I bent at the waist, forced myself to count out five seconds as I breathed in, two as I paused, five as I breathed out, two as I paused. And again.
THE NEXT day was cool and rainy. I felt every minute of the work I had done in aikido. My muscles were sluggish with fatigue acids. I walked in the rain. I walked to a pier and watched the water. Kuroshio, the black current. I walked to the set. It was deserted, the door locked. I tried to remember what day it was. Sunday?
I’m here. Yes, but for how long?
THE SUITE was as cold and impersonal as a flatiron. I turned the AC off and sat on the bed. My joints and feet and head ached.
I started the shower, and the rush of water made me realize I was thirsty. I filled the tooth mug under the cold tap. I drank, filled, drank.
The shower was hot. I stood under it a long time. The water smelled of chlorine. I had not noticed that in Seattle before. Perhaps someone had added something to a reservoir. Perhaps my sense of smell was coming back.
I sat on the bed and dried myself carefully. Buckets rattled outside as the housekeeper cleaned something.
Something behind me kicked a bucket. No, a can. The can rattled and bounced down a cobbled alley. I’m here, it said, right behind you. And then all sound died, everything, even the sound of my heartbeat.
I woke on my back. The room was brilliant with sunshine. It had stopped raining. A housekeeper was banging and clanging in the hall. I felt as though I had a hangover.
I had another shower.
DORNAN ANSWERED on the third ring. "What did you mean,” I said. "The other day. When you said you didn’t live in Seattle?”
“Well, as you know, Torvingen, I live in Atlanta.” Silence. “Are you quite well?”
“What did you mean?”
“Why do you ask, why now particularly?”
“I’ve been thinking. About things.”
“Things, is it?” I didn’t say anything. “And have you reached any conclusions? ”
Yes. But for how long?
“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.
THE SCENTS of sweat and mold and deodorant in the dojo’s changing room were briefly overlain by that of fabric softener as I stripped the freshly laundered gis from their rain-wet bags and hung them on the rail. The next newcomer wouldn’t have to wear clothes that stank of anyone else’s sweat. I laid my new gi and hakama, the black-bloused trousers that yudansha are entitled to wear, on the bench.
I took off my clothes and folded them. I taped my left knee. I pulled on the gi, then the hakama, pulling ties tight, twisting this way then that, loosening, retying. They were stiff and harsh with newness, but despite this, and despite the fact that it had been a long time since I’d experienced the odd combination of tight belt, loose arms, and the swing of cloth around my calves, it felt deeply familiar.
When I went out onto the small mat in my hakama to warm up, Mike smiled, but nobody seemed surprised, and this time, when the bell rang, and we assumed seiza along the edge of the mat, I took the far left position, and after we bowed and sensei stood, it was me he gestured into the center to be uke.
“Kokyu-dosa.”
I stood opposite him, and took his left wrist in my right. It was a big wrist, flat and hard on top and bottom, with tiny dark brown hairs like wire sickles springing from around the wrist bone. As I gripped, he opened his fingers and I felt the massive tendons on each side expand and stretch my own fingers, opening them.
Kokyu-dosa, the blending exercise, is the most basic building block of aikido. It is gentle and fluid, and the nage does not have to worry about making sure that the uke falls well or protects his or her shoulder or wrist or elbow or hip; the uke doesn’t fall at all. The best practitioners simply breathe, and step and turn and lift both hands before them as though carrying a lightly balanced tray of tea, and the uke, if she keeps hold of the nage’s wrist, is twisted to one side and bent forward from the waist, forehead almost to the ground.
But there is beauty in even the simplest movements.
Sensei, Petra had told me, had been practicing aikido for twenty-five years, many hours a day. He was very, very good, but as I matched myself exactly to his strength and force, skin to skin, fascia to fascia, vein on vein, as I felt his wrist joint turn smoothly and his muscles relaxed and open, I understood that he was not great. He had never been hurt, never had his confidence taken away and had to refind it, never, since young adulthood, met anyone bigger, stronger, faster or better trained.
He couldn’t teach me how to be the Aud who had never been drugged, who still had her sense of taste, who had never thought of letting someone else do the protecting: but, just as my mother was a woman who had lived twenty-five years longer than I, just as Dornan was a man with blue eyes who understood what friendship meant, he knew more aikido than I did; and I could learn.
It seemed to last for hours, but at some point it must have changed, because now he was the one wrapping his massive fingers around my wrist, heavy as a manacle, and I was the one imagining a pinpoint between my radius and ulna, leaving that point in exactly the same locus of three-dimensional space and pivoting everything else around it: keeping the same distance between that point and my center of gravity, two finger-widths beneath my navel, yet stepping forward, and turning and breathing out, and extending the imaginary tea tray. He was the one who bent down and to the side like a tin soldier slumping under a blowtorch. We changed hands, changed roles again, uke to nage, nage to uke, and soon my joints moved like frictionless electromagnetic bearings and my autonomic nervous system hummed like a transformer reaching capacity.
NINE O’CLOCK. The night was clear and I drove down the viaduct with the windows down, cool air sliding over my arms, tires hissing and splashing through standing puddles. In Atlanta the temperature would be about seventy-five degrees, and the air scented with jasmine and honeysuckle and laced with the creak and chir of crickets and tree frogs. There would be less atmospheric pollution, and the stars would be brighter and sharper. There would be less traffic.
Half the parking lot’s sodium lamps were dead, and what remained painted the dark with brass. The right-hand side of the lot was crowded. The two Hippoworks trailers were lined up neatly, side by side, Kick’s van next to them. The left-hand side of the lot was cordoned off and Janski stood in front of the cones, hyperalert, head swiveling this way and that, weight forward on his toes. I got out of the car. I could smell the metallic tang of adrenaline and testosterone.
“What happened?”
“Probably nothing, ma’am.” He scanned the shadows.
“When?”
“An hour ago. I thought I saw someone approaching one of these gas lines.”
“Gas.”
“Propane, ma’am. For the stunt tomorrow.”
My heart began to pump smoothly, powerfully.
“Just one person?”
“Hard to tell. They ran off when I challenged them.”
“And you’ve searched the area?”
“Ma’am, Mr. Turtledove’s inside, perhaps you’d like to speak to him about it.”
I listened, sniffed. Nothing. I nodded to Janski and went in through the side door. Everything seemed to glow, as though specially lit. The lock looked different: newer, bigger.