Back in the fall I posted a short story about Jimmy "Moose" Leamington, a baseball player for the Traverse City Plovers in the mid 2020's. This is part 2 of Jimmy's story.
Part Two: The Lotus Beds
It is easy for one to get lost in the fluorescent glow of advertisements
and the rush of pedestrians (residents and tourists alike). The nights in Osaka
were different from any in the world, more vivid. There was enough nightlife in
Dotonbori, Namba, and Shinsaibashi to keep any self-respecting young man
occupied for the better part of a decade. The food alone was enough to bankrupt
a man. A trip along the canal was almost a necessity and a lifetime’s worth of
pictures had been taken from its banks. It was a world so eccentric and
alluring to foreigners that nearly 105,000 occupied the city, mostly Chinese
and Korean. In a country burgeoning with new promise and new possibility, Osaka
burned with passion as the country’s beating heart.
Jimmy Leamington (there was no “Jimmy D.” here) stepped off
a plane in March of 2023 into the middle of an unusually cool, rainy day in
which the clouds seemed to hang like wet linens over the metropolis. He looked
out upon not only a new city or a new country but a new world. The last one lay
crumbled in the smoldering ash-heap of corruption back in the states. Every
dream he had strived for was in doubt. He, like every other major leaguer, found
themselves suddenly out of work. He tried to occupy himself with conditioning
and strength training back in Ann Arbor but when the lights grew dim and the
sleepless nights dragged on, he found himself asking: what was it all for now?
In mid-December, Stephen Mory, his agent called with an
offer. It was the first he had heard from him since a brief and thoroughly
pessimistic phone call in early October.
“How do you feel about Japan?” the congenial, if not
completely altruistic New Yorker asked sporting a full beard and a sympathetic
smile. Mory had to be nearing his mid-fifties but he dressed and spoke with the
energy and cockiness of a man who spent his nights in the nightclubs and bars
unwilling to give up a life that may or may not have passed him by. He might be
self-deluded but he operated with a combination of ruthlessness and dedication
on behalf of his clients that one could never feel completely steamrolled. If
there was one thing Stephen Mory had, it was sincerity.
Honestly, Jimmy thought, what more can I really ask? There
were thousands of guys just like him who found themselves unemployed and
listless. If a team wanted to give him a chance, any team, who was he to turn
them down? Besides, it was not as if he had a lot to hold him to the states. His
parents had moved to Arizona and were living a remarkably comfortable life,
communicating sparingly. His sister, with whom he had once been close, was
thoroughly occupied in becoming the most sophisticated homemaker that the
income of her engineer husband could afford.
In all honesty, his first inclination was to reject it
outright. He had never been one to revel in the big cities let alone another
country. He was no wanderer. Even his time in Atlanta had been such a whirlwind
that the detail remained as hazy as the mid-summer afternoons. Looking back he
could hardly remember anything aside from the ballpark, the lights, and of
course the teammates. However, nostalgia gave way to reason and he acquiesced
to give it a try.
Since the majors’ collapse most of the Japanese leagues had
loosened their stipulation of only allowing four foreigners per team. With the
glut of professional talent available the allure of greater competition was
simply too great. Simultaneously, the rise of Japanese tech companies
(especially robotics) was fueling one of the greatest economic bubbles in
recent history. Japan was becoming a world power once again and it sought every
opportunity to promote its national
pastime in the wake of the corporate corruption that brought down American
interest in the sport.
There was no slackening of interest from Japanese fans.
Seeking to fill their newly expanded quotient of foreign
players, the Orix Buffaloes had sought him out. Likely their interest stemmed
from a tightening payroll budget that placed established major leagues firmly
out of their price range. Still, Jimmy had established himself as a significant
power threat in his six minor league seasons. There was reason to believe that
this was simply the next step toward a greater victory for his career.
All these words engrained themselves in the months and weeks
prior to his arrival.
Osaka met him like an estranged lover. Yet he found no
solace in her embrace. For the first week he found himself firmly residing on
the bench in the home dugout. He understood nearly nothing his coaches said
despite the cordial translations of his other American teammates. Never before
had he felt so inadequate. Even the calisthenics practiced by the other
Buffaloes seemed to leave his body in perpetual pain. He had always considered
himself remarkably fit for his frame but these simple, repetitive exercises
awakened soreness in muscles he was unaware he possessed.
