Always

SIX

I CALLED DORNAN BEFORE BREAKFAST. HE WOULDN’T PICK UP. I LEFT A LONG message. When I called again, half an hour later, he answered.

“It didn’t look like work,” he said.

“No.”

“In fact, it looked to me as though I showed up just in time.”

An image popped into my head of Dornan in baggy blue shorts and sagging tights, cape askew, kicking down the door to my suite to the accompaniment of melodramatic music.

“I did, didn’t I? Show up in time?”

Depends how you look at it. “Yes.” Though I hadn’t got the information I’d wanted.

“Aud, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re all right?”

“How do you mean, exactly?”

“Last night just… well, it’s not like you. The whole idea strikes me as baroque and too complicated, all that potential for things to go wrong. And the timing. It’s almost as though you set yourself up for it. At best, it seems uncharacteristically silly.”

Irresponsible. Then a victim. Now silly. “Every week a new high.”

“Yes, well, that’s probably some sort of joke, but those drugs were truly wicked. Most of those other people are still in hospital. One of the carpenters just had to go back on a ventilator, for God’s sake.”

He was very well informed.

“Look, why don’t we just go back to Atlanta? You don’t really care about your warehouse anyway, and you’ve seen your mum. I’ve seen enough of the Seattle chains. I have some ideas to be working on, and, besides, the business is probably dissolving with no one looking after it. Let’s just leave. Don’t get distracted. What happened with the drugs is irrelevant, like, like an earthquake. It affected you, yes, but it wasn’t aimed at you. It wasn’t personal.”

“Oh, but it was.”

“More than a dozen people—”

“Dornan, think about it. This whole thing has been aimed at getting me to sell the warehouse cheaply. Who I was didn’t matter, it was the fact that I owned the warehouse. They began by reducing my cash flow sharply, by calling OSHA and EPA to harass my leaseholder, which they hoped would make whoever owned the warehouse view it as a liability. It was a liability. But then Rusen came along. He started trying to deal with the problem, he tried to talk to EPA and OSHA, so then whoever was engineering all this had to start messing with the production itself.” The day-as-night exposures, the lighting setup, the props. “And when Rusen, with his unexpected corporate efficiencies, starts trying to find ways to finesse that, and keeps making his payments to me, they start to scramble and dump drugs in the coffee. Which I drink. Ironic if you stop to think about it. Two months ago all they would have to have done is make me an offer. As you’ve said, I didn’t really care. The only reason I came out here in the first place was to be distracted.”

“And because of your mum.”

“Yes. But mainly to get away from Atlanta. Only now I find I’m being manipulated again.”

“This is different.”

“Is it? They drugged that coffee, and I drank it. They slid their nasty little hands inside my head and paddled about. I can’t rely on myself anymore. Is what I see real? Can I walk up a hill without my heart faltering and the oxygen not getting to my lungs because some compound that I can’t even name has altered my metabolic cycle? If I have to run I don’t know if I can. If something, someone comes for me, I don’t know if it’s really happening. Do you know what that’s like?”

“No.”

“So, yes, now I care. I’m going to get these people. And you know what?” And it slowly dawned on me that this was true. “I’m going to enjoy it. Because, as you say—and you’re obviously more well informed than I am—someone is still on a ventilator, and the people who did this to her—”

“Him.”

“—him deserve whatever I can mete out. This is something I can do something about. It won’t be easy, because Seattle isn’t my town, and I’ll have to do things differently, but I’ll find them.”

“I’m getting that.”

“I’m going to get information from Corning’s office and follow it. And if, in order to get to these people, I have to deal drugs or talk to kiddie-porn merchants or get naked with gorgeous women I’ve given a lot of money to in the privacy of my own suite, I will.”

“Though you didn’t. Get naked.”

“No.”

“Though she was very decorative.”

“She was, wasn’t she?”

“But not really your type, in the end.”

“No.”

“Maybe if she’d pissed you off,” he said. “That seems to work for you.”

I said nothing.

“Well, I don’t imagine there’s any way I can help, but if there is, let me know.”

“There is something,” I said, and imagined him flinging himself skyward and hurtling around the earth faster and faster until it slowed, and reversed, and the film of my life ran backwards through the last year to the afternoon when Julia sat on my lap by the fjord and said she was going to Oslo and there was no reason for me to go with her, she would only be gone twenty-four hours, and I said all right. “Have dinner with me tonight. ”

“You’re eating again?”

“Not by choice. Come be my moral support. With my mother and Eric.”

Silence. Then he sighed. “What time?”

“Seven. I’ll pick you up.”

THE SUN was bright and the air soft. It was going to be a hot day, for Seattle. The sunshine seemed to puzzle and provoke the normally placid local drivers. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I heard the tire squeal and horn honk of two separate near misses.

I got to Corning’s office at two minutes to nine. Gary was hovering by the door, already agitated.

“Miz Corning’s been… there’s… I’m afraid your appointment is postponed.”

I moved him aside gently. The reception area was brightly lit, and the adrenaline coursing through my system made it seem brighter still. Corning’s door was ajar, and her lights off. “Don’t move,” I said. I listened.

“She’s…”

I walked in, turned on the lights. Perfectly tidy and normal, apart from a lone piece of paper facedown on the floor. I picked it up. Page two of a standard commercial lease, blank. “Gary?” He ventured in behind me. “Where is she?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. She hasn’t been in, and she hasn’t called. It’s not usual.” Emphasis on the last word.

I turned and waited.

“She’s very particular about clients. Always here half an hour before an appointment, always wanting the file so she can appear to have remembered everything about the client. The personal touch, she called it.”

Past tense. “When did you get here?”

“Usual time. Eight o’clock. Well, five minutes late, so I was worried she’d… I’ve been working on a presentation on the new… on the presentation she was going to give later this week.”

Was going to give. He was young, but not stupid. Perhaps he knew something he didn’t know he knew. “Why are you so worried?”

“I just am. It’s not usual. When she still wasn’t here after I’d finished my coffee, I waited another minute or so, then called her cell, in case she was stuck in traffic, so I could ask her if there was anything I could do to prepare for her meeting, you know, so she wasn’t cutting it too fine, but there was no answer. She always answers her cell. So I thought maybe she was sick, so I called her home. Nothing. So I checked her appointment calendar, and she hasn’t canceled anything, so I was thinking maybe she’d had an accident.”

“Yet you haven’t called the police.”

Silence.

I sat in Corning’s chair. “Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll have a little chat.”

He sat stiffly.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Fourteen months.”

“Fourteen months. Long enough to know that not everything that happens in this office is aboveboard. You’re smart. You know that you should probably have reported some of these things to somebody. But it’s your first real job and who could blame you if you listened to your boss when she told you that everybody does things this way. Business is business.”

His face was set.

“But, as I say, you’re smart. And no doubt you understand by now that at least one of your clients, me, does, in fact, blame you for conniving in irregular, unethical, and very probably illegal activity. But perhaps you and I can work something out.”

He wavered for a moment, then sat as straight as a plumb line and lifted his chin. How annoying. I could break something—it probably wouldn’t have to be a bone, a desk lamp would do—but he was young, and I’d bought him chocolates last time I’d been here.

“Do you know what money is, Gary? It’s a lubricant. Money makes the things you want possible. It can’t buy love, but it can buy sex, and respect. Money gets you security and attention. It can buy health and it can pay for justice. So if I said I would offer you an undreamt-of sum, what would you do? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be? Take a minute to think about it.”

He crossed his left leg over his right, linked his hands over his knee, and began to sweat.

Dornan would ask for an empire of some kind, six thousand coffee shops all over the world, and guaranteed bargains every time he shopped. Maybe he would ask for Tammy back. My mother? For all political and business negotiations to be reasonable and rational. Luz would want a pair of leather trousers and permission to have the light on all night. Kick, oh, I would bet my bank account I knew what she wanted: the impossible.

