Always

SEVEN

I WOKE LATE AFTER A LONG, DREAMLESS SLEEP. I EXERCISED IN THE HOTEL GYM, showered, then sat in my underwear and opened the file Rusen had sent. I looked through it with growing frustration. I had no more idea of what might be relevant than I had before Isabella. Outside, clouds scudded by and the tops of trees shivered in bright sun. I closed the laptop, put on a summery silk dress and jacket, and set off to learn some Seattle neighborhoods.

Queen Anne was rather staid, even twee, the Seattle equivalent of Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland area. Farther north, I walked around Greenlake in the breezy sunshine. I attempted to eat a sandwich in a café by the water but was defeated by the extraneous aiolis and mustards and strange pickled vegetables. Even before the destruction of my taste buds, my idea of a good sandwich was simple ingredients: fresh whole-meal bread, Danish butter, chicken roasted at home without garlic or rosemary or anything else. Chicken, butter, bread, perhaps a little fleur de sel. Nothing to clutter the essential flavors.

I considered returning to the hotel but doubted the spreadsheet would have become any more meaningful. I needed to go to the set, talk to people, get a feel for what was going on. Perhaps SPD had missed something.

Mercer Street was choked with traffic. I checked the time. Just after four o’clock. Later than I thought. The light had fooled me; I was used to more southerly latitudes.

I called Dornan. “I’m heading for the set. Want to join me?”

“Already there.”

“Oh.” Traffic was at a complete standstill. For the first time since I’d got to Seattle, someone started honking.

“Hello?”

“I’m here.” It was getting hot. Without movement there was no airflow. More honking. Despite the noise, I didn’t want to close the windows and use air-conditioning. “Hold on.” I unfastened my seat belt, took off my jacket, refastened the seat belt.

“Look,” Dornan said, “things are getting busy here.” I heard Kick’s voice in the background, and Dornan said something about the director, and the stunt actor, but in the rumble of stationary traffic and honking horns, I missed it. “I have to go,” he said.

I eventually merged with traffic on Alaskan Way, and watched my rearview mirror. Nobody followed me. How disappointing. Today, he wouldn’t have got away. Today, I would have got some answers. I lifted my left hand from the wheel and flexed it, then my right. I sat up straight and stretched my spine as I drove.

A MAN STOOD in front of the closed side door, brown hair parted on the left, feet in Velcro-fastened cross trainers that looked like bowling shoes, set wide. Near the door, the asphalt was turning to greying gravel crumbs, which could prove dangerous underfoot. A potential liability issue; I made a mental note to mention it to Bette, and put on my jacket. The late afternoon was a little too warm, but it freed up my hands and would protect my bare arms. When I approached, the man held up his hand, palm out. Left hand. The right stayed at his side, but not limp. The tendons at the wrist were relaxed, brown eyes alert. I stopped about ten feet away.

“ID?”

I reached into my inside breast pocket. His eyes followed my hand, but despite his right hand remaining conspicuously free, there was none of that subtle body turning that meant he was ready to pull a gun, that he was thinking of the gun under his arm or at his belt, that he had a gun at all.

“I’m glad to see they’ve finally got some security,” I said.

He nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off my hand. I took out my wallet and extended my driver’s license. He beckoned me forward a little, stepped to meet me, accepted the license with his left hand, and stepped back, still trying to make his body lie. His gaze flicked down, then back up at my face. After a moment he nodded and transferred the license to his right hand, then extended it towards me between the tips of his index and middle fingers, again leaning forward slightly, moving back when the transfer was complete. He didn’t step aside.

“Is there a problem?”

“Nope,” he said. “It’s a closed set today.”

“A closed set?”

“No one in who isn’t on the list.”

“I see. Any idea why?”

“Nope.” But his eyes moved side to side; he was about to confide something. “Closed set is usually when they’re doing naked stuff.”

Wisps of steam. But I’d had the distinct impression that that had been filmed already, and that Rusen and Finkel were aiming for a teen audience. I still hadn’t read the script, though, so I couldn’t be sure.

“I need to talk to someone inside. Any idea how I should go about doing that if you don’t let me in?”

“Nope.” A sudden gust of wind blew a stiff, finger-wide hank of hair over his right eye.

“I’ve been having a relaxed day,” I said. “It seems a shame to lose that tranquillity.” I resisted the temptation to do a quick hamstring stretch. “Step aside.”

“A closed set, lady, means you can’t just walk in.”

Personal space is adjustable—in a crowded room, for example, we expect less; in a deserted park, more—but we always know when it’s being invaded. Various bodily signs from a stranger prepare us for the possibility: heavy sweat and a pale face hint at high adrenaline levels; muttering alerts us to craziness; hunching of shoulders or raising of hands shows preparation to move forward, as does a show of teeth or narrowing of the eyes. We send and receive a myriad of signals. But if you give a warm smile and wear a pretty dress and stay relaxed, their conscious mind overrules their subconscious understanding of the signals.