It was this isolation that, for the first time in his life,
allowed a sliver of loneliness into his heart. It led him not to the bustling
streets ever-ready to drown angst with entertainment and delusion but rather to
the sheltered solitude of a botanical garden along the banks of the Yodo River.
He came on an off-day with a cool wind slipping in around the seams of his
wind-breaker. He slowly walked the pavement still wet with the morning’s mist.
Every surface seemed to gleam with a thin film of rain.
Jimmy followed a metal railing that kept safe distance from
the steep banks. Below, the lapping water seemed less of a rushing torrent
capable of sustaining the vast hydro-electric generators that powered much of
the city and more like an extension of a becalmed sea with no current to be
witnessed. Here the great river was nearly a quarter of a mile wide and
traditional fishing boats could be seen bobbing gently in the distance.
Wonderfully manicured topiaries lined the path to his right.
He passed with middling interest at the carefully cultivated hinoki cypress,
some of which aged nearly 200 years. An elderly man passed holding the hand of
a young girl wearing a red jacket, a brief splash of color illuminating the
day. No passing ray of sunshine could have more accurately brought attention to
the oppressive grey-ness of the morning. Far out in the bay the sea and the sky
seemed to mingle in an indistinguishable embrace. The young girl in the red
jacket had loosed herself and could be seen tottering to and fro on the path
ahead, pin-balling from one side of the pavement to the other. The elderly man,
her grandfather, Jimmy reasoned, made no effort to curtail her despite the
proximity to the river. His own steps, sure, steady, and resolute seemed to
always bring the girl back to him as gravity affects those compelled by it. The
couple disappeared around the bend and only then did Jimmy realize that he had
stopped to watch them. He started again in self-conscious haste.
He rounded the curve and approached a cement pier that
stretched out into the river. Listless water lapped around the pylons whose
surface was encrusted with mollusks of all shapes and sized, their gills
drifting with the pressure of each wave like the lolling tongue of a dog with
its head out a car window. The pavement,
like much of Osaka, had been redone recently yet still a few hardy grasses
managed to poke through the cracks concrete; stalwart souls, Emerson and Thoreau
standing against the perpetual onslaught of wind, rain, and crowd. Jimmy sidled
up to the railing which was also slick with rain.
Seabirds rose and fell in the eternal sky.
“English?” a voice behind him asked.
Mostly out of confusion he turned but gave no answer.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course”
“Of course? What does that imply?”
“I just mean that yeah I speak English. I wasn’t expecting
an inquisition.”
There was a pause. A puff of salty breeze pushed against
Jimmy’s back. It tossed loose strands of the woman’s long black hair up into
her face, but she made no attempt to brush it away. So much for the example of
the sultry shampoo commercials. Truth be told, this newcomer seemed to stare at
him a bit too long, a bit too awkwardly. He had always had a hard time with eye
contact anyway and now he felt compelled to turn away but could find no
appropriate opportunity to do so. Her pervasively brown eyes compelled him.
“There are two types of people who stare aimlessly into the
sea on cold, grey days,” she stated, mercifully breaking her gaze to scrutinize
the distant shoreline. She thrust her hands into the pockets of the black trench
coat she wore.
Pause.
“And they are?” Jimmy followed up impatiently.
“There just are,” she stated as if summarizing simply multiplication
tables.
If he had known the relevance of what happened next he would
have been a little less impatient, given a little more grace. As it was
however, he was thoroughly put off by the strange conversation and erratic
behavior and desired desperately to be relieved of this social obligation. Here
he stood, noticeably alone on a miserable day. If anyone cried out to be left
alone more than he, then let them come.
“I’m Poet,” she said, her hand still firmly implanted in her
pockets. She turned to look over her right shoulder.
“I’m sorry?”
“My name, Poet.”
The words hung about him like a cloud of unknowing. There
seemed to be something mystical about this young woman like the howl of a wolf
or the uneasy tension in the midst of a fight.
“Do you come here often?” she asked, not waiting for an
answer, “I like to walk along the coast and look at the flowers on my days off.
That’s the best thing about this country,” she continued, “the flowers, it’s
like the ground itself is singing or painting a beautiful landscape. There is a
place, about half a mile down the path, do you know it? There’s a place where
the river forms a tiny little bay and in the spring the whole surface of the
water is covered with lotus blossoms. When the wind comes up off the bay all
the little lilies flutter about like a field of butterflies. A whole field of
butterflies tethered to the water.”
Jimmy found himself undeniably attracted to this woman and
her strange demeanor.
