Page 2 of Goaltender Interference

He ended up in Central Park, sitting by one of the fountains and watching children splash and play in the water even though they weren’t supposed to. A twenty-something kid recognized him and came up for an autograph; Aiden sighed and signed the snapback shoved into his hands. He politely but firmly shut down the attempt at starting a real conversation and started walking again.

He hadn’t been to the MoMA in years; he had no reason to go. Today, Aiden spent a few hours walking around the exhibits, looking at the art in complete silence, avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes. No one bothered him.

He stood for a long time in the contemporary gallery, looking at the wall with Cy Twombly’sLeda and the Swan, and wondered how the hell he ended uphere.

The days went by.

Aiden’s phone rang while he made himself lunch. He didn’t pick up.

He checked the voice mail a few hours later:Your jersey is ready, please come and get it anytime during regular business hours.After every season he’d played, he framed the jersey, from mini mite to the Harriers, his juniors team; Worlds and Olympic and All-Star jerseys, his minor league gear and every single variant of the Liberty’s jerseys from the first year he’d played through his penultimate season, when they’d had a new third alternate.

The one he was avoiding picking up was the last game-worn jersey he’d ever put on his body, framed and ready to hang, the capstone to his collection. Aiden knew it was stupid. Leaving the jersey at the store didn’t change the fact that his career was over.But he still wasn’t ready to pick it up yet, and he didn’t know when he would be.

Aiden woke up.

He went to the gym.

He came home.

He sat on his couch and stared at the ceiling.

He ignored phone calls from his mom, texts from the team, phone calls from Hannah.

He remembered to eat mostly because paying careful attention to his meals, macros and intake had been ingrained in the Routine for years.

He sat on his roof deck and stared at the skyline.

He intended to fall asleep at a reasonable hour.

He did not.

Aiden woke up.

The Routine had used to help him feel grounded and at ease. But now, at a certain point, he realized he was more bored than he had ever been in his entire life. Before, he always had something to work toward, but now it didn’t matter how many times he went through his yoga routine in the morning, how long he spent in the gym after. No matter what he did, it felt like running in a hamster wheel.

A few of the guys from the team texted him regularly, the ones who stayed in New York City over the summer permanently and the ones who just hadn’t left yet. Even then, Aiden was painfully aware that he was five or ten or in some cases fifteen years older than them, and he couldn’t bring himself to accept any of the offers to hang.

Eventually he stopped responding at all.

For the last few years, there hadn’t really been anyone steady in his life. When he had first—when it had happened, at first he had slept around for a while. For a long time after that, he’d dated, serially monogamous relationships that would alwaysfizzle out around a year, when the other guy realized Aiden couldn’t give him what he wanted. That even though Aiden could commit to a relationship, that no matter how good the sex was, sex and companionship was all it was ever going to be. Aiden was never going to be emotionally available the way any of them wanted.

And it wasn’t like heneverhooked up, but at a certain point it was almost more effort than it was worth for an ultimately unsatisfying reward. None of those men understood what he wanted—and he’d learned, a long time ago, that with the wrong person, even asking for it could be disastrous. You couldn’t just say to a guy you barely knewhey, I’m in kind of a mood today, you should hit me so my brain will shut the fuck up,and expect anything like what you were looking for. Anything like what he’d—

So in the end, sex was just that. Sex and nothing more.

The worst part was that he didn’t even know why dating felt so empty. It wasn’t even like he really wanted romance. It was just that sometimes, he thought he’d kill to be able to talk to someone the way he used to talk to—

Well.

What it came down to was: there were no answers he could give himself about how to fix this. At a certain point you woke up, realized you were almost middle-aged by normal standards and already ancient by hockey standards, and that you had spent the first half of your life failing to set yourself up for the second.

Aiden went running.

It was a hot day. It felt good to sweat and suffer. For a time, he could stop thinking, exist only in the pounding of his feet on the pavement, the gasp of breath in his lungs and ears, the city streaking by.

He stopped to stretch out his legs and rest his knee. Someone said, from behind him, “Sooooouuuup!”

Aiden sighed, turned and smiled. He posed for a picture.

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