Always

by Nicola Griffith

  She didn’t like that. “It’s a referral fee.”

  I opened the drawer under the TV and pulled out a brick of cash.

  “Five thousand, cash, on top of the twenty-two hundred I’ve already paid, and not a soul will know the information came from you.” Which meant no one would take their cut.

  “Thank you, no.”

  After what had occurred between us, I couldn’t bring myself to force her.

  AFTER SHE had gone, I tidied away the champagne, blew out the candles, and stripped naked. I could smell my own need.

  I placed my feet exactly, put my palms together, and reached for the ceiling. I breathed out, slow and controlled, and reached some more, until two vertebrae popped and settled, then I bent to the floor, palms flat, and breathed four smooth breaths, six seconds in, seven seconds out. I began the slow-motion movements of a tai chi form.

  When I was done, I began again, even more slowly. And again, until sweat coursed down my body.

  LESSON 5

  THEY WERE ALL THERE. ALL EXCEPT SANDRA APPEARED HAPPY AND RELAXED: glad for it to be spring at last, finding it easier to travel to a strange part of the city now that it was no longer dark when they arrived, now that they no longer had to be afraid when they got out of their cars.

  “Sit for a minute,” I said, and they folded to the floor with varying degrees of ease. Sandra moved more carefully than usual. I wondered what color her torso was. “Let’s talk about fear.”

  “Let’s not,” Nina said, and though she was smiling, as usual, she wasn’t joking.

  “Fear,” I said, and waited. “What is it?”

  “There’s all kinds,” Kim said. I raised my eyebrows. “Like scary movies are good.”

  “But being pulled into your supervisor’s office is bad,” Tonya said.

  “And worrying that you’re being followed.” Katherine, of course.

  “The Goliath at Six Flags is kind of cool.” Suze.

  “But thinking you might have cancer isn’t.” Nina.

  Silence. “And all these things are fear?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “How are they different?”

  “Some are good, and some are bad.”

  “Why?” Blank looks. “All right. How do you feel when you’re afraid?”

  “Frightened,” Nina said in a duh voice.

  “How do you know you’re frightened?”

  They all stared desperately at the carpet, saying with their entire beings: don’t like this, won’t go there, la la la.

  Finally Christie offered, “I shake.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and probably your mouth goes dry.”

  “Damn,” said Kim, “that’s right.”

  “It’s the same for everyone. Fear is a physical response to real danger, immediate danger. It’s glandular and fast as lightning. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  They looked appalled.

  “But fear isn’t the enemy. Fear is your friend. It tells you the truth about what’s going on. In that sense, it’s a bit like pain.”

  “Pain is not my friend,” Therese said.

  “Reliable messenger, then. We don’t always want to hear what it’s got to say, but once it’s arrived, it doesn’t pay to ignore it.”

  Pauletta was frowning. “That’s it? I paid good money to hear you say we’re gonna get hurt and scared and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that when you’re in danger, your glands release all kinds of hormones that are instructions your body cannot disobey.”

  “So some guy scares us and we run shrieking down the alley, that what you’re saying?”

  “No.” I put on my earnest, friendly face. “One of the most important hormones involved in the fear response is adrenaline. Its prime function is to shunt power to necessary systems, basically to make sure you’re ready to fight or run or both. So, Christie, when you tremble, that’s adrenaline flooding your long muscles, your arms and legs, with power. If you’re not running or fighting, you shake, like a shuttle trembling at the launchpad.”

  “I’m not a shuttle,” Kim said. “I start to shaking, and the next thing I do is pass out.”

  “For real?” Pauletta said.

  “Once. Went down, whap, like someone broke my legs. Busted my teeth out on the ground.”

  “No shit?”

  “Just baby teeth. Loose anyhow.” She shrugged.

  Jennifer was breathing far too fast for it to be healthy, and her upper lip glistened. “You pass out? But if you pass out, you’re helpless. . . . I’m going to buy a gun,” Jennifer said. “I am. A big, big gun.”

  “Guns don’t help,” Sandra said. The whole class looked at her.

