GPS (15 page)

Jeff had skirted everyone but Ascondo after the game on his way through the stadium and the St. Lucie clubhouse, and in the postgame bustle had barely managed to clap him on the back and say, “Great job, Felix,” and flip him his keys. That crowded clubhouse, where Ascondo would finally smile his great smile at the reporters and his teammates instead of just at a drunk scout, was the last room Jeff would ever share with the Dominican.

Jeff filed out of the stadium and into the parking lot without making eye contact with anyone else, called information to find a cab back to the hotel and quietly skipped town. Replays of that majestic stroke Ascondo had put on the ball in what ended as a 7-6 St. Lucie win flashed repeatedly in his mind as the late-night miles from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf coast rolled past. And while his eyelids weighed more and more, starting to pull on Jeff’s entire head as the Celica sped on in the night, the screen on Jeff’s windshield started doing something peculiar.

The Warren GPS, which hadn’t been given to any odd behavior since that frightening aftershock, or whatever it was that had played out in New Mexico the previous Saturday afternoon, made its presence felt again. Since Albuquerque, nothing but the facts had come out of that speaker, nothing but the raw data and gently spinning maps and mileage counts on the screen.

The thing was soothing, especially at night. It knew the perfect moment to blink into its nighttime color schemes when dusk had passed. The bright greens and blues became seas of black with just the red lines of the road and the bright white blips of the towns and cities. Just as it should be. It was like putting on mood music when that thing turned its lights down.

He was sorry he’d missed that transition this time around, but Jeff was enjoying its cool darkness now that it was here. He cruised along at about 80 miles per hour past the Gainesville exits on Florida’s Turnpike near his merge for I-75. With the cabin of the Celica almost completely darkened, Jeff’s brain had flipped away from its baseball files and turned back to Riley.

He was trying not to do anymore rooting, any more wishing, hoping or senseless planning when it came to his soon-to-be ex-wife. On many a drunken night the last half-year or so, Jeff had declared himself fit to cope with losing her, but with every painful wake-up was the return of the feeling he’d blown the big one, that Riley was his only reliable source of happiness and sanity.

Even now, he sensed the next time he saw her, or maybe the time after that, could be the last. Why? Well, he didn’t know why, other than the fact that some time had to be the last time, and neither of them would likely stay in New Orleans forever. She had more reason to stay than he did, of course, but she also had a growing list of reasons to go.

Regardless, Jeff felt that it mattered how he projected himself the next time they were together. She was ready for the full-time disconnect with him but she also seemed to realize he was showing signs of going off the deep end. He certainly didn’t want that to be the reason she stuck around in his life.

Even if he had to dress things up a bit — a lot, even — he needed to bow out of the this thing more gracefully than leaving hallucinatory messages on her cell phone in the middle of the night. That thought, of course, brought him back to the critical issue. It reared the ugly head of the one thing that would likely doom whatever meeting there was. How in the hell would he explain it all? She wanted answers and he had none.

“Oh no," Jeff had said suddenly in a low, panicked voice. “Jesus, not again!” He leaned forward and tapped the GPS screen with his right hand, stomach tightened in fear. The screen was awash in those pink and orange and green LSD colors again. As the car swerved dangerously onto the highway shoulder, Jeff kept tapping the screen, hoping it was nothing more than a bad satellite signal, or something. The colors seemed to deepen and expand as though inside a lava lamp.

The screen began to scramble, alternating between the big splashes of oozing colors and brief glimpses of a map of a remote-looking expanse of road. Instead of the image of the constant criss-cross of side highways, frontage roads and intersecting state highways that knot together Florida’s Panhandle and most other reaches of the United States, the in-and-out picture on the screen now seemed to be one lonely, branchless road through a long stretch of sand-colored nothingness. Each time it flashed into view, there was the little you-are-here cursor on the road, as though somehow the Warren GPS satellite technology was picking up Jeff”s simultaneous travels through some other place.