I smiled and walked right at him, shoulders down, arms swinging freely, and got to within eighteen inches of his face before he finally processed the information and grabbed at my upper arm. I swayed slightly to the left, clamped his hand firmly to my right shoulder with my right hand, and turned clockwise so that his arm locked out and I stood behind him, left palm on his skull, behind his right ear. His hair was crispy with hair spray. Gravel crunched under his feet as he maintained his balance. I shifted the grip on his right hand to turn it into sankyo, a wrist lock.

He froze. “What—”

“Be quiet and keep still.” I lifted my hand from his neck to the thin metal skin of the warehouse wall. Lots of vibration: lots of noise. No filming in progress. I released him, slid open the door, and went in.

It was as hot and active as a termite nest ripped open by an aardvark and exposed to pitiless light, only here, instead of the South African sun, it was arc lights, dozens of them, and rather than a heaving mass of insects around the grublike queen, three cameras on cranes and nearly a score of people surrounded and focused on Sîan Branwell. And this was merely the inner circle.

She was younger than I expected, still soft with the remnants of teenage-hood. Her hair was the soft brown-black of mink. She was saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” to herself, like a chant.

“It’s going to be great,” Rusen said to her. “It’s going to be amazing. Okay, people. We need this. We need perfection. Sîan, you’ll be just great. Okay. Okay, people.”

He was talking to himself, too. Everyone was talking, and sweating, and pale. I could taste the adrenaline in the air as one person powdered Sîan’s face; another tweaked the fold of her formal ballgown; someone changed a filter on a light; Joel said “Check” into his headset; Peg pointed like a setter at a leaf out of place on the soundstage; and an assistant scurried forward, bending like someone approaching a helicopter, and scooped up the errant greenery. The greenery reminded me of that long-ago trip to York races with my mother, when I had picked up the razor blade. Bright silks, a humming crowd, the racehorses moving to their gates, something they had done a hundred, a thousand times before. Their nostrils were wide and red, their tails twitching, the muscle and skin over their withers shivering, a trickle of sweat, great hearts pumping. Then the last gate closes, the starters’ assistant nods to the booth, the crowd focuses, the flag goes up, jockeys lean forward—

I heard the door open. “Freeze!” shouted the security guard.

White faces swung in my direction, focused past me. I turned. The guard had followed me and now looked vaguely foolish with nothing to point.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Branwell kept saying, only more loudly now, and more insistently, like an autistic child keeping the world at bay.

Someone to the side of the soundstage moved her head in a tight, clean turn: Kick, standing behind an empty craft-services counter and mostly obscured from view by a sweating man in tight black clothes. She wasn’t wearing her white coat, but striped cotton trousers and sandals and a form-fitting long-sleeved white T-shirt with a neckline that showed her collarbones. Something hung from a black cord around her neck.

I stepped forward but, “Out!” shrieked Peg, and ran at the guard as though she would hack his head off with her clipboard. “Out! Do you have any idea how close you came to—Do you realize—Have you any idea—”

“Hush,” I said, and touched her on the shoulder.

“You,” she said, puzzled.

“It’s all right.”

“He nearly… Three cameras! You have to—I mean—”

“It’s all right.” Joel pulled his headset from his ears until it hung around his neck. He was frowning. A restive ripple ran through the crew. “Don’t let it disturb the shoot.”

“But—Everything’s riding on this, it—”

Once at the races I’d seen a horse buck as it came out of the gate. Four horses had crashed into him, delicate patens snapping. Two had had to be destroyed. The race was canceled. “There now. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it. There now. Look, Joel needs you.”

“What?” But she turned around to look.

“They need you.”

“All right,” she said, and took a half-step backwards. Rusen looked indecisively from his set dresser to his star to the security guard. I made a Don’t let me interrupt you gesture. He hesitated, then nodded.

“All right, people,” he said. “Okay. One more time…”

I turned to the guard. “This way,” I said, and gestured to the open door—the breeze was lovely. “And don’t say a word. If you make a noise when the cameras are rolling the producer will sue you for damages. I’ll also sue you for trespass.” I motioned him through the door. “If anyone tries to get in, stop them, but be polite. Think customer service. Do your job.” I shut the door behind him. Took my jacket off.

The atmosphere began to swell and tighten again, focusing, and the hum of voices, mixed with the occasional Fuck, fuck and Okay, people, all right, began to build.

I tiptoed to a sidewall where I’d remembered there being clothes racks. Now there were piles of stacked scaffolding poles. I was glad to see they were strapped together securely. Rolling steel could be dangerous.

“No need to creep,” Dornan said from a few feet away. “At least not until the klaxon.” His eyes were alight with the kind of intensity I hadn’t seen since before Tammy had left him. For some reason it made my stomach clench.

“Why is everyone so tense?”

“Three cameras,” he said.

“So Peg said.” And it hadn’t meant much the first time.

“The director walked out, as I said, and the main stunt actor, and now Rusen is risking everything on one throw. This is the last day Sîan will be here, and instead of breaking the scenes down to separate angles, he’s going to shoot from three at once for the close-action sequences and dialogue. If we don’t get it in the first or second take, everyone, we’re screwed. The film cost alone is huge.”

We, I thought. We both looked from Branwell, still chanting to herself, seemingly oblivious to the tweakers and powderers, to Rusen.

