I lost a game of ping pong once. I was in my fifth semester as an undergrad in Huntsville, Texas, and I didn’t know my opponent well, nor did I generally play ping pong, but the opportunity to engage with someone who only moments before had been sitting in a decommissioned electric chair pushed against the wall of the karaoke bar where I was drinking presented itself as a miraculous, fractured blur rising above the long humidity of summer. He introduced himself as having been released that morning, and instead of sitting at the bus stop waiting for his ride to somewhere, anywhere, in Houston, he thought he’d spend his first night of freedom flexing the scarred sinew of his slender arms over the ping pong table he’d overheard some of the guards talking about. I bought him a drink, and we compared the cold steel of tray beds we’d slept on in different Texas facilities, discussed our favorite jailhouse authors—mine was Hemingway and his was Gogol—pored over the crevices left by absent memories, and reminisced about what our lives could have been. We paddled the ping pong ball back and forth with a sustained vigor, the sweat steaming from our bodies in an East Texas room without air conditioning, when we could maintain momentum, which was only twice during the match because I was on my fifth beer and he was on his third, but he won by a point, or at least I assume so because I didn’t actually know—still don’t know—how to keep score in ping pong.