Gary cleared his throat. “To be in charge. I’d want to run my own real estate office.”

It’s impossible to look at someone and know whether they are being brave. For an agoraphobic, walking down the street is a heroic act. For someone with absolutely no imagination, running into a burning building to save a baby is not hard. Bravery is relative. Perhaps it’s the same with dreams.

“Staying out of jail would be the first step, and I can help you with that. Let’s begin with you bringing me my file. I’ll make us some coffee.”

There was no espresso machine in the break room, but I found a French press and an interestingly scented light Arabica blend. While the kettle boiled I leafed through the magazines and newspapers on the table. One was the Seattle Times with the story about the drugging.

Back in Corning’s office, Gary was kneeling on the floor by the filing cabinet, looking baffled.

“It’s gone,” he said.

I considered. “What else is missing?”

“How did you—”

“What else is missing?”

“A lot.”

“How specific is the loss?”

“I don’t understand.”

"Particular files, files that are connected in some way, or random chunks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out. Do you want cream or sugar?”

He was still riffling through files when I brought back the coffee. I settled comfortably behind the desk and sipped, content to wait now that he’d begun.

“I’m going to have to cross-check the computer records file by file against the paper files to know for sure what’s gone, but I can tell you one thing I’ve noticed. She’d had me make calls about three lots in the last couple of months that are connected. More or less. I mean, literally. They’re next door to each other. Contiguous.”

“Is one of those lots mine?”

He nodded.

“You said more or less.”

“That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s one lot between the others that isn’t for sale. It’s the Federal Center. You can’t buy that. Also, I don’t remember any calls to other investors about these other three lots.”

“You think she wanted it for herself?”

“I don’t know. And it’s pretty useless land, anyhow. Warehouses. Who wants those?”

“Close the file cabinet and come sit. Talk to me about real estate here in Seattle.”

I TOOK THE Seattle Times with me and read the story carefully in the car. I tried to imagine I was Corning. I highlighted the names of those admitted to Harborview Medical Center. I asked the MMI for a map.

At Harborview, I found that they had all been released, except for one man, Steven Jursen, who had been transferred that morning to the University of Washington Medical Center.

According to the MMI, the UW Medical Center was less than a mile from Kick’s house. I drove down her street, even though it wasn’t strictly on my route. Her van wasn’t in the driveway. I wondered if she had got the flowers. Of course she had. Benjamin was an efficient concierge.

The lobby of the medical center was stuffed with art. The floors were clean enough to eat from, if I’d wanted to eat. Nothing was white. The elevator took an age.

Jursen was in a private room. The door was partly open. I stepped close, lifting my hand to knock, and the smell hit me: that hospital scent of disinfectant and fear and floor polish, of bleached linens and sugary drinks, of sleek equipment with its contacts recently wiped down with alcohol and ready to lie cold and stinging against warm skin. I knocked. No response. There again, if he was on a ventilator, there wouldn’t be. I pushed the door open.

He was asleep. Sunshine poured through the large window, gilding the brushed steel and putty white of the equipment standing ready around the room. He was breathing on his own. On the set, I remembered a man in his late fifties with hard hands and grey hair who wore overalls and walked with slightly bowed legs. A manual worker all his life, whose parents or grandparents had come from Sweden and had expected a hard life of hard work. No great ambition for success, just a steady job with one company, maybe in construction, who paid him on time and took care of everything. A mid-twentieth-century man trying to live in the twenty-first.

Asleep, he looked quite different, not younger but purer, untouched by the experience and compromises of age. A preacher from the eighteenth century, say, who knew he was doing God’s work. I looked at his chart. He’d been off the ventilator since midnight. There were EKG records and an order for an echocardiogram and something called a MUGA test. Under marital status a woman had written in blue ink: divorced. I adjusted the slant of the blinds so that the sun wasn’t in his face, and watched his chest rise and fall, then went to find a doctor.

I DROVE A circuitous route—no one followed me—to a café on Boat Street that I’d read about. I pulled into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I didn’t get out of the car; I doubted my hunger would stand in the face of food that tasted of sulfur and burnt rubber.

Jursen had congestive heart failure. The overdose had nearly killed him—an overdose he’d been fed because he was connected to me. His near-death was a consequence an order of magnitude greater than spoiling a few rolls of film, and very public. Corning was running scared, scared enough to try to erase her tracks, starting with pulling the tail on me. Good. I would let her stew in her own juices another day or so. Fear would do my work for me.

KICK’S VAN was parked outside the warehouse, but it was her assistant at the craft-services table. Rusen stood by one of the soundstages, talking to Peg and Joel.

“—can’t,” Joel was saying. “It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way with these time constraints.”

“You’re always saying what you can’t do,” Peg said. “Why don’t you try looking at what you can, just for once in your miserable, whining life. We’ve—” She saw me and broke off. They all turned.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

“No, no,” Rusen said. “Are you looking for your friend?”

“Dornan? He’s here?”

“He was. Or maybe that was yesterday…” He pushed his glasses up his nose, realized that it was him I’d come to talk to, and turned to the other two. “Sorry, guys. Later.”

“But—”

“Later, Joel, okay?”

As we walked through the set to his trailer, someone dropped a microphone boom, someone else started shouting. Rusen’s stride was small and tight.

His trailer was painfully neat. He took his customary seat behind his keyboard and began organizing paper clips into rows.

“Things seem a little tense,” I said.

"Sîan Branwell has to be in Spain in four days to shoot a feature. We’re having to reorder the production sequence to get all her scenes in the can. It’s causing… complications. Disagreements with the director and stunt coordinator. And money is, well, you know how the money is. And Finkel isn’t coming back tomorrow, after all.”

“His son is worse?”

“He’s dying.” Silence. “Boy howdy, it does seem wrong to be worrying about money and production schedules and bickering crew when a boy is dying.”

“Letting your dream go won’t keep him alive.”

“That’s right,” he said. Then, more strongly, “That’s right. And, anyhow, our people need these jobs. The industry’s in a bad place with Vancouver siphoning off business. We can’t… But, hoo boy, you didn’t come here to listen to me. What can I do for you?”

“We should start planning our strategy for OSHA and EPA. Let’s begin with payroll and benefits. How’s health insurance?”

It turned out that his people had major medical but both co-pay and deductible were very high, and the company’s secondary insurer was making a fuss about covering the difference.

We talked about that for a while. He began to look a little less harried.

“I took a long look at your payroll and I don’t see any information on the young person I noticed the other day. Even if he’s an unofficial intern, we need some paperwork.”

“Bri’s not an intern. He’s Finkel’s son. Bri Junior.”

“I thought his son was dying.”

“His other son.”

I mulled that. “How old is he?”

“Bri? Fifteen—no sixteen now.”

“Unless he sits around reading comics all day, get some paperwork going and formalize some kind of payment. Figure out what would make OSHA happy. And how old’s his friend?”

“Mackie? Oh, he’s twenty at least.”

We talked for another hour. When I stood to leave, his tension was no less but it was focused. He had a plan. “We can keep it together,” he said. “It’ll work.”

Back on the set, I wandered over to the craft-services table. The woman behind the counter was standing around looking bored.

“Kick around?”

“Nope. Taking a break.”

“Know where she went?”

“Nope. For a walk or something. Said they’d be back in”—she looked at her watch—“I guess about forty-five minutes from now.”

They.

“Hey, want some coffee?”

“No. Thank you.”

“That’s what everyone says these days.”

I COULD GO talk to the Times reporter. I could go to the police and use my mother’s name. I could forget letting Corning soften herself up in a fear marinade and go find her. But if anyone gave me information I didn’t know where it might lead me, and yesterday, on the hill, I had found myself breathless. There might be other shortcomings I wouldn’t notice until I leaned on them and found them wanting.

