Nicola Griffith - Always

“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 believed 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 KICKwas 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.