Jeff spun the wheel hard to the left when he saw the gold reflectors of the highway guardrail, in just enough time to avoid dying in one of the more pointless ways possible. His heart now pounded as the Celica regained its footing without fishtailing, and Jeff steadily steered the car back onto the highway’s right lane. As he peeked back at the screen again, he saw the orange and purple rorschach images had returned and this time didn’t seem to be allowing the other, more interesting map to come popping through.

But there was something else new. Now, the screen showed the little DESTINATION header on the bottom right corner of the screen, in the same place it normally would appear during a trip to indicate the number of miles remaining. Underneath it, however, wasn’t a mere mileage count but a long sequence of numbers and letters, indicating a ticking clock of sorts, beginning, Jeff assumed, with days and ending in seconds — 14d7h30m18s. Moving steadily again to the I-75 exit toward I-10 and the Alabama state line, Jeff read the time aloud, down to the ever-changing seconds.

“Fourteen days, seven hours, 30 minutes and 14, 13, 12 seconds…”

Not long after, the screen went completely blank for about 10 seconds, then blinked onto the Warren farewell screen —
“Warren, we know where you’re goin’”
— and then western Florida popped up again as though all was normal and nothing had even happened.

Jeff sat in a stupor for about 30 miles after that, half of him wondering if that ticking clock was going to be the end of the world, or an alien invasion, or the Celica exploding to smithereens with him driving to some damn baseball game. The other half was waiting for something to happen right then, some other craziness to come out of the machine Riley had handpicked and delivered just in time for his new life on the road.

It occurred to Jeff after the first hour or so of normal, uninterrupted GPS behavior that if he could not force himself to just be honest with Riley about everything —
“Can we please just talk about this?”
— then he truly had become a worthless, pathetic soul. The unexplained happened every day in some manner or another, so why should he not be honest about it? What was there to lie about? What did he have to lose? Not his marriage, not anymore, so why not just blurt it all out?

When Ascondo finally got the call from that dickhead Reno in the sixth inning, he’d undoubtedly had plenty of time to daydream the at-bat hundreds of different ways, from ninth-inning grand slam to sixth-inning strikeout. Of all the things he knew when he dug in at home plate, the one thing he did not know was what result his at-bat would produce. No one but Ascondo and Jeff knew of or cared about his dream of playing in New York. Maybe striking out would have been the right thing to do, but he had no way of knowing. He just let it fly. Without thought of consequence, Ascondo went up there and delivered.

As Jeff drove on through the night, he tried to imagine Ascondo being introduced at Shea as Felix himself had dreamed it a million times.

Then Jeff tried to imagine his parallel dream, his own Shea Stadium moment. But he couldn’t because there wasn’t one. He felt as though Ascondo had served as some sort of inspiration, and Jeff felt truly inspired to be inspired. About what he had no idea.

He plowed onto I-10 lost in thought, the Celica windows rolled down in attempt to keep himself awake and refreshed. What in the world had that counter on the screen been? That question lingered for hundreds of miles more, as Jeff inched his way across the land monitored ever so closely by the GPS and the woman’s relentless reminders about exits and his proximity to them. It was nearly eight hours later, after Jeff had re-entered the state of Louisiana and had begun to think again about what would happen with Ascondo, that she, the GPS, talked out of turn.

“
In, 14, days, begin training.”

Then nothing else until Jeff was beckoned to take Exit 236-A to Esplanade Avenue. As he steered onto the ramp and back down into the arms of the Crescent City, Jeff’s face was again crumpled into a confused frown. He had not yet gotten over the shock of the GPS’s most recent strange behavior and was now rifling through his brain trying to organize every shred of memory of that night in New Mexico. Again.

There had to be one thing he could tie to another, something that could explain what had happened, what was still happening. He had to sit down and lay out the evidence, be honest with himself and determine what was real and what wasn’t. But wouldn’t there have to be a third list for the stuff in between fact and fiction, like a third pile of laundry oddities that has to be washed separately? Of course there would. There would be a big stack of stuff in between the real and the fantasy that Jeff simply could not rule on himself. The arbiter he immediately thought of, the only one he would have considered asking to make a ruling on the pile of unknowns, unfortunately, was likely a little too familiar with the person involved in the incident to make an unbiased decision.

