SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

We get up and resume the routine, smooth if abashed, then end up in the kiss-and-cry with Coach Salter.

“Kimalana!” Salter thunders. “What’s wrong with you?” And only after a moment, “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” The top’s thigh is stinging, hard. We know from long experience that by nightfall, a purple bruise will bloom there.

Chris may see it. In our leotards, stupid lust-addled brain—brains, in our leotards!

He is a gymnast like us. He knows pain from pushing a human body far beyond ordinary design specs. He won’t mind.

“Coach Salter,” our top whispers, “who are we?”

He blushes and stammers instead of answering. He knows. Gymnastics coaches are not good at keeping secrets: either you can do a routine, or you can’t, so there is no point in concealing it.

“Why can’t we know?” our base says. “Just tell us!”

“I’m…not allowed. Trust me. Just do your job.”

Our dynamic scores are much, much worse than we are used to, with the penalty for the fall, but still, with our difficulty being so insanely high and with the excellent Balance score, we end up in the final—in sixth place, of the six pairs to advance.

Coach Salter is biting his lip and is looking somewhere else and we follow his gaze. Up in the stands is a man in a brown suit. With the security situation, he must be a verified ticket purchaser. He is just watching.

Our meets have hundreds of people in the audience, their faces drowned in the lights anyway when we come out on the floor. Yet we have a sense we’ve seen this man before.

The barista eyes Chris and our top, trying to get us to go away, as she wants to close up. Our coffee cups have dark brown rings around the inside bottom. Chris and we have been chatting mostly about him; he has two sisters and a brother, artistic gymnasts, and, like most acrobats, he’d started there too but pommel horse proved his nemesis. He calls his family nearly every day, and speaks to his miniature schnauzer too. He is a major Star Trek geek.

We do not pay as much attention as we should, mostly aware that this is perhaps the longest we have been apart, top from base; that this is our first real date as us; that, we admit to ourselves, we are tired and rattled and scared; that some stupid TV show is playing back in our suite and we can’t possibly tell what it’s about because we, our base eyes, are just staring at a point in space that happens to have a TV screen behind it.

“You want…me…to come over tonight?” we say.

His face runs several expressions over it. His real smile is actually very different from his performance smile everyone has seen. “You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then—yes, Kim, yes.”

He doesn’t have a suite mate, the men’s group and men’s pair rooming together, Eva with the third girl of the women’s group, him the odd one out. Privacy. The door lock clicks.

We—the top of us—leap upon him.

He’s worked with Eva for several years, but he’d had other tops since he was a novice. He steps to hold us in handstand on his arms, laughing with joy.

We cast to handstand.

But it’s us who don’t know how to respond, how to align our centres over each other, and the sensation is the most profoundly weird one imaginable, in that uncanny valley of full-body perceptions being off. His body is separate. Surprise paints both our top face and Chris’s as we topple to the bed. He just can’t believe that Kim Tang, top of the best women’s pair in the world, couldn’t hold a handstand, when she could do it easily on the lifeless artificial practice blocks at the gym, when she could do it effortlessly on her partner on the world stage.

But a cooperative human and a set of hard blocks are very different things, and different yet from the human body that is part of you.

“You fell today. Now this. What’s wrong, Kim? Seriously, are you okay for the final tomorrow?”

We put our mouth over his to shut him up, get him to undress us, to caress our new bruise. “We’ll be fine. We were distracted. We just need,” kiss, come back up for air, “a good traditional fuck before finals.”

We’d forgotten to say ‘I.’ He doesn’t notice, willingly obliging: considerate, experienced, sensitive to a partner’s every response horizontally as he is in vertical poses. But he does expect reciprocity.

And we are divided, both parts of us. Half-mad with desire, yet aware that literally he is only getting part of us and he knows that something very subtle is amiss, even as we go through all the proper motions, clothes, condoms, all. Aware that back in the suite, our other half is alone yet feeling every sensation in the wrong body, aroused, still glowing with lust, but not quite…right. As if we fall just a little short of finding the true balance point that we crave; as if, even as we—all of us—somersault into orgasm, something was left only half done.

So this is what sex will be for us, as a sexual being with two bodies and no name and one world-class lie. And as we lie, in bed in his arms, on the carpet floor alone with the TV show still chattering empty stupidities, we seek to find our centre and we can’t.

We sob, and he asks half of us why, what was wrong, can he make it better, it’s always a little weird the first time with a new partner, it’s okay, he’s sorry, he’d thought we liked it. We tell him the empty stupidity that it’s not you, it’s me, only what we say is “it’s not you, it’s us.”

And this time we know he did notice.

We dress and say goodnight and good luck tomorrow, and go home to find ourself.

We are the unique person in the world for whom talking to ourself, arguing with ourself, looks the least strange and feels strangest. Having an athletic mind, both our bodies pace, in circles, around our suite in the morning, and then again around the dressing room as we change and apply our competition makeup. The long warm-up and stretch process keeps us from pacing, but as we sink into oversplits, front foot hooked around a chair seat and back thigh lying on the floor, we glare at ourself, trying to understand.

We mutter things like “Andreea Răducan” and “Chinese women’s gymnastics team at the 2000 Olympics”—infamous cases of losing medals after winning them, departing in shame, names erased from gymnastic history no matter the difficulty and beauty of their moves.

Better to bail out before, we tell ourself. Better to bail out before, and quit this sport but win our names back. Find our family. Coach the sport. Join the circus, as many retired acrobatic gymnasts do. Make love, to whomever, with a separate and clear conscience. The World Championships aren’t everything. Winning isn’t everything, not when it comes at the price of our very identities.

But without our identities, our acrobatic skill is all we have to balance on.

Yet the bell rings and we still come out for the Balance exercise, as if nothing has happened.

We move to counts; we cannot hear the music. Everything that we do, we do because of the muscle memory of two bodies, our smiles pasted on. Balance holds, unfathomably difficult balance holds, stretch for three seconds not because we are fighting for every second up, but because we have absent-mindedly forgotten to change them, frozen still as we think of something else.

No falls. No flaws. No soul. We still end up on top of the board. Our difficulty scores are sky-high; our execution scores are clean and solid; but our artistry scores have fallen from what they were in qualifications. The artistry judges look for it, and they notice that something is amiss.