4 3 2 1

  He kissed Andy on the cheek and smiled. Gotta go, he said.

  Ferguson sprang off the mattress and began collecting his clothes from the floor.

  Andy said: Same time next week?

  What’s playing? Ferguson asked, as he climbed into his jeans and buckled his belt.

  Two Bergmans. Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.

  Whoops.

  Whoops? What’s whoops?

  I just remembered. I have to go up to Rhinebeck with my parents next Saturday.

  But you still haven’t seen any Bergmans. That’s more important than a day with Moms and Pops, no?

  Probably. But I have to go with them.

  The week after next, then?

  Ferguson, who was slipping into his shoes at that point, mumbled a barely audible Uh-huh.

  You’re not going to come, are you?

  Andy sat up in bed and repeated the words at the top of his voice: You’re not going to come, are you?

  What are you talking about?

  You bitch! Andy yelled. I pour my heart out to you, and you don’t say a fucking word!

  What do you want me to say?

  Ferguson zipped up his spring jacket and headed for the door.

  Fuck off, Archie. I hope you fall down the stairs and die.

  Ferguson left the apartment and walked down the stairs.

  He didn’t die.

  Instead, he walked home, went into his room, and lay down on the bed, where he spent the next two hours looking up at the ceiling.

  3.4

  On the first Saturday of 1962, three days after Ferguson handed in his nine-hundred-word essay about Jackie Robinson, he and the six other players on his YMHA basketball team traveled from their home base in West Orange to a gym in Newark for a morning game against a YMCA team from the Central Ward. Two more games were scheduled to be played on that court immediately afterward, and the bleachers were filled with members of those four other teams along with friends and relatives of the players from those teams, not to mention the team that Ferguson and his friends were about to square off against in the first part of the triple-header, which made for a crowd of about eighty or ninety people. Except for the seven white boys from the Jewish Y and their coach, a high school math teacher named Lenny Millstein, everyone in the gym that morning was black. There was nothing unusual about that, since the West Orange boys often played against all-black teams in their Essex County Y League, but what was unusual about that morning in Newark was the size of the crowd, close to a hundred instead of the customary ten or twelve. At first, no one seemed to be paying much attention to what was happening on the court, but when the game ended in a tie and had to go into overtime, the people who had come for the two other games began to grow restless. As far as Ferguson could tell, the crowd didn’t care which team won or lost—they just wanted the game to be done with so the other games could start—but then the five-minute overtime ended in another tie score, and the mood of the crowd swelled from restlessness to agitation. Get the jokers off the court, yes, but if one of those two teams eventually had to win, then the onlookers were going to pull for the Newark boys over the suburban boys, the Christian boys over the Jewish boys, the black boys over the white boys. Fair enough, Ferguson said to himself as the second overtime began, it was only natural for people to root for the home team, only natural for people to shout from the stands during a close game, only natural for people to insult the visiting players, but then the second overtime ended in yet another tie score, and everything suddenly seemed to catch fire: the small, dilapidated gym in central Newark was ablaze with sound, and a no-account basketball game between fourteen-year-old boys had been turned into a symbolic blood match between us and them.

