The Tryout

~Ted Worthington

Sixteen-year-old Henry Fong pulled a black baseball cap from the bottom of his book bag and slapped it on his head. Standing at the door of the library, he adjusted the hat like he had seen other kids at school do it. He looked right, down the arching walkway, a tunnel straight to the parking lot where his mother would pick him up. Nope, he seemed to say to himself. He swung the heavy bag over his slender shoulder like a sailor with his duffel and walked left, out toward the baseball field that he could see from the library window. For more than a year now, since he came to the US, he had watched the boys gather on the grassy field. In the fall it was football, a thoroughly confusing game to him. But in spring the boys would flock to the baseball diamond in the afternoon sunshine. These activities, though, were closed to him. Yet, Henry wanted to be included; he needed to be included. Being alone, being separated from others nagged at him everyday as he looked out the window, maybe harder than his mother’s insistence that he study in the library after school.

The hot Oklahoma sun warmed the back of his neck, producing a pleasant acrid sweetness where the black strap pressed over his short-sleeved dress shirt. His dress shoes and khakis were fine for the library, but it did not occur to him that they would look out of place at the ball field. That was just it, looking out of place. What more could a sixteen-year-old kid from China look like in an American high school? In the aluminum grandstands the girls sipped their sodas, tossed their hair and pulled at their chewing gum—some things he would never adapt to. Surely they would laugh at him when they weren’t talking on their cell phones and waving to their boyfriends.

Henry walked up to the large group of boys wearing baseball pants, spikes and white cotton baseball shirts. The boys, chattering like a pod of sweating monkeys, clustered beneath a large yellow cardboard sign that said “Baseball Tryouts Today” on the backstop. The lettering had a certain feminine touch Henry could see. Girls in America—no doubt the girls with their sodas—had a way of making their letters express more than what they said. This little trick fascinated him. Like hanzi characters, each stroke of the pen—or in this case, black permanent marker—showed inflexion, whether it was just a tiny heart over the “i” or the B in baseball on the sign morphing into a little fielder with a cap on his head and stubby little feet. The boys’ handwriting, he noticed, lacked this effect, showing they cared little for such things. Instead their writing was dominated by a casual slovenliness, a freedom from rigid form so unique in America, which he immediately adopted because the last thing he wanted to do was stand out.

So he waited patiently as the other boys jostled their way to the front of the registration table. He did not want to cause a scene. When it was his turn, he picked up the stubby pencil with no eraser, certainly stolen from the library, and wrote his name in blocky, somewhat drab letters, though the signing itself was not without some sense of independence on his part. It was true beginning of this new life in America, that point where he might be able to say he was, or could be American.

“You realize tryouts are right now?” said the young man sitting behind the table. He looked older than the high schoolers, his face redder and fuller than the rest. His jersey had the name “Josh” stitched on it.

Henry looked at him puzzled.

“Ain’t you got a glove? No spikes?”

Henry’s head sunk a little as he said no.

“Go on home, kid, don’t waste our time.”

Henry stood firm and spoke in halting English. “I heard tryouts were open to anyone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Henry stood motionless and as tall as he could. Just as tall as the other boys, he imagined his feet were planted in the ground and he, a sturdy-yet-yielding bamboo shoot, could withstand any force of wind. An older man, obviously the coach, stepped up behind his assistant. “Josh, give the kid a chance.”

“Why? I’m just saving us the trouble. He’s not gonna be able to cut it,” he said looking up over his shoulder.

“Let him in,” the coach said.

Henry walked away from the table feeling a sense of unexpected excitement. He had not thought the coach would be so accommodating, but this was America, after all. This was a real baseball team. Not the television. He stood beside the bleachers, still somewhat apart from the boys, waiting to begin. Oh, he had met many people like Josh since coming here. They didn’t like his kind. Henry had grown to spot people like Josh quickly and avoid them as much as possible. You could see it in the forehead, that space between the eyebrows where the skin pressed together to form tiny folds, like paper after it got wet.

“Gather ‘round boys. I’m Coach Stevenson. First thing we’re gonna do is run the bases. If you can’t make it around in 22 seconds, you are out—you go home.”

