Always

by Nicola Griffith

  “That kick to your ribs didn’t hurt?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, then straightened suddenly, got a twinkle in his eye, and his brogue thickened, “nothing in service of helping these lovely ladies.”

  They had regained their awareness of the room beyond their own triumph and had noticed that the evil space alien was a not-unattractive male.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Jennifer. “Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly fine. In the peak of health.”

  “Bet we scared you, hey?” Nina said.

  "Absolutely. Terrifying.”

  “Did we hurt you?” Therese wanted to know.

  “My pride, possibly. I had no idea ladies could be so fearsome.” Brilliant smiles all around. “You astonished me.”

  “We had a good teacher,” Christie said.

  “Indeed?” Dornan gave me a wink, as if to say he saw I was glowing under a bit of flattery as much as anyone else in the room. “Oh, indeed. Yes.”

  “And we really didn’t hurt you?” Kim seemed a little disappointed.

  “I’d have to get out of all this padding to find out.”

  “Did you like that palm strike I gave you?” she said.

  “Blinded and surprised me,” Dornan said, though if I’d had to bet it would be to the effect that he couldn’t remember one blow from another. “Took me completely off guard.”

  “And my knuckle strike?” Tonya said.

  “Ah, now that I remember very clearly. Like a bolt from heaven. My life quite passed before my eyes.”

  He was troweling it on. Any minute they’d realize that. “No doubt Dornan would really appreciate the opportunity to get out of that extremely uncomfortable suit.”

  “Oh, my, yes indeed.” “Oh, you poor thing.” “We mustn’t keep you.” Good southern women, they said all the right things while still managing to look crushed: they had not yet had the chance to refight their battles.

  “But no doubt he’d be willing to rejoin us for a debriefing?”

  “No doubt, ladies, no doubt.”

  It would give me the chance to debrief them properly, after which Dornan could twinkle at them and make them feel mighty. They’d done well. They deserved every ounce of their triumph. Meanwhile, though, it wouldn’t do any harm to lead them through another round at the punch bag, refining what they’d learnt in the heat of their personal battle.

  FIFTEEN

  ON SET KICK WAS ENTIRELY PROFESSIONAL AND IMPERSONAL. "THE FIRST STEP is to visually inspect the air bag, both before and after inflation.” I wondered if I hid my feelings so well when I was teaching.

  She lifted this piece and that of the deflated bag, talking about the sensitivity of the plastic to temperature change and how it must always, always be checked. “One stunter died a few years back when they flew his air bag out to Portugal in an unpressurized cargo bay. The cold, high altitude changed the physical properties of the material and the vents didn’t hold. Dead as a stone.”

  Then the compressor thudded for fifteen minutes and we walked solemnly around the Model Seventy once again. She moved smoothly.

  “Now we test it from the tower. It’ll test the camera orientation, too.”

  Again, there were three cameras. One to the side, one on top, one directly behind the bag to focus on the falling object as it fell. Once they were set up to Rusen’s satisfaction, she borrowed one of the props manager’s clothing dummies, carried it to the top of the tower. Then she came back down, handed me a very heavy grocery bag, and said, “Follow me.” Climbing the scaffolding steps with the bag made me aware of the pull of humerus from shoulder socket, the compression of cartilage in my knee and ankle joints, the smooth lubrication of synovial fluid around my hips. We are such delicate machines.

  It was surprisingly crowded at the top with the two camera operators. Everyone but me was wearing a headset. I nodded. They nodded back.

  Kick took several sets of ankle and wrist weights from the bags and wrapped them around the dummy’s limbs and waist. Some of them had been carefully sewn together to be long enough. Then she cinched me into a harness, standing close to check the fit—the impersonal touch was disorienting—clipped a line to the D-ring at my waist, jerked it to be sure, then did the same for herself. I eased one strap, tightened another.

  We picked up the dummy, carried it to the edge of the platform.

