Sitting in the expensive seats my father had insisted on paying for, holding the expensive beer he’d urged into my hand, waiting for the match to begin, I still didn’t know why he was here in the first place—in Los Angeles, with me, watching soccer. As far as I knew, he didn’t care much for any of those things. On the field, the players stood sorted by color, Seattle’s green over there, the Galaxy in white over here. The referee started his watch, his whistle blew, and the players skidded together, blurring the colors, and then my father, as if also waiting for the referee to set things into motion, turned to me and said that he might die.
Because my father no longer looked like my father, it felt like I’d come to the match alone, and my seatmate, a stranger, had just confessed his existential anxiety to me. I looked down at my father’s left knee and pictured the reconstructed joint, the screws and washers and gleaming titanium ball-and-socket. All that metal was still inside him, although the titanium was no longer gleaming but was instead covered in tissue and blood, all the stuff that made my father who he was. My father was incapable of change, I knew. Everything inside him was undoubtedly the same, but outwardly he resembled a totally different person. When I’d picked him up from the airport that morning, I hadn’t recognized him as he broke from the crowd whirling through the revolving doors. He looked like any other older white guy in Los Angeles: a yellow button-up, linen shorts, white sneakers, sunglasses—clothes I didn’t know he owned, clothes I couldn’t have imagined him wearing. After his injury, he’d worn nothing but sweatpants and old gym shirts that, as he lost weight, hung depressingly on him, marking in absence where his body’s breadth had been. But now he was bigger than I’d seen him in years. His short sleeves were pushed up towards his shoulders by the swell of his biceps, and his neck was wide and firm.
Part of the uncanniness was the context, the setting—bright California sun, the scrambling noise of the crowd—so totally unlike the dark living room, full of brittle television sounds, which was the only place I’d seen him since leaving home a decade ago. After he got hurt and I finished high school, we’d settled into a steady and hard-won routine. Once a year I resigned myself to calling him and planning a visit for whichever major holiday was farthest away. I flew in and found a ride from the airport, he met me at the door, and we stood around in a buzzy silence, like we were waiting in line for a very small bathroom, until finally he returned to his chair in front of the television. We sat and watched sports: basketball or baseball through primetime, and then late at night, when the stations needed to fill airtime, sometimes the weightlifting came on, and my father unfolded in his chair like a dying houseplant finally given water.
The broadcast schedule was pretty unpredictable; sometimes the late-late sports show featured weightlifting, but other times it was ultimate frisbee or lacrosse or, worst, bodybuilding. My father, the former weightlifter, despised bodybuilding, which he considered not a sport but a sort of fashion show, and on those occasions he scowled, turned off the television, and pulled a bad mood around himself like a shawl. But on good nights, when the weightlifting was on, this was the arrangement: my father in his chair, me on the couch, our eyes turned towards the television across the room, which offered the safety of a third thing, a shared object. My father’s attention, already narrow, focused like a flashlight beam.
My father spoke like a construction foreman: words were meant to get the job done. Ambiguity was dangerous; casual conversation was at best unserious, and at worst it revealed your lazy preference for appearances, for bullshit, over the real content of hard work. But with weightlifting on, we could talk a little. Mostly my father talked and I agreed. He loved to categorize. In his head was a complex taxonomy used to classify the weightlifters based on style, technique, strength, and dozens of other, smaller things that I couldn’t spot or understand, even though I’d spent years and years in weight rooms with him. Once he’d figured somebody out, declared him a technically proficient underdog, or a showoff with puffy biceps but no legs, that was it—they were forever labelled and unchanging, like pinned butterflies. This was the only language, narrow and specific, that we shared: the language of other men’s bodies.
In my head, all those visits form a single composite night. We’re sitting and watching, and there’s a pizza box full of abandoned crusts and marooned bits of sausage open on the table. I can see the back of my father’s buzzed head, the thick roll of his neck. On the screen, the only light in the room, a man walks out to a wide wooden platform, his hands dusted with chalk, like he’s rolled out a gigantic ball of dough. He grips the metal bar that, once lifted, bends just perceptibly under the wheels of weight stacked on both ends. Like all the lifters, this man is a soft-edged cube: curves of muscle cross all four of his wide limbs, and his shoulders are winning a long territorial war against his neck. Squatting down, his arms locked and his chest flaring red, he lifts the bar just off the ground as he stands up and remains there, the bar threatening his knees, under duress—a deadlift. His knees wobble, and I wince, imagining the tendons and ligaments straining like bungee cords across an overloaded pickup truck. My sympathy extends in two directions, towards the weightlifter in the television and also to my father, his own painstakingly reconstructed joint, but he seems unbothered, incapable of connecting his body with the body on the screen.
What do you think, Eddie? my father asks. His voice is quiet but sure-footed. His eyes remain on the television.
