Davis MacMillan: OLD FRIENDS • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Davis MacMillan
OLD FRIENDS

A long time ago, when we were little or maybe medium-sized boys, a man did yoga in the park near my house. This was strange: yoga was known but it was not really the sort of thing young men did in public. Also, he was shirtless, which, in our small town, was even more the sort of thing young men didn’t do in public.

He had a scar. He had something, an indentation forming a perfect circle on the lower part of his stomach, covered in hair. It was like a tiny part of him was a wolf man or, more accurately, like he was part machine and it was a port, a port covered and protected by its web of coarse hairs, like one of those vacuum attachments that end in a brush.

As an adult, it seems likely that the scar was the result of a colostomy bag or some similar issue. That is, as an adult, it’s clear that our response, which was to ask what was wrong with him, and why his stomach looked like that, and how he felt about its being so disgusting, was crueler than we perceived it at the time. He was reasonable, prepared. He made fun of us back. You don’t take your shirt off in public with a scar like that without being prepared.

Touching my young son’s stomach, which is so soft and smooth that it might be that kids’ stomachs came first and then silk was invented, I can’t help but thinking about the vulnerability of the human body. We’re born so perfect, and all the time the world is trying to destroy us.

I was thinking about this when I found out that Henry Thornton, a friend from high school, had joined our company. This was a surprise in the classic sense: Henry hadn’t told me and I hadn’t heard that the department he joined—product, he had grown up into an engineer—was hiring for a role at his level. Neither of these things were necessarily strange, but together they felt a bit like a prank at my expense.

I made the walk from marketing to product late in the afternoon of Henry’s first day. They’d seated him in the corner of the engineer’s little bullpen. I spotted him almost instantly: acting out the normal first-day experience of having nothing to do but sign forms. He was spinning slowly in his chair, neck snapped back, head pointing at the ceiling so that the shadow of his nose on the side of his face looked like a sundial. He had a piece of scrap paper that he was throwing straight up and catching. He caught it clean, every time, smack into his hand, the athleticism still there.

“Henry,” I said. “You didn’t think to send me a text?”

“I didn’t want you to think you had to put in a word.”

“But once you had the job?”

“I thought it’d be funny to surprise you.”

I laughed. I think it sounded a bit forced, but then it was forced. We didn’t speak regularly enough anymore for this sort of surprise to make sense. It was fraught. If our roles had been reversed, I would have thought the surprise was fraught. Still, I admired the confidence.

“We’ll have to get a drink one of these days.”

“No time like the present.” That wasn’t true for me, I had things to do. But I guess that’s why I’d walked over in the first place. Or anyway I guess my outside hope was that he would want to do something as friends.

At the bar, we talked about him. He’d lived in Tokyo. He’d lived in Seoul. He’d lived in San Francisco. He spent a lot of time with Americans in both Asian cities, but then he realized American expats were lame. He made an effort to make more local friends. He tried and failed to learn Japanese. He tried and failed to learn Korean. He had some words of both languages. He knew how to say “let’s party” in both languages. But he wasn’t that into partying anymore. He felt like he’d done enough of that. He still went out sometimes, though. He had some friends in finance who were into the club scene. He did that sometimes. Also, in Japan and Korea, he’d seen all the sights. He’d seen some beautiful temples. Those had inspired him to spend more time upstate. He went to Bear Mountain a lot.

We ended up drinking a couple of beers. By the end of our time I was a bit buzzed. In fact, I was buzzed enough that I didn’t realize I was annoyed until later. He hadn’t asked me a thing about myself, and he hadn’t given me a second to say anything about myself. As far as he knew, I was still the same person from high school.

We saw the guy with the scar on his stomach a few weeks before soccer tryouts started. It was the four of us: Henry, Martin, Charlie, and me. We had been playing in each other’s backyards since the fifth grade, when Martin moved to town and Charlie got FIFA.

Really, it was Martin, Charlie and me that were friends. Henry was Charlie’s neighbor. He saw us playing ball over the fence and asked if he could join. He was good; he spent a lot of time practicing juggling and other moves. He taught us some of these in those first weeks playing together (rainbows and fakes, that sort of thing), and soon we were inviting him along to everything we did. Four friends were better than three.

