Critical Space ak-5 Read online

  You avoid caffeine. It is the worst possible natural stimulant, addictive and draining to the adrenal gland.

  Since you have almost no fat on your body, you include it in your diet because you need that fuel, and don't want to burn the sugar out of your muscles. Nuts are good, and olive oil. It's hard to get dairy, but whole milk is acceptable. Your taste for artificial sweets, desserts, is limited – fruit is much more appealing.

  ***

  That's the process.

  These are the effects.

  ***

  The first week is hell, you know you're going to die.

  It doesn't matter if you've trained for the Olympics or gone through Basic or reached your umpteenth-level black belt in Tae Kwon Do, your body has never been asked to work like this, to adapt and change to so much so fast. It rebels, sending out every signal it knows in an attempt to get your attention, begging you to quit. When you run, you get sick to your stomach. Your shins feel knotted, your legs are in chaos, the ballet training giving pain everywhere, from the arches of your feet to your calves and knees and hips. When you carry the two-by-four, you see a muscle in your forearms pop up beneath the skin like a golf ball. Your shoulders, arms, chest, and back ache. There are times when you cannot stand up, and each time you try, your thighs cut out on you again, your quadriceps utterly useless, and you find yourself falling to your knees and powerless to resist gravity. The first time it happens, it's alarming. The sixth time, it's pathetically funny.

  Muscles don't hurt; they burn, and by the second day, all of them have come together in one bonfire that rages all along your body.

  To combat the agony, you receive regular rubdowns, to drive the lactic acid from your calves and thighs and back, and that hurts, too. Every night before falling into the exhausted stupor that is substituting for sleep, you use a liniment that smells at once of camphor and molasses – dit da jow it's called, and if you could fill a tub with the stuff and soak in it, you would. It stains your skin amber, but you don't care – it works, seeping into your muscles while you sleep, soothing the pain.

  But when you wake the next morning, that little gift is gone. You're stiff and sore and the act of getting out of bed makes you want to weep.

  You're constantly hungry, too, because fruits and vegetables and a little sliver of fish, that's not food, it's not enough. You think you drink water just to have something in your gut. Because of all the supplements, your urine has turned neon yellow.

  The burning in your muscles continues, and you live on faith that, if you stick with it for long enough, it will pass.

  But you're seeing no signs that it will.

  ***

  The second week is a study in disaster. You think you've pinched the sciatic nerve, but learn that, instead, the iliopsoas – the muscles that work your thighs at the hips and secure the pelvic girdle – have seized up as a result of all of the ballet training. The constant spasm is pulling your back and legs out of whack, and the pain shoots down your hamstrings as if on razor-wire.

  On day ten, while shadow-boxing at full speed and full power, something spasms and for a time you can't turn your neck. Then the muscle relaxes, and you can move your head again, though now it feels like someone is resting their whole weight on their knees, and their knees are somehow on your shoulders. That soreness remains for the next several days.

  The general muscle burn continues, but now it is endurable. The rubdowns at the end of each day are so essential that you shave your legs to avoid the constant hair-pulling. And while one burn may be preparing to leave you, another has arrived, a sunburn so bad that blisters have risen on your back and shoulders, the result of constant exposure to the sun. Sunblock has proven worthless, it simply sweats right off your skin, even the brands advertised as waterproof. Maybe it would be different if you were just taking a quick dip and then drying off on your towel, but because you're running after the swim, because it feels as if you are constantly in motion, you'll never really know.

  Day twelve, while running the trails, your ankle twists and you take a header into the ground, ramming the two-by-four into your chest. The bruises appear within hours, your skin rising taut with the edema, and you learn that the best way to deal with the injury is by massaging the swelling out, getting the fluid and blood to dissipate. It hurts a lot. You end up soaking your sprained ankle in a bowl of dit da jow.

  You are so hungry you think that maybe you dreamt of a cheeseburger last night.

  ***

  The third week you start to turn the corner.

  The pain in your muscles is less constant, though you're still relying on those rubdowns to keep your body from seizing up like a rusted engine, and you stink constantly of camphor and molasses. The ten-mile run that left you puking two weeks earlier is now negotiable, though certainly not easy, and that two-by-four is still the bane of your existence. All the same, you're surprised by the strength in your grip, the power in your fingers. You have opportunity to marvel at how swiftly your body adapts, and there are moments when your focus broadens, when you can see past the constant work to slivers of the results – you smell the ocean and it is different, cleaner, sharper. The trees have their own odors. Colors are sometimes shockingly vivid. Your skin has cleared up with the exercise and constant exposure to sunlight and salt water, and it feels different on you, tighter and stronger.

  You're growing to rely on yoga the way you once relied on coffee. You've learned enough that you try that headstand you've been seeing, and it's going well until you lose your balance completely and nearly kill yourself by going over the veranda.

  Your neck, recovered from the week prior, spasms again.

  The one part of you that seems to have endured thus far without complaint, your wrists, begin aching. You realize you haven't been taping them well enough before working the post and bags. Or maybe you're not punching right, and suddenly you're reexamining the mechanics of the movement, trying to work out what it is you're doing wrong.

