The last time Tobias was standing in this spot he was trying to murder someone.
It was one of those December days where the wind felt as if it could whip right through your clothes and into your soul, but his all-black assassin’s uniform and the adrenaline rush of the hunt kept his body warm. The man he was attempting to slaughter stood motionless in front of him, like a deer frozen in the woods right before a hunter’s bullet blasts through its heart. Do they ever know it’s coming? The man in front of Tobias certainly did.
Still, he stood just yards away, an almost-calming presence amid the chaos of flying bodies and blood. When he was about to arrive here for the first time since that day, he thought the scene would come back to him slowly, like a sepia-tinted dream you remember when you look at a street corner just right and the purple and gold dusk dances off the shop windows to trigger a memory you thought you lost in the ether forever. He imagined it would swirl through his mind almost surreally as he walked across the 30 yard line and directly onto the hash mark where the attempted killing went down.
Instead, he felt nothing.
Tobias was back inside the stadium where he became a god among a sea of little boys. It was where he turned from a 3-star hick into a household name around a state that cared about college football the way fundamentalists care about Christ, and probably more. After all, Jesus Christ never caused a game-sealing fumble in the conference championship.
He didn’t know what instinct caused him to ease his car from the highway onto the service road that led directly to the stadium as he passed through this town that has utterly forgotten his existence. It wasn’t nostalgia really, at least in his mind. There was no more longing for the good ol’ days that had forever passed him by for Tobias. He’d given up thinking he would ever recapture that feeling , before his wife had the “ex” designation and he could still walk comfortably up two flights of stairs without panting. His assassin’s uniform had long ago been replaced by a starched collared shirt and tie, a real tie, one that he learned to tie himself at the age of 24. It didn’t take long for him to accept his new role in the universe as a man whose best days had been buried in faded newspaper clippings stuffed in an attic. He wasn’t like Trainor, or Monk, or the other assholes he used to play with who still needed, craved, that lost feeling that was disappearing faster than their hairlines. They still went to the games and stood dutifully on the sideline or in their seats so they could hear the ever-dwindling crowd roar one more time and smile as a woman in pearls tells them how nice and handsome they’ve become. It wasn’t that he was scared of it, although maybe he was. Tobias had just accepted that it was over and, quite frankly, that was that.
He pulled into the adjacent parking lot and gingerly maneuvered out of his car. The stadium, a concrete monstrosity built in the 1930s, looked largely the same from the last time he saw it in person. More seats filled the lower bowl, sure, and the scoreboard was bigger and probably brighter, but the edifice still mirrored his memory of what it looked like when he last sprinted out of that enormous blow-up helmet and onto the fake turf that bounced black pellets back at his ankles as he galloped across it. The brassy notes of the band’s horns floated into oblivion. No music played on this day.
If he was a little younger or a little older, the feeling of invincibility may have come creeping back as he slipped right through the open side gate and into the colosseum. He might have closed his eyes and heard his coach’s gravelly voice pierce the air as he screamed at the defensive huddle to keep its composure. Things might not have been going particularly well at the moment he may have envisioned, when State was marching down the field with the ease of the band performing at halftime. But he was at that perfect age when the place he revisited was stuck fully in the present. It was like the first time he dropped his daughter off at elementary school, the same school he went to, where they crafted Thanksgiving turkeys out of tracings of his hand and where he met his best friend Evan and where he first realized that he could be pretty good at this whole football thing. None of those memories rushed back to him that Monday morning, either. All he could notice was the smell of fresh paint and the purple wire-rimmed glasses on the kindergarten teacher’s face as she ushered Claire from his arms and onto the classroom rug that was shaped like a cloud.
Is this what purgatory feels like? Stuck forever in the present?
Three kids sat in the third row bleachers, laughing inside school binders, paying absolutely no attention to the fat old man who crept along the wall of the east side of the stadium opposite them. There was no wistfulness that swaddled him as he walked down the steps and onto the field. He couldn’t help but notice how much dingier it looked, how this once-modern cathedral was more like a crypt now that he was closer to dying than to finding religion.
A goldfinch ascended above him.
He stood directly in the spot where he had flown through the A gap and smoked the quarterback standing a few yards away from him so hard that the paper said the guy’s mom cried in the stands. Cried! He was really trying to kill that guy, so much so that he didn’t even look to see the ball bouncing leisurely around his right arm as he buried the poor bastard so deep in the ground he could have introduced him to Satan himself.
But he wasn’t thinking about any of that then. He couldn’t. All he could notice was the garbled dialogue of the three kids in the bleachers wafting through the stadium who now looked at him rather oddly and kept on talking about whatever it was 19-year-olds talked about between skipping classes and hooking up.
They play his attempted murder on the scoreboard before games to this very day, the grainy footage seeming like it was filmed during the Civil War with the way things look on TV nowadays.
But he wouldn’t know it since he’s never been back.
Man, he wanted that guy dead.
***
The cacophonous roar of a football crowd doesn’t sound like it does in the movies. It’s more like a steady stream of TV static that buzzes in your ears, one that you learn to tune out the second you sprint onto the field. On this day the stadium sat quiet and dignified, like an elder statesman propped up by makeup and uppers trying to keep it together for the cameras.
He kept walking down the middle of the field and into the end zone, where he tried to summon that same rush that poured over him when the clock hit 00:00 and the fans rushed onto the field to celebrate in a mass of humanity that could have gotten someone killed.
It wasn’t possible on this day.
He couldn’t even find the emotion to be mad at what once was and never would be again. Tobias just sat shamefully in the present, a man leaving a sale he nabbed 30 minutes away before stopping at the stadium he played college football in two decades prior because he was driving through town and it was right off the highway.
Tobias noticed the sun, an orange basketball dappling light on the end zone through the oak trees that stood stubbornly on the spot where the stadium ended and campus began again. Two students slipped through the open gate he used to get in and ran onto the turf, one holding a frisbee in his hand with a smile that only an innocent person could posses. Tobias had not smiled like that in a long time.
He picked up the pace and circled the field one final time.
All those two-a-days.
The time he accidentally threw up on Monk after a particularly hellish practice inside the stadium, with Monk purposefully doing the same thing to him soon after because they were just a bunch of disgusting kings on this tiny campus.
The Homecoming beatdowns of directional schools when he could stand on the sideline for an entire half and watch the girls in the stands more than the game.
The dogfight with State to win a conference championship.
He thought it would all come back to him. He thought it might serve as a balm to his ennui, or at least give him some angry energy heading into life’s second act. But all he could notice was the goldfinch hovering above the stadium.
Tobias exited the side gate and got back in his dirty car. He started up the engine and drove back onto the service road that brought him here in the first place.
A text message from his boss lit up his screen.
“When you heading back?”
A sense of all-encompassing dread enveloped him. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced since he stood on the practice field that first time they shed their shells and put on full pads. It was pure, unadulterated fear.
He was heading back into the maw of malaise. Back to an office with flourescent lights beaming down on him inside a cubicle filled with pictures of family members he barely talked to and cared even less about. It would always be this way.
His stomach knotted as he picked up his phone. He turned right and a blast of shattered glass snowed down on him and his car bent into a twisted mass of broken plastic and metal. It soared into the opposite lane as the other car skidded to a halt in front of his.
He didn’t feel anything as his soul and body parted.
He would be on the front page of the town newspaper once again.