Roller Ball Murder
Murder.
Our team stands in a row, twenty of us in salute as the corporation hymn is played by the band. We
view the hardwood oval track which offers us the bumps and rewards of mayhem: fifty yards long, thirty yards across the ends, high banked, and at the top of the walls the cannons which fire those frenzied twenty-pound balls-similar to bowling balls, made of ebonite-at velocities over three hundred miles an hour.
The balls careen around the track, eventually slowing and falling with diminishing centrifugal force, and as they go to ground or strike a player another volley fires. Here we are, our team: ten roller skaters, five motorbike riders, five runners (or clubbers). As the hymn plays, we stand erect and tough; eighty thousand sit watching in the stands and another two billion viewers around the world inspect the set of our jaws on .multivision.
The runners, those bastards, slip into their heavy leather gloves and shoulder their lacrosselike paddles-
with which they either catch the whizzing balls or bash the rest of us. The bikers ride high on the walls
(beware, mates, that's where the cannon shots are too hot to handle) and swoop down to help the runners at opportune times. The skaters, those of us with the juice for it, protest: we clog the way, try to keep the runners from passing us and scoring points, and become the fodder in the brawl. So two teams of us, forty in all, go skating and running and biking around the track while the big balls are fired in the same direction as we move-always coming up behind us to scatter and maim us-and the object of the game, fans, as if you didn't know, is for the runners to pass all skaters on the opposing team, field a ball, and pass it to a biker for one point. Those bikers, by the way, may give the runners a lift-in which case those of us on skates have our hands full overturning 175cc motorbikes.
No rest periods, no substitute players. If you lose a man, your team plays short. Today I turn my best side to the cameras. I'm Jonathan E, none other, and nobody passes me on the track.
I'm the core of the Houston team and for the two hours of play-no rules, no penalties once the first cannon fires-I'll level any bastard runner who raises a paddle at me.
We move: immediately there are pileups of bikes, skaters, referees, and runners, all tangled and
punching and scrambling when one of the balls zooms around the comer and belts us. I pick up momentum and heave an opposing skater into the infield at center ring; I'm brute speed today, driving, pushing up on the track, dodging a ball, hurtling downward beyond those bastard runners. Two runners do hand-to-hand combat and one gets his helmet knocked off in a blow which tears away half his face; the victor stands here too long admiring his work and gets wiped out by a biker who swoops down and flattens him. The crowd screams and I know the cameramen have it on an isolated shot and that viewers in Melbourne, Berlin, Rio, and L.A. are heaving with excitement in their easy chairs.
When an hour is gone I'm still wheeling along, naturally, though we have four team members out with
broken parts, one rookie maybe dead, two bikes demolished. The other team, good old London, is worse off.
One of their motorbikes roars out of control, takes a hit from one of the balls, and bursts into flame.
Wild cheering.
Cruising up next to their famous Jackie Magee, I time my punch. He turns in my direction, exposes the
ugly snarl inside his helmet, and I take him out of action. In that tiniest instant, I feel his teeth and bone
give way and the crowd screams approval. We have them now, we really have them, we do, and the score ends.
The years pass and the rules alter-always in favor of a greater crowd-pleasing carnage. I've been at
this more than fifteen years, amazing, with only broken arms and collarbones to slow me down, and I'm
not as spry as ever, but meaner-and no rookie, no matter how much in shape, can learn this slaughter
unless he comes out and takes me on in the real thing.
But the rules. I hear of games in Manila, now, or in Barcelona with no time limits, men bashing each
other until there are no more runners left, no way of scoring points. That's the coming thing. I hear of
Roller Ball Murder played with mixed teams, men and women, wearing tear-away jerseys which add a
little tit and vulnerable exposure to the action. Everything will happen. They'll change the rules until we
Before this century began, before the Great Asian war of the 1990s, before the corporations replaced
nationalism and the corporate police forces supplanted the world's armies, in the last days of American
football and the World Cup in Europe, I was a tough young rookie who knew all the rewards of this game.
Women: I had them all-even, pity, a good marriage once. I had so much money after my first trophies that I could buy houses and land and lakes beyond the huge cities where only the executive class was allowed. My photo, then, as now, was on the covers of magazines, so that my name and the name of the sport were one, and I was Jonathan E, no other, a survivor and much more in the bloodiest sport.
