Always (52 page)

On 36th Street I tracked the trail of used condoms and dirty syringes, of empty potato chip bags and, oddly, a child’s wooly winter cap, to the armpit of Fremont.

Hunched in the concrete crease was a troll, holding a VW Beetle in its left hand.

I stopped. Breathed. It was still there.

I approached cautiously. The VW was real. Life-size. The troll was made of concrete. It had long hair and wild eyes. There was a sign, saying something about a sculpture competition, but it was so defaced with graffiti that I couldn’t read it.

The troll always wins,
I’d said to Julia in Norway, and I had been right. There was always someone, something, bigger and faster and stronger. Always.

MY SUITE
was silent and cool, as still as a burial chamber undisturbed for a hundred years.

I dialed Rusen.

“Yes?” He sounded distracted and grown-up. The Avid’s hard drive was chattering in the background.

“It’s Aud Torvingen. Before I sign the agreement, I have some questions about crew insurance and employee status.”

“Boy, okay.”

“Kick Kuiper.” Silence. “Rusen?”

“Um?”

“Rusen, turn your chair around so you’re facing away from the screens. Turn your chair around.”

A long, floaty sigh and chair creak. “That thing sure is hard to resist.”

“Yes. Kick Kuiper. What’s her employee status specifically as it relates to health insurance?”

“Hold on one second.” Tap, tap, tap. “Okey-doke. Well, it looks like she was hired as a contractor, so no insurance. At least—”

“Change it.”

“That’s not legal. But—”

“Change it.”

“Wait up, just hold on now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I might not have to.” I waited. “I offered her the job of stunt coordinator earlier today.”

“Stunt coordinator.”

“She’s more than qualified. Tell you the truth, I have no clue why she’s working in craft services to begin—”

“Did she accept?”

“Well, now, she hasn’t exactly accepted yet, no.”

“What did she say?”

“Here’s the thing. She’s been out a couple days. I had to leave a message on her machine this evening . . .” When we were in the pub, talking about the blue place and falling, about flow and otherness, about being larger than life, brilliant with it, on top of the world. “. . . in particular?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, is there any reason in particular this is coming up now?”

“Just sign her up as stunt coordinator from the time you left her the message. I want her on the company’s insurance.”

“I guess I could stretch a point that far. For Kick. It’s not really wrong, when you think about it, I mean, I have offered her—”

“Thank you. Please see to the paperwork before you get lost in editing again.”

“Boy, that’s a good thought. That thing sure is—”

“Rusen. Good night.”

The phone felt big and bulky in my hands but I didn’t want to put it down. I imagined dialing Dornan, waking him up, his creased voice saying,
What on earth is it that won’t keep until tomorrow, Torvingen?
And what would I say?

I called Leptke and left a message. “Be available tomorrow. Tell your counsel. I’ll have your proof before midday.”

Then I e-mailed Laurence instructions and the information necessary to wire funds to my Seattle bank. I also asked him to make sure someone at that bank had a cashier’s check waiting for me so that I could finalize the Hippoworks deal.

I called room service for some tea. Tomorrow I would deal with Corning. I saw myself tracking Corning to her hotel, backing her into a corner, flexing my hands perhaps, so that she bolted and I chased her, and brought her down like a lion with a young impala. I would take her throat, just hard enough to suffocate her slowly, and as her eyes rolled back, I’d rip out her soft insides. Her right leg would kick once. If I closed my eyes I could feel her skin under my hands, feel her pulse flutter and still, taste her fear. She would never be able to hurt Kick or anybody else again.

It wouldn’t make any difference. At eleven o’clock tomorrow, it, whatever it was, was coming to get Kick and I wouldn’t be there.

THEY HAD MY PHONE NUMBER, A LITTLE PIECE OF MY LIFE, AND STILL THEY UN
DERSTOOD almost nothing of what I knew of the world. They were peering at it through a keyhole: I wanted them to open the door.

“The important thing to remember,” I said as they obediently lowered themselves to the floor and rolled onto their stomachs, looking scared, “is that there’s a kind of joy to all this.”

