Someone slaps his cheeks. Right. Left. Right again. Since there is no pain associated with the slapping, he opens his eyes more out of curiosity than a sense of abuse.

The slapping stops. T.K. finds himself looking upward at the polished gloss that is the locker rooms ceiling. “Tell me what day it is, T.K.,” demands a man, Coach Carrerra, standing above him.

Strange, T.K. thinks, how so deceptively simple a request can pose such a major problem. What day is it? There are only seven. It has to be one of them. He tries to narrow his selection down somewhat. He scans his memory, backing up, day by day, until he arrives at an action he can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, link to a specific point in time. That day he scouted out the street. Wednesday. For the Killerbowl. The Killerbowl. Who won the Killerbowl, he wonders? Then, like a torrent of slime, it engulfs him. “Saturday,” he answers. “It’s Saturday, January first.”

“Good.” The coach leans out of his field of vision to address someone else. “I don’t think he’s got a concussion, Zack. How about you?”

Zack, good old Zack, bends into T.K.’s constricted universe and prods at his temples. “I agree. Apparently no brain damage. He should get to the hospital as soon as possible, though. In addition to the break, the fall splintered his arm guard. He has fragments of it embedded like shrapnel. Here and here.”

T.K.’s arm moves, although he can’t feel anyone touching it.

“Tell me about the game,” he whispers, but Zack and Coach Carrerra are once more somewhere off to one side and can’t hear him. He attempts to turn his head. It refuses to respond. Only then does he realize he’s strapped, head, chest and legs, to the training table. He has wires running off his cheekbones and, judging by the feel, off his crown and the back of his skull as well. Out of the corner of his eye, he can make out a bank of analytical instruments, their gauges, needles and lights flashing and flickering with his every movement. Reflected in the polished chrome reflectors on the ceiling he can see Zack and Coach Carrerra examining the red squiggles on a strip chart recording gushing forth from a squatty machine.

“You’re right, Zack,” says the coach, tapping a cluster of peaks. “I’ll get him in a jit and over to Harv Med right away.”

“The game,” interjects T.K. with as much insistence as he can muster. “Tell me about the game.” Unfortunately, not all the words make it past his lips.

“What, the game?” says Zack inattentively. He is back to monitoring his instruments and not inclined to interrupt his work to deal with what he interprets to be an injured man’s incoherent ramblings.