The Ball of Wisdom

The gymnasium was a great, dark lung, inhaling the chirping songs of the children in the daytime and exhaling the silence of solitude at night. Behzat had come here for the clarity of the projectile motion, the clean arc of a free throw, the immutable satisfaction of a ball passing through a net, and solving some skirmishes in his life, if not all. Instead, he found this velvety obscurity hanging in the air. The janitor, a sullen and elusive man named Ercüment, was unreachable; his little basement office, behind the furnace room, was locked, and the phone rang into a void that seemed to swallow the sound whole.

He should have left, so he did the right thing once and all. The quarrel with Esra spread on his skin like a fine, irritating dust. Her voice, tight with a practical despair he could never emulate: “The tuition, Behzat. It’s due tomorrow. My father has offered. It’s simple.” And his own, choked with a principle that felt, even to him, like a kind of absolute misery: “We are not taking a loan from your father. Never did in the past, not now, and not in the future… The bank will call about the credit application next week. Can we not just wait?” But waiting, to Esra, was a luxury they could not afford. The child must be paid for. She grinned as if she knew a lot more than Behzat did, the past transactions, hidden accounts…

Dark? Yes, Esra’s eyes were even darker when she fiercely fought. This is why he did not leave the equally dark gym. He needed a distraction, something to keep his mind occupied. He had the ball, a familiar orange planet in his hands, like a wobbly jellyfish filling his sweaty palms. A high, triangle-shaped window and the full moon provided the only light, a weak, ecclesiastical silver that pooled on the hardwood floor, making of the court a ghost of a court, the free-throw line a faint chalky smudge, the backboard a darker slab of darkness. The hoop was an invisible idea, a circular absence he had to believe in, a Platonic rationalism. If not the perfect circle, this was the resemblance of that idealized circle, the one that lives in the world of ideas, same as the way he was the resemblance of a perfect marriage, a perfect husband, a perfect father… Until tonight.

The first shot was a betrayal. It left his fingers with the memory of a thousand practiced motions, but sailed wide, a clumsy satellite missing its orbit entirely, thudding dully against the padded wall. The sound was obscene in the quiet. And the miss conjured another failure: their wedding day. A borrowed car from her brother, a sleek, mocking thing that smelled of someone else’s cigars. A petty, hot argument over a scratch on the door, a scratch that was there before, or was it? The memory was a poorly developed photograph. He saw the guests later, leaving the dance hall, like the red lanterns carried away into the summer night, winking out one by one like dying stars, leaving him and Esra alone in a sudden, terrifying expanse of matrimony.

He retrieved the ball. The second shot was a thought made leather. As he released it, the image came unbidden: his uncle’s grave. A plain, grey stone in a town he had not visited in fifteen years. He had sent money to his grandfather for it, a guilt-offering mailed in a plain envelope. The uncle had lived alone, died alone, a man of extremist political affiliations whom the family discussed in hushed, dismissive tones. Behzat had wanted to visit him, once, but the pressure of their collective judgment—*Why would you? He’s troubled, Behzat. It’s none of your business—had held him fast, an insect pinned in amber. The ball, this time, whispered against the rim. A tremor. A nearness. It did not go in, but the universe had acknowledged his aim.

The third shot was a ritual. He bounced the ball, once, twice, syncing its rhythm to the drum in his chest. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. In the dark, he felt acutely alive, a heartbeat propelling a sphere toward an unseen truth. He was describing an elephant in a dark room, each touch, each shot, a revelation of a part—a leg, a trunk, the curve of a tusk. He was getting closer. The ball left his hands. It struck the iron hook with a clean, metallic clang and sprang back to him, a perfect, obedient return. He caught it, a shock of pure relief coursing through him. Order.

The fourth shot was rage. It flew from him, worse than the first, a wild thing hurled into the darkness behind the backboard. “Damn it!” The curse exploded in the sacred silence. “All because of her. Why couldn’t she wait? A week. Just a week.” The shame was a hot flush. Borrowing from the wife’s father! It was an ancient, humiliating transaction, a subtraction of his own stature. He was the provider who could not provide, the mathematician whose sums never added up to security.

He slowly walked to the errant planet. He began to bounce it again, a steady, penitent rhythm. And then, a deepening. A cloud, a soft, black felt, slid over the moon. The silver pool vanished. The world was extinguished. He was standing at the free-throw line in a pitch-black universe, holding a ball, aiming at nothing. He stared into the abyss where the hoop had to be, where the laws of physics insisted it still was. He saw nothing.

In that nothingness, his daughter’s face appeared. Not as she was now, but younger, confused over a simple equation, her brow furrowed not in concentration but in a kind of sorrow or shame. She doesn’t enjoy math. Why? What did I do wrong? And an answer, not his own, echoed in the vault of his skull: Nothing. Your child is not your child. You borrowed her from the future.” The words hung there. He did not question them. In the absolute dark, all statements were truths. He raised the ball, a gesture of faith. He did not aim; he simply released it toward the void, a surrender. It left his hands.

And then, a sound. A sound so soft, so perfect, it was almost not a sound at all but the ghost of one: a swift, clean swish. The net, sucking the ball through its hoop. A hole in the universe is accepting its offering. He stood frozen. Had he? It was impossible to know. The darkness revealed nothing. It could have been a trick of the air, an auditory hallucination born of desire. There was no proof. There would never be proof. He remembered his math classes where he was the master of truth. “Every theorem we mention in this class must be proven or must not be used at all…” A slow smile touched his lips in the blackness. “The wisdom of uncertainty,” he told the empty gym.

He waited. The cloud passed. The moon, that bright, nonchalant ball, returned. He found the ball and continued playing. For an hour, he played. Until the darkness ceased to be an opponent and became his only friend. Until his muscles ached with an honest fatigue. Until he realized that the basketball didn't have any intention of saving his marriage! If darkness was the problem, inside the ball was even darker, so what?... Until he missed Esra with a sharp, almost metaphysical yearning. Until he was profoundly, simply, crazily thirsty. Then he went home.