“Joy?” Pauletta said, sitting up again. “Excuse me, but are you insane? You get off on imagining someone’s about to pin you face-first in the dirt?”

“The mat’s quite clean,” I said. “Perhaps that’s not what you meant. Except it is, in a way. Lie down again. All of you, lie down. Facedown, arms at your sides.” I sat cross-legged so that I wouldn’t loom over them. “Those of you on the mats, can you smell that sharp scent? It’s vinegar. I wipe the mats down with it after every lesson. It’s a natural disinfectant. Feel the mat, how it pushes back at your hips, how you have to turn your head to one side to breathe comfortably, how that pulls at the muscles that attach to your jaw, that run down your neck, that connect to your arms. Feel it. Feel yourself, your body, your bone and muscle, the blood singing in your veins. Breathe deep. Feel your lungs expand, how your spine lifts another inch from the floor. Imagine your rib cage, what it holds and protects: your lungs, your heart, your spleen, all those blood vessels. It’s a fortress—very, very strong. Feel your knees, delicate and strong and indispensable. It’s all yours, every inch. Even when it feels bad, if you get a bruise, a graze, a cut, a break, a puncture, a sprain, it feels good because it’s yours. You are it, and it is you. Enjoy it at all times. Enjoy using it. Enjoy defending it.”

Someone had forgotten to wear underarm deodorant today. I tasted it, the tang of fatty apocrine sweat, full of much larger, more complicated molecules than the simple C
₂
H
₄
O
₂
of vinegar. It was faint, and it was healthy, clean sweat on a clean body wearing clean clothes, but unusual in Atlanta, where almost everyone equated any kind of body odor with filth and wrongness, where people liked to pretend the body didn’t exist.

“This is your body. Yours. No one but you has the responsibility to keep it, to keep yourself, whole. If someone pins you to the ground, what will you do?”

The underarm scent grew, perhaps, slightly stronger.

“So you’re facedown. The first thing you do is protect your throat, and neck, and your breathing. Turn your face forward again. Stretch the crown of your head towards the wall in front of you. That will stop your neck bending the wrong way, it will pull your chin down.”

“It puts my nose on the floor,” said Tonya.

“Bring your arms under your body. That will make it harder for an attacker to grab hold of them. But keep them bent, elbows down by your ribs, hands up between your breasts. If you can, while keeping your upper arms close to your body, bring your hands up, like this.” I made the international sign for
vulva:
palms out, tips of index fingers and of thumbs touching. “Keep your elbows in. Put your hands in front of your face. Put your face in the gap. If your attacker starts banging your head on the ground, it will afford you some protection.”

This time the strengthened body odor was definite.

“Everyone, sit up.” They did. I looked from set face to pale face to lightly sweating face. Katherine had carpet fluff stuck to her lip gloss. “Pick a partner. ” Katherine turned to Tonya, Pauletta to Nina, Christie to Suze; Sandra didn’t look at Therese, but Therese understood it was her job to be Sandra’s partner, and sat a little closer; Kim looked at Jennifer and sighed—though, to her credit, silently. “You’re going to learn this together. You’re helping each other learn. When you play the attacker, remember that your partner is a grown woman and needs to know the truth; she needs to know that you won’t let go immediately to make her feel better. She needs to know that in a real situation the techniques she learnt here will work. When you play the one being attacked, try not to panic. This is a controlled situation; you’re safe. We’ll begin with lying facedown and your attacker on top of you because that’s the worst position to be caught in. You’ll learn how to get away from that and then you’ll know you can do anything. A volunteer.”

No one.

“Therese.” She had been the most confident tumbler last week. “Come here and pin me. Everyone, move back a little.” I stretched out, facedown, put my face in its protected gap. “Sit on my back. Pin my wrists to the floor.” She sat on me, but carefully. I doubted she weighed less than 120 pounds, but she was keeping about half that on her feet, taking the strain on her quads. “No. Sit on me. The point is to pin me so I can’t move.” She did. “Now pin my wrists. Hard.” She leaned into it. Her hands were cold and slightly damp. “Think you can roll out all right if I throw you over my head?” I felt movement. “Are you nodding or shaking your head?”

