I don’t play tennis, but I like the courts. I have four in the park across the street.
They have thick white lines. The lines divide a blue interior from a green exterior. The green of these courts has a borderless but geometric quality. It’s all so fresh. The nets are black with a clean white sleeve for the suspending rope. Between each, there’s a single black enameled-metal bench. There’s often duffel bags, racquet cases, and sweatshirts angled casually on the bench. The courts are surrounded by a chain-link fence. This fence is coated by a black weatherizer.
I live on the third floor. I’m a young professional, and my apartment and my place in the city, and my life, reflect this. My balcony overlooks the courts. Proximity to the park and the courts are, I recall, included within the apartment’s list of amenities. They are amenities to me in a different way than was intended, though I did take the dog down. My dog and I like to stand together as he barks vocally, and I bark silently, to myself, at other dogs.
Tennis is interesting. I like to see the outfits and follow the exchange. There’s teaching, and learning. There’s childish and adult play. There’s joy. There’s anger.
I like to study people’s manners. I like to study their outfits. I find anyone in big sunglasses comical.
I like the thwack and counter-thwack.
I like to watch the yellow ball going swiftly through blue and green space.
The people who play seem tanner than normal people.
I like how all the people dart, or walk confidently in their little shorts and skorts, full of the euphoria of exercise and competition; I particularly admire the spry old men and women.
I like to drink Diet Coke while I look, and I like to look for the time it takes me to drink a Diet Coke.
I like it best when the tennis courts are empty.
There’s something to those courts themselves: eight rectangles in a mirror image of one another, the symmetry. They are in place. They remain vibrant, and poised. At night, they’re preserved this way by large floodlights.
I close the sliding glass door and briefly see the doubled image of my own hair, forehead, cheeks, neck, and the white or blue of my many Brooks Brothers shirts.
There I am, I think uncomfortably.
I’ve taken out my phone and learned the proper names: the long, thin rectangular sidelines, the two square boxes of the service courts—the left, and the right service court—and the back rectangle, the flavorfully named “no man’s land.”
Something in the gentle, voluntary constraint of it all maybe provides the most comfortable place for my eyes to rest as my thoughts wander after a day at work. I can stare at the courts until they seem to be floating on top of that green that separates court from court. It’s like the opposite of a swimming pool, or maybe the converse?
(I classed this behavior with me, alone, standing half or all-the-way naked, pulling my stomach muscles back, and doubling over so I can look up into my belly button, and find out what’s going on, what it looks like.)
It goes on, and then one day, I am standing in the open sliding door, in the noise of the street mingled with the noise of my apartment, the familiar swish-shush-swish-shush of traffic passing, the dopplering of a siren, the exclamations, barks of people and dogs in the park. I feel nothing.
I feel anger.
I go inside. I recall anger that’s like a throbbing hurt in one place, or an anger like a cramp. This is the all-over anger, a sense of warming, of coming sweat that’s brought on by something in the blood, by vigorous movement or food with both spice and heat.
I take a shower and brush my teeth. I silently eat spaghetti bolognese at the coffee table. I’m not watching the prestige drama. I’m trying not to punish my girlfriend for nothing when she laughs the easy, open laugh she has in my company. It’s our habit to make fun of the seriousness of the prestige drama’s most dramatic, prestigious moments, where it, Donna says, “works up into a kind of lather.” My girlfriend is named Donna Schumaker. Sometimes we’re caught up in it, and sigh.
I wake up the next night. I’m dehydrated. I go to the kitchen to fill my bedside glass with cold water. I notice the front room is lit with an unfamiliar glow. I go to the sliding door. The court lights are out. There’s a flying saucer above the tennis courts. It’s shiny. It’s ovoid, with a dome-shaped glass on the top. It’s about the size of the sedan. I can see a green balloon-shape inside the dome. The shape seems organic. The saucer seems to turn slowly in place. I think to myself, this must be some moronic viral advertising stunt. The shininess, the shape, it seems quaint; it seems retro. I put my glass down on the counter, walk to the doorway, zip a hoodie up over my pajamas, slip on my penny loafers, walk down the hallway, down the staircase, out of the side-door, past the smell of a skunk, across the street and into the park.
The tennis courts have a dry smell. I have never been in the tennis courts; it feels strange to be in this place I’ve looked at and felt towards so often.
I lift up my phone. The saucer opens above me. There’s purple light. There’s brighter purple light. I don’t remember what happened next. There was no “I” to do the remembering, even if things happened. The “I” that I am now, writing these sentences, is a different “I” than the one who experienced these things, any of them: the thoughts, feelings, habits, language, and belief of thirty years sit inside of me like furniture. My name is Jake, Jake Hernandez. I don’t know what will happen next. Do you?
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Joshua Hebburn is an assistant fiction editor at X-R-A-Y. He recommends “Two Joy Odes” by william erickson from the hex archives.