The intensity of this moment blots out the past, obscures the future…his senses are so hyper-alert he can hear the desert wind whistling into the jagged gashes of this sun-parched earth…he leans forward into now, revelling in the infinity of the present.
This ability to stay in the moment, to keep his thoughts from peeping around the bend ahead, or retreating along the path already taken, this is why he can tell a story with his body that breaks the boundaries of what has been done before.
He is two points from the win and the two bored Sky Sports commentators search through their clichés and curdled pieties to inform viewers around the world what is plain to see. His victories are now routine after all. These days he has regained that singular and absolute concentration, that renowned focus, laser-like in its purity. Finally, one of them quips with jocular good cheer, “Seems like J.P. has forgotten how to lose.”
“Winning has become a habit,” drawls the other with syrupy admiration. “It’s like he’s a machine. The King of the Jungle just keeps on winning. And winning. And winning.” “Killer instinct, that’s what this is,” affirms the first commentator. “Like a hungry lion stalking his prey, J.P. just refuses to go home with an empty belly.”
*
Two points from the win and Marisol, up in the stands, is sucking on her knuckles to avoid chewing on her nails and chipping away at her manicure. Her torso is tilted forward as she watches him slicing through the dry desert wind of southern California just as easily as he moves through the spring rains of Europe or the clammy damp of a British summer. He is two points away from victory and then she will be able to exhale because every time he wins, something serendipitous happens in her life: her agent calls her about an exciting audition for a breakout role, her boyfriend surprises her with purple dahlias, her horoscope promises that Jupiter is entering her tenth house of fame and fortune…
“So planetary movements too? J.P. can even shift planets?” asked her boyfriend one evening, pretending to be mock-jealous although he was, in truth, very jealous of the man whom Marisol depended on more than him. She knew he thought her irrationally superstitious but she was positive about one thing in this life. When J.P. inexplicably lost in the second round at Wimbledon two years ago, what had happened?
“Absolute disaster,” she intoned dramatically, elongating the rrrrrr.
But today, the universe is in order even though J.P. is facing Janus. Marisol had been worried but now she can relax, he is two points from the win. She surreptitiously pulls her phone out of her bag but the glare of the sun prevents her from seeing if any good news has come through yet. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, the casting director for the new primetime series on HBO is going to call her agent to offer her the role she has been working towards all these years of audition, rejection, audition, callback, second audition, callback, third audition, rejection…and the whole cycle starts again, audition.
Marisol slides her phone back into her purse and calls out, “Come on, J.P.! Vamos! You got this!” She clenches her fists, preparing for the deathblow.
*
Two points from the win.
His phone vibrates in his tracksuit pants pocket, disturbingly near his testicles. Rory is sitting in the corner seat behind J.P. who is bouncing the ball methodically, preparing to serve another unreturnable ace to his hapless opponent. This is just a third round match but truth be told, he’d been a little anxious, just because it was Janus on the other side of the net…but at least against everyone else, J.P. was the consummate closer, so Rory takes out his phone and strokes his index finger across the screen. His wife, Syeda, who knows the tennis calendar by heart wants to check if he is coming home in between Miami and Monte Carlo. She isn’t being passive-aggressive: J.P.’s stellar career paid for their vacation home in Durban, their sons’ expensive school fees at Bishops, Cape Town’s most elite private school, and Syeda’s love of opera, an expensive hobby for a Muslim girl from the Bo-Kaap district but one that had saved her after she was forced to stop playing tennis because of a shattered knee.
Rory had met her just a year before her life-changing injury at the very moment he was beginning to realise that his gilded dream of being a top professional player on the ATP Tour was probably not going to materialise. Being the top South African player did not even translate into being a Top 200 player on the international circuit. What he had lacked in height and natural talent, he made up for with pure guts and determination but when the second year of trying to gain some traction resulted in a win-loss record of 8-26 including challengers, he turned to coaching. Four years of coaching players who failed to produce more than mediocre results began to turn Rory’s trademark thatch of ginger hair grey even though he was only in his mid-twenties. Beginning to despair that his beloved tennis would never yield a sustainable career, the final blow came when Syeda’s father took him aside and told him in no uncertain terms that he would have to find a real job, one that could actually support his young and growing family. He had been against the marriage, just as Rory’s parents had been, both families insisting that they were not against “mixed marriages” but that the “children would suffer,” being neither white nor Indian but “half-and-half.” Rory’s face, already crowded with fat orange freckles, grew hot and red. Would lack of money split a family apart even where relatives, religion, race, culture and language had failed.
It was Gilles, his former doubles partner, who called him from Provence one day to tell him about a possible “two-fer.” Gilles had learnt English on the tour and prided himself on mastering several English dialects. He had learnt that word from a Bostonian and used it constantly but in this case, Rory was confused. “Two kids, mon ami, identical twins, only eight years old. Mere children,” he warned, but boys whose explosive groundstrokes and rock-solid confidence foretold a bright, perhaps even an incandescent, future. The problem was that every eligible coach in the world was throwing his hat into the ring. The twins’ father, a canny businessman, wanted the best but was overwhelmed by applicants from more than twenty different countries.
Flying out to meet his prospective clients – at his own expense – Rory knew it was a long shot, a gamble, but then again, he was a betting man. Although only a regional tournament, it was obvious that these twins, uncannily similar except that one was right-handed and the other a south paw, were already light years ahead of the competition. Copper, gangly as a young colt, was the quicker of the two and clearly saw the ball as if it were a watermelon flying towards him, allowing him to take the ball early keeping his opponent off-kilter. Watching J.P. strutting around the court, destroying a precocious fourteen-year-old who was already well over six feet tall, Rory felt that tingling sensation in the left lobe of his fleshy, doughnut-like ears where he believed his intuition resided.
Attempting to convey his intuition with words inadequate to the task, he laid a freckled hand on their father’s solid shoulder. “What makes the difference between a good player and a great one.” It wasn’t a question, it was the opening line of his pitch. “The bounce of the ball changes according to the surface – clay or hard court or grass. It zips through the air or fluffs up, it needs more or less spin, a flatter forehand or a body-jamming serve to win the point. A coach can help with that, with strategy. What makes the difference between a good coach and a great coach. A good coach sticks to strategy. A great coach hones that essential ingredient. That killer instinct that no matter what, victory will be taken.”
