'Many years,' Marvin said.
'Many years.'
'Because certain events have a quality of unconscious fear. I believe in my heart that people sensed some catastrophe in the air. Not who would win or lose the game. Some awful force that would obliterate- what's the word?'
'Obliterate.'
'Obliterate. That would obliterate the whole thing of the game. You have to understand that all through the nineteen-fifties people stayed indoors. We only went outside to drive our cars. Public parks were not filled with people the way they later became. A museum was empty rooms with knights in armor where you had one sleepy guard for every seven centuries.'
'In other words.'
'In other words there was a hidden mentality of let's stay home. Because a threat was hanging in the air.'
'And you're saying people had an intuition about this particular day.'
'It's like they knew. They sensed there was a connection between this game and some staggering event that might take place on the other side of the world.'
'This particular game.'
'Not the day before or the day after. Because this was an all-or-nothing game between the two hated rivals of the city. People had a premonition that this game was related to something much bigger. They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be in a big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay home with my family and my brand-new
To his surprise Brian did not reject this theory. He didn't necessarily believe it but he didn't dismiss it either. He believed it provisionally here in this room located below street level in a frame house on a weekday afternoon in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. It was lyrically true as it emerged from Marvin Lundy's mouth and reached Brian's middle ear, unprovably true, remotely and inadmissably true but not completely unhistorical, not without some nuance of authentic inner narrative.
Marvin said, 'Which the whole thing is interesting because when they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball.'
'I always thought it was a grapefruit.'
'A regulation major league baseball no less than nine inches in circumference, going by the rule book.'
He crossed his legs, he stuck a finger in his ear and jigged an itch. Marvin had enormous ears. For the first time Brian became aware of music playing somewhere in the house. Maybe he'd been hearing it all along at the assimilated edge, music blended with the room tone, the airplanes drifting into Newark, the faint wail of bullet traffic on the speedways out there-a moderated sorrow, piano work that had the texture of something old and gentled over, a pressed rose faded in a book.
'People sense things that are invisible. But when something's staring you right in the face, that's when you miss it completely.'
'What do you mean?' Brian said.
'This Gorbachev that walks around with that thing on his head. It's a birthmark, what he's got?'
'Yes, I think so.'
'It's big. You agree with this?'
'Yes, it's quite big.'
'Noticeable. You can't help but notice. Am I right?'
'Yes, you are.'
'And you agree that millions of people see this thing every day in the newspaper?'
'Yes, they do.'
'They open the paper and there's the man's head with that amazing mark high on the dome. Agreed?'
'Yes, of course.'
'What does it mean?' Marvin said.
'Why does it have to mean something?'
'You take it at face value.'
'It's his face,' Brian said. 'It's his head. A blemish, a birthmark.'
'That's not what I see.'
'What do you see?'
'You asked so I'll tell you.'
Marvin saw the first sign of the total collapse of the Soviet system. Stamped on the man's head. The map of Latvia.
He said this straight-faced, how Gorbachev was basically conveying the news that the USSR faced turmoil from the republics.
'You think his birthmark? Wait a minute.'
'Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that's on Gorbachev's head. In other words when he's lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, this is Latvia she's looking at.'
Brian tried to conjure the shape of the winestain mark on Gorbachev's head. He wanted to match it with a memory of geography tests on mellow afternoons, his limbs faintly aching with biological drives and the sweetness of school's end. The old melodic line came lullabying back, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. But the map shapes escaped him now, the precise silhouettes of those nestled anatomies.
Marvin was looking at the Scoreboard again.
'People collect, collect, always collecting. There's people they go after anything out of wartime Germany. Naziana. This is major collectors looking for big history. Does that mean the objects in this room are total trivia? What's the word I'm looking for that sounds like you're getting injected with a vaccine in the fleshy part of your arm?'
'Innocuous.'
'Innocuous. What am I, innocuous? This is history, back-page. From back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate.' Marvin shifted his gaze. 'In this trunk right here I have the one thing that my whole life for the past twenty-two years I was trying to collect.'
Brian had an inkling.
'I tracked, I searched and finally I found it and bought it, eighteen months ago, and I don't even put it on display. I keep it in the trunk, out of sight.'
Now it was Brian who looked at the Scoreboard.
Marvin said morosely, 'It's the Bobby Thomson home-run ball, which I traced it back starting with rumors in the business. It wasn't even a business back then, just a few interested parties with someone's telephone number or first name, the skimpiest kind of lead that I pursued with a fury.'
He paused to light his cigar. It was old and stale and looked like a soybean sausage from the school cafeteria. But Brian understood that a cigar was tribally required, even if the smoke stung his eyes.
For the next three hours Marvin talked about his search for the baseball. He forgot some names and mangled others. He lost whole cities, placing them in the wrong time zones. He described how he followed false leads into remote places. He climbed the stairs to raftered upper rooms and looked in old trunks among the grandmother's linen and the photographs of the dead.
'I said to myself a thousand times. Why do I want this thing? What does it mean? Who has it?'
Through the narration, the whole wandering epic, skimmed here, protracted there, Brian was confident that the man was slipshod only in the telling. The search itself had clearly been hard, fierce, thorough and consuming.
At one point Marvin hired a man who worked in a photo lab and had access to special equipment. They studied news photographs of the left-field stands at the Polo Grounds taken just after the ball went in. They looked at enlargements and enhancements. They went to photo agencies and burrowed in the archives. Marvin had people sneak him into newspaper morgues, into the wire services and the major magazines.
'I looked at a million photographs because this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you
