Judging Time by Leslie Glass Page B

was going on. That gave him some comfort.
    Jason checked his watch again, wondering when he could get in touch with April. It was the first Monday of the new year. Jason's day was completely booked with eight patient hours, an hour and a half of teaching, and thirty minutes with the psychiatric resident he was supervising. He had canceled his first four patients and was now debating canceling the class. He was still hoping he could get Rick to take something to calm down before having to view Merrill's body at the medical examiner's office.
    "Do you know how many needles were stuck into me so I could run down that field?" Rick demanded angrily. "Sometimes an eye or my nose swelled up— twenty degrees outside—and I could feel the blood on my face so hot it burned." He shook his head at his old life of the killer instinct: eleven broken bones, countless sprains, and constant physical pain. He turned his back on Jason to stare out the window.
    The spectacular city view of the present embraced lower Central Park from the west. The high-floor apartment faced east, and the three of them could have watched the sun rise at 7:03 if there had been one to see. But there had been no visible sunrise that day. The light had come slowly, almost painfully slowly, and only revealed a morning as bleak and silent as the night had been wild.
    "I took so many painkillers. . . . God, by the time I was eighteen, nineteen, no one had to tell me anything about what was going on inside of my body. I knew it all. I could hear things happen. Does that sound weird? I could hear the injuries. And there was a lot of screaming going on, a whole lot all around me, from the coaches, my family, every human being who had ever been a slave in all of history."
    Liberty paused, looking back on himself and the burden he'd carried for every slave in all of history. "I knew they would get together and kill me if I stopped. I knew if I stopped, if I cried, if I said anything, my life would be over. I had to play the game, because it was the game of life. You know what I'm talking about? Everybody was nice to me. I heard nice things, you know, but I knew I had no friends. I was alone. I couldn't do anything else but take the needles and play ball. I had no choice."
    Jason was surprised to hear this. They'd talked about football before, had even watched games together, but Jason had not heard him talk like this before.
    "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this," Rick muttered, glancing nervously at Emma as if he feared he'd just ruined his image.
    "You forget that I know you from then," Emma reminded him. "I know who you are."
    The two friends made an interesting contrast. Emma was like a ghost, bleached white, with her blond hair a little darker than usual for her theater role and her deep blue eyes now dulled with shock. Beside her, Rick Liberty was a warm medium brown. Both white and Indian blood showed in his cheekbones, his jaw-line, his lips and nose. Everything about his speech, his gestures, the confidence and grace with which he moved, bespoke a man who had grown up not far from where he sat right now. Nothing about him seemed tutored or strained. He was like a white man with brown skin, a man who never talked about his color, and didn't want to be asked. Jason suddenly thought that pretending there was absolutely no difference between them except exceptional athletic prowess had probably been a very bad thing for them all.
    "You know you can tell us anything, Rick," Jason said.
    "Then don't think I'm proud of myself. Everybody used to tell me I should be so proud of what I've accomplished. That's bullshit—" Rick held his head with the hand not restrained by Emma's.
    "No one should be proud of begging to be anaesthetized so they can hurt themselves some more. You know, I used to tell them to give me the max. 'Gimme the damn max,' I used to say." He snorted derisively. "I had a knee injury once they didn't pick up for a year. They stuck me so full of shit sometimes