GOOD DOJOS are often found in bad neighborhoods. Seattle Aikikai was on Aurora alongside Korean massage parlors, a gun shop, and several love motels.

The dojo smelled deeply familiar: chalk, sweat, the white vinegar used to keep the canvas mat clean and bleached. One young woman and five men were stretching on the smaller mat. They were friendly enough. A heavyset Chinese-American introduced himself as Mike. The woman said her name was Petra and that if I didn’t have a gi, I could see if any of the ones hanging in the women’s changing room would fit. The changing room was tiny, with flimsy walls and a crooked shower stall no doubt installed by a hapless volunteer. The pleasantly amateur feel reminded me of my first martial arts classes in England. I hung my dress on a hanger and contemplated the gis. None of them would ever see bright white again, but one tunic was reasonably clean. The cleanest trousers were too small, and the white belt stiff and difficult to tie.

There were covert glances when I came out to stretch, but it was considered impolite to ask questions or appear to be interested in another’s level of training. Aikido is built on Taoist principles; competition is frowned upon.

When the bell chimed twice, we moved to the large mat and knelt in a line along the long side. Despite the supposed lack of competition, it was traditional to line up according to rank; as the newcomer, untested, I politely took the low-rank spot on the right. Mike took the left-hand position. The sensei, full of his own dignity, descended magisterially from upstairs, hakamas, the bloused trousers of dan rank, swishing like a long skirt. The students exuded awe; I guessed he was very high-ranking, sixth or seventh dan. He was in his early forties, and his hands were reddish around the knuckles. His hair was very dark brown, and crinkly, and his forehead crinkled to match when he saw the newcomer in the ill-fitting gi in his dojo, but the ceremony had begun and there would be no talking until after the final bow.

We all bowed to the kamiza in the center of the long wall, then he turned and we bowed to him and said in unison, “O-ne-gai-shimasu.” Please practice with me.

He moved through what was obviously an unvarying set of warm-ups, which began with loose shoulder swinging, moved on to spine stretching, wrist working and blending exercise, and ended with shikko, a kind of duck-walking on the knees, and finally roll-outs, forward and back. Everyone moved easily, and I guessed none had been studying less than a year. Serious students.

We knelt in our line again, and the sensei motioned Mike onto the mat as his attacker, or uke. They stood in hanmi, though Mike began with right foot forward rather than left and had to change. Probably left-handed.

“Shomenuchi,” the sensei said, and Mike stepped forward smoothly with a right-hand knife-hand chop at the sensei’s forehead.

In karate or judo, the nage would block solidly, meeting strength with strength, the muscle-sheathed arm bones clashing like swords. If you were good, if you struck at the right angle and speed, your opponent was already off balance and in pain by the time you punched out his floating ribs, if you were a karateka, or took him crashing to the mat, if you were a judoka. It was a wasteful way to work, with so much effort expended in negating one force with another.

When Mike’s hand came down, there was no bone-on-bone shock, no meeting of force at all. The sensei stepped out of the way, an easy turn at the hip and glide back and out, and laid the side of his right hand on the uke’s right wrist, the left hand behind his right elbow, then was behind the uke, guiding him, helpless in a stiff arm bar, along his original path, facedown to the mat, where he was pinned. It was like watching a leaf get sucked into a whirlpool.

A young man made a late entrance and hurried through his bow and rushed into the men’s changing room.

“Shomenuchi ude osae,” the sensei said, describing the technique, and Mike slapped the mat twice, and the sensei let him up. He demonstrated twice more, slowly, and then once at full speed. The final time, Mike slapped the mat in earnest, and when he stood, he was sweating.

The newcomer came out to the mat, still tying his belt, but instead of kneeling he waited for me to move down a space. When in Rome.

Sensei gestured us to our feet. The others paired off instantly, which left me with New Boy. He bowed at me sulkily, and assumed hanmi, waiting. I dutifully stepped into shomenuchi.

He was rushed, and clumsy, and if I’d been a beginner he might have sprained my shoulder, but he was uncertain enough that my arm was not fully extended, and he moved stiffly, using muscle rather than technique, and I could control him without appearing to and go down without injury. He frowned. He knew something wasn’t exactly right, but had no idea what.

Part of the noncompetitive ethos of aikido is to help and guide each other: the uke helps the nage with the technique; the nage ensures that the uke goes down without injury. The greater the disparity in skill, the greater the responsibility. A ninth dan should be able to take down a rank beginner with speed, grace, and precision, without anyone getting a bruise. He should be able to help the beginner do the same to him.

The woman who had taught me aikido in Atlanta, Bonnie, had talked about sensing ki, and blending energies. She showed me an exercise called the unbending arm. We faced each other, and she asked me to hold my right arm out straight and make a fist. Then she turned it palm up and laid my right forearm on her shoulder. “Don’t let me bend it,” she said, and interlaced her hands, and began to press down at the elbow. I gritted my teeth and locked my arm. “You’re strong,” she said, but after three or four seconds, my arm bent. She smiled cheerfully. “Want to see if you can make me bend my arm?” So we exchanged positions, and I pulled on her elbow, and nothing happened. She looked bored, even pretended to yawn while I grunted and exerted more and more pressure. “You look like you’re going to burst something,” she said. So I asked her what the trick was. “Trick? It’s not a trick. Here, put your arm back up.” I did. “Now bend it a little. And spread your fingers wide. Relax, relax your shoulders and neck and back. Root your feet to the earth.” The earth was covered in concrete foundation, steel I-beam construction and bamboo flooring, but I didn’t comment. “Now feel the energy coming up from the earth and through you and down your arm. Stay relaxed, keep your fingers open. Channel your ki through your fingers. It’s pouring out of you in a stream of light.” And my arm didn’t bend, and it took absolutely no effort. And I didn’t understand it at all.

“Are you really trying?” I said, and she said she was. Later that day, I found Frank King, my first APD partner, six-feet-three and two hundred thirty pounds, and put my arm on his shoulder and said, “Bend it,” and he couldn’t.

I didn’t believe in ki, or the energy from the earth, or light shooting out of my fingertips, but the fact was, when I relaxed and thought about energy flowing smooth and liquid through my arms, my arm didn’t bend.

I wrestled with the idea for a week, and I told Bonnie the idea of ki was nonsense, and she shrugged and said, “What does it matter?” and after a while, it didn’t. I could feel when I got into the zone and became fluid and unbendable. And then one night Frank and I were called to a fire. The firefighters were already there, herding people back, unspooling their hose, locking down the connection, but just as the water began to stiffen and bulge through the flattened canvas, a chunk of burning roof pinwheeled in orange flame onto the lead hose man, and he’d gone down. The hose whipped and snapped like a dying moray eel and snaked itself ten yards across the pavement, leaping and spraying the crowd before I got to the hydrant and cut the water supply. When another firefighter took the nozzle and shouted, “I’m good!” I opened the hydrant again, and watched the hose turn into a live thing, and something I couldn’t articulate clicked in my brain.

In one of those strange coincidences, when I got home, too wired to sleep, I turned on the Discovery Channel and saw a program about crocodiles. “This twenty-two-foot croc can run more than twenty miles an hour,” the narrator said in an Australian accent, “but when you take a look at its spinal structure, that doesn’t seem possible. Researchers at the University of Melbourne tell us that the key to this incredible strength and flexibility is hydraulics.” And they showed two geeky-looking academics draping an empty hose over two saw horses fifteen feet apart, turning on the water, and watching the hose transform from a limp tube to an arcing, stiff sausage. They hung weights from it; it didn’t bend.

Hydraulics. It wasn’t the bone and ligaments and tendons that made an arm strong, it was the blood pumping through the vascular system, the plasma in the cells of sclera and muscle.

