by Peter Besson
“You serious?”
“Very.” He turned and waved his hand in the air. Go!
All of a sudden, music started blasting from the rink speakers. One of those stadium rock songs from over thirty years ago that still was a guilty pleasure at parties, as long as it was played ironically.
Ansel shrugged apologetically. Not his choice. It didn’t matter. A smile spread across Nikki’s face like wildfire, threatening to tear her face in half. She snatched the skates from Ansel’s hands with a squeal of delight.
She was seven again. She was twenty-one, but fourteen years had evaporated. The world was simple once more. Only the ice before her, a blank canvas she would paint with cross-overs, pattern jumps, and spirals.
She gathered speed, whizzing across the rink, faster and faster, her heart thumping from bliss as much as from exertion. Then she stretched out her arms, her feet in line, and let herself glide, eyes closed, drawing a circle around the rink, blind, fully aware of where she was, reclaiming what was hers.
Ansel gaped in wonder at her transformation. The grace of her movement spoke of years far beyond her age. That girl with the perpetual rain cloud hanging over her head had gone, replaced by a swan-like creature at play. Even the red-faced man stood to the side, following Nikki.
She opened her eyes again. She was back. Twenty-one again. There was Ansel, watching her. On the other side, the red-faced man. She waved to him. He allowed himself a smile, then killed it promptly. Nikki zoomed by, got in position, then tentatively jumped—
And nailed it. She landed firmly on one leg, sweeping the other out behind her. Pretty. She searched for Ansel. He applauded. She held up a finger.
Just you wait.
She gathered speed, her hair flying, trailing her like a banner towed by an airplane, her legs pumping furiously. She zipped by Ansel in a streak. She hesitated for a brief moment, unsure, afraid. She’d spent the last four years putting a wrecking ball to everything that had come before: a haze of alcohol, drugs, and sex she thought had buried it all. But her body sang its song, and it was a familiar tune vibrating through all of her, so she gave in to it. She hacked the tip of her skate into the ice and jumped high, spinning in the air one, two, three times, and landed solidly on her leg in a spray of snow, spreading her arms in relief and exaltation.
Voila.
Ansel grinned broadly, shaking his head in amazement.
She skated by, arms wide, head high, recovering a dream from childhood. With every fiber of her being she was on the ice, performing, re-inhabiting the body of that seven-year-old who wanted to do nothing but dissolve into music and movement and beauty.
Ansel marveled at the speed, the elegance, at this body in pure graceful motion, circling, pirouetting, leaping in defiance of gravity, drawing a fluid picture of visual poetry. After all the death and misery and squalor of the city, the morose years at Hotel Terminus and the endless parade of bodies, this was a moment of transcendence, like a butterfly tumbling across a battlefield strewn with corpses.
The music ended, echoing out into the darkness of the large hall. Nikki’s movement came to a gentle halt as she folded into herself, winding down, and slid to a stop.
Loud clapping echoed from both ends of the rink. On one end, the red-faced man quickly wiped at his eyes and applauded louder.
“Bravo.” Ansel was still clapping.
Nikki unfolded, her eyes clearing. She was back, here, now, standing on the middle of the ice, awakened from dreams past. She flashed a shy smile, took a bow, then skated rapidly toward Ansel. He opened the door in the barrier for her, but instead of slowing down, she accelerated, raced straight for him and—swoosh! In a great spray of snow, she braked to a stop right before him. Breathless, she took his ice-wet face in her hands and pulled him into a deep, probing kiss, holding, tasting, and before Ansel had a chance to grab hold of her, she pushed him away, shot him a withering look, and stomped past him.
Ansel was speechless. He felt like he’d been air-dropped into a ceremony taking place somewhere in China, or on an alien planet, and he didn’t speak Chinese, or alien-ese, nor had he any idea what the ceremony was about, but he was sure he had somehow messed it up, and his next step, without fail, would be terrible.
Nikki clawed at the laces of her skates, wrestling them off as fast as she could. “I don’t care,” she said. Not loud enough for anyone to hear. “I don’t care.” Barely a whisper.
