Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

At the start of the fourth Elwood began trying to do it all, to outrebound everybody at both ends of the court, to steal the ball, pass it to Early, then run up and set a pick for Early and rebound Early’s shot if he missed. I watched in amazement, near total exhaustion myself just from our frantic play on the defensive end. In frustration with the Knicks’ defensive adjustments he started going up himself, with his usual too-powerful stuff moves, scoring some points but committing fouls the refs couldn’t ignore. Still, he bulled us to three points back, then doubled over with a leg cramp.

Coach Wilder called a time out. Elwood limped back to the bench.

“Okay, Elwood, you got us close. Now you better sit.”

“Uh-uh,” said Elwood. “I’m stayin’ in. Listen, Early—”

Early leaned in, his eyes wide.

“You gotta figure out one new trick, ’cause they’re bumping you off, man.”

“What?” said Early in his high, frightened voice.

“Pass off when you go up now. Don’t shoot. Find the big man here.” Elwood jerked his thumb at me. “He’s big and white, you can’t miss him, man. Just throw it up to him every time you get a clean line.”

“Elwood,” I began to complain, “I’m not like you. I can’t go back and forth. I won’t make it back on defense if I’m up fighting with Flynnan under their basket.”

“Don’t go up under their basket,” he said. “Shoot from wherever you are when you get the ball, man.”

“What?”

“I seen your jumpshot, Lassner. Just shoot.”

The time out was over. Elwood hobbled out, massaging his own thigh, and we took the ball up. We fed it in to Early and he drew three men. He spun out and five hands went up between him and the basket.

He didn’t try and shoot over the hands. Instead he turned and lobbed a clumsy pass high in the air to me, halfway back to our end of the court.

“Shoot!” hissed Elwood.

I tossed it up, not even noticing which side of the three-point line I was on. It went in.

I panted a thank-you prayer and zeroed in on the ball, which was in Flynnan’s hands. I threw myself in his path and forced him to give it up, miraculously avoiding destruction in the process. Elwood followed the ball out to Vanilla Dunk, who pumped, pivoted, pumped, head-faked, shrugged, anything to try to get out of Elwood’s cage. He lifted the ball up and I batted it out of bounds.

Elwood stole the inbound pass and scored on a solo drive for a layup.

The Knicks brought it up and Otis, looking frustrated with Dunk, shot from outside. He missed. Elwood directed the ball to Early, who drove to the basket and was surrounded there. He threw it out to me where I stood at the top of the key. “Shoot!” said Elwood again. The ball floated up out of my hands, and hit.

Tie game, four minutes left.

Elwood got too excited and fouled McFront on the next possession. McFront, ever-solid, hit both from the line, putting the Knicks up two. Elwood brought the ball up to midcourt then passed it directly to me, and nodded.

Swish. My jumpshot was on. Practice, I guess.

We traded turnovers again, and then the Knicks called time-out with just over two minutes left. Their season was getting very, very small. We only went halfway to the bench and then just hovered there, waiting for the Knicks to come back out. There wasn’t anything to say. We were too pumped up to huddle and trade homilies. Too much in the zone.

The Knicks brought it up and Flynnan staked out prime real estate under the net. I sighed and went in to try and box him out. He got the ball and I went up with him, tipped the shot away. Elwood took it and charged upcourt, slamming it home at the other end.

Since he was all the way up there anyway he decided to steal the inbound pass and do it again, and we suddenly had a four-point lead.

But Elwood was tired, and at the wrong end of the floor. They sent Vanilla Dunk up. I tried to stop him alone; we both jumped. I landed what seemed like a couple of years before he did. His jam was a poster-shot, I heard later. I sure didn’t see it.

We came up again and sent Early in to try and answer. He got caught in traffic and bailed it out to me, and I shot from where I stood all alone, in three-point territory.

That made four in a row for me, and a five-point lead for the team.

They answered with a quick basket. So quick that I glanced at the clock; we were in a position to run the clock out. I brought it up slow, dribbling with my big body curled protectively around the ball.

“Nobody foul!” I heard Coach Wilder yell from the sidelines. Thanks, Coach. I passed it to Elwood. He passed it to one of our guards, who passed it back to me. Flynnan lunged for the ball, and I passed it away again. It got passed around the circuit, everybody touching it except Early, who wouldn’t have known what to do with it. He only existed in two dimensions: up and down. Time was beyond him.

The ball came back to me with a two seconds on the shot clock. What the hell, I thought, and chucked it up.

Swish.

We’d won. Five points up with 16 seconds. No way for them to come back. The Knicks milked it, of course, using two time-outs, scoring once, but two commercials later we got official confirmation. When the final buzzer sounded, we had a nice healthy three-point edge.

The locker room was mayhem. All the Disney executive people I’d managed never to meet wanted to shake my hand. The media swarmed, media-like. Some beer company exec gave Early Natt an award for series MVP and they stuck a mike in his face and Early just grinned and made this sort of bubbling sound with his lips, ignoring the questions. Another bunch of TV people isolated me and Elwood by our lockers, and I readied myself to do the talking once again.

“Well, Elwood, care to break your media silence for once?”

Elwood paused, then grinned. “Sure, asshole, let’s break some silence. What you wanna know?”

The reporter clung to his pasted-on smile. “Uh, you were a real leader out there, Elwood. Some would say the MVP belongs to you. You took an unconventional mix of talents and made them work together—”

Elwood stuck his big finger against the reporter’s chest. “You wanna know who the star of this team is?”

“Uh—”

“This dude here, man. He’s taught himself to play without sampling, man, ’cause the skills they gave him sucked, and he didn’t even tell anybody. Me, Early, Vanilla Fucking Dunk, all them other dudes are playing with exosuits, but not my man Lassner, man. He’s a defensive star. He can hang with the exosuits, man, and that’s a rare thing.” He laughed. “He’s also got this funny jumpshot ain’t too bad. Big white elbows stickin’ out all over the place, but it ain’t too bad. No suit for that either.”

They turned to me. I nodded and shrugged and looked back to Elwood.

“How does it feel beating Michael Jordan?” The question was directed at either one of us, but Elwood picked it up again.

“Didn’t beat Michael Jordan,” he said angrily. “Beat Vanilla Dunk. If that was Jordan we wouldn’t have beat him.”

“What’s going to become of your feud?”

Elwood’s face went through a quick series of expressions; angry, then sarcastic, then sealed-up, like he wasn’t going to talk anymore. Then he went past that, smiling at himself for a minute before answering the question.

What came out was a strangely heartfelt jumble of sports cliches. I don’t mean to be insulting when I say that I don’t think I ever saw Elwood speak from a deeper place within himself than at that moment. I really do think he was the last modernist in a sport gone completely postmodern.

“Ain’t no feud. Alan Gorman is a rookie, man, and you got to give him time to put it together. I was honored to play alongside the man in New York and I’m honored to face him now. I hope we meet again — after the Heat wins this championship, that is. I’m sure he’ll grow into the suit. Ain’t no feud. I plan to beat the man every time I can, but when he beats me it ain’t gonna be Michael Jordan then, neither, man. It’s gonna be Gorman, or Dunk or whatever he wants to call his ass, and when he does I’ll shake the dude’s hand. Here, you oughta ask the big white dufus some questions now.”