When Billy Jurges recovered from his gunshot wounds and led the Cubs to the World Series to face the Yankees, I thought it was a sign, like his recovery was a preternatural phenomenon that could only point to one outcome. My optimism was proven merely a delusion by the tip of another man’s finger. The series was tense, with years of bad blood between the two teams boiling over when the Cubs awarded former Yankee-turned-Cubbie Mark Koenig only half of his World Series share. The Yanks didn’t want to come to our house and we didn’t want them there, a fact we made obvious by showering them with lemons and other shit we could toss on the field. It could have been the jeering that inspired Babe Ruth to gesture to center field while at bat in the top of the fifth and then promptly send a monster homer streaming through the air to that very spot. If the hit had been a strategy to shut us up, it was effective. We grew more silent the following day when the Yankees swept the series, ending us in four games. It had gone worse than I could have imagined, a fate I blamed on my naivety and the fleeting thoughts I had that the universe somehow had a plan, that causes had effects and miracles had reason. I would have thought that like Ruth’s shot to the wall, Zangara’s shot—possibly intended for Roosevelt and absorbed by Cermak—would have dashed the dreams of those who dared to believe anything would be different, but it hadn’t. They continued to hope, and I continued to wonder why — until baseball season, when I did too.

Inviting Cal to join me for opening day made me feel more exposed than sleeping with him ever had. It was one thing to welcome someone into your body—I had done it so many times with people who never meant more to me than an orgasm—and another to reveal your world to them, show them what you value for no reason other than to share it because you want them to know you in a real way, to know all of you, even if just through peeks. So much of me was built in that stadium, an island in the middle of the city where I was a castaway, a shelter in the maelstrom.

“It’s not crowded,” Cal garbled, his mouth full of the peanuts he’d insisted on stopping for before we’d even gotten to our seats and settled in. His vehemence for the nuts should have frustrated me because it went against my routine, but it hadn’t. I wanted him to have fun, to enjoy the game as much as I would. I wanted him to smile at me with white teeth peppered with peanut skins and eyes full of new sights.