RECOMMENDED
READING
AFFILIATES
"Uh, seaweed soup, please," I said, since there wasn't too much else good left on the menu. The little restaurant out in the middle of the little out in the middle of nowhere town on the Connecticut border smelled like a greasy truck stop I'd passed through once. A shadow scuttled across the floor near a corner. Whether it was mice or rats, I couldn't tell through all the smoke, even with only two other customers.
"New to town?"
"Just passing," I shrugged. "In for a few days. You know where Portswall Neck is?" She poured some doubtful-looking coffee and nodded.
"About four miles away from here, but you have to take the dirt road; the other one's out since that last storm."
The dirt road. As compared to the semi-paved dirt road, and the highway that nobody used anymore.
I'd come on a search for an eyeball. It was the eye of the famous Dr. Noh, who'd won the Red Sox World Series finally in 2031 with his breaking ball curve that was as good as Pedro's had been thirty years before. Philip Noh had come from Japan in the later twenties and not been much at the time, 'til he had that accident. And that was what changed him, what brought in the whole controversy.
The soup came, tasting kind of like greasy Jell-O. Oh, wait I forgot, you kids don't know what Jell-O is... Okay, bad tofu then. Anyway, it tasted horrible, sliding in my throat like a snake on duty, chewier than leather used to be. (That, for reference, was an animal product that used to be popular before the Cow Crash).
Guy next to me eyed the thing that I was reading. "Dr. Noh, huh? I remember him: man, that game back in '22 when he had just come up from the Pawsox. Hot day, the sand, the sun, all of it's in here, right up here." He'd had it put into the memory chip in his head where everybody had begun to store useful info that they didn't want lost. A true baseball fan, I thought.
"I missed that game," I admitted.
"Aww, you should have seen it! That was before he became big, of course, but man, the Doctor was on. Bottom of the sixth, two out: Champson with a sore arm so they put Noh in. Everybody cheered. He had quite a following even then, you know!" I did know. Noh had that charisma, that do-or-die that Red Sox fans love in their players. Like good ol' Petey did in my parents' day...
The accident changed the history of baseball as a sport. Noh was socked right on the elbow, and you could hear the crack from the Green Monster to Wrigley Field. He went down fast enough. The Sox tried to rally after that, but what's to go when your star player is downed and you've only just gotten near the playoffs?
I remember that: I was in the stands to watch it happen, see the poor guy's pale face as he was led off. But he certainly didn't stay down long. Next day, there was a press conference with the manager and the GM of the team, who said that Noh was going to be trying out a new, experimental type of treatment. Some guys in the minor leagues had already had it with fair results: DeCappo out in Texas, James in S. Dakota. They'd see.
But they wouldn't tell what the stuff was.
Well, reporters had loads of fun with that one. Speculation went into every field. But the bottom line, the guys on the radio kept saying, was that the guy had broken his arm and probably destroyed a nerve there. That took time to heal, for goodness' sake, there really wasn't much you could do for something like that!
Dr. Noh came back in a month and a half, in the middle of a generic Red Sox slump. Guys were getting injured left and right, people were making stupid mistakes. Jake Klaus, the brand-new pitcher they'd picked up from Chicago, wasn't getting along with Averdes the catcher; they were calling each other names during the whole game, instead of the other team. And the Sox went down, 2-17. It was bad.
And then Dr. Noh walked on, next day of the season, and pitched a perfect inning to thunderous applause. (If you ever want to be really appreciated, guys, work for the Red Sox and work your heart out: the fans'll love you). And another. And another. Fastball was clocked around 103 mph. There was a slider you just couldn't understand, and a knuckleball that came out of nowhere for the sake of more confusion. He mixed 'em up, and mowed 'em down, and the fans cheered him off the field.
That was the way it continued for three more years, as the Sox won the World Series - three times in a row, something unheard of ever since their struggle to get to it in 2001. This was like holding solid gold in your hands, and it's all yours, folks. Dr. Noh was the hero of Boston. He destroyed the White Sox, and then the Mets. Next year, massacred St. Louis's greatest hitter, Quick Martin, two years in a row. And, more importantly, he pulverized the Yankees on the way.
