Tendons
Tendons
By Malavika Praseed
Drew, who was more a family friend than an agent at this point, was the one to call Jonathan Thomas and tell him there was someone interested in a meeting. Double-A Pawtucket, Jon thought. He sat up in his corduroy recliner and ran his nails over the soft fabric grooves.
“Not a club,” Drew said, and Thomas sank back down. “New guy. Dr. Mehta’s his name.”
“Doctor? The hell’s a doctor want with me?”
“I could tell you some, but it’s better to let him explain.”
Saturday, one of those aimless afternoons in June. The ball game crackled in the background, and he watched the players in their schoolboy colors mime roles in the grass and dirt. That’s what it looked like, from this vantage point, miming. He’d never been much of a spectator. Half the time he preferred the old cop shows or home shopping advertisements. But here, he’d turned on the game, then Drew had called, and he could feel the balls of his feet arching up over the mound, digging in slightly. Stretch, glance right, kick, release.
“He wants you to see him in his office. Friday, I think.”
“I don’t know about—”
“Come on Jon, just talk to him. It’s something to do.”
Drew was still in the biz, had a couple Venezuelan kids under his charge, served as representation slash translator through the extent of their rookie contracts. Point was, he didn’t have to make these calls himself. There could’ve been an email, and Jon would’ve answered.
“All right,” he said. “But I’m not going there. Tell him to stop by the fish shack, between ten and noon.”
He’d had enough of doctors. Their clean white walls, slick floors, the even cadence beep beep beep of all the monitors and scanners. Something eerie about that level of synchronicity.
The fish shack, named for and started by his brother Robbie, was a seaside joint that boasted the best po’boys north of New Orleans and crab legs that popped so clean out of the shells you couldn’t tell they were frozen. Jon had contributed the down payment and a few months’ rent and, in exchange, ordered fried shrimp to his heart’s content. Signed a few autographs here and there, when some eagle-eye spotted him in his short-sleeve button-up and cargos. But those dwindled out with time. Now, it was somewhere to go other than the apartment, and on this Friday morning the only stirrings were the prep cooks slicing potatoes and the blonde bartender fixing him a weak vodka tonic.
“It’s early, Jon,” she said.
“It’s Friday,” he replied, though in her business and his, the days of the week rarely mattered, and clinging to them was a ruse. To cover what, he didn’t know.
In the intervening days he’d looked up this Dr. Mehta, which proved difficult at first without his first name. There were at least a thousand of them in the tri-state area. Even ‘Dr. Mehta baseball’ yielded nothing informative, and he thought to call his daughter and mine her computer knowledge, but calling her meant going through Shelley and the thought of that…Jon leaned back and decided he’d wait for the date itself.
It was a quarter to eleven when the doors jangled again, and in walked a young man, balding a bit at the temples, in Italian wing-tip shoes. Couldn’t have been over thirty-five but dressed like the alcoholic uncle at a wedding. Yet the most obvious bullshit about this Mehta was that he’d shown up to the fish shack in khakis, a printed polo, a leather belt, and a ridiculous white sport coat over the whole ensemble. Not his white physician coat, but pretty damn close. Asshole, Jon thought. It’d be like him wearing his jersey to the supermarket.
“There he is!” said Mehta, offering a hand. He had a tan line on his fourth finger, starting to blend into the rest of the skin. Jon smirked.
“You must be Dr. Mehta.”
“Please, call me Hal. Can I just say, it’s an honor to be seated here in front of you. I watched you come up, your seasons with the Sox. Brilliant stuff.”
Nowhere on earth was this man’s first name Hal. “You age me,” said Jon.
Mehta pushed a few guffaws out of his chest. “S’pose it hasn’t been all that long, has it?”
“You’re with the Sox then? Team doc?”
“No no, I’m unaffiliated with the league. I’m at Mass General, orthopedic surgeon. Yes sir, couldn’t pull me away from this general region. Places like this,” he said, gesturing to the fish shack. “Family joint of yours, right?”
“So what’s this about?” Jon asked, leaning imperceptibly forward in his barstool. Without looking, just a little wave, he gestured to the bartender and another vodka tonic appeared by Mehta’s wrist. “I don’t have terribly long, I apologize, expecting a call from Pawtucket sometime soon. Triple-A ball, you know. They need a pitching coach.”
He noticed Mehta’s eyes, set for a moment on his face, then drifting off towards the right every few minutes. Some kind of tic, some anomaly, maybe that experience led the man to medicine. Sick treating the sick.
“No no, of course, this won’t take but a moment of your time. Now, how much did Drew tell you?”
“I got the back half of your name and nothing else, sir.”
Mehta smiled, bit his tongue, shook his head. “Leaving the hard parts to me, huh? All right then, we’ll start at the beginning. D’you know Ashley Johansen?”