“Rusen’s directing?”

“Yep.”

“He’s done it before?”

“In film school. The real director walked out. Said he couldn’t work under this kind of pressure.”

We looked beyond Rusen, who no longer looked like a chess prodigy but like a teacher on a field trip with twenty psychopathic schoolchildren, to Kick.

“Who’s that standing with her?”

“Bernard. The stunt guy.”

“He’s not the same one who was here the other day.”

“No. He left with the director. Bernard’s a beginner. Kick says that if she doesn’t babysit him, he’ll bolt. It’s a something-and-nothing scene: jump over a table, roll, pretend to hit someone. But he’s pretty inexperienced.”

Kick was talking intently to Bernard, who was nodding. He was only an inch or two bigger than Kick. I wondered why she didn’t do it. Dornan probably knew; he always seemed to know these things. Without her white coat, the deep V-shape of her torso and the wide shoulders and narrow waist were clear: a high-diver’s body, or a trapeze artist’s. Her hair was clipped up, and tiny muscles in her neck moved under the skin.

She looked different. Better. “She seems… less tired.”

“Yes,” Dornan said.

He sounded almost smug, and I started to feel prickly and restless. “It’s hot in here.”

“The air-conditioning is so noisy we have to keep shutting it down. People keep forgetting to turn it back on again between takes.”

As I watched, Kick mimed a ducking turn for the stuntman, who was looking dubious. She moved easily, a quarter horse to the racehorses: powerful, nimble, responsive, intelligent, present. The thing around her neck swung out and banged back against her breastbone.

“So what’s with the rent-a-cop?” Dornan said.

“Um? No idea. But he won’t be around long. What’s that thing around her neck?”

“A fan. She doesn’t do well with heat. I wish she’d use it.”

I hadn’t known her long but I couldn’t imagine Kick buying something like that for herself. “So is it going well, the filming?”

“Well, yes. I think. People are focused, and Rusen seems to know what he wants. Though they haven’t actually done any filming yet today.”

“No?”

“No. Rusen’s been running everyone through the rehearsals. It’s complicated. The second-biggest sequence of the whole pilot.”

I nodded, not really listening. Kick was now turning her chin into her chest, gesturing to the stuntman, watching him do the same.

“You still don’t know the plot, do you?” Dornan said.

“No.”

“Have you even read the treatment?”

“Whose treatment?”

“The treatment. The story outline.”

“Why don’t you tell me it?”

“And you’ll listen?”

I turned to face him. “You have my undivided attention.”

“Okay.” He seemed mollified. “There’s this woman, Vivienne—that’s Sîan, of course—who wakes up one night and she’s naked, and alone in the middle of a big city.”

I nodded. Wisps of strategic steam.

“She has no idea who she is or how she got there. And she’s just recovering from the shock when she sees the dawn, and as the sun rises, phhttt, she turns into a fox.”

“A fox.”

“It’s pretty cool—metaphor made concrete: foxy woman and all that. Anyhow, the fox, naturally, has no clue about anything. I mean, it’s a fox. So then night comes again, and, phhtt, the fox turns into the naked woman, Vivienne, who once again has no clue, et cetera. Only this time, she remembers, after about an hour of shivering naked behind a Dumpster, that she woke up the day before in the same position and then somehow lost time.”

It was interesting how he assumed a vaguely American accent to tell me all this.

“So she spends the rest of the night thinking and planning, stealing some clothes, scrabbling for food in the Dumpster, et cetera. Day comes, phhtt, she turns into a fox—”

“You don’t have to keep saying phhtt.”

He blinked. “Oh. Well, so she turns into a fox. Fox runs around, eats a bird, all that fox-type stuff. We can use stock nature footage for that. Did you know that foxes live all over the city?”

“Yes. Go on with the story.”

“So night comes”—he made a flicking phhtt gesture with his right hand—“she turns back into Vivienne—that’s easy, apparently; you just do a shimmering dissolve—”

“Dornan.”

“Right. So, anyway, she’s Vivienne again, she doesn’t know anything, but this time she remembers in about ten minutes that she’s done this a couple of times before and trots off immediately to her Dumpster, where she finds the clothes. Which she puts on. And this goes on for a while, with the cycle getting shorter. Eventually she makes friends with other people— street people, to begin with, of course, all of whom, for budget reasons no doubt, seem to live in the warehouse district—which is complicated by the night-as-woman, day-as-fox shapeshifting.”

“The Ladyhawke part.”

“Right. Eventually, through a series of events that, frankly, seem a bit muddled to me, but Kick says will get cleared up in the editing, she gains allies, learns about the fox transformation, makes sure she’s protected while she’s an animal, and starts trying to work out who she is, where she came from, and what happened. With me so far?”

I nodded.

“And it turns out, there’s this bad guy—I don’t know if he’s an evil corporate research scientist or an evil government agent, but he’s evil—”

“And lives in a florist’s shop.”

“What? No. That’s one of the friends. Lots of friends. It’s an ensemble show—that’s the Dark Angel part, that and the government thing, and that it’s in Seattle. Where was I?”

“Lots of friends.”