Rory knew that their father, protective of his children, sceptical of fakers, was a small-time businessman who dreamed of turning his two restaurants into a worldwide franchise. He read books like Good to Great, The Law of Success, How to Win Friends & Influence People, The Art of War. Rory was fluent in that language because it was the same rules just applied to different games: tennis, business, boxing, economics. “We live in a winner-takes-all society, hey. There is no room for second best. That’s why I had to get out. I had it here,” he tapped his freckled temple, “the extraordinary level of concentration every player needs to execute on court but I didn’t have the height, the heft or the talent. But I know that no-one remembers the runner-up. It’s the law of the jungle out there, you fight to win. Eat or be eaten. Unless your boys break into the top ranks, it’s not worth it. Only victors get the big payday. These boys have the skills but I will breed them into killers.”
Rory held out his hand to shake on it and their father stared long and hard at this compact, orange man. He was a man whose frustrated ambitions were bunkered down in his clenched jaw. There were his sons with their great manes of hair gilded by the late afternoon sun. He couldn’t take them any further with his own coaching skills and he sensed something in this orange man with his orange freckles and his orange hair, his pale eyes framed by colourless lashes…desperation? Desperation was a good thing. Desperation was the soil in which the drive to succeed was nourished and sweet success flowered.
Sixteen years later, Rory’s whole demeanour has changed. He is now a man whose confidence goes before him like a bodyguard removing any potential obstacles. Coaching J.P. to become the World Number One means that he is respected in every continent on the planet and J.P.’s current winning streak, 49 consecutive matches, tying him with the GOAT – the Greatest of All Time – translates into a love fest with sponsors – myriad endorsements are offered daily, his fans are legion. If he wins today, he will carve yet another record in the annals of tennis history, further swell Rory’s ballooning reputation inextricably linked to J.P.’s ascent as he transcends the sport of tennis to become a global icon. His bad boy fashion sense, the complex Chinese character tattoos on his biceps, his unorthodox forthrightness with the press, his paradoxical devotion to Delphina – all of these have made him into a media darling. Except for that bizarre business with Janus, J.P. is invincible and everyone loves a winner.
Coach Rory strokes his phone. He will go home between Miami and Monte Carlo. He can afford to because he is a man who took a bet a long time ago and he just keeps on raking in the winnings, year in and year out.
*
Two points from the win.
Overhead, a flock of birds appears in arrowhead formation, suddenly cleaving the endless blue in two, startling Delphina out of her reverie. She knows she should be paying more attention but everything is going swimmingly well, even though he’s playing Janus. Five years of being “the girlfriend” means that she is clapping mechanically and urging him on out of habit. In her head, however, she is going down her checklist of potential donors for the campaign she is spearheading to raise money for ovarian cancer research. As soon as this match is over, she has to meet the photographer from Vogue who is already driving over from Palm Springs. He wants to shoot her posing against the stark rocky outcroppings of this ochre desert. Naturally shy and reserved, Delphina has only agreed to the photo shoot because it will run alongside an article about the fund-raising campaign. Her mother’s death when she was seventeen, just a few months after she had met J.P., had inevitably shaped her nature and their relationship. J.P. was a leggy, hyperactive adolescent with a big serve and scabbed-over elbows from diving for the ball when family friends introduced them but when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage four, the quiet girl with such a gentle smile told him that she would no longer be able to see him. J.P. surprised her, and himself, when he insisted on staying by her side throughout the agonising weeks in which her capable and competent mother was swiftly hollowed out by the disease and then bloated like a stuffed sausage. Mercifully, the end came quickly but left a sudden blank space at the centre of Delphina’s life.
Television pundits, fed the story by Coach Rory and J.P.’s media-savvy father, liked to attribute J.P.’s maturing game to her calming presence but as far as she was concerned, Delphina was just a regular girl from a regular family and she still woke up some days wondering why she wasn’t getting ready to graduate from college like her school friends. Instead, she was here in Indian Wells on this sprawling, flat and arid piece of land ringed by sinewy mountains, a stalwart of J.P.’s official entourage, and on her right was a fedora-wearing Hollywood mogul and on her left, between her and Coach Rory, was an ageing Australian pop star with pink hair.
They were bankrolling her campaign but Copper, always the cynic, said it was just because they wanted seats in the player’s box, it had nothing to do with pure-hearted philanthropy. It was Copper too who referred to J.P.’s invisible cloak of invincibility as “the magnet.” When yet another celebrity would have his agent call J.P.’s agent to ask him to do a cameo on a TV show, or an up-and-coming singer would beg him to star in her music video, Copper would shrug, “That’s the magnet at work.”
In a skyrocketing career, the only gravity-inducing force had been Janus. When J.P.’s crisis began two years ago with that second round Wimbledon defeat inflicted by Janus – Janus of all the players in this world, someone who should have never even taken a set off J.P.-– no-one imagined at that point that it would linger so. After the first of those three subsequent, inexplicable, ugly defeats at the hands of Janus, of all players, Copper had turned to Delphina, “Question: What demagnetizes a magnet. Answer: Janus. Question: Why Janus?”
The crisis had been possibly hardest on Delphina but she had answered defensively: “You’re his twin. If you don’t understand it, how am I supposed to?” She had left the rest unsaid.
*
Two points from the win.
The arrowhead of birds abruptly divides down the middle becoming two smaller triangles and then divides again until they are arranged in two long lines. Copper tilts his head back following them with his perfect eyesight. Ever since J.P. had started to win so regularly, churning up the history books, shredding records, vaporizing milestones set by the game’s former greats, he questioned more and more whether he had outlived his purpose. But Coach Rory wanted him to stay on. Superstitious, Rory feared that one day, J.P. would just start losing again for no reason. “This is a winning team,” he would say, “and we’re all part of it.” But on the cusp of his 50th win, would Copper taking a couple weeks away from the tour destroy J.P.’s rhythm? Was his winning streak really only made possible by a fragile ecosystem of interdependent elements – the right people, the right diet, the right practice drills?