Henry watched the boys, one by one, stand at the plate until Josh, stopwatch in hand, sent them careening off in exaggerated arcs around the bases. They each sprinted across the plate panting like thoroughbreds. So far, everyone made the route successfully until up stood a heavy-set teenager, his baseball pants filled with flesh. Josh made a crack which Henry couldn’t make out from where he stood, but the rest of the boys laughed. Then the boy was off. He loped off the plate like a circus bear unsteady on two feet. He too took the first base in a circular arc before his lumbering body began to pick up speed. In the end, he touched the plate just as Josh snapped at the stopwatch and called out, “24.8 seconds.”

Josh trotted up to the sweating boy and said, “I’m sorry, son.” The fat kid gathered his things and left the field as Coach Stevenson called out, “Henry Fong, you’re next.”

Henry walked up to the plate in his leather shoes. The book bag still hung from his shoulder. Josh stared at him a moment. “Gonna take the books around the bases with ya?”

Henry felt stupid and tossed his books in the grass. The textbooks slid out of the bag. Any other time that would have made Henry panic. His mother revered books. To her, they were sacred. One would never throw a book, much less on to the grass.

When Henry returned to the plate, Josh yelled “Go!”

Henry’s second step slipped uselessly in the silty dirt. By the third step he was off and running. Unlike the other boys he reached first base and took a hard turn, nearly coming to a stop as he changed direction. He looked more comfortable running to second, taking the base in full stride, but then his feet slipped from under him and he went down into the dust, his cap rolling away.

Josh nodded to Coach Stevenson, “See.”

Panic shot through Henry’s body like electric shock. His opportunity at this was ticking away. He could see in his mind the seconds rush by. Henry got up and sprinted, the dust trailing behind him like a comet. Taking the arc of third perfectly, he shot past home plate, stopping at the chain link backstop.

“22.5 seconds,” hollered Josh, who grinned, raised an eyebrow, and nodded to the others looking on as if to say I told you so.

He shuffled over toward the backstop. “I’m sorry, kid.”

Henry, his head pressed against the metal fence, felt ashamed. He had failed. Something so simple. He swatted at his trousers in a useless attempt to eradicate the dust, to remove the stain of defeat. This dream of his—to play American baseball—was a joke. He could just go back to his books, lying there in the moist grass. He could just pick them up and go home.

Coach Stevenson approached Josh, just a few feet from Henry. “Wait.”

“Coach, he didn’t make it,” Josh said, with his eyebrows clenched.

“And he’da made it easily if he hadn’t fallen.”

“But,” Josh said.

“Let him stay.”

“Why don’t I go get the fat kid while you’re at it?”

“Can it.”

Henry felt puzzled again. What exactly was going on? The other boys in groups were talking low, talking about him. This wasn’t the way to fit in. How could he break in, but without being seen? There was just no way. The situation seemed hopeless, a paradox. To become one of the crowd, this new crowd, in a new land, he had to stand alone and demand admission. In the meantime, the coach tossed him an extra glove, and called out to the boys, “Next is fielding.”

The boys lined up behind shortstop and Henry followed after. The object, it seemed to him, was to field grounders and throw them to Josh at first base. Henry stood back, last in line. When it came to his turn, the coach tossed up the baseball and hit it sharply to his right. Rather than backhanding the ball, Henry moved right and gloved it awkwardly beside his right leg. The throw, though, arced high in the air and bounced twice before rolling to a stop six feet from Josh, who stood there with his arms wide as if to say this is ridiculous. The rest of the boys laughed.

“Give it a rest, Josh,” Coach said.

Henry was less confident after trying to catch fly balls in the outfield. He was sure one of those balls was going to hit him right on the head. What business was he doing out here trying to play baseball? Maybe it just isn’t a game for a guy like Henry. He never thought it would be this difficult. Watching the other kids, baseball looked so effortless, graceful in a uniquely American way. It was precisely this fluidity, this natural action that appealed to him. What would be better than to play this game, a game where each member of the team acted individually yet in concert?

Coach rallied the boys together saying it was time for batting. “Josh is gonna throw you some pitches.”

