — that is your seventh inning. In a real game, there is music, there is a crowd, there is the physical relief of standing after sitting. In this game, there is only the pause. The pause is where the story lives.”

Johnson shook his head. “You’re making it too formal. The seventh-inning stretch should be messy. One of them wanders off. Goes down to the field. Stands in the weeds where second base used to be. The other one keeps talking into the microphone — color commentary about the guy standing in the weeds. ‘And now my colleague appears to be having some kind of experience. We’ll see if it develops into a play.’ That’s the humor. It’s two guys who can’t stop being themselves even when there’s no reason to be anything.”

“The humor is essential,” I said, realizing I was just agreeing with him.

“The humor is the only thing that makes it bearable,” Johnson said. “Not for the reader. For the men. If they weren’t funny, they’d have to acknowledge what they’re doing. The jokes are structural. Load-bearing. You remove the humor and the whole press box collapses.”

Beckett looked at Johnson for a long time. “We agree on this. The comedy is not decoration. It is the mechanism by which continuation is possible. But I would say — the humor should be dry. Not antic. Two men in a press box are not clowns. They are professionals performing expertise on nothing. The comedy arises from the competence.”

“Fine, dry,” Johnson said. “But with spikes. The color commentary guy says something about his ex-wife and it’s funny and then you realize he’s devastated, and then it’s funny again because he’s back to the game that isn’t happening, and the transition is so smooth you almost missed the devastation. That’s the rhythm. The broadcast is a format. It gives them a container for the things they can’t say any other way.”

I mentioned the sparrows. I’d included them in the pitch because they felt right — nesting in the grandstand, the only living audience, indifferent.

“Sparrows are good,” Johnson said. “Sparrows are the holiest bird because nobody notices them. They’re ubiquitous. They’re the same everywhere. A sparrow in Phoenix is the same sparrow as in Detroit. They don’t migrate, they don’t have dramatic plumage, they don’t sing songs you’d recognize. They just — persist. Like the broadcast.”

“I object to ‘holy,’” Beckett said.

“Of course you do.”

“The sparrows should not signify. They should be present. There is a difference, and the difference is the entire project. If the sparrows become a metaphor for persistence, or for nature reclaiming, or for whatever it is birds are asked to represent in American fiction, you have lost them. A sparrow beneath a grandstand is a sparrow beneath a grandstand. It is nesting there because the structure provides shelter. The men are in the press box because the structure provides a press box. The parallel is enough. Underlining it would be vandalism.”

Johnson didn’t argue, which surprised me. He just nodded and said, “The sparrows should shit on things. That keeps them honest.”

I laughed. Beckett did not laugh, but something in his posture shifted, a fractional relaxation that might have been the Beckett equivalent.

I brought up the linked-story structure from Jesus’ Son — scenes arriving like hallucinations, the unreliable narrator. Could the innings function that way? Each inning a discrete unit, almost its own story, with the continuity coming from the two voices rather than from plot?

“That’s the only way it works,” Johnson said. “If you try to build a narrative arc across nine innings — rising action, climax at the seventh, resolution in the ninth — you’ve written a baseball movie. The innings should have their own weather. Third inning feels different from the sixth. Not because something happened. Because time passed, and time changes the quality of a lie.”

“They are not lying,” Beckett said, and there was a sharpness in it. “A lie requires a truth it conceals. These men are not concealing a truth. There is no game. They know there is no game. The audience — were there an audience — would know there is no game. There is no deception. There is only the act.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. “Not lying. Hallucinating?”

“Performing.”

“Performing works for you,” Johnson said. “For me the play-by-play man is somewhere else. He’s not performing. He’s there. When he says ‘low and outside, ball two,’ he is seeing the pitch. That’s not performance. That’s — I don’t have a clean word for it. It’s what happens to people when the regular channels of perception shut down and something else opens up.”

“You are describing psychosis,” Beckett said.

