Always (51 page)

I threw again, and managed a respectable score of sixty-one.

She took two darts to finish: a sixteen and double eight. “Should have done it with one,” she said, “but, like you said, they’re inferior darts.”

We took our beer to a table.

“So,” she said, “you survived trial by nephew.”

I nodded.

“Sorry I was so late. But Christ, when I came in and saw him lying so still on the couch . . . He’s never slept at my house before. How did you do that?”

“I took him into the garden for some good, clean, healthy fun in the fresh air and sunshine.” She gave me a look. “All right: we shot at each other with the Nerf gun. Moving targets.” We’d also shot at squirrels, but she didn’t need to know that. We’d missed, anyway.

We sipped the rich, nutty beer. Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter, served in imperial pints.

“Was it a problem with the scan that made you late?”

“Just the IV. I have pathetic veins.” She shrugged. “Hopefully it’ll be worth it. They said the gadolinium will . . . They said . . .” She stared into space. The tips of her fingers, where they wrapped around her glass, were pale. “They said the gadolinium would make the lesions show up more clearly. Lesions. Christ.”

Two tables away, three women and a man burst out laughing at the end of some joke. “Drink some beer,” I said. She did. I did. “They think you have lesions?”

“Brown-Sequard syndrome.”

Which was a set of symptoms, not a diagnosis: weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, numbness on the other, caused by a spinal lesion. But the spinal lesion could be the result of a tumor, or MS, or trauma, or infection with something like TB. Had she had a cough recently? Or smelled oranges in the middle of the night, or newly mown grass, or heard music? Did her arm ever get weak? How was her vision? I opened my mouth, then shut it, and tried to imagine how she felt. “Do you want to talk about this?”

“No.”

I nodded. “All right. Just tell me when you’re due to get your results.”

“Tomorrow. I have to go back to Northwest. Eleven o’clock.”

The patient was always the last to know. By now, half a dozen people would already have seen the results. Some radiologist would have shoved the film up under the steel clip at the top of the light panel and given it a preliminary read, would have looked at the pictures of the delicate sheathing on her spine, the thin image-slices of her brain, and would be sitting at home eating a Reuben sandwich and saying to their sweetie,
Saw a sad case today, hon. She’s only twenty-eight . . .
They would have sent the information to her doctors, where it would be printed and read by nurses, then handed off to receptionists and neatly filed.

“All right,” I said.

“I just . . . Today I want to talk about ordinary things, and drink beer, and pretend there’s nothing wrong. Because after tomorrow I’ll know, and there won’t be any more pretend.”

“Tomorrow, then.” If I knew who her doctor was, I could break in, read the results for myself. Or rip it from the Northwest Hospital’s servers.

Four men came in and sat at the table between us and the joke-telling group. Business clothes, or at least shirt and ties. Their voices were very loud. I looked at my watch. “How’s the food here?”

“Pub food. Burger and fries. Club sandwich. It’s okay.”

We ordered. She had the garden burger and cole slaw. I had fish and chips. Ordinary things.

“So, the scaffolding’s about done,” she said.

“Good.” The chips were almost English: fried in lard, and soft. They tasted good when doused with vinegar. “How big is it?”

“Forty-two feet.”

“And I imagine someone’s going to have to jump from that.”

“Bernard.”

“Is he up to it?”

She sighed. “No. He doesn’t understand the camera. He can’t act. He’s afraid, which is dangerous for everybody, and he can’t fall. Pass the salt, please.”

She applied salt and rearranged her burger for a minute, obviously working up to something.

“Falling isn’t like any other kind of stunt work. To fall, you have to understand the ground. You have to embrace not being on your feet.” She pushed her fries around. “Listen to me. I’m probably not even making sense.”

“You’re making perfect sense.”

She hesitated, and then went on in a rush, “It’s about letting go. It might sound crazy, but it’s a kind of acceptance. A being right there and a not being there. Christ, no, that’s not right, that makes it sound like a fortune cookie. Wait a minute. Let me think.”