Yes, J.P. was his twin brother, yes everyone said he was an integral part of the entourage that was needed to keep J.P. emotionally secure and mentally balanced as he moved weekly from country to country, tournament to tournament. Yes, he was there so that J.P. could keep on winning but lately, Copper found himself clinging to novels – books that were like a best friend – snuggling into their plots, taking refuge in their pages, befriending their fictional protagonists. They helped him to better juggle his own divided emotions: he was always happy for his brother but sad for himself because when you’re “the twin,” the twin who is not the star athlete/the millionaire/the family’s benefactor/the world’s envy/People magazine’s sexiest man alive/Sports Illustrated’s sportsman of the year/one of the world’s most influential people according to Esquire, Forbes, Time, no, instead when you’re the twin with the broken elbow which never truly healed after that freak accident, the one who could have been, might have, should have cracked the Top 10 because you had the leftie’s advantage, you used to see the ball so well, hit it so cleanly, intuit its arc before it left your opponent’s strings, it’s easier to live in the pages of books, escape into their complex worlds, cuddle up to their characters. But when your parents have sacrificed everything – your father has given up his business, your mother has stopped teaching, your twin brother never ceases to say “I’m sorry” in a voice filled with empty echoes, your family has become itinerant gypsies moving countries, crossing oceans in search of the best tennis facilities, originally for both your careers but now just for your brother’s career, you can’t quit, you can’t just quit your family and jeopardize your twin brother’s success which is your family’s livelihood and besides, when you start thinking of yourself in the second person, as a supporting character in someone else’s drama, best to turn the page, get back to reading because this match is pretty much over. J.P.’s just two points from the win.
Copper pulls off his baseball cap. After the accident, he had cut his sun-kissed halo of hair even though it had spawned his nickname so that everyone would be able to differentiate them: the one who could play and the one who was doomed to watch from the sidelines, forever more. What had Delphina said to him? “Celebrate what you have, don’t mourn what you have lost.” The only reason she could get away with that was because she had lost her mother, the ultimate loss, so much greater than the loss of a career. But, he wanted to protest, although he never would because it would sound so bratty, spoilt, entitled, but he had lost so much more. He had lost his brother too because now they were different, twin brother tennis players all their lives, now they were just twins. One a player, the other a spectator, an almost-was, could-have-been-great spectator but a spectator nevertheless. He could feel their father’s gaze glancing off him, instead dwelling on J.P., the victorious son, the one who had realized his own aspirations. Copper bites down on his tongue. Now, his father sometimes absent-mindedly grasps his left elbow, cradles it gently, as if that one body part contains all his own past failures and then he turns back to the one who always wins.
Copper can read his brother’s body language like he feels his own shorn scalp warming in the afternoon sun. J.P. is 5-1, 30-love up, about to close it out. He is fiercely gazing over the net as he stalks from the sunny side of the baseline to the other side deep in shadow, brazenly sizing up his opponent as if he is dinner. But Copper knows J.P. can’t really see Janus because he is in the Coma as Coach Rory calls it. That unreachable place where his mind takes refuge in the wholeness of the present moment, where he is purely in the flow of the action, no thoughts, and certainly no doubts. He is two points from the win.
Copper closes his eyes but the sun pierces his lids, making him see red.
*
Two points from the win.
J.P. points to the ball girl with his racquet. He wants the same ball back again. He’s already served two aces with it. He bounces the lucky ball on the baseline, once, twice, thrice, catches it, and throws it up in the air. Overhead, the birds fly straight for the sun, distracting him. He grabs the ball out of the air. Bounces it, once, twice, thrice, throws it up. It hovers there for a split second, awaiting the smash that will inevitably follow his ostentatious wind-up forcing the ball to a velocity of two hundred kilometres an hour. It skips across the net and lands right on the T. Janus lunges for it. Somehow his racquet just makes contact, his right wrist snaps with a powerful whipping motion and the ball hurtles across the net right into the far corner. “Stone cold winner,” J.P. mutters to himself just as the Umpire calls, “Let.” He smiles, showing his canines. “Make your own luck,” he says under his breath, waving at the ball boy across the court to return the same ball. Seconds pass. The Umpire glares at him. He is well known for liberally dishing out time violations. J.P. shrugs, winks at him as if they are partners in a grand conspiracy, wipes the sweat off his palm with the towel, tosses it to the ball girl, bounces the ball once, twice, thrice, throws it up and just for fun tries the exact same serve again just to mess with Janus’s head. He will be expecting J.P.’s trademark body jammer or maybe the out-wide. But they have played so many times in the last five years, surely Janus should be able to read his serve by now. But Janus is leaning the wrong way, listening to his head and not his eyes. J.P. repositions his stance, starts his service motion again. No-one can miss this, he thinks, almost angry at Janus’s wilful blindness. The ball balances against the piercing blue sky and he brings the racquet down. Perfect serve right on the T. Janus makes contact, whips the ball back again. “Stone cold winner,” J.P. smiles. He feels proud as if a slow-witted pupil has finally solved a basic equation.
“30 – 15,” says the Umpire.
Across the net, Janus is pumping his fist at his box and suddenly he is jumping from side to side on the balls of his feet as if he is still in this match. When they were juniors, Janus had always enjoyed the upper hand, leading the head-to-head nine-two but once they both hit the professional tour, the tables had flipped and now Janus couldn’t beat him, even on his best day. Unless…But he won’t even think about those four…incidents. Everyone knows they were an aberration, even that horsey boxing lady. Stay in the Coma. Stay in the Coma. “Let it go. Don’t dwell on what’s done. Stay in the moment! Don’t get ahead of yourself.” This mantra has been fed to him daily along with his morning vitamins. Here he is in the present, all alone on this purple hard court, closing out a match against another opponent, just another adversary to be pulverised on the way to the next round.
*
It had come on without warning. Suddenly, unheralded by sirens or symphonic violins, the wrong storyline had sailed into his brain in that fabled corner of South-West London on one of those afternoons when the sky seemed very close to the earth and the air was filled with moisture as if there were an invisible waterfall hidden somewhere. It was not quite raining and yet the grass was becoming slippery and then…his mind tripped over an impossible thought, sacrilege of the greatest magnitude.
He had beaten the thought away. This was Wimbledon. He was here to win. But the impossible thought started to thrum like an ominous drumbeat. It wouldn’t go away, chipping away at his on-court concentration, shaking his confidence because he had never, ever, not even once in his life thought such an outrageous traitorous thought.
This was Wimbledon!
Across the net, Janus was rearranging his bandanna. The All-England Club’s rules required all whites so it was not his usual purple. It didn’t suit him. He looked blanched out, pale, weak.
Coach Rory’s voice echoed in his mind: “Don’t ever go soft. Never, ever, feel sorry for your opponent. All sport is blood sport. You’re there to annihilate. He is your enemy.”
But…sacrilege! A sudden sense of release flooded his muscles, making him loose, relaxed as if he were reclining on a cotton wool cloud, far above the tumult below. That galvanising, desperate desire to win floated away…why not just lose this third set, just lose this one set?