“Well, there will be, if we ever get to do a series and not just this backdoor pilot. Anyhow, this guy does something to Vivienne, only that, it turns out, is not her real name…”

Kick was… not frowning, exactly, but getting tight around her cheeks and eyes. The stuntman was looking young and frightened.

“…this afternoon’s sequence comes just before the end, where the bad guy has followed her to her friend’s place, the florist, and is sending in the hard lads.” Now the American accent was slipping and he sounded very working-class Dublin, the way he did when he was ebullient. “Lots of action. Viv and her friends fighting for their lives. But all surrounded by greenery, d’you see, instead of the usual shite blowing up. It’s cheaper. And what that means is it’s all internal work for the actor.”

“In addition to the stunts,” I said.

“Well, yeah. The stunts. No one’s exactly sanguine about that. Rusen asked Kick to give Bernard some unofficial coaching.”

Now Kick was pushing the sleeves of her shirt up in frustration. “As well as doing the food?”

“No one’s exactly eating the food. Partly, you know, because of what happened. Partly because, well, who could eat in this kind of atmosphere?”

He was right. The tension was building again. Kick slapped the stuntman on the arm, and he clenched his jaw and walked forward into even more intense light towards what I assumed was his mark. The tweakers left Branwell, who now drew herself up to her full five feet five inches.

“Okay, everyone. Going hot in thirty. Let’s go.”

The building hushed. “Twenty-five,” a voice said. Branwell looked like a brown-furred fox: sleek, well fed, bright-eyed. The stuntman looked like a moron. “Twenty.”

The countdown continued. Joel listened intently to his headphones, then gave a thumbs-up to Rusen, who looked at the camera operators, who appeared to ignore him, the way heavy machinery operators always ignore lesser mortals.

“Ten.”

Branwell had her eyes closed. Rusen smiled at the stuntman encouragingly. He looked as though he needed it.

“Five. Four.” Rusen pointed to the cameras, and to the clapper operator, and nodded to Branwell. “Go now.”

The lights seemed suddenly brighter, the greenery more green, Branwell’s face more alert. She took a great, shocked breath, swung around, flinched—and, “Cut!” shouted Rusen, and the entire set burst into applause.

“Fantastic,” Dornan said, “bloody fantastic.”

“That’s it?” Bernard hadn’t even done anything.

“No, that’s just the beginning. But she nailed it. First time. That’s great. That’s a good omen.”

All around me the termite mound was heaving again: swinging of lights, the rushing of hair and makeup, the nervous pacing of the stuntman, the furious note-taking of two different people. I started for the craft-services table, but Kick was no longer there.

“Okay,” Rusen said, “ready again in thirty.”

And everyone hushed, and this time the scene lasted almost seven seconds, and again Dornan’s face brimmed with delight, and again everyone clapped. Bernard still hadn’t done anything. I watched the intent, focused bustle.

I didn’t understand a bit of it, but it was mesmerizing, as urgent as a trauma team working at the scene of an accident. In the middle of the fourth scene, Branwell’s key light went out with a pop.

“Hold!” Rusen called, and everyone froze to the spot. Branwell closed her eyes and went even paler. Rusen looked at Joel.

“I can have it changed out in about five minutes,” Joel said.

“I need it in two, Joel,” Rusen said.

“The engines willnae take it, Cap’n,” someone said—Peg—and everyone smiled.

“Aye, aye, two it is,” Joel said, and I understood that for two minutes you could hold together the mass delusion that this was possible, that one could make a sellable, watchable film from two bobby pins and a roll of sticky tape. Five minutes would leave time to question the miracle. Every person in the room was willing the impossible to become real with every fiber of his or her being. Magic wouldn’t wait. Technicians worked frantically, stripping gels, repositioning, rechecking light levels.

Kick appeared at my shoulder. She looked supple and alive. She nodded at the stuntman. “He’s in a flop sweat.”

She wasn’t sweating at all, I saw. And her breath smelled of strawberries. On my other side, Dornan shifted.

“Makeup,” Rusen said conversationally, and pointed his chin at Bernard. They rushed up and started powdering his face and neck.

Without the surrounding dark rings, Kick’s eyes seemed brighter and softer. Every individual cell seemed to be humming.

“Places,” Rusen said. “In thirty.”

And again, Bernard did nothing. Again, Branwell nailed it. Everyone was grinning. There were high-fives.

“Don’t get cocky now,” Kick murmured to herself, leaning forward so far I thought she might topple over. The black plastic fan on its black cord hung down like a plumb line. Her waist was tiny. My hands could span it easily. “Not yet. Not yet.”

“Just this one, then we’ll break for a half hour,” Rusen said. “Places.”

The whole room was focused on Bernard, but my focus was split between the actors and Kick, who was practically quivering.

“Going hot. In five, four, three, two. Now.”

And Bernard ran under the lights, tripped over his own feet, rolled with a crash into a stand of greenery, and got up again, looking dazed. No one yelled cut, no one made a sound, but Kick twitched. Bernard leapt over a chair and rolled again.

“And cut.”

No applause.

“Bernard, are you good to go again?” Rusen said.

He nodded.

