The Bubble
“The Bubble” was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize.
The story imagines the experience of a closeted NHL player, competing in the 2021 Stanley Cup Finals in Edmonton’s COVID-free “bubble”, trapped in his own bubbles of fear and privilege while he observes the difficult life of regular people in the rest of the locked-down city.
The Bubble
They said there would be mountains, but all I see are fields - stretching to the horizon in every direction, flat as freshly Zambonied ice.
I stand at my hotel room window and watch the storm roll in. You can always see them hours before they arrive, building up in big menacing mounds of cloud like a swarm of locusts or an enemy air force about to descend on the city. I feel the electricity in the air, close my eyes and sense the skyscraper swaying slightly around me. Maybe this next storm will be strong enough to topple the tower, and the whole building will come crumbling down, and they’ll search the rubble for my body but never find me.
My phone buzzes, breaking me out of this grim fantasy. I turn away from the approaching storm and throw myself across my bed, picking up the little glass tyrant. 8:15 p.m.
I turned off notifications for almost everything. Before the playoffs, I had about 5k followers on the Instagram account that the team’s social media manager set up for me, which I never posted to. Now there are over 750k, people liking and commenting on anything I post. At first I did what the PR people told me, posting behind-the-scene shots of life in the bubble - my teammates playing basketball down in the plaza, or axe-throwing during one of our field trips. But as the weeks wore on I’ve taken perverse satisfaction in posting more and more banal, inscrutable things: a grainy shot of a hotel hallway, a blurry pic of the clouds outside my window. It doesn’t matter. They all get thousands of likes.
I ignore the pulsing red blister of notifications on Insta and see the one notification that slipped through my Do Not Disturb filter - a terse text message from dad: good luck tomorrow. You’re gonna crush it.
This year has been crazy. For a while it didn’t look like there would be any playoffs at all. But then the league announced that we would play in this bubble, up in Edmonton, in the middle of nowhere.
They say we’ve been here for weeks, but who knows how long it’s really been? My body can’t feel time anymore. Every day is either a training day, a game day, or a rec day with some kind of group activity. We go on isolated field trips to play golf, or soccer at the stadium, or just kick around the hotel playing ping pong and Settlers of Catan.
There’s a strange dread bubbling under the surface, everyone obliquely aware of how surreal and artificial our situation is. I can sense the tension in my teammates. I’m watching them unravel in real time, the stress and the isolation gobbling at the edges of their minds like an encroaching flood.
But not me. I am calm.
When I was a kid, my favourite thing in the world was going to the zoo. My brother hated it - he’s always loved taking moral stances, and he decided early on that zoos were evil and all the animals should be released. So whenever I got to pick the activity, on birthdays or summer holidays, my mom would do something with him and it would just be me and my dad.
I loved the elephants best. They would look at me with this deep, steady knowledge in their eyes. They were so calm, at peace with themselves. Would they have preferred to be out of the zoo? Yes, probably. Of course. But it wasn’t safe outside of the zoo. And the elephants knew that.
I look at the text from my dad for a minute, then type: thanks. It feels inadequate, so I add a little trophy and a fingers-crossed emoji.
I’ve always been a competent, solid player. The kind of player that teams need - nothing flashy, but consistent. I was never destined to be a Gretzky or a Lemieux. But for some reason, here in this bubble, I’ve been playing the best hockey of my life. I don’t even know how many points I have now, but it’s some kind of come-from-behind record for late-season gains. Out on the ice, in an arena full of empty seats, I’m unstoppable. Maybe that’s what spurred this hot streak. I’ve never played better, not with thirty thousand fans screaming my name. All it took was a global pandemic.
I should put my phone down on the nightstand, have a shower, go to sleep. Tomorrow is the big day. The culmination of years and years of work.
But my fingers flick through my phone, swiping four pages deep, past a chocolate box of colourful icons that are mostly there just to create distance. I open the app, hidden strategically in the third tab of a Utilities folder, amongst useless apps like Compass and Apple Maps. A little yellow mask on a black background.
