LeBron James sat in the back of the team plane as it flew to wherever their next game was. He didn’t know their schedule anymore, nor did he care. It was all over. There would be no Finals. There would be no playoffs. Would he even play in the rest of the team’s games? That was another thing he didn’t know, and it was another thing he didn’t care about.
Sitting there by himself with a sleeping mask pulled over his eyes and a pair of headphones over his ears, LeBron was confident that nobody would disturb him, and that was what he wanted. To be alone with his thoughts as they dispersed at the approach of oncoming sleep. He set the seat back to its maximally reclined setting and settled in, trying with some success to fend off the encroaching despair with well-practiced meditative techniques.
—
The next thing LeBron knew, he was toddling around his childhood home. The duality of his existences, both as an adult in the “real world” and as a young child in this…flashback? Recollection?…was odd, but not too odd to jar him from whatever sleep-like state he was currently in. His younger self was walking around their home, not looking for mother as he so often did, but looking for something else, something that could never be found…
“Dada! Dada!” the child version of LeBron called out, visiting one room after the other in their small, but cozy, Akron home. “Dada! Where are you?”
“In here, Bron,” came a deep voice from one of the bedrooms, and the present-day LeBron found this to be very strange, as his father had never been present in his life. He chalked it up to some kind of subconscious wish-fulfillment scenario that his brain had created to help cope with the stress of the season.
“Dada!” repeated the toddler LeBron, but now the tone of his voice was one of happiness, rather than the yearning tone that his previous words had been said with. He peeked his head around the doorframe to see a shadowy man, very tall but with indiscernible features, standing in front of the dresser with his back turned from the door. Now, his voice became slightly scared. “Dada?”
The man stood there for a while, his shoulders moving up and down with his breaths, but not saying anything. LeBron wanted to run up and give him a hug, no, to RECEIVE a hug from his loving father, but held back. He couldn’t detect any love coming from that man whose visage was inexplicably cloaked in darkness.
“Yes, Bron. It’s dada.” his dad (?) finally said. This emboldened LeBron enough to enter the room and walk towards his dad (?), holding his arms out to be picked up and adored.
However, when the man turned around and revealed his identity, little LeBron’s heart jumped out of his chest with sheer terror. The acne-riddled, patchily-bearded, pasty-white face was certainly not his own dad, but the adult LeBron recognized who it was at once:
Mario Hezonja.
“I’m your dad, LeBron! I’m your dad!” Mario bellowed in a demonic voice that echoed unreasonably in the small bedroom. As the child version of LeBron screamed and ran out of the room, down the hallway, the footsteps of the pursuing Croatian seemed to shake the foundations of the house. “Come back, Bron! Don’t you want to play with daddy?”
“NAAAH! AAAAAH!” LeBron cried incoherently, desperately running as fast as his toddler-sized legs would take him. But now, the child LeBron and the adult LeBron were one in the same, and the hallway of his childhood home was overlaid with the hallways of Madison Square Garden. The effect was disorienting, sickening. But, in both places, Mario Hezonja never gave up the chase.
When Mario finally got his hand on LeBron’s shoulder, halting his escape, the dream sequence blissfully ended. LeBron, in the real world, woke up with a start, covered with sweat and breathing heavily. Disoriented by the total blackness in his vision, he remembered the mask on his face, and he ripped it off, relishing the familiar sight of the team plane and his teammates. But his relief was short lived as he looked down at his body.
The blanket which had been laid on top of him had been replaced with a Croatian flag. On it were words which seemed to scrawled in blood: “I’m your dad, LeBron.”
LeBron began to scream.