Seemed like a good lift, though maybe—
His grip was shit! he declares. Fucking typical. Always sloppy. The bar wasn’t even. He didn’t take his time when he took his stance. He didn’t center himself. Lucky for him he was off towards his strong side.
The next weightlifter, even wider and thicker than the first, drops the bar. My father makes a gesture of frustration with one hand, as if he already warned this particular lifter personally about dropping the bar and was ignored. The rubbery weights on the right side thump down first, and then the left side hits the ground. The bar dances for a moment, right-left-right-left, like it has to pee.
Another uneven grip?
What? No, grip was fine, he says, his eyes still unswervingly on the screen. His leg drive was all uneven. Pushing with one side more than the other. He’s the kind of guy who takes reps off, doesn’t finish his sets. One leg’s stronger than the other. Look at him stand, he’s not straight. If you watch you can see.
As the next lifter chalks his hands, I stare at the television and try to look for details that reveal who this lifter really is, deep down. I’m tired, my eyes are cottony, and everything, the platform and bar and all the lifter’s bones and joints, becomes a network of abstract lines and hinges, an animated technical diagram, all working at once in bloodless cooperation. The weightlifter isn’t a person but instead an empty variable, an X. My father watches until the competition is over and the broadcast ends. He asks me nothing about myself, about my trip here; he says nothing about his knee, his work, his life. Without a word he gets up—although his body has deflated, his arms and legs gone thin and hollow, the memory of size and strength is visible in certain places—and shuffles off to bed. As I dig spare sheets from the closet and arrange the couch, the noises of the room—electrical hum, refrigerator compressor—begin to crowd out the silence.
Every time I showed up at his door, we became people without any history together: people who shared no photographs, people who had never fought. We occupied a bizarre space out of time, where nothing ever changed. During those visits, from the dusty couch across the room, I saw him in his blown-out chair: his entire life. I couldn’t imagine that, in my absence, he lived any differently. It was this same day repeated, over and over, scaled up fractally—identical days, months, years. My father and the television and the weightlifting. Always in the same position, as reticent and reliable as stone. I got used to it. We would never talk about anything important, I understood, and he would never change.
And so who was sitting next to me, exactly, right now? By all accounts it was my father, this solid man who looked nothing like my deflated father but spoke in his voice, who said to me, as I watched a Galaxy forward break away with the ball past a Seattle defender, down the wing—Eddie, I’m having surgery tomorrow, and the doctor said, you know, there are risks.
The sentence seemed directed towards someone else, and I’d just happened to overhear it as it floated by. Because it wasn’t addressed to me, it couldn’t do anything to me, couldn’t ping on my radar. My father was wearing the team scarf he’d insisted on purchasing from the team store. Mine was draped over the back of my seat because it was a Los Angeles afternoon, ninety degrees and cloudless. Above us loomed the second deck and the huge steel floodlights, which reflected the sunshine with such intensity they were difficult to look at. On the far end of the field, the Galaxy striker, Robbie Keane—tall, grizzled, Irish—fired a shot that flew just over the crossbar. In one voice, the crowd’s rising-pitch anticipation collapsed into the low groan of disappointment. I glanced at my father: he was angled uncomfortably towards me in his narrow seat. I looked back towards the field.
What kind of surgery? I asked.
Heart surgery, he said. A stent. Not open-heart surgery. They aren’t ripping me open or anything. It actually goes up through, you know, with a catheter.
They made you come all the way to L.A. for that?
The Seattle goalkeeper launched the ball downfield. I tracked its flight as it soared in our direction, and my eyes fell over towards my father again. His eyes were clear and level.
There are complications. Or there could be. Heart attack, aneurysm, organ failure, he said, like he was listing exercises off a workout sheet. He tapped his hand on his knee in an irregular rhythm. Turns out when you do a lot of steroids, it does stuff to your heart.
This was a surprise.
When were you on steroids?
On the field, the referee called a foul against the Galaxy, which brought a staticky grumble from the crowd.
Ref’s a fucking joke, said the man sitting behind me.
Forever. Everyone at the Barn was, my father said. Mesterolone or Oxymesterolone or Stanozolol. Just incredible, what it could do to you. Like you could feel yourself growing, becoming a different person.
So that’s why you’re here?
Yeah, to see a specialist. Turns out there’s a bunch of guys on steroids in LA, he said with a half-laugh. Who knew?
The sound of a whistle: another foul. I watched the referee carefully negotiate between the injured party—a Seattle midfielder—and the Galaxy culprit. When I moved to LA, I started refereeing soccer, and I was interested in how professional referees managed things, used language to shape and direct the game. I could hear the Galaxy defender protesting: Not a foul! Not a foul! This always bothered me. It was a foul because the referee called it one. You could say it was incorrectly called a foul, but you couldn’t say it wasn’t a foul, because it became one the moment the whistle was blown. I figured people who actually played soccer, who weren’t exclusively referees, disagreed with me on this point. I felt my father looking at me.
Was that a foul? he asked.
