The Cards of Unknown Players: Digital Science Fiction Short Story Read online

  After pulling off the expressway and heading into Asheville around two that Saturday afternoon, the first thing I did was stop at The Village Diner at the corner of Central Avenue and West Main and, after a trip to the restroom, took a window booth. I was starving and tired after the long ride and craved a hamburger and a cup of coffee. This cozy diner seemed the perfect place for that.

  For a few moments, out the window of my booth, I observed the relaxed pace of the few pedestrians strolling along Main Street. Finally, the lone waitress, a tall, smoke-skinny, distantly attractive woman in her forties, came over with a pot of coffee.

  “Coffee, sir?”

  I nodded and watched as she filled my cup.

  “Business here?”

  I took a sip, black, and looked up at her. I was new in town. A city slicker.

  “Not really,” I told her. After another sip, I added, “Looking for someone.”

  She shifted on one hip, frowning.

  “Yeah?” she said, squinting. “You a process server or something?”

  “No,” I said, smiling. “Nothing like that. Looking for an old friend, actually. Jim Gleason. Know him?”

  She nodded and seems momentarily distracted, sad. As she absently freshened my coffee, I asked: “Is his son still playing baseball?”

  That stood her straight up. Holding the pot of coffee to one side, her expression told me that the question had thrown her for a loop.

  “His son?” she asked. “Kevin?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, energized. “That’s him – Kevin. Kevin Gleason.” My heart was thumping with this sudden, unexpected verification of his existence.

  She set the pot of coffee near the edge of the table and swallowed.

  “How long’s it been since you seen Jim?” she asked.

  “Few years,” I lied. “Why?”

  “His son,” she said, swallowing. “Kevin – he’s, he’s dead.”

  Now I was the one thrown for a loop. It felt as if a jackhammer was pummeling my chest.

  “W-what?” I stammered.

  “The boy was killed a couple years ago,” she said. “Just after his eighteenth birthday. Coming home from baseball practice for the Legion team. Terrible accident just outside town on Route 286. Some other kid out joyriding ran a stop sign, hit him broadside.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, in an instant, both were gone.”

  The waitress shook her head.

  “Kevin had been some ballplayer, too,” she continued. “Star of the high school team. All state or something. Everyone says he would have made it to the big leagues.”

  “Jim,” I said after a time, trying to swallow, “he must have been devastated.”

  The waitress nodded glumly.

  “Sure was,” she said. “Took the soul out of that poor man. Never got over it. His grief.” She shook her head again just thinking about it.

  “To this day,” she added after a moment, looking up, “he goes down to the boy’s grave after dinner every night. Stands there staring at it until the sun goes down.” She shivered. “Breaks your heart to think of poor Jimmy grieving there every single night.”

  I frowned.

  “Every night?”

  “Every night,” she said. “In the rain. In the snow. No matter what, he’s out there. Staring at that grave.”

  She let out a long, deep sigh. Frowning suddenly, she asked: “You ready to order something, Mister? My shift’s almost up.”

  I ordered the hamburger plate. Waiting for my food, I took out Kevin Gleason’s baseball card and pondered what kind of magic had called into existence the card of a ballplayer killed before he could have ever made it to the big leagues.

  An existential, I said to myself. Whatever that meant.

  It was almost four by the time I left The Village Diner and ambled out into the yellow sunlight of that warm, lazy Saturday afternoon. Main Street was mostly deserted both ways, east and west. The local folk must have been home watering lawns, stoking up barbecues, or lazing on hammocks in backyards listening to the buzz of flies and bees and the twang of some country song or a ballgame on their radios.

  I decided not to try and find the Gleason house just yet. The waitress had told me the Gleason’s didn’t live too far away, just a short walk west on Main until you started up a hill and came to Elm Street. Turn right, keep going up about a hundred feet or so until you came to Pleasant Avenue. That’s where the Gleasons live, at 92 Pleasant, in a small, nicely kept cape, Jim and Gladys. Jim, a strapping hard-working, honest man, and Gladys, his quietly suffering wife of thirty years.

  Instead of barging in unannounced and shocking them with the mysterious card depicting, in full life, a photograph of their tragically lost son, I drove to a quiet, clean motel at the edge of town, the Asheville Inn, near the new Wal-Mart, and checked in.

  After filling out the registration card, I told the desk clerk, a gaunt, weary looking fellow, that I was going to take a nap and needed a wake up call about dinner-time. Say, six o’clock.

  The clerk nodded glumly. Seemingly, he understood.

  “Sure,” he said. “Six o’clock.”

  Before plopping across the double-sized bed, which took up most of the room, I called Beth. Hearing my voice, she let out a sigh of relief.

  “So,” she asked, “solve your mystery yet?”

  I immediately told her my astonishing news – that the kid on the card, Kevin Gleason, had died three years ago. Killed in a stupid car wreck.

  Beth didn’t respond right away. I sensed that this was becoming a mystery of equal importance for her. She had seen the card herself. She knew I wasn’t making it up.

  “He’s dead?” she asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I sighed. “Dead.”

  “Then, how in the world–”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I just don’t know.”