This time he ran, leapt, rolled, and by Kick’s gush of relieved breath I understood it had gone well. Everyone was grinning. I was, too.

“Thirty minutes, people,” Rusen shouted. “Thirty minutes.”

“Excuse me,” Dornan said, and headed to the bathroom. The huge main doors rolled open, and the brilliance of the lights dimmed for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the different spectrum of the sun. A roar started near the ceiling. Someone had remembered the AC. People flowed out into the sunshine.

Kick and I turned to each other. We stood close enough for me to see the loose weave in the stripe that ran over her hipbone.

“I got your flowers,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You’re looking well.”

“You’ve lost weight.”

“It’s hard to eat when food tastes like something shoveled out of a crematorium. ”

Her face sharpened with professional interest. “Still?”

“Worse, if anything.”

“And I thought it was just people not wanting to get drugged again— not eating my food. Jesus. Okay.” She nodded to herself. “Okay. What tastes the worst?”

“Scrambled eggs.”

“Other eggs?”

“Any eggs. Especially boiled. And milk smells terrible. I’ve been drinking my tea without.”

“Butter?”

“Not good.”

“In what way?”

“Sulfur and smoke.”

“Fish?”

“Some are fine. Some aren’t.”

“But fruit is good.”

“Yes. Not all vegetables.”

She was nodding again. A wisp of hair slid gracefully from its clip. “Like broccoli.”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

She brushed aside the question, briskly, impersonally, like a doctor. This isn’t about me, it’s about you. “I have some ideas about what might taste good. Though, hmmm, is it the taste or the smell?” She was talking mostly to herself.

“Everything would taste better if I could find whoever did this and bang their head on the wall.”

She laughed. “That sounds like you mean it.”

I shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“I thought you owned things.”

“That, too.”

The stripes in her trousers flared and stretched from waist to hip, ran in muscled lines down her thighs. Someone brushed by me. I turned, glad of the distraction. Peg and Joel, carrying milkshakes, laughing for a change. Behind them was Bri, the bony-faced teenager, and his friend, with greasy paper sacks. His brother was dying, and he could still eat.

“Fast food,” Kick said, misinterpreting my look. “No one even drinks my coffee anymore.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“Because I’m stubborn. They won’t be willing to eat fast food forever. And the minute they change their mind, I’ll be ready.”

“All right. How about now?”

She looked me up and down, raised her eyebrows. I nodded. “Okay, then.” She took off the fan, dropped it on the counter, and busied herself with the urn. “It’ll take a minute to make fresh.”

“No cream.”

“No cream.”

People were flowing back in. Cool air eddied from the door and the ceiling. Once she had the coffee on, she got a can of soda from the fridge. Instead of popping it open, she ran it across her forehead and the inside of her wrists.

I laid my hand on hers. “Not the wrist.” Her hand was so small. “Lots of nerves in the wrist and the side of the neck. If you put something cold there for long enough, those nerves will send a message to the rest of the body saying, Hey, it’s cold out here, and all the peripheral blood vessels will close to preserve heat. Those blood vessels are what dissipate heat. So if they close, you won’t cool down. Here.” She let me take the can. I ran it slowly down the outside of her arms, smearing condensation over her smooth skin. I took her hands, one by one, rubbed the can over the backs then palms, tilted her chin, followed the curve and hollow of her face, slid the can to the back of her neck.

She looked up at me. “It was good, what you did with that rent-a-cop. Just leading him out without fuss. Maybe you just act nicer when you wear a dress.” I didn’t say anything. “You said last week that you wanted my help.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s trade. I talk to you, I get you as my food guinea pig.”

“All right.”

“Then come to my house for dinner. Supper. Nine o’clock. You know where it is.”

“Yes.” I brought the can back to her cheek. Moisture from the can trickled down her neck, as far as her collarbones, which rose and fell, rose and fell. I wondered if the water would still be cool or whether it would have warmed running down her skin. “If you really want to stay cool, you should wet your hair. The heat generated by your head will dry it, and the evaporation will cool you down.”

“What are you doing?”

We turned. Dornan. Holding a red-cardboard-bound script.

Kick stepped away and took the can from me in one smooth move. “She’s telling me to go soak my head, in the nicest possible way.” She put the soda back in the fridge, got herself a bottle of water.

“You should use the fan I got you.” Kick pretended not to hear him.

“Is that the script?” I said.

“What? Oh, yes. Here.” He held it out. “You should read it.”

The air conditioner fell silent.

I hefted the script in one hand. Nine o’clock. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said to him. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay awhile,” he said. “But thanks.”

OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL OVER SEVENTY DEGREES. INSIDE, THE BASEMENT AIR-CONDITIONING unit set in the wall rattled like a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in it. I turned it off. It would get hot. Tough.

I handed out the five polystyrene weapons and lined the women up opposite their unarmed partners.

