Nobody owns anything. Not your helmet or anything else that you might use for protection. Not your uniform or whatever else that might fix you for a while in a specific identity. Not your identity. Not your legs, your arms, your movements, your embraces. Not your eyes or reflexes or timing or swing or anything else that might bring you that fleeting feeling of connection. Not any feeling, not any connection.
My four-year-old, Exley, held this card in his hands a few weeks ago. It was still in one piece. Earlier that day, he and my older son, Jack, had asked me to get out a freezer bag of cards from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. They’d dumped out the cards, scattered them around, and pretended to bulldoze them across the carpet in imitation of bulldozers at a landfill. They used to play this game more, but they’ve mostly moved on to other games, and this time around they lost interest pretty quickly, an indication that they probably wouldn’t be asking to play the game again.
Anyway, we cleaned up most of the cards, but we missed a few. It’s always gone that way: some get stuck in the corners of the room, and we come upon them later.
Nobody owns these cards. They’re not mine. I have my box of cards from my childhood, and my older son, Jack, in imitation of me, has a smaller box of his cards, and Exley, in imitation of Jack, has an even smaller box of his cards. All three of us now mostly ignore these possessions. For quite a few years, the cards from my childhood, my first and most persistent possessions, had a lot to say to me, but they’ve grown quiet over the last few years. What more can they possibly say? The only cards saying anything at all to me lately are the ones from the freezer bag, the nobody cards, the cards touched by my boys.
Nick Esasky was one of the cards we found in the corners this time, maybe our last time playing with these cards. Exley found Nick Esasky and held him. I knew what he was thinking. He was grinning and tightening his grip.
“Don’t,” I said to Exley.
***
Nick Esasky owned a strong home run swing. He was in turn owned for several years by the Cincinnati Reds. I know this from memory and also from looking at the back of this sundered card. I know from memory that he came to the Red Sox and had his best year. I don’t remember if he then moved on from the Red Sox or if he was with the Red Sox when he started struggling with the vertigo that would make it difficult for him to move around in the world safely, let alone hit major league pitching. He was out of baseball as quickly as if some greater power had reached down and ripped him in half.
***
This morning I was late leaving the house for work. Exley had decided that he needed to wear the Batman costume he’d worn trick-or-treating, and I helped him step into the main part of the costume, but we couldn’t find his cape. My wife was in another room with Jack, and she could take up the search, but I didn’t want to walk away from Exley while he was standing there capeless. Ultimately I had to leave anyway, so that’s how I left him.
It was cold outside and the wind was blowing against me the whole way as I rode my bike up Clark Street. There was a flyer in the elevator at the building where I work:
Safety presentation today, Suite 427
Topics:
- Fire
- Active Shooter
***
The pieces don’t go together, not really. Capes go missing and then reappear but are ignored, forgotten. I thought about going to Suite 427 but got busy with work and forgot what time the presentation was anyway. The flyer was gone by the time I rode the elevator back down. I biked home in the dark, the light on my handlebars blinking don’t kill me don’t kill me to the traffic.
I wanted to get to my home, to my wife, to my boys.
Cardboard Gods 
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