The final cut list goes up at 11:06 AM on a Thursday.
I know this because I check the clock sixteen times between 10:30 and 11:06, which averages to once every two minutes and fifteen seconds, which is a frequency that suggests I have developed an obsessive-compulsive relationship with a wall clock in a hockey facility and that the relationship is not healthy.
The list is posted on the board outside Coach Callahan's office. Institutional cork, the kind that exists in every facility in every sport at every level, and the cork has held the names of men whose careers continued and men whose careers paused and men whose careers ended, and the cork does not care about the difference. The cork holds the paper. The paper holds the names. The names hold the futures.
Players cluster. The clustering is the herd instinct, thirty men moving toward a piece of paper with the gravitational urgency of people whose lives depend on the arrangement of letters on a page. Some men walk toward the board quickly, wanting the information like ripping off a bandage. Some men drift, delaying the moment of knowledge because the not-knowing, whileagonizing, is also safe, because the not-knowing still contains the possibility that you stayed.
I am the second kind. I drift. The drifting is the performance, of course. The drifting says: I'm casual about this. I'm easy. I'm the guy who grins and shrugs and says "whatever happens, happens" while his internal organs rearrange themselves with anxiety.
The Alberta defenseman (Tyson, whose last name is Bennett and whose personality is the personality of a golden retriever who has been told he's going to the park) is at the board already. He turns around. He sees me. His face does a thing that golden retrievers' faces do not do because golden retrievers cannot read, but the human equivalent is: joy, relief, and the uninhibited enthusiasm of a person who has no emotional filter.
"MERCER!" he shouts across the corridor.
I walk to the board.
The names are alphabetical. I scan the M's.
Mercer, Eli.
I stare at the name. My name. On the list. On the roster.
I stay.
The grin arrives and for once the grin is not a performance. The grin is the real thing, the underneath thing, the grin that exists when the performing and the earning are the same action. I made the team. I earned the ice. The speed and the wanting and the five AM skates in Tampa and the years of juniors and the highlight reel that was half brilliance and half recklessness and the week of camp where I got hip-checked by a glacier and coached by a man who said "be effective" and kissed in an elevator and fed pasta at 10:30 at night, all of it compressed into five letters on a piece of cork.
Mercer, Eli.
Bennett hugs me. The hug is the Bennett hug, which is the hug of a man who does not understand the concept of personalspace and who processes all emotions through full-body contact. I accept the hug because the hug is real and because my body is vibrating at a frequency that requires grounding and Bennett is two hundred and twenty pounds of ground.
My new key card works on the player entrance now. My name is on the stall tag in clean black print. The room looks the same and nothing in my life does.
Coach Callahan finds me in the hallway. The fire hydrant stands in front of me with his arms crossed and his face in the configuration that means "I am about to say one sentence and the sentence is going to have to be enough."
"Mercer. You earned it. Don't make me regret it."
"Yes, Coach."
He walks away. The conversation is over. I have been praised and threatened in eight words. This is the Callahan experience.
I should call my mother. I should call my mother because Carmen Mercer has been waiting for this phone call since I was four years old on the Tampa rink and because the phone call is the thing she has earned through eighteen years of 5 AM drives and equipment costs and the relentless, Cuban-American-mother faith that her son was going to make it.
I should call my agent. I should call my sister. I should call every person who stood behind me while I chased this.
I go to the video room.
Room 3 is dark except for the idle blue screen. Nikolai is in the chair nearest the projector. He is not watching film. He is sitting in the dark with his reading glasses on the arm of the chair (not on his face, the glasses have been migrating off his face with increasing frequency, the control deviating) and his hands folded in his lap and his posture the posture of a man who has been waiting.
He was waiting for me. Not at the board. Not in the corridor. In the room where the teaching happens. In the room where thelooking happens. In the room where his hand found my jaw and the inch between our mouths was the most populated inch in Atlanta.
"You stayed," he says.
"Yeah."
"You knew?"
"Yeah."
"That's arrogant."