Yes, I said. A soft one.
What makes it a foul?
A bunch of stuff, I said.
My father made a gesture of understanding, waving the unopened beer in his left hand, the tendons in his forearm leaping up, thick and ropy.
Why’d you buy two beers? I asked. If you’re having surgery tomorrow. Can you drink?
Oh, he said. Felt weird bringing back just one. Figured you’d have both.
He offered me the second beer. I was still holding the first beer, and I used it to point to my cupholder.
Thanks, I said.
He was no longer smiling.
Look, Eddie, he said. I think there are maybe some things we should talk about. Before tomorrow. I thought maybe it would do some good. You know, the talking. Would do some good.
On the far side of the field, the Galaxy winger rolled the ball into the corner of the goal, and everyone leapt up around us.
◆
From the moment my father had called—had interrupted our steady routine because apparently he wanted to come to California and, as he put it, see what I was getting up to—I realized that the problem was going to be talking. What would we talk about? What would we do? Our usual arrangement was impossible. I lived in a tiny studio; I did not have a living room, or cable, or more than one place to sit. Most of the books and magazines scattered around were unobjectionable, but clearing my search history might be a good idea. I had no idea what I would feed him.
On the way to work the next day, I decided to ask Marisa for help. She was my only friend at the coworking space—my only friend at all, really—where we sat around and wasted remote-work hours. I did PR for a manscaping company that sold tactical, military-grade razors to men who considered body hair the last hoary defense against the waxen barbarians. The marketing strategy was my marine-recruitment copy attached to softcore gay porn: the words Take back your territory! above a headless shot of a naked man using a very large razor as a fig leaf. I’d gotten the job with the combined powers of an English degree and personal experience with masculine grooming offered by a childhood spent in locker rooms. When I asked my boss, whom I’d met only through email, what my copy was supposed to do—was it meant to arouse? confuse? amuse?—I was told that it was supposed to make people buy things. Sometimes I imagined that every letter I pressed on the keyboard brainwashed a consumer somewhere, gave them a zombified hunger to make online purchases, which made me feel powerful in a cramped and tiny way, and also a little guilty.
Marisa helped manage a subscription box of snacks. Every Monday she revealed the new theme. Today it was roasted and candied nuts. On her shirt, selected to match, Rocky and Bullwinkle. Her hair, brown and thick and straight, was always down, almost to her knees. The night I met her, at a Halloween party, she’d wrapped her hair around a tube of Pringles, tied the tube to the top of her head, and wandered around bending at the waist like a pecking bird to offer chips from her column of hair.
How am I supposed to know what you should do with your dad? she asked. I don’t even have a dad.
She was sitting next to me, and her topography of papers and wrappers and empty bags of snacks crept near my right elbow. I saw on her screen a long list of words that rhymed with nuts and a much shorter list of words that almost rhymed with pistachio.
Just imagine you had a dad, I said. But also that you never talked about anything, and that he hadn’t changed in fifteen years.
Does he like sports? she asked, head down, typing. All dads like sports.
He likes weightlifting. He was a weightlifter when I was little. That’s all we did together, workout at the gym.
Marisa looked up.
You were a weightlifter? She squinted at me, like she was trying to see through my disguise. You can’t be a weightlifter. I’ve seen you read books.
I shrugged. It was a long time ago.
What do you do when you visit him?
We sit and watch sports.
Marisa widened her eyes in a way that suggested I was an idiot.
So take him to the soccer game, she said. It’s Robbie Rogers’s first game for the Galaxy. You’ve been talking about it for weeks.
The Galaxy had just signed Rogers—he’d recently become the first professional soccer player to come out in thirty years. I already had a ticket but I couldn’t imagine bringing my father along. I’d thought about bringing Marisa, but she had a snack-themed conference to attend, and anyway I decided going alone felt somehow right or proper.
What’s your dad like? Marisa asked. Would he be down for that kind of thing?
I wasn’t sure whether the thing Marisa meant was soccer or Robbie Rogers being gay. But I decided it was probably the former, since Marisa occasionally had a hard time remembering other people’s parents were sometimes not only not gay, but actually disinclined to like gay people. Marisa believed that her own mother, who’d been an activist in the eighties, had watered the sprouts of her own incipient gayness into full bloom while nursing her. She joked about dumping her mother’s milk into the water supply.
Yeah, I don’t think so, I told her.
I get it. He has dad politics.
I have no idea what his politics are, I said. I don’t think he’s capable of having politics. I just know the kind of person he is.
Okay, fine, I’ll play along, Marisa said, after it became clear I wasn’t about to go on. What kind of person is he?
A nothing person, I said. Empty. Inert. Outside of the flow of time. No longer subject to the law of entropy. Incapable of change.