One way or another, he had to talk to Riley and he planned to. Instead of outright honesty, though, it would be vague, his explanation. It would be nothing more than a description, as best as he could muster, of what he had seen play out in his car that day, and also in his frantic dream in Florida which he’d long since realized would not simply vanish from his memory like most dreams did.

In fact, that dream had felt like a half-hour drama that might just pick up and continue in a week or so. Maybe sooner. But it was also like picking up a half-hour drama in midseason and trying to figure out who was who, what had happened before that and whether or not what happened next would make any sense. None of it made sense to Jeff now, as for the first time in his life he thought ahead to that night’s sleep with a feeling of trepidation.

In a time when in most places in America spring was still arriving with its comfortable breezes and peeking green buds, the summer heat was already on full blast in New Orleans. The orange glow of the Esplanade street lamps already had that foggy, damp tint that never left town for long. The red Celica slowed to a squeaking stop — it was feeling a lot worse physically than the man riding inside, only the man inside hadn’t thought about that yet — and its lights blinked out immediately. As tired as he was, Jeff was feeling the discomfort of a man who feared the things that might haunt his slumber, things he could not control or make go away.

“
Warren — we know where you're goin’”
sounded more like a warning now than a comforting thought as he pulled the ever-hot GPS off the windshield and extracted the rest of his travel gear from the car.

Lefty was certainly happy to see him. He was sitting halfway down the steps when Jeff wrestled himself through the door. But the cat didn’t follow him into the bedroom and dive headlong onto the bed to inspect all of the smells of the outside world like he usually did. Instead, he took a quick detour at the bedroom doorway, veering off into the bathroom to his left, looking back and meowing uneasily as Jeff clumsily threw his bags onto the mattress with a bounce and then did the same with his body.

With painstaking, incremental movements, the cat wormed its way into the bedroom minutes later, walking along the room’s far outer edge, away from the closet, while Jeff reclined, staring straight up at the ceiling. The man on the bed was thinking he didn’t care to travel anywhere for a couple of days, or maybe weeks. He didn’t want to think about baseball. If he could just wait out the return of the Zephyrs, he might be able to make that happen ...

Lefty was suddenly in his face, making his heart jump as the cat leapt silently, unexpectedly onto the bed and began cramming its big black head into Jeff’s chest and purring. Soon, the man fell asleep between his unpacked bags, still wearing his clothes and with his feet still touching the floor while the cat — usually good for at least 22 hours of shuteye a day — spent the night like it had the last 24 hours, gazing suspiciously down at the clothes hamper, which still emitted that dangerous aroma.

Jeff slept through what little was left of the night, through the morning, into the early afternoon and through any terror that might have been lurking within. The new day brought an unexpected sense of hope for him, at least until he plunked the Tuesday Times-Picayune onto the table. At the same moment, he waited for his cell phone to reveal who might have left him a message at 7:58 that morning.

“
Felix Ascondo — movin’ out,”
was all Sandy’s voice said on Jeff’s phone. It knocked him right off his feet and into his chair, perhaps more numb than stunned. There wasn’t much more detail in the Associated Press transactions in that morning’s paper, but it was there:
“New York Mets trade RHP Tanner Grace and OF Felix Ascondo to Texas for IF Tyler Mack and future considerations.”

- 17 -

Old, bad habits usually don’t just vanish into thin air.

They attach themselves to things over time, like parasites, so they can just hang on for the ride like bums in boxcars. They camouflage themselves against their hosts and just become an inseparable part of them, shadowing them everywhere they go in life.

Since Jeff was in no position to drink any toasts in honor of Felix Ascondo
—
or maybe toasts denouncing the Mets for trading him
—
Monday night in St. Lucie, he decided to drink one toast, and then another, and then another to the outfielder on Tuesday afternoon, alone in his living room. He couldn’t decide if Ascondo’s trade to Texas marked success or failure for Jeff in the eyes of the Mets organization, but rightly feared it was the latter, and that was worth a few toasts as well.