Always

by Nicola Griffith

  “It’s for my mother.” Whom I had no idea how to describe in two sentences or less. “And there is no budget.”

  She nodded, as though that were usual, and suggested that she might know just the thing, if I would follow her?

  Just the thing turned out to be a beautiful, fat-bellied incised black-on-black San Ildefonso bowl by Maria Martinez. Early twentieth century. It was valuable, and breakable, but she took it out of the glass case and handed it to me without apparent hesitation. It was heavy and cold and very smooth. I wrapped both hands around it, and hefted it.

  It was simple, almost plain, but fascinating in the way all good art is. Casual elegance. And, as she might say, black goes with everything.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  Carefully boxed bowl under one arm, I floated down the escalator and got off at the ground floor. I walked through the jewelry department and amused myself by trying to spot security.

  In Seattle, very few people wore gold or pearls, and there were no padded shoulders or wingtips. Bizarre behavior was not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Security personnel probably had recurring nightmares about apprehending a suspected shoplifter with an awful haircut, cheap glasses, and dorky lunch-stained clothes only to find out he was a software billionaire.

  In the end, she was easy to spot: neither young, like the two teenage girls giggling and trying on costume jewelry near the Sixth and Pine entrance, nor rushed, like the thirtysomething women selecting hose on their lunch hour. She was wearing a tasteful hunter green jacket and a red slash of lipstick, and despite the early lunch hour rush, managed never to stand next to a customer or meet anyone’s eye.

  My attention was caught by a four-strand pearl choker lying fat and snug around a dark blue velvet form. Julia had loved that particular shade of blue. Before I could stop myself, I imagined the pearls around Julia’s neck, imagined fastening it there, the way the strands would move as she breathed. I rested my hand on the counter, thought I saw her face reflected next to mine in the glass, only it was a curiously two-dimensional image, and colorless. A dream, a memory.

  “Ma’am? Can I help you?” A middle-aged man, smelling of cologne.

  I shook my head, then changed my mind. “Do you have something similar in black pearls?”

  He thought he did. He produced a key with a flourish and moved to the display case on the opposite side, but as he started to open it, I heard Kick saying, Where the hell would I ever go to wear pearls? “No,” I said. “Don’t bother. Another time.”

  It was a pity. The bluish-grey of black pearls would heighten the mysterious soft blue-grey of Kick’s eyes. And her finely muscled neck would—

  The floor rippled. With a grinding crack, the mirrored pillar by my head splintered. That, I thought, is not normal. Glass rained down in slow motion, glittering like fairy dust, or the ray of sunlight piercing a forest dell in some fantasy painting.

  I put my box on the counter. Everything tilted sideways and people began flying about, like the snowflakes in a shaken snow globe. Well, I thought, I hope the bowl is well packed. Somewhere in the distance, a roar grew. Herds of bison? A train? And then I got it.

  “Earthquake!” I bellowed. “Everyone out on the street.” I grabbed the man behind the counter under his tailored armpits and lifted him bodily over the counter and away from the glass.

  And then everything was silent and still, and a woman in a green jacket was standing too close, and there was no glass on the floor, no crack in the column.

  I turned and surveyed the store. Everyone was staring at me. In the shoe department a man with one shoe on and one shoe off had grabbed his toddler and pushed her behind him protectively.

  “Ma’am,” the green-jacketed woman said.

  My boxed bowl stood exactly where I’d put it. The jewelry clerk was white-faced and swallowing over and over. His tie was askew.

  “Ma’am,” Green Jacket said again. “Are you ill?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. It was quiet enough to hear the teenagers in the lingerie department giggle. They were giggling at me.

  “Perhaps you would like to come with me, someplace quiet, and sit for a moment.”

  She put her hand on my arm. I considered it. The skin between her wrist and knuckles crinkled, just beginning to get crepey. Late forties, then. Not old enough for there to be much danger of her bones being brittle from osteoporosis. A swift wrist lock wouldn’t hurt her. There again, she was only doing her job. I remembered the sound of breaking bone just three weeks ago, and I hesitated. “A glass of water would be nice,” I said.