Since college, I’d received advice from friends, girlfriends, therapists, and strangers on airplanes—anyone to whom I told the story of my father’s injury, his retreat into himself that left me alone. They said that I needed to confront him, to tell him how I felt, to express myself. From everyone, the therapists and the laypeople alike, I heard, again and again, that words have power. That speaking my truth to my father would make some sort of difference. But even if some fathers, the kind with weekend hobbies, were susceptible to language, my father and fathers like him were not.
In one sense, this was the whole appeal of refereeing. I’d become a soccer fan in college, and once I understood it was too late to learn to play—my childhood spent lifting weights meant that controlling and passing the ball would never feel easy or natural to me, would never be something that happened in my body rather than my brain—I turned to refereeing instead. It kept me in shape, maintained the leanness that emerged when I burned away the weightlifting bulk I’d grown with my father in the gym, and I came to love the fact that a referee didn’t just observe the match but participated—with his language and whistle, like the players with passes and shots—in the big collaborative project. Your role was clear; everyone knew who you were and what your job was. It was the one time when words actually did have power, at least a little.
So this means you haven’t told him, Marisa said. About the whole bisexual thing.
My sexuality had been our primary conversational topic for weeks. In the way that one season gives way to another or the minute hand moves smoothly around the face of a nice watch—a gradual change you cannot break down into little individual units—I’d slowly come to understand that I was something other than straight. But I wasn’t sure how to frame that fact grammatically. Was wasn’t quite right. The be-verbs, the verbs people used to describe themselves, am was have always been, seemed concrete in ways that made me squeamish. Those words had the power to declare something; they called something that seemed literally fundamental into existence. Who was I to say what I was, or would be later on? Even if there was only a small gap between my desires and the way I described my desires, that gap still overran was, to be.
When I’d first tried to explain this to Marisa one day over lunch, she failed to understand.
So you’re attracted to men and women, she said, cradling an oblong tomato in her plastic spoon. We have a word for that. Colors and a flag, even. I could make you a button!
We were eating at the same long cafeteria desks we used for work, which made the whole conversation feel gossipy and adolescent. I put down my sandwich; I couldn’t eat and think and talk at the same time.
I just don’t think I deserve a medal for realizing that I find some men sexually attractive, I said.
I’m not offering you a medal, she said, thrusting the plastic spoon towards me like a tiny, blunt sword. I’m offering you an adorable button.
It’s just that—to say I am this or I am that—it feels inadequate. All the little things that make me me, they’re always moving and changing position.
That doesn’t feel like the important question, Marisa said. The important question is, so, what’s your type?
See? That’s the thing, I said, jabbing at my sandwich for emphasis. I don’t know how to put it into words. It’d be easier if I had some kind of category. Dudes with beards. Dudes with tattoos. Instead, it’s like, I dunno. Hot dudes? Beautiful dudes?
You’re begging the question, Marisa said. The whole point of a type is to define what hot and beautiful mean to you.
This suggested that I’d failed some obscure test. I thought about something I’d been told by a guy we saw in the coworking space sometimes, a PhD in astronomical science. Apparently, particles from space sometimes hit your laptop in just the right way, and they flip a bit, or maybe a byte, and change something. Maybe a period in your email becomes a comma. Maybe the file with all your favorite photos is corrupted. Maybe something like this had happened to me: maybe particles from space had made me—whatever I was, or wasn’t.
What if I haven’t always been this way? I asked Marisa. It feels unfair, I guess, to people like you, who have always known what they are.
I haven’t always known who I am, Marisa said. I’ve just always known I was gay. Your sandwich is leaking onto your laptop.
I looked down—tomato juice threatened to drip into the gap between = and delete, down to the precious wiry bits inside. Maybe particles of tomato were more dangerous than particles from space. I rubbed at the juice with a napkin; it left behind a pink wash. The conversation had ended there.
No, I told Marisa now, as she fiddled with her rhyming dictionary. I haven’t told him, obviously.
Okay, wild idea, Marisa said. Maybe it’s totally cliché, but you could make this the thing you talk to your dad about. He might be helpful, you know, in a you’ll always be my son, son kind of way. He might surprise you.
That would be, I said, very surprising.
◆
My father and I hadn’t gone to games of any kind when I was growing up. Instead we’d gone to the Barn, his weightlifting gym, which was near the fairgrounds and once had been an arena for showing livestock. At one point the wooden walls and rafters had been white, but they’d gone a grayish noncolor, and the rich smell of wet hay and manure had given over to the only slightly subtler smell of rubber mats and men’s sweat and chalk. Concrete had been poured and polished over the original dirt floor, pounded rock-hard by years and years of hooves; it was perfect for the sledgehammer impact of weighted bars.
I came with my father to the Barn every day after school, or sometimes the other, casual gym where he worked as a personal trainer. I’d been in kindergarten when my mother died, and my father figured there were worse places for a boy to grow up than the gym, where, as he said, serious people were working on themselves. He was either a brilliant or a disastrous personal trainer. His only style was intensity. He would assign his trainee an exercise—say, flys on the rowing machine—and then he’d sit at the adjacent machine and do two or three times as many reps, grunting and boggle-eyed, flicking sweat in all directions like a wet dog. Some people found his example inspiring or aspirational; other people thought him terrifying, even repulsive. His trainees were few but fanatically loyal.
