Always

by Nicola Griffith

  The hoop dropped, the sound flared up, unbroken, like a ring of fire. My face stretched in a fierce grin: you breathe, you make a noise, the next thing you know you’re talking back, and then, next time he thinks about hitting you, you leave.

  Ooosh.

  Ooosh.

  Ooosh.

  “Louder! Blow your attacker into the back of next week. Use that fear, use that anger. Louder. And up, and in, and one last time. Ooosh!”

  The sound was tremendous; I felt it through the soles of my feet. If there had been a window, it would have rattled.

  “Yes!” Suze said, pumping her arm.

  Everyone was grinning. Tonya turned away briefly, but not before I saw the sparkle on her cheeks. Sandra looked as though she had seen God.

  “Whoo!” Kim said. “We kicked ass!”

  The basement door opened.

  It was like watching a pride of lionesses lift their dripping muzzles from the belly of the dying zebra and zero in on the giggling hyena.

  The face of the long-haired woman in the doorway went white. Classic fear response. The scent of mass-produced incense, and the whine-and-tinkle of Crystal Gaze’s sound system—three women with nasal problems singing Om-mani-padme-hum—drifted into the basement. The woman swayed, clutched for the doorknob, missed, nearly fell.

  “Breathe,” Nina advised.

  Everyone laughed. The woman in the doorway looked as though she might cry. I recognized her from behind the cash register upstairs. “How can I help you?”

  “I, uh.”

  “Breathe, honey,” Nina said again.

  We all waited politely. “You, uh, that is, the customers were wondering . . .” She didn’t seem to know how to proceed.

  “Were we too loud, honey?”

  “Yes. Loud. You were loud.”

  “They heard you upstairs,” I told everyone. “Through the concrete and the floors and over the sound system.”

  “Excellent!” Christie said.

  SIX

  I CALLED DORNAN BEFORE BREAKFAST. HE WOULDN’T PICK UP. I LEFT A LONG message. When I called again, half an hour later, he answered.

  “It didn’t look like work,” he said.

  “No.”

  “In fact, it looked to me as though I showed up just in time.”

  An image popped into my head of Dornan in baggy blue shorts and sagging tights, cape askew, kicking down the door to my suite to the accompaniment of melodramatic music.

  “I did, didn’t I? Show up in time?”

  Depends how you look at it. “Yes.” Though I hadn’t got the information I’d wanted.

  “Aud, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re all right?”

  “How do you mean, exactly?”

  “Last night just . . . well, it’s not like you. The whole idea strikes me as baroque and too complicated, all that potential for things to go wrong. And the timing. It’s almost as though you set yourself up for it. At best, it seems uncharacteristically silly.”

  Irresponsible. Then a victim. Now silly. “Every week a new high.”

  “Yes, well, that’s probably some sort of joke, but those drugs were truly wicked. Most of those other people are still in hospital. One of the carpenters just had to go back on a ventilator, for God’s sake.”

  He was very well informed.

  “Look, why don’t we just go back to Atlanta? You don’t really care about your warehouse anyway, and you’ve seen your mum. I’ve seen enough of the Seattle chains. I have some ideas to be working on, and, besides, the business is probably dissolving with no one looking after it. Let’s just leave. Don’t get distracted. What happened with the drugs is irrelevant, like, like an earthquake. It affected you, yes, but it wasn’t aimed at you. It wasn’t personal.”

  “Oh, but it was.”

  “More than a dozen people—”

  “Dornan, think about it. This whole thing has been aimed at getting me to sell the warehouse cheaply. Who I was didn’t matter, it was the fact that I owned the warehouse. They began by reducing my cash flow sharply, by calling OSHA and EPA to harass my leaseholder, which they hoped would make whoever owned the warehouse view it as a liability. It was a liability. But then Rusen came along. He started trying to deal with the problem, he tried to talk to EPA and OSHA, so then whoever was engineering all this had to start messing with the production itself.” The day-as-night exposures, the lighting setup, the props. “And when Rusen, with his unexpected corporate efficiencies, starts trying to find ways to finesse that, and keeps making his payments to me, they start to scramble and dump drugs in the coffee. Which I drink. Ironic if you stop to think about it. Two months ago all they would have to have done is make me an offer. As you’ve said, I didn’t really care. The only reason I came out here in the first place was to be distracted.”

  “And because of your mum.”

  “Yes. But mainly to get away from Atlanta. Only now I find I’m being manipulated again.”

  “This is different.”

  “Is it? They drugged that coffee, and I drank it. They slid their nasty little hands inside my head and paddled about. I can’t rely on myself anymore. Is what I see real? Can I walk up a hill without my heart faltering and the oxygen not getting to my lungs because some compound that I can’t even name has altered my metabolic cycle? If I have to run I don’t know if I can. If something, someone comes for me, I don’t know if it’s really happening. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “No.”

