“Absolutely not. You do not look like Teddy. Stop asking.”
We stop at a Love’s in the Lehigh Valley. I stare into the restroom mirror, my mother’s voice in my head. There’s a very particular malaise that comes from being screamed at, when someone names you something terrible in an absolute fury—like something green and vital inside you has wilted. If she is just now calling me a bitch, a mistake, she must have felt this way for years. It was an ultimate judgment. I cannot pretend that it does not matter.
We cross the Verrazano-Narrows at midnight, power plants glowing in the dark, and up the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. Moisture runs down my face. It hurts, seeing that cold, radiant skyline. We coast back into the city.
—
We get the last installment of the Hollingsworth money and go to work cleaning the studio, filled with cigarette butts and half-empty beers and the stink of twenty-two-year-old dudes. It’s numbly satisfying, having something to do.
Once we’ve made the place spotless, I am tapped. My mind is a frayed wire—no sparks, no heat. Everything—our cork wall for the storyboard, our drafting tables—is primed for work, except for me. “I don’t know if I can do it,” I say, curling up on the couch in a fetal position.
Mel squints at me, biting her lip. “We’ve already got a chunk, you know,” she says. “It’s not like we’re starting from scratch.”
I cover my head with my hands.
The next morning, she finds me on the couch again. I’m watching the trunk scene on my laptop: the soundless fluidity of my face, Teddy’s hands. The quick slice of movement as the trunk is opened—how it seems fast yet deliberate, done with just the right amount of gravity. Mel was in peak form in Louisville. Maybe me too. The work is immaculate. No one walk or nose-scratch or cigarette flick like any other.
Mel flops down on the floor and laces her hands behind her head. Peers up at me, mouth screwed to one side.
Says, “Did I tell you about that article I read?”
She begins to tell me of a dancer she’s read about who works almost exclusively with falling. The dances she choreographs are built of leaps from upper platforms and edges—the swoop, the plummet, the dive, the pitch. Dancers trained for the company have to first buck their natural fear of falling, correcting the body’s self-protective horror of giving itself over to gravity. A fall is a fall, no matter how deliberate; it will never fail to stop your heart.
To practice, the dancers assume a plank position, as if readying themselves for a push-up, and then lift their arms, letting their bodies collapse to the ground. “It’s a controlled fall,” Mel says. “It hurts, but it trains you to deal with the fear so you don’t start hyperventilating when you dive off a ledge. It’s your body going against instinct.”
“It’s smacking your face into the floor.”
“You’re not afraid to walk, are you?” she says. “Every step you take is like a little fall. You’re just so used to it that the fear’s not there.”
I give her my best durr face. Point to my cane, propped up by the door.
She rolls her eyes and climbs up. “Let’s try it. Come on.”
I slump over. Look at her through my hair.
“Come on, Kisses. Do it. Make sweet love to the motion. Become one with it.”
I know what she’s trying to do. I also know she won’t leave me alone until I do it with her.
And that’s how we both come to be on the floor, in plank positions, side by side. “Okay,” she says. “One. Two. Three.”
Nothing happens.
“Fuck,” she says. “See? Your body doesn’t want to do it.”
“It means we’re dumber than our own bodies.”
“Let’s do it just once,” she says. “Once will be enough. Okay? On three.”
We both take a deep breath.
“One. Two. Three.”
Our elbows unlock at the same time and we fall. It feels like a mistake, like we really have jumped off a bridge together, and when I begin to move, I feel a split-second stab of regret. This is ridiculous. What have I done? I would give anything—anything—to go back, to have kept myself upright.
And then, there’s a rush, so brief it’s a blink. I’m falling. I have weight, and yet I am weightless, at the mercy of something larger than myself. It is reverse flight.
I have finally discorporated.
We hit the floor at the same time with a smack. We groan. Mel rolls over onto her back. Her lip is bleeding.
“Did you become one with the motion?” I ask her.
She punches me in the shoulder. Groans, “Motherfuck.”
—