“They say some plants can be up to 1,000 years old. Can you
imagine that? These simple, beautiful plants just floating there through the
course of human history. We will be dead and buried and those flowers will
still be blooming in the spring.”
“Well, that’s a pleasant thought,” Jimmy added.
“What?”
“Nothing? I’m James by the way.”
They shook hands. There are moments when reality stills;
when the ebb and flow of existence slips away and the tide of time slows to a
trickle, lingering like droplets of rain suspended in midair. If he could have
captured the tenor and magnitude of this moment for his own simple, transitory
existence, he certainly would have sold his soul for it. The gains and
successes he had found and would find on the field paled in comparison.
History, their own personal stories, wisped stealthily in the shadows as the
two future lovers introduced themselves. In the moment, of course, there was no
earthshattering revelations; no star-crossed lover’s gaze. There seldom is. In
the moment there was simply one American expatriate meeting another, just a
baseball player meeting a social media director. In the moment, there was only
James Leamington and Poet Bashki.
Humans like to latch on to certain memories, certain
colossal events, and forget the mundane. It simply is in our nature. Our brains
lack the capability to internalize all that we take in. To keep us from
becoming unnecessarily bogged down our minds dump the information we discern to
be unimportant. Jimmy couldn’t dial his parent’s phone number or remember his
grandfather’s middle name but he could, years later, remember the way that Poet
pirouetted, showing off her trim legs as she turned to lead him on. He could
have (had he been an artist) sketched the way her hair, wet by the oncoming
sprinkle, hung beside her unblemished cheeks.
As she led him on, toward the bay of lotuses, the walked
side by side. It began to sprinkle again.
Looking up to the heavens he disdainfully said: “of course.”
“I’d be great if you had an umbrella right?” Poet said
pulling out a pocket umbrella and holding it triumphantly above herself,
leaving Jimmy decisively out in the rain. “Bummer.”
She gave Jimmy a sideways smirk and offered the umbrella up
to him. This act, which Jimmy of course accepted, forced the pair closer
together than their burgeoning friendship might allow. Yet she gave no hint of
awkwardness or unfamiliarity. This took Jimmy off his guard. He had grown up in
a family in which was loving and caring but kept a fair distance when it came
to personal space. He could remember few embraces from his mother and even
fewer from his father who often worked overseas for much of his formative
years.
Still, the unfamiliarity was just that, not unpleasant as he
often found himself in social situations. Something about this woman’s presence
seemed to act as balm to his current uncertainty.
In Eastern mythology, the lotus symbolizes divine beauty or
the expansion of the soul.
When they arrived, the miniature bay lay spread out before
them, carpeted by the pale pink flowers with vibrant yellow hearts. They
huddled together beneath the canopy of the umbrella caught in the tension
between new-found friends and something deeper.
Poet seemed oblivious to this. As he would later come to know, she gave
almost no thought to perceived social boundaries. In her was a joyful spirit who
talked to every stranger with the awareness of a life-long compatriot. She
shared colloquialisms with the enthusiasm of a family friend whose past is
littered with stories and anecdotes of pleasant shared memories. She shared too
the dark hurts and pains of her all too recent past. Only a few short weeks
later, sitting at a high-top table at a sushi bar she tearfully shared the
abuse she had experienced at the hands of her mostly absentee father. By then he
was coming to know that there was no pretension in her heart; no artificial
concept of boundary. He laid his hand lightly upon her arm as she wept loudly
without thought or care to the fullness of the restaurant.
She came to her first Buffaloes game just about the time
that James’ bat began to heat up. Quickly she filled a place in his heart that
he hadn’t known was void. From the batter’s box he could feel without
consciously acknowledging it that she was somewhere in the stands. He found
success for about two months with the Buffaloes. At first he was only used for
a start here and a start there. An injury to their starting third baseman,
another former major leaguer by the name of Roberto D’Arcy, allowed James to
get his foot in the door. D’Arcy was out about three weeks but by the time he
got back James had firmly entrenched himself in the line-up. Even his average,
which had always languished just above the lowest acceptable level, had vaulted
up near .300. Strikeouts of course remained about constant but it was quickly
glossed over by his new manager in light of the success he was brining to
himself and the team.
Somewhere in the back of his mind there always remained that
placid bay of flowers glinting gaily in the springtime sun.