The little clunker that had brought me all the way here from Boston thunked and shook all the way over those hills in northeastern Connecticut, as I passed through various opened-air regions. I even saw a few cows, thin and mean-looking, through the glass of a protected farm that I didn't think looked too protected. The paint cracking on the walls of the house and the rubble in the yard said it all.
Finally, I reached an electro-station and pulled in for my battery to recharge. Portswall Neck was about an hour south of here, I was told by the attendant, who waited impatiently for me to pay and leave even though the next customer didn't show signs of coming any time soon. I moved on.
The scenery changed. I recognized after a while the signs of military intervention: somewhere along the line, the US Army had gotten the cute idea of making fake forests, so they went and landscaped and planted and cut and changed things around till what you ended up with was a bunch of red pine and spruce, maybe a little oak and not much else, with huge wide open spaces that just shouldn't be there in northeastern North America. Fact was, all these forests - and I've heard that there are quite a few of them - were modeled on the southern Appalachians. Somebody really liked it down there, I guess. They just didn't look normal sticking out of the crowds of maple and warped white pine and oak and catbriar and wild rose and birch groves waving in between. Not at all.
But the eyeball would be worth it, probably the biggest payoff I'd ever gotten. If I could find that, I'd be the richest guy in the world.
Noh pitched and kept on pitching. His arm was tireless, all through that summer, and the next, and the next. Sox fans were ecstatic: the Pru was lit up just about every night. The stadium sold out.
And then, reporter Chazz Bigley cracked the story at last, of the special surgery that Noh had received.
His arm had been refit with a special kind of biogenetically generated arm. It was an arm like none other: this arm now had cells, some of the DNA of the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Mister P himself. The arm thought like HIS arm did, it received messages from a special hookups in Noh's brain that were like Pedro used to think - though only Pedro and the gods really knew what Pedro was thinking.
But I saw him, Dad, I saw his fingers change!
It was true: Dr. Noh was not only double-jointed like Pedro now, but he could think baseball like Pedro did. It was amazing.
The fans were in an uproar about this. Of course, the idea of two of their favorite pitchers of all time being literally joined at the hip - or brain - brought mixed feelings. On the one hand, they weren't sure if it was right doing this: wasn't this kind of akin to taking steroids to increase your muscle strength? people asked. On the other hand - it was Pedro. It was Dr. Noh. It was amazing.
The Baseball Commissioner insisted Noh remain off the mound for the time being, while they figure out what to do about him. Some people weren't sure if there really was anything: "After all, many people are part cyborg now," they said. "There are plastic and metal arms and legs and tendons and whatnot all over the place..."
"But should they be playing against us?" others asked.
There it was again. "Them" versus "Us."
In the end, since they couldn't exactly change him back, the Baseball Commissioner had the GM of the Red Sox fired and a new one brought in. Dr. Noh himself was unfortunately not to be allowed to play ball again, since his change: the next twenty years of lawsuits were all the news in Boston. If you go up there even now and ask around, you'll get after a while the impression that the town is still divided in half about it.
His eye, though, was never discussed.
I reached the town several hours later in the middle of a pouring rain that didn't make the droopy forest out on the edges look any better. Their crappy little motel was cold and damp, and the heat wasn't working, but it was all I could find. I plopped down on my bed and did a little channel flicking on the ceiling, because I was too tired to sit up anymore.
The crumpled piece of paper that had brought me here was lying on the inside of my briefcase. I'd come a long way to get that eyeball, and I wasn't about to give up yet. A long way.
Next morning, I checked out and headed down yet another dirt road, finally able to follow the directions I'd been given. I passed the cemetery which must have housed Noh's bones, and kept on going. Trying not to think of how he'd died a crazy old man, impoverished by the lawsuits and robbed by his agent, his brain screwed up till he couldn't remember who he was anymore, a great Dominican pitcher or a semi-great American Japanese. Baseball legend had it he strangled himself to death with Pedro's hand. The official version was that he was murdered by a crazed fan.