New Boy didn’t yet know this. Directing him, from my position as an uke, was a little like trying to direct a high-pressure hose from the hydrant end instead of the nozzle.

Then it was my turn as nage. It would have been very easy to breathe in two long gushes and take him down in a perfect moving spiral, pin him helpless to the mat, nod unemotionally when he slapped, let him up, do it all again. But he wouldn’t learn anything, and neither would I. And so the first time, I took control very gently, like sliding my palm under a tap runoff and tilting it so it was almost, but not quite, perpendicular and the water landed an inch to the right of the drain. For a moment, he tried to fight. He tried to draw his wrist up, but my palm on his elbow was firm and I guided him kindly to the mat.

He slapped, and leapt up, rubbing his shoulder, and then looked confused when it didn’t hurt. But the sensei had seen it, and came over.

“Everything okay here? Jim?”

Jim looked at me, then nodded slowly.

“Continue,” the sensei said, and watched while I assumed hanmi, and Jim came at me, and I took him down, just as before. The sensei nodded, and gestured for us to swap roles, and I attacked Jim. I used my body to guide his hands and he took me down with the same puzzled look as before.

The sensei motioned Jim away, said, “Watch,” assumed hanmi, and nodded for me to attack.

We barely touched each other, but we felt each other’s strength clearly, and it was the difference between the exuberant rushing together of two mountain streams and the vast movement of ocean currents—the Kuroshio gliding past the North Atlantic Drift, separated by the continent of North America. I went down, and slapped, and stood.

He bowed with a thoughtful look.

When we sat again for the next demonstration, it wasn’t in rank order. I sat between Petra and an older man with red cheeks and grizzled hair, and the sensei held his wrists out behind him for a man with a tense face and long, black hair to take in ushiro tekubitori. The student flinched, even as he grabbed the wrists, and the sensei stepped backwards into tenchi nage. The student was already up on the balls of his feet, longing to go down so that he wouldn’t have to anticipate it anymore. Sensei threw him; the student rolled out well enough for me to guess he was perhaps yonkyu rank and to wonder why he would keep studying if he were so afraid.

We stood. Petra hesitated just a fraction before turning away and bowing to the student on her left, which left me with Mike.

Mike knew what he was doing. When he took my wrists, his arms were relaxed. It was clear he was ready to deal with a complete beginner or a master. I swept my right hand up and left down, stepped back smoothly with my left foot, then scissored my arms and sent him flying into a forward roll. He rolled like a big cat and came up grinning. I grinned back.

This time when we knelt, sensei beckoned me onto the mat to be his uke, and held out his left wrist. I grasped it in my right, careful to grip with my little finger, which so many people forget. We didn’t look into each other’s eyes, not yet, because this was for the class, not between us, but he paid me the courtesy of not holding back when he whipped me into kotegaeshi, and I had to twist in midair and break-fall to save my wrist and ribs, and when he flipped me onto my stomach, he moved fast and not gently and he not only put me in a wrist pin but locked out my elbow and braced my upper arm against his thigh to torque my shoulder at an uncomfortable angle. I slapped. When I stood, the row of kneeling students were sitting very straight, eyes wide, except Mike, who was grinning even harder.

This time when we paired, Petra didn’t hesitate.

She was light and whippy but I took particular care to guide her neatly. “Wow,” she said, when she came up. Her eyes were wide-set and hazel, under straight brows. “Your energy is, like, really clear.”

I smiled and held out my other wrist, and she took it. It was like playing with a lariat: twist this way, twist that way, and everything is neatly coiled on the floor and perfectly still, with no more ability to get up and move without permission than a piece of old rope.

She held her left wrist out, and I took it with my right, and she frowned in concentration, turned her left hand over and out, stepped back with her left foot, pulled her elbow close to her body, put her right hand over mine and turned. I went down, but in real life I would simply have moved behind her on the diagonal, put my hand up, and kept turning until she was unbalanced and I could flip her over my hip. Or I could have twisted faster in midair and turned out of the wrist lock. But I went down, and waited patiently until she decided which way to step over me to flip me onto my stomach. A bit more fiddling and she had me in a decent shoulder pin.

I got up and took her wrist again, but this time before she moved, I said, “Spread your fingers. Just imagine it for a moment, then do it.” She frowned again. “Relax your shoulders. Imagine you can do this perfectly, and then do it.”

She did. She beamed. Held her left wrist out eagerly.

“This time, with your right hand, guide mine, turn it as though you’re rolling a fat sausage over in the air.” She did, and it gave a tighter, faster torque to the wrist lock. This time I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but go down.

“Cool,” she said.

The dojo was not air-conditioned. Soon everyone was glowing with sweat. Mike was drenched. Every time he rolled, sweat spattered the mat.

The tense student, whose name turned out to be Chuck, was hard to work with. It was like dealing with a panicked deer. When he was nage, he would begin a technique, then stop and say, “Shit, shit, no, no, let me try again,” pleading as though I were a judgmental father who would beat him for any mistake. I found myself moving very, very slowly, breathing loudly so that he would take an unconscious cue from my respiration rate and slow his own, and keeping my face quite still. Once or twice I found myself trying not to get between him and the light in case he bolted.

The grey-haired man was Neil, and although he was competent, it was clear he was not well. His cheeks acquired a faintly purple tinge and he ran out of breath very quickly, and had to rest every now and again. Everyone seemed used to that.

We knelt again. Sensei surveyed us, paused, and said, “Free play.” Electricity rippled down the line of students. Petra and Jim moved regretfully off the mat and sat to one side. Free play is not for beginners.

Chuck, Mike, Neil, the two men I hadn’t worked with, and I ranged in a circle around sensei, Mike looked around, nodded, said “Hei!” and Neil charged at sensei, and then flew through the air in a tucked ball, and one of the anonymous students ran and was flung on his back, and then Chuck, whom sensei stepped to meet so he couldn’t collapse with fear before making contact, and then Mike, who rolled backwards, then me. I ran without breathlessness, smiled as the currents brushed and I described an elegant spiral and rolled out and was on my feet again even before Neil came charging in once more.

The more truly expert an aikido player is, the more closely movement on the mat during free play resembles the Brownian motion of particles in suspension. Sensei moved slowly across the canvas, flinging bodies random distances, never letting the group close in or a pattern develop. But against six opponents no one can keep that up forever without taking them out permanently, one by one, which is why, generally, only those who aren’t too far from being yudansha take part in free play: gradually, no matter how good one is, things start to get just a little ragged, just a little rough. The goal becomes one of pushing away rather than guiding. I’ve seen more than one person get hurt in such situations.

Sensei lasted two and a half rounds before the raggedness became serious. He stiff-armed Mike in the center of the chest and he went down with an ashen-faced thump; sensei immediately stood straight and clapped his hands twice. Everyone sagged a little. Neil was gasping; the others were breathing fast. So was I, but not in distress.

Sensei offered his arm to Mike, who came off the mat looking fine.

“Angelo,” he said, pointing to the student with the mustache whom I hadn’t worked with, and we began again. Angelo was ragged after two people: shoulders tense, fists clenched, steps small and abrupt. Sensei let everyone have a go at him before pointing to someone called Donny. Then Neil.

And then it was my turn, and Mike charged first, like a young bear, and I smiled and bowled him neatly into the path of Chuck and they went down in a tangle, and then I turned to help Neil fly, and then sensei ran at me and dived to roll and come at me feet first and I refused the challenge and leapt over him like water bursting over a stone and sparkling clear and bright in the sun, before dipping and rising under Angelo, tossing him up like a whitewater rapid flips a raft, and joy fizzed under my skin as he turned turtle and came down flat on his back and I was spinning, taking Donny into a headfirst fall that would have broken the neck of anyone who didn’t practice falling two hours a day. Blood rushed sweet and hot under my skin and laughter bubbled up through me and I loosed it. It was a lovely day.

