Exhume and exhaust

It shouldn’t feel courageous or careful this many years later to name Rose, to speak with confidence and no caveats about the harm he did.

At the Knicks game this week it felt physically jarring to register Rose, see him walk in close proximity to me onto court.

I’d been watching the team warmup. Watched from the baseline as Taj Gibson flung himself in repeated boomerangs to the basket and dunked with ease, hanging off the rim each time to swing like a rollicking pendulum, laughing as he landed; as Kemba Walker went through the motions of shooting drills, making everything while idly chatting to his trainer, smiling as he shifted from three o’clock, to four, smiling as he worked all the way around the half court.

It surprised me, how disruptive it felt. How unsettling to a core and covert part of me, like barometric pressure. I even glanced around, skimming the impassive faces of security, of camera operators coiling their cords for the game, of the Knicks courtside reporter running through her lines, for conformation, but even if everyone hadn’t been sunk into their own pre-game cycles I don’t know how I would’ve asked, without explaining, are the hairs on the back of your neck standing up?

I left. Walked a half loop back down to Toronto’s side of the court and watched there. Mostly the Raptors wrap up but caught my eyes trailing back down to Rose and watching — for what? I have no idea — from a distance. Between her takes, Lindsay walked up behind me and said she’d been watching me from the sideline, that I looked so thoughtful, graceful, with a self-possessed energy, something extremely generous like that, and I laughed and made a joke about trying to stand up straight after just two drinks the night before. But if I can give myself any credit it’s that vigilance might be the keenest, honed and pained form of self-possession, in that your focus sharpens to a point that can skewer, and how well practiced I have gotten at it by now.

There are rhetorical traps Rose’s ardent fans and feverish supporters like to spring each time his sexual assault allegations are brought up, using the misinterpretation of law (“He was found not guilty”) or shame (“It was X years ago, why are you still bringing this up?”) as bait. It’s the latter that’s the most telling. Either to the likelihood of that person having experienced the time-shredding sensation of trauma or the larger collective approach to it which is still to move on, and to do it quickly.

The shittiest irony is what a dream it would be, I’m sure, to forget. To have the mind and the memories of the body wiped clean, two vehicles that tend to reject working in tandem, that will and often do override the other in this strict business of getting on with a life. Memory creeps out, burrows and bleeds beyond designations of time and place. In my experience, whole neighbourhoods become haunted. The city I was born in, for a long while, became a place that wasn’t mine. And it’s not just a vigilance, or a wariness that settles over you every time you step out the door, there’s an anger, too. Anger at the streets and the places you know best becoming suddenly off-limits. Barred in-person, in the present, at the chance that you’ll run into the person who caused all of this, still up and walking around oblivious — another fact that will make you so angry when you think about it, which is too often — or off-limits in memory, whole sections of your life’s map rendered to minefields: shortcuts, parks, even certain times of day designated a no man’s land.

And the thing is you do try, very hard, to not bring it up. You strain against your animal responses, the parts of you trying to protect yourself, as much as you tamp down on your cerebral compulsion to talk through it. Your friends are patient but you see where it wears, or how there is only so much space in their lives to square the version of you they’ll get today with the one they know best, the one you are also trying to get back to by moving on, by running yourself over.

I remember walking blocks and blocks back and forth in a freezing loop with my friends to stall going into a goodbye party because on first pass the glowing, winter-fogged window of the bar framed the person’s face I had been working diligently to exhume from the mental catacomb I’d first sealed them into. Because the first impulse is to bury, very deep, what or who harms us. You only figure out later that you’ll need to dredge it up to catalogue it, understand it better in order to let it go.

It was a collective decision that night. It was also well past the point where it seemed, abstractly, that it would still be affecting. I was relieved to be shuffled into the steps of my friends, ferrying me away, as I was surprised that yes, no longer abstract, but sitting, laughing, just beyond a pane of glass, it was very affecting. It was years passed at that point and now, many years passed that point, I hold only loosely enough to memories when they drift by to acknowledge them, better at untangling harm from whatever backdrop or stretch of time they show me and letting it go. The psychic equivalent of pulling a stray hair out from where it’s been tickling under your shirt.

With Rose, far away from anything personal, there’s a danger in forgetting. The NBA already has a ready, comfortable amnesia with sexual assault and domestic abuse, so much so that it can feel like the league holds it up as somebody warmly would a jacket for you to slip your arms into. Naming not just Rose, but naming explicitly what it was he was accused of — gang rape — ranges from feeling like an exhausted Hail Mary to a responsibility you want no part of, but always, unfortunately, like something that if I don’t say it, who will? It’s what is impossible to explain to the people who would prefer a shroud of silence fall around Rose’s name, that this kind of naming, this kind of repeated excavation, is intentionally desecrating what was so unceremoniously buried — Rose’s choices and actions to inflict violent bodily harm on another person.

His isn’t a hallowed name. The more it’s handled the closer we get to being able to bring it into the plain light of everyday conversation, rather than having it be one brought up only in the confidence of people you know feel the same way as you do, huddling furtively together like grave robbers to sift through what you wish you could bring to light. It shouldn’t feel courageous, or bold, or careful — to borrow that well-worn and tired counter — this many years later, to name Rose, to speak with confidence and resolve and no caveats about the harm he did. It should feel as practical as stats, as methodical as learning the numbers.

The men I know in the industry, even the men that are industry adjacent, don’t talk about Rose. They aren’t the ones bringing him up, unprompted. When they do make mention of him it’s under a kind of adjacency duress to something someone else said or wrote, and when I say someone else I mean women. It’s not only Rose. It’s Kristaps Porzingis, Jason Kidd, Chauncey Billups, Rodions Kurucs, Avery Bradley, Luke Walton, plus the many and more I don’t want to list for the sake of it but enough already to illustrate how frequent the opportunities are, always, to say something. To learn the fucking numbers.

In that way the men I know have a clarity of mind I’ll never relate to or understand. For them, the reality of Rose still exists in a world where conversations about his Hall of Fame candidacy coexist with conversations about his admitting to not understanding consent. Where it’s enough to have a two minute, toneless preamble on a podcast about the allegations against any of the men listed above and move onto 40 heady minutes of fake trade scenarios. The clarity doesn’t come from still being able to claim that they don’t know what to say, or that if they do, when would be a good time to say it, but because the rush and roar of this infinite loop churning in the back of their heads, their bodies, is absent. The clarity comes from the ability to not always be thinking about it. To live in a world where time runs linear, cleaves into four neat quarters, where it becomes possible to go with great speed from one game to the next. Where the aim of each season, season after season, is to move on.