En Bref (Short Stories)

Every Move You Make (Figure Skating, Eerie)

The room boxes Greg in with his bed, TV mounted on the wall next to the piece of local art, and a fridge. Stuffy curtains block out Italy. The radiator purrs, filling the air with the smell of burning dust. He kicks the comforter lose. Every hotel in the world thrusts the bedding in deeper than pirates hiding their treasure, and he always forgets to dig it out before nesting in between the sheets.

"You, Mr. Twenty-Six, did not achieve an impossible thing yesterday. Unexpected, but not impossible.... I was watching you."

Through the haze of longed-for sleep he realizes that the smarmy voice was speaking of him, to him. Twenty-six was his starting number on the competition roster, twenty-sixth of the thirty-seven men, the eleventh ranking going into the competition.

The screen of his cell-phone, his shut-off cell-phone, glows to life. He flips the phone over, to blip and flash messages into the nightstand's fake wood.

Some asshole is psyching him out.

Let them.

This was his senior debut, and he ended in the top six after the short skate. Groznitz looked winded, Ito — unstable. He could medal tomorrow after the free skate.

He would medal tomorrow.

At this point it is about who wants it the most, and he does. A hacked phone is nothing compared to what he wants. Nothing.

But he peeks at the screen, spots the text babble on the locked screen. 0.59 2.71 16.8 — the numbers stay on the inside of his eyelids when he closes his eyes. It beeps four more times. Four more messages from the universe.

"Shutup." He touches he nightstand without looking, pushes the phone into the drawer with the hotel Bible and the city guide, restaurants, night-life spots, always the same crap. He does not peek this time. Doesn't need to. He knows what each beep of the phone sends.

These are the ice scope numbers for the triple axel for the other five men in the top six. The height, the span, the landing speed — the eye-in-the-sky's metrics for each jump, measured with an impartial precision.

The new tech will help the judges and the spectators overcome their 'human bias'. One jumped yea big, give him the highest score, the public goes home happy... as if. Until it's up to snuff, it is a curiosity to check out while waiting for the score, and the ammunition for spats on social media over who should have won. Not him, they were raging yesterday, never him, and were still raging for all he knew.

Greg fouled the triple axel, the benchmark jump, in the short program. The ice scope picked a quad toeloop from his skate to display the measurements while he sat in the kiss-and-cry instead.

"Triple axel, my ass. I got more points for the quad. I'm third going into the free skate tomorrow," he says to the ceiling. If the asshole hacked his phone, they will be listening.

"You are an outlier, Mr. Twenty-Six." The speaker sucks the oxygen from the room, replacing it with something cloying. It came from the drawer, Greg tells himself, from the phone. They can't get into my head.

"I've seen better digs on Instagram yesterday." Maybe that's what it is, a fan with issues too 'important' to flame on social media with everyone else. A creative bastard with time on their hands.

It doesn't matter who it is. Nobody could ruin it for him, not if Axel Paulsen rises from the grave, twirls his moustache and says, Mr. Twenty-Six, you're an imposter.

He relaxes one muscle at a time from the neck down to the toes. Axel's ghost flickers before his closed eyes, black-and-white documentary style, makes the jump, starts the decades of obsession with it. Axel, double axel, triple axel... stupid axel.

The phone stays quiet in its drawer as minutes trickle by. No raspy voice, only the radiator rumbling in Italian.

He outlasted the troll, like he outlasted everything else to get here, pain, falls, doubts, disappointments.

He will fall asleep in five minutes. He will stand on a podium in fifteen hours. He wants it more.

I want it more, he thinks lining up with the last warm-up group, single file. Behind him, the crowd sways in the lights; ahead of him shines the flat ice surface. Red crystals glitter on Ito's shoulder, throwing sparkles on the white sleeves, on the white boards, on everything.

Involuntarily, Greg studies the other competitors. He deleted the bubbles of texts with their ice scope data this morning. Each guy is like that now, numbers wrapped into bubbles, though Ito beams out a smile. Groznitz stares at the ice ahead, as if hypnotized, he probably does not see anything else.

The ice catches Greg, he circles the edge of the arena as he listens to the bilingual presentations. His turn comes up, name and achievements on the loudspeakers, to applause and the waving of flags. He times a toeloop, his old faithful, while the camera is on him. As he comes out of the spin, the commentator's crowd-rousing voice changes to a murmur.

"Mr. Twenty-Six, third after the short, an outlier."

He leaves the field of shimmering emptiness for the next guy, raining blunt mental blows on the inside of his head. Stop it.

"I'll be watching you," the voice promises.

Suit yourself. When he falls, when he gets up, when he laughs, when he struggles for breath waiting for scores — he is always watched here. He peeks at the watchers, the judges, the tech panel, the cameras, the ice scope.

There are specks of unnatural colours between the evenly spaced ovals, the faces. Three technicians by the cameras wear masks of cartoon characters with wide smiles and bulging pink cheeks. They are in Italy, after all, the land of carnivals.

A piglet, a kitten, a duckling.

"Every move you make," the voice mocks, louder than before.

Nobody watches him closer than the cameras capturing the technical data for the judges. He gives a brilliant smile to the masks, to the piglet, the kitten and the duckling and assumes his starting position. I want it.

The music starts, he speeds up into the first jumping pass, the quad toeloop, his old faithful, the first of the three quads in his program.

"Every step you take, Mr. Twenty-Six," the voice weaves through his music.

His eyes dart to the watchers as he spins.

A piglet, a kitten, a duckling—

Wrong. The black splotch instead of yellow seizes his attention.

Not an innocent duckling, but a crow. The black mask cackles out of a shiny beak. Its white-ringed eyes hold him as he pushes into the air.

He senses cameras zero in on his feet. The blade hits the ice before the rotation is complete, the judges will see it in a full replay. He braces, but first his knee, then his shoulder hit the ice sending shock waves through before he finds his feet.

A piglet, a kitten, a crow.

Pain takes over the vulnerable knee. The second quad, the salchow, is a repeat of the first. His axis is off, the blade hits the ice wrong, he tries to save, he drags himself upright, as if out of a bog, a Rapanzel pulling herself by her own hair.

He steps out of the third quad, but lands it, sneaking a dark glance at the crow. This one was mine. I will win again.

"I'll be watching you."

Under scrutiny of the kiss-and-cry, he stares back at the cameras. A piglet, a kitten, a duckling. He misses his numbers when they come up, but he knows what they will add up to.

Eleventh going in, eleventh going out.