At the beginning I played for Oil Conglomerates, then those corporations became known as ENERGY;
I've always played for the team here in Houston, they've given me everything.
"How're you feeling?" Mr. Bartholemew asks me. He's taking the head of ENERGY, one of the most
powerful men in the world, and he talks to me like I'm his son.
"Feeling mean," I answer, so that he smiles.
He tells me they want to do a special on multivision about my career, lots of shots on the side screens
showing my greatest plays, and the story of my life, how ENERGY takes in such orphans, gives them work and protection, and makes careers possible.
"Really feel mean, eh?" Mr. Bartholemew asks again, and I answer the same, not telling him all that's
inside me because he would possibly misunderstand; not telling him that I'm tired of the long season, that I'm lonely and miss my wife, that I yearn for high, lost, important thoughts, and that maybe, just maybe, I've got a deep rupture in the soul.
An old buddy, Jim Cletus, comes by the ranch for the weekend. Mackie, my present girl, takes our
dinners out of the freezer and turns the rays on them; not so domestic, that Mackie, but she has enormous breasts and a waist smaller than my thigh.
Cletus works as a judge now. At every game there are two refereesclowns, whose job it is to see nothing
amiss-and the judge who records the points scored. Cletus is also on the International Rules Committee and
tells me they are still considering several changes.
"A penalty for being lapped by your own team, for one thing," he tells us. "A damned simple penalty,
too: they'll take off your helmet."
Mackie, bless her bosom, makes an O with her lips.
Cletus, once a runner for Toronto, fills up my oversized furniture and rests his hands on his bad knees.
"What else?" I ask him. "Or can you tell me?"
"Oh, just financial things. More bonuses for superior attacks. Bigger bonuses for being named World
All-Star-which ought to be good news for you again. And, yeah, talk of reducing the two-month off season. The viewers want more."
After dinner Cletus walks around the ranch with me. We trudge up the path of a hillside and the Texas
countryside stretches before us. Pavilions of clouds.
"Did you ever think about death in your playing days?" I ask, knowing I'm a bit too pensive for old Clete.
"Never in the game itself," he answers proudly. "Off the track-yeah, sometimes I never thought about
anything else."
We pause and take a good long look at the horizon.
"There's another thing going in the Rules Committee," he finally admits. "They're considering dropping
the time limit-at least, god help us, Johnny, the suggestion has come up officially."
I like a place with rolling hills. Another of my houses is near Lyons in France, the hills similar to these
although more lush, and I take my evening strolls there over an ancient battleground. The cities are too
much, so large and uninhabitable that one has to have a business passport to enter such immensities as New York.
"Naturally I'm holding out for the time limit," Cletus goes on. "I've played, so I know a man's limits.
Sometimes in that committee, Johnny, I feel like I'm the last moral man on earth sitting there and insisting that there should be a few rules."
The giant lighted boards circling above the track monitor our pace, record each separate fact of the
slaughter, and we have millions of fans-strange, it always seemed to me-who never look directly at the
action, but just study those statistics.
A multivision survey established this.
Before going to the stadium in Paris for our evening game, I stroll under the archways and along the
Seine.
Some of the French fans call to me, waving and talking to my bodyguards as well, so I become oddly
conscious of myself, conscious of my size and clothes and the way I walk. A curious moment.
I'm six-foot three inches and weigh 255 pounds. My neck is 18'/a inches. Fingers like a pianist. I wear
my conservative pinstriped jump suit and the famous flat Spanish hat. I am 34 years old now, and when I grow old, I think, I'll look a lot like the poet Robert Graves.
The most powerful men in the world are the executives. They run the major corporations which fix prices, wages, and the general economy, and we all know they're crooked, and they have almost unlimited power and money, but I have considerable power and money myself and I'm still anxious. What can I possibly want, I ask myself, except, possibly, more knowledge?
I consider recent history-which is virtually all anyone remembers-and how the corporate wars ended, so
that we settled into the Six Majors: ENERGY, TRANSPORT, FOOD, HOUSING, SERVICES, and
LUXURY. Sometimes I forget who runs what-for instance, now that the universities are operated by the
Majors (and provide the farm system for Roller Ball Murder), which Major runs them? SERVICES or
LUXURY? Music is one of our biggest industries, but I can't remember who administers it. Narcotic
research is now under FOOD, I know, though it used to be under LUXURY.
