Vic watches as the yellow reflectors in the road snake lightly left then right like a miles-long lumbering and unending centipede—as though he were not traveling at all, not driving, but just sitting in his seat aimlessly pulling the steering wheel to and fro, as a giant glowing animal with a million legs scuttles past. He looks to the right and sees that dark marsh passing him by, wondering about all the things occurring in front of him that he just cannot see, wondering about life and what it means to him—just him—days slipped by. His father had given him a “speech” from behind the batting cage once, yelling at him from behind the chain-linked fence after the rest of the team had gone home, after the coach had gone. “Life is basebell! If you ever want to amount to anything, you better believe that it’s in hitting that ball, or you minus well quit now!” Vic was to be a priest to the religion of baseball. He played every day, ignorant of all else that was going on. 50 some-odd years on now, there is just a stupid beach that Ray wants to watch the sun rise over. Fair enough, thinks Vic—they were already 250 plus miles from home; surely it was to late to protest his actions.

The only thing Vic had imagined love to be was a good-looking woman who loved his passion for baseball—loved him for his love for baseball—a woman who came out to see him play every time he stepped up to a plate. The baseball did not care about her, she was not aiming at it. Her goals lay elsewhere, and when his concern for the ball was gone, she became as meaningless as the name on that god damned bat he’d swung.

The weavings of that little white sphere spun through his mind in a curveball that beanballed any hopefully philosophical thoughts. The only meaning to be gained from life orbited around that ball, wove itself into the fabric. And when one day in April, that ball flew right past him with a loud leather thump in the catcher’s mit, he had believed that his life was truly over.

Now, the calm pre-dawn blue that surrounds him makes its rebuttal. It is beginning to filter through the trees, and making him breathe, and showng him a world where that baseball was equal in all things—even then—he sees a place where meaning is derived from love that lasts a lifetime. Where were his fans, his father, his wife, as he plows through Florida to the gulf? Where is the meaning in not saying what he feels? What was the point in leaving a place that he’d always planned to leave anyway? He looks to Ray again, sleeping quietly, and smiles, the indigo of a coming dawn, a jackhammer attacking the young wrinkles around the corners of his eyes.

Ray just sleeps in his flowerprint shirt. Ray asks no questions in his sleep; fails to ponder why his life had gone one way and not the other. And Ray has never known anything about baseball besides how to watch it. The only time the subject had ever come up between the two of them, a few years after they first met, Ray had asked, “So what exactly do those batting averages mean—like, where do they come from? Do they actually count every time you bat?” Ray hadn’t believed it, couldn’t believe it—that someone actually stood and counted every single time you batted, quantified your every move, added your life up by the numbers and divided it. He had said it was too much “like Santa Claus’s list of brats to be believed.”

He stoops. Bending down to tie his shoe in the grand white plaza of this latest new sterile mall, Vic removes his homburg hat and sets it on the concrete, momentarily so that his sixty-five-year-old hands might have opportunity to wrestle with an errant shoelace without the crown falling over his eyes. His face, a straight nose drowning in jowls, is a picture of creased concentration as he loops one string over the other, hands shaking. Vic Hauser’s way never fails to trickle out, through his shaky movements, his defiantly agitated grimace, from beneath gravity’s favorite cheeks; he isn’t yet ready to be bullied by old age. Indeed, to Vic, every day is just a new fight as long as Life continues to see fit to give him another twenty-four hours like the last—a decreasing probability of getting back everything he ever lost—a challenge like a third turn up at home plate after striking out twice and breaking your arm. He could have just tried to tuck it in towards third and then run in slow small steps to stumble to first base. He could have.

Shoe retied, the homburg is placed back up top and he moves again, shuffling toward the far end of the plaza, where the buses wait. Vic had let go his car too or rather driving it. It sits unused in his driveway, and these days the bus is his sole transport, leaving him to the restrictions and impersonal curfews of the city of Columbus’ bus schedules. The only unfortunate aspect of his life lately: he spent a lot of time at home–and a lot of time at home alone. Nodding politely at every passerby with a total lack of conviction Vic makes his way to the bus only to have it drive away without him, as he watches his reflection shrink in the slightly reflective back end. It is fifteen minutes until the next bus comes and Vic shifts his feeble trajectory to move toward an unoccupied bench by the curb. It is Friday afternoon and there are very few people out and about, most existing inside office buildings where Vic himself could have once resided, only after, of course, he’d become no one at all.