The Cards of Unknown Players: Digital Science Fiction Short Story (Ctrl Alt Delight) (3 page)

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.

Only one.

(Dedicated
to Jason Bley and John Teszyk, and all the other lost players)

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