Anyway, I think I'll ask Mr. Bartholemew about knowledge. He's a man with a big view of the world,
with values, with memory. My team flings itself into the void while his team harnesses the sun, taps the sea, finds new alloys, and is clearly just a hell of a lot more serious.
The Mexico City game has a new wrinkle: they've changed the shape of the ball on us.
Cletus didn't even warn me-perhaps he couldn't-but here we are playing with a ball not quite round, its
center of gravity altered, so that it rumbles around the track in irregular patterns.
This particular game is bad enough because the bikers down here are getting wise to me; for years,
since my reputation was established, bikers have always tried to take me out of a game early. But early in the game I'm wary and strong and I'll always gladly take on a biker-even since they put shields on the
motorbikes so that we can't grab the handlebars. Now, though, these bastards know I'm getting older-still mean, but slowing down, as the sports pages say about me-so they let me bash it out with the skaters and runners for as long as possible before sending the bikers after me. Knock out Jonathan E, they say, and you've beaten Houston; and that's right enough, but they haven't done it yet. The fans down here, all low-class FOOD workers mostly, boil over as I manage to keep my cool-and
the oblong ball, zigzagging around at lurching speeds, hopping two feet off the track at times, knocks out virtually their whole team. Finally, some of us catch their last runner/clubber and beat him to a pulp, so that's it: no runners, no points. Those dumb FOOD workers file out of the stadium while we show off and score a few fancy and uncontested points. The score 1 feel wonderful, like pure brute speed.
Mackie is gone-her mouth no longer makes an O around my villa or ranch-and in her place is the new
one, Daphne. My Daphne is tall and English and likes photos-always wants to pose for me. Sometimes we get out our boxes of old pictures (mine as a player, mostly, and hers as a model) and look at ourselves, and it occurs to me that the photos spread out on the rug are the real us, our public and performing true selves, and the two of us here in the sitting room, Gaelic gray winter outside our window, aren't too real at all.
"Look at the muscles in your back!" Daphne says in amazement as she studies a shot of me at the
California beach-and it's as though she never before noticed.
After the photos, I stroll out beyond the garden. The brown waving grass of the fields reminds me of
Ella, my only wife, and of her soft long hair which made a tent over my face when we kissed.
I lecture to the ENERGY-sponsored rookie camp and tell them they can't possibly comprehend
anything until they're out on the track getting belted. My talk tonight concerns how to stop a biker who
wants to run you down. "You can throw a shoulder right into the shield," I begin. "And that way it's you or him."
The rookies look at me as though I'm crazy.
"Or you can hit the deck, cover yourself, tense up, and let the bastard flip over your body," I go on,
counting on my fingers for them and doing my best not to laugh. "Or you can feint, sidestep up hill, and
kick him off the trackwhich takes some practice and timing."
None of them knows what to say. We're sitting in the infield grass, the track lighted, the stands empty,
and their faces are filled with stupid awe. "Or if a biker comes at you with good speed and balance," I
continue, "then naturally let the bastard by-even if he carries a runner. That runner, remember, has to
dismount and field one of the new odd-shaped balls which isn't easyand you can usually catch up."
The rookies begin to get a smug look on their faces when a biker bears down on me in the
demonstration period. Brute speed. I jump to one side, dodge the shield, grab the bastard's arm and separate him from his machine in one movement. The bike skids away. The poor biker's shoulder is out of socket.
"Oh yeah," I say, getting back to my feet. "I forgot about that move."
Toward midseason when I see Mr. Bartholemew again he has been deposed as the chief executive at
ENERGY. He is still very important, but lacks some of the old certainty; his mood is reflective, so that I
decide to take this opportunity to talk about what's bothering me.
We lunch in Houston Tower, viewing an expanse of city. A ice Beef Wellington and Burgundy. Daphne
sits there like a stone, probably magining that she's in a movie.
"Knowledge, ah, I see," Mr. Bartholemew replies in response to my topic. "What're you interested in,
Jonathan? History? The arts?"
"Can I be personal with you?"
This makes him slightly uncomfortable. "Sure, naturally," he answers easily, and although Mr.