James’ success evaporated as meteorically as it had begun. First
his average dropped precipitously. Next a few poorly timed fielding miscues led
opposing teams to some big innings and the Buffaloes to several key losses. The
strikeouts piled up. He found himself back on the bench by late June with an
average clinging desperately to the Mendoza line. The starting third baseman
returned and he found himself relegated to blow out games and pinch hitting as
he had proven himself untrustworthy as a defensive replacement. In late July
his manager called him into his office and told him, through the team’s long
suffering translator, that his services were no longer necessary. The news was
not unforeseen and so James reacted with surprising restraint. He felt no great
loss or heartache. Perhaps this was due to his inability to really fit in to
Japanese culture but more likely it was Poet, who had become an inescapable
element of his life; an integral force of nature.
There may be some of you would wish to hear the tale of
these two love-struck expatriates through the years, for it was several years.
You may desire to hear anecdotes of their love, of birthdays, romantic
gestures, and milestones. I must regretfully inform you that while such a tale
might bring some satisfaction to our otherwise mundane lives or even joy, today
is not the day for such a story, nor am I the man to tell it. A pity, perhaps,
for such a story, rife with whimsy and adoration might well warm the heart or
rekindle simmering desire.
You must however, take my word, that James and Poet loved
each other deeply and truly. They weathered the tempestuous storms that come
with a life in baseball and indeed life in general. In truth, it was the
inevitability of coming home to Poet that kept James sane after long road trips
or disappointing games. Each time he returned home was different. Sometime he
found her painting in her office. Other times he took the bus home to find her
singing with radio on the balcony like some Disney princess for all the world
to hear. She made a point to stay awake until he returned home in the early
hours of the morning when he’d find her splayed out on the couch reading with
the regal grace of Audrey Hepburn. Never disheveled, she would take him into
her arms and envelop him in the buzzing quality that seemed to hang ever around
her.
When his Japanese career reached its bitter end there was
little debate over a new course of action. With the prospect of the new
Continental leagues which were still in their relative infancy and the
potential employment they offered, the couple who had now been together for two
years sold all their possessions and moved back to the States. For Poet, it had
been nearly a decade since she had set foot in her homeland and it now seemed
as foreign to her as Japan once had. Jimmy however (back in America he was once
again surrounded by former teammates and opponents) found that the return came
with such familiarity that it seemed inconceivable that he had ever left.
By now most of the major league veterans who had been
hanging their hopes on some sort or professional resurgence had retired and
Jimmy found himself firmly atop the minor league home run leaderboard. Thus he
was met with some measure of fanfare when he signed with Traverse City. All
this seemed to rejuvenate the passion for the game that had driven him for the
better part of his life.
For Poet, reintegrating to life in America was less natural.
Having given up her job when they left Japan she spent a good five months
searching for a comparable job back home. Since Traverse was not exactly a
booming metropolis, she was forced to choose between an unenviable commute or
finding some way to work from home. She had never spent that much time out of
work and it began to take its toll upon her.
She had even sought out an ill-fated reunion with her estranged
father. Perhaps it was out of desperation for communal contact or perhaps it
was simply sheer morbid curiosity. Either way, she found herself driving
half-way across the country to a town in upstate New York to meet a man who had
invested nothing into her development or education. She met him at a Denny’s
restaurant off the interstate. He offered her pleasantries that went about as
deep as her cuticle. He wore a surprisingly trim polo shirt. This shook her.
Perhaps she was expecting his attire to reflect the carelessly with which he
conducted himself nearly thirty years before. She brought up little of the past
and made little eye-contact beyond their initial re-introductions. Instead she
kept her gaze firmly downward on the salt and pepper shaker. He asked nothing
about her mother. He inquired once about her job, her lifestyle but when she
informed him of her current unemployment he quickly dropped the subject. They
left on objectively good terms. He headed back to the life he had carved out
for himself, one that didn’t contain room for an unintentional daughter. She
headed back to the plaintive existence into which she had settled. She hadn’t
really known what she had been hoping for. There is no way to reproduce the
lost innocence of youth; no way to repay for the nights spent in tears or the
memories never created. So she drove home silently through the night only to be
met by an obviously empty apartment.
While she maintained her whimsical nature on the surface,
she spent many nights fruitlessly job searching and waiting for Jimmy to return
home after the games. In truth, she sought refuge in literature. All her life
she had maintained a healthy appetite for fiction and a passion for defending
it in an age of declining practical literacy. She always maintained the
benefits of a well-read student of literature by pointing to the value of
experiencing life through another’s eyes and the helpful imaginative process.
