The Treatment Room

The treatment room is small and very clean and Ruth does not look up from her notes when he comes in. She is maybe his age, maybe a little older, in the Bobcats' polo with her sleeves pushed up and a pen behind her ear and a second pen in her hand, which Mateo's brain files away as the detail of a person who loses pens. Her hair is pulled back hard. There is nothing on the walls of her room. In a building of faded grinning photographs she has chosen a room with bare walls, and Mateo, who has spent eleven months unable to look at photographs of himself, feels an unexpected flicker of kinship. "Sit on the table," Ruth says, still writing. "Hat." He takes the hat off. "Shoulder," she says. "Both. Shirt off, or roll it, your call, I've seen shoulders before." He rolls the sleeve. She finally looks up, and Mateo waits for it — the flick of recognition, the recalibration, the slight change in the air that has happened in every room he has entered for eleven months. The face that says oh, you're him. It does not happen. Ruth looks at him the exact way she would look at a fence post she had been asked to assess. She comes around the table and takes his arm in both hands, and her hands are warm and absolutely without ceremony, and she begins, methodically, to hurt him. "Tell me when," she says, rotating the joint. "It's fine." "That wasn't the question. The question was when." She moves the arm again, and Mateo holds the fine on his face, the press-conference face, the one he could do in his sleep — and Ruth stops, and looks at him, not unkindly but with the bottomless patience of a woman who has watched men lie to her about their bodies for a living, for years, and has stopped finding it interesting. "Here's the thing," she says. "I genuinely do not care that you used to be famous." "I didn't —" "You didn't say anything, I know. You don't have to. You came in with the hat down and you've got the press face on and you flinched two rotations ago and decided not to show it, and all of that is the behavior of a man who is used to his body being a public document." She sets his arm down, gently, and folds her own. "It isn't, in here. In here it's just an arm, and it's a forty-year-old arm doing a twenty-five-year-old's job, and it has been compensating for something for at least a season, probably longer, and if you keep performing fine at me I will clear you for nothing and you can spend your summer watching twenty-two-year-olds play the game you came here to get back into. Your call. But I only do this the honest way. It's slower. It's the only way that works." Mateo looks at her. Bare walls. Lost pens. No oh, you're him. "It's the shoulder," he says, and it comes out lower and rougher than he means it to, because he has not said the true version out loud to anyone, not the three specialists, not Petrosky, not the men with the podcasts. "It's been the shoulder since before — before the pitch. Before the championship. I knew something was off in the back half of the season and I didn't say anything because we were winning and you don't take a winning closer off the field, and then in the ninth inning of the biggest game of my life my shoulder did a thing it had been threatening to do for two months, and the ball went where it went, and the city decided I choked." He stares at the bare wall. "I didn't choke. I broke. There's a difference and I have never been able to say it to anyone because saying it sounds like an excuse." The room is quiet. Somewhere down the corridor a ball machine thuds, regular as a heart. "It's not an excuse," Ruth says. "It's a diagnosis. And it's the first true sentence you've said since you walked in, so." She picks her clipboard back up, all business again, but something in the room has shifted, some small honest weight has changed hands. "Lie back down. We start from the true sentence. Everything before it, I'm not interested in. The hat, the famous, the pitch with the nickname — none of that walks into my room. Just the shoulder, and the work. Understood?" "Understood," says Mateo. And for the first time in eleven months a stranger has looked straight at him and seen, instead of the worst thing he ever did, simply a problem that two people could maybe, slowly, fix.