Episode 160 · Where the Foot Stayed

By the sedan, Krista counted the employees who had come with her. Then she looked back toward the shelter, waiting until the medic and the man on the phone had come clear of it too.

Maxim reached the truck last. He unlocked it and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. Soles sat in the open rear doorway. His left shoulder hurt even when he let the arm hang.

Tesa crouched in front of him.

— Where?

He touched the front of his shoulder with two fingers. She looked at his hand, then at the right arm still pressed against his body.

— Don’t try it again.

— I can’t.

She stood and called the medic. Soles watched the guard being taken toward the van. He was no longer struggling. His mouth kept moving, but they were too far away to hear him.

The younger agent came to the truck. There was a red mark below his eye. He touched it, then looked at his fingers.

— Did he get you? Soles asked.

— Not properly.

The agent glanced at Soles’s arm.

— You turned him.

— Part of the way.

— Enough.

The second swing would have reached the man if Tesa had not pulled him clear. Soles had stopped one blow; she had stopped the one that mattered.

— She got you out.

The agent turned to her.

— Thank you.

Tesa nodded. She was watching the offices. A thin stream of dust still fell beside the doorway. The policeman at the gate waved everyone farther down the road.

— It moved when I did it, Soles said.

Krista had seen it too. She held the envelope against her chest.

— I couldn’t see the wall behind you. I saw the doorway move.

— I felt the force change. That wasn’t just me stepping aside.

Tarn joined them. He looked from Soles to the doorway, then touched his earpiece and asked for the cordon to be moved back.

— You stopped the first blow, he said afterward.

— And then I couldn’t stop the next one.

Tarn’s attention moved to Tesa. She did not offer to demonstrate what she had done.

The medic came to the truck. Soles made room for her, then stopped when moving sent pain through his shoulder again.

Behind her, the younger agent was telling the policeman what had happened. He pointed at the guard, at Soles, then at Tesa. This time he did not leave her out.

Soles let the medic take his hand. At the gate, someone bent to pick up the sheet that had fallen from the folders. The policeman called him back before he reached it.

The paper stayed where it was.

The doctor after the medic said what the medic had said, in more words: the left shoulder was new, the right elbow was old, and neither of them was going to like being used for a while. Soles came out needing help with his coat. He let Krista give it, which he decided to count as progress.

At home, Mina waited on the sofa until he sat down, then came to inspect the place where his arm usually rested.

— Not there, he told her.

Krista put a folded blanket beside him. Mina stepped onto it and settled as though the blanket had been her idea.

— I’ll bring the plates in here, Tesa said from the kitchen.

— We can sit at the table.

— Or you can stay there and let somebody bring you a plate. Try it. For the novelty.

Maxim lowered himself into the chair by the window with the care of a man defusing something.

— I’m with her. I’ve just sat down. Don’t waste it.

They ate with the plates on their knees. Maxim told the story of the agent’s cheek twice, and the second time the baton was longer. Tesa corrected him both times. Krista let him finish, then said that the sheet from the folders was still lying in the yard, and nobody laughed at that. Afterward, Soles was left with Lucky asleep by his foot and the turn still unfinished in his head.

At the gate he had felt it as clearly as a gear catching. The pressure had changed direction under his palm, the room had opened beside the guard, and for one instant his body had known exactly how to step into it, because it had done it before, in another body, with both arms free and no hip to argue with. Then his right foot had stayed behind.

He stood up. Lucky moved out of the way without being asked, which Soles found more insulting than encouraging.

Left foot where it had been. Right foot behind. He began to turn, slowly, and it felt like nothing at all until the pull reached his hip and stopped him like a hand on his chest. The turn he remembered had carried him twice as far.

The turn belongs to someone else. The hip is all mine.

He sat down before Tesa came back. She looked at Lucky, now on the far side of the room, then at Soles.

— What did you try?

— The turn.

— Did it hurt?

— I stopped.

— That wasn’t what I asked.

— My hip. I didn’t get far enough to find out about the shoulder.

She called Krista back from the kitchen and asked her to hold out one arm.

— Nobody’s swinging anything, Tesa said. I’m showing him his feet.

She laid her good hand on Krista’s forearm and turned, one foot first and her body after it, until she stood beside the arm instead of reaching across it. Then she did it again with her rear foot left where Soles had left his. The turn died halfway.

— That’s you, she said. You carried on after this.

— The force was still coming.

— I know. And your back foot was still in the last century.

— You can explain that bit, Maxim said from the window, once you can do it without wrecking another arm.

— I haven’t got another one.

— Then stop treating them like spares.

Soles almost laughed. His shoulder advised against it.

— The back foot, he said to Tesa. Show me that. Only that.

— Not the turn?

— I’ve had the turn before. In someone else. The foot is the part that’s mine, and it’s the part that stayed behind.

She considered that for longer than he liked.

— Then we start with standing. When you can stand. Until then, you watch.