When I came to the Barn, he’d set me up on a little training circuit of my own while he lifted or spotted the other serious lifters. As young as nine or ten, reedy and awkward in a stumbling, bursting way, I proceeded from machine to machine, loading and unloading small weights, doing my reps according to the weekly plan that my father and I filled out every Sunday night on an index card: seven columnar days divided by ten rows, the little boxes filled with the name of a lift or drill, plus sets and reps. If I completed all the sets, I shaded the box green; if I gave out, muscles jellied, before the last rep, the box went red. There was no reward for a fully green card.
The work is its own reward, my father told me. The gains, the progress, the weights and sets and reps all getting bigger. And me: by the time I began high school I was wide and thick in a disproportionate way, a photo of a strong adult man inexpertly resized on a computer.
What are we getting ready for? I asked him once as he sat on a padded blue bench, dripping, during a sixty-second recovery period.
I’m getting ready for a competition next week, he said.
What am I getting ready for?
You’re getting ready to get better.
This didn’t make sense to me.
I’m going to become someone else? I asked him.
You don’t change, he said. You get better. You become who you are, but better.
When we finished, I’d follow him to the locker room, which smelled more like a barn than the rest of the Barn. I remember being confused by the fact that everyone in the close, tropical space looked so much like my father. All I could see was his body—its sweaty skin-sheen, its prickly short hair, its wide-legged cowboyish walk—reproduced again and again, in front of every locker. Later, it felt eerie to me, the way all the men resembled each other more than they resembled actual people. You couldn’t even really call them attractive, because they weren’t attractive: they were specialized, like precision machines used to produce highly specific components. Their bodies revealed their function in their form.
All our days were identical. My father’s self-discipline required, or maybe produced, a narrowness of attention that limited his ability to invest in other things. We just didn’t do anything else. He didn’t ask about school. I never thought much about what I’d do when I grew up. The days had always been the same and would continue to be.
I was fifteen when he blew out his knee at a tiny weightlifting meet held in a school gym with six or seven people in the stands, the kind he attended every month. Big blue gymnastics mats on the floor of a basketball court. The judge—like every weightlifting judge a former weightlifter himself, whose body was melting with age as his muscles loosened and his ligaments sagged—sat behind a fold-out card table, and through a pair of propped-open fire doors I could hear the clang-bang-grunt of the competitors warming up, abusing the equipment in the weight room. I sat on the wooden pullout bleachers, facing my father as he stepped up for his clean and jerk. A simple lift: he’d pull the bar up from the floor, squat down and fold his arms beneath it, and then push the bar up over his head as he rose to his full height, and then he’d hold that pose, arms spread by the bar like he was already celebrating, until the judge confirmed it was a good lift, and he could drop it. No wobbling, no buckling, no drifting of the bar in one direction or another. Poised, unchanging, perfect.
In the Olympics they used a series of lights to show when the lift has been called good. Some smaller competitions I’d seen had little colored flags or placards. This meet, the judge just declared Good lift, said it out loud, and that was it. I didn’t see how much weight my father attempted, whether this was a milestone lift or just another exercise. I’m not sure he recognized a difference. It was silent as he began, feet and hands whitened by chalk, his legs straight and planted as firmly as roots, good through the clean and then up into the jerk. He stood there, legs spread and toes dug into the papery mat, the bar up over his head, which was wet and pink, his mouth taut and open as if he’d been asked to show off his teeth.
The judge’s voice was quiet; all day I had trouble hearing his calls. Maybe he called Good lift for my father and we never heard it. I didn’t, anyway. Or maybe there was some tiny waver in my father’s arms, a little shaking in his knees or lean in the bar, that kept the judge silent.
My father’s legs began to give way. He stepped to the side to resteady himself, but he slipped on the thin gymnastics mat, and his left knee, under the pressure of the plates stacked on the bar, snapped sideways. There was a sound like a gigantic can of cold beer cracking open, loud enough to produce a little echo in the nearly empty gym. Everything that wasn’t bone shredded: tendons, ligaments, the soft oystery pad of the meniscus. Luckily the bar went backwards as he fell, rather than straight down onto his skull. Beneath the shouting and the sound of large men’s sneakers slapping on the hardwood floor, I heard the judge finally speak, softly, almost to himself: That’s not good.
After the reconstructive surgery, my father was laid up for months, dazed by painkillers and the sheer wall of stillness. Six months before he could stand, nearly twelve before he could walk. He was either in bed or on the couch, and his leg, propped up and encased in a complicated brace covered in bolts and spidery rods, looked like an object someone had set next to him and forgotten about. Even with the household things I had to do, especially during the first six months, I also suddenly had time I had no idea how to fill. Daily visits with my father to the Barn had left me physically solid but socially fragile. Without the routine, how I spent my time was suddenly a choice rather than a given, and my father, hardly speaking, had no opinions or advice to offer. I was on my own. The library was open during the after-school hours I used to fill by lifting. I spent much of the time reading.
