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For Ilya Rozanov, hindsight is 20/20, and immediacy is a solid 20/25. Mildly myopic, yes, but not tunnel-visioned or blind—just focused.
Here are his immediate circumstances: The date is Saturday, March 23rd, 2013; the Boston Bears are playing the Toronto Guardians at 19:00, so the team is currently in the visitor’s locker room at Canada Air Centre; and Cliff Marlow’s phone will not shut the fuck up.
“I did not know you are so popular,” Ilya quips, lacing his skates so he doesn’t need to see his friend get the sort of attention he, notably, and not of his own volition, isn’t getting. “This is breaking news to me.”
Hollander is doing his usual avoidance of anything Rozanov-related. The last message under Jane is a lonely, half-sarcastic eggplant emoji. Not even a perfunctory fuck off in response. Which otherwise would have been fine, because sexting Hollander is rare enough to be an occasion, except—
Except.
It doesn’t bode terribly well when they’re playing Montreal in a few days. Ilya himself is a horny wreck, having been on the road for the last week and stuck in too-small hotel room showers with only his right hand to keep his dick company. Not that he couldn’t easily find someone to spend the night with, because they’ll be in Boston, except.
Fuck.
“Awh, Rozy,” Cliff simpers, but his heart clearly isn’t in it. When Ilya glances up at him, his attention is fixed on his phone. “Nah, it’s just some old friends. Something big happened, so.”
Never let it be said that Ilya is an unfeeling creature. He can be as dense as the next hockey player, and his emotional maturity maybe is exactly where it should be at twenty-two years old, but even he can’t miss the furrow in Cliff’s brow; that uncharacteristic pinch to his ugly, early-balding forehead.
“Something big,” he repeats, then looks down to tie his other skate. “Like what, Vettel did not get pole in Malaysia today?” His Red Bull sponsorship keeps him apprised of their superstar’s accolades, so he knows that much isn’t true.
“No, he did,” confirms Cliff, still absentmindedly. Still tapping away at his slide-out keyboard. “A band we grew up with just broke up out of nowhere.”
A band?
“Music?” Ilya demands. His head snaps back up. “Marly, you are fucking my pre-game feng shui over music?”
The man in question meets his eyes. His furrow is gone, replaced with an expression of amusement. “Man, it’s My Chem. They were, like, everywhere when we were teenagers.”
“Ma-kem?” Doesn’t sound like any famous band Ilya’s ever heard of. He may have grown up on the other side of the world, but that doesn’t mean he grew up under a rock.
Cliff finally puts the phone down on the top shelf of his locker, setting about the rest of his pre-game routine. “My Chemical Romance,” he clarifies. “You know.”
“Right,” Ilya says, because hindsight is still 20/20, and the name has unearthed something adjacent to the box he keeps tightly locked in the recesses of his mind.
“Or maybe you don’t?” Cliff slips his jersey over his head. “I don’t know if they got big in Russia.”
They were plenty big. They filled up almost all the thousands of spots at Dvorets Sporta Luzhniki, and the pit was so tight as to squeeze the air from Ilya’s lungs, where he stood in its very centre. They were loud enough to transcend language, with their singer in a black suit and parade pants, shouting, we’ll carry on.
They broke up?
Ilya shakes his head quickly. “Never heard of them in my life.”
Hindsight is 20/20, except sometimes it’s 20/30 or 20/40, like he’s seeing his life through the thin layer of condensation on a glass of vodka. Here’s what he remembers:
My Chemical Romance had rolled into Moscow on a sticky Wednesday in June, 2007, and both Svetlana and Sasha were certifiably obsessed. At the grand age of fifteen—two days away from sixteen, to be precise—Ilya himself was above the idea of American boy bands. But he'd had an equally grand time the year prior dancing to Depeche Mode at the same venue, and he was a magnanimous sort of friend besides. In response to their pestering about his impending birthday, he'd thus agreed to attend, with a cool pronouncement and studied nonchalance.
They’d gotten tickets for cheap. He’d snuck out of his home and into the Vetrovs', where he'd borrowed a mesh wifebeater from his sometime hookup, and where Sveta smeared black kohl over his eyelids. Sometime between then, looking at the stranger in that bathroom mirror, and looking at the unreasonably pretty men on stage, Ilya had fiddled with the cross around his neck.
