FUN. GO. 

 

He said it aloud, one syllable at a time.

 

Fun. Go.

 

He liked the sound of it, the taste of the word on his tongue.

 

Fun—go.

 

But why fungo? Why was he thinking about fungo? And what the hell was a fungo anyway? He knew he should know, the meaning was on the tip of his tongue, but …

 

He looked at his tongue in the mirror. Pinched the tip between his fingers and pulled it out like the dentist. He couldn’t see anything hidden behind it or under it. Something had been on the tip of his tongue a moment ago, but now … nothing.

 

He let his tongue go. It curled back in his mouth and immediately began forming the word again.

 

Fungo.

 

How did a word like that get into the language? Was it because the word was so much fun to say that it had “fun” as one of its syllables? It’s fun to say fungo! That’s silly. Otherwise every word with the syllable “fun” in it would be fun to say, and that couldn’t be.

 

Could it?

 

Fungus was just as fun to say as fungo, but he couldn’t remember any other words with “fun” as a syllable. Funeral came to mind, but the sound was so different he couldn’t see any connection between fun and funeral.

 

Suddenly he remembered a joke from his undergraduate days. They’d been reading Sam Beckett’s bizarre novel Watt about a man, a former butler he thought, who was a prisoner in his own room because he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Too many choices, that was it. Every time the butler started to formulate a plan to leave, he was overwhelmed by the variety of ways in which he could do it. The butler spent his days trying to list all the various routes of departure from the room—to the bed first, then the window, the dresser, the closet, and then the door; or to the door, then the window, the dresser, the closet and the bed; to the closet, the bed, window, the door and then the dresser; the dresser, the closet, the bed, the door, the window … 

 

“Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” he said aloud. A perfect Beckett conundrum: an endless listing of options that makes any action at all pointless. So the overwhelmed butler just stayed in bed. 

 

He looked around at his own surroundings, his tiny room in the Men’s Wing of the Camarillo State Hospital. Yes, he thought, he could appreciate Beckett’s character’s dilemma. Nothing to do but name the meaningless choices.

 

But why had he been thinking of Beckett at all? Ah yes, because of the joke about “fun.”

 

Beckett, he and his college buddies used to say, put the fun back in fundament.

 

A sophomoric joke if ever there was one. Still, he found himself smiling. Then a chuckle erupted and before he could stop himself he was actually laughing. 

 

At what? A bad pun from 40 years ago? Well, that was reason to laugh, wasn’t it?

 

So he did. He laughed so hard he fell off the bed and spilled all the cards on the floor.

 

The cards!

 

Think of all the possibilities! Excitement welled up inside him. Like Beckett’s butler, he began to calculate how many different ways the cards could be ordered. One hundred some cards, so that makes how many combinations? 100 factors? Was that the right word? He couldn’t remember. But he thought he remembered how he used to figure out the number of possibilities—permutations! that was the word—in the baseball games he invented to amuse himself. But he wasn’t sure anymore. Numbers and their functions seemed to have been scrubbed out of his gray cells. How did they do that? 

 

Okay, he said to himself, let’s reconstruct this from scratch. If you have 2 cards, A and B, there’s only two possible orders, two permutations: AB and BA.

 

And if you have 3 cards, there are six permutations (it was coming back to him!): ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA. 

 

Factorial, that was the word he was looking for a moment ago! Not factors, but factorials. 2 factorial is 2, and 3 factoral is 6, and 4 factorial … Wow, the numbers increase so quickly. 

 

4 factorial is 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24. Right? He thought so. He remembered that to compute the number of permutations possible, you factor the number of items from which you’ll construct the list. (Factor? Was that the right word? Didn’t matter, the results were what he wanted, not the word.)

 

So if he had roughly 100 cards, he would have roughly 100 permutations. Oh my, that’s huge. 

 

100 x 99 x 98 x 97 x 96 … 2 x 1

 

Sufferin’ Sugar Santos! He could never calculate that. Nor could he ever figure them all out. 

 

He looked at the cards where they’d fallen on the floor. How many teams did he have there? Four or five, he thought, depending on whether he had a full 25 man roster for each of 4 teams, or 5 teams with 20 players. So how many lineups could be made from a 25-man roster?

 

Well, he thought, you’d want to separate out the pitchers. Only one of them per lineup. And since roughly half of any roster is pitchers, that would leave 12 or 13 potential hitters. Something about that figure 12 sounded right to him. He vaguely remembered looking over rosters somewhere to make sure he had 12 pitchers and 12 hitters at least. Where had he done that?

 

Some things were returning to the electrified memory cells in his brain, but not everything. Not yet.