  “So, yes, now I care. I’m going to get these people. And you know what?” And it slowly dawned on me that this was true. “I’m going to enjoy it. Because, as you say—and you’re obviously more well informed than I am—someone is still on a ventilator, and the people who did this to her—”

  “Him.”

  “—him deserve whatever I can mete out. This is something I can do something about. It won’t be easy, because Seattle isn’t my town, and I’ll have to do things differently, but I’ll find them.”

  “I’m getting that.”

  “I’m going to get information from Corning’s office and follow it. And if, in order to get to these people, I have to deal drugs or talk to kiddie-porn merchants or get naked with gorgeous women I’ve given a lot of money to in the privacy of my own suite, I will.”

  “Though you didn’t. Get naked.”

  “No.”

  “Though she was very decorative.”

  “She was, wasn’t she?”

  “But not really your type, in the end.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe if she’d pissed you off,” he said. “That seems to work for you.”

  I said nothing.

  “Well, I don’t imagine there’s any way I can help, but if there is, let me know.”

  “There is something,” I said, and imagined him flinging himself skyward and hurtling around the earth faster and faster until it slowed, and reversed, and the film of my life ran backwards through the last year to the afternoon when Julia sat on my lap by the fjord and said she was going to Oslo and there was no reason for me to go with her, she would only be gone twenty-four hours, and I said all right. “Have dinner with me tonight. ”

  “You’re eating again?”

  “Not by choice. Come be my moral support. With my mother and Eric.”

  Silence. Then he sighed. “What time?”

  “Seven. I’ll pick you up.”

  THE SUN was bright and the air soft. It was going to be a hot day, for Seattle. The sunshine seemed to puzzle and provoke the normally placid local drivers. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I heard the tire squeal and horn honk of two separate near misses.

  I got to Corning’s office at two minutes to nine. Gary was hovering by the door, already agitated.

  “Miz Corning’s been . . . there’s . . . I’m afraid your appointment is postponed.”

  I moved him aside gently. The reception area was brightly lit, and the adrenaline coursing through my system made it seem brighter still. Corning�
��s door was ajar, and her lights off. “Don’t move,” I said. I listened.

  “She’s . . .”

  I walked in, turned on the lights. Perfectly tidy and normal, apart from a lone piece of paper facedown on the floor. I picked it up. Page two of a standard commercial lease, blank. “Gary?” He ventured in behind me. “Where is she?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. She hasn’t been in, and she hasn’t called. It’s not usual.” Emphasis on the last word.

  I turned and waited.

  “She’s very particular about clients. Always here half an hour before an appointment, always wanting the file so she can appear to have remembered everything about the client. The personal touch, she called it.”

  Past tense. “When did you get here?”

  “Usual time. Eight o’clock. Well, five minutes late, so I was worried she’d . . . I’ve been working on a presentation on the new . . . on the presentation she was going to give later this week.”

  Was going to give. He was young, but not stupid. Perhaps he knew something he didn’t know he knew. “Why are you so worried?”

  “I just am. It’s not usual. When she still wasn’t here after I’d finished my coffee, I waited another minute or so, then called her cell, in case she was stuck in traffic, so I could ask her if there was anything I could do to prepare for her meeting, you know, so she wasn’t cutting it too fine, but there was no answer. She always answers her cell. So I thought maybe she was sick, so I called her home. Nothing. So I checked her appointment calendar, and she hasn’t canceled anything, so I was thinking maybe she’d had an accident.”

  “Yet you haven’t called the police.”

  Silence.

  I sat in Corning’s chair. “Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll have a little chat.”

  He sat stiffly.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Fourteen months.”

  “Fourteen months. Long enough to know that not everything that happens in this office is aboveboard. You’re smart. You know that you should probably have reported some of these things to somebody. But it’s your first real job and who could blame you if you listened to your boss when she told you that everybody does things this way. Business is business.”

  His face was set.

  “But, as I say, you’re smart. And no doubt you understand by now that at least one of your clients, me, does, in fact, blame you for conniving in irregular, unethical, and very probably illegal activity. But perhaps you and I can work something out.”

  He wavered for a moment, then sat as straight as a plumb line and lifted his chin. How annoying. I could break something—it probably wouldn’t have to be a bone, a desk lamp would do—but he was young, and I’d bought him chocolates last time I’d been here.

  “Do you know what money is, Gary? It’s a lubricant. Money makes the things you want possible. It can’t buy love, but it can buy sex, and respect. Money gets you security and attention. It can buy health and it can pay for justice. So if I said I would offer you an undreamt-of sum, what would you do? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be? Take a minute to think about it.”

  He crossed his left leg over his right, linked his hands over his knee, and began to sweat.

  Dornan would ask for an empire of some kind, six thousand coffee shops all over the world, and guaranteed bargains every time he shopped. Maybe he would ask for Tammy back. My mother? For all political and business negotiations to be reasonable and rational. Luz would want a pair of leather trousers and permission to have the light on all night. Kick, oh, I would bet my bank account I knew what she wanted: the impossible.