Janus had been so nervous, his hands trembled. J.P. could feel it all from across the net, Janus’s heart beating in his throat like a frog’s when he won the third set. The poor guy couldn’t believe he had somehow won that set and was totally unprepared to confront the fourth. His anxiety as thick and damp as the water-laden air. So he just thought, why not lose the fourth? Janus worked hard, travelling the globe, playing an average of twenty-nine tournaments per year not to mention a few challengers now and then. He had an amazing backhand even if he did tend to place it cross-court too often, too predictably but so what? It wasn’t his fault he got injured just when he was on the cusp of breaking through.
Then, the fourth was over. The crowd went silent. Stunned. And so, why not lose the fifth, why not donate the whole damn match to the cause of Janus?
Why not?
And then he did.
He did the unthinkable.
He lost and he felt that strangest of nebulous emotions: happiness.
But afterwards, and especially after the next three defeats, they all said it was a Crisis. The Coma had been punctured and now it was a Crisis.
*
Two points from the win. 30-15.
The two parallel lines of birds suddenly veer away from each other at an acute angle, one heading east and the other west. Superstitious Marisol looks up, interprets it as a bad omen. She gnaws on her knuckles and looks down towards J.P.’s box. She recognises his coach, his girlfriend, his twin brother from the television but she can’t read their expressions. Half of Rory’s fleshy face is in shadow because of the peak of his trademark Springboks cap, Delphina’s mirrored sunglasses only reflect the incandescence of the desert light, and Copper is peering down into his lap. She tries to signal them with her eyes but none of them notice her so far away in the stands. Can’t any of them see what is happening? It is about to happen again. Can’t they see? He hasn’t lost in eighteen months but that is because he hasn’t faced Janus again in all that time. She pushes her long, dark hair off her perspiration-soaked nape. The desert wind makes the ball girls’ skirts flap soundlessly. J.P. is serving for the whole match. The photojournalists aim their long lenses at him, ready to snap his trademark victory high jump over the net on his way to shake his vanquished adversary’s sweaty hand. The reporters won’t be rewriting their routine stories with, “Defending Champ Sails through to the Fourth Round.” Instead, they are ready to type, “Historic 50th Consecutive Win for the King of the Jungle!” Rory is sliding his phone back into his pocket; Delphina discreetly tries to smother a yawn; Copper surreptitiously turns a page. Frustration builds into a chafing anxiety in Marisol’s chest. Can’t they see what is about to happen? If he loses, she won’t get the part, or her boyfriend might dump her, or, like last time, would her abuela’s sugar levels catapult to unsustainable levels inducing a near-fatal coma, in which she just lay there insensate? Can’t they see? The expectations that buoy him, huddle around J.P. like a doting grandmother, can also drown him, push him into a dangerous current. Is she the only one who can see it?
*
That grey English day, the wet air buoyed him along on a wave of exhilaration but once he was back in the musty locker room, the magnitude of what he had done jumped up and slapped him. He descended into an ice-bath, the piercing cold searing into his flesh, contracting the muscles. There was no way he could go to the press conference. They would have questions he could not answer so he would just have to pay the penalty fine. The first to come in was Rory, ominously silent. J.P. forced himself to stay in the bath. “So where is he?” Rory’s voice was quiet, constrained like a caged animal.
J.P. played dumb.
“Where is he? The King of the Jungle, he who never gives up in his merciless quest for victory?” He turned red, started hyperventilating, the darkened freckles pulsating like blinking traffic lights.
J.P. didn’t say anything. He closed his eyes, leaned back all the way so that the nape of his neck was submerged in the freezing water, sending an icy chill shooting up into the base of his brain.
“Thirteen, almost fourteen years I have been coaching you. I have never seen you throw a match like that. You threw it. Except nobody paid you to throw it. This isn’t the bad old days. You just threw it. For what? Why? Why?”
There were no words to explain what had happened.
“I saw you thinking out there. The little motors of your brain going whirr whirr whirr.” The r was harsh, like a rock being crushed.
J.P. closed his eyes, held his breath, and put his whole head under. The cold pressed down on his brain. When he came up for air, Coach Rory was standing by the door.
“You lose 6-2 in the fifth when the guy had more than six double faults in that set alone. He shanked half his shots, framed the other half, and you lose? Jislaaik! I still can’t believe you didn’t close it out in the third when you were up a break!”
J.P. shrugged. How could he explain that when he lost, Janus’s elation had filtered through him in a wave of vertiginous effervescence. His pure delightedness had been almost palpable, dancing around him in a crystalline cloud. Instead of his traditional victory hurdle over the net, J.P. jumped up and down like a little girl given a new doll – the media would dub it a tantrum but it was in fact a celebration. When they embraced by the umpire’s feet, Janus’s heart was descending back down into his chest but his palms were still clammy with nervous sweat and the pupils of his watery blue eyes were fully dilated even though it was still daytime. But how could he explain any of that?
Rory glared at him long and hard, his colourless eyelashes fluttering ominously. He was awaiting an explanation but none was forthcoming. After a long, noisy silence, he shook his head in disgust. “Don’t let it happen again.”
*
Two points from the win. 30-15.
J.P. experiments with the idea. Lands a soft serve into the box, a sitting duck. Janus roars as he clobbers it.
“30-all,” intones the Umpire like a priest saying the liturgy.
J.P. crosses to the other side of the baseline. Why not? He nets the first serve, sends the second so wide, it seems he is aiming for Mexico. Double fault.
30-40.
Instead of staring down match point, Janus is all revved up, jumping from side to side, wildly pumping his fist at his box because suddenly he has a break point on J.P.’s serve.
“Tennis is a funny game. Ja-nè, sometimes you never know where the turning point can be,” Coach Rory’s words whisper on the desert wind. That was his counsel to J.P. all those years ago when they were juniors and Janus used to eat him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Any point can be the turning point.
J.P. is preparing to serve when he catches sight of the birds again and grabs the ball out of mid-air, making a fist around the fuzzy green sphere. He looks to the umpire, motions skyward. The umpire acknowledges that the birds are a legitimate cause for delay. They pass out of his line of vision. J.P. bounces the ball, once, twice, thrice, throws it up in the air to serve when suddenly a bird drops from the sky, landing on the court right behind Janus. J.P. points with his racquet, shrugging as if to say, can you believe this. The umpire nods and one of the ball girls tries to shoo the bird away but it refuses to budge, instead just walking around in circles, pecking at the hard surface in a vain search for crumbs. Janus releases his upper body from the expectant forward-bending posture he had assumed as he waited. The ball girl runs towards the bird threateningly but the stubborn bird skitters sideways and then resumes pecking at the court. The ball girl waves her arms up and down but the bird does not scare and suddenly, Janus pulls back his lips which are drawn and white, dehydrated, and he laughs. Raising his bushy eyebrows in amusement, he looks across the net, seeking to share the joke with J.P., and for one instant, they are no longer locked in a high-stakes tennis match in which the victor will earn double the loser.