I expected my father to apply his single-minded self-discipline to the months of convalescence. If there was anyone on earth, I figured, who could beat the timeframe for recovery, it was him. When I saw his leg unbolted and unwrapped for the first time, I was fascinated by its atrophied thinness, a broomstick next to a ham hock. Where had all the stuff of it gone, all the blood and tissue? And how many sets and reps would it take to restore him, replace this imposter leg with his own, which had, I imagined, been scattered to all the things he would soon eat and convert, squat by squat, back into himself?
But my father didn’t throw himself into recovery. Even after the immobilizing brace was replaced by a sleeker piece of titanium and he took his first drunken steps flanked by grip bars and two husky physical therapists, standing and walking didn’t propel him into progress. He slept late, came right home after work, where his maniacal approach to training gave over to listlessness. He never stopped by the Barn even to say hello and receive the ritual attention paid to a fallen athlete. Watching his decline was like tracking the melting of a gigantic ice cube: it was imperceptible for a very long time, and then his sharp edges and corners were gone, and finally he collapsed in on himself. Also he sweated a lot. Weight and shape dripped away. After I stopped lifting, my body had reformed itself quickly, almost eagerly, like a rubber band snapping back, and soon I looked basically like everyone else. But the mass left him more quickly in some places than in others, and so he looked literally misshapen, a painting botched during a restoration. There were days I’d leave for school in the morning and find him in exactly the same position on the couch when I came back in the afternoon.
His behavior confused and frustrated me. He had given up on the lifting, on everything. Without lifting as an object we could hold together, we floated away from each other. In my father’s position, some men might’ve turned jagged and mean. No longer penned up by self-discipline, the huge stone of energy or anger or whatever had made that self-discipline possible would speed downhill, flatten whatever it found. Instead, my father withdrew: he never demanded I take care of things, but he retreated so far into himself that it became totally obvious that if I wanted us to live, I needed to cook, shop, allocate his disability money. Nothing was spoken aloud, no demand and no acknowledgement. The collapse of his outer appearance, everything going soft and concave, reflected whatever was going on inside of him.
He broke out of this weird isolation only once, maybe a year after he’d managed to learn to walk again. Something in him came momentarily loose. I came in from school on what, I realized when I stepped inside, had been an unusually bad day. He was on the couch, dressed in the neon-green polo wore to work, which read All Day Fitness: Be Better Today! beneath a smiling, disembodied bicep. His leg was a drawbridge from the couch to the coffee table, flanked by a jug full of water and an empty bottle of Gatorade. Another Gatorade bottle, half full, sat beside him.
It’s three-thirty, he said, without looking over.
Sorry, I said. The bus was late.
Why are you home? Gym closed?
There was no good answer to a question like this. I hadn’t been to the Barn in months. My father knew this. Even without him I would’ve been tolerated, maybe even welcomed, but I knew at this point I didn’t belong there, either socially or physiologically.
I have homework, I said. Reading to do.
You know you’re lucky you have the option to go, he said. You’re young and healthy and you could be in the gym, putting in the work.
Thinking that this small, irrational meanness signaled that something like life was finally emerging from him again, I decided to engage.
You could be too, I told him. Until I said this aloud, I hadn’t realized how frustrated I’d become. Why hadn’t he gotten up? Why had he left everything to me? At first the immobility, and then the pain—but then? The doctor’s cleared you for upper body, I said. And you could probably do some body-weight stuff with your legs—
So, you’re just not a lifter anymore, he interrupted in a flat voice. You’re just going to give that up?
He drank from the bottle of Gatorade and rescrewed the orange plastic cap with deliberate care.
You’re the lifter! I said, sharply. You should go back!
I can’t go back like this, he said, sloshing the bottle towards his leg. I can’t do shit with all that shit in my knee.
So you’ll do something else, I said. My voice began to vibrate with frustration. Swim, or cycle, or—whatever. Just something to get off the couch and—
Shut up, he said. I’d been staring at the ceiling, trying to think of sports he might take up, feeling something threatening to spill over inside me. When he spoke I looked down. His body hadn’t moved, but he’d turned his neck to look at me. He was wide-eyed, and his cheeks, which had softened and begun to sag, were unpleasantly bristly. He was sweating, and his hair, which had grown from his military buzz to an indeterminate middle length, lay oily against his forehead.
You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, he said.
A terrible and vibrating silence. I didn’t move. He stared at me. And we held this position until his jaw tensed and he hurled the Gatorade bottle over my head, against the far wall, up above the television. For a moment, ridiculously, I thought the bottle would explode and shatter like glass. Instead, it thumped dully just beneath a shelf of weightlifting trophies and fell without bouncing to the floor.