  Both teams were playing poorly, both teams were missing nine-tenths of their shots and throwing away a third of their passes, both teams were tired and distracted by the noise from the crowd, both teams were doing their best to win and yet performing as if they wanted to lose. The crowd was unanimous in its support of one team over the other team, stomping and roaring its approval every time a Newark player wrestled away a rebound or intercepted a pass, hooting with derision whenever a West Orange player clanked a jump shot or bounced the ball off his foot, yowling in raucous ecstasy every time Newark scored a basket, booing in prolonged bursts of outrage and disgust whenever West Orange answered with a score of its own. With ten seconds left on the clock, Newark led by one point. Lenny Millstein called a time-out, and as the West Orange players gathered around their coach, the clamor from the stands was so loud that he had to shout to make himself heard, the sage Lenny Millstein, who not only was an excellent basketball man but an excellent person as well, who knew how to handle fourteen-year-old boys because he understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body, and in the furnace of that claustrophobic arena of belligerent, bellowing partisans, the astute man with the curly blond hair and the jocular, no-discipline approach to running a team was shouting at his charges and reminding them how to break a full-court press, and before the boys put their right hands on top of Lenny’s right hand for a last Let’s go!, the thirty-four-year-old husband and father of two pointed to an exit door in the side wall of the gym and told the boys that no matter what happened in the next ten seconds, whether they won the game or lost the game, at the instant the final buzzer sounded they should all run for that door and jump into his station wagon parked at the curb because, as he put it, things are getting a little nuts in here, and he didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed in the mayhem that was sure to follow. Then the five hands and the one hand came together, Lenny barked the last Let’s go!, and Ferguson and the other starters trotted back onto the court.

  They were the longest ten seconds of Ferguson’s life, an absurd, high-speed ballet that seemed to be unfurling in slow motion because he was the only player on the court who wasn’t moving, fixed in his position at the top of the far circle to receive a long desperation pass if all else failed, the last option out of several desperate options, and for that reason he could see it all from where he stood, the whole dance sharply etched in space, vivid and indelible, called up again and again over the ensuing months and years, never not remembered at any point in his life, Mike Nadler’s inbounds pass to Mitch Goodman after faking out a leaping, arm-waving Newark defender, Goodman’s no-dribble wheel-around pass to Alan Schaeffer at midcourt, and then Schaeffer’s blind shot-put heave as the clock ticked down to three seconds, two seconds, one second, followed by the astonishment on Schaeffer’s pudgy face as the ball made its improbable journey through the air and went straight through the hoop without touching the rim, the longest buzzer beater in the history of the Essex County Y League, an ending to trump all other endings for the rest of time.

  He saw Lenny bounding off in the direction of the side door. As the West Orange player standing farthest from that door, Ferguson started running before anyone else, started running the second he saw the ball go through the basket, not even pausing to congratulate Schaeffer or celebrate the win, for Lenny had been right to suspect trouble, and now that Newark had been robbed of its victory, the people in the gym were incensed. A howl of collective shock to begin with, eighty or ninety brains clobbered by the sight of that cheap, lucky basket, and an instant later half the crowd was surging onto the court, crying out in anger and disbelief, an army of thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old boys, four dozen black boys bent on tearing apart half a dozen white boys for the injustice that had been committed against them, and for a few moments as he sprinted across the court Ferguson felt in real danger, afraid that the mob would catch up to him and knock him to the floor, but he managed to rush through the swarming labyrinth of bodies with just one random punch delivered to his right arm, a punch that hurt and continued to hurt for the ne
xt two hours, and then he was out the door and running toward Lenny’s station wagon in the cold air of that bleak January morning.

  Thus ended the miniature race riot that almost happened but didn’t. All during the trip home, the other boys in the car whooped it up in a high-octane surge of manic good cheer, again and again reliving the last ten seconds of the game, congratulating themselves for having escaped the wrath of the avenging crowd, conducting pretend interviews with the still incredulous and ceaselessly smiling Schaeffer, laughing, laughing, so much laughter that the very air was thick with jubilation, but Ferguson took no part in it, couldn’t take part in it because he had no desire to laugh, even though Schaeffer’s last-second shot had been one of the funniest, most unlikely things he had ever seen, but the game had been ruined for him by what had happened after the game, and the punch still hurt, and the reason why the punch had been thrown hurt even more than the pain still throbbing in his arm.

  Lenny was the only other person in the car who wasn’t laughing, the only other one who seemed to understand the dark implications of what had happened in the gym, and for the first time all season he reprimanded the boys for their sloppy, incompetent play, dismissing Schaeffer’s fifty-footer as an accident and asking them why they hadn’t trounced that mediocre team by twenty points. The others took those words as a sign of anger, but Ferguson realized that he wasn’t angry but upset, or scared, or disheartened, or all three at once, and that the game meant nothing in light of the ugly scene that had followed the game.