This time Henry watched more closely. He watched the way each boy stood in the batter’s box, the way they each held the bat, juggling it around like some martial arts weapon. Henry had little to compare it to. It wasn’t like playing the piano, with your arms stretched out on the ivory keys, or like wielding a bow playing his violin. Each ballplayer stepped to the plate and went through a little routine, swinging the bat, adjusting their helmet, digging in with their feet. They did it with a sense of purpose and concentration; their eyes squinting as the first pitch sailed in. That focus was the only thing Henry could relate to, it was the only thing he could understand, because it was the focus that his parents urged him to master everyday. It didn’t matter if it was a school day or not, they kept after him to concentrate on what was important. To his mother, this was studying. But, Henry had other ideas.

Next it was Henry’s turn. Josh looked over at the coach, raising his eyebrows. Coach nodded back.

The first pitch came in fast, with a sharp pop in the catcher’s glove. Henry swung and missed. Josh eyed the coach again. Henry swung hard at the second pitch, which was way outside, and missed again.

“Give him something to hit, dammit. Stop toying with him,” Coach said.

The third pitch, a hard fastball, Henry fouled it straight back. Henry let the fourth pitch, a nasty curveball in the dirt, go by. “Come on, Josh. We want to see him hit, not you pitch,” Coach said.

Henry readjusted himself in the box, grinding in with his dark leather shoes. He still struck a funny sight, standing there erect as a flagpole in slacks and a collared shirt. But, he took a long tug at his baseball hat and stared right at the pitcher.

Josh went into his motion and delivered another fastball right down the middle of the plate. Henry uncoiled on it and sent the ball deep to left field. Everyone behind the backstop watched it as it flew, clearing the eight-foot fence by a few inches.

Determined to make a fool of Henry, the next pitch sailed high and tight, narrowly missing his ducking helmet. The next pitch, a change-up, meant to throw off Henry’s timing, promptly landed over the centerfield fence. Josh threw six more pitches—a slider, two curveballs and a few letter-high fastballs—all of which landed beyond the fence before Coach Stevenson stopped it, saying “I’ve seen enough. Troy, you’re next.”

“What the hell was that?” Josh said, stepping off the mound.

Henry grinned, filled with a euphoria he seldom felt. Most of the boys looked stunned by what they had just seen. Henry walked back toward the dugout, when the next batter lowered his bat and tripped Henry into the grass.

“That still doesn’t make you a ballplayer. Go back to study hall,” said the boy named Troy.

Coach Stevenson, consulting with Josh, didn’t witness what happened, but saw Troy standing over Henry with several others caught between laughter and amazement. Coach turned and yelled out, “What’s going on here? If I see any funny business, I’ll toss each one of you off the team.”

Trotting from the mound, he helped Henry to his feet. “So you’ve never played baseball, huh?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m Coach, not sir, okay.”

“No, coach.”

“Why do you want to play ball?”

“I want to be American,” Henry said.

“Where you from? What brings you to Oklahoma?”

“My parents move here from Beijing last year.”

“Ever seen a game before?”

“In Olympics.”

Coach Stevenson put his arm around Henry and said, “With a little extra help I think we can make you into quite a good American ballplayer.”

He walked Henry toward the dugout. “Now, I just need to show you some of the basics. I think I might even get our assistant coach Josh to help you.”

But before Coach Stevenson could continue, a woman marched quickly onto the field from the direction of the library. “Henry Jian Fu, you come here right away. What are you doing here? I was supposed to meet you in parking lot half hour ago. You come home with me right now.”

Her face looked hard and crisp. She stomped through the grass without looking at anyone but Henry. She walked up to him, the top of her head barely reaching his armpit, and grabbed his arm and began leading him away. Henry was mortified. His eyes darted from the boys snickering at his situation back to the coach.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Henry’s mother?” the coach said stepping forward.

“You no ma’am me. How dare you try to get my son to play your silly game.”

Henry finally spoke up, but could only muster, “Mother.”

She turned to him and spoke sharply. “No, you stay out of this. Go get your books.”

“But, Mrs. Fong. You don’t understand. Henry’s good. He could be a good player,” the coach said.