We got older. That’s what happens. The way I remember it now is we graduated as fifth graders with no real sense of the meanness of the world to sixth graders nervously approaching that meanness, to seventh and eighth graders who realized the best defense was to go on the attack. We developed a sense for each other’s weaknesses, poking and prodding and listening until we understood that Martin, for example, was embarrassed of his mother’s shrill and overbearing nature. Or that Charlie feared that he was dumb. Or that I was chubby and unathletic.

We attacked in circles. We moved with an understanding of our own vulnerability. More than that, we felt at all times the possibility of being defined by our own inadequacy. We were still young: a year was infinite. We knew that our future selves could be made by one unguarded moment.

The key was to get the others on your side, to form a bank of three and then attack the fourth. That way you could ensure, for a day or so, that you would not be the victim.

The summer after eighth grade, there were tryouts for the soccer team. This involved, first, the assignment to run forty miles in the months of June and July. The four of us did this together. I often lagged behind—no matter how much I ran, my body never quite found what it needed. I was always wheezing, always hurting, even as my friends began to find the miles easy. This was followed by three weeks of all-day training camp called, even though it was all day, two-a-days. At the end of camp, there were cuts.

It was clear from the beginning that I wasn’t at the level. I thought, given my slowness, of trying a shift to goalkeeper. The coaches humored me. I wasn’t really a focus. The shift lasted two days. My friends, everyone, pummeled me with balls. At some point, after they’d scored enough, they decided to kick the balls straight at me. I tried to tell myself that this was about improving my reflexes. I tried to give the impression that my friends were helping me: that they were giving me a chance to “make saves” in front of the coach. Really, though, they were just making me squirm.

Otherwise, my deficiencies didn’t come up. This was, somehow, the worst possible outcome. I would come in on my friends in a group of three, talking without me. They were pleasant, but I was outside. My failure was predetermined.

The three of them made the team. I did not. We grew apart, though Martin, Charlie, and I stayed in tentative touch. They made better friends and so did I. This was mostly fine.

Henry was recruited and played D-2 college soccer. He built himself into a very skilled and successful engineer. He was popular, successful.

It took me a bit longer, though I have things figured out now. I spent a long time lost, drinking too much, going out most nights searching for the life I was supposed to have. I spent a long time trying to figure out and fix what had gone wrong with me.

A little while ago someone told me a story about his son, a twelve-year-old. As it turned out, every day the boy went to school he was beset on all sides by kids throwing balled-up papers at him. There was no reason for this, he hadn’t done anything. It just happened that someone started it and others joined in. The father found out because he was dropping off a forgotten homework assignment and saw it happen. He was far enough away that his son didn’t see him. Or he thought he didn’t. In the end the father opted not to do anything.

We had, for the last year of my tenure, harbored quiet plans to go public. A couple months after Henry and I went drinking, efforts expanded substantially. As part of this, we cut costs. I had to fire two of my four subordinates. Engineering let a few people go as well.

Henry won the shakeout. A couple of months after the firing, it was announced that he was taking on the role of Associate CTO. This was a mostly made-up title. That is, it was an intermediate step to ease him into the role of full CTO.

During this process, I led the hiring of a public relations firm tasked with helping us build publicity pre-IPO. And, while there were a lot of steps between that choice and this end point, one result was that our company elected to put on a charity soccer game.

The idea, a bad one in retrospect, was to sell tickets to clients, friends, and whoever else to watch the engineering team play a selection of the administrative staff. I wound up involved because I like soccer, but more than that because our company is not actually very big and finding twenty-two healthy adults to play in the game had proved challenging.

The game was not Henry’s idea. I know this because I hired the idiots who proposed it and because I was in the room when they proposed it. However, it could not have played out more perfectly for him. He was unanimously appointed captain by the engineering department. In this role, he gathered everyone outside of work for a short practice (followed by drinks) and assigned his team positions. He sent people videos explaining their positions in detail: how to move, where to stand. He brought a ball to work and trained people at lunch.

I was not immediately aware of these efforts. I was also not the captain of our team. That was one of the finance guys, Dylan, a weightlifter and a bro who sent everyone on the team positions based on his perception of their abilities. He put me at right mid, a fun place but also where you might bury a bad player. I tried not to take it personally.

Things went along. I didn’t see or speak to Henry outside of a few all-hands meetings. I had a sense that his team was taking the charity game somewhat more seriously than ours but I didn’t worry about it. I don’t know why I didn’t worry about it.