Bartholemew isn't especially one to inspire confession I decide to blunder along.
"I began in the university," I remind him. "That was-let's see-more than seventeen years ago. In those
days we still had books and I read some, quite a few, because I thought I might make an executive."
"Jonathan, believe me, I can guess what you're going to say," Mr. Bartholemew sighs, sipping the
Burgundy and glancing at Daphne. "I'm one of the few with real regrets about what happened to the books.
Everything is still on tapes, but it just isn't the same, is it? Nowadays only the computer specialists read the tapes and we're right back in the Middle Ages when only the monks could read the Latin script."
"Exactly," I answer, letting my beef go cold. "Would you like me to assign
you a specialist?" "No, that's not exactly it."
"We have the great film libraries: you could get a permit to see anything you want. The Renaissance.
Greek philosophers. I saw a nice summary film on the life and thought of Plato once."
"All I know," I say with hesitation, "is Roller Ball Murder." "You don't want out of the
game?" he asks warily.
"No, not at all. It's just that I want-god, Mr. Bartholemew, I don't know how to say it: I want-God.
He offers a blank look. "I want more".
"But not things in the world," I add. "More for me".
He heaves a great sigh, leans back, and allows the steward to refill his glass. Curiously, I know that he
understands; he is a man of sixty, enormously wealthy, powerful in our most powerful executive class, and behind his eyes is the deep, weary, undeniable comprehension of the life he has lived.
"Knowledge," he tells me, "either converts to power or it converts to melancholy. Which could you
possibly want, Jonathan? You power. You have status and skill and the whole masculine dream many
of us would like to have. And in Roller Ball Murder there's no room for melancholy, is there? In the game the mind exists for the body, to make a harmony of havoc, right? Do you want to change that? Do you wantthe mind to exist for itself alone? I don't think you actually want that, do you?"
"I really don't know," I admit.
"I'll get some permits, Jonathan. You can see video films, learn something about reading tapes, if
you want."
"I don't think I really any power," I say, still groping.
"Oh, come on. What do you say about that?" he asks, turning to Daphne. "He definitely has power," she
answers with a wan smile.
Somehow the conversation drifts away from me; Daphne, on cue, like the good spy for the corporation
she probably is, begins feeding Mr. Bartholemew lines and soon, oddly enough, we're discussing my
upcoming game with Stockholm.
A hollow space begins to grow inside me, as though fire is eating out a hole. The conversation concerns
the end of the season, the All-Star Game, records being set this year, but my disappointment-in what,
exactly, I don't even know-begins to sicken me.
Mr. Bartholemew eventually asks what's wrong.
"The food," I answer. "Usually I have good digestion, but maybe not today."
In the locker room the dreary late-season pall takes us. We hardly speak among ourselves, now, and like
soldiers or gladiators sensing what lies ahead, we move around in these sickening surgical odors of the
locker room.
Our last training and instruction this year concerns the delivery of deathblows to opposing players; no
time now for the tolerant shoving and bumping of yesteryear. I consider that I,possess two good weapons: because of my unusually good balance on skates, I can often shatter my opponent's knee with a kick; also, I have a good backhand blow to the ribs and heart, if, wheeling along side by side with some bastard, he raises an arm against me. If the new rules change removes a player's helmet, of course, that's death; as it is right now (there are rumors, rumors every day about what new version of RBM we'll have next) you go for the windpipe, the ribs or heart, the diaphragm, or anyplace you don't break your hand.
Our instructors are a pair of giddy Oriental gentlemen who have all sorts of anatomical solutions for us
and show drawings of the human figure with nerve centers painted in pink.
"What you do is this," says Moonpie, in parody of these two. Moonpie is a fine skater in his fourth
season and fancies himself an old-fashioned drawling Texan. "What you do is hit 'em on the jawbone and drive it up into their ganglia."
"Their what"? I ask, giving Moonpie a grin.
"Their goddamned Bunch of nerves right here underneath the ear. Drive their jawbones into that
mess of nerves and it'll ring their bells sure."
Daphne is gone now, too, and in this interim before another companion arrives, courtesy of all my
friends and employers at ENERGY, Ella floats back into my dreams and daylight fantasies.