  It was the first time Ferguson had witnessed a crowd turn into a deranged mob, and hard as it was to take, the irrefutable lesson he had learned that morning was that a crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own, in this case the truth about the resentment and even hatred many black people felt toward white people, which was no less strong than the resentment and even hatred many white people felt toward black people, and Ferguson, who had just spent the last days of the Christmas holiday writing an essay about the courage of Jackie Robinson and the need for total integration in every aspect of American life, couldn’t help feeling upset, scared, and disheartened by what had happened in Newark that morning, fifteen years after Jackie Robinson had played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Two Mondays after the Saturday in Newark, Mrs. Baldwin stood in front of Ferguson’s ninth-grade English class and announced that he had won first prize in the essay contest. The second prize had been awarded to Amy Schneiderman for her impressive encomium on the life of Emma Goldman, and how proud she was of them both, Mrs. Baldwin said, the top two submissions coming from the same class, her class, which was one of thirteen ninth-grade English classes in the school, and not once in all her years of teaching at Maplewood Junior High had she been granted the privilege of having two winners in the annual writing contest.

  Good for Mrs. Baldwin, Ferguson thought, as he watched his literary nemesis gloating over the dual triumph at the blackboard, as if she were the one who had written the essays herself, and happy as Ferguson was to be the winner from among the three hundred and fifty students in his grade, he understood that the victory was of no importance, not only because whatever Mrs. Baldwin judged to be good necessarily had to be bad but because he himself had turned against his own essay since the debacle in the Newark gym, knowing that what he had written was too optimistic and naïve to make any sense in the real world, that while Jackie Robinson deserved all the praise Ferguson had given him, desegregating baseball was just a midget step in a much larger struggle that would have to go on for many more years, no doubt for more years than Ferguson himself would ever get to live, perhaps for another century or two, and that next to his hollow, idealistic portrait of a transformed America, Amy’s piece on Emma Goldman had been much better, not just better written and better thought-out but at once more subtle and more passionate, and the only reason why she hadn’t been given the first prize was because the school couldn’t award the blue ribbon to an essay about a revolutionary anarchist, who by definition was to be regarded as a thoroughly un-American American, a person so radical and dangerous to the American way of life that she had been deported from her own country.

  Mrs. Baldwin was still droning on in front of the class, explaining that the three winners from each grade would be reading their essays out loud at an all-school assembly scheduled for Friday afternoon, and as Ferguson glanced over at Amy—who sat one row in front of him and two desks to the right—he was amused that when his eyes landed on her back, dead center between her two shoulder blades, she instantly turned around to look at him, as if she had felt his eyes touching her, and, even more amusing, once their eyes met, she scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue at him, as if to say, Pooh on you, Archie Ferguson, I should have won and you know it, and when Ferguson smiled at her and shrugged, as if to say, You’re right, but what can I do about it?, Amy’s scrunch turned into a smile, and a moment later, unable to suppress the laugh gathering in her throat, she let out one of her weird snorts, an unexpectedly loud noise that prompted Mrs. Baldwin to interrupt what she was saying and ask, Is everything all right, Amy?

  Just fine, Mrs. Baldwin, Amy said. I burped. I know it’s an unladylike thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. Sorry.