  “Very good. I’ll have someone bring your purchase.”

  After two or three steps, she let go of my arm, but she kept very close. In the elevator, we stared at each other in the reflective chrome.

  The office was quiet. Some people spoke. I spoke back. Everyone was very calm. “Medication,” I said. “A momentary confusion.” Which, in its way, was true. I apologized for any distress I might have caused. Someone brought me a paper cup of icy water. They assured me they were only concerned for my well-being. I thanked them. They insisted on calling me a taxi and then escorting me to it. The car would be perfectly safe in the parking garage, they said.

  I got into the taxi, gave the driver directions. Outside the Fairmont I found I didn’t want to be inside, several stories up. It might not have been a real earthquake but I still felt safer closer to the ground. I told him to wait, took the box to Bernard and asked him to send it up to my room.

  I got back in the cab.

  “Take me to a park.”

  “Looks like it might rain.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re the boss.” He pulled into traffic. “Volunteer Park. That’s the place. There’s a conservatory, too, in case of that rain. And there’s a museum. Asian Art Museum.”

  “Fine,” I said, wondering why that sounded so familiar.

  I leaned back, took out my phone. Dialed.

  Eric answered on the first ring. “Are hallucinogenic flashbacks to be expected? ” I asked him.

  “They are certainly within the realm of possibility.”

  “How can I avoid them?”

  “Flashbacks are often triggered by stress. Physiological or emotional: extreme temperature, for example, or worry. Even low blood sugar. Lack of sleep, or grief. Excessive stimulus. Extraordinary physical effort. Take your pick, really. Have you had an episode?”

  I ignored that. “So I could have one of these anytime?”

  “No. We don’t really understand how it works, but they’re rare. My guess is that you’re unlikely to have another. Of course, I would have said it was unlikely you’d have one in the first place.” Pause. “I don’t feel as though I’m being very reassuring.”

  “No. Is there any treatment?”

  "Lead a perfectly regulated, boring existence.” Silence. “Aud, what happened? ”

  “I thought there was an earthquake. In Nordstrom.”

  “Ah.” Silence. “I’m sorry. Is there anything you need?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  Another silence. Then, “You understand that, although I don’t have a license to practice, I still regard our discussion as carrying the weight of doctor-patient privilege.”

  “Thank you. But I don’t mind if you tell my mother. Unless you think she’d worry.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  OUTSIDE THE museum a banner announced the new exhibit of Chinese furniture. Petra and Mike, I remembered. I wondered if they’d gone.

  WE LOOKED at the Ming high-yoke-back chair and the docent shook his head again. “The owner paid almost a quarter million dollars for that one chair alone, and that was eighteen years ago. Rare as all get-out. I don’t know of any others in this neck of the woods. Not of huanghuali. Elm, or some other soft wood, maybe.”

  But no softwood could ever look like this, even one lavished with care and the patina of fifteen generations of reverent handling. Its dense golden w
ood was simple but sensuous, with an S-shaped splat and indented yoke-back, and delicate curved arms that flowed like wooden streams. Simple, organic, precise. The joinery was seamless, yet the mortise-and-tenon construction meant it could be dismantled and reassembled without using pins or glue. It was solid and stable and undeniably real. It had the visual balance and functional elegance of a Japanese sword. I wanted it.

  “It looks strong.”

  “Yes,” he said. “As sound today as when it was made.”

  I nodded, and squatted, and wanted to run my fingertips along the yoke-back. It would be silky, and cool to the touch. I imagined stroking the inside curve of the left arm. Not an ounce of wood wasted. The rear legs were longer and thinner than Kick’s spine, and arched as gracefully as she did when I touched her.

  It had been made before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, before Newton watched apples thump to the ground outside his childhood home. Its crafters had not had the benefits of modern steel blades or precision measuring tools, yet I would pick this chair above a warehouse full of Wiram furniture without thinking. This chair wasn’t about thinking. It wasn’t even about doing. It was about being, absolutely itself.

