It is when we have to shelter indoors for a year. I am alone in my studio apartment watching four basketball announcers on TV. They are between games and spaced apart around a table shaped like half a circle. They talk without looking at each other. Their voices sound hesitant, syrupy, and far away. They often shrug. In the absence of a game to announce they have turned to theory. They discuss how a player can move his feet to goad an opponent into risky shots. They offer scenarios where an underdog can win with strategies based around a weakness in the favored team's alignment on the floor. The announcers use far too many words for what they want to say. Maybe that is how people talk to each other. I can't remember. It's embarrassing. I don't know why they keep on with talk that somehow misses the unquantifiable truth of the game itself, its shouts and its sweat, and its pain. A man with a puffy white face earnestly weighs the play styles of two guards. He tries to articulate something particular about an unequal physical matchup. His sentences scatter apart before they mean what he wants. He has the power to release all of us from his thrall but instead he keeps failing on live TV. The tip-off for the next game is near. He talks with mounting excitement. He mentions West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, wondering at the name, turning it on his tongue. He calls Bob Huggins "Huggy Bear" and "Hugger" and finally "Hugs." The game has begun but the camera still doesn't shift away. Huggy Bear has to make tough calls. Hugger needs to take serious risks. Hugs should throw those big bodies right in the lane. The announcer's neck is red. I wonder if he's drunk. I turn off the TV. Maybe I recognize his insobriety because of my own. A fire engine wails past the window. My lower right eyelid is spasming. I can still smell the frozen burrito I've microwaved. I can almost imagine the heat of studio lights on his hair, the taste of his dry mouth, the forgetting that comes when markers of time collapse, an eternity of small bright rooms, how silence makes you listen to the sound of itself. What I mean is Bob Huggins, Hugger. Huggy Bear. Hugs.


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