Get the fuck out of here.
It was clear that he wasn’t ever going to change—that, in fact, he hadn’t changed, but that this version of him was what he’d always been, and that the rigidity of his pre-injury life had been scrubbing and polishing the sludgy essence always bubbling up, every set and rep a little exfoliating bead. Now he let it totally submerge him. He never asked about school, never asked whether I was dating someone. Never wondered, my senior year, where I was going to apply to college or what I was going to study. I, having given up on him, didn’t mind. And then I left, and we established the pattern of my annual visits, which lent structure and purpose, and therefore safety, to the time we spent together. This was the fact of it: he wasn’t exactly abusive, and he definitely wasn’t loving. He wasn’t much of anything.
◆
At halftime the Galaxy led by four. Robbie Keane had scored three goals, and the lead was so safe I hoped the other Robbie, the one I wanted to see, might be subbed on early. My father had broken the silence by setting out to hunt for snacks, and I sat watching the groundskeepers water the grass.
I could comprehend my father’s external change, the reappearance of his biceps and firming-up of his neck, but the apparent change in his personality wasn’t just confusing but impossible, like the perspective of a surrealist painting. He wanted to talk, he said—but what was I supposed to say to him? That I hoped he wouldn’t die on the operating table? What would be the point of that? Marisa would say that I ought to tell him about myself, come out. But what would change afterwards? He would either take it well, or, more likely, he wouldn’t, and then he would go have surgery, and assuming it went okay we would be right back where we were. According to Marisa’s way of thinking, whatever I said to him would create a different world, and it felt vertiginous to try to imagine all the branching possibilities, each one occupied by a different version of me and, technically, a different version of him.
Even if it was possible to create all these worlds by saying certain things, how were you supposed to choose which world you wanted to create? It felt as impossible as choosing what kind of person you were. In fact, they were connected. I wasn’t sure whether I’d always been a certain way, some identity from Marisa’s long list, bisexual or pansexual or whatever, or whether I’d been one thing and now was something else, and I wasn’t sure what exactly each possibility meant. And in the same way, anything I said to my father would begin with some image or model of him in my mind, and for the first time, maybe, I wasn’t exactly sure who he was.
Maybe I needed to tell him in order to figure out who I was, or what it meant to be something or someone. But if I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know who he was, how could I know what we owed each other, or how I should feel about him? It was like trying to referee a game played in absolute darkness, to make calls about fouls and throw-ins without being able to see what was going on or where anybody was.
All I’d wanted was to see Robbie Rogers, and to get through my father’s visit without much awkward conversation. Untangling these possibilities made me frustrated and irritable.
My father came back with two precarious mountains of nachos in bowls that looked like halved soccer balls. We ate as the second half began and the Seattle striker stepped on the ankle of a Galaxy defender. Immediately, everyone shouted for a red card, everyone’s arms went up in the universal sign of the indignant fan, but the referee—a balding white guy, with stubby legs and a bit of a belly—jogged over and showed the Seattle striker a yellow.
Bullshit! shouted the guy behind us. Come on, ref! Take some fucking control!
Was that a red card? my father asked me.
No, it was yellow, I said, but it probably should’ve been.
Can the referee be overruled? he wondered. If someone breaks the rules but the referee misses it, or makes a mistake, does someone step in and catch it?
Not really, I explained. Sometimes they review the replay, but it’s still the referee’s choice. He has the only say.
What do you mean?
It’s like—okay, a player might do something that deserves a red card, but only the referee showing it to him actually makes it happen. In the past, a referee has accidentally showed a card to the wrong player, but that player still had to leave the game. It’s the showing of the card that actually does it.
So the referee runs around like a king. What he says, goes.
Pretty much, I said.
That’s a lot of power.
A Seattle player kicked the ball out of play, deep into the stands, and I followed the flight of the ball up towards the top of the stadium. It had some ridiculous corporate name I never bothered to remember. I ran my eyes up one of the concrete pillars that supported the useless but gorgeous glass wing that protected the crowd from the danger of Los Angeles rain.
You know, I think I get it, my father said. I get the appeal.
Of being a referee? I asked.
Well sure, he said. But I meant soccer, the whole thing. This is fun. Everybody’s really into it.
He pointed down towards the other side of the field, behind the goal, where the big supporters’ section was. They’d been singing all game, songs for certain players, songs to poke fun at Seattle, songs for themselves.
I like the singing, he said.
I laughed through a nacho.
Really? Doesn’t seem like your thing.
My father was quiet for a moment. We could hear another song begin, something about Los Angeles and sunshine.
I joined this bodybuilding group, he said. They have a good gym.
I thought I’d misheard him.
What do you mean, bodybuilding?