I remember when I met Dr. Noh. I was about thirteen, and absolutely crazy about him and the Red Sox. Oh, I listened to every game, I tapped past my parents' CARE signal on the wall vid to get the radio talk shows, I even called in once from a payphone using an assumed name (okay, Teddy W. isn't too believable, but hey, I was a kid) to argue about who should go first in the lineup: the guy with the semi-strong bat who was occasionally not all there, or the consistent hitter. I met Dr. Noh on a rainy Sunday after a long game, where he'd been playing relief. He was only semi-good back then, but to me he was a hero. I still have his autograph.
He was a great guy: modest, nice. He liked kids all right, but he liked people in general more. He was always giving away stuff he couldn't use anymore, like old equipment, and taking people out to dinner out of the blue. I guess you could say he was the perfect Red Sox player. Fans certainly loved him to pieces.
"Domo, arigato," I said, in a carefully practiced phrase that I'd learned by heart among with a couple others - just in case I someday got to rub elbows with Him.
Noh grinned at me, his round face shining with sweat from the heat of the game. "Aloha," he laughed. "I was born on Kawa'i, kiddo. Don't believe everything you see on Sportsnet!"
And that was that. My fifteen seconds of fame disappeared off among a crowd of other children and parents and people in general. He loved people.
I rang the doorbell at the quiet, brown house up on the hill. It was in the condition of a much-used sedan: porch sagging, paint peeling, some old things in the yard, and yet still going. There were tiny lines in the windows where somebody had taken the care to put plaster in, and metal sticks would hold the porch roof up a little longer. The yard was carefully raked.
The thin young man who answered the door was as quiet as his house: Noh's house, inherited by his son Gerome. The man smiled a sad, impoverished country smile at me and let me in. "You are the Mr. Bricks, then?"
"Yes," I nodded. The inner part of the house was clean and neat and quiet, like its occupants. Pictures of Noh were everywhere: Noh with the President, Noh with the Governor of Massachusetts, Noh with various celebrities, Noh with his team and his family and a couple of fan pictures. The 2032 Golden Glove sat on the mantle piece. But they'd already sold his World Series Rings, and his awards from the Minor Leagues. "Well," I said uncomfortably, sitting down in a faded, moth-eaten padded chair.
"Well," said Gerome Noh.
After a few moments I cleared my throat and brought out the check, gave it to him. "$40 million, like we said." So why did I feel like the one who was robbing him?
He nodded, got up. I wondered when the last time had been that he'd seen this much money, or if he ever had. Gerome had been just a boy when Noh had gotten banned from baseball, and it had all gone downhill from there. As he disappeared into another room, I wondered what that was like, to have all that money and just lose it all of a sudden.
He came back with a small box, very plain, but obviously very precious. "Here it is," he said softly, placing it in my hands as if it were breakable china. "It's yours now."
I took the box and left soon after that, after having a quick glance at the inside: yes, there on the inner part of the prosthesis was engraved his name and his signature, in tiny print: Phillip M. Noh. My car clunked away.
I put the Eye of Noh in my trophy case with all the other Red Sox stuff I've collected over the years. Balls, bats, awards, rings, pictures. But there's only one eye, after all. Someone else has the armbone, believe it or not.
Sometimes, I look at that eye and I pretend that I'm him for a bit, I pretend that I can see out of that eye every game that he played. Noh had lost his eye long before he got to the Major Leagues, and he was only out for two years from the injury he'd sustained: misjudged throw from catcher, right there. So he'd worn that eye for years before the accident that made him history. The accident that changed baseball forever.
With that eye, I pretend sometimes that I'm him. There's the smell of the sweat and the sand, the soft plop of the ball dropping in my mitt, the sharp sun at four p.m. when the game's tied and it's late and you have to kill the Yankees. And you wind up, and you throw. These are my fifteen seconds of fame. They're very rare.
Massachusetts resident J. A. Howe has been writing science fiction and fantasy for almost ten years now. In addition to writing, Howe enjoy historical reinactments and is a very avid Red Sox fan. For more information, visit Howe's personal web site.
© J.A. Howe
Ultraverse e-zine is Copyright 2003 Parola Scritta and Chris Africa.
All articles published in this e-zine are copyrighted by their authors, with limited publication rights given to Ultraverse. All other rights are reserved by the author. Distribution without permission is a violation of copyright law.