“He no be good player. He need go home and study. He going to be doctor. You ask him?”

“No,” the coach said.

“Henry want be doctor. Ever since little boy.”

With that, she walked away, dragging Henry by the arm. All he could do was look over his shoulder.

Tears of the Dragon: A Review

Xavier Greene is a high-level assassin for a worldwide secret organization–The Citadel–that operates the levers of the power behind the scenes. Known as ‘The Silencer’ he is known for his ability to go undetected through even the biggest jobs: political coups, counterterrorism, assassinations. His face is in no personnel system, no facial recognition can place him: He’s a ghost drifting through the floating world of modern political play where transnational political actors create destructive encounters, Realpolitik games, with little regard for loss of life. Xavier has tired of his work, retired to a remote monastery, and takes jobs intermittently as he contemplates enlightenment alongside complete retirement.

Then, a new job appears. A terrorist organization known as The Brotherhood has recently received a strong, financial backer. With their help, The Brotherhood have developed a contagion called “Tears of the Dragon.” They plan to release it at a large event within the week and to wipe out most human life on the planet in the process to prompt a hard reset of the unjust systems of power of the world: to fight political injustice with apocalypse. The allure of The Brotherhood is immediately apparent to all dissidents who read Ryan McGinnis’s debut novel. You can’t fight power within the system because it has always already co-opted its members and will rapidly absorb destabilizing tendencies to prevent the system from toppling. The only option left is economic or real violence. Despite The Brotherhood’s subversive appeal, Xavier’s actions and the narrator’s handling of The Brotherhood seem to respond no to both options: working within the system and working to destroy the system. Rather than engaging in political angst, in Nietzschean ressentiment, Xavier remains a counterterrorist and thwarts a factional uprising within The Citadel to restore this latter organization to its proper institutional spirit and to save the world.

“Tears of the Dragon,” the contagion, is derived from the venom of the vampire bat: a substance touted for the past few years for its medicinal properties and potential usage in the development of drugs to combat diseases. However, with each new development there are negative externalities, downsides that the developers of the tech could not have foreseen. In Tears of the Dragon, The Brotherhood has developed a kind of blood coagulant that can be spread quickly and effectively worldwide with just one vial. Writing often mirrors life in unexpected ways and the parallel between the development of an apocalyptic pathogen with the apparently accidental mutation of a world-upsetting virus that led to our own pandemic is not lost on this reader.

Finally, as in all of McGinnis’s writing hitherto, dreams play an important role throughout the novel. At many crucial points in the text, Xavier dreams, day dreams, or hallucinates visions of the dragon. At times he tries to contain its power and it burns him, at others he seems to have a strong emotional connection and is warming up to the dragon. It is both his nemesis and a very attractive mystical object, which could bring him untold riches or power if he chose to keep it. All told, the novel is reflective but mostly active. The reader gets good doses of spy intrigue, political machinations, helicopter chases, firefights, and even a very compelling duel to the death between two of The Citadel’s most legendary assassins. Tears of the Dragon is a fun, riveting, on the edge of your seat kind of novel and a good first novel that bodes well for McGinnis’s future work.

To learn more about Tears of the Dragon or to purchase a copy follow the link here. To read about McGinnis’s short fiction follow these rabbit holes: Sketch and A Good Night’s Sleep.

“A Good Night’s Sleep” is Hard to Find

(See my previous review of Ryan McGinnis’s fiction here)

Sam and Kevin Woodworth are a well-adjusted, suburban couple in the final stages of the adoption process. Their domestic life includes an altruistic relationship with an elderly widower, Agnes, in their neighborhood; a good work-life balance; and a loving-lovable terrier Max who keeps them company. Domestic bliss seems inevitable with the arrival of their new daughter Lily. However, Max seems afraid of the little girl no matter how long she chases him around and vies for his affection. And in a small case, she keeps a set of dolls–one male, one female–whose appearance echoes her biological parents that disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When Sam and Kevin begin having night terrors, sleep paralysis, and experiencing other unsettling nighttime events, they begin to suspect that something is amiss in their would-be domestic tableau.