No, Janus smiles as if they are childhood buddies, as if they are, in fact, young men of twenty-four who can afford to laugh. For one millisecond, instead of being professional athletes halfway through their careers, they are no longer adversaries but old pals and J.P. suddenly remembers when Janus chipped his tooth diving into a shallow pool at the Milford Tennis Academy in Arizona when they were training there in the off-season. He thinks about how Janus’s parents, like his own, have sacrificed everything for Janus to become a professional tennis player; how Janus’s girlfriend embarrassed him by being caught on camera cavorting with a well-known coach; how he’d torn his rotator cuff at age eighteen and then spent fourteen months in intensive physical therapy to rehabilitate it but even now, the gimpy shoulder could still affect his serve, especially when he is nervous or stressed. J.P. had never beaten Janus prior to that injury. Just like he had never beaten Copper until after…
And then it happens. An army of memories suddenly blitz the present into smithereens, aggressively push him deep into the past: Janus as a knock-kneed twelve-year-old with his trademark purple bandanna. Their birthdays were a week apart and they’d met…where was it…in Sweden for the first time. Janus was used to hard courts. J.P. and Copper were not. Having grown up on clay courts, they couldn’t stop sliding into the ball. Coach Rory’s eyelashes fluttered up and down nervously, first after J.P. was beaten by Janus in the quarters and secondly when Copper was dispatched in the semis. “Janus ate you for lunch,” he said dolefully to each of them but that was half a life ago. Once they had all turned pro, J.P. had beaten Janus eleven straight times.
Until that day at Wimbledon. But they had fixed him now. Maybe that horrible horsey lady had helped…So first of all, he must suppress all these memories, thoughts, fleeting impressions which have condensed in the seconds between the ball girl clapping her hands at the bird until it finally takes wing. The Umpire is nodding down at him from his high chair, Janus is softening his knees, bending forward with an excessively straight spine, gripping the racquet with both hands and here is J.P., down 30-40, preparing to deliver yet another blistering serve. The dry desert wind rustles. It’s time to reenter the Coma but he keeps gazing at the bird, so much more efficient than a plane in its take-off, rising up almost vertically, the downy underside of its wings visible in between quick beats of its strong wings as it streaks off into the empty blue sky. He thinks, if I were in a plane right now, or on top of a cloud, I would see the topside of its wings. If he were Janus, he might see himself from a completely different angle – not as prey but as the annihilator, not as determined but as intractable, not as confident but as cocky, not as aggressive but as combative. He bounces the ball once, twice, thrice and throws it up into the air, his racket comes crashing down and the strings catch the ball at the wrong angle.
Coach Rory always says that in a lifetime, a tennis player will hit over a million serves but no-one will remember 99% of them. “Tennis is a funny game. Ja-nè, it’s repetitive, infinitely repetitive. But when you’re at a turning point, that’s when it counts, that’s what they remember.”
The ball crash-lands well long.
Out of the corner of his eye, J.P. sees Coach Rory bring his hands together and interlace his fingers. Coaching a player from the sidelines is against the rules but after sixteen years together, they have developed their own system of non-verbal communication. Right hand to the left earlobe means cross-court forehand needs to be amped up but palms together, interlaced fingers means close it out. Close it out now.
Second serve. He bounces the ball once, twice, thrice.
*
Towns blurred into one another during the North American swing except for those blistering defeats. In Montreal, seven weeks after Wimbledon, the uncanny feeling of inhabiting Janus’s skin returned. J.P. lost so many ranking points after another inexplicable early exit from a tournament that he had won the year before that Rory’s ears began to throb. He had to get Delphina and Copper alone to hold a crisis conference. A day later, J.P. went off to roam the duty-free stores whilst the three of them sat grouped around the luggage in the sleek first-class lounge full of glass, steel and hard edges with a view of airliners landing and taking off. Rory looked at them, his freckled face full of furrows like a ploughed field. “You two know him better than anybody. If you can’t sort this, no-one can. What gives?”
Copper ran his hands over his shorn hair, back and forth, as if he were massaging his brain, trying to come up with an answer. Delphina shook her head, perched on the edge of the black modular couch, her brown eyes glistening with confusion.
“Winning is a habit. If you lose the habit with one opponent, you can lose it with another,” said Rory. “The problem is that he is thinking. What is he thinking about? Is he burnt out? Why don’t you guys take a couple of days and relax?” This last was addressed to Delphina but when she broached the topic with J.P., why not a weekend in Bermuda or closer to home, perhaps Zanzibar, he just shook his head. He seemed very calm, too calm. Sure enough, the next week in Cincinnati where he had an automatic bye into the second round, he got lucky when his opponent had to withdraw due to a groin strain. But luck of the draw, he had to face Janus again and he was full of confidence having twice beaten the World Number One in as many months. The media – both traditional and social – obsessively psychologized, philosophized and dissected the possible causes of J.P.’s “crisis of closing out.” In each loss, he had been virtually at match point when suddenly, “a mysterious dark force,” one blogger wrote with gleeful hyperbole, “seems to overtake him and the fearsome lion abruptly transforms into a frolicsome lamb, gambolling about the court as if it were a play pen.” Everyone agreed that the so-called crisis made itself manifest during that third round match on a damp day in London but the search for its true root cause would become the subject of newspaper op-eds and TV breakfast shows. Why did J.P. only lose to Janus? After the third, bizarre loss in Cincinnati, he had gone on to win in Atlanta, a small tournament he would normally have skipped but which Coach Rory thought he needed to steady the ship. But then the U.S. Open draw came out and – a trill rumbled across the internet – should J.P. and Janus both make it through, they would meet in the quarterfinals. Apocalyptic predictions peppered every comments section of every article predicting J.P.’s imminent loss. Coach Rory printed them out and came in, wielding them like a man carrying a machine gun.