DORNAN WORE black jeans and a jacket and had taken the sapphire out of his left ear.

“What are you smiling at?” he said crossly as we drove north to meet my mother and Eric.

“Not a thing.”

He wriggled uncomfortably, tugged at his jacket cuffs and then his seat belt. I wasn’t sure why he was so tense. He’d already met my mother. She hadn’t eaten him.

“We’re going to be early,” he said.

“Yes.” If you were early, you could check out exits, and crowd choke-and vantage-points before you had to settle down. You could scan the clientele, get a feel for who might do what. Except that when we parked by the massive totem outside Ivar’s Salmon House and went in, my mother and Eric were already at the far side of the enormous room at a table cornered by two picture windows, sitting drenched in the westering sun that poured across Lake Union and turned their chardonnay to bottled summer, but they rose with such glad smiles, such open shoulders and wide hands, that I smiled, too, and felt a jet of the same joy I’d experienced that afternoon.

I walked to the table slowly, absorbing the vaulted space, the forty feet of native canoe suspended from the roof beams, the rounded faces of the Inuit and Aleut servers—not unlike the Sami in the north of Norway and Finland—the deep reds and creams of painted native carvings on the walls. Even the music sounded Sami, too, which made sense when one considered the fact that Alaska and Siberia were separated only by the narrow Bering Strait. The smell of salmon did not fill me with horror.

They had thoughtfully left the two chairs facing the best view, which meant I had to sit with my back to the door, but if I turned in my seat slightly I could watch reflections in the window. There were three possible exits.

We all sat as though we meant to stay: shoulders down, feet flat, back relaxed. To start, everyone but me ordered the clam chowder. I opted for the green salad, on the theory that if I could manage fruit, I should be able to manage green leaves. The chowder arrived first. It smelled like pale, thick brimstone. I swallowed. When my salad came, I found that if I avoided the cheese, it would be edible.

We talked of our day. I told them about aikido, about Petra obviously thinking it was a stigma to work with another woman, about the joy of falling at speed.

Dornan talked of his morning, lunch at a French bistro downtown, the growing franticness of the film production. “Time is getting short. They only have another four days on their star’s contract, and she wants to leave before that. The director is threatening to go, too, and take the stunt actor with him.” Eric wanted to know who the star was, and he and Dornan talked happily about favorite TV shows. My mother and I smiled at each other, and I realized that I was quite relaxed.

We talked of Eric’s day at Spherogenix and then Encos, the companies’ focus on bioengineering specific immune-system proteins. He sounded urbane and relaxed, but it was clear he was passionate on the subject.

“You’re a scientist?” Dornan said.

“I have an M.D., but I don’t practice.”

“Why is that?”

He paused. “I was twenty-five. I was a doctor. Patients would put their lives in my hands and trust me to help them. I found myself unwilling to play God. I don’t mind playing business but people’s lives… I was afraid.”

I had been wondering why he didn’t practice, and Dornan had simply asked.

“Are you still afraid?” he said.

“No. Or at least I don’t think so. Plus I’ve come to see that negotiating development licenses ultimately affects many people’s lives. It’s different, though. Doing so at one remove.”

The difference between squeezing someone’s warm neck with your hands and launching a smart bomb from two miles up. I nodded.

“Plus,” he said, “I get to have lunch with all the big-shot investors, mostly famous CEO-type people.”

Else laughed. “But what he really likes is the people the famous CEOs attract.”

He smiled at her, then at me and Dornan. “I admit it. I like the shallow glitz.” And he and Dornan talked about the relationship between celebrity and big business, and when the conversation morphed back into a discussion of what was going on with Seattle biotech, I watched a cormorant airing its wings on one of the dock pilings.

“But of course a lot depends on a proposed South Lake Union real estate development project.”

I focused. “Real estate? How does that tie into biotechnology?”

“One of the city’s major developers is trying to get various concessions from local government—a spur from the proposed light rail line, relaxed commercial/residential zoning, and so on—in order to essentially create a biotech hub on the lake’s south shore.” I tried to visualize the area: the northern edge of downtown, then I realized that those were probably its lights shining across the water. “If he succeeds, then half the people I’m talking to would relocate, at favorable lease rates and certain city and county-level tax breaks. But in order to assure those favorable terms, they would in turn have to make concessions, commitments to employment levels, diversity quotas, environmental controls, and so on.”

Something in my brain began to tick.

“Naturally, all this affects pricing and long-term product viability, which are my major areas of concern.”

“So if the city’s getting less tax money, why is it a good thing?” Dornan said.

“Hubs are good because they attract other businesses. Like, for example, software nexuses in Silicon Valley and here in Seattle.”

“Coffee,” Dornan said, nodding. “Tully’s, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best.”

“Exactly.”

“Also beer and tea and chocolate,” he mused. “Seattle’s Best Chocolate, Dilettante, Fran’s, Red Hook, Stash, Tazo—though those might be Oregon, now that I come to think of it.”

All delivery mechanisms for nice, respectable drugs; all things that would get a Scandinavian through the winter.

“That’s the way it seems to work,” Eric said. “Once an industry perceives that the business climate is favorable, that the employee base has the right education, that others will travel to a particular city in order to take employment there, then it will relocate. Others follow.” He made a rolling motion. “It snowballs.”

“Ah.” Dornan nodded wisely. “Fashion.”

Eric laughed. “Of course. Though they’d hate to admit it.”

The cormorant launched itself from its perch and flew out over the water.

“Zoning,” I said. “Is it hard to change?”

“Not as hard as it should be,” my mother said.

“It depends,” Eric said, with a glance at her. “There are some good arguments for keeping zoning flexible. But perhaps there’s a particular reason you asked?”

“My warehouse.” My mother looked at me. Dornan looked at his wineglass and sighed. “I was thinking of selling it, only now I discover that that’s exactly what someone wants.” And I explained what I believed had been happening. “This morning I found out my agent has run off, and taken my files and a few others with her. Her assistant tells me that she’d been negotiating to purchase several properties along that stretch of the Duwamish, all industrial property. Only he couldn’t figure out why, who she was negotiating for, or who would be interested in it. So I was just thinking, maybe she’s found a way to change the zoning. How would she go about that?”

“City or county council vote. Most of the time they just rubber-stamp the recommendations of a zoning committee chaired by one councillor and half a dozen civil servants. They will usually indulge in a pro forma public meeting before formulating their recommendations. For high-visibility issues, though, the individual councillors will make up their own minds. That is, they’ll let interested parties make it up for them by means of campaign contributions, promises of future development dollars, and public and behind-the -scenes support for the councillors’ pet projects.”

“Buying votes—that simple?”

“Pretty much.”

“The way of the world,” my mother said. “Favors for favors. For example, that’s one of the reasons I’m here: the Norwegian government’s licensing agreement with a large software company is ending shortly and there are interesting new parameters to explore, particularly relating to security. I’m talking to the executive team purely informally, as a favor to the Labour Party.”

I forgot the zoning issue. “The party, not the government?”

She nodded.

Party politics operated only in the domestic arena. “You’re thinking of going back to Norway.”

Her face smoothed into that automatic pseudo-candid expression all career diplomats—all politicians—learn, but then she paused and glanced at Eric. He shrugged: your daughter, your decision. She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“What have they offered you?”

“The Ministry of Culture and Education. For now.”

“Well, well, well.”

“What?” Dornan said, looking from me to Else to Eric and back again. “What?”

Eric took his wife’s hand. “Aud has just discovered that her mother has greater ambition than she knew.”

“You’re aiming for the top,” I said.

“Yes.” Now that she had made up her mind to tell me, she seemed quite calm about it.

“What’s your timetable?”

