An excerpt from Seeking the Center

… posted in honor of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and specifically dedicated to all of the teams eliminated from the tournament.

This chapter is told from the point of view of Owen MacKenzie, an American Hockey League player recently called up to the National Hockey League—the “major league” affiliate—to play in the Playoffs.

The Stanley Cup Playoffs comprises four best-of-seven series. Many say that it’s the most grueling championship contest in sport.

Owen tossed his bags into the trunk and slammed it shut. No reason to spend the night alone in the goddamn hotel, not sleeping. He stood looking at his car, and it shone back at him, glazed by the cold drizzle.

Most of the guys lived right here in the city. They were going home. Some would be sliding into bed alongside a warm, soft body, which, if they were lucky, might provide a temporary distraction from the wreckage of their manhood. Others planned to seek solace at one of the local watering holes. Maybe he’d join them for a consolation round or two. Maybe not. He didn’t know yet.

He walked around to the driver's side. His quads quivered like jelly as he lowered himself into the car. The cold vinyl seat burned through his thin dress pants. He shut the door, pulled his tie over his head and dropped it onto the empty seat beside him. Then he leaned back and sighed. The white puff of his breath dissolved quickly in the damp April night. Quiet filled the car with its grand presence, serene and indifferent after the overwrought noise of the arena and the heavy hush of the losing dressing room.

Owen fastened his seatbelt and the dome light faded. He was left to the yellowish glow of the parking lot light, its cheap plastic fixture chipped and clouded with an accumulation of moth corpses. He turned the key in the ignition and his headlights hit the car parked in front of him. He backed out, exited the lot, and made his way through the tired, disappointed city. But when he pulled up to the bar, its neon signs glowing with the promise of booze and smoke and guys who had nowhere else to go, he didn’t stop. He had no appetite for a night on the town with a bunch of losers, even if he was one of them. Especially if he was one of them. He kept driving.

The streets were dark and shiny. A giant raindrop burst out of nowhere and splattered onto the windshield like a bug spilling its guts. A couple of blocks ahead a car slowed and turned, its brake lights bleeding red onto the wet pavement. Otherwise there wasn't much to see but the robotic motion of the windshield wipers, right, left, right, left. Owen stopped at a traffic light and a pickup pulled up alongside, throbbing with a bass beat. He just kept staring straight ahead. His turn signal ticked cheerfully, out of time with the music and unmindful of the evening’s events or outcome. Finally he got the arrow. It wasn’t long before he saw the sign pointing to the highway. Without giving it a thought, he turned.

Now it was pretty much a straight shot across the empty prairie. It was dark as hell, and Owen drove like a madman, trying to put the game behind him, to make it shrink, like the city in his rearview mirror, from the present into the past. After a while he noticed that the city lights behind him had disappeared, and without really wanting to, he started to replay the game in his mind.

Who could explain why his team had stumbled while the other had risen to the next round of play? Had fate simply decreed in advance that they would be the losers tonight?

No, it wasn’t fate. They’d had the power to win. They’d held it in their hands. But somehow, at some crucial moment, they’d surrendered it without even realizing.

Words of explanation were pointless—shameful, even. Nothing but empty excuses. The game had been so close, so infinitely close, but in the end they had failed to make a play, failed to get the puck on their sticks, failed to shoot it into the net, and, instead of one of them, some miserable bastard on the other team had done it. Then those guys had erupted with cheers, poured off the bench, thrown their gloves into the air, and piled on top of one another in one big celebratory scrum. Meanwhile, us guys were suddenly undone, undressed, unraveled and revealed to be nothing more than twenty-some-odd graceless arrangements of used-up limbs and pulverized flesh flung haphazardly across the ice and slumped over the boards.

What if he—Owen MacKenzie—had managed to win the puck in the corner that one time, from that big fucking son-of-a-bitch what’s his name? Yeah. What if. The fact is, he hadn’t done it. He couldn’t do it. The guy had been planted in the ice. Fucking frozen into it. So big and heavy that it was impossible to move him.

There you go again, Owen fucking MacKenzie. More bullshit excuses.

Jesus Christ! Why did he have to fail? Why hadn’t he been able to draw on some secret reserve of strength, like some kind of miracle hockey superman? Hadn’t he wanted it enough? What kind of weak-ass loser was he?

He hadn’t been tired. He was never tired on the ice. Off the ice was another story. It had been a long few weeks. Little by little, the fatigue had begun to sift down, its drowsy weight filling the endless hours spent on planes and shuttles, in hotels and restaurants and bars. It never lightened. It never lifted. A nap was never enough. A night was never enough. A day off was never enough. And now the whole goddamn summer wouldn’t be enough.