J.P., Delphina and Copper were flicking through channels in the hotel when he slammed the armful of articles down on to the coffee table. Copper quickly removed his feet as the top sheaf
fluttered to the floor and cupped his left elbow in his right hand. Coach Rory’s fury, although directed at J.P., was like a cold draught, activating his arthritis, the aftermath of his injury. His freckles on fire, he began reading out excerpts from different articles, his booming voice carrying: “The King of the Jungle, tennis’ ultimate superman, has met his kryptonite in the form of current number 43 in the world, Greece’s Janus.”
J.P. retreated behind a wall of silence.
“Solutions?” said Coach Rory but it was a rhetorical question. He had already directed Copper to locate the world’s best sports psychologist, the man who would reignite that drive to victory essential to a champion’s psyche. Copper turned to his sulking twin, “Don’t worry, we are going to find you a magnetizer. Before the Open.”
*
Second serve. 30-40. Breakpoint down.
J.P. grins, idly wondering where that familiar sensation of glass shards shooting through his veins had disappeared to, that tortuous pain that bedevilled him when he was losing. Instead, a profound peace is flooding through him as he goes through the motions, pretending to attack Janus’s weak second serve, faking a drop shot so obviously a blind grandmother could spot it coming, running the wrong direction when he knows Janus will as usual go for the cross-court backhand.
It is so fun!
He almost wants to laugh because he is flying high above the birds now. With his too-thin skin, he can feel, hear, see the world from Janus’s perspective. Soon it’s 5-all and he goes ahead, lets Janus take the second set. As he shelters under the umbrella held by the tallest ball girl, he catches sight of Coach Rory glaring at him – a mixture of shock and suspicion flushing his freckles darker. But instead of asking the Umpire for a comfort break which would give him a chance to regroup in the locker room, reset the renowned killer instinct, reenter the Coma, he thrusts his head under a towel, wallows in the forbidden sensation of somehow redeeming himself…the relief. Even though, it hadn’t been his fault. That’s what they all said. It wasn’t his fault. But how did they know.
*
“You’re having a midlife crisis.”
“I’m only twenty-two.” J.P. turned his right hand palm side up and massaged the ridge of familiar calluses there with the fingers of his left hand.
“Yes, you’re only twenty-two but you’re almost halfway through your tennis career. You’ve been on the pro tour, what, seven, eight years? You might play, god willing, until you’re thirty, maybe even thirty-three if your body can last that long. But you’re almost halfway through, it’s the time the bottom falls away and suddenly, you need to reevaluate. And of course this is also a reaction to Janus.”
“This has nothing to do with Janus.” J.P. looked out the window. The best sports psychologist in the world turned out to be an older Muslim man who had immigrated to London well before J.P. was born. Dr. Haddad’s office was located in a garden flat in Bloomsbury and outside the window was a glorious garden filled with summer’s dying blossoms. J.P. had no idea how much this man was being paid for this hour but it certainly wasn’t worth it. Smug, middle-aged, the man was beleaguered by a hairline that was climbing up his cone-shaped head unbecomingly balanced atop two or three chins and a round, dough-like body. He was the furthest thing from a professional athlete.
“Well, let’s just say, you’ve lost your motivation.”
“I have not lost my motivation!” J.P. pulled at a wad of dry skin. Was it so difficult to understand? Before he had a goal, one objective when he stepped on court – to win. That goal had unified body, mind, soul, into a singular unit that fully inhabited the present – there was no future, there was no past, there were no thoughts. Now suddenly, he was plagued by thought upon thought, feelings, memories, imaginings, longings, not just his own, but his opponent’s. Or rather Janus’s but it was not about Janus. It was about the cost of victory.
“God willing it will return but now you’re experiencing a mental blockage. When you see Janus, the pressure from your family, coach, fans, your sponsors, your country, it mounts and mounts. That is why you can’t win.”
J.P. rolled his eyes. “It’s not that I can’t win.”
Dr. Haddad’s large nose twitched. “You’re saying, then, that you choose not to win? You’re saying that you could win if you so desired?”
J.P. snorted derisively, pushed back his fuzz of hair, “Of course! That is what I have been telling you.”
Dr. Haddad prescribed visualisation, self-talk and relaxation techniques. The problem was that all of them were formulas for winning. He knew how to win against Janus, of course he knew, he had beaten the guy eleven times in a row. The problem was he just didn’t want to beat him anymore.
And when they met in the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open, J.P. lost in three.
*
One set all.
As he sits there under his towel, breathing in his own breath, his own sweat, he feels like God. He can decide Janus’s fate, it is on his racquet after all. That psychologist knew nothing. He couldn’t even answer any questions. Questions like, do I always have to win to be a winner?
But he can’t play around anymore. His father, Coach Rory, maybe even Delphina and Copper will be so angry. He wants to want to win.
The Umpire calls, “Time,” and fixes him with a puzzled and meaningful look which peeks out for a second before he rearranges his features again into a blank professional demeanour.
J.P. jumps up to begin the third and deciding set. For Janus, it would be one of the greatest moments of his career, beating him for the fifth time, preventing him from achieving the landmark of fifty consecutive match wins. No, he mustn’t. He must want to want this…It wasn’t his fault. It isn’t a sin he needs to redeem here today, even that crazy boxing lady had said it. He needs to decide right here and right now that he is going to win. As he leans down to await Janus’s serve, he hears a woman from the stands yelling his name. “You got this, J.P. Vamos! Kill him.” She sounds like she is underwater, choking
*
After the US Open, Coach Rory threatened to quit. He called Gilles, enjoying a peaceful retirement in Provence. “I can’t sort this. The psychologist was a dud.” Gilles suggested techniques like rolfing, zero balancing. “What’s that?” asked Rory. Gilles sighed down the crackly mobile connection: “It’s a new world, mon ami, a new world, just try them out.” Rory had his doubts. Then there was mention of flying in a new sports psychologist from Geneva but finally, it was his wife who suggested trying a life coach, a woman famous for her unorthodox but effective approach. “A woman?” said Rory lightly, his tone failing to hide his doubt from Syeda who bristled down the line. How would a woman be able to solve this inexplicable crisis?
Hawley Whitfield was a big woman with the splayed limbs of a former college basketball player. Her hands were never still, drumming on her desktop, periodically squeezing a metal device for strengthening the wrists, then back to drumming. J.P. couldn’t take his eyes off the woman’s long fingers. She crinkled her eyes at him and said bluntly, “So I hear you’ve lost it.”