I was a corporation child, some executive's bastard boy, I always preferred to think, brought up in the
Galveston section of the city. A big kid, naturally, athletic and strong-and this, according to my theory,
gave me healthy mental genes, too, because I take it now that strong in body is strong in mind: a man with brute speed surely also has the capacity to mull over his life. Anyway, I married at age fifteen while I worked on the docks for Oil Conglomerates. Ella was a secretary, slim with long brown hair, and we managed to get permits to both marry and enter the university together. Her fellowship was in General Electronics-she was clever, give her that-and mine was in Roller Ball Murder. She fed me well that firstyear, so I put on thirty hard pounds and at night she soothed my bruises (was she a spy, too, I've sometimes wondered, whose job it was to prime the bull for the charge?) and perhaps it was because she was my first woman ever, eighteen years old, lovely, that I've never properly forgotten.
She left me for an executive, just packed up and went to Europe with him. Six years ago I saw them at a
sports banquet where I was presented an award: there they were, smiling and being nice, and I asked the only one question, just one, "You two ever had children?" It gave me odd satisfaction that they had appliedfor a permit, but had been denied.
Ella, love: one does consider: did you beef me up and break my heart in some great design of corporate
society?
There I was, whatever, angry and hurt. Beyond repair, I thought at the time. And the hand which stroked Ella soon dropped all the foes of Houston. I take sad stock of myself in this quiet period before another woman arrives; I'm smart enough, I know that: I had to be to survive. Yet, I seem to know nothing-and can feel the hollow spaces in my own heart. Like one of those computer specialists, I have my own brutal technical know-how; I know what today means, what tomorrow likely holds, but maybe it's because the books are gone-Mr. Bartholemew was right, it's a shame they're transformed-that I feel so vacant. If I didn't remember my Ella-this I realize-I wouldn't even want to remember because it's love I'm recollecting as well as those old university days.
Recollect, sure: I read quite a few books that year with Ella and afterward, too, before turning
professional in the game. Apart from all the volumes about how to get along in business, I read the history of the kings of England, that pillars of wisdom book by T. E. Lawrence, all the forlorn novels, some Rousseau, a bio of Thomas Jefferson, and other odd bits. On tapes now, all that, whirring away in a cool basement someplace.
The rules crumble once more.
At the Tokyo game, we discover that there will be three oblong balls in play at all times.
Some of our most experienced players are afraid to go out on the track. Then, after they're coaxed and
threatened and finally consent to join the flow, they fake injury whenever they can and sprawl in the infield like rabbits. As for me, I play with greater abandon than ever and give the crowd its money's worth. TheTokyo skaters are either peering over their shoulders looking for approaching balls when I smash them, or, poor devils, they're looking for me when a ball takes them out of action.
One little bastard with a broken back flaps around for a moment like a fish, then shudders and dies.
Balls jump at us as though they have brains.
But fate carries me, as I somehow know it will; I'm a force field, a destroyer. I kick a biker into the path
of a ball going at least two hundred miles an hour. I swerve around a pileup of bikes and skaters, ride
high on the track, zoom down, and find a runner/clubber who panics and misses with a roundhouse
swing of his paddle; without much ado, I belt him out of play with the almost certain knowledge-I've
felt it before-that he's dead before he hits the infield.
One ball flips out of play soon after being fired from the cannon, jumps the railing, sails high, and
plows into the spectators. Beautiful.
I take a hit from a ball, one of the three or four times I've ever been belted. The ball is riding low on the
track when it catches me and I sprawl like a baby. One bastard runner comes after me, but one of our bikers chases him off. Then one of their skaters glides by and takes a shot at me, but I dig him in the groin and discourage him, too.
Down and hurting, I see Moonpie killed. They take off his helmet, working slowly-it's like slow motion
and I'm writhing and cursing and unable to help-and open his mouth on the toe of some bastard skater's
boot. Then they kick the back of his head and knock out all his teeth-which rattle downhill on the track.
Then kick again and stomp; his brains this time. He drawls a last groaning good-bye while the cameras
record it.
And later I'm up, pushing along once more, feeling bad, but knowing everyone else feels the same; I have that last surge of energy, the one I always get when I'm going good, and near the closing gun I manage a
nice move; grabbing one of their runners with a headlock, I skate him off to limbo, bashing his face with my free fist, picking up speed until he drags behind like a dropped flag, and disposing of him in front of a ball which carries him off in a comic flop. Oh, god, god.