 

He looked around his room. He tried to see it from Beckett’s butler’s point of view. A series of optional moves. He could sit on the bed, stand AT the dresser, sit ON the dresser (though he’d have a hell of time getting up there at his age), stand in the closet, lie down in the closet (if he were found like that, he’d be moved to the observation ward where he could be watched 24/7), or stand at the door. Since the door was locked, he couldn’t leave, so these options didn’t interest him much. Besides, even if he could wander down the hallway, where could he go? The tv room, the Social Activities Room, a courtyard or the john. 4 options. 4 factorial. 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24. That’s what he was limited to, 24 different routes around this hospital. He was certain he’d already taken all 24 routes. Besides, none of them interested him. Not like the cards that lay scattered beside him on the floor. So he continued his calculations.

 

How many different lineups can be constructed from the usual 12 hitters on a team? (Leaving the ninth spot in the batting order for the pitcher and ignoring the possibility that there might be 13 hitters on a team. Thirteen, he sensed, would make his calculations a whole lot more difficult.)

 

12 players in 8 batting spots. Right there you have 96 different possibilities. Oh my. But if he used the factorial equation he’d just worked out, you’d have 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1, which was …

 

He did the calculations in his head, slowly, one at a time, until he came up with the figure …

 

40, 320! That can’t be right. Just 8 batting spots creates that many permutations? He didn’t trust his calculations, he wanted to confirm them with paper and pencil, but the orderlies had removed all his writing equipment after the shock treatments. They didn’t trust him.

 

He was fired up. Hadn’t felt this energized, this motivated, since … well, since before the youknowwhat. 

 

The Great Electrification. 

The Random Cellular Reorganization. 

The Impulse Disestablishmentification.

The Re-Regularization. 

 

They had plenty of names for it. Just the other day he’d heard one of the orderlies refer to it as The Patient’s Sal-i-vation. That was a good one. They all came out of the shock room drooling like hungry dogs.

 

Whatever you called it, it changed everything. Like electric lights at Wrigley. They said it was the same game of baseball after Wrigley Field got lights, but it wasn’t. Once they were able to play in the dark of the night, illuminated by a thousand bulbs lit by a current pumped from some power plant on the other side of Lake Michigan, well, it was NOT the same game.

 

And that’s how he felt. Lit up by the electroshocks, his brain was NOT the same brain he’d been getting by with before the therapy. No sir. This brain had oomph. This brain had juice. This brain was on fire, and he wanted to see how far it could go. He wanted to finish his calculations. But he needed to confirm with someone that he was figuring factorials the right way.

 

But who?

 

And how? He didn’t even know how long it was until the next orderly checked on him or brought him food. Was it dinner time? Or lunch time? Had he eaten breakfast yet? He had no idea. No memory of eating.

 

Holy Granny Hamner! I’m trying to work out lenghty factorials and I can’t even remember my last meal. What kind of brain is this they’ve left me?

 

He slapped his palm upside his head, a gesture he used to use to indicate his brain needed a little shaking up, a playful, even comic gesture in the days before. But this time, it just hurt.

 

Jumpin’ Jesus Alou! He held his head and waited for the wave of pain to pass. 

 

When it did, he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing. He looked around. He remembered the room, all right, but why was he on the floor? And what was this mess—

 

The cards! He remembered the cards! The cards would save him!

 

There was a knock at the door, and he knew lunch was being delivered. They knocked to let patients know the food cart was in the hall. In a moment, they’d find the keys and unclock his door. Breakfast, he remembered, had been toaster waffles that morning. They were soggy and cold. Lunch, he hoped, would be soup.

 

Wait a minute! A moment ago he couldn’t remember if it was lunchtime or breakfasttime or dinnertime. And now he knew lunch was being delivered. And what they’d served for breakfast. But he couldn’t remember how he’d spilled his cards on the floor. What was happening to him? He was remembering somethings and forgetting others.

 

Double Damn Dom Dimaggio, he said, I rather remember the cards, and what I was doing, than what crap they served for breakfast!

 

But he was smiling. He knew something was starting. Memories were shaking loose. He gave the side of his head another slap, just for good measure. He could feel the chemicals sloshing from one side of his brain to the other. Or he believed he could. As Sherlock Holmes used to say, “The game’s afoot!” It felt like a new beginning. And in the beginning …

 

… had always been …

 

… and always would be …

 

FUNGO BATS!

 

He remembered them too! The skinny little bat coaches used to shag flies to outfielders before a game. 

 

It was all coming back. Electrons were lining up in his head, reconnecting, sorting it all out like a reunion of old friends. Shake a few hands, repeat a few names, and we’re back in business, boys!

 

The door to his room opened. Lunch. Just like he’d expected. Only soup and crackers and ice tea, but to the old man with the reorganized gray matter it looked like … well, like salvation, like his ticket out, like Opening Day and the First Pitch and a win on the road all rolled into one.

 

Lunch was served and he knew it. And he knew that he knew it.

 

Wallopin’ Willie “Devil” Wells! First fungoes, then the names—the wondrous litany of baseball names—and eventually, inevitably he believed, the numbers. It would all arrive at his door like lunch. Served on a tray.

 

Just like spring training, he thought. Anything is possible.