Now though, her reading manifested itself more as mere escapism than any
intellectual discipline. So on many a night she found herself laying half-awake
on the couch trapped in any number of fictional worlds when he arrived home.
Just how many nights their paths intertwined as such it is
hard to say. Two separate satellites desperately trying to maintain a shared
orbit. They talked of marriage as one might talk about having a wart removed,
as an expected but unenthusiastic outcome. That is not to say that both were
equally disillusioned. Jimmy’s career seemed to be settling into its peak.
Instead of trying to catch on either with a major league club or a Japanese
one, he now bought into the role of elder statesman and power hitter in the
young emerging league. His teammates called him Moose for reasons that he would
later fail to recall. Still Moose Leamington was flourishing in his second
baseball career.
On the particular night in which our story revolves, Jimmy
“Moose” Leamington hit a three run homer in the seventh inning against former
Dodger Josh Sucre. The hit was tall and majestic and sailed over the right
field fence at the speed of 78 miles per hour. The homer put Traverse City up
by two runs. The bullpen, led by a former teammate from his Atlanta days, held
on to the lead and they won the day. This event, though not unprecedented
obviously occupied his mind as he prepared to go out to dinner with Poet. They
met at a pub on Front Street. It was pretty touristy but why not, they liked it
and had frequented it often. Poet too, liked to pop in to a used bookstore
located nearby.
Poet, for her part, had spent the afternoon walking along
the lakefront. She had completely missed the home run (and the game overall)
but the exultant cheers from the nearby ballpark let her know with remarkable
certainty what the outcome had been. There is no way however, she could have
known that it was in fact James who had secured the victory. If she had,
perhaps she would have stayed her tongue. Perhaps she would have waited for a
more appropriate day and in the waiting who knows what could have happened. We
are left only to wonder for when she approached the pub she was aware of only
the stirrings of her heart.
“Do you remember the time I ate that bad Mahi-Mahi and got
sick for like a week?” she asked as picked her way through a Greek salad. He
was enraptured by a think burger. “It basically cleared me out, purged me of everything. I was exhausted for days.
That’s how I feel now.”
“Like you’re going to purge?”
“No, this. I’m empty. I’ve been purged.”
“This what?”
“This city. This job. This life. This crappy beer.”
“Us?”
“Us.”
In his mind, Jimmy saw only the batted ball rising in the
July air, reaching its zenith and clearing the outfield fence. He felt the
pumping of his legs as he eased into his home run trot.
“I’ve been back in the states for what, a year and a half?
What do I have to show for it? A crappy job working in publishing? An hour
commute to Cadillac? It’s nothing. Or nothing that matters. In Japan everything
mattered. The air mattered. The sea mattered. The people mattered.
“The people don’t matter here?” he asked.
She looked up from her salad briefly to make contact faintly
with his eyes.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“I feel stuck, dry, thirsty. You can’t even understand that
can you? You have what you want, what you are, and that’s all that matters.”
He took a hearty bite of his burger. A dollop of ketchup
dripped onto the paper placemat.
“James I love you. I do. But you have what you need. You
know what drives you; what makes you tick. I need more. I need the wind in my
hair, the brush in my hand, the birdsong in the morning. I’ll just take off.
You can keep my stuff. I don’t need it. No, that’s not like some backhanded jab
at how much I hate you (I don’t). It’s just… that kind of stuff, the possessions,
it’s holding me back. I don’t know from what, but I know that it’s keeping me
from something, something that I can achieve or something that I have to find.
Yeah. Maybe that’s more of what it is. Finding. The universe has something for
me.”
Jimmy’s first thought was this: “don’t we have birds here?”
He thought this and knew immediately that it was idiotic, but the thought stuck
with him, it became a fireball in his chest that his conscious mind was unable
to let go of. He said nothing, not wanting to appear dumb. His silence too was
often mistaken for stupidity so he was stuck either way. But as his mother
always said “If you don’t have something nice to say don’t say anything at
all.” Or was that Bambi?
“So that’s just it?’
“I guess. Do you want me to pay for dinner or something?”
“No. I got it.”
Poet pushed back from the table. Somewhere off in his mind
Jimmy heard the roar of the crowd, smelled the peanuts, salsa, and stale beer.
He felt the fine, granular dust against his skin. His mouth was dry and he
could taste the field.
Somewhere the hushed din of the crowd echoed faintly.