  On the off days you download video, PBS's Dance in America, footage of the New York City Ballet, the Bolshoi. Dances choreographed by Balanchine, performances by Baryshnikov and Nureyev. An art that never held much appeal before now is fascinating, and you can break down patterns and steps, attempt to recreate what you see. You stink at it, and you know that, but that's not the point. You're beginning to understand the motion.

  The food tastes better, though your diet has remained fundamentally the same. Watermelon is astonishingly more delicious than tiramisu. For the first time you're not ravenously hungry.

  The fourth week, stepping from the shower and reaching for the towel, you see yourself in the mirror, and for a moment honestly do not recognize yourself.

  You stare for quite a while, wondering.

  ***

  By the eighth week, when you move, swimming in the water or running on the beach or working at the barre, you are completely aware of yourself, the space you consume in your environment and how to travel through it. You see for the first time, perfectly, the nearly infinite ways you can move your body, and with that comes an epiphany: you understand why yoga and ballet have survived for as long as they have. It is no longer just enough to do the exercises; now you strive for proper form and grace.

  You understand the beauty and benefits of being able to move your own weight, with mastery, completely. When you hit the heavy bag with your hips driving the blow and not just your arms, you're both delighted and horrified with the understanding of just what that blow would do to another body.

  Then one morning you rise with the sun and you look out at the water as you start your morning yoga and you realize you are up first, you are folding yourself out of your handstand before she even emerges from her bedroom. You greet one another, say good morning. You settle into the day.

  You realize you have been doing this for almost four months.

  And you know it's got to end soon, one way or another.

  Chapter 5

  She cried in her sl
eep.

  It took me a while to figure out that was what I was hearing. During the remainder of August I was too blitzed from the regimen to do anything but sleep through the night, and my physical exhaustion was so total that nothing short of gunfire could have roused me, anyway. It was mid-September before I actually heard the sound, and even then I couldn't identify it. It was faint and small, inconsistent, and there were nights when I heard nothing at all. If Miata had been able to speak, I'd have blamed it on him; instead, I convinced myself it was wildlife playing about in the trees, a manicou or a bananaquit up past its bedtime.

  It was October, fourteen weeks since I'd been taken from New York, when I woke in the predawn and heard it again. A warning had been issued earlier that week for Hurricane Josephine, and though the storm had missed the Lesser Grenadines, Bequia had taken some collateral fallout, with winds and heavy rain. While I had been concerned, thinking that if he were close, Oxford could use the storm to good effect, Alena hadn't seemed to care one way or another. Josephine was the fourth named hurricane to have traveled the Caribbean since my arrival; clearly she was used to them.

  My concerns about Oxford had been growing daily; for the last two weeks I'd carried a gun whenever and wherever I could, an HK P7 from Alena's substantial weapons locker. I'd urged her to carry, but she'd been surprisingly resistant to the suggestion, acquiescing only when we were out of the house, either exercising or during the occasional trips into Port Elizabeth.

  We didn't talk about it, but we both knew there wasn't much time left.

  Thoughts like that made it understandably hard to sleep.

  There were other things, too, though, more complex and somehow more potent than Oxford's impending arrival. I hadn't spoken to anyone in New York since the call to Erika, and the guilt had begun to eat at me. It was no longer a question of getting to a phone, because I now had the run of the house; the satellite phone was there for me to use if I wanted it, and Alena had given me the codes both to the hard room in the basement and to the general alarm system. I could call if I really wanted to.

  But Alena had asked that I not, and at first I'd told myself that I was respecting the wishes of my principal, so I hadn't. And the longer I went without making contact, the worse I felt about the situation. When I thought about it, which was normally at night after we'd each retired to our separate beds and me staring at the blur of the fan, I knew why the guilt was growing to be so strong. The people I'd left behind deserved to know that I was all right; it was a cruelty to keep them ignorant. And it really wasn't my honoring Alena's request that was keeping me from the phone.

  I was scared. I didn't know what I would say. I didn't know how to describe the situation. I didn't know how I could convince Bridgett or Dale or Natalie or Scott that I was not only fine, healthy – hell, very healthy – and relatively safe, but that I was doing something I wanted to do. That I wanted to be here.

  As sprung as it sounded, that I was happy.

  That wouldn't play in the Big Apple. I could practically hear Natalie lecturing me on the history of hostage/terrorist brainwashing.

  They wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't understand.

  I wasn't certain I did, myself, and I was the guy it was happening to.

  Thoughts that keep you awake at night.

  ***

  It wasn't the wind, the sound was too varied, too sharp, and without the customary rise and fall that one hears when a breeze finds cracks and corners. It came to me broken, past the sound of the rain pounding the roof and slapping the leaves and branches outside the house. I lay on my back and listened, and abandoned the idea that it was some creature outside. It was coming from inside, and it was coming from her room.

  I got my glasses and rose. I'd switched to contacts almost two months ago, and the difference in lenses was briefly disorienting. I thought about taking the gun, and decided that if I was going into her room in the middle of the night, carrying a firearm was possibly a version of suicide.

