John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Harry is out on an angle to the left maybe twenty feet and as his knees dip and his right arm goes up he feels the heaviness of the years, all those blankets of time, since he did this last. A bank shot. He has the spot on the backboard in his sights, but the ball doesn't quite have the length and, instead of glancing off and in, jams between the wood and hoop and kicks back into the hands of Number 8.

"Hey man," the third one, the one who looks most Hispanic and most sullen, taunts him, "you're history!"

"I'm rusty," Rabbit admits. "The air down here is different than I'm used to."

"You want to see somebody sink that shot?" Number 8, the tallest, asks him. He stands where Harry stood, and opens his mouth and lets his pink tongue dangle the way Michael Jordan does. He gently paws the air above his forehead so the ball flies from his long loose brown hand. But he misses also, hitting the rim on the right. This breaks some of the ice. Rabbit holds still, waiting to see what they will do with him.

The boy in the hat of concentric circles, a Black Muslim hat, Harry imagines, takes the rebound and now says, "Let me sink that mother," and indeed it does go in, though the boy kind of flings it and, unlike Number 8, will never be a Michael Jordan.

Now or never. Harry asks, "Hey, how about letting me play one game of, whaddeya call it, Three? One quick game and I'll go. I'm just out walking for exercise."

The sullen Hispanic-looking boy says to the others, "Why you lettin' this man butt in? This ain't for my blood," and goes off and sits on the bench. But the other two, figuring perhaps that one white man is the tip of the iceberg and the quickest way around trouble is through it, oblige the interloper and let him play. He goes a quick two misses down – a floating double-pump Number 8 pulls off over the stretched hands of an imaginary crowd of defenders, and a left-handed pop the wool hat establishes and Number 8 matches – but then Rabbit finds a ghost of his old touch and begins to dominate. Take a breath of oxygen, keep your eye on the front of the rim, and it gets easy. The distance between your hands and the hoop gets smaller and smaller. You and it, ten feet off the ground, above it all. He even shows them a stunt he perfected in the gravel alleys of Mt. Judge, the two-handed backwards set, the basket sighted upside, the head bent way back.

Seen upside down, how blue and stony-gray the cloudy sky appears – an abyss, a swallowing, upheaving kind of earth! He sinks the backwards set shot and all three of them laugh. These kids never take two-handed set shots, it's not black style, and by doing nothing else from five steps out Rabbit might have cleaned up. But, since they were good sports to let him in, he lets himself get sloppysilly on a few one-handers, and Number 8 gains back control.

"Here you see a Kareem sky-hook," the boy says, and does sink a hook from about six feet out, on the right.

"When I was a kid," Rabbit tells them, "a guy called Bob Pettit, played for St. Louis, used to specialize in those." Almost on purpose, he misses. "That gives me three. I'm out. Thanks for the game, gentlemen."

They murmur wordlessly, like bees, at this farewell. To the boy sitting on the bench out of protest, he says, "All yours, amigo." Bending down to pick up the furled golf umbrella he brought along in case it rained again, Harry smiles to see that his walking Nikes are coated with a pink-tan dust just like these black boys' sneakers.

He walks back to his car at the meter feeling lightened, purged like those people on the Milk of Magnesia commercials who drift around in fuzzy focus in their bathrobes ecstatic at having become "regular." His bit of basketball has left him feeling cocky. He stops at a joy Food Store on the way back to Valhalla Village and buys a big bag of onion-flavored potato chips and a frozen lasagna to heat up in the oven instead of going down to the buffet and risking running into Mrs. Zabritski. He's beginning to think he owes her something, for keeping him company on the floor, for being another lonely refugee.

In the condo, the phone is silent. The evening news is all Hugo and looting in St. Croix and St. Thomas in the wake of the devastation and a catastrophic health-plan repeal in Washington that gets big play down here because of all the elderly and a report on that French airliner that disappeared on the way from Chad to Paris. The wreckage has been found, scattered over a large area of the Sahara desert. From the wide distribution of the debris it would appear to have been a bomb. Just like that plane over Lockerbie, Rabbit thinks. His cockiness ebbs. Every plane had a bomb ticking away in its belly. We can explode any second.

The rooms and furniture of the condo in these days he's been living here alone have taken on the tension and menace of a living person who is choosing to remain motionless. At night he can feel the rooms breathe and think. They are thinking about him. The blank TV, the blond sofa, the birds made of small white shells, the taut bedspread in the room where Nelson and Pru stayed last New Year's, the aqua kitchen cabinets that seemed too intense once they were painted and still do, the phone that refuses to ring all have a certain power, the ability to outlast him. He is flesh, they are inanimate things. The well-sealed hollow space that greeted his arrival seventeen days ago now does brim with fear, with a nervous expectancy that the babble of the TV, the headlines in the paper, the ticking warmth of the oven and the minutes ticking down on the timer panel, even the soft scuffle and rustle of his body's own movements hold at bay for their duration; but when these small commotions are over the silence comes back, the presence of absence, the unanswerable question that surrounds his rustling upright stalk of warm blood. The lasagna is gluey and like napalm on the tongue but he eats it all, a portion for two, while flipping channels between Jennings and Brokaw looking for the best clips of hurricane damage and wind, wild wet wind screaming through rooms just like this one, knocking out entire glass sliding doors and ski mming them around like pie plates. Everything flies loose, the world is crashing, nothing in life can be nailed down. Terrific.

He suddenly needs, as suddenly as the need to urinate comes upon a man taking diuretics, to talk to his grandchildren. He is a grandfather, they can't deny him that. He has to look up Nelson's number in the address book on the fake-bamboo desk, it was changed last winter, he's forgotten it already, your mind at Harry's age lets all sorts of things slip. He finds the book, kept in Janice's half-formed schoolgirl hand, in a variety of slants. He dials, having to hang up once when he thinks he might have dialled an 8 for a 9. Pru answers. Her voice is casual, light, tough. He almost hangs up again.

"Hi," he says. "It's me."

"Harry, you really shouldn't be -"

"I'm not. I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to my grandchildren. Isn't it about time for Roy's birthday?"

"Next month."

"Just think. He'll be four."

"He is four. He'll be five."

"Time for kindergarten," Harry says. "Incredible. I understand you and little Nellie are working on a third. Terrific."

"Well, we're just seeing what happens."

"No more condoms, huh? What about him and AIDS?"

"Harry, please. This is none of your business. But he was tested, if you must know, and is HIV-negative."

"Terrific. One more thing off my mind. The kid's straight, and the kid's clean. Pru, I think I'm going crazy down here. My dreams – they're like cut-up comic strips."

He can picture her smiling wryly at this, her mouth tugging down on one side, her free hand pushing back from her forehead with two fingers stray strands of carrot-colored hair. Sexy; but what has it got her? A would-be social worker for a husband, living space in another woman's house, and a future of drudging and watching her looks fade away in the mirror. Her voice in his ear is like a periscope glimpse, blurred by salt spray, of the upper world. She is up there, he is down here.