Eleven ranked wins between 9:40 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., a warehouse supervisor of thirty-eight in a room lit only by the monitor. He heard footsteps a beat before they mattered. He stopped noticing his own hands. Twice he laughed out loud at how simple it had become, alone, at a volume that would have embarrassed him in daylight.

It left around the twelfth match without announcing anything. He played nine more looking for the door back in, lost seven, and decided the servers were bad. He clocked in at 6:00 with his eyes aching and a headache behind them. For four hours the zone had felt like evidence about who he actually was, and he wanted the evidence back.