  The bowl and the chair were simple and beautiful, form and function wholly aligned. They could be nothing other than themselves. Who was I? What was my function? Who was I if I couldn’t trust my own senses? The body knows, I’d told my self-defense class. But sometimes the body was wrong. I began to understand the awful, confused world my students must live in.

  I walked through the park for an hour. There were very few people about; the wind was gusting, and every now and again rain rattled the foliage overhead. I felt some of that almost-ecstatic delight in the ordinary that the drugged coffee had induced: rain sparkled on the bole of an apple tree and I paused to look, and noted the screw-type distribution of leaves around its stem, which ensured each leaf got as much sunlight as possible. I picked a rain-flecked daisy. It had thirteen petals. She loves me. I picked another: thirty-four. She loves me not. Another. Twenty-one. She loves me. All numbers in the Fibonacci series. Nature didn’t need to measure. Even its improvisations were orderly and graceful.

  I was wet. It was a little after three o’clock. I called another cab and headed back to the Nordstrom parking lot.

  KICK’S VAN wasn’t in the lot, but the big rolling doors were open, and I saw Dornan just inside the entrance, wearing a bright yellow construction hat, handing up a pipe to a rigger on the growing scaffold.

  I was surprised by how glad I was to see him.

  “Dornan!”

  He handed up his piece of pipe and pulled off his gloves. “Well, hello to you, too, Torvingen.” He looked quite unlike himself in his yellow hat. “Things here are progressing, as you see. Kick’s not around, as I expect you know, but doubtless you’re here to see Floozy and the Winkle.”

  Floozy and the Winkle. I wondered if everyone called them that except me. I wondered if everyone knew they had asked me to invest. I would have to read that script at some point.

  “I have a few minutes,” I said. I wished he would take that hat off. “How about you? Due for a break? I’ve just seen a chair.”

  “Chairs again, is it?”

  “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee if you take that hat off.”

  He did, and we went in search of a café. In the end, we settled for Americanos to go from an espresso stand a mile from the warehouse, and talked and sipped as we walked. The air was cool and rainy, the coffee hot and tasty. He talked about building the scaffolding, how bloody awkward steel piping was when you were wearing huge, great gloves, and how he’d wrenched his wrist once already and dropped a steel connector on his left foot.

  I saw an earthquake, I wanted to say, but it already felt as though it had never happened. Which of course it hadn’t.

  “That’s a most peculiar expression.”

  “Um,” I said, and found I couldn’t talk about it. Maybe I’d be able to talk to Kick, but I didn’t know where she was. “So, how’s everybody?”

  “Everybody is just fine.”

  “I suppose there’s not much call for Kick to be on set at the moment if no one is eating her food.”

  “You know, Torvingen, when I first met you, I never knew what you were thinking, but there have been times lately when I can practically see the thoughts form on your face. It doesn’t seem natural and I’m not entirely sure I like it. I am sure, however, that I find your unwillingness to simply ask the question wholly tedious.”

  We waited for a light.

  “If you have a question, or something on your mind, say it. Just open your mouth and let the words roll out. It’s not so very hard.”

  Where is Kick? How come you always know where she is and I don’t? Why isn’t she here so I can hold her and bury my face in her hair and know it’s real? I tried to imagine the words rolling out as bright and sturdy as toy trucks, immune to all misunderstanding.

  The lights changed and we started to cross.

  “It is hard,” I said.

  “Do it anyway.”

  I put one foot in front of the other. Trucks roared by, rain hissed. It would be easier to talk to someone I could hold.

  “Usually, if people want you to know where they are, they tell you,” I said.

  After a moment he said, “Is that a question?”

  “Yes. I don’t . . . I want to talk to Kick and I don’t know where she is. She didn’t tell me. I just, I wonder why she didn’t volunteer the information.”

  “She’s not a mind-reader, Torvingen. Besides, sometimes people like to be asked. It shows you’re interested.”

  “Not that you’re being nosy?”

  “She’s a grown woman. If she wants you to back off, she can say so.” He shook his head. “Christ, you’re as bad as each other.”

  “So . . . I should just ask?”