Jon drank down to his ice cubes and sat staring at the glass condensation. “Know of him,” he said, which meant nothing. Everybody in the sport knew of him. First round draft pick, whizzed up from Rookie ball to Double-A, couple months in Triple, made his debut to flowers and cheers at twenty-one. ERA barely a whisper on the stat sheet. And Jon remembered laughing at the sight of him. Gangly kid, girl’s name.
“He’s got a girl’s name,” he’d said to Robbie. “He’ll never make it.”
“Did they say that to Sandy Koufax?” Robbie called out from the kitchen, too far away for Jon to thump him over the head. That was Robbie, pithy, cutting lines, too much intelligence for his own good.
Then that seventh inning, two weeks ago. Ashley stretched out a little too far, overextended past the boundaries of his anatomy and will. Jon wondered if the kid knew, soon as the ball left his hand. If he’d felt, or even heard, something snap.
“You did his procedure?” he asked Mehta. Ashley Johansen had gone on IL a few days ago, but he hadn’t seen the press report detailing his surgery, his estimated time off the rotation.
“Well, that’s the thing. See, we could do the repair, a routine thing for our department. That’s not the hard part. Thing is, you know better than I do that pitchers rarely come back the same way afterward. A year, two years, they’re a different kinda cat.”
“I never had it done,” said Jon. He’d seen it, a dozen or more times. Hard throwing lefties with half the stuff knocked out of them. Fastballs bordering a hundred, practically neutered at the plate. Course there’d been a few who worked out the kinks, adjusted their grip and motion, crafted new careers for themselves, often in different uniforms. No one came back quite the same. He suspected a year or more home with their wives did most of the damage, but there was something about the procedure itself, trying to repair and restore what had once been perfect. A baseball arm was God’s domain, first and foremost. It was the only way you could separate out the ones who made it.
Mehta tightened his lips so the sound out of them came out hushed, restrained. “Of course. You made it unscathed. But you know what guys’ll do to avoid it, too.”
If it hadn’t been for the laminated menus handed out, at that moment, to each of them, Jon could’ve socked the white, white teeth out of Mehta’s mouth. The fucking nerve. Perhaps the bartender saw it, fire in his eye, because she held his food menu a little long in front of his face, so it blocked the space between the two male bodies. By the time she walked away, the rage subsided, and he turned his attention to the list of sandwiches.
“That was uncalled for, Hal,” he said.
Mehta threw his hands up, a fake surrender. The tan line on his hand was obvious, stark, clearly fresh. At least Jon’s had faded out a bit, enough time and walks in the sun had taken care of that. Guy like this, all tailoring and class, couldn’t keep a good woman? Jon dropped his shoulders and recommended to the doc the grilled grouper on rye.
“The way I see it,” said Mehta, after they ordered their sandwiches, “that procedure’s been unchanged for decades now. No one’s thought to refine it, perfect it, reimagine it. Imagine if no one changed their grip on a fastball, or found a new arm angle, because there was just one way of always doing it?”
“I don’t need an analogy,” Jon said. But he had to admit Mehta had the ease, the manner, of a physician working with athletes. Half the dialogue in his hands, exaggerated gestures. You could lose the words but keep the essence, watching his limbs in space.
“Of course you don’t. Point is, I’m the one reimagining this procedure. We’ve done thousands of tests, minor work, and we’re bringing this to the forefront.”
“Look, what does this have to do with me?”
He’d humored the doctor long enough, eaten half a grouper sandwich and a basket of fries, and a second drink made its way to his elbow. Mehta’s eyes drifted again, then snapped back.
“What’s the number-one thing people say about pitchers after Tommy John? That it’s not the same arm anymore, right? It’s weaker, more feeble, no matter how much PT and how many painkillers. Fellas lose five miles off their top end velocity, you’ve got fastball throwers trying to develop curveballs, two-seamers looking like changeups, they’re losing all the edge off their game. Because it’s not the same arm anymore, and it never will be. Years of time, billions of dollars, whole teams pour everything to get those arms the way they were. But what if we lean away from that? What if it’s not even close to the same arm, but still a strong, experienced, knowledgeable arm, and it’s better than ever?”
When those eyes drifted yet again, Jon caught them at the nadir of the arc, how they rested on the curve of Jon’s right wrist.
Then at once, he snapped up in his seat, withdrew his arm so quick it nearly knocked the vodka tonic off the table.
“You can’t be fucking serious.”
“Come on, Jon, don’t make a scene in your brother’s place. Two mil in debt won’t get any easier.”
Jon froze, and his ankles stayed wrapped around the legs of his chair. How did he know? Before the question could be asked aloud, Mehta went on.
“It’s a fairly routine procedure. You’d be inpatient for less than a day.”
“And sans a fucking arm.”
“We’d cover all the occupational therapy costs it would take to get your non-dominant hand functioning at day to day level. And of course you’d be compensated accordingly.”
Jon leaned back, downed his vodka tonic and waved for another. Rapidly he shook his head, side to side, gazing in every corner of the room for cameras fixed on their conversation. Surely some absurd prank. If Robbie wasn’t dead, he’d chalk it up to him. Drew was probably capable of dark humor. He wouldn’t put it past Shelly either, all the way in Muskogee but still watching him in these shadowy, unforgotten ways.