  “Clear,” she said conversationally, then, for the benefit of people on the set without earphones, she shouted, “Stand clear below.” Then she turned to me. “Follow my swing. Let go at the top, don’t try to push it.” She waited for my nod, and we began to swing. “On three. One”—swing—“two”— swing—“three”—release, and the dummy sailed up and out in a rapidly climbing curve, seemed to pause, then plummeted in an almost straight line to the bag, which hissed and sagged and caught the dummy safely in the center of its sweet spot. Whistles and general applause from below—I saw the flash of Dornan’s grin.

  “Of course a body, a person, falls differently,” she said, and unhooked her safety line. “With an active leap and flailing arms it’s more of an overhand, egglike curve. It takes a little longer, and it’s easier for the camera operators to follow.”

  “Do they know that?” They seemed barely out of film school. We unbuckled our harnesses. I resisted the urge to help her.

  “They will when Buddy gets here.”

  We climbed down, a lot easier without the weights, and started the compressors pumping the bag full again.

  “Sandwiches?” Dornan called from the craft-services table. He gave the impression of wearing an apron, though he wasn’t.

  “Later,” Kick said.

  We sat cross-legged on the floor while we waited. She looked around, at the quietly humming set. “We’re pretty much set. Buddy’ll want to test the bag himself, but essentially we’re good to go.”

  “I thought you said most serious stunters had their own bags and own air-bag people.”

  “I used to be Buddy’s air-bag woman. He coordinated on Tantalus. He trusts my bag work. He’ll walk in here, we’ll get it in one take. Two at most, then I’m free for a couple of days. I can take care of . . . things.” Maureen. Her brothers.

  The air compressor clicked off, and on, and off again.

  At eye level, the bag looked huge. She reached out and patted it. It shivered like a big square jellyfish.

  “Buddy’s not here,” I said.

  “He will be.”

  “Yes,” I said. We admired the bag some more. “Is it calling to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Insurance aside, would you be up to it?”

  She snorted. “It’s only forty-two feet.”

  “It occurs to me that you don’t need insurance to jump if it’s just for fun.”

  She looked at the bag some more.

  “And the cameras could probably do with the practice. Save Buddy having to do two takes.” She didn’t say anything. “How long’s it been?”

  “Long time.”

  “You—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Stop there. Stop. Give me a minute.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned back on her hands, tipping her head to take the measure of the fake office building. She folded over her legs, chest touching knees, stretching out her hamstrings, breathing easily. She straightened, looked at the tower again, began to fold back, then jumped to her feet so fast I didn’t see the transition. She seemed different, burlier. “Roland!” One of the cameramen poked his head cautiously over the lip of the tower. “Live rehearsal!”

  There was a moment’s silence, in which several crew stopped mid-hammer or mid-yammer, then Roland said, “You want us to load?”

  “Film for three cameras? You and whose fucking checkbook? Rehearsal, I said.”

  Einstein once called quantum entanglement—when the quantum states of two objects have to be described in reference to each other even though the individual objects are spatially separated—“spooky action at a distance. ” He believ
ed that it was impossible to use this entanglement to transmit information. Einstein had never been on a film set. I didn’t see anyone leave the building to go get Finkel or Rusen, I didn’t see anyone pick up a phone, but by the time Kick got to the top of the tower, they were both there, watching.

  I stood twenty feet from the bag, two feet behind the camera dolly, in direct line-of-sight to the tower. She would look as though she were falling right at me. Dornan stood a little to my left. He looked worried.

  She came to the lip of the platform, in safety harness and headset, stood wide-legged for a moment, then sat, feet dangling. She adjusted her headset, appeared to be saying something. The camera operator squinted and made some adjustment. Rusen came over, they conferred. Rusen took the operator’s headset a moment, looked up at the figure on the tower, said something, listened, nodded, said something else, grinned, and gave the headset back.

  “Okey dokey,” he said loudly. “Everybody, keep still. Try not to make any sudden moves or loud noises.”

  You can’t distract her now, I thought. She sees nothing, hears nothing but what is to come.