Shit. The whole summer. There’d be no regrouping this time, no practice in which to fix the mistakes, no game tomorrow or the next day or the next in which to reestablish themselves as winners, as warriors, as men. They were done, dead, dormant until next year, while that other team, those other guys, those miserable smug bastards: they would continue on, they would live.

Owen had fully planned to win the Stanley Cup this spring. He didn’t even know, yet, what it was, what it meant, or even what the game was, this man’s game—how hard it was, how fast it was—but he was going to win it. Then he was going to carry that big, shiny, mythical, magical, fantastic silver chalice back home to her, to Agnes, overflowing with champagne. True, he couldn’t even picture it in his imagination—it wasn’t anywhere near real enough for that—but he knew he was going to do it. Only he hadn’t done it. And now he was in shock. Was it really over? It couldn’t be. Not so quickly, not so finally. There must be a way back. But no, there wasn’t. Only darkness in the rearview, now.

God knows, he hated himself for losing. He hated himself for failing. He honestly did. But he hated himself even more for the feeling that he now started to notice bubbling up inside of him, threatening to replace the bright edge of anger with the limp pallor of complacency. That feeling was relief. He was terribly ashamed to admit it, even to himself, but the honest-to-goddamn fucking truth was, there was nothing left inside of him. Nothing. He didn’t care about winning anymore. He didn’t care about anything. He just wanted to lie down in his own goddamn bed and sleep and forget.

Sleep. He jerked his eyes open. Fatigue was setting in. The game was fading. Even his self-hatred was fading. The fight to win had been replaced with the fight to stay awake so as not to end up upside-down in a slough by the side of the highway—an ordinary, every-day survival instinct shared with birds and bugs and fucking bacteria, for all he knew. Glorious, right?

He remembered, as a kid, reading about some pilot or other who’d flown solo over the Atlantic in one of those tiny, old-time planes. Was it Amelia Earhart? She’d kept herself awake by opening the window to blasts of freezing air. He tried that, and it helped. Even so, sleep might have overwhelmed him had the cramping of his cold muscles and the emptiness of his stomach not conspired to keep it at bay.

Finally, with the moon rising, he reached the outskirts of town. In spite of the fact that it was the middle of the night, there were some lights on here and there. He was glad to see them—they were comforting after the vast, dark solitude of the prairie. Maybe Amelia Earhart had felt the same way when she finally came within sight of land.

He turned onto his street. Thank God he was home. He didn’t even bother to get his bags out of the trunk. He was going to go inside and fall directly into bed. He wasn’t going to stop to change his clothes or brush his fucking teeth, that was for sure. He walked up the front steps, fumbling with his keys in the darkness. Finally, he found the right one, turned it in the lock, and opened the door.

 An(other) excerpt from Seeking the Center

The set-up: Agnes grew up playing hockey, she loves to play, and she was good enough and committed enough so that had she been male, she would have had options for continuing to play at an appropriately high level. But she’s a girl, so she doesn’t. A friend gets her a job down in Wapahaska and she moves down there. Soon after she arrives, she runs into a former teammate, Owen MacKenzie, who now plays for Wapahaska's professional hockey team, the Prairie Wolves. She goes to a couple of games, she starts getting interested, and when, one day, she has some time off, she decides to go and watch the team practice.

Agnes opened the door to the practice rink with anticipation and, yes, even joy. The place was cavernous, cold, and unnaturally white. There was no bright sky, there were no pale, winter sunrays streaming from behind a fringe of dark trees to kiss the tarnished ice, and there was no rough log where you could sit while you pulled on your skates, surrounded by hand-me-down snow boots and shovels and discarded layers of clothing. Rather, the indoor rink was artificially, aggressively clean and empty, the light even and undifferentiated, the space finite and separated from the world outside by a hard membrane.

Though perhaps not beautiful, it seemed entirely right to Agnes. For her, a game of hockey was a whole unto itself, a complete entity encompassing desire, intent, action, and consequence. But although separate from the everyday, it wasn’t completely apart. The membrane between was occasionally, curiously, porous.

Agnes appreciated the sensuous beauty of outdoor ice—variable, uncharted, marked only by the elements—but she also loved the clarity and the symmetry of the red lines and blue lines, the circles and dots and hash marks. They lent their own structure, delineated their own universe, in which order could be born of chaos—bounded by certain laws, as was Nature herself—and then be dissolved once more. The indoor hockey rink was like a giant graph on which dramas would be plotted and improvised, commenced and concluded, all in the perpetual-motion aesthetic of the game that was, to Agnes, the most beautiful game on the planet.