“I’m describing attention.” Johnson’s voice had gone quiet, which with Johnson meant he was serious. “I’ve been in rooms where the walls were breathing and the man next to me was explaining his theory of angels, and the most terrifying thing wasn’t the hallucination. It was how much sense it made. Not logically. Sensibly. Like something in the room agreed with him. The play-by-play man has that quality. He’s not crazy. He’s too attentive. He’s attending to something that isn’t there and that attention summons it into a kind of existence.”

Beckett was quiet for a while. The bar’s air conditioning cycled off and the room grew warmer by a degree, then two.

“I will grant you this,” Beckett said finally. “The play-by-play man believes. Or rather — he does not disbelieve with sufficient force. He is not deluded. He is simply unwilling to stop. And the distinction between delusion and refusal to stop is, I admit, interesting.”

“That’s the whole story,” Johnson said.

“That is never the whole story,” Beckett said. “That is one man in a press box. There are two men. The second man — my man, if you’ll permit — knows the box is empty and the field is weeds and the microphones go nowhere. He knows this and he provides color commentary. Why?”

Nobody answered for a moment.

“Because,” Beckett said, “the alternative is silence, and silence in a press box is intolerable. Silence in a field is acceptable. Silence in a bedroom. But a press box exists to not be silent. Its architecture demands speech. And so he speaks. Not because he believes, and not because he is performing, but because the room will not allow him to stop.”

“The room as trap,” I said.

“The room as condition,” Beckett said. “He could leave. He could climb down the stairs and walk across the parking lot and go home. He does not. He does not because — and I am not interested in a psychological explanation — he does not. That is sufficient.”

Johnson was turning his water glass in slow circles, leaving wet rings on the table. “You know what I keep coming back to? The specificity of the broadcast. They’re not just talking. They’re calling specific pitches, specific at-bats. The play-by-play man has a batter in mind — a left-handed pull hitter, maybe, with a bad knee. The color man remembers a game that never happened where this same batter hit a triple in the gap. The specificity is what makes it. Because generalized delusion is boring. Specific delusion is indistinguishable from memory.”

“Specific delusion is indistinguishable from memory,” Beckett repeated, and for the first time he seemed genuinely interested in something Johnson had said, turning it over, testing the weight. “Yes. That is precisely the danger. If the details are specific enough, the reader cannot be certain they are invented. The game acquires a history. The history acquires a weight. By the late innings, the reader may have forgotten that the field is empty.”

“Should the reader forget?” I asked.

“Intermittently,” Beckett said. “The reader should forget and remember and forget. The oscillation is the experience.”

“That’s exactly right,” Johnson said, and then looked annoyed that he’d agreed.

I asked about the ending. The ninth inning. How does it finish?

“It doesn’t finish,” Beckett said. “The game ends, as games end. They sign off. There is a moment after the sign-off. The microphones are off. The press box is what it has always been. Then what? Do they leave? Do they remain? Do they agree to come back tomorrow?”

“They come back tomorrow,” Johnson said.

“Perhaps,” Beckett said.

“They come back tomorrow,” Johnson repeated, “but you don’t show it. The story ends in the silence after the broadcast. The microphone is off. One of them says something — not into the microphone, just to the other man, just in the room — and you don’t hear what it is.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because the broadcast is over. You were listening to the broadcast. The broadcast is done. Whatever they say to each other as men, off-mic, in the dead press box — that’s theirs.”

Beckett folded both hands again. “I would end it differently. But I will not say how, because you would use my ending, and my ending would be wrong for your story.”

“So you admit it’s my story,” Johnson said.

“I admit nothing. I observe that you have spoken more than I have, and I decline to interpret that as ownership.”

The air conditioning came back on. Johnson finished his water. I had a page of notes that I’d been writing without looking at, and when I glanced down, half of it was illegible and the other half was a drawing of a press box I didn’t remember making, with small marks along the grandstand that might have been sparrows or might have been nothing at all.