“A lot of us are scared when we face an edged weapon—a big knife, a broken bottle, a razor. If and when that ever happens to you, the first thing you do is breathe, the way we learnt two weeks ago. Do it now.” They did. In. Out. “Now that you’re sure you won’t pass out, the next step is to demystify the weapon. Look at the weapon—Tonya’s bottle, Kim’s bread knife, Sandra’s razor, Suze’s ice pick, Jennifer’s KA-BAR—and ask yourself: Why is your attacker carrying a weapon in the first place? To boost their confidence? To instill fear in you, his victim? To hide behind it in some way? Then you ask yourself what the potential power of the weapon is. How sharp at the tip? Is it edged? How long is it? What kind of damage can it do? So, for example, an ice pick isn’t very long, and it’s not much use for slashing or bludgeoning, but it’s great for stabbing.”

Suze gave Kim a superior look.

“And Kim’s bread knife,” I said to her, “while it might not be very sharp, nor have a stabbing point, can be used, with sufficient force, to take your nose, or your head, right off.”

They nodded, but they had no notion of the sheets—the rivers, the lakes—of blood, or how much muscle it took to saw through flesh and then bone.

They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.

Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.

“Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how difficult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.

“What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.

“Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”

None of them looked as though she believed me.

“Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”

“Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”

“I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”

“I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.

“Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”

“Getting my oil changed.”

“And what did you want from Pauletta?”

“To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly. Weep. Very biblical. Very melodramatic. I’m special, her tone implied. My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course. But I was tired of her nonsense.

“All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”

“I don’t… Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”

“Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.

“Eeeuw!” Pauletta said, and stepped back.

“There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose…”

“Gross!”

“…drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fly, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never figured in them. Vomit is visceral: wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”

Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused. “Which part don’t you understand?”

“Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.

“Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”

“Yeah,” Pauletta said.

It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”

“I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”

“Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”

“That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”

They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the first second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”

“Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.

“Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“How?”

“You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”

“I don’t understand,” Therese said.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.

Suze snorted.

“Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”

They looked perfectly blank.

“Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big flat-ended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confidentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust your first instinct.”

“Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”

“Anyone disagree?”

None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.

“Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fight back because she was never going to make her defiance permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”

And I’d thought they’d looked blank before.

“You’ve probably all seen the way children imitate things to understand them. They’ll pretend to roll out a pie crust right along with you, they make noises and pretend to change gears as you drive. This happens in your brain, too. When we see someone pick up a bottle, a whole set of nerve fibers, called mirror neurons, pretend to be picking up the bottle, too. Whether you’re actually picking up the bottle or just watching someone do it, those neurons fire in the same pattern. Your body understands intimately how it feels. So when I shift grip, your brain shifts grip, too. And these mirror neurons are hooked into your limbic system, to the part of your brain that handles emotions. So your brain knows what it means when I’m turning the bottle like that. You know, deep down, in that intuitive part of you, what’s going on, in a way that your conscious mind probably doesn’t.”

Katherine looked thoroughly confused.

“You can look it up when you go home. For now, think of the mirror neurons as re-creating the experience of others inside ourselves. We feel others’ actions and sensations in our own cortex, in our own body, as though we ourselves are having those sensations, doing those things. In a very real way, we are doing those things. Think of your mirror neurons, your hunches, your intuition as a powerful adviser, an interpreter.”

“So,” Nina said slowly, “when you said the first week that no one is a mind-reader, you lied.”

Next time I taught this kind of class, I was going to do things differently. Completely differently.

“Well?”

Next time. I set that aside to consider later. “Think of the two concepts as complementary. The body knows, the body doesn’t lie. But our conscious mind doesn’t always want to believe what it knows. It’s not convenient. This is true for an attacker, too. They will tell themselves a story about how the attack will go. They’ll ignore what they know—they’ll ignore the mirror neurons telling them that you don’t want to talk to them, that you don’t want to be their friend—and believe what’s convenient. Because they don’t want to hear what you have to say they’ll pretend you’re not saying it, so it’s good to state your wishes and intentions clearly.”

“Loud and often,” Kim said with the half smile that meant she was thinking of her children.

“If you say something clearly and specifically to a potential attacker, two things will result: One, he won’t be able to pretend to himself that he doesn’t know you don’t want his attentions. Two, you yourself won’t be able to pretend that everything’s fine. Your conscious and subconscious mind will be aligned. That’s a very powerful feeling.”

“The power of the righteous,” Sandra said.

Silence.

“It could be described that way, yes: knowing you’re doing the right thing, even if others don’t understand. Sometimes self-defense or the defense of others requires actions that no one understands. Sometimes you have to do them anyway.”

Everyone pondered that.

“Now, let’s go back a little, to the importance of knowing what your attacker intends. Any ideas about why that’s important?”

They all shook their heads.

“It’s important to know what they intend so that you can judge whether the situation will get more or less dangerous, more or less opportune for you to act. For example, Suze, what do you want?”

She blinked.

“You’re threatening Christie with an ice pick. Why? What do you want?”

“Okay, yes. Her money.”

I looked at her polystyrene. She raised it menacingly. “All right. Christie, what did I say about ice picks?”

“Good for stabbing, not cutting or throwing or bludgeoning.”

I smiled. I hadn’t said anything about throwing; she’d come up with that one all on her own. “All of which means your attacker has to be very close indeed to do you any terrible damage. So what would you do?”

“Throw my purse on the ground and run.”

“Good. Why?”