Before the All-Star game, Cletus comes to me with the news I expect: this one will be a no-time-limit extravaganza in New York, every multivision set in the world tuned in. The bikes will be more high-powered, four oblong balls will be in play simultaneously, and the referees will blow the whistle on any sluggish player and remove his helmet as a penalty.
Cletus is apologetic.
"With those rules, no worry," I tell him. "It'll go no more than an hour and we'll all be dead."
Gertrudis stock. This is probably the ultimate spectacle of my wealth: my own beef cattle in a day when
only a few special members of the executive class have any meat to eat with the exception of mass-
produced fish. Cletus is so impressed with my cattle that he keeps going on this afternoon and seems so
pathetic to me, a judge who doesn't judge, the pawn of a committee, another feeble hulk of an old RBM
player.
"You owe me a favor, Clete," I tell him. "Anything," he answers, not looking me
in the eyes.
I turn the cart up a lane beside my rustic rail fence, an archway of oak trees overhead and the early
spring bluebonnets and daffodils sending up fragrances from the nearby fields. Far back in my thoughts isthe awareness that I can't possibly last and that I'd like to be buried out here-burial is seldom allowed
anymore, everyone just incinerated and scattered-to become the mulch of flowers.
"I want you to bring Ella to me," I tell him. "After all these years, yeah: that's what I want. You arrange itand don't give me any excuses, okay?"
We meet at the villa near Lyons in early June, only a week before the AllStar Game in New York, and I
think she immediately reads something in my eyes which helps her to love me again. Of course I love her: I realize, seeing her, that I have only a vague recollection of being alive at all, and that was a long time ago, in another century of the heart when I had no identity except my name, when I was a simple dock worker,before I ever saw all the world's places or moved in the rumbling nightmares of Roller Ball Murder.
She kisses my fingers. "Oh," she says softly, and her face is filled with true wonder, "What's happened
to you, Johnny?"
A few soft days. When our bodies aren't entwined in lovemaking, we try to remember and tell each
other everything: the way we used to hold hands, how we fretted about receiving a marriage permit, how the books looked on our shelves in the old apartment in River Oaks. We strain, at times, trying to recollect the impossible; it's true that history is really gone, that we have no families or touchstones, that our short personal lives alone judge us, and I want to hear about her husband, the places they've lived, the furniture in her house, anything. I tell her, in turn, about all the women, about Mr. Bartholemew and Jim Cletus, about the ranch in the hills outside Houston.
Come to me, Ella. If I can remember us, I can recollect meaning and time. It would be nice, I think,
once, to imagine that she was taken away from me by some malevolent force in this awful age, but I know the truth of that: she went away, simply, because I wasn't enough back then, because those were the days before I yearned for anything, when I was beginning to live to play the game. But no matter. For a few days she sits on my bed and I touch her skin like a blind man groping back over the years.
On our last morning together she comes out in her traveling suit with her hair pulled up underneath a furcap. The softness has faded from her voice and she smiles with efficiency, as if she has just come back to the practical world; I recall, briefly, this scene played out a thousand years ago when she explained that she
was going away with her executive.
She plays like a biker, I decide; she rides up there high above the turmoil, decides when to swoop down,
and makes a clean kill.
"Good-bye, Ella," I say, and she turns her head slightly away from my kiss so that I touch her fur cap
with my lips.
"I'm glad I came," she says politely. "Good luck, Johnny."
New York is frenzied with what is about to happen.
The crowds throng into Energy Plaza, swarm the ticket offices at the stadium, and wherever I go people
are reaching for my hands, pushing my bodyguards away, trying to touch my sleeve as though I'm some
ancient religious figure, a seer or prophet.
Before the game begins I stand with my team as the corporation hymns are played. I'm brute speed
today, I tell myself, trying to rev myself up; yet, adream in my thoughts, I'm a bit unconvinced.
A chorus of voices joins the band now as the music swells.
The game, the game, the game the music rings, and I can feel my lips move with the words, singing.
William Harrison, Rollerball Murder.
Esquire Magazine, September 1973. Illustration by Charles White III.
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