  * * *

  EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS told Ferguson that life resembled a book, a story that began on page 1 and pushed forward until the hero died on page 204 or 926, but now that the future he had imagined for himself was changing, his understanding of time was changing as well. Time moved both forward and backward, he realized, and because the stories in books could only move forward, the book metaphor made no sense. If anything, life was more akin to the structure of a tabloid newspaper, with big events such as the outbreak of a war or a gangland killing on the front page and less important news on the pages that followed, but the back page bore a headline as well, the day’s top story from the trivial but compelling world of sports, and the sports articles were nearly always read backward as you turned the pages from left to right instead of from right to left as you did with the articles in the front, going in reverse as if plowing through a text in Hebrew or Japanese, steadily working your way toward the middle of the paper, and once you hit the no-man’s-land of the classifieds, which were not worth reading unless you were in the market for trombone lessons or a used bicycle, you would jump over those pages until you wound up in the central territory of movie ads, theater reviews, Ann Landers’s advice column, and the editorials, from which point, if you had started reading from the back (as Ferguson, the sports enthusiast, usually did) you could keep going all the way to the front. Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past, and even though Ferguson had not yet turned fifteen, he had accumulated enough memories to know that the world around him was continually being shaped by the world within him, just as everyone else’s experience of the world was shaped by his own memories, and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else. The question was: What world did Ferguson inhabit now, and how had that world changed for him?

  For one thing, he wasn’t going to be a doctor anymore. He had spent the past two years dwelling in a far-off future of noble self-sacrifice and unstinting good works, a man utterly unlike his own father, working not for money and the acquisition of lime-green Cadillacs but for the benefit of humanity, a doctor who would treat the poor and the downtrodden by setting up free clinics in the worst urban slums, who would travel to Africa to work in tent hospitals during cholera epidemics and murderous civil wars, a heroic figure to the many who depended on him, a man of honor, a saint of compassion and courage, but then clear-eyed Noah Marx came along to tear down the scenery of those outlandish hallucinations, which in fact were the stuff of cornball Hollywood doctor movies and weak-minded, sentimental doctor
novels, an appropriated vision of a future calling that Ferguson had not found within himself but had always seen from the outside, as if watching an actor in a black-and-white film from the 1930s, with a comely nurse-companion-wife hovering at the edge of the frame and soulful music playing in the background, never the real Ferguson with his complex and tormented inner life but a mechanical toy hero born out of a desire to forge a heroic destiny for himself, which would prove that he, the one and only, was better than any other man on this earth, and now that Noah had shown him how badly deluded he was, Ferguson felt ashamed of himself for having squandered so much energy on those childish dreams.

  At the same time, Noah was wrong to think he had any interest in becoming a writer. It was true that reading novels was one of the fundamental pleasures life had to offer, and it was also true that someone had to write those novels in order to give people the chance to experience that pleasure, but as far as Ferguson was concerned, neither reading nor writing could be construed as a heroic activity, and at that point in his journey toward adulthood Ferguson’s sole ambition for the future was, as his number one author had put it, to become the hero of his own life. Ferguson had read his second Dickens novel by then, all 814 pages of that long, circuitous slog through the fictional life of the author’s favorite child, consumed in its entirety during the two-week Christmas break, and now that his marathon reading jag had come to an end, Ferguson found himself at odds with his phantom companion from the previous year, Holden Caulfield, who had bad-mouthed Dickens with his comment about all that David Copperfield kind of crap on the first page of The Catcher in the Rye, for books were beginning to talk to books in Ferguson’s head now, and good as J. D. Salinger might have been, he wasn’t fit to shine Charles Dickens’s shoes, least of all if the old master were decked out in a pair of brogans named Hank and Frank. No, there would never be any question about it: reading fiction was great fun, and writing fiction was great fun as well (fun mixed with anguish, struggle, and frustration, but fun for all that, since the pleasure of writing a good sentence—especially when it started out as a bad one and slowly improved after being rewritten four times—was unsurpassed in the annals of human fulfillment), and anything that was so much fun and caused so much pleasure could not, by definition, be looked upon as heroic. Forget the saintly doctor routine, but there were countless heroic alternatives Ferguson could imagine for himself, among them a career in the law, for instance, and given that daydreaming was the talent he continued to excel at above all others, in particular daydreaming about the future, he spent the next several weeks projecting himself into courtrooms where his eloquence would save wrongly accused men from going to the electric chair and cause every member of the jury to break down and weep after each one of his closing arguments.