On the other hand, thought Karp, recoiling from his own fantasies, if you impaled criminals in Times Square, wouldn’t that brutalize the society even more? Wouldn’t that start a vicious cycle that would make a civil society impossible? What was the point of all this mindless hurting and counterhurting? Or of anything?
Karp’s mind raced around these thoughts for a while and then clattered to a stop, like the little ball in a pachinko machine. His vision grew blurred and he felt sick. He had been walking rapidly for half an hour, crossing streets whenever there was a green light, and now he wasn’t sure where he was. He sagged like a drunk against the chain-link fence around a playground. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked at his hand. It was filthy with soot and what could have been dried blood. There was a drinking fountain in the playground. Karp drank deeply from it then washed his face in the tepid water, drying himself with his shirtsleeves.
He sat on a bench, watching the slight breeze ruffle the leaves of a dusty maple tree. He watched some ants attack a Crackerjack nugget. He watched two teenagers playing horse on the basketball court, a very tall black kid in white Converse high-tops and a slightly shorter, but faster, redhead. All these were of equal interest. Everything else was on hold.
The basketball took a bad bounce off the rim and rolled to Karp’s feet. This was interesting, too. Karp picked up the ball and stood. He was about twenty-five feet from the hoop. He stared at the ball for a long moment. The kids yelled, “Hey, Mister, let’s have the ball, huh?”
Karp held the basketball in both hands. He saw a thin, glowing wire leading from the center of the ball to the basket. He gave the ball a little shove and it traveled neatly along the wire and through the basket, without touching the rim. The glowing wires were Karp’s secret. He had constructed a network of them from every square inch of a standard basketball court forward of the foul line to the basket. He knew the right combination of push and spin from every one of those square inches to the basket, left-handed, right-handed, backward over the head. He didn’t have to think about it anymore, just find the right wire and the push came from his body naturally, like breathing or walking. It had taken him only about twenty thousand hours of practice over ten years to learn how to do this.
The kids whistled and the redhead said, “Hey, luck-eee!” The black kid retrieved the ball and said, “No way, man! That old dude can shoot.”
“Shoot, my ass! Shit, he couldn’t make that shot again in a million years. Look at him, he’s a wino or some shit!”
The black kid laughed. “Baby, you wrong there. That dude could wipe his ass with you on this court.”
“Bullshit! A buck says he can’t make it again.”
The black kid looked over at Karp, who stood motionless. “Hey, mister! This little man here say you can’t make that shot again. How about it?”
Karp raised his hands silently and the kid threw him the ball and he sank the shot in a single liquid motion, one-handed this time.
“See?” said the black kid. “I told you he could play ball.”
“That still don’t mean shit. A fuckin’ foul shot don’t mean he can play ball.”
“I bet he could take you apart under the boards too.”
“No way, man!”
“Ask him, then. It’s your ball, man.”
The redhead, his face flushing now, grabbed the ball up and yelled at Karp, “Hey, you! You want to play a little one on one?”
Which was exactly what Karp wanted. He wanted to descend once again into the waking dream that had been his refuge for most of his life, the world of thump, thump, bang, swish, of trajectories and patterns, a world with no problems he couldn’t handle, where there was always another shot, where violence could be stopped by a whistle, where pain was only physical, and could be borne. Yes, Karp wanted to play a little one on one.
The black kid sat down behind the basket, leaned against the fence, and watched his friend get his ass whipped. The redhead was an OK player, but then neither of them had ever seen anything like Karp, except on TV. The redhead’s speed didn’t do him any good, because Karp seemed to know where the kid was going before he himself did. Karp could lose half a step and then the kid would make his play and Karp would be there to snatch the ball out of the air, spin, fake, shoot, and score. And he was wearing wing tips.
The redhead got madder and madder and began to foul Karp, giving him the hip, the elbow. After ten minutes, he was doing everything but holding Karp by the wrists. Karp didn’t mind and didn’t say a word. He could score off-balance, from either hand, on both sides. Karp was ahead, twenty to two, when he took to the air for a jumper, ten feet out. The kid was playing in his face and he went up too, not for the ball, but to swat Karp out of the sky. They collided with a beefy smack, their legs tangled, and Karp fell and landed on the black asphalt on his bad knee and the kid fell on top of him.
They heard Karp’s bellow across the playground, and pedestrians on First Avenue paused and turned their heads, wondering who was being murdered-before going about their business.
Karp, his body arched like a bow and rigid with agony, continued to scream at top volume until his throat was raw and he was out of breath; then he just sobbed. Through a red haze of pain he saw a circle of faces surrounding him: young ball players, elderly checkers players, mommies, kids, crazy people, an ice cream man, and, since the midtown East Side of Manhattan contains one of the world’s largest concentrations of medical establishments, an assortment of nurses, orderlies, nurses’ aides, medical technicians, and a physical therapist.
This latter group took Karp expertly in hand, and, having determined that there was nothing life threatening about Karp’s condition, took a brief medical history, which Karp grunted through gritted teeth, and recommended that he go straight to the emergency room at Bellevue or Beth Israel-depending on his insurance coverage.
“No, thanks, that’s OK,” he gasped. “I just need to get home. If one of you could call me a cab …”
The physical therapist was a stocky Puerto Rican with a lumpy but pleasant face and close-cropped graying hair. He had rolled up Karp’s pant’s leg and examined the knee, which was by now the size of a grapefruit and getting purple.
“All right, buddy, but I hope you know what you’re doing. You want to get that in ice and keep it there, right? As soon as you get home. You got something for pain?”
“Yeah, I think I have some Empirin and codeine left.”
The PT man rolled his eyes. “It’s your body, mister. I had a knee looked like that, I’d crawl into a bottle of Demerol and stay a week.”
Somebody found tape and scissors, and they made an immobilizing wrapping for Karp’s knee out of a couple of newspapers from the trash. They got him into a cab and the PT volunteered to help him into his apartment. The cab pulled away, the crowd broke up, and the two teenagers began playing horse again.
“I wonder who that dude was,” said the black kid. “He sure could play some ball.”
“Who the fuck cares,” said the redhead. “Shoot.”
“Hector Delgado,” said the PT in the back of the Checker. Karp had his foot elevated on the folded jump seat. He was still in intense pain.
Karp told him his name and shook hands. “Good thing we found a Checker,” Delgado said with a chuckle. “They couldn’t fit you into one of them little ones, huh? So tell me, Butch, you always play a little basketball after work, on that knee?”
“Hector, you want the truth? I haven’t touched a basketball in, what? Almost fourteen years.”