My profile is blank, but that doesn’t stop occasional taps and messages. I guess it’s such a small pool here that any fresh meat - even faceless, mystery meat - attracts the circling sharks. My phone buzzes instantly, insistent. A couple dozen messages, all variations of each other.
U seem close
Marriott?
Hey man
Looking?
I scroll through the messages and feel the familiar rush, the thrill, the little flowers blooming deep in my gut. Many of the profiles are also blank, or muscular torsos that may or may not belong to the person behind the keyboard. But one of them stands out.
Most guys get bored quickly and stop responding. So do I, if I’m being honest. After the initial rush of swapping pics, the rote back-and-forth about what we’re into, things cool off. When it becomes clear that I’m not going to drop everything and come fuck them, the conversation fizzles out.
But this guy’s been messaging me on and off for weeks, conversations that build from little tastes of horniness to feasts of elaborate fantasy. Don’t get me wrong, he sends me pics that get me insanely hot and instantly hard. But he also asks me questions, and he’s still interested even after weeks of me not actually meeting up with him.
What’s up, my fair maiden?
He started calling me this after I admitted to having a dream where I was a princess trapped in a tower, and he cast himself as the knight who would come rescue me. I don’t know who the dragon is. Coronavirus, I guess.
Just heading to bed. Early morning tomorrow. You?
He works at a grocery store a few blocks away from the arena. He’s been there for the whole pandemic, an essential worker.
Getting off shift soon. Gonna bring a bunch of the food I’m supposed to throw out to Pekiwewin. Hope I don’t get caught.
He’s told me about this homeless camp run by Indigenous people. The city shut down a bunch of shelters because of COVID, so people just started camping in a park near the river. Apparently there are hundreds of people there now. He brings them food from the store even though he’s not supposed to.
That’s amazing. You truly are a knight in shining armor.
I worry that it sounds sarcastic, so I add a series of raised-fist emojis in every skin tone, to show solidarity.
I’ll be free after, if you finally want to get together.
He sends me three more photos, each one hotter than the last. Boy knows how to take a nude. I feel six months of pent-up desire raging like a wildfire beneath my skin.
Mmm, I can’t wait.
I send him the pics that I took this afternoon when I was flirting with someone else. He replies immediately.
It’s all yours. I’ll be at my place all night. Or you could invite me over...
I start typing different responses, then delete all of them.
This year is unprecedented in many ways. But it’s not a new experience for me, fighting against my appetites, pouring cold water on my fire, killing my desire. Not just the urge to fuck, but the urge to feel a guy’s arms wrap around me, to nuzzle the back of his neck as he presses himself back against me. I had that urge for years and years, and I fought against it with every deep breath and scalding shower and extra rep at the gym and break-of-dawn run. I hunted down my lustful impulses and murdered them, until I was as cold as the ice I skated on to distract myself from these sinful thoughts.
When the dam finally broke and I finally gave in - an awkward, fumbling night in a guy’s dorm room - I swore that I’d never do it again. And I didn’t. For six months. Then another promise to myself and another four months of intense self-denial. Then two months. Then two weeks. Then eventually I was doing it all the time - never the same guy for any extended period (I had no room in my life for a boyfriend, I just had an itch to scratch every so often).
I never expected to go back to my old high-school pattern - letting off steam with the regularity of a geyser, getting hot to cool down so I won’t act on my impulses. But then 2020 happened, and here we are. A decade back in time.
Busy now. I’ll let you know later.
I put down my phone and roll over on my bed, letting out a deep breath. I glance out the window and see that the sun has set, the winds have risen. The storm has almost arrived.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like to open up to the team. This bubble has brought us closer together than ever before. I’ve heard confessions that I never expected - substance issues, relationship troubles, disappointed dreams. If there’s any time for me to do it, it would be now. But something always holds me back.
