Episode 168 · Into the Wind

The bag came at him at chest height, sixty kilos of old canvas on a rope, and Soles went backward.

He did not decide to. His feet decided, the way they had been deciding for two days, and took him two neat steps out of the way while the bag swung through the space he had left and came back toward Maxim.

— Stop leaving, Tesa said.

— I’m not leaving. I’m relocating.

— Relocate forward.

Maxim caught the bag on the return, braced it against his good leg and looked at Soles over the top of it with the patience of a man who was going to remember all of this.

— I can do this all day, he said. Correction: I can do this until my ankle files a complaint. So, about an hour.

Soles looked at the grin above the bag.

— You’re enjoying this.

— You built a machine to kick your own ass. I’m admiring the craftsmanship.

The rig had been Soles’s idea, which meant that every time it worked he was pleased with himself and every time it didn’t he had nobody else to blame.

He had lain awake after the investigator left, turning the problem over the way he would turn over a gearbox that only failed under load. In the washroom the pressure had not hit him like a punch. It had leaned on him, steadily, everywhere at once, and every time he leaned back harder it had leaned back harder still. Nobody could train for that by being hit. You trained for that by being pushed.

So: the old heavy bag from the corner of the gym, hung from the second beam, because neither of them was going to hang anything from the bar with the crooked bolt. A rope through a pulley Maxim had brought from the truck, a sandbag on the other end as a counterweight, so that when Maxim let it go the bag did not swing so much as arrive, slow and heavy and patient, like a wall deciding to come closer.

The rule was Soles’s as well. He could step into it. He could turn against it. He could let it slide off his shoulder and go past. He could not push it away.

Because pushing is what fed it. Because the man in the corridor pushed with muscle and went down on one knee, and I pushed with more and went through the ceiling. Whatever gets me to that thread, it can’t be more.

— Again, he said.

Maxim let the bag go. It came. Soles watched Tesa’s foot instead of the bag, the way she had shown him in practice, and moved his own right foot first, small, at an angle into the swing instead of away from it. The canvas met his shoulder. It was heavy and it kept coming, and every part of him that had been in the washroom wanted to plant his feet and shove.

The weight was there. He could feel it waiting under his ribs, steady and familiar, the strength that had moved a slab and knocked a ceiling down. It would have been easy. It would have felt wonderful for about two seconds.

He did not use it.

He let the bag push his shoulder around instead, let it turn him the way water turns a boat that has stopped fighting the current, and brought his left foot after the right without letting them cross. The bag slid off his back. It went past him. He was standing a full step deeper into the space it had come from than he had been when it started.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

— That’s the one, Tesa said.

She did not say well done. Tesa said well done the way other people paid for rounds, rarely and only when everyone was watching. That’s the one was worth more.

— Do it again before your feet remember they don’t like you, she said.

He did it again. His feet remembered. He went backward, hit the ropes of the ring behind him, the ones he had spent the morning re-stringing to a new corner post, and stood there with the bottom rope pressing into his calf, while Maxim caught the bag and looked at the ceiling.

— All that footwork, Maxim said, and he’s found the one direction we didn’t teach him.

Krista had been sitting on the bench with the envelope of photographs open on her knees. She had laid the pictures out along the bench in order of the times the younger agent had finally given them, and for the last half hour she had been looking at them the way she looked at a document she suspected of lying.

— It breathes, she said.

All three of them turned.

— The thread. In these.

She held up two photographs taken from the same spot by the pillar, twenty minutes apart. In one, the thread was faint against the white wall, barely more than a scratch. In the other it was bright enough that the camera had caught a halo around it.

— Same angle. Same light from the window, I checked the shadow of the basin. Nobody went in between, they told us that. And it isn’t getting brighter in a line, the way it’s getting longer. It goes bright and then faint, and then bright again. I’ve got six of them. It’s slower than breathing. But it’s regular.

Something that pushes harder and then less. Like the bag. Like a tide. Soles thought of the washroom, of the moment the pressure had seemed to give and he had leaned into the give and then it had come back twice as hard and thrown him upward.

— I went in on the wrong beat, he said.

— Maybe, Krista said. I can tell you it changes. I can’t tell you that’s why.

That was Krista. She would hand you the whole truth and refuse to let you add a single word to it.

— If it changes, Tesa said slowly, then there’s a moment when it’s leaning less.

— And somebody has to count it, Maxim said, looking at Krista. Somebody who notices things.

Krista put the photographs down.

— I can try to count your bag.

So they tried that. Maxim swung, Krista counted aloud the moment the bag reached the bottom of its arc, and Soles stepped on her count rather than his own eyes. At first it was better. Then Tesa, without warning, dropped a glove on the floor beside the bench, and Krista turned her head toward the sound, lost the count and called it late, and the bag arrived on Soles’s chest a quarter-second before he expected it and sat him down on the mat.

It did not stop there. It came on over him, and up on the beam the rope jumped out of the pulley’s groove with a dry snap. The bag dropped. Sixty kilos, straight down, onto the place where he was sitting.

Everything in him that had been in the washroom wanted to put both hands up and throw it at the ceiling. He could feel how easy it would be.

No. Not that.

He threw himself sideways instead, onto the bad hip, and the bag hit the mat where his head had been with a sound he felt through the floor. At the other end of the rope the sandbag came off its hook and burst on the boards. Maxim was on his knees by the bench. He had caught the running rope with both hands and held it for maybe half a second, long enough to slow it, not long enough to stop it, and now he was looking at his palms.

For a while nobody moved. Then Tesa crossed the mat, set her foot against the bag and pushed it once, as if making sure it was dead.

— Sorry, Krista said, already standing.

— Don’t be, Tesa said. Not for the count. That’s the exercise. You’ll be listening for one thing in there, and the building will be making a hundred other noises. When something else happens, you check it, and then you come back. You don’t stay on the glove, and you don’t stay on him.

Krista looked at the glove on the floor for a long moment, as though it had personally taken something from her.

— Again, she said.

Soles put the rope back in its groove and drove a nail across the pulley so it could not jump again. They went on until Maxim’s ankle filed its complaint, his palms wrapped in tape from Tesa’s bag. By then Soles had passed through the swing eleven times out of twenty. Krista had lost the count twice when Tesa interrupted her and found it again both times. Tesa could close the hand that had gone numb against the post again, but she had not punched anything, which seemed to cost her more than punching would have, and the bolt on the bar under the ceiling was still exactly as crooked as it had been two days ago, which Soles checked twice without telling anyone.

His left shoulder hurt. His hip hurt. The eye Tesa had closed was open again, but it watered when he turned his head fast. He had used nothing he could not have used before the temple, and he was further into the swing than he had any right to be.

Eleven out of twenty. In a gym, with a bag. In there, the bag doesn’t stop when Maxim’s ankle does.