Nicola Griffith - Always

“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.”