The day came. The company pitched the game as part of a larger clients and family day, so my wife and kids came. My kids are five and three, both speaking and lucid without really being sensible. They were excited to watch the game and absolutely could not be relied on to not try and join.

The company had secured a permit for the soccer field and surrounding grass in a midtown park. Picnic tables were set up under a small stand of oak trees near the top corner of the field. There was a face painter, a volleyball net. There were drinks and hot dogs and hamburgers—all catered, though our CEO performatively grilled a few dogs in an attempt to either look personable or take credit.

I sat for a while in my gym shorts with my family. It was a nice day, the sort of day that made me feel successful on both the personal and professional sides of my life. Here I was, sipping beer with my beautiful wife at an event from my well-paying job. I had the sneaking suspicion that I might have made it. I wanted Henry to see me. I needed him to confirm that I’d made it.

“Are you sure you want to drink?” my wife had asked when I cracked my second beer. I told her that it was a casual game, something that I thought at the time to be true. That wasn’t the reason I was drinking, though. I was drinking to deal with the anxiety I’d felt creeping from my stomach to my throat since early that morning. I felt like I’d swallowed a large ant. I needed to drown the ant.

I was on my third beer when Henry came over. “You ready?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Sorry, I’m Henry,” he said to my wife. She introduced herself, so did my children. I was proud of them. “OK, gotta go put on my cleats.” He left.

“Huh,” my wife said.

“What?”

“Nothing. He seemed nice.” She paused. “Not how you described him.”

The game started. We kicked off, passed around the defense a bit before Stacy from accounting dribbled the ball off her left foot and out of bounds. A tall, skinny engineer grabbed the ball and heaved it into the midfield (a probable foul throw). Henry picked it up, juked one, two, of our defenders, then floated the ball into the top corner of the net. One to zero.

This happened several more times. After his third goal, Henry shifted his focus to setting up others on the team. He dribbled around our players then, once the way forward was clear, laid gentle rolling passes in front of his teammates. They scored again and again. By halftime, it was six to nothing.

We took it pretty well, I think. Only our captain was upset, and he handled this by telling everyone that it was closer than we thought, and we just had to listen to him more. Even I wasn’t overly upset, though I did feel that Henry was showboating a bit. “He played in college,” I said a couple of times during our huddle. “It’s not really fair.”

Most everyone shrugged it off. We did make a few changes, one of which was my shifting backwards to the defense. Our captain, who’d put himself at striker, stayed at striker.

The second half began in much the same way as the first. We passed for a bit, moved up the field, then someone on the other side took the ball and gave it to Henry. I stepped towards him, but he dropped his shoulder and accelerated around me. I tried to shuffle into his path in a way that would allow me to make a play on the ball, but I misjudged the distance and fell over. He scored. “Stay on your feet,” our captain yelled. I looked at my wife. I looked at my kids.

The clock ran down. Henry’s team had mostly stopped trying and we kept more of the ball. I even ran up the field a few times, dribbling pretty well and shooting over the goal. I was upset about this, but also thought that, in spite of all the years, my running and my form must’ve looked good. “Next time, buddy,” Henry said. This felt a bit like being hit with a warm ray of sun.

What happened next ended that good feeling. I was jogging back to my position when I turned around and saw Henry and another member of his team huddled together, laughing.

Of course, I knew right away that they were making fun of me. There were ten minutes left in the game. I decided that I needed to score to prove them wrong. My team passed the ball around in the midfield for a bit until someone on Henry’s team partially intercepted the ball. It bounced along, and then I trapped it. I decided this was my chance. No one was pressing me so I dribbled forward through the midfield. Our captain, who was near the goal but covered, was screaming at me to pass. I ignored him. One of the engineers stepped to me and I poked the ball forward, around him. I ran after it, really moving now. I was maybe twenty yards from the goal.

The ball was gone. I saw, moving impossibly fast, the side of Henry’s head. He was around me, going the other way. I turned, ran after him, tried to catch him. I reached my hand out, grabbed at his arm. I missed. I fell. My cheek was wet with what I realized was blood.

In the meantime, Henry had scored. Our captain was standing over me. “Dude, you have to pass.”

“Shut up, Mark.” I kept touching the part of my face that was bleeding.

“Oh dude,” he said. “That looks bad.” I didn’t respond. I walked off the field. I tried not to cry.

Davis MacMillan has had work in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, and some other places. He lives with his wife and two sons in Jersey City.