She threw the skates down and jammed her feet into her shoes. As she did, she happened to glance at her wristband.
Fourteen minutes. Counting down.
“I don’t care. I DON’T CARE. I DON’T CARE GODDAMMIT!”
She grabbed Ansel’s hand and yanked him toward the exit. Ansel, more confused than ever, stumbled along behind her. They burst through the door and right through a throng of well-to-do, smartly dressed people, all pretty much soused. The corporate group. Nikki and Ansel barreled through them, pushing them out of the way to cries of “Hey!” and “What the…?” and “Watch it!”
Didn’t matter. Time was running out.
***
It was amazing how little Ansel had in the tank after running for only one city block. The perpetual cigarette in his mouth had done nothing to improve his athletic ability. Not exercising for over a decade hadn’t helped either. Come to think of it, the most physical exercise he’d gotten in the last ten years had been swinging from the chandelier and sleeping with Nikki, and both had almost killed him. Now he was sprinting at full tilt, every bone cracking, every tendon threatening to snap, and his lungs didn’t want to talk to him anymore about the way they were being treated.
Nikki fared better. Not by much, since she’d done everything she could to brutalize her body with any drugs or chemicals she’d been able to get her hands on, but being younger, she had reserves Ansel couldn’t call upon. She pulled Ansel along the crowded sidewalk, afraid to let go of his sweaty hand lest he be lost in the crush of the masses. She bumped into people, pushing aside much bigger men with sheer ferocity. She yanked Ansel through moving traffic, startling up horn blasts like a flock of birds. She yelled at everybody and the world to get the hell out of their way. Still, as they rounded a corner, she noticed Ansel’s hand slip. She tried to grip again, but it was gone. Panicked, she turned around, expecting to find his leg sticking out from under a delivery van, but he simply stood there, staring into the distance.
“What? What is it?”
Ansel, with infuriating slowness, brought up his arm and checked his wristband. Then he lowered it again. “We’re not going to make it.” He pointed down the road. Way up ahead, a straight shot down the wide street, was the Hotel Terminus. “We’re too far away.”
“No!” Nikki looked around, frantic. “No, we’re not. We’re not giving up now—there!” She gestured to a gas station one block up. Before Ansel even had a chance to see what she was indicating, he was jerked along with the force of panic.
The old man hadn’t driven his car for a while. As expensive as it was, he’d held off buying gas for a while, but the prices showed no sign of coming down—not in the next twenty years at least, and living another two decades was even beyond his wildest dreams— so he’d decided to fill ’er up one more time. Take the old lady for a leisurely drive around the city—a city he didn’t recognize anymore, not one bit. Where had all those buildings come from? And all those people? And frankly, not one white face among them. This wasn’t his world any longer. He was glad he’d decided to put some gas in the tank, in case he had to make a fast getaway when the inevitable race riots broke out. As he got out of the car at the gas station, his hand closed tight around the few dollar bills he had managed scrounge up from around the house—one could never be too careful; the youth of today had to be the most vile and corrupted of any age—he felt someone snatch at his jacket collar. A young, pretty girl—he was old, but he still had eyes—yanked him aside as if he were a disobedient dog on a leash and jumped into his car. S
he didn’t have to tug very hard, unstable as he was on his feet. He careened to the side like a drunk in a windstorm, hand still clutching his money, and watched her slide behind the wheel.
“Get in!” the girl yelled as she kicked the passenger door open. There was a man standing by the car, older than the pretty thing. He seemed conflicted, and his eyes sought the old man’s. “Come on!” The girl again. With an apologetic shrug, the man dived into the passenger seat, and the young girl—and my, yes, she was pretty, his wandering eyes confirmed—she cranked the starter and punched the accelerator, and with tires smoking and doors banging, his car peeled out of the gas station and shot into the traffic flowing down the street, trailing the sound of car horns and squealing rubber.
The old man was too stupefied to feel much anger. At least those two had been white, he thought. It would have irked him much more if a couple of brown people had stolen his car.
“Jesus, Nikki.”
