doesn’t answer. Golden Cock Stands on One Leg.
“Maybe you could tell me what this building’s really like.”
I watch him go through the forms: Wind Rolls the Lotus Leaves, Swallow Skims the Water. Maybe he doesn’t speak English. Maybe he’s one of those monks who’s achieved the Tao and is no longer ruled by his senses. Maybe he’s trying to answer my question another way. I look for hints, a hidden message disguised in the movements—Roaches Scuttle Along the Floors perhaps, or Faucets Drip Through the Night—but he’s inscrutable.
I can’t wait forever. I need a place to live, and this one looks as good as any I’ve seen. There are no police cars outside the building, no laundry strung from the balconies. The address is 555 Munchak Drive. In tai chi, five is a magic number. Five Repulse Monkeys. Five Cloud Hands. To me the magic number is $650 a month. That’s my budget. It’s not much, but I’ll be lucky even to afford that. Bottom line: I’m desperate. As the Tao Te Ching says, “What is firmly established cannot be uprooted. What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.”
The monk’s now into Snake Creeps Down. He’s a personification of the form, a philosopher in motion-yielding, supple, balanced, rooted. Soft, not hard. Always moving. According to the Taoists, stagnation is the cause of disease. Nature moves unceasingly. Movement prevents stagnation. The healthy always go with the flow. So I will, too. If a Chinese monk watching a fight between a bird and a snake led to the development of tai chi, in which symbolism is religion, who knows what my watching this monk performing could lead to? I move toward the door. Every step is slow, effortless, yielding. The symbolism isn’t lost on me. I’m conscious of the delicate balance. Life is like pulling silk from a cocoon. Pull slowly and steadily, the strand unravels nicely. Pull too slow or too fast, it breaks.
FIVE
Humans are trusting creatures by nature. We throw car keys to guys dressed in red, hire children to look after ours, allow strangers near our throats with blades. Crispen has one hand on the razor, the other on my chin. I’m not sure if he’s holding himself steady or preventing me from inching away. I wince every time he rasps the blade past my jugular. His touch is firm, his strokes bold. I wonder how long it would take an opened artery to pump me dry.
“Relax! Stop jumping around or I’ll slice you. See, you gotta use long, straight strokes—even pressure. When you were doing it, it looked like you were chopping at your face with an ice pick, going over the same place fifty times and shit. Where’d you learn how to shave?”
“I didn’t.” I try to talk without moving my jaw. A ventriloquist.
“Didn’t your dad ever teach you?”
“He left us when I started growing peach fuzz.”
“That’s hard. What about your mother?”
“She tried to teach me, but she had no clue. We spent hours in the bathroom trying to figure out how to work the electric razor. Eventually we gave up and used her depilatory cream. I went to school for three days with a rash on my upper lip.”
Crispen shakes with laughter but doesn’t stop shaving. Closing my eyes doesn’t make it any better. “There. All done.” He pats me dry. My face is so smooth it’s sticky. Crispen strolls out of the bathroom.
“Hey, where are you going?” I call after him. “Aren’t you going to fix my bikini line?”
“We’re going to the gym. Coming?”
It’s more of a statement than a question. Personally I can think of better things to do with a day off. Reluctantly I toss shorts, socks, and a T-shirt into a plastic shopping bag and follow the boys out the door.
We all fold into Augustus’s Mazda and drive the couple of blocks to the Bally’s downtown. Breffni signs me in as a guest. Inside it looks more like a dance club than a gym. Pumping beats, mirrors on every wall, skimpy outfits that seem to hinder rather than facilitate movement. Most of the men here wouldn’t be able to scratch their own backs. Most of the women look as if they’re just here to lift a man.
I spend the next hour and a half strung to pulleys, encumbered by weights of all sizes, pulling and pushing objects that would be far better left where they lay on the floor. Nearby Crispen and Breffni are a couple, shouting encouragement, grunting like warthogs, stooping over each other and occasionally stopping the weights from crashing down and crushing the other’s windpipe. Augustus is as strong as tequila—by himself, heaving huge chunks of metal that, from here, look like ballast. I’m relegated to the Nautilus area, along with women, children, and the occasional rehab patient. I strap myself into bizarre machines that would have brought a tear to Franz Kafka’s eye. These devices work muscles I didn’t know I had but am distressed to find out I own. I learn that gravity even works sideways. Soon my arms become so heavy they have to be operated by remote control. Ligaments in my legs snap like turtles. Somehow I seem to become stronger when a woman walks by. I flush with embarrassment when one of them waits for me to finish, then climbs on and lowers the peg to an even heavier weight.
I corner Breffni at the water fountain and ask him if they’re done.
“Almost. One more set.”
He said the same thing after the rowing machine and the step master. I point to a short man working out on a nearby bench. “Isn’t that that guy from Forever Warrior?”
“Paul-Claude Leloup? Yep. That’s him.”
I’m surprised and pleased to see he’s doing biceps curls with the samesize dumbbells I was using. Only he hasn’t put them down since I spotted him five minutes ago.
“They all work out here. Steve Davis, Volchenkov, Mark Ramsay, everyone who’s in town making a movie.”
“I know it’s a cliché, but I’ve got to say it, anyway. I can’t believe how short he is in person.” Paul-Claude looks as if he could walk comfortably between the arch of my legs. “And who’s the other guy?” The other man looks like Paul-Claude’s doppelganger, only his features are slightly distorted. It’s like peering at Paul-Claude in a rearview mirror.
“Probably his stunt double.”
“Cool. So...can we go?”
“Just one more set.”
When we finally do leave, my legs are petrified wood. I have to hold my swollen breasts as I go downstairs. From somewhere in the car Augustus has pulled out a bottle of thick, proteinaceous sludge. He tilts the bottle toward me, but I’d rather lick the sweat off his nose. Then I see the comforting red-and-white stripes of Kentucky Fried Chicken off to the right. “Can we get something to eat?”
“Are you mad?” Crispen almost shouts. “You can’t eat that junk. You know the fat content of that stuff? There’s enough fat in the skin to burn a candle for three months.”
“I’ll peel the skin off,” I lie.
“Plus,” Breffni says, “I hear their chickens are grown without brains. They genetically engineer them with tiny heads and huge bodies. Big fat eating machines with no brains.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? That way they don’t think about the crappy conditions they’re living in.” I’m not upset that my meat is intellectually deficient. I’m not worried that my meat lacks moral fibre. But Augustus