  I described Jim Gleason’s daily vigil at the poor boy’s grave and my plan to interrupt him that evening.

  “Oh, God!” she said. “Won’t that be difficult.” She drew in a breath. “Good luck. And, David, I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I told her, meaning it this time. Thinking of Jim Gleason standing at the grave of his dead son, I added, “And please give my love to Timothy. And a big hug from Dad.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  “What else,” she laughed. “Watching a baseball game.”

  Immediately after hanging up, I plopped across the soft mattress of the double-sized bed and fell instantly asleep.

  Suddenly, at six, the phone rang.

  The cemetery was at the other end of Asheville, just outside the village, a hidden place up some gently sloping, well-shaded hills. To get to it, you had to turn off the state highway and travel perhaps half a mile along a narrow road aptly named, Cemetery Hill Road, whose berm on both sides was overgrown with trees and bushes.

  At the entrance to the cemetery, I was struck by the sheer isolation of the place, the utter, reclusive quiet. Stopping the car, I rolled down the window and, for a time, simply enjoyed the silence while a warm breeze rattled the leaves of the tall oak trees which seem appointed to protect the solitude of the place.

  After a time, remembering my purpose, I drove along the narrow roads winding around the sections of graves, looking for Jim Gleason. At first, I saw no one and wondered if the waitress’ information had been bogus, exaggerated. Every day? No man could grieve so much, not even for a lost boy.

  But finally, rounding another wide turn, I spotted a tall, solid man in the middle of some graves. Arms crossed, head bent, he was staring at a particular marker. Kevin Gleason’s, no doubt, the grave of his son.

  I drove on to that section and parked the car a couple feet onto the grass. Gleason glanced my way and watched with a stone-faced scowl as I shut the car door and started up the low hill towards him.

  As I approached within a few yards, his frown deepened. He was in his early fifties
, a handsome, no-nonsense kind of man, with a square jaw and steely blue eyes, his blonde hair long ago turned to a silvery gray. His once-smooth face had cragged and hardened from the ravages of hard work, the wind, gravity, and, of course, ultimate heartache.

  “Help you?” he asked in that hard voice I recognized from our phone call only last night, although it seemed an eternity now.

  “I’m looking for Jim Gleason.”

  He squinted, himself seeming to recognize my voice from somewhere he just couldn’t place.

  “Well, you found him,” Gleason finally said, scowling. “That’s me. What’s your business?”

  As I took a few steps closer, I glanced down at the short granite marker before him, and stopped. There it was, the name, Kevin Gleason, starkly chiseled out of stone. And the dates: November 16, 1979 - May 23, 1996.

  “Your son,” I said, looking up, shivering.

  He looked at the marker, nodded.

  “Yes,” he said dryly. “Died three years ago.” He sighed, almost a laugh. “Three years already.” He turned to me. “Killed in a car accident.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “Me, too.” He sighed, looking up. “So what’s your business, mister. You didn’t come here to look at my son’s grave.”

  “In a way, I did,” I told him. “I came here to show you something connected with it.”

  Scowling, Gleason backed away ever so slightly, clearly suspicious of my intentions.

  I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the card depicting his son.

  “This,” I said, holding the card between the thumb and index finger of my right hand to the level of his eyes.

  Squinting, he stepped forward. As the card came into focus, his expression changed from one of curiosity to astonishment. His boy. A major league player on a baseball card.

  After a moment, reality must have set in. Gleason’s expression returned to his usual hard, impassive scowl.

  “What kind of trick is this, Mister?” he asked. “The card has Kevin’s picture on it – my boy.”

  “It’s no trick, Mr. Gleason,” I told him.

  I spent the next minutes trying to explain how the card had come into the possession of my son, Timothy, and how I had tried to verify the existence of Kevin as a major league ballplayer. Without success, of course.

  I told him what the Topps consumer rep told me. Something about existentials, whatever they were.

  “Kevin’s dead,” Gleason stated, finally interrupting my rambling. “Dead.” His stare was cold, defiant. “Taken from the Earth in his prime. His destiny as one of the greatest pitchers who would ever play the game stolen from him.” Bowing, he added, “And me.”

  After a moment, he looked up again.

  “Killed before he ever had the chance to make it on a card like that.”

  “I don’t know how and why it exists either,” I told him, and flipped the card over in my hand to look at his son, standing there, alive, so tall, so confident. “It just does.”

  Gleason looked down at the grave marker. Nothing I could say would ever change the sad fact that Kevin’s name was chiseled across the bottom of that stone, together with the date of his birth, and death.

  “I brought the card here,” I continued, “because I thought you should have it. Maybe it proves that in some other place – in some other universe or something – Kevin wasn’t killed.” I swallowed. “That there, he made it to the big leagues.”

  For some reason, I thought of Timothy right then, playing in the big leagues next to Gleason’s son. Like in my dreams.

  Gleason stared at the grave of his son, and for a time I thought that maybe he hadn’t heard me. When he finally looked up, there were tears in his proud eyes. After the last few steps to his side, I handed him Kevin’s card. Taking it, he gazed at the photograph a long while before flipping the card over to read the back. A brief description under the bio section raved about Kevin’s potential. A rookie phenom destined for stardom, or something like that. Only twenty-one years old.