“Because.”

“Think about it.”

“Just because.” I waited. “Because he’s mentioned money?” I nodded. “So throwing the purse would be a distraction?”

“Yes. Excellent. Because even if he wants more than money, you know money is on his mind because he’s mentioned it. If you judge it’s time to act immediately—and this sounds like a situation in which it might be—a distraction is often a good first step. Then you remove yourself from danger. Nine times out of ten that will mean what?”

“Run,” Katherine said.

“It depends,” Tonya said.

“Yes,” I said.

“But which?” Jennifer said. “It can’t be both.”

“It is both. Everything always depends. In the absence of other data, in this imaginary mugger scenario, leaving if you can is a good option. This is an example of a situation where it appears to be a good idea to act immediately, whether by running or engaging. Other examples of times to do that are when you think your attacker plans to put you in an even more dangerous situation, where your options will be narrowed. For example, if he traps you by your car and instead of saying, Give me your keys, he says, Get in the car and drive me.”

“What about, what about if…” Jennifer couldn’t bring herself to say it. She was very pale. The make-believe KA-BAR hung loosely in the hand at her side.

“What if he wants to rape or torture you?”

I think she nodded but her neck was so stiff with tension it was difficult to tell. I’d never had this problem with rookies. I thought for a moment.

“Jennifer, I want you to relax, if you can, and breathe. I’m going to ask you to imagine some bad things, but they’re not real.” I looked at the others.

“We’re all right here,” Nina said, and stood close enough for Jennifer to feel her body heat. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

Suze stepped up, too. “We’d kill the fucker.”

Jennifer smiled tremulously.

“So. Jennifer, you’re planning to rape Therese.” I raised my eyebrows at Therese: Are you all right with this? She nodded and, too late, I remembered that Therese was probably one of those who had answered yes on the have-you-been-assaulted exercise. There again she was confident and contained, she had trained with guns, she had what-iffed. With luck she wouldn’t have a meltdown. “You have a KA-BAR. It’s big, it’s frightening. You have it at Therese’s throat. You want to rape her. She knows that”— again I checked with Therese, who nodded minutely—“and she’s too frightened to do anything but what she’s told. What do you do now?”

“I don’t, I don’t…”

“Rape. What does it involve?”

“Sex.”

“How can you have sex if you’re both fully clothed?”

“Oh. Well. Okay.” She jabbed her polystyrene in Therese’s general direction. “Take your clothes off!”

Therese, also pale now, put her hands to the buttons of her polo shirt.

“See how we’re all staring at that, waiting to see if she’ll actually take off her shirt? Someone who is contemplating rape will be staring, too. His focus will be split now between the weapon he’s holding and the delicious-ness of getting a grown woman to be his puppet. This would be an excellent moment for Therese to act. But let’s say she understands that there will be an even better moment soon. So let’s imagine that she’s taken off all her clothes. Now what?”

“Now I guess I rape her.”

“So will you push her against the wall? Onto the ground? Let’s try the wall.” The class parted like the Red Sea and Therese walked to the wall.

Most stranger rapes are fast and brutal, an overwhelming battering force, with no time to think, only to act immediately. Violence, like love, always happens when you least expect it. But that was not an analogy I wanted to use in a self-defense class.

Therese stood, back against the wall.

Most rapists who preyed on a stranger literally couldn’t face their victim. But this wasn’t a real-life reenactment. This was a lesson.

“So, Jennifer, now what?”

Jennifer swallowed.

“To fuck her from there your dick would have to be about a yard long,” Pauletta said.

Jennifer looked involuntarily at her crotch and everyone grinned.

“Pauletta’s right. You’re going to have to get very close. Let’s… Therese, you step out. I’ll take over.” Therese, stiff-legged with tension, pushed herself away from the wall. “Jennifer, would you like someone else to take over for you?”

She shook her head.

“All right then,” I said to her. “You know I won’t let you hurt me. You know I won’t hurt you.”

She nodded.

“Where’s your knife?” She showed it to me uncertainly. She was going to need some direction. “Put it against my throat.” I turned to the rest of the class. “Now what would he do?”

“Whip out his whanger,” said Nina.

“Can you pretend to do that?” I said as gently as I could to Jennifer.

She looked down again at her crotch.

“At this point he’s distracted again. This would be a good time to take some action.”

“But what if he was strangling you, too?” Katherine said.

Pauletta hooted. “He can’t strangle her, hold a knife at her throat, and pull out his dick at same time. He’s a rapist, not a three-armed superschlong. ”

I could have kissed Pauletta but settled for smiling with everyone else. “That’s absolutely right. So this is an ideal moment to do something. What?” Blank. “Let’s try it. Everyone without a weapon, against the wall. Everyone with a weapon, put it against your partner’s cheek. Closer, Suze, you’re not even touching her face with that ice pick. So, now, those against the wall. He’s fumbling with his zipper—everyone, put your hands on your fly.” No one moved. Southern women. I sighed. “Okay, just hook your thumb into your waistband and let the hand dangle in roughly the right place. Good. Now, remember, a weapon has no power in and of itself. If you knock away the arm holding the weapon, you’ve knocked away the weapon. Give that a try.”