  And she did that trick again, stood so fast I didn’t see her get up, and her headset was gone, and she was unbuckling her harness, and it was like watching a quarter horse, stripped of its tack, roll in the dust and stand and remember what it meant to be alive. She stood motionless, and I knew her nostrils would be flared, her heart thumping like a kettle drum, that she would be testing the air for unexpected currents, rocking imperceptibly on her feet, feeling the delicate articulations of the talus, the anklebone: the ends of the tibia and fibula, the heel bone, the rays of the metatarsals. So much work for one bone, sliding back and forward on its springy ligament. Less delicate, in comparison, than a horse’s paten.

  She was already going to that place, the heart-stopping moment when the world pauses, then resumes as a crystal dream. She was like the horse running, running around the corral, getting up speed before heading towards the fence, gathering itself, listening to its own rhythm, nothing but the heart, nothing but the blood, nothing but the breath. Bit and bridle forgotten, iron shoes now weightless, ribs working like bellows and arteries wide open.

  She stepped back, and all I could see was the top of her head, and it moved slightly, as though she had nodded to herself, and then she ran, and leapt, up and out, and—

  “Oh!” everyone moaned, as she faltered, then crumpled as though shot, and fell like a dead thing.

  Gravity seemed to triple for a moment, then adrenaline burned through my system and kicked me into hyperdrive. Kick fell in slow motion. Sound fell away. I started to draw breath before leaping—to do what, I don’t know—when my automatic processing of images caught up with my brain and I realized she was smiling. And then she thumped neatly into the exact center of the bag, and swung herself to the ground like a pro. Her grin was big enough to split the world.

  Noise swelled around me: applause. She bowed, laughed.

  Dornan was there, patting her on the back, saying, “Jesus, God in heaven,” and Rusen pumped her hand like a maniac. I stayed where I was. My muscles trembled with unspent power.

  Then she was standing in front of me.

  “Well?”

  Her skin looked perfectly elastic, blooming and alive. I touched her cheek. "You were good,” I said. "I believed it. I thought you were going to die.”

  “Yep,” she said. “Pretty much perfect.”

  “And you used to do that every day?”

  “Only higher.” She grinned. “Still want to learn? When Buddy’s done the jump I’ll pack away the Model Seventy and we’ll get out that old Forty and give it a try. Hey,” she said, as Dornan ambled over with two cups. He gave one to her, held another out to me.

  “I remembered no cream,” he said. “But I put sugar in it. You looked as though you could do with it.”

  I accepted the cup.

  “I can also recommend the sandwiches,” he said. “Tuna or jerk chicken.”

  Kick sipped at her paper cup. It smelled strange. She saw my look. “Red tea. Don’t need caffeine after that. But I could eat. Aud?” I shook my head. She nodded, then gave me a one-armed hug. She squeezed hard, then kissed me. “I’m glad you were here.”

  She headed back to the air bag, swaggering slightly. Dornan said, “She’s different, isn’t she, when she jumps.”

  “Yes.” Hearty and careless, unfragile, unneeding. “I think I’ll take my coffee outside. Join me?”

  We sat outside on the hood of my car and watched clouds sweep in two different directions, as though the sky were being torn apart.

  IF KICK was a quarter horse, Buddy was an old steer, sinewy and raw-boned, grazed on arid land all his life. His skin was leathery and tightly stretched, and when he shook hands with the crew, I saw a scar twisting up his left forearm like a brand. He walked around the air bag with Kick and listened attentively as she talked about the testing and her own fall. His limbs were lanky, and next to Kick he seemed uncoordinated, but there was a kinship, a live-free-or-die lift of the head, a risk-calculating twist of the mouth. I looked at him, nodding and listening, unbuttoning the cheap flannel shirt, looking over the harness Kick handed him, and understood they shared a world I couldn’t. I wondered if her stunt rigger brother looked like that.

  I left them talking to Rusen and the camera operators.

  Finkel was in his trailer. “That was some jump of Kuiper’s,” he said. “We should’ve been rolling for that, saved the cost of this Buddy guy.”

