The monkey man had killed people. The three of them had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The monkey man’s stained pants smelled like motor oil and chicken fat. He and Jackson mostly talked about food they liked, but Nina was too shy to say a word to the old fighter, who had bristly white hair and a long scar down his neck.
After lunch, the monkey man escorted them back into the kitchen. Midsentence, he punched a fist-sized dent into the metal door of a walk-in freezer. The kitchen staff kept working, chopping pork and rinsing bean sprouts. The other freezer doors had similar dents. The monkey man was a regular.
On another trip to Denver, they watched an underground, unadvertised demonstration. A boxer had challenged a skinny Thai guy. The Thai guy held out just one hand, the other still grasping a cheap Asian cigarette. The boxer sent a jab, and the Thai guy hit his arm so hard that an aubergine-colored bruise instantly appeared on the boxer’s wrist. Within seconds, the blood vessels broke and spiderwebbed all the way up his arm and neck to his face.
Once, they visited a craggy Chinese man who smelled like ozone. If you stood next to him, your skin vibrated, and static electricity raised the hairs on your arms and legs. In a dusty alley behind a burrito stand, Nina watched him drink an entire bottle of clear Chinese firewater with a snake coiled in the bottom. Then he ate the snake. Then he ate the bottle, tearing into the glass with his teeth, chewing and swallowing. She thought that was it—what else could there be? Then he started demonstrating throws, chucking people around the pavement until everyone just shook their heads, panting, hands on their knees.
He beckoned to Nina, the only girl there. She stepped forward, ready to be thrown against a wall or something. Instead, he wiped his hands on his bald head and gave her a fresh lychee, shell on. She ate it while it was still warm from his pocket.
Jackson used to split open watermelons with his fingertips. He cracked entire stacks of bricks with his palms. He could extinguish a candle from three feet away by swatting in the air. He could split a plank of tossed wood in midair with a punch, and push down trees. He kicked a double layer of baseball bats in half on his fiftieth birthday.
He criticized Nina for being in love with the tricks, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe that these people existed—real-life unsung heroes and demons in basements with water stains on the ceiling tiles, in alleys behind projects, in putrid restaurants that served jellied meat parts. In warehouses. She saw an eighty-year-old man throw a college linebacker fifteen feet. She saw a fat Chinese guy make a med school student puke from across the room, by pointing a finger at him.
How is this possible?
Nina refused to believe in a god who refused to believe in her. And Jackson said not to trust anything she perceived, said it was just shadows on the walls of a cave. The physics book she had stolen from the library said that sound was nothing more than vibrations in the air. From that you get language, the barking of dogs, Yo-Yo Ma. Sight—you actually see everything upside-down, and the mind subconsciously makes the flip for you. A mind can do that. An apple only looks like red because it absorbs light in every color except for red. So, the sky is everything but blue. What you get is not what you see.
Or what you touch. If you remove the space between particles, a human body can fit on the head of a pin. Same with rocks, same with aircraft carriers. The only thing that gives the impression of solidity is that these tiny pieces of matter are moving fast all the time, carving out space for themselves, saying, “I’m here. Get the fuck out of my way.” And everything—every fingerprint, every snowflake—is made of the same particles, doing different dances. These tiny particles are connected by a force that moves at the speed of light, and is, therefore, light. If you could find a way to look closely enough, you’d see that everything is exactly the same, made of light, space, and potential. That included Nina.
So, on this most basic of levels, it was possible to do all these crazy things. Hell, more, even. You could shake a house on its foundation. You could walk through walls of stone, or split diamonds in half. Jackson called it Areté, after the Greek—doing that which you cannot do. Nina wanted to figure it out for herself—but with her body, not her mind. She wanted to be more than a story of something that happened to someone once. She would go to the source itself. By learning the exact relation of motion to matter, even the most ordinary person—Nina—could become extraordinary.
~
Her relationships tended to suffer. Not that she didn’t want one. She wanted one. Especially at night, watching her pizza cool on the plate, or sitting alone in a movie theater, baseball hat pulled low. When Nina saw couples going to dinner or bickering in a drugstore, she wondered how they managed to pull it all off. Her most recent love affair had stalled out when her boyfriend answered a call from the girlfriend Nina didn’t know he had, from a cell phone she didn’t know he had taken to bed with them. He called his girlfriend “Pumpkin” and smacked kisses into the phone, hung up, and tried to roll back on top of Nina.
That was over a year ago. Romance swirled around her and rolled off, like mercury in the palm. One day, she kicked a rug and found herself staring at her half-buried diaphragm, trying to remember what it was. It was a dilemma. She knew she’d never use it again, but it seemed like too personal an item to just toss in the trash with the potato peelings. Was it like a flag—once it touched the ground, you had to burn it? She eventually threw it into the South Platte River and watched it bob away like a legless octopus.
Before the married man, there had been others—men she had met in clubs, at coffee shops. She wasn’t a nun or anything. Her sheets had seen plenty of tug-of-war over the years. She had built pillow barricades to muffle nose whistles, endured scratchy feet crawling over her legs. She had eaten morning waffles and drank morning coffee with a bartender, a short order cook, a day trader, a marine, a tollbooth operator. A bisexual clown.
For one windy spring month, she dated the takeout guy from her favorite Chinese restaurant. She sloshed around his sleeping bag until dawn, dreaming out the window at neon signs with letters missing, waiting for him to bring home soggy fried wontons and leftover Kung Pao.
But he dumped her for the dishwasher, who was a man. Then she went out with a guy who believed the Federal Government spent too much money on education. Then she went out with a guy who brought along his ex-wife. Then she went out with a man who tried to sell her Amway.
Nina had never once planned ahead, never taken the person in her bed for granted. She had never walked down the street, humming, “Looks Like We Made It.”
She did have occasional good sex, which is easy to confuse with love. She spent hours lounging in bed with men, letting the major muscles atrophy while she thought, This is it. She memorized near-strangers. She laughed hysterically at things that were only vaguely funny, awash with desire, certain for the twelfth or nineteenth time that she had never, ever felt this way before.
Then, without warning, the drawbridge went up in the man’s face as he realized how precious life is, or how precious he is, or how nothing amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world, or how he’d always wanted to move out of the state but had never known it until that second, or how he’s not ready for love, or how he’s incapable of love, or how he’s got this, um, wife? Or this, um, disease? Or how he’s still getting over this girl, really psycho, who traumatized him, or how he was wondering if Nina ever noticed that she snores a little bit, or how this isn’t a relationship, they’re just dating, or how he’s used to his own space so could she please go home now, or how this is a momentous connection and he’s fucking it all up. He knows it, but he can’t stop himself, and it’s just killing him.
“Fight for love,” Jackson used to say, but Nina didn’t have any love to fight for. Instead of an actual heart, she had one of those have-a-heart traps: the rats get in, and they stay in. She suspected that she herself wasn’t a human being, but some kind of mutated animal. It made sense that she would attract men who could only love her with an animal love—that is, ferociously, and then not at all.
Sometimes, though, she caught glimpses of something, rare moments full of potential when, despite herself, she unfurled in sleep and the men did, too. For a night, they were one person, one breath. Their thoughts blended