It’s not that I don’t trust my teammates. They’re great guys. It’s just that I’m aware of them as one big group that I’m only somewhat part of. The Venn diagram of “NHL Team” and “Heterosexuality” is pretty much a perfect circle. Except for me. I’m the only one that’s sitting just on the edge of the circle, in my own little pocket universe, inextricably connected to them but still apart from them.
Most of them would probably be fine with it. Hell, some of them must suspect. But honestly I think most of them are just blind. But it’s not them I’m worried about. I’m not ready to be the first, or the face of some movement. I’ve seen the scrutiny and the pressure placed on the few Black players who knelt to support Black Lives Matter. I’m lucky that I’m able to hide, at least. I always hated having to perform for a crowd - on the ice, in school plays, whatever. I just want to do my job.
I hate doing interviews - an unavoidable consequence of my newfound success. I was never noticeable enough to do an interview before. But now the media relations team trots me out on Press Day, so all the journalists on Zoom can ask me repetitive, obvious questions.
Earlier today I had a presser with a bunch of them, a pre-final interview about my mindset heading into this last game.
“We’ve heard a lot about the struggle, the difficulties of being in this bubble in terms of mentality and mental health,” one of them asked. “How are you holding up?”
I looked at all the little rectangles on the screen, the dozen journalists, the masked PR people in the room with me, behind the camera. I stared into its black unblinking eye.
“I love this bubble,” I said. “I’m doing just fine in this bubble. I’m more resilient than my teammates. They can’t stand being so distant from people, being all alone with themselves in their rooms at night. But I’m fine. Because I’ve been in a bubble my whole life. It used to be big. I had to keep everyone very far away, so nobody could glimpse the real me. But I got used to it. I grew into it. It got smaller every day. Until it stretched across my body. Tighter and tighter around my skin. An invisible plastic coating. Across my face. Down my throat. And the plastic hardened. A thin, lustrous exoskeleton. Now, everyone looks at me and sees themselves reflected off my bright surface, smiling and shining and gliding through the day. And inside, I have a whole world to myself, while everyone goes on interacting with their reflections on my shell. A bubble traps you inside. It suffocates you. But it keeps you safe, when everyone outside is a threat. It protects you, from a nasty, hateful world. I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be.”
Except of course I didn’t say any of that. Obviously.
Not because I’m afraid. But because they don’t deserve to know.
Rain starts to lash against the window. The storm hits the city.
I open the addictive app and flick back through all the photos he’s sent me. He really is beautiful, this fiery Canadian boy. It would be so easy to message him, to fall into his arms.
Instead I jerk off to his nudes, imagining his lips on my skin. I take a long hot shower after, thinking nothing at all. I crawl into bed and fall asleep, lulled by the rumble of thunder...
I wake up hours later. I’m not sure what time it is.
The night sky shimmers like an oil spill, an iridescent rainbow lacquer. The storm is over. The world is calm.
I get out of bed, and I realize that I’m wearing my jersey, my pads, my skates. I creep out of my room, go down to the kitchen, sneak out a service door.
And just like that I’m beyond the perimeter, alone in this unfamiliar city for the first time. I skate along the empty streets, feeling a rush of adrenaline. I’m out. I’m free.
I meet him in a gigantic, empty grocery store, a cathedral of food. He waits at the end of an aisle lined with hand sanitizer and condoms, blowing big pink bubbles of gum.
We make love all night, on his bed, on his floor. He whimpers my name, which I tell him without fear.
At dawn, he leads me to the roof of his building, and we watch the sun rise from behind the snow-capped mountains in the distance. I look over at the bubble - the hotel, the arena, my home.
As the morning sun strikes the silver dome, the arena spreads open like a flower. Out its gates parades a cavalcade of animals: sharks and bears, coyotes and panthers, ducks and orcas and penguins. A zoo, emptied. A bubble, burst.