"Move back later this year, assume the junior cabinet position next year, then ...”

“Madame Prime Minister.” We all looked at each other. “But why?”

“Victor Belaunde,” she said. “Do you remember?”

It had been a long time, but Belaunde, onetime Peruvian ambassador to the UN, had been quoted in our household all through my childhood. My mother was very fond of quotations.

I said from memory, “When there is a problem between two small nations, the problem disappears. When there is a problem between a big country and small country, the little country disappears. When there is a problem between two big countries, the United Nations disappears.”

“It’s even more true today than it was then. Norway needs to be bigger. We have work to do. But the sense of importance must come from inside. That’s what I want to do.”

“You want to change the world.”

She didn’t deny it.

Dornan looked around the table, shook his head, and said, “It’s genetic.” Which everyone seemed to find funnier than I did.

“Aristotle,” Eric said, with the air of a magician producing a rabbit from the hat. “Humans have a purpose in the world, and that purpose is to fulfill their destiny.”

“Destiny is a pretty creepy word,” Dornan said, and then, with a disarming smile, “depending on the context.”

“Quite so. There again, Aristotle also said that greatness of soul is having a high opinion of oneself.”

“Yes,” Dornan said in his best Trinity debating voice, “but do we believe him or Socrates when it comes to moral action? Socrates declared that it’s impossible to know the right thing and not do it. Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that one can have the knowledge but fail to act because of lack of control or weakness of will.” He was enjoying their surprise. “Straw poll: Aristotle or Socrates?”

“Aristotle,” said Eric.

“Aristotle,” my mother said, but more slowly.

They looked at me. “Socrates,” I said. “Because it’s all about what you mean by ‘knowledge.’ And ‘the right thing.’ ”

They looked interested.

“There are hierarchies of knowledge. It depends on which you privilege: somatic knowledge or extra-somatic. If you tell a child the fire will burn if she sticks her hand in the flame, she’ll only believe you if she knows what hot means.”

“You mean like the razor?” my mother said.

“Razor?”

“You were seven, or perhaps eight—old enough, anyway, to have had more sense—and you found a razor blade on the turf at York races, and picked it up, and I said, ‘don’t touch it, that’s sharper than any knife,’ and you just couldn’t help yourself, you had to see how sharp it was. You tested the edge on your thumb and bled all over your new shoes.” She turned to Dornan. “We had to spend half an hour in the first-aid tent until she stopped bleeding.”

Dornan grinned. I looked at my thumb.

“You were saying?” Eric said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, think of religion. If you believed, really and truly, that you would spend eternity burning in hell for having sex with your brother’s wife, you wouldn’t do it.”

“Unless you couldn’t help it. And if you’re nineteen and in the grip of powerful hormones, you’re next to helpless. Reason might not exist.”

“Yes, but while you’re feeling the rush of hormones, at that moment, you know—physically, somatically—that having the sex is the right thing. It doesn’t matter what your frontal cortex is trying to tell you. Except that I sound as though I think our minds and our bodies are separate things, and they’re not.”

Before I got myself even more muddled by trying to explain how I thought of the layered brain—the limbic system not under conscious control, the cerebral cortex being a lightly civilized veneer over everything— Dornan stepped in.

“So,” he said, with a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, “if Aristotle is right, are we to believe that (a) most politicians are weak, or (b) uncontrolled, or (c) just not smart enough to know the right thing?”

“Politicians are like con men,” my mother said. “They persuade themselves to believe ridiculous things, and then pursue them in all sincerity.”

Startled silence.

“Which is why powerful people need people they love by them, to say the unwelcome thing, to help them believe what is right.”

It was the first time I had heard her use the word love. We had never said to each other, I love you. When I was little, it had never occurred to me to believe otherwise. By the time I was old enough to wonder, I would not make myself vulnerable enough to ask.

Over after-dinner drinks we talked about politicians, and family members and lovers who had damned or saved them, and Eric paid the bill, and we walked outside and stood on the dock for a while. Dornan and Eric moved down the ramp a little, and a Canada goose waddled fatly behind them, hoping for a handout.

My mother and I watched the water. It was the blue-black of an old-fashioned Beretta that someone had oiled lovingly for twenty years. It heaved lazily, constantly, and the reflected boat lights smeared and ran like Day-Glo paint.

My mother and I watched the water for a while. “You didn’t say what you thought of my plan for national politics.”

“Eric seems as though he would be willing to say the unwelcome thing. I would, too.”

“Thank you,” she said, “I would listen.” And I imagined us clasping hands in the dark, though neither of us moved.

AS I GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND STARTED UNLOADING THE TRUNK, THE SLANTING sun turned my windshield to gold. It wasn’t just the light, it was a faint dusting of pollen. Yesterday there had been one minute less than twelve hours of daylight, today one minute more; it was twenty degrees warmer than the past week; tomorrow there might be rain: spring gamboling as senselessly as a new lamb.

I opened the basement door with difficulty at 6:01. That familiar scent of dust, competing perfumes, and carpet.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, and kicked the door shut behind me.

“What the hell is all that?”

"Swords,” I said, dropping one bag, “or maybe they’re lightsabers, it’s hard to tell.” I dropped another bag, the one full of T-shirts and the sponges and the red ink, and set down the cheap gas station cooler. I pulled one of the plastic toys, lime green, from the first bag and examined it. “No, it’s a sword. A cutlass, I believe.”

“This has got to be a lightsaber,” said Pauletta, picking up another and holding it like a shocking pink banana.

“Let me see. No. It’s meant to be a katana.”

“A what now?”

“Katana. Japanese sword.” A hollow plastic imitation of the one I had at home, with a braid-wrapped ray-skin hilt and signed tang and a blade that shone like watered silk.

“I think I’m pretty safe in saying that is not a sword.” Nina pointed at the white polystyrene cooler.

“Take a look inside.”

She toed off the lid and peered in. “Water pistols.”

“Unfilled,” I said. “Two volunteers to fix that.” Suze and Christie won the privilege and practically ran from the room. “And a volunteer to kick the cooler to bits.”

Katherine and Tonya decided they could manage that between them, and did. The polystyrene squealed and squeaked. I half expected Nina to say, “Scream, sucker,” in an action-hero voice but she just watched. Perhaps she didn’t like mysteries, perhaps it had been difficult for her last week admitting, even to herself, that she’d been assaulted.

“Everyone else, stretch out and warm up.” They were doing that, and the cooler was a pile of jagged polystyrene splinters by the time Suze and Christie got back with the loaded guns. Christie’s hair was wet and the back of Suze’s T-shirt was sticking to her spine. Clearly they’d felt obliged to test-fire a couple.

They settled into stretching with the rest. “Today we’re going to talk about weapons: guns, knives, sticks, and swords. What they can do, what you do if faced with one.”

Several laughed, some nervously. Weapons weren’t made of Day-Glo plastic; plastic couldn’t hurt them. Right?

I picked up the shocking pink katana, twirled it like a baton, then balanced it on my index finger, thinking. “Who thinks they can stab my hand with this?”

“Me. You bet,” said Kim. I tossed it to her. She caught it on the blade. A martial arts class would have stopped everything to explain about taking the weapon seriously, treating it with exaggerated respect, but that was not what I was after.

From the bag I took two large white T-shirts, a sponge, and a bottle of red ink. I pulled one of the T-shirts over my head, then poured a little red ink into the sponge. “Give the sword back a minute.”

I squeezed the wet sponge around the sword below the hilt and pulled the blade through my fist so that it gleamed redly. I gave it back to Pauletta, then wrapped the second T-shirt around my hand like a cartoon bandage and held out my hand.

“Stab this. Leave a big bloody mark in the middle.” I stepped back a little. She edged forward. I edged back.

“No fair. Keep still.”

“If someone was standing opposite you with a sword, or a knife, or a gun, would you stand still?”