“Yes, I can roll.” She sounded grim.

“All right. Like a Band-Aid. One rip and you’re off. Ready?” And I breathed out with a
whoosh,
shot my hands forward, and bucked her off. There was no crash, and she stood about the same time I did, so I assumed she’d landed well.

“Whoa,” said Suze.

“Ready to go again?” I asked Therese, and she nodded, though she wasn’t grinning, which surprised me. The first time I’d been thrown and had landed well enough not to get hurt, my exhilaration had been fierce, burning brightly enough that I could have thrown back my head, opened my mouth, and lit the sky. I would never understand these women.

I turned to the rest of the class. “This time it’ll be slow motion, so you can see for yourselves how easy it is.”

Therese perched back on top of me.

“What would an attacker be expecting from me in this position?”

“Panic,” and “Struggle like crazy,” Nina and Tonya said at the same time.

“And what would you do in a panic?”

“Curl up like a bug,” said Nina.

“Why?”

“Because I’d be panicking,” she said with obvious patience.

“And why would you, Tonya, struggle? What’s the ultimate point?”

“To get him as far from me as I could. Protect myself,” she said.

“Nina?”

She nodded. “Get him off of me.”

“Pin me,” I said to Therese. She did. Her hands were less cold and damp. Perhaps relief and lessening of stress were her version of exaltation. “Now look at her balance. Where’s her weight?”

“On your wrists,” Jennifer said.

“Yes. She’s leaning forward, thinking that what I’ll do is pull in like a bug, to protect myself. Or thrash about, to get her off me, away from me, somehow. The last thing an attacker will be anticipating is any kind of move that pulls them towards us, or that appears to spread us flatter to the ground and therefore make us more vulnerable. So that’s exactly what we do. It also happens to work to pull them further off balance. Watch.”

Instead of the untrained, instinctive move to pull my hands down to protect my belly or breasts and groin, I exhaled and slid them smoothly forward along the mat, wrists first: Spider-Man shooting web at the wall. Therese started to topple forward.

“Now if that’s all I did, she’d just fall on me.” I turned my face slightly and said to Therese, “Get off for a moment, please.” She did. I got back into my initial position. “What I do is tighten my abdominal muscles and jerk my knees up underneath me”—I showed them in slow motion, pulling into a tight mushroom, then down again, then bunching again—“and I shoot my hands forward at the same time as bucking.” I showed them. “Now watch while I do it at full speed.” I nodded to Therese.

Even though she was expecting it, she went over. This time she smiled as she came up, a small smile but definite.

I smiled back. “You want to throw me this time?”

“You weigh a lot more than I do.”

“True. But it will work.” Using exactly this technique, on a gravel road in Arkansas last year, I’d thrown a man weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds.

“All right.”

She lay down like a woman going to her execution. I sat on her sacrum. “Remember to protect your face.” She did. I pinned her wrists firmly. I could see her pulse thumping madly in her carotid arteries and felt her rib cage swell and shrink, swell and shrink. Then she stilled, and with a cry of despair and rage, she threw me off. She threw me far harder than necessary and I flew seven or eight feet.

The class clapped and Pauletta whistled and stamped. As I rolled to my feet, Therese sat up, looking pleased.

“Man, you practically sent her into orbit,” Pauletta said to her.

“You can’t do that from a mattress,” Sandra said.

“You can,” I said. “It’s more difficult, yes, but possible.”

“Well, I couldn’t.”

“Perhaps you haven’t, yet, but you could.”

“I can’t. I’m speaking from experience.”

“Yes,” I said. “But that was before you had me to teach you.”

She glared at me. “And an attacker wouldn’t pin you like that, anyway.”

“All attackers are different,” I said. “But I’ll be happy to show you a way around any pin. What would you like to try?”

“I want you to tell me what to do when they break down your bedroom door and grab you from behind around the throat with their forearm and pin your arms to your body with their other arm and then push you facedown into the bed so you’re suffocating and while your hands are trapped by your own body they pin you down with one hand on the back of your neck and you can’t breathe, can’t think, and then they have their whole body weight and they have a hand free. Can you picture that?”