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The Baseball Game Memory
Anders uses his final moments to contemplate a previously forgotten childhood memory: a pickup baseball game with a group of neighborhood boys. The last two to arrive are Coyle and his cousin, who is visiting from out of town. Coyle’s cousin is asked what position he wants to play, and he says shortstop: “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders recalls being enamored with the unconventional phrasing. He contemplated asking Coyle’s cousin to repeat himself but chose not to because he did not want the other boys to think that he was making fun of the new kid. On the contrary, Anders was delighted by the final two words “they is” because of their “pure unexpectedness,” and he likens them to “music.” Anders recalls how he walked to the field “in a trance” while softly repeating the phrase “they is” to himself.
This memory, the only memory Anders recalls at the moment of his death, symbolizes a childlike optimism and a general zest for life that Anders has since lost. The reader already knows that Anders is a book critic and that he used to be an avid consumer of poetry and literature. It’s clear that this day on the baseball field was a foundational moment for Anders; it forced him to contemplate the power of language, perhaps for the first time. It’s telling that Anders has long since forgotten this moment, suggesting he has descended into a life of cynicism, apathy, and misanthropy. The child Anders, who finds delight in words and doesn’t wish the other boys to think that he is mocking Coyle’s cousin, is a far cry from the adult Anders, who regards others’ words with contempt and can’t stop himself from mocking them even at the expense of his own life.
The Bullet
Aptly, the bullet that enters Anders’s skull, prompting his vivid recollection of the baseball game in his youth, symbolizes death. Though Anders has “plenty of leisure” to look back on this resurfaced memory, seeing as the bullet has entered “brain time,” his death, like all deaths, is inevitable. Therefore, the bullet represents not just Anders’s death, but the concept of death itself: “it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt.” The narrator insists this “can’t be helped,” and though Anders has time for now to look back on a moment in time forty years previously, “in the end [the bullet] will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