  “Okay,” I said. “All right. I’m going to tell you what happens and what can happen when we’re scared. And then I’m going to show you some ways to get around some of those things. No one has to pass out with fear ever again—”

  “You said there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “—and no one has to buy a gun.”

  Now I had their attention.

  “Fear is an emotion, a glandular reaction. It’s physical. It affects what we do, how we think, and how we feel. Fear is the body’s response to an understanding of real and immediate danger. Remember those key words: real and immediate. Your glands flood your body with a variety of hormones, like adrenaline. Adrenaline instructs your body to rev up the parts and processes essential for you to fight or run, and to shut down the nonessentials. So, for example, the capillaries in your face close, making you go pale. Your digestion—from saliva production to excretion—turns off, so your mouth goes dry.”

  “Is that why I get sick to my stomach?” Tonya.

  “Yes. You get queasy because your stomach, usually churning away constantly, essentially freezes. Your heart and respiration rates go up—your heart pounds, you feel breathless—to get oxygen, lots of oxygen, to the long muscles of your arms and legs, getting you ready to respond at your maximum. Fear is a good thing.”

  “But getting scared isn’t.” Pauletta was stubborn.

  “There’s nothing good about being in danger, no.” Except that it means you’re not yet dead. “But fear, when you are already in danger, is a good thing. Adrenaline also affects the way your brain works.”

  “Panic,” said Jennifer, nodding.

  “Not necessarily. What happens in times of real and immediate danger is that your unconscious brain, a kind of emergency expert system, takes over. Panic is a system conflict. It’s what happens when your conscious and unconscious brain fight.” And melt down, and all sense just runs and hides. That had happened to me for the first time last year, in New York. Tonya was saying something. “I’m sorry.”

  “I said, like a robot trying to compute when the scientist says, I always lie.”

  Nina made robot-in-a-loop motions, like something from a bad 1980s music video. The tension was beginning to ease.

  I blinked. “Yes. Very good. Just like that. And just as a robot in these stories is always naïve, our conscious mind can be, too. It can persuade itself of things an idiot child wouldn’t believe.” I shook off memories of last year. “I’ll come back to that, because it’s important.” It was the heart of everything, but I couldn’t get there from here. “For now, I’d like you to think a bit more about what fear is and where it comes from.”

  I stood. They watched warily as I walked to the back of the room and my satchel. Tension was high again. I retrieved the packet of blank three-by -five index cards and the box of Sharpies and handed them out.

  “On this card I want you to write the one thing you’re afraid of, that you hope taking this class will help with.”

  “Small card, big pen,” Nina said.

  “That’s because I want you to keep it short. And add, at the bottom right, a simple yes or no, in answer to this question: Have you ever been assaulted? By which I mean physically or sexually attacked.” There were a dozen w
ays to define assault, but for my purposes, that would do. “You won’t be reading these aloud, and I don’t know your handwriting, so be honest, be specific.”

  Caps popped as they came off and the air filled with Sharpie scent— Tonya sniffed hers meditatively; she’d have a headache later—there were lots of faraway looks, some scribbling. Sandra’s pen moved vigorously but never touched the paper.

  “Time’s up. Cap the pens, please, and pass them back to me.”

  “What do we do with the cards?”

  “Hand them to Nina.” There was some standing, some timing of the thrust of card from their hand to Nina’s: attempts to disguise who had given what. “Nina, shuffle them and give them to me.”

  She did. While they sat down again, I sorted the cards rapidly into the yes pile, three; the no pile, six; and the blank card. I set the cards to one side, facedown.

  “According to the 1985 London WAR study, eighty-one percent of women sometimes or often feel frightened at home alone in the daytime. This percentage rises for when we’re outside or it’s night or both.” I looked around the circle, waiting until everyone but Sandra stopped looking at the cards and met my eye. “So what, exactly, are we afraid of?”

  Sandra lifted her head. Her face was waxy with intensity, the tiny muscles in her brown irises pulled so tight that in this bad light the plump fibers had an amber sheen. I’d seen a woman look like that once whose boyfriend had their son in a cupboard with a gun against his head. She was ashamed. She couldn’t tell me; she wanted me to know.

