Fiction By Eli Hopkins

I see Nolan Ryan through a sunburst halo of fireworks walking through the eastern concourse of the airport. There are some places you want to be, but there are also some people.
I wake up from a dream about chemical warfare to find Nolan Ryan sitting next to me. Capitol guy, riding coach. Don’t worry buddy, I’m not gonna try anything weird. But listen, I wrote this haiku about you. Not interested? That’s cool. But rap at me for a minute. Anybody that can throw a ball as hard as you as often as you and for as long as you must know a lot about life, right? What do I wanna know about? Well, women, of course. What else? Sure, sure, you can have my Chicken Kiev. It’s not like I love Chicken Kiev, and mostly only fly so that I can eat it because there isn’t anywhere else in the world that has Chicken Kiev like that. So help yourself. Take my heart, too, and my pain.

Nolan Ryan is smoking three cigarettes simultaneously and there is no one in the world that would stop him.

Other passengers—non-smokers, pro-lifers, tobacconists, anti-tobacconists—are offering him more cigarettes, more lights, coughing—no problem. He says to me:
“Women are vampires, son. They do whatever it takes to make you to give up the things you care about, and then when they look at the sacrifices you’ve made for them, that gives them the strength to leave you.”
I say “Geez, Mr. Ryan…”
“Call me Lynn.”
“Alright, Lynn…”
“No, stick with Mr. Ryan. I like to be called Mister.”
“Mr. Ryan, that’s some pretty strong language, you can’t really believe that?”
“Believe it, you sonofabitch, that’s Tolstoy.”
Somehow I don’t mind being called a sonofabitch, so long as it’s Mr. Nolan Ryan that’s doing the saying.
“Tolstoy? Where did he say that?”
“It’s the only thing he ever said. Take my former wife, she spends years getting me to give up calf-wrestling just before she up and leaves me for some French Philosophy professor. Now I can’t even look at a calf without feeling sick to my stomach.

Do you know what that’s like? To have your world taken away from you?”

“Well maybe you should have given up cat-wrestling in the first place. On your own, I mean.”
“I said Calf-wrestling, boy!”
“I’m sorry, it’s hard to understand you with all those cigarettes in your mouth.”
“You could never understand, because you don’t know shit and you aren’t shit.”
I see Nolan Ryan wrestling calves in the red dirt after the sun and everything in the world is painted like blood, with an empty house to his back and the pastures dried up and barren and no diamond in the world to shine on that old face. His hair is wet and matted under the baseball cap that he doesn’t take off even when sleeping or showering, and his eyes are two knotted crescents that are just plain tired of seeing. The pictures have been taken down and there are dirty squares on the walls—I don’t want this burden, Mr. Ryan. I just want to fall back asleep and pretend this never happened. I was saving my money to come visit you, Mr. Ryan, but now I’m just gonna spend the money on booze.

“What the fuck?” Doyle thought. Dr. Brohand had just finished telling him how he was dying, tossing at him some polysyllabic words Doyle didn’t care to understand. The unwavering focus of Doyle’s attention was entrenched elsewhere, between the waist and shoulders of the Dr. himself. The reason was this: the Doctor was wearing a belt around his waist, in the normal fashion—this was not what concerned Doyle, his mind was broad and as such could recognize that many a good man wears a belt—the thing that Doyle could not fathom, was that thrown cleverly over his shoulders, like a man hiding something, Doctor Brohand had also a pair of suspenders.

What could be the purpose of this seemingly innocuous yet severely troubling pants-holding duality?

“Did you hear what I said?” Dr. Brohand asks, leaning towards Doyle with something of an avuncular familiarity. Leaning so close, in fact, that Doyle was afraid of being punctured with the aquiline crest of the Dr.’s nose. The threat swayed him from his obsession for only a moment.
“Yea, sure.”
Could it be a fashion statement? Brohand’s other aesthetic accouterments—such as his large, wire-frame glasses and his scuffed, brown oxfords he had obviously tried to use black shoe-polish on—spoke only of degradation and exile and had led Doyle to believe that Brohand was not a vain man: but then there were the belt and suspenders.
“I understand that this is a very hard thing to understand.” Brohand says.
“You’re goddamned right it is,” replies Doyle, his eyes fixed to the ungainly straps of leather and nylon flanking Brohand’s belly like the discombobulated armies of Richard III.
“If you need someone to talk to, I know of a specialist I would be happy to refer you to. He deals with people facing the daunting uncertainties you are. I really think he could be of some help.”
They have specialists to deal with this? Doyle thinks, the problem must be bigger than I thought. “Sure, that would be nice, thank you for offering.” Doyle says, thinking that perhaps a man as highly recommended as the one in question might have light to shed on the wardrobe debacle at hand. But then again, how could he? Anxiety rose up in Doyle’s throat, and his eyes swam feverishly over the crystalline austerity of the room, the instruments glistening as though they had never been used; the light from the midday sun peering through the slats of the pastel, Venetian blinds. The scrubbed pinkness of the Doctor’s face and neck looking like baby skin under a flashlight. And finally, the belt and suspenders.

Doyle felt suddenly overwhelmed and he lurched forward, grabbing Brohand by his starched, white lapels. “Why?! Just tell me why!”

“I’m afraid there is no simple answer to that question, aside form the medical one I’ve already mentioned.”
Medical answer? Did Brohand suffer from a bad back? Did the surplus of pants-holding power somehow alleviate the strain of an internal injury that the Doctor kept secret, like the onus of a spy? Doyle began to feel tired and light-headed, and he sank back into the plastic depths of his chair.
Eventually Doyle left Broahnd’s office, no closer to understanding Brohand or himself. He made his way down the seemingly infinite halls of antiseptic white, his shoes squeaking audibly on the freshly mopped floor, the floor that was forever freshly mopped. At last he reached the outer doors, which opened automatically, and Doyle stepped into the corpuscular blaze of August, feeling all the questions of the world beating at him at once. If he could just figure out this one thing.