An hour ago they were dancing in the blinking lights at Vertigo. She turned her back to him, bent her knees and leaned her shoulders into his chest. She let him rest his hands on her hips and run them down over her thighs in time to the throbbing music. They swayed like that, both facing the same direction and sometimes she would reach all the way around and put her hand on his back to pull him in closer and feel his whole body coming through his clothes. Sweat dripping down from his hair and the tip of his nose, his sternum square and flat in the middle of his chest, and his already hard cock, bent sideways in his jeans. He put his fingers on the side of her face, pulled the hair away from her ear and half-kissed her neck. Though the music was loud and she could feel the beat coming up through the floor, she heard it clearly when he whispered about how he had always wanted her.
“Always,” he said. “Since that first day, right from the beginning. I knew we would end up like this. I could feel it from the start.”
“Me, too,” she told him, not turning around. “Me, too.”
FOR THE LAST SEVERAL MINUTES — since they spilled out of the car and climbed to the roof — she had been trying to figure out exactly where they stand now relative to each other. She sat on his lap in the car and he put his hand on the bare skin of her stomach, in the gap between her T-shirt and jeans. On the roof, they snatched quick secret looks back and forth. In the complicated calculus of getting it on, she knows they are approaching a limit, but she isn’t sure what the line signifies, or what a step across it will require.
A slow clapping starts up and she hears her name chanted, broken down into two halves.
— Stay-see, the voices say.
Then again — Stay-see and Stay-see and Stay-see.
When the speed picks up and the clapping gets faster, the back becomes the front and all she hears is — see-Stay, see-Stay, see-Stay. Brad’s voice rumbling through under the other sounds. There is something extra in the way he calls her name.
The added attention makes it impossible to do nothing anymore. She starts up: left, right, left, right, in time with the rhythm. Stay-see, Stay-see, before see-Stay, see-Stay. Her arms follow along, pumping, and her breath goes in and out, a bit ragged. With every rotation she is running out of space. When she plants down hard for the takeoff, she splashes into the middle of a small puddle that has formed in the jumping-off spot others have already used many times before. Even as she tries to launch herself out, she feels the slip, all her traction giving out. She knows it immediately, knows with an absolute and instant clarity, that she doesn’t have enough. There is no force behind her, no momentum to carry her forward. As she goes over the side, stumbles really, she hears Krista’s tinny, whiny voice and catches the two, sucked-in, hissing words.
– “Missed it.”
There is nothing in the sky. A thin whispering dark surrounds her while another one, a different dark, thicker and shifting, waits below.
As she falls, she is surprised to find that even as it is happening — even as her voice pours out and her arms and legs wheel in the air and she rolls down so clumsily and so totally unlike a swan — even as this is happening, she is surprised to find there is time for lucid reflection and simple calculations. How did she get here, to exactly this point? What purposeful first step could have lead so directly to that last one?
There is also enough time to think about the way something soft passes through something hard. Cheese yielding to the cheese grater. Playdough’s Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop. The garlic press. Greasy burgers dripping on the grill. The carts are a hard net waiting below the high wire act, a sieve.
All the way out, then all the way down.
She thinks about her arc, her way through the air.
How far is far enough? How close too close? Her cheeks inflate, a pair of useless parachutes. The light in the water or the light in the sky turns sideways and the Renaissance Center seems to bend over and touch its toes. She tucks her eyes into the crook of her elbow, braces against the emptiness, and waits for contact.
Before any of this, the ocean came first. It was the original problem and if you had to look for beginnings the source for everything that came later. She was seven years old, travelling with her parents on a doomed vacation in Nova Scotia and it happened on a sharp, stony beach across the highway from a cluster of brown housekeeping cottages. Each little plywood house had a clever kitchenette, a folding table, two sets of bunk beds, green polyester comforters and a supply of thin, over-laundered towels. The cupboards held place settings for four and came equipped with nearly enough cutlery. A regular tourist place, nothing special, but it comes back to her all the time, like a crime scene photograph, barging uninvited into her mind with all its black and white details. Before she took hold, signed herself up and started to turn around, almost anything could trigger an attack.
There was — she remembers — a time a couple of years ago when a visiting license plate from ‘Canada’s Ocean Playground’ went into her brain the wrong way and her throat started to close up all on its own. Her neck felt like an arm squeezed inside a blood-pressure cuff. She started to cough and gagged and had to turn away from the street, sit down on a park bench, close her eyes, and put her head between her knees. She cupped her hands over her mouth and nose and concentrated hard on sucking back her own air until the sleeve loosened and the clenching hissed away.
It had become a biological fact in her life, like a severe allergy or a fundamental and unalterable weakness in her body. Bad news stamped out in her genetic code. Fear was an illness, a virus that forced its way in, compromised your immunity and damaged your defences in ways that couldn’t be fixed. There was a force that lived inside of all deep water — she knew it intimately — a starving, swallowing power that pulled everything down into itself. It had chased her for years, back from Nova Scotia, away from the pool parties of her childhood and the reckless Spring Break opportunities of high school and university. Even long bridge crossings made her uncomfortable and she never liked it when the airplane stewardesses, with their bored and glassy expressions, pretended to pull the tabs that would inflate the lifejacket under your seat in the unlikely event of an emergency. And those trickling sounds — the recordings of breaking waves some people used for relaxation — they gave her a twisting feeling deep in her gut and bowels, as if someone were wringing out her intestines like a wet dishcloth.
She’d seen something like it only once before in another person, a woman in an elevator. There was no predicting it. The doors closed like they always do and the little room started its descent. But then the woman’s eyes went erratic and she made a whimpering sound and involuntary muscle spasms rippled up through her back and shoulders and neck.
She said it quietly first, “I have to get out of here. I have to get out right now.” Then louder: “Let me out. Let me out. Open the door. I have to get out.”
She pounded on the red emergency button and her head swivelled around the top and bottom corners of the elevator, looking for a different exit. Then there was an exhausted groan, a full submission, and she went blank and fainted. Stace caught her by the waist as she went down and when the doors opened on the ground floor she was holding this stranger’s body up. The lady’s head rested on her shoulder like a sleeping toddler.