He despised bodybuilding. Judging weightlifting meant hard, objective numbers: reps and pounds. But bodybuilding was aesthetic, subjective: soft. It was the difference, I imagined he would say, between making your body look a certain way and using your body in order to actually do something.
Bodybuilding, he said. You know.
Do you—compete? I asked him. For a moment I held in my head an image of my father on stage to compete as Mr. Universe, dressed in tiny underwear, oiled like a trussed duck.
Not in a Lou Ferrigno, Arnold Schwarzenegger way, my father said. It’s way smaller. Not really a competition. It’s more like—I don’t know, a talent show? We pose and there’s a prize, but the prize is usually a bottle of whiskey or something. Really the point is just hanging out.
It was difficult to picture my father actually doing these things—at least the version of my father that appeared most easily in my head. The man next to me who didn’t really look like my father, he seemed more like a bodybuilder, maybe.
Sounds alright, I said.
Seriously, it’s great, he continued. I wish I’d done it my whole life. Weightlifting was so serious, all the time. You remember. I’ve thought about this a lot. Maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to me it’s like, weightlifting has technique, you remember me teaching you your form. But bodybuilding has something else. I don’t know. Style? It’s all about the numbers in weightlifting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing, putting up weight you never did before. But it’s so rigid, and the judge’s only job is to look for where you go wrong, and if you don’t do anything wrong he says, okay, you can stop now. The whole goal is for it to be over. Nice thing about bodybuilding, there are a bunch of ways to do it. We’re all old and falling apart. How’s anyone else going to tell you how to build your own body?
He’d rose up and leaned forward and he spoke, and now he sat back again, balanced his nacho ball on his knee.
You go to the gym, do what you’re gonna do, you don’t kill yourself over it, sometimes you miss a day, he said. And then we all get together and you go up on stage and dick around. It’s fun.
I didn’t know how to respond. I asked the only question that came to mind.
If there’s no routine, how do you know what to do?
You figure it out. Do what seems right. Push yourself a little. Not too much.
Another collective shout: a Galaxy player was rolling on the grass, and the referee blew his whistle and showed a yellow card to another Seattle player, who howled and gesticulated, but the referee stared right through him. He even smiled a little. He was an excellent referee, I realized, and I thought about how it felt to referee a good game and referee it well, to know exactly what your speech and actions mean and what effects they manifest in the world. You showed a red card, a player left. You pointed for a penalty kick, and a penalty kick happened. You could shape the world, at least the small world of the game, in definite and reliable ways. That’s what it meant to be a referee, that you could perform a set of actions, had the power to make them effective. A perfect circle: your actions had power because you were the referee, and all those actions together shaped the power the referee had and what a referee was. Nothing about that changed from game to game.
But that was only partially true. It wasn’t so perfectly stable. It was always a risk, too. There was always the possibility that some kind of mass mutiny would happen, that everyone would all at once just stop listening to you. Every time you blew the whistle or showed a card, you were asking everyone to acknowledge you, to keep going with you. To keep participating. It was always at least a little uncertain. To do it, to try, you had to take it on faith.
I imagined the referee running over towards the corner flag, towards us, and making my father and I shake hands. What would that mean? What would it do? What if the referee made me perform some kind of ritual absolution over my father, the sign of the cross or something? What if he ran over to Robbie Rogers, showed him a rainbow card? What if he came over and showed it to me, or gave me one of Marisa’s buttons?
Is that the right word for it? my father asked.
I’d missed something.
Is what the right word for what?
Aesthetic. The way I was describing bodybuilding. I thought you might call it aesthetic. Honestly I’m not really sure what it means.
Oh, I said. Actually, yeah, that sounds about right.
A Galaxy midfielder went down with cramp. On the sideline, the substitutes popped up from their bench and started their warmup drills, sprinting between flat orange cones, spraying little divots of grass and dirt in every direction.
Look, Eddie, my father said. I know you’re probably mad at me, for a bunch of stuff. But, you know, I’m glad I’m here.
I watched the Galaxy’s manager, a tall, slightly round man who looked a little like my father, call one of the substitutes over. At midfield, the fourth official held up the screen that showed the numbers of the players coming off and on. My father was looking in my direction. His arm rested on the bar between our seats, extended towards me. A little sound came from the fans behind the Galaxy’s bench and spread in both directions around the stadium, rolling into a roar. My father stopped talking and looked towards the field.
What’s going on? he asked.
Robbie Rogers is coming on, I said. The crowd was cheering, shouting.
He sure is popular, he said. He’s been here a long time?
It’s his first game.
Oh, he said. Nice to give him a big welcome.
Robbie Rogers slapped the hands of the player coming off, ran over to the far side of the field, towards us. He was tall, he had excellent hair. His mouth was open—he was smiling. He was, I thought, beautiful.
He’s gay, I said. He just came out a few weeks ago.
The referee looked in both directions to make sure everyone was ready.
Brave fucking guy, my father said.
The referee whistled to continue the match; somebody booted the ball downfield to start play again.