Atrophy

Chapter 1. 200

The only moment I'm alive is when I could die. The numbers on the dash are frozen at 214. I catch it out of the corner of my eye for a split second, then look forward again — to where the xenon headlight beam cuts the night in two, splits it open the way a scalpel splits flesh, exposing what's hidden under that thin skin of darkness.

At this speed the yellow lane markings lose all definition — they melt, blur, become one continuous phosphorescent thread sliding under the wheels, draining away into a past I have no intention of catching up to. The wind hits the helmet hard enough that my neck burns from the resistance, like someone is methodically, millimeter by millimeter, pressing a hot wire under the skin at the base of my skull. It roars, it tries to press the visor's plastic into the bones of my face, push it in until it reaches whatever's locked away back there.

Somewhere at the bottom of my stomach a sticky, stubborn instinct wakes up: just close your eyes. Let go with your hands. Give in to this roaring thing, let it finally take the little that's left in me still resisting its own collapse.

I don't close my eyes. I don't even blink. Through the tinted visor the world takes on a painful, almost surgical sharpness.

Every grain of sand on the asphalt. Every flare off an oncoming headlight, splintering in a bead of sweat on the visor. Steve is in front of me, flattened against the tank with a predator's greed, fused with the machine into one snarling body.

His broad back, wrapped in thick motorcycle leather, takes the worst of the wind and works as a living, breathing shield for me — one he obviously has no idea he's providing. The jacket trembles faintly across his shoulder blades, and that vibration — small, buzzing, mechanical — travels into my palms, climbs up my wrists, settles somewhere under my collarbones. I hold on to him.

My fingers, white-knuckled, dig into the stiff folds at his waist, bite into the leather of his jacket hard enough that tomorrow there'll be bruises there — not from passion, from pure mechanical necessity. There isn't an ounce of feminine weakness or thrill in this grip, whatever he no doubt imagines, in that self-satisfied head of his, stuffed full of its own greatness. This is pure physics.

A survival calculation: five foot two and no weight to speak of leave no room to negotiate with the elements. If I loosen my grip even a millimeter, centrifugal force and a wall of air will peel me straight off the seat, smear me across the asphalt the way cheap paint gets smeared on canvas, and no one will even notice the moment it happens. Two hundred fourteen kilometers an hour.

There it is. That exact gap between one second and the next. A narrow, almost weightless slit in time where you can fall through completely and never hit bottom.

A place where an absolute, sterile silence settles in my head — the same silence I keep trying and failing to buy with sleepless nights, with work, with other people's bodies. Speed burns thoughts down to nothing, leaves only ash and a steady hum in the bones. There's no time here to dwell on my own emotional anemia, or pick at the emptiness under my ribs the way you pick at an old scab, hoping to find living skin underneath.

And there's no suicidal romance in any of this, no wish to die beautifully while people watch. It's simply a fact, confirmed by years of watching my own body: my inner voltmeter only comes alive where the cost of a mistake is death. Below that line, the needle doesn't move at all.

Before the turnoff to the coast road, Steve straightens his back and starts a long, drawn-out braking. The bike dips its nose, the pads bite into the scorching discs with a thin, almost musical shriek, and the numbers drop: 190, 160, 140, then, reluctantly, 110. The world gets its sharpness back, a different kind now — slow, domestic, the kind I have to exist inside again.

On the right, like someone carelessly threw a handful of broken neon onto black velvet, nighttime Miami starts to unfold. A scatter of lights, the oily gleam of the bay water, and a low sky stained by city smog into a dirty, inflamed shade of violet. One in the morning, but the heat hasn't backed off — it's just changed state, gotten thicker, denser, more physical.

The air's gone thick and sticky, like heated tar. It settles on the visor as a film of moisture, works its way into my lungs, reeking of salt, overheated asphalt, and rotting seaweed — that particular sickly-sweet coastal smell I stopped noticing sometime in my second year here. We roll into a half-empty parking lot along the waterfront.

Steve smiles. There's too much possessive triumph in it, too much of the satisfaction of a man who's just closed a good deal. He looks at me like he's just handed me an expensive gift, unwrapped it himself, and is waiting for me to gasp in delight.