Then he looks at me and says, “You’re doing very well, Bennett. Better than I expected, honestly.” He returns his gaze to the camera. “I mean that as a compliment.”
I make a face that the strip later confirms looks like I am not sure if I have been complimented or diagnosed.
Then Brogan, for love. He gets in the booth and executes love by putting his arm around me, squeezing my shoulder, and giving the camera the smile of a man who has been watching his brother figure out how to be a person and is deeply, genuinely moved by the progress. I manage ‘brotherly affection’ if you tilt your head sideways. Joely, watching from outside the curtain, actually tears up. The strip goes straight into her purse.
Then Mom, who gets in the booth, looks at me for a long moment, and says: “Proud. That’s the emotion I’ve got. Not what’s on the card. That’s just what I have.” Then she looks at the camera and sits there, steady and certain, the way Mom does everything. I look at the camera, too, and my expression does a thing I didn’t authorize it to do. The flash goes off four times. I don’t know exactly what the photos look like but I know the moment felt like one I’m going to remember.
Coach Duff is next. The assigned emotion is joy. He gets into the booth with the posture of a man reporting for duty. He sits down. He looks at me. He looks at the camera. The countdown runs. He does not smile. He does not frown. He generates an expression of such profound, weaponized neutrality that the concept of joy seems to evaporate from the immediate vicinity. When the strip comes out, Shep holds it up and the room goes completely silent for two full seconds before erupting into the loudest noise of the evening.
“That,” Shep says, “is the face of a man who has outlawed feelings since 1987.”
Coach Duff nods once. “They’re inefficient,” he says, and returns to his drink.
Then Pru, clipboard still in hand, gets in for mildly exasperated. She looks at the camera, she looks at me, she looks back at the camera, and she holds up the clipboard so the lens can clearly read the item at the top of her to-do list: MAKE BENNETT FEEL THINGS. It has a checkmark next to it. The date is from three weeks ago. She has been tracking this.
The room does not recover for several minutes.
Then Virgil. He gets into the booth with the unhurried steadiness of a man who has agreed to a task and intends to do it with dignity. His emotion is wisdom. He does not make a face. He does not perform. He simply sits next to me and looks at me the way he looks at Sleetwood Mac when she needs repairand he hasn’t figured out what yet—patient, attentive, absolutely certain that the answer is in there somewhere. The countdown runs. The flash goes off.
“Good,” he says when the curtain opens, and climbs out without further comment.
Then Slammy arrives.
The question of who is inside the costume tonight is unanswerable, as always, but whoever it is has made a very confident decision to participate, because Slammy is already moving toward the photo booth with the unstoppable momentum of a mascot who has somewhere to be. The problem becomes apparent immediately: the costume is not designed for a photo booth. The hammer head alone accounts for roughly half the available interior space. Getting Slammy through the curtain requires forty-five seconds, the assistance of three teammates, and one moment where the entire booth shifts approximately four inches to the left on its platform.
Inside, Slammy’s enormous face takes up the entire frame. There is not room for meaningful emotional expression because there is barely room for both of us to exist simultaneously. Shep calls the emotion through the curtain—enthusiastic support—and Slammy responds by producing, from somewhere inside the costume, a small hand-lettered sign that reads GO CAP and holding it at chin level for the entire countdown. Every photo is identical. Me, compressed against the side of the booth, and Slammy’s sign filling the remaining space. The strip is a piece of art. Several people ask for copies.
I am sitting at the bar afterward with a water and the accumulated weight of seventeen photo strips and one strip featuring Virgil’s face that I am going to keep, when Lynsie Baxter appears to refill my glass. She has Heath’s eyes and none of his reserve, and she’s been working the bar all night with anefficiency that says she grew up watching someone do this and absorbed it without thinking.
“You’re doing really well,” she says and means it without any performance attached to it.
“The bar was underground,” I tell her.
“Still counts.” She refills the glass. “For what it’s worth, everyone here actually likes you. They’re rooting for you. They’re not doing this because Gisele asked. They’re doing it because you matter to them, and they didn’t know how to say that before she gave them a format.”
She moves back down the bar before I can respond to that, which is probably for the best because I don’t have a response that doesn’t involve a Post-it note.
I watch her go, and I’m about to find Shep and ask how much longer this evening has scheduled when I notice him standing very still at the far end of the bar, holding a drink he hasn’t touched in ten minutes. He is watching Lynsie work with the particular focused attention of a man who is trying very hard to look like he is not watching someone. I know that look. I wore it for years in various rooms whenever Gisele walked in.
I make a mental note to say absolutely nothing about this for at least a week. Some things need room to become what they’re going to be.
“One more.” Shep appears at my shoulder. His voice is quieter than it’s been all evening. The performance is dialed back just enough to show the person underneath it.
“What’s the emotion?”
He doesn’t answer. Just holds the curtain open.
I look at the curtain. Look at him. His expression is different—settled, like a man who has been building toward something and is finally at the moment he was building toward.
“Just get in, Cap,” he says.
I get in the booth.
I sit in the quiet for a moment, the room muffled on the other side of the curtain, forty people and a mascot and all the noise of a Thursday at Power Play. The countdown hasn’t started. I’m alone, which is a strange thing to feel in a two-foot square box, and then the curtain opens and someone slides in next to me and I look up.
Gisele.
She’s still in her work clothes—it’s been a long day, I know that. I can read it in the slight tiredness around her eyes—but she’s here, looking at me with the expression she gets when she’s caught me doing something that moves her and she’s trying not to let it show. Not entirely succeeding.