  Gary cleared his throat. “To be in charge. I’d want to run my own real estate office.”

  It’s impossible to look at someone and know whether they are being brave. For an agoraphobic, walking down the street is a heroic act. For someone with absolutely no imagination, running into a burning building to save a baby is not hard. Bravery is relative. Perhaps it’s the same with dreams.

  “Staying out of jail would be the first step, and I can help you with that. Let’s begin with you bringing me my file. I’ll make us some coffee.”

  There was no espresso machine in the break room, but I found a French press and an interestingly scented light Arabica blend. While the kettle boiled I leafed through the magazines and newspapers on the table. One was the Seattle Times with the story about the drugging.

  Back in Corning’s office, Gary was kneeling on the floor by the filing cabinet, looking baffled.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  I considered. “What else is missing?”

  “How did you—”

  “What else is missing?”

  “A lot.”

  “How specific is the loss?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  "Particular files, files that are connected in some way, or random chunks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out. Do you want cream or sugar?”

  He was still riffling through files when I brought back the coffee. I settled comfortably behind the desk and sipped, content to wait now that he’d begun.

  “I’m going to have to cross-check the computer records file by file against the paper files to know for sure what’s gone, but I can tell you one thing I’ve noticed. She’d had me make calls about three lots in the last couple of months that are connected. More or less. I mean, literally. They’re next door to each other. Contiguous.”

  “Is one of those lots mine?”

  He nodded.

  “You said more or less.”

  “That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s one lot between the others that isn’t for sale. It’s the Federal Center. You can’t buy that. Also, I don’t remember any calls to other investors about these other three lots.”

  “You think she wanted it for herself?”

  “I don’t know. And it’s pretty useless land, anyhow. Warehouses. Who wants those?”

  “Close the file cabinet and come sit. Talk to me about real estate here in Seattle.”

  I TOOK THE Seattle Times with me and read the story carefully in the car. I tried to imagine I was Corning. I highlighted the names of those admitted to Harborview Medical Center. I asked the MMI for a map.

  At Harborview, I found that they had all been released, except for one man, Steven Jursen, who had been transferred that morning to the University of Washington Medical Center.

  According to the MMI, the UW Medical Center was less than a mile from Kick’s house. I drove down her street, even though it wasn’t strictly on my route. Her van wasn’t in the driveway. I wondered if she had got the flowers. Of course she had. Benjamin was an efficient concierge.

  The lobby of the medical center was stuffed with art. The floors were clean enough to eat from, if I’d wanted to eat. Nothing was white. The elevator took an age.

  Jursen was in a private room. The door was partly open. I stepped close, lifting my hand to knock, and the smell hit me: that hospital scent of disinfectant and fear and floor polish, of bleached linens and sugary drinks, of sleek equipment with its contacts recently wiped down with alcohol and ready to lie cold and stinging against warm skin. I knocked. No response. There again, if he was on a ventilator, there wouldn’t be. I pushed the door open.

  He was asleep. Sunshine poured through the large window, gilding the brushed steel and putty white of the equipment standing ready around the room. He was breathing on his own. On the set, I remembered a man in his late fifties with hard hands and grey hair who wore overalls and walked with slightly bowed legs. A manual worker all his life, whose parents or grandparents had come from Sweden and had expected a hard life of hard work. No great ambition for success, just a steady job with one company, maybe in construction, who paid him on time and took care of everything. A mid-twentieth-century man trying to live in the twenty-first.

  Asleep, he looked quite different, not younger but purer, untouched by the experience and c
ompromises of age. A preacher from the eighteenth century, say, who knew he was doing God’s work. I looked at his chart. He’d been off the ventilator since midnight. There were EKG records and an order for an echocardiogram and something called a MUGA test. Under marital status a woman had written in blue ink: divorced. I adjusted the slant of the blinds so that the sun wasn’t in his face, and watched his chest rise and fall, then went to find a doctor.

  I DROVE A circuitous route—no one followed me—to a café on Boat Street that I’d read about. I pulled into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I didn’t get out of the car; I doubted my hunger would stand in the face of food that tasted of sulfur and burnt rubber.

  Jursen had congestive heart failure. The overdose had nearly killed him—an overdose he’d been fed because he was connected to me. His near-death was a consequence an order of magnitude greater than spoiling a few rolls of film, and very public. Corning was running scared, scared enough to try to erase her tracks, starting with pulling the tail on me. Good. I would let her stew in her own juices another day or so. Fear would do my work for me.

  KICK’S VAN was parked outside the warehouse, but it was her assistant at the craft-services table. Rusen stood by one of the soundstages, talking to Peg and Joel.

  “—can’t,” Joel was saying. “It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way with these time constraints.”

  “You’re always saying what you can’t do,” Peg said. “Why don’t you try looking at what you can, just for once in your miserable, whining life. We’ve—” She saw me and broke off. They all turned.