Page 29 of The Forbidden Center

I have treated professional athletes for most of my career and I have arrived at a settled opinion of them, which is that they are the most expensively maintained and least curious men alive. They come in believing their body is a machine somebody else broke. They want the number repaired and they want to go.

This one changed the angle of his own skate to solve a problem he has told nobody about.

I have watched this more times than the assessment requires. I became aware of that somewhere around the fourth replay and have continued regardless, which is new information about me and not the kind I was looking for.

Friday I found him in reception with Tova. He had stopped performing long enough to listen when she told him something difficult, then gave her an answer that did not make him the hero of it.

That information should make him easier to categorize.

It does not.

I write: avoids contact on right side, substitutes positioning.

Aris Guerra’s note is open beside the video.

No further injection before playoffs.

Good medicine. Unpleasant sentence.

A knock sounds against the open door.

Gabi leans in. “Mr. Riley is here.”

Colt appears behind her in a blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up his forearms, and whatever the gray in his beard is doing against that color, it is doing it deliberately.

I notice the shirt first, which is a problem.

Then I notice the right cuff is open, giving him more room through the sleeve and one less small movement to negotiate.

Better. That one I am permitted to have noticed.

He crosses the room and I get his eyes properly for the first time.

They are not brown. I had decided they were brown, at forty feet, in a mood. They are a pale steel blue and far too direct, and he has obviously been using them on people since he was about nineteen.

Noted. Filed.

“Mr. Riley.”

“Colt.”

“Mr. Riley.”

One corner of his mouth lifts. “We’re starting strong.”

“We are starting accurately.”

He offers his left hand.

“Safer side.”

I take it.

His palm is warm and dry and considerably larger than mine. Men who are proud of their hands squeeze. Men who want something squeeze longer. He does neither, and he does not let go either, and so we stand in my treatment room holding hands like two people who have forgotten what the gesture is for.

I can feel my own pulse in my fingers.

He can almost certainly feel it too.