But before the game could begin, before the drama could commence, there was practice, and that, for Agnes, was where it all came together—or fell apart. Practice was where bodies and minds learned to accommodate themselves to those laws, those natural laws of hockey. For it was only after the players had absorbed them, and had become secure in their positions and paths, their orbits and trajectories, that the magic of creation could begin.

She stepped inside. A coach was taking shots at one of the goaltenders, easy ones at first, aimed at the glove or the blocker, to get him warmed up. Agnes loved the sound of the puck popping into the glove or bouncing with a thud off the big, rectangular, padded blocker into the corner. To her goalie self, these sounds signified a save made, a puck steered to relative safety. She felt a kinship with the guy behind that big, caged goalie mask—whoever he was—and felt his saves as her own.

Agnes was so absorbed in the goalie’s practice that at first she scarcely noticed when Owen and a couple of other guys hopped onto the ice, arranged themselves in a sort of circle, and started snapping a puck around. The clack of puck on stick was musical, though, and she couldn’t resist it. Her hands itched for the feel of it. These guys had hard shots, though: hard and fast. Even Owen. Yeah—especially Owen. At the moment, his back was to her, but the force of the guys’ passes and the subtle shuffle of their skates to get in position for the next one pushed their circle slowly clockwise, so that soon he’d be looking right at her. She tried to stay out of sight, because she really wasn’t sure that she wanted him to know she was there.

Meanwhile, more players emerged from the dressing room. She could see them come trudging down the hall across the ice from where she sat. Some started skating right away, some hit the ice to stretch first, and others eased into the session leaning against the boards, shooting the breeze with their teammates. Little by little the noise increased. Each player added the slithering of his skates, the resonance of his stick meeting a puck, and the twack of frozen rubber on the boards to the general racket. After a few minutes of random activity, the boys started their first, lazy, warm-up laps, some working with their sticks as they sailed around the rink, loosening up their hands and wrists. 

Their pads, helmets, and practice sweaters sheathed them in exoskeletons of anonymity—even their facial features were bleached out in the glaring light. But Agnes didn’t need to see Owen’s face or name or number to recognize him on the ice. She’d been secretly in awe of his clean, smooth skating since they were kids, and she’d know it anywhere. He was deceptively fast, and his turns were effortless. He was always square to the play. There was never a flailing arm, never a misplaced motion, just one unbroken, arching, curving line after another, perfectly paced, perfectly balanced. She remembered skating with him when they were younger, trying to match his stride and his movements. She could come close then, but she wouldn’t be able to now.

Soon the coaches appeared, and at the whistle the players gathered in a knot around them. Then they lined up to begin the first drill. They worked on breakouts, east-west passing, drop passing, and, finally, defending the two-on-one. With a D-corps that virtually specializes in giveaways, thought Agnes, they’d better pay particular attention to that one!

For an hour or so she lost herself in the rotating patterns and ceaseless motion. The players shed the cool mien of guyhood to reveal the open, hyper-aware faces of boys and the ferocious abandon of men. They hurled themselves down the ice, an initial giddyap catapulting them forward, skates splayed for maximum bite, arms pumping. Frozen pucks thumped into gloves and clattered along the boards, sticks smacked, bodies banged, men cursed and hollered, the Coach’s whistle shrieked, and skates whooshed like a firehose as they skidded to a stop in front of the whiteboard.

Agnes remembered how intensity mounted during a good practice, and how, even as it tired her, it psyched her up for the coming contest. She knew that the boys got each other even more revved up in the room, post-practice, and as ugly as their little pranks and jokes and rituals no doubt were, she imagined that they must also be, paradoxically, beautiful. Beautiful in function, if not in form. But she’d never know for sure.

When the whistle blew for the last time, formal practice was over. The polyphonic clatter thinned as the players started to leave the ice. Agnes stood up and made her way out, too. In the lobby, she glanced across the signs announcing classes and pickup games, and the bulletin board where people posted notices about used hockey gear, lost and found items, and teams forming. Then she buttoned her coat and stepped out into the frozen afternoon.

The door closed behind her. All was still. Back when she used to play, that stillness had been accompanied by a wonderfully loose, post-workout buzz. Today she just felt stiff from sitting so long in the cold air of the rink.