This time it was the pepper shaker, followed by ketchup. Her eyebrows went up and down, the muscles to either side of her mouth tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, as they moved in tandem with her interior monologue. “It’s much more than the possibility of being hurt. It might have started out that way, when our ancestors were swinging from trees, but it’s become this whole moral metaphor. A fall from grace. Pride before a fall. Feeling good means you’re up, bad means you’re down.”

“Lucifer’s fall.”

“Exactly. It’s the most basic prohibition of all: Do not fall. It’s drummed into us. We’re not as scared of the landing as we are the falling. Think about it. A fall from thirty feet can kill you just as dead as one from a hundred feet, but fewer stunters will do a hundred feet because it just feels more scary—and that’s because it takes longer to fall.”

She dipped a fry in her tartare sauce. Munched it. Dipped another.

“When you’re preparing for one of those falls you have to know the physics and the math, the geometry and architecture of the thing. And you have to think all the way down, but in a way you have to not think.”

“It sounds a bit like martial arts.”

“Does it? Well, anyhow, before, I planned and I calculated and I imagined forces and angles and safeties and redundancies, but I never really thought I’d ever get into trouble. I was as confident of landing well and walking away as I was of walking to the fridge for a beer without tripping. You need that confidence. You can’t afford to lose it.”

I nodded.

“There are two kinds of people, those who thrive in acute-stress, high-input situations, and those who don’t. Bernard doesn’t. When I jump, when I step out of the plane or dive off the cliff, there’s this kind of internal flash, and I can feel my heart slow for a second or two. It slows down, and I focus like a machine. No, that’s not right. Like a laser, maybe, except I feel so alive. And I don’t make mistakes. The more stress I feel, the more my concentration improves.”

Her gaze was unfocused, her food forgotten.

“I don’t know anything like it. It’s like being God for a few seconds, except it can feel like hours. Everything looks and sounds, I don’t know, different, like it’s outlined in crystal.”

“Like being washed clean.”

Her eyes focused on me. “Yes. How do you know?”

“It’s happened to me.” Now it was my turn to hesitate. I wasn’t used to talking about this. “It’s like dancing, like being a hummingbird among elephants, like having all your joints lubricated and everything suddenly tuned to perfect pitch. Even the light changes. I call it the blue place.”

We stared at each other.

“It’s the limbic system,” I said. “It changes the way our neurons work.”

She was nodding. “It changes everything. It changes the whole brain network.”

All of us see the world in images. We tell a kind of instant story about every moment. But when fear triggers the amygdala, it releases neurotransmitters; the hypothalamus dumps adrenaline. They change the rate at which we form and process those images: we form them faster and then we connect them together more richly and widely. Meanwhile, all that adrenaline is opening the arteries and speeding the heart rate, changing the physical machine up to top gear. We don’t just feel smarter, stronger, and faster; we are.

It was getting more crowded. I signaled a passing server for another round. After it came, we sipped for a minute. I moved my glass around on the beer mat, sometimes centering it on the Fuller’s logo, sometimes fitting it to the corner. “It’s funny how the mind can interpret the same signals in different ways. That adrenaline arousal—elevated heart rate, breathing, galvanic skin response—can be felt as fear, or sex, or excitement. It’s all in the mind.”

“I tried to tell that to Bernard: just grin like Rusen and tell yourself, boy howdy, this is fun! and eventually you’ll believe it. But he doesn’t get it.”

“No.”

We shook our heads, like two old soldiers drinking at the veterans’ hall and despairing of the youth of today. “But let’s get back to arousal,” she said, and grinned. “My flash, your blue place. I did some reading. Psychology books call it
flow.
They talk about losing awareness of your surroundings, about being swept up in the tide—not exactly surrender, but a kind of letting go.”

“When you can do nothing, what can you do?”

She frowned.

“A Zen thing,” I said.

“But it’s not doing nothing. Is it?”

“Not for me.” And when, two years ago, your muscles failed you on the drop, what did you do about that? Why have you waited so long?

“Right. What was I talking about? Oh. Those books. Flow. So, anyhow, flow leads to the gestalt thing, and physical fabulousness, but also disinhibition.” She drank more beer and grinned again, but it wasn’t the twisty grin I’d seen two nights ago. This was the otter, diving in and out of the water for pure joy. “In other words, there’s a reason those po-faced puritans of every stripe hate it when people take risks or have fun. You jump off a bridge with a bungee cord around your ankles, or go dancing, or surf that rip, and the next thing you know your body is not only giving you the arousal message, it’s telling you there’s no reason not to have sex.”