  “In an earlier class I gave you Department of Justice statistics on the chances of avoiding rape if you fight back.”

  “Seventy-two percent if he’s unarmed, fifty-eight percent if armed with a knife, fifty-one if armed with a gun,” said Tonya.

  “Many of you expressed surprise at that.” Nods. “That’s because the information we get, every day, from TV and newspapers and online, is all about the rapes that are completed, the lives lost, the pain suffered—preferably with blood and body parts and panicky eyewitness accounts. Why? Because that’s what gets an audience, and the bigger the audience, the more the media can charge for their commercials. More than eighty percent of us spend our lives afraid because that helps soap makers and computer manufacturers sell product.”

  “Same old same old,” Nina said. “The military-industrial complex.”

  “The capitalist system,” Christie said. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d turned purple and exploded. “Someone was talking about this at school last semester. The patriarchy.”

  “The patriarchy,” Nina said. “Haven’t heard that word since I did women’s studies in college.”

  “They had college back then?” Pauletta said.

  Nina ignored her; she was getting excited. “I remember now. Some big feminist, one of those dead ones, said men teach us to be afraid to control us.”

  Andrea Dworkin: “We are taught systematically to be afraid. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we will be women . . . ,” in Our Blood, though I had no doubt she’s said it in some form or other in all her books. The male conspiracy against women. When it came to the media I had always thought corporate greed was a much simpler explanation.

  “It’s been estimated that the media publicize thirteen completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. If you round up the chance of getting away from an unarmed attacker from seventy-two to seventy-five percent, that means you have a three in four chance of getting away.”

  “Or kicking his fucking head in,” Suze said.

  “And then if you take the thirteen-to-one completed-versus-uncompleted -rape media figure, it means that the papers and the news underreport fight-back stories by five thousand two hundred percent.”

  “Math makes my head hurt,” said Katherine.

  “Imagine you’re listening to WSB while you drink your mocha and drive to work. Imagine it’s a slow news day, so you hear about a grand-mother who fought off a rapist with her umbrella. Think about the other fifty-one women who got away.”

  Tonya got it. Her eyes shone, and it was a different shine than Sandra’s. “Much of what we call fear is actually worry about imaginary situations, ” I said. “It’s learned. It can be unlearned. When you read about someone being raped, remember the three others who got away. On those rare occasions where you do hear about a woman getting away, remember the fifty-one others who did, too. Better yet, don’t read or listen to that kind of news.”

  “Not listen to the news?” Jennifer looked shocked.

  “The news exists to make people anxious, so that they keep watching, so that the provider—the website, the network, the publisher—can sell advertising space. But anxiety and worry are not the same as fear. There’s very little useful about them. Worry, or stress, or anxiety are responses to long-term or persistently imagined danger, not real danger, not immediate danger. Horror and dread, again, aren’t usually about the immediate, but about the future: the suspense of waiting for what you think will come. Note that: think. When you lie awake at night and start imagining mad axe murderers or hooded rapists, we’re not smelling them, not hearing them, not feeling the vibration of their footsteps.”

  I picked up the cards and turned them over.

  “Let me tell you something about what’s written on these cards. The ones with no in the bottom right list fears like ‘being raped,’ ‘being followed, ’ ‘dark places,’ and so on. Do you see any similarities between them?” I waited.

  “Horror-movie stuff,” Tonya said. “Kind of generic.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The ones who wrote yes were more specific.”

  “Like what?” Suze, one of the Nos.

  “Waking in my hotel room to find the bellboy exposing himself, my old boyfriend getting drunk and paying me a visit, being beaten with a garden rake.” I looked around the circle of faces. Therese and Kim’s faces were closed, Nina looked particularly detached. “Some of you seem unhappy.”

  “You just said we’re afraid of make-believe things,” Pauletta said.

  “Those of you who have never been assaulted are worrying about the wrong things. You’ve paid for my advice, so listen to me now. Fear is a good thing, worrying about fear is not. All right. On your feet.”

  “What?”