  “Yes! Yes. A thousand times, yes. Look.” He stopped and turned to face me, but a truck thundered past close to the curb and threw up a curtain of muddy puddle water, drowning whatever he had been about to say. He sighed and wiped the lid of his go-cup with his T-shirt, and changed his mind about saying whatever it was. “This is a sorry excuse for a summer.” We walked for a while in silence under a scudding sky. “Now,” he said, “what’s this about a chair?”

  I told him about the chair, and the trees, and by the time we got to the warehouse, I still hadn’t told him about Nordstrom, or teaching my mother to punch, about Corning or Ed Tom Hardy, about my plan to buy more land, about much of anything, because all of a sudden I had no faith in my ability to integrate any of it, to plan and execute. I couldn’t be sure I was making the right decisions. I couldn’t even trust what I saw.

  When we were halfway across the parking lot, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and waved me on before answering. Jonie, I told myself, some problem with the coffeehouses, as a maroon Subaru Forester pulled into the parking lot and Deverell Turtledove and a woman who looked a bit like Green Jacket got out: his wife, Philippa. Dornan had turned his back to me, so I said hello to the Turtledoves and led them to Finkel and Rusen’s trailer.

  When I stepped back down into the parking lot two hours later holding legal paperwork, I found the sky bright blue, the air washed clean and now fat with warmth. Several cars were gone from the lot. Dornan was gone, too. I lifted my face to the sun. I considered calling him, but decided against it. Perhaps I would go to the dojo. Perhaps I should call Kick’s house.

  My phone rang, but it was Gary, with an appointment for tomorrow morning at a downtown bank. I thanked him and folded the phone. Walked to my car, threw the paperwork on the backseat. My phone rang again as I got in the car, and this time it was Kick.

  “Want to come over?” she said. “I’ll grill us something. We can watch the sun set over Troy.”

  SHE SAT cross-legged on the back patio next to a tiny Hibachi grill, tending tuna, and vegetables in foil, and sipping a bottle of Stella Artois.

  I lay with my
head on her lap. She had showered just before I arrived, and in the early-evening sun her damp hair smelled sharply of fennel shampoo. Her bare legs were warm, and her tank top had been sheared off just below the breasts. If I looked straight up, I could see the shadowed swell. Her stomach touched my hair every time she breathed.

  When I had arrived, she had smiled, and kissed me, and busied herself with starting the coals and preparing the food, but although she chopped and marinated and tasted with every appearance of engagement, it was clear that most of her attention was focused on some interior plane.

  I didn’t mind. We could talk later. For now it was enough to feel her skin on mine, to sit inside her smell. I enjoyed the scrape of aluminum foil as she turned the vegetables, the warmth of the sun on my face. Every now and again, the early-evening breeze shook a few of the afternoon’s raindrops from the ancient cherry tree and they hissed on the coals.

  Two cats appeared, one black, the other a tawny puffball, and sat silently by the fence.

  “Meet El Jefe Don Gato and Der Floofenmeister,” she said, the first time she’d spoken in ten minutes.

  The cats turned their gaze, laserlike, in my direction, then returned their focus to the sizzling fish. The black one was wearing a blue-and-red collar with a blue tag. I read it upside down. “According to his tag, his name is Sylvester.”

  “Well, that’s what the neighbors call him, and seeing as he’s theirs, I can’t stop them.”

  He did look like a don riding about his hacienda, thin and aristocratic, greying but formidable. I squinted. “The other one’s tag says Blondie.”

  She made a sound of disgust and adjusted the vent at the base of the grill.

  The cats looked at me again, and back at the fish. “Are they expecting a handout?”

  “They won’t like the lemon marinade.” She lifted the boning knife from the Pyrex dish she’d brought the fish out in, and pushed the dish over the concrete to the cats. The black one leaned forward a millimeter and blinked as though someone had flicked him on the nose, just like Dornan when descriptions of gore got too graphic. He sneezed, turned, and walked away to the fence, leapt up and disappeared over the other side. The fluffy one gave Kick a disappointed look, and ambled off towards the bottom of the garden. It looked as though she were wearing puffy pantaloons.