Nicola Griffith - Always

“Yes,” Finkel said, unwillingly.

“It’ll make all the difference,” Rusen said. “I’d been storyboarding, but then, with the money troubles, I shelved those plans, and was trying to come up with a less expensive way to do things, you know, maybe some smoke, and a big noise off camera, then pan back to people lying on the ground, that kind of thing. And I was worrying about insurance for that, too, since our stunt coordinator left, and Kick hasn’t signed on officially yet, and even the use of firecrackers requires permission from the fire department. But, cripes, this changes everything.”

11:23. This changes everything.

DORNAN AND Isat on a bench in the little park overlooking the Duwamish. My phone was between us. 12:14.

“Well, now,” Dornan said. “This is lovely.”

The air was bright and lively, friendly, and it was possible to fool yourself into believing the world was a harmless place.

“She should be done by now,” I said. “Shouldn’t she?”

“I really don’t know, Torvingen.”

I closed my eyes, and let a purplish afterimage of the river twist behind my lids. When it faded, I opened my eyes again. 12:17. “I’m going to drive to her house. You want to come?”

“I do not. She said she’d call when she had news. She’ll call when she’s ready. It might be hard for her to talk about.”

“That’s assuming it’s bad news.”

But we both knew it would be bad, just not what kind of bad: brutal and clear as an executioner’s axe, or the death of a thousand cuts. How do you tell someone that kind of news?

“Oh,” I said, and flipped open my phone and dialed the Fairmont. Yes, the front desk told me, I did indeed have a voice-mail message. Would I like to access my voice mail now?

I would.

It was Kick. She sounded breezy and offhand. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “To repeat the message, press one. To erase the message, press two.”

I pressed one.

“It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re—” 12:22. I closed the phone. The river kept flowing, the sun kept shining. The bench was warm under my thighs.

Dornan was watching me, terribly alert.

“She left me a message,” I said. A message. “They think it’s MS.”

He sighed, the way a zip-lock bag does when you squeeze out the excess air. His shoulders lifted, then sagged. “Where are the lesions?”

“What?”

“Are the lesions on her brain as well as spine?”

“Lesions? How on earth do I know? It was a bloody message.”

A bumblebee droned stupidly over a spill of yellow flowers sprouting at the base of the bench supports. A message.

His hands lay still in his lap, no longer tugging at his hair.

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

He sighed again. “There was this man who used to come into the Little Five Points coffee shop. We talked about it sometimes. He didn’t like the heat. That’s what I noticed first. And his crutches. I always used to turn the AC up a notch when he sat down with his coffee.”

“Used to come in. What happened to him?”

“John. He joked about it once, how you could never predict what was going to happen to someone with MS. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘You can’t tell how someone’s doing, really. They fight, and they seem okay and full of hope, and then one day, they just don’t show up anymore and you know they’ve lost the battle, that they’re stuck in a motorized bed somewhere, surrounded by strangers.’ One day he didn’t show up anymore.”

“Did he have good medical care?”

“I imagine so.”

“Was he on any of the experimental drugs?”

“He was a customer. He came in one day with crutches. A year later he was in a scooter. Two years later he didn’t come in anymore. All right? That’s all I know.”

The bee came back. I listened to its deep, round soothing sound, and wondered what had happened to that fly in Kick’s house.

I DROVE TOWARDSKick’s house but as I crossed the Fremont Bridge a seaplane flew low, west to east, and suddenly I had to know where it was going.

I swung off the bridge and along 36th, driving faster than I should. I still lost it. But I followed another plane. I dropped down to 34th, swung right along the water.

Over Lake Union, a seaplane overhead dipped one wing and turned sharply, then evened into a shallow approach and came in to land. Water planed up and out from its fat pontoons the way it would under the webbed feet of a landing duck.

Hope. Maybe it was like falling. If you felt the physiological effects, and called it exhilaration, not terror, then it was exhilaration. What did hope feel like?

I pulled over and called Kick. After four rings, the machine clicked on. “It’s me. I got your message. Thank you. I’m standing by Lake Union, wondering if you’ve ever taken one of those tourist seaplane rides. It looks as though there are three different-sized planes, one is—”

“Hello?” She sounded wary but curious.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“Well, you know, I have MS.”

“Yes,” I said, matching her light tone. “I heard that.” Silence.

“So what’s this about seaplanes?”

SHE METme at the terminal on Westlake. She jumped from her van as lithe and strong as an acrobat. Vitality sang under her skin, shone in her breeze-whipped hair, flowed like a poem with the pump of muscle as she slid her door shut. Beautiful. She even looked as though she’d slept well, better than I had. The only sign of shock was a barely perceptible pause between my conversation and hers, as though the signal were being routed through some intergalactic wormhole for processing. She seemed to have walled up the whole diagnosis, encysted it somewhere deep inside, to be dealt with later. She smiled cheerfully as she swung herself up into the plane.

The smell of fuel was overwhelming to begin with. The noise was overwhelming for the entire flight; we wore earplugs, and I still felt crushed by the din. Once we were two hundred feet up, I didn’t care.

We were the only passengers on a seven-seater Beaver. We held hands across the aisle, to begin with, but as soon as I realized that meant we would be looking at different things through our separate, tiny portholes, I unbuckled and took the seat behind her. There were no headrests, so I could put my chin on the back of her seat and lay my cheek against hers as we gazed at the water.

The plane stayed almost entirely over water: north over Lake Union to Gas Works Park, then east across two bridges—one was up; toylike cars formed a shiny tail to north and south—to another bay, the university to the north, the green swath of arboretum to the south. East some more, and the water abruptly paled to an almost royal blue, and we were in a steep turn south, flying low over a floating bridge. Down, along beautiful coast-line; west, directly over the city—the Space Needle seemed close enough to touch; a jag south again, down the Duwamish—I tapped Kick’s shoulder and pointed to Kellogg Island and the tiny patch of park. She nodded, and reached up and back. I kissed her hand.

West over West Seattle, then a great curving arc around Alki, and the deep, deep blue of Elliott Bay. From above, the orange cranes looked nothing like brontosaurus.

From up here, everything seemed very clean and tidy and contained, easy to deal with, easy to understand. Beautiful, delicate, precious. The messy details were hidden, the power and angular geometry of humanity’s controlling stamp clear. If we could bend the landscape, surely we could find a way to defeat some autoimmune molecule gone awry?