  “Up.” I stood. “Stand in a big circle. Good. Fear releases adrenaline. Adrenaline will make your heart pound, and make you pant. It’s the panting that leads to hyperventilation, which leads to passing out. Some people pass out because they’re so frightened, they forget to breathe at all. So if you’re not breathing, start. A good way to do that is to exhale sharply, even if you feel you’ve got no air, and that’ll trigger an inhalation. It’s enough to get you going. But then you have to not hyperventilate. I’m going to show you how.”

  Their chests rose and fell with rapid, shallow breath.

  “Stand in a stable, comfortable position. Push your tongue up into the roof of your mouth and clamp your back teeth together. This will control your jaw and neck muscles, in case you’re shaking, and also, if you get hit on the jaw, it’s less likely to break. Keep your back straight.” Their notion of straight was pitiful. “Try to feel your spine in one long line, like a plumb line. Don’t stick your chin in the air because that will put a strain on your vocal cords, which we’ll need nice and relaxed for later.” Though there was a good physiological argument, too, for lifting the chin: it reduced the emotional response and promoted blood flow to the frontal cortex. But one thing at a time. “Keep your shoulders down. Not only does that look more confident and relaxed but it reduces muscle tension and therefore speeds any emergency response. Breathe through your nose, breathe deep from the diaphragm. Feel your belly swell. Put your hand on your stomach. There.” I walked around, adjusting posture. “Make that hand move out. Your chest should hardly move at all. In through the nose, deep and slow, your belly swells. Out, a long gush through the mouth. In, deep and sl
ow, and out. In. Out.”

  Their faces grew pink.

  “Now that you’re breathing nicely and there’s no more danger of passing out, it’s safe to address some of the other fear symptoms. If your arms and legs are trembling, but you don’t yet know if you should run or fight, try clenching and relaxing them. If your mouth is really dry, open your mouth slightly—if it’s safe to do so—and run the underside of your tongue over your bottom front teeth. That should make your mouth water. Do this for a few seconds, and swallow a couple of times, and gradually the dryness will go away and your larynx will relax. So now we’re ready to use our voices.”

  Ten pairs of shoulders rose. Well, they were going to have to get over that.

  “Voice is an important body weapon. In its way, it’s as useful as a kick or punch. Voice can embarrass or frighten a potential attacker. It can summon help, give warning, and say no, loudly and clearly. It can give you confidence, and deafen your attacker, actually damage an eardrum. Voice can immobilize an attacker or potential attacker for a split second.” Therese made a slight huh of skepticism. I started walking around the inside of the circle. “Voice increases the power of any physical move you might make because it helps you focus your attention and your strike. Voice depends very much on the way we breathe. Make the voice come from deep down, as though it’s from your thighs and stomach, not your throat and head. You want a deep, explosive sound.” I stopped in front of Therese. “Like this:

  “Huut!”

  The sound slammed into her face and blew her backwards. Her arms pinwheeled. I resumed walking while she shook her head and pulled herself together.

  “Spread out just a little. We’re going to do some squats.” I demonstrated. “Slow and easy. Breathe out through your mouth as you go down, in through your nose as you come up. Down, out.” The less self-conscious made a kind of ooourff as they went down. “Up, in. Down, out. Up, in. Now a little faster. Down!” More oourffs. “Up. Down! Good. Let me hear some noise now. A deep sound, a boom. Feel it blast out of you, like a train from a tunnel. Ooosh! All together. Ooosh.” The entire circle dropped, like a falling hoop. Half made a noise. “Up, and in. And oosh.” More of the hoop sounded. “And up and in and oosh.” Gaps in the hoop only from Jennifer and Katherine and Sandra. “And up and in and oosh!” Katherine sounded. Not much, but something. The circle was almost closed. “Up and in and oosh! Up, in, oosh!” An uncertain ooh? from Jennifer. Almost. “Up and in and oosh!” Jennifer’s ooh firmed and strengthened. Katherine was as loud as the rest. “Up and in and oosh! Louder. Ooosh! Louder. Ooosh!” I walked around, breathing, booming, listening. And there, at last, a thin, hesitant sound, wavering like a ghost. “Louder. Ooosh!”