“Then how can I stab you?”

“Good question.”

She charged, stabbing madly, and I moved away, and she missed. She looked mortified.

“It’s very hard to hit a moving target—with a blade, or a bullet.”

I gestured for her to give me the sword. The ink was dry; I leaned it against the wall, picked up a water pistol.

“Who wants to have a go at shooting my hand with the gun?”

“I’ll do that,” said Suze.

“Choose your weapon.”

She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.

“What kind of gun is it?”

“A big one,” she said with relish.

“Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”

“SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”

Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.

“That’s a heavy gun,” I said.

“Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”

“How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.

“The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”

“Then that’s what this is.”

“All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.

Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.

“Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.

“Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”

“She missed!” Pauletta said.

“Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”

“Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.

“In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”

“But…” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.

“If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”

“Start running.”

“Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”

“To hurt you.”

“Sometimes.”

No one else had anything to offer. I decided to approach from another direction.

“Remember that they can’t hurt you with a stick or a knife unless they can touch you with it. They can’t hurt you with a gun unless they can hit you. That means stay out of reach, and start moving.”

“What if he’s already behind you in the car?”

“He won’t be, because you will have parked in a well-lit spot, and before you get in the car, you have looked through the window.”

“I will?”

“Yes. As you approach the car, you have your keys ready. You are not overburdened by bags. You examine the car by eye as you get closer, noting whether there are any extra shadows under or inside the vehicle.” Why didn’t they know this?

“Underneath?”

“Attackers have been known to hide there.”

“Jeez, I never thought of that.”

If they spent time worrying about being attacked in the first place, why didn’t they spend time considering realistic possibilities and responses?

“So what do we do if there’s someone under the car?” Jennifer said.

I looked around with raised eyebrows and waited. “Leave?” said Christie.

I nodded. “If he can’t touch you, he can’t hurt you.”

“Unless he has a gun.”

Either they were unable to listen or they couldn’t connect the dots. “The hit rate of four times in a hundred only applies under usual circumstances. If the assailant is squeezed under a car I imagine the number is even smaller. Also, as we’ve learnt before, you can use almost anything as a weapon. You could throw your groceries at him before you run. A can of tomatoes makes a formidable weapon.” Or a cup of hot coffee. Or a good yell. Or a spray of oven cleaner.

Nina made a rock, paper, scissors hand. “My tomato beats your gun.” They all laughed.

I wasn’t in the mood for it today. “I’ve given you statistics,” I said. “Now you tell me what it is about guns and knives, even toy ones, that makes you all so nervous.”

No one offered an answer. Katherine shifted from foot to foot. Kim started flicking her nails.

I sat down. “You may as well make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while.”

They sat one by one.

“This is a serious question. Why do knives and guns scare you so much?” Flick, flick, flick. Tonya’s faint wheeze.

After a long thirty seconds, Therese said, “We’re afraid of getting hurt.” “Let me tell you something about the times you’ve been hurt, all of you, every single one: it didn’t kill you.”

“But getting hurt… it hurts.” Pauletta.

“Certainly. So does having routine blood tests. Or dental work. Having children, spraining your ankle, menstrual cramps. A hundred and one things you’ve all been through before and survived.”

“But a knife. Being cut.”

“None of you has been cut while chopping vegetables?”

“Do you really not understand?” Therese said. “It’s the malice. It’s the fear. It’s the idea of some masked man with a knife threatening to torture you, and you being so scared that you do anything he says. Anything. You humiliate yourself just so he won’t… damage you.”

“So he won’t cut your nipples off and rape you with the knife!” Jennifer said.

There was a gelid silence and they all looked away.

The bogeyman with a knife. Afraid of the bogeyman, because they didn’t know that 76 percent of women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are attacked by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date; that for women ages fifteen to forty-four, domestic violence was the leading cause of injury. They have met the bogeyman and they are married to him, at least according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

I had encountered ignorance before in my brief stint as a community liaison officer. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know. They hadn’t been twelve when their mother had visited a London domestic violence center in her ambassador’s clothes, chatted politely to the executive director, and been given a green-covered, amateurishly designed book titled The Women Against Rape Study. Their mother hadn’t given that mysterious-looking book to her assistant. They hadn’t taken the book from the assistant’s desk the next day and leafed through it, trying to understand who their mother was and what it was that other people thought interested her.

I had gradually become fascinated by that book, with its columns and tables of statistics, its quotes from women who had been attacked by husbands and brothers and boyfriends, by bosses and transport workers and babysitter’s fathers.

I had read that green-bound book over and over, in between novels like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Dune, and had gradually come to believe it was my job to be the wise and powerful one, the wizard, the warrior, the seer; my job to lead my people and protect them from harm. I was the one with the noble brow and the secret book of runes, I was the one who knew. And so I became that person. I taught myself. I read that book, and others. I watched people. I studied their faces, their hands, their words. I learnt karate, and later wing chun, and boxing, and aikido, and tai chi. Killed a man who pointed a gun at me when I was eighteen. Joined the police force. And gradually forgot that I had ever had to learn, that I hadn’t been born this way, that nobody is.

I stood and pulled my shirt off.

“The fuck… ?” Suze said.

I pointed to a silvery line about three inches long on my left side, just above my hip.

“This thin scar here, that was a knife. At the time it felt as though someone had drawn a pen along my ribs. I barely noticed. Adrenaline does that.” I walked slowly around the circle of women. Look. See. Know. This is what it’s like to have your skin opened like the thin skin of a peach and watch the juice run out. “It bled a fair amount, but I didn’t even need to go to the emergency room, I just bound it up.”

“It didn’t hurt at all?” Tonya looked as though she wanted to put her fingers on it, in it. Doubting Tonya.

“It hurt the next day, a kind of deep ache, a bit like the worst time I sliced my finger when cutting up carrots.”

I showed them that scar on the tip of my left index finger. There was a scar on my thumb, too, but I couldn’t remember what that was from.

“Cutting carrots?” Katherine said, with a look that said, Are you fooling with me?

“I took naproxen and that helped.”

“Like for period pains.”

“Yes. Pain is pain, whether it’s ‘natural’ or not.”

They chewed on that.

“Were you afraid?” Jennifer said.

“No. It happened too fast. It often does.”

“Was he trying to kill you?”

“No.”

“What did he want?”

“He, they, wanted to escape. I was in their way. It wasn’t personal.”

“Not personal!”

“No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t expecting me there in the first place. He didn’t care whether I hurt or not, whether I died or not, he only cared about himself.”

I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

“This”—I bent my left arm and put my fist on my shoulder to show the pink furrow running along the line between triceps and biceps, then turned so they could see the entry wound by my left shoulder blade—“this was a rifle bullet, fired from a scoped weapon. I couldn’t tell you if that was personal or not. It was for money. He was an expert, who was lying prone and ready in the snow. Snow. I was a dark target against a white background. As you see, it missed all my vital organs. I was hit here on the shoulder and the bullet traveled just under my skin, down my arm, and out near the elbow. I lost blood but was able to drive myself back to safety eventually. I’m told that the scar can be repaired nicely. This—”

“Wait. How did that feel?”

“At the time, it felt as though someone had punched me in the back.” And then I had been worrying about not getting shot again, about hypothermia, and bleeding too much, and, overwhelmingly, worrying for Julia.

Therese said something.

“I’m sorry?”

“After that? After the punch in the back?”

“It hurt. But pain is just a message. Just a note to let you know that something is wrong. You can ignore the message.”

“You can’t ignore a hole in your back.”

“You can. You can ignore anything if your life depends upon it. Pain is just a message. Of course, I did take some morphine.”

“Morphine.”

“Yes. And later I went to hospital.”

“Did the police catch him, the guy?”

“They found him.”

“Did he go to jail?”

