The Ongoing Diary of Neal Casey

The “Walters” Apartment

(February 2020)

I was standing in the “Walters” apartment in Kure, which is in Hiroshima prefecture. It is the ex-home of the Kure Arsenal, a team that won the Neo-Tokyo cup just three seasons ago but has now been disbanded in financial ruin. I was alone this time, Ichihara having decided to stay home and go over the data again.

The apartment was just like the rest.

Actually, the resemblances were eerie things of themselves.

All the fake names kept coming to me.

Charlie Cooper, Shannon Franklin, Dylan Ortega, Donald Walters, Rick Watts.

I thought it was ironic that I came to the first “Cooper” apartment trying to discover “how” Cooper had done it, and now, after having visited each of the five all I really had accomplished was to learn about “who” this “Charlie Cooper” was.  He was a young man with a disciplined mind when it came to appearance and people, but left his bathroom and kitchen in disarray. He was a person, perhaps, without an individual identity. A shape shifter in a way. And he was a sports addict.

Still, I wanted to know more.  How did he get himself into this?  What was his real name.  Like almost everyone who cared about baseball, I wanted to …

Understand.

I spent a good half-hour staring at this version of the sports memorabilia wall, trying to squeeze some kind of truth out of it.

The whole thing just felt weird in a way I couldn’t shake.

Charleston Statesmen, Arlington Bureaucrats, Washintgon Nationals, St. Louis Browns … those were all teams I knew of.  And there were others.  The Houston Texans from American football, a US Soccer Club logo.  College logos were scattered around the place, and pictures of ballplayers.  But so many of the logos seemed to be from smaller, out of the way teams.  The Miami Tropics? I’ve been in Florida a lot, but I never heard of them. The Worcester Loggers? Utah River Rats?

I sighed to stretch my lungs more than anything.

My eyes caught an “Arizona Thunderbirds” logo. Basketball. I thought about the dunking man in Charlie Cooper’s hutch.

On a whim, I pulled out my phone and searched for them.

Not a thing showed up.  At least nothing about a sports team.

Strange.

So I tried another, and another, and another.

Finally, I gave up and dialed Yuni.

“Ichihara,” his voice came from the other side.

“I think I’ve got something here, coach. But I don’t know what it is.”

“Tell me.”

“These teams,” I said. “The ones on the walls of all the MSB’s walls.”

“What about them?”

“They don’t exist.”

Ichihara was silent for a moment.

“What do you mean, they don’t exist?”

“I mean, they are ghost teams. A lot them anyway.  These teams do not exist now, nor do they ever appear to have existed at any time ever. Search them yourself if you don’t believe me. Here are some team names.”

And I rattled three of them off the wall.

Ichihara was silent for a moment again.

“I see,” he finally said. “I’ll get someone on it.”