Hindsight is 20/20 and immediacy is 20/25, but his vision usually changes to something like 20/15 when he’s playing hockey, because his instincts have been fostered through countless hours of practice and sheer natural talent, and he can see every play unfold before anything happens. The only person to match this skill—and grudgingly, he’ll admit, sometimes surpass it—is Shane fucking Hollander.
Usually.
He’s off his game today, and he knows it, even if he doesn’t quite know why. Dallas Kent manages to draw first blood, getting a stupidly textbook shot in the net about five minutes before the end of the first period.
It’s stupid. It’s all stupid, especially when Cliff is playing as he usually does, and he’s the one who had enough of an emo phase to warrant messing up Ilya’s careful pre-game routine of chirping the shit out of his friend. Montreal is playing tonight too, so Hollander has a perfectly valid excuse for ignoring his messages, and everything is literally fine, except.
Second period comes and goes with a third penalty on the books, and Boston can’t get past Toronto’s backup goalie.
Coach LeClaire looks two seconds away from popping a vein. He glares at Ilya in a way that conveys what the fuck are you doing and get your head in the fucking game simultaneously, which is effective communication, on his part. Ilya throws a towel over his head in the locker room, digs under his clothes to clutch at his mother’s cross, and closes his eyes.
Hindsight is 20/20 and can be 20/30, but even still, sometimes it’s perfect darkness and muffled sounds of humans being humans. Ilya only really recalls flashes:
Dancing with his sweaty hands captured by Sveta and Sasha, one on either side to avoid getting separated, the bass pounding through his heart;
Staring at Sveta as she sang in harmony with the singer, words i thought i’d choke on, figure out, her cheeks glittering under the flashing lights;
Following his friends and pumping his fist in the air, faltering in place when his brain finally made sense of the chorus, your memory will carry on;
Crying mama, mama, increasingly hysterical—
Standing in the heart of the pit, paralyzed with awe as the music stopped and the crowd took up the song around him.
He’d grabbed the cross then, too. The stage was a pulpit and the singer was a preacher, and dutifully, the audience raised their voices to the sky in worship, or maybe defiance. Awake and unafraid. Asleep or dead.
That band. That band, whose message was about perseverance, who experienced Hell and came out the other side to tell adolescents all over the world that there is life after death. That band broke up?
Hindsight is 20/20, and foresight is 20/15, and Ilya Rozanov gets his ass back on the ice to prove it. He vaults over the boards after Toronto’s third goal with Cliff and Carmichael right behind him, and they answer within the next minute. Even two down, they’ve got the rest of the third period. Ilya’s done more with less.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Bears seem resigned to their fate. How the fuck is Ilya supposed to take these chucklefucks to playoffs?
“Wake the fuck up,” he barks during the next line change.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s the way Gerard Way’s voice crept through his headphones en route to Regina, playing with a mix of other rock songs that involved a lot of fast-paced drums and screaming. Just sleep. He’d put Evanescence right after on the disc, like a little musical conversation. Wake me up inside.
Hindsight should be foresight, should be immediacy.
“And put the puck in the fucking net,” he shouts after the jerseys skating out before him. There’s an A on his chest for a reason, and by God, they better listen the fuck up, because it’ll be a C very, very soon.
Vicky gets the next goal, two minutes before the end of regulation. 3-2. That’s game.
Hindsight is 20/20, and in his post-game shower, he thinks with vivid clarity about the afternoon he spent in Sveta’s bedroom the day after the concert, lying on her floor and listening to Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in its entirety.
“It’s a concept album,” she’d explained from the lofty height of her bed, looking down her nose at Ilya, their mother tongue a lilting thing, “about a man who makes a deal to kill a thousand people to get his lover back, only to realize after nine-hundred and ninety-nine that he’s the last.”
Ilya’s English had, with some effort, improved between 2007 and 2008 in preparation for his imminent international career. Prior lessons hadn’t brought him the fluency needed to fully understand Gerard through the tumult of sound, but they were enough for him to parse out, even then: You are never coming home, never coming home.
