The doorbell was ringing like an alarm, In a long, demanding scream, broken by the impatient stabs of someone’s frantic finger.

Leaping out of bed, Joe Thomas noticed the cold, pale sunlight of late morning and a clock on a distant spire marking the hour of ten. He had lifted weights at the gym till four A.M. and had left word not to expect him at the team facility till noon.

The white face ungroomed by panic, that confronted him when he threw the door open, was Paul DePodesta.

“He’s gone!” he cried.

“Who?”

“Alex Mack! He’s gone, quit, vanished, disappeared!”

Joe stood still for a moment, holding the belt of the dressing gown he had been tying; then, as the full knowledge reached him, his hands jerked the belt tight-as if snapping his body in two at the waistline while he burst out laughing. It was a sound of triumph.

DePodesta stared at him in bewilderment. “What’s the matter with you?” he gasped. “Haven’t you understood?”

“Come in, Paul,” Joe said, turning contemptuously, walking into the living room. “Oh yes, I’ve understood.”

“He’s quit! Gone! Gone like all the others! Left his pads, his helmet, his jockstrap, everything! Just vanished! Took some clothing and whatever he had in his locker – that’s all! No word, no note, no explanation! Sashi Brown called me from Columbus, but it’s all over ESPN! The news, I mean, the story! He can’t keep it quiet! He’s tried to, but…Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the twitterverse like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he’d gone, and then…before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! Tashaun Gipson, Mitchell Schwartz, Travis Benjamin, even Swagger the team dog! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all their contract incentives! Mack’s quit and the rest are quitting and the only guys we can get to replace them are scrubs like Alvin Bailey and Justin Tuggle and Rahim Fucking Moore! Do you understand what that means?”

“Do you?” Joe asked.

DePodesta had thrown his story at him, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off Joe’s face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; the effort had failed. “It’s a catastrophe! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that it’s a fatal blow? It will break the last of the fan base’s morale! We can’t let them vanish! You’ve got to bring them back!”

Joe’s smile disappeared.

“You can!” DePodesta cried. “You’re the only one who can! He’s your friend, isn’t he? You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!”

The way Joe now looked at him was worse than his smile – he looked as if he were seeing DePodesta naked and would not endure the sight much longer. “I can’t bring him back,” Joe said, not raising his voice. “And I wouldn’t, if I could. Now get out of here.”

“But the team-”

“Get out.”

Joe did not notice his exit. He stood alone in the middle of his living room, his head dropping, his shoulders sagging, while he was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Alex Mack. He wondered dimly why he should feel so glad that Mack had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse himself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in his mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He’s free, he’s out of their reach! – the other was like a prayer of dedication: We’ll be drafting in the top five again in 2017.

—

It was strange – Joe thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around the Browns training facility – that catastrophe had made them aware of Alex Mack with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value. Some spoke of him in shrill curses – others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them – some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.

The blogs, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: “It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Alex Mack’s desertion and to undermine team morale by the old-fashioned belief that some paycheck-sniffing glory boy’s achievements can be of more significance than those of the team.”

It had seemed hard to live through that month – yet now, as he looked at the team’s draft board, where Paul DePodesta had penciled in Mack’s replacement as coming in the fourth round in the form of a left fielder out of the University of South Carolina, the thought that Mack and Benjamin and Gipson and Schwartz had gone was still harder to bear. Now Joe felt as if his motor, too, had stopped. He went on, with the bright, pure glitter of a Capital One Bowl championship ring, which he kept in his pocket, as his last drop of fuel. He went on, protected from the world around him by a last armor: indifference.