  “It really is Kevin,” he laughed. Overwhelmed just then, Gleason broke down and fell on his knees to the soft grass.

  “Kevin,” he groaned.

  In the gray fog and chill of dawn the next morning, a Sunday, I quietly departed the Asheville Inn and drove home, still in a daze over the unresolved mystery of the card of an unknown player.

  Late that morning, hunched over the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in my hand, I glumly reported to Beth the details of my trip, dwelling, of course, on my meeting with Jim Gleason at the grave of his son. Timothy was upstairs in his room, reading another of his baseball magazines, watching highlights of last night’s games.

  “How is such a thing possible,” I asked Beth, “that a card like that exists. That dead sons are playing baseball somewhere.”

  “Why don’t you just leave it at that,” she suggested. “As a puzzle.”

  I nodded, sipped more coffee. We listened for some moments to an announcer describing a game from Timothy’s television turned up too loud again. Until there was a thunk of a bat on the ball and the announcer excitedly called it out of the park.

  Then, Beth yelled up for him to turn it lower.

  In the next few weeks, the mystery receded from my mind and my soul as I became distracted by the latest crisis at work, chores around the house, and caring for Timothy.

  My thoughts returned to the card only when I pushed Timothy’s wheelchair on the narrow paths of a small park in our neighborhood that wound around some little league diamonds. For Timothy, I always stopped so that he can watch the boys and girls playing sandlot games.

  “I wonder,” he always asked, “if I would have been any good.”

  I assured him that he would have been the best, an all-star. Like in my dreams.

  Then, with the summer safely behind us, on a cool Saturday afternoon in late September, we ventured to the Westbrook Mall and, not really trying to, stumbled upon the cubbyhole of a baseball card shop just outside JC Penney’s where Timothy had bought the mysterious Kevin Gleason card.

  Beth rolled her eyes as I hurriedly pushed Timothy’s wheelchair into the place. She begged off to do some browsing in a women’s clothing store next door.

  The card shop consisted of no more than a long glass case against one wall, and some shelves against the other, each crammed with boxes of unopened packs of cards. Behind the glass counter stood the card shop owner, a short, disheveled man with ruffled gray hair and a stout chest.

  After a polite exchange of greetings, I told him about the Gleason card. How Gleason, despite the card’s existence, had never played. That, in fact, Kevin Gleason was dead.

  “You bought the card here?” asked the shop owner.

  “He did,” I said, nodding to Timothy.

  Timothy tried to straighten his head as he looked up from his wheelchair.

  “I found it in one of the mixed packs,” Timothy mumbled, pointing to the boxes on one of the shelves behind us. “But my dad gave it away.”

  I explained to the scowling owner that I had traveled to Asheville and given the card to Gleason’s father at the dead boy’s grave.

  After a sigh, the owner said, “Must have been an existential.”

  That took me by surprise, and I gave the owner a calculating look.

  “You heard of that?” I said.

  “Sure,” said the owner. “What self-respecting collector hasn’t?”

  He reached down under the glass and plucked out a card from a line of some others. It was protected by a thick, clear plastic sleeve.

  “They’re a special item,” he said as he handed me the card. It depicted a young black ballplayer with a personable, confident grin, holding a bat across his left shoulder as if he had been born with it there.

  “Like this one,” the card owner said. “But they’re so weird, they’re hard to value.”

  I turned the card over and examined the stats. Timothy was looking up at me with an excited scowl,
drooling.

  “Some numbers,” said the card owner.

  “Sure are,” I agreed. Last year, the card said he hit .345 in 162 games, with 192 rbis. Even more amazing than that, he’d broken Dale Jones’ record with 67 home runs.

  “Wow,” I said, and laughed.

  Handing the card back to the shop owner, I remarked that I had never heard of him.

  “That’s right,” he said. “No one has. It’s an existential.”

  “How many are there?” I wondered. “Existentials?”

  The shop owner shrugged. Nobody knew for sure, he said. Just like no one knew where they came from, or why they existed. Hence, the name.

  “Can I have it, Dad?” Timothy asked excitedly. “You gave away my Gleason card.”

  I looked at the shop owner.

  “I’m asking forty dollars,” he said, and looked down at Timothy in his wheelchair. “But for the kid, I’ll take twenty.”

  It seemed like a bargain and Timothy’s wide-eyes told me it must be a good deal.

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?” I pulled out my wallet and was handing over a fresh twenty just as Beth joined us in the shop.

  “What’s he getting now? More cards?” she asked with a smile.

  The card shop owner took the twenty and gave me the card depicting the existential. In turn, I handed it to Beth.

  Examining it, she asked, “Who’s Ken Griffey Junior?”

  She looked up, waiting for an answer.

  With a shrug, I told her: “Never heard of him.”

  Since that day, Timothy and I have started our own collection of existentials. We have even found another three cards of unknown players over the long, cold winter. Timothy keeps asking how much they are worth and I tell him I haven’t the slightest idea.

  Of course, I haven’t told him that the collection would be invaluable to me if I could find only one more existential.