J.P. looked at her impassively. She was tanned, fiftyish, and eminently plain except for striking doe-like brown eyes, the only soft thing about her. Hawley smiled amiably, revealing a gap between her front teeth, but J.P. could sense the restlessness rippling through her. It was unsettling. Suddenly, she stood up, scattering the multi-coloured notes cluttering her expensive mahogany desk which was in stark contrast to the rumpled maroon tracksuit she wore. “Come on, we’re going out. You’ve got to get it back.”
Ten minutes later, they were in a yellow cab driving over the Brooklyn Bridge. “Where are we going?” asked J.P., the wind off the East River whipping in through the open windows.
“I told you,” she said. Then she inexplicably put her head back and laughed, the sound remarkably akin to a neighing horse. “You’ve lost it. Let’s see if we can find it.”
*
Third set. Five games all.
Now here in Indian Wells, he feels the hot desert wind riffling across the court, the audience’s expectations all around him like a friendly hum of butterflies. Didn’t he often drop the second set sometimes when he was bored, wouldn’t he pull out this victory just as he had so many times before in his usual Houdini act, keeping it tight, keeping it interesting for the fans? Even though this is Janus. They’re deep in the third. He should try and break here, then serve out the match. True, Janus is playing better but now the sun is sliding down the sky and Janus is serving straight into the throbbing orb which is making the shadows lengthen and undulate across the court like writhing belly dancers. Blinded, he lands his first four serves long. Without doing a thing, J.P. is up 0-30. From the player’s box, he hears his brother, his girlfriend, his coach, “Come on, J.P., you can do it, you can do it!” From the stands, he hears a female fan howling, “Vamos, J.P., vamos!”
*
She didn’t say anything more as the taxi trundled up a narrow street and dropped them off in front of a forbidding grey building. He followed her up a set of stairs and then they emerged into a large bright space. The smell of sweat hung like cobwebs from every corner. A dozen or so people were scattered around the gym, jumping rope, beating up swollen boxing bags dangling from the ceiling on creaky chains, working the speed bag which let out a satisfying thwap every time it hit the wood. Hawley threw a half-hearted greeting at the old Chinese man at the front desk and headed towards the boxing ring, unrolling a long strip of fabric as she marched forward. “Give me your hand.” She slipped a loop over J.P.’s thumb and began to wind the fabric through his fingers, around his wrist, back across his palm and finally the thumb again, then secured it at the wrist. She did the same on the other hand. “Have you ever done this before?”
He shook his head. She made him do some jumping jacks and push-ups to warm up. Then she picked up a pair of beaten-up target mitts and put him through some drills: jab, cross, hook; cross, double jab, upper cut. Everywhere, there were huge posters hanging on the wall with inspirational quotes and sayings, the standard fare for athletes: WINNERS QUIT, QUITTERS NEVER WIN! screamed one in huge block letters. Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent, was scrawled on another.
After half an hour or so, she said, “Okay, now you’re ready.”
“For what?”
“Don’t worry. I am putting you in with Tommy-boy, he’s going to go easy on you. Just keep your hands up and keep dancing around him. He’s pretty slow on his feet but you don’t want a fist to make contact. He’s got those heavy hands. Open your mouth.” She shoved a mouth guard over his teeth and handed him a battered piece of leather that looked like a medieval torture device. “Put this on.” He pulled the head gear on but his hair was so thick it made it tight. She pushed some old, cracked gloves on his hands. “The most important thing to know about boxing? Don’t get hit. You’ve got to get it back.”
“What?” J.P. finally asked. He was tired of this charade. She slapped his chest hard as if he were being deliberately obtuse: “The killer instinct, man, the killer instinct.” Then she neighed again.
J.P. entered the ring but if Tommy-boy, a medium-size man with a deceptively gentle demeanour and no neck, knew that this was just supposed to be some light sparring, he gave no sign. Eighty seconds into the first round, Tommy-boy’s deadly hook made contact with J.P.’s temple and despite the head gear, he felt his brain rattle in its cortex. When the buzzer rang, he gratefully retreated into his corner, the sweat stinging his eyeballs. He knew they must be bright red. “What the fuck is that guy doing?” he asked aggressively, anger bursting in his chest at this huge ungainly woman. Instead of answering him, she said, “You see that fist coming towards you, skedaddle right on outta there. You hear me. Don’t stick around to get hit, you big oaf. Use this,” she tapped her head, “and your feet!”
The second round was more intense. Tommy-boy kept coming after him with a battery of blows aimed at his mid-section and then suddenly out of nowhere, he would land a deadly hook right to his temple. But by the fourth round, adrenaline was pumping through his veins, making all his senses come alert so that he couldn’t feel pain. All he could feel was his own heartbeat and he knew with a profound sense of peace that he had to do two things: avoid Tommy-boy’s punches and land a few of his own. It was exquisite. There was no time, no past, no present, no future. No Janus. No Copper with a broken elbow, a broken career. Just this infinite moment. He lost track of what round he was in. Hawley disappeared to the outer edges of his consciousness. Water trickling down his throat, the tangy taste of blood on his tongue, oxygen whistling into his desperate lungs, the knuckle-crushing vibration of bone on bone, the brain so vigilant, so alert he felt he could see anything coming.
Suddenly, Hawley’s hoarse voice cut through the Coma. “Last round, last round. You’re doing good. Real good. Think knock-out punch. Can you take him down? Do you feel it?” She drew her lips back revealing that gap and abruptly he came crashing back to reality. “I know what you’re trying to do.” It was so obvious, he felt irritated that he had gone along with this silly ploy. He pushed at the head gear glued to his sweaty pate.
“What am I trying to do?” Hawley’s big brown eyes were wide with fake innocence.
“Rile me up so I win.”
She smiled but it was full of cunning, “I want you to remember what winning means to you.”
Tommy-boy was towelling down in the opposite corner. The buzzer rang. Tommy-boy shrugged off a sweat-soaked towel and walked back into the centre of the ring expectantly. J.P. glared at him and then pulled off his gloves, tugged off the headgear with his newly freed hands. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Hawley shook her head, “Don’t be a sore loser. You have to finish the fight.”
“I have nothing to prove here.”
“You have everything to prove here. You have to prove you’re a winner.”
He began to unwind the sweat-sodden wraps. His knuckles were bruised despite them.
“Does a winner have to win to be a winner?”
She threw her head back and laughed long and hard. “Ah…I see now. You are not talking about yourself, are you? I get it, I get it. This is not about Janus. It’s about your brother, Copper. When he broke his elbow.”
*
Two points from the win.
