He smiles. Not the grin. The smile. The distinction is the distinction between the performance and the person, and I have been tracking the distinction since the corridor and the tracking has become automatic and the automatic has become a problem because the automatic means I am investing cognitive resources in the cataloging of Eli Mercer's facial expressions and the investment is not professional.
The session continues. Two more clips. A power play entry that he executed cleanly. A defensive zone sequence where his positioning was wrong and I show him why and he nods with the focused attention that he brings to the ice, the attention thattransforms him from the grinning chaos of the locker room into something precise and hungry and wholly present.
The second clip ends. The screen goes to idle blue. The room is dark except for the blue and the faint corridor light under the door.
"What were you like as a rookie?" he asks.
The question arrives without the grin. The question is the underneath asking the underneath, and the underneath does not have the grin's diplomatic immunity.
"Angry," I say.
"I don't believe that."
"It is true. I was angry at the game. The travel. The language. My own body for not being better immediately. I came from my mother's program, where perfection was the standard and deviation from the standard was addressed with additional repetition. The NHL does not operate on my mother's standard. The NHL operates on a standard that includes chaos and inconsistency and other human beings, and other human beings are not controllable, and the uncontrollable made me angry."
"What changed?"
"I became the control instead of requiring it from the world."
The sentence is more honest than I intended. My adult life compressed into one clause, and the compression does not diminish the weight. I became the control. I stopped expecting the world to be orderly and became the order myself. The apartment. The routine. The film sessions. The reading glasses that go on when the analysis begins and come off when the analysis ends.
The reading glasses are off. I took them off when he arrived. The analysis is not happening. The analysis has been replaced by something that is not analysis and that the control is failing to categorize.
"You do that a lot," he says softly.
"Do what."
"Look at me like you're trying not to."
The sentence is quiet and precise and lands with the accuracy of a shot to the upper corner. I cannot save it. The sentence gets past me because the sentence is true and I do not have a defensive system for truth.
I am looking at him. I have been looking at him since he walked into the corridor with a coffee stain and a grin and a duffel bag and the chaotic energy of a person who has never been successfully contained by anything including his own best judgment. I have been looking at him because the looking is automatic and the automatic is the filing and the filing is the problem.
"Mercer."
"See? That tone? That's not a denial."
It is not a denial. He is correct. The tone is the control attempting to produce distance and failing because the distance requires the grin to be present (the grin maintains the performance, the performance maintains the boundary) and the grin is absent and the boundary is absent and we are two men in a dark room without our walls.
I reach across the space between us. My hand finds the side of his jaw. The finding is not a decision. The finding is the control failing, the same way it failed in the corridor (the shoulder-tightening) and in the kitchen (the filing-failure) and in the video room (the finger-flex on his hip). The control has been failing in increments and the increments have been building and the building has produced this: my hand on his face.
My thumb finds the ridge of his cheekbone and stays there half a second too long. His breath catches. Mine answers before I can stop it.
His eyes are on mine. Brown and wide and not performing. The underneath looking at me with something I recognize because I felt it once before: the expression of a person being touched by someone they want.
"You should move," I say. My voice is rough. The roughness is the control's last position, the final defensive line.
"That's not what you want."
"No."
We hover. His mouth is an inch from mine. The inch is the distance between the control and its absence. The inch is the most populated inch in Atlanta.
The door opens.
A trainer, clipboard in hand, backlit by the corridor fluorescent. "Hey, Sokolov, do you have tomorrow's clip list? Coach wants it before..."
The trainer stops. The trainer sees. The trainer is a professional and the professional assessment takes approximately half a second: two men, dark room, proximity, the charged, unmistakable geometry of a moment interrupted.
