Nicola Griffith - Always

“Your air-conditioned suite.”

“Stay the night.”

The night was hot and airless but intensely alive. In un-air-conditioned Seattle people sat on their porches, by windows. On the two-block walk to my car we passed through miniature seas of music, laughter, wafts of marijuana smoke.

Kick talked about falling. The difference between a controlled, green-screen studio shot, with backgrounds inserted digitally later, and a live shot. “You can fall a hundred twenty feet from a specially built platform that’s perfectly dry and level, and even the airflow is controlled. Falling off a real building from sixty feet is three times as dangerous. There’s always the risk of a distraction—a traffic accident on the next block, a sudden rainstorm or gust of wind—and then there’s all the bits of building that stick out that you have to compensate for, flagpoles and ledges and pipes, and the way wind moves over a solid surface.”

She talked hard and fast, waving her arms for emphasis. “And, oh, I just had a thought. About safety and risk, and falling and beginnings. About stunts and film and human story. A grand theory of everything, or at least a reason you could make a case for film being the ultimate narrative medium… the most basic thrill narrative of all. The ultimate high-stakes story. We care about what happens. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and it’s all or nothing. The stumble, the fall, the landing. You either walk away or you don’t. Success or failure.” She talked faster but walked even more slowly. “It’s turning the clock back to a million years ago, when Junior fell out of the tree and the whole troop watched, banana half-chewed, to see if she caught herself in time or broke her back in the dirt.”

The closer we came to her house and my car, the slower she walked, until we stood at the bottom of her steps and she was still talking, and her eyes shone a strange electric blue under the sodium street lamp, and I realized she was trying to give me it all, tell me everything she knew about falling, because maybe this time tomorrow it would no longer be true, or at least no longer her truth.

For a moment she seemed to bend and glimmer. I said, “You’re not coming back to the hotel, are you?”

Her arms sank to her sides. “No.”

I knew the answer to my next question, too. “Would you like me to stay at your house?” Halos sprang out around the street lamps. “I could come with you to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

“No. Thank you, but no. It’s—This is mine.”

The halos fractured. “Will you call me?”

“Yes.” She reached out and touched my cheek with the back of her hand and when she lifted it, her skin gleamed.

“I mean, will you please call me as soon as you know anything? And call me if you change your mind. Call me for anything, anytime.”

“Yes.”

“And stay cool, remember the bathtub. And that fan Dornan bought for you. If you can’t find it—”

“Aud.”

“—I could probably find a twenty-four-hour—”

“Aud.” Again she reached out and brushed my cheek, then the other. “It’s all right.”

I caught her wet hand and kissed it. “It’s not.” How could it be.

I enfolded her, cradled her head against my collarbone, felt her hips sharp against mine and her ribs, sheathed in taut muscle, bending like bone bows in and out, in and out, and I wanted to howl and hurl myself against the world, to lay my body down to keep her safe. I breathed the Kick-skin, fennel-shampoo, and beer scent of her, then squeezed and let her go.

I WALKED DOWNHILL.It wasn’t the way to my car but it was easier. After about a mile, I was at Gas Works Park, but I didn’t want the comfort of night-breathing greenery and the confusion of natural and industrial. I turned right. In another half a mile, I was walking along the ship canal in Fremont. I turned right again where the Highway 99 bridge ran over the water, walking under its blank shadow, seeking the place where its soaring impossibility met the dirt.

On 36th Street I tracked the trail of used condoms and dirty syringes, of empty potato chip bags and, oddly, a child’s wooly winter cap, to the armpit of Fremont.

Hunched in the concrete crease was a troll, holding a VW Beetle in its left hand.

I stopped. Breathed. It was still there.

I approached cautiously. The VW was real. Life-size. The troll was made of concrete. It had long hair and wild eyes. There was a sign, saying something about a sculpture competition, but it was so defaced with graffiti that I couldn’t read it.

The troll always wins, I’d said to Julia in Norway, and I had been right. There was always someone, something, bigger and faster and stronger. Always.

MY SUITEwas silent and cool, as still as a burial chamber undisturbed for a hundred years.

I dialed Rusen.

“Yes?” He sounded distracted and grown-up. The Avid’s hard drive was chattering in the background.

“It’s Aud Torvingen. Before I sign the agreement, I have some questions about crew insurance and employee status.”

“Boy, okay.”

“Kick Kuiper.” Silence. “Rusen?”

“Um?”

“Rusen, turn your chair around so you’re facing away from the screens. Turn your chair around.”

A long, floaty sigh and chair creak. “That thing sure is hard to resist.”

“Yes. Kick Kuiper. What’s her employee status specifically as it relates to health insurance?”

“Hold on one second.” Tap, tap, tap. “Okey-doke. Well, it looks like she was hired as a contractor, so no insurance. At least—”

“Change it.”

“That’s not legal. But—”

“Change it.”

“Wait up, just hold on now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I might not have to.” I waited. “I offered her the job of stunt coordinator earlier today.”

“Stunt coordinator.”

“She’s more than qualified. Tell you the truth, I have no clue why she’s working in craft services to begin—”

“Did she accept?”

“Well, now, she hasn’t exactly accepted yet, no.”

“What did she say?”

“Here’s the thing. She’s been out a couple days. I had to leave a message on her machine this evening…” When we were in the pub, talking about the blue place and falling, about flow and otherness, about being larger than life, brilliant with it, on top of the world. “…in particular?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, is there any reason in particular this is coming up now?”

“Just sign her up as stunt coordinator from the time you left her the message. I want her on the company’s insurance.”

“I guess I could stretch a point that far. For Kick. It’s not really wrong, when you think about it, I mean, I have offered her—”

“Thank you. Please see to the paperwork before you get lost in editing again.”

“Boy, that’s a good thought. That thing sure is—”

“Rusen. Good night.”

The phone felt big and bulky in my hands but I didn’t want to put it down. I imagined dialing Dornan, waking him up, his creased voice saying, What on earth is it that won’t keep until tomorrow, Torvingen? And what would I say?

I called Leptke and left a message. “Be available tomorrow. Tell your counsel. I’ll have your proof before midday.”

Then I e-mailed Laurence instructions and the information necessary to wire funds to my Seattle bank. I also asked him to make sure someone at that bank had a cashier’s check waiting for me so that I could finalize the Hippoworks deal.

I called room service for some tea. Tomorrow I would deal with Corning. I saw myself tracking Corning to her hotel, backing her into a corner, flexing my hands perhaps, so that she bolted and I chased her, and brought her down like a lion with a young impala. I would take her throat, just hard enough to suffocate her slowly, and as her eyes rolled back, I’d rip out her soft insides. Her right leg would kick once. If I closed my eyes I could feel her skin under my hands, feel her pulse flutter and still, taste her fear. She would never be able to hurt Kick or anybody else again.