  I went slowly and quietly, crossing through the bathroom rather than through the hallway along the stairs. I left the light on in my room, using the door to block its spill.

  The noise was now entirely human, a whimper, and I knew it was her. It stopped me, kept me motionless with my palm pressed against her door, gave me time to consider whether I should open it or not. The sound stopped. The silence filled only with the sound of the rain.

  I took over a minute to open the door, letting the pressure from my hand increase a little at a time until it had swung out. I heard the sound again, sharper and briefer and louder.

  She was twisted on the mattress, her legs drawn up almost fetal, the thin sheet tangled around her. She slept topless, wearing shorts, and a bandanna was tied around her neck, loose, as if it had slipped from her forehead. Her expression was pained.

  Miata trotted over to where I was standing, pressed the side of his face to my thigh.

  Her breath was ragged, deep nightmare breathing, and she made another short cry, then twisted again, her leg straightening suddenly as if kicking in her dream. Her breathing quickened, and Miata turned his head to look her way. She was waking up, would break the surface in a few seconds. I thought about trying to retreat, to keep her from seeing me. I wished I hadn't come through the door, regretted switching on a light, and I wondered what I had thought I would find when I had.

  She stopped moving, her breathing calmer. In the ambient light, I saw her eyes open. Her legs straightened, and she sat up. We stared at one another for several seconds.

  She hooked the bandanna at her neck with her thumbs, lifted it up over her chin, fitted it back into her mouth. Then she put her head back on the pillow and shut her eyes again.

  I closed the door, went back through the bathroom, and climbed into my own bed.

  ***

  She didn't offer and I didn't ask.

  The next day was marked for rest, and after yoga and a swim, we rode the motorcycle into Port Elizabeth late in the morning. We did some general grocery shopping at the S W Supermarket and then restocked on fruits and veggies at the produce market. We hit a couple of the shops along the shoreline walkway, passing the windows filled with batik and silk-screened clothing, model boats, and the like, getting some extra supplies. We also picked up my new identities, false papers. Alena had informed me that I would need false papers in case we had to move quickly, and I had agreed without argument; I hadn't needed a passport to get this far, but neither of us knew when or how we'd be leaving.

  She knew the right people, of course, and the same day I'd gone to the optometrist to be fitted for contacts, we'd met with a couple who owned a yacht named The Lutra. They were a man and a woman in their early thirties, with the look of healthy Euro-trash, and knew Alena as Giselle Roux. In exchange for fifty thousand dollars in cash, they were more than delighted to take the passport-sized photographs of me and to promise a speedy return.

  Today, almost eight weeks later, The Lutra was back in the harbor. I parked the motorcycle at the edge of the Shoreline Road, near the Bequia Marina, thinking we'd head aboard together, but Alena told me to wait while she headed down the pier. Scattered vendors were working on the beach, selling T-shirts and handmade dolls. The storm had left humidity in the air, but the heat, still in the high seventies, had already evaporated most every puddle. What little tourist season there was to Bequia seemed to have ended, though there were a couple of other yachts at anchor, mostly manned by European Old Money dilettantes who couldn't make landfall in Mustique, to the south. A couple kids were splashing in the waves.

  If we were being surveilled, it was happening from a distance and via optics, or perhaps from a more direct concealment. But in watching the movement of those people around me, there was nothing to give me alarm. One of the results of my becoming more attuned to my own movement and carriage was that I could now more easily see it in others, who had good posture, who carried their weight in their hips and pelvis or in their back or at their knees.


  Alena came off the boat and back down the pier, a brown envelope tucked under her arm. She handed the envelope to me to hold while we did our shopping. I kept my eyes on the crowd as she picked fruit, bantering with the peddlers in the French-English patois that served as Bequia's unofficial language. She took almost fifteen minutes to fill the two bags we'd brought.

  A uniformed policeman from the station by the ferry dock was examining the motorcycle as we made our way back to it, though he moved away from it as we approached, giving us a smile and a wave of his hand. We smiled and waved back, and pretended to be sorting the contents of the two bags until he was out of sight. Then I got down on my haunches and gave the bike a good looking-over while Alena covered my back, watching our surroundings.

  "Nothing," I said.

  "Check the oil cap."

  "I did. Nothing."

  I straightened up and started the bike without climbing aboard, and the engine ran just as it had, and so I swung my leg over and got the stand up. Alena climbed on the back, and I pulled out, heading north.

  "You're going the wrong way on purpose?" she asked in my ear.

  I nodded, checking the mirrors and accelerating. The roads weren't in the best shape for high-speed anything, and I knew I was taking it a little fast, but I figured it was an effective way of flushing any possible tails. The road ran along the edge of the island, uphill, with the ocean on our right. After putting a couple of miles between us and Port Elizabeth, I took a turn and slowed down, taking us onto a dirt track that cut through a lemon grove. Behind me, Alena made an approving noise. We'd taken the route before, but only on foot while running.