Jayson Tatum sat silently in front of his locker before the game. While his teammates made small talk around him, they knew not to disturb him while he collected his thoughts and centered himself. This was his ritual before every contest; home or away, he would partake in this kind of semi-meditation.
To help block out external thoughts, Jayson closed his eyes. Immediately, he felt a sensation of falling, as if he had momentarily drifted off to sleep. But the sensation continued past the point where he expected himself to wake up. He opened his eyes, only to find himself confronted with total blackness. Just as he realized that he could see his own body, but nothing else, he landed with a thud on some unseen surface.
The fall hadn’t hurt exactly, but it had shaken him up. He slowly got to his feet, looking around curiously at the black void surrounding him. Was this a dream? A descent into madness? Or something else? He walked a few steps, but nothing about his surroundings changed: it remained a total absence of matter. Except for his own body, but Jayson was quite unsure if his own existence was “real” in this dimension.
“Ignore the teachings you have received,” echoed a rumbling voice which was the first indication something else existed here.
Jayson furrowed his eyebrows. A cryptic remark that had more religious connotations than anything else, but he couldn’t recall any specific teachings had had received recently either on religion or on any other topic. “What teachings?” he asked into the void, taking the chance that he might be able to have a two-way dialogue with the disembodied voice.
“The teachings of Kobe Bryant,” the voice intoned. “He wishes to sabotage the Celtics by way of altering your development – for the worse.”
Jayson thought back to his summertime workouts with Kobe. They had been grueling, yet informative, and while Kobe had been obsessed with showing him the secrets of the midrange game, Jayson felt like it had been more helpful just to observe the relentless, precise methods of a hall-of-famer. That didn’t mean that he hadn’t been using Kobe’s own moves in game situations, but that hadn’t been Jayson’s main takeaway from the workout sessions. “But he’s one of the GOATs,” Jayson replied.
“So am I,” said the voice. “And I’m telling you now – banish from your mind all that you learned from that man, for his intentions were impure.” Before Jayson could ask the voice for its identity, the floor dropped out from under him, and he was falling again.
This time, however, he jolted awake rather quickly to find himself back in the locker room. If he had been asleep for a long time, his teammates didn’t seem to have noticed. What had he just experienced? Did it have a deeper meaning or was it just a creation of his troubled mind?
When Jayson bent over to put on his game sneakers, he happened to glance at his palms. There were markings on the skin of both of them. Holding them in front of his face, his eyes grew wide with surprise.
The left one read “PP34”. The right one read “The Truth”.