As with much good horror fiction, the fears and anxieties at the core of “A Good Night’s Sleep” (eBook available for free by joining the Ryan McGinnis mailing list here) are contemporary while simultaneously hearkening back to older, more primal notions of the self. There is first, the classic fear of the adopted child whose genes and past history are alien to the foster parents: the child who appears with a kind of psychic baggage it is the perceived job of the foster parents to absolve, to correct, to fix, or to come to terms with. What happened to the child’s parents? What trauma did the child experience through their loss? Can we really help the child? These kinds of anxieties can lead to self-doubt and fears of failure in parenting that are amplified for foster parents. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” Sam and Kevin’s fears are internalized and received subconsciously through dream visions of a man who stands at the edge of the room or right outside the window: a man who beckons to follow. Or they are externalized by visions of Lily’s midnight wandering through the house or constricting nightmares of suffocation.

The Self is at its most peaceful when its surface, the conscious person, hides or abjects those things that pull at and create tension within the self. The dream of a domestic space of peace and tranquility and simplicity is aided by a self-formation that is limited, that does not reflect openly on the darker aspects of the self. Here, the fears of failure and of the dark past of the orphaned child bring to surface the multiplicity of the self with its abyssal, fragmentary, and self-destructive capabilities. A large change in life calls for a requisite and equal change of Self, which is self-dislocating, anxiety-producing, and terrifying, though necessary. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” McGinnis reflects these fears in a narrative where the worst of them is actualized and the self is destroyed in the process of change and the foster parent becomes little more than a doll in a child’s scheme for their own self-formation: essentialized, always present, and nothing more than an object of the child’s will. In horror, our deepest fears are made real and that is definitely the case in McGinnis’s short story.

Read my review of McGinnis’s novel Tears of the Dragon next.

Ruminations on a “Sketch”

In “Sketch” (published online at Mandatory Midnight), North Carolina native and Brownsville, Texas denizen Ryan McGinnis crafts a sinister, Lovecraftian vision of cerebral horror befitting a New Weird moniker. In an introductory blurb we learn that Sarah, an aspiring sketch artist of landscapes and gothic architecture, has recently suffered from a hard breakup. Her friend Tracy attempts to help her by managing and staging an art exhibit of Sarah’s work on gothic castles from her travels in Europe. Sarah takes to the work well, at first, as she drafts image after image with her expressionist style of deep shadows and chiaroscuro contrast with attendant surrealist motifs and unsettling smudge-work. However, when an image of a man appears and then disappears of its own volition within her frames, Sarah experiences abject fear and her friends believe she is going insane. Half-horror, half-edge-of-your-seat-fugue-state, this tale draws parallels to the texts of Junji Ito. It’s gothic fixations remind one of the imaginative power of Mervyn Peake or Jorge Luis Borges.

As a sketch, “Sketch” is the beginnings of a larger body of work: One in development and one I will be reviewing for the next few weeks here. The narrative style is simple and unadorned third-person narration from a relatively invisible narrator with direct access to the interiority of Sarah’s mind. The writing is straightforward, which aids the reader in clipping along quickly and building the sense of tension. Its central idea of note is the question of how our creative works can absorb us as artists? In Sarah’s case, she is offered the vertiginous possibility of her creative work bringing new life into the world and through her fears and anxieties she is unable to do so. Instead, Sarah stifles her greatest creative achievement (freeing the spectre of the gothic castle) and is, in a sense, consumed by her inaction.

The idea here is that creative endeavor is voidal, abyssal, aporetic by its very nature. That in the process of writing, the writer changes, evolves, and becomes a more complex entity. The attendant fear of psychological disintegration is so strong that it may block the writer from ever truly engaging a project or putting it out into the world through submission or private publishing. Yet, by not letting the creative work live and emerge into the real world, the writer risks a far more pernicious spectre’s birth: Regret, a beast much more able to consume the artist totally in the final analysis. In “Sketch,” the anxieties of a beginning writer are veiled through an engaging piece of horror short fiction that is harrowing, both metaphysically and on the gut level.

For more information about Ryan McGinnis and to receive a free ebook and access to his writings, please peruse his personal website here. (Check out my review of “A Good Night’s Sleep” next)