  “Mmmn,” I said. Had Kick not told anyone about her diagnosis apart from me and Dornan? I sat down. “We need to talk about OSHA and EPA. And Sîan Branwell’s PR value. Let me see her contract.”

  We were both on the phone an hour later when Rusen came in, glowing. “We got it!” he said. “In one—Oh, sorry.” He made a production out of putting his finger to his lips and sitting with conspicuous quietness in a chair in the corner while Finkel and I wound up our calls.

  We finished at about the same time. I nodded to Finkel and he crossed two more names off an already heavily striped list.

  “What’s that?” Rusen said.

  Finkel handed him the list. “We’re inviting everyone and his goddamn dog to the set on Tuesday to hang with Sîan Branwell. Well, not with her, exactly, just around her. See her from a distance. Watch a real movie being made.”

  “Dornan’s idea,” I said. “The regional manager from OSHA is bringing her two children. The woman from EPA might come with her mother. Apparently her mother is a big fan.”

  “Are we allowed to do that?” Rusen said to Finkel, who nodded to me.

  “We all agreed that this in no way affects the official business of their respective offices,” I said. "That the public good must be considered, we must be shown no undue favoritism, and so on. What it will do is ease the pressure these higher-ups might have brought to bear on the case officers handling our paperwork because of the newspaper article. Now we’ll go back to waiting our turn in the queue; it will take time to get to us. And time is all we need.” And without Corning paying Mackie to call in every single violation, we would be in only one queue. “Also, the fire department has agreed to expedite the pyrotechnic permit, and the reporter who wrote that Times piece will show up with a photographer.”

  “What do we have in the way of publicity stills?” Finkel said.

  Rusen looked blank.

  “Maybe we could strike a side deal with the photographer,” Finkel said. “So, Stan, I’m sorry, you had some news?”

  “We got the shot. The fall. Perfect. All three cameras the first time. They’re already packing away that huge bag thing. We’re in good shape. Great shape. I was thinking it might be good to give folks a break.”

  “It is a holiday weekend,” I said. “And we could cut some checks.”

  “Bad idea,” said Finkel. “You give these people a couple days off and who knows if they’ll come back, ’specially if they have money burning a hole in thei
r pockets. You know what these creative types are like.”

  I wondered how Rusen and Finkel had met and started working together; they seemed to be from different continuums.

  “What is there still to do?” I asked Rusen.

  “On set? Not a lot. Rigging the pyrotechnics, which Kick says is eight hours’ work, max, even including testing. The rest has to wait for Sîan on Tuesday. We could give them Saturday and Sunday, get everyone back first thing Monday, and still have a pretty good margin for error.”

  “And off set?”

  “Editing.”

  “Lining up product placement,” Finkel said.

  “But you don’t need the crew for that,” I said. “And they’ve been working hard, and you’ve some money in the bank.”

  “We sure do. Boy, Anton, I really think we should do it.”

  THE CLOUDS had slowed from scudding to drifting. One layer, moving from the southwest, looked like an indigo veil. Kick’s van was gone. I’d helped her and Buddy wrestle the Model Seventy into the back. She and Buddy would drive it back to the storage unit.

  “And then we’ll maybe go out for a beer . . .”

  I imagined them at a rickety table in a smoky bar, with beer and shooters, pausing in their conversation for a moment to watch some pretty woman walk by before going back to agreeing that all directors were ass-holes who didn’t know nothing about nothing.

  “. . . and then I have to spend a couple of days breaking the news to the rest of the family.” On her own.

  "AUD, ” Eric said in surprise when he answered the phone. "Your mother was just about to call you. We were hoping you could have dinner with us tonight.”

  “Yes. Yes, that would be fine.”

  Pause. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more . . . episodes?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Taste?”

  “About the same. Perhaps a little better.”

  “Good. That’s good. I spoke to my colleague the other day and he admits that they’re no nearer to determining a couple of the mystery ingredients. His guess is that it came from some illegal basement lab. It’s astonishing just how—Hold on one moment.” Muffled conversation. “Your mother would like a word. We’ll see you tonight?”