“Bodies are smart.”

“Yeah.” She clinked my glass with hers. “You know that fall metaphor? I sometimes wonder if the Adam and Eve thing, getting kicked out of the garden of Eden, is a species memory of coming down from the safety of the trees, of losing paradise in order to walk upright and grub about on the forest floor.”

There wasn’t a single bone in her neck and shoulders that was too big or too small, not a single muscle that should have been more or less developed. She was perfectly proportioned, slight and exceptionally strong and beautiful. “I don’t want any more to drink,” I said. “Come back with me. Have coffee in my suite.”

“Your air-conditioned suite.”

“Stay the night.”

The night was hot and airless but intensely alive. In un-air-conditioned Seattle people sat on their porches, by windows. On the two-block walk to my car we passed through miniature seas of music, laughter, wafts of marijuana smoke.

Kick talked about falling. The difference between a controlled, green-screen studio shot, with backgrounds inserted digitally later, and a live shot. “You can fall a hundred twenty feet from a specially built platform that’s perfectly dry and level, and even the airflow is controlled. Falling off a real building from sixty feet is three times as dangerous. There’s always the risk of a distraction—a traffic accident on the next block, a sudden rainstorm or gust of wind—and then there’s all the bits of building that stick out that you have to compensate for, flagpoles and ledges and pipes, and the way wind moves over a solid surface.”

She talked hard and fast, waving her arms for emphasis. “And, oh, I just had a thought. About safety and risk, and falling and beginnings. About stunts and film and human story. A grand theory of everything, or at least a reason you could make a case for film being the ultimate narrative medium . . . the most basic thrill narrative of all. The ultimate high-stakes story. We care about what happens. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and it’s all or nothing. The stumble, the fall, the landing. You either walk away or you don’t. Success or failure.” She talked faster but walked even more slowly. “It’s turning the clock back to a million years ago, when Junior fell out of the tree and the whole troop watched, banana half-chewed, to see if she caught herself in time or broke her back in the dirt.”

The closer we came to her house and my car, the slower she walked, until we stood at the bottom of her steps and she was still talking, and her eyes shone a strange electric blue under the sodium street lamp, and I realized she was trying to give me it all, tell me everything she knew about falling, because maybe this time tomorrow it would no longer be true, or at least no longer her truth.

For a moment she seemed to bend and glimmer. I said, “You’re not coming back to the hotel, are you?”

Her arms sank to her sides. “No.”

I knew the answer to my next question, too. “Would you like me to stay at your house?” Halos sprang out around the street lamps. “I could come with you to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

“No. Thank you, but no. It’s—This is mine.”

The halos fractured. “Will you call me?”

“Yes.” She reached out and touched my cheek with the back of her hand and when she lifted it, her skin gleamed.

“I mean, will you please call me as soon as you know anything? And call me if you change your mind. Call me for anything, anytime.”

“Yes.”

“And stay cool, remember the bathtub. And that fan Dornan bought for you. If you can’t find it—”

“Aud.”

“—I could probably find a twenty-four-hour—”

“Aud.” Again she reached out and brushed my cheek, then the other. “It’s all right.”

I caught her wet hand and kissed it. “It’s not.” How could it be.

I enfolded her, cradled her head against my collarbone, felt her hips sharp against mine and her ribs, sheathed in taut muscle, bending like bone bows in and out, in and out, and I wanted to howl and hurl myself against the world, to lay my body down to keep her safe. I breathed the Kick-skin, fennel-shampoo, and beer scent of her, then squeezed and let her go.

I WALKED DOWNHILL.
It wasn’t the way to my car but it was easier. After about a mile, I was at Gas Works Park, but I didn’t want the comfort of night-breathing greenery and the confusion of natural and industrial. I turned right. In another half a mile, I was walking along the ship canal in Fremont. I turned right again where the Highway 99 bridge ran over the water, walking under its blank shadow, seeking the place where its soaring impossibility met the dirt.