Afterwards, Sveta had settled back on her bed while Ilya sat up to stretch, and her voice floated from above like the word of God—contemplative and dreamy, and damning all at once.
“If you ask me,” she’d said, “I don’t think it’s about two lovers at all.” The Way brothers, as it turns out, lost their grandmother.
Ilya had stared at the photographs lining Sveta’s wall, unseeing, one hand halfway to his throat, somehow wondering if grief was an emotion so universal as to be insignificant. That’s sixteen for you.
Hindsight is 20/20, and immediacy is too, because Hollander sends him a thumbs down emoji while he’s waiting for the plane back to Boston, and he can’t even care because Sebastian Vettel is defying team orders to pass Mark Webber for P1 in Malaysia.
The race is on Cliff’s laptop. The Bears are huddled around it, a group of rowdy men kept quiet to hear the tinny commentary. Only Ilya and Cliff kept up with the 2012 season, though, with Cliff cheering on Fernando Alonso like some deranged crazy person, and even then, only Ilya has kept up with Red Bull. So, while the rest of the boys mutter about F1 getting exciting for once, he sees how the team has—fractured. Perhaps irreparably.
There was Brazil at the end of the last season, of course, with Webber blocking Vettel’s way; or maybe this was about Webber defying team orders himself in 2011. Or had they managed to keep a grudge from 2010, from Silverstone or Turkey or Abu Dhabi?
In the cooldown room and on the podium, Webber’s mouth twists with hideous jealousy. It’s so familiar that Ilya can see the Vegas skyline in his mind’s eye, and he looks away from the laptop, down to where his phone is open to his messages app.
If he were brave and in touch with the stiffness beneath his ribcage, he’d probably text something like, i’m glad we don’t actually hate each other, or maybe, i’m glad it’s you with me at the top.
Distantly, Ilya wonders if band members can have rivalries as well. There’s probably a spectrum to this sort of thing.
Being in this band for the past 12 years has been a true blessing. We’ve gotten to go places we never knew we would. We’ve been able to see and experience things we never imagined possible. We’ve shared the stage with people we admire, people we look up to, and best of all, our friends. And now, like all great things, it has come time for it to end. Thanks for all of your support, and for being part of the adventure.
My Chemical Romance
What a great load of nothing. Ilya reads the post while he’s wrapped in blankets, the Boston sky a midnight blue beyond his windows, then re-reads it. Then sends it to his chat with Sveta and Sasha.
This is apparently the weekend for bad breakups and games. Montreal just lost to motherfucking Buffalo, of all teams, 2-1, so Ilya doesn’t feel quite so anticipatory about Wednesday. It’d be one thing if Hollander was coming in off a win; instead, they’re on equal footing.
He skims the post again.
It’s almost outrageous, and he’s not even a real fan. No wonder Cliff couldn’t shut the fuck up. How does a band like that decide to stop? How does anyone just up and decide to retire from the greatest project of their lives? How can people be so selfish as to leave you alone when you’re barely old enough to understand the world, when you can’t even fucking remember—
“Fuck,” Ilya shoves his phone onto his nightstand and turns in place. He stares at the mirror hung up on his walk-in closet door, and at the black silhouette of trees in the reflection of the outdoors. His own eyes peek through the darkness, dimly gleaming.
Hindsight is whatever vision it’s allowed to be. Hindsight is hearing, I am not afraid to walk this world alone, and the bite of warm metal into the skin of his palm. Hindsight is packing the experience and the music away, just enough to dull their magic.
Jane just now
?
The notification pings from behind him, and with a sigh, he rolls over to check. It doesn’t make any sense until he sees the link to https://www.mychemicalromance.com/node/2842611, and he realizes his mistake.
Text wrong person, he writes back. Then, on a whim: did you know marly was emo
Hollander must be taking a break from being perfect at everything, because he reads and responds almost immediately. Ilya decides not to examine how incandescently pleased he is to have Shane’s attention. If only for a little while.
When his eyes begin to droop and the exhaustion of the roadie catches up to him with frightening speed, he sends one last text, and vows to keep quiet until their game.
So long and goodnight.