She turned the steering wheel frantically, weaving between the cars crawling along the street in front of them, missing each by a fraction of an inch. One hit, and they’d spin out. “You’d rather check out?”
“Right now it’s a toss-up.” Ansel looked pale.
“Shut up.” She punched the car horn. Somehow, she managed to tear around the other vehicles. Ansel was thrown from left to right and back again, as if he were on a roller-coaster that had gone off its rails.
“You better close your eyes,” she said.
“What—” Then he saw: The traffic light three cars ahead turned to red. There was no way they’d make it.
Nikki didn’t seem to agree with that assessment. She slammed her hand on the horn and left it there. Her foot punched the gas pedal all the way down and didn’t let up. Honking, smoking, the old car lurched forward.
“Oh dear god.” Ansel closed his eyes and kept them closed as they belted across the intersection, horn blaring, somehow, miraculously, missing every single car rushing through the crossway ahead of them. He didn’t see Nikki’s face, the exhilaration, the euphoria, her wide-eyed amazement at the feat. He only heard the car honking and Nikki yelling.
“Whoohooo!” Exhilaration and euphoria didn’t last long. The next intersection was right ahead. Lights red. “Crap.”
“Which one is it?” Ansel opened his eyes again. “Oh fuck.”
They shot through the next crossway. Startled horns and screeching tires. They almost made it, but in the last lane they had to cross, an SUV the size of a cruise ship barreled toward them.
Collision course.
Nikki stomped on the brake and ripped the steering wheel around. The car lurched, then the back end spun around to say hello. The large SUV, honking more angrily than everyone else, zoomed by, swerving madly. Nikki steered into the spin and punched the accelerator, trying to prevent the trunk from overtaking them. The tires caught again with a startled wail. The car bucked and whipped around the other way, beginning an uncontrolled crazy whirl, once, twice around, tires smoking. Ansel changed his mind. He wasn’t on a roller-coaster; he was trapped with Nikki inside a large washing machine on a high-speed spin cycle, the world sloshing by outside.
“Whoohooooooo!” Nikki threw her arms up. Ansel tried to hold on to his breakfast.
The car screeched to a stop. Behind them, all the other cars, seeking to avoid the maelstrom of metal and smoking rubber, slammed to a halt at crazy angles, clogging up the street for several blocks, as if a horde of drunk valets had dropped the keys and walked away.
Nikki jumped out of the car. Ansel crawled out the other side.
“Let’s go, old man.” She held out her hand, smiling. Ansel took it.
They took off.
A chorus of angry yells and furious honking followed them. People climbed out of their cars, gesturing passionately, shaking fists, pulling hair. It was a hopeless gridlock.
Nikki, grinning, pulled Ansel behind her. Faster and faster. Her feet were a blur. Her body sang. She was all legs and arms and lungs and pumping heart and air.
Ansel huffed. The air was viscous, impossible to force into his body. His head threatened to explode. His lungs were on fire. And still she pulled at him. Making him run faster than he had any business doing. His legs, lead weights, pounded the ground, each step threatening to be his last. If he stumbled, he would never get back up.
Hotel Terminus. Not twenty yards from them. Nikki glanced at her wristband. Thirty seconds. All the time in the world. They could make it. Even Ansel started to believe. He smiled. They were saved. Only a few more steps and—
He tripped.
Let go of Nikki’s hand.
The bond broke.
He reached, fell, but—
Nikki was gone. She zipped through the open entry door of the hotel.
He crashed to the ground. Mere feet from the saving line between inside and out. Between living another day or checking out.
He wouldn’t make it. He wasn’t going to be saved.
Prickling with euphoria, Nikki whirled around, ready to throw herself into Ansel’s arms. But there was no Ansel. No arms to throw herself into. Ansel was sprawled on the ground right outside the door, a couple of feet shy, his timer seconds from zero.
“What are you doing? COME ON!”
Ansel scrambled to his knees, speed-crawled on all fours like a toddler on steroids, and threw his arm forward, reaching, stretching it past the door jamb of the entry. His wristband cleared the invisible line separating the inside of the hotel from the outside, just as the timer ticked to zero.