No one moved. “How would you do it?” Katherine said.

I gestured her away from the wall and took her place under Tonya’s bottle. “It’s always best to knock the weapon away from your body, not towards it or across it. So here I would knock her right arm away from me to my left, her right. If she had the bottle on my other cheek,” I tapped Tonya’s wrist and pointed; she shifted the bottle obligingly, “I’d want to knock it away and to my right, her left. Think about that for a minute.” I could see them mentally thinking right, then no, left, no, right. “A forearm block is best. If the bottle is here, on my right cheek, I would use a left forearm block.” I demonstrated in ultra slow motion as I talked. “See how that means I twist to my right, and that moves my right cheek back out of reach of the bottle and at the same time presents less of my body towards my attacker as a target.”

Lots of frowns. Clearly too much information at once.

“Just remember to knock away from your body.” I demonstrated again, very slowly. “Try it.” I gestured Katherine back into place and walked up and down the line of pairs. “Slowly, very slowly. Imagine it’s a game of slow motion. Pivot, bump your forearm into theirs. Yes, good.” It wasn’t, but it would get better. “No, Pauletta, see how that drags the razor right across your face if you knock it across your body and Sandra’s? You want to spin the other way, knock with your left arm, to your right.”

“But I’m right-handed.”

“All right. Sandra, for now, hold the razor against her other cheek.”

Sandra gave me an amused we-know-it-wouldn’t-be-this-convenient look, and swapped hands. She was beginning to annoy me.

“Now,” I said to Pauletta, “try again. Pivot, yes, cross slam, yes. Excellent. But try to use the outside of your forearm, like this.”

“Why?” said Pauletta, as though it were just another detail I was using deliberately to confuse her. Sandra maintained her veiled-secret expression; she already knew.

“Because there are fewer important nerves, blood vessels, and tendons to be damaged on the outside. Also, it will hurt less when you take the impact on muscles when you’re hitting as hard as you can. Also,” I said, raising my voice to the whole class, “when you move, yell. Not only will it remind you to breathe, it will be a further distraction to your attacker. You can never have too many distractions or too much noise.” I plowed ahead before they could get twisted up about that. “We’ll do it together. On the count of three. Okay. Knives on cheeks. One. Deep breath. Focus. Three. Yell! And pivot. Slam. Excellent. And again. Knives. Breathe. Yell and pivot. And again.”

“Ow!” said Jennifer.

“Slow motion, Therese, but very good.” Pauletta had hit Sandra twice as hard, but Sandra hadn’t made a murmur. “And again.”

“Ow,” Katherine said, too, as Tonya’s bottle ran across her throat for the second time.

“Try again,” I said.

She did. Same result. “I can’t do this,” Katherine said.

“Sure you can,” said Tonya.

“I can’t.”

“Not yet,” I said. “That’s why you have to practice.”

“If Tonya was a great big guy and that was a real bottle, do you think I’d really have a chance?”

“Yes.”

“It’s ridiculous. I can’t do this.”

“All right,” I said.

“All right? All right?!”

“I’m not going to force you.”

“I just, I want… I want you to teach us how to not get hurt.”

“Infallibly? I can’t. No one can. There is no perfect security. Yes, most men are taller and stronger than most women. That’s not the point. You can be seven feet tall, and in fighting trim, and there will always be someone out there who is bigger and stronger and faster. The point is to do the best you can, then stop worrying.”

“Stop worrying? I dream about this stuff every night now. I worry that someone is lurking under my car, that they’re assembling clues from my e-mail conversations, that they’ll watch my every movement and rape me on the subway platform.”

“The fact that you’re worrying about these things now makes it less likely for them to happen. You’ll never be carjacked by someone lying underneath your car because now you look.”

“Maybe you’ll die of worry,” Suze muttered.

“I heard that.”

“Hey, then at least you’re not deaf, just stupid.”

“All right,” I said. “Everyone, swap roles. Five minutes. Then we’re going to sit.”

When they were done, I carried around the bin so they could ceremonially throw away their polystyrene weapons.

“You did well. Yes, even you, Katherine. You’ve all learnt a lot in the last six weeks. You’re not perfect killing machines, no, but there again, that was never the goal.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” said Suze. Surprisingly, Therese nodded agreement.

“My goal is to make sure you’ve thought and planned and practiced so that you can relax in everyday life. Here’s something that might help.” I handed out the list I’d compiled after last week. “Read it carefully and we’ll talk about it next week.”

“Hell,” said Nina, flipping the page, “now we’re all going to die of worry.”

“Next week?” said Jennifer. “Next week’s a holiday. I’m going out of town.”

“Then the week after is fine.”

“We should get together anyhow,” Katherine said. “Have a picnic or something. Leave the guys at home.”

“A field trip,” Nina said.

“I’ll be out of town,” Jennifer said again.

“I’m gonna be here,” Suze said.

“And me,” “Me too,” “I’m not going anywhere.”

They were all looking at me.

“How about my place on Lake Lanier,” Therese said. “A social event, not a class, so it doesn’t matter if some people can’t make it. A covered dish.”