The Game

At the first whistle, there were 22 men on the pitch. A sunny afternoon in Berlin*. At the final whistle, one will have been abducted by aliens (“Where are you taking me? Are we going to go play football in space? Is that what we’re doing? Though – do we have to play football in space? Can’t we just look? How will the rules of football translate into zero gravity, for one? Or are we going somewhere where there will be gravity? Are we off to terra-form a planet? Are you going to terra-form a planet just so I can play football on it? I mean, I know there’s a lot of money in the game, but even so –”), the television cameras will have fizzed out, and a small collection of trees will have begun to grow over the center of the pitch. Nevertheless, the crowd would sway the stadium and all the seats over which they stood with song.

Minute #1: Kickoff. Frederickson made an early break down the left flank. He had just returned from New Orleans the night before. He was thinking about how plants grew out of the houses down there on Esplanade Avenue like Sam Cooke** or some equally comparable soul singer (inasmuch as there can be one) stepping out of a tent on the freezing side of a mountain, singing out into the air, and taking the frozen shape of the air to some sort of botanist as a special request. Man #10 just kept saying to himself in a constant loop, “My shoelaces. My shoelaces.”

At minute 35: a goal! A goal! A goal! Jesus returned to earth! Tupac and Andy Kaufman emerged in the jumping joy of madness, shouting, “Guys! We’re not actually dead! Guys!” Someone actually admitted that Thomas Pynchon was a construct wrought entirely by masons! People began comparing the notion of reparations in India, Colombia (which actually had a program underway), and the United States! Confetti exploded into tinier pieces of confetti, which — in turn — exploded into even tinier pieces of —

At minute 82: man #3 started to wonder what exactly those lights were coming over the stadium walls. Man #18: “And is that the bus?” Man #19: “No, it’s n – why would you –” Man #3: “Who knows, man?” Man #18: “You know that’s not my name.”

They escaped into the subway at the close of the day. The only mention that was made and the only thing that they heard of what happened at the Olympiastadion happened when someone finally opened their copy of Bild at Neu-Westend, flipped through a few pages, and said, “Well – isn’t that something?” to their friend sitting alongside them – and even that piece of sound got jumbled up like someone who’d just released a handful of dice after the result of a shove of a sneeze.

They’d spent the day in Tiergarten with a blanket that could ward off even the stodgiest of morning gray and a dog they’d rescued after watching a ‘dog shaming’ video that featured a daschund mix that had broken into a car that didn’t belong to its previous owner, accidentally make its way through a drive-thru (where it was rewarded via the window with a milkshake), and then end up gently crashing into a tree near a popular make out spot for teenagers with the crash setting off a long, slow howl of a horn that could only heighten the romantic mood.

The dog, freshly freed from a bizarre sort of prison, merrily flopped around the blanket.

Footnotes:

Jesus Gave Me Water.

He heard the song beneath a layer of coffeehouse chatter while taking a break wandering through the French Quarter one afternoon. What if he gave up football and became a priest? Was that where he wanted to be? There was an American who lived and worked in Heidelberg who’d spent the Gulf War as a fighter pilot and then opted to become an original ‘white collar’ worker instead.

What if he compared the music he was hearing with some sort of serious proponent of religious ideology, like Karl Barth? How did he differentiate the presence of music with sitting up straight and ‘doing the job’ of serious Christian thought? (But that struck him as a paltry binary compared to the presence of the fact that Barth mailed the Barmer Erklärung personally to Hitler.)

Maybe the question to ask himself was why did he love the sound of old Christian, pre-and-post-Civil War spirituals but hate ‘Christian rock?’ Why did his ear react that way? He didn’t know why, and he wanted to know why.

He grabbed a napkin and drew a series of stick figures on it: a congregation, a rock band, and himself. Tiny little musical notes hovered around each — like butterflies, flies, or butter. (It took him a moment to realize that wordplay in English didn’t quite work like that.)

A second song came on over the PA. He listened.