Marisol slides her hand into her bag seeking her phone. For a second she thinks it is vibrating but it’s just a phantom sensation. After breaking serve, J.P. is serving for the match. He is up 40-15. She silently prays as he leans forward, bouncing the ball, once, twice, thrice, throwing it up in the air, smashing down the rackethead, propelling the ball across the net into the deepening shadows. But suddenly Janus lunges and attacks it, unexpectedly pushing back a winner that skids off the baseline. J.P. can’t get his racket on it. 40-30 calls the umpire. Marisol sees a flash of teeth as J.P. wipes off the sweat. She pulls her phone out and glances at the screen. A message pops up. Her agent. Suddenly it is deuce. “No news yet but no news is good news.” Marisol blinks fast and hard. If they want her for the part, she should hear today but the afternoon is already dying a slow death, succumbing to evening, and when she looks at the scoreboard, J.P. has been broken and instead of a 7-5 victory, it’s 6-all.
Tiebreaker.
Marisol bends her head forward so her long, dark hair shields her gaze. She can’t bear to watch.
*
3-3. On serve.
As the players change ends, the thrum thrum thrum begins as always in Coach Rory’s left ear but almost instantaneously moves down into his neck sprawling towards his bunched shoulders. He interlaces his fingers, signalling vainly to a seemingly oblivious J.P. who nonetheless manages to send an ace flying past the outstretched racket of a flailing Janus.
4-3. On serve.
Rory breathes a sigh of relief but a second later, the hot fury squirms up his neck and sets his head athrobbing as Janus wins the next point on his serve.
4-4. On serve.
If J.P. didn’t do it now, when would he ever achieve fifty consecutive wins? Rory couldn’t imagine being lucky enough to coach another player with this level of talent. He hears the audience erupt into frenzied applause as Janus serves out-wide and then sends J.P.’s return all the way to the opposite side of the court before J.P. has even made up half the distance.
4-5. On serve.
Rory feels a jolt in his left lobe. J.P. couldn’t, he simply couldn’t throw this away. Could he? And his trusty intuition screams, NO, NO, NO!
*
5-5. On serve.
The Hollywood mogul removes his fedora to fan himself with it. The pink-haired pop star is feverishly texting. Delphina stops herself from whipping the phone away from her busy thumbs. Does she even understand the rules? Does she know that if J.P. doesn’t win this next service point, he will be one point from losing the whole match? J.P. bounces the ball, once, twice, thrice. Delphina closes her eyes and reminds herself, it’s just a game after all, just a silly game, and he’s already won so much, it doesn’t matter, win or lose, it really doesn’t matter, just a game…but then she opens her eyes and her intestines clamber up her throat. She presses her hand against her mouth to stop the bile erupting.
*
One point from defeat. 5-6. Mini-break, Janus.
Copper inadvertently drops the book, doesn’t notice. He gets to his feet, trying to read his twin’s confusing body language. He has no idea if that last poor serve was deliberate. All the signals are crossed. He clamps his teeth into the soft bed of his tongue until he draws blood, the pain the only thing he is sure of. What should he feel now? Despair at a lost record, a secret glee at the underdog’s match point. Janus is one good serve from victory. A great sob racks his chest and he explodes, “Come on, J.P. Come on!” But for the first time, he does not know if his brother can hear him. And he does not know if he wants him to because J.P. might hear in his voice everything he tries to hide, even from himself.
*
One point from defeat. 5-6. Mini-break, Janus.
Janus wipes his hands on his shorts, one after the other, preparing to serve it out. J.P. walks forward taking up an aggressive position, crowding the baseline, signalling that he’s expecting an easily attackable serve but at the same time, laughter burbles in his throat. He tries to suppress it but wouldn’t it be utterly hilarious if Janus could lay down an ace now, at match point? What if he went to that place beyond nerves, where you can hear the ocean whistling in the delicate swirls of a seashell because you’re so deep in the Coma that there is nothing more, nothing less and you can do anything.
That large, ungainly woman had followed him after he stormed off without so much as a glance at Tommy-boy. Trainers and their chubby businessman clients, boxers preparing for upcoming matches, hipster girls trying to get in shape – everyone who had been pretending not to watch the match suddenly went silent and he was aware of so many eyes upon him as he passed all those platitudinous posters and ran down the stairs, his parched throat crying out for some water. When he got to the street corner and turned to head downhill towards the river, he was surprised to find Hawley Whitfield snapping at his heels like a terrier. But since that day in the boxing gym, he had never again faced Janus at a tournament. Luck of the draw. And he had not lost a match. But he is at a loss now. He can’t decide what he wants. That Hawley woman might be watching. Millions of people are watching. The Sky sports commentators must be mulling over his stellar win-loss record, salivating for number fifty but he might as well be stark naked, the sun’s horizontal rays slicing through his too-thin skin. Should he lose today? That crazy lady had stood on that bustling street corner next to the East River, the sky a mask of grey, and said it wasn’t his fault, Janus’s shoulder injury, Copper’s elbow. Now, the desert wind skips a beat, revs up, preparing for evening. He squints into the dying sun. How can he disappoint all his fans? Everyone wants him to win. Janus is about to serve. J.P. leans down, ready to attack whatever ball Janus manages to get across the net but it is sucked into the net as if compelled by a magnet. Tears of pity sting J.P.’s eyeballs because he sees Janus is not in the Coma. J.P. knows the shoulder is talking to him. The stress is gnawing at the rotator cuff, inflaming it, making it sore. Still he has match point. “Second serve,” calls the Umpire. Janus again wipes his sweaty palms on his shorts. He inhales, exhales noisily, lifting and dropping his shoulders. J.P. again bends down straight-backed, his racket spinning in his hands. Janus throws the ball up into the last rays of the vanishing sun, and his racquet comes smashing down. J.P. is ready to receive what Janus has to offer him, a thing that is more than winning or losing, a thing that silly Dr. Haddad and that horrible horsey Hawley lady and certainly never his pragmatic businessman father or even Coach Rory could understand. Copper and Delphina might try, but would they? Out here on this purple tennis court, it is just him, all alone, fighting, struggling, determined to get the victory. But Janus can offer him something far more valuable. Janus’s racket makes contact a second too late but the ball doesn’t nosedive. Instead, it sails in slow motion across the net and J.P. snaps upright. The audience stops breathing. The seconds tick. He doesn’t move a muscle. J.P. stands stock-still like the ball kids and the linesmen watching the ball’s slow, graceful arc, praying it will land just inside the box, willing a winner.
He hopes the world will understand.
*Photo by Magda Kapa