“No. He didn’t make it that far.”

Most of them didn’t get it, but Sandra was looking at me, face very still, eyes like a photograph of an eclipse: pupil a black hole, iris blazing, almost writhing, like a corona. I didn’t understand her message. “That one,” she said, pointing to my neck, “that looks personal.”

“An addict. An adolescent with a straight razor. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a boy or a girl. It turned out to be a boy.” I had seen his naked, skinny little chest when I had taken his sweater. I could have killed him. I nearly did. “As I say, an addict, or schizophrenic.” Funny, that had never occurred to me before.

“Were you scared?”

“I thought I was going to die, but I’m not sure I was scared.”

“What did you do?”

“He had the blade against my jugular. He’d probably seen how from television. For a little while, I gave up. I just started telling a story.” I had spent months trying not to think about that night, how I had known, really known, I would die, how sordid I found the situation, the understanding that this was it, right there, in the dark, in a park full of homeless people in a city where I knew nobody while wearing the clothes of a man I had just beaten half to death, and that there was nothing, nothing to be done.

“A story. Like a Dick and Jane type story?”

“No. I don’t remember, exactly. I just talked and talked, and then he wavered, because he was young and he needed his drugs, and his arm dropped, and I took the razor away from him.”

“Did you hurt him?” Suze said.

“No.” But there had been a moment when I considered cutting his throat, watching his blood gush out and down his chest. It would have been black in the faint city light among the trees. “No. I left.”

“Don’t tell me, no hospital, right?”

“Right. A plane, to North Carolina. Then healing. There was some… some blood loss.”

“No shit.”

“But not everyone’s like you,” Kim said. “We can’t let someone shoot us, stab us, slit our throats, and then go home and take an aspirin.”

“The human body is very strong, very difficult to kill, unless you’re facing an expert.” If I put a razor to someone’s throat, they’d die. “And they, I, you heal. Look.” I sat down and pulled up my left pants leg, past the two-inch white scar just below the back of my knee. “This happened when I was nine. Or eight, something like that. A nail sticking out of a piece of wood. I was running around in the garden, jumped over something, felt a little scratch, then—”

“Blood for days,” Nina said, nodding. “Cuts on the plump parts, near a joint, they just gush. ’Specially if you’ve been running. See this?” She flexed her right arm, showed a very similar scar just above her elbow. “Barbed-wire fence. And this”—she showed us four neat indentations across the tops of the fingers on her left hand—“a steel tape measure. We were running around on this construction site when I was a kid, three of us holding the tape, only I tripped over my own ankles and fell over and, zzzt, they ran on and the tape cut me open.”

“I have a burn scar,” Katherine said, and then they were all rolling up or unbuttoning or pushing down something and showing scars, and saying, “You’re right, it didn’t hardly hurt to start with,” or “It bled like crazy,” or “I had nineteen stitches! Hurt like a motherfucker the next day.”

Sandra talked about her crooked middle finger, how it got caught in her sweater sleeve when she was trying to take it off and running to catch the school bus when she was eleven, how she’d tripped and fallen and her finger was broken to pieces. She didn’t mention the burn on the back of that hand that looked much more recent. She didn’t point out the damaged thumbnail. Nobody asked her about those things, either, though Pauletta did say to Kim, “So, that scar on your chin. That’s from when you bashed your own teeth out on the pavement?”

“This? Nah. That was from going facefirst down a slide and forgetting to put my arms out.”

So then the conversation became about playground mishaps, and I was struck by the fact that none of them talked about being hit or strangled or knocked down with malice by the school bully; though Pauletta admitted to having been a bully when she was a kid. “That was my momma. She told me I needed to take care of my business, so I did. And then I started to take care of business that wasn’t mine, you know? You look at me crosswise and I slam you against the lockers. You don’t ask me to your party and I trip you up and kick you in the stomach and take your lunch money.” She saw the way Therese was looking at her and shrugged. “Hey, I was a kid. I don’t do that now. You never hit somebody?”

Therese shook her head.

“What, not ever, not even as a kid?”

“I never did, either,” Tonya said.

“Nor me.” Jennifer. “Or me.” Katherine.

They stared at each other and I stared at them all. Sandra stared back. “You’ve hit people,” she said. “What’s it like? Does it feel good?”

“No.” But surviving did, feeling brilliant with life, huge, vital. Winning: one life between us and it is mine.

She nodded slowly, knowing there was more to it, knowing, too, that I wouldn’t talk about it. This was private, the way being hit and burned and cut and strangled at home was private. We could acknowledge it between us, as long as it remained unspoken.

“So what’s the broken-up cooler for?”

I stretched across the carpet and lifted a shard from the pile. “This?” It was a little over a foot long. “It’s a KA-BAR.”

“A what?” Jennifer said, clearly prepared to be frightened.

“A hunting knife. The blade is about nine inches long, partially serrated. ” I handed it to her. “This”—I picked up another piece, a bit shorter—“this is a broken bottle. Who wants it?” Tonya held out her hand. I picked up another piece, small and slim. “What should this be?”

“A razor,” said Sandra. “I’ll take it.” I wished I could read her mind.

I took two more pieces of polystyrene from the pile, which turned out to be a bread knife for Kim and an ice pick for Suze. “Everyone stand. Those with a weapon choose an unarmed partner.”

Several of them looked at the wall clock, but there were six minutes left. “Stand opposite each other. Attackers, move in until your weapon touches your partner on the chest. Now look at your feet. None of you are more than eighteen inches apart. Some of you only a foot or so. It’s not too hard to make sure you don’t get that close to someone, especially if it’s a stranger. If you’re paying attention to your surroundings, to what’s going on around you, no one will get that close to you. Unless it’s a public situation: a line at the grocery, a seat on MARTA, getting in an elevator.” It occurred to me that I had no idea what a PTA meeting was like, or singing in the church choir, or a ladies’ coffee morning. But from what I had gathered, these were not things that frightened them.

“You can’t watch everyone all the time,” Therese said. “You’d be stressed out of your mind.”

“But you’d be alive,” Sandra said.

I found I didn’t like being on the same side as Sandra. “You don’t watch everyone all the time. Not consciously. You don’t spend your life on red alert. More like amber, except in your secure home. You take simple, automatic precautions, like having your keys ready, taking the corner wide, parking under a light, checking the car before you get in, not giving out information you don’t have to, never unlocking the door without looking and putting a chain on first, and so on.”

“That’s a lot to remember,” Kim said.

“Not really. You’ll get used to it and eventually won’t even think about it. You all already remember to turn the gas off, to check both ways before you cross the road, to not pick up kitchen knives by the blade, to avoid broken glass, to not breathe water, to not pick up a roasting pan without an oven mitt, and a thousand and one other things. Checking your car and carrying a phone and locking your door are like that. Just sensible precautions.”

“You’ll have to make us a list,” Nina said. Jennifer nodded vigorously, forgetting the hunting knife she was holding at Therese’s breastbone. A list was something she understood, something she could master. Better than nasty knives.

“I will. And we’ll go through it together.” Because the best defense was to need no defense, to see them before they saw you. “Meanwhile, back to our weapons.”

They all straightened. The women with the polystyrene shards assumed vicious expressions and their partners looked nervous.

The clock clunked as the hour hand moved.

“We’ll have to pick this up next week.” I handed out Sharpies. “Write your name and weapon on the polystyrene and give them to me until next week. Meanwhile, everyone who had a weapon, decide what it is that you want. Money? Your victim’s car keys? Murder? Rape? A nice long chat about state politics? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Are you bored? Young? Smart? Angry? Frightened? Who are you? What do you want?”

Jennifer looked panicked. Decisions are hard.

“Unarmed partners, remember that no one waves a knife at you just because. They want something. Something tangible or something emotional. You have to figure out what. Think about that before next week.”