Safe.
“Welcome back, Mr. Grayson.” Behind the concierge desk, Huntley scarcely raised an eyebrow. If anything could ruffle Huntley, it wasn’t a last-second decision about life and death—he’d seen too many of those—though he had to admit, Ansel was a resident he’d grown fond of over the years he’d been here, and Huntley would have hated to see him check out on a mere technicality.
Nikki helped Ansel to his feet. He looked spent. Dodging death appeared to have taxed his reserves. She held Ansel at arm’s length and took careful inventory of him, as if assessing a critical purchase she couldn’t afford to be wrong about. She took it all in, the way he looked, felt, the way he was; the fact that he was still alive and would be for a short time longer, the tender, grateful smile on his lips. She brushed his cheek gently and then, without a word, turned on her heel and stormed off.
Ansel blinked, confused. He glanced over at Huntley. No use. Huntley couldn’t have been less expressive if he’d stepped in from a whole-face Botox party. Compared to him, the Sphinx was a ham.
***
Someone had stuck her heart into a blender, selected ‘pulverize’ and switched it on. That wasn’t a storm of emotions inside of her, it was a fucking hurricane. A post climate-change supercell hurricane, threatening to obliterate everything. Where had this come from? Had these feelings been buried and forgotten under the rubble of life, and only the last two days had swept the accumulated debris clear? Was there something to this Ansel guy she’d never experienced before? Or was it nothing more than the closeness of death, the constant threat of obliteration that had shaken something loose deep within her? Nikki didn’t have any of the answers, but nevertheless the questions kept coming, a barrage of doubt and uncertainty she had no hope of withstanding.
She needed clarity. Something concrete.
To make all this stop.
Ansel inched the door to Nikki’s room open. He cautiously stepped inside. “Hello?”
She had her back to him and didn’t turn around.
“Nikki, I—” He stopped when he saw the gun in her hand, dangling by her side as if she’d picked it up on a whim and then forgotten she was holding it.
“I was fine. I was,” she said.
Still, she didn’t move. She was in deep thought, as if what needed to happened next was a problem to be worked out by reasoning, like solving a mathematical equation by following simple, logical ste
ps. “I was ready to go. But now…”
She’d surprised herself, down in the entry hall to the Hotel Terminus. When she’d charged through the open door, she had been immensely relieved, but as soon as that buoyancy took hold of her, she caught herself, stunned. It was as if she’d woken up from a drug-fueled dream. She’d come to the hotel to put a sharp end to everything, but now, no more than a few minutes ago, she’d thought of nothing else but racing back before time ran out, so she wouldn’t have to do what she’d thought about doing day in, day out for this past year. The only thing that had kept her from throwing herself in front of a train had been her promise to her father.
Wait. Just wait, Nikki, he’d said. It’ll all sort itself out, believe me.
Nothing had sorted itself out. Things had only gotten worse. She couldn’t stand to spend another minute in the dark corners of her mind where nothing but self-loathing, helplessness, and despair bloomed like toxic mold. So she had waited, and waited, counting down the days, hours, minutes, and now that she was here at last, she’d had her brushes with death, and she had to admit to herself that after every one, she’d been… glad. Yes. Glad. Glad to still be here. The exact opposite of relief at the black embrace of death.
“All I could think of was getting back here in time,” she said. “So this doesn’t end.”
Whatever ‘this’ was. No, she didn’t want it to end. Not now. But if not now, when? There it was, this familiar voice of never-failing despondency, a constant companion in her life, which she’d always associated with plain common sense. Who was she to think anything good should happen to her? All she had to do was take a long look in the mirror and realize she’d never be deserving enough. She’d never do enough—be enough, have enough—look—feel—never… all the words she’d told herself about herself.
Those words were her truth.
“But who are we kidding? Who am I kidding?” She turned around to face Ansel. “Look at us.” She shrugged her shoulders, carelessly pointing the gun this way and that. “Look at where we are. What’s the point?”