An excerpt from my new book, for which I have yet to come up with a title.

It sounds weird to say this, but I was almost five years old the first time I met my dad. I’d seen pictures of him, and I’d heard my mom talking about him, but that was the first time I actually set eyes on him. It was summer then, after the Fourth of July, but before August set in and it got too hot to go outside, and Dad stopped by for dinner.

He came alone, which was strange by itself. I don’t think I ever saw him again out in public without an entourage. He pulled up in front of the house, un-announced, in a generic-looking rented Honda. I was sitting on the front porch, bouncing a basketball off the wall, and waiting for Mom to call me in for meatloaf. He was no bigger then than I am now, but I remember him as being huge, unfolding himself from the front seat of that little car, bald and long-limbed and gangly as a praying mantis. He came up the walk slowly, his eyes on me the entire time.

“Hey,” he said when he got to the bottom of the steps. “You’re Trey, right?”

I nodded, then turned away and bounced the ball off the wall again. He came up the steps slowly, and sat down beside me.

“That’s a nice ball,” he said. “You play?”

I nodded again. I didn’t yet, of course. I couldn’t get the ball up to the rim. I’d already started dribbling, though, and I thought I was on my way to The League. I tossed the ball against the wall. He reached out and caught it in one spider hand.

“That’s good,” he said. “You know who I am?”

I looked him up and down. I knew who he was, all right. I’d seen Mom yelling at him on the wallscreen often enough. I nodded.

“I know you,” I said. “You’re god-damned Darius.”

#

That wasn’t the only time I ever saw Darius Blake, but it didn’t happen often. Mom took me to Boston to meet up with him a couple of times when I was in elementary school, and he came to visit us once more, when I was ten or eleven. He wasn’t much of a dad, obviously, but he was always kind, soft-spoken and polite. You wouldn’t think it if all you ever saw of him was him trash-talking on the court and throwing elbows under the boards, but god-damned Darius was actually an introverted guy, the kind of player who’d rather have spent his free evenings with a book than with a crowd of wanna-be baby mamas.

That wasn’t how it worked out for him, though. He was a star from the first pro game he played, and when things started getting crazy, just before the Stupid War, he was probably the most famous basketball player in the world. Some of the people in the UnAltered movement tried to adopt him then, tried to make him into some kind of latter-day John Henry, standing against the wave of Engineered players that was just starting to crest. He never did anything to encourage them, but the UnAltered label stuck to him anyway, and after the Hiatus, when they started playing basketball again, the protests and counter-protests when the Celtics came to town sometimes got more press than the games.

I was too young to worry about that stuff at the time, of course. All I knew was that god-damned Darius had something for me every time I saw him—candy that first time, later clothes or shoes or gift cards for electronics or music. The last time he came to the house, he took me out onto the basketball court Mom had put up for me in the side yard, and spent an hour showing me how to start right, cross over and finish with my left hand.

“He’s good,” he told Mom later. “Gonna be a star some day, just like his daddy.”

It was a nice thing to say—but I was a natural-born Homo sap, and I’m guessing he knew even then that it wasn’t going to happen.