Yet ordinary twenty-one-year-olds forget things easily; thoughts and even people slip out of their minds like things dropped over the deck of an ocean liner. Very little time passed before his teammates began to forget about the Stump. On the team, he was surprised to learn, he was replaced as assistant captain almost immediately, his skills easily substituted, his talents forgotten. He had been interchangeable all along. And he was forgotten in other ways as well. Sometimes Jason would arrive at the team’s usual cafeteria table to find that it was empty, no one having told him about extended practice that day or about a trip to a restaurant for a teammate’s birthday. Other times he would limp his way over to the locker room after practice, only to find that he could barely even follow the team’s conversations anymore. How could he join in their laughs about the idiot who missed such an obvious goal at an away game, or their gossip about the freshman he had barely met, or their impersonations of the new assistant coach he hardly knew? Even off the field, when he and his teammates sat around their long cafeteria table together, he began to notice more and more jokes he didn’t get, references to people he had never met, mentions of parties to which they had forgotten to invite him. Jason began to feel as if he didn’t exist. As if he had never existed.

Jason changed. His body began drooping, his muscles withering and loosening on his limbs like damp clumps of clay sliding off an unsturdy armature. At first Leora attributed it to his leg, to a lack of exercise. But then she noticed that his face had begun drooping too. His jaw began going slack more often—he would stare into space for a moment, and soon his mouth would fall open, as if nothing were holding him together. His eyes sagged in his face. Even his hairline began to migrate backward, little by little. And as he sank into the depths, he called out and was rescued.

One evening—and it is often evening when these things happen, that time wedged between being clearly one moment and clearly another, where people sometimes get stuck—when Leora couldn’t meet him for dinner, Jason went to the campus Jewish student center, sat down at a table at random, and met someone named Moyshie. Leora knew Moyshie, vaguely. He lived a few floors below her in the dormitory, on a floor low enough so that he would never need to use the elevator, since Moyshie would not use electricity on the Jewish sabbath. Jason and Moyshie hit it off, to both Jason’s and Moyshie’s surprise. By a curious accident of fate—if one believes such things are accidental, for Leora wasn’t so sure anymore—Moyshie knew a tremendous amount about soccer, had made himself into a veritable walking encyclopedia of soccer-fan statistics on the various international teams, and watched the World Cup with religious fervor. It wasn’t long before Jason got to know Moyshie’s friends: Avi, Ari, Shmulie, Yossie. They became Jason’s new soccer team. And that meant he had to start practicing.