“Okay, let me ask you something then, Hal. What the hell would you want with my old ass arm?”
He watched the teeth glint in the back of Mehta’s mouth, not all of them enamel, some of them gold. And those hands waved again as the doctor conceptualized stem cells. That magic elixir, brewing deep in the bone marrow and capable of almost anything. Rejuvenation, reanimation, negating even the presence of God. Jon leaned further and further back in his seat, till the barstool nearly tipped over.
“So you’re saying, cut his arm off, replace it with mine, pump it full of these stem cells or some shit, and he’s on the field the same old pitcher.”
“Of course there’s recovery time, we estimate the same year off. But if all goes according to plan, he’s on the field better.”
Any laughter on Jon’s face faded now, as he asked if Mehta had ever done this before on other ballplayers.
“Now most of that is confidential. Doctor-patient privacy and all. But I’ll just say there are a couple single-A pitchers sans arm down in Pensacola and Tempe.”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Coincidentally, most of these fellas find themselves in car accidents right before. Single-car, papered over by the press, you understand. We’d do the same for you. Simple DWI situation.”
Jon’s hand slipped off his drink, he whipped his head to see if anyone was listening in Robbie Thomas’s House of Fish, but the lunch rush amounted to hardly more than a trickle, a few slow bodies in wicker chairs at the other end of the place. Off-peak, he’d tell himself on days like this. But it was June now, and if that wasn’t peak for a seaside place, the concept didn’t exist.
“So…can’t you get one of those bozos for Ashley?”
“Ashley’s arm is at another level of performance and you know it. We’ve done the research. Angle, velocity, grip, heck even the skin tone, he’s a dead ringer for you, what you were, what you could’ve been.”
What you could’ve been. He felt the ghosts of Shelly and Robbie and Drew and a hundred other souls, whispering to his past self don’t do it. But the pain, he’d said. For years it radiated up from the shoulder down his fingers. The numbness, the tingling. Sometimes he could hardly feel the seams. A few shots here and there, docs said. Docs like this one, tanned and smarmy and smiling. And Jon was twenty-eight back then with the world ahead of him, the hall of fame in a glowing, distant view for a while, till the light went out.
“So somehow,” he said through his teeth, low enough that Mehta had to lean in, “what I did was cheating and what this is, won’t be?”
The doctor didn’t have to answer the question. The silence said it all, how he picked up a fry and swirled it around in ketchup, before letting it fall limp in the newspaper basket. It’s only cheating because you got caught.
But then Mehta pointed to his own elbow. “You know where we get most of the replacement UCLs?”
“Where?”
“Well, sometimes we can graft a little from other ligaments, elsewhere in the body. But often times we take a cadaver graft. A dead man. And no one dares call that cheating, do they? And we can’t pay a dead man. Can’t get his restaurant out of the hole.”
Robbie’s ghost, almost literal this time, white and spectral, moved in and out of Jon’s body, lurking in the lobster crates and rope nets.
“I’m awaiting a call,” he said, voice dry, “from Pawtucket. They need a new—”
“Pawtucket hired their pitching coach last week.”
The pretty blonde bartender ignored Jon’s wave for another drink. He looked at her, at her back half-turned. Hair in a ponytail, jaw set, her backbone like fish scales visible through the fabric of her tank top. She looked like Shelly from this angle.
Blue sky had crossed over into afternoon, the sun high up and streaming through open windows. Lunch came and went, hardly any passersby to show for it. And the shore was teeming with people, locals and tourists, none of them in their doorway. Maybe the problem was calling it ‘House of Fish’, maybe people thought it stank, maybe—
“Then,” Jon said, throat so dry now that the words cracked and shattered on their way out, “can’t you do that with me? The stem cells, in my arm, and—”
Mehta’s laugh rang out uninhibited, so the few people in the fish shack, customers and cooks, turned and looked for a moment before returning to their days.
“You know as well as I do that can’t happen,” he said.
Jon left a lump half-swallowed in his throat. He nodded.
And the doctor urged him that for the first time in a decade he could join the game again. In part, in pieces. And wasn’t that better than nothing? Implying that what he had now was nothing, and Jon could not protest, couldn’t argue anything to the contrary.
“No one’ll know it’s my arm.” Jon said. He’d gone back to laughter, a desperate, hollow sound.
“That’s true,” said Mehta. “But you will.”
This short story is the winner of the 2024 Sidd Finch Fiction Prize.
Malavika Praseed is a MFA candidate at Randolph College. Prior to this, she graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in English, and been published in Cuckoo Quarterly, Re:Visions, Khoreo, and others. She currently works as an oncology genetic counselor, reviews books for the Chicago Review of Books, and formerly ran the literary podcast Your Favorite Book.
Jeff Brain is a retired public school teacher. You can find more of his art on his website or on Instagram.
The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.